Creating Viral Food Content on Social Media with Kimberly Espinel

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This episode is sponsored by Clariti and Yoast.

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Welcome to episode 493 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Kimberly Espinel, food photographer and author of How To Make Your Food Famous.

Last week on the podcast, Bjork chatted with Stephan Spencer. To go back and listen to that episode, click here.

Creating Viral Food Content on Social Media

We are excited to welcome Kimberly back to the podcast to discuss her new book, How To Make Your Food Famous, and her strategies for building a successful career as a food creator, especially in today’s ever-evolving social media landscape.

Kimberly discusses how she made the leap from her job as a social worker specializing in adoption to working for herself as a freelance food photographer, starting with brand partnerships and scaling her business along the way. She emphasizes the importance of listening to your audience — paying attention to what resonates with them and shaping your offerings around their needs — and shares her formula for creating viral food content.

Three episode takeaways:

• How to balance business strategy with staying true to your passion —Kimberly reflects on how she navigates changes in Instagram’s algorithm and features, focusing on what makes her happiest—whether that’s photography or video — while still seeing growth on her account.
• Kimberly’s secret formula for creating viral food content — She explains why her strategies are more timeless than they may seem, stressing the power of consistency in content creation. Kimberly also shares the commonalities she has observed among creators who were able to grow their accounts on social media.
• The common traits among successful creators on social media — Authenticity, vulnerability, personality, and storytelling are all essential for those looking to grow their platforms in the next decade. If you can master one platform, nail your messaging, and build a community, the skills you build will carry you through to the next phase of your business.

Resources:

• The Little Plantation
• 314: Creative Food Photography – How Kimberly Espinel Teaches and Inspires Food Photographers
• How To Make Your Food Famous: A Masterclass in Sharing Your Food Online
• Korean Vegan
• Eat Capture Share Podcast
• Follow Kimberly on Instagram
• Join the Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook Group

Thank you to our sponsors!

This episode is sponsored by Clariti and Yoast.

Interested in working with us too? Learn more about our sponsorship opportunities and how to get started here.

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to [email protected].

Transcript (click to expand):

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’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week we are welcoming back Kimberly Espinel, the author of How to Make Your Food Famous and the Food Photographer at The Little Plantation. In this episode, Kimberly shares more about her career journey from working as a social worker, specializing in adoption to working for herself and how she started out with brand partnerships and has scaled her business along the way. In this interview, she also talks more about her new book, How To Make Your Food Famous, and the common traits she’s noticed among successful creators on social media, including authenticity, vulnerability, personality and storytelling, and more about her secret formula for creating viral food content. Kimberly has really great strategies for seeing success on social media without burnout, and we know that you’ll leave this interview with lots of new ideas and inspiration for how you might revamp your social media strategy. If you enjoy this episode, please take a moment to share it with your followers or to leave a review. We really appreciate it. Without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Kimberly, welcome to the podcast.

Kimberly Espinel Hey, Bjork, thank you so much for having me back.

Bjork Ostrom: Welcome back to the podcast. We’ve been privileged to do this podcast long enough where we can start to say to people, welcome back to the podcast. Last time we talked was, I think the episode came out summer of 2021. Very different time in life compared to now. A lot has changed globally, but also within your business. We’re going to be talking about the book that you have coming out. The title of the book is How to Make Your Food Famous, a Masterclass, and Sharing Your Food Online, which I know people who listen to this podcast they’re going to be very interested in. But before we do that, I think it’s often helpful to have a touchpoint with people who have made the transition from two different careers, and you previously were working in social work, made the transition into photography, freelance photography, building an audience online book publishing. That’s a pretty significant change and it’s a hard thing to do to make that transition. So how did you approach it and at what point in your first career or your last career that you were in as a social worker, when did you know that you wanted to start to make that transition?

Kimberly Espinel So I knew very early on that I wanted to work in adoption. That’s what I specialized in as a social worker. I remember being high school and just feeling passionate about just always wanting to do that. And so I did that career for almost 15 years. It was never on the horizon. It was never my plan not to do that. Then I fell pregnant, I had my son, and that just totally changed everything for me. It just meant I was just like, I’m teaching parents about attachment and connection and building a bond with their child, and here I am leaving my child at a child minder at whatever 8:00 AM and coming home at eight. And I always say, it’s no judgment for people who choose that path or whom that’s right and that good, and they feel more fulfilled in that role. But I knew I just wanted to be with him all the time.

That’s what I wanted. And so I just thought, what can I do that will allow me to work for myself? That means that I don’t have to ask permission to go and see his school play when that’s on or take time off for school holidays. I want to be my own boss. And so I just thought about what are the things that I love? What are the things I’m passionate about? And food was top of the agenda. So actually what I did is I retrained as a nutritional therapist. That was my first venture, and I was like, okay, I want to work around food. How are people going to find me? How are they going to know about me? So I started my blog and I, I got a secondhand camera off eBay, didn’t know how it worked, but I don’t know what, there’s something about creativity.

For me, it was photography, but for other people might be stitching or singing, but there was something about picking up the camera and then playing with light and playing with textures that something just clicked. And so I was obsessed. All I could do was photograph food and then I would feed my son and then I’d photograph food again. And it was just a complete obsession. And then I think about a year of running the blog as a kind of hobby. As I was studying, I got my first brand inquiry and I was like, okay, wait a minute. What’s going on here?

Bjork Ostrom: A brand reached out to you and said, can we work with you on your blog? Or they reached out and said, can you do photography for us?

Kimberly Espinel So they wanted a recipe developed, they wanted photos and they wanted it featured on my blog. And so that was really the beginning of everything. I was like, okay, if one brand reaches out,

There’s another brand somewhere. And then somebody reached out to see if I could photograph their products and do a monthly recipe, and it kind of snowballed. And I knew then that it was possible. And I think about would’ve been maybe two years of having the blog and having built an audience and posting regularly, et cetera. I was just earning enough and getting sufficient inquiries and getting enough repeat customers that I just said, this is it. This is the moment. Of course it’s never perfect. And I always say when I left, when I handed in my resignation, I did cry because it felt so monumental and actually also really scary. But I just knew, I knew it was possible and I think I also trusted myself enough to know that I would fight for myself to make it work, if that makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

Kimberly Espinel It’s

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting. I think one of the things that I’ve been reflecting on in this season of life is how many seasons of life we do have.

And I think sometimes what happens for myself at least is I can put my head down and think like, okay, this is what I do. This is how I do it, and I’m going to do it like this, and I did it like this five years ago, so I’m still going to do it today. But so often, even as we alluded to at the beginning of the show, not only do things change within the world, and it could be platforms that work or don’t work, or it could be the state of everybody’s mindset globally, that changes. Or it could be things more close to home. In your case it’s like, do you have kids or not? Or are your kids more independent than they were? Or do you have a parent who has needs or are you just burnt out? All of that shifts and changes, and I think for myself at least, sometimes I don’t pause enough to reflect on how things are changing in my life to then look at how I’m working, what work looks like to shift and adjust that to reflect the season of life that I’m in. So it’s cool to hear you saying

You were pretty intentional about that and you made that move and made that shift, which is a hard thing to do.

Kimberly Espinel There’s something you said that makes me think of going with flow like these ebbs and flows, and it was just like me going to my nine to five felt like I was trying to push against the current rather than going with where everything was pointing towards. You know what I mean? And then also I think what was the straw that broke the camel’s back as it were? The thing where I was just like, what social work is always going to be there?

Let me give myself a year and then if it doesn’t work out, I can always go back. Why am I building this up as this is? This is forever now. And as you were saying, now my son is 14, he’s so much bigger, he doesn’t need me to be at home. So if I wanted to go back, I could, because this season of life is different. I hasten to add, but everything is just to trust your instinct and go with where the currents are taking you and yeah, I dunno, something you said made me think of that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. In that season when you did transition to say, Hey, I’m going to do this full time. I’m going to give myself a year, what were the things that you did that were most helpful to get from kind of the, Hey, I’ve kind of proved it out a little bit. There’s been some brands that pay me. I have some successful partnerships. So you validated the idea, but then to transition to today still be working for yourself, building your business full time, what were the things that you did that were most helpful in that early stage of going from you have a W2 in a job that doesn’t feel like a great fit for this season of life to working for yourself in a way that does feel like a good fit? What if you could point to a few different things that were most helpful or decisions you made, what would those be?

Kimberly Espinel So I think the number one, and it’s actually also something I do mention in my book and I talk about a lot, is I really listen to my audience and I’m kind of like, I think I am a little bit of a data geek. I do love to go into the nitty gritty. And so what I have always done since analytics were there, but on my blog I’ve always had analytics is kind of looking at what are the posts that are resonating most? What is getting the most clicks? What is getting the most engagement? And so when I started my blog, it was mainly plant-based recipes. And then occasionally I would do something about food photography or how I was lighting my food, and those just got 10 x views, 10 x engagement. I was like, wait a minute. Why am I pursuing this one path when my audience is clearly wanting something completely different from me? Which is also how I started my online courses, which form a huge part of my revenue actually.

But I think a lot of the times we’re not, it’s a kind of a balance between doing what feels good, what you like, what you’re passionate about, and also meeting a need, providing value, a service for your audience, for your community. And I think I was very quick to notice how important that was. So I think that was number one. Number two, I have always put a lot of emphasis on Instagram. I have my blog, I’ve got decent SEO, I’m really pleased with that. But there was something about Instagram, even when I started 10 years ago, there was something about that community, that connection that I never quite, you don’t quite get that on the blog,

Bjork Ostrom: And there’s a little more friction when it comes to communicating with people, connecting with people on a blog.

Kimberly Espinel So there’s just that connection that people who I think see me as their friend, I see them as my friend. There’s just something a little bit deeper. And I leaned into that pretty much from the start. And then also as other platforms emerged, I’ve had to play with them for sure, but I’ve also just known what I’m good at, where my people are, and I’ve always stuck with that. And I think the final thing is I’ve always tried to be authentic is maybe an overused word, but to allow my voice through my podcast through now voice over say with my reels to let that shine through. I always used to write super long captions to really give my photos a personality, so to say. And I think that’s helped build community. So those are maybe three things that have really helped me.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Yeah, I think of your comment on listening to your audience, whether through the conversations that you’re having with them or through the data and seeing what resonates with people. And I feel like for us as creators, publishers like internet business owners, but specifically thinking about content, there’s kind of a spectrum and it feels like the spectrum is like you are creating for the sake of creating. And I feel like the ultimate example of that is Lindsay has an Instagram account with 40 followers. It’s private and it’s family, it’s friends, and she creates content on it and will edit a video and post a video of us and her family out doing a thing. She’s creating that for the sake of creating content. And that’s for her, that’s for family, that’s for friends. Are we looking at metrics? No. And all the way on the other end is content purely for the sake of business. And what you are doing is you’re trying to build a content business, and what you do is you get after the metrics, you understand those metrics, you pursue those metrics, you test headlines. And so for us as publishers and creators, I think there’s a little bit of a decision that we need to make, which is where on that spectrum are we landing?

And knowing that oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes if we are landing towards like we are creating for the sake of creating, and we are not going to have as much consideration around our audience metrics, what’s resonating customer development or product development, having those conversations to see what people want. It might be harder to grow and scale a thing. But on the other end, if we only do metric-driven analysis of what’s going to perform best, unless we are a metrics data geek and that’s all that we want to do and we don’t really care about the content, it’s like the metrics is what we love, that potentially could lead to burnout, creating things you’re not super passionate about. It sounds like for you, the benefit was not only was this something that was resonating with people, but you also talked about it was your passion, the number one thing that you love to do, which was some of the photography stuff. So do you have any advice for somebody else who’s navigating the question around, I want to do this thing, I’m passionate about this thing, but trying to figure out is there an audience for this? How long do I wait until I know if this does resonate with people, if I’m in the early stages and kind of testing it out to see, because maybe I just need to do it longer. What does that look like for somebody who’s kind of navigating questions around what they are creating?

Kimberly Espinel Yes. I think for it to be sustainable, you do need to feel passionate about it. So I would say it’s important that you choose a topic that you can envisage yourself doing for at least two years for it to really materialize into something substantial. I think that’s a good timeframe. So if you’re not passionate about, for example, I don’t drink alcohol, so starting a drinks account probably isn’t the right fit for me because I wouldn’t know what to talk about. So that wouldn’t make a lot of sense. So I think it’s important, but within that you could niche down one way or the other and have a play and be really experimental. I think that’s the beauty of starting out, that there’s no pressure, haven’t built an audience that is expecting something of you and having a play with lots of different things, seeing what you’re good at, seeing what comes naturally to you, what you’re talented.

And to be honest with you, that’s what I love about Instagram and what could argue TikTok as well. You get instant feedback. So you’ll know within hours at most one or two days whether something is hitting the mark. And then I also think it’s interesting to see what you yourself gravitate towards. Do you notice a pattern, things that you are interested in, things that you see other creators having success with that you’d like to not replicate, but to be inspired by so that you’re not starting completely blind, but you’re starting from a model that has the potential to work. So I hope that answers your question.

Bjork Ostrom: It does, yeah. And I think sometimes people misinterpret the idea of you hear somebody say, work on something that you’re passionate about. And I think the pushback against it could be like, well, sometimes the thing you’re passionate about, there won’t be a market for it. But I think it’s less about selfishly you just want to be working on something that you like and you’re passionate about, so that’s why you should do it. And it’s more to the point that you made. It’s more towards like, Hey, you’re going to have to, especially if it’s creating content, you’re going to have to be doing this for a long period of time. And if you are doing something that you don’t like doing for a long period of time, that’s going to be pretty miserable. And I think the other piece to layer on top of that is that’s I think important for people to think about is can de-risk that time that you are committing to a thing, even if you come out of it and you don’t have a business, you still have something that is valuable to you, like the ability to take better pictures or in understanding if you get really into analytics and understanding of Google Analytics and you could go and freelance for other companies or whatever it might be.

So I think that’s the other piece with the passion part is maybe you pursue it for two years, you work hard, there’s not a business there, but you can still come out of it and say like, Hey, I have these skills and these abilities that I can deploy in other ways. And you want to make sure as much as possible that it’s stuff that you want to continue to do. So I think that’s great, and I think it’s worth calling out.

Kimberly Espinel Can I just add something because it’s the same, but just a different angle and maybe there’ll be people here whom that will resonate with. But my first love is photography, food, photography. That is my love, that is my passion. But as we were talking about changes and Instagram as a platform has changed hugely. Whereas before it was just a photo platform and now it’s ultimately video first. So if my aim is business growth and my analytics and statistics tell me that my reels reach a broader audience, I make more sales for my courses, et cetera, then the business thing to do would be to just and exclusively post reels. Makes sense. But my heart is in photography, so what I try and do is I kind of have a rough two to one rule. So I post two reels, which is with a vision of I want to reach new people, I want to make more sales, I want to X, Y, Z. And then one post is usually a carousel of some of my favorite shots from the month or the week or whatever. And I am then not attached to the outcome of those images. If they do well, amazing. But if I get a hundred likes, that’s fine too because I know I’m just leaving, I’m doing that part is for me. And so I think that’s a combination of passion and business and having them all under one roof, so to say.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I know Lindsay talks about creating content for Pinch of Yum. And for her, I think the idea of spending a bunch of time doing keyword research is pretty soul-sucking. It is just something that we’ve not done a lot of in general, but for other people it’s like they love that, they love it, but we also know we need to be smart about search. And so our approach, usually if we are doing anything search related, it’s like, Hey, we have these recipes we’re thinking of doing. Let’s refine maybe some of those based on search queries and keywords and things like that. But there’s a huge opportunity that we are leaving on the table by not approaching search from a really strategic standpoint of saying what are the biggest keywords that we could go after? But instead leading with like, Hey, we think this would really resonate with our audience, even though people aren’t searching with it or searching for it. But what that gives us or Lindsay or whoever the creator is longevity, and that is something that is unquantifiable but does have to use a business term like ROI return on investment because you’re able to, in this case, it’s like Lindsay’s here right now in the other room shooting recipes and loves it, and the return on that, you can’t quantify it, but it’s like, man, to have something over a long period of time that you stick with and you continue to get better at and you love doing is a really valuable thing. So I think that’s important to point out. I’m glad we had that conversation.

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Speaking of Instagram photos, videos, the book that you just released this summer is all about food content and media and really maximizing the exposure that you get when you are creating food content. So tell me more about that and the reason behind the book and we can get into some of the specifics with it.

Kimberly Espinel Yes, so just a disclosure as it were, I did not come up with the idea for the book. So I was approached by a publisher who had the idea for the book and they were looking for an author to bring it to life, so to say. And the moment, and actually a little side note, which is very interesting because last time I was here it was talking about my book, which I self-published. And because no publisher would work with me, they’re like food photography, why would we publish a book on food photography who’s interested in food photography? But the book sold really well, and it’s actually that book that the publishers saw.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, cool.

Kimberly Espinel And that’s how they found me. So anyways, cool. And the moment they mentioned the topic, I was like, this is what my audience needs. This feels like a match made in heaven. So I instantly said yes. And the task was really to try and investigate everybody’s posting content, especially since the pandemic, everyone’s posting content on social media on TikTok. Why do some people take off and get a million plus followers and why do other people who seemingly are doing the exact same thing barely get a hundred views on their reels? What is the secret sauce? What is the secret formula to success as free content creators? So that was my task to try and find out what that was. And so what I did is I essentially created a list of 40 plus creators, food creators who are really making waves. And what I wanted to do was to find 40 creators who are sharing food in vastly different ways. So I didn’t want to have 40 times pinch of yum. I wanted different people from different parts of the world, people sharing different kinds of food, different ways of sharing the creativity and to see was there a common denominator? What is working? So that’s the idea and the premise behind the book. And then I’ve added some videography tips and food photography tips mixed in. So that’s kind of what the book is about. Cool. And yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Was it hard to write that social platforms change so quickly? What was that like navigating that and did you have to distill it down to almost non feature-based observations?

Kimberly Espinel So I would argue that the tips shared and that was important to me. Most of the tips shared, there’s maybe one or two, one could argue not, but most of the tips shared I feel are timeless. And that was actually for me, an interesting revelation that it was. So I thought everything’s different. But then actually when I broke it down, I was like, no, these are tried and tested long-term strategies. So one of them, for example, is consistency. Like most of the people who are hitting a hundred thousand, 200 half a million followers in whatever a year, most of them have consistency as a core part of their strategy. And we know this from even 10 years ago as bloggers, that consistency does matter. So some of them was that, but some of the tips and some of the features that I mentioned in my particular section in the book I know will change. For example, there used to be, now we have Instagram reels, Instagram live, but will those features continue? Will they change in name? That kind of thing. We have a DM feature now we have groups, you can do polls. There’s little things like that that change. But the core essence I think of tips is timeless.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. When you say consistency, I think one of the things that people often think about is consistency. How is it once a week? Is it once a day? Is it only once a month? But it has to be the best piece of content ever. Is there anything that you could speak to when you say consistently what that means and does it look different across platforms?

Kimberly Espinel So I would say two things. It looked consistency, looked different for everyone. That’s number one. I’ll go into that in a little bit more depth in a second. But the other thing I will say is without naming names, I did feel that in discussion with some of the creators, burnout was something that many of them had experienced. And as a result of that, they changed what consistency looked like for them in order to do this long term. So I think it’s important to mention that that can happen. I think it varies for people, but I would say that most people show up regularly and have their style that they have cultivated and crafted and they show up in that format. Usually I would say at least twice a week. That is a general theme. And the other thing that most of them did is they showed up on Instagram stories regularly or TikTok stories or whatever it is. So they might only post once, twice, three times on their grid. But there was a lot of regularity and consistency in almost daily posting on stories because of that connection element.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things that I’ve talked about on the podcast before and believe to be generally true is this idea that there are different iterations of the web, generally speaking, different iterations of each social platform. And it feels like each of those could be kind of a wave. And in the world of Instagram, you can think of the wave of photos like we talked about, and then there’s this wave of, and it’s almost like curated photos. It’s really beautiful pictures and everything looks perfect and it’s well crafted. And that’s the first iteration. And this is broadly speaking, what it feels like. The second iteration was kind of Instagram live. I think that was kind of next, this InBetween of transition to video, or not necessarily even live, but stories and then there’s Instagram reels. And it feels like that’s really such the main thing that I would assume if you look at what people are consuming on Instagram on a time basis, I would assume it’s majority Instagram real content and then maybe stories and then maybe photos, all that to say it feels like with each one of those waves, they’re all very different and you need to be a different type of surfer to surf those waves well, and it feels abnormal for there to be a surfer who surfs each one of those waves really well and is able to transition with each new wave to then surf it.

Well again. Do you feel like that’s true, or even in your interactions with creators for this story, did you see people who were multiple wave surfers?

Kimberly Espinel That’s such an interesting question. So I think there’s certain qualities that some of them had that made it much easier for them to adjust and adapt. And I think the people who were very personality based, so the people who essentially their audience is there for them more than they are there for their recipes. I think for them transitions to the different mediums was much easier. But then, and what I noticed is that a lot of food bloggers, so people or food photographers who were used to creating this beautiful content, there was a lot of reluctance to suddenly now use an iPhone and create something that wasn’t pristine and perfect and beautiful, and they felt they just couldn’t. So it took them a very long time to jump on the reels bandwagon, so to say. And then when they did, they still want to create really created beautiful content, which doesn’t work quite the same way on Instagram anymore and just takes so much more time to create. So in the time that somebody who uses their iPhone can create five reels, they’ve just put together one reel. You know what I mean? So because they’re holding onto something else that’s important to them. And so I found that people who are used to that pristine look, that transition for them has been a little bit harder, but I, it’s

Bjork Ostrom: Almost like outside of, there’s two transitions. One was the transition of the medium photography to video primarily,

But within that, there was also a more ambiguous transition, but also obvious if you use the platform from curated and perfect to unfiltered, even if there is technically a filter, but just this idea of it’s a little bit more of a look inside somebody’s life and maybe they’re sitting on their couch and talking into the phone or in the kitchen and things aren’t perfect in our world. And those two things seem to happen almost kind of hand in hand, mostly due to the nature of the medium changing from video and the capture of that medium going to your phone. And as soon as that happens, it feels like it suddenly is an informal, it’s more informal because you’re not setting up a tripod, you’re not setting up a DSLR, you have your phone and it’s really easy to just press record. And to your point, if you can do that five times instead of once and with those five pieces of content, if they still perform well or better than something that is really carefully curated, then it’s like, why not? And I think the why not is because it’s not a good fit for you. You don’t like doing it, which feels like that’s the hard chasm to cross for a lot of people.

Kimberly Espinel And also it requires different skills, so it doesn’t require necessarily a good understanding of artificial light and composition. And I think a lot of people were like, well, but those things are important. But now in this new world, relatability and music choices and transitions, all the other things were suddenly important. And I did notice, especially in the food blogging and food photography space, a little bit of resistance to that. But we’re getting there. I think now creatively there’s so many other options than just pointing and dancing that more people are positive about.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think the other thing that it requires is vulnerability in a way that didn’t, when you could take a picture, you could edit the picture, you could craft a description, you could edit the description, you could refine it, you could read through it again, and then you could press post as opposed to turning the camera on, turning it towards you, maybe pressing record and then posting, it feels like a very vulnerable thing to do. And so

It’s easy to understand why there is that resistance there, but to your point, it’s a really important thing to be doing. It’s a way that the platform works. And if you are wanting to get in front of people the name of your book, how to Make Your Food Famous, how do you get attention? It feels like that’s one of the ways that you need to figure out how to do it is through video. So what were some of the other commonalities that you noticed in these conversations for people who were able to grow and account well, they’re considering the platform they’re posting consistently. My guess is they’re committed to, you talked about two years, it’s not going to happen in two months for most of us. What were the other elements that you saw as a through line despite all the different genres, all the different locations, all the different types of creators in the things that really allowed people to grow their following quickly?

Kimberly Espinel I would say the other through line was storytelling, and with that understanding the importance of a hook and opening something to really grasp, get people’s attention. And I think a lot of those creators understood that super well. And then you have people who obviously go over and beyond. I’m thinking about somebody like Korean vegan who I featured her storytelling is just next level. It’s not just visual, but it’s her voiceovers, which she scripts and

All those kinds of things. But just a really good understanding of beginning, middle and conclusion resolution. And I think that food really lends itself beautifully for that. You show the finished product, then how you made it, and then maybe how you’re enjoying it. So there’s a natural story through line anyways in the medium in the topic that we share. But I think that was another one. And the other one we’ve kind of touched on already in our discussion is authenticity, vulnerability, personality. That has been, and especially the levels of success. I think the more you show of yourself, the more you share of yourself, the deeper the connection with your audience, the higher your success. I definitely saw a correlation with that. That is not to say you have to step in front of the camera, you don’t have to share your baby’s photos or none of that. I also featured creators who do none of that, but I did see a strong correlation between personality, authenticity or vulnerability and the levels of success. And then finally, again, we’ve touched on this video. First there was nobody in the book and I looked, I tried to see, but really and truly, nobody who is really making waves is doing it on a photo only basis.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. I like to think in spectrums a lot, and I think of a super extreme on one end, which is like somebody’s showing up and they’re creating content and the content is nameless, it’s faceless, it’s still food, and maybe the quality of that food is good, but there’s no stories. It’s just like a recipe. And let’s say you’re posting that onto social, okay, that’s one end of the spectrum. Could you create an account like that? Could you have success with it? Maybe on the other end of the spectrum is somebody who’s telling stories, they talked about what they did yesterday, they’re sharing their life update, their stories, they’re sharing about their family, you’re getting to know their kids. It’s like the spectrum of reality TV show. And I’m not saying one is good or one is bad. I’m just saying my bet is to your point, the closer you get to reality TV show the higher probability that you are creating content that is sticky just due to the fact the way that the human brain works and the type of we are drawn to relationships, connections…

Kimberly Espinel A hundred percent.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, seeing people in their lives for whatever reason. And so if you think of that spectrum, a lot of people, ourselves included, we don’t want to be a reality TV show, but we also don’t want to be nameless, faceless and story less. And so for us as creators and publishers, we need to think about where is that line that feels most comfortable for us? Knowing that as you get closer to reality TV show, there is a higher probability that you are creating intriguing content because human content is intriguing. Content insofar as what you’re trying to do is inspire, engage. There also is the just purely transactional content. Hey, you create a thing that solves a problem. But I think, and I’d be interested in your thoughts on this, I think that is getting, AI is solving

Transactional informational content. How long do you boil an egg? If you want a hard boiled egg that shows up as a Google AI answer. People use Chachi PT for that. What does it look like to live on a farm where you have chickens who lay eggs? Oh, I want to watch about this person and their story and their kids and how they get up in the morning and what the routine is like. So it feels like some of that transactional content is getting replaced and has been for a long time. And if you are building a content business, that’s being the opportunity then is some of the stuff that you’re talking about. So how do you, as somebody who understands the world of content creation, understands building an audience, understands food, how are you thinking about the role of AI and in search in answering questions and what can creators be strategic about or how can they think strategically moving forward into the next year or two, but also decade?

Kimberly Espinel So again, I love this question. Two questions I’ve loved so much.

Bjork Ostrom: Great.

Kimberly Espinel So I would say I definitely want to reassure people because I know there’s people tuning in who are the thought of pointing the camera towards me terrifies me. The thought of doing a voiceover terrifies me. The thought of sharing something vulnerable terrifies me. So I definitely want to reassure them that it’s not necessary to do all of those things. I would advise for the longevity of your business, for the success of your business to do one of those things. So it could be your face appearing in your reels on your Instagram stories. If you don’t want to do that, do a voiceover with a little bit of SaaS, a little bit of personality or something really just a little bit more specific to you that cannot be done by ai. Whatever that looks like. A combination of all the things that we just said, a snippet here and there. I think there is still a possibility to make it without doing those things, but what I have noticed is that the quality of your content has to be spectacular. The recipes have to have a little bit of a twist. You have to post more consistently, more often.

So it’s a different kind of pressure, I think. And the last thing is you need to really understand virality for your reels to go viral and for you to grow whilst being a faceless, nameless voiceless account. So it is possible, but you have to strengthen other muscles and work with other muscles say than if you’re more personality based. It gives you more freedom, I would say, if there’s something, a voice, a face or both to go with the account. But I think for people to be still around in five years time, 10 years time, it’s important to try and overcome that fear and inject some personality into your content or have a podcast or a YouTube channel or something where there’s an element that’s just not replaceable by ai.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And I think more and more it’s going to be consideration. What is our differentiator against hundred percent something that is incredible at providing content? Our differentiator is our humanity. What’s the least robotic thing? Us, it’s like our humanness.

So you have this process of building a following, this idea of making your food famous. You get followers, you get exposure. Really what you’re getting is attention. Attention is valuable because it is scarce. And they talk about this idea of real estate. And real estate is valuable because there’s only so much land in the world. And if you own some of that, that can be a valuable thing. There’s also only so much attention in the world, and if you can get some of that, that’s a really valuable thing. And in our world, we’re getting the attention of people who are interested in food and creating food content. Once you have that attention, then it’s one thing to grow a following, to get people to watch your content, to see the numbers increase. But if your purpose is business building, which I think for a lot of the people who listen to this podcast, it is how do you then be as intentional as possible with that attention and leverage that into revenue change if that’s what you’re trying to approach. But I think it’s easiest to talk about it within the context of revenue. And I heard you even talk about, hey, courses, having a product, a digital product is one of the ways that it’s most helpful for you to have that attention. So for somebody who’s building their following, who has a big following, who’s making these considerations, what would your advice be for them once they do start to get some traction? How to think intentionally about translating that into revenue within their business?

Kimberly Espinel What I love now compared to say when we started whatever a decade ago, there’s so many options of monetizing your content now that didn’t exist. So for me, I have multiple income streams that tie in with the type of content that I share. So I have my online courses, which are a big part of my revenue. I also still do lots of food photography work. And that’s also another reason why I still post those stills because Instagram is still a great

Bjork Ostrom: Way portfolio for clients.

Kimberly Espinel Yeah, exactly. For clients to find me influencer work. So collaborations with brands, and I mean I’m always for actively pitching, but I have also found that if you tag a brand when you use them in your reels, if you use it regularly or mention them in stories, nine out of 10 times they do start noticing you. And a lot of collaborations have come through that simple digital products like eBooks. For me, I’ve sold presets, light Lightroom presets, which have sold super duper well physical products like an actual book, a cookbook, subscriptions. Now, there are so many ways newsletters like a Substack, SEO, ad revenue, there’s so many ways. I think what’s important is to find the one that’s the best fit for you and build that so that you have a nice stream of income there before you build the next thing. That would be my recommendation because not all of these apply to everyone in the exact same way, or they don’t appeal to everyone. But I just love how many options we have now. And so yeah, these are just a couple of ideas I’ve played with most of them except subscriptions. I’ve not done that or membership, but everything else I have and I can recommend them all.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. We talk about this idea of egg carton method where hey, work backwards from where you want to be from a salary perspective. Let’s say you want to be earning $50,000 a year as kind of the first goal that you have, or even let’s say $12,000. So what does that mean? That means a thousand dollars a month, where are you going to get that? And when you break it down, it starts to get a little bit easier to say, Hey, I want to get two a thousand dollars or $10,000. It’s like, well, if that’s only ad revenue or if that’s only courses or book sales or whatever it might be, that might be kind of hard to get to it.

But if you can start to chip away at it with multiple streams of income like you talked about, it suddenly becomes a little bit easier. Now the hard part is you probably want to start with one thing, go deep on that one thing, get good at it. And if that’s making money, continue to do that. There’s something to be said about the shiny object it feels like where it’s easy to look at a next thing, go to the next thing. If somebody is in that stage of, Hey, maybe they have a hundred thousand followers on Instagram or that’s their first goal, would you have one of those potential sources of income that you’d point them to start?

Kimberly Espinel So I was thinking about this because my very first product was a digital product, was an ebook, which I think was like 4 99. So to your point, there is no way I was going to hit whatever 50,000 or replace my salary with that. But I did think it was important for me to do that lower ticket item because what having that firstly showed me and it sold decently well, was actually I had built an audience who trusted me enough to buy from me. So there was again, proof of concept that didn’t feel so scary because

Bjork Ostrom: Almost more for yourself than anything else completely. It’s like reps and the reps you’re getting are for yourself as an entrepreneur. I did a thing, somebody bought it.

Kimberly Espinel Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s a major confidence boost. Yeah,

Kimberly Espinel Exactly. And then also it takes a different kind of skill to sell something at $4.99 than $327. So you are building that muscle again, you’re building those soft skills of marketing. And so I do think there’s value in starting with something small just so that you learn marketing skills, learn to see if you’ve built an audience that’s willing to buy from you, there’s enough trust. And the other thing that having that might be taking us off a tangent, so do pull me back if need. But what that did was I then built another digital product, so another ebook and then my presets, and then what I did was I started to build funnels. So if somebody bought one product, then they were led into buying another product. And again, that taught me something else once again. So I do think there’s value in starting small. For me personally, I have loved online courses. That has been what I excel at. That is what I’m good at, that’s what people know me for. And I love that it is passive in that I don’t have to deliver it. It’s there and I can sell it and sell it again. And interestingly enough, even it’s evergreen. We have launches of course, but it’s an evergreen product. And through my reels, the type of reels that I share, we sell quite a lot outside of launches too. And I love that. I do love that. And if anybody’s so inclined to do online courses, and it could be something like a pastry course, it doesn’t have to be food photography or real creation like I do, they do sell well, and it’s a great, great asset to have in your business.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that funnel of you create free content around a certain topic, you encourage people to sign up for a free thing or a low tier thing, $5 or a free email list, or maybe it’s a free webinar into something that’s maybe a little bit higher. Value feels like such a clean and relatively easy conceptually to understand process. The interesting thing is we often joke about this idea of being called Food Blogger Pro, but really it’s like food creator and how do you be a creator online? And for some people, if you have a following on, Instagram is probably best for you not to be sending them for the transaction, to not be trying to get somebody to a blog post. It’s getting somebody to sign up for an email list or to join a webinar or to have some other kind of action that you’re hoping that they take. And maybe blog ad revenue piece isn’t even a consideration within it. So I think that’s important to point out, especially for people who are social, first of which now there are many

Of those people who come to us or connect to us and they’re like, Hey, I don’t have a blog, but I have a decent social following. What should I do with it? They maybe haven’t monetized it great, or they’re trying to figure out how to do it. They don’t want to do sponsor content. Blog is great, and I think you should do that. I think it’s a great recurring type of revenue once you’re able to stand up and get it to a point where it has some of that traffic, but it’s going to take longer than it would to have a course offering that you could have and you could sell. And the price per impression or per view is going to look different than just ad revenue. So I love that. And I think it’s important to point out, and an important consideration is what would people want from you?

And it goes back to what you were saying earlier, that product development, customer interaction, having those conversations. So the book is How to Make Your Food Famous. It is your second book, it is available on Amazon. We’ll link to it in the show notes. Are there any other things that you would point out for people who are kind of in that stage, early stage of wanting to build a food business or maybe they have a following and maybe you could wrap it up in the form of advice that you would give to yourself if you were back at the beginning and starting over again?

Kimberly Espinel Oh, that question is mean. It’s really hard because it’s so different now. I would say to try not to be in too many places at once. Get good at one platform.

Bjork Ostrom: Love that.

Kimberly Espinel Get your message straight. Get comfortable in front of the camera. Learn the key basic scales and build a community that is something that you can take to the next platform, to the next thing, to your next project. That would probably be it, I think. I love it. Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Kimberly, you also have a podcast in you’re, believe it or not, producing content online. So can you mention those as well and we can point people to where those are?

Kimberly Espinel Yes. So my podcast is called Eat Capture Share, and I share content creation tips, but also business tips. So if anybody wants to dig a little bit deeper into the business side, then do tune in there. And then of course you can find me on Instagram, do drop me a dm. If you’ve listened to this episode, be lovely to see who’s tuned in and found me through the podcast. So I always respond and would love to hear from you.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Kimberly, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Kimberly Espinel Thank you so much for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I wanted to take a minute and just ask that if you enjoyed this episode or any of our other many episodes of the Food Blogger Pro podcast that you share it. It means so much to us as a podcast if you share episodes with your friends and family, or if you are a food blogger or entrepreneur, if you could share ’em on social media or even in your email newsletters. It really helps us get the word out about our podcast and reach more listeners. Thanks again for listening. We really hope you enjoyed this episode, and we’ll see you back here next week.