Unlock New Revenue Streams as a Creator Q&A with Ben Jabbawy from Grocers list

All right, we are switching over to live mode. We have some folks trickling in. Ben from Grocer's List is here. Ben, we've talked to you in different contexts. You've also been showing up in more places, right. With like Mediavine and Raptive. You are slowly but surely making your way into the world of food creators. We're glad that you're here. For people who aren't familiar with your story, do you want to give a little bit of a background and then what we'll do is we'll start to jump in to some of the questions that people have submitted or will be submitting for anybody who's tuning in live.

Awesome. Yeah, that sounds good. Excited to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm a bit of a software nerd. I like to build tools for entrepreneurs. I did that for about 10 years in the E commerce space building what looked a lot like a kit or a flow desk for Shopify stores and learned a lot about focusing on one business owner type. And if you can unlock a lot of value for that business owner through software, then you'll probably do okay yourself. And that company did very well, thankfully and then took some time off. We cook a lot at home and was getting all of our my inspiration from social media and just felt like there was a lot of technology around the recipe but it lacked a lot of the modern day conveniences we're all used to from E commerce.

Yeah.

And express checkouts and all these things. So that was kind of the genesis of the concept behind Grocer's List. And then maybe just a quick overview if you're not familiar. Today we are most well known for our comment for DM functionality that helps you drive traffic to your website from your social media presence.

That's great. So an example of that concretely Pinch of Yum has used Grocer's List. We are investors, advisors and users. We're kind of going for the trifecta and fans, the quadra of what you're doing. The reason that we're interested in, reached out to you and said, hey, how can we be more involved is because it's a great tool and because it's specifically for food creators. And I think that anytime that you have deep expertise in a certain area, like for you, software technology, frictionless transactions. You know, in E commerce it's money for product. In our world it's usually like email for information or attention for advertising dollars. Still a transaction there, but you're wanting to make that as seamless as possible. And anytime that you can have like a deep expertise in an area and a very specific focus in a niche, like there's some really cool things that can happen there. And I know you have some things coming down the line that you're working on that are super exciting. Almost like thinking about how do you become a marketing stack for food creators. And so there's some really cool things coming down the line with that. But the DM feature specifically, an example for vintage yam is like, Lindsay created a meal plan for how to get, you know, $100 of ingredients at Trader Joe's for a week of meals. Hey, here's a reel. We're advertising this product. If you want this product, you can just comment. You know, you pick a word, save or meal plan, whatever it might be, and then you get information sent in. Your DM idea being, tell me if this is accurate, how do you reduce as much friction as possible? Because previously what you'd have to say is, you know, maybe you're trying to instruct people to go to a webpage in Instagram. You can't do links really well, so you'd have to say, like, go to my link in my bio and you click on that and you scroll to the one that you'd want to click and click. And so all of this is like, not only how do we become good marketers, that's the job of the content creator, but then how do you use a tool to make it as frictionless as possible to get people to where you are marketing them to? So you talked about E commerce. That's like the checkout process. How do you make that as easy as possible in our world? It's like, how do you make it as easy as possible for people to click on a link or to give you their email address or a lot of other opportunities that might be coming down the line? Anything you'd add to that?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's something like comment 4DM we call these automations. It's purely additive. Right. So if you are already using a link in bio service, great. That's one way. That's one potential way someone can get to your site. Searching Google is another. Commenting the word recipe or save on your reel is yet another. And that's really what it's all about.

Yeah, that's great. Cool. We have some questions that people have wrote in here that we can work through as a reminder for anybody tuning in live. You can go ahead and submit these questions while you are watching live. For anybody who's Watching after the fact. Next time we have one of these, you can submit it ahead of time and get it answered and then watch it after because we know for a lot of people it doesn't work to tune in live for this specific taping. But let's go ahead and work through these. First one is a question around deep link. So we talk about like comment for dm, that's one of the features. But then there's also this thing called deep linking which is related to revenue. It's also related to that like frictionless experience because essentially what you are doing is creating a more frictionless experience for people to have more success checking out. So can you talk about what a deep link is and then how people can use those effectively?

Yeah, I'm not going to bore everyone, but I want to do like 30 seconds on why Instagram makes it hard for you to leave the platform. As a, as a consumer, Instagram makes money when people stay in Instagram and they're engaging in Instagram. And so traditionally, if a Amazon affiliate link is shared inside the Instagram platform, Instagram recognizes that. And inside the Instagram app they open up the Instagram browser to that page in Amazon. And the problem with that is that very few people actually have ever logged into Amazon outside of the app that's on their phone. And so as someone who's maybe occasionally promoting affiliate links on Amazon, if you are doing that, the chances of someone remembering their password logging in inside of Instagram then checking out are pretty slim. And so a deep link is a new version of your Amazon affiliate link that you can create inside of Grocer's List. And when you post that deep link on Instagram instead, once that link is clicked, assuming it's on a mobile device, we will open their Amazon app, we will attach your affiliate ID to that visit and there's a much higher likelihood, about five times more likely that a click to a deep link is going to check out, which means about five times more affiliate sales for you as the creator.

And so you can imagine if you're getting $100 from Instagram related traffic to Amazon just by changing the type of link that you're using, you, you might find that you would now make $400. And the only thing that changes is the type of link that you're using. Because what's happening, like you said, is it's not going to within Instagram and trying to open it where people aren't logged in, but it's hopping them. I almost feel like a hop link is A better way to describe it in this context because you're hopping out of Instagram into the Amazon app as opposed to staying within the app. And so that's something that you can do within grocery stores. Can you talk about, like, what that looks like and how that works?

Yeah. So basically, if you're in the Amazon app and you copy your affiliate link the way you normally would when you go to promote a link, you come into your Grocer's List account and there's an area in your account called Amazon Deep Links. You just paste in your affiliate link and you click Generate. And we takes like less than a second. We give you a new link back with an easy copy button. And that helps you copy the deep link, which you then put in your Instagram story or in your, you know, your email or wherever you're going to put that. And then you'll have some analytics on how each of your links are performing and which has the most clicks and all that stuff. But all the revenue and affiliate sales reporting will show up in your Amazon affiliate account as normal.

Cool, that's great. Here's somebody from that's just starting out. They said, I'm just starting. I've just started blogging in the last year. Is it too soon for me to start using something like Grocer's List? If not, where should I start?

Yeah, so you can think about Grocer's List as a funnel. Right. It's going to. If you, if you set up the basics with Grocer's List, you're going to be in a spot where as you grow your social following, your convenient paths for your audience to get from recipe reels on Instagram or Facebook to your website will be present. And, you know, we have some easy set it and forget it ways to do that. We also have a free plan for people that are under 25,000 followers. We totally get that a lot of people are just starting out. And so you could take advantage of that. You can set up the funnel and then really we'll just do the work for you behind the scenes as you focus on what I would say is the hardest part of this, which is the consistency of creating entertaining, great recipes and putting those on the Internet.

Yeah, I think that under 25,000 mark is so great because if you are just starting out, you have an Instagram account, you have 200 followers. You know, is it worth it to pay for a tool? Maybe not. Is it worth it if it's free? Yeah. It reduces the friction around that decision and Then once you do tip into that point of having 25,000 followers, that's the point where it's like that's a substantial following. And algorithms are such today that, you know, you could have two followers, but you could have a piece of content that reaches millions of people. So there always is that. And it's almost like you want to have those paths in place in case there is this piece of content that goes off. You want to make sure that you capture some of that value. It's one of the things that I heard yesterday. I was actually listening to a podcast. Raptive just started doing a podcast. Paul Bannister is their chief strategy officer. And he was talking about one of the things that's really important today as a creator is to think about not only how do you get somebody to your site, how do you get more traffic, but once you do start to get those eyeballs, once you do start to get that attention, what are you doing to continue that relationship? Really easy example is capturing an email address. And so to have that stuff in place is really smart. So love that you have the free plan for folks who have a. Are kind of in the early stages, are starting to build their account and can people can be sure to check that out. How about this question about like membership or meal plans? And I could weigh in on this too, and I know that you have some related products around meal plans. If you, if you're just starting out with memberships or meal plans, do you have any advice on figuring out what to offer and how much to charge? Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think the way that you should think about whether or not to do meal plans just from one person is really around. Is this something that's going to add more value to your audience? Right. And so for some people, maybe their audience is full of families, parents. Right. And so meal planning is like a hot button in that crowd. Even younger folks, younger demographics that are single. Meal planning. Oh, sorry. Meal prepping is a huge trend right now that I'm seeing, you know, and so I think it's really just about like, okay, if you're already in the habit of posting and publishing recipes, that's great. Meal plans might be a way to take content you've already invested in that's great, and repackage it into something that's more valuable to your consumer, you know.

Yep, that's great.

And if that's the case, then, you know, there's a number of different ways, mediums for delivering that and what's included in a meal Plan, Is it free? Is it just something you do through email? All of these kind of go in line with like, what's the goal? And we've seen a range of things where it's just all you need is an email to get the meal plan and subscribe to the email list all the way up to. I actually have a membership where I charge five bucks or ten bucks a month. And that gets you access to an email to meal plan as well.

Yeah. I like to think in extremes, in scenarios like this, and I think your value point is a really great one, because meal plans, it's like, what is a meal plan? Is it a good one? Is it a bad one? Like, in and of itself, a membership or a meal plan is kind of big gnostic. It's nothing. What really matters is like, what is the value that it brings to the person that you are giving it to or who's buying it. And to think of in extremes, on one end, let's say you had a meal plan, but it was like it went through like a word mumbler. And so all of the words were switched up and like, you sent it to you, you sent you a PDF, but like, you had to match all of like the words were out of place. Okay, how valuable would that be? Not very valuable. That's on the extreme end. It doesn't make any sense. It's complicated. On the other end, you are actually showing up at somebody's house, you're giving them the PDFs and you're. And you're walking them through and saying, like, here's exactly how to follow this meal plan. Whoa, that's super valuable. Also, maybe you have specific dietary considerations. Right? You have meal plans for that. You're an expert on that. Super helpful. Maybe it's generic. Maybe that's. Maybe that's not as helpful. And so there's these spectrums that we need to think about as creators, both from a. From content but also from a product perspective. And the closer that we can get to something that is extremely valuable and is more of. We talk about this idea of vitamins or painkillers, the more it's a painkiller versus a vitamin. Vitamins like, hey, it's kind of nice to have. You should take your multivitamin every morning. But it's like painkiller. It's like if you just had a surgery and you don't have the painkiller, you're probably going to pay a lot for that. We also have that within the world of content and product. And so It's a little bit of a non answer, I think. But your point about value, I think is a really good one where it's like you need to think about how do you create something that is incredibly valuable for the audience that you are serving? And I think the best way to figure out what that is. The first part that they ask, figuring out what to offer, is just to ask, what are your pain points? What are the things that are hard? They talk about this idea of customer development. There's a lot of conversations with people in the audience that you're trying to serve to try and get to understand what is the thing that is most painful. And that could be a survey. It could be Instagram requests to send a message and let you know. Could be a lot of conversations with friends and family. Any other thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think even for some, the idea of creating a survey feels daunting. I don't know how to do it. I've seen a lot of our customers just open up Instagram stories. They have this poll that you can add and. Or even a empty answer box that you can.

That's great.

It's great. You know, but one thing I did want to say is that in the decision of that you have to make as a creator around, should I be offering meal plans for free or as part of a paid program? The one thing I'll say is that whenever I catch up with one of our creators that is doing meal plans inside of their email marketing, like a weekly meal plan.

Yeah.

The feedback that I hear is that it's. It generates the most clicks of any email type that they send.

Yep.

And so you have to think about these decisions together, not in isolation. Right. Because if you are monetizing your site through ads, it might make sense to keep the meal plans free or at least test that through email marketing and see if that engagement holds for your audience. Right. Is that a great way to drive traffic from email? If so, keep it free. If it's just your most loyal people that are asking for these and your audience all replied, no, they don't want that, then maybe it's a paid thing, you know, that's just for your VIPs.

Yeah, that's great. And I think some of that stuff you'll develop as a creator, a little bit of intuition around it. It's hard when you're first getting started to know, but the more that you do this type of work, the more that you experiment with it. Maybe you launch a product, it doesn't work, and then you're like, okay, why didn't that work? Or you launch it. And it does work. You'll develop some intuition around it, which is great. Yeah. Cool. Maybe you can. I think you hit this a little bit. This should be a quick one. Can you explain the difference between an affiliate link and a deep link?

Sure. So I think the only place this really matters is inside of Instagram or Facebook. A normal Amazon affiliate link will open up inside of the Instagram browser, trying to keep that person inside of Instagram. The problem with that is they're not logged into their Amazon account. A deep link is just a different variation of a affiliate link. So you're still getting credit for it. But it's a technology that actually once clicked inside of Instagram, has the ability to hop them from Instagram or Facebook directly into their Amazon app on their phone where they're already logged in with their address saved and one click checkout that we all love on Amazon. So it's just a slight nuance, but they're both affiliate links. A deep link will convert better because it's more convenient to the person clicking on it.

And that's why, you know, an important differentiator I think for people is like it's not as important to use a deep link on your website because usually people are on their desktop, they're on their phone, they're within Safari. The one example of when it would be beneficial is like let's say somebody's looking at a link in Instagram for one of your recipes. They click on that, it opens in Instagram, your website, and then maybe on that page you have an affiliate link that would be a use case of like when you'd want that deep link would be on your website. Like if somebody is experiencing your website from within the Instagram browser. But if somebody's just using Safari or if they're using Chrome, chances are they're also be logged in on Amazon. You know, it'll. It'll help them out. Do you know? Well, I'll, I'll backtrack a little bit because I know that's true for desktop. Is that as predictable on like a mobile Safari or mobile Chrome that it will, that it will predictably jump them out of Safari or Chrome on mobile.

So this all literally just changed, I would say with two months ago iOS. Yeah. The new iOS Safari plays nicely. Google Chrome plays nicely with traditional affiliate links now. So if you just do your normal thing on your blog post, let's say you put a normal affiliate link.

Yep.

As long as the person Clicking it is on the latest iOS.

Okay, sure.

IPhone. It will open in the Amazon app.

Yep, yep. So, but that's only if they're on the newest version of.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah, got it. Okay, that's helpful.

So it may change inside of Instagram too, but I think the incentives are misaligned there.

Yeah, that makes sense. Can you talk a little bit about TikTok? Stephanie's asking, will this feature be able to be used on other platforms like TikTok?

Yeah. So we are in communication with TikTok. It is a different type of company to work with. I'll say. I'll leave it at that.

And going through a lot of changes soon.

Going through a lot of changes. So it's all subject to change. That is the number one most requested feature of all our customers. I will say that we have made some Progress with the TikTok team and they are not putting out dates, but let's just say I'm very hopeful that in 2026 we will hopefully be able to launch that.

Cool. Great. We'll stay tuned for that. Here is this is from Anna. She's a grocery list user. She's been using it for a month, seen amazing benefits, props out. Will you go over today the best way to set up groceries list to get the most from it? Do you have influencers that set up the list of keywords in a spreadsheet for stories? Can we use the keywords more than once? For instance, I shared a brownie link and in two weeks might want to share the same brownie link. Does it all have to be set up again or can I use just the word? Do you find it's best to let stories expire for an hour and then ask for a reply with a word? So a few different questions within there. I don't know if you found the submission there to kind of work through.

It, but any thoughts on those first, Anna, thank you. Glad to hear it's going well. Welcome to Grocer's List. You should reach out to the live chat and support. We're happy to schedule an onboarding call by the way, and walk you through these, but I think they're good questions so I'll address them for everyone. There's a few different ways to use Grocer's List. I think we'll say like, you know, pretend it's college level 101, which we recommend for everyone is add a few words to what we call comment for DM on your posts and your reels. These could be things like save or Recipe or send recipe. And once those are in place, when someone goes to comment on your in feed posts or reels, they'll receive a DM from you with a link to that recipe. And that's just probably the most basic way to use us. It's going to help you grow traffic, all of that. What Anna's mentioning as well is what we call the story reply. And so when you go to set up a story, you can create one of these automations so that if someone replies to your story with the word brownie, let's say, then they'll get a DM back from your account with a link and a picture of that brownie. This is actually our fastest growing feature. It's usually what I would call like level 201 with grocer's list, because it does, you have to like log in and set it up and then you have to create a story on Instagram to go with it. But what I will say is that Instagram loves this because like I was saying, they want to keep people in the platform. And so when your story that you post that story frame doesn't include a link and it gets a lot of replies from your audience, they say, oh wow, this is a really highly engaged story from this creator. Let me show it to a higher percentage of the audience. So that's what this is actually our fastest growing feature. And back to Anna, your question. Once you set it up for that brownie recipe, it's just there for you. So if in two weeks you want to promote that recipe and your stories again, you don't have to log in to set anything up. You, you could just create a story with a picture or a video of you making the brownies, whatever, and just say, hey, reply brownie. And that whole thing will be ready for you again.

And interesting little tidbit that you alluded to that I think is worth pointing out. There is maybe a little bit of a growth strategy there because what you're saying is algorithmically, the belief is that if Instagram sees a lot of replies on a story that's a highly engaged piece of content, therefore the likelihood that Instagram will show that story is going to be higher. And so it's one of the things that you can do as a creator to potentially increase the visibility of a story is to have some type of, you know, comment or reply mechanism built in. Because then Instagram will look at it and be like, oh, this is highly engaged. I'll show it to more people. The more people they show it to the more people engage with it, if it's a compelling piece of content that they'll get. Is that what you're getting at with that?

Exactly. Yeah. We have this one customer that I'll mention because it blows my mind every time I talk to her. Sammy Montgome. She's one of our larger creators on the platform. She has had more success driving traffic and capturing emails through story replies than through her in feed posts and reels. So every Sunday she has like five or six recipes that she's gonna cook for her family from herself that week, and she has story replies for those. And so every Sunday it's like, oh, you know, she's driving a ton of traffic just through this simple mechanism that she, you know, she sets up a bunch of. And then they're there for her forever whenever she wants to pull from them and use them.

That's great. Awesome. There's a question here. I'm going to delete this one. Sharon is asking, how do you create deep links? Talked about that a little bit before. So, Sharon, you can go back and look at that. Essentially you are just taking the affiliate link, going into grocer's list or other deep linking tool, dropping that in, and it's almost like a bitly link kind of where it creates a new version of it, but that new version has technology built into it to hop people out of the app. So covered that before. I also feel like we should cover this just to be clear. Somebody's asking, what is a grocer's list? It is the product and the company that Ben started.

Yeah. It's a software platform built for food creators to make it easy to do all the things we're talking about, but mostly just drive traffic to your website from your recipe reels.

We're covering the basics. Good. To do that. This question is just kind of around, like getting a sense for if people are ready to pay for things. So somebody's asking, how can I determine if my audience is ready for a paid membership? Do you have any thoughts on that?

That's a really, really good one. So actually, if it's okay with you, Bjork, I'll share. We are launching a paid membership option that lives within your WordPress site. And we are in beta with that right now with our first handful of creators. And that rather than like going to a substack and pushing your audience somewhere else, this was another one of our top requested features. These creators wanted to do it on top of their existing content.

Yep.

The. The, the primary use case that Kind of got this on our radar was a bunch of our creators have been telling us that the number one thing they hear from their audience in terms of like support is they, they want an ad free experience for the people that come and cook a lot of your stuff.

Yep.

So if you are hearing from your customer base, sometimes that people are like, hey, these ads are annoying. Is there an ad free offering that could just be an early signal that not all of your customers. Right. Most of them are going to be there for free and stay there for free, and that's why you have ads. But maybe there is a sub segment of your most loyal people that would be willing to pay a few bucks a month or 50 bucks a year because they come back and cook for the holidays and cook a couple recipes each month from you. So if you're starting to hear some of those questions, that's a good signal. The other thing I would do is kind of like we were saying earlier, I would just run an experiment. Try making a meal plan. Try including that in your weekly newsletter or your monthly newsletter. See what the engagement looks like. If the engagement's really strong. Most email platforms show you whether you're using Kit or Flodesk or mailchimp or whatever, it'll show you who clicked. You could email that group of people and say, hey, I saw you clicked on the meal plan. Did you get value out of it? Any, any suggestions on how to improve it? Is this something you would pay for? You know, I find that when creators go to Instagram Stories and they say, hey, I'm thinking about doing a paid membership, usually they just get slammed with negativity from people who want content for free. Yeah. Who wouldn't be the ones that are going to pay for it? You know, so you got to just like find the people that are engaged and ask them for input.

Yep. One of the things that we did way back when we launched Food Blogger Pro as a membership was we pre sold to get a sense for like, are people willing to actually pay for this? And so it was like a discounted one year membership. I don't remember how much it ended up being, I don't know, $20,000 or something. But it was enough for us to know, okay, we can kind of pay for this to be developed to create the initial content. You know, if we would have had $500, we would have been like, oh, shoot, like there's probably not enough interest here based on what we thought would be cool. But like, obviously people aren't interested in it or we don't have enough people. Probably would have just refunded people their money. Not done it obviously a little bit more complicated to do a less complicated version of that would be asking people to sign up for an email list. Hey, if you're interested in this, join the waitlist. We're going to have some information on when this will launch in a little bit, so a few other ideas there you can think about.

One other thing I just want to add to that too, that comes back to Grocer's List. A big part of the why behind our company is as a entrepreneur, I don't believe you should have to pay thousands of dollars to a developer to custom build stuff for you before you have feedback.

Right.

And so, you know, part of I think what we can bring to the table is like if you're curious about memberships, you could deploy this on your website in minutes without even being a paying customer of Grocer's List. You could see if people are willing to go ad free for 5 bucks or 50 bucks for the year, something and just learn, you know, like, I think that's part of the beauty of where we are with all technology these days is, you know, it can.

Short feedback loop.

Exactly.

Yeah. That's great. Is that you said it's in beta. Any ideas when that will be out of beta, like folks?

Okay, yeah, we'll do some big announcements around that and we're happy to help, you know, talk through it, answer questions, all that stuff.

Breaking news on the Food Blogger Pro Live. Q and A.

Exactly. Exactly.

That's great. Colton is asking, this is kind of a cool one. What is the lowest hanging fruit for someone just getting started but buying an existing blog that has been operating for 12 years, 99% ad revenue driven currently, and looking to diversify this. So that's kind of cool. You know, we're at the point now where there is a marketplace for these sites and you see people selling a site that they've built and have had a lot of success with, but also seeing people buy sites and coming into it being really excited to build and grow a thing. So any thoughts for Colton? You buy a business and you immediately want to think about how can we increase revenue and maybe look at opportunities in other places.

Yeah, I think two things. One though, I'm curious, is there actually a marketplace for food blogs specifically or not? It's just starting.

Yeah. Not for food sites, but Quiet Light brokerage FE International. Yep, I have their. Chelsea, who we've interviewed on the podcast, had a marketplace for blogs I don't remember what that's called. So not specific for food sites, but marketplaces for online businesses. And then a few of those brokers are. Have like a. Have become like the go to for food sites, so. But not like a specific food site one.

Cool. Well, yeah, I mean, Colton, I think you're. You should really be asking this to Bjork more than me. I'll give you a quick, quick take and then I would love to hear your take, Bjork. Yeah, What I would do first is I would look at the Google Analytics of the site. If 99% of the revenue is ad revenue, that's. That's okay. Yeah. I would just want to understand where is that traffic coming from? Is it social? Is it Google? Is it Pinterest? And then, you know, like, if it's social and there's no DM automations, okay, let's get a funnel set up. If it's Pinterest and no one's pinning new, new stuff. Okay, let's spend time weekly just getting consistent with how to pin and maybe that traffic can grow. So I don't think I believe in diversification, but I also think first just start with a layout of the land and see if there's ways to grow what's already working. And then sure, yeah, there's affiliate, there's email marketing, that'll become important. But I would just start there, to be honest.

That's great. Super insightful. General. Same advice would be instead of first starting to look at diversifying revenue, like, I don't think there's much risk in ad revenue suddenly falling off over the next three to five years. I do think that there is risk with traffic falling off and especially if your traffic is siloed to either one main referrer like Google or Pinterest, it's probably primarily Google, my guess is. And direct. And then thinking about not, you know. Well, the second piece would be also looking at diversification of the pages that are actually getting traffic. Because what can happen sometimes is, you know, you have a site that does really well, but it's because 5% of the content is getting 95% of the traffic. And so looking to diversify not only where traffic is coming from, but also to which pieces of content in order to. That would be the thing that I would be mitigating risk against the most. And then you can look at saying, okay, how can I be creating additional sources of revenue? Of which I think the first thing, the easiest thing to look at is affiliate. The hard thing in an acquired site is that I think the easiest way to do affiliate within the context of food is actually if you are like a personality driven food site. And like for Pinch of Yum, our strongest affiliate stuff, like just today I had a conversation with like a beauty brand and it's because they noticed how much sales Lindsay was able to drive to, to like a skincare routine company completely unrelated to food. And so our most successful affiliate stuff is actually like, you know, it's non food content. So my, my quick take would be similar to yours, Ben, which is I'm not too scared about the fact that the majority of the revenue would be from ads. I would be scared if the vast majority is, you know, 90% is from search and 80% of that search is to four pieces of content. That's where I think the risk primarily is from a, from a like traffic and ad perspective. So that's how I would view it. We'll rip through a few other ones here. How do you balance trying to grow your audience while also focusing on making money from things like affiliates and, and memberships? So any thoughts on your end with this one?

Yeah, I think affiliates and memberships will only work after building trust with your audience. I think that's an important thing. I think the idea of someone just posting affiliate links on social media and earning money off of that, I think that that might work maybe in other industries. I think here it's really about, you know, have you been building trust with your audience through your recipe content for years? Are people back weekly or daily? If you're posting on social and if so, one way to separate affiliate from your normal content would be, and this is what we see very typically is your feed, your reels, your static posts, your carousel posts, those are focused on your recipe content. Your stories are a bit more of a personal view into your life. And that's where we see a lot of our creators surprising themselves with how much they're making by posting the shorts that they're wearing. Like you were saying, Bjork, the makeup that Lindsey puts on or whatever that was. And just like anything else, the beauty of stories is that they're transient and easy to post. And that means it's easy to test content. Right. And so affiliates is something you have to be careful with. But you know, once you have built trust in your feed with your audience, if you find people are actually looking at your stories, that's a great place to be trying new things around. Affiliate.

Yeah, I think of it, I think the skill that you are developing, sometimes we think of it as different. And people are like, oh, I hate marketing and I don't want to market a thing and I feel like I'm pushing a product. But really, even if you are just producing content and there is no transactional, you're buying a thing, you are still needing to market it. We are in a season of content creation where if you are just producing content and the hope is to monetize via ads or maybe you partner with a brand, you are marketing this in our case recipe as the best recipe that you can get. Here's why it's awesome. You need to think about problem solution. I think my encouragement to whoever it was that wrote this in is it's kind of the same skill set that you're developing, which is, here's a cool thing, here's why it's helpful, here's why you should use it. It's just the exchange is different. Sometimes it might be buying a thing, other times it might be buying the ingredients and spending your time in order to make the recipe. But you still need to convince people that it's worth it. So I think a huge part of it is just thinking of it as the same thing, but just the transaction that's happening is a little bit different. And I think it's less of when do I do this and when do I not do it? And more of developing the skill as you get into it and getting better at it over time and practice. Like a lot of it is just reps and getting better and better through repetition.

If you're looking for an example of someone that does really well with affiliate, I highly recommend checking out Katherine from Welicious, I think. And she's a food blogger, right? So you'll notice her feed is mostly recipes but her stories. She does an amazing job selling the products that she actually loves. Some of those are food related, some of them are clothing, some of them are not food related on Amazon. But it's just the way that she sells it. You know, she's not selling it like a brand partnership through an ad. She's just saying like, oh yeah, here's how I clean my cast iron iron pan. This is the brush scrubber that I use. She knows that people reply to that story asking for the link. Then she posts a screenshot of people asking for the link. If you want it, here's the link. You know, it's like, it's very authentic. And I find that when I see creators taking a little bit of extra time on affiliate, that's when they do really well yeah.

And we were just out in New York. We did this thing with Raptive where we spoke with brands who were in attendance. They were talking about brand partnerships and they were talking about how do you continue to create and scale while also doing brand partnerships or affiliate. That doesn't feel like you lose trust. And so I think a huge part of it is like, how do you create that where it's additive, people are interested in it, it's helpful, they want that information. And I think the examples you gave are great, where it's like you're using a tool, you know people are going to ask about it. You show a screenshot of somebody asking for it, which is kind of this, like social proof. You're answering a question. You're not pushing something on somebody. That's great. So we'll link to her account as well. How about you had mentioned, you know, a membership on your site that's coming down the line. Pros and cons of doing that versus something like a substack. Yeah.

I have to be a little bit careful here because I am supportive of anything a business owner can do to monetize. The one thing I would say is if you're already on Substack, great, keep doing it if it's working for you. The thing that bothers me about Substack is that your business is about building your community and your audience. Right. And so when you launch on Substack, what you're doing is you're taking your audience and you're pushing it into substack. And so yes, these are your email addresses per se, but you could export.

Them if you wanted to.

You could, but you can't export the memberships if they're paying for you through Substack.

Yeah, just the email addresses. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I think it's. So we all know how hard it is to build an audience. And so my take is, if you're going to do that, one, it should be on your website, which is like the anchor of your business in this, in this business model. And two, you need to own that entire experience end to end.

And is that with Groceries List? Would it run through Stripe, like an owned Stripe account?

Exactly. So we, I mean, you're onboarding through your Grocer's List account, but it's actually powered by Stripe. And so, you know, if whatever happens in the future, you have your own login to Stripe, you're getting paid, you're seeing all the customers, and then we're. We're making life easy for you. That's part of what our job is by syncing that data to Kit or Flodesk or whatever. But the other important thing is a lot of what we hear from creators in the food space is that it takes a lot to get content live. And so they don't want to also start creating content somewhere else to have some content on their site and other content somewhere else. So I think that was why we started seeing a lot of demand for memberships that live within your existing WordPress site.

Yeah, like it's a difference of creating a new thing versus layering onto a thing that already exists.

Exactly.

Owning the like that recurring membership piece is a huge part of it. I would say pros and cons for substack, it's both a pro and a con. Like a pro would be you are getting some network effect. So you're entering into a network where there's pre existing creators. There's also a con in that. Substack's goal is to increase the value of substack which means not just increase the value of your account which is part of it additive, but if the network effect for them is also beneficial because then if you bring people over they might be able to then market to other accounts to get signups. And so a lot of considerations with it. But I think if I were to say just from a creative perspective, the number one benefit of building on your own site is the layering effect where you go through all the effort of creating a content. You have the system, you have the process. And if you can be then smart about saying okay, I want to advertise in these places, in this case like around an ad free experience. What is the extra effort with that considering what you're already doing very low now there might be some opportunities and I don't know if you'd want to speak to this to then also say hey, maybe you have some premium content that's gated or you have a certain area of your site where you're able to interact in a different way. All of that continues to be additive. But the thing that's so great about it is all of it is people coming back to your site which is the main hub. The other thing that I'd be interested in on your end is just like the idea of having some of that first party data, people logging in information around those people if they continued to be operating in an ad based environment. So maybe there's a membership where they're not paying for it, but they have somehow logged in and then you have that first Party data. Is that something that you're looking at as well?

Absolutely. Of the folks that are already in beta, the number one feature request is a free tier of the membership for a lot of the reasons that you're thinking about. To capture the email, to have that data, to maybe pass, you know, like the value of an email address. I know specifically for raptive, there's a lot of benefits to that. So I definitely think that's a direction we're headed in.

Well, we have four minutes left. This is somebody that's asking, assuming you'll be sending out summarized notes, post Q and A. So we work on that and we have that. That within kind of the resources section of the Q and A after. So the answer to that is yes. So maybe, you know, this person is asking, can you share some tips for creating a meal plan or membership that keeps people coming back? Can you talk a little bit about, you know, your expertise is within the Grocer's List product. Like how do you easily kind of create that? What will that experience be like to actually go through the process of implementing the membership component and then maybe, you know, would meal plans be a part of that? So just talk about that a little bit if you could.

Sure. I'll speak to the how it works and what's important. Then I want to maybe link to actually a pinch of yum example. That is killer. So inside your account with Grocer's List, we have an area where you can create a meal plan. The things that matter to the follower or your subscriber around meal plans are referencing the recipes, right? The visual, the title, easily having the link back to the recipe for when they want to cook the full thing as well as the shopping list. Right. We think a shopping list, a lot of people go shop in store. I do so making it easy, organizing it by aisle. Like those are things that really help a meal plan. The other is if they are an online grocery person, Instacart, Amazon Fresh, whatever. We will provide links. So you simply paste in three or five or eight of your recipes that you want included in this meal plan. You title it and then we do the work of kind of de duplicating the ingredient list, organizing it by aisle, making it a visual list as well as providing the online checkout links. And we have a PDF that will spit out of that, that if you want to customize how it looks, you can move that into canva and stylize it. So that's something that you can do inside of Grocer's List. If you want to know the most successful post to ever flow through the Grocer's List system, Lindsey from Pinterev. Yum. Did a seven day Trader Joe's. I think it was called Meal Plan.

Yeah.

And she didn't use our meal plans feature for this. That's. She just wanted to do it herself. Lindsay and Jenna made this like awesome printable sheet that included all the ingredients. A day by day thing. And it was just a single page. It wasn't overkill. And it was all from Trader Joe's.

Right.

So it was like. I think it's a really great inspirational example of what a meal plan can be.

Yeah, that's great. We can link to that in the notes. And then somebody just asked as well, the link to Grocer's List. So we can. Emily can drop that in. It's just grocerslist.com if people want to check that out. You mentioned this onboarding calls. Can you talk a little bit about if people like, what does that look like? Post signing up in order for people to have the most success. And then we can let you go because I know you got another call.

Yeah. So we do a few things. We're all about education. That's a big part of who we are and support. So every two weeks, if you go to grocerslist.com, which I see Emily just linked. Thank you. There's a spot at the top that says webinar. We run that every two weeks. It's more like in office hours. We walk through setting up the account. Some of the more advanced features. Plenty of time for questions from whoever shows up live. You could certainly do that. Inside every account, whether you're free or paid, we have a live chat experience that is a member of the team. And then for anyone who's on a paid plan, we actually let you schedule calls with. It would be myself or Juliana or Evelyn on my team where we actually can help you get set up specific to how you want and stuff like that.

That's great. That in and of itself is like such a valuable thing, like to be able to have a conversation with somebody who's seen a lot of what's working within the tool. You know, success that people have had and being able to like not only help you get set up, but also point you in the right direction. I know you actually have one of those calls at the top of the hour, so I'll let you go here. For anybody tuning in live, thanks for joining live. It's always fun to have some people listening in live on these. And for anybody who's watching after the fact, thanks for tuning in or people who submitted questions ahead of time. Really appreciate it. And Ben, thanks for your time. Always. I learn a lot in having conversations with you, and I know others do as well.

Thanks so much for having me and.

Thea and Grace all dropping in some thank yous as we close out here. And thanks to Emily for helping these to run smoothly and providing links and stuff as well. So we'll catch everybody around. Ben, thanks for being a part of this and we'll be in touch.

All right, take care. Thanks.