423: How Liz and Lauren Allen Built a Food Blog with 11 Million Monthly Pageviews

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Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast this week on the Podcast Bjork is interviewing Liz and Lauren Allen from the blog Taste Better From Scratch. Liz and Lauren are twin sisters that founded their blog together way back in 2009 and they've been working together ever since to grow their site. Liz and Lauren are super strategic about every aspect of their business, from hiring and communicating with their team, to how they create content, to the division of labor between them and even to goal setting for coming years and how they want to approach changes that they see coming in the food blogging space, like AI and changes in data privacy legislation. Liz and Lauren saw a huge amount of growth for their site in 2020 and they've managed to maintain 11 million monthly page views on their site since that time. They are really open and honest about every aspect of their business and it's a super interesting listen and nice to get a peek behind the scenes of a blog like Taste Better From Scratch. So I won't keep you waiting. I'll just let Bjork take it away.

Liz and Lauren, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having us. Yeah, we're excited to be here.

So for those who aren't watching the video you are wearing, it's not exactly the same, but it's coordinating. And your twins, this was not intentional, though. Is this the life? Is this forever the life?

It's never intentional. And often we have to be intentional about not looking like twins. Yeah. But in this case, I drove over here and I didn't have time to go home and change when I got.

Here, and I didn't want to change, so.

So you're going to own the twins.

I guess instead of intentionally coordinating, you have to intentionally not coordinate. You have to be like, we're not going to wear. Wear the exact same thing. So, you know, one of the things that we often do on the podcast, especially for people who have been at this for a while, started your site in 2009, so you've been at it for a while, is to hear a little bit about your origin story. But one of the things that's interest is for you as sisters to be working together. I'd be interested to start and talk about that. So the site tastes better from scratch. Launched in 2009, but it wasn't both of you working on it at that time. So can you tell the story of starting it and then going full time and then when you started to work together?

So we actually did kind of start it together back in 2009. We both had the idea and we both loved it.

Not as a business adventure, just as a, hey, let's get all these great recipes online in the, in the cloud so that we can access them.

Yes. Just as a way to share our childhood recipes. Basically.

Liz was, I got a real job and I got. I was getting my master's and teaching, and Lauren was like, hey, I really want to take this seriously. And I was like, do it, Go for it.

Yeah.

Yeah. So she left pretty early on and I. So I Incorporated in 2014. That's when I really started to take it more seriously.

And what did.

When you say take it more seriously, what did that look like?

Just be more post consistently move to a legitimate WordPress. I was on Blogspot. I got a nicer camera. Just like really incorporated an llc. Just treat it more like a business. Try and give it a real shot. And so I did that for a couple years on my own. It was around 2017 when I had my first SEO audit and I Was feeling really overwhelmed with all the things I needed to do. And I would constantly call her just to talk about it. She was always interested in a good listening ear. So that's when she. She had actually just.

I was just moving across the country and I was pregnant and kind of deciding to maybe wait to have before I got a job. And so I was like, great, I'll.

I'll help you.

And.

And I just was really interested. And at that point, I think us having really different roles is what helped us kind of get on this path of a happy working relationship.

I was probably always more passionate about the food, the content, the photography, and she really enjoyed the data side of everything. So it was just a match made in heaven from the beginning. She's always enjoyed doing the stuff that I don't and vice versa.

Yeah, it's super helpful when the division of labor is such that there isn't a lot of overlap. And it's essentially you have your respective departments. I think that's one of the things that when people are like, oh my gosh, how do you and Lindsay work together? And you're married? And isn't that so stressful? But what ends up happening is we have these. And it wasn't this really intentional thing for us. It just happened to be. And it sounds like kind of similar to you happened to be that we had these areas of interest that resulted in kind of a clean line. And so we kind of come to each other almost like for consultation. Hey, what do you think about this? But it's not like we're then going and shooting a recipe together in the same room and like, you know, passing the camera back and forth.

We work.

Yeah, Liz. Liz probably. She never even knows what's coming live on the site or what rescues I'm working on really.

I know when I. She brings me yummy food and I obviously know if I look at the calendar, but I work so much on different things that I don't always know exactly what working on at that moment.

So. So the. The story of. The story in and of itself is really awesome, like you coming together, working on it, but also awesome because it's been so successful. And we. We do a little intake survey and we talk about it. And the site right now, correct me if I'm wrong, averages 11 million page views a month. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah.

Which is amazing. And one of the additional amazing things within that is your story was such that you. You had these kind of like bumps along the way where you increased, you know, 50% one of those. And I don't know exactly percentage wise, what it was, but Covid, which a lot of people can relate to, but it sounds like you've been able to just maintain that growth moving through these different periods. So it wasn't like it grew and then it dipped back down and then plateaued, which I think a lot of people could relate with. Similar, for us, like, you have this huge spike, and then it comes back down. But for you, you're able to have these areas of growth and continue to maintain those at a really significant level. So can you rewind the tape for us and kind of play back what those different points were? And if you can pinpoint maybe some of the things that you changed or ideas that you had or things that you implemented along the way that were able to unlock those different stages of.

Growth, it's been a fun exercise for us to try to think about. Okay, we have all, you know, before going into 2020, we were averaging 5 million page views a year. Yeah, sorry, 5 million pages that year. Yeah. And I think it's been fun to kind of look at. Okay, we have all this. This. This big new. What is it? That's. What are these milestones that have helped us grow? And so, yeah, I think we pinpointed a few very humbly, recognizing that you never really know exactly what it is that's helping.

But, yeah, I think we've found a few things that seem to have worked for us when Covid happened. I think everyone can relate to having a huge spike in traffic. We went from 5 million page views a month to 8 million page views a month. So our real goal at that time was how do we maintain this? How do we audience. And especially once kind of things got back to normal and people weren't stuck home cooking so much. That was one of our goals. And I think the very first change that we made was immediately deciding that we wanted to really ramp up our content and work smarter, not harder. So we already had such a huge wealth of content on the site. It was just getting all of those old recipes in front of new eyeballs constantly. So we went from publishing three recipes a week to five recipes a week. Immediately, we just wanted to just keep recycling this content and updating it.

And when you say publishing, that would be taking content that exists and maybe refreshing it a little bit and then getting it in front of those readers. So two things within that. Can you talk about what you would do when you would go in and look at a piece of content and refresh it? What does that like refresh mean if it can be so ambiguous, it means.

Retesting the recipe, making sure it's perfect and we're super happy with it, updating photography if needed. And even if we liked the photography, it would still mean re editing the photo and uploading it as potentially a new file. And just really, we've never worried about word count ever. We just really want it to be clear and concise and to the point, answer the necessary questions and no more than that. And yeah, I just think that's always process.

And then how about in terms of getting it in front of people? So does that mean sending out an email, putting it out on social, what did that like? If you had a little checklist of all the different things that you wanted to check along the way, once you did revisit a piece of content internally, then what does it look like to shine a light on that externally?

The getting it out in front of people I think has a few layers and we use different names. A lot of people, low hanging fruit and things like that, we kind of put them into categories based off of data. Right. So something that is actually getting republished on our site is getting the most attention we can give to it. But then there's kind of other levels of things that might not need a whole republish but might really need some attention in other ways. And so we'll kind of put it on different message boards for our team to see and notice and decide. Does that need an email? Does it need a fresh video or just a reel? Does it need, does it need to.

Be highlighted on the homepage as under the main or you know, something, someone.

Yeah, so think totally depending on the piece of content and where it used to be and where it is now and what we think could happen with it. You know, if it was something in.

Search results, like where it is.

Yeah, exactly. Like if it was something that was ranking in the top three and it's not anymore, we feel like with a real refresh we probably could get it back there. So we're going to give that our best attention.

Yeah. And when you say data, Liz, this I'm guessing is in your category being the data nerd. What are the different tools that you're using to get that data? So and maybe what process within that do you use?

We love to take advantage of the free or really cheap tools. So and I don't know whether this just happens to work for us or whether people are really. We've never used Semrush. We refer to it Occasionally, like, there's some, you know, you have a certain amount of free. But generally, I think wherever we're looking to do well, we spend time on that platform. So if we're looking to do well on Google, we spend time on the.

Google page, you know, using Google.

Exactly. Like, yeah, it's like we listed out.

So novel. But it's like, if you want to get good at something, you need to understand it. Yeah, right.

I feel like the more time spent away from Google, trying to rank on Google is somewhat wasted. I want to see exactly, you know, our. Maybe we've had things listed as bullets and now they're not in bullet form and they're. Or they're showing images differently or, you know, some things change that we might want to capitalize on. But I think about quarterly, we go together. We like to just like sit at a restaurant and go through content Quarterly and see we're using Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Yes, the tools are Google Analytics, Google Search Console. Um, and then the, the process is just what's doing well, what's not doing well. Keeping in mind, I think sometimes people sort of like weigh themselves every day, so to speak. Whether we're talking about like a piece of content you just published, or we're Talking about your RPMs or whatever, we kind of get focused on like the tiny little. And we're just looking at a big picture of how's. How's our content generally doing.

That's great. And so using a tool like Google Search Console to say, okay, once a quarter and we're going to sit down and look and see like, okay, we. And it sounds like a big part of it too, is knowing two things really well. Your content and the platform that you're most interested in your content doing well on. And in your case, it's obviously you have your site, and so it's all kind of within the borders of that site. And then Google. And so it's spending time on Google understanding what, what it looks like, how it's working, searching for your own content and then using Google's tools, Analytics and Search Console to say, okay, this I noticed. My guess is in a quarterly meeting, you pull up Google Search Console and you see like, okay, let's take a look at this important piece of content. Oh, Google Search Console is telling us that it used to be in position two and now it's in position seven. Yeah. Okay. Knowing what we know about our content, did we update it? Did we not update it? And knowing what we know about using Google and seeing how Google is working, what are some things that we could do or change? So it's almost like the push back on this if it's not, if you don't feel like it's accurate, but it's like developing your skills as like an artist when it comes to content creation and having it be data supported where you know the tool, you know how it works, you know your content, you know what it looks like and that's supported by data. But it's not necessarily like you're living and breathing data as the only thing you're needing to understand the nuances of the content and the tools. Does that feel accurate?

Yeah, absolutely, 100%. Yep. And the tools, there's so much that Google Search Console and Google Analytics can do that you might be going to a different tool to do. But that tool is likely sort of scrapping that very information. Right. And so seeing right fresh right there, looking at something that is ranking 10 or higher or you know, just filtering in various ways to put content in front of your face that needs attention. And then go to Google and see, okay, how's this perform? Oh yeah, I remember I've got a note here that it was, you know, ranking here a year ago and it's not.

Yeah. So can you talk about what that looks like to sit down in one of those quarterly meetings like and it maybe it's not structured at all, which is also great. But talk through how, how that looks and if somebody's on their own, like maybe what could they do if they want to have like a similar kind of review meeting once a quarter.

It's pretty simple. I think we always start off with looking at the calendar at least three months, usually around three to six months back and the content that we shared and then we just do a quick search and just see how it's doing. So we start there and then I'm always content planning for later in the year. So she will help me pull up the data of maybe if we're looking at the fourth quarter, we're looking at holiday content from two years ago. I usually am looking back like two years, something that's at least that old that could use a refresh. And that's how I work on planning the content calendar.

And then we'll pull up, we'll kind of do that first phase of like looking back through months on the calendar and then we'll pull up Google Search Console and we'll look at low hanging fruit or potential champions, things that have dropped. We'll filter by different ways we want to think about our content. And then I'll sit with that and I'll list it off to her and she'll say, nope, we're already doing that one. Yep, we already did that one. Great.

I'll plug that in here.

She'll say, awesome, let's look at this piece of content and we'll scroll through it and see. Yeah, it's not really fitting the format we like now.

It doesn't have fresh images or it doesn't.

And then we'll put it on the.

Calendar or I'll say we just read, we just re updated that recently. Let's put it on our schedule to, you know, social media blast and send another email, backlink it a few more times on the site like whatever else we do to give it a boost.

To boost it. That's great. And one of the things that I love about that and Lindsay and I have been trying to do this and she calls it the trickster and the martyr from the book Big Magic. And we often talk about this idea of trickster mindset but it's taking things that otherwise might be mundane and making them fun. And it's such a small thing but like going to a restaurant to do it. It's like you can take this planning meeting which for some people like it would be fun. And it's, it's a great thing in general. But then saying like okay, like how can we make this fun and how can we take advantage of this great thing that we have which is like flexible job. We can go somewhere, the environment's fun. So I love that as like a really small piece of the equation to.

Try to make it fun. It's not always the funnest job. So ye, yeah, you've got to find a way to make it fun.

That's great. So you, you had mentioned this a couple times but talked about, you know, as you're thinking about arranging things and the schedule, connecting with the team. So what does your team look like right now and how do you, how do you kind of can loop your team into the day to day work that you're doing? Because my guess is you two work pretty closely and you have a pretty good understanding of like what's the common. You alluded to the fact like sometimes a post will go out and Liz, you might not know it's going out or maybe you're working on something. Liz and Lauren, you don't know like what's happening behind the scenes, but my guess is you have a general understanding of like the core mechanics of the business. And then you have a team who is working with you as well. So what does that look like and how does the dynamic work with you two as kind of day to day decision makers and then looping your team in as well.

So one thing that was really helpful, that might sound cheesy we did a couple of years ago was just envision our. We wrote, we did a what flow map of what our business looks like right now and then we thought five years ahead of where we want this to be. And we really worked on just funneling buckets of what categories we needed help with. Because my ultimate goal was to be CEO, creator the creative up here and then Liz to be the next buffer down over team, like director of operations over the.

So you wouldn't be managing anybody, you would be CEO and your main responsibility would maybe be looking ahead around the future of like kind of the vision of what the site would be and creating.

Yeah, exactly.

So that's what we've really worked on the last few years and it's been super successful. And I think it went right along with, at that time with COVID us ramping up more content, needing more help, us really sitting down and saying we actually calculate. This was my dad's advice to me, like calculate exactly how much you make per hour and anything else you can hire out, hire it out. Whether that's a house cleaner or a post. And so between those two things, I feel like we've really worked to grow a strong team and just make sure that we're really intentional with who we're hiring and what role they're filling. Based off of this kind of flowchart, we were able to see where we're missing someone or you know, if someone's doing multiple different things, do we really want them or do want them to just focus on this and hire someone else out to fit this?

Yeah. So what did your dad do? Like for him to be able to give that advice? Like was it just kind of like dad advice?

Yeah, he's just a.

He's just a good. Has always managed his money well. Yeah. Here's just a good. I know it's not like eye opening advice, but for me to think of it in terms of even outside of my business, what's taking up my time, whether that's errands or house cleaning, things like that really helped me. You know, it's.

And, and it requires us to think about. It's a shift because you think about work. Normally we have this hard line. You have work and then you have home, and it feels weird. Weirder to, like, hire somebody to do home stuff than it does to, like, hire somebody to help with work stuff. At least for me, it does. We just had some friends staying with us for a week, and they were like, oh, you have somebody? It's a family friend's son who's 18, and he comes, like, five hours every weekend. And I have a little asana project that I created for him. And it's, like, all of the different things, and it's things as simple as, like, refilling the bird feeder. It's like, once a month he refills the bird feeder. But it's. It was so nice to create that little asana task. And then just last night, we got home and we had been gone. We got back, and I was like, oh, the bird feeder's full. And it's just like. It just feels so good. But the mindset that I had with it as I was talking to my friends with it who are in the process of launching a business was that exact same thing that you said, Lauren, which is like, calculate your hourly rate, and if it's not something you like doing, like, if you really love feeling the bird feeder or gardening or doing the lawn or cleaning the garage, like, do it, that's awesome. But if it's not something you love doing and it still needs to get done, it's probably better for me on a weekend to, like, do some email than to, like, clean the garage if I don't love cleaning the garage. And the return on, that's going to be better because of that calculation of, like, okay, what is the hourly rate for this to hire out? You know, $20 an hour, depending on where you are? Like, and what is the return that I would get if I'm, like, able to figure out how to do a sponsored content deal for Picture VM or something like that. So can you talk about how you did that? Like, is it calculating the total profit within your business, looking at a rough estimate of how many hours you work, 2000 hours in a year, and then just dividing that and being like, okay, I make whatever it would be, you know, for people, $50 an hour. So anything less than that, it probably makes sense to hire out, as long as this would maybe be the key. You're efficiently prioritizing that time to do the work. Like, you could hire it out all day long, but then if you're not actually backfilling it with, like, that productive work, it might not make sense. Is that how you went about doing It.

Yeah, that's exactly what I did. And honestly, the first thing was for me, a house cleaner, because it just felt like half the time I can clean my own house. But it was that it was just going through exactly an estimate of how many hours I'm working and then based off of what I'm paying myself, exactly what I'm making per hour. And, yeah, it was just as simple as that. And I think exactly what you said. I've always, what are my strengths and what do I enjoy? So I've always known that the content. I'm never going to hire a recipe developer. I enjoy that. So it's whatever I don't enjoy. And someone could possibly do a better job than me then and be less expensive than.

I feel like that's one of my bigger unwritten jobs is as soon as she looks overwhelmed and stressed, it's like, okay, let's look at our processes and what's happening and the flow of things after you create a recipe. And what more can someone else on our team do to help with that? Because I think burnout is real. If Lauren doesn't want to make recipes anymore, then there's a lot of us out of the job. And so just trying to figure out who's the best person and how we can flow things down.

And it's amazing how many things you can end up doing that it doesn't matter if you do them or not. The tasks matters. It's an important task to get done, and it needs to get done well. But it doesn't matter who's doing it. And for all of us, I think anybody listening can relate to this idea of, like, there's a lot of stuff that happens that one way or another, if it gets done, nobody's going to care. Like, it just needs to get done. But there's also a lot of stuff that it would matter if it wasn't you doing it. And in your case, Lawrence, probably like you said, recipe development, or if you are the face of the brand, like showing up on Instagram and, you know, being the person in the kitchen doing it, and if suddenly that's somebody else, that's going to be like, wait a minute, that's a really big deal. But if suddenly it's somebody else cleaning your house, literally nobody in the world knows other than you, and you are the. And you're like, great, this is awesome. Like, it's a. It's a beneficial thing. So I think people understand that in the context of, you know, the. All the different things that we have to do within our personal life to make happen. And also acknowledging, like in the early stages, you might not have the resources for this. And so you are having to do all of those things or strategically saying, I'm not going to do some of those things until I can get specialized in something that I am uniquely skilled at. So you can start to do that like resource trading, where you're getting more for your time and then can bring somebody into support. But how about in the. On the business side? You. You alluded to this, Liz, where one of your jobs is to look at the processes and to analyze and to say, okay, where's. Where can we bring somebody in to help with that? For somebody who wants to do that with their own business, how do you go about doing it? How do you analyze a process? And maybe even how do you create a process?

Yeah, I think my process, and I don't know if this will work well for everyone, but I have just tried to dive into whatever I think we need to do better at. Email was one thing a couple years ago. It's like, we really should do a better job. So I'm going to jump into it and I'm going to learn everything I can about it and I'm going to learn what we should be doing better and start doing that myself. But as soon as I understand it well enough, we're going to get somebody to take that over because again, it's just about shuffling things down because I think my time is most well used as sort of an overseer of strategy. And so, yeah, it's a process of jumping into that thing. When web stories became a thing like, okay, I'm going to figure this out, figure out the plugins, start making some. Figure out how we want them to look and hire out as soon as we can. And then, and then I can spend more time looking at how the web stories are performing. Or, you know, that's maybe an updated example now, but that's the idea is to jump into the thing, figure out how it goes, and then find somebody that can help you, that can help you.

I love the idea of, and I've been thinking about this a lot just with my life in general of pinpointing and understanding a problem, coming up with a solution for it, creating a process around it, and then having somebody support you in that process or take over that process. And sometimes you'll just decide forever, like, this is going to be the thing that I'm going to manage if it's that thing that you're uniquely equipped for or excited about. But also there's so many of those things that we can look at understand. Like you said, Liz, it's not like you just necessarily throw somebody in and you don't know what's happening. You understand it, you understand how you want to do it. You solve it once. But then once you've solved it, somebody comes in and then they are the ones that are managing it, are taking care of it. I love that.

I think it from feeling chaotic, if you just figure the thing out before you understand it, then someone has questions or they quit and they leave and all of a sudden you're like, oh my gosh, I don't know what to do now.

And. But the other thing that it requires is like a certain type of discipline because it's slow work. It's not. You can work on something for two or three days and you're not necessarily like accomplishing things in what in typical way. So can you talk about even the specific process of creating a process like are you going in and recording a video and then using that to show somebody? Do you create a Google Doc? Is it just like understanding it and then teaching it to somebody? What does that look like when you're solving for something and then documenting it?

It's sort of an iterative process. Email's a good example where I really took that over. And then initially with email, I just got help drafting the email. So I'm just teaching them how to get in, how to create a new one, how to use the box and draft it and then I'm approving it and then that kind of that person starts to get to know it. And I'm still looking at all the data and I'm still creating some different things in email and sequences. And so I'm going to teach them how to do the next step of it.

And then you use loom a lot. You send. Yeah.

And a lot of it is meet face to face and then kind of check in and then I want them to do something new. That's easy. I send them a loom or just a screen record and send that. But it is helping that person keep understanding more and more and more and.

Then really be able to take ownership.

Of that platform to where I can just say, hey, let's meet this week, let me know. Tell me how things are going and what work on and then I can kind of keep my ears open just to the wider world about what's going on and what we might need to folks to change or focus on next or do Differently within that platform and then that information down.

But that's great. So when you say face to face is that literally face to face or like zoom face to face Zoom.

Yes it's zoom. Nobody.

All of our team is remote so we each meet. Well I would say you mostly meet with the team at least once a week. Different. Different people on the team.

Once a regular meeting actually pinch of yum. I think inspired years ago I think I was listening to your podcast and you guys have like a team huddle of sorts every night and that and so we do that too just to make sure that even people that aren't involved in the little things going on that we're all on the same page with the bigger things happening with the brand and.

Sure. And so can you talk about the. The team dynamic like are you in Slack? Do you communicate via email? And then also one of the questions we always get for people who are in the early stages is like how do you find people to work with? So the team itself, what does that look like? W2 contract part time, full time remote you established what does communication look like. Would be interested to hear kind of your current state of all things team.

Yeah.

So we've always started people 1099 contract and we've never hired people that are on our type team that works for other bloggers. We've always just. It's always been kind of a friend of a friend or someone that was a fan of the blog. Someone one of our readers and it's just kind of been word of mouth really as we been trying to fill positions and we've gotten organized on Monday.com so a lot of our systems are automated on there which has been invaluable for us. And then we communicate with Slack.

Yep. And then we those people you quickly come to see who's. Who's really invested in your brand who's and reliable and and then you. And then you incentivize those people and you make them employees and so you can speak to that.

That's been something that's been important to us is once they do become to the point where they're invaluable to us and we don't want them working for anyone else. That's when we employee. So we have what four or five employees now? Five Jeff. Anyways. Yeah so we have. We have a handful of employees. Those are just really the self motivated.

Awesome people who are aligned with the team who are interested in being a part of the team.

Exactly. And they're just really self motivated in what they're doing, they're out looking and.

They'Ve kind of earned their stripes when you ask them to do something and then they go more or they, you know. Yeah, they just go above and beyond.

But I think it's always been really important to us too, to try and be very generous. And whether that's Rev share or bonuses or just different incentive programs to make it an environment that we all really want to.

We're excited year by year about our growth and we really want them to feel the exact same way where you're just like, wow, this is so cool. Oh, gosh, this is so cool. And it just gets, gets better and better.

Yeah, that's great. It's one of the things that, you know, I think it was Charlie Munger, so he's the partner to Warren Buffett and he. That's one of the things he often talks about. It's this idea of aligning incentives and making sure that you understand what that is. And the interesting thing is, like, it's different for different people, like for entrepreneurs. That's one of the things that I'm learning is like my mindset of like, what motivates me, you know, look a little bit different than what motivates other people. Whether it be autonomy, flexibility, working on the thing that you're most excited about, Revenue, profit, like leadership, all of those different dynamics. And. But the core part of it is figuring out like, okay, how do you figure out what people are excited about? How do you create alignment around that? So then you're all working together and kind of moving together. What about. You talked about this idea of the looking five years out and kind of saying, what do we want our team to look like at this point? Are you doing like once a year? Do you do a really big annual review and say, okay, what's our five year plan? What does that process look like? If you're doing a quarterly one, do you do an annual one?

We do annually. And I feel like every year we can pinpoint that as a boost for our team.

Every year we, we have a team retreat and then prior to the retreat, we really sit down and we look at our goals from last year, make a presentation our goals last year, how we did our goals for the coming year and our org chart. And what does it look like now? How has it changed? But how do we want it to continue to change? What do we see for them? And it might not always look exactly that way a year later, but to give our team a heads up of, hey, Stacy, you're doing so awesome at this and we hope to be able to bring a couple people under you and you know, just give them a little bit of a vision of where.

We hope their role will be going. And then it's always really rewarding to see what we did last year, what were the wins and what were the losses. And then as a team to work together to talk about what our goals are for this year and you know, what we're struggling with, what roles are working or what's not working and what we could do better.

So how about right now looking into the future? You've been at it for a while. So 2009, it's kind of coming up on that 15 year mark, which is just crazy. The next 15 years of content on the web is going to look very different and you're both people who are plugged in and understand kind of the landscape. Do you have thoughts on what the future of content creation looks like? And I'm thinking of things like we talked about the importance of data privacy and how that plays in AI. Obviously a really big one changes around search and for so many of us search is popular but also social. So it's a big question. But I would be interested to hear your respective thoughts on the future of content.

Yeah, I think top of mind for us is that we feel so blessed we've been able to have an ad supported business for so long and that's always been a really passionate thing for us to offer for free. Our meal plans are free. Most of everything we offer, we do it for free because we're able to.

Being an ad supported business.

So that's kind of our biggest focus right now looking towards the things you just mentioned, privacy laws and legislation around that and AI.

Yeah, we're sort of going and trying to address two issues. One is educating our audience a little bit about as privacy laws become more serious and third party cookies go away and this digital advertising spend potentially shrinks. Like consumers largely expect the Internet to be a free place and it's not. But they are not necessarily seeing that. Exchange, exchange.

It feels free, but it's because their information is being sold.

Right.

And what else feels good to them is this like idea of privacy. Right.

And like protecting and wanting both of those things.

Yeah, yeah, wanting both, but maybe not recognizing that, you know, publishers are going to have to start changing the model, you know, subscription to subscription based or things like that. Or we might have to charge for our meal plans or things like that. If advertisers really withdraw because they're no longer able to track you. Right. And so there's one thing we're trying to address, like how do we help our audience maybe understand this bigger picture? And then the other direction is how are we going to adjust as a business, knowing what's coming down the pipeline, how are we going to adjust and maybe strengthen our brand, have Lauren a bigger part of our brand and what are some things that we could do in the future to make up for some of that loss?

Having Lauren be a bigger part of the brand because of like making it more human? Is that the idea? Yes.

Well, yeah, I think I've, I've. Neither of us are on camera type of people. We don't love the spotlight that way. I've never had social media before the blog personally, so I think that's always been a struggle. Is like I really love producing great content and sharing recipes. I don't always love. Yeah. Sharing my life. So it's kind of how do we balance that?

But yeah, to your point, the robot versus, you know, real versus fake I think is going to be an issue that continues to absolutely just really affect society. People are going to want to know what's the robot and what's the real thing with their news and with their blogs and everything else.

So yeah. And the potential scenario in the future where one of the best plays defense, offense, whatever you want to call it against AI is essentially the ability for platforms like Google, Facebook, being like whatever the platform is their ability to create compelling and helpful content. One of the greatest things that we can do defenses or offenses against it would be to be more human.

Like exactly.

So people are following a person versus discovering a recipe on search which has good ratings because potentially they might get that somewhere else. It's hard to know like what that will look like and how search will incorporate sources and whatnot. But as it is right now, it's like recipes is like, it's not super predictable and you're gonna have much better results searching for a recipe and going to a top rated result than you would with, you know, a barred result for it. But probably three years from now that'll look quite a bit different. And so yeah, it's smart reflections around kind of folding in humanity into your content. But it's hard if you don't necessarily bend that way. So what does that look like for you, Lauren, as you contemplate a future where you're needing to be more present?

Yeah, sorry. It's just, I think it's a balance of just trying to still be authentic and not be someone that I'm not. I'm not going to ever be that tiktoker entertainer.

Totally.

But I think it's always going to be important to me to that that I'm a trustworthy brand and a trustworthy place to come for really reliable content and recipes. So I think I do. We do hope to be a little bit more on camera when it has to do with just teaching skills, educating. So whether that app or whatever platform we decide to do that would be still on like an educational provide value and useful resources for our audience.

Yeah.

And you talked about kind of the data privacy piece and to expand on that a little bit, Liz, third party cookies are going away and essentially what that means at a really high level is it's going to be harder to track people specifically when they're using Chrome. Like it already exists with Apple and Safari. Apple being privacy focused but now it'll be with Chrome eventually. I forget the date. When is it? I should know this because we talk about it a hundred times.

Like they change it.

Yeah. But it's like coming down the line.

Yeah.

And the idea being when that changes, it's potentially less valuable for advertisers to do traditional ads. So they'd potentially spend less. It's all. It's hard to know exactly how that all shakes out, but one of the ways that you can work against that is by getting information from people through them. Opting in like email addresses as an example. So with you doing the free meal plans was that part of the thinking is, hey, we want to create like a database of users where we have information and obviously it's a valuable service as well and that's why people are signing up for it. So when did you launch the meal plans and did that have anything to do with thoughts around the upcoming changes with third party cookies?

Originally?

Not.

We've been doing them for many years and we just always wanted it to be free because in our mind it's. We don't provide the shop, we don't provide the recipe. We just provide a shopping list and the links recipes. So we're like, we would love people cooking from our site every single night. That was the goal.

It's like a goal. A way to make your site more sticky is to create resources around it. Yeah.

I think we love the idea too that it started as this thought of like, okay, if I am paying personally $10 a month for something that a lot of people aren't paying for, I might feel a little dumb sharing that I'm like, don't want to admit that I'm having to do that, but if I am using this site that has these free resources, I'm going to tell all my friends about it because now I'm cheating the system. I'm winning at life.

Right here's a great resource. It's free. There's no downside.

So I think that sort of marketing of it. But we also, we like to offer things for free when we can. So I don't know that we've ever been too thoughtful about how it would into party cookies and all that.

I will say we did. We have started to be more strategic about trying to capture emails. Yes.

As we promote the meal plan, it's definitely become, you know, looking five years down the road, something that we want to continue to brand as something that might help offset some of those losses from digital advertising.

That's great. Do you use. Are the meal plans just available as like PDF downloads or you're creating an account and what does that process look like? It feels like it might potentially be difficult to manage or.

No, no, it's not. It's you. They're just free on our site to anyone as a PDF download. If you register as a. For a free account, there's additional tools to make them even more, you know, editable, customizable and things like that.

Great. That's awesome. So tell me about the. As you look towards, we talked about kind of the five year. As you look towards the next, like three months, six months, nine months, what are the things? I think it's interesting to look back, hear about reflections on the past, interesting to look way in the future. But it's also interesting to hear like what's happening right now, like what are you working on, what are the things you're trying to figure out and potentially what's working well, yeah, there's a.

There's several. I think we're trying to hone in on on that Email is always something that we're really trying to, to dial in on how we can.

That's probably been our biggest focus.

That's been our biggest focus for maybe the last year or so.

And why is that?

I think it's our best, most loyal audience that we could sell to in the future as we need to or want to and just figuring out what's working best with email. How we particularly right now, how we can do a better job converting our social audience to email because they're not always big.

Like actually right now focus of ours is converting social audiences to email. Yeah.

Yeah. And the idea being that email is a little bit more owned than a platform like Instagram. Like if you think of Facebook 10 years ago, we both lived in a world where we can look back that far. It was a very different platform for a brand than it is now. And if you would have captured that audience into email, you'd be probably in a better place. And so you're thinking, like, what happens if Instagram changes? We want to make sure that we can capture those folks over to email.

Yeah, email, it's definitely what we own, but it's also what converts best if you're selling cookbooks or anything else. And it's also one of our more powerful resources to give a piece of content a boost. Eyeballs on it wanted to have. So yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.

But has anything worked well so far on that?

With that, we're really excited about manychat and this is like a couple days in excited. So we're probably not seeing the big picture in problems haven't all presented themselves out but. But using many chats automations a little bit more to. To offer something that people are going to want to automatic if they enter their email in the DM and it automatically gets on your list versus having to swipe up and fill out a form. Right. All they have to do is just type it in and they get it. And then after that being able to serve them with additional content that you want them to see. Like, okay, are you.

We're so happy you signed up. Now check out this.

Yeah. And look at this. You might also like this recipe. And being able to be strategic and mindful about putting the right piece of content in front of people.

That's great. Yeah. We, Lindsay and I have a. This is one of those where your entire family is sick for a week and then we had guests for a week. We have this one meeting that keeps getting bumped, but it's like, look at manychat and figure out any type of like chat solution that allows you to. It's like, how can you stay as native as possible to where people are wanting to have a conversation or the platform that people are using. And to your point, like, if you're then sending them to a site where the form has to load and it feels like it's slow, it's just going to create more friction and it creates that frictionless experience, which is cool.

I think any opportunity we can have to try to understand our audience better. That person who came from here to here interested in our challenges or they're interested in our meal plans, or they're interested in dessert and trying to hang on to what you know about that person and using panel them into the right place.

Yeah, that's great. So, as we wrap up, I'd be interested in directing a question to each one of you in your kind of respective areas. Lauren, I'll start with you. If you look at, you know, your work, the things that you've done, and you could boil it down to, let's call it like three things that are most critical for you, like skill set, the things that you do that are the most valuable, and the skills that. But for somebody who wants to do similar things to you that they should refine and get really good at, would you be able to pinpoint those three things?

I think for me personally, the things that have helped me not burn out and stay motivated and love what I do, because I think that's rare. I think all the time with groups of bloggers, they actually don't even like cooking or they don't enjoy what they do. And I still absolutely love it. It's still a passion for me. And I think one of those has been avoiding comparison. I don't do competitive research. I try. And I'm not on social media often. That was something I really wanted to give up. It just is a healthier mental.

We always say, stay in our lane.

Yeah, just stay in my lane. I say that all the time. I just try and stay in my lane. And that way I'm able to just produce content that is. I know that it's authentic and genuine. I love it. It's exciting and motivating for me. I was going to say something else with that and I forgot.

And as you're thinking about it, one of the things that I would like to point out, it's we. So we just had these friends over and they have two boys who are like 10 and 8, and they were playing video games. I have a switch that I played like seven minutes on. And then they came over and they're like, oh, my gosh, Nintendo Switch. This is the best thing ever. So we played like Mario Kart and all these games. It was really fun. But it aligned with this thought that I've been having quite a bit around video game design and this idea that, like, we are all. We all have the opportunity to design our own video game, and we are the character in our video game. And one of the most important things in a video game to define is, like, what are the metrics around success and we get to look at it, our lives, and say, like, what's important to us? And then that's what we're comparing ourselves against. Am I doing a better job this year than last year of whatever the things are, Being a present, dad, growing my business, if that's an important thing, being healthy, like, you get to define what those things are. And one of the hard things with the comparison world is, like, the way that our brains work is, like, as soon as we see somebody doing a certain thing, we have the potential to anchor off of that and be like, that's what I want. I need that. But whether it's like, stay in your lane, like, design your own video game, like, as if you can become good at that, it feels like such an unlock to a life lived that's maybe more at peace or not as rushed or not as, like, in angst, but it's also a hard thing to do. But it's great to hear you reflect on that. To say, like, that was. That's actually a really important piece of the puzzle. Like, maybe the most important piece is to figure out how to continue to, like, enjoy the work.

Yeah.

I heard another person, it was kind of a motivational speaker talk to. That really hit home with me was just having three people in your life to talk to that are outside of your business world. So that's really helpful for me to have those three people that you can talk and they're interested in what's going on with your business and et cetera, but they're able to kind of be a sound voice and keep you a little bit grounded.

Has been really helpful.

And I would say the other part. The other piece of the puzzle for me has been I've never, ever posted something on Taste Better from Scratch that I actually wasn't really passionate about and wouldn't want someone, one of my best friends, to make. So I've never done hardly any sponsor content for that reason. It's just hard for me to balance that. And I've never. I mean, there's been stuff that I've made, I make all the time that just won't end up on the site. Because even if it's the best search term in the world, and even if I think that I could absolutely win if I don't like it, I can.

Remember a time when she brought me chocolate tiramisu. And I was like, this is awesome. And she's like, I mean, yes, it's good chocolate tiramisu. It will probably be the best chocolate tiramisu out there. But she's like, but if my friend called me and said, hey, I'm having.

People over, what should I make for dessert?

I'm never gonna tell them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it doesn't make it, you know.

That's a great filter. Yeah. That's awesome. How about you, Liz? When you think of the things that are most important for your role.

Yeah. I think bucketing my time has been hugely important. There were days when I'm kind of like trying to be mom and trying to do all of the things, but not with strict time boundaries. And so I spent just doing a half job at all of it. You know, I'm working and then I'm changing the laundry and then I'm like.

Oh, shoot, I need a dinner.

And I'm just sort of all over the place.

That transition time.

Yeah. So making time to either for me, it works to leave the house, but like have set hours, leave the house for that amount of time and then I can have that car ride back to transition and shut it off for a minute. Because otherwise.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like the psychological and actual merger back into life. Like you're taking the lane from the work highway.

Yeah.

Merging off of that onto the life highway. Yeah.

And then I think that the only other thing would be to like, I. I keep my own life happy by. I don't. I pass off the things that I don't want to keep doing and I keep doing things that I think are most important. That and that I think I'm good at. But making sure sort of like, you know, this if. If I'm passing all these things down, that those strings are like smooth, so to speak. That like, yeah, things are running well and constantly evaluating like, you know, I moved this person over to help manage this person, but I don't know if it's going super well and thinking through how we can better use these people for what they are interested and want to do and what their strengths are and what I think might be best moving forward and just sort of making sure things are organized.

That's awesome. That's great. Super inspiring to talk to both of you. And we've connected in real life as well. So it's fun to. Always fun to have like a real life connection before a zoom connection here. And I'm sure other people would love to follow along with. If they're not already with what you're up to. So my guess is tastes better from scratch kind of everywhere on the web. Is that where to find. That's it.

Yeah.

Awesome. We'll link to it in the show notes as well. Liz Lauren, so great to connect. Thanks for coming on.

It was our pleasure. Thanks so much.

Foreign.

Hey there, Alexa here. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Thanks for tuning in this week. I wanted to let you know that we actually recently launched something called the Member directory. So all Food Blogger Pro members have access to it, and they can access it by going to foodbloggerpro.com directory. And it's there that you can see and connect with all of your fellow Food Blogger Pro members and industry experts and those of us, us on the Food Blogger Pro team. So you'll see different things like social links and blog links and bios and just ways to connect. And it's just such a fun place to go if you're looking to kind of build your own community on a social media platform or just be able to connect with other people and see what they're up to on their blogs. So again, that URL is foodbloggerpro.com directory and if you are a Food Blogger Pro member and you're interested in filling out your profile, you can do that over in the edit profile area of your membership. And then once you fill out that information and you're kind of exploring the member directory, you can filter by cuisines. So if you're blogging about vegan recipes and you want to connect with other vegan bloggers, it's very easy to do that on the directory. It's very fun, very cool, and just a really awesome place to connect with one another. So, um, if you're a member, be sure to check that out@foodbloggerpro.com directory. And if you're not a member, all good. If you're interested in joining, you can learn more@foodbloggerpro.com membership. Um, but otherwise, we'll see you here on the podcast next time next Tuesday. And until then, make it a great week.

Sam.