How to Balance Creativity and Consistency in Blogging

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Ann Morrissey: Hey there, Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team here, you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. In this episode, we’re sitting down to chat with Riz Asad from Chocolates and Chai who shares some amazing insights on balancing creativity with monetization. Riz also drops some valuable tips on staying efficient and consistent in your content creation, and you’ll also hear him talk about how jumping on popular topics like viral TikTok recipes can really up your visibility and engagement. Lastly, we dive into the importance of finding your niche, understanding who your audience is and carving out a space that’s uniquely yours is the key to long-term success while staying true to your creative passion. If you enjoy this episode, we would really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Riz, welcome to the podcast.

RIz Asad: Hey, Bjork, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we were talking about this before we press record. You’re at the decade mark for working on your site. We’re going to be talking about that, what’s changed through the years. But before we did that, I wanted to talk to you about kind of an interesting post that you had on your site, which is how to read a recipe post. And I think what’s funny to me is there’s so many conversations and commentary on the internet around here’s what it looks like. Here’s my commentary on how I think a recipe post should be written. These are people who don’t have recipe blogs. You should do this different. Here’s how you should approach it. I love that you take this approach of saying, Hey, I’m going to educate my readers. Here’s how to interact with a recipe post. Talk to me about the reason that you decided to write that, and maybe do you refer back to that or send that to people? I think it’s a great idea to educate your audience in that way.

RIz Asad: So yes, I definitely send that to people quite a lot, especially people in my mailing list when they ask questions about quantities and what to do about things. I will reference that post quite a lot. The main reason I wrote it was exactly like you said, there was no conformity. Every website also has different expectations. Every blog has different ways of doing things, so I wanted to write something up so that people who were following me had a reference for exactly what I’m doing and what I’m thinking when I’m writing out quantities or instructions. It makes it easy for me. It gives them something to understand as well. In terms of a standard, it was also possibly me just very slightly venting. Right, because I still get them, get all the strange questions, right. It’s like I made sure pancakes without any flour, didn’t turn out real good. Why?

Bjork Ostrom: Did they not turn out? Yeah, totally, totally. And I think everybody can relate to that. I think one of the things I appreciate about it is we went through this process with our businesses. It was something called EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and there are little bits and pieces that I took away from that process of training. It was like a year or maybe two years that we worked with a, I think they’re called an Implementer, and one of the things was that they talked about was within business, one of the things you’re always trying to do is to figure out if you have a problem, how do you solve it and make it go away forever? And I think this is a great example of that, which is you had these people asking you questions. You had maybe people struggling with a recipe when they shouldn’t be because they were maybe doing something wrong, not including flour within pancakes or whatever it is. And so you look to that and say, how do I solve this forever? Sometimes it’s creating a process. Sometimes it’s creating a system. In this case, it’s creating a post. It’s almost like a KB, a knowledge base article for your site that then you can refer people to. And I think about that even if I’m emailing a lot and I’m emailing commonly answering a certain question, there’s probably an opportunity for me to create something that’s on the internet that can get discovered and shared, but that can also be something that I just refer people to. And instead of having to write the email out every time, you just then have this piece online that you can send people to. And so an encouragement to anybody listening to think about how do you solve a problem forever, especially if it’s creating your own FAQ section within your site that answers common questions that you can send people to. Just out of curiosity for those, we’ll link to it in the show notes, but for those who don’t see it, what are some of the things that you tell people within that article? The advice that you give?

RIz Asad: I think I’ll go through it step by step. And I don’t remember exactly all the steps right now, but tell people to follow the recipe for a start. I think the term I use is something before mastery, mimicry before mastery. So learn to copy the recipe before you learn to amend and edit and revise the recipe — that’s something I generally encourage most people to do, is to adapt a recipe, but only once they’ve learned how to make it.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And even step one, you talk about read the entire recipe twice preferably. I think about that with, if I’m assembling IKEA furniture, I’m like, I’ve started to get in the habit of sitting down with a cup of coffee and being like, what I’m going to do now is just talk or I’m just going to read through. And sometimes it is talking out loud, okay, this step here, this step here. But just a reminder for people like, okay, this is what you have to do if you’re going to have success with the recipe. Understand about understanding measurements as step two and

RIz Asad: That’s exactly what I said.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah. I love that. The point with it that I think is helpful and the takeaway I think for any of us as creators is thinking about how do we help people have success with the content that we are creating? And one of the ways is you write really clear instructions, really clear ingredients. You yourself do whatever you can to make it as easy as possible. But the other way is you equip your audience by educating them, here’s what it looks like. Here’s how to interact with me as a creator. Here’s how I’m creating content. And so people kind of know what is the ethos of this? How does this work? So it’s kind of a fun little piece and we’ll link to that if anybody wants to check that out and potentially create something similar for themselves as well. Speaking of decades, so we talked about you’re at the decade, mark, take us back to 2015 when you were first starting out. One of the things that you talked about as we were doing kind of a pre-interview was this idea that your intent truly in chocolates and chai was I want to have an outlet, a creative outlet for publishing content on the internet. And then at some point that switched into, I want to try and monetize this. So how long was it a creative endeavor? And then we’re going to talk about that point along the way where you said, actually, I want to start to not only have this be creative, but also have this be a source of revenue.

RIz Asad: So when I started it, I started it mostly as a way of sharing recipes with some families and friends that were in different countries. And prior to that, I’d just been WhatsApping people, and that really just wasn’t very efficient. So I was like, you know what? I’m just going to make a WordPress website and it’s just going to be there. It was one horrible photo and me just rambling on in every recipe. And I think it was like that for a good, at least, I don’t know, four or five months. And then I think one day I was just kind of looking through my traffic for fun and I had a few thousand people reading it and I was like, oh, I don’t know, a few thousand people. So obviously people have found it right at which point I thought, okay, so I should probably clean it up if other people are using it. And maybe it was a whole year later where I started thinking of it as, oh, maybe this can be a side business. I should probably start learning how blogs work. I should figure out what a recipe card is. And yeah, it was that. And then from there on, I’d say it was a slow kind of growth into monetizing it. For the longest time, I think I resisted it, something about monetizing the blog completely felt almost like a betrayal to what it was,

Bjork Ostrom: Which was a creative outlet and

RIz Asad: It was just fun. It was a way of sharing information. I’m a bit of a hippie, so I very strongly feel that knowledge should be free.

Bjork Ostrom:: Sure.

RIz Asad: So the idea of putting ads in or affiliate links, I was like, is it costing anyone anything? I don’t know. It’s certainly distracting from the experience a little bit. So it was something I jumped back and forth on for years, think actually.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I remember when we put the first singular ad unit on Pinch of Yum and just thinking like, oh my goodness, this is the end. People are going to be angry. It’s going to ruin the experience. And I think part of it was in that time, in that season, it was ads were less frequent, they were more noticeable. People saw them in a way that they don’t now. And so I think the general climate was a little bit touchier around ads where it was a little bit more noticeable when you did start to include ads. And I think now it’s common to have ads on site that it would be rare to have a site that doesn’t have those. So I think part of it is just the landscape of the internet and content sites, but also part of it is you are getting, you’re new into a thing and you don’t have a ton of experience with it and anything. The more reps you get with it, you’re like, okay, actually people aren’t mad that there’s an ad on here. And I’ve even heard people talk about this idea of helping to educate your audience that they should expect ads or expect sponsorships because if you go 10 years and you never talk about a brand or you never include an ad or you never include affiliate, it’s almost like the expectation then is that you aren’t including those things. You don’t have those things. And so it almost becomes more of a sharp edge once you do start to include them. And so I think there even is something to be said about for those of you who are listening and starting early or in the early stages to start early with some of that. So it’s like that’s not an unexpected thing. Talk to me about moving through that, the initial fear of having an ad and then you start to have ads and then you’re like, oh, actually I can earn money from these ads. How did that progress?

RIz Asad: So in my case, it progressed. Initially I’d been reached out to by a small ad company, not even sure if they’re still active. They were called Nexus Media. They’re based here in Toronto, and they had an ad manager who met me in person and kind of comforted me and was like, alright, we’re not going to wreck your site. It’s not going to look like one of those horrible gambling sites. You used to see that, right? It’s just going to be a couple of ads at the top and the bottom. And it wasn’t bad at all, didn’t make any money, but it wasn’t bad at all. But from there I moved to gourmet ads, which was a bit more, and then from gourmet ads to Mediavine, which actually wasn’t that much more, and Mediavine Interactive, which was about the same. So it was really just sort of scaling up the ads for me.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah,

RIz Asad: That makes sense. In terms of other monetizations, sponsored posts are something I’ve always kept to a minimum, but whenever I’ve done them, I’ve always tried to do them with people or brands that I generally love and on topics that I generally love as well. Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: That feel aligned.

RIz Asad: It feels aligned. Yeah, absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. So talk to me about with the evolution of the ads that you’re using Nexus and then Gourmet Ads, Mediavine, Raptive, my guess is along the way you’re continuing to grow the site and also kind of starting to see, hey, this is something that could be a substantial source of revenue. How did your mindset shift along the way as you started to experience that and start to see, hey, if I have 50,000 page views, here’s how much you can earn a hundred thousand page views. Like, oh, your mindset can shift from this is a creative fun outlet to this could be a business and this could earn substantial revenue. Did that shift how you approached content creation and even looked at the site itself?

RIz Asad: Yeah, absolutely. The first thing was me really just getting the site working and I guess up to scratch for what people would expect from a site that’s not just your personal blog, getting it fast, getting it clean and sort of following a format, maybe cutting down some of the waffle in my own writing readers more of what they want. But aside from that, definitely things like choosing how often a post recipes or what recipes to post that was definitely impacted. When I first started the blog, I was posting something every few months, even when I started taking it a bit more serious, it might’ve been one recipe a month, and now I’m on a weekly post schedule. And it’s one of those things I almost never miss now, which it leads to a lot more preparation. You’ve got a runway of posts and you’ve got something coming and you sort of have to always have something coming. So it’s been great in that I’ve gotten to eat a lot more food, but the pressure is always on. It’s like, oh, do I have a post next month? I better check that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s one of the things that I’ve noticed with a lot of people who achieve a certain level of success is that they have this perpetual state for better or for worse of pressure around getting content out. And the hard thing is we’re in a world where that never eases. You’re always going to feel that pressure because it’s always going to be there. You’re going to always have a post that needs to go out next week or a piece of content that needs to be updated or marketing around that that needs to go to social channels. And so we kind of live in this perpetual state of pressure to publish content because it’s kind of like we’re feeding this beast that is always going to be hungry and the beast is the internet and that traffic comes from places that require fresh content like Pinterest or Google search or even social media. So as you’ve started to take on this kind of pearl mindset, Hey, I’m going to deliver content on a weekly basis. I’m going to always publish on a certain day and I’m going to really make an effort to make sure that I do that. How have you done that consistently and what are the patterns that you have in week to week or month to month to allow you to do that successfully? I think that grind is one of the things that a lot of people feel and can get discouraged by. And so I’d be interested to hear from you after a decade of creating how you continue to do that.

RIz Asad: Unfortunately, I don’t have anything too unique. I batch my content as much as possible. I’ll spend usually Mondays of the week, I do any plugin updates, any issues sort of on the backend of the website. And then the rest of the day I’ll be preparing pins or Instagram posts or social media. And if I have any extra time, then I’ll use that to write posts. But usually I don’t, the rest of the week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I’m almost always focused on writing, researching, or just sort of testing recipes. And Friday is sort of when I do most of my editing.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Editing of written content or photo editing

RIz Asad: Usually more like photo and video.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah, mostly written. It’s one of the other. Yeah, that makes sense. One of the other things that I hear people say is developing that rhythm, what am I doing each day? So you could have some repeatability and predictability to how you are creating and how you are showing up. It’s different for everybody, obviously. Even for myself loosely, I’ve started to say, okay, Monday and Friday aren’t going to be my create days. Those are going to be my kind of catchup days. So it’s like on Monday, Slack, email projects, I’m kind of heads down on that Friday the same thing. And what I’ve found is if I get into it, if I have a Monday and it’s packed full of meetings, today’s a busy day, we’re recording on a Wednesday, and I have, it’s probably six different calls or meetings. That’s an abnormally busy day for me. But the reason why is because I’ve started to learn, Hey, on Monday and Friday, I want to protect those days as either catching up out of the weekend to making sure I’m on top of things going into the week or on Friday. I want to make sure that I’m clearing things out, catching up as I head into the weekend. And so that rhythm for me has felt really good. And I think for other people who are trying to figure out how do I feel good about my work, one of the things that I think is a huge takeaway is find and find and fine tune the patterns around your content creation process that allow you to feel like you’re on top of your work. You have enough time for it, because I think a lot of us always feel like we’re always behind. We don’t have enough time for it. And then to make micro adjustments as you need to that process. And a lot of it I think comes down to what you were saying, which is batching. Like, okay, you don’t do a little bit of editing on Tuesday and then on Wednesday and then on Thursday you just block that out and say, on Friday I’m going to edit. And that’s the headspace that you’re in on Friday. You’re going to be in the editing Headspace. One of the things that you talked about was on kind of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, those sound like they are more content creation days. How much of that is in front of the computer versus you being off computer doing recipe development and work like that?

RIz Asad: I go through phases. So I find that I have a lot of trouble kind of switching between sitting in front of the computer or sitting or standing in the kitchen. So when I’m in the kitchen, I sort of spend a few months kind of just working on kitchen stuff, writing down recipes and writing down some notes, and then a few more months after that, I’m 70% focused on just being in front of the computer writing everything up.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. And then the other thing that you talked about was researching. I think people are always interested to hear how other creators are going about the research process when it comes to recipes. So when you talk about that as a keyword research, is it general research around a recipe? And then maybe what are some of the tools that you use, whether it be organizational tools, planning tools, research tools. We’d love to hear about those

RIz Asad: Research. Yeah, like you said, I do two types of research. I do do some keyword research now. It’s something still very new to me, but usually whenever I decide on a post, I will look up whether there’s a huge amount of competition there, whether it’s completely pointless writing it. But more than that, most of my research is actually focused on the history of recipes. A lot of my recipes tend to be from around the world. And one of the hardest things with recipes, especially traditional recipes, I find is actually figuring out where they’re from. So many places share recipes or share versions of recipes, and they all have a very deeply ingrained sort of, what’s the word, possession of that recipe. I never want to post something and be like, Hey, this is Italian, and the Greeks come at me and say, actually that’s Greek.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, sure.

RIz Asad: And you have offended my entire family. That sort of research where the recipes come from, where we’ve seen first mentions of them, that’s one of the areas I try to write on in my blog. Give a little bit of background, so a lot of research there and that’s it. Keyword research as well. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So a lot of what I see when I pull up your side on the homepage right now, it talks about Dubai chocolate bar, Egyptian, Japanese, Mexican, Hong Kong style French toast. Are people searching for those things? Would people search for Hong Kong style French toast, and is that part of your keyword research process, or do you see this somewhere maybe in your travels or online and think, oh, that looks really cool. I want, is it creative forward or is it keyword research forward? Talk a little bit about that.

RIz Asad: So definitely more creative forward than keyword research. I could probably count on my hand how many recipes are based purely on keyword research with me. Something like Hong Kong french toast. I went to boarding school when I was younger and one of my roommates was from Hong Kong, and he showed me Hong Kong French toast. That’s the premise behind that post. I think he even talks about it at the beginning of the post and waffles on, and people complain about how much I talk before I actually give a recipe. And that tends to be the case for most of my recipes. I moved around a lot when I was younger, so most of my recipe history or learning how to cook has kind of been a little bit here, a little bit there. And that’s what I try to put forward with my blog.

Bjork Ostrom: There are multiple places you’re pulling from, and it makes sense when you talk about wanting to really understand where is the original source of this? How do you do that? How do you figure out where something is originally from? It feels like it’d be pretty deep in the internet that you’d have to search to find out what you’d consider to be the ultimate truth for that.

RIz Asad: And the honest truth is sometimes I should just come back and say, I don’t really know. It’s either one of these five places. And that’s actually a very common answer. It’s like it’s somewhere in the Middle East, probably something further west.

Bjork Ostrom:

RIz Asad: Yeah. But that’s really it. It’s a lot of reading. It’s looking for, in my case, I try to look for initial publications of recipes. So what the earliest publication we have for, I don’t know, kri, which is an Egyptian recipe, and we don’t have one because it was a street food. So then we’re trying to see do they have similar street foods that have been published somewhere else, maybe.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

RIz Asad: And in the case of it’s purely Egyptian.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. And are you able to find, where are you looking when you say earliest published version of a recipe, where are you seeing that or where are you getting that information?

RIz Asad: Two different places. Wikipedia is always a great place to start, and from Wikipedia, they’ll generally link out to various places. And I usually follow the rabbits trail there or any sort of newspapers will have things as well. Sometimes I just go to Amazon and buy a book.

Bjork Ostrom: I love that. It’s fun. One of the things we talk about is how can you as a creator find the overlap of a need on the internet in your interest and passion? And I think one of the things as a first pass looking at your site is you could say, Hey, the niche is pretty broad. You have Egyptian, you have Hong Kong style French toast, you have this Mexican recipe, but it feels like actually what the niche is is unique regional foods. And so actually it does feel like there is a certain niche for what you’re doing and a certain passion that you have aligned with it. It feels like a passion, which is an understanding of the history of foods. Does that feel like fair and accurate?

RIz Asad: It does, and my friends and I often joke that I have the broadest niche you could possibly have. It’s the no niche niche, it’s just food, but from everywhere.

Bjork Ostrom: But also the niche being these are unique regional foods, and so it’s like there is actually a unique vertical there and a unique area of interest that you have, which is kind of the history of food, which is cool to see.

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So one of the things I just did, I forget what you were talking about, but I just pulled up and I was like, oh, I wonder what search traffic would be like. Maybe you’re talking about keyword research or whatever. So I just pulled up a quick Ahrefs overview, and it looks like on Ahrefs that at the start of this year, you’ve had a spike in search traffic. Have you noticed that or have you seen that?

RIz Asad: Yeah, a little bit. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is awesome, and it’s a straight-up into the right increase. Do you have any idea of what that comes from or any theories around where that increase ties back to?

RIz Asad: I got some Google rankings back during the last update. I think Google had dropped me a few spots and then they brought me back for some of them. So that was some of it. And then I just had a few posts that I put up more recently that were suddenly getting a lot more traffic. The Dubai chocolate is certainly one of them. It’s been really popular on TikTok, and I think that caused a lot of it.

Bjork Ostrom: On your TikTok?

RIz Asad: Not my TikTok. My TikTok is

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

RIz Asad: My TikTok is very sad.

Bjork Ostrom: But on TikTok in general, that’s been popular. Yeah. Yeah. It’s one of the things, and we’ve never done this, but I feel like there’s such an opportunity for somebody who is interested in understanding social trends, to be aware of and monitor food trends that are happening and creating content around those different trends. On TikTok, on Instagram, those would probably be the two primary ways that you see kind of trending food and maybe more so on TikTok than anywhere, but it seems like there’s an opportunity there because what will naturally happen is people will see a recipe, they’ll see a piece of content, and a lot times that content isn’t even necessarily from somebody who’s, they’re just like a food creator on TikTok. They don’t have a site. They’re not creating content adjacent to it, and so you can kind of catch that mini wave as a creator and create a piece of content around it. There’s also the flip side of that, where if you have a large following on social, you can create a piece of content and kind of create that wave through having a piece of content that goes viral or a lot of exposure to it. But if you don’t have a strong social following, you can kind of figure out who are the people that do that maybe don’t have a site that they are creating content along with the TikTok video that they’re creating and look to strategically say, Hey, is there an opportunity for me and my niche and my focus to create a piece of content here? We’ve had some interviews with people who have done similar stuff where that’s their focus. Is social content, was that something for you that just happened to align, or did you notice that in using the app, people talking about a certain recipe and saying, Hey, there might actually be an opportunity for me to create a piece of content here and potentially catch some of the search traffic that is coming from other people who are looking for that?

RIz Asad: To be completely honest, it was pure luck. Sure. I think some of my readers had requested it. It’s actually a little out of the wheelhouse of what I usually do. I tend not to do sort of the trending recipes, but some readers had requested it, so I was like, all right, I’ll give this a shot and it picked up for whatever reason.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. One of the things I remember back to Pinch of Yum, we had one of the earliest pieces of content that went viral. In this case, it was on Pinterest that really made a difference where we were suddenly like, oh my gosh, we have a decent amount of traffic and this is really exciting. It was a sweet potato skins thing. I don’t even remember specifically what the recipe was, but what it allowed us to do was it was a little bit of a proof of concept around a piece of content that for some reason really hit with our audience or an audience on Pinterest in this case. And then from there, what we were able to do is iterate a little bit and say, Hey, if people liked this, I wonder if they would this adjacent recipe to that, if there’s something kind of similar to that that would perform, well, maybe the image looks similar and we post it to Pinterest. I think of an ultimate example of this is Mr. Beast on YouTube. He’s constantly creating a piece of content, seeing how it does iterating on it at massive scale and just continues to do that, okay, this worked from this. Why do we think that is? Let’s create a little bit of a playbook around that and then build on the success of the past content and continue to iterate. Do you anticipate looking into the success of this piece of content that you had and seeing how you can iterate off of that, or even maybe being open to saying maybe there are some opportunities on social to create recipe content around other viral pieces of content?

RIz Asad: So it’s funny you should ask that because that’s actually what I was doing this morning.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, great. So yes, the answer is yes.

RIz Asad: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Not so much looking at social to find what else is trending. I am so bad at keeping up with what’s trending. It’s something about me. The algorithm’s just like you are old, you don’t need to know. But I was definitely looking at different ways that you could package something like Dubai Chocolate, whether I tend to do a lot of pancake and brunch recipes, and I was wondering if there was a way to mix those together, whether it be Dubai chocolate, in case you haven’t tried it. It’s basically milk chocolate filled with a pistachio cream and kataifi dough, which is a breaded dough, crispy dough. So I was wondering if there’s a way to sort of deconstruct that and turn it into a sweet brunch and I leaning, leaning towards, yes, I just think it’s going really, really messy when I do.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, but delicious. But the idea of being, okay, there’s some success here. What does it look like to take this and maybe create an adjacent piece of content that could be attached to this other viral piece of content that you have or this other piece of content that’s doing well?

RIz Asad: Yeah, absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So within your business, talk a little bit about the focus that you have in terms of what’s most important from a revenue perspective. So my guess is you talked about a little bit active on social, but that is primarily the site itself. So if you were to break down into a pie chart revenue sources from your business, what would that look like? And then how do you as a business owner, think about the allocation of your time as it relates to that pie chart of where revenue comes from for your business?

RIz Asad: So vast majority is ad revenue for me, and I’d say that’s probably maybe 70% of it, about 20% is probably affiliates and 10% may be sponsorships or licensing or something like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Can you talk about licensing, what that looks like?

RIz Asad: Licensing is when another outlet likes some of your media and they just want to use it again. So last year, I think Google used my Japanese pancakes in one of their promotions on YouTube. I think their Year in Review. And so prior to doing that, they sign a license for you and you get some income from that.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, cool. So the Year in Review video that they do.

RIz Asad: Yeah, and it’s hilarious. The year in search videos, so you could get a license or they would need to get a license to use your stuff before they do.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Is it the Google Year in Search video? That one?

RIz Asad: I believe so, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So if I have it pulled up right now, what was the image?

RIz Asad: I think it was my Fluffy Japanese Pancakes. So you can see them on the first page of my blog on the far right.

Bjork Ostrom: And so Google wanted to use that in the video, and so they reached out to you and said, Hey, can we pay you to use this image? And you’re like, yes, please. What was the search term that was, I actually don’t know. Was it pancakes?

RIz Asad: It was probably pancakes or Japanese pancakes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

RIz Asad: It’s really a blink and you miss it sort of thing. But yeah, it’s there.

Bjork Ostrom: Somewhere, but awesome. That’s a really, really cool thing. And that was just them reaching out. It wasn’t like you had an agent who was shopping that or anything. They just reached out to you.

RIz Asad: Yeah, they reached out to me.

Bjork Ostrom: So ads I think makes sense. People are familiar with that. You talked about using Raptive as your ad provider. How about affiliate? Where are the places that you’re finding the most success with affiliate on your site or social or email?

RIz Asad: Mostly on my sites and mostly just direct. Like Amazon affiliate links have tended to perform the best for me. I’ve tried a couple of other affiliates, not that much success so far, but yeah, still experimenting there. Affiliates is one of those areas I really should work on more, and it is one of the things I want to do more just for the sake of diversifying, but yeah, so far just Amazon affiliate links.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah, a great podcast interview for people to check out and we can refer back to them. We had a conversation with, I think it was one of the founders of URLGenius, another platform would be Genius Link. They both do a similar thing, which is create Amazon deep links, and so especially people who are sharing on social, but even on your site too, I think there’s something to be said about strategically using deep links with an email too, and so that would be a really good one for people to check out. For us too. It’s one of the things that we’re thinking about is how do we be more strategic with affiliate? We had some success with email. We’re starting to experiment with social a little bit, but there’s a huge opportunity there, especially if you’re intentional with curating really great products that are helpful for people and catching people at the right time too, where it’s like people are, it’s one thing to include a pan in a cookie recipe where it’s like people probably have a pan and they might click on it and they might buy, but especially when you get into the world of social, if you can start to share adjacent pieces of content, people are kind of in the buying mindset, and if you are strategic in using some of those deep links, it can be a great tool. And so for us too, we’re thinking a lot about how do we use affiliate strategically where it’s always kind of an after afterthought for us, so love that. I’m curious to hear, you’ve been at it for a decade, been creating for a decade, it sounds like this is what you’re doing full time now. When you kind of describe what your week to week looks like, oh, it’s not. Okay, so you’re doing it in the margins. Tell us about what that looks like to balance that and what that looks like. Do you have a full-time job, part-time job, and how do you continue to do what you’re doing because the site gets hundreds of thousands of page views, you have the success that’s hard to keep that up while also doing other work. So what does that look like?

RIz Asad: It looks like a lot of organization on my part, usually. I’m very fortunate I’ll start with because I can work from home during my full-time job, and that just gives me that little extra time every day, whether that’s in the morning when people would usually be commuting, or in the evenings when people may have to come home and they’re just tired from commute. I get those little extra hours and that really makes all the difference for me and how would I do it? Yeah, it’s really just organizing, really compartmentalizing that time. My wife will tell you that I never left that boat in schools where it’s like, oh, 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM This is exactly what I’m doing. 9:00 AM to 10.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, your schedule’s pretty tight.

RIz Asad: That’s what I’m, yeah. Yeah, my schedule’s pretty tight and I’m not the best at concentrating, so I tend to just sit in a room and work in silence whenever I’m working. So I would say just really concentrating whenever you get those opportunities to do that. I feel like there’s a lot of time that we kind of do unfocused work and it maybe takes a lot longer than it really needs to

Bjork Ostrom: Totally do. Alex Hormozi, does that name sound familiar?

RIz Asad: Yes, it does. Why does it sound familiar though?

Bjork Ostrom: He’s like this kind of those classic business influencers. He talks a lot about sales and marketing and I think generally has some pretty great content, but one of videos that I saw just the other day was his productivity. He’s like, here’s how I stay productive. And he had this little table and he was like, I get up in the morning and I go into a room where there’s no windows. I dim the lights, I put in earplugs, and then after I put in earplugs, I put on headphones and it was over ear headphones. He’s like, I have my laptop. And then he had nicotine gum and then he had coffee, caffeine. He’s like, that’s my productivity routine. And what I do is I go and I sit down and I work until I can’t work anymore, and then I take a break and it’s like, oh, there’s something I kind of appreciate about. Some people are like, I get up and I do a cold plunge and then I visualize the week ahead and I meditate. And for him, he is just like, I just go in a quiet space, shut everything out. I think the other thing you said is turn off all notifications, but to your point, a lot of times what we don’t know how much we can actually get done when we stop and focus and don’t let outside distractions come in and it’s turning off notifications. It’s like putting in headphones or earplugs or noise canceling headphones and just really going heads down and focusing on the thing. We can be extremely productive I think. So, yeah, if we don’t let those outside pieces come in.

RIz Asad: Are you familiar with Cal Newport’s books?

Bjork Ostrom: Yes. He has a book and I’m guessing what you’ll refer to is Deep Work.

RIz Asad: Yes. Well, I was about to,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you tell me, I haven’t read it, but I know of it. Can you tell me have you read it and what were the takeaways from that?

RIz Asad: So it’s been years since I read it, but essentially exactly what you’re saying is that people can be a lot more productive than they give themselves credit for as long as they force themselves to focus on something and he says deep work. I think his main takeaway is that deep work isn’t always necessary, but if you are looking to get a lot done or if, I think he specifically talks about if you’re looking to break the barriers of your industry, you need to focus at that level. And that means just working with just the utmost of concentration, without taking lots of breaks, without having the TV on in the background, which is in the past. It’s something I’ve definitely done and I know it’s really distracted me. I think that’s about it, really.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I feel this the most when I have a task that I’ve maybe been procrastinating on that I come up against and I’m like, I’m just going to do this, and when I do it, it actually takes 10 minutes, 15 minutes. It could be a work task, it could be a home project task, but I think so much of it is just saying, I’m going to do it, commit to doing it, and also knowing what doing it means. I think that’s a huge piece of it is having a workflow that says, Hey, if you come up against an ambiguous task that needs to get done, sometimes we can procrastinate on that. But I think the unlock for me has been, Hey, instead of procrastinating on this because it’s ambiguous, just redefine it and saying the ambiguity is the task. It’s defining what the task is, breaking it into little steps and then taking it from there. And that’s allowed me to feel more confident moving forward is something that’s a little bit squishy and to define it and then to address it in a way where otherwise I’d say, ah, maybe it’s like a maybe tomorrow task and then maybe tomorrow tasks become maybe next year tasks. But instead of it allowing it to become a next year task saying, why don’t I define this, get into the specifics of what this task means, breaking it into micro tasks or projects, and then it becomes a little bit easier to work through. But yeah, Deep Work, that’ll be one that I am going to add it to my Amazon reading list because I think that if we can be people who understand how to do deep work over the next decade, the outcome of that is massive, especially if you think of that and contrast it against a distracted or fragmented or shallow work. And so I often think of this idea that for the knowledge generation, for people who are interacting with information and creating knowledge or creating tools or creating resources, the greatest thing that we can do is be undistracted in our work and to be deep in the work that we’re doing. But man, that’s hard to do.

RIz Asad: It really is. And could I add to that? You were talking about some of the ambiguous things that hold you back, and one of the things I find with creative work especially is that a lot of it is in those ambiguous realms, and we never really know how long something may take to finish or assessing the time requirements of something can be just difficult. You may be working on editing a batch of 10 photos and be like, I could edit these in 10 minutes, but then you get into it and there’s just something off about them and you lose a few hours of your day, maybe full day, and there’s something to be said about that. I think being generous with forgiving yourself for that lost time. It’s something I definitely work on. I find I’ll just get stuck just on a photo or editing or something like, oh, the beat doesn’t drop just here. I need to just edit the whole thing again so that the beat drops right here

Bjork Ostrom: And three hours later,

RIz Asad: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

RIz Asad: Three hours later, no progress, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And there’s something to be said about having a marker. What is your percentage marker? Is it 80%? Is it 90%? So I think some of us will try to get to a hundred percent, but if we’re trying to get to a hundred percent, the amount of content that we’re going to be producing and publishing is going to be far less than if it was 90% and we get to 90%, it’s like, is it good enough and good enough? It’s going to be different for everybody because it can’t be subpar. It can’t be below average because if it’s below average, then it’s not going to stand out. But it also can’t be perfect because if it’s perfect, you’re never going to press publish. And so it feels like one of the skills that we need to develop as content creators is like, what is good enough for us as a creator that we know it’s going to get traction, we know it’s going to resonate. We know it’s maybe not perfect, but it’s going to be enough for us to feel good about pressing publish, and then doing that without fine-tuning around all the little edges of it, which it’s not an easy thing to do. Absolutely. But important, important for sure.

RIz Asad: Perfect is the enemy of good.

Bjork Ostrom: So yes, totally.

RIz Asad: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think that’s a great note to kind of round things out on. You’ve been doing this for a long time. Maybe last question for you, Riz, is for somebody who’s interested in doing something for a decade, doing anything for a decade is really hard, the same job, but especially entrepreneurial pursuit that requires you to show up early mornings, late nights, weekends, what would your advice be for somebody who wants to do a decade of work,

RIz Asad: Pick work you enjoy doing. Well, okay, pick work you enjoy doing one A, one B, pick work that is also profitable when you do it. If it’s not and you just can’t sustain it on a fiscal perspective, it’s just going to get harder and harder to enjoy that, right? Those would be the two things I think that really covers everything in terms of sustaining doing the job.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Yeah, if you can find something that you love doing and get paid for it, that’s a huge, huge win. And that’s so much, that’s why we exist, that’s why we have these conversations is because we want to figure out ways to help people do the work that they love, scale the work that they love, and then get paid for the work that they love. And it’s cool to hear your story and the fact that you’ve been able to do that and have continued to find these new unlocks of success. Even like in looking, seeing that spike in search traffic is so cool to see, and that’s so much of it is showing up every day, figuring out how you can get better. And then along the way, we have these great unlocks, these great wins along the way, and it’s cool to see you having experienced that. So if people want to follow along with what you’re up to, Riz Worth, where can they do that? And we’ll include that in the show notes.

RIz Asad: Best place to find me is chocolatesandchai.com. My email is riz at chocolatesandchai.com. For social media. Like I said, I started this kind of just for fun, so it’s a mix of different handles. My primary handle is why am I so hungry on Instagram? Y for why.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it

RIz Asad: Because that was actually my personal handle and I think that’s where I am on most things. It’s probably on yamIsohungry?

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s awesome. We’ll link to that in the show notes. And ris, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

RIz Asad: Oh, thank you so much for having me. This was fun.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. Since we are kicking off a brand new month, I wanted to update you on what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership for the month of April. If you are not yet a Food Blogger Pro member, remember that you can always head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more about the membership and join us. And if you are already a member, here’s what you’ll see in the membership this coming month on Thursday, April 3rd, we will be publishing a brand new Coaching Call with Carolyn from the social sipper. Next up on Thursday, April 10th, we have a Live Q&A. This Q&A will be with our email expert, Allea from Duett, and we will be talking about creating income from your email list. Last up on Thursday, April 24th, we will be releasing an update to our Quick and Easy Traffic Tips course. As always, there’ll be lots of new conversations in the forum, new activity on the blog, and new podcast episodes every week. We’re really excited about this month and we look forward to seeing you in the membership. Thanks so much for listening to this podcast episode, and we’ll see you again next week.