How Rebecca Blackwell Turned Food Blogging into a Six-Figure Digital Business from an RV

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Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. I'm Anne from the Food Blogger Pro team, and in this episode, Björk is sitting down to chat with Rebecca Blackwell, who started out as a food blogger and traded in a stable paycheck for a life on the road running her digital business full-time from an RV. She'll open up about what that transition actually looked like, why she made the strategic decision to manage multiple websites rather than rely on a single stream of income. She'll also share practical advice in growing a newsletter, engaging readers, and landing sponsorships that feel like a natural fit. They'll round out the episode by discussing the challenges of AI and shifting search algorithms, why leaning into personal storytelling has been her biggest differentiator, and what she's learned from building community through mastermind groups and in-person retreats. And now, without further ado, I'll let Björk take it away.

Rebecca, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me, Björk.

Yeah, you are often on the road, but you right now are in Michigan. We're going to talk about what life is like living in an RV, traveling. Uh, one of my good friends, uh, had a, still has a site called Tiny Shiny Home, uh, and talked about, you know, they've now set up in Arizona, but talked about this idea of kind of adventuring and living off grid and, uh, super inspiring, uh, but also inspiring your story of creating for a really long time. You started your site in 2013, uh, your first site, and, uh, but also have recently started some new things, a Substack account, which we're going to talk a little bit about. But, uh, tell me about your site that you started in 2013, and then you started another site later on. Uh, talk a little bit about the reason why for doing that. Why have multiple sites? Then we're going to talk about Substack in a little bit as well.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, first of all, I'm familiar with Tiny Shiny Home and their food.

Oh, you are?

John?

Yeah, John was the designer who first designed Food Blogger Pro.

Oh, I didn't know that. That's amazing. Yeah, they were one of the first people that we started following when we decided to, to move into an RV back in 2019. And so, yeah.

Oh, small world. Yeah. It's been awesome to see kind of their journey. Now they're content creators. They have, you know, their YouTube account and have created these really incredible buildings. And, but I remember having a conversation with him. He was living living in Tennessee at the time, and he's like, I think we're going to just like pack up our family and hit the road.

Yes.

And when they were in Minnesota, we actually met up with them and I haven't talked to them for a while, but, uh, they're, they're awesome. Super great. And really fun to see like their arc as an adventurous family and content creators. And, uh, so fun, fun connection there.

Yeah.

They were, they were very inspiring to us when we, when we were at the beginning and we didn't know anything and awesome. So, so yeah. Um, so yeah, that's a, that's a fun connection. So yeah, I started my first site in, in 2013. At the time I was working as a copywriter and, um, freelance marketing consultant. And I was just really tired of writing about things that I didn't care about that much. Um, I wanted to write about my own things and the things that I was most interested in. And, and I'd had a background in food. And so I started the first site. Um, really, I would get up at 4 o'clock in the morning to have some time to carve out. In the day to work on it because we had 3 kids at home and a full-time work schedule. And, but I just, I really wanted to find a way to get back into food and to write about the things that I really cared about. So gradually over a few years, I started to build some traction there and decided to launch the second site for a couple of different reasons. The first site is baking and I love baking. It's probably my primary passion, but I also wanted to create recipes that weren't in that category. And I saw some value in having two different sites on two different topics, both recipe creation. But, you know, one of the things, I had been a freelancer for a long time, and I knew that a little bit of diversification in where your income is coming from is—

Sure.

Important. And so having two different sites that were focusing on two different areas of food felt like something that would be, you know, kind of smart from a business perspective and also allow me to do some cooking recipes in addition to baking recipes.

Yeah.

And went full-time with those in 2020. Was that the same time that you also hit the road and lived in with your husband in an RV?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We, you know, my husband and I had decided that we wanted to, be able to work remotely from anywhere in the world a long time ago. Our youngest who turns 25 this month, she was 7 when we decided when she goes off to college, we wanna be able to work remotely and live from anywhere. But we really didn't know how to make that happen. We thought that we would maybe rent Airbnbs here and there and, you know, stay in a place for a few months and, we house sat in 2019 for some friends of ours in Southern California. Beautiful house. Absolutely loved house sitting for them and learned that we really hated living in somebody else's house.

Yeah, sure.

Nothing's yours. You never feel like you're at home. You can't like modify the space to make it work for you. And, and so we, we met up with some old high school friends that we didn't know lived in an RV and learned that they lived in an RV. And it was like, the answer. We instantly decided that that's what we were going to do. And in 2019, I was really close to going full-time with the blogs. I was holding onto a couple of clients. And then when we decided in 2020 that we were ready to sell the house and start traveling full-time, that was a really good time for me to say, okay, I'm gonna let go of these last couple of clients and just go all in.

What allowed you to do that? Specifically, I think of people who are on the edge, they're trying to make that decision. My guess is there's, everybody has different variables they're dealing with that they would consider to be the major variables. Primarily it's going to be income, how much you're making, but then also the risk associated with it. There's certain levels of perceived safety and in a W-2 job or a 1099 or freelance work, the some people would be at a point where maybe they would have like just enough from the businesses that they've created, or maybe they feel like I could get there if I have the time to work on it, but there's some risk there. How did you make that decision and what did that look like for you?

Yeah, you know, it was always, um, as soon as I could monetize both sites, it was part of the plan. And so it was really just a matter of timing. Um, I had been working for myself for a long time and so we already were used to fluctuations in income and, uh, you know, kind of a higher level of risk. I'll tell you, one of the things though that meant, that mattered the most to us is the fact that my husband is not a freelancer. He does, he works for a company and, you know, they faithfully pay his salary every single month no matter what. And so, there is a lot of stability when one partner is generating that steady income and the other one then, you know, when I, as a freelancer, I would have months where my income was really high and then months months where it was lower and you just kind of learn how to roll with that. So, so we were already accustomed to that, but also the sites were steady when I went full-time. They, they had been generating about the same monthly income for a while. And so I knew that unless, you know, something unforeseen happened, that it, it wasn't that big of a risk. I knew I was going to be able to count on the same income that I had been counting on for a little while.

You have enough runway to look back and say like, okay, I can see relatively predictably, this is probably what it's going to earn next month if there is no, you know, major shift or change, which also exists with the 1099 or W-2, right? Like I've, I have lots of friends within last year who have been let go. Like it's, it's not an algorithm change, but it kind of is similar where things were happening one way and you could expect that predictably and then there's a change. And so I think the idea of secure income, doesn't really exist anywhere. There's just varying degrees of it. And it's that diversification piece that I think is so important. You know, one of the things we often talk about is this idea of kind of envisioning an egg carton and like, how are you going to put all the different income sources in that to get you to the point where you need to get? And, you know, maybe that's if you're trying to get $6,000 a month to get a full-time income, you know, each egg is $500. Can you get that to the point where you can say, Hey, through this and this and this, I can build that up. A lot of times what eventually happens is you have a lead income source that becomes your primary income source, but this idea of diversification within that income, so you're not relying on anything too heavily, or you know that if something's there, you can scale that up. But I think that also exists within a household. We talk about it individually, but if you have a household, you have maybe somebody who has that W-2 income, and then that allows you to have maybe a little bit more flexibility as an entrepreneur. So Obviously everybody in different situations, but it's always helpful to hear what the decision-making process looks like for people. My guess is the other piece is that you also are then shifting your, uh, spend, like you have less expenses, or is that not true when you are doing RV living? Like, is it essentially the same as what it would be if you had a house or not?

Yeah. So, um, I think the, I think the key thing there is that we have more control over our expenses. I, we know people that live in an RV and really live extremely inexpensively. And so it's doable. If we wanted to, we could do that. The way we live is not, I wouldn't say that we've cut expenses. We just are spending a lot more of our money on experiences than—

Yeah, it's variable. So to your point, it's like things you can control. Yeah. But it's maybe not less spend. That makes sense.

Yeah, we've spent, I mean, we've been living in an RV now for 6 years. Years, and, and we've gone to just a lot of really amazing, incredible places. And so proportionately, probably the amount of income that we spend on those experiences and on the places that we go and the things that we do when we're there is, is probably much, much higher than most people who are devoting more of their income to a house and maintenance of a house, you know. All of those things.

It's, it's one of the things that I think we could do a better job of as people. I'm going to just speak to all people. Maybe not you guys, you guys aren't included in this because you're doing it well, but just like lifestyle design. And I think so much of us have because of societal norms or our, you know, own not having or creating margin to think about these types of things, but we've created like lives that are a lot of times difficult, stressful, like super high demand. And sometimes that's just like life in general. But there's this great book, I think it was Stanford professors, um, called Designing Your Life. And it just walks people through this process of saying like, what is a, what does a beautiful life look like for you? What does a wonderful life look like for you? And I think so many people who listen to a podcast like this, that's what they're trying to do. They're They're not just trying to like create a food blog or create a big following on Instagram for the sake of doing it. They're doing it because it allows them the ability to design a life that is something that is, uh, desirable. And sometimes that has to do with revenue and finances that unlock certain things for you, but oftentimes it has to do with autonomy and flexibility and creativity and finances are a component, but they're not the major component of it. And it sounds like a shift that you've had recently in kind of the allocation of your time is towards lifestyle design within the context of work, but around creativity and community in launching this Substack. We've talked a lot on the podcast about this idea of Substack and people growing a Substack account. But it sounds like your approach to it has been one where It has allowed for you something that has been really life-giving. There's some income that comes from it too, in that you have paid subscribers that are a part of it. But talk to us a little bit about the reason for starting a Substack, when you started it, and kind of what that looks like for you day to day now. Uh, because it sounds like it's been a really good thing.

Yeah, it's been a really good thing. Um, you know, uh, one of the conversations that my husband and I have been having for a long time is if, if you found out that you only had a year left to live, how, you know, how would you spend your time? This is something that comes up often. And it is one of the reasons why we live the way that we live. And last year we came to Michigan to learn how to sail. We, we've, we'd always wanted to take sailing lessons and, and we did. And, and then we, we didn't intend to buy a boat, but after we took sailing lessons, we were like, well, now we need practice.

And so amazing.

Sailboat. And we did so, so like on the outside, it was a very impulsive decision, but it was motivated by what you were talking about of saying, okay, well, if not now, when? And if this isn't how, if we're not spending our time and our money doing the things that we want to do now, what are we waiting for? And so that was one of the things with Substack that really intrigued me is I wanted to write about more of those experiences and it just didn't make sense to do that on a food blog. When we first moved into the RV, I thought, well, I'll write about some, you know, RVing content and travel content on one of my recipe sites. And it's a weird mismatch. It's hard to do that. It's hard to add a totally different kind of content to a recipe site and do it well. And I also realized I didn't want to be a travel writer. I didn't want to be the go here, do this, see this.

Top 10 things to see in Charleston. Yeah.

Yeah, I just, I didn't want to do that. What I wanted to do is write about our experience from a subjective standpoint. I wanted to write about what it's like to travel, what it's like to pick up your house and move every couple of weeks, what it's like to be in all of these different places, to every year get to look out across the year and say, where are we gonna go? And the planning process and the decision-making process for how we decide where we go, where we go. And then also there's some other things that I am, you know, constantly kind of wrestling with. And I feel like other people are probably having similar, would probably relate even if they're not living in an RV. And that's like the conflicting desires between freedom and autonomy and connection to the people that you love love and adventure. So these are things that we're kind of dealing with every day. We have two daughters in Colorado and we have friends that, you know, are really important to us and we're also picking up and leaving all of the time. And so how to maintain those really important relational ties while you're also, you know, traveling about the country. So those are the types of things that I wanted to write about in relation to our lifestyle and during doing it on a food blog just didn't make sense. But Substack is great because I can write about whatever I want. It's, it's a, it's a, there's so much freedom there to create whatever is interesting to you and the list of people that are also interested in those topics.

And it's freeing, I think, for people especially like yourself who have been creating for a long time. And for a portion of that time early on, there was more freedom in how you created. Whereas now it feels like, uh, because if you are creating for the purpose of business on a blog, uh, there is some really narrow ways that you can create if the desire is to like rank in search or to convert people who show up or even to like maximize revenue. And it's a little bit more like science than art. And I feel like, uh, platform like Substack is so purely art. There probably is still some science behind it and some strategy behind it for sure, if that's the intent. But I know for a lot of people who have used a platform or created on a platform like a Substack, one of the freeing things is like you get to release the filter of like, will this rank? How will this get discovered? How am I going to get eyeballs on this? Because to some degree, that comes as a byproduct of a creative, interesting, engaging piece of content. There's, you still wanna think about title and how do you captivate an audience and attention and things like that. So how did you initially grow? You have 16,000 subscribers now. What did that look like? When did you start? And then how did you initially grow that audience and get exposure on that platform?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, one of the, one of the other, I think, important things to say about why I started too is, you know, I was in 2013 is when I really started thinking about about how AI was just changing the playing fields for those of us who publish recipes online.

This was in 2013? You were thinking about it?

Yeah.

AI?

Yeah. I mean, like, you know, I listened to, I don't know if this is where I really, it came into my mind or not, but I listened to the Hard Fork podcast and I think they were talking about it and I thought, this is gonna, this is gonna change everything.

You were ahead of the curve.

I didn't know how it was going to change everything. I just knew it was. And at the time I had been fairly interested in building, like being the faceless creator behind the blogs.

It's like nobody knows, uh, James Clear talks about this. It's not exactly the same, but he talks about this idea that he wants to have everybody know his ideas, but nobody know his face. Yes. Yes.

Yeah, I would like, I would like that.

There are different, there are different versions of that, like in the recipe world, less now than previously, but like you could create a site that gets a ton of traffic, but nobody knows who you are. Like you just rank really well for a bunch of content. Is that kind of in that, that category? Like, oh, that feels really cool. You can travel, you can see the world, you can be living in an RV, you can have kind of a system for creating content. A lot of people see that and create it, but you don't have the burden of a personal brand.

Yes.

Where people are like, if the recipe doesn't go well, they don't think, hey, this recipe didn't work well. They think, hey, this person who told me to make this recipe told me a bad recipe. Is that the idea?

Right. Yeah, kind of. And I just, I like being behind the camera more than I like being in front of it. It's, I just, I don't know. I wanted to, I wanted to build these two sites, you know, mostly based on the recipes and kind of keep my, my keep my personal self and my personal, you know, life out of it to a certain extent. And I just, as I was looking at how things were changing, I just thought, I don't think that strategy is going to work because more and more people are wanting to know that there's an actual person behind it, that it's a, there's another person on that screen. And so I thought I need to figure out a way to kind of bring my, uh, kind of essentially rebrand myself based on me. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Like more personal brand. So when was this again?

So I started thinking about it in 2013 and then I, I started, um, uh, or sorry, 2023.

And, and this is making more sense. I wanted to come back around to that. 2023, 2013, 2013. Yeah. And that's why I was like 2013, like you were thinking about AI in 2013. Like, were you in a research lab at OpenAI, like before they launched? Um, no, it's 2023. That makes so much more sense. Uh, 2023, ChatFBP is coming out. People are having these conversations around AI.

Yeah.

And starting to see the writing on the wall a little bit like, hey, this is gonna be really easy for people to create content that is, uh, you know, if it's, it, it's just like easy to create that content and you need something to anchor people to, which the most defensible thing is your humanity. You're a personal brand. And that's where the Substack idea started to develop. Is that what I'm getting? Yeah, exactly.

I, I, social media is not my thing. Um, I don't, I don't like to be on it. I don't like to create content for it. It's, it's always been this like struggle for me to, to try and like muster the motivation to do anything on social media. But, but I kind of saw Substack as a way, as a place where I could just be a little bit more myself and write about the things that I cared about and create recipes that weren't based entirely on keywords and, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And so I took quite a bit of time to watch what other people were doing, to think about how I wanted to show up there. And then early in 2024, I launched my Substack, which is called Let's Get Lost. Let's Get Lost. My husband and I actually have matching tattoos on our—

Amazing.

Say, say, let's get lost, which we got, I don't know, 10 or 12 years ago. So that, that's kind of a, it's been a recurring theme of our, our life and our marriage is, is travel and going different places. So that was kind of a natural name for the newsletter, but I, I used, Substack lets you use a custom domain and I used my name for the custom domain. So, so you can find it at rebeccablackwell.com. And that was intentional because of what we're talking about with, with needing to attach my name to my work. And, and I thought, well, if I can, if I can brand it, if I can call it Let's Get Lost but put it on rebeccablackwell.com, then that gives me a lot more control in terms of like, how am I attaching this to me as a person?

It's interesting on, uh, SEO Twitter, like a few weeks ago, one of the things that went viral, which it wasn't like mega viral, but like a lot of people were sharing it, was this, uh, picture that somebody took from some, it was a search conference, one of the big search conferences. I think it was Google presenting on best practices from their perspective around like articles and how you're creating articles. And it was like good, bad. It was one of those. And the basic idea chat, um, was that like bad now is like essentially what you said the travel content that you didn't want to create was, which is like top 8 pla— top 8 restaurants in Minneapolis. Like for today, that would be a bad article to write if you are interested in creating a compelling article. I don't, I don't know if they were saying even from like a search perspective, uh, but what they said is going to be really important moving forward in like the good example is like something that is around your personal experience. So like how my visit to Charleston changed my perspective on slow living, like, and that is so different from a, um, user intent perspective. And the reason I think why it's good versus bad is because of the shift that we're talking about, which is AI. Now people are going to more and more look for an answer like best restaurants in Charleston through ChatFBP, through Claude, or if not, they'll search it on Google and there'll be an AI overview. But what an AI overview won't be able to do is like tell the story of your personal experience as it relates to your travel in Charleston. And I think that was speaking a little bit more in the perspective, from the perspective of like Google's eyes. And I don't know what that looks like in terms of keywords and how that works and whatnot. But when you talk about other platforms where it's more story-driven, could be to Google Discover, but Substack is an, is a great example of that. That's where you're able to create in them from a more personal perspective and where that becomes more defensible. Like, it doesn't matter if somebody else creates a top 10 places to visit in Charleston because they can't create another story, which is like, um, here's how RVing changed my life and why I'm going to continue to do it for the next 5 years. Because that's your personal story and people are following you for that. So it's interesting to hear your reflections on that. Not only the fit for a creative outlet, but also alignment from an industry perspective. Around a type of content that can't be easily replaced. What did it look like in the early years to get started? And I know one of the things that you said is, you know, it's helpful if you think of that egg carton method to have a little bit of supplemental income from it, but you, your stance would be it's probably not going to be the main source of income unless you're like going super deep and have, you know, multiple tens of thousands of followers. So Talk to me a little bit about that and how also how your other sites fit into it. Like, is that still a strategy for you?

Yeah.

Well, when I first started the newsletter, I, I kept it fairly separate from the blogs and I gave myself a year to go all in. The nice thing about having monetized websites is they keep generating income whether you're working on them or not. And it's a perk that I lean on every now and then. And, you know, allow myself to do some other things that are a little bit more interesting to me. And so I did that for a year where I just went all in on the newsletter just to kind of see what I could build there. I grew my list by several thousand people and published a little over 200 new recipes there that were exclusive to Substack. And at the end of it, I kind of, at the end of that year, I kind of looked at it and reevaluated my strategy there. There was a couple of things happening. One, I wasn't growing paid subscriptions like I hoped I would. I think it's, it's really, really hard to get people to pay for recipes where there, there's too many, there's so many free recipes. I mean, I'm— website's full of free recipes.

There's, um, and so what was your expectation? Like even from a percentage perspective, hey, 5 out of every 100 people will sign up or whatever it might be. And then what do you feel like is a more realistic —number?

Yeah. Well, you know, when I started, people, like, people on Substack were saying, people from Substack were saying, you know, 3% or 5%. And what I've found from this network of other food writers that I've now, that I'm now connected to, is that that's extremely optimistic unless you are publishing content that is extremely narrow and very niche. Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, like there are some people that are doing it well. If you create meal plans for gluten-free people with food intolerances, that's right. That's a, that's a very clear tool that is solving pain.

We talk about this idea of painkillers versus vitamins. Like the closer you get to a vitamin, probably the lower the conversion is. That's right.

That's right. So, so I think the people that are, are doing well with paid subscriptions are doing that. Publishing recipes and also just publishing other content that doesn't clear that or solve that very, very clear problem for people, then that becomes a different thing. But building your free subscriber list, if you're putting out good content, then becomes something that is well within your reach. And so I saw my free subscriber list growing and also I was just engaging with people on a different level, on so much more personal level than what I was experiencing on the blogs. And I really liked that.

What did that look like? When you say engaging with people, how did that happen?

Yeah, yeah. So people on Substack are interesting because they want to interact. They want to comment back to you. They want to talk to you. Substack has its own internal social media called Notes. But there's, you know, it's not, it's not driven by advertising because there isn't advertising on Substack. And so you, you kind of can build your own little community of people that you're interacting with on a regular basis and, and talk about subjects that you're interested in. And, you know, some of that was food, but a lot of it was, you know, related to other topics. Life and yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you had mentioned this idea of having connection with other food writers. Talk about that. And two things I want to hear about is first, the benefit of Substack being this community and community being a beneficial thing, not even from a strategy perspective, but just from like a lifestyle design perspective. So it'd be interested in that. And then I'd also be interested, I know you have a mastermind where you are meeting with these food writers to hear about your kind of analysis of the state of food writers. So let's start with the first one, the benefit of community. And one of the things I often hear is people saying, how do you find people to connect with? How do you create a community? What does that look like? It sounds like you've successfully done that using Substack, but then also having some initiatives you've done around monthly meetups, uh, gathering people together and facilitating that. What does that look like?

Yeah, yeah, that was a very unexpected benefit from being on Substack. And at the moment, I think it's probably the most valuable reason for me to stay and for me to be there. The network of people, of other food writers that I've met there is just incredible. And as I started interacting with them and building relationships with them, I thought, what I really wanna do is get all of these people in one room and pick their brain and ask them for feedback and ideas and brainstorm and offer feedback to them. And so I started this group called Mastermind for Food Writers, and it's a free group. Almost everybody there are Substack food writers, but a lot of them have blogs as well. There's people that come from all different areas of publishing, traditional publishing, non-traditional publishing. So it's food writers and recipe developers. In kind of a big broad context. And so that's kind of nice to be able to interact with people that have different experiences and are doing different work from what I'm doing. But we get together on Zoom once a month and for 90 minutes we talk about different topics that are of interest to us. It started out as a little more of a, a little bit more of a free-for-all where we would, you know, just chat about whatever is what was interesting and pressing to us at the moment. And then as the group grew, I needed to add some structure. So now every month we have a topic that the meeting is centered on. And it's grown to be food writers from all over the country and all over the world. We have members all across Europe and in some areas of the Asia Pacific. And so there's actually another volunteer in the group that said, "Hey, I'll start a second meeting in a different time zone to help accommodate hate some of the people that were, you know, joining meetings at midnight. And so now we have 2 meetings a month and a book club has started from it. And we even last year, one of the members decided that she wanted to do a food writers retreat. And so she organized this whole retreat in Pennsylvania. And we had 20, I think 25 of us got together in this house in Pennsylvania from different parts of the country and different parts of the world, flew in for a few days where we hung out together, and we did sessions on things from food photography to a cookbook proposal to scaling your business. And the greatest thing about that retreat is all of the sessions were taught by other food writers, and I thought, "This is something that I want more of. I wanna learn how to do things from people that are doing it." And so just this last month, we, we started the Food Writers Business Lab, which is exactly that. It's a, a series of classes and workshops that is for food writers taught by other food writers. And, and all of the instructors have grown out of that, that group of mastermind. Cool.

It's one of the— I'm a part of this group. My friend Sean, who's been on the podcast before, started Kind of a similar idea. It was, he reached out to a handful of people and we'd get together in Colorado, all different types of businesses. But what I found is like in observing in those meetups, a lot of times that's the most like impactful time as a business owner that you can have is blocking out, in this case it was maybe like 3 days, 4 days. And just being in the same place as other people who are trying to figure out things alongside you, that would work in a way where you'd do a hot seat. Like there's maybe 10 people, each people do a 30-minute hot seat where they talk about a specific thing they're trying to figure out and then people would weigh in on it. But then naturally you continue to talk about it and you just get a lot of really bright people in the same room having conversations around things that they're trying to figure out. And it's not quantifiable, but it's definitely impactful. And the easiest way to get into one of those rooms is to, to be the one who creates it. And I love that as like an outflow of this Substack community. Can you talk about what that looked like initially? Was it sending an email out to your subscribers and just saying like, if you're a food writer and you want to join, here's where we're going to do Zoom, sign up here?

Yeah, kind of. I, you know, I started by talking to a few other food writers and saying, I'd really like to create some sort of mastermind group. I don't know what that looks like, but are you interested if, you know, if I do? And they were like, yeah, absolutely. One thing that has been just very impactful to me is how generous and open all of these food writers are. There's no information hoarding. They're extremely generous with, if you have a problem, if you need some feedback, You know, whatever they want to offer it. And so the idea of, can we do this on a regular basis was, was very appealing to people. And so I just, I looked up whether Mastermind for Food Writers was a, an available domain and I, I bought it and I, I set it up on, on Substack and then we just started. And I think we started with maybe there's probably only 10 or 12 of us to begin with and, and now we have. About 300 members. Not everybody comes to every meeting, but every meeting is recorded, and the recordings have been really useful to people as well, so. Cool.

We'll link to that in the show notes. My guess is if you're a food writer, then you can sign up for it? Yeah, it's free.

All the meetings are free. Everybody that does things on there is completely volunteering their time, and it really is a remarkable group of people. And you know, the other thing is that The collaborations that have come about. So, you know, there's a lot of non-tangibles, as you were talking about, non-quantifiable things that have come out of that group, but also some really important collaborations that have moved our businesses forward have come from that as well. When you have a network of people that you're connected to in the same industry from all over the place, then, you know, the value of that, of being able to say— Yeah, it's massively valuable. Who can come alongside and help me? Who has connections? Who, who knows somebody who can help me do this or accomplish this thing? And that is happening all the time. And that's amazing.

That, I mean, they, this is one of those like eye roll phrases, but I think it's really true. Like your network is your net worth. Like, um, and you don't, I think, yeah, I always want to be careful of like inscribing like financial value to relationships. I think within the context of business, one of the benefits is like you can have people, you know, like, trust, enjoy being around, and you have mutually beneficial interests, passions. You can help each other. You're motivated to help each other. It's one of the undeniable realities of building a successful business is having those people that you can reach out to. Who have an area of expertise, you know, in whatever the thing is that you're trying to figure out or break into or whatever it might be. So talk to me a little bit about the state of food writers. So we talked about AI, you know, your 2013/2023 predictions and, you know, for all of us kind of seeing there's a shift that's happening here. You can prompt ChatGPT and it will write an article for you. Debates around how effective that is or generic it is. You know, I think it's, as that is capable of doing that, we also become more suspicious of it. And so there's all these considerations with it, but it's undeniable that it's there. I'm curious to know your reflections after talking with hundreds of food writers, what the state is for food writers, you know, what some of the fears are that people are talking about and also what's working really well for people right now?

Well, I'll answer the last part first. I think what's working really well is creating personal relationships with our readers and really creating a very personal brand. I think that's what's working best for the other food writers that I'm in contact with all the time. And then collaborations is another thing. You know, going back to the the paid subscription model, I think that one of the things that we have to contend with when we have a paid subscription of any kind is the very real situation of subscription fatigue. I am constantly, as a consumer, reevaluating what are all the things we're subscribed to and do we need to be subscribed to all of these different things? And we know that our readers are doing the same thing and will not continue to subscribe to the same thing over and over and over when there's other options on the marketplace. And so, how we connect and collaborate then becomes a service to our readers and also—

What do you mean by that? How we connect and collaborate is a service to our readers?

Yeah, yeah. So, things like, one of the things that I'm working on with a group of 12 other food writers on Substack are monthly monthly cooking classes available to our paid subscribers. So, probably all of our paid subscribers aren't going to subscribe to all 12 of us, but they can subscribe to one of us and receive a monthly cooking class from 12, you know, food writers. So, it's a lot of value for very little lift on our part. So, you know, looking for ways where we can say, Okay, so, you know, you as a subscriber might pay for these 3 publications, but you're not gonna, you know, pay for 12. But how can we also offer you some value from all of these other people? Yeah, that makes sense.

So that's working well. Personal brand story, personal connection, you know, that idea of less generic, more personal, moving away from transactional content. Moving towards relational content where you feel like you know the person, that's who you're following. It's not just this like transactional recipe. How about the things that you hear bubbling up around like fears or even things that were working that are no longer working? Yeah.

You know, one of the interesting things that's happening on Substack right now, and we'll see how this plays out, is Substack is taking a little bit of an SEO focus, and that's been a shift over the past year. They've just introduced recipe cards for recipe formatting. And there, you know, there's a lot of writers on Substack that we all used to format recipes just in the body of a newsletter, just in the same way you would format any paragraph. And now the recipe card functionality just gives us the ability to format recipes more like we would on a website.

Sure. So then if it's free, then that means that the URL is available, which means that it could rank in a recipe carousel.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, and that's happening. It's happening, you know, quite a bit these days. A recipe that's published on Substack is just as likely to show up in search results as, as anywhere else. And so, you know, as we kind of navigate those changes, being able to just kind of lean on the expertise of others. There's a lot of Substack writers within the Mastermind group that have no idea. They've never paid attention to SEO. They've never had to. And, and so now that, that this change is happening, being able to learn and kind of teach some of those skills to each other is important. We've had, we've had cookbook authors launch a cookbook and, and know that there's a a network of people that will promote it for them and alongside them. And you can do these things on Substack called Substack Lives, and, you know, we've done plenty of those to, you know, promote each other's work and promote each other's cookbooks. So, you know, that level of collaboration I think is essential. To, you know, finding kind of what, what is successful and, and what works well for you.

Yeah. And, and my guess is, um, that Substack is kind of walking this line where it's like it doesn't necessarily want to be a blogging platform, but also they're trying to figure out how do you get discovery? And discovery comes from other platforms like search or social., it also comes from, you know, an email going out and maybe on that email you're, you know, featuring some other writer, but even then you're already in the Substack ecosystem. So it would make sense that there's some of these evolutions at the platform where they're trying to figure out how do we grow, you know, net new users who have never signed up for a Substack in order to help grow all the other accounts. So, uh, looking forward, what do you think your time split will look like? You have the two sites, you have Substack. Um, have you seen a shift with your site? That has resulted in you wanting to focus more on Substack?

What does that look like? Yeah, you know, after I really put a lot of time into Substack, primarily the first year, I kind of stepped back and realized that I needed the three things to connect to each other more. And so I did reevaluate that strategy, and now my newsletter is just as likely to include new recipes that are published on Substack and recipes that I've published on both of the sites. I really opened things up. There's very little on my Substack that is behind a paywall, so I can link back and forth between all 3 of them. On both of my recipe websites, I also have an email subscribe option through Kit, and when somebody subscribes there, they get an email that is a personal message from me that includes all logos from all 3 brands right at the top of the email. And the email also comes from rebeccablackwell.com, just as a way of saying, "Hey, you're gonna start getting these weekly emails, they're gonna have recipes from all 3 of these places on a, on a regular basis. So, so you have a kit email list and the Substack.

Yeah. Yeah. How do you view those separately? And then also are the recipes, are you publishing recipes on the Substack and then are those different than the recipes on the blogs?

Yes. Yes to both. So, you know, the, the kit email newsletter list, uh, I send that out once a, once a week. If you subscribe on either site, you get the same and it contains recipes from all 3 places. Because Substack doesn't offer the same functionality in terms of, you know, easy to— it's, you sign up for a Substack newsletter and if you're just on a website because you were, you know, looking for buttermilk pancakes and somebody is like, hey, do you wanna sign up for this newsletter? It It doesn't really make sense. But you can give somebody that signs up, you know, that's on your buttermilk pancake recipe, you know, an email opt-in that is in line with that. And that makes a little bit more sense. So that's why I've kept both. But I keep trying to blend them both together as much as possible so that people learn my name and here's the 3 different places that I publish. In terms of time, I spend probably half my time on the blogs and half my time on the newsletter. And, you know, there's some variation there depending on what the week holds for me, but it's pretty evenly divided. And I do publish recipes just on Substack, and then also every issue of my newsletter includes links to recipes that are on both of the blogs as well. So, so one of my goals, you know, I do want to continue to grow the paid subscriber numbers, but, but really the, the free subscribers, I think long-term are what's most important to me. Not, not only does it allow me to send traffic back and forth to all three places, it allows me to build a more personal relationship with readers. And then And one thing that I just started doing is some paid sponsorships through the newsletter and really having higher numbers in your free subscriber list is more important to—

So somebody's paying you to have their brand show up in the newsletter, Substack, and Kit? Exactly. Yeah. Can you, somebody else just recently reached out and was like, hey, you know, do you guys ever do that with Pinch of Yum? Can you talk about how that happens? Do people reach out to you? Do you reach out to other people? Any guidance on pricing?— you know, the thing that I always think about is like a $30 per CPM. So like if you have 1,000 people who are opening an email, you'd charge $30. Like, I don't know if that's— I don't know where I got that and I don't even know if that's like accurate. And obviously it depends on if it's finance or insurance or how engaged your audience is or how niche the email is or whatever. But what advice would you have for people— as you've done that, if they're interested in starting to get sponsorships for their email?

Yeah, that's— I mean, that's exactly how I thought of it. So the first brand that reached out, they reached out to me and said, hey, we're interested in sponsoring a newsletter. It wasn't something that I had thought about doing. I'd worked with brands on the blogs before, but I had never thought about working with a brand as a sponsor in a newsletter. I hadn't tried their products. They said, can we send you some stuff? And I was like, sure, if I like it, then we can talk. And so I tested it out. Out, really liked what they sent over. And so then I went back and I, when I was thinking about pricing, I was thinking of it exactly in the way that you were talking about. And I was like, well, I think I'll price it per 1,000 subscribers because that's the other thing with a newsletter list is, you know, we're talking right now and I'm just about to cross 17,000 subscribers. It's my, my list is growing at about 500 people a month. And so by the time a campaign rolls out, the numbers are, are going to be higher. And so, so pricing things per 1,000 subscribers seemed like, seemed like the way to go. And so to decide on that number, I just looked at what my, my blog RPMs are and I, I said, here's what I get per 1,000 views on the blogs. And so that's what I'm going to say per 1,000 subscribers. I did price it based on subscribers, not on open rate. And I'm glad I did that. Which is great.

Yeah, if they accepted it, good for you.

They didn't blink because the thing about Substack that's really interesting, and I think it's different from other platforms, is my open rate may be 30 or 40% per email, but that one post is still probably going to generate 20 or 30,000 views because Yes, it lives on Substack. It lives on Substack. It's permanent there. People keep coming back to it. And so basing the number on the subscriber number rather than the open rate just seemed like a better, a better—

it's interesting. You, everybody thinks of Substack as an email platform, which I think its roots are that, but really it's like a publishing platform. You go in and it's just like email is the main mechanism for Notification of a new piece of content, like, but there's a social media component to it. There's the actual post itself. It could be discovered via search or Pinterest or social, like, um, so yeah, it's a good reminder for people who are looking to do any type of brand partnerships that it's not just an email. Yeah. It lives on forever as long as you keep it up.

Right, right. And, and from a, from a From the perspective of working with brands, the, the numbers that I think are, are the most interesting to brands are the fact that, you know, you can look at it in terms of page views on a website. So, you know, I'm sending out a once-a-week newsletter to 16,000 people, and, you know, 40% of them might open it, but, but 50,000 to 60,000 people a month are on my Substack looking at what I'm writing there. So those are two different sets of numbers. And, um, if you're working with brand, tho— those are the numbers that I think matter.

Yeah, that's great. And important to paint that picture when you're having that conversation, which you did. Uh, and cool to see. Um, we'll include Mastermind for Food Writers as a link. People can sign up for that. Really cool to hear what's happening there. And I'm sure it's super helpful for a lot of people and just great to have more connection in the world. Uh, link to your sites as well. Anywhere else that people can find you? Sounds like not on social media. Via, but they can on Substack. Where else can people find you and follow along with what you're up to?

Yeah, I mean, rebeccablackwell.com is where you'll find my newsletter. And my baking site is ofbatteranddough.com, and my cooking site is alittleandalot.com. But the primary place is rebeccablackwell.com. You can get to everything that I'm doing from that one spot. Awesome.

Rebecca, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Thank you, Björk.

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 greatly 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 Björk sits down with Emily Baksa to talk about shifting food blogger mindsets from giving away all your content for free to selling directly to your audience. We'll see you back here soon, and in the meantime, we hope you have a wonderful week.