How to Create Valuable Content & Understand Your Audience | The Food Blogger Pro Podcast

Let's say hypothetical question, that starting over question. Let's say instead of somebody buying it, somebody accidentally hit. You didn't know this existed, it was a delete all button and like 13 years goes away. It's all deleted. You have like one moment, one day of being kind of sad, and then you're like, you know what? I'm going to get back at it. How do you start? What do you do to get back at it? What is the first area that you focus on in order to start building?

This might be the single greatest interview question I've ever been asked. I just got hives because what you just explained is an actual nightmare that I have daily face.

Like, you wake up and you try.

And load your site screaming, like, tweaking, oh, my gosh. Yeah. What?

Wait a minute. I don't own a computer.

Oh, my God. Where do you start? Okay. Oh, man, I don't even know. That is such a good question. I think I would go back to the core of what just a taste is, which is easy but impressive recipes. And I think I would just say start again with the recipe development because honestly, at the end of the day, and I always say this content is king. You can market and PR the crap out of anything. It doesn't matter. Like, I can market anything, but at the end of the day, if the content isn't there and the content isn't valuable, it's not useful, it's not, you know, reliable, you have nothing.

Yeah, I think it, yeah, it's, it's. I think it's something that we can get lost in a lot of times in the world of tips, tricks, podcasts, for sure, videos, courses, is like, a lot of that is teaching the technique of, like, what you said, marketing, which is really important. It's a super important, critical. Yeah, but if you're deploying that against something that isn't, isn't quality, isn't good, whether it be an actual product or the product of a recipe, it doesn't really matter. It's like it's not going to have an impact no matter how good you are at marketing.

Exactly. If it's not useful to someone and it doesn't solve a problem for them, they're not going to come back.

And that's hard to get good at that. It's hard because it's more art than science. A lot of times where you're developing the ability to create something that has an impact, that helps people, you are understanding your audience. So if somebody wants to get better at that, how do they do that?

And I think too. So you said it's more of an art than a science. I would say it's like a little bit of a split. So the art part of it. Yes. And. And that's very like, you know, kind of. You're in the dark. Like, so many times, you know, we develop recipes and I'm like, this is going to be a huge hit. This is going to break the Internet. And then it does nothing. And then other times we have recipes that just go completely crazy. They, like, you know, 40, 50,000 people a day come to the site for them and you're like, why? So then that's a perfect case study.

Yeah, yeah, that's science.

Like we're. That's the science element. We are so big into analytics and numbers and knowing exactly what drives people to the site. And also, more importantly, what are our top exit pages? So, not to get like a total nerd for a second, but we want to know when people come to just to taste and we, meaning Libby and I, why are they. Why are they leaving? Why are they not staying longer? So we can kind of solve for that and that really helps dictate to what kind of content we're going to create.

Yeah. So if I were to distill that down, it would say, hey, going back to content, how do we create recipes that are awesome as we're doing that? How do we use analytics to understand people's behavior around these recipes and potentially replicate that? And you talked about exit. When you go into Google Analytics, seeing where people are leaving the most, it's almost like what people don't like and then also seeing what people do like. Can you talk about within Google Analytics, I'm guessing, is what you're using for that, how you go about doing that, how do you find that and surface that information and then what do you do with it?

Definitely. And I think one of the biggest tips and things that I learned early on is for the first two years of my site, I didn't even have Google Analytics installed on the site because, I don't know, I had no clue what I was doing. So Now I have 10 years of data, a decade's worth of data, so I can look back and obviously food trends change and climate changes and all of that sort of thing, but when we go into analytics, which happens multiple times a day, there's a really cool thing in Google Analytics that I don't think a lot of people are aware of, but it's called real time analytics, and you can get in there. And you can see exactly in that moment who is on your site, what pages they're hitting, what pages they're leaving from. And we can see this ebb and flow all day long now. It's very addictive. So once I start watching it, it's like one of those things I like, zone out and it's like being on TikTok and 17 hours later, I'm watching like a pig in a tutu and I'm like, I can't stop watching it.

How did I get here? And why did I send this to everybody on my contact list?

Exactly. So I think it's like very easy to go, like, become obsessed with it. But when you make the jump from wanting to do blogging in whatever, you know, food, fashion, whatever lifestyle, to as a hobby to a business, you've got to focus on those numbers. Because if you don't know who your audience is, where they're coming from, what content they're liking, and most importantly, what content they're not liking, you can't further your company, you can't develop your editorial calendar. So for me, analytics, especially those real time analytics, like, we can see when we send out our newsletter, we can see exactly the hotspots on the site where people are going to. And we say, okay, that was a huge hit. We got to do that again.

Yeah, so what if the huge hit is like, you know, not hypothetical triple cheese hot dog. Like, and you look at it and you're like, wow, that was actually published as a joke. Everybody loves it. That's extreme example. But how do you balance, like, this is what I love. I'm interested in, like, passion publishing with performance publishing.

Oh, I love, I like that. Passion publishing, performance. Okay, so here's an even better example that's along those lines. Baked feta pasta, right? Broke the Internet, okay? Totally broke the Internet. The world is now short on feta because of this whole recipe craze. So we jumped on it real quick, like, immediately. As soon as I saw it starting to trend on TikTok, I'm like, oh, let's do that. And you know what? My variation is going to have some white wine. So I did a variation with white wine, shot a little reel, and then I was talking to Libby and I was like, I think we should put it up on the site so we have somewhere to link to. You know, it's a really basic recipe. People can just pull it from Instagram, but let's go ahead and get it on the site. Oh, my gosh. Beat our number One recipe for the last seven years. In the first two weeks, it got more traffic than than the number one top rated recipe for the past seven years. It was a very good learning lesson. But that's not a recipe that I would necessarily spend weeks developing and testing. And beautiful photography. If you look at that post on our site, those are my iPhone photos that I literally took screenshots of from the video because I didn't even take photos of it. But it was such a good example of not letting perfection be the enemy of good. We just had to get it out there. We got it out there. It's a great recipe. Don't get me wrong, it works. Are they the best photos I've ever taken in my life? No, but people relate to it and it did really, it continues to do very well. So it's a balance. So there's that and then there's the takeout fake out recipe that I spent three months you know, perfecting and beautiful photos and like the whole nine. And they can both do well. But it's just interesting to know that something like the feta pasta or the triple cheesy hot dog, there's somebody, there is an audience for both of those things.

Sure. Yep, that makes sense. I know for Lindsey, as she thinks about content, there's a balance where she's like, hey, I'm going to be okay doing like 25% of the time. A recipe that I know will be good, that will test that, it's going to be awesome, but might not be like sweet spot recipe. It's more like performance recipe. And then leaving plenty of room for passion content that might not perform as well. I think it comes down to, for a lot of people, a balance between, you know, for some people, the passion might be creating content that performs well. Like that might be the underlying thing that's interesting and engaging. And for other people it might be, hey, I'm just, I like to the process of creating art that is food. But I know that I can't do that all the time.

Right. I'm gonna cook, I'm gonna put on the site what I have for dinner every night. And I don't care if people like that or not. Like, sorry, I had salami with cheez its and you know, whatever for dinner. And I'm gonna take a really cool picture and put it up because that's just my real life and I definitely think there is that balance. So it just depends. Like people come for different reasons to the site and that's why I want to have a little something for everyone. So that you know, no matter what you're looking for.