The Importance of Building Community with A Couple Cooks

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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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, Bjork is interviewing Alex and Sonja Overhiser from A Couple Cooks. Alex and Sonja are a married couple that work together to develop recipes, write content for their food blog, and have written two cookbooks together. The second of which, 100 Recipes to Cook Together comes out later this week. They first started their food blog in 2010, and their website now gets between three and 5 million page views every month. They have over 3000 original recipes on their site, so they know a thing or two about creating sustainable content that lasts. But they’ve also been really intentional about choosing joy in their business and not doing things that they don’t enjoy doing, like spending too much time on Instagram. Bjork and Lindsay have been friends with Alex and Sonja for over a decade, and it’s really fun to listen in on these friends catch up about everything in the food blogger space. Without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Alex and Sonja, welcome to the podcast.

Sonja Overhiser: Thank you so much for having us. Glad to be here. Glad to be back.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things that I think about, and I’ve told this story a few times, maybe even with you guys in a podcast or q and a that we did sometime was you guys were our first internet friends that we met in person. And so some people have maybe heard this story, but I remember going to Indianapolis and Lindsay’s parents were like, what are you going to do? And we’re like, oh, we’re going to visit our friend Joe. And then we connected with these people that we’ve known online and we’re going to go over to their house. And in 2010, it was kind of still at that point of like, wait, you met somebody on the internet and then you’re going to go to their house. But it was this great connection and what’s been so fun, we only have a few people like this friends that we’ve connected with who through the years have continued to do similar work and have built these really successful businesses. And it’s so cool to see the arc of your story through the years working on what you’re doing and all of the different things around it. And so I just want to start the podcast by saying kudos to both of you for having built a really incredible thing in A Couple Cooks. You guys do really good work. And we’re going to talk about through the years, the decade plus of doing that, the different iterations and what that’s looked like. So what I want to hear,

Sonja Overhiser: Thank you to you, too. It’s an amazing thing and I feel like as I get older, I get more sentimental. And so we’re really sentimental about that time of that very first internet from connection.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, totally. And I think one of the things that I really like about it is you have applied conceptually the thing that we talk about a lot on the podcast, which is showing up every day and working on the thing that you’re building. And if you do that for 10 years, 12 years, 14 years, seven years, if you string together years and years of showing up and working on a thing after a long period of time, you can look back and be pretty amazed at what you have done. But also 14 years is 14 years. That’s a long time. So I want to hear from you, as you look back on your journey early on, what were the things that kept you going when you didn’t have necessarily those things that necessarily pointed to like, Hey, this will be successful one day, or you’ll have millions of page views one day. What was it that kept you showing up and producing content and taking pictures and developing recipes in the early stages? I think a lot of people are there and the idea of showing up for 10 years is intimidating. What was it for you that helped you continue to show up every day?

Sonja Overhiser: That’s a great question. I mean, I would say each other, and I know not all of your listeners have that, but for us it’s been really special to work together. And I think early on we did get very, I don’t know, I want to give up pretty much every other week, but having that other person to bounce ideas off of to be kind of a separate brain working on the same problem has been so helpful for us. So I think that even if you are a solopreneur and you’re working on your own, having that accountability partner, someone who can just say, you’re doing a good job, you are learning, you’re creating, and you just have to keep going.

Alex Overhiser: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Anything you’d add to that, Alex?

Alex Overhiser: Yeah, I’d say really early on it was pure creative joy. There was no concept of business, no concept of page views. It was I created this thing and Lindsay in Minnesota commented that looked delicious, and it was just that joy of community and doing something new was awesome. And then as we turned it slowly into a business, that’s where you started feeling like you weren’t doing enough or something because it was heartened, but at the beginning it was just all fun.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think about that and I think there’s two different opinions you hear people talk about, you need to do what you’re passionate about, do what you can, show up every day and be thankful and grateful that you’re doing. And on the other side, there’s people who are like, actually, you kind of have to embrace the grind. There’s going to be parts of any entrepreneurial journey or any job that you’re not going to love, and it’s actually better if you just accept that and have these things that are kind of passion projects that you do on the side. What has that looked like for you through the years? Because you talked about Alex in the early stages, it’s this creative outlet, and I think there are some people who we talk to and we know that that’s true. They have this creative outlet and it’s really fun for them.

And then maybe the business stuff creeps in and then it starts to be not as fun. And then you have people who approach it and they’re just like, what? You can build traffic and make money from that on a blog, but they’re not actually that passionate about it, and so then they burn out because the thing that they’re talking about they’re not actually passionate about. So how have you navigated that as it has become a business, as it has become your sole source of income to balance both the necessity of this thing in your life along with the creativity and wanting to make sure that you embrace that as well?

Sonja Overhiser: Yeah. I love that you brought that up because that is exactly the tension that we have in our business. And luckily we both love to grind as much as we actually create and have fun. So I feel like as you’re talking, I’ve been thinking more about my journey as a classical musician. So I went to school for classical music. I was a French horn performance major at IU Bloomington, and that’s how I ended up in Indiana and meant Alex and got married and this whole thing started. But I think I really learned both of those skills of having this passion but then working so hard and being so disciplined and my entire late childhood and college career was just putting in all the hours, practicing the art that I loved. And unfortunately with that, it grew to be something I didn’t love anymore. So I ended up quitting right after I graduated, and it became kind of a really hard spot in my life coming to terms with this thing that I loved so much I just totally burned myself out on. And so I think when you asked the question earlier of staying in the game and consistency, I think I could have done that. And I’ve seen people I went to school with for classical music who have succeeded because they did stay in the game. And I think that’s what I always try to encourage entrepreneurs with is having that stick-to-it-iveness or that just ability to apply yourself to something over the longterm does bring results in the end.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think of that concept 10,000 hours, and I think it was like a Malcolm Gladwell book, but it was maybe based on another study. There’s also a song, who is it that has that song? You know what I’m talking about? 10,000 hour song. I don’t know if it’s the name of it, but he has, the idea is as a musician in his case, what does it take to, it’s just called 10,000 hours Macklemore, but what does it take to reach success? And he talks about this idea in this Malcolm Gladwell book, but also in this song you kind of need 10,000 hours to get to mastery. And let’s say you think of a typical 40-hour work week as 2000 hours. It’s like, okay, you need five years of doing the same thing eight hours a day to get to this level of mastery.

And you can think about that within the context of what we do. I often use music as an example. I think a lot of people show up and after a year they’re like, ah, why don’t I have success with this thing? I’m publishing to Instagram, I’m publishing to a blog. And I think because the act of doing those things is so easy, it’s pretty easy to create a piece of content and publish it similar, it’s probably kind of easy. French horn is maybe a bad example, but to make a noise out of a saxophone, but to be really good at it, that’s actually takes a huge level of commitment. And I think the same thing applies in the world of content creation. You have to master it in order to get to a point where you stand out. And the hard part with that though is that you might burn out because of how much time and effort you’re putting in, especially if you’re not getting the traction that you want to see or that you’d expect. So do you feel like Sony in those early stages of doing this, that you approached it any different in order to protect yourself from burning out? Or was it just the luck of the work that you’re able to operate within the context of this in a way where it doesn’t feel like you’ve hit that burnout point or maybe you have and what did you do if you did for each of you?

Sonja Overhiser: Yeah, great question. I dunno how I would answer that such good question.

Alex Overhiser: I think having a partner, I am a good, I notice when the grind is getting too hard end of, we do split up tasks and do things that each of us love more. That way we can kind of balance that. And especially I think during the high pandemic when it was like you saw a nobody and if you’re a content creator, you can kind of stay in your house and work 24 7. We just got into that and then we realized, okay, we just need to pull back and start deciding how much, what is our work-life balance, what does that look like? And I spent a lot of time and gratitude for the ability to do this as a full-time career.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. We did a podcast interview years ago with Emily Perrin and this was episode number 365. It’s all about this idea of how to find your Zone of Genius. So the episode is called How to Find Your Zone of Genius and Hire the Right People. I think within a partnership relationship, the two of you have, you might be able to kind of task trade a little bit where it’s not a great fit for you, Sonja. So Alex, you pick it up or vice versa. I know that’s true for Lindsay and I in our working relationship. What Emily talks about in that podcast interview is let’s say you don’t have somebody who’s a partner in your business, a business partner or a life partner. How do you go about approaching that in order to, the goal for us should be to continually adjust the things that we’re doing. So as much as possible we’re working in our zone of genius, which are the tasks that we are uniquely equipped for but also uniquely excited about.

And if you can spend most of your time there, wow, that’s a really wonderful thing. But I know that you have done that without building a really big team. And I would be interested to hear your reflections on the decision to not build a team. You have some people who have 10 people and they’re all working on different things and the businesses maybe running itself a little bit and somebody’s in the background kind of directing it. We’ve talked to people who like, hey, they really like the idea of managing the business and it kind of runs with themselves, kind of the E-Myth of like you’re working on your business, not in your business, but it sounds like you both really working in the business and have intentionally decided to not bring in a bunch of outside employees or team members. What’s the reasoning for that and what does that look like day to day for the two of you?

Sonja Overhiser: Yeah, a lot of our colleagues have been building these great teams, which is wonderful and awesome, and I love seeing these amazing, incredible groups of people that they have assembled. But for us, we worked in business together actually outside of a couple of cooks. When we first got married, we worked for the same business, a technical writing business, and we got a lot of experience in people management. And as we’re able to transition out of that environment and work for ourselves, we said, Hey,

Bjork Ostrom: This feels good not to be managing people for sure.

Sonja Overhiser: And so we made the intentional decision of we love creating recipes, we love writing recipes, we love photographing our own food. And so we decided, hey, we’re going to keep this small. I think what we also love is spontaneity. Our creativity stems from spontaneity. And so a lot of times we’ll be like, Hey, let’s make whatever tarragon chicken today and see what happens. And I think when you have a team, you have to plan so far in advance and sketch out your days and you have people reporting to you, and if you don’t have work for them, you’re meeting up things. We’ve been through all of those scenarios, and I think for us, our dream life was completely, I mean, we do have meetings, we do have things that we tend to, but a perfect day for us is a free calendar and just get to go create and have fun.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. No meetings. Essentially you are creating the meetings that you maybe have are with the two of you talking through a thing, but the focus is creating, is that right?

Alex Overhiser: And it does limit, we realized there’s only so much we can get done in a week. And so it took us years to figure out that rhythm of how are we super efficient while spontaneous and creative so that we can get done what we need to get done and do some of that boring stuff we have to do, but be able to do it all. We understand as a max, we’re not trying to scale this business and sell it. We’re happy to max out and find our balance. And

Sonja Overhiser: I think we’ve made a lot of compromises too. It means that we can’t be really great at Instagram reels, we’re just not that good at it. And that’s okay. We decided we’re not going to spend time or energy on that because it’s not a core focus of our business. And so right now, that’s not a priority. If any of your listeners are really awesome at it and want to pitch us to us, love to hear that. But for us, we have really focused on creating recipes and then writing our second cookbook.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. I am excited to talk to you about that second cookbook that’s coming out. It’ll be just a week after this podcast goes out. When you’re talking about that, it reminded me. So one of the things we will talk about occasionally in the podcast is the idea of defining the game that you’re playing. And I have a friend here in the Twin Cities, his name is Ryan Tanam, he just released, started a new podcast called Independence by Design, and he’s interviewed probably like 400, 500 entrepreneurs, not in the world of content creation or some of ’em online, but mostly it’s like HVAC company or somebody who has a construction company or all of these different company owners. And one of the things that he realized in all of those interviews is sometimes people would set these arbitrary numbers, I want to get to a hundred million in revenue, or in our world, I want to get to a million page views or 10 million pages views or whatever it might be.

But they didn’t really have a strong why behind it. And so he created this podcast series Independence by Design because his thesis, his theory is what people usually are after. Oftentimes what they’re after is independence. People want to have autonomy, they want to have some level of freedom in what they’re doing. That looks different to everybody. But what I hear you saying is pretty clearly what you want to do and pretty clearly what success looks like for you. And that is awesome. You’ve defined the game, and then what you do is you show up and you play the game. And it sounds like you guys have done that, but have done that through some iterations. And Alex, you had mentioned it took a while, I think you said, to figure out exactly what that looks like to work efficiently. What did you figure out along the way and what does that look like now if somebody else wants to play a similar game? What have you learned that has allowed you to play the game? Well at this point?

Alex Overhiser: Yeah. I mean specifically for bloggers, I think we originally would do two posts per week, and then we realized, hey, if we do five posts per week, that’s great. And then you get more content out there and more eyeballs out there. But the thing you can’t plan for is recipe development and how many iterations it takes to really get a good recipe down. And so figuring out things like a calendar that was flexible enough to plan ahead, but not inflexible enough that you’re depressed if it’s a day need to take a photo, and things like figuring out food photography with artificial light so that we could shoot on any day of the weekend, anytime at two o’clock, only on Mondays that are sunny and stuff like that. So some of those business efficiencies helped a lot and then just communication was huge.

Sonja Overhiser: And I think saying no, I was mentioning, I mean Alex is really good at saying, no, I want to say yes to everything. And he is like, no, no, but saying no to wasting a lot of time on Instagram where that’s not a big return on investment for our particular business model, we don’t do a lot of affiliate sales or trying to sell products or that kind of thing. We really focus on our recipes and these days, Instagram is not providing a lot of traffic or click overs. It’s a great way to show your brand. It’s a great vanity metric if you want to build it really high. And I know there are a lot of people who make a really great business model around Instagram, but for us, we’ve been focused on SEO and websites. So for us, that hasn’t been a great use of our time. And Alex has been really good at saying, well, let’s not waste time on it. But I mean, that’s a trade off. And we don’t know possibly now that the algorithm update that just happened, maybe that waits your social media presence or maybe more people find out about you on social media and so they’re Googling you and then that is part of that. So who knows, that might not have been the right decision, but we just had to make some of those decisions to be like, okay, we’re going to stay in our lane and we’re going to stay focused on that. We enjoy doing,

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost like, so we had a plumber come out this morning and had this, Lindsay lost an earing, and so it was like taking the P trap out, getting that out, which I could have done, but it would’ve been like three hours for me. And leaky toilet, they had to fix that and looked at water heater. Anyways, all these random things around our house, and I think of sometimes people would look at a house and they’d be like in a similar way that you’d look at content creation and be like, oh, building a house. You do carpentry, you do plumbing, you do electric, you put a roof on, you design it, you architect it. And I think some of us are showing up to our online business and we’re kind of trying to do all of those things as we build it. We’re trying to do the plumbing, the electric, we’re trying to do the carpentry and understand all that stuff.

And so often what I see is actually somebody who’s really good at one specific thing. Our friend TJ’s really good at comedy on short form video. Does he have a blog? I don’t think so. Is anybody going to it? Probably not. But he’s also showing up to gas stations and doing shoots with Minnesota Vikings players working with QuickTrip. And so he has that as his skillset, but he’s also really clear on what he doesn’t do. And I think that part of your story is important because it’s so easy to try and do all the things, but if you get really good at one thing, that’s what you can focus in on. Go deep on that and be okay with it. I think that’s the other hard part is the psychology of letting somebody else be good at one thing, but just embracing what you can be good at and being okay with that.

Within the context of that though, and you alluded to this earlier, you have your blog, you have SEO, and then you’ve also done cookbooks. You’re coming up on your second cookbook now. You did one in 2018. Oftentimes I’ll have conversations with people and they’ll be like, this was harder than I thought, took longer than I thought, more stressful than I thought. And you’ll have some people who are like, I did one and now I’m done. And then you’ll have other people. Danielle Walker was another interview who did, I think she’s on cookbook six. She’s written seven books total who just really embraced that and lean into it. What has your approach been on doing a cookbook and what did you learn from your first one that you applied for your second one coming up here?

Sonja Overhiser: Question. The first book was a little overwhelming. We put so much of ourselves into it, and I think we put so much emotion into it, so much of our own identity that it was a really tough process

Alex Overhiser: And we hadn’t quite had 10,000 hours.

Sonja Overhiser: We did it generally so too, if you can help it. But I do think that process, going through it and then also launching it, having press going through it all one time was so helpful for the second time. And I do think possibly back then it was helpful for SEO or at least providing some underlying backlink structure around yourself as an expert. So I’m really glad we did it, but we learned a ton from that process and this time around it has been much smoother. We actually hired a photographer this time, so we used Shelly Westerhausen of Vegetarian Ventures blog. She has a couple amazing books out there. And actually, I’ll tell the story that we, so we have this idea around covid because all good ideas happen when family and trying to dream of an escape. And so we were like, is it time? Is it time for us to think about a second book? And we went around and around, we landed on a concept and we decided we wanted to switch publishers and switch agents because we weren’t quite happy with the first go around or we were happy with it, but we had a different,

So we did that and we wrote up a proposal and sent it out to a bunch of publishers and we were all excited and it came back that no one wanted to purchase.

Bjork Ostrom: We were like, oh, when that happens, do they provide explanation? Is it like a college acceptance letter where it comes back and they’re like, thanks, we’re going to pass. What does that process look like?

Alex Overhiser: I think maybe our agent pitched to the 20 publishers and 18 just said no, two maybe said not quite the right fit or something along those lines. It was very vague and disappointing. You have to create, I mean, we spent months creating the proposal, making recipe for it, all the ideas.

Sonja Overhiser: So that was a big blow, especially to be like, well, we wrote a cookbook and we’re doing these things and trying hard and feel successful in life. And to be like, okay, no one wants to publish a book

Was really hard. So we got back together, and this is I guess where your question of staying in the game comes in. It was like, okay, what can we do to make this a feasible project? And we knew that there are some newlywed style cookbooks out there that do very well. And so we had always kind of avoided that because it felt like A Couple Cooks wedding. Good book. It feels too close, too easy. Yeah, exactly. Too easy. But we were like, okay, this is our brand. Why don’t we do something about cooking together? And we could brand it as not just for weddings, but for any two people cooking together via it, your friend or your family member or your spouse or your roommate or your kid, whoever you want to cook with, because that’s been such a big part of our story is just the joy of doing things together. So we put that pitch together, we found the publisher that we loved, which is Chronicle Books, and because we knew their books were so beautiful and giftable, and then we approached our friend Shelly, who had a couple of cookbooks with them already, and we said, Hey, would you want to shoot this book for us because we love your aesthetic and just the beautiful way you’re able to create these giftable items. And so we put that together into a specific pitch. Went to one editor at Chronicle and miraculously she said yes.

Bjork Ostrom:: Interesting.

Sonja Overhiser: So yeah, so that was I think just a good example of if something’s not hitting, and you can speak to, this works for blogs as well, if you’re not hitting that target niche, like niche down a little more or find the place where your passion intersects with what people want and what the marketplace.

Alex Overhiser: And the funny thing is, oh, sorry. No, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Just the context of the book probably aren’t that different than what the original concept would’ve been. It’s the way that we fit it and themed it. The recipes are probably pretty similar. It’s more our approach to how we talk about the recipes that change. So we’re passionate about making food that people will eat. So it was a rework to find that niche.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s almost like you do judge a book by its cover,

And so much of it is the branding and positioning. I was talking about that with a friend who’s a publisher with book publishing. He has a company called Bard Publishing, and they’ve done a lot of really successful business books. And he was talking about just the importance of a title. It relates to business books and how important that is. Obviously the book itself has to be really good, but so often in his case if people are going through the airport and quickly looking at a book that’s sitting in a kiosk or something like that. So can you talk to me about what that process was like as you have this idea, you’re excited about it, you’re moving forward with it, you spend time with it. I think a lot of people struggle with the question of how long do you continue with a thing that you think is a good idea in the world and versus how quickly do you pivot and change? And we had that recently with some marketing stuff we were trying, and it was like first or second time that we did, it didn’t really work. And the conversation that we had a team was like, oh, it’s just we haven’t given it enough time. We have to shift and adjust a little bit and change, stick with it fit.

And I think that’s often the case, but sometimes you can stick with an idea for five years and it’s like, actually it didn’t work and it shouldn’t have existed in the world. What was that like for you guys as you navigated this with a cookbook?

Sonja Overhiser: Yeah, I mean, I think we’re lucky that one got picked up because otherwise I don’t

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, well, that was the last stop on the road,

Alex Overhiser: But I think this whole book we took as a professional project instead of a personal project, I think. And so we were like, what do you mean by that? How can we make this more professional instead of, this has to be my idea that’s so important that I will release if we want to work with this publisher that sells really beautiful giftable books, let’s think about the type of books that they do and the type of zone of genius that we have and where do they mix? Instead of saying, this is my idea, it has to happen. And then as we went through the actual process of the cookbook, we treated it much the same way of taking out that layer of personal emotion and adding a layer of expertise to it.

Bjork Ostrom: In the world of product development, they talk about one of the most important things is to not hold too tightly to your right, the idea that you think should exist within the world, you need it to start, but then being flexible enough based on feedback or maybe conversations with customers to shift, nudge, adjust what the product is. In this case it would be a cookbook to get to a place where it’s like, Hey, there’s some indications that the market would be interested in this and we have some expertise and some interest in it. And then finding that Venn diagram overlap with those two things can coexist the market need and your interest and passion and using that to drive things forward versus what it sounds like you were saying, Alex, which is approaching it by saying, well, I just want this to exist and this is exactly how I think it should look. And so that’s what we’re going to do.

Sonja Overhiser: Totally. And I feel like that is the key to any creative business where it’s driven by both passion and business. It’s having that ability to change and pivot. I was just thinking about, we had a podcast at one point and you were asking about when do you decide it’s too much? It was an okay podcast, it was not a great podcast, so we just no more of that podcast. But your podcast is an amazing podcast, so it needs to exist in the world. So just I guess not getting too emotionally invested in any one of your business offerings,

Bjork Ostrom: And also to acknowledge what you said, which is the creative business. And I think those two words are really important to have in tandem because if it’s just creative, it doesn’t really matter. You just go and you create and it’s fun and you do it because that’s what fills you up. But if you have the business part, like my friend Nate down the hall, he does video and he does some stuff that’s purely creative. He’s not trying to figure out how to monetize it. And then he does some stuff that’s like creative business, it’s like documentaries, it’s things like that. And he does some stuff that’s like business. It’s like a contractor needs a video showcasing the dentist buildings they’ve built over the last 18 months, and it’s like, okay, they could do a really good job of that, but it’s not necessarily the most creative thing he’s ever going to do.

And I think for all of us, within the context of our needs, how much of the business do we need for revenue to support ourselves? And within the context of the creative outlet, maybe we have a really great W2 job and we just really need something that fills us up. And so you can lean into that creativity part. There’s a spectrum and we all have to make that decision. So one of the things I’m curious about that you’ve alluded to a couple times with the cookbook is this idea of giftable. Can you talk about that as a concept and a word, and it sounds like almost like a strategy and approach for this specific cookbook.

Sonja Overhiser: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because we’ve never formalized it really. I mean, we kind of have in the past couple months, but for us as authors, it really takes the pressure off because I think with our first book we were like, this is a great book. You’re going to love it. You should cook from it every day. You want it, you want it. And that’s a hard sell, right? But with this book, we’re like, Hey, you need a gift for weddings. You need a gift for anniversaries. You need a gift for your friend. You might not need this cookbook at all, but I know that you’re going to want to buy it for someone else. And that helps kind of take the pressure off for us. We’ve

Alex Overhiser: Also, we’re not natural salespeople, so

Sonja Overhiser: Yeah, we’re not great at

Bjork Ostrom: Sales. It’s like encouraging people to buy a gift is the sales approach and marketing approach as opposed to encouraging people themselves to buy it. And that little,

Alex Overhiser: I think this is a higher book. It’s a $40 book. And so we’re telling people, stop using our free recipes and buy this seems like a harder sell than saying, we cream you this wonderful thing that you should make recipes with your daughter. That’s a more fun concept for why you should buy a book to us.

Sonja Overhiser: And also, we have a little bit of data behind it. We’ve been, you were AV testing a little cookbook ad that we had on our website, and it has a little picture of the cookbook and a banner, and at one point it said a hundred of our best recipes or something like that. And then you can just change it to give the gift of recipes and it performs slightly better. So that’s what we right now, but when I saw it, I was like, yeah, your brain is like, oh, okay, I do want to give the gift of recipes versus like, oh, a hundred recipes I need now. There’s

Bjork Ostrom: Lots there.

Well, and part of it too is I think so much of our mindset as creators, specifically in the food space, Lindsay talks about this is what we’re selling isn’t really recipes. It’s a readily available resource. You can get it in a lot of different places. We’re actually selling the thing behind that, which is for some people it’s like a certain way of eating For other people, it’s a certain way of life. In this case, it seems like, and I’d be interested to hear you validate this one or push back against it some ways it sounds like it’s selling connection. It’s selling an experience, it’s selling or marketing, selling or marketing, whatever you want to say. That’s the thing that you’re pointing people to is like, Hey, this is an opportunity to connect. It’s an opportunity for community, whatever the word is that you use within the context. It’s not necessarily saying, Hey, these are the recipes that you need because you might be able to find those anywhere. But what you won’t be able to find is kind of like the ethos of what these are all wrapped up in. How much does that feel true as you’ve approached this?

Sonja Overhiser: A hundred percent, yes. I feel like that’s exactly what we’ve been trying to do. So thank you for codding that.

I do think as you’re saying that, I think this is what all of us as content creators and food bloggers should be thinking about as we look towards the future, where we’re competing against ai, where we’re not sure if, are people going to be looking for recipes in the same ways on Google? Is AI going to be creating all of our recipes? Maybe they are, maybe robots will be, but they can’t replace us as people who are able to bring that backstory and bring that connection, the human element of cooking together. So I love that you said that, and I think that is what is going to bring us forward into the next generation of content creation.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, they talk a lot about brand, the importance of brand. I was talking to Paul Banister from iv, and he talked about this idea of the people who aren’t worried about a Google update. An example would be Disney. He’s like, Google Update doesn’t happen, and they scramble around somebody who might be would Dotdash Meredith because a lot of their stuff is not all of it, but a lot of it is, or maybe all of it, I don’t know, Dotdash Meredith would also do the magazines, but I don’t know to what degree that’s part of their business. But basic idea being you have this brand and brand is inherently bigger than just something online. And so often if you’re building a brand and that brand has a following, you have some kind of shared belief or you’re on a similar journey or you’re trying to get to a similar outcome. And so I think the challenge for anybody listening to this and for all of us as creators is what is that for us? And then you use these tools, SEO, keyword research, social media, to get in front of people, but that in and of itself isn’t the transaction. It’s not like you get a page, you and somebody comes and looks at it and leaves. You’re really trying to build this kind of experience that people are joining and becoming a part of. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors.

This episode is sponsored by Raptive. When it comes to monetizing a blog or a site, display ads are a fantastic passive way to generate income on the content you’re already producing. In fact, Raptive display ads are one of our biggest revenue generators at Pinch of Yum, they make up nearly 80% of our overall monthly income. riv, which is formerly Ad Thrive, is on a mission to empower independent creators like you. And to date, Raptive has paid out more than $2 billion to creators. Not only do they help creators generate ad revenue, they also offer creators many other benefits to help support them with their audience revenue and business goals. For example, Raptive creators get access to industry-leading tools like Topic, which helps creators discover opportunities to improve their content and plan the structure of their blog posts. You also get access to resources on HR and recruiting SEO email marketing, customized ab ad layout testing, and more as a Raptive creator. You can learn more about Raptive’s, creator levels and what’s all included in each level at riv.com/creator-levels. Then when you’re ready to apply, head to.com and click the Apply Now button. Working with an ad network has had a profound impact on the way Pinch of Yum monetizes our business, and by being a Raptive creator, you’re getting access to results-based solutions that can really impact the way your business runs and grows. Learn more at raptive.com. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

How do you guys think about that? And can you even speak a little bit to this idea of AI and Google algorithm updates? What does that look like for you in your conversations, and is it something you’re worried about and how do you approach that as online digital business owners?

Alex Overhiser: Yeah, it’s definitely something we think about a lot and discuss the

And use and use, yeah. Yeah, we use AI in various ways for our website as well. But the big idea I think now that we’ve been doing this for 14 years is seeing that a couple cooks as a brand has changed a little bit, but we’ve kind of existed through these different phases, and we just have to assume no matter how strong the current phase is, that there will be a new phase of internet content creation. And if we want to be a part of it, we need to be paying attention to not jumping on every trend, but paying attention to those long-term things that are changing throughout the industry.

Bjork Ostrom: I have a follow-up question on that, but if you had predictions, it’s one of the things I’m curious on asking more on the podcast, especially for people who have seen years and years, like decade plus type creators who have seen the waves come and go, you maybe start to develop a little bit intuition if feel like AI is different, it feels more monumental, it feels maybe more like a hurricane versus a wave, but would you have any guess as to what the next year or the next two years brings knowing that you are studied and researched and have some awareness of what’s coming?

Alex Overhiser: I think that there will be fewer and fewer brands that are able to get us control massive amounts of audience. And so how you can take care of your own individual audience will become more important than just that well, or well created keyword researched page. I just don’t think you can get beautiful images for free on ai. It works. If you wanted to do that and not take a food photograph, you could do hacks that made yourself show up. And I think Google’s paying attention and they’re trying to elevate these smaller pages. They’re not necessarily doing a good job yet. But I think that everybody, there’s just not going to be this singular answer to every question. If you just want a chili recipe, I think you go in a chat GT and they’ll give you a decent one. So how do we develop that brand I think will become more important. But I think the opportunity for an individual blog to just command millions of eyeballs might slowly dissipate.

Bjork Ostrom: The internet will become more fractured. In essence. It’s not like you

Alex Overhiser: Might just follow star one, TikTok star, and that’s still the place you go. You don’t have that idea that I will go to Google and I will type. A billion people are doing that per month.

Bjork Ostrom: And even you alluded to this, even for myself, I’ve noticed quite often now I’m going to get my answers from chatt PT, I have it on my phone, I have it on my computer, and I have a thought, and the benefit being that it’s a clear delivery of that content, but it’s also interactive and I can ask, follow-up questions and iterate and it’s really good and it will only get better. And I think especially once you get to the point where you can interact with voice, and I think the advanced voice stuff with OpenAI is not publicly available, but I think it will be shortly. Apple as of this recording, has released their next iPhone that will have OpenAI, chatt deeply integrated. So I think you’re right. It looks like that will get fragmented. It’ll start to exist in other places. How do you do that though? How do you make sure that you continue to serve your audience and deliver good content and when chat GPT or Gemini is able to deliver a really good recipe, which probably a year from now it’ll be at that point, you can get probably a really good chili recipe from Chachi Tea in a year. What does that look like? Do you have thoughts on how you’ll approach that?

Sonja Overhiser: Yeah, I mean, we’ve already been been harping on email list for the past five plus years, and we never quite, we were like, oh yeah, email list, whatever. And now we’re seeing, oh yeah, email list. So we did switch to ConvertKit and we’re doing more emails and we have a strategy on how we kind of resurface old content. We have so much old content and just kind of bringing that to the forefront, dusting off posts and being able to come into people’s inboxes is a big privilege and we’ve been seeing a pretty good return on that in terms of just being able to give them recipes from a brand that they trust. So I think that that is going to be the key moving forward is having that brand that people trust. I’ve heard from people who are doing membership sites, some creators who have started doing that. I’m not sure if that’s something you guys have talked about on the podcast, but there will be more of that type of, I know I love a couple cooks or I know I love Pinch of Yum and I’m just going to follow them because I know that their recipes are great, and when I need to look up chocolate chip cookie, I’m not going to Google. I’m going to Pinch of Yum.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. We talk about this idea of walled gardens and how there is this idea of the internet just being open. You could search it on Google, you could access it on Google, but maybe there’s a future where you shift that a little bit. Food blogger probing an example, it’s a membership site, it’s a walled garden. Our content’s not showing up on Google. Some disadvantages to that, but also advantages in that you have this kind of community element and that’s the only place that you can get it. One of the things you talked about that I’d be interested to hear, you talked about it’s just using AI tools within your business. What does that look like? What are the ways that you’re using it and the ways that you find it to be most beneficial?

Alex Overhiser: The easiest, most beneficial is I wrote a prompt for proofreading. It took a while to get the prompt, but we just copy and paste it in and it’s really good at proofreading the entire blog, boost the recipe. I have it checked for like did we remember to put in the serving amount, all that type of stuff, and it’s very good, and so it’s a lot better. Previously I was proofing and just missing everything.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s amazing. And it does it in instant.

Alex Overhiser: Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Two seconds. Yeah,

Alex Overhiser: So there’s that. We use it for brainstorming. We use it for boring email communications. If I need to email a problem to our web designer, and it’s a lot easier for me to speak it in the chat GBT and have it spin out an email versus me take the time to write it up. And so I use it for communication quite a bit in that way.

Sonja Overhiser: Use it to help brainstorm meta descriptions or whatever, but pretty careful about now you can tell what ai, AI likes to use Elevate or whatever.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. That as a word

Sonja Overhiser: To keywords are. And honestly now when I get personal emails that are written in certain ways, I’m like, oh, that sounds like they manage G PT first or whatever. So we’re really careful about not making it sound too AI ish, but it really does help when you’re just staring at a blank page of what is good about this recipe. Tell me,

Bjork Ostrom: Brainstorm. The editing I feel like is a great example. There’s a podcast that I listened to, his name is Jason Kani. He talks a lot about startups. He has a podcast called This Week in Startups, but he has this theory that companies are going to grow in size but not in employee numbers over the next few years because they’re going to be able to outsource a lot of the tasks that they would’ve hired or otherwise. And I feel like some of those examples are great examples of how as a small lean team, you talk about not having a team, you can create efficiencies and by writing a prompt as an example to have somebody edit it 10 years ago, that would’ve been an editor sitting down and looking through it and maybe missing stuff as well. Can you talk just real quickly, Alex, when you say write a prompt, can you talk about how somebody could do that if they want to? Maybe that one specifically, but just what it looks like to craft a good prompt and how you iterate on that.

Alex Overhiser: Definitely. So I love just nerding out with AI just to see what its capabilities are, and I found the more specific you get when you ask a question, the better it gets. And with Chad GT specifically, you can have it create a GPT that you can reuse, so it just saves the prompt and all I’d have to do is paste in the webpage and it gives me the same result every time. And so in this case, I think it says double check and triple check because if you tell it to do that, it actually does matter.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, interesting.

Alex Overhiser: You read this as my editor. You’re a copy editor for a cookbook magazine, and so I actually treat it like a person and then I say, double check and trickle check. Make a list of 12 possible typos, 12 possible suggestions, and then go through the recipe card and make sure it has all these specific things that aren’t messed up and that it spits out like a pretty good answer.

Sonja Overhiser: Not always,

Alex Overhiser: It hallucinates little things, but it finds things like, a good example is it’ll find words that are spelled correctly about using the wrong word. I’m trying to think of one that I’m use in cooking, but that it’s not a typo from just spelled wrong, but it doesn’t make sense in context and it picks up stuff like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it feels like what it’s great for is a companion sitting next to you that can, it’s like I think of if Lindsay and I are ever on a hike it, we’re going up a hill, and if I’m ever behind her and I push a little bit, she’s always like, oh yeah, if you could just keep pushing my back a little bit, it makes it easier or vice versa. She pushes me up the hill. But I feel like that’s what it can be for us. It’s not going to do the walking, but it can do a little bit of the relieve, a little bit of the effort in certain places along the way.

Alex Overhiser: Just speeds it up a lot. Just little speeds up your task.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. We could talk for another hour, but we can’t. We got to wrap up. I know the cookbook is coming out soon. What’s the best way for people to pick that up? We’ll link to it in the show notes, and I know some people who might have some gifting opportunities in the future or just want to buy it for themselves, would love to pick it up. So what’s the best way to do that?

Sonja Overhiser: Yeah, go to a couple cooks do com slash cookbook, and we have all the methods on there. Our local bookstore is actually offering to ship signed copies anywhere in the us, which is really exciting. We’ve never had any way to sign them on the paper and ship them, so that’s a really exciting way to do it. So there’s a signed copy button and then you can get it on amazon bookshop.org. Barnes and Noble, there’s a bunch of buttons there.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. And then if people want best place to follow along with you online would be your site.

Sonja Overhiser: Yep. A couple clicks.com or they can follow our Instagram as well slash a couple clicks.

Bjork Ostrom: They just have to be prepared. You’re not going to have as many r=Reels as other people might have, but they can follow

Sonja Overhiser: Low expectations when you know us, but they can sign up for our newsletter, but that’s the best way to keep track of us. They can sign up on our website.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Alex and Sonja been so great to be friends with you through the years to watch what you’ve built and excited for this next chapter.

Sonja Overhiser: Thank you so much.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We really hope you enjoyed this episode. If you want to go even deeper into learning how to grow and monetize your food blog or food business, or you’re interested in starting a food blog, we definitely recommend that you check out the Food Blogger Pro membership at foodbloggerpro.com/membership. In the membership, we share all of our course content about topics like monetizing photography, essential tools and plugins, building traffic, and so much more. We also host monthly live Q&As and coaching calls to dive deeper into the topics that food creators need to know about and have a forum where all of our members can ask questions and get feedback from each other. From the Food Blogger Pro team and all of our incredible experts, we have received lots of amazing testimonials over the years from Food Blogger Pro members.

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