Mastering Digital Products and Meta Ads with Tammy Overhoff

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Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This week on the podcast we are welcoming Tammy Overhoff from Organize Yourself, Skinny Tasty Digital Eats and the Reset and Flourish Shop. Tammy first started food blogging in 2011 and has reinvented her business many times over the last 14 years. She took her food blog full time in 2014 and after being hit hard by one too many Google algorithm updates, Tammy knew she needed to make a change to her business so that she was no longer working from a place of desperation. In 2022, she took a step back from SEO and diversified her business by leaning into digital product sales. Over the last few years, she has.

Worked really hard to master meta ads.

And uses them really strategically to sell her digital products, grow her email list, and build her community. In this interview, Tammy explains her exact process, including numbers for selling digital products, including her current meta ad strategy. I know it can feel really daunting to spend money to reach an audience when social media and organic traffic are free, but Tammy makes a really compelling case for investing in meta ads as a different opportunity for discoverability to allow you to think beyond organic traffic for growing your business online. Especially in this day and age when search traffic is increasingly volatile, it's really important to think about diversifying your traffic and you won't want to miss this interview. With that being said, I'm just going to let Bjork take it away.

Tammy, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much for having Me, I'm just. I'm really excited to be here with you today, Bjork.

Yeah, we were talking about this before we record. We are in the, like, decade plus club of people who have been showing up, creating content for a really long time. Your name is one that I recognize have some, you know, exchanges back and forth. And so when this podcast was queued up, I was like, this is going to be awesome, because I know that you are coming to the table, having a lot of experience as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, having to reinvent yourself multiple times, as all of us have, who have showed up for a long period of time. So this will be a fun conversation.

Let's talk about when you first got.

Started with your site, and then we're going to kind of quickly recap that and then ramp up to where you are today, because what you're doing today looks very different than what you were doing kind of originally within your business and how you're making money within your business. So talk about kind of the early stages ramping up and getting to the point where you're able to do what you're doing full time.

Absolutely. I mean, it's so long ago now, 2011, so what is that? That's 14 years ago. I mean, I remember following you and Lindsay back in that time, too. The first income report and all that. And, yeah, I do remember emailing with you and you helping me out with Food Blogger Pro. So I definitely remember all of that. Yeah. Going back to 2011, at that point, my kids were really little. I mean, they were three and five. And just to put it into context, right now they're 20 and 18, and I was working full time outside of the home. I was working at Buffalo State College, so I had a master's degree. I went to college. I had the student loans to prove it. I had all those things. And I never really thought of myself as kind of giving all that up to be an entrepreneur. But obviously, after I had kids, things shifted and I thought differently, and I wanted to find a way to work from home. And at that point, I did a couple of things online. Before I even started my blog. I was selling on ebay, so. And I actually sold my first digital product while selling on ebay. I was selling Gymboree clothes for my girls. And then I wrote this whole how to Gymboree Sell Gymboree. And just, you know, it's just funny because at that point, you couldn't even sell it as a digital product. I had to burn it onto a CD and then mail it out. I had to mail it out to them. And.

Amazing.

I know. It's. So that's. I'm gonna be 50 in, like, two weeks. So that's. That's. That's where I'm at. And. And obviously that was a lot of work. And, you know, I stopped that. And then I started a different blog, a couple other blogs that kind of didn't work out. But then I just kind of saw the potential of what. What blogging can do, you know, online entrepreneurship. But I kind of took a break. And in that time, I was work. I, like I said, I was working full time. I had little kids, and I thought, I just. I can't do it all. So I started taking care. I started working out meal prep, freezer prep. I lost about £40 at that time. And everyone started asking me about it. And I started talking with them about meal prep, whatever. And then I thought to myself, well, why don't I start a blog, like, on this topic? I mean, this seems to be what people are asking me about and what they're interested in, so.

Which is always a great indicator, like, what are the things people are coming to you? And asking about is a great sign to what you could be creating content about.

Yes. And it's funny because sometimes you're always thinking of these, like, grand ideas of what you can do a blog about. And at that time, you know, and that's what I was doing. And then it was like, you know what? This is what people want. Like, this is what they're asking me about. So I just started talking about my own journey. And it wasn't necessarily a full food blog at that time. It was more. Well, I was showing people how to take recipes and prep them ahead of time and freezer prep them ahead of time. And then I was just talking about different habits and routines. Well, that was in 2011. And then it just started to grow. And I really got my first burst of growth from Facebook, which was a very different time with Facebook. And then I started just. I was just getting like little, like little sponsorships here and there. It still wasn't a big thing, But I was listening to Pat Flynn at the time. And so this was around, like, 2012. So I was just kind of, like, working on it for a year. And then he talked a lot about digital products. So in 2012, I created my first meal plan. And so it was a meal plan habit challenge, challenge, exercise challenge. And I just sold that to my very small email list at the time I put it On Facebook, I put on my blog and that made a thousand dollars and I sold for like five bucks. And I was. That's when it really started to. That's when I was like, okay, like that started to click with me that this can be a real business, that I can actually make real money. So I did that for about four months and. But then I stopped because what the problem was I didn't have systems or funnels or anything in place to kind of keep that going. So it just, and I going meaning.

Like new people, fresh audience. And I think a lot of times what can happen is people will have this initial success. They launch a product, they have success with that product, they have an email list. Maybe it's a thousand, maybe it's ten thousand, maybe it's a hundred thousand. And a lot of times what people is this wonderful surprise that they fall into is people are interested in buying the thing that you're selling, but people aren't going to buy the same thing twice. And so you need to have this continual new input into the funnel, the top of the funnel, in order to have people who haven't been exposed to the product before, haven't made a decision if they're going to buy or not. So it makes a lot of sense when you talk about that. So when, what year was that when you first had that?

So that was 2012. And just for context too, there was no canva. So I literally created them in a word doc and just saved it as a PDF. But people loved them and they purchased them. But what I should have done and what I do now is I should have just bundled it together and then just kept selling it over and over again. And so what's interesting is that those meal plans that I created in 2012, I actually resurrected them in 2020 when I put them together with my ebook that I created in 2015. And I bundled them together, which I called my, which I call to this day, my 30 day reset and flourish workbook bundle. And that still sells to this day, like all the time. So stuff I created in 2012, bundled with something I created in 2015, redesigned it, repackaged it, and it still sells. So. So learning from that is I started to learn that I don't necessarily have to be grinding it out all the time, that I can create something, bundle it together and just keep. But you gotta keep bringing those people in to purchase it. So after I got that taste of selling those men, those meal plans, I went a few, a couple more years and then I got into an ad network. So I got, I did something with aol, but then I got into Raptive. And so at that point I was kind of like then getting really focused on the ad revenue. But that's when I also decided to write my first ebook. And so that ebook I called Organize Yourself Skinny. And so that just went over all my different strategies that I use to eat healthy, lose weight, all of that. And now at that point, I'm building my email list. I'm just talking to them, nurturing them. I started writing that ebook in the summer of 2014. January 2015 is when I sold it. That weekend it made $5,000 and I literally sold it for 10 bucks. And so, and I only sold that to my email list. And so that's when I was like, okay, this digital product thing is like, this is definitely the real deal. But looking back, when I really think about it, my, I was, I was bringing in the right people, I was nurturing them. And so when I was ready to sell a product, my audience was ready to buy. So then just Fast forward to 2017. So I continued to sell that. I was making ad revenue. I actually quit my full time job in 2014 from Buff State and I went full time with my blog. So I was making enough money through ad revenue, sponsored posts, and then also now I was selling my ebook. Um, so then in 2017, I started learning all about online courses. I was following Melissa Griffith and I took her course and I created, I took my ebook, Organize Yourself Skinny, and I expanded that into my A course. And so again, I'm just building my email list. Not no crazy strategies at the time, just building it, talking to them, nurturing them. So when I launched that, that first launch made $18,000 in a week. And I sold that for $67. And so, and then that, that course went on to sell to just under $200,000 in about like 18 months, maybe a little bit more. But then those sales started to die out. Because what I learned now, I mean, I know this now looking back, I was just, I wasn't bringing in at a, like, at a consistent rate, those like, new leads. Like I was bringing in leads, but not enough to keep up with those sales. And I didn't have the sales systems in place. So even people coming into my world, they weren't in a funnel. They weren't being offered this course until I launched it again. And so that just started getting, like I said, those sales started to dwindle. It would still sell, but just not at that same rate. And Just for context, too, I repackaged and repurposed all that, and that course still sells today, like, all the time in my funnel now. So taking all those lessons learned. But then fast forward to November of 2019, and. And I was hit with that big Google algorithm update. And now I never really had a lot of SEO traffic that would generate a lot of ad revenue. Like, my money came from more Pinterest, Facebook, my email list, stuff like that.

But what ad revenue?

Yes. Yeah, I still had my ad revenue, but that was because of Pinterest and everything, not because of Google. Sure. But the money I had from Google, though, were affiliate sales. So I had a few affiliates that ranked, like, between 1 and 3 on Google, and that was bringing in, I would close to $80,000 a year just in affiliate sales. Disappeared, like, went away pretty much almost immediately. And that was really stressful. And then I saw what little SEO traffic that I had that started to go down. So I, of course, went into, you know, this panic SEO mode and did all the things that food bloggers do. And I just. For about two years, I just would grind and grind and grind away. Just update posts, do this, do that, and my site's just old, and it's just me. And when you lose money, you just don't have the money to, like, pay all these people to help. So after about two to three years, I got hit with, like, two more Google algorithm updates. At that point, I was still, like, selling my course and things, but it was almost like more like. I don't want to say, like, out of, like, I just felt this. Like, I was coming from, like, this place of, like, desperation. Like, I'm losing money, I'm trying to sell, but I'm not bringing in the leads because I'm doing all this other stuff. And then I just finally got to a point where it was, like, the summer of 2022, and I was like, I have to do something different, because, I mean, at this point, I'm already eight years removed from my, like, real job. So I'm kind of like, what am I gonna do? I mean, I can't, like, go back to work. My whole family depends on my income at this point. So I was like, you know what? I. I have this audience. I'm just gonna. I have this Facebook group of, like, 17,000 people. So I got out from behind my computer in SEO, and I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna do a smoothie challenge. I have all these smoothies on my blog. I'm gonna put together A smoothie challenge. And I'm gonna just. I'm just gonna reinvigorate my audience or I'm just gonna. It was like a Hail Mary. So I put together this whole smoothie challenge and I just said to my audience, all right, let's, you know, we're gonna do a smoothie challenge. And everybody. I shouldn't say everyone. Like, so many people were so excited. I mean, I could not believe the comments. They're like, tammy, where have you been? Like, we miss you. And I was like, I miss you guys too. And I just realized I spent so much time not doing what mattered, and that was building my community, talking to my community. So I did the smoothie challenge. It was a 10 day smoothie challenge. And then after the smoothie challenge, I launched my. Well, I guess I relaunched my 30 day workbook bundle so that. So two years prior to that is when I rebundled it with the meal plans and everything in the. In the ebook. And I launched that after that smoothie challenge, and that made close to $5,000, like in a three day launch. And I was like, okay, so I don't have to go out of bed. I'm back in business. Like, this is great. And so then I did a Mason jar salad challenge, and I did the same thing. And I ran a launch after that and made around the same amount of money. And so. And around that time is when I took another ads course. And that's when I really started to get into meta. Meta ads and what that looked like and the strategy and everything. You know, creating a sales page and all messaging and positioning and. And all that stuff. So at that point, I decided to take that smoothie challenge, Mason jar salad challenge. I pulled out some other recipes on my site. I created an overnight oats challenge, a healthy dinner challenge, and I packaged that into my 10 day healthy eating challenges kit. And I launched that in October 2022. Again, that came close to about $5,000 in that first launch. It's weird. Like every time I Launch it's like $5,000, but whatever.

Predictable. Yeah.

Yeah. And so I was just like. And people loved it. I mean, the reviews were amazing. I was like, okay, I'm back in business. This is awesome. I'm going all in on digital products. I should have been doing. I should have never liked, steered away from it, because at the end of the day, that is what I found to be and what I still find to be very predictable, where you create, you listen to your audience, you talk to your audience, you build products that they want, not just what I think they need, what they really want. And you're just nurturing them and you know, and they want to buy from you because they see what you're offering as helpful, valuable, you're solving their problems. So from there I, like I said, I took that face that Facebook ads course and I just started running, you know, I created a sales page for it and I just started running ads to that, to that offer. And so, so I run two types of ads. Now I have my direct to sale ad which still goes by the way, so it's 2025. I still run ads to that offer. I've, I've changed it over the years so that it used to just be the PDFs. Now I, I added some like pre recorded workshops to that. I bundled some other things together so I could increase the price. So now I sell it as a jumpstart bundle. And then I also have a couple upsells that go off the back end. And having those upsells makes my ads, it makes it easier for them to be profitable. And so, and then I also run my freebie to tripwire ad because now I see how important it is not just to bring in leads, but to bring in those targeted leads that, that will ultimately buy from you. So I really try not to focus on just pumping up my email list with a bunch of just leads that I, you know, like I don't run lead campaigns, I run sales conversion campaigns. So meta is always finding people who want to purchase. And so they either they sign up for the opt in, they go to a tripwire and they're more likely to buy because of that. So that's just kind of where I am now. I just, now I see, you know, my time is still, my time has to be very focused because one of the things that I think is really important for food bloggers to know specifically about me and just my whole blogging journey is I've never run my business without being in the chaos of kids, kids, family, pandemic, life, tragedy, anything you can imagine. So anything that's going on in my business, I need to figure it all out. In between volleyball and cheerleading. And like my mom, I actually had to send a text out to my entire family and I just said, nobody come over here at 3 o' clock because recording a podcast, I am not kidding you. I've had, I've done podcasts before where all of a sudden my mom's like knocking on the window. And so it's like no one come over Here. So I have done. I built my whole business. And I'm not even like exaggerating. I built my whole business in my car. I have a little lap desk while my kids are in practice, while I'm driving them here doing this. And so I've had to create and figure out workflows, systems and automations because I just don't have the time or the energy to really just do it all. Not that any of us do, but I just realized if I wanted this business to be successful without me completely burning out, not saying I haven't burnt out, because I have, but if I want this business to be successful, that was going to have to be a priority in what I do.

That's great. There's a lot to pull out of that. Thanks for sharing. And one of the things that I think is first important to talk about or to point out is this idea of reinventing yourself. And I think so many of us have an expertise in a certain thing. Like for you, it was this transformation that you went through that was desirable for other people. And you had some things that you learned in having gone through that transformation that you were able to teach people meal prep. You know, you talk about healthy smoothies or like salad that you're able to put in a jar and just make it easily accessible. So you had this information. And I think one of the things that's important is when you talk about, or we talk about digital products, what we're really talking about is helping people experience some type of transformation. If we use Food Blogger Pro as an example, like we went through the process of taking our interest in food or Lindsay's interest in food and recipes and turning that into a business online. It was a digital business. There were other people that we heard from along the way that were interested in that. We created a digital product out of that. And so my encouragement to people listening is, or my reminder is that the most important thing that you need to understand, and you alluded to this as well, is like, what can you help people do? What is the transformation that you can help people through? What is a problem and a solution? And how can you become best in class at that thing? And then once you have that defined, how do you then strategically package that up in a way that is going to be most helpful and most useful for people and deliver that to them? And you can do that in multiple different ways. You can do that and offer it for free. So you can publish a blog post, you can publish content on YouTube, you can publish like in our Case we do a podcast, that this podcast is free. But then you need to think about how are you going to monetize that if you are doing it for free. You can have a brand partnership, you can have affiliate income, you can have ad revenue. One of the hard things that you pointed to is oftentimes distribution for free is reliant on algorithms. So Google, Instagram, Pinterest, all of these are platforms that have algorithms that are deciding whether to show your content or not. It's not bad, it's just a reality. And oftentimes, as many of us have felt, that shifts and changes and then your business changes, you can lose revenue or on the positive, if it changes for the better, you can gain revenue. What you're talking about that I think is important to remind listeners of is the fact that there is another channel for distribution and that channel is paid. So instead of trying to organically show up in different places like Instagram or Pinterest or Google, you can Facebook, you can just pay to show up on those places. But the mechanism for monetization changes when you are paying because the way that the market works, like generally speaking, you are not going to be able to create a substantial income from paying to show up somewhere unless you also have something that you are paid to transact. So like a product or sometimes it works for affiliate like you'll occasionally see people who pay to show up to have some type of review post or something like that. Usually these are bigger companies and organizations that have the, the numbers really fine tuned around that. But the predictability around putting a dollar in and getting a dollar fifty out or putting a dollar in and getting two dollars out is a really unique and special type of business once you figure that out. So I'm interested to hear, you know, for a blog like Pinch of Beyond, we think about search traffic, we think about email signups, we think about keyword ranking. What is the transformation that you had as you started to sell products and what are those? People would talk about this idea of a KPI, those key performance indicators within your business that you are now starting to track. Acknowledging again that one of the biggest variables within this is you have to have a product that people like that's helpful, that's gonna make a difference for people. We could do a whole series on what that looks like and maybe you can talk about some of the things you've learned along the way. But I think for now let's talk about some of those metrics. Assuming that you've done the product development and you Have a good working theory around a product that's gonna be actually helpful for people. You've created that product. Now you wanna look at not just reaching your list organically that you already have, you know, your followers organically, but you want to start thinking about ads. What are some of the numbers that you need to be aware of and start to pay attention to?

Yeah, that is a great question. So, and I was writing a bunch of stuff down. So the first thing I want to say about meta ads is this. Meta ads itself is not about, is not going to make you money. Meta ads are the mechanism, I like that word you use. The mechanism of to get them to the thing that is going to make you money. And not necessarily the thing like your product, but it's going to get you to the opt in page so people will sign up for your freebie. It's going to get you to the thing like the sales page. So the first step is putting together creatives copy that have good messaging positioning and really like positioning your product in a way that, that is going to bring in those targeted people to be able to purchase them. And then your backend, your funnel, that all needs to be put together and optimized. Not saying you're never going to go back and optimize it, but you want to make sure all those pieces are in place before you even think about putting a dollar into meta ads. Because meta ads are fuel to the fire. And what meta ads will do is if your, if your funnel, if your product's not selling, it's just gonna highlight more that your product's not selling because you're gonna lose money. If you have a funnel in place, if you have a product that you know your, your people want, if everything is optimized and the conversion rates are going the way you want them to go, meta ads are just going to increase that. It's just going to make it work even better. So that's something to really think about. And also another difference with meta ads compared to organic. And I think this is something for food bloggers to think about because I think as food bloggers we're really good at building our social following, having like our people, our warm and hot people that we talk to, that want to listen to us, learn from us, watch us on Instagram, Facebook, whatever. If you want to be successful at meta ads, you have to be able to sell to a cold audience. So how you talk to your warm people, that might work great, but you might find that it needs to now be repositioned and messaged differently in order to attract the, you know, your targeted people into your ecosystem, into your world. And so, so that's like the first thing is when I, before I, when I'm running ad, well I've been running ads to the same, to the same product. But I, you know, my job is to make sure that my sales page, my checkout page, the things that those my people are going to go to, they're optimized. They take people through that journey to get them in, you know, in that direction of purchasing. Now my edit, meta ads, I need to make sure that the creative and the messaging is pulling those people in. And now meta ads have really changed a lot over the last year that they're very AI focused now. So with back in the day with meta you would be choosing audiences to focus on. It would be very targeted of like you would say, okay, I want to focus on people who shop at Whole Foods or I want to focus on these people. It's not like that anymore. So meta is now reading your creative, they're reading your copy and they want volume, they want lots of creative, lots of copy to be able to see what is the best message, to be able to get the people that you want into your world. So they're looking to find those people. And that's why, you know, also that's what the metapixel is for. So as people now are going onto your sales page or your opt in page and they're opting in and they're purchasing, Meta is now taking that information and they're taking that to find more people like that. That's why when you're running meta ads you want to run a sales conversion campaign rather than a lead gen campaign or traffic campaign or engagement. Because with a lead gen campaign they're just Meta is just going to look for those freebie seekers, not necessarily people who are going to purchase from you. Sales conversion campaign is looking for those buyers so people who are going to purchase from you. So when I create my meta ads, I'm always testing, I test different angles and themes every single week and that is something that I've learned from. I'm in a high level mastermind for my, for Facebook ads and I, I'm also in a program called the Alley and they're very focused on more e commerce but their stuff is still very relatable to digital product sellers. And so they're really big on the strategy of testing different themes, different angles, which is basically like different messaging because you want to find what's Going to land to bring your person into your world.

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So in the success metric it sounds like, you know, you talk about leads versus sales conversion. So. And you also mentioned pixel. So for those who aren't familiar, a pixel is literally like if you imagine an image and we upload it onto our website, that's made up of thousands or often, you know, millions of pixels and tracking pixel. You'll hear people talk about a tracking pixel. It literally is a tiny little image. It's a little pixel. It's a tiny little image. But the purpose that it serves is that when it loads, it allows whatever service it is that is using that tracking pixel. In this case, meta could be Google Analytics or you know, these different companies, um, it allows it to track the behavior of the person on the website. And in the case of a sales conversion, my guess is what happens is there's a confirmation page. So like after somebody purchases and buys a thing, there is a meta pixel on that page that talks to meta and says, okay, we know because this originated with Facebook, originated with meta, we know that this person was originally on Instagram or on Facebook. Then they went off of Facebook, Instagram, they went to this site. And eventually because we have this pixel at the last page on the confirmation page, when somebody checks out, we know that it was a complete loop. And so then you're able to see this person actually saw an ad. They either clicked on it or saw it and, like, loaded the page somewhere else. They hit the confirmation page, and so that data can go back to Meta and let you know that whatever ad that person saw created a, you know, positive entire loop where the person eventually ended up purchasing it. Then Meta knows, okay, this. That's probably an indicator that this is a good ad. If that happened three times with this ad and it didn't happen at all with another ad that you are running, is that a little bit of what's happening here where you're running multiple versions to get the sense for what performs better than others?

Yes. And I'm sure everyone's brain is, like, exploding right now trying to think about, like, how all this works. And when I run my ads, I, you know, I always look at them at the campaign level and how Facebook works now is that it's all, like, working together. So you have your campaign, and then in the campaign, you have what's called ad sets. And each ad set is the different theme or the different angle I'm focusing on. Then in those ad sets is where you have the ads that you've created for that theme. And so if my campaign. So as far as KPI goes, if my campaign is over a 1.85 ROAS.

I don't ROAS, for those who aren't familiar.

So that is return on an investment. So, like, I'm sorry, return on investment?

Yeah. So, like, you are spending ads, and what's the return on it? So, like, I don't know roas very well. You tell me, like, if it was a two, would that mean that.

That means you doubled your money, so.

You put a dollar in and you get $2 out?

Yes. So if I spend a dollar, and then I got a two roas return on Aspen, I made $2. So if I spend a dollar or a dollar, and I have a 1.85 roas, I make a $85. So in. In how Meta. Back in the day, meta, you would get a 4 ROAS and it would be. It was. It was very crazy high. Now it's. There's a lot more competition.

So any marketplace, it's like it gets squeezed and it gets smaller. And it's one of the reasons why it's advantageous to look at early marketplaces for advertising is because they haven't been made efficient yet. But, like, the Meta marketplace is very efficient.

Yeah, it is. And. And so, and what I love about Meta and the AI is, like I said back in the day, you had to really have all these different ad sets and all these different people, audiences you're focused on. But now you're just focused on. You just, you let meta do all of it. So you're, it's, it's all AI, it's all advantage.

You're, you're creating the copy and the ads, the images, uploading those and then kind of saying you look at the ad copy, you look at the landing page, you look at the image and decide who to deliver this to.

Well, it's kind of shows it a little when it's in that learning phase. It's showing all of them really and then how people start responding to it, then you'll start seeing the ad spend go more towards, allocate more to one theme, one ad. So if all, if my whole campaign is at a 1.85 or higher, I don't touch it at all. Because what I've learned in the groups that I'm in is that Facebook almost runs like a symphony in a way where they're all working together. So maybe someone had to see this ad and then they saw this ad and then they decided to purchase from this ad. And Facebook knows that like they have all these different data points where they're seeing all of this. So but now if it goes below 1.85, now I start to look at the ad set level and I'm looking at what is not performing. So what is below my target KPI, I turn those off. I only optimize once a week. So I have to let, I let everything run for seven days. I keep an eye on everything. But Facebook needs time to optimize things and so I go in once a week. I optimize if everything I look at a seven day window. If my KPIs are what I need them to be. As far as like the campaign roas I leave it. If not, then I go in and change. Other things that I look at are my click through rates. So you'll start to see so you want, so if you have a click through rate of over like 2%, 3% that means people are liking what they see and they're clicking and they're looking at it and you'll see other numbers. Like if you have a cost per click is over $2 or over even a $80, then that's telling me that people like Facebook doesn't like those ads. So you want to have it between like a dollar fifty or under. And that means depending on the product. Probably, yeah, depending. And I talk and that's the thing, like I'm very obviously like mine, I'm very specific with my food blogging, like my digital products and the low ticket items. But obviously like yes, like E commerce and other things are a little, you know, they're more difficult. So that's all kind of like getting in the weeds with all the numbers. But, and I, and I only know that stuff from being in the groups that I'm in. But there are certain things that when you're looking at these numbers and it's, it's showing you that, okay, your ads are the problem. Your sales page, if you have a high cpm, that's telling you your sales page might be the issue. And then you can start looking at what conversion rates are. So you see so many people click through to your ad. Well, if you only if you had a 10% conversion rate on the sales page, like that's good. If you're only getting, well that's actually really good. If you're only getting maybe a 1% or 2%, you have to make adjustments with your opt in. I like to get between 65% or higher when people are opting in. If I'm.

This would be a free product. People are putting their email in and so when they land on that page, 6 out of 10 people after seeing an ad, clicking on the ad, seeing the fields to fill out for their email to get a free product, you're saying you like to see 60% of those people filling out that form?

Yes, because I just feel like if you're paying for those people getting to your ad and they're the right people, then they should be converting. And I just actually started working with a food blogger on her ads and she has over a 65% conversion rate and she is like crushing it. She has a two row as we made sure. And another thing to think about, when you are doing a freebie to Tripwire.

Your freebie, explain that real quick. So for those who aren't from freebie I think makes sense it's a free product to tripwire. Explain what a tripwire is and when that would show up.

So a freebie to Tripwire means that you have your opt in page, that it's the freebie. When they sign up and opt in to that freebie, they're automatically brought to a thank you page which they get the option for a product.

And it's one of the ways that you can both simultaneously build your email list but also recover some of the spend that you have on the ads that you're using to build that email list. It's showing up after the fact. They've signed up, they put their information in and you know, it's just a marketing term, Tripwire, essentially, it's like a after signup offer for a certain product. Is that right?

Yep. And it's a fast action offer. And the key is you want it to be that next step.

Fast action offer, meaning, hey, this is available for 24 hours. This is available for two hours at this price.

Yes, we always do one hour. So you have one hour to get this discount on this product after signing up.

Yep.

Yes. And it's always positioned as that next step. So the opt in is that little baby step of this is how I can help you solve this problem. And so they're like, oh, okay, yeah, I need that help. I could see how this can help me. That tripwire is that next step. Like, okay, you purchase the Tripwire now let's.

Yep. You've signed up for the freebie.

Yes. And then you go to the Tripwire page and it's like, okay, let's keep you going with that momentum. Let's take you to that next step. And then when they purchase that, then that would be considered a sale. And so, and honestly, our goal is to make money. So we are, of course we want to cover our ad spend, but very often because we're working to get the sales page or the opt in page, the tripwire page to be so connected and the messaging and the positioning to be so locked on that it's really just talking to your targeted person. And then we have order bumps and upsells. So what that means is when they go to purchase the Tripwire, they are now given an opportunity to add on to that sale. And then once they add that on, they get another opportunity to add on something else with an upsell. And so I have that with mine and I put that with my other client that I'm working with, and that's what increases the average order value. And I feel like that is very critical to making sure that you are able to be profitable with your ads.

Sure, that makes sense. And I think one thing that's important to point out with all of this, and I think it'll be eye opening to people, is all of the different ways that you can think about building a business online. And a lot of what we talk about on this podcast and a lot of what people talk about within this space is figuring out how to get organic traffic. And the, you know, we've talked about funnels Essentially, a funnel is like steps that people follow in the way that your business makes money. In the world of, you know, we're doing a kitchen edition right now. In that world there's a funnel. And the funnel is, you know, somebody reaches out and then they help you design it and then you eventually put an agreement together and then you sign the agreement. Like there's a marketing term, but really it's just like putting a term around something we would naturally do in any transaction. In the world of organic, it's like you create a piece of content and then you publish it on a blog or on social and then people see that content. And maybe the funnel in organic search world is like you publish content, people see it on Google, they click to the site, they make the recipe, that's it. And you're monetizing either via affiliate brands or advertising. That's great, it works. But one of the things that's wonderful about a business model that allows you to put paid behind it is that there is no long lead up period. And for anybody who's created a website and has attempted to get search traffic or created a Instagram account and has attempted to build a following, there's a really long lead time to get to the point where you have enough attention from people to monetize. That's not true in the world of paid because tomorrow if you had something that was helpful, impactful, transformative, you created a product around that, whether it was a video course or a PDF or a physical product. You talk about the world of e commerce like something that is going to be of use to people. If you create that tomorrow you could start on an advertising platform and start to get your content in front of people. The important thing then is to make sure that the amount you are spending on ads is less than the amount that you are earning from the product itself. And you talk about this idea of roas with that is meta hooking into. I know in your case you use ThriveCart, is that right?

Yep.

Is Meta hooking into ThriveCart to see the actual transaction amount to have an accurate number on the roas?

Absolutely. And you, if you're going to run meta ads, you want all of your, your whole funnel needs to be connected to whatever that you're selling from. So meta is on. I use leadpages for my sales pages and then leadpages connects to Kit. So everything then goes to Kit and then it's also connected to ThriveCart so it sees and records all of that. And I also think with meta Ads. One of the reasons I was always so drawn to meta ads. And I'm not saying like meta ads is still, like, you still have to babysit it. You know, at times it's still work. You still have to figure it out.

It's still passive. You're gonna show up and check on it every day. Yeah.

But I will say this, you have more control, like, once you figure it out. And so when I lost so much traffic with SEO and I work with so many food bloggers who have some of the most beautiful food blogs I've ever seen, they are. They do everything right and they still get hit with Google algorithms. And you don't even know what's wrong with meta ads. I can look at my ad account and I can see by the numbers, okay, this ad is. Facebook does not like this. Like, my audience is not responding to this. I need new creative. Or I can see, all right, my sales page is not converting. I need to maybe add some more testimonials like you. You're just more in the driver's seat of being able to figure out what's working, what's not. And also with the freebie to Tripwire, what I wanted to say too, you want to make sure that you have a back end funnel like your email sequences. So every person, whether you purchase from me, you go into an onboarding sequence. And so then at the end of that onboarding sequence, you are led into one of my bigger programs with my. And that's with the Tripwire too. Because the Tripwire and the direct to sale are the same products. So you go right into that onboarding sequence. If you just opt in, can you.

Say direct to sale?

So direct to sale would be bringing them right to my sales page. So I'm not. It's not freebie to Tripwire, it would.

Be an ad that goes directly to the sales page.

Yes. And then if they purchase that, they go into my onboarding sequence. And then after they're done with that onboarding sequence, they're given the opportunity to purchase another higher level program with the trip Freebie to Tripwire. If they don't purchase that, then they now go into my nurture to sales primary funnel. So that's what I call my welcome sequence, I guess you can say.

And so this would be somebody who signed up for the freebie. They see the offer, but they decide not to move forward with the tripwire offer. There's a note within kit like a tag. My guess is that identifies that person as having not purchased that product. And so what you're saying is you want to make sure they get exposure to that later on within the email list.

Yep. So then they go into a six day email sequence where I take them through the freebie they just downloaded and I'm helping them get those quick wins, teaching them, nurturing them. And then again they get another offer to get that, to purchase that product again. And so there's two type of buyers you always want to keep in mind those fast action buyers, those are the ones who are going to find you and they're going to be like, yes, your product can help me. And then they purchase right away or they purchase in the primary funnel. Then you have the slow action buyers where if they don't purchase in the primary funnel, they go into my evergreen funnel and, and now they're continued to be nurtured in between flash sales launches, open enrollments. So when that stuff happens, they've now just, they've been nurtured more and you know, the plan is that they'll be ready to buy. So it's never just like one and done. With meta, you want to have your whole backend put together. So now you're basically just bringing them into your world and then bringing them through that process to either purchase from you right away or at least down the road. And if they don't, that's fine. Then you send them back to your site for the traffic or you have affiliate offers, but now you know you have people in your world that want to be there.

Yep. I think I was just having a conversation with Jenna on our team this morning around the value of having this was in the context of organic social, but just thinking about publishing to different platforms, like how do we have a playbook that we can follow, that we feel like is really strong, but also that we can improve. Okay, so like we have an opinion on how something should show up on Instagram. We change that opinion. What does it look like to reflect that in this playbook that we're creating? Similarly with something like this, I think what's so great about it in what you referenced is it's something that you can set up and especially in our world where the content is evergreen, you can find ways to improve and enhance the different steps along the way and then it will, generally speaking forever be better. So if you fine tune the first email that goes out and you make it more engaging, you increase the open rate, you increase the click through rate, all of that stuff then will just be in place moving forward. If you, you know, he talked about a landing page. If you make that more compelling, you add testimonials. And I think again, it offers a different perspective for creators around discoverability and around the return on the effort of the content that you're producing. Where sometimes it can feel like you're creating into a void and you're publishing a piece of content on Instagram, it's like, do people see it or do they not? A lot of times they don't. Sometimes they do. In this case, you can be guaranteed exposure to the thing that you're creating. It's just then on you to make sure that the exposure you are getting to that content has a return on it. And so I'd be interested to hear you talk about what does that look like for you within your business now? Could you even share some numbers around, like how much would you spend on an average day on advertising and what could you expect to get on a return within your business? You know, in, to the degree you're comfortable sharing and then whatever time metric I think it's interesting to hear like on a, do you know on a day by day basis, like what you could expect to earn and what is that like to, to see that number, like to improve it or to change it or to, you know, adjust it?

Yeah, absolutely. So I spend between 160 and $220 a day on Facebook ads. And my return on ad spend is always between 1 point, like 6 and 1.85. If it starts to kind of dip below that, like, I'll be okay. If it's 1.5, I'll be like, okay, maybe. But if I see that it's not trending back up, that's when I start making decisions. So.

And then it's the decision usually refreshing ad copy and looking, it's all the things that we talked about. It's looking.

I'll start to turn off the underperformers.

Sure.

And then I'll inject new themes, new ads, whatever that looks like. So, yeah, so and I, I started at $25 a day. So and like I said, I always look at a seven day window. So last month my profit from Facebook ads was about $2,500. So I'm not doing like 10 or $20,000 a month right now, which, I mean that's what I'm trying to scale towards. But that was with, I mean I don't have the exact numbers, but the profit was 25, about $2,500. And then the ad spend was a little over like $3,000. So my total. So it was about, I think it was like 3200 was my ad spend and like I said, 2500 in profit. So I think it ended up being a 1.65 ROAS and so. And I'm happy with that because I feel like that's, you know, that's a good profit and I'm able to kind of keep that going. But it's when you start to see it go down because obviously you got to think about, I gotta pay taxes on this and I have operating expenses and all those things. So once it goes below what you're comfortable with. But the great thing about digital products is our margin is very small. We don't have all these. We don't have inventory. So I can sell. I could.

Your margin is large. Like you.

Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. Our margin is large.

There's not a lot of overhead.

Yeah. So we have a large margin. I can sell it for, you know, I could run discounts and, you know, spend more money on ads and take a lower return on ad spend because I don't have other things like inventory and stuff to pay for. So. Yeah. And so. And now I get about three to 400 leads a week.

So that's, that's gonna be my next question. When you say lead, that's like an email sign up.

Yeah.

And so not only are you getting a profit, but I think the other thing that's really valuable to point out is you're building your email list, which also is. You can't really quantify the exact value of that, but it is definitely a valuable thing.

Well, yeah, and also that that profit is direct profit from those ads. That's not even counting the profit that's coming through the funnel. Through when I do my. I do two flash sales a month when I do big launches every year. So. And that is all the people who are coming in are coming through Facebook ads. So the goal is obviously is to make money through those, through those leads at some point in the funnel or through a launch or an open enrollment. So. But direct Profit is a one between, like I said, 1.65 and 1.8 or higher. But another thing to keep in mind with meta ads is some days you're going to do two or three roas, and then some days you're going to barely break even. And there might even be some days you don't make any money at all. But once that campaign starts to get optimized, it starts to become more stable and, and you'll start to see, you'll Start to be able to predict more of what you're making on a daily basis. So I would say on a daily basis I make anywheres between a hundred, one hundred and twenty dollars a day in profits. But I, but like I said, some days are less, some days might be more. Like over the weekend it was like barely breaking, breaking even. But then yesterday I had close to a three roas.

So yeah, I think that specific number, and thanks for sharing that is really helpful for people because it allows us to wrap our heads around like, okay, what does it, what does it look like when I show up at my day job? Okay, at my day job I'm able to earn, you know, $20 an hour or maybe I'm able to earn, you know, $300 a day or whatever it might be. And you can start to think strategically around saying, okay, what would it look like for me to replace my income? Or for people who have this as a full time gig, you can start to think about, okay, what would it take for me to, you know, justify building out this within my business? Would it, could I do this if I got an extra 40,000 a year? Yeah, probably, like it'd probably be worth it, I think for a lot of people. Obviously there's a lot that goes into it. Like you have to create a product, you have to set up the funnels, you have to create the systems, you have to manage them moving forward like you talked about. But one of the things that is beneficial is that it is a system. You know, you talked about this idea of living in a, the last decade of being very busy. You're doing stuff, you're out and about and you're needing to make sure that you're not having to hamster wheel a thing. You're wanting to create something that still requires active management, but also could allow you to take a trip for a couple weeks to check in on things. Still, you're not going to completely let it go, but that you could still get a hundred dollars that shows up in your bank account one day because of the system that you've set up. One of the questions that I have related to that is, is there a reason, like you've proved out to say, hey, I can get a 1.6 return on ad spend. What's keeping you from scaling that up? Is it like, is the assumption there the market, like there's not enough people there? Cause you know, at a very basic level you'd think like, hey, once you prove out that you can put a dollar in and get a dollar 60 back. Would you not just then, like, increase the volume lever to put that in front of more people?

Yeah, I have it set. I mean, Facebook is very finicky at times, and it's not as easy as just, like, doubling your money, because then that can cause Facebook to go back into learning mode, and then you're almost, like, starting over. So I do a 5% scaling. So every time my roas is over, and I do it kind of on the higher end. So when it goes to 1.85 that day, I have it set to scale at 5%.

Is that automatic?

It's automatic, but what I find is on the days, you know, and it doesn't scale every day because, like I said, there's some days that's below that, and so then it doesn't scale. But when it does scale, I noticed that it kind of throttles a little bit, because anytime. And that's why I really try not to change anything, except for, like, once a week, because Facebook is a little bit finicky. And with the whole new AI, you just have to kind of. You're. You're always in, like, testing mode. Um, but, yeah, I do. And. And the higher you scale, the less roas you get. So it's not. It's kind of like, I don't know, it. That's where it does get a little bit, like, you know, finicky, where if you want to scale where you're making, like, $10,000 a month, that does. You're not going to be just only putting in $10,000, you know, an ad spend, you're probably gonna be putting in closer to 20 or more.

Sure.

Um, so that's just. But, yeah, so I do scale. I scale very slowly. And working with my client, that's exactly how I'm doing it with her. Like, we're scaling very slowly. Like, she started at $25, and now when she gets over 1.85, we scale her at 5%. Because when you could scale slow, then you could. You don't. Like. You don't. Like, Facebook doesn't get all, you know, kind of freaked out and start going into learning mode and stuff, and you can just kind of do that very, like, easy. And then you don't have to be stressed out about doubling your money. Yeah. Like, go, you know, doubling it to, like, $300, but then it doesn't. You don't make any sales that day. So for me, I'm comfortable with, like, slower scaling. And so that's my goal is ultimately to get to my profit being between 5 and 10k a month. However, my digital product sales in general are up to $10,000 a month. So between my sales that I run and my, like I said, the open enrollments and I also have my Shopify store, so I'm always linking to that in my evergreen funnel. So all of that together will reaches the goals that I want to make financially with my digital products. And I guess you could say that is ultimately a byproduct of Meta ads, because that's all I'm using to bring people in. But those sales may. May not happen on the front end. They're gonna happen more like down the road where you can't track it as much as you would coming from Meta.

Yeah, that's great. Maybe know my friend Tony Ruley. He's does a lot of Facebook ad stuff. He's actually food blogger Pro. We're doing a live Q and A with Tony, so anybody who's a member can check that out. I think it's in September, but I was just at a meetup. He was there and he was talking about some of the clients that he works with and was talking about it's like hundreds of thousands of dollars that people are spending because they have figured out how to scale this and reach a bunch of people. And the thing is, we don't hear a lot about that in our world because it's not a common conversation. So really appreciate you bringing it up and your willingness to share not only what's working, but some of the specifics around the numbers. And we talked about this at the beginning, but it's such a great example of sticking with it. And the core of what we are doing as content creators is we are, believe it or not, creating content. The decision that we need to make is when we create that content, how are we going to attempt to create a business out of it? If that's the purpose, you can do that through organic, like we talked about, brand partnerships, advertising, affiliate or you can actually sell that. If you're going to sell it, there's a lot of ways that you can get in front of people of which paid is a great option to quickly get to the point where people are seeing the content that you're creating, they're getting into your ecosystem, and then you just need to make sure that you have an eye on those numbers because you want to make sure that it's actually working for you. So I know, Tammy, that you are working with people along with doing this. You are helping people. You referenced a client that you're working with. Can you talk a little bit about that? If people are interested in connecting with you and partnering with you to more quickly kind of fast track into doing this within their business.

Sure. Over the last year I created I guess a consulting business called tasty digitaleats.com and I'm working, I have like two kind of camps of food bloggers. Someone who is kind of just starting out in the digital product world, not really sure what to do. And then I have the food blogger who's more well established. They have these digital products, they have courses, a membership, they just don't have the sales systems behind it. So I have everything. Well, not, well, not everything but I have things like self led courses that if you want to just do it yourself, go through everything that I teach in those courses. So from funnels to your sales systems like order bumps, tripwires, all of that. And I also have more of a high touch coaching type thing program. So I do strategy intensives and that I could work with newer people, newer to the digital product side of things. But then I also do funnel coaching and meta ads coaching. And so if you are. But the meta ads coaching is very specific to people who already have the proven offer. They just really need help figuring out what that strategy looks like for them. Especially since meta has changed so much. So really depending on where you are in your journey, whether you just kind of need help figuring out ideas and how to package your content into digital products all the way to how do I build out these funnels to consistently sell my products? And really how do I how do I target the people that I need to target through positioning and messaging. Bring them in the door. So I have my Tasty digital framework, my Tasty Digital accelerator. I have it all housed under my Tasty Digital project which is everything that I have created under housed under one program. And then I have my coaching services and I do the done for you stuff, the meta ads done for you stuff. That's a case by case basis. I have to really see, you know, what their funnel looks like and how I can help them. So that would be something that I can just talk to people about individually if that's something they're interested in doing. But they could just go to my website, tasty digitaleats.com and I have everything listed out there if they want to see or if they want. I have a whole funnel checklist from Freebie to Evergreen. So if they go to Tasty Digital Eats Backslash Food Blogger Pro I can, they can get that for Free. I could send that to them. But yeah, that's how I love working with food bloggers. I just, you know, I've seen a lot of people lose so much traffic and income, and so to be able to really help them build out this other income stream that is stable, is streamlined, it's a lot easier to scale. You have more control over it. I just, I've loved seeing that with all the food bloggers that I'm working with, for sure.

That's great, Tammy. Thanks so much. It's great to connect with you after all these years, to have a conversation, to see you continuing to show up and to reinvent yourself. And I think this is a great next step for you and excited to see what's to come over the next decade.

Yeah. Hopefully I'll be retired by that, but yeah, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. This was great, Great.

Thanks, Tammy.

Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that. That episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I wanted to take a minute and just ask that if you enjoyed this episode or any of our other many episodes of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast that you share means so much to us as a podcast. If you share episodes with your friends and family or if you are a food blogger or entrepreneur, if you could share them on social media or even in your email newsletters, it really helps us get the word out about our podcast and. And reach more listeners. Thanks again for listening. We really hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll see you back here next week.