A Common Problem with Food Blogs (and How to Fix It)

Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Ann. In today’s episode, we are kicking off our three-episode mini-series with Memberful in which our very own Bjork Ostrom talks about the power of income diversification and memberships. In the solo episode, Bjork discusses the importance of diversifying your revenue streams and the risk that comes with relying on a single stream of income. Instead of consistently juicing one orange, in this case, that would be one source of revenue, he encourages creators to look for other oranges to squeeze. That could be in the form of affiliate marketing, sponsored content, or membership sites. If you’re looking to bring in recurring income, ultimately you want to think about how you can create a strong business without relying on one traffic source. If you enjoy this episode, we would really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. Be sure to tune in next week for the second episode of our mini-series in which Bjork will talk more about the ins and outs of membership sites and tactics to remote your brand. And now, without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Hey, everyone. Bjork here. So I am recording a solo episode today. We occasionally do these. It’s actually been a while since we’ve done one of these, and one of the reasons why we don’t do them as often is because there’s just a different cadence with them. It takes a little bit more work. It takes a little bit more effort to think through and build an outline and really be strategic about what we want to talk about on these episodes. But one of the great things is we’ve been partnering with Memberful. I’m sure you’ve heard Memberful mentioned on the podcast as a sponsor, and they are sponsoring this mini-series that we are doing about membership sites, and we feel like it’s a really important topic. And the reason is because, well, it’s something that I think a lot of food bloggers and really in general creators need to hear, and I think it really comes down to a major problem with most food blogs, and more importantly, how to solve it. And so let’s not bury the lead. What’s the problem? Well, most food bloggers, and this applies to a lot of other content creators too, aren’t diversified in how they make money. For many, their main, if not only source of revenue comes from ads. And don’t get me wrong, ads are great. We use them for Pinch of Yum. It’s a major income source for Pinch of Yum, and they can be an incredible way to monetize your blog. You’ve heard from countless people who have come on the podcast and have talked about how life-changing it can be when they get ads on their site and they work with an ad partner and suddenly they’re able to monetize traffic. But the challenge comes when your success becomes too dependent on that one stream of revenue. You see, ad revenue is heavily dependent on traffic from sources like Google or Pinterest, or to some degree, social media. But really, we think of Google Pinterest and direct traffic as the main source. But if those traffic sources change, for instance, the dreaded algorithm update, your traffic can suddenly drop and with it so does your income. And we’ve also heard from countless people in countless stories about what that’s felt like and what that experience has been like. In the 14 years that we’ve done this, almost 15 years that we’ve done this, we’ve heard stories going back 10 years. So it’s not like a new thing. This isn’t an uncommon thing, to have to deal with algorithm updates, and specifically the problem of traffic from Google. And what we’ve found is that relying on a single stream of income that’s tied directly to traffic is risky. And it can be amazing when everything is working, but when things change, it can be a big blow to your business. And I’m sure you’ve heard stories of people who have experienced that within the last year, but especially if you’ve been doing this for longer, we’ve all had stories, either ourselves or from other people who have experienced some of the negative consequences of an algorithm update, whether that be an algorithm on a social media platform like Pinterest, right? So years ago, Pinterest was an incredible traffic source. If you really look back, Facebook, at one point, was a really incredible traffic source. Google now is really the traffic source that people talk a lot about. But here’s the thing, those algorithms change. And we’ve seen that with Facebook, we’ve seen it with Pinterest, we’ve seen it with Google. And what happens is a lot of bloggers try to just juice the orange. So when I talk about juice the orange, I’ve talked about that on the podcast before, it’s this idea of you have an orange and you’re maybe making orange juice, and you’re juicing the orange, meaning you’re trying to get the juice out of the orange. And what’s happening is we see a lot of people who just try and juice the orange even more. They ask themselves, how can I get more traffic from Google? But here’s the catch. Sometimes that orange has already been juiced as much as it can be, or it’s an orange that’s… There’s maybe some more juice in it, but what if there was a completely unjuiced orange sitting right next to you and you were making orange juice? So it would make sense to pick up that orange and juice that orange as opposed to trying to squeeze more out of the orange that you’ve already been trying to squeeze juice out of. It could be, in our world, a new revenue stream. And here’s the thing, it’s already within your reach. You just need to notice it and start working on it. For example, there’s lots of different ways that we could approach this. Let’s talk about social media. So many creators have built a strong following on platforms like Instagram, or Facebook, or YouTube, but they haven’t found ways to leverage those followers into something more. And in the old model, you might think, gosh, how do I just get more traffic to my site? And that’s one way you could approach it, and it’s not a bad thing, but there’s more brand equity there. People trust you, they follow you, they engage with your content, but maybe they’re not going to your website as much as you’d like. And maybe in this current version, that’s the primary way that you are capturing some of that value, is just through traffic to your site. Or another scenario, let’s think about your existing blog readers and email subscribers. These are people who are already invested in your content. They’d probably be open to buying something you create. But the question often is, what? What are those people going to buy? And especially if the thing that you’re selling is ads, it’s not that people are actually buying something, they’re just trading some of their attention to be exposed to ads. Well, here’s where the diversification play comes in. There are so many different ways you can diversify your revenue streams without drastically changing what you do. And what I love about this is thinking about… Let’s say there’s a world where you are right now is completely locked in. Your followers, your email subscribers, your traffic, all of that is locked in and it’s not going to change. What are you going to do to make your business more valuable moving forward, if that’s your goal? Now, for some of us, it’s not, but let’s say that is your goal. So maybe it’s creating a physical product like a cookbook. You could do an in-person event or a cooking class. That could be one of the things you could do, and you could offer that to your audience. You could also explore affiliate marketing. However, with updates like Google’s, helpful content update, that’s become a bit trickier to execute on blogs. And I think a lot of people in the world of affiliate have maybe noticed that, but potentially it could work well in other places like Instagram Stories or on other social platforms, or one of my favorites is sponsor content. So let’s say you have a following on Instagram or TikTok. You can partner with brands that you love and are aligned with, and you can create a win-win for everyone. But if you’re looking for something with recurring revenue, and for me, that’s the real magic of some of the businesses that we look at, whether it be online businesses or brick and mortar businesses, is this idea of recurring revenue. You think of even car wash, and 30 years ago, you’d go put $3 in a machine, and then you’d wash your car. But now, there’s so many car washes that have this recurring membership subscription. And the reason is because recurring revenue is really valuable, and it’s different than these one one-time transactions. And it gives you stability. And for that, membership sites in our world are amazing. Now, let me explain. There’s this idea of having a thousand true fans. You’ve heard me talk about this before. Kevin Kelly wrote this really popular, iconic post years ago talking about a thousand true fans. And the concept is that if you have a thousand people who are diehard supporters who love what you do and are willing to pay for it, you can build a sustainable business. And it’s not just for food blogs or food creators, it’s really anything. It could be as a musician. It could be as somebody like my dad who does pottery. It could be as an author. And the other thing is it doesn’t have to be a thousand. It could even be a hundred true fans to start, or even fewer, depending on how the structure of how you’re collecting payments and what the cost of a membership site looks like in the scenario that we’re talking about. Now, here’s what I want you to do. Think about this. There are over 8 billion people in the world today, 8 billion. Now, half of those people have access to the internet, so that’s 4 billion people who could potentially come across your content. Now, obviously those people are scattered all around the world. And if we’re talking about the world of food, that’s going to dwindle that number down even further, but it’s still in the billions. And somewhere in that group, there are people who have problems that you can help solve. And I feel very confident that you, with your unique story and your unique skills and your unique passions, can find 100, 200, 300 people to help, to bring together, to allow people to help each other. We see that even within the Food Blogger Pro membership. We have this great community of people who help other people. And that’s just a few hundred. If you really scale that up, it could be thousands. And I would even be confident saying there are thousands of people that you could help. And the question is, how do you want to help these people? What kind of offer could you create that makes their life better while also diversifying the income that you have from your business and creating a more stable and predictable business? Here’s the key takeaway. When diversifying your income, you don’t need to make a complete shift in your business or learn an entirely new skill. The goal is to find that juiciest orange that’s closest to what you’re already doing. You can, again, imagine just holding that orange and you’re juicing it, juicing it, juicing it, and then you try and juice it a little bit more. But what the goal is to look around the table and say, “Actually, there’s another orange. I just need to grab it and juice that orange.” And that’s why I love membership sites, not only because of the recurring income, but they also allow you to build on what you’re already great at, which is creating content, engaging with your audience, and communicating with people online. Plus, you’re building a business around something you’re passionate about, something you could talk about all day long. So that’s the problem, and the problem is that a lot of us aren’t diversified. We don’t have this diversified source of income. And for many of us, we have 80, 90, 100% of our income coming from one source, which is ads, which, again, is great, but it’s reliant on traffic, and traffic is reliant on algorithms from places like Google or Pinterest. So that’s the problem, and the solution is diversification. And one of my favorite ways to diversify is to create content in the form of a membership site. We’ve done that with Food Blogger Pro. We’ve felt what that has felt like, and it’s a wonderful business model. So in our next episode, we’re going to be diving deeper into the benefits of membership sites. We’ll discuss how monetization works, the key metrics you should keep an eye on, and how you can start building your own. And before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to Memberful or sponsoring this mini-series. It’s a three part mini-series, so this is the first one. The second one, like I said, we’re going to talk about monetization, how that works, key metrics you can keep an eye on, because it’s a very different world than the world that we are used to when we think about traffic and ads, and how you can start building when you are interested in taking the next step. So thanks to Memberful for sponsoring this mini-series. As we’ll talk about in the third episode when we interview Jen from Memberful, they really make it easy to build and manage your own membership site. We built Food Blogger Pro from the ground up, and it was a lot of work. We pre-sold membership. This was like 10 years ago, maybe raised, I don’t know, eight, nine, $10,000. We used that for all the development and design costs, and doesn’t cost that much anymore. It’s one of the wonderful things about technology and advancing technology, is it all gets easier and more accessible. So I’m excited to talk more about how you can use their platform and future episodes, and really appreciate them dedicating some resources to Food Blogger Pro to make these episodes possible. And thanks to you for tuning in. And if you found today’s episode helpful, I’d love for you to subscribe, leave a review, share it with someone who might benefit from this content. And I will leave you with actually a quote from a newsletter that I subscribe to. It’s my friend Ewan. We’ll link to the newsletter if you would want to subscribe to it. And he talks about niche publishing and what it’s like to be a niche publisher. And for a lot of us, we are that. We are niche publishers, meaning it’s a small team with a niche focus. For a lot of people, it might be kind of recipes in general, but for a lot of us, we’ve found a niche and we are serving a certain audience. And here is what Ewan says in his newsletter, which I feel like applies to what we’re talking about. And he says this, “The age of the Mono channel publisher is over,” meaning someone that just publishes and gets traffic from one main area, he says, “it’s walled gardens,” meaning you have to subscribe. You have to sign up. You can’t necessarily just find it on Google and get in. It’s a community. So it’s a walled garden, diversification or bust. And then he says, “Okay, now that we have the scare fest over with, what does this all mean? As difficult as this transition is, it’s probably a good thing. It’s forcing indie publishers, so that’s like you and I, to create better businesses.” And then he says, “Dare I say real? The reality is that many of the old Google reliant publishers, even the largest pubs with millions of monthly users were just Google satellites glorified growth hacks. This, in spite of many publishers and creators actually producing phenomenal content.” And the point here is that these businesses were really, really just a feeder content for Google. Now, it works. It still does work. And if you can figure it out, it’s a great solution. But I would make the case that it should only be a part of your business. It shouldn’t be your entire business. And it’s important for us to think about how we can diversify and how we can create strong businesses that aren’t reliant on single sources of traffic or single sources of revenue. So stay tuned for episode number two in the mini-series. This is going to be great, and looking forward to connecting with you then.

Emily Walker: Hello, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. I wanted to pop in today and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We are so grateful for you for listening. Before we sign off, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Food Blogger Pro Forum in case you didn’t know how it works. If you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you get access to our amazing forum. It’s one of my favorite places on Food Blogger Pro. I spend a lot of time there myself. And on the forum, we have tons of different topics for you to explore. We have a building traffic section, a photography section. We have an essential tool section. We chat about generating income and essential plugins, all sorts of areas for you to ask questions and chat with your fellow Food Blogger Pro members. It’s a great place to connect with fellow members, troubleshoot any issues you’re having, and brainstorm together. Our industry experts are always popping into the forum to help members with their questions. Casey Markee and Andrew Wilder are always popping in, and so is Danielle Liss, our legal expert. It’s a really great place to get access to these experts and have them help you with your concerns. The Forum is also just a fantastic place to find a community in this food blogging space as you’re working to grow your site and your business. If you’re ready to join Food Blogger Pro and get access to our wonderful forum, head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about our membership. We really hope you enjoy this episode and can’t wait to see you next week for another great episode. Have an amazing week.