Diversifying Income Series: Membership Sites with Adam Sobel

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Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This is a special one as we're kicking off our Diversifying Income series, where we'll dive into strategies to help you grow your business through multiple income streams. Today we're joined by a truly inspiring entrepreneur, Adam Sobel of Cinnamon Snail. Adam's journey is one of transformation, from running a restaurant to pivoting into successful online cooking classes. After the pandemic, he's here to share the lessons he's learned along the way, including how building a loyal community and mastering content marketing helped him thrive in a rapidly changing world. In this episode, Adam reveals the importance of lead magnets, split testing and using paid ads to attract and convert customers. He also discusses how he scaled his business by diversifying income streams, incorporating his membership site and automating key processes for SETI revenue. We hope you enjoy this episode. If you do, be sure to tune in to the rest of the Diversifying Income series. It's going to be a great one. Now, without further ado, I'll pass the reins over to Bjork.

Adam, welcome to the podcast.

Bjorkalork Snork, Brigor. It's delightful to be here with you.

It's not just you. It sounds like before we hit record you said there's also you have five dogs and a wallaby.

I don't mess around. We do a lot of. We do like a lot of wildlife rehabby stuff and animal rescue stuff and you know, wallabies are in the United States. Actually because people eat them. They were like sold as, as kangaroo burgers by like Outback Steakhouse for years. So that even though we are vegan, we're never gonna eat the poor guy. Like, our license is like through the USDA for him and stuff.

That's incredible. So in order to have him, the license comes from the usda, right?

That's right.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't, I do not recommend anybody go adopt a wallop. They are a pain in the butt.

And I would imagine it's one of those things where it's like, we have a pet frog. So we have a dog and a frog, a frog named Rice, a dog named Sage. And yesterday our 6 year old daughter was like, why aren't there vets for frogs? And I was like, oh, there are vets for frogs. They're just not as common. There's pro. It's probably much less common to find a vet.

There's like wallabies, two vets in the state of New Jersey who can see him. And they are not cheap. So, you know, you're saving up from your food blog ad revenue. You could pick like, either go get the Lamborghini you've always wanted in green Bjork, or you go get a wallaby, because wallaby.

And you guys decided to do a wallaby, which is great. So speaking of income from your food blog, that's what we're going to be talking about today. We're in this series where we talk about diversifying income. One of the great things that you've done with your site is you have ad income. But really, you know, we've talked on the podcast, the difference of like, some people market content and the content is the product. That's what they're selling because they get ad revenue and they maybe work with brands. That's one path you can go. You can also use content to market products and consulting and services. And you've built this kind of pie chart of different revenue sources from your influence online, from your following online. So tell me about how that evolved, how did it get started and what, what does that look like today for you?

So probably I'm coming at it from like the opposite direction from a lot of food blogger pro listeners because, you know, a lot of folks have had like a food blog and their main thing has been like ad and maybe some affiliate revenue for a while and now that like traffic is looking questionable and you know, people are a little bit freaking out about the potential of, you know, eventual third party cookie, you know, decimation. AI people are starting to think about adding digital products. Whereas I was, you know, before the, before the pandemic, I had a very like, popular food business, you know, restaurant and food trucks and stuff like that. And what's nice is like in the 10 years before the pandemic, I had that same domain and I was getting, you know, backlinks from the New York Times and all these different things. But I never really did much with my website. It was like just where I had the menu for our thing and, you know, where people could hit me up for catering.

So this is Cinnamon Snail. That was the. And that was a restaurant food truck.

Yeah, yeah, food business.

Yep, totally.

And. And so the pandemic hit and like once the dust settled and I like closed my business down, I started teaching cooking classes online, like live streamed ones. At first I was just selling tickets through Eventbrite, which was relatively an easy way to get set up with it. And then, you know, people had been asking me to do a food blog for ages and I never had the time or bandwidth to deal with it. But then I was like, wow, this could really be sort of the top of my funnel, like attracting all of these people into my world who then potentially get on my email list and sign up for classes and stuff. And so the process I've gone about selling has changed quite a bit over the last few years. But basically, like, I only launched my blog a few years ago as sort of that way to acquire new customers.

Yeah, because the business model previously had always been about you have a site, you have a menu. The purpose of it within the context of a restaurant is really like, how do you deliver information for people who are maybe looking ahead of time of what they want to order? Pandemic hits, that world shifts massively. You go into kind of like landscape analysis. Is that like, hey, what does the business landscape look like? I have these skills, I have this expertise, what am I going to do with it? And out of that said, hey, I'm going to do some virtual cooking classes. Is that generally what that season looked like?

Kind of. So, you know, I was very fortunate to spend like the first year of the pandemic, like living out the last year of the love of my love dog's life with her. She had gotten cancer like a year or two before the pandemic and we, dude, we were going to get married and live in a cottage forever. Like, we were really besties and she was a messed up dog. She was like, she bit people. She was going to get put to sleep so we adopted her. And when the pandemic hit, you know, she had gotten surgery and they thought she's not going to make it, or if she does, she's going to have, like, incontinence for the rest of her life. And so when she made it through that surgery and was then like a totally different, much sweeter, less bitey dog for the rest of her life, and then the pandemic hit and I no longer had, like 60 plus employees. I spent so many days just going on super long walks with her and, like, taking some of that time to think about how I wanted to align what I was doing with, like, where I was at now as a person, you know, because it was very different from where I was when I started a food business. And, you know, I have, like two teenage and adult aged kids and, you know, like, I just, I want to prioritize stuff other than working 90 hours a week inside of a restaurant.

Yeah.

And, you know, above that, like, because I do consulting work for a lot of other restaurants and, like, food manufacturers and stuff like that, I was just getting this vibe that, man, this is like the riskiest time to be in retail food service ever. Between, you know, supply chain issues and how difficult and expensive it is to find qualified staff. And, you know, ultimately, like, my goal is to help people stop eating animals. And that's what kind of drives me with having a food business in the first place. And because I had been teaching at some culinary schools before the pandemic, it was just a very natural progression to, like, well, I can still, like, help people not eat animals this way. And there's no, like, real risk about it. You know, it's not like if flour goes up another 30 cents a pound, I can't, like, pay my bills or something. So that was kind of the progression into that, like, teaching online stuff.

Yeah, that makes sense. And so, like, through that, your mission, your vision, the heart for what you're doing didn't change, but almost like the canvas for which the business was painted on did. Previously. It was retail restaurant, same mission, but looked at that world and said, maybe this isn't a good fit moving forward, both from like a macro industry perspective, but also for you personally.

Yeah, I mean, that stuff is exhausting. It's like a thankless job. And we. I mean, it's not a thankless job. We were very, very lucky to get, like, a lot of love throughout the, you know, the run of that business. But, I mean, there's probably no shortage of, like, one star Yelp reviews For like days that I had worked like a 20 hour day and like, put a lot of care and love into, you know, it's just how that goes.

So, yeah, I think anybody who has gone through that experience of building something over a decade like you did, to the point, you know, you have 60 employees, it's a successful business, you're working really hard. The idea of reinventing yourself or business seems really daunting. How did you, how did you do that? Like, how did you start from? Not zero, from skills or expertise or even like business experience, but it's in some ways starting from zero in a new area of business and building that up.

You know, it's kind of just a different dimension of the same business. And I'll be honest, like, I'm. I barely crawled out of high school alive. I'm mad dumb and I don't think I could like, do a lot of things. Like even a lot of things that I think are in my industry. Like, I do culinary consulting for restaurants and food manufacturers, but not at like, the level that somebody who really needs, like, food science degrees needs to be at. And really, like, deep, deep understanding of like, automated food manufacturing systems. Like, I have a very rough understanding of that. And so, like, even those jobs which are kind of the bottom line of what I would need to keep my family afloat on, like, though even those are kind of out of my league. So it was like, do I bet on myself or do I try to like, really reinvent myself and do some whole other thing? And you know, what I reflected on in my long walks with my dogs is that like, I, I'm still really passionate about helping prevent, you know, avoidable harm to animals. And this is like one, one skill I can share with people that, you know, if I believe in myself about it, like, I can kind of create this new business online around that.

Yeah, that's awesome. So tell me about those first few customers. So you, you start to do these classes you're teaching online, you're selling through Eventbrite. How did those first few customers come in and then how has the business evolved since then?

Right? So, I mean, as, as, you know, first of all, during the pandemic, people were like, something to do online. Sign me up. Like, it wasn't really that hard. And we had like a very loyal customer base. You know, there was like a year, I think it was 2014, we were like the number one highest rated place of any kind to eat in New York City on Yelp. And we had, we had like amassed this Very loyal following. And so the first couple classes I did, there were a lot of people signed up. Like, I think the second class I did, I maybe made like 10 grand on it, which was awesome. But I didn't have like an email list. Like, I didn't really. I would just like pushed it out to social media pretty much, which I kind of suck at, to be honest. Like, social media is like, I'm from like the old social media. When you could put something up, you.

Had a MySpace account just like me.

Yes. Find me on tribe.net so, so, and.

I think you're probably being humble, but because obviously you did something that really resonated with people. You created a restaurant, a culture, a community that people felt they wanted to be a part of, that they were interested in. And that's like a really hard thing to do. So I want, I feel like you're obviously being humble, but it's like a really incredible thing that translates different, different places. Social being an example, you know, this community wanting to support you and what you're doing there. My guess is that first time that you did that class, you make $10,000. That feels different probably than, you know, profit of $10,000 within a restaurant. Oh yeah. Just in terms of like, I don't know. You would know better than I would. But my guess is it would be. It was a moment of like, wow, this is interesting. Was that a pivotal moment for you around like a new world that you could potentially access?

Yeah, I mean, I also like really did not know what I was doing, you know, like when I first started thinking about doing it, I was like, man, I gotta figure out how to like have more than one camera and switch between cameras and like, I wanted to at least get it looking halfway decent. And luckily there's like a whole Generation of 10 Year Old Boys who think they want to grow up to like have the world watch them play video games out there, who are like all spending their time making tutorials for you on YouTube, on like how to do live streaming, how to do like multicam setup, how to deal with like lighting for, you know, so I, I kind of like binged really hard on all of that sort of material to at least get like some basic setup. And then it's, it's evolved a lot as I've gone. Like, I now incorporate obs into my kind of workflow where I can, you know, do all kinds of overlays and bring up the ingredients written on the screen and all kinds of like sexy stuff like that, but more obs is. I think it stands for like Open Source Broadcast System or something like that. It's, it's a, it's a free open source software. It's I guess competes with, what is it, Streamlabs.

There's a couple other ones kind of.

That Stream deck is like the controller that, for that, that Elgato makes for that that you can kind of pre program with different buttons. Anyway, it's, it's like a, it's a very powerful free software that you can like load up with different plugins for, you know, like doing all kinds of different transitions and you know, having different kind of like intermission screens or what have you. But more than that production side of things, what's changed over time is like how I go about acquiring and you know, new customers and selling to them and stuff like that.

And that would be learning curve too. Yeah. And, and I think that is a really interesting topic where that touches on that idea of content as marketing for a product. And uh, it diverges from a lot of the conversations that we normally have, which is marketing content, which isn't bad. But the idea of marketing content is, you know, like Pinch of Yum, the food and recipe site that we have that my wife Lindsay publishes to. She's. What she's thinking about is how do I market this content. We're not as often thinking about how do we use the content to market a product. Um, unless you know, it's maybe a brand partnership or we're doing meal plans or something like that. But usually it's thinking about how do we market the content. In your case, my guess is a lot of the content that you're producing, you're thinking about how do I create this content to market my product? Can you talk about what that looks like and even how you approach and think about content as you talked about your site being top of funnel for you and what that looks like?

Well, I mean, first of all, just like anyone else with the food blog, I am trying to bring in traffic generally. And you know, just because if I can convert a certain percentage of those people onto my email list, it's easy for me to like, you know, put them into automated sequences to pitch them some of my, you know, most popular classes or even like slightly more slick things to that than that. You know, one example is like, you know, you hear people like Matt Mullen speak about having these kind of more specific lead magnets for different categories. Right. Like it makes sense that if somebody's looking, you know, a Thai recipe on your blog, they might be more interested in some kind of Thai lead magnet. But what I've done is I've created like a whole like opt ins for every possible category on my site and then each one is like a, a sequence that offers a discounted rate on a recorded relevant class to that topic. So somebody might opt in for my like 5 Top Thai Recipes which is going to come out over five days. And during that time they're also going to be getting pitched through those emails like a 50% off discount of a recorded Thai cooking class I have. And you know, even though like there might be a very low ticket sale, I've created a lot of like kind of order bumps and upsells so that the average person who purchases that is also tacking on a few other things. You know, like sometimes somebody will go through one of those opt ins and I wake up and it's like somebody spent $200 on that or whatever.

Which is. Those are like fun emails to get. I don't know if you get the actual emails for those, but yeah. Can you talk about, do you have an idea of when you talk about top of funnel, like how many people percentage wise sign up for email? Do you have a sense for how many percentage wise end up purchasing after they sign up for email?

Not like holistically enough. Like it is definitely time for me to set up like UTM tracking and a much slicker like you know, look or studio kind of dashboard to, to see kind of based on like acquisition source what the conversions are like right now I'm, I'm not really analyzing it that, that deeply. Like I can, I can see, I can go in and like see what tags the person has and whatever but I, I couldn't tell you like based on like the specific source, what the conversion rate is and stuff like that.

But if you had to guess, let's say 100 people sign up for the email list, how many of those, if you had to guess would be people that would convert to paid like one out of a hundred, two out of a hundred.

It's super depends. I would guess it's under 1%. Taking into like taking into account things like print pass signups and like save this recipe because it's just such a different user intent, you know. Yep, I do pitch to those people and something I've gotten like a lot slicker in the last year about is like split testing the way I pitch to those people which has been really fun. Like I kind of really enjoy that like data driven decision side of this type of Marketing.

Yeah.

So like in ConvertKit, which is what I use for email, you know, there's kind of like, it's not really so well suited, like out of the box to do split testing. Like, pretty much all they allow is like the subject line split testing on broadcasts. But there are clever, weird, wacky ways. You can like, split the incoming flow of people in an automation and put them into two different sequences and like, you know, one of them has one offer, one of them has another offer, or they both have the same, same offer and it's positioned slightly differently. So kind of one of my, like, reoccurring tasks every month is to check in on those split tests and like, kind of pick my winners and keep on optimizing and tweaking all those different parts of the funnel.

That's really cool. So let's say it's. It's somebody who just signs up for the generic email list. What you're saying is, you know, ConvertKit's not great at offering a B testing, but you could split that initial group and then they would each go into their own respective funnels that would be a little bit different and you'd. At the end of it, you'd be able to see which one performed better.

Yeah.

Do you have an example of how to.

One way of doing it is you create a condition that looks at the time they set up as like a binary and you know, whether it's like an odd or even second that they signed up or entered the automation from, you can. You can create like a little filter within your automation and then branch it off. Like, okay, if it's odd seconds or even seconds, they go to this or that different part of the automation.

That's awesome. And. And then you see. I love that. So you see, then they split. You look at the performance of those. The one that wins after a certain amount of time performs better, probably becomes the new, like number one in the four square box. And it's like, then all the other tests have to, like, see if they can beat them out and it stays there. You run another test and you continue to run that until that one beats it out and then that goes in the number one.

Sometimes it's not. Like, at the end of every month you have a clear winner. Like, you really want to have enough traffic go through both of those and enough conversions happen in each of them to like, statistically see some.

Sure.

Like semi. Your decision is not just going to be a shot in the dark type of thing. Like, if only 100 people pass through both branches and one has four sales and one has three sales. Like it's kind of hard to say, but if you get like 3,000 people through each side of that, it's a little bit clearer which is the winner.

That makes sense. And then are you doing all of the product sales within Kit? Is that what you're using for your commerce or what are you using?

I don't use Kit for? The only thing I use Kit for is occasionally like some fundraising thing. Like I'll, you know, like I've, I've asked for help from my subscribers before if like one of my animals has like an insane vet bill that's going to like sink our family and people will like throw us some cash about something like that, which is really sweet. Or like I used it for, you know, like our friends just lost their house in LA to those fires and stuff, so we raised money that way. But no, I use samcart as kind of my sales engine, which is for those of you guys who don't know, it's, it's kind of like, I would say the main Competitor is like ClickFunnels or maybe, maybe ThriveCart. It's, it's primarily like a checkout system. It's. You can use it as like a page builder for actually like making sales pages. Though it's not great for it. But where it is great is for like embeddable checkouts that you can plug into WordPress or wherever else and give yourself kind of a whole like flow where, you know, if somebody's looking at this product, it's going to suggest these other relevant products as kind of order bumps they can grab. And then like, if they purchase it, you can have it go to like an upsell page that offers them, you know, a free trial of my membership or whatever, you know. Yeah, so, so yeah, that's what I use for the actual sales.

So Kit is obviously emails are going into there, funnels are happening there where. Or automations, I guess people are getting tagged, sending out broadcasts there. You were saying with the, the only transactional thing you do with Kit is, hey, we have this fundraiser or, you know, raising help for a friend who lost their house in la. Otherwise you're sending people to your products on Sam Cart. So you're still using Kit to email.

Terrible. I mean, it's, it will do the job. If somebody is already, you know, using ConvertKit and they don't have the budget for adding some kind of sales system to their world, like it could do the job. But I don't think it allows you to add like order bumps and things like that. And those upsells and all that you can tack onto a product is really what makes the difference in like average order value. And once you have a higher average order value than just your base product, that's when you can really like for fuel on the fire and like run Facebook ads to a class or whatever, which can be like an incredible, like, if nothing else, an incredible way to build your email list, you know, because, you know, you can have like a, a cheap product like I do every year, like a veganuary program, like a month long kind of vegan cooking program. It's, that's all sent out by email other than like an office hours session I do for that. And it's like pay what you want. People take it for as little as a dollar and some people pay more. And then they tack on like all these bundles that I have. And, you know, it makes it so that even though somebody could potentially pay a dollar for it, like the average order value of that is like $37 a person. So if you know what the average person is spending, it's much clearer to be able to like, know what you can pay to still profitably acquire a customer.

Yeah.

Through, you know, paid advertising or whatever.

And is that something that you're also doing? Is paid advertising as a part of. Yeah. Can you talk about that? Because that's another thing that is really a mindset shift when you're only used to thinking about organic traffic acquisition. How do I get more people to my site, make money from ads or sponsors to then say, actually, you know, in your case, I know that on average people pay $38. So if I can get a customer and pay $30 for them. You could do that all day long. Yeah, you could do it on repeat. So talk about what you've learned in that process. Having a product that you can attach a dollar amount to and then running ads against that.

All right, what I can tell you about that is that Facebook is always elusive. Like, it's always shifting and changing. And an ad that works great for three weeks can all of a sudden just like kind of fatigue and you have to, you know, experiment with new creatives or whatever to find something that works. One thing that really helped me a lot is this method that this marketer named Jeff Coffee teaches, and he has this program called the Ad Lab method. He has, he has a podcast called E Commerce Alley, which is great for anyone who wants to learn about, like Facebook advertising, but he teaches this method in his course that's like basically a testing method where you know, before you actually make a live ad that you're running to a sales page, you make like a ton of different variations on it and you test like each part of the ad kind of on its own, not as a sales campaign, but as a traffic campaign, which is like the only time you'd ever want to run an ad like that on Facebook or Instagram where. And you set like a very low threshold. Like you don't want any of these variations to spend more than a couple dollars each. And so you'll do. Each one will be like the same picture with like 20 different headlines and then like the same headline with like 20 different pictures and the same, you know, picture and headline with like six or eight different like primary texts and then you find which ones like give you the highest outbound click through rate and then kind of combine them. Be like, hey, that, that picture or video with this headline and this primary text is going to give me like the highest outbound click through rate. And then you have something a little bit more scientific to work with rather than just like, you know, that's, that's the nice thing about digital marketing is it's not like the old days where like you've got to guess what to put up on a billboard and hopefully you like said the right hook or had the right picture and there's no real way to know if it could have been better. Like this way you can do all these short little tests, find the winning thing and then like, you know what's going to give you the best bang for your buck in, in Facebook advertising. But yeah, it's always changing. One thing that's really changed like in the last year or so is they came out with what's called Advantage plus shopping campaigns which I think they just recently changed the name of to something very similar. But it's, it's their kind of like AI powered, like just trust us and we'll try to find you customers. Yeah, and it works. At least for right now. It works really well. It works, you know, because before then I was like really had to learn how to you know, create Facebook look alike audiences of previous purchasers or different, you know, different demographics and stuff. And it's kind of made it like, you know, it's like kind of putting people who are in the like ad buying space out of a job a little bit because it works at least for right now.

Yeah. So you, in that case you would, let's say you have the V January Vanuary? Yeah, yeah, Veganuary. You could go to Facebook and you could give it some general media assets. It would take those and create campaigns and would just. Those would kind of run in the background and then you'd be able to go in and look and see, here's how much I'm paying in Facebook ads. And are you also able within Facebook then to see how much you're paying per acquisition? Like, are you using a confirmation page in samcart as the like, success variable within that campaign?

Yeah, I mean, well, Facebook has like their pixel thing, which makes it very easy to track, like what the, the row as the return on ad spend is because you can see actually not just when there's a conversion, but what the value of that conversion is. You know, if somebody paid a dollar or paid $200, you can kind of see. But you know, the other thing that works super, super good is driving paid traffic to something that's free. Some type of lead magnet that has like a tripwire offer on the like, thank you page. And you can still do that the same way, like, you can still have Facebook or Instagram track those conversions that happen kind of on the back end. And like, I do that for like, I do a vegan Thanksgiving program every year that's, that's totally free, but there's like a bundle you can purchase on the thank you page. And you know, like, I think this past year like 7,000 people signed up for that program. So that was like 7,000 new people on my email list that were free because I made my money back on the, the thank you page. And then later in that program, I did like a, a free live cooking class, like a prep along with me for Thanksgiving type of class that at the end of like, I pitched them a small discount on my membership. And that's where I really made my money on that funnel. Like, I, you know, like, I made the acquisition side of it, like, cover the cost of those new people onto my list. But where I really made my money is through the membership, which is like potentially recurring revenue. If you do a good job with your membership, you know, like, those are people who now are going to be paying you every month or once a year, a big chunk or whatever. And that's nice. That makes, that makes for like, a much more sustainable revenue stream because it doesn't fluctuate as much, you know, month to month. Like, no matter how popular the classes I teach in a given month, I always have the like, hundred plus people in my membership who are ultimately paying for that class.

Before we continue, let's take a moment to hear from our sponsors. We know that developing, testing and publishing a blog around food can get costly, which is where Cookie Finance comes in. Did you know you can write off ingredients like flour, butter and chocolate chips that you're using to produce content? Cookie Finance specializes in helping content creators like you maximize tax savings while handling all your bookkeeping, quarterly tax payments, and personal and business tax returns. Plus they'll help you uncover deductions you might be overlooking, whether it's kitchen tools, camera equipment, ingredients, or even your Food Blogger Pro membership. So you never miss out on savings month to month plans with no long term commitments. Cookie Finance makes managing your taxes and finances simple so that you can focus on what matters most. Creating amazing content. Ready to start saving? Book a free consultation with Cookie Finance today by going to CookieFinance Co and clicking on the Book an intro call button. A couple of questions with that because there's a lot to talk about number one. So you're talking about a lot of marketing stuff and it sounds like you kind of got into this in 2020. 2021. I'm curious to know like your information acquisition process because you've done a lot and learned a lot in three, four, maybe five years around running an online business and what while also producing content, doing the classes. What has raising a wallaby? Like what? What has that? How would you recommend other people who want to not only learn a thing but then do a thing? What has your process and mindset been with that over the last few years?

I mean so it's twofold. One is like really giving myself the room to like play with it and try things and like sometimes it sucks. Sometimes my sale page is gone. Dude. If I look back at my original sales pages I started first building after I stopped selling on Eventbrite, they're like terrible looking. Like they're really hard to read and you know, they're not really to the point and they took me a long time to make them and stuff. And so part of it's just like through getting your reps in and experimenting and seeing what works and doesn't work and then as far as like learning it, you know, there's tons of killer resources. You know, for a little while I was part of your like paid membership of Food Blogger Pro before my Appreciate the shout out. Oh yeah, well it was super helpful and you know we're lucky that our industry, not just blogging but like online business, there's tons of killer podcasts and resources out there. That it's like really easy to chain smoke that. Like now every week I do, I. I publish like five recipes a week to my blog, which is crazy. And I like batch it, you know, like, there's one day of the week where I'm just like in my kitchen doing food photography for 12 hours. And like, I put on like tons of podcasts and I listen to that. Well, well, I'm doing food photography, you know.

And is that primary or one of the primary forms is podcasts. Like podcasts. It sounds like YouTube.

YouTube. Less so. I definitely listen to my share of podcasts. I mean, do you want me to mention like a few?

That'd be great. Yeah. If you could mention like, so any and all.

Who is awesome is this lady, Gillian Perkins, who has. She did like a YouTube course and then she created a whole course and membership thing around selling stuff online. And she has a very, like, actionable, helpful podcast. You know, a lot of these, A lot of these podcasts, you got a lot, like sift through the weeds because a lot of them, it's a lot of fluff and it's like a lot of people like selling some snake oil or whatever. But there are some great ones in there. Gillian Perkins, one is awesome. Who else is super good about, like, funnelly stuff? Some of the stuff that Russell Brunson from Click Funnels puts out is good, but he's also like, he talks like a mile a minute and you've got to drink mad coffee to keep up with that flow.

It's one where you don't put the podcast player on 1.5.

Yes, you can't do it. You'll have an aneurysm for sure. No, there's really some good podcasts. There's some good courses out there as well. But yeah, I mean, like, I just kind of look at it as lots of different pieces, you know, Like, I'll try to focus on, like, who I can learn the best, like landing page optimization stuff from and who I can learn like the best email marketing stuff from and the best, like copywriting related stuff from. And, you know, it's just lots of little pieces like the ads are a whole other piece that like, I just went to like the ad experts to learn that stuff, you know?

Yeah, it's one of the things I've, I've started to get better at specifically with listening to podcasts is not coming into it like with the a show in mind, but coming into it with like a problem in mind and searching within the podcast app, which it sounds like you've done around what the thing is that I'm trying to learn and then building a cue and then listening through that. Like your idea of chain smoking certain categories or topics. I love that idea because I think too often I get caught. This would be for everybody. Take this advice. Other than the Food Blogger Pro podcast, continue to subscribe and listen to every Food Blogger Pro podcast. But. Yeah, but to listen through categories has been helpful for me lately and I think that's a great little takeaway for a shift in how you can consume information. The second piece that I was curious about is you mentioned your membership. Can you talk a little bit about that? And we've talked a lot about the importance of community, how it's a great way to create a defensible business from AI generated content and all the benefits that can come from community. How do you facilitate that? Is there a tool that you use for that? Tell us a little bit about what you've learned from building a community and a membership.

Yeah, my membership, I really first started offering it like not long after I started selling classes online. And initially all it was was like a discounted subscription to my live classes. And you know, during your membership period, whatever live classes happened during that time, you got it for a little cheaper because you were paying, you know, either a monthly or yearly plan. And towards the end of like 2023, three was it. Yeah. I was like thinking about how helpful that recurring revenue really is, you know, because, you know, you don't have to keep acquiring those customers. Like some of those people have now spent thousands of dollars with me over time.

Yeah.

And, and so I thought like, you know, for the sake of having better retention, you know, because that's always the issue with any kind of like recurring revenue business is like, you want to retain those customers as long as you can, otherwise you are always like filling the bucket up as it's leaking out or whatever. And so I wanted to make a much better experience for my members that was like more than just a discount to my classes because it's, it's very easy for you to then be like, I'm too busy for this now. Let me like move on to something else or let me cut that bill or whatever. So I, I made my membership better, like two different ways. One was that now in addition to like you having access to whatever class has happened during your membership, all of my recorded classes are like in a massive library that you can access. And there's like kind of a learning roadmap I'm creating for you know, like to help direct people through that material in a way that's like actually helpful to them. You know, where it's helping them tackle like fundamental cooking problems that will make them a more effective vegan cook. And when I say effective, I mean like something that you can tangibly measure in that like our goal, our like purpose in the membership is to help spread vegan cooking. Like not just getting better at cooking, but getting so much better that like the families of the people who are in my membership and their co workers are getting turned on to really impressive vegan food that could potentially like make them more open minded about not eating animals anymore. So, so I created this huge resource library and then I've kind of built it out in Mighty Networks, which is, it's like a membership software. It's similar to Circle, if you know Circle, they're almost like indistinguishable from one another as softwares. There's other ways to do it. And you know, like before I had it on Mighty Networks, it was just this thing like with email tagging that I was doing. But I just thought it wasn't a great experience and it didn't give people the like community platform to connect with each other. And I really, I really love to see that in my membership. Like people learning from each other and sharing what they're struggling with or what they're working on and are proud of. So that's where I do that now.

That's great. I have a friend, Daryl, who's gotten involved with Mighty Networks and so I've gotten to know kind of what they're doing a little bit more. So give me an overview of kind of when your business, right now, you talked about membership, talked about ads, talked about product. You also do consulting. What does that pie chart look like? Is there one that you view as kind of the leading north star within the business?

That's my barking dogs. Yeah. That might be the cue for your editor.

No, we can keep it in. It adds good, it adds good background, realistic background.

All right, so catering and culinary consulting are big for me. And you know the SEO benefit of having this huge like traffic source from my blog post, it really has had a very profoundly positive effect on acquiring more catering and consulting clients. And it's also given them a place where they, when they land on my site, they see, oh, you like, do all these different kinds of food and wow, your food looks really beautiful in a way that like a lot of other caterers and consultants don't have that vast of a library of stuff on display. So those, those still remain to be like the hugest, you know, because, like, I could do a culinary consulting job for somebody that's like $100,000, you know, like creating a whole menu for a restaurant and, you know, creating SOPs for their staff to follow the execution of it. So that can be really super good. It's not like every day that I get a job like that, though. Hold up one second.

Yeah, you're good.

I got border collies. That's like my weakness in life. And this time of day when, like the sun's coming through my windows, I have like this one really quirky border collie who chases the shadows. And this is the time, like, she's gonna start getting nuts.

Activated.

Okay, sorry, what was the question?

Oh, consulting.

Yeah, yeah, so. Oh, yeah. The kind of breakdown of things. So. So consulting and catering are really big. I. I do a lot less catering now on purpose than I used to do because I used to cater like three weddings a weekend sometimes, and now I really do, like a very customized approach to my catering and it's a much higher ticket kind of catering and I have a much higher minimum guest count. So I only do very large, like, weddings and corporate events. And I do like five or six of them a year. And I'm great with that. Like, I don't want to be doing more than that. But between that and the catering consulting, that's a huge piece of the pie. Then, you know, the classes and membership, they fluctuate a little bit right now. Like on a good month, they're like, I might do like 14 grand in that, and on like a less good month, I could do as little as like maybe 6500 bucks on it or something like that.

Yep. But the thing that I want to point out that's so great about that is it, and you can tell me if this feels accurate. It feels like a really great balance between recurring, somewhat predictable. It's not passive because it requires a lot of work, it requires a lot of effort, but it's a little bit more of this idea of like shoveling coal into the engine of a train. It's work, you do it, but after it picks up speed, you have some momentum with it, momentum with the content.

And especially with a lot of automation. And especially, like, if you choose to not do things the way I'm doing it. Like, if you do, rather than doing live classes all the time, if you build out like a couple very good purpose built courses, you do some market research and like really find A problem that you can solve for people. You know, maybe it's freezer prepped meals or maybe it's, you know, like how to cook for somebody with this type of medical condition or whatever is your area of expertise, you know, and you just build like a one and done thing or maybe a couple little courses and stuff. Like that's very something you could get automated and like have part of your email flows and you're not constantly like launching and doing new things. I just love overcomplicating stuff for myself as much as humanly possible. It was no different with like my restaurants. It was super hyper complicated more than necessary and because I'm just really into like as much chaos as I can possibly. But yeah, you could do it in a much more sane way that makes it so you could be like in Sicily eating a pistachio gelato while the money comes in. But I'm just like about that hard work.

But the other thing with it that you are able to do is you're able to. I was at a conference once and somebody talked about this where he was talking about as people who have businesses, we need to be thinking about not only what are the singles and doubles, but like what is it? What does a grand slam look like? And I think for a lot of us, us being food creators, we're pretty good at like singles and doubles. Like hey, we, we have, we're slowly incrementally building traffic. We're monetizing that via ads. You know, maybe we have some affiliate income that comes in. But what you've also layered in is kind of some of these grand slam pieces where you talk about these consulting gigs that you can get. And I think there are opportunities for us within our existing audiences to have those really outsized outcomes from our expertise and our knowledge that we could deliver to somebody if we wanted to create some type of, you know, package or offering around that. And so you have this great combination of both of those things. You have the recurring piece with membership, with ads, with the automations that you've created that allow for kind of this baseline to come in. But you also have some of these offerings above and beyond that with the consulting or catering, which it sounds like you can still use your existing audience to market to those people to some degree or not necessarily.

It's super.

Catering is probably different.

Catering's there and so is consulting because like the audience for that are like culinary professionals and like really food industry people.

How are those people coming in? Is it through your industry connections?

Like there's some degree of word of mouth by now, because I was doing culinary consulting, like, long before I had a blog and long before the pandemic. But I would just, like, let that come to me, you know, if somebody emailed me and was like, hey, I need help setting up a food truck, or I need help, you know, like, launching a vegan product line of this thing that we're already selling, I would. I would take those on. But I never, like, went, like, I never even had, like, a consulting page on my website until during the pandemic. And now, like, it just. It trickles in and, you know, like, 80% of the requests are kind of, like, not worth my time. Like, it's people who, they have, like, a fantasy of one day doing a thing, and they just want to pick somebody's brains and. But I've kind of, like, figured out how to filter out the noise. And I try to be helpful to everybody. Like, I was also one of those people once upon a time, like, not knowing what the heck I was doing, starting up some food business. And I'm happy to get on the phone with somebody for half an hour and, like, give them some kind of nice, you know, mentoring in the right direction. But, yeah, it just comes in kind of organically through, you know, people Googling, you know, recipe development or whatever are the kind of keywords they're finding me for.

Yep. And it. It's a great example, too, of the skills around, you know, a recipe post publishing. That SEO, getting traffic there also applies to when you're trying to build out landing pages for consulting or for vegan restaurants. Like, that same concept still applies. The nice thing is the competition is a lot lower than, like, vegan chocolate chip cookie when it's like vegan restaurant consulting. Or maybe it's not, I guess I don't know, but that would be my assumption.

Probably the search volume is consistent, but, you know, it's. It's just a different business. And I think they work. They work very harmoniously with each other.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I'm glad to be doing it. It's keeping me doing lots of fun, creative stuff I love. And it's keeping me snuggling with dogs more than it is keeping me in HR conversations with 60 employees, which I.

Also love, which is like, mission accomplished. Yes. And what the great thing about this conversation is, it's such a good example of diversifying income. And that's, you know, this series that we're working through right now is thinking about, okay, if we are good at creating content, building an audience, capturing attention. The question is always then what do we do with it? And there are a lot of different things that we can do with it. And you've demonstrated like lots of different ways that you can direct that attention, whether it be consulting, classes, membership, or even just the advancement of a mission, which is what I hear kind of as a through line for what you're doing is the mission of how do we encourage and spread the good word about eating vegan in order to encourage people to eat less animals. And that is a huge part of what we do as well with the audience that we have is spread the word around the things that we care about. So Adam, it was awesome to talk to you. Really appreciate you coming on.

It was fun for me too. I'm so glad we talked so extensively about Daryl Strawberry. I think his Wikipedia page is like blowing up right now.

So I think to it we got it done.

Bjork.

We'll get to it in the show notes for sure. Adam, if people want to follow up with you, if they want to connect with you, what's the best way to do that?

So you could go on? My website is called snopes.com it's a cinnamon snail.com and you can send me an email the old fashioned way.

Love it.

Carrier pigeon.

And send you a message on MySpace. That would be the last time.

I'm still there. The only guy left.

We might still. I might still have a MySpace that. Maybe I'll do that after this is login to see if I still have it.

Yeah, it's going to be our five big group chat. Only ones in there.

Yeah, it'll be a new thing, a new marketing channel. Thanks Adam. Really appreciate it.

Super fun. Have a marvelous day.

Thanks. Foreign.

Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Thank you so much for listening and tuning in Today I wanted to chat a little bit more about one of the perks of the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you likely already know about these, but maybe you're a new member or you're thinking about becoming a member. And I just wanted to let you know about one of my favorite things in the membership. Every month we host a live Q and A over zoom with an industry expert and usually Bjork. They chat about topics ranging from republishing content to Google algorithm updates, Pinterest or advanced SEO. Sometimes we'll do an ask Bjork anything or even questions about creating content plugins Site Speed really we cover every topic you might need to know something about as a food creator. As a Food Blogger Pro member, you're given the option to submit questions in advance. Or you can submit questions during the live Q and A and the guest and Bjork will answer your questions and provide feedback. It's always a really awesome opportunity to get advice and feedback from experts in the Food Creator community, and it's just a really fun way to connect as members and get to know each other better. These Q&As are hosted live, but we always post replays on our site and for our members only podcast if you can't make it live. So anyways, it's just a really great feature of the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you aren't yet a member and this sounds like something you would like access to, head to foodbloggerpro.com membership to learn more. And that's it for this week. We'll see you back here next week for another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Make it a great week.

Sam.