Food Blogging News Roundtable: Brand Partnership Trends, AI Platform Comparisons, and Pinterest Best Practices

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Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I'm Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team, and in this episode, we're bringing back Emily Walker, the associate general manager of Food Blogger Pro, to the podcast to chat with Bjork about the latest and greatest news shared in the blogging newsletter that went out last week. Emily and Bjork will chat through the differences between the big three AI platforms like Claude Gemini and ChatGPT, best practices for Pinterest, and how to navigate holiday partnership trends and develop brand authority. If you enjoy the style of the episode and want to hear more like it, let us know. Your feedback helps shape what we create next. And now, without further ado, I'll pass it over to Bjork.

Emily, we're back.

We're back. Good to see you.

It feels like it's just yesterday, but it wasn't. It was a month ago that we had this conversation. Do you want to give people kind of a quick recap of, like, what this is, kind of the rhythm behind it? And then if people actually want to follow along with, like, the newsletter version of this, where they would go for that?

Absolutely, yeah. And the holiday season, time flies, but we're back in December and we just sent out our blogging newsletter on Thursday, December 4th. So you may have seen that in your inbox and thought, I don't have time to read that. No one has time to do anything this time of year. Or your inbox looks like mine does after Cyber Monday. And it just got Lost. So we are here to reconnect, recap the latest and greatest news in the blogging world, hopefully add some additional insight or context to some of the news articles and just provide a different way for you to consume the news. And if you would like to receive the blog newsletters in your inbox, you can just head to foodbloggerpro.com, you can opt in on the homepage to receive the newsletter. And yeah, we are hoping to do this every month and so this will be our Last one for 2025. But if you tune in in January, we'll be back. And if you have any thought news articles you're just dying for us to cover, you can always email me emilypro.com and we will try and get to it.

Yeah, that's the just. Yeah, it's one of those things where as creators, we're always having to balance, like creating. Right. So you want to be able to consistently put content out. But we talk about this idea of getting a tiny bit better every day for forever. Part of that is the education piece. Um, from a creator standpoint, how do you get better at photography? How do you get better at, you know, developing recipes? How do you connect with people better? And then there's the, like, industry tools, industry norms, things that are changing this. These are kind of in that third category of, hey, there's a lot going on in this world. You are a creator. A lot of us are professional creators. And like any other profession, you have tools. We just did a big kitchen remodel. They had some really amazing tools to take the side of the house off and like, build a kitchen. And if they would have been using the same tools that were available, you know, 15 years ago, it wouldn't have been as effective. Some of those are consistent throughout. Right? You're always going to have the hammer, you're always going to have like a nail gun. But like a nail gun today is going to be better than a nail gun 15 years ago. Similar in our world as professionals who are creating content, the things that are evolving and changing allow us to do our job of creation, content creation better, whether as kind of the technician who's wanting to make sure that you are creating something accurately and, you know, a post is structured in the best way possible for SEO or, hey, there's all these tools. ChatGPT and Gemini Claude, we're going to talk about that in the first article. What is and how are they different? So that'll be our transition into article number one.

Yeah, man. Going from ripping A house off to AI Tools is we're going to cover it all. Yeah, we sure are. Welcome to foodblogger Pro podcast. Yeah. So the first article that we covered in our newsletter is comparing ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, the differences between them and then analyzing which one is best for various purposes. So they. I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm. I don't use these tools a ton, but I'm fairly, I guess, loyal to ChatGPT.

Same thing.

Just because that's what I started with.

Do you use the web version of it or do you use the app?

I use the web version.

Yep. I, I use the app. I love the app.

But yeah, I'm the same. 95% of my, like, LLM chat interface conversation is within ChatGPT.

And do you pay for it?

Pay for the $20 a month just this morning. This is kind of a side thing.

I. One of the frustrating things is the current version of ChatGPT can't read a scanned PDF. It used to be able to do this. I don't know if you've ever done this, but I'm. I'm like a. Ask Lindsay around, like, the 10 character traits of Bjork and like, one of them will be scanning documents. Like, that's one of my character traits. Scanning documents and like, shredding documents. That's. It's like number eight, nine. Yeah. And so I will scan documents. And I'm. And. And I've been really methodical about, like, okay, you have the Cars folder and the Cars folder. There's like all the cars we've had through the years. And then there's like the, you know, Subaru Ascent and like, here's the documents from the maintenance we've had. Now I'm getting rewarded for that work because you can then put those into an LLM and have, like, comprehensive understanding of all of those. So, like, hey, remind me of when we had the work done on the Ascent, blah, blah, blah, blah. But ChatGPT is not very good at. Well, it just can't, like, scan a document unless you upgrade. This is getting back around your question to the enterprise version, apparently, which I don't know, I don't. Didn't even look into how much that is. But Claude. And this kind of gets into some of the things that the article talked about, like the differences between these. Claude can do that and it does it pretty well. So I actually pay for Claude as well and we'll use it for a little bit more, like, technical things. This talks about the idea that it's a little bit better at like code related stuff, which I'm not doing a ton of. But in this instance I'll bring that PDF into Claude, ask it to parse the information, give a recap, I bring it back into ChatGPT and I've also been doing a lot of like projects where they'll have a separate folder.

And for different areas and items. So I'm a ChatGPT loyalist as well. Claude would be the, you know, 4% usage and then Gemini would be 1%. But I've heard people talking about how the new version of Gemini is actually pretty great. So what did this article find and what did it highlight as kind of some differences between them?

It kind of tested, did some prompt testing and used all three platforms to figure out for like SEO purposes, research purposes, writing and other tasks which one was your best bet. And I mean they all have their strengths. So I think depending on how you are currently using these, I'd recommend reading it to, to figure out like how it will best suit your needs. But one of the examples they used was the SEO one where they put the prompt, what are the top three technical SEO factors I can use to optimize my site? And you know, they shared the responses from each platform. ChatGPT was, did a great job at, mentioned, you know, site speed, core web vitals, crawlability, indexation, site structure and schema markup and then gave kind of some like how to optimize like actual to DOS under each one. Um, and then it also said like if you want put your website here and I can give you more specific technical SEO stuff. And so for an SEO prompt like that, Claude and chatgpt were the winners. They mentioned specific tools, actionable steps, Google. So Gemini, Gemini wasn't quite so strong because as you might imagine, it stayed in the Google universe. So the tools that it mentioned were things like Google Search Console, which obviously is helpful but may not be the most like unbiased.

So we have some advice. Use one of our tools, right?

Yeah. So anyways, it broke down kind of the strengths of each in terms of writing, research and stuff. But I think it's also just a reminder that I think if you started using these tools like right when they started, you might be stuck in the like, oh, I can use it to help me do research and writing, but having it do more complex things like helping you fix some coding on your site, like sometimes I'll pull code from Food Blogger Pro and be like if it's broken or whatever, put it in there and be like, what is wrong?

Yeah, totally.

And like, that is now kind of one of my favorite ways to use these is not. Not in doing the tasks that I enjoy, which are research and writing and that kind of thing. But, like, I don't enjoy coding. I don't necessarily enjoy, like, figuring out, like, you know, how could our, I don't know, broken links or site speed be fixed? Help me with that kind of thing. And so, yeah, for those, ChatGPT seemed pretty strong, and so did Claude. So.

Yeah, well, one of the great things about a couple other ways that I've been using it, and we've been using it so you can create projects which are personal, and then you can create custom GPTs which would be accessible to. And we talked about this on the podcast, you know, when we went deep with Trey. Trey, thank you. And, you know, talking about projects and custom GPTs and stuff. One of the ones that we've done is we want to make sure that we have a process for reviewing recipes. And so we want to make sure, as a example, that, like, all the ingredients that are mentioned in the ingredients list are then included in the instructions at some point. So we've created a custom GPT that's shared, you know, with our small team that people have access to if they want to do that or if they are doing that and want to double check that the recipe looks that way. Another one that I've done completely unrelated to anything that we've ever talked about on the podcast, other than maybe taxes. Um, so we'll donate items to Goodwill. Uh, I've been on a massive purge lately. I'm like, I don't need this season. I don't totally. I don't need this JCPenney, you know, suit that I got literally 15 years ago that doesn't fit anymore, but I would still wear. Like, I finally went and got a nice suit. Um, anyways, so I did this massive closet overhaul. This is going to be the rest of the episode. I know you said you want to keep these short and tight, but you're like, we've only. We're only one in. Yeah, I promise this will be the last thing on this. So I've been taking pictures of everything that we've donated, and I've created this project that has the, like, Goodwill donation value PDF in it. And what it will do is I used to go through and, like, keep track of this stuff. Like, how much have we donated and how much is it?

You are so much more organized than I am.

It's only in certain categories. Like.

But then what it will do. I'll. So like this weekend did a drop off. I had eight photos and what I do is I'll take the photo and then I like send them to my desktop and my desktop is like the action item place for me to like work through stuff. So then I take those, I just put them into the Goodwill project, create a new thread and then it does it and it's super accurate. Like it's really amazing.

You know, its ability to look at something and take the value of it. So if it's like a $10 thing, it'll be like, hey, this is probably $3. And then it creates it into a spreadsheet and then I just copy and paste it over.

So no, I'm the type of person when I go through the Goodwill drop off drive thru, they're like, would you like a receipt itemizing your donations? And I'm like, no. And I peel out of parking lot.

Yeah, you, you actually don't stop moving when you're going through. You just throw the stuff out the window and then you're done with these things. Yeah, but I think point being with this article is it's an important reminder that these are, these different products are good at different things. And one of the things that we need to do is understand when to use them. And we'll probably have a home base like you talked about for a lot of people I think right now is ChatGPT. You know, if you're a developer, maybe you're in Claude a little bit more. But over time I think we need to continue to be aware of the benefits, the downfalls, the opportunities within each of these products and use them kind of like we do Word or Excel or PowerPoint where you know, we kind of switch between them and we have different ways that we are using these different tools. But I think always to be thinking about what is one of the ways that either I can do a thing that I'm not doing now that this would be really good at. Like doing the recipe review as an example. Like we're doing that, but not as methodically as a tool like this would do or what is it the thing that it could just replace that I'm currently doing in order for me to allow to, to do something that's like more human, more valuable, you know, like on a podcast versus me spending time entering Goodwill items in on a spreadsheet. Like that's probably a better value ad. So yeah, great article in the newsletter. And we'll link to it in the show notes as well.

Yep. Okay, next up, this is should be a short and sweet one. How just a really good kind of reminder of best practices on Pinterest from our Pinterest expert, Kate Al from simplepin Media. And just kind of some like, technical best practices to set you up for success. I know that this time of year, kind of December, January is a, can be a really big time on Pinterest. I also know Pinterest is kind of a wild, wild west right now. And so, you know, take this all with a grain of salt, but control what you can control and so make sure that your pins and sight are at least set up for success. So image size for your pins should be 1000 by 1500 pixels or a 2 by 3 vertical ratio. If you're posting videos to Pinterest, they can be anywhere between four seconds to 15 minutes, but she recommends under one minute. I cannot imagine watching a 15 minute video on Pinterest. Yeah.

And then also, like outside of Pinterest, you want to make sure when people get to your site that it's functional. So you want to make sure that there are no broken links, that someone doesn't come to your site and is disappointed because they're not taken anywhere. And then also slow load times can really impact the success of your pins. I mean, your site also, like, this is SEO best practices, but a good reminder that it, it impacts Pinterest as well. And then once you've kind of nailed down the technical side of things, more user experience stuff. So the image that you use in your pin should also appear on the landing page. You want to limit pop ups, intrusive ads. Once people get to your site, post consistently and then focus on high quality content over quantity. So don't feel like you just have to turn stuff out, but post consistently, which I feel like we say for almost every social media platform.

Yeah. A few things that I think are important to point out here. There's always this world that we are balancing as creators around the technical and the art. Like the art and the science and the information that's always really great to hear is the science. Okay. And this is, this post, it looks like she did in partnership with the Pinterest education team. So it's like this is from Pinterest, right? They are saying this, this is reliable, like a two by three vertical ratio. So thousand pixels by 1500 pixels. So it's like essentially like a, like a long image, vertical image, you know, a minute or less for videos. Okay. These are really great. Best practice. Broken links, slow load time, you know, that's going to hurt your site regardless. So we know that this one gets into a little bit of the art piece, which is this image consistency. I think also this idea of, you know, especially when you talk about, you click on the image, is that image then available on the site itself? Broadly speaking, within marketing, there's this idea of marketing match. So like you have this ad copy, it shows up somewhere. You know, for us it's not technically an ad, but we're kind of advertising in our world. A recipe. When people click on that, are they going to be, is it going to be reinforced that they are in the right spot when they land on that page? That's this idea of marketing match. And I think it's what they're getting at here and it's, it ensures confidence that somebody, yeah, okay, I've landed on the right spot, I think where it gets a little bit hard from a.

You know, UI UX perspective, this idea of too many pop ups, too many ads, that's where it gets into, in my opinion, like your own personal gut. Like what, what's your gut on how, how much you want to ratchet up ads? How aggressive do you want to be with ads? You can maybe be pretty aggressive. Maybe there's no downside from an SEO perspective, but there definitely is a downside from a user experience perspective. But to what degree is that going to keep people from coming back again? It's really hard to know the data on that. So that's where it gets into the art side of, hey, is it better to have a pop up that somebody sees every single time they come to your site so you can get more emails? Maybe. But also it creates a worse experience. I don't have a great answer on it other than we usually.

Fall like kind of in the middle. So we're not going to have the leanest ad stack. We're not also not going to have the most aggressive ad stack. We'll try pop ups, but we're always a little bit like, do we want to do this? We recently did the gated print option for Pinterevum, but always kind of straddling that middle line of user experience versus kind of like value extraction optimization, to use the most corporate term that I'll use on the podcast.

It's all about your goals. Like if your goal is like as much money from your ads as possible, then like you go for those pop ups.

Yeah.

If you're in a season where you're like, I really want to see what I can do on Pinterest, then like maybe you limit them for a little bit. You know, if you're in a season. Yeah. Where you want to maximize email signups, then. Then maybe it's a pop up. Um, I think. And those things can ebb and flow as well.

Yeah.

Um, I think what you want to avoid is I clicked through to something from Pinterest once and there was a, Like a full. Or re. Like a couple weeks ago and there was a full screen pop up ad and I was like, escape, Escape. You know, and it just kept like it was. And that. I was like, okay, well that, that's. That, you know, that was.

You're not going to go back there, right? Yeah, yeah.

Um, I don't even, I don't even know if I could tell you what the site was because it was so immediate and it was so intrusive. So yeah, just what are your goals in this season? And if it is maximizing everything on Pinterest, then follow these steps as much as you can.

That's great. We've talked about this before, but I think it's important to revisit article number three, the role of brand authority in EEAT in the AI searched era. This is the search engine journal.

Yeah, we won't belabor this because like we said, it's been kind of the theme of the last few of these podcasts we've done. But good reminder that in this new kind of AI powered search era, it's not as. I mean, ranking still matters and I think it will for the foreseeable future, but you also want to become the trusted resource for these AI tools that we were talking about earlier. So the experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness matter because obviously you want your audience to feel that way about you, but you also want these LLMs to feel that way about you. And so when they, when someone asks them a question, they know that you are a trusted authority for cooking of ice, for recommending recipes, and what can you do to like increase the odds that you are the food blog that they cite in their answers?

Yeah, I think of a great example of the best case scenario of this. My friend who.

Kanye West's team reached out to him and he was like, how did you find me? And they're like chatgpt.

That is a really great example of somebody who has established themselves in all of these. Experience, expertise, authority. They're trustworthy in the world.

But what does he do?

He's a designer. Like a web design, graphic design. Oh, Cool. Yeah. Um, random and. Yeah, super, super capable. I don't know, to. To the degree he had, like, NDA type stuff. So I don't want to, like, go too deep into it. So it's going to be this kind of mysterious.

Yeah, we don't want to. We don't want to anger Kanye.

No, definitely not.

If you're listening, Kanye, if you're thinking about starting your food blog, just ignore us, please.

So that's a, you know, or, like, in a service industry, like, super specific example, what's a. Our daughter Lena has this, like, Christmas dress that's been passed down through generations, and it, like, ripped somehow. So it's like, what's a, you know, sewing place near me? All of these would. They'd probably look at, like, ratings and location. And Kasey talked about on the podcast, like, hey, best food blog SEO experts. Okay, he's going to show up as number one. And.

But then what does that mean for, like, a recipe creator when you're monetizing with traffic? Because one of the things it talks about here is, like, a lot of the times you can't identify this as a traffic source. It's just like people doing research. It's information. I think sometimes we think about it as, like, and then somebody's going to search for a recipe and they're going to get the recipe within ChatGPT, which I think definitely can happen and will happen and has been happening. But I think there's also the potential of somebody talking about, you know, I've used both of these examples on the podcast before. You know, somebody saying, like, I'm trying to figure out ways to help my kid to eat, my toddler to eat better.

And what are the resources that you'd have? Okay, we can think of some, you know, yummy toddler food. Like, that would be an example of a. A site that, if they've established themselves as an authority, that would come up as a resource and an expert.

Yeah, I think the same for, like, if you're a registered dietitian and you provide a lot of nutrition advice or eating for certain diets, like diabetics or chronic kidney disease or whatever, it may be, like, you could position yourself as an expert that then chatgpt or whatever would pull from you. And then someone would go to your site if you're sighted or, you know, you're. Or even just name dropped, you know, in the responses.

And one of the things they talk about here that I think is great is, like, a lot of times it's almost like Word of mouth kind of where you'd be talking to somebody and they'd be like, oh, do you know this pinch of yum recipe? You should check out their site. That's not going to register. That conversation isn't going to register in Google Analytics obviously.

Right.

Similarly, you're having a conversation with ChatGPT or Claude and you're trying to figure something out and you're referenced. What this article talks about is like people then might take that and go do. I think they called it like the discovery engine and then like the conversation engine. I forget what it was specifically that they talked about but you know, take that information and then you would take it over to a search engine to like take that a little bit further. I think the hard part with it is still the unknown around like how does a recipe, which is a lot of the ways that people are transacting right now on the Internet, which is like I create a recipe and I monetize that recipe via ads or affiliate or sponsorship. What does that look like? But I think the other takeaway that I had here as I read through this article is the importance of niche. Like the broader that you are in your content category, I think the less likely that you will show up within some of these engines as an expert or authority in a certain subject because people are usually doing like subject based searching.

And.

And so I think the it, it's just another example of why having a folk like for us like it's food and recipe content businesses like we're going to show up when people are searching for that in these LLMs. Yeah. And it's the value of niche. Another example of that and another example of like E E A T showing up in other places other than just like traditional search. Yeah.

And just real quick to kind of wrap this one up the like practically what can you do? Show your face, share your story, demonstrate your experience and know how in the kitchen keep your content, your recipes updated and accurate and then use helpful schema like recipe metadata. And then also obviously like getting cited in news articles always helps. So I know we've mentioned this all before, good reminders of what you can actually do. That's great. Yeah, Love it.

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This next article is from later, kind of focusing on social media content scheduling. They're talking about kind of the holiday season as it relates to brands, but also mention creators a lot within this article as well.

Yeah, so this is the article was mostly about like holiday marketing and I know when you listen to this will be middle of December, but I thought there was a lot of evergreen pun, holiday pun intended information in here. So they surveyed later surveyed creators and they surveyed brands about kind of their holiday marketing campaigns, their budget struggles, timing of things. And I thought there were some interesting takeaways. One of them is they asked brands and creators what channel was most important for their holiday campaigns and creators overwhelmingly over 60% said that Instagram was the most important, While only about 30% of brands agreed with that. Um, brands weighed Instagram and TikTok almost equally. But they also said 21 said 21% of the brands said that Facebook was the most important channel, while only 4% of creators agreed with that. So kind of the takeaway for me is that like if you are reaching out to brands, pitching yourself for holiday campaigns, but also any time of year if you mention Facebook, mention your, you know, following on Facebook strategy for Facebook that you could stand out from the crowd, that maybe leaning so heavily into Instagram could be doing you a disservice because it might the brand might not necessarily agree with that as much as you might think.

Yeah, it's a, it's a great example of like we live in our own worlds, we have these preferences. I think especially in the world of food, we probably lean towards Instagram. You know, if, if this was just food creators talking about social media platforms, my guess is that number would even be higher. 70%, 80%. Um, but for a brand, they're going to be looking at things very differently. And I think it's an important reminder if you are having conversations with brands about working with them as sponsors, one of the most important things you can do is just ask like, hey, what are the most Important channels for you. What does success look like in this campaign?

You know, where do you spend most of your time as a brand? Like all of these questions will help fill the picture out for how they operate and how they think of things and seeing if you can then find ways to align with that to say, oh, email is a really important channel for you. Okay, what would it look like to sponsor our newsletter? You know, or we've seen that even within Food Blogger Pro, as we've had conversations with different brands, we've noticed, hey, they have different preferences for how they want their message to show up and where they want it to show up. And it's a constant reminder for me to kind of get outside of my own head to get a better understanding of the priorities for other people.

So yeah, and I would say the other, the other big discrepancy was on YouTube that brands said that 15% of brands said it was their most important platform and only 4% of creators agreed. So I think if you are looking to differentiate yourself, YouTube and Facebook seem like there's the biggest opportunity. But like you were saying, in terms of like the format of content, the other thing that they looked at was like long form, short form videos, static posts. And they said, you know, long form videos and static posts, especially like carousel posts on Instagram can be a better fit for certain products or brands that require more context or explanation. I think of maybe like a kitchen tool or something like, like a, like Lindsay recently did that better than bouillon, like a cube like that that might not be conveyed in just like a picture or, or, or like a short form video, like how are you using that? How does that connect to this recipe? But like a longer form video or swipe through carousel posts of like how you use it could be a better fit. So I know short form video is like you know, all the rage. But thinking through when you are reaching out to brands, like what might actually be the best way to explain their product and might it be something different? Like a long form video on YouTube can help set yourself apart.

Yeah, it's great. And I think it's another example of.

Critical thinking as it relates to content. And one of the ways that you can think critically is what is the outcome that you're trying to get. And if it's comprehension of a thing, then the longer form is probably going to be better. If it's just like numbers, if it's like the number of views, like a four second like dance video with a better than bouillon cube, like maybe Might get more impressions, but like, is that actually going to be more successful? Then we'll pitch that maybe next go around.

Oh my God, please do.

Yeah.

That. But will it be more successful in like people actually having. Making a recipe with it? Maybe not. Yeah, probably not. And so I think sometimes we can, I think of podcasts in a similar way. Like the number of podcast views or like listens that we get is going to be lower than if we like really focused on building, you know, viral videos on Instagram. But the connection that you have with people is different. And so there's all these considerations around where you're creating content, how you're creating content. And part of our job as content creators is to think critically around what the outcome is, what our skills are, like, what platform we best produce on, and then being strategic about how we do that.

So, yeah, and last thing I'd say from that article is just as I know this is bonkers as we are just kind of entering this Christmas holiday season, but when you think about what you would like to accomplish next holiday season, you should, if you are proactively reaching out to brands, which we recommend, you would want to start doing that in Q2, which is, you know, I mean, seems wild in like April May to be thinking about that. But that's really when these bigger brands, and I mean really any size brand starts thinking about this. I thought this was pretty interesting that the portion of brand influencer marketing marketing budget allocated to the holidays is, I mean, 26 to 50% of the budget, 38% of brands are. Half their budget is going towards the holidays. So they plan really far in advance.

Essentially. Like what you're saying is like 40% of the brands have 50% of their budget in Q4.

Yeah, like I pretty much could not have said that in a more complicated way.

So things, there's so many percentages.

I mean, have you noticed that with Pinch of Yum that you start hearing from brands that early?

You know, it's a really interesting.

Position for us because we are super reactive for sponsored content. We're not doing a ton of outreach. We don't work with an agency. It's me doing the calls with brands if somebody reaches out.

And so a lot of times what we'll get as it relates to Q4 is people who I think are needing to spend through their ad budget. Hey, we have this. There's. Well, there's two categories for us ongoing. Hey, we have a partnership that lasts a year and we have three to four pulses Instagram. There's an email. Those are, you know, you talk through it and you have a deal. And it's like, okay, we're going to deliver these over the year of which Q4 is going to be a really important one. So that would be one example long term with like a focus on Q4 then will always happen before Q4. And then we have the like, hey, I, you know, we have some money left in our ad budget. I think that's what's happening. Or our, you know, social marketing budget. Somebody will reach out and say, like, could you get this done in like two weeks for the holiday season? Here's what it would look like. And it kind of is this like rush job where you kind of are getting through it. You book the video crew, you come up with the recipe development. And so we see both one like really long term, ongoing. And then one is like, hey, can you get this out? And sometimes it's just like, we're just too busy. Or you have experiences where it's somebody like, hey, we really want to get this out around Thanksgiving. And then it kind of ends up somebody slow to get back. And then it ends up being, you know, Friday after Thanksgiving. That wasn't this year. But like we've had situations like that and it's like, oh, that's not very fun. And also there's always the question of like, would it be better for us just to focus on editorial, like non sponsored content.

Right.

Grow the work on the blog, grow traffic. We don't have a perfect answer to that. And I think a little bit of it is ensuring that we always have this system in place if needed if traffic goes away or whatever it might be. So we see a little bit of both kind of last minute, but also kind of the longer term stuff.

Yeah, Interesting.

Yep. Cool.

Okay, Last step is a food blogger pro blog post. And this is all about YouTube and just tips and strategy for YouTube. And the blog post was updated and went live on Thursday, December 4th. And so it's on the site if you want to read the whole thing. But I, I updated it and there'd been a lot of changes, so we wanted to highlight some. I thought one of the most interesting takeaways is that YouTube itself has shared like how they kind of approach their algorithm and they said we don't pay attention to videos, we pay attention to viewers. So don't try to make an algorithm happy. Focus on making videos that make your viewers happy. And the way that they are, like the, the data behind that is how long are people staying on Your video.

So watch time.

Watch time is huge. So it's similar to when you're making a reel or a TikTok. Like the importance of a hook at the beginning. The same is true for YouTube. And I think sometimes we forget that, like if you're putting out a 15 minute video, you think, oh, people are in it for the long haul, but your loyal followers are for sure. But if someone is stumbling across that video just on their algorithm, you need to, you still need to hook them really fast and then.

And deliver on it. It kind of goes to that marketing.

And you need to keep it interesting the whole time because YouTube will reward you for that.

Yeah, it's. You know, Mr. Beast talks a lot about this. You know, he. His obsession with YouTube, where he talks about just like a year of watching YouTube videos, like locking himself in a room and watching YouTube. And you see that in his videos. Like if you watch Mr. B's video, it's like, is there a super strong hook? He also talks about the importance of thumbnails. And I know that, you know, we talked about that as well in this article. And then it's like, man, the, the pace at which these videos move, not that it has to be frantic, but it just has to be really quick. Like it's similar to a movie if you go and watch a. Especially an action movie. Like the cuts are two to three seconds. You know, it's like it moves really quick and it's hard to create a video that's really engaging and compelling for 10 minutes, 15 minutes.

Right.

And it requires either like a really compelling personality, really compelling videography, like the cuts and the edits.

And that's, it's like, that's not easy stuff to do. Which is why, like, Everybody's not a YouTube star.

Yeah. We had.

What are some of the other things that. Yeah, go ahead.

I was going to say the interesting interview with Carla Lolly Music earlier in the year. I think about her presence on YouTube and how much time, money and effort went into every single recipe video she created and why eventually she left the platform. Um, I know we're not like inspiring you to get started on YouTube. Um, but it's an interesting.

It's miserable. It's a lot of work and a lot of money.

No, but brands really care about it, so maybe do it also.

Yeah. Right. But I, But I do think it's.

You know, this has come up multiple times in different iterations with. On the podcast, which is like there are tactics.

Yeah.

In on any of these platforms and it's like, you know, how long should a video be? And, you know, like, what, you know, camera is the best one to use.

Yeah.

But also, like, there is the art of creating one of these videos.

That is really difficult to do for multiple different reasons. Totally possible, but it's art in a similar way to learning a musical instrument and writing a song. Yeah. I think sometimes, though, we forget that. It seems like it's easy because you're uploading the file and then you do all the tactical things. But it's similar to, like, uploading a file to Spotify and then publishing it. There are best practices for uploading a file to Spotify, I'm sure, and like getting onto playlists and stuff. But really it's like the song and then the tactics are the multiplier. And so I think it's a good reminder that it, like, it's both of those things. And I think some of these are like, art considerations within this article. Like, even just the.

You know, the piece on, like, thumbnail design, like, there's some kind of art consideration within that. And just generally engaging content is more art than tactic. But then once you have that, if you layer on some of these tactics, it's like, wow, that becomes really an incredible multiplier on this good piece of content that you've created.

Yeah. Like we were talking about earlier, same on YouTube, that if you are going to put in all the effort to create this content, aim to be consistent with it, fall into a regular cadence for posting, like once a week, once a month. I mean, whatever is feasible for you, but stick to it so that viewers know when to tune in. And that might look like batch filming your videos or one of the ones I love is developing videos as a series. So like holiday cookie baking cookie, you know, 12 days of cookies, cookie number one. So that people know to come back and watch the second in the series and the third in the series. And you can put them in a playlist, which helps viewers discover them, you know, many years from now, if they want. We've talked about the importance of having effective thumbnails for your videos so that if people go to your channel, they all look the same and kind of share like, the vibe of your platform, the vibe of your videos. And we give some examples in the article.

Links. I think this is often overlooked in YouTube that you can. There are lots of places you can put links in YouTube, like in the description box, in the little cards that, like, pop up in the video at the beginning or the end. But you want to encourage Viewers to subscribe in those links. You can link to a relevant video or you can include external links like to your recipe, but you want to have them at the end because otherwise they're going to click away and then you know, that's not great for watch time. Yeah. But yeah, just some, some things to think about with links in your YouTube videos. Similarly, SEO also matters on YouTube. So you want to make sure that you're using keywords strategically. You can look in like Google Keyword Planner, Semrush or even just like the YouTube search bar. You know, start searching and see what populates. But don't forget about SEO on YouTube. And we go into that in a lot more deal detail in the article. And then we round out the article just by talking about how to improve your watch time and also how to use the YouTube analytics to figure out what your watch time is.

That's great. Yeah, Takeaways, I think watch time above everything.

Yeah.

Create engaging content within watch time. If you kind of double click on that, it's like thumbnail to get people there. Yep. Delivering on the. The hook and the thumbnail like a hook in the beginning and then delivering on that throughout. And then I think the other thing that's important that I've heard people talk about as it relates to YouTube is within the analytics like you mentioned, looking at when are people dropping off, going there and letting that inform future videos to see if it. You can develop a little bit of a sixth sense around, hey, this is why people are not watching anymore. One quick additional note here we use Genius Link. We have a couple podcasts where we've talked about this idea of deep linking as it relates to affiliate links. And for anybody who is doing affiliate links within YouTube or really on any social platform like Instagram, it's important to like put a pin in that idea of deep linking. Go back and listen to podcasts where we did that. But Genius Link often talks about YouTube as an important platform where people are using deep links in order to ensure that people essentially that are using clicking on the link within the mobile app. Hop out of the mobile app into usually Amazon the app, the native app, as opposed to kind of the browser within the social app where they won't be logged in. Yeah. So a little extra, little technical tip there for any affiliate linking within YouTube. So anything else on this article?

No, I think that's it.

Cool. Super fun to do these. Just a reminder for anybody who's not subscribed, go ahead and subscribe to the podcast. The podcast app within Apple recently changed things where like if you haven't listened to a podcast for a certain period of time, then it stops downloading those. Is that right? Even if you're subscribed? Yeah. So just a reminder for anybody who.

Is this a subscriber or I guess it would be anybody who's not a subscriber to subscribe. If you are a subscriber, keep listening. Otherwise it'll stop downloading the the podcast. But really appreciate everybody listening in.

Appreciate that would be a wonderful holiday gift for Team Food Blogger Pro if you would subscribe to the podcast or share it. It really makes a huge difference. So.

It does. Yep. And leave a rating or review if you have a second is also super helpful.

Yeah.

Super fun to do these with you, Emily. Thanks for doing the work to put these together. We will be back in January with the newsletter and continuing to do our weekly episodes. Anything else as we round out?

I think that's it for us this December.

Happy Holidays.

Happy holidays, everybody.

Thanks.

Bye.

Hey there Anne, again from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, we would so appreciate it if you could share it with your community and leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll be back next week with another episode where Bjork sits down to chat with Rachel Cunliffe of Create a design to chat through Finding your voice and scaling your food blog. We'll see you back here soon and in the meantime, we hope you have a wonderful week and happy holidays.