Achieving Quiet Success as a Six-Figure Food Creator with Elizabeth Emery

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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 we are chatting with Elizabeth Emery from the food blog Vancouver with love. Elizabeth first started blogging in 2015 as a side hustle and then took her site full time in 2018. Elizabeth shares more about the burnout that she experienced in 2021 and how she really fell out of love with her job. She talks about how she worked with a business coach to adjust certain parts of her business that she wasn't happy with, and how leaning into the joy in her business helped her both find renewed excitement about her job, but also helped her business to grow. She chats about the importance of adjusting her sources of revenue and prioritizing passive income, how qualifying for an ad network has really transformed how she thinks about her business and how she's worked to grow her income for her blog to a six figure business this year. Elizabeth also talks about what quiet success means for her and why you don't need TV appearances or cookbook deals to have a successful career as a food creator. I really enjoyed editing this episode and love the perspective that Elizabeth brings to food blogging and think you will too. Without further ado, I'll let Bjork take it away.

Elizabeth, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. It's an honor.

Yeah, whenever we do a podcast we do a little bit of a, you know, check in before and talk about some of the things that we're going to talk about and all of the things that we recapped as we kind of built the agenda. They're all things that I'm really excited to talk about because I think they're important topics for a variety of reasons. We're going to be talking about money and making, like a sustainable income. We're going to be talking about burnout. We're going to be talking about, you know, diversification of revenue sources, you know, quiet success. That phrase that you used. But where I want to start is 2021, because it sounds like that was a season for you where you had been blogging, publishing, building this business for, at that point, maybe six years, seven years. You'd been at it a while, is that right?

Yeah, less full time. I've been doing the blog from about 2015, 16, but full time, end of 2018, so.

So you've been working on it side hustle initially and then full time. And it sounds like that was a season where you, in your words, were burnt out. Like, what did that look like? What did that feel like? Tell us about that season in 2021.

Yeah, I mean, it. It was awful. There's no other word for it, really. We'd. Obviously, we were still going through the pandemic, weren't we? So there were sort of lockdowns in place. But by that time, I think it's safe to say the novelty of lockdown had well and truly worn off for.

Most of us that first month. It's like, we're going to get so much done. Everybody's going to exercise. It's going to be a great thing. Yeah. Now it's like, oh, I just want to, like, hang out with my friends and not feel weird about it and wonder if everybody's okay. Yeah.

Yeah. So by that point, I think, as many of us did, I'd just sort of really gone sort of hard into work and had got to this point where I realized I was waking up in the morning, just dreading the day. And like, that is just a horrible place to be. Literally waking up thinking, oh, I've got to do this, I've got to shoot this content, got to do this on Instagram, gonna do this for a client. And I basically just completely fallen out of love with the job, I think. And it looked very different to me to what it does now. My business has changed somewhat, but it was just. It was the worst feeling. It was. I could see I was getting sort of depressed with all of it. And, yeah, the best way I can Encapsulate it, though, is literally waking up in the morning dreading it, not wanting to do it.

What do you think you were dreading? Like, can you pinpoint the, the things in your day that you were dreading or was it just kind of this general sense of dread?

I think it was both, to be honest. I think there was a general sense of dread and then I think there were elements of my business that just weren't working for me and it wasn't further on that we'll come to until I started working with a business coach that I realized it was a wake up call for me to just adjust those parts of my business that I wasn't happy with. Like, I was putting too much energy into certain parts, like freelance recipe developments for clients and stuff. And it wasn't my work, it wasn't giving me the same sense of creative fulfillment. And I think my. The business coach I work with now, she's brilliant and she has this phrase where she says, you know, if you're feeling burnt out, it's always a sign that something isn't working in your business, whether that's a specific area that you're giving more time to or whether it's just something you need to stop doing altogether. Not necessarily, but that for me, there were definite areas that I wasn't enjoying. And I think, you know, Instagram, for example, is becoming a bit drag by that point. It was relentless back then. It was. You'd be posting every day or I was, and it was just hard to keep on top of it. I basically felt like a hamster on a wheel. Yeah, yeah.

And do you feel, do you feel like at that point part of it was you felt like you had to. Like, it was a thing you have to do and I have to. Other people are doing it and so this is what I have to do. Like what, what was it that kept you doing it? If the thing was making you feel dread or, you know, a certain level of like, oh, this is really depressing, or I am depressed doing this work. Like, what. What was the driving force behind it to keep you doing it?

Yeah, I think, as you say, there's. There is definitely an element of that's what you have. You think that's what you have to do, that's what everyone else is doing. So surely I must have to do that as well, therefore I will do it. This is just how it's done. I think also at that point my business wasn't particularly sustainable and my income was very low from. It hadn't Discovered ad revenue at that point. I was quite late to the party with that. So I was really sort of focused on sponsored content and then freelance recipe development, both of which very labor intensive. You're not. There's no passive income there. It's, you know, you're exchanging your time for income and I think every month.

Is a blank slate. You have to show up, you have to earn it. Like there's no kind of foundational layer of recurring. It's up and down with ad revenue but there's no base level of like. Yeah, I know. Generally speaking I might earn a couple thousand dollars this month and then you can layer on additional things on top, which that feels different than if I don't earn any money from sponsored content this month, then I don't earn any money.

Yeah, a hundred percent. You're really having to hustle and put yourself out there and do it. And I think if someone's not been in that experience before, it's exhausting. It's really exhausting. And there's no element of being able to coast at all. Not that, not that we coast but like with ad revenue it is kind of passive in a way and you can take a month off and probably terrible things aren't going to happen. You'll still have that income coming in. And I wasn't there at that point. It was very much all on me. And I think I really felt that pressure big time.

Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about your site a little bit. Vancouver with love. So you've been working on it for 9ish years full time. About half of that. Does that sound right? More now. But tell us about your site and kind of what the focus is with it and maybe anything that has kind of evolved with it as you've been working with this business coach, if at all. And then we'll get back into kind of some of the changes that you made as you worked out of this season of burnout.

Yeah, for sure. So my site is primarily vegan recipes where it's all vegan recipes, a little bit of lifestyle and plant based travel with that. But vegan recipes are the main focus. It has been since I started it, really. Originally the focus was vegan gluten free recipes because that's how I was eating. Now all the recipes always have gluten free options. So that hasn't changed. But it's primarily a plant based focus and that's kind of, that's really my niche. I don't specialize more than that. Perhaps I go more for like dinner recipes and breakfast rest. But the idea being that they're easy and accessible for the most part because I know that my community, the audience I have, they're not generally the people that are interested in spending three hours baking a four layer cake. Like, yeah, that's how long it takes to make sure. But yeah, they want quick and easy.

But if, if there was one that took that long, your people wouldn't be doing it.

Yeah, it's not, it's not who they are. So yeah, it's much more like simple dinner recipes, overnight oats recipes, that sort of thing. I think whatever makes plant based eating more accessible to people really. That's, that's what I do.

Yeah. And you started eating vegetarian when you were 4, is that right?

Yeah, yeah.

Can you tell us about that? We, so we have a, we have a three year old and a five year old. So like right around that age, was it something that your parents had done or your family had done or were you somebody who was like, you know, aware of animals and animal products and that at a young age? What was that like?

Yeah, it's a funny story. I, I went to the butcher with my mum one day and it's weird, I can still remember it. There were, I assume they were turkeys, birds strung up in the window. And I remember just looking at them with horror. Why? What, what is that? And my mum was like, well that's meat, that's what we eat. That's where it comes from. Yeah, I just sort of went, I don't want to. If that's what it is, I don't want to eat that anymore. And she went, okay. And to her credit, neither she nor my dad ever tried to dissuade me. They were very supportive. They weren't plant based themselves but they, I think they had been thinking about it and I think they decided if their four year old daughter could do it, they could probably give it a go as well.

So yeah. So did they start eating vegetarian at that point?

Yeah, yeah. My dad's still pescatarian, he still has some fish, my mom, my sister, fully vegetarian.

Wow. What a like pivotal moment in all of your lives, like watching, I mean you think about like what could have happened if you didn't walk into that butcher store as a four year old.

Yeah, I do wonder because it's, I think it's very hard to make the distinction, the understanding of what meat is if you don't have that kind of misual. Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't have known. I wouldn't have understood what the chicken in my stew meant. Like, I think, you know, it's little kids naturally, I think often don't always want that. So it's. It felt very natural to me to say no. And I can only say I was very fortunate that they didn't try to.

Yeah. Make me dissuade you. Our 5 year old who's very like, aware of things and feels things on a very deep level, is starting to ask questions about the food that we're eating. Is this, is this. I forget the phrase she uses. Like real or made? Like, is chicken real or made? And it's like, oh, chicken is real. It's like the chicken that is outside. Or like, you know, is bacon real or made? It's like, oh, it's real. And I think what she means by real is like, is it an animal? And so we've always thought, like, she has, as she starts to learn more, the potential to be somebody who makes a decision to eat vegetarian.

Yeah.

One more quick example. We just got a frog recently, a tree frog. And she's been really excited about it. Its original name was Tree, a tree frog named Tree. And then she, when she went to stay with my parents for the weekend, she came back, she had renamed it to Rice, so it's now that's its permanent name, Rice, the tree frog. But we needed to get food for it. And so we got crickets. And we were bringing the crickets in and she had this moment where she stopped and she looked at me and she goes, dad, do we. So these, we feed these to the frog. And I was like, yeah, that's what the frog eats. Like the frog will eat crickets. And she had this long pause and she said, do you think they're happy? And I was like, oh, my gosh. And it was for me then, like, suddenly I'm like wrapped up in like the moral implications of like feeding crickets to a frog. And like, yeah, yeah. As a little like four or five year old, you feel those things and can make those decisions. And so anyways, a little bit of a tangent, but it's really cool to hear as part of your story and now part of the work that you do, like, you help facilitate that for other people. And we talk about that with pinch of yam a lot. Like, so much of what we do is driven by, hey, we want to have a successful business, but we also want to make a difference in people's lives. And a good example is like, we do meal plans and the testimonials that come out of those meal plans are empowering and motivating for us to continue to do that because it makes a difference in people's lives. But in order to do that, you have to be at your best as a creator. And there's this person that I followed for a long time. He's now kind of moved into semi retirement. His name was Michael Hyatt. Just talked about like leadership and creating and things like that. And he always talked about the analogy of your putting your oxygen mask on first. And he always talked about, for himself, it means like fitness and health and making sure that he's getting his margin and he's not over scheduled. And I think about what you're doing, the success in your business as you've grown that over the last few years, but also the mission of the business, to help people eat vegan and to do that in a way that is sustainable and not overwhelming. None of that can happen if you are at a point where you feel like, burnt out or you're not passionate about it. So what when you were working with, well, let's go to the coach first. Like, how did you have the idea to find a coach as a way to facilitate your way into maybe a better future? And even why did you make the decision to work with a coach versus just like, I'm burnt out, I'm going to wind this down and go in a different direction?

Yeah, that's a good question, Bjork. I think the honest answer is desperation. I couldn't go on the way I was, but I knew I loved the job. I'm in my late 30s. I'd done a lot of other jobs before this, and I had pretty much hated most of them. And I. I'd never had a career I felt I truly wanted to be doing. This was the first one I felt I could see myself doing for years to come. And that excited me. And I thought.

And you had tasted it, you knew you liked the taste of it. It was. But it. It had like soured a little bit and. But you knew that there was something there that you wanted to get back to.

Yeah, I knew I could have some sort of success with it. Whatever that was going to look like, I knew I could make it sustainable. So I'd got to this miserable point where I just literally was dreading the day and I knew something had to change. I wasn't prepared to give the business up. And I thought, right, business coach. I'd followed this woman on Instagram. I'd listened to her podcast for several years and as we know, like, the podcast is such a powerful method, I think, of reaching people and it really made me want to work with her. She's based in the uk and what's.

Her podcast or the name of the coach?

Yeah, so she. Her name is Jen Carrington. Like I say, she's based in the uk. She has done various podcasts over the years. Her most recent one, I think the one I listened to was your simple and Spacious Business. And she. Another joint podcast called Letters from a Hopeful Creative, which is a really good podcast. They're both great. So I really knew that her style fitted me. She actually. She works with a chronic illness. She's had a chronic illness for years. So she manages to sustain her business by working around sort of 10 hours a week. And it's sustainable, it's successful, she makes the income she needs to make. And I don't have any chronic illness. I'm very fortunate in that regard. But I remember listening to everything she was saying and just thinking, that's what I need. I need a more human approach to running this business because I'm being a hideous boss to myself. I'm forcing myself to do things I don't want to do every morning because I feel I have to. And she takes such a more calm, kind, joyful approach to it that I thought, yeah, that's the person for me, if this can help me find joy in the business again. And, yeah, joy in life, really, because so much of our work is like. Right, that's what. Yeah.

So I remember reading this book. I think it was maybe Stanford professors who had this class that was really successful, and then they put it into a book, and it was called Designing youg Life. They've also recently published one, I think, called Designing your Work Life, which is more specific to career versus just life. And one of the exercises they have you do is there's, like, empty to full, kind of like you'd see in a car. And they'd have you go through and do, like, an inventory of the different things that you were doing throughout the day. Does this make me empty? Does it make me full? And it's just a way to reflect on what you're doing and how you, as a creator, individual, like, respond to it and, you know, things that I would love to do, like sit down and do, like a finance review with Lindsay, she'd be like, please know, like, poke me in the eye a hundred times with a stick. Yeah. And. But point being, like, people really enjoy different things and get life from different things. What did it look like for you as you started this process of reanalysis and or just analysis for the first time and working with a coach to get like a lay of the land of what was happening, to even like understand where things are at. Was there an exercise you did? Was there a process you followed?

Yeah, it was more holistic I would say. There wasn't a formal exercise as such, but she was great at talking me through literally as you say, like what, what is filling your cup and what is taking away from it. And it was, you know, completely eye opening to realize that for example doing a lot of client work, doing a lot of recipe development, it's, it's a really important part. But it wasn't, I was doing so much, it wasn't filling my cup at all. It was really draining me. I felt like I had virtually no time for myself in terms of creating my own content for the blog because I wasn't monetizing it through ads at this point. I, as I say I was late to the party with that. So basically all my time was getting spent on client work and then sort of brand sponsored deals all for other people, which again great work, but I was never ever left with any time to build up my own blog at.

The end of the day. So in realizing that like in your case, hey, I'm doing a bunch of client work, it's, it's, for some people it might be really life giving. For you it wasn't, but it was monetarily significant. You saw this opportunity of hey, I, I want to work on my own thing and build that, that's important. But a lot of times we are in a situation where it kind of feels like golden handcuffs. Like I have this income that's coming in, but I also want to build this thing adjacent to what I'm doing because I think the long term return on that, both for my own well being and maybe from a business perspective is going to be better. What did it. And, and I think the equivalent could be a W2 job or a 1099 job or a freelance job. You know you talked about having a lot of these in the past and I think a lot of people could relate to this idea of I want to, I want to build the momentum with the thing that like I own that is like that maybe not necessarily passive but like has some passive functionality built into it. But I also have to pay the bills and I have to keep this income coming in. What did it look like for you to adjust the dials on the different sources of revenue? That you had in order to focus on your site, which doesn't have an immediate return, but maybe has a better long term return once it becomes a little bit more passive.

Yeah, well, I will caveat this with saying I got very lucky with it. So because I'd had my site for quite a few years and I was sort of just about managing to do a bit of work. Like, I'd recently learned what keyword research was actually attempting to do something with each post rather than just randomly putting out recipes. It was slowly building in traffic. And coincidentally, I think as I started working with this business coach, I hit the amount of page views that meant I was able to qualify for mediavine. So that made all the difference. And I do think it was a bit of a fluke. Like, I want to be very honest about that.

Well, and to your credit, I think luck, we say this often, like luck is dressed in overalls. Like luck, you talk, you also talk about being burnt out because you were working so hard and like putting in all this effort. And so it's not like, you know, you opened your email account and somebody said, hey, we've gifted you a website, like, and now you qualify for mediavine. It comes from years of doing hard work and showing up and creating good content and even like freelance recipe development plays into your ability to craft a recipe in a way where people respond to it and it's a good recipe. And so there's like always a luck component with anything that we do. But we will never get lucky to the degree that, like, you know, money just randomly shows up in our bank account or traffic randomly starts coming to our site. Like it still requires hard work and effort and showing up, you know, for six, seven, eight years. So I want to point that out as a part of your story. But I also appreciate you being humble and acknowledging that, you know, for all of us, our success probably has some degree of luck, but also a lot of hard work. But nonetheless, you got to this point as you were working with a coach where you're able to qualify, or mediavine started to get some of that feeling of like, hey, even if I don't work this month, I'll get thousand dollars, $2,000, $3,000. What was that like at that moment? How did that change things for you?

Yeah, I mean, it was felt like gold dust, to be honest. It changed everything. And like, you know, as you probably know, when you first start with ad revenue, the amounts aren't that high because I think it takes them a little while to kind of figure Your site out, figure out who you are figuring out. So it was, it was sort of a few hundred dollars at first. It was still fantastic. But it wasn't higher numbers. But it was enough that I thought, oh, okay, this could be doable, this must be scalable. And the key, the absolute key piece for me was being able to drop down the amount of sponsored work and client work that I was doing to a level that felt like it wasn't burning me out, that I felt like I could manage and then still have time to create content for the site and really, really focus on building that up. And that I didn't expect it to feel so different, but it was like night and day. It was suddenly I was actually looking forward to what I was doing. I really enjoy keyword research. Like I find that really fun. And when you hit on that phrase, that's low competition and high search volume, it's simple pleasures, I suppose, but it's, I really enjoy that. And obviously it's difficult with helpful content updates and we never quite know what's going to happen with Google, with the algorithm. It's not, as you say, it's not sustainable income. But just knowing I had that, what felt like a safety net, I think from ad revenue, like, yeah, that real game changer for me it was the missing piece.

Yeah, it feels like art and science. Like I think of the movie Moneyball which is about the, you know, Oakland Athletics, I think baseball team. And they. It was the whole idea of like it was kind of the first, I forget his name but it was the first person who really came into baseball and made like data decisions around players. But there's still an art and a science to it. And before it was kind of like art. Like you think this person's pretty good, you can see some of their stats but like not really into data. And I. So much of content creation is similar in that regard where there's an art and a science. Like you could come across, you know, a search term with a super high search volume, really low competition. But if you know it's not within the realm of what your people would want to make, it's not something that you're going to use or if it even feels like maybe they would make it, but it's not brand aligned. And so it's almost like this additional data point that you're able to fold in to the process to make decisions and to inform it. And sometimes that will rank, then sometimes it doesn't. Like, you know, no true formula for it. But especially for People who like that type of analysis, like yourself, it's a really great tool to fold into the process. Some people, they start with it like it's the first thing you do and then you go down the content production line. Some people would have a hundred pieces of content they want to make and then they'll inform their decisions based on keyword research. Can you share just at a high level the tools that you like to use and what the process looks like for you?

Yeah, I mean I'll be honest, I'm pretty basic with it and I use KeySearch. That was always kind of my go to and I, you know, to be again transparent with it. I live in Canada, I'm British, but I'm based in Canada and a lot of these tools are based from the States and like the exchange rate from Canadian to US to Canadian, like it's not kind to us at the moment. We don't get an easy deal. So I think quite a lot of these tools are just out of the reach of a lot of Canadian based creators. So for me.

You mean like US dollar to Canadian.

Yes.

Yeah, that. Yep, yep.

It's a challenge. I know.

Like an upcharge.

Yeah, always. Always. It's. Yeah. A frustration for Canadians.

Yeah.

So for me like KeySearch was an obvious choice just because it's, it's an affordable one and I know there are much more comprehensive ones out there. But it just in the beginning it wasn't really an option for me. So I've had keyset of stuck with that. It seems to have served me quite well. And more recently I started using Rank IQ as well. But I use it more. I don't really use it to write my posts as such. I'll write the full post and then I'll pop what I've written into Rank IQ and if there's any glaring areas that I'm missing out on, kind of use it for that rather than literally writing the post.

Yeah. See if there's any gaps or like ideas for additional things you could add in.

Yeah. But yeah, that's what I do. Key search is usually my go to and then just googling stuff as well because yeah, for sure can only tell you so much, can't they?

Yeah, there's little things even that, you know, I feel like every day I'm learning different ways that you can approach keyword research. Idea being like for example, looking at the order of like if you search a certain term like an example not in the food world would be like how to do a backflip not that I was like actually searching that I'm make no attempt to do a backflip, but then looking at the tabs up above and seeing what order they're in. So like I'm looking at Google right now. I search how to do backflip and it says videos, images, forums, you know, shopping, news, books. That informs you a little bit on the user intent around that keyword. Like they're probably going to want to see a video. Whereas you know, if you do something like school bag, that's going to show images and then shopping and then videos and then news. But as we're doing keyword research, part of it is just like understanding user intent and user behavior. And so if you do a keyword search just using Google and you see videos is close there, that might be something that helps you understand like, oh, that's an important piece of content to include a video for. So I think sometimes that we don't give enough credit to just kind of like almost like exploration research. It's like, let's see what's out there and how Google is structuring things and you know, what content is present, how it's being presented around the web. And so I think it's great. Like it's the art and science with what we do, it's understanding the data that you have. But then also you at your core are a creator, you're an artist, and then using that to inform some of the decisions that you're making with the things that you're creating. Before we continue, let's take a moment to hear from our sponsors. When starting out a new business, it's a pain to get through the LLC part forming that limited liability company. And my guess is it's painful enough that many of you listening to this haven't gone through the process yet. Well, the good news is that Taylor Brands makes it so much easier. Not only is it easy, but it's also affordable to get your LLC with Taylor Brands. Taylor Brands offers all the legal requirements for LLCs, such as a registered agent, annual compliance ein and an operating agreement. All of these are really critical components of forming that LLC and having a nice and tidy business structure. Tailored Brands also walks you through each step of building a successful business and has everything you need all in one place. Bookkeeping and invoicing, business licenses and permits, business documents, bank accounts, and so much more. And our listeners will receive 35% off Taylor Brands LLC formation plans using the link taylorbrands.com LLC food blogger that's t a I L O R B R a n d s.com food blogger or just search Build a biz with Taylor. So get started today with Taylor Brands. So to go back, you start this process of kind of rebuilding and you get accepted and are starting to earn ad revenue. And it sounds like the business revenue grows kind of adjacent to your kind of like love for the business. Like you're falling back in love with the business. Does that feel like it was true, that was happening kind of in lockstep? And do you think like, as you fell in love with the business, the natural outflow of that is like you enjoyed the work and it was able to grow and thrive or was it actually now that you're able to like see the business growing and creating income from makes it easier to like invest into the business or maybe both. What did that look like in that season as you kind of came out of this, you know, 2021 burnout period?

Yeah, I think spot on. Really. Like it was a combination of both for sure. And like, again, I will be honest, like, I was quite motivated by the money. Like, yeah, I knew I always wanted to do something I loved, but I always wanted to make a good income as well. And seeing the money that you can earn increase from ad revenue is hugely motivating. I think when you haven't really come from money as well, there is. There's a different sort of motivation behind you to some other people and.

And is that true for you? Like you feel that having. Implying not coming from money?

Yeah, yeah, we. We never, we never had a lot of money growing up. And I think having been sort of keenly aware of how much other people have had in comparison and things like that, and just kind of growing up and seeing that around you, it's always made myself and my partner as well, like really prioritize wanting to build a stable, sustainable income for us. So that is definitely been a big driving factor for me. I think it's really influenced some of the decisions I've made. They've been more from a place of sort of business sense rather than, oh, this is be a great exposure opportunity, for example, you know, like writing cookbooks and stuff. Like, I've all. I've gone more down the business route thus far because it's been much more of a priority to really stabilize that. Yeah, but yeah, I was motivated by seeing the income increase. That was huge. But also, yeah, just having more joy with it. Falling back in love with business, like you say, realizing that I could, you know, take Fridays off and it Wasn't the sky wasn't going to fall in and just realizing I could have more breathing space. It's all just given me the space to actually enjoy the business I've created and really find more joy in continuing to build it, I think.

Yeah, so much of what we're doing, I think, comes down to individual priorities. And one of the things I love about your stories, it feels like you really discovering that, like, what's important for me as a person, as a business owner, for my life, for my business, and to let go of maybe some of the things that you see happening online and saying, like, that's that person and that's what's important to them and that's the game that they're playing. But really to think of it as, like, we get to. We are in a video game, and, like, we get to decide what the. The. Not all of the rules, but, like, even, like, what the rewards are within the game that we're playing. And for some people, it's purely monetary. I want to make as much money as possible. For other people, they anchor around flexibility. I want to have as much autonomy as possible. Or we've heard people say, like, I want to be famous. Like, I want to be known, and that's a motivator. But to really look inward and for other people's impact, like, and for all of us, it's probably a mixture of, like, all of those considerations. Not that everybody wants to be famous, but just, like, I actually don't want to be known at all. And that's one of the things that I'm optimizing for. But to really look inward and to say, what are the different things that I'm after? And to center on those. But it's hard when you look outward and you see other people doing a thing, and it's like, oh, they released a cookbook and they're doing a book tour. Like, that looks really cool and everybody likes it. Or, you know, they launched a product. I don't know what, like, a hundred different examples. And one of the things that you talked about, you know, as we were checking in before, was this idea of, like, quiet success, and that that's something that's available for people is quiet success. Can you talk about what that means to you? And was that always something you were aware of, or did it come up over the last couple years as you reflected on what you want work to be?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think, you know, truth be told, I wanted all those things, you know, I wanted the cookbook deal, I wanted, I don't know, present TV shows and stuff. Like, I wanted to do the high profile stuff. It just, for whatever reason, I was not in the right place at the right time for those things. And, you know, I have worked on pursuing some of them and it just hasn't really worked out. So I think that has kind of pushed me down a different avenue. It's kind of showing me that, like, okay, well, these aren't available for me right now. So I'm gonna do what I can. I'm gonna work on what I can control. And what I can control is building a quieter business. So I don't have, you know, huge amounts of Instagram followers. I don't have all of these high profile achievements. But I do feel that's it's something that isn't modeled to people. You know, we're taught that you have to sort of go after the book deal. And those things are wonderful. They're really wonderful. You know, the person that's just launched this book that's doing well and all seems very high profile. You know, what, what they're not telling you is how little they got paid to write the book and how.

Or how stressful it was.

Exactly how they had to work nights and weekends just to get this thing done. And, you know, there's huge, huge value in books. I would love to write a book one day. But it's also a very specific business choice I think, that you're making often, you know, advances typically aren't high. Um, sometimes they're incredibly low and not feasible if you have an income that you need to maintain. So I think we're sort of fed this idea of shiny success with all the achievements. And particularly as bloggers, we're not really told that, you know, you can build a sustainable business. Like, ad revenue can be very lucrative. You can do occasional sponsored posts on Instagram and things, and you can charge appropriately for those. You can do freelance work. There's so many avenues I think you can go down to build up a reputable business. You're just not necessarily becoming a star at the same time. Yeah, but I do think it's important to say it because I. It was something I never saw modeled and yeah, it wasn't shown to me that was possible.

Yes. And so often it's not modeled because the people who are experiencing that quiet success aren't like out there talking about it. Like it's a natural function of being quiet is like that you can't be heard. And I think about that in the context of business, broadly speaking, that there are millions of examples of people who have different businesses that are really successful and allow incredible autonomy and, and you don't know about them because they're not on Instagram talking about it, they don't do book deals, but they're out there just kind of in the background running their businesses. You know, so much of what we do, it's on Instagram, it's Pinterest, it's like showing up high end search results. But like, even in our world, there's a hundred different businesses that you could create that are successful. And you know, you could, whether it's doing something with photography or small boutique workshops or whatever it might be, you know, endless examples of different ways that you can build a successful thing. And so I think it's great, it's great that we talk about it. One of the things that you had talked about, you know, is this kind of as you started to figure out the things that bring you joy, the growth within your business kind of happening alongside that and you know, slowly but surely building up revenue income from your business and being on track to hit that kind of six figure mark this year, which is incredible. Congratulations. And that coming from a variety of different places, it sounds like maybe primarily ad driven. But talk to me a little bit about how you fill in the different parts of your business to get to that sustainable income level.

Yeah, of course. I mean, yes, ad revenue this year is the, the drive, like the main portion of it. It's probably about 60% of my income, I think will be coming from ad revenue. And then the remaining 40% would probably be split between sponsored content, maybe a little more sponsored content on Instagram for brands. And then the other part is the freelance recipe development I do, which I don't do a ton of anymore. I have one client that I do it for every couple of months.

Sure.

It's quite nice because it's a sustainable income and I, I believe in what he's doing, so it's nice to work with that. But yeah, that's pretty much the split. I have those three income streams. Really?

Yeah. And did you, am I looking into this correct that you are with Raptive as a Raptive publisher?

I am, yes. I switched to them this year and it's, you know, different experiences for everyone. I hear different things about different agencies. My earnings have gone up search recent working with them. Um, I can't deny that. Yeah. But I've, I've loved both of them. I've worked with Mediavine and Rautive and had had great experiences with both. So. Yep.

And we talked to a lot of creators who say the same thing, like have had good experiences with both. Um, and then when you are doing the sponsored content, working with brands, is that primarily Instagram and how do those deals happen?

Yeah, it's fully Instagram for me. My TikTok account is almost non existent. I have about 150 followers on Tik Tok. Yeah, it's primarily on Instagram. I haven't done any blog sponsored content in years. I. I just find brands that anymore. Sometimes I will pitch, sometimes it's brands that find me, sometimes it's returning brands that I've worked with previously. I did go through a phase where I did a, like a heck of a lot of pitching and that I would say if someone's starting out and kind of wondering how to go about it, I do recommend pitching brands to start with because then you'll start getting responses come back in. And that was the way I sort of did it with that. But fortunately I do get found by certain brands now, which is really nice. So I. In that way. But I do, I do think people chronically undercharge for sponsored content. Maybe it's more of a Canadian thing than a US thing. But you know, I know some people that will charge a couple of hundred dollars for a sponsored reel on Instagram. And again, not to be sniffed at, you know, if that's.

Yep.

Where you feel comfortable.

Our first brand sponsorship was free bags of frozen vegetables.

Yes.

Everybody starts somewhere. Yeah.

In there.

Yeah.

For sure. I think the first one was a hundred dollars and a couple of free things maybe. But it's. One of the things I think is actually fascinating is I have some other blogger friends that I speak to and we realize how much people don't talk about fees like we don't talk about money. I really understand the desire not to talk about that stuff, but sometimes I think we're kind of just not helping ourselves because you have no idea what somebody else is charging. I know friends, like I say, who will charge a few hundred dollars for a sponsored post. I know friends that charge a few several thousand. And the spectrum is enormous. And I think generally we should all be charging a bit higher because all we're teaching to brands otherwise is that it's okay to really be willing to pay $300. Which doesn't, you know, doesn't cover our time, it doesn't cover the resources.

Yeah.

I think it's just important to know our value.

I had a conversation on the podcast recently with the folks from Tastemaker and Chandice is the person who does a lot of the Tastemaker conference. Chanda says a lot of the brand deals for them. And I asked her, like, how do you know what to charge? Like, how do you figure that out? She's like, generally speaking, the best way to get better at understanding what your rate should be is to have conversations with other people. Like, find a group of five or six people and form a Slack group or a Facebook group, or get together in person and say, like, what brand are you working with? What are you charging? Because what it does is it allows you to see, you know, in the example I gave is like, Zillow. Do you. Would you use Zillow for Canadian real estate? Okay, no.

No, I didn't know that.

So, like, it's a real estate, like, residential real estate application. So you'd be able to go around and look and see, like, how much is a house in my neighborhood selling for? But they also have this thing called the Zestimate. And the Zestimate is like, what's the estimate or what this house is worth? Or your house is worth based on, you know, millions of data points of what other houses are selling for every year, square feet, you know, things like that. But we don't really have that in the world of sponsor content or brand work. And if we did, it'd be really helpful because then we'd all be able to see, like, oh, actually, this person who has, you know, a million followers is charging this. And so we kind of have to form our own little marketplace and do the analysis with a group of five, six, seven people just to get an idea of what are you charging? And to say, like, oh, maybe I need to be charging more, or to tell somebody else, maybe you need to be charging more. How did you go about increasing your rates? And then when do you know when to stop? Like, when are you at the point that feels appropriate?

Yeah, I mean, that's a really difficult question, actually. I think I talk to friends to start with and, you know, felt pretty good about what I was charging, then spoke to some more friends and started to feel kind of rubbish about what I was charging because they were managing to charge so much more. I usually quote perhaps a little higher than I think some brands will go for. And then if they come down, that's absolutely fine. If they say, yes, that's amazing. But then I've got that wiggle room. I'm willing to come down a bit in terms of knowing when you've reached the right level. It's really hard to say. I think what I've noticed in the last year or two is it's so different. Like the spectrum of what brands are willing to pay and what is just, it's so vast. It can be quite hard, I think, to know what to charge. But I would say as a general rule of thumb, given that I really think most creators are undercharging for our worth, I would say charge more than you think you should be. Like, pick the amount you think you should be charging and then, you know, go a thousand or go several hundred over that because you're probably, you're most likely undercharging. And I hear this again and again from kind of experts on this as well.

That's great. And one of the things I've learned. So we're working with some people. Anybody who listens to the podcast knows that you're starting to hear more podcast ads. So we're thinking of ourselves as like somebody who can do brand partnerships, which we hadn't done for years, which seems like so obvious, but it just took us a while. But one of the things that I've, that I've learned in working with them is they've really said like, hey, you're not just selling podcast ads. Like, it's kind of, you're able to sell this kind of holistic, you know, exposure for this brand. And so they helped us kind of expand our view of it to say it's on Instagram, but also like, you could include it in an email and you can. Well, for us it would be on the podcast, but you can include it in email, you can include it in Instagram. Like there's all, there's all of these platforms that we have as creators. And so I think one of the other avenues that we can all think about is if a brand approaches us and they say, hey, we would love to work with you, or we approach a brand and say we would love to work with you, they might, we might immediately say, like, how many followers do I have on Instagram? But really if you start to collectively say, and we can send an email out and the email will include a mention, and here's what that looks like as a line item. It costs this much and maybe there's a blog post and you can start to put together these packages. I have a friend who has a site, smaller traffic, smaller following, a little bit more higher like value in the things that they're selling. But he talked about putting together these million dollar packages to, for brands but they would, they'd be these holistic packages that would have like an event and like all of these different components. And so I guess it's just encouragement for anybody listening to think strategically, not even just about pricing within one area, but to think about all the different areas and the pricing that you can build into a package for a brand. And I think it helps communicate the value when you break it up and kind of show how it's going to live across the web in different ways and then also report back on that. So it feels like you're in a good place. Especially when you look back to 2021 and what that season was like. What does it look like for you looking forward? Like when you think of the next two or three years, what are the things that you're excited about and moving towards within your business?

Yeah, honestly, ad revenue is a huge part of it. Like just scaling that really has been very exciting and I'm really looking forward to kind of seeing what I can do as we're going sort of into Q4 and Q4 and Q1 weirdly, is a really good quarter for me because a lot of people are going plant based, I suppose.

Sure.

But seeing what I can do in terms of scaling that, that it does excite me. It's motivating because for the first time in my business that feels like a thing. I don't want to jinx it, say I'm in control of it, but like, who knows?

Sure, yeah.

But it's. I feel more in control of that than anything else. And it's really exciting to build that. And, you know, within the last year I. I've seen my ad revenue start, you know, a certain figure, like in the Hundreds and I've like 7x'd it in the last year. And it's such a good feeling to do that. Like, it really excites me to know where that could go. So, yeah, continuing to kind of make the business sustainable, I'd love to do something like write a cookbook one day. Any other sort of higher profile opportunities would absolutely be welcome. I actually used to have a podcast very briefly, so I'd really like to bring that back because that would be so fun and yeah, just kind of round the business out a bit more, I think, really focus more strategically on different areas that I want to. I've definitely taken a bit of a break from Instagram. Well, not a break, but I haven't been posting quite as regularly in the last couple of years on Instagram. So I've just been Getting back into posting a lot more consistently on there and yeah, kind of seeing what comes with that, but just sort of continuing to stabilize and build the business, which doesn't sound really sexy, to be honest, but great. Yeah, it works.

Yeah, that's awesome. And then last question for you as we rounded out. Let's say somebody is in a similar season where they're feeling burnt out. Maybe they're where you were in 2021. What would your advice be for them now having been, you know, three, four years out from there?

Yeah. Oh, my heart goes out to them if they are, because I, I remember how it felt vividly. My advice would be you don't have to listen to all the advice that's out there. There's a heck of a lot of advice and I wish I hadn't paid attention to everything because some of it won't apply to you. You don't have to do all of it. And some of the advice that is being given out by people in the know, like, is plain wrong. I've found in my experience, for me it's not been helpful.

Do you have an example of like something that was.

Yeah.

Reached as true that you felt not to be true?

Yeah, and I'm not gonna name any names, but no.

Yeah, just like generally speaking, the thought or the advice or. Yeah, sure.

There was a very specific example I can think of. I remember listening to a podcast once from someone who's very well known, expert in this field and somebody said, I'm.

Nervous that you're going to. That it's going to be me that's going to be the spoiler.

Wouldn't that be.

Lives in Min. Lives in Minnesota. Yeah. Name rhymes with New York. Yeah.

He has a feed blog.

I know.

Yeah. So this well known person, someone asked the question on the podcast and said, can you do what? Like can you do sponsored work on Instagram if you have less than 10,000 followers? And this person said, like kind of categorically said, no, I'm sorry, you can't. It's just not going to happen for you. It's not worth trying. Focus on building up your followers. I wouldn't bother. And I remember listening to it at the time and thinking, but I started doing sponsored work when I had like just over a thousand followers. And granted they're not the same types of deals that I do now. It's. They're different brands. But it was perfectly possible for like local brands and things like that or newer brands. It's all of that stuff I think is possible. And yeah, that was just an example of a time I remember listening to that and thinking, but I know that's not true. I know that's inaccurate. And this person was sort of flatly saying, like, yeah, less than 10,000 followers, you're not gonna get any. I wouldn't even bother at that level. And you know, I have less than 30,000 followers on Instagram. I don't have a huge account, but I make a significant part of my income from sponsored content. It is perfectly possible, for sure.

Yeah, well. And even like the brands that we work with, I don't know what the count is for food blogger pro, 12,000 people. Like, the. It's valuable for them to get in front of that audience because it's like B2B. Like, a single sign up for Yost is like a really valuable thing over a lifetime for them. Like, and I think of there's this Alex Hormozi. He's like a sales. He's like, he was really into gyms and then got into like, business. And I don't know if you ever come across Alex, and I forget his wife's name. Who also does a lot of content, generally like great content, but like any influencer content, it's like, you know, they're like a 200% human, like very. The opposite of like quiet success. They're loud success. But he talked about, don't. Like, nobody should quote me on these numbers. But like, it was a Instagram person. A person on. Who had an Instagram account. It was under like a thousand followers, but was making a million dollars a year. And he's like, and we can find it and link to it in the show notes if anybody wants to see it. But he was help. Or she was helping dietitians. She was an expert at medical billing and she was helping dietitians bill and invoice to insurance companies appropriately. And it would make the difference. It'd be like tens of thousands of dollars for these dietitians that they'd be able to make more in a year. And so they'd be willing to pay her, you know, a lot of money in order to work with her. And it was this great example of it's not about numbers. Like, it's about who are you talking to and what are you teaching and what is the value that you're creating. And you could have 10 million people, but if it's, you know, a certain subset of people who are. It's like 10 million people who never want to spend any money in a year. Like, that's going to be different than 10,000 people who are billionaires. Like really extreme example. But so much of it has to do. There's a thousand different variables that play into it. And so I think it's important to point out, you know, broadly speaking, to your point, to look at every piece of advice intentionally and say, is this true? And it might not be true. And a lot of times that general advice that's meant for everybody isn't necessarily great advice. And you know, the best advice really is like that advice kind of one on one. Somebody who understands your situation in the case of a business, understands your audience.

So yeah, and to the point of I was just going to very quickly say, the second bit of advice I would give is don't do it alone. If you can invest, like work with someone like a business coach that can really sort of help guide you through because they will help you find the joy in it again. And you have to love what you're doing, otherwise you're not going to want to do it. You can't force yourself. That's that is your system telling you something if you're hating what you're doing.

So, yeah, that's great. I think it's a, you know, there's all these different experts in the world and I think of, and I've talked about this idea of a personal board of directors before, like who are the people that you go to to get advice on, you know, health, spirituality, like business finance, relationships. Like we can have all these people in our lives, some in a paid capacity like a business coach, others in, you know, like a friend or a mentor capacity. But I think in any situation, if we're intentional with building out those connections or establishing those relationships or paying for those mentors over a long period of time, let's say a decade, we will be better for it. Like I always think of in bets and like if I were to place a bet on, you know, if somebody was working with a business coach or they weren't working a business coach, like, would your spirit business be more successful in 10 years? My bet would always be somebody like you're working with a business coach or personal trainer. Would it be healthier in 10 years or not? Probably if you're working with a personal trainer. And so thinking in bets as it applies to a long period of time, applying that idea of a business coach, it's like, yeah, your business is probably going to be better and you're probably going to be happier if it's a good business coach.

So it's an investment in everything. Your health, your mind.

Yeah, they're all linked.

Yeah, for sure.

That's great. So if people want to follow along with what you're up to, where can they do that? How can they reach out to you? How can they connect with you? Let us know all the places that people can go.

Yeah. So the blog is vancouverwithlove.com and on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook. If anyone's on Facebook anymore, it's ancoverwithlove, so you'll find me there.

Awesome. Elizabeth, thanks so much for coming on. Just great to talk to you.

Thank you so much. It's been an absolute privilege.

Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I wanted to take a minute and just ask that if you enjoyed this episode or any of our other many episodes of the Food Blogger Pro podcast that you share. Share it. It means so much to us as a podcast. If you share episodes with your friends and family or if you are a food blogger or entrepreneur, if you could share them on social media or even in your email newsletters, it really helps us get the word out about our podcast and reach more listeners. Thanks again for listening. We really hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll see you back here next week.

Sa.