423: How Liz and Lauren Allen Built a Food Blog with 11 Million Monthly Pageviews

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I. Here’s the question, are you manually keeping track of your blog posts on a spreadsheet or project management tool, maybe it’s like Airtable or Asana? Or maybe you’re not even keeping track of anything at all. When it comes to optimizing and organizing your content, how do you know what to change? And how do you know what you’re doing is actually moving the needle?

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Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro Team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Liz and Lauren Allen from the blog, Tastes Better from Scratch. Liz and Lauren are twin sisters that founded their blog together way back in 2009, and they’ve been working together ever since to grow their site.

Liz and Lauren are super strategic about every aspect of their business, from hiring and communicating with their team, to how they create content, to the division of labor between them, and even to goal-setting for coming years, and how they want to approach changes that they see coming in the food blogging space, like AI and changes in data privacy legislation.

Liz and Lauren saw a huge amount of growth for their site in 2020, and they’ve managed to maintain 11 million monthly page views on their site since that time. They are really open and honest about every aspect of their business, and it’s a super interesting listen, and nice to get a peek behind the scenes of a blog like Tastes Better from Scratch.

So I won’t keep you waiting. I’ll just let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Liz and Lauren, welcome to the podcast.

Liz Allen: Thanks for having us.

Lauren Allen: Yeah, we’re excited to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: So for those who aren’t watching the video you are wearing, it’s not exactly the same, but it’s coordinating, and you’re twins. This was not intentional, though. Is this the life? Is this forever the life?

Liz Allen: It’s never intentional, and often we have to be intentional about not looking like twins.

Lauren Allen: Yeah.

Liz Allen: But in this case, I drove over here and I didn’t have time to go home and change when I got here.

Lauren Allen: And I didn’t want to change, so…

Bjork Ostrom: Instead of intentionally coordinating, you have to intentionally not coordinate. You have to be like, “We’re not going to wear the exact same thing.”

So one of the things that we often do on the podcast, especially for people who have been at this for a while, started your site in 2009, so you’ve been at it for a while, is to hear a little bit about your origin story. But one of the things that’s interesting is for you, as sisters, to be working together, I’d be interested to start and talk about that.

So the site, Tastes Better from Scratch, launch in 2009, but it wasn’t both of you working on it at that time. Can you tell the story of starting it, and then going full-time, and then when you started to work together?

Lauren Allen: We actually did start it together. Back in 2009, we both had the idea and we both love to cook-

Liz Allen: Not as a business venture, just as a, “Hey, let’s get all these great recipes online, in the cloud so that we can access them.

Lauren Allen: Yes, just as a way to share our childhood recipes, basically. Liz was-

Liz Allen: I got a real job, and I was getting my master’s, and teaching. And Lauren was like, “Hey, I really want to take this seriously.” And I was like, “Do it.”

Bjork Ostrom: Go for it, yeah.

Liz Allen: Yeah. So she left pretty early on. So I incorporated in 2014. That’s when I really started to take it more seriously.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say take it more seriously, what did that look like?

Liz Allen: Just post consistently, move to a legitimate WordPress, I was on Blogspot, I got a nicer camera, just like really incorporate it as an LLC. Just treat it more like a business, try and give it a real shot.

And so, I did that for a couple years on my own. It was around 2017 when I had my first SEO audit and I was feeling really overwhelmed with all the things I needed to do, and I would constantly call her just to talk about it. She was always interested and a good listening ear.

So that’s when, she had actually just moved.

Lauren Allen: I was just moving across the country, and I was pregnant, and deciding to maybe wait to have the baby before I got a job. And so I was like, great, I’ll help you. And I just was really interested. And at that point, I think us having really different roles is what helped us get on this path of a happy working relationship.

Liz Allen: I was probably always more passionate about the food, the content, the photography, and she really enjoyed the data side of everything. So it was just a match made in heaven from the beginning. She’s always enjoyed doing the stuff that I don’t and vice versa.

Lauren Allen: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s super helpful when the division of labor is such that there isn’t a lot of overlap and it’s essentially you have your respective departments. I think that’s one of the things that when people are like, “Oh my gosh, how do you and Lindsay work together, and you’re married, and isn’t that so stressful?”

But what ends up happening is we have these, and it wasn’t this really intentional thing for us, it just happened to be, and it sounds like similar to you, happened to be that we had these areas of interest that resulted in a clean line. And so, we come to each other, almost like for consultation, “Hey, what do you think about this?”

But it’s not like we’re then going and shooting a recipe together in the same room and passing the camera back and forth.

Lauren Allen: That sounds like exactly How we work. Yeah, Liz probably, she never even knows what’s coming live on the site or what recipes I’m working on, really.

Liz Allen: I know when she brings me yummy food.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, yeah.

Liz Allen: And I obviously know if I look at the calendar, but I work so much on different things that I don’t always know exactly what we’re working on at that moment.

Bjork Ostrom: So the story, in and of itself, is really awesome, you coming together, working on it, but also awesome because it’s been so successful. And we do a little intake survey, and we talk about it, and the site right now, correct me if I’m wrong, average is 11 million page views a month. Is that right?

Liz Allen: Yeah.

Lauren Allen: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is amazing. And one of the additional amazing things within that is, your story was such that you had these bumps along the way, where you increased 50%. One of those, and I don’t know exactly percentage-wise what it was, but COVID, which a lot of people can relate to. But it sounds like you’ve been able to just maintain that growth, moving through these different periods.

So it wasn’t like it grew, and then it dipped back down, and then plateaued, which I think a lot of people could relate with. Similar for us, you have this huge spike and then it comes back down. But for you, you’re able to have these areas of growth and continue to maintain those at a really significant level.

So can you rewind the tape for us and play back what those different points were? And if you can pinpoint maybe some of the things that you changed, or ideas that you had, or things that you implemented along the way that were able to unlock those different stages of growth?

Liz Allen: It’s been a fun exercise for us to try to think about, “Okay,” before going into 2020, we were averaging 5 million page views a year.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Liz Allen: Or sorry, 5 million page views that year, yeah.

And I think it’s been fun to look at, “Okay, we have all this big new audience and what are these milestones that have helped us grow?”

Lauren Allen: Yeah, I think we pinpointed a few, very humbly recognizing that you never really know exactly what it is that’s helping. But yeah, I think we’ve found a few things that seem to have worked for us.

When COVID happened. I think everyone can relate to having a huge spike in traffic. We went from 5 million page views a month to 8 million page views a month. So our real goal at that time was, “How do we maintain this? How do we maintain this audience?”

And especially once things got back to normal and people weren’t stuck home cooking so much, that was one of our goals.

And I think the very first change that we made was immediately deciding that we wanted to really ramp up our content and work smarter, not harder. So we already had such a huge wealth of content on the site. It was just getting all of those old recipes in front of new eyeballs constantly. So we went from publishing three recipes a week to five recipes a week, immediately. We just wanted to just keep recycling this content and updating it.

Bjork Ostrom: And when you say publishing, that would be taking content that exists, and maybe refreshing it a little bit, and then getting it in front of those readers.

So, two things within that. Can you talk about what you would do when you would go in and look at a piece of content and refresh it? What does that refresh mean, if we can be so ambiguous.

Liz Allen: Yeah, so it means retesting the recipe, making sure it’s perfect and we’re super happy with it. Updating photography if needed. And even if we liked the photography, it would still mean reediting the photo and uploading it as, potentially, a new file. And just really, we’ve never worried about word count, ever. We just really want it to be clear, and concise, and to the point, answer their necessary questions, and no more than that. And yeah, I just think that’s always paid off well for us.

Bjork Ostrom: And then, how about in terms of getting it in front of people? So does that mean sending out an email, putting it out on social. If you had a little checklist of all the different things that you wanted to check along the way, once you did revisit a piece of content internally, then what does it look like to shine a light on that externally?

Lauren Allen: Getting it out in front of people, I think, has a few layers and we use different names. A lot of people, low-hanging fruit and things like that. We put them into categories, based off of data.

Liz Allen: Right.

Lauren Allen: So something that is actually getting republished on our site is getting the most attention we can give to it. But then there’s other levels of things that might not need a whole republish, but might really need some attention in other ways. And so we’ll put it on different message boards for our team to see, and notice, and decide, “Does that need an email? Does it need a fresh video or just a reel? Does it need to be highlighted on the homepage, under the main dishes?”

Or something, so much-

Liz Allen: Yeah, so I think totally depending on the piece of content, and where it used to be, and where it is now, and what we think could happen with it, if it was something-

Bjork Ostrom: You mean in Search results, like where it is?

Liz Allen: Yeah, exactly. If it was something that was ranking in the top three and it’s not anymore, we feel like with a real refresh, we probably could get it back there. So we’re going to give that our best attention.

Bjork Ostrom: And when you say data, Liz, this, I’m guessing, is in your category, being the data nerd, what are the different tools that you’re using to get that data?

Liz Allen: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And maybe, what process within that do you use?

Liz Allen: We love to take advantage of the free or really cheap tools. And I don’t know whether this just happens to work for us or whether people are really, we’ve never used Semrush, we refer to it occasionally, you have a certain amount of free business to it. But generally, I think wherever we’re looking to do well, we spend time on that platform. So if we’re looking to do well on Google, we spend time on the Google page.

Bjork Ostrom: Using Google?

Liz Allen: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Liz Allen: We list it out.

Bjork Ostrom: The idea’s so novel, but if you want to get good at something, you need to understand it, yeah.

Liz Allen: Right. I feel like the more time spent away from Google, trying to rank on Google, is somewhat wasted. I want to see exactly, maybe we’ve had things listed as bullets and now they’re not in bullet form; or they’re showing images differently; or some things changed that we might want to capitalize on.

But I think about quarterly we go together, we like to just sit at a restaurant and go through content quarterly and see how it’s performing.

Lauren Allen: We’re using Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Liz Allen: Yes. Oh, yes.

Lauren Allen: The tools are Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and then the process is just what’s doing well, what’s not doing well, keeping in mind, I think, sometimes people weigh themselves every day, so to speak, whether we’re talking about a piece of content you just published, or we’re talking about your RPMs, or whatever, we get focused on the tiny, little [inaudible 00:13:13]. And we’re just looking at a big picture of how’s our content generally doing?

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And so, using a tool like Google Search Console to say, “Okay, once a quarter and we’re going to sit down, and look, and see, like, ‘Okay.’”

And it sounds like a big part of it, too, is knowing two things really well, your content and the platform that you’re most interested in your content doing well on. And in your case, it’s obviously, you have your site, and so it’s all within the borders of that site, and then Google.

And so it’s spending time on Google, understanding what it looks like, how it’s working, Searching for your own content. And then using Google’s Tools, Analytics, and Search Console to say, “Okay, this I noticed,” my guess is in a quarterly meeting you pull up Google Search Console and you see, “Okay, let’s take a look at this important piece of content.”

“Oh, Google Search Console is telling us that it used to be in position two and now it’s in position seven.”

Lauren Allen: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: “Knowing what we know about our content, did we update it? Did we not update it? And knowing what we know about using Google and seeing how Google’s working, what are some things that we could do or change?”

So it’s almost like the pushback on this if you don’t feel like it’s accurate, but it’s developing your skills as an artist, when it comes to content creation. And having it be data-supported, where, you know the tool, you know how it works, you know your content, you know what it looks like, and that’s supported by data, but it’s not necessarily you’re living and breathing data as the only thing. You’re needing to understand the nuances of the content and the tools. Does that feel accurate?

Liz Allen: Yeah, absolutely, 100%. Yep. And the tools, there’s so much that Google Search Console and Google Analytics can do that you might be going to a different tool to do, but that tool is likely scrapping that very information, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

And so seeing it right fresh, right there, looking at something that is ranking 10 or higher, or just filtering in various ways to put content in front of your face that needs attention. And then go to Google and see, “Okay, how’s this performing?”

Yeah.

Liz Allen: “Oh yeah, I remember, I’ve got a note here that it was ranking here, a year ago, and it’s not.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So can you talk about what that looks like to sit down in one of those quarterly meetings? And maybe it’s not structured at all, which is also great, but talk through how that looks. And if somebody’s on their own, maybe what could they do if they want to have a similar review meeting once a quarter?

Lauren Allen: It’s pretty simple. I think we always start off with looking at the calendar at least three months, usually around three to six months back, and the content that we shared, and then we just do a quick Search, and just see how it’s doing. So we start there. And then I’m always content-planning for later in the year. So she will help me pull up the data of maybe if we’re looking at the fourth quarter, we’re looking at holiday content from two years ago, looking back two years, something that’s at least that old that could use a refresh. And that’s how I work on planning the content calendar.

Liz Allen: And then we’ll pull up, we’ll do that first phase of looking back three months on the calendar, and then we’ll pull up Google Search Console and we’ll look at low-hanging fruit or potential champions, things that have dropped. We’ll filter by different ways we want to think about our content.

And then I’ll sit with that, and I’ll list it off to her, and she’ll say, “Nope, we’re already doing that one.”

“Yep, we already did that one.”

Lauren Allen: Or, “Great, I’ll plug that in here.”

Liz Allen: She’ll say, “Awesome. Let’s look at this piece of content and we’ll scroll through it and see, ‘yeah, it’s not really fitting the format we like now.’”

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Liz Allen: It doesn’t have fresh images and then we’ll put it on the calendar.

Lauren Allen: Or I’ll say, “We just re-updated that recently. Let’s put it on our schedule to social media blast, and send another email, backlink it a few more times on the site,” whatever else we do to give it a boost.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, to boost it. That’s great.

And one of the things that I love about that, and Lindsay and I have been trying to do this, and she calls it the Trickster and the Martyr from the book, Big Magic. And we often talk about this idea of trickster mindset, but it’s taking things that otherwise might be mundane and making them fun. And it’s such a small thing, but going to a restaurant to do it, you can take this planning meeting, which for some people it would be fun and it’s a great thing in general, but then saying, “Okay, how can we make this fun? And how can we take advantage of this great thing that we have?,” which is a flexible job, we can go somewhere, the environment’s fun. So I love that as a really small piece of the situation as well.

Liz Allen: That’s a must, but to try to make it fun. It’s not always the funnest job…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Liz Allen: … so you’ve got to find a way to make it fun.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

So you had mentioned this a couple times, but talked about as you’re thinking about arranging things, and the schedule, connecting with the team. So what does your team look like right now? And how do you loop your team into the day-to-day work that you’re doing? Because my guess is, you two work pretty closely and you have a pretty good understanding of what’s to come. You alluded to the fact that, sometimes, a post will go out, and Liz, you might not know it’s going out, or maybe you’re working on something. Liz and Lauren, you don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes. But my guess is you have a general understanding of the core mechanics of the business. And then you have a team who is working with you, as well. So what does that look like? And how does the dynamic work with you two as day-to-day decision-makers? And then looping your team in, as well?

Liz Allen: So one thing that was really helpful that might sound cheesy we did a couple years ago was just, envision our, we did a flow map of what our business looks like right now. And then we thought five years ahead of where we want this to be. And we really worked on just funneling buckets of what categories we needed help with, because my ultimate goal was to be CEO/Creator, the creative up here, and then Liz to be the next buffer down over team, like Director of Operations over the team.

Bjork Ostrom: So you wouldn’t be managing anybody, you would be CEO and your main responsibility would maybe be looking ahead around the future of the vision of what the site would be…

Liz Allen: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: … and creating content?

Lauren Allen: Yeah, exactly. So that’s what we’ve really worked on the last few years and it’s been super successful. And I think it went right along with, at that time, with COVID, us ramping up more content, needing more help, us really sitting down and saying, “We actually calculate,” this was my advice to me, “Calculate exactly how much you make per hour and anything else we can hire out, hire it out, whether that’s a house cleaner, or a poster.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Lauren Allen: And so, between those two things, I feel like we’ve really worked to grow a strong team. And just make sure that we’re really intentional with who we’re hiring and what role they’re filling, based off of this flow chart. We were able to see where we’re missing someone. Or if someone’s doing multiple different things, do we really want them? Or do we want them to just focus on this and hire someone else out to fit this bucket?

Bjork Ostrom: What did your dad do, for him to be able to give that advice? Was it just classic dad advice?

Liz Allen: Yeah, he’s just a good, has always managed his money well.

Lauren Allen: Yeah, he’s just a good, I know it’s not like eyeopening advice, but for me to think of it in terms of, even outside of my business, what’s taking up my time, whether that’s errands, or house cleaning, things like that really helped me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

And it requires us to think about, it’s a shift, because you think about work, normally we have this hard line, “You have work and then you have home.”

And it feels weird, weirder, to hire somebody to do home stuff than it does to hire somebody to help with work stuff, at least for me it does. We just had some friends staying with us for a week, and they were like, “Oh, you have somebody?”

It’s a family friend’s son, who’s 18, and he comes five hours every weekend. And I have a little Asana project that I created for him. And it’s all of the different things. And it’s things as simple as refilling the bird feeder. It’s like once a month he refills the bird feeder. But it was so nice to create that little Asana task. And then just last night we got home and we had been gone, we got back and I was like, “Oh, the bird feeder’s full,” and it just feels so good.

But the mindset that I had with it, as I was talking to my friends with it, who are in the process of launching a business was, that exact same thing that you said, Lauren, which is, “Calculate your hourly rate.”

And if it’s not something you like doing, if you really love feeling the bird feeder, or gardening, or doing the lawn, or cleaning the garage, do it. That’s awesome. But if it’s not something you love doing and it still needs to get done, it’s probably better for me, on a weekend, to do some email, than to clean the garage, if I don’t love cleaning the garage.

Lauren Allen: Totally.

Bjork Ostrom: And the return on that’s going to be better because of that calculation of, “Okay, what is the hourly rate for this to hire out, $20 an hour, depending on where you are? And what is the return that I would get if I’m able to figure out how to do a sponsored content deal for Pinch of Yum or something like that.

So can you talk about how you did that? Is it calculating the total profit within your business, looking at a rough estimate of how many hours you work, 2,000 hours in a year, and then just dividing that and being like, “Okay, I make,” whatever it would be for people, “$50 an hour.”

So anything less than that, it probably makes sense to hire out, as long as, this would maybe be the key, you’re efficiently prioritizing that time to do the work. You could hire it out all day long, but then if you’re not actually backfilling it with that productive work, it might not make sense. Is that how you went about doing it?

Lauren Allen: Yeah, that’s exactly what I did. And honestly, the first thing was for me, a house cleaner, it just felt like, half the time I can clean my own house. But it was that, it was just going through exactly an estimate of how many hours I’m working. And then based off of what I’m paying myself, exactly what I’m making per hour. And yeah, it was just as simple as that.

And I think exactly what you said, “What are my strengths and what do I enjoy?”

Liz Allen: Yeah.

Lauren Allen: So I’ve always known that the content, I’m never going to hire a recipe developer. I enjoy that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Lauren Allen: So it’s whatever I don’t enjoy, and someone could possibly do a better job than me and be less expensive, then-

Liz Allen: I feel like that’s one of my bigger, unwritten jobs. Is, as soon as she looks overwhelmed and stressed, it’s like, “Okay, let’s look at our processes, and what’s happening, and the flow of things after you create a recipe, and what more can someone else on our team do to help with that?”

Because I think burnout is real. If Lauren doesn’t want to make recipes anymore, then there’s a lot of us out of the job.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Liz Allen: And so, just trying to figure out who’s the best person and how we can flow things down.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s amazing how many things you can end up doing that, it doesn’t matter if you do them or not. The task matters. It’s an important task to get done and it needs to get done well, but it doesn’t matter who’s doing it.

And for all of us, I think anybody listening can relate to this idea of, there’s a lot of stuff that happens that, one way or another, if it gets done, nobody’s going to care. It just needs to get done.

Lauren Allen: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: But there’s also a lot of stuff that, it would matter if it wasn’t you doing it. And in your case, Lauren, it’s probably like you said, recipe development. Or if you are the face of the brand, showing up on Instagram and being the person in the kitchen doing it. And if suddenly that’s somebody else, that’s going to be like, “Wait a minute, that’s a really big deal.”

But if suddenly it’s somebody else cleaning your house, literally, nobody in the world knows, other than you, and you’re like, “Great, this is awesome. It’s a beneficial thing.”

So I think people understand that in the context of, all the different things that we have to do within our personal life to make happen. And also acknowledging, in the early stages, you might not have the resources for this, and so you are having to do all of those things. Or, strategically saying, “I’m not going to do some of those things until I can get specialized in something that I am uniquely skilled at,” so you can start to do that resource-trading, where you’re getting more for your time and then can bring somebody in to support.

But how about on the business side? You alluded to this, Liz, where one of your jobs is to look at the processes, and to analyze, and to say, “Okay, where can we bring somebody in to help with that?”

For somebody who wants to do that with their own business, how do you go about doing it? How do you analyze a process? And maybe even how do you create a process?

Liz Allen: Yeah, I think, my process, and I don’t know if this will work well for everyone, but I have just tried to dive into whatever I think we need to do better at, email was one thing. A couple years ago, I was like, “We really should do a better job, so I’m going to jump into it, and I’m going to learn everything I can about it. And I’m going to learn what we should be doing better and start doing that myself.”

But as soon as I understand it well enough, we’re going to get somebody to take that over. Because again, it’s just about shuffling things down because I think my time is most well-used as an overseer of strategy. And so yeah, it’s a process of jumping into that thing.

When Web Stories became a thing, like, “Okay, I’m going to figure this out. Figure out the plugin and start making some. Figure out how we want them to look and hire that out as soon as we can.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Liz Allen: And then I can spend more time looking at how the Web Stories are performing. Or that’s maybe an outdated example now, but that’s the idea is, to jump into the thing, figure out how it goes, and then find somebody that can help you.

Lauren Allen: That can help you.

Bjork Ostrom: I love the idea of, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot, just with my life in general, of pinpointing and understanding a problem, coming up with a solution for it, creating a process around it, and then having somebody support you in that process, or take over that process. And sometimes you’ll just decide forever, “This is going to be the thing that I’m going to manage,” if it’s that thing that you’re uniquely equipped for or excited about. But also, there’s so many of those things that we can look at understand, like you said, Liz, it’s not like you just, necessarily throw somebody in and you don’t know what’s happening. You understand it, you understand how you want to do it, you solve it once, but then once you’ve solved it, somebody comes in and then they are the ones that are managing it, are taking care of it.

Liz Allen: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: I love that. But-

Liz Allen: I think that keeps it from feeling chaotic.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Liz Allen: If you just hire the thing out before you understand it, then someone has questions, or they quit, and they leave, and all of a sudden you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know what to do now.”

Bjork Ostrom: But the other thing that it requires is a certain type of discipline, because it’s slow work. You can work on something for two or three days and you’re not necessarily accomplishing things in typical way.

So, can you talk about, even the specific process of creating a process? Are you going in and recording a video and then using that to show somebody? Do you create a Google Doc? Is it just understanding it and then teaching it to somebody? What does that look like when you’re solving for something and then documenting it?

Liz Allen: It’s an iterative process. Email’s a good example, where I really took that over. And then initially with email, I just got help drafting the emails. So I’m just teaching them how to get in, how to create a new one, how to use the box, and draft it. And then I’m approving it. And then that person starts to get to know it, and I’m still looking at all the data, and I’m still creating some different things in email and sequences, and so I’m going to teach them how to do the next step of it.

Lauren Allen: You use Loom a lot. You send-

Liz Allen: Yeah, and a lot of it is, “Let’s meet face-to-face, and then check in.”

And then if I want them to do something new, that’s easy, I send them a Loom, or just a screen record, and send that. But it is helping that person keep understanding more, and more, and more, and then really be able to take ownership of that platform, to where I can just say, “Hey, let’s meet this week. Let me know, tell me how things are going, and what we’ll work on.”

And then I can keep my ears open just to the wider world about what’s going on, and what we might need to focus, to change, or focus on next, or do differently within that platform and then doubling that information down.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So when you say face-to-face, is that literally face-to-face or Zoom, face-to-face?

Liz Allen: It’s Zoom, yes, it’s Zoom. Nobody’s here-

Lauren Allen: All of our team is remote, so we each meet, well, I would say you mostly meet with the team, at least once a week.

Liz Allen: Yeah.

Lauren Allen: Different people on the team, regular meeting.

Liz Allen: Actually, Pinch of Yum, I think, inspired years ago, I think I was listening to your podcast and you guys have a team huddle of sorts everyday.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Liz Allen: And so we do that too, just to make sure that, even people that aren’t involved in the little things going on, and we’re all on the same page with the bigger things happening with the brand.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

And so, can you talk about the team dynamic? Are you in Slack? Do you communicate via email?

And then also one of the questions we always get for people who are in the early stages is, “How do you find people to work with?”

So the team itself, what does that look like: W2, contract, part-time, full-time? Remote, you established. What does communication look like? We’d be interested to hear your current state of all things team.

Liz Allen: Yeah. So we’ve always started people 1099 contract. And we’ve never hired people that are on our Type Team that worked for other bloggers. It’s always been a friend of a friend, or someone that was a fan of the blog, one of our readers. And it’s just been word of mouth really, as we’ve been trying to fill positions. And we’ve gotten organized on Monday.com, so a lot of our systems are automated on there, which has been invaluable for us. And then we communicate with Slack.

Lauren Allen: Yep.

Those people, you quickly come to see who’s really invested in your brand, who’s really reliable, and then you incentivize those people, and you make them employees. And so you can speak to-

Liz Allen: Yeah, that’s been something that’s been important to us is, once they do become, to the point where they’re invaluable to us, and we don’t want them working for anyone else, that’s when we do make them an employee. So we have, what, four or five employees, now?

Lauren Allen: Five, Jeff.

Liz Allen: Anyways. Yeah, so we have a handful of employees. Those are just really the self-motivated, awesome people.

Bjork Ostrom: The people who are aligned with the team, who are interested in being a part of the team.

Liz Allen: Exactly. And the just really self-motivated in what they’re doing. They’re out looking and-

Lauren Allen: They’re trying earned their stripes. When you ask them to do something and then…

Liz Allen: They go above and beyond.

Lauren Allen: … they do more, or they just go above and beyond.

Liz Allen: I think it’s always been really important to us, too, to try and be very generous, whether that’s rev share, or bonuses, or just in different incentive programs to make an environment that we all really want to-

Lauren Allen: Yeah, we are excited year-by-year about our growth and we really want them to feel the exact same way, where you’re just like, “Wow, this is so cool. Oh gosh, this is so cool.”

And it just gets better and better.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. It’s one of the things that, I think it was Charlie Munger, so he’s the partner to Warren Buffett. And that’s one of the things he often talks about is, this idea of aligning incentives and making sure that you understand what that is.

And the interesting thing is, it’s different for different people. For entrepreneurs, that’s one of the things that I’m learning is, my mindset of what motivates me will look a little bit different than what motivates other people, whether it be autonomy, flexibility, working on the thing that you’re most excited about, revenue, profit, leadership, all of those different dynamics.

But the core part of it is figuring out, “Okay, how do you figure out what people are excited about? How do you create alignment around that? So then you’re all working together and moving together?”

What about, you talked about this idea of the looking five years out and saying, “What do we want our team to look like at this point?”

Once a year, do you do a really big annual review and say, “Okay, what’s our five-year plan?”

What does that process look like? If you’re doing a quarterly one, do you do an annual one?

Liz Allen: We do annually, and I feel like every year, we can pinpoint that as a boost for our team.

Lauren Allen: Yeah.

Liz Allen: Every year we have a team retreat. Then prior to the retreat, we really sit down and we look at our goals from last year, we make a presentation, our goals last year, how we did, our goals for the coming year, and our org chart. And what does it look like now?

Lauren Allen: Now. And how has it changed?

Liz Allen: And how has it changed, but how do we want it to continue to change? What do we see for them?

And it might not always look exactly that way a year later, but to give our team a heads-up of, “Hey, Stacy, you’re doing so awesome at this, and we hope to be able to bring a couple of people under you.”

Lauren Allen: Just give them a little bit of a vision of where we hope their role will be going. And then, it’s always really rewarding to see what we did last year, what were the wins, and what were the losses?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Lauren Allen: And then as a team, to work together to talk about what our goals are for this year?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Lauren Allen: And what we’re struggling with, what roles are working, or what’s not working, and what we could do better?

Bjork Ostrom: So how about right now, looking into the future? You’ve been at it for a while. So 2009, it’s coming up on that 15-year mark, which is just crazy. The next 15 years of content on the web is going to look very different. And you’re both people who are plugged in and understand the landscape. Do you have thoughts on what the future of content creation looks like? And I’m thinking of things like we talked about the importance of data privacy and how that plays in? AI obviously, a really big one. Changes around Search. And for so many of us, Search is popular. But also, social. So it’s a big question, but I would be interested to hear your respective thoughts on the future of content.

Liz Allen: Yeah, I think top of mind for us is that we feel so blessed, we’ve been able to have an ad-supported business for so long, and that’s always been a really passionate thing for us to offer for free. Our meal plans are free. Most of everything we offer, we do it for free because we’re able to, being an ad-supported business.

So that’s our biggest focus right now, looking towards the things you just mentioned, privacy laws and legislation around that and AI.

Lauren Allen: I think we’re going and trying to address two issues. One is, educating our audience a little bit about, as privacy laws become more serious, and third party cookies go away, and this digital advertising spend potentially shrinks, consumers, largely, expect the internet to be a free place, and it’s not. But they are not necessarily seeing that exchange as an exchange.

Bjork Ostrom: It feels free, but it’s because their information is being sold.

Liz Allen: Right. And what else feels good to them is this idea of privacy, right, and protecting.

Bjork Ostrom: And wanting both of those things. Yeah.

Liz Allen: Yeah, wanting both, but maybe not recognizing that publishers are going to have to start changing the model, subscription to subscription-based, or things like that. Or we might have to charge for our meal plans, or things like that, if advertisers really withdraw, because they’re no longer able to track you, right?

And so there’s one thing we’re trying to address is, “How do we help our audience maybe understand this bigger picture?”

And then the other direction is, “How are we going to adjust, as a business, knowing what’s coming down the pipeline, how are we going to adjust and maybe strengthen our brand, have Lauren a bigger part of our brand? And what are some things that we could do in the future to make up for some of that loss?”

Bjork Ostrom: Having Lauren be a bigger part of the brand because of making it more human? Is that the idea?

Liz Allen: Yes.

Lauren Allen: Well, yeah. I think neither of us are on-camera type of people. We don’t love the spotlight that way. I’ve never had social media before the blog, personally. So I think that’s always been a struggle is, I really love producing great content and sharing recipes. I don’t always love sharing my life. So it’s how do we balance that?

Liz Allen: To your point, the robot, real versus fake, I think, is going to be an issue that continues to…

Lauren Allen: Absolutely.

Liz Allen: … really affect society. People are going to want to know, “What’s the robot and what’s the real thing?”

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Liz Allen: With their news, and with their blogs, and everything else.

Bjork Ostrom: And the potential scenario in the future where one of the best plays, defense, offense, whatever you want to call it, against AI, is essentially the ability for platforms, like Google, Facebook, whatever the platform is, their ability to create compelling and helpful content. One of the greatest things that we can do, defenses or offenses against it, would be to be more human.

Liz Allen: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: So people are following a person versus discovering a recipe on Search, which has good ratings because potentially, they might get that somewhere else. It’s hard to know what that will look like and how Search will incorporate sources and whatnot.

But as it is right now, it’s like recipes is like, it’s not super predictable, and you’re going to have much better results searching for a recipe, and going to a top-rated result than you would with a barred result for it. But probably three years from now, that’ll look quite a bit different.

And so yeah, it’s smart reflections around folding in humanity into your content. But it’s hard if you don’t necessarily bend that way. So what does that look like for you, Lauren, as you contemplate a future where you’re needing to be more present?

Lauren Allen: Yeah, sorry. I think it’s a balance of just trying to still be authentic and not be someone that I’m not. I’m not ever going be that Tik-Toker, entertainer.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Lauren Allen: But I think it is always going to be important to me, too, that I’m a trustworthy brand and a trustworthy place to come for really reliable content and recipes. So I think, we do hope to be a little bit more on-camera when it has to do with just teaching skills, educating. So whether that’s an app or whatever platform we decide to do that would be still educational, provide value and useful resources for our audience.

Bjork Ostrom: And you talked about the data privacy piece, and to expand on that a little bit, Liz, third party cookies are going away. And essentially what that means, at a really high level is, it’s going to be harder to track people, specifically when they’re using Chrome. It already exists with Apple and Safari, Apple being privacy-focused, but now it’ll be with Chrome, eventually. I forget the date, when is it? I should know this. We talked about it a hundred times.

Liz Allen: They change it.

Bjork Ostrom: But it’s coming down the line.

Liz Allen: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And the idea being, when that changes, it’s potentially less valuable for advertisers to do traditional ads. So they potentially spend less. It’s hard to know exactly how that all shakes out.

But one of the ways that you can work against that is by getting information from people, through them opting in, like email addresses as an example.

So with you doing the free meal plans, was that part of the thinking is, “Hey, we want to create a database of users where we have information.”

And obviously, it’s a valuable service, as well, and that’s why people are signing up for it. So when did you launch the meal plans and did that have anything to do with thoughts around the upcoming changes with third party cookies?

Liz Allen: Originally not. We’ve been doing them for many years. And we just always wanted to be free, because in our mind, we don’t provide the recipe, we just provide the shopping list and the links to recipes. So we’re like, “We would love people cooking from our site every single night.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Lauren Allen: Yeah.

Liz Allen: That was the goal.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a way to make your site more sticky is to create resources around it. Yeah,

Liz Allen: I think we love the idea too, that it started as this thought of, “Okay, if I am paying, personally, $10 a month for something that a lot of people aren’t paying for, I might feel a little dumb sharing that.”

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Liz Allen: I’m like, “I don’t want to admit that I’m having to do that.”

But if I am using this site that has these free resources, I’m going to tell all my friends about it…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Liz Allen: … because now I’m cheating the system. I’m winning at life, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Liz Allen: I’ve found something really cool.

Bjork Ostrom: Here’s a great resource, it’s free, there’s no downside, yeah.

Liz Allen: So I think that marketing of it. But we also like to offer things for free when we can. So I don’t know that we’ve ever been too thoughtful about how it would play into third party cookies and all that.

Lauren Allen: I will say we have started to be more strategic about trying to capture emails…

Liz Allen: Yes.

Lauren Allen: .. as we promote the meal plans.

Liz Allen: Yeah, it’s definitely become, looking five years down the road, something that we want to continue to brand as something that might help offset some of those losses from digital advertising.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s great.

Are the meal plans just available as PDF downloads? Or you’re creating an account? And what does that process look like? It feels like it might potentially be difficult to manage or no?

Liz Allen: No, it’s not. They’re just free on our site to anyone as a PDF download. If you register for a free account, there’s additional tools to make them even more editable, customizable, and things like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. That’s awesome.

So tell me about, as you look towards, we talked about the five year, as you look towards the next three months, six months, nine months, what are the things, I think it’s interesting to look back, hear about reflections on the past, interesting to look way in the future, but it’s also interesting to hear what’s happening right now? What are you working on? What are the things you’re trying to figure out? And potentially, what’s working well?

Liz Allen: Yeah, there’s several. I think we’re trying to hone-in on that. Email is always something that we’re really trying to dial in on how we can-

Lauren Allen: That’s probably been our biggest focus.

Liz Allen: That’s been our biggest focus for maybe the last year or so.

Bjork Ostrom: And why is that?

Liz Allen: I think it’s our best, most loyal audience that we could sell to in the future, as we need to or want to. And just figuring out what’s working best with email, particularly right now, how we can do a better job converting our social audience to email, because they’re not always overlapping.

Lauren Allen: Yes, that’s been a really big, actually right now, focus of ours is converting social audiences to email.

Liz Allen: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And the idea being that email is a little bit more owned than a platform like Instagram. If you think of Facebook 10 years ago, we both lived in a world where we can look back that far, it was a very different platform for a brand than it is now. And if you would’ve captured that audience into email, you’d be probably in a better place. And so you’re thinking like, “Okay, what happens if Instagram changes? We want to make sure that we can capture those folks over email.”

Liz Allen: Yeah, email, it’s definitely what we own, but it’s also what converts best if you’re selling cookbooks or anything else. And it’s also one of our more powerful resources to give a piece of content…

Lauren Allen: A boost.

Liz Allen: … eyeballs on it that we want to have. So yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there, but-

Bjork Ostrom: Has anything worked well, so far, with that?

Liz Allen: We’re really excited about ManyChat, and this is a couple days in, excited. So we’re probably not seeing the big picture and the problems haven’t all presented themselves out. But using ManyChat’s automation’s a little bit more to offer something that people are going to want to, if they enter their email in the DM and it automatically gets on your list, versus having to swipe up and fill out a form, right, all they have to do is just type it in and they get it.

And then after that, being able to serve them with additional content that you want them to see. Like, “Okay-”

Lauren Allen: “We’re so happy you signed up. Now, check out this, this, and this.”

Liz Allen: Yeah, and, “Look at this.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Liz Allen: “You might also like this recipe.”

And being able to be strategic and mindful about putting the right piece of content in front of people.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Yeah, Lindsay and I have, this is one of those where your entire family is sick for a week, and then we had guests for a week. We have this one meeting that keeps getting bumped, but it’s like, look at ManyChat and figure out any type of chat solution that allows you to, how can you stay as native as possible, to where people are wanting to have a conversation, or the platform that people are using. And to your point, if you’re then sending them to a site where then a form has to load, and it feels like it’s slow, it’s just going to create more friction. And it creates that frictionless experience, which is cool.

Liz Allen: Yeah, I think any opportunity we can have to try to understand our audience better, that person who came from here to here is interested in our challenges, or they’re interested in our meal plans, or they’re interested in dessert, and trying to hang on to what you know about that person, and then using that information.

Lauren Allen: Funnel them into the right place, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s great.

So as we wrap up, I’d be interested in directing a question to each one of you, in your respective areas. Lauren, I’ll start with you. If you look at your work, the things that you’ve done, and you could boil it down to, let’s call it, three things that are most critical for you, like skillset, the things that you do that are the most valuable. And the skillset for somebody who wants to do similar things to you, that they should refine and get really good at, would you be able to pinpoint those three things?

Lauren Allen: I think for me, personally, the things that have helped me not burn out, and stay motivated, and love what I do, because I think that’s rare, I think all the time when I’m with groups of bloggers, they actually don’t even like cooking, or they don’t enjoy what they do. And I still absolutely love it. It’s still a passion for me.

And I think one of those has been avoiding comparison. I really don’t do competitive research. I’m not on social media often. That was something I really wanted to give up. It just is a healthier mental space for me.

Liz Allen: We always, we just say stay in our lane, stay in our lane.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Lauren Allen: Yeah, just stay in my lane, I say that all the time. I just try and stay in my lane. And that way, I’m able to just produce content that is, I know that it’s authentic and genuine. And I love it. It’s exciting and motivating for me. I was going to say something else with that and I forgot.

Bjork Ostrom: And as you’re thinking about it, one of the things that I’d like to point out, so we just had these friends over and they have two boys who are 10 and eight and they were playing video games. I have a Switch that I played seven minutes on. And then they came over and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, Nintendo Switch! This is the best thing ever.”

So we played Mario Kart and all these games. It was really fun. But it aligned with this thought that I’ve been having quite a bit around video game design. And this idea that we all have the opportunity to design our own video game. And we are the character in our video game.

And one of the most important things in a video game to define is, what are the metrics around success? And we get to look at our lives and say what’s important to us? And then that’s what we’re comparing ourselves against. Am I doing a better job this year than last year of, whatever the things are: being a present Dad, growing my business, if that’s an important thing, being healthy? You get to define what those things are.

And one of the hard things with the comparison world is the way that our brains work is, as soon as we see somebody doing a certain thing, we have the potential to anchor off of that and be like, “That’s what I want. I need that.”

But whether it’s stay in your lane, design your own video game, if you can become good at that, it feels like such an unlock to a life lived, that’s maybe more, at peace or not as rushed, or not as in angst. But it’s also a hard thing to do.

Lauren Allen: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: But it’s great to hear you reflect on that, to say, that’s actually a really important piece of the puzzle. Maybe the most important piece, is to figure out how to continue to enjoy the work.

Lauren Allen: Yeah.

Liz Allen: I heard a motivational speaker talk to that, really hit home with me was, just having three people in your life to talk to that are outside of your business world.

Lauren Allen: Yeah.

Liz Allen: So that’s really helpful for me, too. Have those three people that you can talk, and they’re interested in what’s going on with your business, and et cetera, but they’re able to be a sound voice and keep you a little bit grounded, has been really helpful. And I would say the other part, the other piece of the puzzle for me has been, I’ve never, ever posted something on Tastes Better from Scratch that I actually wasn’t really passionate about and wouldn’t want one of my best friends to make. So I’ve never done hardly any sponsor content for that reason. It’s just hard for me to balance that.

And there’s been stuff that I make all the time that just won’t end up on the site, even if it’s the best Search term in the world. And even if I think that I could absolutely win, if I don’t love it-

Lauren Allen: Yeah, I can remember a time when she brought me chocolate tiramisu. And I was like, “This is awesome.”

And she’s like, “Yes, it’s good chocolate tiramisu. It will probably be the best chocolate tourism out there.”

But she’s like, “But if my friend called me and said, ‘Hey, I’m having people over. What should I make for dessert,’ I’m never going to tell them.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lauren Allen: So it doesn’t make it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s a great filter. Yeah.

That’s awesome.

How about you, Liz, when you think of the things that are most important for your role?

Liz Allen: Yeah, I think bucketing my time has been hugely important. There were days when I’m trying to be Mom and trying to do all of the things, but not with strict time boundaries. And so I just doing a half job at all of it. I’m working, and then I’m changing the laundry, and then I’m like, “Oh shoot, I need to cook dinner.”

And I’m just all over the place.

Lauren Allen: It’s that transition time.

Liz Allen: Yeah. So making time to either, for me, it works to leave the house, but have set hours, leave the house for that amount of time, and then I can have that car ride back to transition and shut off for a minute. Because otherwise, I live in this bubble

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. The psychological and actual merger back into life. You’re taking the lane from the work highway, merging off of that onto the life highway, yeah.

Liz Allen: And then I think that the only other thing would be, I keep my own life happy by, I pass off the things that I don’t want to keep doing. And I keep doing those things that I think are most important and that I think I’m good at. But making sure if I’m passing all these things down, that those strings are smooth, so to speak. That things are running well. I’m constantly evaluating, “I moved this person over to help manage this person, but I don’t know if it’s going super well,” and thinking through how we can better use these people for what they are interested in, and want to do, and what their strengths are, and what I think might be best moving forward.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Liz Allen: Just making sure things are organized.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. That’s great.

Super inspiring to talk to both of you and we’ve connected in real life, as well, so it’s always fun to have a real life connection before a Zoom connection here. And I’m sure other people would love to follow along with, if they’re not already, with what you’re up to. So my guess is, Tastes Better from Scratch everywhere on the web, is that where to find you?

Liz Allen: That’s it.

Lauren Allen: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. We’ll link to it in the show notes as well. Liz and Lauren, so great to connect. Thanks for coming on.

Lauren Allen: It was our pleasure.

Bjork Ostrom: Thank you, thanks so much.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey there, Alexa here. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Thanks for tuning in this week. I wanted to let you know that we actually recently launched something called The Member Directory. So all Food Blogger pro members have access to it and they can access it by going to FoodBloggerPro.com/directory, and it’s there that you can see and connect with all of your fellow Food Blogger Pro members, and industry experts, and those of us on the Food Blogger Pro Team. So you’ll see different things like social links, and blog links, and bios, and just ways to connect. And it’s just such a fun place to go if you’re looking to build your own community on a social media platform, or just be able to connect with other people and see what they’re up to on their blogs. So again, that URL is FoodBloggerPro.com/directory.

And if you are a Food Blogger Pro member and you’re interested in filling out your profile, you can do that over in the edit profile area of your membership. And then once you fill out that information and you’re exploring the member directory, you can filter by cuisines. So if you’re blogging about vegan recipes and you want to connect with other vegan bloggers, it’s very easy to do that on the directory. It’s very fun, very cool, and just a really awesome place to connect with one another.

So if you’re a member, be sure to check that out at FoodBloggerPro.com/directory. And if you’re not a member, all good, if you’re interested in joining, you can learn more at FoodBloggerPro.com/membership.

But otherwise, we’ll see you here on the podcast next time, next Tuesday. And until then, make it a great week.