Differentiating Your Content in a Crowded Market with Brian Watson

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Ann Morrissey: Hey there, thanks for tuning into the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Ann, and in today’s episode, Bjork is sitting down with Brian Watson from Thee Burger Dude. You’ll hear about Brian’s journey as a content creator and how he has navigated his way from Instagram to YouTube, why blogging remains crucial for his success and how it can offer stability for creators on TikTok and Instagram. Plus, you’ll hear his tips for standing out in a crowded space, including smart photography setups and the value of multifunctional recipes. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re looking to elevate your content, this episode is filled with insights you won’t want to miss. If you enjoy this episode, we would really appreciate it if you’ll leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Brian, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Yeah. I’m going to lead with a question not related to food at all, because it was something kind of curious that you said in kind of the pre-interview questionnaire filling things out. You were talking about earning income from your YouTube and from your blog, and then you said in addition to royalties, I think. Is that right? So tell me, I’m curious about the royalties part, start there.

Brian Watson: Sure. Yeah, so before I started doing the food blogging stuff, I was doing kind of two jobs at the same time. My first job was doing 3D environment art for video games, and I did that 20 plus years. And then the last started around 2013, I started doing music for mostly reality tv, so all the real Housewives stuff and lots of discovery stuff, and it’s just the background music.

Bjork Ostrom: In fact, we can relate. I had a song placed on Real World in the background.

Brian Watson: Nice.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, this was 12 or 13 years ago.

Brian Watson: Do you still get royalties from it or

Bjork Ostrom: Maybe since at this point, but I mean, when I was young twenties and it was like a royalties track and I didn’t have, it was just me as publisher and writer. I remember getting a check for, at the time, I think it was maybe like 1500 each, so like $3,000.

Brian Watson: Yeah, that’s about right. That’s great. Yeah, if you can do that a bunch of times every month, you’re doing great.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And stack those up. So you were doing environmental art for video games, meaning you would design the landscape that the characters would live in

Brian Watson: The buildings. If it was like Grand Theft Auto, I would’ve done the streets and the buildings, basically the big stuff. I wouldn’t have done the small stuff like the cars and little props and stuff, but the major environment stuff, it That’s awesome. It was a really great fun job. It was very stressful. It could be very stressful depending on who you worked for. Sure. And then I’ve always done music ever since I was a kid, and I started just composing. I got into Philip Glass and I was like, maybe I can stuff like this. So I started doing that and a friend of mine who was an editor was like, Hey, music library guy I know needs some music. So I sent it to him. They said this was great. And so we basically, I just would write them stuff and just send it to them and they would get it based on shows. And yeah, I haven’t done work for them in probably since I started doing this, probably since 2019, I’d say at least five years, and I’m still getting royalty checks, which are really great because it’s literally

Bjork Ostrom: Passive money sometimes People are like, oh, you’ve built a website, it’s passive income. It’s like, actually, no, it’s very active income.

Brian Watson: That truly is, you can do something and it becomes passive. It pays royalties, which is I don’t have to do Anything. I literally don’t do anything and just, yeah, it’s really nice. I don’t know when it’s going to peter off and just disappear, but I imagine eventually it will.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So you were talking about this new business that you’ve created and that you’ve built over the last four to five years, and it really is a business. It’s at the point now where you’re earning advertising revenue both from your site, from YouTube, hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube and Instagram. This for you, it sounds like came out of a transition from that W2, or was it a W2 contractor job? It was your main gig?

Brian Watson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, my main gig, it depended when I would work salary for some video game companies. I used to work for Insomniac who did the Spider-Man games recently.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, cool.

Brian Watson: But yeah, towards the end I was kind of just doing odd job stuff where I would work for somebody and help them out for a couple months, so, so I was definitely kind of in a weird spot where I was like, what am I going to do? And I was getting burned out on the music stuff just because, I don’t know, it’s like it’s a grind. I have a ADHD, so I tend to get, sometimes I get a little bored of things after a while, which I’m curious. I don’t know how long I’ll be doing this. Hopefully I would love to do this for the rest of my life, but I really have no idea if I will be.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And so there’s this job transition, and you’ve recently gone vegan, and so you’re doing a lot of burger experiments and cooking, and you’re making a lot of vegan burgers, documenting that on your personal Instagram, it sounds like there are some conversations that came out of friendships, your girlfriend, now wife at the time kind of being like, Hey, you’re doing this thing. There’s something here. Why don’t you make it a thing? Is that more or less what happened?

Brian Watson: Yeah, my wife April was like, you should just start posting this stuff on Instagram, a food account, like a separate burger account. And I didn’t know that that was a thing. And so I looked into it and I started doing that, and it just kind of grew out of there. I just started posting stuff and people would ask for the recipes. So then I actually started writing down what I was doing, and then I would just post that on the caption, and then eventually somebody was like, you should start a blog because you could actually make money doing that. And so that’s what I did. So it was, like I said, it was very unintentional. It was just kind of something I was doing for fun, and I had no idea that you could make money at it or make a living off of it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. When did you start to realize that was possible? Give us kind some high level stats around when that happened, and then maybe how many years of into it?

Brian Watson: Yeah. Well, I didn’t know that you could. Well, a few years into it, I think I started, so when I first started doing stuff, Instagram was just photos. They didn’t have any sort of bonuses or anything like that. Really the only place that you could earn TikTok didn’t even exist. And so the only place you could really earn any sort of money was either on a blog or on YouTube advertising revenue.

Bjork Ostrom: You could work with a brand on Instagram, but if you’re going to do,

Brian Watson: Right, right. Yeah. Actually, I started doing that early on too. I remember I was like, why do these people want me to do stuff for them? I definitely had an imposter syndrome, and I do to this day, but especially early Days as to all of us.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

Brian Watson: I did my site on Wix just because I don’t know how to do any sort of, I wouldn’t know how to do a website on WordPress. Yes, thank you. I didn’t know how to do any of that stuff, and I just thought, well, I’ll do it on Wix and I’ll figure out how to get ads on it later. I also was like, I hate when there’s ads on blogs on recipe. So you know what? I’m going to keep my blog ad-free because I just want people to be able to see that. I wanted it to basically be a place where people could just get the recipes from my videos on YouTube, and I just thought, I’m going to put all my eggs in the YouTube basket and I’m really going to focus on YouTube, and eventually it’ll pay off. And I just kind of plateaued. And I started getting worried because I was like, like I said, with the royalty money, I don’t know when that’s going to dry up, but it does.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like still there. Every time you get a check, you’re like, oh, thank goodness.

Brian Watson: Yes,

Bjork Ostrom: Still there, but maybe not next month.

Brian Watson: And sometimes it’ll go really high up and sometimes it’ll go really high down. It’s very inconsistent too. So I started getting worried that this YouTube money, there’s no way I could subsist off the YouTube money. It’s just simply not enough. And I just remember being, people make money doing this besides brand deals. I also didn’t want to do a ton of brand deals. I’m grateful for them, but at the same time, they’re not my favorite thing to do, which I think

Bjork Ostrom: Totally,

Brian Watson: I mean, everyone would say that probably. Then I saw a blog, or I saw a post by Tiffy Cooks, I don’t know if you’re familiar with her, And she was talking about how she quit her job. She was working some corporate job. She quit it and really kind of just concentrated on the blog, and she’s like, now I make five figures a month on my blog. And I’m like, how is she doing that? And so that’s when I started looking more into monetizing the blog, and I realized with Wix, it was just way too hard. So I paid somebody, a friend recommended me to somebody to essentially move my blog from Wix over to WordPress and get it up and running with Google Ads. And what was interesting was because I had been doing my blog for three years, by the time I started putting ads on it, she realized, she’s like, you’re getting enough hits that you could do. I soon did Mediavine, and then a few months after that, she’s like, now you can move to Raptive. You’ve got enough for Raptive. So that’s basically what I’ve done, and that’s actually become, I’m trying not to put all my eggs in one basket sort of thing, because I know that’s not wise, but right now the blog is kind of the main breadwinner for me. And so that is where I’m putting most of my energy. I haven’t really done a long-form YouTube video in, it’s like, six months Just because I don’t really enjoy them as much now. I like doing short videos. Like I said, I have ADHD, so my attention span is the kind of thing where I just do much better on that. Even when I watch videos, I actually prefer short videos. Most of the time. It’s something I’m very new to, and I have no idea how to make it. I would much prefer a shorter video.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting, I think that one of the things we often talk about is looking at holistically, what is your experience as a human and how can you wrap all that stuff into your unique offering? And I think for you, it’s like vegan obviously is a really specific thing, vegan, but also burgers. And it’s not just burgers I know now, but kind of this idea of you made a Reuben and I’m watching it and I’m like, man, that’s awesome. I’m not vegan. But we have some vegan restaurants that we really like in the Twin Cities, and it’s great, and it’s a skill that you have in making the vegan food, but also you obviously are somebody who has a history of creating a thing, and the previous version was music and buildings in a Spider-Man universe. Not that you’re doing it for that game, but that idea and what you have then. And you also have a brain that works in a certain way. And so it’s kind of looking is maybe strategic, maybe not. But just saying collectively you as Brian Watson, what does that look like for you to come up with something that allows you to create a successful thing online? And what’s cool about it is that you’ve done that, you’ve put all of those pieces together and you’ve created a thing that not only is uniquely you, but also there is a need for it in the marketplace. And it’s like you could do long form video, there’s also a need for that, but Shortform is working really well right now. And for me on the outside, it’s really cool to see somebody who’s like is surfing a wave and they’re really good at surfing that wave and the wave that they are surfing is a wave that’s relevant to how content is being produced right now on the web, which is short form as an example. So it’s cool to see all those collectively coming together. One of the questions that I have for you is with your Instagram, you have 360,000 followers, and on YouTube you have 442 followers at the time of the recording for this. And yet you talk about your site kind of being this main hub for you, at least from the financial perspective with the business. Can you talk about how you kind of view those things collectively? And do you view really the social meaning YouTube and Instagram as a channel into getting people to the site? And if so, how do they get there?

Brian Watson: I mean, yeah, I hope it doesn’t sound too cynical, but yeah, that’s kind of how I do view them because social media, especially being a vegan content creator, a recipe creator can be very exhausting. You’re dealing with comments basically. And when you’re dealing with the expectation that you put on yourself, okay, I worked really hard on this video, I really hope it resonates. I get a lot of likes and a lot of great feedback and all this stuff, and then it bombs, and then you kind of feel defeated. And I really mean, I know this is not a unique perspective, but I really don’t like that. And I was trying to figure out how can I make this sustainable? And so for me, it’s just a way to kind of quantify success, I guess. As long as the blog is chugging along and I’m doing just as good as the last month or better, I don’t really care about how something performs on Instagram or on YouTube, you know what I mean? Obviously it’s great to me, it’s like a bonus now on Instagram or YouTube or whatever pops off and does well, it’s a bonus as opposed to something that I’m relying on to be a barometer of how I’m doing. It’s just a very, it’s not a sustainable way for me to do what I’m doing basically.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Well, especially if you think about, let’s say you take the blog away and you only have Instagram or you only have YouTube. YouTube to some degree, there’s maybe some predictability with revenue, but still it kind relies on a video going up down’s, the solid

Brian Watson: Score. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: But Instagram, it’s like you talked about bonuses. It’s like, we’ll, occasionally for Pinch of Yum, which is our food site and Instagram get bonuses, but it’s like maybe every once in a while collectively we’ll get over a thousand dollars a month from that, and we might be doing it wrong. If anybody knows a better way to do it, let me know. And I know there are some people who are doing long form content on Facebook and having success with that and monetizing that. So for you, if you look at the pie chart of your business income, what does that look like percentage wise? Is it like 70% revenue from the site, 30% from YouTube?

Brian Watson: Probably, yeah, close to that. I’d say 75% from the blog and 25% from YouTube right now. It’s funny because you just reminded me when Instagram first started doing bonuses and I signed up for it, and it was actually semi-decent. It was like half of what I made on YouTube. And so I was like, oh, wow, they’re actually going to, they’re actually trying to contend with YouTube. This will be interesting to see how this plays out. And then a couple months later, it just plummeted to 10% of what it was before.

Brian Watson: I think that’s the thing. What you brought up with YouTube is YouTube is pretty consistent. There was definitely a weird thing when they were doing with shorts where I was getting just an insane amount of views, millions and millions of views, and then it dropped as quickly as it started. You know what I mean? So they definitely were messing with the algorithm and trying to figure out how do we suggest things and whatnot, which is, that’s expected, obviously. But even with that, yes, YouTube is definitely the most consistent. If I was going to give anyone advice, if they were going to double down, not double down, but I see a lot of people doing stuff on TikTok and Instagram and they don’t have a blog, and I guess they’re just depending on Brandy, and some of these people have 500,000 a million followers, and I’m just, I’m like, y’all got to get a blog. You know what I mean? At least the thing that I like about the blog is it’s your thing, you control it. Obviously we’re beholden to Google, but it’s the most independent thing that you can do in this whole social media sort of stratosphere,

Bjork Ostrom: Especially people talk about this idea of comparison against, you have a garden and the garden is on land that you own, and you can kind of till that garden and make it whatever you want, versus you have a garden, but it’s on rented land, being social media, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and you can grow a crop on it, but they might come and plow it over someday and build a big building because it’s their land. They can do whatever they want with it.

Brian Watson: Especially Instagram. I mean, I don’t see it as much as I used to, but there would just be people who are like, oh, Instagram deleted my account.

Bjork Ostrom: Right? Well, it happened to us. Oh, really? Lindsay’s Facebook account, if this ever happens to anybody. We did a podcast episode on it, so it was maybe two years ago, somebody hacked Lindsay’s personal Facebook account somehow still unclear exactly how it happened. She had two factor authentication stuff turned on, but then they did something with selling ads. It was some weird stuff, weird behavior. Anyways, her personal account got shut down, but her personal account was connected to all the other meta accounts, so it was like 10 o’clock one night. She’s like, Instagram’s just gone. It’s like, what? Yeah, it just doesn’t exist. So it was a whole to do with having to get ahold of a friend that we had at Meta and they had to submit some document.

Brian Watson: That seems to be the only way you can get it resolved. I just saw something where someone was saying how their account got deleted, and she was saying that the only reason she was able to get in there was because she has the meta verified thing and they have some special customer service that if I wouldn’t be able to get it, I don’t have the meta verification thing, so I would be screwed if one day that happened. And I think about, and again, that’s why I am putting more stock in something like the blog, because hopefully no one’s going to delete my blog.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, well, it’s owned a little bit more, not that there’s ever any platform that’s completely risk free. Even with email, I remember when Gmail released some updates where they started filtering email and it was like, oh, maybe this is going to have a big impact on newsletter sends and opens. And so there’s always risk in anything that we’re doing in any business.

Brian Watson: Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Algorithm change, platform changing emails not being delivered, all of those things. But to your point, I think less volatility, or at least you own it in a different way where it’s not going to completely go away or you’re not going to lose access to it. Google algorithm change for sure, but even within that, it’s all about diversification. And it sounds like high level, a lot of what you’re talking about is like, Hey, I had this income coming in from royalties, that was great, but I felt a little bit like I needed to diversify. So I started working on this business that was the food business, but within the context of that food business, it was a little bit too reliant just on YouTube revenue. So then I looked at the blog revenue, and we’ve done different iterations of that even outside of digital business where we’ve said, Hey, what’s the ultimate contrast of what we’re building? And it’s like bricks in a parking lot. So it’s like what does it look like to have commercial real estate? So let’s say everything does go away. You have this kind of adjacent, completely unrelated business, But part of it is also very personal. It’s like some people are very comfortable going all in on a singular thing and getting really good at it, and they benefit from it. And so it really has to do with your own personal risk assessment and resource allocation, but time allocation, money allocation, all of that. So when you think of how you are spending your time today, what does that look like? You have a, let’s say, eight hour day. Do you still view yourself as a video creator or are you focusing a lot on the site at this point?

Brian Watson: Yeah, I am focusing on making the blog kind of a giant digital cookbook is essentially what I want be, and I want to just do the kind of thing where I did start with burgers, but today after we’re done, I’m going to try and do a carbonara. I’m trying to do more stuff like that just because I want it to be the kind of thing where people go to the site, they might think, oh, I want make whatever. Let’s see if the burger dude has a recipe for it. I want to do that kind of thing where it’s not, I can’t think of a good word that doesn’t sound pretentious.

Bjork Ostrom: Go for it. Just say it.

Brian Watson: I was going to say a beacon or something like that, but I just want it to be a home base for people. A destination. A destination, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a resource for people as opposed to people randomly coming across it on a search result, they maybe go there to search.

Brian Watson: Right, exactly. And like you said, I mean, it’s cool because since I’ve been doing this, I have noticed a lot more people are doing, because I think a lot, there’s still a stereotype that vegan food is all vegetables and all this stuff, which is fine, obviously. But yeah, that was the kind of thing when I was going vegan, I wanted something different. I wanted to be able to eat what I was already eating. And so it’s very niche down. You’re already doing vegan food, which is obviously a very small subset, and you’re doing more like comfort slash fast food sort of stuff, which is even more, it’s like a very small slice of the pie,

Bjork Ostrom: Basically. Yeah. It’s like vegan Raisin Canes, barbecue, shredded tofu beef. I’m looking through all the different examples. One of the things that I appreciate about your style is in our world, a lot of times you’ll see people have these kind of really beautiful, laid out, expansive. There’s the cloth in the dish and then there’s some cups in the background for you. It’s a very minimalist, it’s almost like something you would see on a really well shot menu. And it’s the plate, it’s simplistic, and I think it does a really good job of showcasing what the food item is, what the recipe is, but it’s also a departure at least from what the norm would be. And it feels like such a great example of somebody coming in yourself, in this case, unencumbered by what everybody else is doing, and maybe just kind of blazing your own path. And that working, is that accurate in terms of you saying, Hey, this is kind of how I envision it, or did you kind of have a picture of what it was going to be like coming in based on a photographer you liked or things that you’ve seen?

Brian Watson: Yeah, no, he still posts. There’s a guy, Joe’s Vegan Food, Gram, I believe his account is, and he does the same thing. It’s just a stark white background then whatever he’s shooting. So he was definitely an influence. But like you said, also when I would go to the McDonald’s site or the Burger King site to look at what they had so that I could get some inspiration, I noticed, oh, it’s just a burger with a white background or an orange background, or whatever it is. They don’t really make it look like what at Burger King, you know what I mean? And on top of that, it’s a much less romantic version or a reason. It was because I did try to do some of that stuff with plating and everything, and I wasn’t very good at it, so I just thought, you know, why don’t we just get rid of all that stuff? And it does make it a lot easier. The thing that I love about it is I white everything out in Lightroom. I do shoot on a white backdrop, but it’s not a hundred percent white. There’s still shadows and stuff, but what I love about it is I can shoot things separately and then if I need to make some sort of compose scene with multiple things, I can just do it. It was because you would shoot something that was already pre composed and you’d be like, oh, I wish the spoon was just moved a nudge to the right or whatever. You know what I mean?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah. That’s great.

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Brian Watson: Perspective? Yeah, I try to think about it from the perspective of if I was, for instance, with the carbonara, if I was looking for a carbonara recipe, a vegan one, what’s going to stick out to me? Because you go on and you Google it, and like you said, you do see stuff. It feels like everything is kind of very similar. So that’s one thing I’m trying to figure out right now is how do I make certain things? Because obviously easy if I’m doing a vegan rai canes, there’s not a ton of vegan rai canes recipes out there, but when it’s something that’s a little bit more that’s been treaded a bit more, it is difficult, I think to forge your own path and make something a little bit more of your own thing. Also, to be honest, sometimes I try and do stuff like that, and a lot of times people, you try and do something like a new spin on something familiar, right? There’s that same, the same but different. I can’t remember what it’s, I was going to do some saying, but I can’t remember.

Bjork Ostrom: My friend and I have this insight. It’s a group of friends. We have this inside joke where one of ’em was trying to come up with a thing and he said it was something of a something, and then he paused, and then he goes, it was the greatest thing ever. So whenever we’re trying to come up with something, we always go, it was something of

Brian Watson: Greatest thing ever. Familiar, but different, I think is what the term was. Sure. But yeah, it’s very, very difficult. And sometimes I think it’s cool to have that. And other times I think just make the recipe because, and don’t worry about if it’s going to be super unique and stick out. Sometimes I just want to make a recipe. I want it to be on the blog. Like I said, I want the blog to just be a digital cookbook that has My mom, I have it back there. My mom has the Betty Crocker cookbook. If you look through those, it’s like, now it’s like you look back, it’s so old fashioned. It’s like how to make meatloaf. It’s like, who doesn’t know how to make meatloaf? But it’s, some people don’t. You know what I mean? But that’s kind of what I want to do with the blog, and eventually I want to go back and do super basic stuff for people who are just starting to go vegan, even though, again, stuff exists out there, it’s easy to find, but I don’t know. I want to have that on my site. I don’t know why I, why I want to have ownership on certain things. You know what I

Bjork Ostrom: Mean? Yeah, for sure. Well, it’s like you can find a hundred different things in a hundred different places, but what’s unique about us as content creators is there are people who inevitably are going to want to come from us and learn from us similar. It’s like there’s probably, I don’t know, a hundred million songs that exist in the world, but we each have our own artists that we want to go and listen to, even though we could probably listen to something that’s pretty similar in a similar genre, but it’s like we have preferences, and those preferences are tied to people, and there’s a lot of different reasons why. So I think it makes sense.

Brian Watson: That’s a really good way to look at it. I didn’t think about it that way, but yeah, that’s totally true. You could listen to a new album for every day for the rest of your life, and still barely scratch the surface of what’s out there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. Totally. You talked about starting to do less long form, and obviously you alluded to the fact that it is just a better fit for who you are, but talk about just the focus on short form, and is there anything that you’re seeing working especially well with short form video on YouTube and Instagram? And then are you posting the TikTok as well?

Brian Watson: I am. I’m basically just posting the same, I tried doing so with TikTok. What’s interesting is they actually will pay you, or videos that are longer than a minute are up for monetization

Bjork Ostrom: With TikTok?

Brian Watson: What’s that? With

Bjork Ostrom: TikTok?

Brian Watson: With TikTok, yeah. And what’s interesting is sometimes people will complain, especially on TikTok, the culture of TikTok I found versus Instagram and even YouTube, is that they don’t want to leave the TikTok app. They don’t want to go to your blog, the recipe either in the caption or in the video somehow. So I’ve been thinking about doing longer, actually, long, short form videos, I guess maybe two minute videos where I go a little bit more in depth and actually give the full recipe in the video. But I’m sorry, I totally lost the original question.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s just kind of like what’s working and maybe a double click on the TikTok thing. Have you been able to, well just maybe talk a little bit about monetization, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, what does that look like? I talked about Pinch of Yum. It’s like, we’ll occasionally get a check for two $50 or $300 on Instagram, and I think PG VM has maybe 1.4 million followers, and Nike just posting relatively frequently.

Brian Watson: I make $0 on Instagram right now. I don’t think I’m even signed up for the bonuses. I did it and I would get, yeah, $20 or something like that. And I don’t know if maybe there are people out there that are making decent money on the Instagram bonuses. I feel like they cap it though. Don’t they cap it where it’s like you can make up to $1,500, you get a bazillion,

Bjork Ostrom: I don’t know. Yeah, that sounds right.

Brian Watson: I’m not

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Brian Watson: Whereas again, with YouTube, it’s a little bit more flexible. And I know people who, with TikTok who do fairly decent because they upload longer, they upload longer up to five minutes sometimes or 10 minutes even. And I know a few people who make a decent amount of money on TikTok, so it’s not something to ignore. But again, it comes back to that thing they were talking about banning TikTok, who knows if that’ll happen or right, and I remember now your original question was, do you notice anything? Is it working well? Honestly, no. It’s always a crapshoot. What I like to do, I’ll let you in on a weird kind of ritual that I do, is I will post a video on Instagram, then I will go on a walk and I won’t look at my phone for a half an hour, and then I open it and look at how it’s doing after a half an hour, and based off of that first half an hour, I can tell if it’s going to do well or views what’s that

Bjork Ostrom: Based on views?

Brian Watson: Based on just likes and views. But that’s the kind of thing where I will, before I look at it, I’ll guess I’ll be like, it’ll have whatever, and I’m never right. I either think it’s going to have way too many or it’s way too low. It’s almost like it’s the opposite of what I think it’s going to be. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: You should just will in your mind that it’s always going to be super low numbers and see, maybe it’s something in the universe you can start to impact it.

Brian Watson: I’m lying. So the things that do well are things that are kind of foundational recipes. So if it’s a really easy way to make a vegan chicken, it’s not a specific recipe like a chicken pot pie, although chicken pot pie does well too. But if it’s something where it’s like, oh, that’s a cool way to make a thing, I can use that to make a bazillion other dishes, those have a better chance of doing well than something that’s super specific and

Bjork Ostrom: Single ise versus multifunctional.

Brian Watson: Exactly. So if you can show somebody a new way to cook tofu that can be used in a myriad of ways, that’s going to be a lot better than, here’s a sweet and sour tofu recipe, or whatever.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that makes sense. And then are, I think one of the things people always are curious about is timing. Do you post at a specific time? Always.

Brian Watson: I just do it at eight because they tell me that most people are online between six in the morning to, I think it’s like noon or was it seven and nine or something like that. So I just figure, oh, I’ll just post in the middle of it. Eight in the morning. Yeah, eight in the morning on my time. Haven’t really, maybe I should experiment more with posting at night or posting at five in the afternoon, something like that. I don’t know.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think Lindsay usually posts evenings, but I don’t know.

Brian Watson: I don’t know how any of this stuff works. If Instagram’s going to be like, oh, you’re posting at a weird time, we’re not going to do a video. I don’t know if that’s a real thing. Probably not. That’s probably a little paranoid, but I don’t know.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s like all of us trying to figure out the algorithm.

Brian Watson: But that’s the thing. That’s what I’m saying about, I’ve freed myself, I see so many content creators complaining about their views going down and all this stuff happening, and I’ve been working on that, not letting that affect my mental health basically.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s such a game. And the game that I think a lot of people talk about is how do you produce good content? How do you get a lot of views? How do scale? And I think to some degree, people talk about the other part of the game, but not a lot of people, which is the headspace. And I know for Lindsay, who’s primary person being in Instagram, interacting right now, she’s doing this series called the SOS series and is kind of like these recipes that are going to be easy to make when you’re in a bind and you don’t have a lot of time. And last night I was talking to her about it and she was like, yeah, I don’t know how they’re doing. I just haven’t checked. And it’s not like because I don’t care, it’s because I think she cares so much that she knows if it goes one way or the other, you ride that rollercoaster. And so part of the formula for success as a creator is figuring out how do you show up every day? And I think for a lot of people, the way that you show up every day is you protect your head space from being too impacted by metrics that you can’t directly impact. And that’s a hard thing though, because you have to be very intentional about it. For a while, Lindsay would do this thing where she’d open it up and she’d put her hand in front of where the metrics would be, where the stats would be if she had to check something. And I think people, anybody here listening or many people at least, can relate to that idea of just feeling like, man, there could always be more and it could always do better, and it’s really hard on the thing and it didn’t do as well as you could. So are there other ways that you approach that just to protect your headspace as a creator?

Brian Watson: Something that I’ve been doing, not just in regards to work, but just in life in general. I’m 47, I keep forgetting how old. I’m 47 and I’ve lived most of my life. I’ve had anxiety, depression. And as I’ve older, I remember just the other day thinking about how I’ve always been worrying about stuff. I’ve always been this, at the end of the day, none of it’s really been a big deal. Nothing that I’ve ever worried about has been catastrophic. You know what I mean? Life changing in a negative way. And I just remind myself now it’s not a big deal. And that’s kind of my mantra now is like, don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal. And just those little words in my brain for the past, I’ve only been doing it for the past month or so, it alleviated so much of my stress and anxiety about everything. But obviously I think a lot about work. And when a video doesn’t do well now, that’s literally what I think I go, it’s not a big deal, and it completely deflates it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Brian Watson: That’s overly simplistic, but I think the bottom line is you have to figure out whatever that thing is, whatever, if it’s a phrase or if it’s an exercise that you do when you feel upset about something, maybe something didn’t work out the way that you wanted it to, but for me right now, that’s been working wonders.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. I think it does, and I think it’s important to talk about just, it’s a huge part of the experience, I think for people universally, but especially for people who are trying to do creative things and also putting themselves in vulnerable positions. To press publish on a thing and to put it in front of potentially thousands, tens, hundreds, millions of people is a really vulnerable thing. And I think it’s important that we as people who are doing that, have conversations around how we can show up as our whole person without getting too bent up along the way because of the implications of the work that we’re doing. It’s like 50 years ago, the dangers of work would’ve been like, and still for some people that are doing this work, it’s like you’re out in the field and you have a tool. I don’t even know what the tool would be, a tractor. And it’s like, that’s a dangerous thing to do today. It’s like we’re not in physical danger, but I think we’re much more so in mental health danger because of what we’re doing. So I think there’s some considerations that we all need to make around how do we do that well, so I appreciate you talking through that. One of the other things that, yeah, go ahead

Brian Watson: Another thing I wanted to bring up, you just reminded me of something. So when you shoot a video and it bombs, you get upset. But then one thing I would think about, I’d be like, that was a little 32 second video about pumpkin cheesecake that I made that didn’t do well. There’s people who spend years making a full length movie with hundred people spending billions of dollars and those bomb, what does it matter? And I’m like, oh, this is not a big, again, it’s not a big deal.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That perspective piece. One of the things that I think about personally is, and we’ve talked about on the podcast before, is this idea of defining the game that you’re playing. And I think a lot of times the views, the metrics, the numbers are all symptoms that play into what it is that we’re actually trying to do. And I think what we’re actually, for many of us, what we’re actually trying to do is have work that we love or to not have the Sunday scaries or to do a creative thing that makes people’s lives better. And part of that is about reach, but also a huge part of it is Lindsay showed me this picture of somebody’s center. It was her two twins, that just had these ricotta meatballs that she made. And it’s like, that feels, and she said this about the SOS series, she’s like, I don’t think the content probably is not going to do as well in terms of views, but I think it’ll do better in terms of people actually making these and having an impact on people’s lives. That’s really hard to quantify, but I think it’s an example of defining the game that you’re playing in service of detaching yourself from the metrics to know, Hey, this stuff that’s important to me is still happening. It’s going to be different for everybody. For some people, it might be like, Hey, I want to make a bunch of money. A lot of people, it’ll be like, I want to have enough to sustain me and have an impact on people’s lives. It’s different for everybody.

Brian Watson: There’s definitely been times when I have been feeling kind of down in the dumps or whatever about how things are going, and then I’ll get an email notification that somebody left a new review. And it really is like, oh, you just totally wiped away all that boohoo-ness sad stuff. You know what I mean? So definitely, you’re absolutely right. I think that sort of stuff where it’s like, I’ll do that. Sometimes I’ll make a recipe and I’ll be like, I know that not a lot of people are going to like this, but the people who do it are going to

Bjork Ostrom: Really, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yep. That’s great. So you’ve been at it long enough now where you can look back and do some analysis. And one of the things that you mentioned when we were chatting before is you didn’t really get into it with the idea of, Hey, I’m going to build a food media business. It was kind of like you liked creating that content, and there’s a couple of people in your life who came alongside you and you’re like, Hey, there’s actually an entire area of Instagram that’s just food. And then somebody coming along and being like, Hey, you have a lot of followers on Instagram. You can kind of repurpose that content onto a blog and create income from that. And one of the things that you said was, if you did have that mindset of like, Hey, I’m going to build this as a business from the start, there would’ve been some things that you would’ve done differently. What would those things be if you were to go back and do it differently? How would your approach have changed if you from the onset knew that or had the idea that you were building it into a business and a source of income?

Brian Watson: Yeah, I definitely would’ve monetized the blog. I would’ve looked into, excuse me, SEO optimization. I didn’t know or care about SEO optimization when I was first starting my blog. Like I said, it was a place for me to post my recipes. It wasn’t intended to generate income. If you want to make a living at this or even just some supplemental money, that would be my biggest piece of advice is to take that seriously, look into it, educate yourself. Obviously you guys do an amazing job with some of the education that you have about it. So there’s so much stuff out there to learn about this. And it’s never ending because it’s always changing, as you know. So that would be my biggest piece of advice. And then my second piece of advice would be to not take things so seriously.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. I love that.

Brian Watson: Try and lighten up. That was the thing, is I originally did this. I enjoyed it, and I’ve always wanted a job where I was working for myself, and I didn’t have to answer to anybody. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with Internet Shaquille? I don’t think so. No.

Brian Watson: He’s great. But he did a video about, I don’t know if you remember this, but six months or so ago, there was a lot of YouTubers, big YouTubers that were quitting. They were burnt out. He did a video about burnout and how he evades being burnout. And one of the things he said was, if your whole goal is to be your own boss, why would you be cracking the whip on yourself all the time? And that really affected me. That really got me to think, oh, all this pressure that I’m putting on myself and taking things super seriously and being mean to myself about certain things, that’s me doing that to myself. I don’t have to do that. You know what I mean? So that would be my two biggest pieces of advice is be nice to yourself and don’t take things super, super seriously, but also don’t screw around and learn how to do stuff correctly. Kind of opposing things right there.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, yeah. But it’s almost like being gentle with yourself, the opposite of being too hard on yourself. And Lindsay, and I think, I’m trying to remember, I think the book was Big Magic. It’s a book, it’s called it Big Magic Creative Living Beyond Fear. Lindsay and I referenced this a decent amount. I listened to the audiobook years ago, but in it, she talks about this idea of the trickster mindset, and Lindsay and I have kind of used that universally, and it’s around kind of being light on your feet. Don’t get too bogged down, be light on your feet. It’s like, don’t be a terrible boss to yourself. And so I think for, and I didn’t realize this, but she’s actually the author of Eat, Pray, Love, so somebody who is a creator, the two that we talk about Big Magic, and then we also talk about the War of Art by Steven Pressfield and these being two kind of creator type books. So good ones for anybody in that world. But I really love that idea of like, Hey, don’t be a terrible boss yourself if you’re going to be your own boss, still be strategic, still be smart. You’re just not like you’re being lazy, but it’s also you’re being gentle with yourself and light on your feet. So I love that, Brian. My guess is people are going to want to follow along with you. They’re going to want to connect with you. We have some folks in the world who in the podcast world who are eating vegan as well, and they can get some recipes from you. So best way to do that. And then best way to maybe contact you if somebody wanted to reach out.

Brian Watson: Yeah, all my social media stuff is The Burger Dude with two Es, and that was just because when I was doing my name, there was already the burger, dude.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Love it.

Brian Watson: Just add an E to it, I guess. And that’s on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok. My website is theeburgerdude.com. You could contact me there. My email. Do you need my email for that or just contact through the website?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, people can just reach out. Yep. Website is great. That’s awesome. Cool. Brian, thanks so much for coming on. Great to chat.

Brian Watson: Thank you. Yeah, this was really fun.

Emily Walker: Hey, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. It is hard to believe that we are in a new month, but November is already well underway and the holiday season is upon us when we kick off the month, we love to provide a little insight into what is going on in the Food Blogger Pro membership for the month. There’s always a lot going on in the membership – new forum, conversations, new courses, Live Q&As and Coaching Calls, and we have archives of hundreds of courses and live Q&As for our members. But every month we have new content coming out too, and we like to take this first week of the month to share what our members have to look forward to. We have a busy month here at Food Blogger Pro, and we’ll be kicking off the month with a Live Q&A on November 7th, all about maximizing affiliate income. As you probably know, Q4 is a big season for affiliate income for food creators and creators in general, so we figured this was a great time for a refresher on affiliate income and how you can make the most of it as a food blogger. Again, that’s on November 7th at 3:30 PM Eastern Time. Feel free to submit your questions in advance, and we can’t wait to see you there. Next up, we have a coaching call on November 14th with Candace from Just A Bit Sweet. In this coaching call, Bjork and Candace discuss finding a niche, determining priorities, and growing an audience, and the importance of focusing on a platform rather than spreading yourself too thin. Next up on November 21st, we will have a brand new course all about getting accepted to an ad network. If you’re not yet a member of Food Blogger Pro, you can head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the podcast, and we’ll see you again next week.