How Sarah Cook Went From 17k to 600k Monthly Pageviews with Her Blog | The Food Blogger Pro Podcast

What does that look like? To then start with your blog and say, hey, I'm gonna. And talk a little bit about your blog. We haven't done that yet. We'll talk about it in the intro. But talk about your blog and talk about some of those first things that you did to start to focus on growth and building.

That sure. So my blog is Sustainable Cooks, and up Until January of 2018, it was called Frugal by Choice, Cheap by necessity to any new blogger out there, just to hint if someone falls asleep by time you finish saying the name of your blog, it's a good idea to rebrand. It's so long. And so one of the first things I did was I got on a, I think an audit wait list with Casey from Media Wise. And then I got on a wait list to be on a wait list to have my blog redesigned and rebranded. Um, and all of that. Because to me it was like, okay, I want this to be a full time job, but I was treating it like a hobby. You can't open a restaurant without. Without a bunch of pots and pans and plates. And yes, to think that I could just keep going with all the free resources available was. It's not realistic.

Yeah.

So I started.

Like, literally. The name of the site was Frugal. Frugal had Frugal in it. Was that a hurdle for you to say, like, hey, I'm going to put some money into this?

No, Because I'm always willing to invest in things that are going to last. And since I wanted this to last, I was okay with it. And we had moved this. Sorry, this is telling a story like my mom used to tell a story. We had moved to Los Angeles from Seattle so that my husband could work in film and television. He was what's called a grip. So behind the scenes, you do lighting and electrical.

Yep.

So we did that. I went, got the. The full time job with the benefits to support his dream. We did that for four years. We moved home during the recession. I got a job that was fine to support his dream of now becoming a firefighter. So once he got that firefighting job and then once I decided to blog full time, I was like, list in the amount of time and money we've invested in chasing two of your dreams. I'm like, I'm gonna take 1% of that.

It was like, no, it wasn't because.

I handle all the money. He's like, yep, fine, do it, whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I was like, I think I went from always asking, like, should I Be doing this to telling people, this is what I'm doing. Like, I took ownership of it. I had pride in saying what it was, that kind of thing. But it did, it took money and it'. That's not a popular thing to say.

Yeah. What were the best things that you spent money on in the early stages.

Or just in general getting a new site. My old. I'm like terrible with design. I'm terrible with anything tech related. And so having someone completely do that for me was huge. And then going from like a free or cheap theme that I didn't know how to work to this, like I'm going to say beautiful because I'm now like site that someone else helps me manage. It was like, oh, okay, this is what it can be.

Yeah.

And then doing the audit with Kasey, I mean, I knew I had lots and lots of problems, like lots of problems with how my site had been. And so just getting that 43 page report of these are the things you need to fix. Like it gave me marching orders. I'm type A. If you give me a to do list, I'm on it.

Yeah. So can you talk about. So you talked about Casey doing the SEO audit, Other people that you worked with or companies that you worked with in the early stages, just to give them a shout out for people who would deserve a shout out.

Yeah. So I started working with Lindsay from Purr Design. So she did my site. I started listening to Simple Pin Media podcasts, Kate, all from Pinterest. I had zero knowledge of Pinterest. I didn't even have a personal account. I didn't have a blog account. So I worked with her. She did a Pinterest audit. So I could just kind of like, I guess it was called a board cleanup. Just to get me set off on the, the right foot.

Yeah. Awesome. So did you start to. When did you start to notice an impact then? So you do these things. You're. You're investing into Pinterest, you're investing into SEO, you're actually doing the work. Right. That's the other important piece. It's not just an audit. Doesn't do anything unless you actually do something with the audit, whether it be Pinterest, SEO Technical. At what point did you actually start to see an impact and a change? And what did that look like?

So I had my audit with Casey in May of 2018. And then by the next month I had like just put my head down and churned through that work, that checklist. By the next month I qualified for Mediavine so, like, I saw results within 30 days. But I would say from the time I decided to, like, be serious to the time I actually started making money was almost 12 months. Like, because I said, okay, I'm going to be serious. But I didn't know what that meant and I didn't know what it looked like. I would say it took a full 12 months of just researching and education to figure it all out.

Yeah. And what did. So on that day one when you said, I'm going to do this to 365 days later, what did your day. How did your day look different than it did 12 months before? Were you doing different things? Were you thinking differently? Were you producing different content?

Absolutely. I had never done keyword research before, and as I said, I didn't even have a recipe card on my blog, so I converted all my old recipes to a recipe card. I think I did that three different times. Because I switched so many recipe cards, I started doing keyword research. And so that meant going back through all my old posts that I thought were actually worth keeping and retitling them. So going from the best thing I ate all week as the title to air fryer pizza rolls or something like that, I mean, that, that was a slow and long and painful process. But I noticed that the SEO, once I started going, things snowballed quickly because I was fixing the old stuff that already had a little, I would say, juice behind it, like content juice behind it. And then all of a sudden Google's like, oh, this chick is serious. Let's give her another look.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What tool did you use for the keyword research?

I use KeySearch. I still use KeySearch.

Okay, got it. And one of the things that I think is so great is you're looking at the content you currently have and optimizing that alongside or even before you started looking at producing new content. What did that process look like? Was it. Was it a long season of focusing on the assets you currently had because it had been six, seven years of producing content?

Yep. Yes, it was definitely looking at what I had before moving forward. Um, I also, I think I went from like 3,000 posts and then I deleted all but 800 of them. Now some of those that I left were like a weekly wrap up post or something. Or something that I just wanted for myself that I de indexed.

Yeah.

But yeah, so doing that deep clean like you talked about, you know, when you're in a time of stress, you like to deep clean. It was like so wonderful to just get rid of all that old junk. And then once I had the posts that were left, I'm like, okay, so what do I do with these now?

Yeah.

And then I started working my way through them.

Can you talk about why you would do that? I think that's a foreign concept for a lot of people that you would have so much content, and as a strategy to get more traffic, you would delete the majority of it. It seems kind of counterintuitive. But why? Why did you do that?

So I think it. You can kind of think of it like a playroom that is completely full of toys, and then your kids come upstairs and say, we don't have anything to do. Whereas you get rid of 80%, do a huge goodwill run, and then they go downstairs and they're like, oh, look at all this stuff we have to play with. Because it's not cluttered. It's not, you know, it's not overwhelming. And I was overwhelmed with that. Almost 3,000 posts and a lot of that content was super thin. It'd be like an old cell phone picture, like from 2010, with, like 10 words like, nobody needs that.

Yeah. And by thin you mean not a lot of content and not valuable content.

That is there by any means. And what Casey explained to me, and I'm not going to put words in his mouth, this is just my interpretation of what he said was you only get so much crawl allowance by Google, so they can only look at so many of the pages you have on your site. And if the vast majority of your pages are junky, old content, they're not going to see and index any of your good stuff.

Almost like another analogy would be if you have a luxury or like an antique store and you had these, like, beautiful, incredible antiques, but then you also had, like, then additional 75% of it was these, like, crummy antiques that weren't valuable and were, like, not well taken care of. And when you go in, what you see isn't like, wow, these are beautiful. This is a beautiful antique store. It's like, well, this is kind of crummy, right? And if you get rid of all the crummy stuff, you walk in, you're like, oh, my gosh, this is incredible. Similar concept to content where it's like, man, if you just have incredible content, the general ideas, all of your content is incredible. It's not. It's not hit or miss. And if content is crawled, the pieces, the articles, the posts, the pages, whatever we want to call it that are crawled are all like, wow, this is Good. This is good. This is good. Um, so did you, in doing that, did you notice an increase in traffic pretty, pretty quickly just from doing that, or was it a cumulative effort of a lot of different things?

It was a cumulative, but by deleting as a first step, I was then able to see what was left and then work on it and categorize it. And one thing that. Getting rid of all that junk, one thing that it did, is it helped me see themes, so which posts were popular. And then by seeing that, I was able to put my content kind of into three categories. I have three very distinct audiences, and they have nothing to do with each other. So I have people who love to can and garden.

Yep.

I have people who want, like, fast weeknight meals. And then I have people who have been with me since the beginning, and they're just there for, like, friends, whatever. Yeah.

Like Internet friends. Whether you're Internet friends.

Exactly. And so by able. By being able to focus on kind of those three groups, I was able to then build out content plans going forward. So instead of wasting all my time on, oh, I should do this because it's popular. I should do this because it's popular. I think. Would one of my three readers like, yeah, do they want that? So I kind of went from a Cheesecake Factory menu to. To a tasting menu, as as opposed to everything we have. You can have whatever you want to. Hey, this is what we have. If it's not for you, great.

Yeah. Yeah. And you could, especially if somebody's starting out, probably just one of those buckets, like, here's the bucket where we produce content. It's canning, you know, or it's like Whole 30 or whatever it might be. But as you start to grow, in your case, it was kind of like you had all this stuff, and you kind of, uh, compartmentalize it into three down from a lot. But especially if somebody's starting out, you can even just have one of those and expand maybe later on. I think of it almost as, like, when I text my friends, I know, like, okay, I have my friends who are really into tennis.

Yes.

And then I have my friends who are really into business, you know, and then I have my gadget and tech friends, and I'll text them about stuff. But what's nice is, you know, okay, here's content. And what I hear you saying is you almost have these kind of Personas, and, you know, okay, I'm going to create this content. Here's the person that I'm creating this content for. Do you have any type of schedule where you're like, the canned people are going to get four pieces of content every month. Or is it more like, here's what I feel like creating content, here's how it will fit into the site, and then I'll schedule that.

So one of the benefits of having that, like, canning gardening niche is that it's only seasonal. So I only have to push that stuff out May through early October.

Yeah, if you're doing it in January, it's going to be like, how to eat. How to eat canned goods.

That's exactly right. And then. But so what I do for my, you know, quick weeknight, weeknight meal recipes is I'll often link back to a canning recipe. Like, sure, let's say this stew requires, you know, canned tomatoes. And I can. I'll just put a little link within the post. That said, you know, interested in preserving your own food? Check out this recipe on how to can whole tomatoes. It's gonna make making this dish next year be a lot faster kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. So can you talk about the impact that some of these changes actually had? So you have this moment where you are like, you know what? Casey's speaking to me on the Food Blogger Pro podcast. As you're coming over this hill, the sun is. The sun is rising. The smoke off your coffee is slowly rising.

Birds are chirping.

Birds are chirping. There's a bear in the forest waving hello. What did that look like in terms of traffic growth? To the extent that you're comfortable talking about that?

Sure.

Was it at the end of the year, you're like, hey, and now I've gotten to this point, you know, I've got accepted to mediavine or whatever it was, and I'm able to earn enough to justify this. What, what did that look like? Just so people can get an idea of if they were to do this. Not that it's guaranteed that the same thing happens, but just results that can come from taking it seriously. Like you did.

Yeah. And I'm happy to share numbers because I feel like too often people keep that stuff close to their chest. And that's. That's fine. I don't think it actually helps anyone by saying, well, I improved.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so one thing I'll just note, especially for newer bloggers, is back When I joined Mediavine, the qualifications to join were 25,000 sessions. Now I believe it's 50,000. So it's hard to compare those, you know, apples to apples. Exactly. So at the time I had my audit with Kasey. I was probably at like 20,000, maybe like 17,000 page views. I also had my audit during like the slowest traffic time for me, which is April and May. Um, and then by the next, By June of 2018, I was able to get over that 25, 000 session mark.

And that was then. That's when you apply for mediavine and that's when you start to see like, oh, this is, or this just from ads, I'm, I'm able to earn, you know, 10, 20, $30. And that's when it, you can start to get into the numbers game a little bit where you're like, yes, okay, 30 is actually pretty close to a hundred and a hundred times. 365 is 36,000. Like that's where it starts to get kind of cool.

But then you learn the defeating truth of the first quarter of the year in which. Yeah, yeah, your, your rpm. Yeah. So each, each quarter of the year has kind of a different average in terms of rpm, so how much you can expect to earn from your ad company and the first quarter. So January through March is always the lowest because that's when budgets reset for the new year, that kind of thing. The fourth quarter, so kind of October through December is usually the highest for most bloggers in food and, and wine and that kind of stuff. For me it's actually July and August and September because that's when all the canners are on my site and those posts are very long because people don't want to kill their families with botulism. So they read everything in depth. So the time on page is extended, that kind of thing.

It's a certain level of like that it's, it's accountability for you to be like, I want to make sure that all of these steps are correct. And oh yes, yeah, the fear based.

Earnings are high in summer. So I went from like 17 to 20,000 page views in spring ish of 2018 to just finishing my best month ever yesterday in which I hit 600,000.

Wow, that's awesome.

So it's like an overnight success. Took me 11 years.

Yeah. But I think what's really cool for me to hear is this moment where you said, you know what, I'm going to take it seriously. And we talk about this a lot, but it's because there's truth to it. Like it's showing up every day figuring out how you and your site can get a little bit better, making those improvements. And you'd use this phrase, but that starts to snowball. And that results in something that I would assume in some ways is life changing. I mean, I don't know if that's like too significant of a word to use, but can you talk about how that has changed things for you and your family and.

Yeah, absolutely.

This new kind of reality that you're living in.

So I'll note that last spring I switched from mediavine to ad Thrive. And everyone's experience is different making that switch, but for me it was like 100% the best decision. And so as soon as I made that switch, my income skyrocketed at the same time that everyone as at is trapped at home because of the pandemic and they're online. So it was good timing on my part. So last year just, you know, the increase in page views and the increase in earnings, you know, I was able to save enough for, from a few months to complete, really remodel our kitchen, which has been driving me crazy for 10 years.

It was life changing in that way.

Yeah, it was, it was what we call the one butt kitchen.

Totally.

And so we, we've basically done all the things we haven't been able to do since the recession. We've remodeled things, we've put more money aside for retirement, we've, you know, padded our kids college fund. But I would say the best part about making more money is the freedom that it gives me to support causes that I care about.

Can you talk about some of those?

Yeah. So I, I mean, obviously I love the fact that I got a new kitchen, but I also love the fact that I can and see a need and be like, well, here's some money.

Yeah, totally.

It's. And being able to, you know, bless people that never even have to know about it. Supporting things through our church, we just had a neighbor's son pass away from COVID left a family. And so I was just able to just throw some money at a GoFundMe. And the material things are great, but being able to do all the things I've wanted to do for so long but couldn't, it's been much more exciting.