Increasing Your Revenue Streams and Standing Out as a Food Blogger with Andrew Wilder

Let's do these. Let's do these, these last few points that you have, because I think these would be important to hit because these are less tactical. It's like, install this plug and do this thing. And more like general guidance of considerations and important pieces for creators to consider. And you see this, and it would be interesting for you to surface these as well. And one of them that you mentioned was, hey, as creators, we need to be thinking about diversifying our income. What does that mean? And how do people actually do that in this world?

So with the rise basically of Mediavine and AdThrive, advertising has become the primary source of revenue for food blogs. You know, it's been a source of revenue for a long time, but now we see, you know, revenue that's just through the roof, especially in the fourth quarter. You know, this year I'm hearing numbers that I've never heard so high, like $80 per thousand page views. I mean, it's just nuts how much money is pouring in. So I totally get why it's blown up. But the problem is in parallel to that, we've got so many ads, right? So, you know, if you look at a site now that's making an $80 RPM or revenue per thousand, you can barely see the content. There are so many ads being served. And I don't think this is sustainable because I think visitors are going to be sick of it real soon and everybody's just going to start installing ad blockers. I couldn't actually do my job without an ad blocker. I literally could not load enough pages in my day. And this isn't a knock on ads. There's nothing inherently wrong with display advertising as a way to earn reven. But I think it's really scary to be in a position where all your traffic is coming from Google because Pinterest is no longer good. Pinterest doesn't know what to do.

You see that across the board for the sites you're working with, where there's a real strong correlation to decline in Pinterest traffic.

I think so, yeah.

Same for pinch of yam for sure.

I mean, who likes using Pinterest now? It's horrible, right? So I think traffic with Pinterest because they're trying to monetize their own way. So with the shift of traffic source being Google, every and then your revenue Source being correlated 100% to your traffic and nothing else, then you are on this hamster wheel of trying to always be worried about SEO and traffic. And man, I am so glad that I'M not in a business where like Google pushes out an update tomorrow and half my revenue cuts in half. Like that's, that's. I mean if you're up at that level, where it's that big, then that's great. Enjoy it while it lasts. Right. But there's so much risk there that it's just, I don't see how that's sustainable over years and years and years.

Yeah, totally. Like inevitably there'll be a season where that changes or shifts, whether that be monetization through ads and the impact of, you know, cookie lists, which is a conversation for another period of time or to your point, a Google algorithm change. That can be really significant. So what do you diversify into then? Like what are the options?

Right, so you still have to have traffic on your site obviously. Right. Without visitors, you don't have a website. But there are a lot of options. And I think you've done a few episodes on various options. We don't need to get too far into it. But you know, I'd love everybody to start thinking about what they can do besides ads to monetize their sites. Whether that's, you know, building an ebook and selling that to your visitors or a subscription service of some kind, a meal planning service. Some of our clients have launched product lines.

It's interesting if one of the things that you can do is any public company that would be in the space that you're in, you can go and you can read the annual reports from those companies. And it's eye opening to see.

The.

Amount of income that some of these sites are creating from. You know, we think of it as like, hey, traffic monetized via ads. But I'm trying to think of some examples of that. Like is Food52 public? I'm trying to think it's, it's. I think it might still be, I don't remember.

They were bought and huge now and they're part of, they're like a sub, Sub brand, right?

Yeah. Within another company. But any of these companies that are in the world of content creation, they'll have annual reports. And a lot of times those annual reports, like Leaf Group is one of them, they'll have annual reports and within those annual reports they'll talk about the different successes they're having and opportunities. And you see you can kind of get inside the mind of these organizations that content businesses but are monetizing through different ways so would encourage you to do that. And I think it's, it's a great point. You know, Andrew, you Talk about your business. It's the metrics. The business metrics are so different where it's referral, it's word of mouth, it's marketing, like being on podcasts. Right. There will be people who listen to this podcast who will inevitably sign up to work with NerdPress. And it's. There's a certain sustainability with it that's more predictable as well, and that can exist within the food and recipe space. So I love that, I love that you drive that point home. Home. The other thing that I think would be important, along with diversification that you mentioned and along with kind of dialing back ads to prioritize user experience, is thinking about ways to differentiate yourself from other food sites. What does that mean and how does that look?

So, yeah, I mean, Google doesn't care where they send their visitor as long as the visitor is happy with the answer. Right. Google's goal is to get the person the best answer to their query. And so what's been happening is this, been this sort of consolidation isn't quite the right word, or standardization maybe, where it's like, okay, well, this is clearly working for Google. So we're all going to do this to try to get up in the search results and in particular visually with the core web vitals, even we can't be visually as distinct anymore because that takes a lot of resources and is slow to load. So ironically, like, food blogs are all starting to kind of look the same because you have to pair everything back. Can't use web fonts anymore because they're too slow. And so the, you know, you swap out the logo at the top of the page and it could be any other food blog.

Sure. Right.

So, I mean, your logo, I think having a really strong logo does help, you know, if, if you don't have a great logo, that's a great next step. You can get a logo really cheap at 99designs.com or logotournament.com within a week you'll have a logo. And if you're really active and engaged and involved with the process, these logo contests can get you a great result. But where was I going with that?

Oh, just the idea of differentiation, like the idea that because of some of these things, standardization of themes, standardization of best practices, standardization of advice and where people are hearing it from, what you get is a really standard look. And that is a benefit in some ways because it's going to be achieving some of the outcomes you want, like core web vitals or design aesthetic or user experience or ease of use for Menu navigation or recipe index or whatever it might be. But what I hear you saying is it's a disadvantage in that suddenly it becomes like essentially like all recipes but spread across a bunch of different URLs, which is like your competitive advantage, if you fold in some differentiating elements is going to be strategic in that you will be able to separate yourself from other people. But my question is like how do you separate yourself from other people, other creators?

Well, yeah, and you know, I can't give you that answer.

Sure.

You know, but the point.

But your point then is to like be aware of that and to think about it.

Yeah, think about it. And you know, what is it that you makes you unique? What is your secret sauce? What is special about you? What is compelling about you?

Personality. It's personality. Yeah, totally.

At the same time it's a fine line because there's always those haters who are like, you know, don't give me your life story, just give me the recipe. Right. And you know, we've kind of, we've, I feel like we've swung a little too far. Like blogs originally were, you know, lifestyle and, and you're, you know, like Julia's blog. Right. It was like all about like your personal life and your family and then, oh, here's a recipe. And now it's swung back the other way where there's almost no personality and it's like a frequently asked questions at the top of how to make your whatever it is perfect and all the, all the possible questions somebody might ask about this recipe or the content of the post because that's what Google think seems to be looking for. And so I just feel like we need to swing the pendulum back a little bit and breathe some like humanity back into all of this.

Yeah. And that can be a way to say here's who I am. Here's it's. You're not following me because of how I'm setting up my post to optimize for Google search. You're following me because you feel connected to me and you're interested in who I am and you feel aligned with me in some way or inspired or connected. And that requires some non optimization type decisions like sharing a little bit about who you are, your story insofar as you're comfortable doing it. I don't think, I think there are some people who aren't comfortable for doing it and feel like that is something you have to do as a strategy, perspective. But if you're somebody who's comfortable sharing about who you are in Your story, I think to your point, Andrew, like, that's a really helpful thing to do insofar as people follow people and want to know other people and be connected with other people, which I think is awesome and a good reminder for us, especially as we get potentially super hyper focused on content, to rank.

You know, it's, it's all about your user. It's not about Google. And so there are these boxes you have to check to make Google happy so that Google technically can figure it out. But at the end of the day, Google's not reading your site. A human is. And they're probably on their phone and they're probably trying to figure out what to make for dinner and they're scrolling through. Right. One of the things I recommend everybody does at least every couple months is use your actual phone to look at your site.

Yeah, totally.

We, we all, we all work on our sites, on our desktops or our laptops or even our iPads. Right. But our readers, 90 or what, like 80% of them now are on their phones mobile and, and they probably don't have an ad blocker. And there, I can't tell you how many sites where, even if the content's great, I can't see it because there are so many ads.

Yeah.

Like literally there's one sentence of the post and there's three ads and an overlaid video. Like I can't get to it. So, so if you're doing that, like you're doing all this work to create great content and then your people aren't, can't get around the ads to see it. So, you know, I think it's important to basically put yourself in the mindset of your users and your visitors and actually do a gut check on that every once in a while. And I think you should, you know, you can also do like real user testing, like go to a friend, hand them a phone and say, hey, can you look up my strawberry shortcake recipe on my site and watch them do it and have them, you know, you can ask them to talk through what they're doing and what they're seeing and it'll be eye opening.

Yeah, it's, it's one of the things that we have as a monthly recurring task for every site is it's, I don't remember exactly how it's worded, but it's something like use on phone for 30 minutes. Like it's just every month it's like it's brought, we call it browser testing. But like, hey, just like go and use it on the different and that being like a really productive, helpful thing to do. You can take screenshots, you can record a video recording of it. Hey, this is off. This needs to be improved. And all of that stuff is super impactful. Speaking of impactful, always helpful and impactful to have conversations with you, Andrew, like I mentioned before, I know that people are going to be interested in connecting with you, potentially working with you and your team. Can you talk about the best way to do that and where people can follow along with NerdPress as well?

Well, you know, you can visit us online at www.nerdpress.net. that's N E R D P R-E-S.net and if you have any questions you can email us@supporterdpress.net and if it's a inquiry about our services, the team's going to forward it to me. So I'll be the one checking that email. I'll be happy to talk with you some more and you can learn all about our site, our services on our website and I look forward to any questions you guys have.

Well, Andrew, always great to connect, really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on.

Thank you again, Sam.