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Whether you're brand new to food blogging or a seasoned pro, we're here to help you with proven tips and strategies for growing your blog. Here on the Food Blogger Pro blog, you'll learn about building traffic, food blog SEO, social media tips, and more. Keep an eye out for a new post every week!

How to Keep your Gmail Inbox Neat Using Boomerang

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by Bjork on Nov 5, 2014 in

This blog post is part of a new series we’re doing on Food Blogger Pro called Keep it Neat. The series will cover simple tips to help you keep your blogging life neat and tidy.

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Easier said than done, eh? 🙂

Today I’m sharing a tip for keeping your Gmail inbox neat.

My personal goal is to "do email" once a day. When I login to my email account I try and work all the way through my inbox until it’s completely empty.

This process works great until I find an email that I can’t respond to. Maybe I don’t have the information I need, maybe I don’t have enough time, or maybe it would make more sent to respond to someone a little bit later on in the week.

Regardless of the reason, an email that’s left in the inbox results in a disappointing scenario: an almost empty inbox. I’m not sure about you, but I hate that feeling.

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3 Quick Tips for using Final Cut Pro to Edit YouTube Videos

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by Bjork on Oct 16, 2014 in ,

I'm not a YouTube or video expert, but I'm a big believer in expert enough and want to live out that belief on this blog. Hence the reason for blog posts like this one (or five things I learned in my first month using YouTube or the gear we use for recipe videos) where we share "real-time" tips and tricks.

Today I'm sharing three simple tips I use to improve our YouTube videos using Final Cut Pro X. The easiest way to learn the tips is by watching the video below, but I'll also provide some basic screenshots after the video as well. You can choose your own adventure. 🙂

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Zen Accounting for Bloggers

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by Bjork on Sep 9, 2014 in ,
Graphic of man meditating that reads 'Zen Accounting for Bloggers'

There aren’t many things I’d rather be doing than accounting.

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Okay, well… actually…

…now that I think of it there are quite a few things I’d rather be doing than accounting.

Things like:

  1. Juggling porcupines
  2. Taste testing cardboard
  3. Listening to Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini on repeat.

Are you with me or are you with me?

Here’s the deal though: if you’re working to build your blog into a business then you need to treat it like one. That means doing a good job with your accounting.

While I don’t like spending time in Excel or QuickBooks, I do like knowing that our books are in order and that we’re keeping track of our income and expenses.

So how do anti-spreadsheet people like Lindsay and I manage to keep our books in order?

We do it by using a system I call Zen Accounting for Bloggers.

It's a simple system that we developed over the past few years. This system allows us to keep really clean books while spending less than 30 minutes a week on taxes/accounting/bookkeeping.

And today I’d like to share that simple system with you.

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The Definitive List of Takedown Notice Forms

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by Bjork on Aug 20, 2014 in

Are you looking for a certain company's takedown notice form?

You’ve come to the right place.

Does my word not convince you? I bet this ninja karate chopping a computer will.

Convinced now?

Good.

🙂

Before we look through the list I want to talk about what a takedown notice is and when I think you should use them.

Quick tip: Want to watch a video instead of read the post? You can scroll to the bottom of this post to check out the "video recap" from our YouTube channel.

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7 awesome apps we’re using to build Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro

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by Bjork on Jul 16, 2014 in

Trying to build a blog without good applications is like trying to build a house without good tools. You can do it, but it will take a lot longer.

Have you ever searched for a password you wrote down on a piece of paper and put “somewhere safe” (but you’re not quite sure where that is)? Have you ever tried to communicate a design concept over email using written text? Have you ever written the same sentence over and over in different emails to different people?

All of those things are examples of ways that we try and build our virtual house (i.e. blog) using crummy tools.

If you’re looking to build an awesome blog then you need awesome applications for your virtual toolbelt. The following seven apps are the first "tools" that I'd suggest you purchase (or download for free).

Note: Some of these apps are specific to Mac OS. If there’s an alternative option for Windows then I include it at the end of the description.

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How we improved our landing page conversion rate by 138%

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by Bjork on Jul 9, 2014 in ,

Three months ago I wrote a post called How to Increase Your Conversion Rates with A/B Testing. In the post I promised to put together quarterly updates to let everyone know how the A/B testing is going.

My hope with these quarterly updates is to:

  • Encourage you to do A/B testing if you have the time and energy.
  • If you don’t have the time and energy then I want to show you the changes we made to help increase conversion rates.

You can take the things we’ve learned about increasing conversions and apply them to your sales pages without having to do any A/B testing on your own (but I still think you should do A/B testing if you have the time).

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Introducing The Nutrition Label Generator

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by Bjork on Jun 26, 2014 in , ,

Today is a big day at Food Blogger Pro Headquarters (otherwise known as the Ostrom’s basement).

Food Blogger Pro is launching our first tool for food bloggers. We couldn’t be more excited!

We’re calling it the Nutrition Label Generator.

Any guesses as to what it does?

Yep! You got it. It generates nutrition facts labels.

We have three goals with the Nutrition Label Generator.

We want this to be a tool that is:

  1. Easy to use
  2. Accurate
  3. Value adding

Before I explain the three goals I want to quickly show you how to use the tool, explain why we're developing software tools, and discuss our software philosophy at FBP.

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The best type of affiliate marketing: What it is and why you need to do it

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by Bjork on Jun 7, 2014 in ,

I always get giddy when I talk about affiliate marketing.

It’s just so darn cool.

You know what I mean?

You don’t?

Okay…fine then. I guess I'll have to convince you.

And I'll do so by telling you about how the best type of affiliate marketing can help you increase the income you’re earning from your food blog (and I know you think that is pretty darn cool).

I want to make sure we’re all on the same page before we jump into my main point for this post, so I’d like to take a moment to share a thrilling short story entitled “A Very Basic Example of Affiliate Marketing.”

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