Yum Goggle - Community Education Hangout

I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and tonight we're here with YumGoggle, and we're doing a community education event, and we're going to talk about this new food porn site and how you can use it, and how you can use it to help build your following and help get yourself some more hits and some more notice out there and become a little more active with your posts. So I'm going to introduce everyone right now, and to my to my left, so whichever side she's on, is Anita, and Anita runs Yumgoggle. To my other side, we have Calamity Kelly, and we have Susan Palmer, and they are both users of Yumgoggle. They're going to talk about their experiences and what they can— how they see it going and how they've used it. So right now, I'm going to turn everything over to Anita, and before I do that though, guys, if you have questions put them in the comment bar underneath the screen and we'll get to your questions. Alright, so Anita, it's all yours.

Okay, well, thank you. First of all, thank you, Dennis Littley, for putting this together. This is my very first Google Hangout and it's very exciting. This is a lot of fun. I wanted to have an opportunity to introduce YumGoggle to the community and to talk about what it is. As you said, it's a, it's a food porn site, which is how we know them. Meaning a food photo sharing site. And our users upload photos of food they've cooked, we publish it, we publicize it. But I wanted to talk about kind of what might be different about this one than the ones that we know pretty well. The woman who started this one didn't have it for long and was kind of making a life change and put it up for sale, and I saw an opportunity. I am a foodie. I'm a food blogger. For those people who might not know me, my blog is Hungry Couple. I have lived within the blogging community and in all the blogging networks. I know the problems and the frustrations of food bloggers when it comes to photo sites. I know we've all gotten composition rejections and a lot of inattention and feeling that we don't have any power over what we submitted, who looks at it. And I thought it might be different if a site like that was run by someone who is a cook and is a food blogger and does understand. And what my philosophy of what should be published wasn't necessarily what was the philosophy of some of the other sites. To me, I think about it from the perspective of someone who might not be a food blogger, who's just coming to the site to look at the pretty pictures of food and decide if they want to click on the recipes. And to me it's about whether the food looks good and if it's tasty looking, not about whether the props are nice or it's perfectly composed or good enough to be run in a magazine. It's about the food and about whether it looks like something you want to eat and something that you want to get the recipe for. So that's kind of where the site is different maybe from some of the others. And I just got through with a pretty big site redesign. When I got it, it was a little bit of a mess, and I think not terribly user-friendly and not very contemporary looking. So I worked with a wonderful designer to try to make it easy to use, easy to navigate, easy to submit. And the reason I've invited these two lovely ladies, Kelly and Susan, both of whom are food bloggers themselves, because they use the site a lot, and I was hoping that they could talk a little bit about ease of use and what it's like being on the site and using it. And I was hoping that Susan could kind of talk to that a little bit.

Certainly. You know, I was looking back today, I think I've been on Yumgoggle for a year now. I think that's right, Anita. I'm not sure. I was trying to look back to my old posts.

I've lost track.

Yeah, I know. But I was on it before I even realized Anita was the woman behind it. So I was really surprised when I And it's just, it's so easy to just submit your photos and, you know, you do your title, your description, you link your URL, you upload your photo. Anita does it, prefers it the 500 by 500, which is great because that's how I size it for all the photo sites. So it's no, you know, having to resize it kind of funky like that. Then before you know it, it's up on the site. What's really great is that she shares it everywhere. It's on Google+, it's on Pinterest, it's getting tweeted out on Twitter. It's just extra exposure for you that you're not getting from the other food porn sites. It's a great feeling to know that, you know, this site is there and caring about everything that you're doing. And just, you know, you're looking through it and it's just all different types of photos. It's not one style, it's everyone's different style that you get to see.

It's true. It's really, when I'm looking at the food, it's not about what my taste is or what I like to eat, it's just about whether it looks good. And one funny thing I was going to share is when I was working with the site designer, she had told me right at the beginning that she's not much of a cook. She would much would much rather sit at her computer and write code than to be in her kitchen. And after a few weeks of working on the site, she was emailing me in the evening telling me what recipe she just tried from the site because she just couldn't stand looking at them all day. She had to try something. You talked about sharing, Susan, and Again, I'm coming at it from the perspective of a food blogger and what I would hope to see. I think with the other sites, and I submit to the other sites too, sometimes I feel like you submit into a void and you either get a rejection or an acceptance and that's the last you hear of it. I consider myself part of this community and that means that I engage and I comment and I I share and I pin. I wanted it to be not anonymous, which is why I announced myself after the site was done and said that it is me. Because I want to talk to you. I don't want to be a faceless person approving or rejecting your photos. It's somebody that's talking to you that understands your frustration. I'm in my kitchen cooking. I'm at my photo table trying to take pictures. I get it. I'm one of you.

Oh yeah, and I think that's a great thing. You know, I mean, even before we knew it was you, I just really liked using the site. It was just easy to use and it was— I would go through phases where I really wasn't submitting the things because I didn't think, you know, I would only submit if I thought the pictures were good enough quality, and even then they would get rejected most of the time. But I need to just get into the habit. Even for those photos, just to go to Yumgogo and just do it because it takes a minute at most. It does not take a long time. For everyone that thinks it takes a long time to submit to the photo sites, it really doesn't. Once you size your photo, you just go on, you do it. I mean, you know, when I go through all the sites, I'm done in 5 minutes. And I mean, that's just the ease of the site once you get into the routine, you know, it's really It's simple, and Yumgoggle should always be in that routine, in my opinion. I'm not just saying that because I'm your friend.

You talked about the size, Susan, and that's the other thing is that we're not married to one particular size like 275 by 275. Because I think I do it the way probably most bloggers do it, which is after I'm done, I size to 500 by 500.. And from there I upload to my blog, I upload to sites. So it's set up that you can do 500 by 500, you can do 250 by 250. It makes it easy to use.

Yes, absolutely, I would agree to that.

Anita, what kind of images— you talked about taking things, and I'm sure you do reject some images. What are the images you do reject? What are we looking for?

Okay, what I'm looking at when I'm looking at your photos are, first of all, I'm looking to see if you've made a mistake. The, the link has to track back to the actual recipe for the photograph that you submitted, and it has to be yours, needless to say. I'm going to reject if, let's say, you are making a dip, a tomato-based dip, and you're showing me a photo of a tomato. I'm going to tell you to give me a photo of the dip. Because in order for people to want to click on it and see the recipe, they're going to want to see what the dish looks like, not what an ingredient looks like. I might also reject it if it's really terrible, if it's so close up and so blurred and taken with such a harsh flash that there's no way to actually tell what the food is. I might send you a rejection, but most of the time when I'm rejecting, it's for a mistake. Somebody forgot the link, or it's an incorrect link or it doesn't match the photo. When I do reject it, you're never going to see composition rejections from me. You're never going to see any boilerplate rejection. I'm going to tell you why and I'm going to tell you to resubmit it. There's no stigma. There's no, "Oh, I don't want to see, I don't want to hear from you again." I want you to fix the problem and give me a new photo. I want your photos on the site. Even though I'm not necessarily looking for the most perfectly composed, beautiful glamour shots, when I look at the site and all the photos that are on the front page, I think they look great. I think the site looks beautiful. I'm proud of all the photos, even if individually they're not technically perfect.

That's good to know. Another question for you on submitting them. I know you said the sizes aren't really a big deal to you.— and you're not getting hung up on that, so that makes it easier to do. When you're submitting them then, I mean, you are still talking squares, we're not taking horizontal shots, right?

The actual technical size is that— the way the site is laid out, it's 275 by 300 if you want a perfect match. If you look at them, they do look just a tiny bit horizontal, but the squares also fit perfectly, so there's actually a lot of flexibility. In photos that you can upload.

Well, it must take you a long time going through these each day. You've got to be dedicating quite a bit of time to this.

I do, I definitely do. I try to schedule my day to work between Young Goggle and Hungry Couple and cooking and keeping a household and dealing with an enthusiastic dog who's running under my feet right now. What I do try to do is schedule my approvals for 4 or 5 times a day. I think, again, knowing how food bloggers think, one of the frustrations that I think we all have with some of the larger sites is that you get an acceptance and you're immediately on page 5. And I wanted to be able to give everybody a chance to be on the front page at least for a little while. So I'll go in and do approvals pretty much at set times throughout the day.. But I try to leave at least a 2 or 3 hour window. So I'll go ahead and turn the front page and then leave it for a couple of hours and then come back and do it again. So you won't be on the front page all day because we're getting quite busy, but you will have some time on the front page. You won't think, oh, I got accepted, and then look and you can't even find your photo.

Yeah, that happens all too often. I don't even submit to the other sites anymore. It just didn't seem like the traffic was worth it. And now speaking of traffic, Adam Holland had a question. He wanted— can someone address traffic compared with the big 3? What kind of numbers are we seeing that people are using it?

We are obviously in growth mode. From the time that I got it and redesigned it, it's still kind of in startup mode. I always submit my own photos to it, partly as a test to see the traffic, and I am definitely seeing traffic coming through from YumGoggle. Are we anywhere in comparison to the big three? No, of course not. But my hope for the site is that we can be the blogger-friendly site and that we can all work together with it. So what comes to mind is almost like an employee-owned company. I want the other bloggers to think of it as their site, as someplace where they have a voice, someplace where they have some control, someplace where they can talk to the owner. I'm here, I'm cooking and I answer emails and I'm available. And if we all work together and we all submit and we all share and pin, then I'm hoping that we can build a lot of traffic for each other. And then maybe we won't even care about the other big 3 anymore.

I tell you, I really don't pay much attention to them anymore. It just really wasn't worth the time and effort for me. I mean, the constant rejection does nothing for your self-esteem too.

I've been there.

I've been on the recipient end of rejections.

We all have, that's for sure.

I think a lot of bloggers know when they've taken a good picture. So sometimes if we know it's not that great and we get a rejection, we're like, yeah, I kind of knew that. But when you know that you really put the effort into it and you still get a composition rejection at 3 o'clock in the morning, I think that's when it's really frustrating because you know that somebody just didn't have time and they just didn't feel like looking at it. And that's not ever going to happen here.

That's good. I want to ask you about one of the other problems that we see as food bloggers and photographers, and that's the people stealing our images. Are you getting them turned in by other people that don't own them, or are people, you know, taking them off your site and using them?

That I haven't encountered yet, but I have encountered our first photo thief. And obviously it's impossible for me to check the provenance of every photo, but I was in one of the blogger groups just chatting about photo theft, which is a big thing for all of us. I recently had a photo stolen, and BuzzFeed decided to feature that photo and credit the thief, so no one was angrier than I was. I was on a tirade. But I heard one of the other bloggers mention that a photo of hers had been stolen and she saw it on one of the other big sites. And I saw who the thief was and I said, "That sounds familiar to me." And I went looking through YumGoggle and sure enough I found them. And the next photo that they submitted, I checked. I went through Google Image Search and I checked it because now I was suspicious. I was suspicious of them. Sure enough, it didn't take me but a few seconds to find that it was in fact stolen from another blogger who happens to also be a Young Global User. I immediately emailed her and alerted her so that she could file a takedown notice. I banned them and I sent them a note and I told them why. They've actually tried to come back under different names a couple of times and I caught them. There is a zero tolerance policy. If I catch you, you are gone.— and that's that.

Well, that's good to know. Okay, you said you do pin them and send them out on social media. You want to talk a little bit more about that? What do you do exactly with them?

We have a— first of all, a Google+ page, and we have a Facebook page, and we have a Pinterest page and a Twitter account. And every single photo that's submitted gets pinned to our Pinterest page. The way that I have it laid out, if anybody hasn't seen it, it's just Yum Goggle on Pinterest. I have all the different boards, whether it's entrees, meat, poultry, desserts, bar— cookie bars, whatever it is. Every single photo that you submit is going to be pinned by me to one of those boards. In addition, we also have a community board. A lot of you have gotten invitations from me. With the community board, it's just one more ability for people to pin. Here I'm actually going to ask Kelly if she'd like to talk about it. Kelly is kind of my little Pinterest expert and a big, big driving force behind the community gallery. Kelly, you want to talk about that?

I don't know, she may have frozen. She looks like she's been standing in that position.

Uh-oh.

Yeah.

Okay.

We may have to just go on without her.

Okay, well let me talk, let's see if she comes back. Let me talk about what I do with the Google+ page, for example. Every day I'm going to look through the photos that I'm improving. I'm going to see if something is looking particularly fetching that day or if it's something that's very seasonal. Obviously we're seeing a lot of pumpkin recipes right now. I am definitely going to call that out. Every day I will share something on our Google+ page or share something on our Facebook page. I'm always going to credit the blogger. When you sign up and you submit something, I'm going to go to your site, I'm going to follow you on Google, I'm going to follow you on Pinterest, I'm going to follow you on Facebook and on Twitter. Then I'm going to call you out. Unfortunately, a lot of the bloggers I'm finding don't have Google+ pages, but I'm hoping that more of them come on board with that because they're going to see their names called out. For example, today I shared one of Rachel Gu's photos for pumpkin muffins. I called her out on it so she was able to see it and thank me for that. And there she is. It's a little incentive to have seasonal photos and definitely to have better photos. Again, it's not about whether the photo is perfectly composed. It's just that those pumpkin muffins were talking to me. Sometimes I'll share more than once per day. Sometimes I'll come in and I'll do breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Or a snack or something that I'm in the mood for. There's no set thing but it's always another opportunity. Sorry, it's always another opportunity for you to get more exposure.

I think Kelly was trying to get back in. There was a little notice there. So if they do, I mean, you do pin them, and we can pin to your— I remember you saying we can pin to your boards too, so as long as it's something that was from within the site.

Correct. What I ask with the community board is that you pin from Young Goggle, because that way we'll get a traffic hit and then you'll go ahead and get a traffic hit. I see Kelly got knocked off and she's trying to get back on. Is there anything we can do to help her with that?

No, she just has to enter in through the— she can come in through my profile page. That's about all she can do at this point.

Okay. All right, so those are all the ways that I can share. I also have it automatically set up to tweet so that I might not have time to interact as much on Twitter with my Young Goggle page, but I definitely put it out there so anybody can see it. And we do get hits from that as well, and I see a lot of traffic in particular come through from Google and from Pinterest to the site.

Guys, if you have any other questions out there, now's a good time to ask them too. Just put them in the comment bar and we'll try and get to them.

I'm enjoying reading these comments on the site.

Okay, alright, well, if there's anything else about YumGoggle that we need to know, or I know you just sign up, it's pretty simple. I did it, I don't remember the process, it's been a while, but it's just not like a denial or anything. You just have to fill out the information and send it in, and then you can start adding your images. And I think you, like I said, you approve them a few times a day, so I remember getting my approvals pretty quick for them. I didn't have to wait too long like you do with some of the food porn sites and that anticipation. Sometimes it's days, seems like anyway.

Oh, I know, days and then it comes in at 3 in the morning.

Sure, when no one's around.

3 in the morning, I'm sleeping and I'm the one approving, so that's not going to happen.

Alright, we'll try and send her another one, but she should be able to get in. I'm on the same one. All right, Susan, would you like to add anything?

I think so. I think that was all, you know, everything I had to add.

Okay, we have a question here from Barbara. I'll put it up. Is there a best time of day or day of the week to submit?

Okay, there is no best time because I go ahead and approve every day of the week including weekends. As I said, I try to do approvals several times a day so that everybody has a chance to be on the front page. What I will tell you is I generally do my last group of approvals around 11 PM or even midnight if I'm awake, I'm in New York, so that's Eastern Standard Time. And then I'm not going to change the front page again until late morning. So it's not like your photo will be on page 1 at midnight and then it gets changed again at 6 AM. I'm not going to change it again until 10 or 11 in the morning. So you're going to have a fair amount of time on the front page. So it shouldn't matter necessarily when you submit.

Okay, do you think there's more— Barbara also, do you think there is more traffic on the weekends?

I actually find that there is less traffic for us on the weekends, and that's been my personal experience just with my own blog for myself when I download anything to any photo sites or to Pinterest or to Google+. For Hungry Couple, I also find that there's less interaction on the weekends. Our busiest day is Monday, so I think maybe everybody saves it up over the weekend and then comes in on Monday to take a look at what's going on. That's always our biggest traffic day, surprisingly.

Okay, and Stephanie Manley wants to know if you can repeat your URL again.

Sure, we're just www.hungrycouple.com.

Www.youngoggle.com. Okay, another question from Becca: Do you place limits on tags, and speaking of tags, do those rank into Google somehow?

I do not place limits on tags, and the short answer is I don't think that those tags are going into Google. I think those tags are more for search functions within the site. So if it's Thanksgiving or close to Thanksgiving and a user is coming onto the site to look for Thanksgiving recipes, they might search Thanksgiving in our search bar and come up with recipes that you've tagged Thanksgiving.

Okay.

Sorry, what was the first part of the question?

Do you place limits on tags?

No, there are no limits on tags.

All right, there's a question from Cheryl. Are there any bloggers who use camera phones for their photos that you know of submitting to you?

Not that I know of. Do I think that some of them are using camera phones? Absolutely. Can I tell when I see a photo that looks like it was almost professionally done versus one that was less professionally done? Probably. I have spent a lot of time on my own photography and it's definitely something I have an interest in. But again, because of my philosophy that it's about the food, that's not going to impact whether or not I approve the photo. And back when I first started blogging, I was just using a little point-and-shoot and got some of those approved on some of the big sites too. I think it's not always the camera but the person behind the camera.

Absolutely. Here's another question from Adam, and it's, what site did you take over? You took over YumGoggle.

YumGoggle was originally called MyFoodo, and it was owned by a woman named Marie Cinquemars. She had started it just as a blog, and then when she turned it into YumGoggle, and that was the name she gave it, it just means to look at something delicious. She was thinking of featuring professional photos from professional photographers, and I think her original philosophy was to be ultra super picky about the food quality, the photo quality. When I bought it, I really bought it for the technology of the build of the site, not for her philosophy, because that was definitely not the philosophy that I had, and I changed that pretty immediately. So although I thank her for creating the site and having it built and for selling it to me, it's really not what it was. It's for all intents and purposes a brand new site.

What was the difference in the site build? You said you bought it for the site build. How much more is involved?

The entire look of the site was changed. In my opinion, the look was old-fashioned and didn't appeal to my sensibility. I wanted something that was more clean and contemporary looking. But also what I found was that once you start looking behind the curtains on something, you see that the coding wouldn't be complete. The search function wasn't working. Code was written in loops so that it seemed like, for example, the badge— and we do have badges if anybody wants to download them to their site. We have. We definitely have several bloggers that have already, including myself on Hungry Couple. The badge seemed like the code was written for it, but in fact it wasn't and you couldn't download a badge. So I had my website designer who was very fabulous go in and fix that. So it was a lot of cleaning up old code, but the infrastructure of how the photographs were laid out on the pages, that's expensive to build from scratch and that was already done.. So that was the worth of the site to me. And it was just irresistible when it went up for sale.

Great. How do you even know these things went up for sale? Is there someplace to go look, or did you just happen to see it, or were you looking?

You know, it was really purely an accident. She did have it listed on GoDaddy, although I don't go searching through GoDaddy looking for sites to buy. But I heard someone mention it in one of the blogger groups that I belong to, and I mentioned it to Brian. Those of you that read Hungry Couple know that he's my partner in crime and in life. And I said, hmm, one of those sites is for sale. And he's the one who said, really, how much? Maybe we can do something. So it kind of started as a lark. Let's email her and see what she has to say. And the more we talked about it, the more we realized that we thought that there was room for another one in the market with a slightly different philosophy. Right now you've got the big 3 that are super fussy about what they accept, and then you've got a lot of smaller ones that take everything, but they don't necessarily bring traffic, and they might be indiscriminate about what they take. Um, and I'm not going to take something that makes the food not look good because it is about the food, and ultimately I want us all to work together, and I want to attract non-bloggers to come look at it and say, that looks delicious, I want to use that, I want to make that, I want to go see this recipe. Because for us bloggers, that's what it's about. It's about people clicking on our sites and getting our recipes. I think the food porn sites are big drivers for that.

All right, well, what can we do as bloggers then to help you get more notice and more people looking at YumGoggle?

Well, first and foremost, for those of you who are not submitting photos, maybe— I can't tell you how many comments I've seen in blogger groups from people who say, "I don't even bother anymore. I don't need to get any more rejection letters. I'm done." Well, don't be done. Come check us out. Give us a chance. Submit your photos and work with us and wait for us to grow. Help us grow. Pin, share. We do it too, so you do it too. Spread the word, spread it to other bloggers, tell people about it. And I want it to be something that we can all build together, that we can all own together and build our own traffic and be in control of our own futures.

Good philosophy.

Mm-hmm.

Always better when we work together. Community is a very important thing to me. I know that's a good thing. I'm happy to hear you say that, that we're going to do this together. Really, together we are stronger. It makes a big difference.

It's one of my favorite things about being a blogger that I didn't even realize when I started my blog is how important that was going to be and how much I've learned and how many wonderful friends I've made.

That's the definite plus of blogging. It's all the people you meet along the way. All right, you going to hold your pup up there for us?

This is my Sous Chef, very, very enthusiastic. She's absolutely driving me crazy tonight because God forbid there should be 5 minutes that go by when nobody's paying attention to her.

I know, got to love them though.

We can't have that.

What's her name?

Her name is Hadley.

Hadley.

She features prominently on Hungry Couples. Say hello.

That's why Becca was waving to Hadley.

She's my trusty kitchen assistant and floor crumb cleaner.

Yeah, I just lost my major floor crumb cleaner. I'm still in grieving over that.

Yeah, it's very sad. They're really part of the family. I did a little fun post a couple of months ago about doggie and kitty photobombs. Because I think all of us that have pets in the house, whether they're dogs or cats, know that they like to come by when we're taking photos. And I've got quite a few with Hadley's nose in the picture. So I figured other people must too, and I did an entire post about it.

Yeah, if I'm going to do an over-the-head shot of food, it's got to be outside away from crying faces. Can't turn your back on food. It's on the ground, it's theirs.

Oh yeah.

Alright, well, I'm glad to see you back there, Kelly.

I'm sorry.

It's alright, things happen. That's what happens on Google+.

I got kicked off about 4 times.

Kelly, I was hoping actually that you could talk a little bit about Pinterest.

Is it over?

No, go ahead. Talk about Pinterest.

Yes, I wanted to actually in a way answer Adam's question about the big 3. I'm not exactly sure who the big 3 are because Yeah, I've never been accepted by any of them, but Adam's been to my blog, so he knows. All I know is that since I've been using YumGoggle, my traffic has increased about 120%, which is, you know, a lot. And Pinterest has now become, through YumGoggle, has now become my major, my number one referrer every day consistently for an extremely long period of time. Now a lot of you have been accepted by the other sites that I assume, I don't know, but I can only assume that they give you a lot more traffic. But for me It's been really helpful and I also pin for the community board along with a lot of other people. I really like to pin and then I like to track what my repins are from that. I kept track of it for a long time and then at some point I had to turn it off. I had too much email. One morning I got up and I had almost 400 emails and most of them were Pinterest notifications and when I checked them most of them were from YumGoggle. And so it was, and I can think of several recipes off the top of my head and I know those bloggers because I know that for instance their lemon strawberry ice cream or their chicken Caesar salad or that ultimate macaroni salad recipe was pinned 4 million times overnight. And I think that YumGoggle and using Pinterest on the community blog, I mean on the community board, as well as the boards that Anita does herself have really increased my traffic, which in turn, you know, you can increase your traffic and then it goes away as quickly as it comes. But I have consistently gained. And I counted this morning, I'm a little obsessive about it, I guess, because it's such small numbers, but I have gained about 75 new followers in the last few months since I've been using YumGoggle and pinning for the board. So to answer your question, I mean, that's how I would answer it, but I've never been accepted to those other You know, they, they don't think my lighting or composition— well, they think it sucks, but they say it in a much nicer way.

Well, you're in good company. They think a lot of ours too. Alright, well, thank you. Alright, well, moving along, we have a couple nice comments here. Where is it? Well, Rene wants to know where Sir Pugsley is, Susan.

Oh, he's in the other room. Should I go get him?

Sure.

Okay, hold on.

And Becca says, not true anymore, Kelly. She gets more traffic from Yumgoggle than she ever got from Food Gawker. That's good to know.

Well, that makes me happy. Thank you, Becca.

Absolutely.

Hey, thanks, Adam. That's sweet of you to say that my blog is I work really hard on that part-time because I got that regular job and all, but I appreciate it. I pay attention to what all you really great bloggers do and I try and copy off you like any good cheater would.

Hey, listen, some of my best recipes are from other bloggers. I will say, Kelly, about a year ago, Kelly made my macaroni salad, which is Brian's And she tells me that her husband has requested that daily ever since.

And the boys.

And the boys too.

Yeah, yeah, and I have to make a lot of it. And I pinned it a couple of times on Pinterest and it really—

oh, there's your dog.

He was screaming.

And it really went wild.

There's Renee.

Yeah, say hi. Say hi to Renee. Hi, buddy. He's sleepy. He didn't like being woken up.

He doesn't want to do TV appearances.

No, well, he was at the recording studio all day yesterday with my husband, so he's really tired.

Today. Well, here's another comment from Cheryl. By noting our blog name on our pictures, does it make the recipes more likely to get rejected, or do they add interest? So if they have their blog, their watermark, their blog name on there.

I'll tell you the truth, if I look at it just from the perspective of what I like in a photo, I don't like it. But on the other hand, do I think that somebody is I'm not going to want to go make the recipe because there's a watermark on the photo or a blog name on the photo? No. It's not going to stop me from approving your photo. I think it looks a little cluttery, but I understand the reason for it. We all deal with photo theft and we all deal with the worry about it. I'm not going to make that the issue when you're submitting your photos. I know it's an issue for some of the other large sites, it's not going to be an issue on YumGoggle.

Okay, good. Here's one from C. Hawkins. Is there anything in particular you look for in the description for a recipe submitted to YumGoggle?

I would like the description to be something that a non-blogger would understand. And sometimes, especially when the dishes are not American dishes, I might go in and put in a side description. I try to look at it from the perspective of somebody who wants to come look for ideas about what to cook but is not themselves running a blog and is not themselves necessarily the most adventurous cook. And I think if it sounds too fussy or too foreign or too strange or too complicated, they might not click on it, whereas if it sounds like something that they could try, if it's a casserole if it actually says casserole, I think it's going to be a little bit more friendly. So I would advise that. I'm not going to stop you from naming it whatever you want to name it. Sometimes I've noticed people will give it a vanity name, something like My Thursday Night Special, and then in the description they'll tell me what it is. I'm going to change the title to what it is because nobody's going to want to go cook your Thursday night special. That would be my advice, is name it what it is and make it user-friendly.

I think that's good all around. Sometimes we put in these cute names in our blog titles and then in search, unless you have the ability to change that for search, it's okay if it's on your blog, but you want it to be something searchable. You want people to recognize it. You want someone to click on it. That's the whole idea we're doing this.

That's not very Google-friendly, is it, Dennis?

No, not at all. Learned a lot of stuff the hard way with them. Not at all, especially with the new algorithms they're running with Hummingbird and everything. It's better to say what it is in the title. I think we've had a great session here. If there's any last questions, now's the time to ask them before we sign off. Ladies, is there anything else you'd like to add in before before we go?

No, just other than to say thank you so much, Dennis, for organizing this. I asked Dennis for some ideas about what we can do to publicize, and before I know it, he's got me appearing on TV here. Thank you so much, Susan and Kelly. These two have really been rocks and good friends and helpers, as well as quite a few bloggers that are not on the Hangout tonight but have been wonderfully helpful in getting this started and picking up some of my slack while I was trying to juggle two blogs. So thank you very much, and this was such a real pleasure.

My pleasure having you on and getting to learn a little bit more about Young Goggle myself. Alright, alright, well guys, thanks for coming tonight, and if you still have questions, you know, if you read this later and you want to leave them in the comments, I'm sure Anita will check over later and Susan and Kelly, and if you have questions for them specifically, they can answer them for you later because this will stay live. It's going on YouTube, and it's here forever. You can keep asking questions. Thanks a lot for coming. This was Community Education Night, and we'll see you all real soon.

Good night.

Thanks.

Bye.

Bye-bye.