377: Q4 Advice for Food Creators from the Food Blogger Pro Experts

This podcast is sponsored by Clarity. That is C-L-A-R-I T I.com and Clarity is really the hub for you if you are a blogger or a publisher. If you have a website, it's really the hub for you, the place for you that allows you to better organize your portfolio of content. And it's all in one place. So maybe you've been manually keeping track of your blog posts in a spreadsheet or a project management tool, or maybe you're not sure if the optimizations you're making so you make changes, but you're not sure if those are actually moving the needle or potentially. I know this is true for us and our team. You're spending hours manually organizing what to update or keeping track of it in this massive spreadsheet. And it's just kind of overwhelming, or maybe you're just too overwhelmed to start. That's why we built Clarity. We wanted to have a tool that brought all of the most important things about publishing and blogging into one place. And right now that includes WordPress data, Google Analytics data, and Google Search Console data. And what we do is we bring that data in and we centralize it so you can look at a specific piece of content and you can see all of the different components traffic. You can see information about keywords, and then you can see the information about that post itself. And there's really two areas of Clarity. There's the ability to filter and kind of understand your content. We call that area Explore. So it's a place for you to look holistically at your content and say, what does it. What does it look like? You can easily slice and dice and get a better understanding of it. And from there you can create projects to improve your content. And sometimes people say, what do I do when I get in? Like, what is the first thing that I should focus on? And it's a really powerful tool, but sometimes it's helpful to give some simple examples. And I have actually five here, and I'll talk through each one of these. And for anybody who does sign up for Clarity, you can try these out as your first ways to filter and create projects. So, number one, inbound links, meaning are you having links to new pieces of content that you're publishing from other old pieces of content? This is an area for Pinch of Yum that we could improve on. We just published a bunch of really awesome how to articles, and we need to go through old posts that reference those or that could reference those and include links that point to that new piece of content because right now we're not linking to that new piece of content anywhere. And Clarity is surfaces really quickly. Surfaces any pieces of content that don't have inbound links from other places. Number two, broken links. So sometimes we publish a piece of content and 5 years pass and there's a link within that piece of content that's now broken. It could be an internal link on your own site pointing somewhere that maybe you've changed the URL or removed a post, or it could be somewhere else. It could be an external link. You can easily look through broken links within Clarity and create projects to fix those up. Number three, labeling your content now within WordPress, you can create a category, and categories are usually going to be public places within your site that somebody can go and like look through the different pieces of content in that category. But sometimes it's helpful internally to label content. An example for Pinch of Yum is we're labeling every piece of content that has step by step tutorials in it. You could also label sponsor content versus editorial content, so you could quickly go back and see. Great. In this last year, how many pieces of sponsored content did I do? Or how many sponsored content articles do I have in general? Number four, find a post that has missing meta description. So the meta description is an important piece to include because it's a suggestion to Google for what they should show, what or what it should show when somebody searches for a keyword and it shows a result. Now, Google doesn't always show that meta description, but it's best practice to fill that out and sometimes we forget to do that. So you can look through all of your content and see any pieces of content that are missing a meta Description. And number five, find any content that has more than one H1. And H1 is a header. And best practice for H1s is you generally just want one of those. But sometimes we forget about that. We're editing a project or editing a post and we add an H1, and technically it should be an H2 or an H3. So with clarity, you can quickly filter to see and say, hey, show me anything that has more than one, like two plus H1s. And you can create a project to say, go into these pieces of content and change those H1s to H2s or H3s. So those are just five examples of ways that you can quickly use Clarity and see value from it. If you're interested in signing up and becoming a user, Clarity is offering podcast listeners 50% off their first month by going to clarity.com food that's C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com food to receive 50% off your first month of clarity. Thank you to the Clarity team for sponsoring this podcast. Hello.

Hello.

This is the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We do this podcast every week for people who are interested in building, growing, expanding their online business. And the online business space that we focus on is the food space, the recipe space, essentially, creators who are looking to build a following, make an impact, or get their message out into the world. And there's lots of different ways you can do that. You can do that with social media, you can do that with search engine optimization. You can do that by getting really good at video or photography. There's lots of different angles, lots of different ways that people are approaching this. And what we're trying to do is have conversations with experts in their field to shine a light on the things that they're learning, the things that they know to help you with your journey. And today's episode is kind of a fun one because we have actual experts. And what I mean by that is that's what their title is at Food Blogger Pro, who join in on the forums. Occasionally we have them on the podcast. And these experts have a really specific area of focus or a niche that they're really good at. And what we're going to do today is kind of pass the mic, the virtual mic around the table, and give each one of these experts a chance to speak into Q4. A lot of times you. You hear people talk about quarter four and how important it is. And the reason that's true is because there's kind of this perfect alignment in our world, in our world, meaning food content and recipe content. And the perfect alignment is really around two things. It's seasonally a time when people are gathering to make recipes. Thanksgiving here in the United States, Christmas or panica, the holiday season. People are thinking about food, they're making food, and they're also thinking about buying things for the holiday season. And advertisers and companies are spending more money on advertising, which shows up for us in sponsored content or display advertising. So it really becomes this season where the earning potential is really high for creators. And it's important to think strategically about how you're going to approach that. And that's what we're doing today, is asking some Food Blogger Pro experts. And if you want to see who those experts are, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com experts and you can see who those folks are for those of you who are Foodblogger Pro members, you've probably seen them in the community forum, you've maybe heard the interviews here on the podcast with those experts. And today we're going to check in with them quick to see what advice they have for quarter four. And I'll kick it off on my end. There's two things that I think about that would be worth diving into or spending some time with for anybody who's a publisher. The first one is spending some time with something called Google Trends. Now, if you've been in this space for a long time, you're familiar with Google Trends, you know what it's all about. But essentially it's Google's tool to inform you on how certain keywords or topics trend over time, essentially when they are trendy or when they are popular. And it can be trends like on a macro level. For example, if you were to use Google Trends and type in the keyword keto, you would see that over the last five years it's been trending down, but every January peaks. But if you look at the macro level, it trends down with little peaks in January. Another example would be looking at something like apple pie. You could see the patterns around when that's popular. And what your goal is as a publisher is to kind of catch that trend right before it starts to take off. And in the case of apple pie, you probably don't want to be posting about that in February, and you also probably don't want to be posting about it at the peak. So the goal is to find kind of that sweet spot right before the trend takes off, creating content around that. So it's in your pipeline and available week after, maybe it's a few days after. People kind of start to get into that mindset. So it's all about timing. And Google Trends helps you understand the timing of both macro trends, but also seasonal trends. So check that out. The second thing that I wanted to share was thinking about RPMs and RPMs for those who aren't familiar is essentially how much a page on your website is earning based on the visits that come to it. So let's say there's a the RPM is connected to a thousand, so a thousand page views and there's a number attached to that. So it might be $10 for every thousand page views that you have, or it could be $50 would be a high RPM for every thousand page views. So it helps you understand essentially the earning potential of a specific post. And there's a lot of variables that go into that, the content on that post, also how many ads you have. If you have a video ad that's playing a lot of different variables. But one of the things that you can do as you head into quarter four is if you are with an advertising partner like AdThrive or Mediavine, you can go in and see what are the pages that have high earning potential and then look for pages that are also seasonal. And the goal is to find the seasonal content with the highest potential earnings. And thinking about ways that you can promote that might be on social maybe you email it out, maybe you want to refresh that piece of content and send it out to your audience. There's lots of different options for how you kind of lift that content, but being strategic around looking at content that not only is seasonal but also has high earning potential. So those would be my. It's kind of two tips, but those would be two things that you could consider as we head into quarter four. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to step back. It's a little bit of a break for me from being behind the mic and I'm going to pass it off to the other Food Blogger Pro experts who are going to share some of their insights into planning and optimizing for quarter four.

Hi, this is Andrew wilder. I'm the CEO and founder of NerdPress and the food blogger pro WordPress expert. We provide support, maintenance and site speed optimization for hundreds of food blogs. So my tip for food bloggers and content creators as we go into the fourth quarter is to make sure your site is ready to handle the increased traffic. The biggest way you can help your site is to make sure you have good caching in place. By default, WordPress generates each page on the fly every time it's requested. So what caching does is store a copy of that page and then serve it up to the next visitor. This speeds up your site and reduces the amount of work your server has to do. Here's the trick though. Anytime you publish or update content, the caches are going to be cleared. This way your visitors will see the updated content. But the downside is that your server will need to work harder to regenerate all those pages the next time. So if you schedule new posts, set them up to publish in the early morning hours, like 3am before traffic is heavy that day. And the week before Thanksgiving is not the time to be doing lots of updates on your site. If you or your VA is going through and updating old content, that will repeatedly cause the caches to be cleared, making your server work extra hard right when you have the most traffic. Finally, please keep in mind that everyone who helps and supports your site, whether that's your VA or your support team or your hosting team, they're also trying to enjoy the holiday season. So please don't do something like update all your plugins late on a Friday night when nobody's around to help if something goes wrong. All right, so those are my tips. I hope that helps and you have a tremendously successful fourth quarter.

Hey Food Blogger Pro Community. I'm Ali Grimbert, I'm the owner of Duet, and I am your email marketing expert at the Food Blogger Pro Community. Happy to pop in here and chat with you about how you can plan, plan and prepare for quarter four, specifically through email marketing. So I have three strategies for you to implement that I think will really help make the most of this season. And I emphasize season because this is the time of year when people are really coming looking for seasonal content, whether it's fall, whether it's a holiday. And so the first strategy I have for you is to create some sort of seasonal opt in. So, so for the people who are coming to your site from Google, from Pinterest, from anywhere else, if they are looking for seasonal content, how can you really capture that excitement and get them also on your email list, not just for now, but for the long haul? So it could look like creating an opt in. That's a cheat sheet of things to have in your pantry for this season. It could look like tools that you know would be helpful for them as they start baking more or roasting more, grilling more, who knows what. And so providing that on your site, whether it's like an explosive, exclusive recipe that they have to opt in to get, it could look like a lot of things, but really capture that seasonal excitement. The other thing I want to see you doing is sending out newsletters, broadcasts, campaigns, whatever you want to call them with seasonal content. Now you might be thinking, allie, I've sent out that casserole recipe before. Aren't people expecting something new? Well, I will tell you, you have new people on your list who've never seen that content, right? They've joined in the last year. You've also got people on your list who maybe didn't make it last year but would be interested now. And you've got people who on your list who maybe have made it and want to be reminded of it or they'll share it with a friend, right? So whether you are creating brand new emails. Or you go in and you duplicate an email you sent out this time last year. Send those emails out. Don't be afraid to send out content even though you've sent it out before or it feels old to you, because it's not going to feel old to your list. You can always go in and zhuzh up how you introduce that content in the email. And it's not going to take you that much work because if you've sent it out before, great, you're just repurposing that. If you're new to sending out seasonal content, you can send off one off emails that just feature a particular recipe, or you can send out a roundup of a handful of related recipes. Maybe it's all appetizers, or it's all entrees, or it's all desserts, or you can mix it up and kind of create separate menus that include one of each of those. So play around with it, see how your list engages. And if you're afraid that you're going to have people who aren't super interested, you can always include a link trigger if your email platform allows for that to say, hey, I'm sending out some of my best of content. If you're not interested in receiving seasonal content this year, just click here and I'll make sure you stay on my list and get my new content too. That's an easy way to really honor your subscribers preferences, but also make sure that you're sending out your content that you know the rest of your email subscribers will also love and engage with. And then the last thing is this is a great season, a great opportunity to also promote products. So if you have an ebook or you want to create one and you want to put a dollar amount on it, this is a great time to do that. It can be related to these seasonal things as well and really hit on that theme for what's going on right now. So maybe you have a soup cookbook and it can be an ebook, it doesn't have to be an actual physical cookbook, but providing some sort of either discounted price on it. So keeping that low price until X date. Maybe it's October 31st, maybe it's even all the way through Black Friday and that gives you something to promote to your list to hype up to remind them that they can buy that. Of course you don't need to send out those reminders people who've already purchased it. But this is a great time to be able to promote a product. If you do have a cookbook or something that's a larger purchase price. This is a time to add in a bonus. So if you buy during this time and send me a receipt, I'll also maybe you hop on a Q and A with your readers who've already purchased the book and you just get to spend 30 minutes getting to know your subscribers. That'd be awesome. Or it can be some sort of other valuable thing like a checklist or another ebook that you've perhaps created and haven't released yet. There's all sorts of different ways to really build momentum behind these products. It's a sweet season to also suggest buying things as a gift for readers so they can buy it for their friends. So don't be afraid to sell to your list. Don't be afraid to let them know that you have something that's a paid offer. This is also a great time for them to give back to you and all the wonderful content you've sent them throughout the year. I hope that's helpful and encouraging. You don't have to do all of those things, but those would be some great ideas for you to be able to really optimize and maximize the engagement with your subscribers and the revenue you earn from your email list and from brand loyalty throughout the year.

Hey Food Blogger Pro students, I am your Food Blogger Pro expert on Pinterest. My name is Kate all and I'm the owner and founder of Simplepin Media. We're a Pinterest marketing agency. My one tip for you in this quarter Q4 is to go all in on Pinterest. Q4 is the time for food creators to really shine and what this means with going all in getting current and past food content around these holidays circulating throughout your schedule. Right? And sometimes it's okay to pin a little more than normal. There's no real I mean, unless you're going to pin 100 pins a day, which you're not. But we want to go a little bit more than normal because this is the only time that you can pin things like Thanksgiving or Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever it might be the holiday that you focus upon. So go all in. Go all in on using all formats of pins. That means standard pins, idea pins, and really short form video pins. Plus a bonus is as you're doing sponsored work for brands during this time, make sure that you include pins, both standard pins, idea pins, short form video pins in your pitch to the brand and then get the brand to also share your pins through their Pinterest profile as well So I want you to remember this. This is the one time of year you can really pin a little bit more than normal. And you can pin the things that you can't pin any other time of year. So just focus on your content, pinning your content and go all in. And just know that you're going to get more visits to your site. So make sure the front page of your website as a Pinterest user, they know where to go. They make the connection, they can get to the recipe that they're so excited to make that they know is going to be delicious for their holiday meal or or their holiday party. Make it easy for them to find. All right. Just remember that Q4 go all in on Pinterest.

Hey there, I'm Danielle Liss. I'm a lawyer at List Legal and the owner of Business Ease. I also have the pleasure of serving as the legal expert for Food Blogger Pro. I have three tips for you to prepare for Q4. First, let's talk about contracts. If you have a lot of sponsored content for Q4, make sure you're carefully looking at the terms of those agreements so that you can work smoothly during this busy season. Check for draft due dates, talking points, contact person, and the approval process. The last thing that you want to deal with is delays that could have been easily avoided if you got the information upfront. So try to make sure that that's in your agreement. Then also make sure that you have a way to track all of that information. So whether it's in your calendar or your task list, making sure you're using those contracts as a tool can be really helpful. To make things go a little bit easier, let's talk about negotiation. Q4 is often when you'll be negotiating longer term agreements for the new year. So read those agreements carefully and make sure the terms reflect what you want in those deals. You have time, so make sure if there's something you've got questions about that you are going back and asking the brand. One area that I think is really important to look at closely is exclusivity. It can really impact what other deals you can take in the coming year or whatever that timeframe is. So of course, if it has a big impact on what you can accept, please make sure that that's reflected in your pricing. So in other words, longer exclusivity or stricter exclusivity, usually that's going to mean a higher price. And speaking of pricing, that brings me to my third tip. Reflect on your pricing going into the new year. Since you'll likely be looking at those contracts like I mentioned for the longer term partnerships. This is when you want to consider if you're going to increase your rates too. And while that gives you three tips for Q4, I'm also going to give you a bonus tip. I personally find that things start to quiet down a little bit during the last half of December. I think that this is a great time to do work on your business. I recommend taking some of this time to do an audit of your website policies, look at your Terms of Use, your disclaimer, and your privacy policy and make sure that they're updated for the start of the new year. That's it for me. I am wishing you a very successful Q4.

Hi everyone, my name is Jenna and I am the communications expert on Food Blogger Pro and also the General Manager at and I'm really excited to pop in for just a few minutes to talk about what I'd recommend focusing on to prepare for Q4 and kind of give you a glimpse into also what we're doing at Pinch of Yum to prepare obviously for blogging in general, especially food blogging, but also kind of the Internet Q4 is a big few months. There's the holidays, there's Thanksgiving, which is literally a holiday surrounding food. There's also Christmas and other holidays within those two months. And so it's a big few months just in the food world. But also traffic is usually higher, RPMs are usually higher for ads. It's just a big few months. And I'll also talk a little bit about how this relates to sponsored content and brands as well. But the first thing I'm just gonna do two things. The first thing that I would recommend focusing on to prepare for the next few months is content optim. So you probably have a good sense of what's performed well on your blog in years past. During this time of year, probably a lot of Thanksgiving recipes on Pinch of Jam, that would be things like our sweet potato casserole. And so what I would do to prepare for when that search is highest in the month of November, as well as other recipes around Thanksgiving is to make sure that that post is tight. It has every possible optimization that we could do to it. It has frequently asked questions, it's th providing useful information, it has a video, all the things that are making it a high quality piece of content according to Google. So that's one thing that we do at Pinch of Yum in anticipation of Q4 is to think about what are people searching for on Google, what are some of our top posts during these few months and just making sure that when somebody goes to search that, that our posts have exactly what they need to show up on that first page of results. And so that's one big thing to just anticipate and make sure that those posts that you have on your blog are optimized, ready to go. There's a course on Food Blogger Pro that talks about what optimizations Pinch of Yum makes when we update or republish a post. And so that's kind of the number one thing, is making sure that your content is ready. Second thing, kind of a small thing, is that often in Q4 brands are at the end of their budget for the year and so they're looking to finish their spend, whether for them, that's their advertising or influencers. And so one thing that you can be doing right now is doing some outreach to brands, whether you've worked with them before or haven't, but doing some brand pitching. And so reaching out to a brand with a specific product in mind that they have maybe a specific recipe surrounding the holidays, Thanksgiving or in December, whichever, and pitching a specific recipe with a product that you love from that brand. You'll find that a lot of brands do have some extra spend to do before the end of the year. And so sometimes you can find something that's a great fit both for the brand and for your readers and for yourself. And so those are two things that we focus on for Pinch of Yama as we head into Q4 and recommend that you do as well. So thanks.

Hi, I'm Allison Bechdal and I'm the analytics expert with Food blogger Pro. My Q4 analytics recommendations are to get GA4 installed on your site. GA4 is Google Analytics newest recommendation as far as getting an analytics platform installed on your website. Universal analytics is the current form of Google Analytics of which is expiring July 1, 2023. So we want to make sure we have as much data as possible that we can look back on as soon as we ultimately need to make that change. So my biggest recommendation go into Google Analytics, create an account if you don't already have one, create a GA4 property and get it installed on your site. You can install that through either utilizing a WordPress plugin like Monster Insights, you can install it directly yourself through a header kind of inserting plugin as well utilize a developer a couple different ways to get that installed. Google Tag Manager if you have that, just get GA4 installed on your site so we can start collecting data is going to be the best thing that you can do next. What I would do is start thinking about your goals for 2023. What are you trying to accomplish? What are the things that you want users to be doing on your website? Is it downloads? Is it page views? Kind of understand what you're looking for so you can start benchmarking that data, start seeing, okay, in 2022, we had this many page views or we had this many downloads. How can we improve that? What can we be looking at to make sure that we're doing this better? So go ahead, start thinking about your goals and your benchmarks so then you can start working towards more traffic, better traffic, qualified traffic that's coming to your website so you can start making more money and having more users coming to your.

Hi, I'm Nisha Vora and I'm the YouTube expert for food Blogger Pro. So the way I approach Q4 content on YouTube is a bit different than you might approach it on a food blog, and that's because YouTube is a evergreen content machine. So a lot of food bloggers, with good reason, focus on seasonal recipes, holiday recipes in Q4. So you're gearing up all of your Thanksgiving posts, your Christmas posts, maybe even some New Year's posts. And that's great, especially if you're pushing out your content on social media and Pinterest, because that's what a lot of people want to see then. But YouTube surfaces evergreen content all the time. So I have videos from two years ago that still perform well today, which is great. And so if you are only prioritizing Thanksgiving and Christmas content, for instance, on YouTube, you're not necessarily doing anything bad, but you're shortchanging yourself because you could be publishing evergreen content videos or recipes that are going to perform all year round. But if you say, do six videos in Q4 that are all holiday themed, focus. So mashed potatoes or stuffing or pumpkin pie, those might serve a niche audience at the time, but they're not going to continue to perform once January comes around, and they won't have any interest until next November. So whereas another video on a more general topic like chocolate chip cookies or lasagna might perform throughout the year, those holiday niche videos are not going to perform throughout the year. So you're kind of you're not getting the full pie piece of the pie. That's not an analogy, but you understand you're not getting everything you can out of YouTube if you're only focusing on that. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do those. It just should maybe be part of your content strategy for Q4 instead of being the focus or the bulk of it. The other thing I think is a little different for me and for other vegan content creators is that veganuary is huge. So Veganuary is this month of January where a lot of people pledge to eat vegan for the month to try it out because it's better for the environment, it's better for the animals and things like that. So there is huge interest in vegan content in January. So personally for me, I actually spend a lot of Q4 thinking about the videos and the content I want to share in January. A lot of kind of beginner content because I know it's going to be a lot of newbies as well as a lot of holistic overview content of like what a vegan diet is or what a vegan lifestyle is, or like big tips and strategies that can make a vegan diet easier or tastier or those kinds of things instead of like specific niche recipes or instead of like really complex recipes, which I love doing, but maybe in January I don't do those. And so I actually spent a lot of time in Q4 making sure that I have enough time to film that content in November and December and line it up in January and make sure the videos get edited and the photos get edited, get edited and all of that kind of stuff. So As a vegan YouTube content creator, I would say Q4 is actually quite different for me. I don't really focus as much on seasonal content as a traditional food blogger might. So if you are on YouTube, I would do some holiday content if it really speaks to you, if you think it's an amazing recipe, if your audience has been asking you for it. But I wouldn't necessarily make it all of your strategy for Q4. So I hope that tip helps and I'll talk to you guys later.

Hello.

Hello, Leslie here from the FoodLonger Pro Team. We really hope that you enjoyed this week's episode of the podcast and we we hope that you liked hearing from our Food Blogger Pro experts as they shared their best tips for you preparing and getting the Most out of Q4. As a food creator, this was a really fun one and we had a great time putting it together for all of you. Before we sign off this week, I wanted to give you a quick heads up about all of the new content we have coming to Food Blogger Pro in the month of October. So in case you didn't know, aside from the Food Blogger Pro podcast, we also have the Food Blogger Pro membership, and if you sign up for that, you get instant access to all of our course courses, the Food Blogger Pro forum, our live Q&As, our study halls, exclusive deals and discounts and more so you can learn more and get signed up. If you're interested by going to foodbloggerpro.com join. But if you're already a member, here's a sneak peek at all of the exciting things coming your way on the site this month. So we actually held our October study hall yesterday, October 3rd, and it was all about traffic, building, tips and tricks. So if you missed that, you can easily catch the replay and see what we chatted about by heading over to the Live tab on Food Blogger Pro and watching that there. But next week on Wednesday, October 12, we're going to be holding our monthly live Q and A. And it's an extra exciting one because it's going to be with somebody that you heard today. It's going to be with Alison Bechdal, our Google Analytics expert, and she's going to be joining Bjork to answer all of your questions about Google Analytics 4. So GA4 is such a huge topic right now, and that's because Google will be sunsetting Universal analytics in July 2023 and replacing it with GA4. So now's the time to set it up if you haven't yet. And so if you have any questions about that transition process or how to do that, you can ask those in that Q and A. So if you are a member of Food Blogger Pro and you want to join that, you can head over to our Live tab and then add the event to your calendar so you don't miss it on October 12th. Last but not least, and speaking of Google Analytics, we are going to be completely overhauling our Google Analytics course and sharing a brand new one with you on Thursday, October 20th. So this new course is going to have all new lessons and lots of information that will help you get set up and installed with Google Analytics 4. We've been working on this one for a while now and we can't wait to share it with you. So be sure to tune in on October 20th so you can check out the new course once it goes live. All right, that's an overview of everything coming to Food Blogger Pro in the month of October, aside from, of course, weekly podcast episodes and blog posts. But if you're not yet a Food Blogger Pro member and you want to learn more and potentially join, you can head over to foodbloggerpro.com join to get more information and get signed up if you're interested. As always, thank you so much for tuning in and listening to the podcast. We appreciate you so very much. And until next time, make it a great week.