Building Traffic and Growing Your Audience Archives

What Successful Food Creators Have in Common Right Now with Cyd Converse from Mediavine

by Emily @ FBP on Oct 6, 2026 in Building Traffic and Growing Your Audience

Welcome to episode 591 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Cyd Converse from Mediavine and The Sweetest Occasion.

Cyd Converse started her food blog in 2008 and has been working at Mediavine for the last 6.5 years. She was recently promoted ot the Director of Publisher Advocacy and Partnerships, and sits down with Bjork for this interview to talk through the recent shifts in search, how creators can adapt, and what successful creators have in common right now.

Bjork and Cyd talk about the current state of the industry, the rapid pace of changes, the decline in predictability, and how many creators are feeling burnt out. Cyd also shares her advice for content creators — leaning into email, updating old content, and leveraging video, to name a few. This is the perfect interview for anyone feeling like they’re weathering the current search changes alone and looking for actionable steps to take to get back on the right track.

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Building a Sustainable Creator Business Around Family Recipes with Yvette Marquez

by Ann @ Food Blogger Pro on Sep 29, 2026 in Building Traffic and Growing Your Audience

Welcome to episode 590 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Yvette Marquez.

This week, we are welcoming back Yvette Marquez to the podcast to share how she’s built a sustainable creator business around family recipes, storytelling, cookbooks, and brand partnerships. She walks through what her work looks like today, from updating older blog posts and developing her next cookbook to resharing classic recipes in new formats. She and Bjork dig into why your archive can be a long-term business asset, which means you don’t have to keep coming up with brand-new ideas all the time — a game-changer!

Yvette will also share how Facebook, Substack, virtual assistants, business managers, and behind-the-scenes recipe development all contribute to her business. Her advice for new creators: choose authenticity over perfection, invest in the skills and people who support your strengths, and build a business on genuine stories and audience trust!

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Why Jeanelle Castro Thinks YouTube Is the Most Powerful Social Platform for Food Creators

by Emily @ FBP on Aug 11, 2026 in Building Traffic and Growing Your Audience, Recipe Videos

Welcome to episode 583 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Jeanelle Castro from Jeanelleats.

Jeanelle started Jeanelleats ten years ago while still working a 9-to–5 — but she knew she had always wanted to be an entrepreneur, and she always loved making videos. In 2016 she started posting on YouTube, got serious about tracking her metrics and posting consistently, and within a few months her channel started taking off. Today she has nearly 2 million subscribers on YouTube!

In this episode, Jeanelle shares how she built a content system where YouTube is the engine that drives everything else — including her blog traffic, her Google rankings, and her brand deals. She explains how she uses YouTube Shorts to drive traffic to her site (her CTA is simple: “head to Jeanelleats for the recipe!”), and why she believes that the success of a social post and the performance of a blog post are more correlated than most creators realize.

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Building Brand Authority Through PR with Lydia Bagarozza

by Ann @ Food Blogger Pro on Aug 4, 2026 in Building Traffic and Growing Your Audience

Welcome to episode 582 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Lydia Bagarozza.

Have you ever wondered how food creators and brands land coverage in respected publications, and whether that kind of press is even worth chasing? In this episode, Bjork sits down with PR expert Lydia Bagarozza to demystify proactive PR, showing that it’s less about crisis control and more about shaping brand perception and earning credibility through the media. Lydia breaks down how to pitch timely, newsworthy stories to the right editors and producers, and why clear positioning and specific expertise can turn a pitch into a yes.

The conversation also makes the case for PR as a long-term investment. Lydia explains how appearing in respected publications and local news builds social proof, backlinks, and brand signals that feed into SEO, AI visibility, and trust, and she shares go-to tools like Qwoted, Connectively, and Help a Reporter Out for finding real media opportunities. If you’ve been curious about earning press for your brand, this episode is a great place to start!

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Why Personality Is the New Competitive Advantage with Sam Vander Wielen

by Ann @ Food Blogger Pro on Jul 21, 2026 in Building Traffic and Growing Your Audience

Welcome to episode 580 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Sam Vander Wielen.

This episode digs into the gap between the idea of entrepreneurship and what it actually takes to build a business. Sam shares how she was first drawn to food blogging and online business because they felt like a path to freedom, only to realize she was in love with the outcome, not the daily work required to get there. That realization led her to a better-fitting path: combining her legal background with the creator economy to build a business that helps online creators with legal templates and advice.

From there, the conversation opens up into something deeper: success, “enoughness,” and what actually creates fulfillment. Sam gets candid about major personal hardships, including brain surgery, caring for her father through leukemia, and losing both of her parents, and how those experiences forced her to confront a hard truth: business success and financial growth can solve a lot of problems, but not the personal ones. She and Bjork talk about protecting your time, building with intention, and why leaning into story, personality, and authenticity matters more than ever in an AI-shaped world where purely informational content is easier to replace.

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How Josh Gale Grew His Audience to 1.2M+ in Under a Year by Leading with Storytelling

by Ann @ Food Blogger Pro on Jul 7, 2026 in Building Traffic and Growing Your Audience

Welcome to episode 578 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Josh Gale.

In this episode, Bjork interviews Josh Gale, a content creator who has rapidly grown his online presence in the food industry through his blog, The Chef Out West. Josh shares his journey from being a private chef and participating in food competitions to becoming a successful content creator within just a year. He discusses the initial challenges he faced, such as learning to film and edit, and how he overcame the fear of starting something new.

Josh emphasizes the importance of storytelling in content creation, explaining how his personal experiences and passion for food have helped him connect with his audience. He also highlights the role of social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook in his growth, sharing insights on how different types of content perform across platforms.

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Inside Pinch of Yum’s Strategy for Email Growth and Content Distribution with Jenna Arend

by Ann @ Food Blogger Pro on Jun 16, 2026 in Building Traffic and Growing Your Audience

Welcome to episode 575 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Jenna Arend.

This week, Bjork sits down with Jenna Arend, General Manager of Pinch of Yum, as part of our ongoing GRO mini-series. In this episode, she shares how Pinch of Yum is navigating the biggest shifts in the digital landscape right now, from the decline of third-party cookies to the rise of AI, and why those changes have pushed the team to double down on email and Facebook as their most reliable channels.

Jenna also gets into the strategy behind keeping a long-running food blog relevant and thriving — from improving older content to creating targeted resources like meal plans and freezer meals. She shares how GRO has helped streamline the process of converting social media followers into loyal email subscribers, and why building that direct line of communication with your audience matters more than ever. If you’ve been thinking about how to future-proof your content strategy, this one is worth a listen!

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What’s Actually Working for Food Creators Right Now with Ben Jabbawy from GRO

by Emily @ FBP on Jun 2, 2026 in Building Traffic and Growing Your Audience, Monetizing an Online Food Business

Welcome to episode 573 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Ben Jabbawy from GRO (formerly known as Grocers List).

If you’ve been looking for a smarter way to turn your social media followers into website visitors, email subscribers, and paying members — this episode is for you. Ben Jabbawy and his team at GRO have sent over 100 million DMs across Instagram and Facebook on behalf of their food creator customers. That kind of scale gives Ben a uniquely data-driven lens into what’s actually working for food creators right now — and in this episode, he shares it with us!

Bjork and Ben chat about recent changes in the social media landscape, dig into the strategies of successful food creators, and discuss why Facebook is suddenly driving a major surge in traffic for food bloggers. They also get into the email side of things and how GRO’s new membership program lets food bloggers offer an ad-free experience or exclusive recipes directly on their site — no coding required.

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Leaving Your Day Job and Scaling a Food Blog with Pinterest with Sharlene Murrell

by Ann @ Food Blogger Pro on May 19, 2026 in Building Traffic and Growing Your Audience

Welcome to episode 571 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Sharlene Murrell.

In this episode, Bjork Ostrom sits down with Sharlene to explore her journey of building a thriving food blog by mastering Pinterest. Sharlene shares how adopting a “ready, fire, aim” mindset and overcoming early struggles with keyword research helped her rapidly scale her traffic and income after leaving her day job.

The conversation also dives into actionable Pinterest strategies, including targeting broad keywords, creating multiple pins per post, and leveraging tools like Canva. They round out the conversation with practical advice on capitalizing on seasonal trends, maintaining consistency, and overcoming imposter syndrome. No matter where you are in your food blogging journey, this episode is packed with inspiration and tactics for creators ready to take action!

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How to Write Emails Your Readers Actually Want to Open with Liz Wilcox

by Emily @ FBP on May 5, 2026 in Building Traffic and Growing Your Audience

Welcome to episode 569 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Liz Wilcox.

Early on in Liz’s career as a content creator, she noticed a pattern: the most successful creators all had one thing in common — a thriving email list. So she started hers from day one, and she never looked back.

In the following years, Liz sold her travel blog, went all in on teaching email marketing, built a membership with 4,000 members, and — plot twist — competed on Survivor while her business kept running, generating $1,000 a day in revenue while she was literally on an island with no phone.

In this episode, Liz and Bjork talk about what it actually takes to build an email list that drives real business results, how she transitioned from one-on-one client work to a scalable membership model, and why she believes the biggest thing holding most creators back from email success isn’t strategy — it’s that they’ve stopped sounding like themselves. She also shares the mindset shifts, boundary-setting practices, and growth tactics that have made her business not just profitable, but genuinely sustainable.

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