Future-Proofing Your Content with Andrew Wilder and Colin Devroe

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Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Ann. In today’s episode, we’re sitting down with Andrew Wilder and Colin Devroe from NerdPress. Andrew is the CEO of NerdPress and one of our Food Blogger Pro experts. So you may have seen him around the forum breaking down all things WordPress for our members. Colin is also on the NerdPress team. He’s a senior product manager currently working on tools like Save This and Hubbub, NerdPress’ social sharing plugin. In this interview, Bjork, Andrew and Colin discussed the ever-shifting social media landscape and how you can break free from dependence on the larger social media platforms by exploring what’s called the fediverse and diversifying your traffic sources. You’ll also learn how to use powerful tools like Hubbub, Save This and Flipboard to build a loyal community and grow your email list, ensuring your content thrives in the long run. This episode confirmed for us that if you want to keep your content flourishing, you’ll want to dig deep to build a community and form lasting relationships with your readers. If you enjoy the episode, we would really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m going to do a double welcome here because we have Andrew. Andrew, people are going to be familiar with you. You’ve been on the podcast many a times here. So welcome, Andrew, to the podcast. And we also have Colin. Colin is joining us for the first time, and this is a joint call because you are working together. We’re going to be talking about some of the specifics of what it’s been like for you to work on this project called Hubbub and what the Hubbub is all about. But before we do that, let’s do some quick background here to establish who we are and what we’re all about. Andrew, you’ve been on the podcast before, part of the Food Blogger Pro community. You’re an expert. People are generally familiar with who you are, what you’re about, but for those who aren’t, can you give a quick background on who you’re and what you do?

Andrew Wilder: Sure. Well, I’m glad to be back and it’s been a little while, so it’s nice to reconnect with-

Bjork Ostrom: Too long.

Andrew Wilder: Too long. I’m the founder and CEO of NerdPress, and we’re a WordPress maintenance and support company. So I like to say we keep websites running smoothly. The majority of our clients happen to be food bloggers because I started as a food blogger myself and it kind of grew from there. And so we’re deeply embedded and invested in the food blogging community and we want to be here to support everybody.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. You understand the WordPress space really well, which is a little bit of a tease into where we’re going next. And Colin, you also know the WordPress world well given your background, but give us a quick overview of who you are, what you’re about, and then maybe what it looked like to connect with Andrew as you guys started to work on this project.

Colin Devroe: I am now the senior product manager for Hubbub, which is a product that NerdPress offers, and I’ve been involved with blogging since I was 14, which is in 1994 before the word blog existed.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it.

Colin Devroe: So yeah, I have a lot of experience in publishing on the web, and so when I joined NerdPress last year, the timing was perfect, right when we acquired Grow Social Pro from Mediavine and turned it into Hubbub. So it’s been a match made in heaven really.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Andrew Wilder:Aw.

Bjork Ostrom: Collective aw from everybody. One of the things that we learned for people who are familiar with our story, we had WP Tasty for a long time. Eventually sold that company. It was a few years ago now. But one of the things that I remember Daniel, who led the development with those products, talking about is when you have a WordPress company, you really have a support company. And one of the great things is I feel like a lot of people back into support because they launch a WordPress plugin and then they realize, “Oh my gosh, there’s a ton of support that has to happen with this.” It was one of the realizations we had, which is we’re not a WordPress company. Pinch of Yum is our primary thing. Food Blogger Pro and now Clariti are the things that we focus on, but WordPress is this entire world and we wanted to make sure that it landed in the hands of somebody who knew WordPress, lived in WordPress, could keep that going. It sounds like, Andrew, that was kind of a similar story with what happened with this set of plugins was Mediavine had these plugins, they wanted to make sure that they were maintained well with a group of people that would support them well moving forward. You had a literal support company already in place, so you had the infrastructure for it. Was that the thinking in the transaction was Mediavine said, “Hey, we want to prioritize finding a good home for these,” knowing that you had a decade I think, of experience supporting WordPress sites and plugins and just understood the world really well. So they put them in front of you to say, “Hey, is this something that you’d be interested in?” To which it sounds like you said yes.

Andrew Wilder: Hey, that’s exactly what happened. Yeah. I think it was last summer, Mediavine reached out to me and they’re like, “Hey, we’ve got this thing we want to talk to you about.” And we partner with them and collaborate with them a lot, so we’ve already got a great working relationship. And they basically said, “Hey, we’re pivoting a little bit. This is no longer something we think should be part of our core offering and we want to make sure it goes to a good home and takes good care of our clients. Many of your clients are already using this.” We’re talking about the Grow Social Pro WordPress plugin at this point. So they bought that plugin in, I think it was 2019. It was originally called Social Pug. And I’ve known this plugin for a long time. So we’ve supported that. We worked with Mihai, the original developer, so we know the plugin really well. And so they said, “Hey, we think you would be the best company to take this over and really take it to the next level and continue to support everybody.” And it was such an obvious win-win that I think by the end of the conversation I was like, “Yes. Done.” It was such a perfect fit that it was great. And then I got really lucky with Colin appearing at the exact right time. So you have to leave some stuff up to serendipity in the universe.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Andrew Wilder: So we actually happened to have a position open for something else about a month before, a month and a half before, and Colin applied for that job and as I’m reading his resume and we’re doing the pre-interview stuff and we’re on the interview, I’m like, “He’s not right for this job, but I’ve got this other thing.” And when I floated that idea to Colin in our interview on Zoom, his body language changed dramatically. He lit up and I was like, “Okay. We’ve got a good fit.” And then he was supposed to start two weeks later and he started that night. I couldn’t stop him.

Bjork Ostrom: Very quick turnaround.

Andrew Wilder: I feel like you have to be available and show up and let things happen sometimes and be open to things happening and then opportunities will work out.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I love the idea of luck wears overalls and this idea of that’s not going to happen unless you’re having those phone calls and you’re putting that job description out and you’re hustling and you’re working hard. And a lot of times that’s where you find I think serendipity coming through is you are hustling and that feels like a situation where it’s like luck wears overalls. I didn’t actually realize that. Now that you explained that story of Social Pug acquired by Mediavine and then making this decision, “Hey, probably not a good fit for us.” Then it goes outside of Mediavine and now it’s Hubbub. Morehubbub.com. Colin, can you talk about at a high level, what does this plugin do and how do people interact with it? And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about some strategies around email and list growth as well as traffic growth in post helpful content update world. But at a high level, when we’re talking about this plugin specifically, what does it do?

Colin Devroe: Yeah. I’ll give you a short version, then we can dive into whatever you’d like. Hubbub adds social sharing buttons to your website. When we purchased it, that’s what it did. And it would let you share to any social network, whether that was the publisher that was sharing to the social network or even just the visitor to your website could say, “I really like this thing I’m looking at. Let me put it on my Facebook group or onto X or wherever.” And in addition to that, it would give you some statistics for the platforms that let you gather some statistics for that so you could see what was working, what was not. So you could see how many shares you have on Facebook or Pinterest. In addition to that, it really made it fine-tuned options for sharing. So not just sending a link to Pinterest and that’s it, but choosing what the images look like when it gets there, choosing what the title is and the excerpt is that shows up on those platforms. So the publisher could kind of steer the visitor to sharing their content the way they want it to be seen. So that’s what we inherited. There has been new social networks since we acquired it. Some of them have taken off dramatically like Threads and other things like the fediverse have come along and really taken hold in 2024. And so we have already made adjustments to the plugin to support those new platforms or change them just a little bit to work with the fediverse in different ways. And now that the whole world is changing with AI and search and other things, some of the social network traffic is not as what it used to be and so we’re adjusting and we’re going to continue to adjust as the world changes around us. But we’re now changing Hubbub into less of a sharing … Not less. The same sharing tools are there, but adding growth tools. Save This as our first one, which is a form that lets people send themselves an email when they see something. So rather than sharing it to X, they would send it to their own email address so that maybe they’re at work, they see a recipe that they like, they want to make it later when they get home. They can just save it really quickly to their own inbox. And then when they do that, they’re added to a mailing list on MailChimp or MailerLite or Flodesk. So the publisher gets a benefit from this as well. You’ve probably seen these forms all over the place. They are able to be done in other ways, but ours is really coming along. We only launched it about a month ago or maybe a little bit around there, and it’s got a lot of different customization features and we are already collecting analytics behind the scenes, which we haven’t exposed yet so that’s a little teaser for your audience is that we are going to be exposing some of these analytics to people so they can see how are people saving these things. And we have a lot of plans going forward to continue to add new features to Hubbub that will help people grow their traffic apart from search, apart from social and in a variety of different ways.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s cool. You had mentioned the fediverse. What is the fediverse? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word. And I feel like maybe I’m becoming archaic in my understanding of the internet, but inform me.

Colin Devroe: I’m not sure if I’m jealous of you or not because it’s probably a good thing that you … It shows that you touch grass every now and then, I’m sure. The fediverse is … Imagine a social network that could talk to a completely different social network. So if your Facebook account could follow an X account or your Flickr account from back in the day could follow your Pinterest account. The fediverse is a set of protocols that allows that to happen so that no longer do you need to be on Threads, although it’s an advantage to be there no longer do you need to be on X. You can have one or some of those and then they all can communicate. It also means that from a publishing perspective, the content can flow between them all. Someone on Mastodon can share something and people on Threads, the 200 million people that are there can see that or follow that or share that or boost that. So that’s kind of the high level what the fediverse is. It’s an open source, open protocol way of sharing social posts, but then it also goes one step further, which is you can move. So if you have a Facebook account or a Facebook page and it gets mad popular, which many of your listeners probably have that, and you want to move that Facebook page and all of the people and your profile and your content and everything to Facebook number two when that thing comes out, you can’t do that. With the fediverse, you can take an account and move it to a completely different platform and take everything, your followers, your content, your bio, all of your media and take it with you. So it’s why Meta, which is what Facebook’s name is now, it’s why they’ve built Threads. They want to beat X at their own game, but they also have this fediverse layer that allows threads to connect with all these other platforms.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting. Yeah. And I see the March post from Meta, Threads has entered the fediverse. So the idea would be that it allows you, in the case of Threads, if you were to sign up for another platform that was a part of the fediverse, you could do a direct export of the content that you had previously produced to build a portfolio. Or not the portfolio, but to build an account on another site that then would have all that information pre-populated?

Colin Devroe: Yeah, it’s kind of like that, but it’s-

Bjork Ostrom: In theory.

Colin Devroe: You might be imagining that you’re downloading a file and then you’re uploading a file. Like, oh, I’m going to download all my content and then upload it over here. It doesn’t actually need to even work that way. The platforms literally can sync the data in between the two of them. You go over to Platform Y, you give it your platform X’s credentials and it will pull everything over for you. But in the old world, you would be able to do stuff like that. You could move your photos from one thing to another. You could do different things. But your following graph, your social graph would not follow you. It would not go with you. Colin is not on Facebook, so he won’t be able to follow me anymore. Andrew’s not on Flickr, so he won’t be able to follow me anymore. Well, when you make these adjustments on the fediverse, the followers stay intact, so they’re just following this new account now. So you don’t lose juice essentially. You don’t lose all that hard work that you did, and that’s why it’s really attractive to publishers that invest so much time and effort in growing their audiences on Instagram. If Instagram went out tomorrow and they wanted to move to the new Instagram, whatever that may be, they lose all of that hard work that they did, not just in the content, but in the engagement and in the audience that they built there. But with the fediverse, you’d be able to move all of that.

Bjork Ostrom: Is there practical implications for people who are building a following right now? Is it hey, you should be aware of this, or is it like, hey, there are some strategies you should be implementing right now because of this? I know this is a little bit of a rabbit trail.

Colin Devroe: Yeah, no. Well, I could talk about this for a while, so you might have to do some of that live editing you were talking about.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I’ll cut you off.

Colin Devroe: So I would say today, what should a food blogger do today to future proof themselves a little bit? First thing I would do is educate yourself a little bit. Recently we did a webinar with Flipboard. Flipboard is investing heavily into the fediverse. So if you’re listening to this and you’re a publisher on Flipboard already, go look and see what Flipboard is already doing with the fediverse. Your account that’s on Flipboard right now may already be syndicating into the fediverse and you don’t know it yet. So go there. They have some really great videos and one-on-one information that will catch you up to speed on what Flipboard themselves is doing in the fediverse. The other thing to do is look at what Meta and Threads is doing. Threads is going to look very familiar to you. It’s going to look like Twitter. It has a following area, you have followers. It doesn’t look very different to you, and yet that content optionally can be federated into the wide web. Just educate yourself on that first. I think that would be step number one. The next step might be that you learn what these other platforms are that are outside of these large tech companies. So look away from Facebook, look away from Google, look away from some of these larger tech companies to see what is out there that’s on the open web that’s not owned by anybody. As an example, Mastodon is one of many that are just like another social network, just like another X or a Twitter, but they’re not owned by anybody. They’re open source and you can run one right on your website if you wanted to, or you could join a server that already exists that’s out there. They’re usually free. Some of them are five bucks a month or something like that to help take care of hosting costs. As an example, the Dutch government has already said for all of their government agencies, they’re setting up Mastodon. For all of them. They did a year experiment. So now you can imagine something like the Dutch government is no longer beholden to Facebook to be able to get their news out. They could do it this way, and yet it can still be shared on Facebook, it can still be shared on Threads, it could still be shared on Instagram, but they now control … Just like email. A government entity would very likely never let someone else control completely their email. This is the same thing now. You can control social in the same way that you control email.

Bjork Ostrom: Really interesting. Yeah. Both of those I feel like, to your point, Colin, we could probably deep dive on that for a whole podcast episode. Good things to earmark and to come back to. One of the things I’m really interested in, I think within the context of Hubbub, it sounds like the considerations that you’re making are around diversification. And Andrew, I know that you’ve been at this a long time and you’ve seen a lot of ups and downs with a lot of different platforms including Google, and you work with a large base of creators and publishers who have seen a lot of those ups and downs. Can you talk about why you as a group NerdPress, but also just as best practice are starting to have conversations around the importance of diversification as it relates to traffic and maybe some of the things that you’re seeing as you work with different blogs and sites?

Andrew Wilder: Yeah. I think people for a long time have known they should diversify. I’ve been saying for 20 years grow your email list. There’s nothing really new in this concept. But with the helpful content update last fall and then the spring core update that didn’t correct for a lot of people, there’s been a lot of collateral damage and I think that’s been a big wake-up call for people. Because it was really easy and sexy and great to get lots of search traffic and make tons of money from display ads. Display ads are paying and they’re still paying high even though traffic is down, or maybe because traffic is down. Supply and demand. RPMs are amazing still. So it’s very easy to get lulled into complacency because you’re raking it in. The problem is you’re beholden to one entity and that one entity changes an algorithm. And the people at Google don’t even know the algorithm. It’s AI driven now internally. And they say do this, but the algorithm seems to think otherwise at times. So if I were running my business based purely on Google traffic, I’d be terrified because it’s one source of traffic, and if all of your revenue comes from that traffic … So you still need to get traffic and Google search is one of those sources, but then once you do that traffic, instead of just getting a page and a half or 1.1 page views for that traffic and then they’re gone forever, it’s now becoming more about how can you build community, bring that person into your ecosystem, get them to love you and your content and keep coming back for more. So once you have that, once you’ve built this community, you can then bring them back in and you’re going to be much more stable longterm.

Bjork Ostrom: And that would be the idea with being sure to capture email. Once somebody’s there, that’s going to be kind of the low hanging fruit for taking the next step in a relationship with a reader is to have their email address to be able to communicate with them. It’s kind of like we did this trip with Travel Wisconsin for Pinch of Yum, and one of the things they had scheduled for us was a boat tour and we were sitting on benches that faced so people faced us on this boat on the top and we saw this girl and this guy sitting next to each other. The guy was with his parents, and the girl was just on her own. And it’s the first time I’ve seen a live chatting. They’re kind of getting along and then she was like … I don’t know what she said, and she handed her phone over to him and then tapped numbers in and then handed it back, which is like, that’s something that’s never happened to me. The only time I dated was pre phones. But I feel like it’s kind of that version of a relationship where it’s like somebody saying, “Hey, I kind of like this. I want to put my email address in to get to know you as a creator a little bit better.” But what that requires is a clear path to do that. You have to be intentional with it. Maybe in the example that we had before, it’s the difference between the person just remembering the numbers versus having them stored away. It’s like somebody’s not going to remember to come back. You need to have some action that establishes that connection. So that makes a lot of sense. And I think doing that while you do have traffic and implementing it as just a standard thing that exists in your site is super smart. I think the thing that’s interesting to think about is what does diversification look like and how do you start that process as early as possible. Colin, can you talk a little bit more about that conversation that you had with Flipboard and maybe some of the practical takeaways for people who are looking to diversify? Specifically with Flipboard. What is it and how do you use it as a creator?

Colin Devroe: Yeah. So Flipboard, you can think of it … I’m not sure if they would love me saying this, but you can think of it like Pinterest and Pinterest boards except on Flipboard, it’s magazines instead of boards. The difference probably is Pinterest seems kind of indifferent to curation. They’re using a lot of different algorithms. They’re using a lot of different ways to enhance search and things so that people find what they’re looking for when they’re doing home improvement projects or looking up recipes. But Flipboard really values curation. It’s been something that has been a core principle … Human curation. A core principle to them from the very beginning. So they have magazines. You can have your own. You can have a magazine for your publication that you share all of your content into that one magazine. And then from there, people that read on Flipboard, which is an app on the iPad, it’s an app on your phone, it’s a website. They can share that, they can boost it, they can like it, they can put it in other magazines then just like you can take a Pinterest pin and put it in another board. But what they’re seeing is because they care so much about curation is that they have some very, very popular publications on there. Flipboard has been around a long time. They’re pretty OG of the internet and they have tens of millions of daily active readers that are constantly moving stuff and they also have people that are just on there to curate. They’re curating travel stuff, they’re curating food stuff, and those people are popular. So it’s kind of like having magazine editors and they have editors that are in there and curating for not only Flipboard, which has their own magazines, but also these curators do too. So I think that’s what it is. And what should a publisher do? Flipboard has some really great information. They really do try. I mean, they have a lot of documentation. They put a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, they put a lot of stuff on their own website. They have a blog. They have a YouTube channel. Trying to tell people, here’s what the features are and here’s how you use them.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Colin Devroe: I would say the key takeaways from our webinar was that to share to Flipboard the very moment you publish is really going to help quite a bit in getting your recipe or whatever it is that you’re sharing to be noticed by the people that are picking it up. And Flipboard does have some algorithmic pages. They have a for you page and stuff that you’ve liked informs that and other things. And then also they have a thing that’s like stories, but Andrew, do you remember the name of that feature?

Andrew Wilder: Oh, I’m just blanking.

Colin Devroe: It works like Instagram.

Andrew Wilder: Storyboards.

Colin Devroe: Storyboards. Thank you. So it works like Instagram stories kind of where you can kind of build. So you could take your evergreen content, the content you published a year ago, but you’re keeping it up to date because it’s very popular. It’s a pancake recipe that everybody loves. You can then put those into storyboards to say, “Oh, well it’s winter time now and don’t we like to make pancakes in the morning? And here’s the top five pancake recipes.” And those get very, very viral and they move a lot of traffic. We actually worked very closely with the Flipboard engineering team, and Hubbub now supports some of the latest article tags and things like that that Flipboard has. And we’ve had some Hubbub customers that have dug in a little bit with Flipboard and tried to get a little bit of return on investment and they are seeing a huge amount of growth out of there. I don’t want to give away specific numbers, but it’s in the tens of thousands of clicks per month that they’re getting off of just getting engaged in that platform. So Flipboard is like … It’s not a sibling of Pinterest but a peer of Pinterest and it kind of asks for an audience to be more engaged. They care a little bit more perhaps. Pinterest might be a little bit more ephemeral. They might just go there, grab what they need and leave. They don’t really know the people. But on Flipboard you kind of get to know the people. I follow it for photography topics because I’m really into film photography and darkroom printing and things like that. And it surfaces stuff that I would’ve never found on my own on the web. So it’s been really great for that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. It sounds like the evolution is social platforms where over time it’s like a social algorithm is where it starts, where you have these connections, you have these people you follow, you see their content, and now it’s very much like a content algorithm where you are surfaced content not necessarily based on who you follow, but based on an algorithm that’s deciding what content is going to be stickiest based on the other content that you’ve already viewed. It sounds like Flipboard maybe anchors a little bit more towards a social algorithm, which is you choose who you’re going to follow, you choose the … Not that it doesn’t have any of the content algorithm considerations, but it’s still anchored around you curating the type of content that you want to see and then surfacing that curated content. Does that feel accurate?

Colin Devroe: But even their staff is curating. So they are saying, oh, this publication gets a little bit more weight. These publishers that they pre-qualify have a publisher and creator program. They call publishers things like the New York Times. They call creators things like food bloggers. So if you’re in the creator program, your stuff gets weighted a little bit heavier in addition to the fact that they actually have humans at Flipboard that push things into the food area or into the travel area. So when I say they’re into curation, they’re into curation the old school way where you can imagine the editor of Vogue is sitting down with people and saying, “Tell me the stories you got. We’re going to build a magazine this month.” That’s kind of what they do.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. And you can see that on Flipboard. It says for creators, build your presence and it looks like maybe apply to have-

Colin Devroe: Yeah, they have a long list. I mean it’s popular. They have a long list.

Andrew Wilder: That’s one of the challenges is because they’re doing so much manual curation, it’s hard to scale. So you do need to be an active contributor. One of the big takeaways from when we did our webinar with them was they don’t want it to be a you drop a link and you go kind of thing like everybody does with Pinterest. They want it to be an engagement platform. So some takeaways for me were like when you flip something, the platform does favor recency. So as soon as you publish, flip it, but when you flip it, add a caption. Say why you like to make this recipe. They were really big on that. Jessica made that point very clear. Add why you want that. And then you can have comments on every flipped article. So when somebody leaves a comment, you’ve got to engage. Have a conversation with your audience and build community with them on Flipboard. But the really cool thing is it’s going to send the traffic back to your site because they’re not doing anything shady like pulling in your recipe and showing it on Flipboard. They want to send you the traffic, but in exchange, you need to have people engaging. You need to spend time engaging on their platform in return. So there’s sort of that quid pro quo. I don’t know if-

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: Look at it that way. But you can’t just be like, “I’m going to share to this and move on,” because you’re not going to get the results you want from that.

Bjork Ostrom: The idea being that as a creator, you are looking at the piece of content that you’ve published almost as a thing to comment and interact with. That goes on Flipboard. You put a description in, you interact with that, but it’s not like it lives on Flipboard in its entirety. It’s not going to take the entire blog post or recipe. But you do have to treat it as an interesting piece of content that you interact with in order for Flipboard to then treat you as a valuable creator on the platform. Is that what you’re saying, Andrew?

Andrew Wilder: Yeah, I think so. And then you can bring it full circle then. If people ask you questions in those comments, you can then take those questions and update your content and put those questions in there. So you can use it also as a feedback loop to make your content even better.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. And I see on the-

Colin Devroe: I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but-

Bjork Ostrom: No. Go for it.

Colin Devroe: If you wanted to get to the front of the line of that creator list, you can become a … Don’t tell anybody though. Don’t tell anybody this. You can become a NerdPress client and we can help to move you up in that list. However, there’s no way we can help … Whether they’ll let you into the program or not is completely on the merits of your content and the merits of your engagement and the merits of your account there. But as far as getting on the list, they have helped us to help our NerdPress clients move to that list. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And I think all of this is under this umbrella of strategic diversification. And like you said, Andrew, Google works really well. You get a ton of traffic from it. But also it can go away at any moment. And to build in these tools, whether it be an additional traffic source or an email list, that you have to then give more time to in a situation where it’s like, “Hey, Google traffic changes. Okay, I’m going to change my strategy. I’m going to focus on Flipboard a little bit more.” Or I know people who were impacted by helpful content update and they’ve looked at Reddit as a strategy and how do I get traffic from Reddit? But going from zero to one is often the hard thing just to get up and running. So if you can start something, it’s not like you abandon … If Google’s working, it’s not like you abandon it and say like, “I’m now going to focus on Flipboard.” But to take it from zero to one and maybe from one to two, so you have some of the traction you need in a scenario where you need to take it from two to 10 is really smart and really strategic so you have that as a fallback option. And especially if you can start to get some success with it, that can add up if you get … In the world that we live in, if a thousand page views is equal to 30, 40, 50, $60, however aggressive you are with your ads, all of that can add up pretty quickly.

Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Clariti. Here’s the thing. We know that food blogging is a competitive industry, so anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues and filling content gaps, you can make your good content even better. And wouldn’t it be awesome if you could figure out how to optimize your existing blog posts without needing to comb through each and every post one by one, or I know some of you have done this, create a mega Excel sheet with manually added details for each post that’s soon to be outdated anyway. That’s why we created Clariti. To save you time, simplify the process and make it easy. So with a subscription to Clariti, you can clearly see where your content needs to be optimized. Like which of your posts have broken links or missing alt text. Maybe there’s no internal links or what needs to be updated seasonally. Plus you can easily see the impact of your edits in the keyword dashboard for each post. Here’s a quick little testimonial from Laura and Sarah from Wander Cooks. They said, “With GA 4 becoming increasingly difficult to use, Clariti has been a game changer for streamlining our data analytics and blog post performance process.” That’s awesome. That’s why we built it, and it’s so fun to hear from users like Laura and Sarah. So as a listener of the Food Blogger Pro podcast, you can sign up and get 50% off your first month of Clariti. To set up your account. Simply go to clariti, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I, .com/food. That’s clariti.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Let’s talk about email a little bit. We talked about how important it is to build your email list. I think one of the things that people struggle with, Andrew, is “Great. I can build my email list, but then what?” You talk about the Save This functionality within Hubbub, and there’s some great testimonials from people who increased … Sam from It Doesn’t Taste like Chicken who’s been on the podcast before, talked about increasing signups by 49% in just five days, which is awesome. But what do you do once you get those email subscribers? How should people treat those and how can you be strategic in continuing to connect with those people and make those email subscribers a valuable part of your business?

Andrew Wilder: Well, you’ve got to email them.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Startup 101. Start with that.

Andrew Wilder: Start with sending emails. I say that as the worst email marketer on the planet for my own business. Colin’s always like, “We’ve got to get an email out.” I’m like, “When?” So there are ways to-

Bjork Ostrom: Now.

Andrew Wilder: The most important thing is to email them in a way that you’re providing value. That’s my big thing, is you have to provide value to your readers. If so, they will love you. And you may not win everybody over, but that’s okay. You just need to win enough people over. So you need to be thinking about how you can provide value. Often that’s just your latest blog post. So it can be pretty easy to set up an automated system even where it pulls your latest blog post from your RSS feed and sends that out once a week. That’s sort of like the bare minimum automation. And you can have your email marketing tool do that automatically. If you can curate more information, even better. If you do that manually, it’s more work, but you can do a little write-up about why you did the blog post and here, click through. Then you can curate like, here are two other posts. Let’s say you’re doing a how to make pasta recipe. Like you’re making farfalle and you happen to have a recipe for kasha varnishke. Maybe you can then link to both. You can tie things together and make those connections. And so you can use that to highlight other content you already have, and then you can use that to engage with your audience. People can reply and say, “Well, what about this?” It becomes a lot more work and at scale, that can be a lot of emails. But that can be incredibly valuable feedback to find out what your audience actually wants. Other things I see people doing that aren’t just content are emailing and sending out a survey to their readers saying, “What do you want me to write about?” That is huge. “What do you think of my website? What’s working for you? Do you want to see more how-to posts or roundups? Are the ads bugging you or are you cool with the ads so that I can pay for my hosting?” Stuff like that. So I think engaging with your audience at a meta level of like, “Hey, what do you think about what I’m doing?”, can be … You’re pulling people in and sort of a little peek behind the curtain too, which I think people really appreciate. So you have to get a little creative with that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And I think one of the things that we’ve found is for a long time we had an email list. We were building an email list. We would email people recipes, things like that. But it was once we had, in our case, it was meal plans like a product or for other people it might be a cookbook, suddenly it’s like, oh yeah, this is why you have an email list. And so I think it is beneficial to have the sending traffic back to your site. And like you said, we have surveys that we do. Those are really beneficial. And almost just even for the sake of maintaining a connection with those followers and people who have signed up. And I feel like where it becomes really valuable is you sign a cookbook deal and then you launch your cookbook and you have a direct line to people in a way where maybe you don’t in the same kind of guaranteed fashion with a blog post or with a post on social. It might get a lot of people or it might not because of that content algorithm as opposed to the social algorithm. So even if you don’t have anything to sell right now, someday if you continue to build a business online, you will eventually, even if it’s like Amazon Prime Deal Day and you want to send out some emails about it.

Andrew Wilder: It doesn’t have to be your product.

Bjork Ostrom: Right, right, right. That’s great. So Colin, can you talk a little bit about best practices that you’ve seen for building that list? Obviously with what you’ve built with Hubbub and the Save This functionality just out of the box, my guess is that it helps increase email signups. But if people want to start getting strategic about increasing the number or the percentage of people who sign up for their email list, if a hundred people come right now, maybe people get … Or a thousand people come, maybe people get one person who signs up for their email list. If they want to increase that to 10 people, 15 people for every thousand, what does that look like and how can you be strategic about increasing that percentage?

Colin Devroe: Yeah. It’s very early days with Save This, so we are seeing some amazing engagement numbers. The conversion rates are, I would say, higher than I expected them to be. But it is giving someone something in that signup. So the Save This feature specifically is you fill out this thing and you’re going to get something that you already wanted, which is the link back to this recipe for later. So save this is in a category all its own. But there’s other things like creating a white paper or a downloadable PDF or some other digital good that if they give you your email address, you get this thing. That’s one of the leading ways that mailing lists are being grown is by giving something for what you’re getting, which is the email address. And Save This fits into that category. It obviously serves a very specific purpose. But if you have a form somewhere else on your site that is doing a similar thing like trying to grow your newsletter, I would say just having one hanging out in your footer may not convert that much because what is the person going to get for that? So there are others that are far more experienced than anybody on the Hubbub team, although we’re working with them and we have partners and other people that we work with expertise in this. But there are workflows campaigns that you can put together that if someone were to sign up, what do they get? What do they get today? What do they get three days from now? What do they get 10 days from now? And you can plan all of that out with these services that we already support like ConvertKit that if you get a sign-up, you can say, “Well, what do I want the first seven days of experience for this person to be?” I really view the email list as your first step towards growing a relationship with the person. It’s not about driving traffic anymore. Sending a link to social media or making sure that your content goes viral or is publishable on all these different platforms, that’s definitely traffic generation. But relationship generation is that first step of you now have their email, you already have a captive audience. They’ve asked for something, they got something, and now you have that email address. So I would say every time that you correspond, whether that be automated or manual, it should be, how am I deepening this relationship with this person? To your point, you might be telling them about the book that you’re writing and filling them in behind the scenes so that they’re getting geared up for when that book drops or giving them something that people that didn’t give the email address aren’t getting. So if you’re publishing something specific, like let’s say you’re in a vegan category or something, if you’re giving content, videos, audio is big, just to the people that are on the email list, well, now you’ve created an exclusive segment of your audience. And I’m sure that maybe you yourself have covered on your podcast Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans. But if you can get to your point where you have 1,000 true fans, that’s the ballgame. Because when we were in Chicago at Tastemaker Conference, we would be talking about Save This because we didn’t have it yet. But we would be talking to publishers that have eight million unique a month, but they only have an email list of 800 people and that they haven’t emailed in three years. If you can shift that to having 1,000 true fans that pay you for something, whether that’s a product or a subscription … Maybe the subscription comes without ads for your website. There’s a lot of things that you can begin to do that can build those other legs of your revenue chair that you’re trying to build instead of just being … I’m going to lose the analogy pretty quickly, but-

Bjork Ostrom: Stick with it. Stick with it. We stick with it till the end.

Colin Devroe: If you have a share with only one leg, it’s not going to work. So if you can engage this audience … And I view email as that first step. Social media is good because you have followers, but now with the algorithms it gets much more difficult. You can have 300,000 Instagram followers. Congratulations. Four people are going to see it when you post there now. Unfortunately, that’s just the way it’s going right now because the algorithm is choosing what these people are seeing and if this person’s not totally into a vegan recipe on their Instagram, they’re just not going to see it. But when you send them an email and it’s giving them something they either asked for or they want more of or now they’re exclusive, then that is going to be content that you can guarantee is going to be consumed. It’s going to be reacted upon in a way that none of the other social platforms can compete with.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Go ahead, Andrew.

Andrew Wilder: I want to just take a quick step back. We’ve talked about a whole bunch of stuff and I don’t want everybody to feel like they have to do all of it. I was just reading Nathan Berry’s email newsletter. He’s the founder of ConvertKit. And he was basically like, don’t copy everybody. If you see somebody who has a million followers on Instagram, you shouldn’t think, “Oh, oh. That’s going to be good. I can do that too.” And then on X, if you chase people who are successful in each platform and try to do all of them, you’re going to fail at all of them. And his big takeaway was pick the one you enjoy. And I totally agree, because you’re going to enjoy it and that will come through and it won’t feel like work. So we just talked about a bunch of different things. I definitely encourage people to give Flipboard a try. Especially in this moment, I think it’s worth it, but if you don’t like it, don’t use it. And to your question about what email opt-in form, I would say if you have some forms that are working great, give Save This a try and see if it performs better. But if you don’t have all of them, if you sit down and go, “Okay. I have to create a lead gen thing, an opt-in thing, and I have to do it per category like, oh, all my barbecue recipes need to have a barbecue and my pizza recipes need to have a pizza opt-in.” Which that is the ideal maybe, but that’s so much work. Start small. And the reason why I love Save This is because it’s built into the feature. It’s just inherent in they’re on the post and they want the post later. So you’re literally giving them what they want by the nature of where the form is at the moment in time, so you don’t have to do any extra work. So if you don’t have an email opt-in right now, hands down, I would say Save This, whether it’s Hubbub’s or another provider’s, is by far the most effective opt-in and easiest to do because you’re giving them something of value that you don’t have to create more to do it. You don’t have to build another thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Point being, if you have a thousand blog posts, recipes, and it’s not like you’re going to come up with a thousand individual call to actions for each of those, the next closest thing that’s going to get to that is like, “Hey, you want this recipe? You can save this by emailing it to yourself.” That’s going to get closest to the problem that person’s trying to solve, which is I want to make this recipe. Whereas you can’t create something individual at scale, even though it would probably be more effective.

Andrew Wilder: I don’t know if it would be, actually. I get goosebumps about this because it’s so elegantly simple and so effective, and it’s so surgical with the least amount of effort and huge props to Bill Erickson and Matt Mullen for basically popularizing this. I think Bill was the first one to do it. Because one of our mutual clients was like, “Hey, I’d like to be able to do this.” And they built that form and it’s kind of taken off because it’s so successful. So I get excited because it’s such a huge win, and it’s so easy. And then you can build on it. We’re already gaining feature requests to customize the email that’s sent. We built a version one that’s very functional. It’ll do the job and it’ll be customized. It’ll focus on your site. But it doesn’t give you the opportunity to do a lot of messaging yet. Top of our feature list on the next release, we’re going to have more customization. So we’ll add a recommendation engine to that so it’s like, here are three more posts that you may like. And they can be in the same category automatically. So we can do programmatic work to make this automatic and very valuable for people. And then they can still get into that email sequence from ConvertKit or wherever. You can do both things.

Bjork Ostrom: And one thing that we didn’t touch on, and maybe we can talk about it as we round out here, just the value of email in the world of a cookie-less future. They talk about this idea of first party identifiers, and ConvertKit specifically has the functionality to automatically add some of this identifier information onto the URL anytime that somebody clicks. So all of that just generally compounds, and it’s one of the reasons why email is going to be even more valuable in the years to come. Colin, you’re a natural. We’ve got to have you back on. Really fun to talk to you. You could start a podcast. That’s what you guys can do. Now you can have a NerdPress Hubbub podcast.

Colin Devroe: That’s what Andrew needs is more things to do, I’m sure.

Bjork Ostrom: More things to do.

Andrew Wilder: We like talking though.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Andrew, really good to have you back on. Colin, can you talk about, being that you oversee Hubbub stuff, where people can learn more about that and then Andrew, you can give a shout-out for NerdPress.

Colin Devroe: Yeah, sure. So morehubbub.com. There’s a lot of Bs in there. Morehubbub.com. Our website has a lot of help documentation on it. The Save This feature has a landing page specifically to it. You can see some of the testimonials there. You can see a demo of how it works, and the sharing buttons are also there on most, if not every single page so you can click them and see does it share things. There is a free version of the plugin that only has a certain number of social networks in it, which is available through the WordPress directory. So you can just type the word hubbub into your ad plugins page on your WordPress admin, and you can get the free version just to toy around with it, see if that’s what you’d like to use. Or if you go to morehubbub.com, you can get the pro version which gives you all the social networks and all the options and everything there. And then just a reminder that the Save This feature is only available through the Pro Plus tier. So if you go to the website and you look at our pricing page, you’ll see that Save This is for Pro Plus tier users. So if you’re listening to this and you’re really interested in that engagement piece, be sure that you pick up that tier.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. And then how about NerdPress? We didn’t spend a ton of time talking about NerdPress, but it’s a great service. One of those no-brainers for somebody who has the resources to bring in some help with all things technical. Can you do a little shout-out to WordPress Andrew?

Andrew Wilder: Sure. Yeah. I had a publisher who’s been a long time client pulled me aside during the Tastemaker conference, said, “I just assume everybody’s with NerdPress because I don’t know how you’d have a blog without NerdPress.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Andrew Wilder: I was like, “Aw, bless you.” We want to be a partner in your success. We try not to be just any old vendor who’s providing a thing, but we’re really vested in all of our clients’ success. And besides keeping things running smoothly, we want to be a expert partner and resource and sounding board. So people are emailing us all day long for advice of like, “Hey, what tool should I do this? Is this thing the best practice?” It’s a lot of the stuff we talk about in the Food Blogger Pro forums. People are asking questions there. We’re just at a higher level. We’ve got a whole team of folks working on it. And then we really just want to help our clients grow and spend a lot less time struggling with the tech stuff. That’s our job now, and we love it. We love solving those problems and tinkering, but most of our clients don’t and we’d rather take that on and be part of your team for that and then let you focus on your zone of genius and what you’d rather be doing, which is I assume developing recipes and taking pictures and writing about it and flipping.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Cool. And nerdpress.net.

Andrew Wilder: Yes. You can reach us at nerdpress.net. Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. Colin and Andrew, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Andrew Wilder: Thanks.

Colin Devroe: Thank you.

Andrew Wilder: Always a pleasure.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed that episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Since we are kicking off a new month, we wanted to give you a peek behind the scenes as to what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership this month of August. Last week, on August 1st, we published a coaching call with Laureen King from the food blog Art and the Kitchen. In this coaching call, Bjork and Laureen chat about lots of really interesting topics, but they focus on how to approach rank dropping of posts that used to perform well, how to get good backlinks, and then how to update old posts that aren’t ranking as high as you would like them to. Next up on Thursday, August 15th, we will have a live Q&A call all about increasing engagement on Instagram with apps. We’ll be chatting with Ben from Grocers List, which is a platform that helps drive traffic from your Instagram platform back to your website. We are rounding out the month with a brand new course all about a keyword research tool, and we’ll be focusing on KeySearch. This course will be a real deep dive into KeySearch. Why to use it, how to use it, and just everything you need to know to get started with KeySearch as a food creator. It’s going to be a great month. We really hope you can join us for some of these new pieces of content. If you are not yet a Food Blogger Pro member and would like to join us, just head to FoodBloggerPro.com/membership to learn more about our membership and how you can join us on Food Blogger Pro. We would love to have you. And we’ll see you back here next week for another podcast episode. Make it a great week.