Strategically Launching a Food Blog with Jessica Wine

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, Bjork is talking with Jessica Wine, the founder of the food blog Whisk and Wine. Jessica just launched her food blog in the fall of 2025 and is talking with Bjork about what it really takes to launch a food blog from the ground up. Drawing from her background in the tech startup world, Jessica shares all of the details about her launch process and why she intentionally built in a learning and development phase before ever hitting publish. From branding and backend tech to time management, and how she's using AI, this conversation is packed with really practical insights for anyone preparing to start or restart a food blog the right way. Even if you launched your food blog many years ago, this episode has some really great processes. Conversations about the tools you need and insights into the importance of branding that will still be really insightful. Without further ado, I'm just gonna let Bjork take it away.

Jess, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me. I feel like I know you since I've been listening to you for like months.

That's the one thing about podcasts. There's been a few people that I've connected with after listening to their podcast for years and it's like, oh, you talk the same that you do on the podcast, which makes sense. It's not like a totally different person. But it's always funny to meet in person where you're dynamically having a conversation versus just listening to one. So glad to be talking with you as opposed to just talking in your ear. We're going to be talking about your kind of early stages startup. It almost could be the theme for the podcast today because you are somebody who lives in the startup world. You were a part of a tech startup that grew, got acquired, stayed on with that acquiring company for a while. Eventually that role shifted. That's when kind of this window of opportunity opened up for you to work on your site. And what I want to talk about today is, number one, what you've learned in those first few months, because we're really a few months in. And then number two, some of the concepts, ideas, strategies that you've applied with kind of a startup brain. So before we get into those two questions, take us back to just a few months ago when you officially pressed launch on your site. What did that look like leading up to that? And how did you know that you wanted to do this?

It was a lot more work than I thought that it was going to be, you know, look, just from a background, I come from a family where, you know, we, we center everything around food, whether we're cooking or we're eating lunch and asking for what's for dinner. But, you know, I had a lot of people that would come here. Sunday dinner was kind of like a big concept. So I've always been cooking for people for the past 20 years. And everyone always say, oh, you need to have a restaurant. And I, you know, I'd quickly say, there's no way I'm ever having a restaurant. But building a blog was always kind of in the back of my mind. So, you know, time was really the constraint that I had against me. And to your point, when, when a little free time opened up, I found the opportunity to kind of get this started. And I wish I kind of. I wish I did it a little bit sooner.

Why is that?

Because I don't think I realized how much actually goes into it, and I'm still learning. So I think when you break down starting a blog, especially in this space, you have to understand that it's going to happen in phases, and you kind of learn that as you're going.

So as opposed to, hey, I'm going to work on this, maybe I'll have it by the end of the month if I really dedicate a bunch of time. What you're saying is actually, if you kind of break that out and do it over a year, it's probably more realistic than thinking you're going to get to launch in a month.

Yeah, because I think you think you're going to launch, you're going to go monetize immediately, and you really just have to take time to build all of the elements. So when I started to think about this, where I started was I need to find a place that can help me understand where to even begin. Like, what do I even need to do? Like, I know I need a domain. I know I need to probably, you know, get WordPress or something, but that's. That was really kind of it. Like, I had no clue where to start. And then I found Food Blogger Pro, immediately realized that, okay, this is going to be an awesome resource, signed up and started taking the courses. And I'm not, you know, Bjork's not paying me to say this. I'm. I'm letting you know, Like, I. This is literally the process. So I'd say, like, at the end of August or early September, I started doing that and dedicating the time for. Would I just say, like, the learning and development phase, if that makes sense. So that looked like pretty multifaceted in the sense of I started taking your courses. I realized that very quickly that there's a lot to this. It's not just WordPress. There's a lot of additional tech that you need to think about in order to make sure that the blog is, you know, operating appropriately and that you're selling.

Do you remember some of the surprises that as you were getting started, where it was like, oh, this is something I didn't anticipate being a thing?

Yeah. I mean, I just say, even, like, I need. Okay, I need to figure out what the theme is going to be. I, I would have always. I, I would consider myself a pretty tech savvy person, but.

Yeah, you worked in technology tech startup, right?

No, but having, like having something a little bit more turnkey became really important. So I tried. I'm like, oh, I know how to set a theme and set the fonts on WordPress and everything. But like the lure, I, I feel like the last time I coded something was like a MySpace page. For anyone that knows what that is. Maybe I'm totally aging myself out of this conversation, but into it.

I'm a MySpace tech too. Yeah.

So. So, yeah, so I quickly learned like, wow, okay. No, I need something that's gonna help me make this easy. Some little widgets and components. So I had, I had decided to go with Feast and then very quickly realized I needed to like bump up to their premium product because it made, I mean, it's, it was a night and day decision. Once I went through a branding exercise, which we can talk about. I just think like the little things here and there. Right. Like anti spam plugins, things to compress your photos. Just there, there were a lot of pieces that, that, you know, I didn't really anticipate. The recipe cards, the pens, which, like, I still have a learning curve on all of that and kind of am not super focused, if you will. So I just say there were a lot and I needed to find a system to kind of inventory that make decisions. And maybe in hindsight I, I actually took the approach of adopting everything up front so that I had the foundation. Obviously there was a level of investment. I don't think it's crazy, but I wanted to make sure you mean financially,

like you bought the products that you'd need to, to build on. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting.

I was happy I did that.

Yeah. And I was just having a conversation with a friend about potentially loaning some money to another friend of his who is starting a business, speaking generically, like, it's a food production business. And it's like with that business upfront, you need 500, $600,000. And not that that becomes the, you know, anchor point where it's like. And so then if you're starting a blog, you should not even blink about spending 25,000. But I think it's a good reminder that usually if you're starting a business, you're going to have to put some money into it. And really the question comes down to, from an investment standpoint, it's like, are you going to invest your time or are you going to invest your money? And when we first started, it was really easy to invest our time because it was just Lindsay and I, we didn't have kids, we had jobs, but they were relatively flexible in that. Like, Lindsey was a teacher, so she didn't have to work weekends. Or if she did, it was, you know, it's not like a six hour weekend shift that you're having to do. I worked at a nonprofit, but it's like I would be home by, you know, between four and five every day. And so then you could work in the margins and you could figure out how to do that. But when you move into a season where you don't have as much margin, you're suddenly having to compare and say, like, okay, do I want to spend my time on this if that means, you know, I'm gonna have to put a show on for my kids, or am I gonna be comfortable spending this money? Which means that I wanna have some type of return on it over the long run. If the goal is like financial return, which I think for a lot of people it is because you're building a business. So how did you make that decision knowing you're in a season where you, you know, you maybe had more time, but you still had your girls that you're taking care of. You're a single mom, so it's not like you have an abundance of time. You're doing drop offs, pickups, you know, navigating meals. And now you're also starting to get back into the world of building a tech startup, which you can talk about that if, if you want to. But how did you make the decision on time versus money when investing into the business?

Yeah, so first of all, I set a deadline for myself. That's just my type a craziness that I was going to launch this blog November 1st and that really aligned with a social launch. So I felt external Pressure, because one of the areas I decided to invest in was a social media manager. But I say that because I started to realize the amount of effort that it took just to get one post up, and my goal was to have 20. So I went through the whole L and D phase from, like, sep. I'd say, like, early September.

Like learning and development. Is that L and D?

Like learning and development? I w. What I was doing, just for context, I was. I was going through your courses, but again, you need time to, like, sit down and do that. I started to find that a little bit difficult. So what I was doing that I found invaluable was listening to the podcast anytime that I could. So I'd be in the car, taking the kids to and from school.

Dishes.

Yeah.

Like, while I was working out. And then I just, like, feverishly take notes. Like, anytime, at literally anytime you had some. A sponsorship like that, you talked about anything that your guests were talking about. Just so that I could get it on my radar and put that. That went in my L and D section of my project management system that I ended up creating. That we can talk about. Yeah.

Can you talk about that before we get too far away from that? What was the prod. How did you manage all of this? Because so much of what we're doing, especially in the early stages, but really it's just, like, ongoing. I'm still doing this perpetually. Every day. I'm probably listening to an hour of, like, audio content in the margins. Right. I'm, like, driving over here to work. I'm doing the dishes at the end of the day, you know, I'm. If I'm working out and it's not like something like a peloton or something like, I'll have a podcast that I'm listening to, just like you taking notes. And then from that, this is the hard part, like, taking action on it. And that's where it's like, it's either your time or your money in order to take action on the thing. So can you talk about what that looked like, the two parts of, like, information gathering? It sounds like it was audio content. Listening to that audio content. And then once you get that, then it's like, what do you actually do with it? And it sounds like you had a system for that.

Yeah. So I just started using, taking. Drawing from my tech experience as a leader, launching other types of businesses. And where I. Where I've always found that you can be really successful is if you're organized. So having more of a project management type of discipline around those. Those activities. So I have used Asana in the past, you know, I think for this, because it was just me. I was looking for something that was super easy to use, and I. I started trying Monday.com. um, so I. I basically put together kind of a project management system for me. So every time I heard a topic, I'd create like, a workspace for learning and development, and I'd put. Put those topics in there. When I. When I would hear things in the courses that I'm taking or on the podcast, I, you know, I. I'd kind of section it all out logically in terms of what I had to execute on. So whether that was for every blog post, you have to make sure it's optimized for SEO. And then breaking that down specifically, what does that mean? I would have all of that documented to make sure that all of the things that needed to be done, like branding beforehand. Okay, what brand? I need to go branding through that exercise. I'd make sure that that was on my radar. And then that way I could prioritize exactly what I'm working on when. And in that initial phase before the launch, really, it's the brand and getting, you know, the website up and running. You know, for me, it was okay to have, like, minimal nav. I. You know, we're, We're. I'm not at the point to have all of these categories and everything like that. Like, really just getting all the recipes done, tested, photographed, which we can talk about later. But all of those steps are literally documented. I can show you after. But I think, you know, that was really, really helpful in making sure that I was successful when we hit launch.

Yeah, it's, uh. I just was doing a version of that this morning, which is like, capture. It's. A lot of it is capturing. And how do you capture. Well, and then once you capture, how do you have a system to then execute? And, you know, there's different versions for me that this looks like. One of them is I, like, if I'm on my phone and I realize that there's something that I need to do, like, maybe there's something off with the site, or maybe I'm like, walking around and I see something that needs to happen, I'll record a video. But then what I do is I actually save it to my desktop. So, like, if you have an iPhone and you have an Apple computer, so iOS macros, you can send files back and forth. And so I'll, like, take a video of a thing that I have realized or like a screenshot of a podcast, at a certain point I'll save it to my desktop and then each day and it probably ends up being every other day from a schedule time point. But I have a routine every morning which is clear my desktop and that's where I go through. And it's either like I create it as a to do for me, like if it's something that I need to do, or send it along to somebody else who will then do that thing. And as much as possible, I'm trying to think about who is somebody else that I can go to to get this thing done. And my job then becomes documenting, capturing, and then, you know, accountability to make sure that thing actually gets done. How are you making a decision on what it is that you're actually doing yourself right now versus sending along to somebody else, knowing that you have this experience, managed team working within a startup. So some of those like management philosophies are probably baked into how you work because you've worked with a team and you've had other people helping you do it. But then also it feels a little bit different now because you're going to be paying somebody if that person is going to be the person who's doing the thing. So talk about the decision making you versus somebody else. How did you navigate that?

Yeah, I started to quickly realize that the blog is obviously like the center of the solar system when I got into this process. And so all of the other things that you learn about syndicating the content and all the other platforms you need to learn about, it started to become really overwhelming to me and I had to make decisions on where I'm going to focus. So if the blog is the center of the universe, I'm going to focus on making that look really, really good and made a decision up front that I'm going to lead with my brand and I'm going to lean into that. So decision number one to outsource was the branding exercise. Like you have to start there because if you do that the right way and there are ways to do this, in my opinion, with my experience in another space with a very big return on investment, in my opinion, a nominal upfront investment for something that will last you a really, really long time. Super prescriptive. Helps you understand how you need to show up everywhere that you are.

Can you talk about what you mean by that?

So I went through a branding exercise with Grace and Vine. I had learned about them on the podcast. When. When you are launching a brand, you want to make sure that you have consistency in terms of like, not only your website but anywhere else you're going to syndicate your content. So you see a lot of people when they're creating content. It's like, I'm going to try this font today and I'm going to try, but it's going to be red today and it's going to be green tomorrow. And like, nothing kind of flows together. When you're in a corporate environment, you operate with brand guidelines. So I'm very used to that and wanted to have that same rigor with myself as I'm representing myself and kind of going into this new world. So I found it extremely helpful because I knew when to use certain fonts, when to use certain colors, how to use them. I had templates built for me for social, you know, so. So once I got all of that, it, it made the trickle down is. Is just hard to kind of put in words because now all of a sudden it all that stuff gets plugged into the Feast plus, like White Glove service product, and you're off to the races instead of kind of spinning your wheels. So to me, where you, you know, you may think you're investing in branding, but you're actually kind of getting an ROI across the board because you're able to reduce your time when you're building the website out, when you're building social content and, and other kind of assets, if you will. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes everything easier, essentially. One of the things I think a lot about is how do you make decisions once, and I feel like branding is a great example of that. How do you make a decision a single time? And in this case, it's like, okay, what, what is branding gonna look like? What are the fonts gonna be? What are the colors gonna be? And even, you know, your example of the social example, where it's like, now I know what things will look like when I post to these different social platforms. So you're not having to think about that or you give it to somebody else. I think this is really key and say, this is how we do it. And then if somebody else comes in, they're not having to relearn. So you're not only are you building something that's helpful for you, but you're also building a playbook for your business. And I think as much as we can be thinking about playbooks, even if it's for ourselves to start, it's super beneficial because then eventually that, that becomes a playbook that somebody else can inherit and they know, right away. Okay. If we post to Instagram, here's what it looks like. So you worked with Grayson vine for that. Can you talk about kind of. It sounds like it was the actual branding which then. So was it like a branding PDF that came out of it? Well, like what was the actual result of that process and maybe talk about how you use that now. Yeah, you shared a little bit with social, but like where else does that show up?

So yes, it's a full brand guideline and I'd say not only just look and feel. So when you think about what you get with the brand guideline, we talked about fonts, colors, logos, a huge library of submarks that we can use everywhere which are like different versions of your logo, which I love because, you know, there's all different areas we're going to show up. Templates for Pinterest ebooks. You get to choose which is nice. So they have like a package and you can choose what. Which a couple of different add on things that, that you may want to use. So that's what that looked like. And then I use that. Sorry. One other thing is also with messaging, they, they kind of helped bring all of that together. I keep refining that. I think early on that's a. Definitely a work in progress. And I feel like I'm getting closer as I'm doing this more to what is authentically me. Like it was a little jumbled. Like from. From my perspective, it was, hey, I'm a working mom. My real life looks like because I love cooking. I do really simple but delicious things during the week for my kids. And I want to show you how to do it all kind of during the week. You can work and you can be a mom and you can still make good food. But on the weekends, I love slowing down and trying things and entertaining. That's like a lot to get out. Right. And it's verbose. And I've kind of landed at this place where I think what I'm bringing to the table is approachable but elevated. So I just continue to, to change that on my own. But they, they do a good job of helping you with the upfront messaging as well. And you make us a pretty small investment and then you use all of those assets one, you use them on the website. So it helped me, the messaging. Right. Helped me build out my About Me page and kind of the sidebar about who I am. I filter that. I took that messaging guide and I fed it to one of my chat GPT agents that we can talk about.

Yeah.

To make sure that it always is using the messaging so that I again show up consistently across platforms, that not just the website, but also when I'm posting on Instagram or Facebook, eventually it'll be Pinterest. I'm trying TikTok, trying it all, but there's only so much time that you can have.

And so when you say messaging, I think this is an important piece of it. It's almost like the voice. What is your voice? What is your, some people even say like niche. Like when people think of you, you know, when people think of whisk and wine, what, what do they think of? That is the logo, the fonts, the colors, the photographs, all the visual things. But it's also the voice, how you write, what you write about, what you talk about, what people understand about you. And all of that wrapped up becomes this overarching thing that we call brand. And you know, it's interesting that you as a new creator, prioritized brand, which I think is really smart, because my guess is it was something you heard coming up recurring in conversations, on podcasts, within interviews. And so if you're going to be starting in, you know, you launched in November 2025, but like, if you're starting in 2026, if everybody's talking about this being an important thing, it's probably good to prioritize that as like an investment that you're making within the business. And the reason is because we need to differentiate ourselves on the web. People need to understand who we are, what we're about, why they will want to follow with us, follow along with us. But then there are ways that you can do that at scale, when you don't have a lot of time and you are trying to figure out, hey, hey, there's all these different platforms, there's all these ways to syndicate. And it sounds like you've leaned heavily into projects in ChatGPT and creating systems around that. So can you talk about the things that you've discovered as a creator kind of in this first year that have helped create some systems and lifted some of the weight off of your shoulders from having to like manually create a bunch of content for all these different platforms?

Yeah. So obviously I've been a consumer of recipes for my entire life, had no clue what went into it, and have this new deep, deep, deep rooted response for everybody who does this.

When you publish a new recipe, what goes into it?

Wow. Crazy, right? So when I started realizing everything that goes into it, forget getting the like website up and infrastructure and all that, but really the Steps for each recipe, which by the way, I also use my project management tool for. To make sure that I have a checklist of every single thing that needs to happen. So it's like a template for each post just so I make sure that I'm not forgetting anything. I think that that's really important. I, you know, and I took a lot of that. I think you guys have something on the site. You know, I just kind of add as there's like sometimes these nitty gritty things that you want to. You want to capture. And I joke, like, if my sales team would have seen that they. They like would. They wouldn't be surprised in the slightest because it's kind of how I would go about a deal review with my team. You can remember everything.

Having the checklist. Yeah, there's a. I think it's Atul Gawande. I don't know if that's how you say his name. Um, and he is a doctor. He has this book, it's maybe a decade old. Um, it's called the Checklist Manifesto. But his whole premise is like, within the world of medicine, all of the issues and errors were reduced the more that it was systematized. And so it's like this. I. It's more than this, but it's like, okay, has everybody washed their hands? Check like stuff like that, you know. Cause then there's like the one guy who's like, oh, shoot, I didn't. I gotta go wash my hands. Like, have all the, you know, medical. Has equipment been cleaned, like, and as much as we can do that in our world as well, I think it lifts some of the burden. You know, even personally, just this morning, one of the things I was doing when I was talking about documenting was like, we have. We're going to have somebody who's helping out in the office. And I've realized all of the things that I keep in my head that could be a checklist that somebody else could take care of. It's like, you know, cleaning the Berkey water filter and refilling it. And it's like there's a thousand things that we're all doing and if we could create checklists from those, and then either we follow those, or like we said before, somebody else eventually follows those, that can be huge. You talked about a resource within Food Blogger Pro for members, which is kind of this checklist that exists as much as possible. If we can take somebody else's checklist and then like you said, augment, shift, adjust. But starting with something that's kind of a baseline. Using that and then finding little steps along the way that we want to add to it can be incredibly valuable. So that lives within Monday for you as well.

Yeah. And I think, you know, it, the, the reason it changes a little bit too is it depends on the decisions you're making on which tech you're adopting, which, which theme you're going with. Right. So there are little nuances that exist with, with each one of those things. And you start to realize that as you're building out the post, there's an order in which you kind of logically have to do everything kind of going down the page. And this is where my brain was like, okay, this is a lot of work. This is crazy. I ha. Not only do I have to do it, do all of this content, edit all these photos, get everything into a recipe card, write document, test all that. Right. I have to think about while I'm writing, making sure that I'm keeping the key phrases in mind in certain places throughout the copy. And so that just kind of sparked a light bulb for me. And I'm like, wait, I've been hearing this thing where you can like build agents to go do these things for you.

I was just gonna ask if you've looked into that because I know you're in the tech world.

Yeah.

And so know that you are on X and in, and in LinkedIn and like in these tech circles. Openclaw specifically, it's gone through a couple different iterations. It was claudebot and then Moltbot and then openclaw. I just ordered a Mac Mini. It's. I got the ups. Like you'd need a signature in order to be here in order to set one of these up. And it's bonkers. It's essentially something that will, you'll be able to task with doing stuff like going into a WordPress post and updating alt text and making sure there's no typos and it's like on a computer and it does it itself. Is that what you're talking about?

No. So where, where I started, I, I, I've learned a lot. So where I started was, okay, how do I just get, how do I create an agent? I looked that up. Very easy. Put it into chat GPT. It'll tell you you can create your own custom GPT. So I started with custom GPTs which are building your own agents. And my first one that I built was to create the blog post. And then I realized, ah, and, and when I say that I'm Going to back up so you understand, like, the actual process and why it's authentic. Because I realized, okay, the input to that has to be all of these things. So I backed up and I built another agent to help me record recipes. And I think this is a big differentiator because when people think about that, I'm not sitting there typing and like, here's all the ingredients and here's the steps. Like, it's not remedial like that. I actually sit in my kitchen when I am testing recipes, have everything, all the steps all set out. What I, you know, and I make sure that I go through that while I am doing the dish, I am orating back and forth with the agent. And I like chat GPT because it's not suggestive. I can say, hi, I am in the. I am going to be cooking this real time. As I do the steps, Please record it. And it becomes very organic because while I am actually doing whatever I'm doing while I'm cooking, the suggestions come out as you're doing it. Why I'm using certain equipment comes out naturally. So that's where I find the authenticity lives. If you're kind of doing it in that conversational motion,

it almost becomes a note taker. Like, yes and yes. And it removes the unnecessary. For some people, they might like the idea of, like, physically writing it down, but if you're not one of those people, you. It removes the unnecessary step of like pausing, writing something down. And I would imagine it feels pretty fluid for you to. So you have like advanced voice turned on within a project or a custom GPT.

I started with custom GPTs and there are limitations. So I will say, like, yes, it's a note taker, but also just write down your recipes too, because I've there. It is not perfect. You've had enough people on the podcast and we've all heard enough podcasts. It isn't perfect. The one that I built, I would then take that recipe and feed it into the blog creation agent, which I would just say, here's all the rules. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I need, I need. Now that you have the recipe, you have my suggestions, my tips, my tricks, what I use build the blog posts and I want to focus, you know, I give it tone. It knows that already. It's. That's loaded in to the, to the instructions, my messaging, how I like to talk, reference the other blogs that we've created, all that lovely stuff. You know, then it would, it would generate that. But it started glitching a lot I'm not, I'm gonna be up front. And it doesn't remember very well things from, from before. So I, I, I found it actually more frustrating and, and I heard you actually talk about, it was like on a road trip and I heard you talking about projects. I'm like, forgot who you were talking to. But I'm like, let me go try that when I get back. And now I use projects and I can provide inside that project. It knows any prompt. So if I say, hey, let's record the recipe, it knows what to ask me. Yeah, that, like, what's it called? What are the steps? And then I'll just be like, hold on, let's do it together. As I'm, as I'm working, make sure you record everything that I'm saying and we capture that. Then it can flow into the rest of the things and it then obviously can help me with content for social. I do, I did outsource that, by the way, because I, I just couldn't learn. I, I did not have the bandwidth to learn another thing. Obviously I'm on Instagram personally, but like building reels and spending the time on that just, I, I don't have time to do it. So I found that that, that's helped. But does that make sense from an AI perspective?

It's great. And I think that one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about and that you referenced is how do you use AI to replace the things that are not important from a human perspective? And in the recipe world, a really great example is like documenting the recipe and potentially offering feedback. And so one of the ways that we do that within Pinch of Yam is we have like a recipe review custom GPT. We've loaded in instructions and we say, hey, whenever we put a recipe in, we want you to look through and make sure that these certain things are true. For instance, if something is mentioned in the ingredients, but it's not mentioned in the instructions, that's probably an issue. And so we want you, we want you to let us know if something is mentioned in the instructions, but there's not a specific amount that should probably be, you know, fixed. If something is mentioned first in the ingredients, but last in the instructions, we should probably adjust that. And so it's not doing the recipe, but it's really quickly taking the things that we otherwise would say are important and reviewing those.

Right.

And letting us know in a really like, quick and easy to comprehend way. Hey, it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Here are the things that you can improve. I think the thing that I we haven't done that is really cool is figuring out how to have this is what I understand you to be doing, like having an agent and it's voice, right? So you turn chatgpt voice on within a project, which is your recipe documentation project. And then do you just have it on for like an hour or are you going over and tapping and so you're in conversation with it where you're saying, okay, now I'm adding three tablespoons of whatever. Yes, and and then it will say back to you, great, I've noted that. And so then after you have this

long, has a really good accent and says, yeah, tell me what's next.

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you know, again I think. Okay, so loading in all my affiliate links. So every time that I, that I add an affiliate link, I'll put it into a spreadsheet. It right now you still have to use spreadsheets. I can't wait to. You can just like add it and it will remember. Um, but right now you have to kind of put things in in documents. All my internal links. Just kind of having that all there because I had this all in other places that I'd have to go, obviously pull from every single time. And again, I just think it is not without glitches but generally speaking having everything show up in the right order chronologically for me so that I can, I can just execute efficiently. I'm. I'm doing all these postings myself. Right. That is not something I am outsourcing. I am definitely thinking about it. But yeah, I just think it's the time savings right at the end of the day so you can tell it to do anything. And the good thing about a project is versus an agent is it can do multiple things. You can prompt it for all of the things I just told you about. So I kind of have abandoned the agents and now custom GPT. Yeah, I abandoned the custom GPT and now I have the project that has a content creation. When I say content creation, it's like, you know, it takes that messaging and it knows what I want to see for social. It knows what I want to see, you know, for other like, you know, the brief, very long brief that I'm going to do for, for this podcast, you know, so, so it, it wears different hats, which is super cool.

Yeah, we have. I don't know how many different projects I have, but it's amazing once you start to get into projects within ChatGPT how quickly you start to see opportunities for them. A couple of them real quick. I've talked about these kind of off and on on the podcast. I have one that's in for insurance and it's like anytime I get an insurance related notice, like I load it in and it knows to like give me a recap because I feel like those insurance PDFs are just like the worst to read. I actually have one for a dog, Sage, who's a senior dog with a bunch of needs and so like all of her vet stuff I load in, you know. Yeah, Goodwill. Yeah, exactly. You remember that episode where like if we do a goodwill donation, we'll load pictures in scans. All of those gives estimate on the cost and kind of similar idea that 10, 80, 10. You take 10% of your time to shape up what you want. You're asking the project to do 80% of the work, but you're not then blindly trusting what it outputs. You're then taking 10% of the time to review it, make sure it makes sense and upload it. I have one that's like file naming. So like if I'm, you know, if there's a file I scan in, I name those in a certain way and I have preferences on where those, how those are stored as documents. And so I just load it in now and it will automatically rename it. I do unfold for macros like everybody and their mom. I'm tracking macros and so I can load in a picture and it knows how to do that and it knows like what my macro goals are for the day. And I'm not like super strict about it, but I want to be aware of it and it's, it's really great and you fine tune it along the way. I think that's the other piece is that is cool.

Yeah.

If you wanted to do something different like you said, hey, I want to add this affiliate link. You add that to the spreadsheet and in that case is it then adding. Let's say if you have a certain tool that you're using, it knows to then link anytime you say spatula to link the spatula or like how do the affiliate links work?

Yeah, it knows like it knows based on what I say I'm using and or in the instructions to pull. I, I'd say I only have like one kind of of each thing right now. I'm sure that will change or some sort of like premium and then like budget type of options for the spatula. Right. So I think the cool thing with projects that is different from agents. If you want to update the instructions to an agent, you have to go into the setup of the agent. With a project. If you start to feel frustrated because something is not working the right way or you want to change the instructions in any way, you can do that right in, in the same dialog box that you're using to ask it questions so you don't have to navigate to a setup screen, it will, it will update its instructions automatically as you go.

Yeah, you can tell it to like remember a certain thing.

Yeah.

You can also go into the actual instructions for the project where you have, you know, specifics and edit things there. But it's getting better and better at long term memory. It's still not perfect. The other Nice thing about projects is then it has historical context as to the conversation that you've had about that subject or about that project within the kind of view in a way that doesn't exist in the same way with custom GPT. So huge learning piece there. And for anybody who wants to go deep on even more kind of agentic work. I've just been starting to get into this open claw thing. Jess, you'd find that super fascinating.

Yeah, I'm very cool.

You could put a pin in that and come back to it because it's AI that not only is giving you back and forth, but then it's actually executing on the thing that you ask it to and you're doing it from, you could do it from like WhatsApp or like messages. You could use message and like chat to it. So it's, it's wild. We're living in the future. As you look forward to the next step here, I know that you kind of have a new work related step that you're taking kind of in the startup world that will take up a lot of your time. What does that look like for you to continue with this while also navigating the world of being a mom, having a career, knowing that it's like it sounds like you're excited about this next career step that you're taking, but you're also excited about this. Obviously parenting is a priority. How does that all fit together when you look at the next year ahead?

I think the key is not putting undue pressure on yourself and letting it kind of all work itself out organically. I cook every day. That's not going to change. I've always cooked every day. So, you know, I gotta do the best that I can to make sure that where, where I have that time that I'm documenting new recipes, I'm, you know, kind of preparing, I'm kind of looking at it like seasons right now, if that makes sense. I spend a lot of time on the social because I believe that that's gonna drive traffic to the site. Obviously there's the Google piece. I do need help with SEO, so and, and will prioritize that. But again that's gonna be something that I outsource. So the, the, the short answer is there's gonna be places where I have to outsource. I'm, I'm behind 25 recipes right now that I need to get on the site that are on my social. I could. At first I didn't like that, like that was a very tough feeling for me. But then I, I like, I take a step back. Like no one's even going to my site yet anyway. It will, it will happen. It will all come together. We will get it up there. But right now I'm just putting the recipes on social in the captions and guess what? I can reuse that content at this time next year. Right. So I'm just trying to, I'm, I work in spurts with, with the social piece. What we do is content days and we go knock out, you know, 15 recipes. It is easy for me. I've been cooking for a long time. There is a lot of work that goes into it. But to, to build and test and document the recipes, content days are easy because you can move organically. I'm just cooking and someone's filming it. What's hard is actually taking photos of every step, getting the blog post up. Right. And you just gotta give yourself a little grace and I'll get there. So I'm, I'm hoping taking that kind of brand first, brand forward approach will eventually pay off. And I'm incentivizing my social media manager to get me brand deals and things like that. And just, you gotta trust that it all comes together, you do the right things. I, and, and it should work out.

Yeah. So much of this, you know, in, when you look at businesses is talked about this before, but like we have this train and we're trying to get the train to move forward on the tracks and we're doing that by shoveling coal into the engine, right? It's like one of those, I don't know how those worked, but you look, see them in cartoons, right, where there's like the person trying to get it to go faster and they're shoveling coal in. And the hard part is that we all start with no fire and we have the train, but there's probably not anything attached to the train. So it's just like the train engine and we're shoveling coal in and it's like not moving. And you can do that for a long time. And then it might move a little bit and you might feel it move like a few inches. And then one day it might actually move like 10ft. And you're like, oh my goodness, all this coal that I've been shoveling in has finally started to light a fire that's hot enough to move this thing. And what we see often when we have a conversation with somebody who's been doing this 10 or 15 years is that they've been shoveling coal every day for A decade. And people look at that and they're like, oh, my goodness, their train, like, not only is moving fast, but it has like 10, you know, what are they called? Train carts? I don't know. I should probably figure it out if I'm using this analogy attached to it. And wow, what a great business. And that must be so nice. It's something that I want to do. And you get in, you start shoveling coal, and you're like, wait, this isn't very fun because it's not moving. And I think your point about continuing to show up and continuing to do that and continuing to learn, which you talked about to learn to document or to capture, and then to execute and repeating that over a decade, what you'll find is that eventually the train engine will start to move. It's probably going to look different than it did for somebody who started 10 years ago and now has picked up momentum because the Internet changes fast. But if you're continuing to learn, you'll eventually get there. And that's what I so appreciate about your story, is that it's very obvious that you've gotten in, you've learned quickly, you've executed, you have a beautiful site because of it. And now it's that showing up and continuing to do it and trusting the process and knowing that if you continue to learn and continue to document, capture and execute, eventually you get to a point where you have some stuff that breaks out and you're like, oh, interesting. Why did that happen? Let's see if I can repeat that. What was good about that? And I know you've even had that with a piece of content that you published within the last couple months that did have some level of virality. You got hundreds of thousands of views. Can you talk about that a little bit and what that was like to experience?

Yeah, I mean, it was. There's no rhyme or reason. Right. So it actually was a latkes recipe around Hanukkah, and I actually did not have any recipe. I invested in grocer's list, but on this one we decided we're not going to use it. And it had no recipe in the caption, but just the production of the actual reel itself got a lot of attention. So that was really cool. Brought me a lot of followers. But it makes you start to think around about the things that, that you test from that perspective. So felt good, but that, you know, and now you're kind of, okay, how do I. How do I get back there? Right? But. But look, I. I kind of just I think the best way to look at this is in phases. You can't learn everything at one time. I still, I still don't know everything I need to know about how to monetize the blog. I, we will get there. I don't know everything about SEO. We'll get there, right? I, I, I, I have full confidence and yes, I'm starting something new and we all have different priorities. One of my, one of the hardest things for me right now is I hate being on camera. I hate it, like, and I know, I know I have to do it, but I shoot in other places in my own kitchen to do content because my kitchen is like kind of dark and it just, every time I'm in it, I'm like, I just don't like the way that this looks or how it's coming out. But I have to imagine that there is a place, there is a corner of the Internet where people want to hear from someone like me, that there I am living real life. Like, I, I wait, I think about my day in a certain way because I have a lot of competing priorities as a mom, as a person who wants to invest in themselves and go to the gym and all of those things. Right. And then put a real meal on the table. I am crazy. I don't do processed foods or anything like that. There are people that probably want to hear that and that you can do that. I, I think you can go too far. You know, maybe people think I'm too crazy, but, but you know, there is a balance and there's a way that you can structure your day. So I have to get more comfortable with that. And I, I, what I did just notice by boosting a post where I was in it and speaking, we got, I think I've almost doubled my followers in a week and I spent $50.

Sure. Yeah. The point being, if you are in the content, the people, it'll be more engaging. Not always, but like usually human forward content, especially in a world where it's going to get easier and easier to create non human AI content and it's going to get hard to distinguish. The more that you can be a recurring theme within your own content, the better. Which is great. Super fun to talk to you. We love having conversations all across the spectrum from people who have been doing this for 15 years to people who have, you know, are a few months into their journey. And what I've found is no matter where people are, we can learn a ton. And that was true for today's interview. So thanks for coming on Jess Whisk and Wine for people who want to follow along and we'll have to have you on again to check in and see how things are going. So thanks for coming on the podcast and being a Food Blogger Pro member as well.

Thank you for having me.

Hey there, this is Emily. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. Since we are kicking off a brand new month, we wanted to let you know what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership this month. If you aren't yet a Food Blogger Pro member, you can head to fubloggerpro.com membership to learn about everything we have in the membership. We like to say that our membership is always changing because every month we are adding new courses, hosting live Q&As and releasing new coaching calls with our members. We are kicking off March by releasing a brand new coaching call on Thursday, March 5th with JC from the Food blog My Protein Pantry. You can watch the video replay or listen to the podcast episode on the live page within the membership. Next up on Thursday, March 12, we'll be releasing a brand new Quick Win All About Pillar and Cluster Building. This Quick Win course will explain everything you need to know about pillar pages and topic clusters on your food blog to help improve your SEO and site navigation. Last up on Thursday, March 26, we'll be hosting a live Q and A with Nisha Vora and her husband Maxwell from Rainbow Plant Life. They'll be answering all of your questions about content creation and strategy on YouTube. It's going to be a really great month. We're really looking forward to it and we hope we'll see you in the membership. Make it a great week.

Sam.