Creating Reader-First Content and Growing to 800,000 Monthly Page Views with Elena Davis

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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, we are really happy to welcome back Elena Davis from the Food Blog, Cucina by Elena. When we first chatted with Elena in 2022, she had just hit 100,000 page views on her site and qualified for MediaVine, which is a huge accomplishment. Three years later, her site gets over 800,000 monthly page views, but her journey to get there has not been without its hiccups. In this interview, she catches us up on the last few years of her business, including more about the traffic plateau that she hit in September of 2023 and how she’s been working to steadily audit and update her old blog posts to recover from that traffic decline. Elena also chats more about choosing the right marketing channels for your blog and her strategies on email, Pinterest and Instagram, and how she really prioritizes providing value to her readers and how that mindset has really transformed how she approaches her business. It is really fun to catch up with Elena again. I think there are a lot of really great takeaways from this interview, so I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Elena, welcome to the podcast.

Elena Davis: Thanks so much. Honestly, it’s just great to be back.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, back to the podcast. It’s not just to the podcast, it’s back to the podcast. Last time we talked last time, we talked about growing your site to a hundred thousand page views, getting into an ad network, media vine in this case, and what that process was like for you using the tools and the experiences that you had to grow to that point. Today we’re going to be talking about going from that point of a hundred thousand to half a million on your way to that million mark, hitting 800,000 page views. And not only that, but growing your social following as well. And one of the great things about your story is that you have that zero to one, and we’ve kind of captured that conversation and for a lot of people who listen, what does it look like to go from zero to one, that one being, Hey, I’m able to make some substantial income from this.

I have 50,000 page views, a hundred thousand page views, I have a social following. Today we’re going to be talking about going from one to two. It’s kind of going from that point where you’re able to make a full-time income to kind of full-time income plus more than you would expect from a normal job that you’d have as a teacher for sure. But even really lucrative jobs, W2 jobs, you get to this point where you’ve built an online business that’s able to earn a lot of money, and we’re going to talk about the things that you’ve learned kind of on that one to two journey. So if we go back and let’s say we pick up where we left off with that last episode, so we press stop recording. You went back to work for a few years and now we press start recording. What changed? What did you do different, if anything, to get from one to two when you look at comparing that to zero to one?

Elena Davis: Okay, so I’m going to say two things that are complete opposite. One is I did exactly the same thing. Two is I did a lot of different things. Sure. So we’ll start with I did a lot of the same thing, meaning there is a point where it’s a lot of rinsing and repeating. I’m still creating recipes. I’m still doing SEO research, I’m still staying mindful of how things are changing on Google. I am growing my Pinterest, I’m growing my Instagram. These are things that I have done since day one. How I am doing them is much different.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So the idea is

Elena Davis: Difference.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. The idea is like, Hey, I’m still focused in place, system is in place. Let’s talk about that. So the growth, how do I learn how to do? It’s almost like the mechanism that you have around growing on these platforms still exists. That engine is still there. How do I grow on Instagram? How do I grow on Pinterest? How do I grow my following? But what you’re saying is the tactics, the strategy, that’s what’s changed. Let’s touch on that. So how about in the world of search for SEO? My guess is that an important variable or metric in your online business success is the search traffic that you get. What has changed in the last few years when you think of your strategy from a SEO perspective?

Elena Davis: So when we last talked, my blog just continually organically was just snowballing in a growth that was upward hit September, 2023. It was like this wall. I hit this wall and then after the wall things started to go down.

Bjork Ostrom: The wall is almost like a cliff.

Elena Davis: It was a slip and slide and I was not used to this

Bjork Ostrom: Because since the day you started for the most part month over month, things generally go up into the right.

Elena Davis: Things were growing social and Google, it was all kind of organically building upwards. So I was just hit with this huge realization of Google saying basically you need to improve a lot of things. I think a lot of people get very angry and mad at Google when they are hit by the update. Mine was not an HCU update, so it’s not like my whole blog was completely kaput. It was more just specific things. My posts were very long, there was a lot of keywords in the headings. There were things that weren’t working anymore and I had thought that they were good things and they weren’t, weren’t serving the user. And I think that bottom line, these updates in Google’s defense are meant to help the user and what is being searched on Google, which is why we have them and why that they do them.

Bjork Ostrom: Google has this fine line that they’re always balancing, which is how do we surface the best result for the thing that somebody is searching for? And also how does Google capture value within that? And so it feels like there’s this, and if Google gets too much on them trying to capture the value, if the only thing they were displaying were ads, people would stop using it. And also if the only thing they were showing was organic content and even if it was really helpful and they didn’t show ads, then it wouldn’t be a good business strategy. And so it’s like they’re constantly trying to balance how do we show the thing that’s most helpful. And also I think one of the things that we have to navigate as creators is Google’s own interest and capturing some of the value on its own. And so there’s this dynamic that you’re constantly navigating and trying to understand as a creator, where do we fit in there? And to your point, it’s like, Hey, Google is is better off if they surface the best piece of content. They’re trying to do that also simultaneously trying to capture some of that value with ads that they’re displaying or trying to keep people on page on Google on site.

Elena Davis: Absolutely. So it was like September, December, March, July, so I kept getting hit with these updates, but we were updating things all along the way.

Bjork Ostrom: On your site, you were updating your content on the site?

Elena Davis: Yes. I started by instead of, well, you kind of have the moment where you for a bit and you’re like, wow, what am I going to do? You’re so overwhelmed, there’s so many things you have to fix. You’re like, where do I start? There’s some tools that are helpful. Companies like Top Hat Rank can help do this, tools Clarity can help clean up websites and it’s something that isn’t ongoing thing and as I’m sure you and Lindsay know, it’s never ends. We’re always cleaning it up. It’s like the leaky bucket syndrome. I think I talked about that the last time. It’s like you’re putting in all this new water, but if there’s a hole and all your old content is just leaking out, you’re losing so much value in that old content, so you’ve got to put a plug in there and keep it all as you’re adding new and it’s just a time of season of updating, creating new and doing it kind of like I was saying, systems in place to do both at the same time. And then it takes time after you do the updates, you don’t expect, you want to see immediate results and sometimes you don’t. It takes a little while for those posts to catch up and sometimes they won’t. Like some posts that I had, the search intent has changed so much that those posts won’t recover when people are searching Pan recipe in December in the United States, they more want to buy one, not make one,

Bjork Ostrom: And so there’s going to be product links as opposed to a recipe link.

Elena Davis: Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: And that would be, an example of that would be an example of a Google update where it’s actually probably displaying the thing that people want more. They probably discovered that by when people would search that they’d go and they would click on the product as opposed to the recipe. They reorder things. It feels like to you, the creator, wait, what did I do wrong? Who’s outranking me? And it’s to your point, this is a really important word intent and Google’s interpretation of the intent of the user has changed, which means they’ve realized, oh, actually when people search chocolate chip cookies near me, they’re not looking for a recipe. They’re looking for a chocolate chip cookie store. That one’s an obvious one, and I think that intent is a really good word for us to understand as we try and understand the world of search. Can you talk about where were you at from a traffic perspective and then high point, low point in that period of time? I think it helps paint a picture around the psychology of what that’s like and then also coming back out of that. Yes.

Elena Davis: Yeah, so about a 30% traffic loss from Google, is that what you’re talking about? The numbers there? Yeah, about a 30% traffic loss from September just right away, and then it went to 40% from Google. My Pinterest was actually doing really well, so it kept me afloat a lot of this time and I started doing some tactics on Instagram that I changed up that also started driving a lot of traffic that kind of made up for that 40% loss, which is a good thing to remember to have things in different areas where you’re consistently updating, but I know the power of Google and I wasn’t willing to give up, and so a lot of the social influence keeps those posts alive. So like the pane recipe, well, all my loyal followers still come to me for that recipe. I have a really big social pull for that recipe, and so people are still making it and it’s still valuable and it’s still bringing money, although maybe it’s not coming from Google. So after all these updates, if you want me to fast forward really fast to now February of 2025, I have now since the September update, September, 2023, I have gained back a 30% increase of Google traffic and I attribute that to all of the updates that we’ve done and that we’re still doing.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So is that 30% math question here? Is that 30% from you were at, let’s say it was at, it had dropped. I’m not saying these are what the actual numbers are. You can share if you know ’em, but a hundred thousand page views now at 130,000 or were you at 200,000 at the top and now it’s 260,000? Again, not the actual numbers. I know that it was

Elena Davis: Highest date

Bjork Ostrom: Numbers or

Elena Davis: Whatever. No, so it is. I had it written down. It is a 30% increase from what it was originally.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so you are at new highs now. You’re achieving those. So what’s interesting, if you do the math on that, it’s probably a hundred percent growth from the bottom.

Elena Davis: Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Which is really encouraging I think for people who have experienced seasons where they have a drop in traffic to know that you can bounce back from that. One of the things they often talk about in the world of investing or just metrics in general is if you have a 50% drop in traffic or if a stock goes down by 50%, you actually have to have a hundred percent growth to get back to where you were. And so I think it’s a great testament to the work that you did to point to the fact that at the dip, the lowest point in the dip, you had to get a hundred percent traffic growth. Traffic growth, your traffic had to double to get back to where you were. Plus where you said it’s like 30%, so that’s awesome. What do you attribute that to?

Elena Davis: You have to perseverance one, two, knowing what to update, what not to update some posts that are not serving you and driving zero traffic. Again, I wouldn’t recommend this without consulting someone for your specific site, but no indexing them until they are properly updated. So Google doesn’t continually search these pages that are essentially no good in.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Can you talk about that specifically? The no index in your case, what did you know Index and then maybe paint a picture a little bit of what the no index tag means for people who aren’t familiar with no indexing an entire post,

Elena Davis: No indexing an entire post. You just go all the way down to the bottom of the post and it’s like where your meta description is and all that. There’s something called advanced. You go down there and it just basically says you want this recipe to be on your website, but you don’t want Google to search it. Don’t want the Google Bots to search that on your website and see that wow, there’s like, I would write some paragraphs in H two, the whole paragraph would be an H two heading, right?

Sure. So Google’s like, what the heck is going on here? This was like when I first started, I don’t have time to update a hundred whatever posts in a month to do them properly with new photos and all that. So the strategy of the no indexing is I’m just going to head and tell Google to put a halt on these posts that are written terribly from an SEO perspective talking about my nonna for two paragraphs, just stuff that needs to be fixed, but I can’t fix it all at once. Then as I am updating them, which you should, and knowing which ones to update first, there’s tools like Clarity will tell you, this is the traffic potential that you have here, or you’ll never rank for this. Maybe don’t update that right away, et cetera. So kind of make a list for yourself. Just put everything in an Excel spreadsheet, but Clarity does that for you and people like Top Hat Rank can help you or whatever can do that, and then you have to emotionally let go. It was really hard for me to see, and I think that as food bloggers,

Bjork Ostrom: There’s a psychological piece to it.

Elena Davis: Oh yeah. I was like, there’s no way I am. No one indexing these. There’s no way. This is amazing. These are so great. And this goes to my point of where I kind of have this micro lens and a macro lens of how I view my blog, and this is very micro. This is me really zoning in and doing all of this stuff is no indexing is so minute my reader that comes to my site doesn’t even know that this is happening. And they shouldn’t. Right.

Bjork Ostrom: Doesn’t even know that you are no indexing. Is that what you mean?

Elena Davis: Yeah. No reader would ever know what that means. They don’t need to know somebody searching for it on Google, but since it’s not coming up in any of the first how many pages, then it doesn’t matter. It would just be my reader who will then go to my website, which is why I think especially newer bloggers coming in, building an audience, a loyal audience is where a huge majority of the focus should be right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And when you say a majority of the focus, what do you mean? What should the focus be?

Elena Davis: I mean, if you are writing the best content, but you don’t have that pool of people that is coming to share it, then I think it doesn’t create as much value. It’s one of, I do think there’s a huge social pull right now, especially with AI and things. The one thing that I do know that it’s not bots that are making our recipes, it’s still humans as far as I’m aware, that are searching and actually cooking in kitchen this point in time. It’s humans at this point. It’s still us. It’s not the robot that’s cooking. So those people, they want a connection more than ever I think.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And point being, one of our advantages as creators is our humanity. And if we can lean into our humanity, it’s a differentiator in a world where increasingly people will get their information from the sources that automatically generate that content. Gemini, Claude Chat, GPT, it’s not a bad thing and a lot of times it can be really helpful, but if we are going to build a business and the business is going to be creating content on the internet and the way that content is consumed on the internet is changing, we need to think about how are we going to differentiate ourselves. If you have an entire site that was made up of, it was anonymous, it wasn’t you, it was just information, and the information was all around cooking times and it was like how long to cook an egg, how long to cook chicken, what temperature to get beef in order for it to be safe.

There’s going to be a real threat to that content because it’s very transactional. But if you have a human forward site, a brand that’s going to be more defensible because the content’s not going to be as transactional, which I think is a great point. I want to go back real quick to touch on the idea of no indexing. I think some people think a lot about it and they have questions about it. What do I know Index? What do I not know Index? An example in our case is Pinch of Yum has been around for 15 years. We have a lot of really old content, especially from early stages where the site was almost like a journal. And an example, a really specific example in the case of Pinch of Yum was Lindsay was an elementary school teacher and she wrote a post called the Hotdog Cafe, and it was all around how with her elementary school students, she had an activity with hot dogs, and I think it was actually called The Fraction Cafe, and it was maybe, I don’t remember Hot Dogs ice cream. Now that I’m talking about it, I don’t remember. It might’ve been ice cream or hot dogs or both. Exactly why

Elena Davis: It’s going next.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, exactly. And I won’t be able to find it because then it doesn’t exist anymore on the site. But what we had to make a decision on was what do we want to do with this? And the first thing that we said is like, okay, we know that this doesn’t hit our quality standard. The photos aren’t what we want them to be. The content isn’t in depth. We’d want it to be. So that was the first filter. Okay. It passed through that. Okay. Do we want, if somebody came across this on Pinch of Yum, they find it helpful, not really. They might find it sort of interesting, but there’s not really any traffic to it. It’s not really brand aligned at this point. And so then the question for us was do we want to do something with it moving forward? Is there an opportunity here?

And what we came to realize is no, there’s not an opportunity for the fraction cafe post because people aren’t searching for it, people aren’t coming to it. We’re not going to talk a lot about it moving forward. So then the question is, is it meaningful to us? And the response that we had was like, yes. So then one of the things we could do is no index, which means that we are telling Google to your point, don’t put this in your index. Google has an index, which you think of an index card you could think of almost like a digital Rolodex. The bot goes out, it gets a post, it brings it back, it puts it in the index. You can tell Google, please don’t put this in the index. It usually listens to that. And the advantage is that you then have less content for Google to crawl, and the content that it is crawling is higher quality.

And that’s the advantage in making that shift. So the question we said is like, do we want to know index it and keep it still available? Probably not. So then the next thing we said, is it meaningful to us? It was kind of a meaningful post. It was nostalgic a little bit. So then what do we do with it? The decision that we made is we unpublished it. So it’s still in the database. We can still access it. It’s still available for us if we were ever feeling nostalgic and want to go back and look at the Post. But if you search for fraction Cafe Pinch of Yum, you’re not going to be able to find the fraction cafe post on Pinch of Yum because that was a post that we removed, but it’s still within the database for our WordPress. It’s just not available.

So another option for people who have something that maybe would be sentimental to them, but it’s no longer brand aligned if you want to preserve it and still have access to it, but you don’t want to put it in your site. So in your case, it sounds like a lot of the pieces of content that you looked at, you said, Hey, this will be valuable moving forward. I just need to give it some love, care attention and get it to a point where I feel proud of it and where I think other people would find it helpful. So index first and then you went back to those little by little and updated them, is that correct?

Elena Davis: Yes. Now there’s another slew in another Excel sheet where I did not know index them because they were in traffic driving positions. So I don’t want to know Index, they are in traffic driving positions, but I want to bump them from a seven to try to get ’em up to a three, right? And so those I would still update, but I’m not going to know index them because there is significant traffic. So deciphering if there’s zero traffic, I would suggest no indexing and then maybe deciding if you’re going to come back to them later. And then ones that are driving traffic definitely don’t know index them. Just because you have to update them is a very important distinction.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Elena Davis: And sometimes you might need a little help figuring that out

Bjork Ostrom: If you’re not somebody who loves

Elena Davis: And Google Analytics and stuff like that. That’s not my superpower or super interest. And back to what you were saying, I did have something that I wrote down after reading your content. So this is kind of going back to where how do you decide if content is valuable or not? After going back and reading it? Ask yourself, did I answer the question? Did I leave someone feeling like they can now achieve their goal and what they came searching for?

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Elena Davis: And they now achieve their goal in every single way after reading this and after reading this recipe in our case.

Bjork Ostrom: And a lot of times the goal is to have a successful outcome with the recipe itself, to have complete comprehension of how to do it. And what do you view, when would it pass in your view, that question, and when would it fail? What were the elements that you looked at as kind of a consideration around can people have success with this if they come to this post?

Elena Davis: I think that there were two categories. One was too cluttered, too much stuff, too much stuff that didn’t belong. The other is too slim too. What’s another word? Not in depth enough. Overly crowded, not enough info. I think it usually falls into those two buckets. You’re either writing about way too much or you could add a lot more.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, there’s something to be said about what we are doing is we are crafting an experience that is similar to that Google conversation where it’s like Google wins if they’re really good at capturing the value, they do that through ads and delivering the best possible result for the person who’s searching for keyword. It is, in our case, as content creators, what we’re doing is we’re trying to create a piece of content that is going to have the most amount of success for somebody who’s chocolate chip cookies. Are they going to be able to make a great chocolate chip cookie? And how do we strategically think about capturing some of that value through email signup ads? And the answer isn’t just include a bunch of ads because then you’re going to just make as much as possible. There has to be a balance between user experience and value capture with that. And part of that is how you craft the content, the flow of the content, the structure of the content. Also it’s like what do the ads look like? And then how good are you at communicating? What we need to become experts at is communicators. We need to become expert communicators through mediums like video photography and words. So can you give an example of a before and after some of the things that you did and maybe some of the results that came from doing those things?

Elena Davis: Yes. There were a few posts that we updated. For example, my Italian donut recipe with a cream filling and my Nona’s meatball recipe that during the update dropped off of the first page after doing some of these updates, which I’ll tell you specifics, they are now back up in the top three. So significant change why they dropped, they fell into both of those categories, not enough way too much.

Speaker 6: Sure.

Elena Davis: So process photography, taking out long lists of links to other posts, there’s a huge value in interlinking. There’s a major wrong way to do interlinking and a way that can make your website a literal ecosystem that Google loves.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about the difference between those two?

Elena Davis: It’s a superpower.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes.

Elena Davis: So there’s different ways to do interlinking. A lot of website plugins have a thing at the bottom called recommended posts, and there’s some recipes that will auto-populate there that are similar to the recipe. That is one way that interlinking is done, that interlinking is valued less in the eyes of Google because it’s not a natural interlink. In the blog that you type in, Google likes to see natural interlinking such as If you liked my donut filled cream recipe, you’ll like my Italian fried donut holes, whatever.

And my other recipe that’s just in a couple of lines, that tends to be at the bottom of the post. I would do a lot of interlinking of just posts that fit also posts that didn’t fit that I just thought, oh, I could just throw that in there towards the top of the post, like a big long list. Almost like a paragraph of just links to other posts. Wrong way to interlink, wrong way to interlink. You want to build an ecosystem with your links creating clusters and categories where it makes sense. And this is also how you can kind of organically gain authority in a category like chicken or pistachio cookie recipes or whatever, Italian cookies. Italian cakes, which rank really well for me. So think of your blog as an experience. You want to guide your reader. They don’t know what they want half of the time, but you can make an experience for them, like a nice store.

I love anthropology. It guides me in a way where I don’t even know where I’m going, but I love how everything’s organized in different sections and then I see different things and I buy different things. So you are the store manager. You are there to navigate your user, how you want them to experience your website. It’s up to you to help them navigate because they don’t know. They don’t know that you have 500 recipes and that 100 of them are Italian cakes or whatever, especially just somebody doing a transactional where they found you on Google because you are the number one ranking for whatever recipe. They might just go and leave, but your responsibility is to make sure that their experience is so good that they understand the store they’re coming to, they want to stay, they want to stay for the experience, and they want to shop around. They want to look around. They don’t just want to run in, grab the gum and leave. They’re like, wow, it’s so beautiful in here. There’s so many things. And that your website is so branded that when they land there, they know who that is,

Whether it’s by color, logo, your face, it needs to be so brandable that it is recognizable who you are.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And with linking, one of the things I think about, I think of Wikipedia as a great example. That is the ultimate experience. When you go into Wikipedia, this isn’t so true for me, but I know I have friends who just kind of browse through Wikipedia and they start in a place that they’re interested and they’re learning about World War ii, and then it’s linked to a certain battle in World War ii, and you click there and then that links to a general, when we think of what it is that we are doing, we are building a business on the World Wide Web. It literally is a web. And the reason that they call it a web is because the internet is made up of links. If you look at the source code of your post or your page or your website, it’s going to be text and it’s going to be links. And the links are to all sorts of different things to other pages. They are to media, it’s links to video, but at its core all that it is text and it’s links.

The point that’s a good one that you make is we need to be good at understanding links and how links connect and how we can use those internally. Links on other pages are also really important, like links from another post on another page on another site back to ours. But we can’t control those as much. And so it’s important for us to think about what’s easy for us to control, what can we control and to make sure that’s really healthy. And the healthiest links are the links that are natural and native within our content that flow really natural. And I think of Wikipedia as a great example of that. So to go back to what you were saying before, the before and after, you talked about adding in process shots. You talked about something that was too thin, adding to that and something that had too much removing that. You talked about creating natural links within the content that either point to that piece of content from another page or on that page point to somewhere else on your site and not necessarily having just a list of a bunch of links, but you’re actually taking the link and linking anchor text, so it says the name of the thing you’re linking to. Were there other things that you looked at when you were going through the process of updating some of these pieces of content and saw the improvement?

Elena Davis: Yeah, absolutely. Updating headings and updating the recipe title itself. So you might not rank for best mashed potatoes or whatever best mashed potatoes with garlic. And all of a sudden that also has a very high search volume, and now you can be moved up in the ranks for that. So paying attention to SEO, doing a little bit of research of how you can maybe not too far stray from the title, but use similar keywords to change your title and then change your H twos a little bit and making everything really seamless on my website is something that we’ve worked hard to do. And having people to help with that is really great if you can. So you can focus on your area of expertise and letting them do. And then just keeping in mind again, that narrow view and zooming out. So after you’ve done these updates, going on your phone, looking at the posts from there.

As a reader. As a viewer, because you get so into these micro things like the interlinking the right way and doing alt texts. That was another thing. Lots of little technical things that a reader doesn’t care about, doesn’t see, doesn’t know, but making sure that then, because you get so boggled down into those little technical things that you forget how, oh, I should maybe reach out to my ad website because these ads are being too cluttered. And like you were saying before, more ads is not more income. In fact, I have found the opposite. By dramatically reducing ads, traffic will go up and so will income.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s one of those things where you can hear on either side, Hey, if you add more ads, it’s not going to impact traffic. Or I remove ads that traffic improved. And I think one of the things that’s important for all of us to remember is it really is site dependent. There are some universal truths for sure, and I think it’s helpful for us to know other people’s experiences, but I think the only way you know is to try to test it out and to see if I do this thing, is there a resulting impact that will come from that? And we’ve used a tool called SEO testing where we are trying out a new thing, and one of the things we’ll do is we’ll go into that tool and we’ll say, Hey, we made this update at this point and it’s not going to be for sure, but what it’s going to do is it’s going to allow us to say like a before and after a track.

Yeah, it pulls in Google search console data and it says, here’s what it looked like for two weeks before. Here’s what it looked like for two weeks after. And what it allows you to do is start to develop a little bit of an instinct around performance and things that will change or changes you make and the potential upside from those changes. And that’s really what we’re after is we need to get good at predicting our ability to create a piece of content that shows up or good at predicting if a change will help improve a thing, that’s an important skill for us to develop. It sounds like when we chatted a little bit before, you’ve developed a little bit of an instinct with Instagram around pieces of content that will perform well, specifically Instagram reels through that same kind of pattern of trying a new thing, testing out, seeing how it works, and starting to say like, Hey, maybe there’s something here around creating a piece of Instagram content, a reel that performs well. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Elena Davis: Yeah, so creating Instagram reels has been something that has given me a little bit of leverage over the years and growing on Instagram. Again, it’s so hit or miss. There’s very little formula that I have a little bit of a formula that I use for what I think works and what, but what I have noticed is when reels go viral, and it doesn’t even need to get into the millions, which some do, but a lot don’t find that your reel will show up in Google search results next to YouTube or whatever. It can also be in a carousel. And what that does is because since your recipe is linked to that Instagram post, it also will leverage the post some. This is also where organic authority in a subject can kind of trump the Google top results. So if your audience and you’ve grown your audience and they know you are an expert in this subject and they really interact with something on social and they share it a lot, I used to think that it was only on Instagram that that matters. Google is now noticing all social shares and Google is becoming more aware of the shareability, and that’s what kind of their algorithm is moving towards who’s sharing this content, who’s interacting with it, who’s coming back to it, right? Google is becoming another social platform in my eyes,

And it is noticing what the other social platforms are doing, and it’s working it into its system of rankings. This isn’t something that has been proven. I have heard other creators talk about it, and I have seen it directly with some of my content. I can’t say it’s proven, but it’s definitely happening more and more now.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s like you notice it. And I think that’s one interesting piece with it. We always are working within the art and science of creating and science is something that you can point at with high predictability, say this will happen. And the thing is, we can’t really get scientific with a lot of these things, but we can get to a point where we can notice some patterns. And it sounds like that’s what you’re getting at a little bit. Can you explain that? So let’s say that you create a recipe, you publish that to Instagram, there’s a reel. That reel has a certain virality, a certain amount of views, certain amount of interaction. What is the keyword that you are searching where you then see that show up? Is it just the keyword or is it like a branded keyword search? Just the keyword of the recipe.

Elena Davis: Search the keyword, yeah, without my name.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. And then are you also saying what you’re seeing in those cases is you are seeing a search traffic directly from Google to the recipe itself increase as well?

Elena Davis: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So it’s both showing up as an Instagram reel in a search result, and you’re noticing an increase in traffic. And the pattern that you can draw back to is that specific reel doing well. And so the working theory would be that by having a strong social presence, and I think this makes a lot of sense by having a strong social presence, the impact of that, even if you aren’t saying within that specific Instagram reel, go to my site and check out this recipe. Just naturally what’s happening is there’s a lift there within a search from that recipe going viral or getting a lot of views or engagement on Instagram. Is that right?

Elena Davis: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Got

Elena Davis: It’s exactly right.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it feels like it’s an important reminder for us that what we’re doing is we’re creating content and as content creators, that is the product. We are creating a product and the product is content. For some of us, we actually have a product, a consumer goods product, like an oatmeal or maybe we have a drink that we’re selling. But for a lot of us, it is the content that we’re selling and we’re monetizing that via ads, via brand sponsorships, maybe via affiliate. But really we’re promoting the content. And so it’s one thing to create the product, but we also need to think about how are we marketing that product and in what places are we marketing the content, content where then we monetize via those certain mechanisms of affiliate brands or advertising. What have you found, it sounds like Instagram is one of ’em. What have you found to be effective marketing channels for your product? You alluded to Pinterest as well being something that helped see you through kind of the dip with search traffic. Anything else that you would add to that?

Elena Davis: Absolutely. Email something you’ve talked a lot about on here. I think it’s extremely valuable. I just did a survey. I surveyed, I sent a survey to all my email subscribers and I got thousands of responses, and I also did it on social and so many responses. There was a lot of multiple choice, a lot of boxes where you could answer. I was astonished by how many preferred to get recipes in their inbox and email. They said specifically, it is easy to save. It is something that I get every day and social is something that I don’t check every day, and sometimes you don’t show up on my social. So I kind of have these buckets of where these answers fell into. And an overwhelming number of people, which I was kind of surprised, said that they prefer to receive content through email. Interesting. But here’s the thing is sometimes as creators we’re like, oh, we just send these emails. We don’t really get emails back very often,

Speaker 6: At

Elena Davis: Least when it’s just like, here’s my new recipe, you’ll get a few, well, this looks so good, or whatever, but it’s not an Instagram reel that goes viral and you get thousands of comments of like, wow, this looks so good. Give me the recipe. So you’re like, well, email something. I kind of do, but to be in someone’s inbox and have them open your email weekly multiple times a week, which is what I do and people like it. I said, do I send too many emails? Which is about two or three a week and it keeps it fresh a week. So that is one thing that I would say that don’t. Also, I think people get really hung up on creating videos and reels and the time and the quality and all of that. Email is something that you can do very behind the scenes. You don’t have to do a video for it, essentially. You’re just sending content that you already made

Or you are compiling a list of cozy soups for this week or whatever. It’s probably to me, one of the easiest strategies in a way that you can start with if you’re like, the videos are too overwhelming for me, Pinterest sounds very overwhelming for me. I don’t run my Pinterest personally. I have a team member that does that. That is her superpower, and she has grown it and done really well. And I think that there is value in finding people that using their strengths. You’ve talked about on that here, I forget what it is, but it’s essentially your zone of expertise.

Speaker 6: Yeah, sure.

Elena Davis: I can’t be everywhere at once and I cannot. I have a huge social pull on Instagram. That’s where I focus a lot of attention. And then the blog, of course.

Bjork Ostrom: So with email, one of the things in a world that is there’s all these questions around the future of advertising. What does it look like? First party data, third party data, cookies, things like that, that’s been kind of punted down the road. You don’t hear people talking a lot about that, but what you do hear is, number one, the value of email, just in general, it’s an audience that you can speak directly to. Number two, you also hear a lot about this idea of first party data, meaning if somebody simply, but if somebody clicks on an email and goes to your site, there’s going to be information about that person. If you have the correct link within your email, if you use kit and advertiser like iv, there’s going to be a connection that they’re going to easily be able to integrate that allows you to have that first party data. You’re going to be able to earn a lot more. And so when you think of email and the value of email, are you thinking of it as a way to speak to your audience, but also as a way to get people back to your site, not only back to your site, but back to your site with first party data when they click on those links?

Elena Davis: Absolutely. So I would say there’s some recipes that you have that are transactional. If you rank number one for a recipe, when somebody plugs in crispy Brussels sprouts and you’re number one and they click on it, the first thing they see, but they don’t know you. This is what I call a transactional visit to your website. They’re just there for the recipe, number one, and it has a lot of reviews and they think it’s the best. So this is something I’m trying out, but on those posts, I want to have some different email strategies that put them into my nurture sequence and then it can help me know two things. One, it was just transactional. They just wanted that recipe and they were just there for that, which is fine, two, but I need to give them the opportunity to tell them who I am and what I’m all about once they find me from those top ranking posts. And I think that’s an opportunity to create an ebook around that post, give them a free ebook if they sign up with an email or have that in their recipe card, which is generally where they go to if it’s one of those transactional visits, which is what I call ’em. So thinking of creative ways to capture people who don’t really know what you’re about, but they’ve stumbled across your page.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s great. And on social, are you using any tools like ManyChat, groceries List to encourage people to sign up for your email list? And can you talk a little bit about the successes or things that you’ve learned with that?

Elena Davis: I use ManyChat. I love it. I’ve seen a lot of growth on just correlation between Instagram and blog as well. Through using that, it’s very easy to use. I use a strategy in my stories that was shared on here that I heard that was also shared on here, which I started doing.

Bjork Ostrom: Shared,

Elena Davis: Yeah, remind. Yeah. So basically sometimes I’ll do a lot of stories that are very personal about me. Let’s make a recipe together. Those have a lot fewer views in general. People maybe don’t view all of ’em, and unless you give them a way to interact with that first post, the algorithm doesn’t share it so much to everybody else on your stories. So it’s just the idea of sharing one and having an automated link where they have to reply to get the recipe. And so

Bjork Ostrom: Sharing one story,

Elena Davis: One story with a CTA, that makes them reply to the story. And I have

Bjork Ostrom: Seen call to action. Yeah.

Elena Davis: Yeah. So I’ve seen on sometimes I’d get like 2000 to 3000 story views, and on some of these I get more than 30,000 story views. So whatever that math is on there, it’s like a lot.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, 10 x. Yeah.

Elena Davis: Yeah, a lot. So it just kind of depends. And that has been really valuable. I use ManyChat in all of my recipes, my recipe reels to how to get their recipe. People like it. It’s very customizable.

Bjork Ostrom: And are you doing it in a way where people comment within the comments a certain word in order to get what the recipe is? And then can you talk about, for those who haven’t used ManyChat or groceries lists, kind of similar products, different but same outcome. Can you talk about what’s happening? What happens behind the scenes? You post a reel, maybe the reel gets 250,000 views within the description, you’re probably saying comment lasagna in order to get this. What happens then after that? So people can kind of understand what’s happening behind the scenes.

Elena Davis: So after that in their dm, and then sometimes they have to be able to accept messages from everyone, which is kind of a thing that a lot of people don’t know. Sometimes. They say, I didn’t get it. Well, your messages aren’t turned on.

Speaker 6: Sure.

Elena Davis: Then they’ll just get a DM and you customize what it says. For example, I always make it personal. I always say my name, and you can also add a photo with it, which is sometimes what I like to do is add a photo of the recipe to go along with it, and then it will show up in their DM as a message, and then they can just click on the recipe. And then I also have another box, never miss a recipe sign up for my email. I generally find that they go to the recipe because that’s why they’re there. And then a lot of times they’ll sign up for email on the website itself, but sometimes they’ll sign up through the email that way. So I think no matter where you are in your journey, this is something that has worked for me because, and also it creates another opportunity for me to create a personal message that they will then get in their dm. And another way to create brand awareness is how I see it, because especially Pinch of Yum, for example, huge brand or simple recipes or whatever, things like that. But it’s like my blog. It is my responsibility to advertise a market for it, like you were saying. And this is one way that I advertise and market for it, and no one is going to do that for me. My biggest hope is that people will share my stuff organically through word of mouth, which does happen a lot, which I’m grateful for. But

Bjork Ostrom: You have to be a marketer is responsibility

Elena Davis: As the brand. And I don’t think that’s something that a lot of people realize going into this is you’re constantly promoting yourself, which can feel kind of awkward sometimes, but it’s something that you have to be willing to do because somebody’s going to see you 10 times and then maybe remember you. But when they see you 15 times, then they know you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s one of the things that we’re constantly, and we talked about it, but we’re constantly trying to remind people of is like if you’re a personal brand, that means you’re also marketing that. And so you’re marketing yourself. If you’re a personal brand, you could be just like a general brand too, but you still need to market it. And especially if you’re creating content, the content, there has to be some marketing mechanisms that promote that content. And I think using a tool, and we’re not definitely not opposed to it, we’ll probably experiment with it moving forward like a grocery list or a ManyChat. It’s a great way to capture some of the attention that you have and transact with that person, communicate with them, build trust, send them other great content that you’ve created. And so for us, we always need to be thinking about all of the different ways that we can not only be creating great content, but how can we be marketing that?

And so I think what you’ve talked about, you’ve done a great job of that in taking your site initially from the early stages to a hundred thousand page views. That’s like a huge marker from zero. And then now from taking it to a hundred thousand page views to 800,000, and we’ll have to have you back on going from 800 to 1.5 million or whatever it ends up being into your point, what it requires is continuing to do a lot of the same things, but changing along the way. You are going to continue to think about how do I show up on Instagram? How do I do create good content on the blog? How do I do search? But search, Instagram, Pinterest is going to look different in three to four years than it does today. But those will all still probably be valuable platforms. So my question for you to end is, as you look 2, 3, 4, 5 years out, how do you anticipate things changing, things evolving? For you as a creator who understands the world very well, the world of content creation, what do you see as coming down the line in ways that you might change or evolve as a creator?

Elena Davis: That’s a great question. I think I will never not work hard, and I think that’s what makes all the difference. So however things change, I will take the momentum and I will work that hard in that direction. And I do still believe, I still believe that your face and your name and what you are about will have value. And I don’t know if there’s going to be an animated me on the screen and that I have trained to act and be like me, but in one capacity or another, don’t be afraid to change. I’m actually a hater of change. I love comfort. I just like knowing what’s coming next. And so all of these changes that constantly happen are not something I love. I’m not like an adventure seeker. I don’t love to jump on new trends and try. So this is actually very hard for me to say. And all of the things that I often look really introspectively too much at things. And I think we just need to not be afraid to change and educate yourself.

Listen to podcasts like this. Look up webinars. You had a thing with Kit yesterday. Go to those things. Be involved in the community around you as a former educator, education is everything. I wouldn’t be anywhere that I am today in the blogging world if I hadn’t asked the questions to bloggers that I admire, if I hadn’t listened to the podcast, if I hadn’t done all the things. So the information isn’t going to come at, you have to seek it, and things are constantly going to change. So I would say keep yourself informed in various groups and platforms so that, oh, let me try and experiment with this and see if it takes off. And it may, may not, but it’s worth trying. And I think all of us on here listening are creators. And I have this quote that I always say, if you don’t work hard to build your dreams, somebody is going to hire you to build theirs. And there’s a lot of people that want to work for others and build others’ dreams. But if you’re listening to this podcast, likely you’re trying to build your own dream. So invest in that and invest in yourself and know that you can do it. And I’m literally giving a huge hug to everyone that’s listening to this the biggest hug ever. It’s needed. I’m serious. I’m so serious because it’s just been so hard since all the stuff since started in 2023, but always, always changing. 15 years ago things were changing ten five. So it’s just immediately, this is what I know, and this is my world of things changing since that September update. So I’m sending a hug to people that are still listening to this and that are still wanting to improve because it’s worth it if you stick with it and you can do it. There’s so many resources out there now that help you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. I love that. And it ties into what we’re all about, which is showing up every day, getting a tiny bit better. It’s not just about doing the same thing, it’s about showing up, doing the work, but trying to find ways to do the work a little bit better every day. And the outcome of that. You’re a great example of somebody who’s done that and has found success doing it. So, if people want to connect with you, follow along with what you’re up to. What’s the best way to do that?

Elena Davis: Cina by elena.com and then CINA by Elena on my Instagram. Please reach out, DM me. I check those every day or send me an email. I do love email, so send me an email. Cina means kitchen in Italian by elena.com, and you can find me on there. It was so great to connect with you again, and

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, thanks for coming on again. We’ll have to have a part three as we continue to follow your journey, so thanks for coming on, Elena.

Elena Davis: Be great. Thanks Bjork.

Emily Walker: Hello there. Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed listening to this week’s episode of the podcast. Before we sign off today, I wanted to mention one of the most valuable parts of the Food Blogger Pro membership, and that’s our courses. In case you don’t already know, as soon as you become a Food Blogger Pro member, you immediately get access to all of our courses here on Food Blogger Pro. We have hours and hours of courses available, including SEO for food blogs, food photography, Google Analytics, social media, and sponsored content. All of these courses have been recorded by the Food Blogger Pro team or some of our industry experts, and they’re truly a wealth of knowledge. We are always updating our courses so you can rest assured that you’re getting the most up-to-date information as you’re working to grow your blog and your business. You can get access to all of our courses by joining Food Blogger Pro. Just head to food blogger pro.com/join to learn more about the membership and join our community. Thanks again for tuning in and listening to the podcast. Make it a great week.