056: Working in Your Area of Brilliance with Meghan Telpner

Welcome to episode 56 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! In this episode, Bjork talks with Megan Telpner about creating a business, staying small, and finding the work you should be doing.

Last week, Bjork talked with Jason logsdon about self-publishing cookbooks. To go back and listen that episode, click here.

Working in Your Area of Brilliance

Meghan Telpner is the CEO of the Academy of Culinary Nutrition, an online school where students learn to create healthy lives through cooking. The school has certified over 700 people to practice as culinary nutritionists and Meghan is a sought-after speaker about entrepreneurship.

She didn’t start there, though. Meghan’s career online began back in the early 2000s, and she’s fine-tuned (and rough-tuned) her business to grow it into what it is today. Meghan has found that just “doing the work” isn’t good enough, and that to really excel you need to be working in your area of brilliance.

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048: Finding success on the verge of quitting with Dustin & Lacey Baier from A Sweet Pea Chef

Welcome to episode 48 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week, Bjork interviews Dustin & Lacey Baier from A Sweet Pea Chef.

A few years ago, A Sweet Pea Chef was floundering. Dustin & Lacey had grown it to the point where it was getting expensive to maintain, but they hadn’t unlocked the secrets to turning it into a successful business. They bounced from great idea to great idea, but just weren’t able to get anything to stick.

Until, one day, an internet passer-by pounced and described how inferior they were to the competition. Little did they know, this angry email would lead them down a path that would help them properly monetize their website and start turning things around.

Since then, Dustin & Lacey learned how to say no to good opportunities to focus on what’s most important, cracked the code for viral vide, and took A Sweet Pea Chef to new heights.

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045: How to Use Facebook Ads to Reach the Right People with Tony Rulli from IntentionalSpark.com

Welcome to episode 45 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week, Bjork interviews Tony Rulli from Intentional Spark about advertising on Facebook.

In today’s day and age, the internet can be really noisy. There are ads all over the place for products you may or may not be interested in, all sorts of conpanies asking you to buy their products, and more and more things to look at every day.

So what makes you pay attention to the few things that catch your eye? A lot of the time, what makes you pay attention is relevancy – the thing that caught your eye has something to do with you and solves a problem you already have.

So, if you’re selling a product, promoting your company, or just wanting to get the word out, the best way to get people to pay attention is to target the right people in the first place.

While this sounds complicated, Facebook actually makes it pretty easy! Listen in to today’s podcast with Tony Rulli to learn how to leverage Facebook’s powerful remarketing tools to help you create an income from your blog.

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043: How Tieghan Gerard used Photography, Recipe Development, and Hustle to Build Half Baked Harvest

Welcome to episode 43 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week, Bjork is bringing on an oft-requested guest, Tieghan Gerard from Half Baked Harvest!

We occasionally ask in the podcast for guest requests – bloggers or other inspiring individuals that our listeners would like to hear from. One person who came up quite a few times was fellow FBP member, Tieghan Gerard.

When I think of bloggers who inspire me for photography, Tieghan is definitely near the top of the list. I’ve often thought about what makes her photography so special, and in this podcast episode I finally learned what it is: mood.

When Tieghan heads into a photo shoot, the first thing she thinks about is the mood that she wants to set in the photo. How will this dish make the viewer feel? And how can I portray that with a photograph? Tieghan talks about her photography process and how she sets a mood as well as a lot of other awesome info in this great podcast episode.

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042: Building a Successful Bilingual Blog with Clotilde Dusoulier of Chocolate & Zucchini

Welcome to episode 42 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! Today, Bjork interviews Clotilde Dusoulier from the popular food blog Chocolate & Zucchini about running a bilingual blog.

Many of our Food Blogger Pro members reign from places all over the world where English might not be the primary language. This presents a bit of a difficult decision for these bloggers – what language should they use to blog?

Clotilde from Chocolate & Zucchini decided to not even make that decision a while back. Instead, she chose to blog in both languages, and today you’ll find both an English and a French version on her long-standing website. In this episode, she talks about why she blogs in both languages and what that looks like from a process standpoint, as well as how she manages to stay relevant after being in the blogging game for over a decade.

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041: Ninja Email Marketing for Bloggers with Barry Moore from The Active Marketer

Welcome to episode 41 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! In this episode, talks with Barry Morre, an expert in email marketing.

Have you ever received an email and thought “Wow! That was just what I needed to hear right now. How did they know?”

To put it simply, whoever sent that email to you at the exact time you needed to hear it is practicing something called Ninja Email Marketing, and it’s definitely something you want to get familiar with real quick.

In this episode, Barry Moore from TheActiveMarketer.com talks about some ninja techniques for email marketing and how they can change the way you see your website visitors and customers – and how they see you.

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038: 7 Strategies to Build Traffic

Welcome to episode 38 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! In this episode, Bjork talks about 7 strategies to build traffic for your for blog.

When it comes to making a business out of your blog, there is one thing that can have a really big impact: traffic.

We get asked all the time about things that you can do to help grow your traffic. There are the easy, well-known tips, like putting each post on social media and submitting your recipes to FoodGawker. But there are also some things you can do that aren’t as simple or intuitive that can make a really big difference, and that’s what Bjork is talking about today.

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035: How to 10x Your Facebook Following in One Year with Stephanie from Spaceships & Laser Beams

Welcome to episode 35 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! Today, Bjork is talking about Facebook with Stephanie Keeping from Spaceships and Laser Beams (i.e. the coolest blog name ever).

I know… that title seems really outrageous and like a big, fat lie. But Stephanie actually did that in 2015. At the beginning of the year, she had a Facebook following of ~50,000 people, and by December she was up to 500k – a 10x increase.

This exponential gain in followers didn’t just happen. Instead, Stephanie made the conscious decision to focus on Facebook and use it to leverage her blog. Her dedication to this one goal has massively grown her blog traffic, her income, and her ability to do what she loves full time.

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Rebranding Your Blog with Erin Clarke from Well Plated

Welcome to episode 31 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week, Bjork talks with Erin Clarke from Well Plated about rebranding her food blog.

Back when Erin started her blog, it wasn’t called Well Plated. Instead, it was called The Law Student’s Wife – and that’s because 1) she was a law student’s wife, and 2) it wasn’t necessarily about food.

But after blogging under that name for a while, she decided that she loved posting recipes. And unfortunately, the name of her blog just didn’t fit any more.

So, she made the really tough decision to rebrand her blog, and she did it! But it wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns, though. There wasn’t much info about the process of rebranding out there, so she had to go at it all on her own.

In this episode, Erin shares what she learned along the way, and her #1 resource for learning what it takes to rebrand your blog.

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029: The Phases of Pinch of Yum with Bjork & Lindsay Ostrom

Welcome to episode 29 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This is a special edition of the FBP podcast featuring… you guessed it! Bjork and Lindsay Ostrom.

It’s always so interesting to hear about the stories people have with their blogs – when they started, how they got going, what keeps them inspired.

However, it’s pretty rare to get a full breakdown of all the phases that the blog and the blogger(s) went through from day 1. Usually the stories talk about the beginning, and then the present.

But today, Bjork and Lindsay sit down together (literally) and talk about the 4 distinct stages Pinch of Yum went through up until today. It’s just so interesting. And if you listen alllll they way through to the end, they also have some cutesy married-couple moments that I distinctly decided not to edit out. It’s adorbs.

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