464: How Email and High-Quality Content Helped Jason Norris Reach Millions of Monthly Pageviews with Recipe Teacher

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. If you’ve been frustrated trying to discover actionable insights from different analytics and keyword platforms, Clariti is your solution. Clariti helps you manage your blog content all in one place, so you can find actionable insights that improve the quality of your content. Not only does it automatically sync your WordPress post data, so you can find insights about broken images, broken links and more. It can also sync with your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data, so you can see keyword session, page view and user data for each and every post.

One of our favorite ways to use it? We can easily filter and see which of our posts have had a decrease in sessions or page views over a set period of time, and give a little extra attention to those recipes. This is a especially helpful when there are Google updates or changes in search algorithms, so that we can easily tell which of our recipes have been impacted the most. Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast get 50% off of their first month of Clariti after signing up. To sign up, simply go to clariti.com/food. That’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: 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 interviewing Jason Norris from the food blog Recipe Teacher. In this episode, Jason shares more about his first two websites, one of which was WindyCityFishing, and the second of which was a food blog all about George Foreman Grill recipes. He sold both of those websites and then went on to start Recipe Teacher, which is a how-to site featuring recipes from things like Instant Pot to pork chops, all sorts of easy, approachable recipes.

In the early days of Recipe Teacher, he actually listed the site to sell for $1000 and go no takers. Since that time, he has grown his website to a site that is worth well over $1 million. In this interview, he shares more about the importance of evolving your business and being adaptable. He chats about how he’s grown his team of recipe developers and why he outsources certain tasks. He worked with Allea, who is our email marketing expert at Food Blogger Pro and who runs Duett, to help grow his email list from 1000 subscribers to over 75,000 subscribers in three years. As part of that process, learned more about his demographic, which happens to be a lot of senior citizens. This is a really great interview about adapting to your audience, growing your site, and just leaning in to the quality of your content above all else. I’ll just let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Jason, welcome to the podcast.

Jason Norris: Hello, and thank you so much for having me, Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It was really fun. You put together, or had this bio that you sent over and I read through this. It’s your story, which to not bury the lede, maybe that’s the best way to put it, we’re going to be talking about Recipe Teacher, the site that you’ve built, has millions of page views, very successful. But, a little teaser, at one point you put it up for sale for $1000.

Jason Norris: I did.

Bjork Ostrom: And nobody bought it.

Jason Norris: Nobody bought it. There were no offers on it. I thought, “Wow, this is a lemon.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: Eventually, we made lemonade out of it. But yeah, it did not sell.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re going to talk about that. One of the things that so great about it is it’s literally 1000X story. You think of this company that you tried to sell for $1000, nobody wanted to buy it. Now it’s at the point where, as a company, it’s worth a million, million plus, millions of dollars.

Jason Norris: Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Based on how you’d value a website in the world of content and advertising earnings.

Jason Norris: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a story of 1000X, in terms of business growth.

Jason Norris: Right. That’s unfathomable to me, but it’s cool to think about it. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: But let’s take it back to your story. This is really fun for me because you go way back into … Any time you start to mention AOL in somebody’s story, that’s where it gets really fun and nostalgic.

Jason Norris: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: But you had started a website … The reason that we do this, you talk about this, all of this stuff stacks on top. You learn this thing, and then you learn that thing. Eventually you get to a point now, where you have this successful site. But it all stacks, like many careers do over time. For you, it was back in 1998 it sounds like.

Jason Norris: Yeah, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: That you started a fishing website. Tell us about that.

Jason Norris: I did. I did. Back in the summer of 1998, I think it was, I was on my way to a new lake in the Chicago area to go fishing, one that I’d never been to before and I got lost. When I got there, it was a little different than I expected. A little bit after that, about a week later, I started thinking, “There should be a source on this new internet thing that talks about fishing, specifically in the Chicago area.” I got to work and I started learning what I could, and I put together a website which, at the time, was called Jason’s Chicago Area Outdoor and Fishing Page.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s incredible!

Jason Norris: Right. Great name, right? It lived on AOL. It was like members.aol.com, whatever it was at the time, because AOL was huge.

A couple of years later, I actually was able to get the domain name windycityfishing.com. I learned that whole process and I built a website that included message boards. Then the straight HTML pages, which would have the information at all the various lakes and rivers in the area.

Bjork Ostrom: You had these static pages-

Jason Norris: That’s exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: That was in the Chicago area.

Jason Norris: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: With every lake. Then you had a message board functionality for people to interact and talk about fishing in the Chicago area.

Jason Norris: Exactly. When I would see somebody would join, I would get all excited. At first, there were just a couple of dozen people. Then that grew and grew, to over 5000 people as part of the message boards. It really became the stepping stone for what would wind up being Recipe Teacher all these years later. And also, my full-time career, which I had for 23 plus years in graphic arts.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say stepping stone, it’s not like WindyCityFishing evolved into Recipe Teacher. What you’re saying is you’re learning these core, fundamental things-

Jason Norris: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: You’re building an HTML page. Even the community aspect of bringing people around. You also used that, it sounds like, to spin into a career around graphic design.

Jason Norris: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Web based design? Or was it every type of design?

Jason Norris: It was both print and web based.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Jason Norris: Because not only was I interested in fishing, I’ve also always been a fan of the band Phish.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, nice.

Jason Norris: With a P-H.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally.

Jason Norris: Yeah. Years ago, I had started a fan zine, a printable fan zine about the band Phish.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow.

Jason Norris: This was also in the mid-’90s.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: Doing the fishing with an F and the Phish with a P-H, to of my biggest hobbies, I learned the graphic arts both online and in print, which led to my full-time job then as a graphic artist.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that’s one of the things that we don’t give enough credit to, when we’re hustling to learn a thing. Often times, I think we get caught up in traffic or working with a sponsor and getting money, and earning income. All of that’s really important because it’s fuel that drives the car forward.

Jason Norris: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: But I think another really tangible benefit that it’s less tangible but it’s still impactful, are the skills that we’re developing as we’re working on a thing.

If you’re able to pair something you’re passionate about, like in your case fishing, along with something you’re interested in learning, graphic design in your case, that can be a really wonderful thing even if your bet on turning it into a business doesn’t pan out. You can still come away with-

Jason Norris: 100%.

Bjork Ostrom: Really valuable things, and it sounds like that’s part of your story. But even with WindyCityFishing, you eventually sold that. That was something that was valuable, you had built it up.

Jason Norris: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: What was that like? Somebody reach out, cold email and say, “Hey, can we buy this from you?”

Jason Norris: That’s exactly what happened. I ignored it at first because it was … This was before we got spammed every single day with people wanting to buy our websites and all that. But someone had reached out to me and I ignored it. They reached out again, maybe a month later. They said, “We just want to let you know, we are a real, legitimate company.” I researched them.

I was ready to turn the page on WindyCityFishing at that time anyways. I felt that I had taken it to a place where I was very pleased where it was. I was ready to start the next chapter. I was still incredibly interested in fishing, which I still am. It’s the weirdest thing, because when I look back on it now, I think I didn’t realize it at the time, I had no ideas I was going to be getting into the whole recipe thing. But I was ready for a new challenge. I know that sounds cliché.

But yeah, they came to me and they made me an offer. I was blown away by it. Of course, I had to make a counteroffer.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Jason Norris: That went on a little bit. But yeah, they bought it for a sum that, at that point, was a windfall to me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: I didn’t even know that people bought and sold websites, to be honest, so it was really cool.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s cool to see it’s still active. You pull it up and you still see, 14 hours ago, somebody posted, “Slow but kind of fun after work,” and it’s a picture of them catching this fish. It’s like oh, that’s so cool.

Jason Norris: What’s funny about that too is all of my pages and all of my likeness remained on WindyCityFishing until just a few months ago, when they completely redid the message boards and the static pages.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Jason Norris: I’m still listed as a member of the site. I don’t post on it quite as often as I used to. But yeah, they left all my stuff up there for a really long time. I’m super glad it’s still successful.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s really fun. That’s a cool thing to see exist.

Jason Norris: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: People will continue to get value from it. What was that like for you, to go through the process of somebody reaching out and then it actually happening? The day that you get a wire amount and it’s a substantial amount. It’s like, “Wow, I just built a thing and sold it.” Did that change your mindset, even as you started to think about what your next thing would be?

Jason Norris: The thing that I felt most was, “Oh my goodness, this is my baby.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: “Now I have to let my baby go.” That was rewarding and a little difficult at the same time, because I think about all the nights that I stayed up late, working on this thing.

You had mentioned too, when I would work on some of the colors or fonts, or whatever I was working on, and whenever I would come across a problem, for some reason I always thought, “I’m glad I have this problem because I’m then going to learn how to overcome it. I know this is going to be useful to me.” I’m not like that regularly. For whatever reason that I was doing that, it set the stage for overcoming something, small obstacles.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: Don’t let those obstacles get in the way.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Is what you’re saying that, in the process of selling it, then one of the things that you missed was having that opportunity to have a problem and solve a problem, and there was suddenly a gap there?

Jason Norris: Yes, there was. More so I really enjoyed the creative process of it. Now as a graphic artist, that was my creative outlet for many years. Creating brochures and websites for nursing homes, which is what I did, and I also did a lot of freelance work. But I missed the creative aspect of it. I missed looking at the analytics every day, seeing the numbers and seeing, “Wow, this is something I built.” Yeah, that was a little hard to let go of. But it did create a new opportunity for me, because I realized all those things.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. There’s a friend that I know, he had a finance blog, this was years ago, and he sold it. It was a life-changing amount of money. He said the two years after that were the most depressing two years of his life.

Jason Norris: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Which I think it’s important for us to hear it. That’s not always the case for sure, but I think it’s important for us to reflect the value that we get from the things that we do each and every day outside of just the fact that it’s earning income for us. There’s a ton of value that we get from showing up and solving problems, and proactively working on a thing. What did that look like for you? How quickly did you get back into … After selling WindyCityFishing, how quickly did you get into another side hustle? Where did Recipe Teacher come into it?

Jason Norris: Recipe Teacher came in a few years later. After WindyCityFishing, I had had a health issue that ran up some hospital bills, so that was a little bit unexpected. When the money from WindyCityFishing came in, it really helped for that.

When I had the health issues, I needed to start having a better diet. It was some cardiac issues. I bought a George Foreman Grill. Just the regular George Foreman Grill.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: You see it Target, Walmart, whatever.

Bjork Ostrom: Classic.

Jason Norris: I started learning how to make recipes for it, but I could not find a lot of recipes online. Which at the time, that had become where people go to find recipes. I thought, “Let me make a website for George Foreman Grill recipes.” That’s exactly what I did.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: WordPress was around at the time, but it was still very much like a personal blogging type of thing. There were other content management systems. But I just made straight HTML pages. There were no recipe cards.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it.

Jason Norris: I started doing that and I kept at it. Somebody made me an offer on that.

Bjork Ostrom: How long had you been working on it?

Jason Norris: Maybe two or three years, I would say.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Jason Norris: Just very much a side thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, a side hustle kind of thing.

Jason Norris: Not putting a whole lot of effort into it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: I did put effort into it, but I had my full-time job, I had everything else I was doing so it was very much a side project.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. How many recipes about did you have on it?

Jason Norris: Oh, about probably only 30 or 40.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. It was a niche site-

Jason Norris: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: With George Foreman Grill content.

Jason Norris: With George Foreman Grill content, right. I never had any communication with them. It wasn’t about that. Even with WindyCityFishing-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. With George, that company.

Jason Norris: Right, right.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: I never talked to George and I did speak to the company either.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: But doing WindyCityFishing was a total labor of love. It was never about making any money. When it did make a few dollars, and it was just a few, it was like, “Wow, this is the icing on the cake.” It was the same with the Foreman Grill recipe site. But when someone came to me and wanted to buy that, it was again, mind-blowing. It’s like, “Wow. I just sold my second website.”

It was couple of years later then, that I got the idea for Recipe Teacher. It was going to be a very simple how to make this, how to make that type of website. How to make French toast, how to make pork chops, how to make corn-on-the-cob. I put it together. I put up maybe a couple dozen recipes and it went nowhere. But I kept at it because I enjoyed it. I was learning WordPress at the time, too. I was learning some more CSS and some other aspects of it, and it was fun. Then I put it up for sale because it was just doing nothing. I thought, “Well, let me make a few dollars from this.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: Nobody bought it. That’s the lineage and the history that came up to-

Bjork Ostrom: Recipe Teacher.

Jason Norris: Starting Recipe Teacher, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: You’d gone through this process of you had built a site, WindyCityFishing. It’s this passion project, you were able to sell it. It’s not like you sell it and then you retire, but it’s enough money where it’s like, “Hey, this is a substantial amount of money coming in, helps with hospital bills,” things like that. It’s like, “Wow, what a great thing.” Then it’s like, “Hey, I’m learning George Foreman recipes, I want to start eating a little bit differently,” you go through the process of building that thing. Somebody reaches out, you build that. My guess is similarly, it’s not like it’s this life-changing money, but it’s still amount where it’s like, “Hey, I was paid for a thing that I built.”

Jason Norris: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Then you have Recipe Teacher. You play with it a little bit, and then you put it up for sale, $1000. Was it on a marketplace?

Jason Norris: Yeah. I think it was-

Bjork Ostrom: A Flippa?

Jason Norris: Flippa. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: For those who aren’t familiar, there’s brokers, like Quiet Light Broker. We’ve had some of the brokers on the podcast before who work for Quiet Light. It’s more of they’re selling stuff, 100,000, 200,000, five million, six million.

Jason Norris: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: You can have some of those higher priced things on a marketplace like Flippa, but you could also sell something for 1000 or $2000. Or even if you have a domain and you want to get rid of it, Flippa would be a place where you could do that. You put it up and then people could bid on it, nobody bids on it.

Jason Norris: Nobody bid on it. I didn’t get one bid on that.

Bjork Ostrom: Then you take it down. And then what? You’re like, “Actually, I do want to do this thing?” What was the decision making process and about when was it that this was happening?

Jason Norris: This would have been probably 2017 or thereabouts.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Jason Norris: I didn’t want to completely give up on it because I enjoyed creating recipes. I enjoyed photographing them. I enjoyed write … I liked the whole aspect of it. What changed was I heard about this new kitchen appliance called the Instant Pot. That literally changed my life. The Instant Pot changed my life.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Jason Norris: I went out and got one, and I learned as much about this. I bought every book, I bought every magazine. I looked at every website. I learned all about this. My kitchen was a mess, I had stuff everywhere. Once I started doing Instant Pot recipes, the traffic started to go up.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s interesting. One of the things that I think is important to understand in the world of content creation is there’s all of these different variables at play. One of the variables, the obvious one is the quality of the content that you’re creating, that’s super important. Another variable at play is what type of content are you … What is the content about? If you’re able to produce really quality content consistently, and you’re able to produce content around a thing that is itself rising, like in the case of an Instant Pot, more people are using it, more people are talking about it. We talk about it in terms of waves. If you’re able to catch a wave, that’s a really incredible thing. Even better if you’re then also a good surfer.

What’s cool to hear about your story is you had all this experience from your career, but also from going through having built multiple sites, where you had learned surfing. Then what happened, it sounds like, is you were able to catch a wave around a type of appliance in this case.

Jason Norris: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: That other people were starting to use more and talk more about. Does that feel accurate as a reflection of what happened?

Jason Norris: Completely. That’s totally what happened. It was also something I learned with WindyCityFishing, is that it’s important to be adaptable. Because I had had a little bit of different vision when I started WindyCity, or Jason’s Chicago Area Outdoor and Fishing Page.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, .co.uk.

Jason Norris: I was going to have golf courses. Yeah, right. I was going to have all this other outdoor stuff. But I found that people wanted the message boards. I found that people wanted the fishing information, the firsthand fishing information.

Fast-forward to Recipe Teacher, once I started the Instant Pot recipes, I realized, “Oh, people don’t want just how to make this, how to make that. Here’s Instant Pot pork chops, here’s Instant Pot chicken,” heres whatever. I went with that flow. I think being adaptable, not just in an online business, but any business, is important.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s a great point. I think one of the things that we need to make a decision on, as creators, is what is the purpose of us creating? An example, in your case, WindyCityFishing, it sounds like the main thing was, “I’m passionate about this, I’m interested in it. I want to create a thing because it’s interesting for me.”

Jason Norris: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: I think 100% as people in the world create around the thing that you are inspired to create around, that’s one path. It’s a worthwhile and worthy pursuit.

Jason Norris: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Another one could be, “I’m interested in building a thing. I want to get traffic, I want to get followers.”

Jason Norris: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: If that’s the avenue, what I hear you saying is be open to seeing where there’s a market pull, because it’s a lot easier to get pulled into something than to push something on people. If you can be open to adapting and saying, “Hey, this thing, there’s a lot of people talking about this.” Or, “I produced this type of content and people really responded to it.” It’s almost like you’re doing market research a little bit, and seeing where there’s opportunities. And then being adaptable enough to say, “I’m going to continue to do this,” and then continue to create in this way or this genre of content.

Jason Norris: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: And adapt as you see stuff happening. Did that feel like what you were doing in that time? You were also interested in it, in this case, which works out really well.

Jason Norris: Yeah, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: But then you say, “Hey, there’s an opportunity here, I’m going to continue to create content specifically around Instant Pots.”

Jason Norris: Right. Well, exactly. Here’s the thing, too. I’m not a chef by trade. I’ve always been interested in cooking. I find cooking part of the creative process and I want everything to be just right. But when I started doing those Instant Pot recipes, I thought, “I can do this. This is an appliance that’s geared for people just like me,” who are looking to make these delicious, fast recipes, if you will. I was very comfortable in that learning space.

That then led to, about a year later, the air fryer recipes, which was another appliance that I started hearing about more and more. I went out and got one. Actually, I got a couple. I’ve got this little tiny kitchen, you can see behind me. I’ve got a small house here. I had air fryers, Instant Pots, and just stuff all over the place.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: I loved learning it. Yeah, that was catching another wave that was, again, finding a niche in cooking with the countertop appliances. I rode that wave.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Tell me about the moment … I haven’t surfed ever, but my guess is that-

Jason Norris: Either have I.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, okay. My guess is, for somebody whose learning how to surf, there’s a moment where you catch a wave and it’s like, “Oh, that’s awesome. That feels really good.” Did you have a similar moment with Recipe Teacher where you’d gotten out of the stage of, “I’m just going to list this on Flippa for $1000,” and it was like, “Oh, this is working?” It sounds like it was the stage of you’re starting to do Instant Pot recipes. Maybe it’s the moment where you had a check deposited from Ad Thrive, now Raptive.

Jason Norris: Yeah, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Could you look to a specific moment and say, “This was the moment where I caught the wave?”

Jason Norris: Yeah, it was the first time I was able to pay my rent with the money I made from the website. Now, this is even before Ad Thrive. I was using just Google AdSense. I would look at that every single day I would log in. At first, I would make $1 or $2. I would do all the math in my head and try to figure out, “Wow, that’s $300 a year, that’s $800 a year,” and so on.

Now my rent at the time was I think $950 a month. I remember that first month where I made $1000. I thought, “Oh my goodness, this is actually a real thing. I’m making money to pay my rent. I can’t believe it.” I was ecstatic about it!

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: That was the moment of, “Wow, this is something.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. From there, you’ve continued to do the continual level-up, figuring out … Now you’re going out and you’re surfing. Every day, you’re catching waves.

Jason Norris: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: That $1000 turns into 10,000, turns into multiple tens of thousands.

Jason Norris: Right. I had learned … Go ahead, I’m sorry.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, share what you’re going to share. But then also, what has that journey been like, to build this into a substantial business that now pays for much more than your rent?

Jason Norris: Yeah. After I made the money monthly to be able to pay my rent, I had seen that other recipes websites had ads that looked much more professional and substantial than the AdSense ads. I did some research and I discovered Ad Thrive. I contacted them. You had to have, I believe it was 100,000 page views a month to be accepted into their network. I didn’t quite have it at the time, but I kept working. At that point, now I was really striving to get to that 100,000 page views.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, you had a marker and a goal that you were-

Jason Norris: I sure did, yeah. When I got to that a couple of months later and they accepted me, the feeling in my stomach and the feeling in my heart of excitement of what was to come. I went from making $10 a day, $10, $12 a day to $40, $50, $60 a day when I hooked on with Ad Thrive. I just could not believe it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: Here was some real money coming in. As the months went on, I just kept watching that go up and up. It still to this day, I’m in disbelief.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: When I log in at 9:00 AM every single morning and look at what that number is, knock on wood, it’s life-changing, and it’s very rewarding and very cool.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think to go back to what we had talked about before, or one of the things that’s worth pointing out is it’s the culmination of a lot of work.

Jason Norris: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: You look back to 1998 and you’re learning HTML, and building a site with a billboard and you can post to it. I think, as much as possible for all of us who are on this journey of building and creating, and business and entrepreneurship, my encouragement to everybody listening is to think about the journey that you are on, not in one year or two years, but decades. And thinking about how do you continue to show up? It’s the same of our company, Tiny Bit. How do you continue to show up every day, get a tiny bit better in pursuit of your goals?

What can happen is that can stack and that can build, and you can develop these skills, and expertise and insights, and have a story like this.

Jason Norris: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is really cool to even reflect on that and look back on that.

I know one of the things you’ve also done along the way is built a team. You have people that are supporting you. What did that look like, as you started to make more from the site, to start to think strategically about working with other people so you’re not doing it all on your own?

Jason Norris: Right. That’s still very much a work in progress. But I was able to find a couple of really good recipe developers. A couple of friends, a couple of people that I’ve found off of freelancer sites, such as Upwork. I’ve tried a handful over the years and I’ve settled into a couple now, who I know I can trust to make recipes that will resonate with my audience and who can help me in that process. Because as you know, with Pinch of Yum, it starts with an idea for a recipe, and then you have to test it and build it, and do the whole nine yards. Being able to find a couple of good recipe developers has been incredibly rewarding.

That’s something I really want to continue to build this, because right now it’s still me in my little house here. My girlfriend helps when she can. But I’m really hoping in the next year to build a team, especially a team that’s close to home where I can have videographers and photographers come in, and I’m doing more of a directing than having my hands right in everything. Because that does get tough.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah, it’s long days, a lot of work. There’s a lot of things to be doing and you’re doing it all.

Jason Norris: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: You’re the content director and dishwasher.

Jason Norris: Exactly. That’s the biggest challenge because that little sink you see behind me overflows very quickly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, quickly.

Jason Norris: Especially when you say, “This chicken does not look good with this plate.”

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Jason Norris: “Let’s try another plate.”

Bjork Ostrom: “Another one.”

Jason Norris: “Let’s try this kind of silverware instead,” and it all piles up very quickly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. What does a day look like for you now? You get up. Are you straight into recipe development, do you do keyword research? What are the things that you’re doing on a day-to-day or a week-to-week basis?

Jason Norris: Basically, I reserve the mornings are my computer time with Recipe Teacher. Like I said, I get up and look at the numbers, the earnings and everything. But then, it’s getting to my emails. Then a lot of it is research of how can I update some old recipes? That’s been a real big part of it for the last year, is that when I look back at some of these older recipes, I’ll try to identify some that have opportunities for growth. Maybe the images need to be updated, maybe the copy needs to be updated and I’ll work on that. I’ll usually do that until around noon.

Then it’s time to go and play. By noon, unless I’m doing a sheet that day, I go out, there’s where I do my fishing, that’s where I enjoy the outdoors.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome.

Jason Norris: Then in the evening times, usually between 9:00 and midnight, I’ll have a baseball game in the background or something like that. It’s at night where I do a lot of the keyword research and looking at the SEO stuff. That took a while for that whole process to develop.

Bjork Ostrom: You mean that whole process being your day?

Jason Norris: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: To refine your day into what feels good?

Jason Norris: Yes, because I didn’t know at first, my first day of freedom from a full-time job, my first day of having my own business, I didn’t know how to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: Should it be nine to five? Should I take specific breaks? Different people do it different ways.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: I found a workflow that works. I’m up fairly early, I’m up very late at night. Those were the times I really liked to work.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s great.

Jason Norris: That’s how that developed, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of the wonderful things that we have in being an entrepreneur, is to some degree, you can control your day and figure out what you want it to look like.

Jason Norris: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: Now obviously, there’s always considerations where you start to grow a team, and then you want to be available for that team in certain times. There’s all of the considerations that go with building a business. But to some degree, it can be one of the most valuable things that you have, which is autonomy and the ability to craft what you want your day to look like. For everybody, it’s a little bit different.

I’m curious to know, as you’ve been … Well, one of the questions that I had was when was that first day when you worked on … It was just like now you’re done with your job and you’re working on your site full-time.

Jason Norris: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: What was that transition like?

Jason Norris: That was very bizarre and very surreal. What had happened was, in 2019, I had started to look at some of the numbers that I was making with Recipe Teacher. I remember at the beginning of the year I started thinking, “You know, I’m making this. If this went up a little bit, I could actually start to entertain the notion of maybe doing this full-time.” I’m calculating all the numbers in my head. As 2019 went on and the numbers continued to get better and better, it became more and more a reality. But leaving a full-time job with benefits, with security is a tough thing to do.

But it was the day after Christmas, it was December 26th, 2019. We had a 60-degree day here in Chicago. I thought, “Wonderful. I can take my kayak out and go fishing today,” and I did. I remember exactly where I was on the Des Plaines River, I remember the exactly lure I used and I caught a pretty nice Northern pike.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: I was just thrilled. Here we are in December, I don’t get to do a lot of fishing in December. I caught this fish, I release him back in the water. Then I thought, “Oh man, the weather’s going to be nice for the next couple days but I have to go back to work.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: It was at that moment where I decided, “It’s time.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s so cool.

Jason Norris: Yeah. I think that was a Thursday or something like that, the weekend was coming on. On Monday, I asked my boss if we could talk and I said, “My business is taking off. I’m going to make January 30th my last day.” I gave them a little more than a month’s notice. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah.

Jason Norris: When that finally came around, that very first day, I’m sitting here just in disbelief that I can sleep in a little bit.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: Time to start cooking.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s one of the things … Lindsay’s actually in today, she’s cooking. She’s like, “These are my favorite days.” It’s the day where she’s just in the kitchen, making recipes, testing recipes.

Jason Norris: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s just such a wonderful thing.

Jason Norris: I love that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: I love doing that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, which is so cool.

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How about in your day-to-day, week-to-week, what are the tools that you have found to be most helpful? Is there something that you are using as you look to do keyword research or project management? Your digital toolset, what are the things that have been helpful as you’ve worked through continuing to build your site?

Jason Norris: I’ve probably been a little unorthodox with that. One of the things early on, going all the way back to WindyCityFishing, was obviously learning what SEO is, search engine optimization. When I started doing Recipe Teacher, I wanted it to be another labor of love like WindyCityFishing and some of the others were. But obviously, now it was a business. I didn’t want to chase SEO. I wanted that to come naturally and organically.

Now I would still use tools. Keysearch was one that I really liked. It was very affordable, laid out very nicely. I still have it. I’ve got Semrush. I’ve used some of the others. Obviously, Google Search Console and Google Trends, and all that. I look at all of these to stay up-to-date on everything. I don’t think there’s ever been a night where I’ve actually said, “I need to find keyword opportunities.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: Because I have an idea what’s going to work, what can become an evergreen recipe, what maybe isn’t going to become an evergreen recipe.

I just did a recipe, and my girlfriend and I love it. It’s gnocchi with butternut squash and sage butter sauce. It’s absolutely delicious. I know that that recipe is probably not going to wind up being an evergreen recipe, just by the very nature of it. Gnocchi and sage butter sauce, and all that stuff, isn’t hugely popular. But it’s important to have recipes on the site that aren’t going to be evergreen. You have to have a little bit of everything because somebody finds a gnocchi recipe, they’re going to start looking at other recipes, too.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: I’ve always tried not to chase SEO. I try to let it happen organically with what I’ve learned along the way. A lot of that includes reading a lot of sites about the current state of search engine and search engine results, and all that sort of thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: I also have a developer who I absolutely love and trust 100%. Because having to mess around with plugins or color changes, or anything like that, I don’t want to do any of that anymore. I stopped doing that several years ago. That was probably the first really big tool that I used, was getting a developer and taking all of that off of my plate. If ever I needed a change to something, I’d call her up or text her, email her and say, “Hey, Kathy, can you put this plugin in? Or let’s do that.” That was probably one of the most important early decisions I made in getting people and tools in place.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Just to be able to have those things, where you have somebody who’s an expert, a deep expert on a thing.

Jason Norris: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: I think about this a lot. As we start to scale businesses, one of the things that we need to get good at is routing. Meaning you have an idea, a task, something that needs to get done. Where does that go?

Jason Norris: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: Who’s the person that you assign it to? I think about that even within … Lindsay always gives me a had time about this. But even within the context of our personal life. If we have a plumbing issue, it’s like do we have a a plumber in our black book that we go to?

Jason Norris: Yeah!

Bjork Ostrom: There’s the equivalent in the business world where it’s if you have an issue, in your case talking about the recipe and development of the site, where do you go for that? If you have somebody, and you want to bring them in and have help with photography, who do you go for that? Over time, as much as possible, if we can become routers for the things that we don’t want to do or aren’t best to do them, even if we do want to do them, there’s somebody else that’s maybe better at it, in order to, as much as possible, focus on and work on the thing that we are uniquely skilled for.

Jason Norris: That’s exactly right.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Part of your evolution has been saying okay, you did build sites in HTML, you understood how to do that. You still probably could. But that means that you’d spend two to three hours working on that, instead of developing a new recipe, or testing a recipe, or working on content on the site.

Jason Norris: That’s exactly right. A prime example of that came up the other day. I was having a Zoom meeting with a graphic artist for a project that we’re working on. I’ve used her for a couple of things in the past. Now I hired this graphic artist when that was my job for 23 years was a graphic artist.

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Jason Norris: But I’m a few years removed from it. I haven’t been flexing that graphic artist muscle a lot with the print stuff. I wanted to reach out to somebody who was the best. I’ve made that a point for several aspects of the business over the last couple of years. I think I learned that from my time in the corporate world. Because I remember the business owners that I worked with, they wanted the very best people around them. I learned early on that I wanted the very best people around me.

Another really good example of that came from one of your podcasts I was listening to on the way home from fishing one night. You had Allea from Duett on, talking about email marketing. I remember that interview and I remember thinking, “She sounds like the best. I have to work with her.” I reached out to her shortly thereafter. That was one of the best decisions I ever made too, was working with her and getting that whole thing established.

Yeah. Being able to find the right people to work with, making sure you don’t take it all on yourself, even though you think you can. It’s super important to get the right people to do it. That investment’s going to pay off.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s a perfect example. Allea is a Food Blogger Pro expert, she’s been on the podcast before. Her company, Duett, D-U-E-T-T.co, if people want to check that out.

Can you talk about how you approach email? What does that look like for you? Is that an important piece? It sounds like an important piece of the puzzle as you continue to grow the different areas of Recipe Teacher.

Jason Norris: Yeah, yeah. It wasn’t important early on, only because I was trying to take on every aspect of the business myself. I did set up a very rudimentary … I had some emails that would go out once in a while. I think it wasn’t ConvertKit, it might have been Constant Contact.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Jason Norris: It was one of those. I kept hearing about the importance of building an email base. When I heard Allea on your podcast, that was when it really dawned on me, “I have to do this.” Working with her, my email list was maybe 1000 or so when we started working together three years ago. It’s now 75,000 and a very integral part of the whole Recipe Teacher experience.

A big thing we learned from that whole thing too was that I have a demographic of senior citizens that I had no idea I had. Because once I started really going hard with the emails, I would start getting a lot of response from visitors to the site. There’s so many times where I would get an email from Mildred, who is so thankful she found Recipe Teacher. Her and her husband are retired, and they’re 82 years old. Their daughter got them an air fryer and they didn’t know what to do with it. Then they found my site, and they love pork chops, and blah, blah, blah. Every time I get one of those emails, I share it with my girlfriend and that brightens her day also.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally, yeah.

Jason Norris: I never expected that that was going to be part of this whole thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: Doing the emails has really helped me learn my demographic along the way.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s such an important piece to understand.

Jason Norris: It really is.

Bjork Ostrom: It almost personifies those people. As you start to do that, you start to get a better understanding, like oh, Mildred, and you think about her as you’re creating content then.

Jason Norris: 100%, yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Now you’re sending out emails every time you have a new recipe. What does that look like?

Jason Norris: Yeah. Every time I have a new recipe, I send one out. Everybody’s got slightly different approaches to emails. I’ve tried it a couple of different ways. I’ve tried having a long little story before I get right into the recipe. I tried getting right to the recipe. Not all that different from the recipe posts themselves. We all obviously have the story that goes along with the recipe. Those have changed over the years. I think the approach of that with email has changed a little bit, too.

I try to make them personal. I try to make them all from me. I want the reader to understand that this is actually me sending these out.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: Aside from several of the templated ones, the sequences that Ally has put together. Every time I have a new recipe, I make the email for it and I put it together. It gives me the opportunity, maybe something happened that day, maybe I caught a nice fish or maybe I got back from vacation or something, it’s nice to be able to share that little bit of my personality with the readers through the email.

I’ll say, “I’m really excited, I’ve got this new recipe for gnocchi with butternut squash and sage butter sauce. I hope you love it.” I basically do keep them short and sweet. I like to have a nice picture of it. The response has been great.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s awesome. There’s something to be said, it’s not quantifiable but it’s significant, the personality connection to content. I think especially in this-

Jason Norris: Absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: Post helpful content world, I think one of the things that we’re finding is the importance of a connection to your audience.

Jason Norris: Yes, yes.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s hard because it’s also not scalable in a way where it would be if you were just producing content en masse. But it’s also a little bit of a moat. It’s something that differentiates you from another site that’s doing recipes, which is its you, that’s the differentiator. It’s people who follow along with you and know you.

Jason Norris: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s such an important piece. Email is such a great format to do that. It’s cool to hear about your story and growing that in such a significant way.

What have been the things that have helped grow that list the most? Is there something that changed that really helped with growth?

Jason Norris: I just think the natural growth of the website.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Jason Norris: I think the content itself. As Recipe Teacher continued to grow and I started to learn the demographic a little bit more, and I start to learn what recipes really work, and I can keep generating that content. The feedback that I would get from the emails saying, “We love that you use simple ingredients. We love the way you explain it.”

I didn’t invent this. There’s a lot of websites that have easy recipes with pantry-friendly ingredients.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Jason Norris: As you know. But there’s room for your own personality in this. I think that’s where it was a combination of hard work, and I think luck that my style of writing has resonated with people enough that there’s been this natural growth to the site.

Like I said, in the era of the content updates and AI, and everything else, I think it is imperative more than ever to have that personal connection with your content, with your audience, and you can do that through email in a great way. Yeah, I think that’s really important.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Incredible success story. You put it up for Flippa, $1000, people are, “No, we’re not going to buy that.”

Jason Norris: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: Take it down, decide to work on it, grow it to this great success. Do you ever think about, “Hey, what is the value of this thing now,” having been through selling a website multiple times? Selling now, is that ever on the table?

Jason Norris: Well, like you talked about earlier, there are formulas that are generally used for the value of websites. As time has gone on, I’ve always known in the back of my head what a general value is of the site. If someone were to come to me now with that number, I would not sell it. It’s far too valuable to me personally.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: In terms of growth. But yes, I have thought about that number. When I think about those numbers, like this whole process, it’s surreal and it blows my mind.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah.

Jason Norris: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s funny how, in a short matter of time relatively, if you were building a business and if you consider that to be part of your collective net worth is the value of the business, there’s some really crazy stories of people having an idea, whether it’s a recipe site or not. It could be really any business. But if something takes off, that could have such a substantial impact not only on your day-to-day, like you’re able to go out and kayak at noon, that’s a really wonderful thing. But also, we are creating these really valuable companies. That’s what they are, they’re companies. I think it’s important that we think about that as well as maybe a certain type of freedom that it gives you, or cashflow that it could potentially create. In and of itself, it’s also valuable.

Last question for you.

Jason Norris: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: As you think about people who are listening, maybe they’re in that stage of saying they have the site they would list on Flippa for $1000 and maybe nobody would buy it. What would your advice be for those listeners?

Jason Norris: I’ve had people ask me before, “How do you start a website?” I’ll hear people say, “Well, I’ve got recipes and I can start a website, too.” What I tell them now is go to Food Blogger Pro.

Bjork Ostrom: Right, thank you.

Jason Norris: If you want to get all the tips on how to start, yeah. That’s the truth. But basically, I tell people don’t get hung up on what’s the color of my website going to look like, what are the fonts going to look like. None of that matters.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jason Norris: What matters is your content. If you have an idea for something, just do it. Open a Word document and start typing. Whether it’s a recipe, whether it’s the review of a restaurant or a golf course, or something like that. Content is king, start working on your content. Because without it, you don’t have anything.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I love that. So much of it isn’t learning the new trick or tool.

Jason Norris: Correct.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s just getting into it.

Jason Norris: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: I played tennis in high school and I loved tennis. I’ve just recently started to pick it back up. I know it’s not about watching a bunch of YouTube videos, it’s getting out and actually hitting, and then watching YouTube videos.

Jason Norris: Right, right. Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Both of those things in tandem. But the important thing is, like in your case, without the content, you don’t have anything to work with, and to analyze and to think about. The first part is always create the thing, and then you can step back and look at it, and say, “How do I improve the thing now that I’ve created it?”

Jason Norris: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that’s such great advice.

Jason Norris: Especially today. There’s so many tools available at all of our disposals, with WordPress and everything else, that it makes it a lot easier. But you can’t do anything without content.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Jason, if people want to follow along with you, connect with you, what’s the best way to do that?

Jason Norris: Go right to recipeteacher.com and you’ll see the address for all of our different socials. For Instagram, for Pinterest, for Facebook. You can email me at [email protected]. I don’t particularly love mangoes or dislike them, it’s just a song-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, what’s the story with that?

Jason Norris: I like the song The Mango Song by Phish yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Jason Norris: I had to come up with something and that’s what I did.

Bjork Ostrom: I love it. That was going to be one of the questions, I’m glad you mentioned it because I saw on the calendar invite it was [email protected]. That’s great.

Jason Norris: Yeah. That’s my little nod to Phish, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Well, Jason, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story.

Jason Norris: Hey, thank you so much, Bjork. This has been great. It’s a pleasure to talk to you.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed that episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Since it is the first week of a new month, I wanted to take some time to highlight what will be going on in the Food Blogger Pro membership this month.

For the month of June, we have a few great things scheduled. We’re going to kick it off with a coaching call. In June’s coaching call, Tara Smithson from the food blog Simply Made Eats joined Bjork to talk about how to develop, stick with and revise goals in the first few years of blogging, how to manage your time when you’re feeling overwhelmed, and how to approach building back links for your site. It’s an awesome coaching call so make sure to watch the video replay on Food Blogger Pro or catch the audio version on our members-only podcast, Food Blogger Pro On the Go. That will be live on June 6th.

Next up, we have a live Q&A on June 13th, all about creating systems. Chris from the business Creative Biz Launch will be joining us to chat all about how to create systems, which systems are most important and how systems can transform your business. That will be on Thursday, June 13th at 2:00 PM Eastern Time, 1:00 PM Central Time. We look forward to seeing you there. Remember that you can submit questions in advance if you have anything you know that you would like Chris and Bjork to cover.

To round out the month, we’re going to be doing what we’re calling our Summer Lesson Cleanup. We’re going to be doing lots of small edits and tweaks to a lot of our existing lessons. Just as we always talk about the importance of updating and republishing old content, we’re going to be doing the same over on Food Blogger Pro. You might notice some updates or changes to existing courses, just to make them more current and useful for our members. If you are not yet a Food Blogger Pro member, you can head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more and join us. We would love to have you. If you’re already a member, we look forward to seeing you next month in the forum and at our live Q&A. That’s it for this week. Make it a great week.