Reclaiming Your Audience and Moving Beyond Google with Phoebe Lapine

This episode is sponsored by Clarity. If you've been frustrated trying to discover actionable insights from different analytics and keyword platforms, Clarity is your solution. Clarity helps you manage your blog content all in one place so you can find actionable insights that improve the quality of your content. Not only does it automatically sync your WordPress post data so you can find insights about broken images, broken links, and more, it can also sync with your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data so you can see keyword session, page view and user data for each and every post. One of our favorite ways to use it we can easily filter and see which of our posts have had a decrease in sessions or page views over a set period of time and give a little extra attention to those recipes. This is especially helpful when there are Google updates or changes in search algorithms so that we can easily tell which of our recipes have been impacted the most. Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro podcast get 50% off of their first month of clarity after signing up. To sign up, simply go to clarity.com food that's C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com food thanks again to Clarity for sponsoring this episode.

Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. I'm Anne from the Food Blogger Pro team, and in this episode we're sitting down with Phoebe Lapine from Feed Me Phoebe. She'll talk about her evolution from the early days of blogging to the current landscape, opening up about why the constant SEO headaches finally pushed her to pivot towards substack. She shares exactly how she's reclaiming her connection with her readers, and why shifting your focus from content creator back to writer might be the best move for your brand right now. You'll also hear her go into the systems that keep her from burning out, including the game changing decision to hire an SEO team so she could get back to doing what she loves. She'll round out the episode by diving into why picking a niche that genuinely excites you is the only real secret to sticking around for the long haul. Whether you're looking to shake up your workflow or just need permission to step off the algorithm hamster wheel, this episode is a must. Listen. And now, without further ado, I'll let Bjork take it away.

DB welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

This is gonna be a fun conversation. You are a creator. A lot of the people that we talk to, we put in this broad bucket of creator, but one of the things that I want to know as we get into it is how do you view your job? Because you are in the context of creating, you're creating cookbooks, you're creating a substack newsletter, which we're going to be talking about a lot on this podcast. We are going to be talking about a website and how we view ourselves as creators as it relates to a website. But how do you view yourself and how do you even talk about what it is that you do to other people?

Thank you for asking. I'm not very good at talking about it to other people, as my husband will attest. He's always cutting in and being like, she does this, she does that.

He's your PR rep when you're.

Yes, yes. Because it is hard to sum it up, but I would say first and foremost, I'm a writer and I got into blogging during like the Dino age of blogging. Can't remember what year you started, but I started in 2009, maybe eight.

Yep.

Yeah. With my first blog. Yeah. So it was a different time and it was really writing first and foremost that led me to start it. You know, the visuals weren't as important, the recipes were, of course important, but you know, it was more of a storytelling medium for me. And I started my first blog with my best friend from high school with the idea that it would become a cookbook because that was something that we really wanted and it happened for us really fast. So we got. We were one of the first like blog to book deals back in 2009 or whatever. And yeah, so I think that's kind of been how all of my different creations have kind of filtered through. And of course I've had to evolve and spend more time learning to become a photographer and an editor and all these other things. But in terms of what I do public facing, I'd say it always comes back to being an author and a writer. And then I do a lot of creative writing that is not public facing right now. Hopefully will be one day soon. But yeah, what type of writing?

People will be curious when you say that.

Oh, screenplays.

Or is it like you don't want to.

Okay, yeah, yeah, no, I've been doing like tv writing screenplays, and then I just actually finished a novel last week.

So.

Yeah, no one's paid me a dime for any of these things yet. But I don't know. This is the first time I'm saying it out loud, I think. I love it, but yeah, it's all been percolating in the background.

I love that Because I think, you know, a lot. I think a lot of us have aspirations to do things that are things that inspire us, and then there are the things that pay us. And sometimes those overlap. Yeah, sometimes they overlap for a time, and then they don't. And sometimes they don't overlap at all. And the things that inspire us, there's no monetary value attached to those. What is that like for you to reconcile doing the work around something that is inspiring to you, that you're excited about, knowing that you might be kind of in the lab doing it? Not necessarily a brand deal or a cookbook or a partnership or something? Talk to me about that kind of creative process, because I think a lot of people wrestle with that.

Yeah, I'd say it wasn't really part of my work product until Covid. Covid was my time to just, you know, experiment and write this one idea that I'd always had. A lot of my creative projects are food related, food themed. So I wrote my first screenplay during COVID kind of on the side. You know, we all had a little bit of extra time, not a whole lot of, you know, like, emotional bandwidth in order to play around. But luckily I had started right before COVID hit, so I ended up finishing during. And then kind of, you know, sat on the project for a little while, eventually got up the courage to shoot, show a few people, and then eventually got the courage to kind of pursue it a little bit more in a little bit more of a tangible way again. Yet to see the fruit from that labor.

But what does it look like to. To see the fruit from that labor? Like, are you. Do you pitch it then or.

Yeah, yeah. It's a whole. It's a whole other business, a whole other process. I mean, I just turned 40 last week, so I feel in some ways, in Hollywood standards, I'm starting late and, you know, I haven't networked or made any connections, and so I'm just kind of starting from the ground up. I'm not trying to. To force anything. I'm hustling as hard as I can while maintaining, like, all these other day jobs. And then, yeah, just trying to also say, as much as I would love for maybe this to turn into a second career, I'm doing it because it excites me and I'm passionate about it. So just trying to, you know, proceed as the way opens, which is a great quote that I stole from another screenwriter friend of mine, and enjoy the process and kind of at least get from it what I haven't been getting necessarily from cookbook writing and from blogging over the last decade or so. Because I think, yeah, kind of my. My passion as a writer has been slowly whittled out of that process, and even cookbooks eventually started to feel like a little bit of a constraint. I mean, all my cookbooks are kind of weird because they are a lot more. There's so much front matter in them. There's really long head notes that have had to be, again, like, whittled, whittled down by my editors. And I think event I woke up, I guess, in, you know, February 2020 and was like, I think I have to find another mode of expression, another medium to kind of get like this writer inside me out.

For sure. Yeah. And I think a lot of people can relate to that. You know, there's all different sorts of skill sets that people bring to the career of creator or digital creator, if you want to get even more specific. And I think one of the things that's interesting when you look out over decades or even 10 years, you know, a decade, is that it ebbs and flows as to which skill set is, you know, results in success within the context of maybe growth or, you know, business success. For example, within the context of Instagram, if you were a really great photographer, that was a huge asset in the early stages of Instagram. Now there's more along story arc and video and visual graphics as it relates to video. Very different skill set. Some people transfer over that skill set, others don't. But for the photographers who transfer that over, there's probably a handful of them that now feel like, wait, this feels like work in a different way.

Yeah.

Similarly, in the world of blogging early, it was writing. Like, you would get on and you would write and there'd be some visuals connected to it. But it wasn't like there was a Pinterest or Instagram or Facebook in the same way that it is now. That really drove the attention of a post. It was really the writing. And so you'd have these really like, you know, online journals kind of that people exactly write and create and post to. And a lot of people who were really skilled writers developed a following. And that's where people would comment, they would comment on blogs and they would interact there. There's an evolution to that. And what's interesting now is I think you can see a lot of people with a skill set of maybe systems, processes, maybe they outsource to a photographer and they have a queue of recipe development. Like that's not all that it is. But you see A lot of creators who are really successful from purely a search perspective, organic discovery, developing these strong processes and systems. And it really is like the business of content creation.

Absolutely.

And I'm wondering if part of that was what you felt was the evolution of this industry, which is or was primarily writing, now is writing plus photos, videos, email, social media.

Yeah.

Was that part of what you felt shift and change was like essentially the job description of what it meant to add content to a blog.

And I think it started to feel a lot more like a day job to me because of that. And actually, ironically, when I started my first blog, my day job was in marketing. So it's not like it's a completely foreign piece of my brain. I know how to build, you know, a brand and to check a lot of these busy boxes. But yeah, I wasn't feeling like the creativity was offsetting it in the same way. And I think a lot of bloggers, even those who are more marketing minded, are more business minded. I mean, of course, just the, the workload has just quadrupled over the years. Like there are just so many more things that go into keeping up and, you know, keeping on top of your traffic and whatnot. So I, I mean, my business model has kind of evolved with my mainstream.

Talk about the different evolutions.

Yes, absolutely. So I, you know, kind of had that mix of business that a lot of influencers slash bloggers have. I had my ad revenue. I had a lot of, you know, sponsorships in terms of Instagram, a lot of sponsorships within my blog back when that was a kind of, before Instagram kind of took that market share. But I started to get, you know, really burnt out, I think with the Instagram and the TikTok of it all probably around like 2022 or something. And I just decided I was, I'm not going to take money from this bucket anymore. I'm just going to close off that bucket. I'm going to double down on the blog and focus just on SEO for the most part and just keep building that way.

And so that is, for a period of time, it was just to make sure I'm kind of tracking here, sponsors, ad revenue. You had your blog, you were also posting on social.

Yeah. And then for a long time I was also private chefing and catering and teaching. And I had like a whole physical piece of my pie too, because again, I've always been very concerned about the ebb and flow of technology and making sure I'm diversified and I feel like that's what's allowed Me to like stay afloat for 15 years because so many people can lose, you know, huge chunks overnight. Um, and I saw it happen with myself even just focusing on, on SEO and the changing algorithms. I mean for me.

Can you talk about that? I think I would love to.

Yes, I would love to because relate to that. It really does all segue into the sub stack conversation. So I can't remember. I'm very bad at remembering the years. But actually you know what, it was around 2023. I feel things really shifted in terms of like AI overviews were rolling out. I think around then. I know that Google really in the last like two years have cracked down on health claims and really shifted who they give any sort of medical related content priority to. And my kind of bread and butter of sorts shifted when I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. So my first cookbook was kind of, you know, straight up normal cookbook. Then my next two books, one was like a health memoir. Then the third one was a niche gut health book which I actually did a podcast a associated with it called Sibo Made Simple. It's this. I mean it's more well known now but at the time it was a not very well known gut issue that I dealt with and felt like there was really no resources out there, very few like mainstream doctors talking about it, very few bloggers. And so I produced the podcast. I produced a lot of content on my website around it and it was my Sibo content was probably at least half of my, my top 10 posts. It was a huge traffic driver for me and a huge traffic driver for what ended up being my cookbook on the subject. And then actually even because my podcast was the podcast subject as a whole was niche. And then you know, you can to drill down into, you know, 36 plus episodes within that subject matter. I covered a lot of search terms and even just the transcripts of my podcast episodes were high up in search. So when Google, you know, the wind shifted that cut me in half. So I luckily like work with a really savvy team for SEO and they warned me. I didn't listen to them at first and then I realized what was warning. Just that any sort of like information based queries and any like kind of of my, my health related posts that did really well. It was just not going to last.

It will. It would go away. Yeah, saying like, hey, there's a high probability that this.

Yeah, I think it was mostly related to AI at the time. This was before kind of like the health claim stuff took Hold. But they told me to double down on recipes. I really resisted because again, it's like I built a brand kind of as being, you know, someone who talked about these themes in the context of food and diet. And I felt at the time as well, like, you know, I have a podcast, I've published these books. I think I'm an expert at this point. I don't have the credentials, I don't have the, you know, letters after my name, but I have really built a name for myself in these subjects and it didn't matter. Google didn't care, so. So I did lose all of that overnight.

Often will prove.

Yeah.

And I think kind of like the.

Macro learning some of those situations.

Yeah, yeah. And I think the macro learning though is that to be a blogger today. And I know this may sound aggressive and people may not agree, but it's actually like really hard to build a brand. A brand and a point of view. As a blogger, I think like, you know, just the, there are different ways to do it. Much more so on Instagram and TikTok. But just on your blog it's different. But just on a blog, just on a blog, it doesn't matter as much anymore.

And it, it's. We do these calls within the Food Blogger Pro membership coaching calls. And one of the things, it's a little bit hard because the name is Food Blogger Pro, but really it's like we're creators and if you're going to be brand building, it has to be beyond. Just like it's really, it would be really, really hard. And I think this is what you're saying, to only publish content to a site and that being a blog, a website and that being your only mechanism of content creation.

Yeah.

Just like really it would be really hard to build a business like that starting today.

Yeah.

You, you almost have to build all of the infrastructure around it. Social media. Exactly. Concentration, email. Is that the point that you were getting at?

Yeah. Not that, you know, you can't have personality. Certainly now that we're in the world of AI, it does help to have personality, but that's very different than building a brand. And of course people, you know, that's not to say that you shouldn't have a focus. Like I still very much have a focus on my site. Like it's gluten free, it's dairy free. You know, I've shifted the language away from some of the, the health focused terms I used to use like healthy, anti, inflammatory. You know, lots of, I did lots of stuff around thyroid and Again, autoimmune and all that stuff, I just. I don't really focus on anymore because now I see it as a recipe blog that is built on. On SEO. And so that was one of the reasons why I started to flirt with Substack. And I was approached by someone there in 2022 to hop on board. And at the time, I just. I didn't want to cannibalize my site. It was, again, it was like a little bit before I had stopped, you know, focusing on some of the health stuff. So I was really. I was putting some of those articles, posts, whatever, onto my main site. It wasn't just recipes. And I just. Yeah, I. I couldn't. It seemed to me like Substack was just another way to be a blogger and I'd be starting a second blog. So I highly regret not starting in 2022 because starting in 2025 was much harder. It's a lot more saturated, like all things. But now I finally decided, you know, what my niche was going to be. I started a substack in April that was focused on meal prep for toddlers. So not something that I am dealing with at all on my current site. I am not talking about motherhood, frankly. I don't wanna talk about motherhood on Instagram either. Toxic. So Subzac felt like the one place where, okay, I have obviously the desire to write. I miss actually the days of blogging, of just being forced to write every single week a story, a subject that interests me and to dive into it. And I thought, okay, well, this, this will be my thing for a little while and we'll see if it takes hold, see if, you know, it's successful and see if it. If it does, in fact, not cannibalize my core site. And it's been really interesting.

When you say not dealing with it, you mean not dealing with it on your website, dealing with it in real life, in that you do have a toddler every day.

Yeah.

And so part of it is relevant in that each and every day you're thinking about, like, okay, how do we make food for little human? Which we're. We're not in the toddler stage, but we're in the. Our girls are five and seven. And it's something we think about a lot. Like, how do we put good food in front of them that they're going to eat, but that isn't also terrible food. So what's interesting is that it's. You said, not related necessarily to the conversations you were having anywhere else. Did you almost View it as a separate platform.

Yeah.

Where you were developing a new kind of focus. And then did you bring over the email list that you had?

Yes.

Or did you start from scratch and what was that like?

So I decided to bring over my email list, which was about 16,000 at the time. I knew that there was gonna be heavy attrit because obviously, you know, my main site. Not everyone's a parent. Not everyone. Yeah. Even those who are parents. Yeah. Different age kids and some just may not care about it. But I just felt I know other bloggers with established or content creators with established platforms and established email lists haven't done it that way. But I just thought, you know, I might as well, you know, take this head start. I have built a relationship with this community for a decade. I'd like to give them a chance, if they would like to, to pay me something. And I think that is what's really interesting about just the kind of psycho consumer psychology of switching to that platform is that, you know, no one has, besides buying my cookbooks, no one has willfully given me their money up until this point. And I think pre.

In your business, pre Substack, you never had a digital product other than you had your cookbooks.

I lied.

Or you didn't have.

No, I did have digital products.

Okay, okay, okay.

I kind of forgot about those. I did have like an online course and a few ebooks and a group coaching program. But again they were, they were niche.

Like an afterthought in that you didn't remember until this moment. Like.

Correct.

It wasn't a prime, it wasn't like a main part of the business. You had them, but it wasn't like the main mechanism.

It wasn't the main. But actually it was for a few years. It was a pretty big piece of the pie. But I, I phased those out a year or two ago and yeah, but I think again that was like a. More of a high price point product. So I don't know. It wasn't like that many people at the end of the day who purchased those things. And what I was hoping for with Substack was obviously a much higher conversion rate and I was surprised that it didn't really work, honestly. Substack, promise, not promise. Substack says that you should expect 1 to 5% to convert to paid. And I did not see that happen again. I think it was kind of hard to tell with their analytics how many people I actually lost from the main list versus I was gaining on there because I've been really lucky in that my number has remained fairly flat. And I would say that I.

Subscribers.

Yeah, yeah. But it's been, it's been up and down. But I think probably at this point just from the number that I've gotten just from Substack app, I think I've gotten like 2,000 subscribers just from Substack.

The network referrals discovery on the platform.

Yeah. And then, you know, I've tried to be savvy about doing, you know, content swaps or, you know, featuring other people. And so I'm sure some are, at least a few are from Instagram or other sources as well, sharing my content. Um, but so yeah, I would say like, you know, there is definitely a percentage of people that, that are new and the conversion rate is a lot better. I think the more I've been populating my list with people who are used to paying for Substack.

Well, and also I'd be interested. Do you know what the percentage is on those 2000 who discovered you through Substack? Because those would be people who signed up with the mindset of like, this is somebody who's creating content about like feeding your toddler highly aligned as opposed to the list that you brought over to your point. You know, maybe it was a 60 year old single woman.

Yeah.

Who would be interested in your writing, but not necessarily paying for premium access to the specific niche that you were creating. Yeah, yeah, I am not sure what that percentage is.

Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm sure it says somewhere I'm, I'm not the most analytically savvy person anyway. And Substack analytics are still evolving, I would say to be functional, but I should like try and find someone to bring in to, to give me a little analysis. But I think I'm still, you know, starting in April, I'm still in the phase of just like seeing what's working even just from a content standpoint. Yeah. And, and, and you know, there are different schools of thought on Substack and paid strategy. A lot of people don't launch with paid and they feel like you have to like earn your way to even asking for money for like a year. I don't know, that seemed ridiculous from, to me. So I, I launched with it, but I do one paid post and one free post a week, which in retrospect was biting off probably more than I could chew.

What's in the paid content? What's in the free content?

All recipes are paid. And then originally I launched with kind of a weekly meal plan product, not like full Recipes. But I guess my niche was kind of for parents who can't do family dinner every night. So for people who are maybe outsourcing to caregivers or who are maybe meal prepping, a lot of components like to create like a blue plate special. But for me, like my point of view is to optimize for diversity. So in those early years to make sure your kid is like trying as many different things as possible, even if they reject them. And that takes a tremendous amount of planning, a tremendous amount of effort. And you know, my promise, my value proposition was to take, you know, a lot of the mental burden off of you. And I use a lot of quick fix items every week in those menus. I give like 4 or 5 store bought things that you can try because who has time to create that variety from scratch? It's just impossible. So you know, brands I trust that use a good ingredients and then I do offer, you know, some homemade versions of those things, recipes either from my main site or that I trust as well. But giving people the option and you know, stick de stigmatizing, just like buying the jarred version or the frozen version, I think that's important. So that's kind of what the meals, sorry, the meal plans were doing each week and then a lot of them would link to certain recipes that were paywalled. But in theory it was a standalone thing that people could use for free. I was doing that every single week. And then I realized I was like, God, like people don't need this many meal, this many meal plans. So now I've stopped doing that and I'm doing it once a month. And then frankly, like it was even just my, my interest level was being pulled in a lot of different directions, like personal ess, interviews, advice, roundups with other moms. And those have also been a great way that I've been able to like give back to the community and cross pollinate with some of the creators on substack that I didn't know previously. So yeah, I'm not sure, I'm not sure like where my paid strategy really nets out yet. But it's been a fun period of experimentation and I've had periods of really seeing traction. And then also I think I am in theory a success story. I mean, I became a bestseller within a month and I am like in the top 50 of the leader of the permanent leaderboard for the parenting vertical.

Bestseller, meaning within the context of substack.

Yes. Which I do.

You know, what does that mean? Like paid stuff?

Yeah, I'll tell You what it means, it's not that great. It's not that cool.

Okay.

So to get the little they do their check marks by how many paid subscribers you have to. You become a bestseller when you get the first check mark and you only need a hundred paid subscribers in order to do that. So I thought I would, I mean I was arrogant. I thought I would hit that like on day one, but I did not. And I realized, oh, like this is not actually as easy as Substack maybe leads you to believe. Again, those conversion numbers are not, not necessarily accurate for, for everyone.

Yeah, it's hard. It's nice because you have these numbers and you're able to like do math on it. But there's so much that goes into it. Like, yeah, what is your audience? What is your product? How much are you pitching it? How good are you at pitching it? You know, in your case, it's like you have a good list, but what's the overlap of that list with the audience that, that you're now talking to? So it's a good reminder to anybody who's thinking through the decision around, hey, should I do this? How much time should I dedicate to it? What would it look like to do it like anything else, It's a product and you are selling a product. And platform is. Substack is a platform that allows us.

And now a social media platform as well, which a lot of driving a lot of people crazy. Yes. So I don't remember when Notes launched, but Notes is essentially their version of social media and it is how a lot of people are getting discovered. However, I think a lot of people are annoyed because they got on Substack to get away from that hustle. So I think you can absolutely do Substack and not do Notes, especially if you have other platforms where you have a dedicated following. I have like really dropped off of Instagram since I started Substack cause I just, I don't have time. I've always had a very lean team. I have like one assistant who does like a few different social media things for me. But I've mostly been a one woman band this whole time. And I just, yeah, I didn't have the bandwidth to, to do Instagram anymore once I started. Um, so I have not been great at like kind of funneling my people on Instagram over to Substack. I have invested in a friend of mine help helping me with my notes just to see what happens. And some months she pays for herself, some months she doesn't. But it is you Know, the virility on Substack is so minuscule compared to other platforms. However, if you get like a hundred likes on a note on Substack, you end up converting a lot of people to paid. I don't know how it works, but it's very interesting or at least getting, you know, like 400 new subscribers which hopefully down the line will convert to paid. So yeah, it's been, it's been like that 2000 number that I mentioned that I've gotten just from the Substack platform has mostly been through like the participation in the social media elements of it, which is notes.

And so you're talking about 2,000 additional subscribers. The best channel for that was for you was posting to Notes. People are already on the platform. It's easy for them to subscribe to join the newsletter.

Yeah.

And the hope is over time those become paid subscribers.

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What does it look like for you right now when you look at your business as a creator, your time. Like, do you consider Substack to be your main focus from a time perspective? And then also what decisions are you making related to time and revenue? Because you could do cookbooks, you could sign a cookbook deal, you get an advance, you maybe get royalties, you know, you could do sponsored content. How are you making decisions as it relates to substack within your business?

Yeah, so I didn't really fathom how much time substack would take and it was a very bad business decision from that standpoint. You know, it really, it does remind me of like blogging in 2009. You know, I remember doing two posts a week and just, you know, kind of flying a little bit more by the seat of my pants to just like crank out content and build a relationship. And it is similar in a lot of ways. And especially since I am accruing this new audience that doesn't know my work from elsewhere, I have to remind myself, you know, like I have to tell stories all over again. And luckily, you know, I have a rich reservoir of existing recipes and stories and information to share in that regard. So I am trying to find like ways to work smarter, not harder. I've been using some recipes from my past cookbooks as, you know, some of the offerings for my recipes. I. A lot of those posts that I have had to know index on certain health subjects. I'm going to figure out ways to tweak them a little bit, make them relevant for obviously like the audience of parents and moms specifically and put a little bit of that in there and. Yeah, but overall, I mean I have kind of, I post two new recipes a month on my website on Feed Me Phoebe. And that has, I mean I'm, I'm a mid tier blogger, I'm not a mega blogger. So my growth is, you know, just, I don't know, I'm not growing but I'm not decreasing. That has more to do with the algorithm, honestly, and you know, the ebbs and flows of that. But so I went from two posts a month to two a week. I mean I, yeah, I back more than quadrupled my time on your blog.

Is what you're doing. And now it's essentially two posts a week.

Yeah.

Are you also then publishing to your blog still?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

So I mean, yeah, it was taking on another full time job. Usually I am working on some sort of book at the same time. So at the beginning it like kind of in theory like replaced that. But then I was writing this novel which also took up a lot of time. So yeah, this year has been really split between, between substack and my novel. And then yeah, just like the busy work of, of blogging because you know, while, like, I'd say, like, the two new recipes a month are the one to two is. It's such a fraction of the time I spend on my blog. Like, it's all busy work kind of repairing and focus and cleaning the archives. Yeah. Yeah.

That's all the stuff that goes into.

Yeah. Which people don't realize. So it's like, it's passive, but. But it's not.

It's definitely not.

Yeah, it's not passive. Um, but at the same time, I think what's nice and what makes it feel more passive is that I could probably take like an entire month off and be fine.

Yeah.

So that feels. But on substack, I can't just, like, stop sending the emails because people are paying for them now.

It's a really good point. I think it's one of the things that we sometimes forget about is, like, the nature of content as it relates to its lifespan. And every platform is very different. And there's also the ability on certain platforms for something to have a short lifespan but to be reused. We've had conversations on Facebook about that. Like, hey, if you have something that works three months later, you can post it again and it might do really well again. You know, if you have a blog post that you publish and it performs well, especially if it performs well on a search engine, chances are there's going to be a long tail for that. Like, that's going to. Not always. It's not always going to stay there. And algorithms change and other people publish content that might outrank it. But, like, it's very different than Instagram where it might have a, you know, weeks lifespan substack. The idea of reusing content probably doesn't really exist. And the lifespan of that content is probably weeks. Similarly. But there's also some great parts about it. Like the strategy, and we talked about skillset at the beginning is different than somebody who's thinking about technical SEO and ranking and doing keyword research in that it feels like. And this is. Is going to turn into a question. It feels like one of the most advantageous skills to have as a subset writer is writing. You are an author and you're creating compelling stories and maybe within notes, you know, the social component, you need to figure out the algorithm and how to rank and what works well and what doesn't work well.

You don't. Because it's so rudimentary. It's just.

Which is maybe kind of refreshing.

It is. I mean, it's kind of like Twitter slash very early days Instagram like people are sharing like one sentence and a photo and frankly it's doing well. It's just, it's very, very simple. So yeah, the lifespan is, is because there's no real like, I don't know, it's, it's not like recycling in their algorithm. It's, it's not chronological but it's. Yeah, the lifespan of notes is pretty quick. But I actually think that the lifespan of post posts are very different than you know, a traditional email marketing program.

Of a substack post.

Yeah. Because you do have a landing page that looks like a blog. And then I think, yeah, a lot of the, the kind of best practices is what I remember from my early days of blogging was just like all the internal linking that is not keyword focused but just about reanimating old content about, you know, being able to keep people in your ecosystem for long enough. And you have to, you know, assume 50% of my posts are paywalled, that someone may, you know, pay along the way if, if I hit on something that interests them.

Yeah. So knowing what, you know, now having gone through this, I know from a lot of the conversations we've had and even internally we have this conversation a lot like okay, what, what would it look like if we publish a substack? And some of the questions we have is like would we bring our list over? Would we start from scrat, build a substack there? Knowing what, you know now for somebody who's considering substack as a potential, what would your advice be for them? Being that you are coming up to not quite there yet, but like coming up to the one year mark of being a creator there.

Yeah, I think, and I got this advice and I didn't really listen to it, like make sure that you, I think it does help to have a niche. I think it helps to have a niche no matter what, what, anywhere. But especially kind of the way their verticals work and whatnot and the number of creators on there. Unless you are a mega creator like you guys, you know, and just will have enough of an audience to get even, just like a small share and convert that I think it's really helpful to have a particular focus. And then people said, you know, make sure that you choose that stuff, said make sure to choose something that you're not going to get sick of that really holds your interest because your, the frequency again is, is a lot higher than it is for a normal blog. So I think, you know, I've seen other mega bloggers, creators, you know, start their substacks and they're not quite as consistent as I am, maybe because they don't have to be. And they just let it be something fun, you know, just, again, another outlet to write about things that they don't really get to on some of their other platforms. And that is what it is for me. But I think at the same time, because of everything that's happened with SEO and because I've kind of, like, really doubled down on it on my blog, I again, like, really felt the need to have that, like, other piece of the pie just in case things go south.

Yeah. You mean you went through this season of doubling down on SEO and then felt the effects of some algorithm changes, some shifts.

This year's been good for me. This year's been good for me. But in the past two years, yeah, have been tough.

What that did was it made you want to have something else to fall back on if needed.

Yes, correct. And I think, you know, the beauty of, you know, even though blogs are attached to the algorithm, they are much more your own than Instagram or any of these other platforms. And I've always felt that way. And then substack to certain extent. And email lists are something that you completely own.

Do you from substack promote blog posts that you're publishing to your blog, or is that a pretty hard line between the two?

No, I don't. I kind of do the opposite. So I still send a weekly newsletter to. I know a lot of people, you know, do a higher frequency, but I've always just had like a Sunday. A Sunday roundup that goes out and I more likely am kind of pushing people to munch menus my substack from there, just like reminding them of some new things that are going on. But no, I've kept it a fairly hard line. I do share some family meals and again, like, have some. Some recipes in my meal plans that come from my main site. But I'm not really using the subst as, like, as strategically to drive traffic to, like, particular posts. I'm just kind of like, using it because I have this, again, this, like, breadth of recipes, this, like, massive archive that I can pull from that I don't necessarily have on substack yet.

And that weekly roundup that you're sending on Sunday is to, like, your blog audience?

Yeah, my blog audience.

So you have two email lists.

The original list. The original list list, yep.

And so that essentially you have that list that was brought into substack, but you can also then email those people from like, Kit or flodesk or.

Yeah, I do. Kit. Yeah.

Okay. Yep. So you still have the ability to email people. And are people who are coming to your blog able to sign up for that list? Like, is that what you're promoting within the context of your blog?

Yeah, but I haven't even, I mean, now it's like I haven't even put my substack, like in the navigation of my blog. It's just, it's right now, it's a separate thing on my Instagram. It's more front and center pinned to the top. But yeah, I'm kind of viewing them as two separate beasts right now.

Yeah. And it's part of that just from clarity perspective on marketing, different audience. And it almost feels nice to have two completely separate spaces to not have to think about a lot of the back and forth.

Yeah, I mean, again, it kind of goes back to like, what blogging is now. Like, I don't feel like I have a dedicated, you know, like, audience on my blog necessarily, of course, in my email list. But, you know, again, a lot of the people coming in from SEO are new, so they don't, you know, know what I'm about. They're usually just there for the recipe. It's not really like how I'm necessarily retaining people. I think I, I am converting people to my email list and like, hopefully they stay that way, but I feel like that would be much more of like the personal interface, the getting to know me piece of it and, and Instagram too, I'm sure. Like, you know, people filter, if they like a recipe, they find me there as well. So, yeah, I think it, it's more from those two channels that I'm trying to be better about, talking about the substack. But I, I, I haven't been great at it, which is like, man, if.

You looked at the list for any of us, but I just know our list of all of the opportunities, all the things you can do, you know, all the optimizations is like a very, very long list that will never get through all the way. One of the things I really appreciate about you sharing your story is that you've been doing this for, you know, 15, 16 years, kind of similar to us. And what it takes is constant iterations, takes a. And Lindsay and I have been saying this, Lindsay started saying it and I really appreciated it. But like, beginner mindset, like, even though we've been creating content and running a business for 15 years, you've been doing the same, have been, we've been trying to approach Things with the mindset of, like, we're kind of beginners. Like, we're, in some ways, not, like, we're like, like seasoned vets, but in other ways we're completely new at this. And every day, every week, every month, there's going to be something that's going to require us to not take the stance that, like, we fully understand this, but to take the stance of, like, man, we are just gonna start learning because we actually don't know. And it. It's curiosity and it's the willingness to, like, start a thing and make a mistake and look at it and be like, like, hey, actually, that was awesome. But then that didn't work very well. There's a lot of that. And I think for people who are in it, it's super helpful to hear from people who have been in it for a long time to know that it's kind of what everybody's doing is we're trying to figure it out, we're trying to get in. We're making big decisions, we're questioning those decisions. Two years later, we're glad we made em. Sometimes we're not glad we made em. Like, it's just a lot of that that I know.

And I reference my own ignorance, like, at the beginning, or my own arrogance, because, again, I feel like a seasoned professional. Like, you know, I have an existing platform. I thought it would be easy. And some of the people I talked to who did not have that and started in substack were like, yeah, good luck.

What. What do you mean by that?

Well, I was like, I had really, like, high goals for myself that I have not met. Yeah.

People who had been publishing their.

Yeah, they knew how hard it was.

This is a hard thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Yes. And so now I have reverted to the beginner mindset and realized I just have to, you know, rebuild, build a new thing from scratch. I guess that was really the difference. I didn't really feel like I was building a new thing from scratch, and I am.

Yeah, that's great. And I think a good reminder for people, new platform, potentially new audience. Even if you bring people over, if your niche is a little bit different, it's gonna, you know, there's gonna be different messaging. This is one of the things that I've wanted to do more in the podcast I'm trying to do. I wanna hear about the things that are working really well for you. So this could be tools, this could be a mindset, this could be a routine. You know, what are the things that you are doing or the tools that you are using today that are helpful for you in your career as a content writer, recipe developer, you know, publisher. So it's a broad question, but generally it's an opportunity to say, you know, to other creators. Here are the things that have been super helpful for you with your job as a, as a creator.

Yeah, I think hiring an SEO team, Foodie Digital. I know they, I'm sure there's tons of people listening. Use them. They're amazing. You know, I think again, as someone who didn't really outsource a lot, it was like a real line item for me at the beginning. But I could not, I could not do it without them. And they just take care of all the things I don't care about and they give me so much homework and so much work. But it at least means I just know that I don't have to stay on top of the business side and the changing algorithms and all that. So I feel like very taken care of having them as part of my team. And yeah, I think in terms of substack 2 investing in someone else to do the work that I just don't have time for. If I wasn't writing a novel for 75% of my week, I would do more of this stuff myself. But I think yeah, right now outsourcing certain things is working well for me. And then I think yeah, just because I have this weird hybrid work life right now of things that are my day job, quote unquote and making me money and the thing that isn't that is like a real marathon slog. I've just been really intentional about how I, I structure my days. And so I almost every morning I go to my co working space and I work on either my book or substack. But just like kind of writing I, I think of it as like this is my writing time usually till about like lunchtime or 2pm and then everything after that is like what else I can squeeze in. And then like one day a week usually I have to take a morning to do recipe testing and shooting. Since now it's getting dark so early. But yeah, I think I have always been a little bit more loosey goosey about my schedule. Like every day is different, every week is different. I've been doing this for so long that that's been fine. It hasn't been like, it hasn't been a problem for me. But in terms of yeah, just not scheduling calls in the morning, not. But just like making my mornings kind of sacred. Writing time has been really important that's great.

Two big things kind of in a phrase. I think a lot of this phrase, who, not how, it's actually a book by Dan Sullivan, and it sounds like that's been a nice thing for you related to SEO. It's like, who do you go to? Not how do you do it necessarily. You know, you need to do it, but you don't want to be the one doing it. And as much as possible, as business owners, if we can be thinking about the things that we don't want to do or know how to do, but we know we need to do, who are we going to, to do those things is great. And then the other thing is just understanding the energy of your day and dedicating the highest energy, highest output parts of your day to the most important work that you're doing and just sitting down and doing it. I think of that Steven Press feeling quote. I think it was a quote from him where he was talking about inspiration and he's like, I only write when I'm inspired, and I'm inspired every day at 9am but the idea being like, it really is through the methodical practice of like sitting down and writing that you are going to write. It's not when you have this moment of feeling like, and now there's some time in my day, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna write, write. And that could apply, you know, to anything beyond writing. It could be photography or marketing or like, whatever your thing is. And the balance. You talked about this, you talked about your day job. My guess is from that. You mean your blog, maybe cookbook writing?

Yes. I don't spend as much time on my day job as I do on the other stuff.

Sure. But, like, the thing that's paying the bills and that's maybe not as inspiring, and then, then also making sure that you do the things that are inspiring. And there always is a balance with that. Like, we're going to have to do some of those things that pay the bills in service of, number one, paying the bills, but number two, then making space to do the other things that we're excited about doing that someday might pay the bills. But it's not without effort and time to build those things up to get them to the point where they would be able to do that. So.

And it is also about balance. You know, I, I don't want to say that I, I dislike doing my blog now because there are days, you know, if I'm in a tough point with the book, where I will, like, relish the like, painstakingly going through old posts and updating links and, you know, the monkey work or, you know, being. I think it's a. It is a specific type of creativity to come up with, you know, a prop title for a recipe based on keywords and, you know, what we think someone will click on. It's not the type of creativity that feeds me as much as, like, these larger creative pursuits, but it's not without its place in my life. I think it's just making sure that I have. That I'm feeding all the beasts. There's a. Someone wrote an article many, many years ago about these, like, three hats that people wear. The artist, the editor, and the agent. And I think a lot vlogging actually falls under the agent. And it's just a. It's a different hat. It's a completely different way of thinking. I, like, most people struggle to wear. I mean, it's like impossible to wear all three hats at once. So, I mean, when I'm scheduling my week again, it's like I just gotta, you know, make time for the artist, then, you know, make time for the editor, make time for the agent, and not toggle constantly between those. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's great. This is awesome, Phoebe. So fun to talk to you. Munch Menus is the name of your substack. We'll link to your site and socials. Even though you're not posting a lot on those, we'll still link to them. Anything else that you'd want to shout out and link to within the show? Notes here?

Yeah, I mean, my most recent cookbook I didn't even mention is called Carboivore. And yeah, that's just a. It's a more traditional cookbook that celebrates carbs.

It's a pro.

Pro carb health.

We need more of those with, like, a testimonial from Ina. She made it. I was like, this is awesome. I was looking through that. Yeah. Which is so cool. Well, that's awesome. Link to those. Thanks for coming on, sharing your story. Really appreciate it. I know a lot of people are interested in substack. We've had a ton of conversations. And so it's super helpful for us anytime we can help fill out the picture of what that looks like. And really what it comes down to is, like, it's a lot of work. Work like any of this.

Yeah.

There's no magic button. There's no magic pill. It's a lot of hustle. It's a lot of grind. It's mistakes and learning. And so appreciate your perspective on it and sharing that. So thanks for coming on.

Make sure you choose something you love to write about.

Yeah. Because you're going to be doing a lot of it.

Yeah.

Well, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Hey there, Anne from the Food Blogger Pro Team. Again, thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, we would so appreciate it if you could share the episode with your community and leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll be back next week with another episode where Bjork sits down with Emily Walker from the Food Blogger Pro Team to recap the latest news and blogging trends from our blogging newsletter. We'll see you back here soon. And in the meantime, we hope you have a wonderful week.

Sam.