Leveraging Reddit as a Traffic Source

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Ann Morrissey: Hey, there. Thanks for tuning in to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Ann. And in today’s episode we’re sitting down with Ewen Finser from Venture 4th Media. In this episode, Bjork and Ewen discuss the evolving landscape of digital content creation. With algorithm changes impacting traffic, Ewen emphasizes the importance of going beyond Google and looking for an alternative recipe for your traffic. He shares insights on building a strong presence on Reddit while also highlighting the power of community building as a cornerstone for long-term success. This was a really interesting episode because I’ve definitely seen Reddit discussions pop up in search results, but I never considered leveraging the platform to drive traffic. It was definitely an eye-opener for me, and it’s certainly something to consider for your business as Google starts to treat Reddit as a publisher. If you enjoy the episode, we would really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts, or share the episode with your community. And now, without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Ewen, welcome back to the podcast.

Ewen Finser: It’s good to be here, Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. We’re going to be talking about all things search, SEO, traffic. Because, as we’re going to be talking about, the world of search has changed a lot. A lot of people listening have felt that. You’ve felt that as you’ve built sites, and have built these really incredible sites through the years, doing all of the different things that Google has told you to do, and doing a really good job with those. And now the hard part is, we’re in the season where a lot of these really incredible sites that had traffic that was growing, expanding, gaining traction through the years, there’s this thing called helpful content update. And that impacted a lot of those. So, can you share a little bit about the sites that you’ve built through the years, for people who haven’t heard the past interviews that you’ve done, and then what happened with helpful content?

Ewen Finser: Yeah. So, our context is for the last 10 years really has been starting as a lifestyle through bootstrapping my first couple of sites on my own. Basically riding the Google train, that Google needed a lot of information to populate the web with quality content. And starting off blogging myself, then hiring a team, then creating this concept around incubating sites at scale. So, coming up with a concept for there’s a gap in the market in, I don’t know, subscription box reviews or something, and then creating a site that’s dedicated to that. Or more recently launching a big gaming portfolio with specific blogs and communities around certain types of games or titles. And that worked really well for a really long time with Google, to the point where we had millions of page views a month, every year was up and to the right. And so, that’s my context, is basically building more niche down focused content sites really around enthusiast groups. But then the primary traffic and distribution model being Google search, we have some other traffic mixed in, but that was always the golden goose for us. And so, with the helpful content update, the way I describe it is currently it’s like Google took the web and said, okay, content sites, straight content sites, you’re not going to get as much real estate. You’re going to get less prevalence in search, in the first page of search. And so, that’s really been a huge disruption to our business model, and to many other indie publishers, and even big publishers are taking a little bit of a haircut on some of their properties. And what you’ve seen rise in its place is user generated content. A lot of e-commerce. If you’re a brand or a product owner, you can get away with ranking AI generated content. And so, it’s like this big paradigm shift. There’s a lot of flux, there’s a lot of uncertainty in the market. We’ve slowed down our publishing cadence, at least in relation to Google, and said, “You know what? We don’t know if Google’s going to figure it out.” And so, we’re not going to pump any more money into that playbook until we really have that understood and revalidated.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And correct me if I’m wrong on this, but it felt like your expertise was really, broadly speaking, in two areas. You had a really good understanding of how to look at the web using tools, whether that be Ahrefs, Semrush, many other tools, that allow you to get a sense for what people are talking about. And like you said, I think you said this, maybe gaps where, hey, we know that there are people who are interested in guitar and learning guitar, and we feel like, this is you saying it, there’s an opportunity to create quality content in that space. So, understanding macro, hey, there’s an opportunity here. Or video games, like you talked about. And then once getting into that, then seeing like, okay, here’s the specific things we can talk about within the context of video games, or this specific video game. Here are the articles that we can write. So, that’s one. Maybe it’s keyword research, but it’s also general research about the web, having the ability to use some of these tools, understand the web, understand these opportunities. And then the second piece felt like was another strong skill set of yours and your team is then building processes around working with the team to create that content. So, you aren’t necessarily going to be the ultimate expert personally in guitar and video games and subscription box reviews, but there are people who love talking about that stuff and have a deep interest in it. And so, then finding those people to come onto the team and create content about it. And like you said, for the past 10 years you continue to do more of it, you see the opportunities, you have the ability to scale a team, you grow, grow, grow, and then there’s this change. And you didn’t change anything you were doing, you continued to create good content. Your team continued to create good content. It was like Google made a decision around what type of content they wanted to share and display, and that has massive implications for many people, yourselves included. Can you talk about what that was like to navigate that, and at what point did you step back and were you like, oh, something changed here? Was it the day of an update? How quickly did you realize something had changed?

Ewen Finser: Well, I remember, actually when we were both going to Rhodium this last year, it had just dropped. And so, it’s fresh in my mind. This was October of ’23. Going into it being like, okay, here’s a Google update. But we’d been through updates before, and in fact, we had various sites that were impacted. And so, the first initial period of a couple of months is like, okay, what’s the damage? Don’t overreact. The standard stuff. Let’s see how it shakes out. And then it was like, okay, this is a big hit, but it wasn’t terrible. But then there was successive hits, even in Q1 of this year where-

Bjork Ostrom: Additional releases coming out.

Ewen Finser: Yes. They kept turning the dial in the same direction. So, whatever we initially saw, got worse. And [inaudible 00:09:09] skated through the first two that were ultimately hit. So, the cumulative effect was a huge shot across the bow to our business model. And so, then by, I would say early Q1, I was like, okay, we’ve got to change our… Our default has to be alive. We cannot keep just continuing on and hoping that Google figures it out. And so, we had to cut back a lot. We realized that we need to cut back our content production, because new content was being published and it wasn’t ranking. It wasn’t ranking on the first page, it wasn’t ranking on the second page. And so, that’s just step one, stop the bleeding. And then step two is like, okay, we can take a minute and figure out what does this really mean? And so, there was part of me, and part of me still is, a very small part of me is on the fence of Google’s going to have to figure this out. And if we talk to people, like our mutual friend Jeff Coyle from MarketMuse, he’s like, “They have to figure this out.” And it’s like they’re going to. And part of me is like, yeah, okay, you’re right. They have to. And then part of me is like, but we can’t build a business model around-

Bjork Ostrom: The potential of them figuring it out. Yeah.

Ewen Finser: Yeah. What’s right? Almost like they have this, in today’s digital world, they’re almost like a public utility in some regards. They want to get the benefits of that, but not the downsides of that. But we’re waiting around for them to figure it out, because what we see in searches like this cannot be the future, right? This cannot be what we’re faced with as core results in Reddit, and age domain spam, and e-commerce sites ranking with AI that are not actually e-commerce sites. There’s all sorts of problems with Google specifically. I don’t say the internet, with Google.

Bjork Ostrom: And the reason when you say that they need to figure it out and they need to fix it, that’s because that belief is the results aren’t as good as they should be. These are not the things that people want to see. Is that the basic premise with it?

Ewen Finser: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Ewen Finser: Even the AI overviews, how that has been bungled and there’s all sorts of examples of incorrect information or blatant plagiarism. There’s all sorts of issues. And so, yeah, is this ethical? It should be. It should be this is not ethical, but then there’s this other element because in there is self-interest, right? At a certain point users are going to start finding other ways to access information if their queries are not being satisfied. And we’re starting to see that a little bit. I monitor the search dominance rankings and Google’s had like 90% for years, and they’re starting to dip down a couple of points each month. Not huge, but there’s Bing, there’s alternative search. There’s other platforms that are not search engines, but TikTok has a similar function. And so, they’re under pressure and their challenge is they’re trying to ride this AI effect and they want to be upfront with their AI technology where they’re going to surface the answer engine in a different way. But they also have this legacy business model that’s really dependent on the Google search we know. Which is people contributing, creators or publishers, contributing information to the open web for free without any expectation of getting compensation other than, okay, we can monetize with display ads, or affiliate links, or acquiring customers, or billing lists or whatever. We can use that free traffic. And that has been a very opening effect, I think, honestly to the economy. People want to share information, but now it’s almost like, because I know, it’s like, nope, we got to lock it down. This contract is broken. Even if it wasn’t an official contract, it’s broken.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. We give you content, you display it, and then we get traffic from it. And that relationship worked. A small portion of the people that use Google would then click on ads. That’s how they make their money. The majority of people who use Google click on the organic search and you make money from affiliate, or you make money from ads. And like you said, when that contract is broken, then you step back and you say, okay, maybe I need to figure out a different way to approach this. And additionally, it feels like the relationship has maybe fractured when there’s these recent Google leaks. Can you talk about what that was and then what information that included in it?

Ewen Finser: Yeah. So, I’m by no means the expert on Google leaks. There’s some really great Twitter follows, or X follows. But from my understanding, basically this was an insider fed, or someone with knowledge had access to all the documentation around how they basically engineer search results. And this was leaked to the public at various stages and now it’s accessible to anyone. And a lot of it, almost can’t even summarize it in just a couple of words or even a couple of minutes, but there was a lot of information there that came out that people suspected, but Google had publicly said, “Oh, no, we don’t do that.”

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have an example?

Ewen Finser: Yeah. Like click through data. They say, “Well, we don’t really measure clicks on a link.” Say if there’s 10 results in Google search and users 9 times out of 10 are not clicking the first result, they’re clicking the third result, then that will inform their algorithm to rank the third result higher maybe than that first result over time. And they said, “It’s not really how it works.” And so, there’s all this gaslighting around people with theories on the internet. And turns out that, yeah, it’s a real thing. And so much to the point of today, I saw some agencies that are actually offering services where it’s like we will, from anonymized locations, click your result, we’ll enter as [inaudible 00:15:11]. And it’s the growth hack that’s really working right now. So, it’s all of these types of things, the manipulation is laid bare. It’s like the emperor has no clothes and a lot of the stuff that we all suspected was true.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s interesting, you can understand from Google’s perspective why they would say that’s not true, because the response then is you share… Then these agencies was like, okay, if that’s what happens, we’re going to figure out some way to hack this. And then suddenly it doesn’t work as a variable in the algorithm because you can’t really trust that the clicks are the clicks. And so, it’s almost like a weird relationship where Google is forced to say things publicly in maybe these shadowy ways where it’s like, ah, it’s not exactly what we do. And then there’s this leak that comes out and it’s like, oh, that is actually something you do. And it’s easy to understand why they would say that, but it also then feels dishonest to be like, well, so then how do we trust what you’re saying?

Ewen Finser: Well, I think that it gets at the core of it, which is Google can’t really assess quality content. They’re trying to look at… Or they can’t do it affordably. And so, they’re looking at these different attributes to approximate backlinks historically had been people voting for your site. And so, even things like offer profiles, it turns out, oh, just having an offer profile but there’s certain tag… I guess there was tags where it’s in the documentation. I don’t know how, again, it was phrased, but it was something like whatever signal author bio, or it would be small site classifier. And so, all these things-

Bjork Ostrom: Or expertise on science would categorize people as having certain expertise, or sites, as expertise in certain areas. And the idea being sites were tagged as being-

Ewen Finser: Yeah. And Google said, “No, we don’t do that.” And there’s no difference between a small publisher and a big publisher, but oh, by the way, they have these tags that’s like you’re a small publisher. Which basically said you’re going to get different treatment. Is there a smoking gun that says just because they have these tags or modifiers doesn’t necessarily mean they’re measuring it or doesn’t tell us how important they are? But it just goes to show these are things that they had come up with a name for it, they did come up with a classifier, so they probably were using it in some way.

Bjork Ostrom: Some way. Yeah. So, does the information from the Google leaks, haven’t spent a ton of time with it, would you say it still is relevant to understand from somebody who’s interested in how search works in a post helpful content world? Or is it more of just the general sentiment around some of the information is helpful to know?

Ewen Finser: Yeah. I think there are certainly tactics that, it’s probably a small window, where you could probably do like the click manipulation. But Google now is under pressure. They’re going to have to change, they’re going to have to counteract that because otherwise they’re going to be in a sea of spam because everyone’s going to be just, oh, here’s the playbook. We’re going to follow it. So, they’re going to have to adjust it and prevent the exploits. So, I would probably encourage most of the audience here as like, yes, I wouldn’t necessarily arbitrage the short-term here, but I think in terms of the long-term play, I would just keep it in mind that I think there’s this public messaging that Google gives around just create great content and we’re going to rank you. To me, that is misleading and false. Given the current environment, given the leaks that have come out, given just the treatment of sites that have quality content that have been caught up in this whole impact of helpful content. And that’s where my… Just don’t take Google’s word for it anymore. Because there’s all this evidence to suggest that there’s something else at play.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Evidence through best practice that people have learned with experiments on their own. But then also something like this comes out and it’s like actual documentation to some degree.

Ewen Finser: And I think overall, if I were to zoom out, what’s my takeaway? I have an end goal I want to go to now, which is acquiring users or building a community that is, what I call, within my moat, within my walled garden. And so, having [inaudible 00:19:56], in my newsletter I talk about this raising the drawbridge, which is the old internet we talked about, you just publish great content, other people consume it. Yeah, you have to see an ad, but you get high quality content maybe where all you have to do is view an ad. And that is the cost for anyone to access uncommon knowledge. And so, I think actually in the long-term thing, particularly with AI and how easy it is now to create mediocre content with AI, or boilerplate knowledge with AI, that uncommon knowledge, having an ability to raise your drawbridge and say, you know what? I want to actually not share this information widely. And that has a chilling effect I think on the internet as a whole right now. But being able to build in those mechanisms to our businesses where we’re not just dependent on what kind of traffic Google is sending me today. We’re actually building a recurring, even if it’s 3% or 2% or half a percent of the traffic you receive gets on an email list, those are the types of things I’m thinking about long term.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And I love that phrase uncommon knowledge. That I feel like is maybe a better way to define niche or niche expertise. It’s like you have uncommon knowledge, and I think especially in a post artificial intelligence, post GenAI world, that is really valuable. Because the common knowledge is going to become easier to access and there’s going to be more competition against open web content if it’s something that is common knowledge. But insofar as you have uncommon knowledge and want to be strategic about building a content-based business, that idea of raising the drawbridge is really compelling. By that, what I understand you to mean is you have the ability to say, this is my closed off area, this is my membership site, this is my newsletter, this is my group. It could even be an in-person meeting or an in-person meetup. That is going to be the thing that you potentially as a creator moving forward can be strategic about as opposed to how do I publish everything for free and make it available for free and then monetize through ads and affiliate? Is that accurate?

Ewen Finser: Correct.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Ewen Finser: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: So, then the question is, what does that look like to actually get discovered? Because you have to have, you said, that 2, 3, 4, 5%, whatever it might be, that eventually becomes part of that closed off community. For us we have our podcast, and on the podcast we occasionally talk about the membership site of Food Blogger Pro, but I know that if I publish this podcast, there’s a very good chance the transcripts are going to be ingested into some AI, GenAI, OpenAI like Gemini with Google, and that will then potentially give people answers. But for us it’s worth it at this point because we think, hey, a number of those people are going to convert over. But we are able to deliver that through a podcast app, through other places that people are listening to the podcast. How do you do that? How do you get there? In your case, you have a site that’s impacted by helpful content, so what does it look like then to acquire that traffic, those people that you’re going to bring into your community if it’s hard to get them through search?

Ewen Finser: Yeah. So, I think it takes this back to basics mentality of trying to imagine yourself operating in a Google free world. Of course, a lot of our sites still do get traffic. But this kind of reimagine, looking at all the… I’ve started installing different traffic, Google Analytics alternatives, because they do a better job of servicing alternative traffic streams.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm. What do you mean by that?

Ewen Finser: And understanding how… Plausible IO, there’s a couple of others. I’m blanking on the names, but there’s a whole slew of analytics first, it’s not an afterthought that Google threw in there. It’s easy to use. And you start to understand how are people finding us? And just by doing that, if you start visualizing your traffic and you’re like, oh, you go down the rabbit hole, this random forum is sending me traffic. Let me figure out how that’s happening. Or Facebook, I’m getting shared. Someone is sharing my post somewhere even if I don’t have a community. And then you start to put the pieces together of what could an alternative recipe for your traffic look like? And where Google has been the golden goose. So, we reimagine, okay, there’s Pinterest, there’s Facebook, there’s talk about Reddit, Reddit’s the thing I think that’s really working, but there’s a bunch of different alternative traffic sources that we can analyze. And I’ve started to create little hypotheses around each of our sites. And when you think about the value of your site that was reliant maybe a lot on Google traffic, there’s the immediate reality that, okay, it’s not that Google business is broken, but it doesn’t mean your content doesn’t have value. And so, part of the exercise is figuring out what is the intrinsic value of your content. If it really is high quality content, could you put a drawbridge in front of it, or could you redistribute that on a different platform? And so, some of the things that are hot right now are Facebook pages now doing these… Facebook’s become a viral traffic source. It’s interesting and obscure rabbit holes that you can go down.

Bjork Ostrom: What do you by that? Viral traffic source, meaning it can send viral traffic or Facebook has picked up speed with content creators as a traffic source? As a platform has to become viral or-

Ewen Finser: Yeah. For creators.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Yeah.

Ewen Finser: Yeah. And so, what’s working. Again, we’ve only had limited success here so far, but there are people that are having success with boosting their fan pages above 4 or 5,000 likes or members. And then distributing traffic that engages that audience. And they come directly from Facebook to your website. And the nice thing about those strategies is you don’t have to change your monetization infrastructure. So, you can keep the ads. In fact, the ads are often higher coming from Facebook than coming from Google right now. And so, you can keep that flywheel turning. Or Pinterest is another example. Execute a Pinterest strategy where all your recipes are getting distributed on Pinterest and that has this organic mechanism to it where things are getting shared and ranking in Pinterest, and then that becomes a traffic stream. And that, again, that doesn’t rely on you changing, if you have display ads, you can keep using those display ads. I think where it gets challenging is if you are selling maybe products or you have affiliate based business and you have to change your monetization model and your traffic model at the same time. Or you can choose one or the other. And so, it’s figuring out putting those pieces together. And YouTube’s another one where people are investing in that. And I look at all of these as these are traffic arbitrages, but then I connect it to what we talked about earlier, which is, and then what? Okay, we need to get those people converted into something that allows me to have a conversation to re-engage them that is less intermediated by these tech companies.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s interesting. Just as a real quick aside, you had mentioned these different traffic sources can be more or less valuable. And this is for Pinch of Yum, ad stacks are always going to be different, but Pinterest, RPM, $78.

Ewen Finser: Wow.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a really valuable traffic source. Direct, 54. Facebook, like you said, 42,22. Google search for us, 41,58. But you can start to see, okay, if you had a site that had 75% of the traffic, but the majority of it was from Pinterest, it probably would be earning more than a site that would just have traffic from Google. And so, you can start to be strategic about what that looks like to get traffic from different sources. And so much of this world, I don’t know if you can relate to this, it feels like it’s this never ending balance between what is the tactic that’s working and what does content that actually help people look like? And how do you dance with those two realities? Because you can’t go heads down and just say, I’m going to just create extremely compelling content, because there’s always going to be variables that are like, here’s what’s working on YouTube right now, here’s best practices as it relates to SEO. It’s this balance between tactics, what’s working, what’s not working, and how do you create content that’s really good content that helps people with the thing that they’re trying to do. I’m curious to know what does that balance look like for you and your team as you think about that dance?

Ewen Finser: It’s incredibly challenging in some ways because we’re… Again, if you could publish the most comprehensive guide to whatever, in your vertical, the best recipe, publish it, and maybe recipe is the wrong example, but let’s say the best frying pans or something. And it would be better than consumer reports even. It would be more firsthand. You could test all the frying pans. You could publish that. And if you are not in the favorite view, that article’s not getting visibility in Google. And so, it gets to your point. Which is the distribution method versus the content quality, those are separate conversations. And as online marketers we’re constantly navigating what is the best distribution method for our content. And sometimes, we’ve created content for Google for years and years and years, and maybe creating content for Pinterest is similar, but different. What if quality for that platform marries both objective quality with what goes viral, what gets picked up by that platform, what gets ranked. And who is that person using that platform? For Pinterest it’s a certain demographic, and so maybe your content is actually going to be a little bit different than what it was for Google, or YouTube, or Facebook. So, it’s a constant challenge for us. And I think, again, what I try to keep in mind is these are… What I’ve reminded ourselves, we like to think of ourselves as a media company. We’re like, oh, we’re a media company. And when I really thought, after this update, when we really thought about it, I was like, okay, yeah, but we’re actually a Google company.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm. Yeah, totally.

Ewen Finser: And so, as much as I want to be, I’m a media entrepreneur, like I’m like, I don’t know, like Walt Disney or something, no, no, no. We’re a Google satellite team.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, sure. Yeah, we are creating content-

Ewen Finser: And so, how do I change that dynamic long-term? It’s going to be a lot of work. I have to get really good at these traffic arbitrages and understanding distribution in this new environment, in this ever-changing environment. But again, if on the back end I have this way to capture users to have conversations on my own terms, that I think is the end goal. Which could be in our own community, like you talked about your Food Blogger community, or with an email list, whatever it is. Or in-person events. Having that conversation on my own terms, or more on my own terms than not. Right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Ewen Finser: So, Google is still-

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not exclusively on your own terms, but more often than not.

Ewen Finser: Exactly. And there’s still things to navigate, but I think of my community is the end goal I think for where I’m trying to go with some of these verticals. And then being, we can play a different game. We don’t have to play this musical chairs game. Or at least it’s more valuable because we’re capturing X percent of those users. If something changes, hey, we have 10,000 members of our community, it’s not going to rock the boat as much.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm. Yeah. You have a community and that community shows up every day. They go directly to the site, they log in, wherever that might be. Maybe it’s on a subdomain of your URL, or maybe it’s within another platform. But that community is in and of itself the solution as opposed to in another world that might be like, hey, you’re getting traffic and people are coming to your site, but it’s kind of transactional. They have something they’re thinking about doing, they’re wanting to buy a frying pan and learn about it, or they’re wanting a Reuben recipe and they find you as opposed to a community which can persevere through algorithm updates and platform changes because that is the thing. That’s where people are going. That’s the solution.

Ewen Finser: Yeah. And as an intermediate step too, because sometimes that’s overwhelming. When I think about, oh, I have to create a community. Wow, that sounds difficult. An intermediate step for me is either become a customer or somehow get their email list, or get them engaged on different platforms. And so, you have this ability to, once you figure out what community is, you can market it to people, even if you don’t have it quite figured it out just yet.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Member Kitchens. Imagine your kitchen. It’s more than just a place to cook. It’s where your creativity comes to life, it’s where you nourish your family, your friends, and yourself, with food and conversation. Now, imagine sharing that kitchen with the world. Imagine inviting people in to experience your unique flavors, your personal touch, your passion for food. At Member Kitchens, they believe that every food creator has a special kitchen to share. And their job is to help you swing the doors wide open. Their white label meal planning platform is your virtual kitchen. It’s fully equipped with everything you need to showcase your recipes and brand, build a loyal community, and earn a sustainable income. As one customer said, “Recurring revenue is life-changing.” Your kitchen will integrate with tools you already use like Zapier and WordPress, and it’s fully configurable. Putting you in complete control of your brand and your business, all in an easy-to-use interface backed up with stellar one-on-one support. So, if you’re ready to share your kitchen with the world, set up your own Member kitchen. Visit memberkitchens.com today to learn more and start your free trial. And to use the code Food Blogger Pro for 50% off your first two months of any plan.

Can you talk a little bit, I know one of the strategies that you’re starting to look at and use is Reddit as a place to launch a community. Just this morning I was thinking about this, outside of the conversation that we’re having today, just on my own, I was thinking there’s such incredible information on Reddit. I don’t love going to Reddit and spending time in Reddit, but I want to be intentional to tap into some of the communities I’m interested in. So, even noticing in my own psyche thinking about community-based information and getting that information for myself, but I know that there’s also an opportunity for somebody who wants to build a thing online to use that, as a broad pursuit that we’re all doing, to leverage pre-existing platforms to build a version of that community, or to tap into pre-existing communities. So, can you talk about some of your early thoughts as you’ve explored Reddit as a platform?

Ewen Finser: Yeah. So, I’ll start with why did I even stumble on Reddit. So, as I was thinking about all of our traffic losses and starting to analyze the search results for like, okay, well, who’s even replacing us? I noticed that some of the e-commerce sites were ranking for their own stuff. The best frying pans would be the frying pan company all of a sudden. And so, I was like, well, I can’t really be the frying pan company. Other things I noticed were user-generated content. So, when I say that I mean forums, but most prominently Reddit. And Reddit, one way to think about it is it’s like the granddaddy of forums. It’s basically a huge platform where anyone can create a subreddit on anything. People can participate. There’s some rules about it, but it’s decentralization of the internet. They want to be the front page of the internet where people can explore their passions. So, on its surface it’s a very good match for what we’re trying to do, which is these very niche… There might be 3,000 people that are into underwater basket weaving, but there’s a passionate community on Reddit about that. And so, there’s that natural affinity that you are getting to. And the way I’ve come to think about Reddit is it’s actually two different things. And this was a revelation to me a little bit. There is Reddit as a platform, like a Facebook, it’s a social community with its own kind of currency. There’s karma, there’s all sorts of little nuances to how it works, and etiquette. And each subreddit has its own rules. And there’s a homepage. And stuff that goes viral gets featured on the homepage. And then there’s categories and things on certain groups can go viral. So, there’s a whole little algorithm and a way of operating, interacting with Reddit as a platform. But then there’s Reddit as a search proxy. And what I mean by that is it’s basically like Reddit and Google are synonymous in that sense. Because Google is sometimes giving Reddit such precedence, even ranking them first. Even to describe that, what that picture looks like. If you’ve noticed, maybe your verticals, there’ll be a Reddit answer. And that may be on the first page somewhere it’ll be that blue link that maybe a website used to get. But then there’s four related subreddits or threads, if you will, that are also… And their pack is bigger. So, they’re not getting the standard website pack. They’re getting maybe 1.5 times the real estate just for their normal results. Right? So, there’s five opportunities to rank in that pack that tends to be featured prominently. Then there’s this new search feature called discussions and forums, which is almost like it’s the news category. It’s like a new thing that Google has added as a tab. So, if you just wanted to search discussion forums, you could just search Google that way. But even if you’re not, they’re going to have that pack, usually it’s going to have that title discussions and forums, and there’s going to be three or four separate links below that too. And oftentimes they’ll be on the same page. So, Reddit will get treated like a publisher with that box I described, and it’s going to have discussions and forums of which two of the three are Reddit. Maybe Quora is in there, maybe some other random forum is in there. But sometimes when I’m finding search queries, 40 to 50% of the page ends up kind of being Reddit. And so, if you’re looking at how to replace your Google traffic, that’s a very immediate place to start. Step one. Step two, it’s like operating on the world’s most powerful domain. It’s like DR 100. And by creating a subreddit, or a community within Reddit, and then you get that URL descriptors. So, it would be like reddit/pinchofyum. And that would be your community. What was a light bulb moment for me is we published three posts on Reddit on, I think we have newsletter stacks. Just like out of curiosity I created a little community. And it was a ConvertKit versus Beehive. And we ranked on the first page within three days. And we were ranking, it was above Neil Patel and Niche Pursuits. And so, that was a light bulb moment for me. I was like, wait a second. This is basically a super high-powered publishing platform to get that Google real estate. So, that’s a long way of saying there’s two versions of Reddit. And you can optimize for both. And oftentimes just by optimizing for Google search you end up getting interactions and that viral boost as well internally in Reddit.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. I was thinking about there’s this personal finance app we use, Monarch Money, and I’ve noticed myself using the Monarch Money Reddit to see how people are using it, but also to get answers. And I didn’t until this moment think about the fact that they as a company potentially set that up as a solution for their users. Maybe they didn’t, maybe it was somebody else who just had set it up, but I do notice they’re in it responding, giving thorough responses. They almost view it as a support channel, similarly to what they would support.monarchmoney.com.

Ewen Finser: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s interesting, this change that you see with, and I just Googled just out of curiosity, best frying pan, I have the Search Labs AI overview activated, so that’s the first thing that you see is Google’s generative AI response to it. There are, in this case, a handful of affiliate type sites. U.S. News & Reports, New York Magazine, Serious Eats, Consumer Reports. But then it’s Reddit. And then towards the bottom they have that discussions and forums area, and it’s frying pan recommendations on Reddit, and then two Quora links as well. So, one of the questions that I would have is, I know the spirit of Reddit, pretty quickly a Reddit community can sniff out self-promotion. To what degree do you have to be aware of that as you’re interacting with the community? Because it feels like the purest form of Reddit is, hey, I’m a guy out in the world, a girl out in the world, chatting about this thing that I like. And as soon as it gets into the category of, hey, I’m kind of marketing my thing, that very quickly there could be maybe pushback against that. So, what does that look like to walk that line well within the context of a Reddit community?

Ewen Finser: I would say yes. Yes, your assessment is correct in some ways. And I think that’s one of the things I had to get past. I tried to use Reddit years ago and it felt like anytime I posted anything that was vaguely promotional, it would just get shut down. I think that was true of Reddit 5, 10 years ago. Right? So, one, we have to revisit our-

Bjork Ostrom: Assumptions.

Ewen Finser: … pre-conceived notions about what Reddit is today. Partially because they’ve had an influx of users, and because Google’s surfacing Reddit in a way that there’s a whole different influx of different types of users. There’s the hardcore Redditors, the crunchy, angry people that everything, any kind of commercial, anything was bad. But I think of most people it’s actually not the case. That’s a trope, I think, with Reddit. Partially because any place you land on Reddit you’re generally landing on a subreddit. And each subreddit is governed by different rules. And, oh, by the way, Bjork, you can create a subreddit Pinch of Yum, or whatever, Food Blogger Pro, and you’re the king. You can create all the rules.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Ewen Finser: So, what this really means is that Reddit can be anything. It’s like the internet. It’s like you can create a bad site or a bad community, not using those superlatives, but you can create different rules, right? And there’s different nuances that I’m seeing emerging. There’s as moderators, the people that are generally moderators of the old Reddit, these are unpaid volunteers and a lot of them have intrinsic motivation to do that, but that is not a scalable model. There’s even been talk with, if you follow Reddit’s IPO, how are they going to compensate these moderators and are they going to get that preferred stock and all that kind of stuff? It’s a problem to scale that. And so, you end up with some communities they come up with their own rules like you have to have 10 karma to comment. Once you see one community, you’ve just seen one community. There is a universal Reddit algorithm where if you create an account and blast it with affiliate links, your account’s going to be banned. But that’s more of an algorithmic thing just picks up on the pattern. It’s like, okay, no. So, I guess, so what? It’s like, okay, so how I am finding success engaging with Reddit is one, experimenting. Because there is no rule around how many profiles you can have. In fact, there’s a subculture within Reddit of having multiple profiles for different purposes and not necessarily having just one profile, or even one community. You can create tens of communities around different subjects you’re passionate about. So, one is there’s no real enforcement mechanism. And if we look at Reddit compared with Google, there’s no web spam team at Reddit. They have a fraction of the resources, but their implicit guidance from Google basically is like, you are now in charge of the internet effectively.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Because of-

Ewen Finser: Well, they don’t have the resources.

Bjork Ostrom: … the amount of traffic that they’re getting now because of Google search. Suddenly there’s this influx of people consuming the content, but also then creating the content on Reddit.

Ewen Finser: Yes. And so, Google’s kind of devolved that responsibility to Reddit. And from Google’s perspective, well, we find a lot of users really prefer Reddit. And there was this phenomenon where someone would search Food Blogger Pro Reddit. The problem there was Reddit’s internal search was really bad.

Bjork Ostrom: So they would go to Google to get the…

Ewen Finser: To get the right answer in Reddit. And so, Google interpret that, well, people want Reddit. And so, that’s part of, I think, the reason why they… But the other idea being that there’s moderators. There’s this filter, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, interesting. Sure. Yeah. Like a built-in moderator which was an issue that Google’s having was moderating content.

Ewen Finser: Yeah. And so, the reality is it’s kind of the Wild West right now. And at the very least what I’m telling everyone I know is set up your white hat, your above board profile, and it could just be a Food Blogger Pro subreddit. And to your point about people will bring consumer complaints maybe to that forum. And by the way, those complaints happen anyway. And if you don’t register your community, someone else might, or you might get mentioned in a different blogging community being like, hey, that Bjork guy, he’s terrible. But you don’t have a way to really address it. And so, just by having a venue on Reddit that’s like, oh, here’s where you can go to talk about us. That will have some intrinsic benefits. But then just distributing your content on Reddit, even if it’s content you’ve already created, just like you might with Facebook and Pinterest and whatever, create your Reddit post. And some brands just put their naked link in there. And I get into that in the course I created. But what I found success doing is providing context. Like, hey, here’s a product I reviewed. I found that it was great for this, this and this, it really sucks for this. Here’s the link to check out the full review for my full analysis and all my images. And so, it’s almost like, if you remember Digg, back in the day, it’s like that’s a similar era and genre and vibe that Reddit has. And so, just by doing a little bit of adjustment to your distribution strategy you can get that traffic that will… There’s the viral traffic, and by the way, a lot of times that keyword you might be targeting on your article that you publish on your blog that isn’t ranking in Google is getting picked up by Reddit. And so, it’s an extra step that someone goes from Google to Reddit to your post, but it’s a way to recapture some of that traffic.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s interesting. And with the Monarch Money example, it was a good thing when I look back to it. It’s like they were able to have these customer support, I don’t know how they feel about it, but have these customer support interactions in a way where they probably surfaced easier on Google, it was easier for people to find them, they had access to this community. So, almost in a good way it was like they had access to their customers maybe in a way that they wouldn’t have otherwise. And what I hear you saying is the search part made sense where you previously, in your example of Beehive versus ConvertKit, could maybe have created an article that would get onto the first page and you could have gotten traffic to that keyword. In the current state of Google, much harder to do that. But if you create that on Reddit you might be able to get search traffic to that. So, conceptually it’s like, okay, that makes sense, where you’re finding a way to still get access to that audience. But the thing that I hadn’t really considered is this idea of just you are building a community that you can then speak directly to. And I think about that within the context of a brand, like Pinch of Yum, not currently actively doing this, but for a while had this Pinch of Yum VIP group, and it’s like that was the group that we would talk to when we’re like, hey, we’re thinking of tweaking the logo, which one of these do you like best? A, B, or C? It was just a place to interact with the community and the natural platform to do that. And it’s almost like you could even think about leading with that, especially for people that are listening to this podcast who are brand forward type creators, not necessarily product forward, but they have a brand and their brand is their site and they create content on that site. But a way to interact with your community and let them know stuff that’s happening, things that are going on. Additional benefit of potentially capturing search traffic related to some of the things that you’re creating content about. What does it look like? Talk to me about the drawbridge idea. Is that a hop after you have search traffic that you might be getting, it might come straight to your site, you have search traffic that maybe comes to Reddit, that eventually comes to your site. Maybe you have people on Reddit who are seeing something you post and come to your site. At what point do you imagine that drawbridge scenario happening where you try and build that audience of 3% of your traffic that comes into your community, whether it’s a newsletter or a paid community like we have with Food Blogger Pro, where does that happen in that process? Or do you view that as Reddit, that community?

Ewen Finser: Yeah. So, it’s interesting because I think Reddit has a couple of different ways. There’s a intermediate step of someone joins your community on Reddit. And so, then what that basically means it’s like someone liking your Facebook page. When you publish something where some activity happens in your group, that gets surfaced and prefaced in your feed when you log into Reddit. So, if I subscribe to Food Blogger Pro, if you post something today, I’ll probably see that next time I log in. Not every time, there’s an algorithm, it’s not perfect. But there’s that additional sticky layer. Where with Google, I guess they have if you visited a site before they might preface it, but you couldn’t have a membership through Google with a site, really. And so, there’s that element. And that’s a huge advantage, have that additional stickiness. And then, yeah, then it’s getting people, if they can come to your site to capture them that way, just like you would with Google. But I’ve even seen, it’s a wide open playbook, I’ve seen people getting users then to go to Discord as an example, or going to an email list, but to Discord as something that’s a little bit more sticky. Because Discord is something that you have a little bit more control over, even more so than Reddit. In theory, Reddit could take away your community from you if you do something nefarious or whatever. There’s even a, I cover this in the course, but it’s like this place I didn’t know that existed where you can claim lost Reddits. Where someone stopped moderating or there’s a lot of spam and you basically say, hey, I want to take this over, here’s the process. I want to manage it actively. And I was in there and found one example was container homes that subreddit was being taken across some spam. But there are people that had questions and there was real engagement happening. And there’s a process you could go through. There’s 27,000 members. And this person was like, hey, can I have this community to moderate? And, yeah, here you go. There’s a process to go through, but yeah, you have access now to 27,000 subscribers. And anyway, you can get people off of Reddit. There’s also, it’s like a landing page almost in the sense of you can sticky post at the top and say, one example I give, it’s welcome to our page, follow us on Discord. Also follow us here. And then you get everyone that sees that homepage over to Discord. Then there’s also a sidebar, just like you would have on a website, where you can have rules, you can have outbound links to an email list, to your YouTube channel, to your website, to other subreddits that you recommend. And so, there’s all sorts of, if you really get into it, building the spider web of related communities like food bloggers and bloggers and recipe book creators. You can create this web of related communities that refer traffic to each other, and then also have places where they can offshoot to either become a customer or a subscriber that it’s off channel, off Reddit. And so, that’s how I think about it. The world is your oyster in the sense of there’s like a million different places and ways you can get people off of Reddit. But, yeah, it’s similar to any other platform, but I think Reddit gives you more real estate that you can work. I’ve even seen some subreddits that almost look like landing pages or squeeze funnels.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s interesting even to use that Monarch example, I just pulled it up now. I’ve never even looked at the homepage, the subreddit homepage, but they have a little blurb here. “Extend your trial. 50% off now through July 10th. Use the link below to get an extended 30-day trial. 50% off an annual subscription. Useful links. Monarch website, Monarch help center, feature request, product roadmap.” It’s like, oh, okay. You can pretty easily see-

Ewen Finser: Here’s the business.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, exactly. How they’re using it. And they have the rules, but it’s interesting. Or even pinned to the top is “Monarch is hiring. Join our team. As you may know, this subreddit experiencing a lot of growth, do hard work, join our team as a community manager.” All of this is me learning this from you in real time. I need to go through the course to learn more, but you can start to see very quickly, oh, this makes a lot of sense. And if you have the bandwidth to be a part of it, and maybe that’s a good question to round out our conversation is, people are trying to keep up with their site, updates, maybe doing keyword research, doing all the content production, if they’re doing it on their own, maybe on some social platforms. But what does it look like from a time perspective when you think about folding this in as a part of what you’re doing?

Ewen Finser: Yeah. So, that’s a great question. It’s going to vary a little bit. Obviously depending on what you got going on. But for me, I’ve realized it’s… When I look at all of the alternatives, and I’m trying everything, some of it’s working, like Pinterest is working, but it’s slow. It’s a slog. It’s like 6 to 12 months, and then finally you get enough outbound clicks for it to make a difference. With Reddit, the ROI is quick, often within 24 hours we’re showing up on the first page. And to have that push button effect gives me a lot of confidence that it’s a good place to invest resources. So, I’d just like to caveat this whole thing. Reddit now has the same brand visibility, digital visibility as amazon.com. And it’s happened in six months. And so, I think there’s this opportunity now that, again, the human brain is so bad at exponentials.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Right.

Ewen Finser: Even me, I’ve been used to doing things with Google for 10 years and it’s like, oh, here’s the Google strategy and everyone now knows about SEO where maybe five years ago it was still an emerging thing. But this is early, early days for this Reddit phenomenon. And I think about it in… Because there’s a risk here with investing time in another platform and them pulling the rug on you. Right? So, I think about this in two cases. The bear case and the bull case. The bear case, worst case scenario, Google stops prefacing Reddit. They’re like, we made a mistake. We’re not going to feature you so highly. Okay, there’s still going to be some residual traffic from Google. But Google has added so many users to Reddit, and every minute they’re adding more users. So, at a certain point the plane is big enough to fly on its own. And Reddit can take off and they can call their own shots if enough people sign up and become part of those communities that are very sticky, and very engaging, and get a notification every time someone posts something. It has this network effect that takes over. But that’s the bear case. Reddit is another Facebook. The bull case is that, that is true, and Google still continues to give them all this free traffic, and there’s still this search arbitrage. And so, I look at it relative to these other places where I invest my time and energy. And I really like that, that range of outcomes. I’m very comfortable investing. What I recommend everyone start with is just get your brand presence on Reddit. Even if you’re just distributing your content and providing a little blurb. Just like you would for Facebook. I think most of us, and most of your audience probably, has a publication cadence or here’s what we do when something goes live. You share the link on here, here, and here. Oh, add Reddit to it. Maybe prioritize Reddit a little bit more. But that’s minimal investment. It’s probably like if you’re doing that, or your VA is doing it, your editor is doing it, just have them add it to the list. And just see what happens over three months. It’s maybe going to add a couple of minutes maybe, but it’s not going to be this huge investment. I think if you see some signs of progress there and you want to dig in, then it’s like that traffic leak or engagement strategy of really investing into the platform, commenting on other subreddits. And then there’s a whole strategy around even just attaching yourself to an preexisting subreddit. It could be like gluten-free recipes. There’s a subreddit and you just start engaging with that community and over time you develop a relationship, you’re allowed to share stuff, you figure out the rules and you can get traffic either directly from that community, or if that’s a no-go, you can get traffic from gluten-free recipes to your Pinch of Yum subreddit. And there’s this funnel effect. So, we’re approaching it as marketers, but it has a very natural, you’re providing value, you’re developing relationship, but you’re actually spending time just like you would on Instagram or Facebook actually engaging with the platform in a deeper way. And so, that’s another level of investment. And then the crazy investment strategy, I’ve explored it all because I really want to understand the platform regardless if I want to pursue these tactics, is there’s a whole underground market for acquiring community subreddits, acquiring user accounts with high karma, buying upvotes, buying downvotes. There’s the whole, I call it black hat SEO operations around Reddit. So, that would involve spending money to acquire accounts and things like that. That’s a whole buyer beware approach. But I would say you can start small, start with just treating it another platform to distribute your content and then see if that resonates, if that works. And then take it from there.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think the majority of people who are listening to this have some brand and the way that they, whether it’s a personal brand or just a brand that’s maybe not them personally, but a brand that they curate. And so, I think that the biggest takeaway is what does it look like to have a brand presence in a place that’s somewhere you haven’t thought about before, at least for a lot of people, and how do you curate that and treat that well? I think a lot of people listening would think about Instagram and then there may be like… And TikTok is also one of those things. But as you’ve talked about, and it’s interesting even to look up on a keyword research app like Reddit, it’s helpful content update and then it’s up and to the right.

Ewen Finser: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s just bonkers. I don’t remember what it was but it’s like, I can pull it up here, 600 million organic traffic and it’s 10 X what it was less than a year ago, or a year ago essentially. Exactly a year ago. So, it’s like 10 X primarily I would assume due to search traffic plus then the flywheel that happens when you sign up for an account, you get notices and notifications, you’re linking to it more and things like that. So, it’s important for anybody who’s creating content on the internet to at least be aware of it. And then for us to make the decision around how do we approach that from a brand strategy perspective I think is super smart. So, I know that you have a course that you talked about, and I think it’s a great way to quickly accelerate our learning anytime that we can draft off of all of the work that somebody else has done and then has compiled that into an easy to consume course. It’s a big win. I know you have that on Reddit. Can you talk a little bit about that if anybody wants to check it out or look into it?

Ewen Finser: Yeah. And so, I’m not a course creator. You know me, I’ve really never had anything to sell, but what I stumbled on with Reddit was like, oh, my God, no one’s talking about this. I couldn’t go anywhere and find some information. It was like, you know what? Why don’t I just give it a shot? And I’m not the world’s… I don’t even describe myself as a Reddit expert. I want to engage with the community and learn. And so, maybe I’m a few steps ahead maybe of some people, but that’s really valuable at this point in the game to have someone that’s just a little bit further down the tunnel. And that’s how I created this. It’s called Reddit Leverage, and it’s a course that walks you through basic orientation. And then I talk about these three main strategies. The one being the brand strategy of you just want to get your brand exposure, do it above board. Then there’s this middle tier strategy which is called the traffic leaks. Which is, okay, you’re taking a more growth hacky… It’s not really gray hat, but maybe that would be the best analogy. It’s like, okay, how do I reverse engineer what’s working? That’s a lot of keyword research. You can even plug subreddits into Ahrefs or Semrush and understand what they’re ranking for. And a lot of these are successful niche sites in terms of the community traffic they’re getting. So, that’s the other one. And then the last one is the direct monetization. You can literally sometimes get affiliate links into posts. You can be very mercenary. I always recommend providing value with whatever you’re doing, but there’s all sorts of strategies. And there’s even, if you’re a brand, like your Pinch of Yum or your Food Blogger Pro, even if there are no links allowed, just by dropping your brand mention in a subreddit, that’ll drive, it will be hard to tie out with analytics, but you’ll see a spike in search traffic then from it went viral in some subreddit and someone dropped Monarch Money. And there’s a whole strategy around that too. So, I walk through these different strategies. And then on the more black hat, like, okay, you want to invest a lot, you can go out and buy accounts. And I cover that just as context if people want to do that. And then what I’m adding, it’s a real time evolving document. Every week I’m adding more modules. I’m trying to add case studies. Last week I added this module on how I discovered how you can claim Reddits, subreddits. And so, I added that module. And today I got some feedback. Somebody was like, “Can you actually show me how you create a community?” I was like, “Okay, I’m uploading that now.” And then I find different interesting ways people are leveraging Reddit and I add a case study. And so, it’s this course that is actionable now, you can get traction now with it, and there’s this implicit I’m adding, I envision eventually having a community around this where it’s an evolving course, but also a community that we can share best practices. So, that’s the course in a nutshell.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Ewen Finser: I think it’s the first of its kind.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And like you said, kind of covers the full spectrum. I think for anybody listening to really think about what does that look like to own your brand conversation, like you said, that being a really important step. Encourage people to check that out. And so much of what we do is showing up in different places on the web and being, like we talked about, strategic about that in knowing where most people are showing up. If we did a podcast about Myspace, it might be interesting. There might be some really curious ways that you could be using Myspace, but not a lot of people are using it. And so, tactically, even though you could create really compelling, really good content that is super helpful for people, if you’re doing it on Myspace, it’s going to be tough to build a business. And so, there’s this balance for us as creators to say, where’s our content going to be multiplied? Where’s it going to be most strategic? How do we understand how to best create within the context of that platform? Reddit is different than Instagram, is different than TikTok, is different than a blog, is different than Pinterest. And then what does it look like for us to create something that’s truly compelling, helpful for that community, something that is going to hopefully make a difference. You talked about gluten-free. If you are somebody who understands gluten-free and you’re going to be able to help people, you can make the world a better place by figuring out where a lot of people are trying to get help eating gluten-free and help those people in a way that’s going to make a difference for them. And that balance of finding the tactics, finding the platform that works, and then finding out how you can best help on that given platform, I think if we can become really good at that, and it takes a long time to figure out how to do that, that’s where you can have some of these really incredible breakthroughs. So, super fun. All new information for me that I haven’t thought about or an angle that we haven’t really considered. So, really appreciate it, Ewen. Can you talk about if people want to check out that course, we’ll include it in the show notes, but how do people get there?

Ewen Finser: Yeah. It’s a teachable course, but I’ll add a link and a discount obviously for the audience. And it’ll just be, here’s a link, here’s your sign up. And, yeah, it’s fairly straightforward. It’s not going to be too complicated. And I imagine, again, evolving that and adding materials, and communities, and resources, and even part of one of the value adds, and including a list of other user generated content platforms that are like Reddit that you can leverage. It’s a resource list, and I’m adding to that daily. Like there’s Quora out there, there’s niche forum, like the Shopify forum where you can have a presence there and get traffic. And so, yeah, it’s just a simple resource and it’s probably going to evolve over time, but it’s a link. You sign up and enroll in the course.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And are you active online, Ewen? If people want to follow along with what you’re doing and what you’re up to, what would be the best way to do that?

Ewen Finser: Yeah. So, I have my newsletter, which is a weekly take on what’s happening in the niche media publishing world. It’s nichemediapublishing.com. I’ll include that in the show notes too. And that’s my thoughts, current thoughts. And then, yeah, LinkedIn, Twitter, kind of active on X, I guess. But I’ll include that in the show notes. That’s a great way to follow along too. But yeah, those are my channels.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, Ewen, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Really appreciate it.

Ewen Finser: Thanks, Bjork.

Ann Morrissey: Hey, there. This is Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Since we’re kicking off a new month, we wanted to give you a behind the scenes look at what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership this September. Later this week we’ll be publishing a coaching call with Sri and Manny from Vidhya’s Vegetarian Kitchen. In this coaching call they discuss the strategy behind reaching a broader audience with a niche blog, being intentional about protecting your business against a future with AI, and how to use clarity to its maximum potential when updating and republishing old blog content. Next up is our September live Q&A. We were so interested in the topic of leveraging Reddit as a traffic source that we asked Ewen to come back on to host a live Q&A for the Food Blogger Pro community. So, if you enjoyed this episode and would like to learn more about how to approach Reddit as a traffic driver, be sure to join us on Thursday, September 12th and submit any burning questions you may have about Reddit beforehand. We’re rounding out the month with a brand new course all about creating vertical short form videos. This will be a deep dive into creating those eye catching videos that we all see on Instagram and TikTok. So, if you’ve been wanting to learn more about how to create those for your blog, you won’t want to miss this course. It’s going to be a great month, and we really hope that you can join us for some of these new pieces of content. If you are not yet a Food Blogger Pro member and would like to join us, just head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more about our membership and how you can join us on Food Blogger Pro. We would love to have you. And we’ll see you back here next week for another podcast episode. Make it a great week.