Diversifying Income Series: Membership Sites with Adam Sobel

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Member Kitchens. Let’s talk about real results. With Member Kitchens, creators, actual food bloggers and social media chefs are adding an average of $2,500 each month to their revenue with some consistently surpassing $10,000. These aren’t hopes or guesses. These are documented numbers from creators transforming their brands into thriving sustainable businesses. Today. How Member Kitchens offers a fully branded platform that looks and feels like you, your recipes, your style, your unique message members get dynamic meal plans, automated shopping lists, and much more. All within an ad-free mobile app they’ll rave about. Getting started is simple. Using AI, Member Kitchens imports your existing recipe library so you can start selling subscriptions quickly. Plus, before you launch, an expert will personally review your app to ensure it’s ready for the spotlight, ready to see results for yourself. Visit MemberKitchens.com today to start your free trial and you can get a special discount by being a listener to our podcast. You can use the promo Code FoodBloggerPro for 50% off the first two months.

Ann Morrissey: Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This is a special one as we’re kicking off our Diversifying Income series where we’ll dive into strategies to help you grow your business through multiple income streams. Today, we’re joined by a truly inspiring entrepreneur, Adam Sobel of Cinnamon Snail. Adam’s journey is one of transformation from running a restaurant to pivoting into successful online cooking classes. After the pandemic, he’s here to share the lessons he’s learned along the way, including how building a loyal community and mastering content marketing helped him thrive in a rapidly changing world. In this episode, Adam reveals the importance of lead magnets, split testing, and using paid ads to attract and convert customers. He also discusses how he scaled his business by diversifying income streams, incorporating his membership site, and automating key processes for steady revenue. We hope you enjoy this episode. If you do, be sure to tune into the rest of the diversifying income series. It’s going to be a great one. Now without further ado, I’ll pass the reins over to Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Adam, welcome to the podcast.

Adam Sobel: It’s delightful to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not just you. It sounds like before we hit record, you said there’s also you have five dogs and a wallaby.

Adam Sobel: I don’t mess around. We do a lot of wildlife rehab stuff and animal rescue stuff, and wallabies are in the United States actually because people eat them. They were being sold as kangaroo burgers by Outback Steakhouse for years. So even though we are vegan, terrible, we’re never going to eat the poor guy. Our license is through the USDA for him and stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s incredible. So in order to have him, the license comes from the USDA, right?

Adam Sobel: That’s right, yeah. I mean, I do not recommend anybody go adopt a while. They are a pain in the butt.

Bjork Ostrom: And I would imagine it’s one of those things where it’s like we have a pet frog, so we have a dog and a frog, a frog named Rice, a dog named Sage, and yesterday our six-year-old daughter was like, why aren’t there vets for frogs? And I was like, oh, there are vets for frogs. They’re just not as common. It’s probably much less common to find a vet for wallabies.

Adam Sobel: Yeah, there’s two vets in the state of New Jersey who can see them and they’re not cheap. So if you’re saving up from your food blog ad revenue, you could pick either go get the Lamborghini you’ve always wanted or you go get a wallaby because that

Bjork Ostrom: Wallaby and you guys decided to do a wallaby, which is great.

Adam Sobel: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: So speaking of income from your food blog, that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. We’re in this series where we talk about diversifying income. One of the great things that you’ve done with your site is you have ad income, but really we’ve talked in the podcast the difference of some people market content and the content is the product. That’s what they’re selling because they get ad revenue and they maybe work with brands. That’s one path. You can go also use content to market products and consulting and services, and you’ve built this kind of pie chart of different revenue sources from your influence online from your following online. So tell me about how that evolved. How did it get started and what does that look like today for you?

Adam Sobel: So I probably, I’m coming at it from the opposite direction from a lot of food blogger pro listeners because a lot of folks have had a food blog and their main thing has been ad and maybe some affiliate revenue for a while. And now that traffic is looking questionable and people are a little bit freaking out about the potential of eventual third-party cookie decimation or what have you, AI people are starting to think about adding digital products. Whereas I was, before the pandemic, I had a very popular food business restaurant and food trucks and stuff like that. And what’s nice is in the 10 years before the pandemic, I had that same domain and I getting back links from the New York Times and all these different things, but I never really did much with my website. It was just where I had the menu for our thing and where people could hit me up for catering. So

Bjork Ostrom: This was Cinnamon Snail.

Adam Sobel: That was CinnamonSnail.com

Bjork Ostrom: And that was a restaurant food truck.

Adam Sobel: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: For business.

Adam Sobel: Totally. And so the pandemic hit and once the dust settled and I closed my business down, I started teaching cooking classes online, live streamed ones. At first I was just selling tickets through Eventbrite, which was relatively an easy way to get set up with it. And then people had been asking me to do a food blog for ages and I never had the time or bandwidth to deal with it, but then I was like, wow, this could really be sort of the top of my funnel attracting all of these people into my world who then potentially get on my email list and sign up for classes and stuff. And so the process I’ve gone about selling has changed quite a bit over the last few years, but basically I only launched my blog a few years ago as sort of that way to acquire new customers.

Bjork Ostrom: Because the business model previously had always been about you have a site, you have a menu. The purpose of it within the context of a restaurant is really like how do you deliver information for people who are maybe looking ahead of time of what they want to order pandemic hits, that world shifts massively. You go into landscape analysis, is that like, Hey, what does the business landscape look like? I have these skills, I have this expertise. What am I going to do with it? And out of that said, Hey, I’m going to do some virtual cooking classes. Is that generally what that season looked like?

Adam Sobel: So I was very fortunate to spend the first year of the pandemic living out the last year of the love of my love dog’s life with her. She had gotten cancer a year or two before the pandemic, and dude, we were going to get married and live in a cottage for we were really besties and she was a messed up dog. She bit people she was going to get put to sleep. So we adopted her and when the pandemic hit, she had gotten surgery and they thought she’s not going to make it or if she does, she’s going to have incontinence for the rest of her life. And so when she made it through that surgery and was then a totally different, much sweeter, less bity dog for the rest of her life, and then the pandemic hit and I no longer had 60 plus employees, I spent so many days just going on super long walks with her and taking some of that time to think about how I wanted to align what I was doing with where I was at now as a person. It was very different from where was when I started a food business and I have two teenage and adult aged kids and I want to prioritize stuff other than working 90 hours a week inside of a restaurant And above that because I do consulting work for a lot of other restaurants and food manufacturers and stuff like that. I was just getting this vibe that man, this is the riskiest time to be in retail food service ever between supply chain issues and how difficult and expensive it is to find qualified staff. And ultimately my goal is to help people stop eating animals. And that’s what kind of drives me with having a food business in the first place. And because I had been teaching at some culinary schools before the pandemic, it was just a very natural progression to like, well, I can still help people not eat animals this way. And there’s no real risk about it. It’s not like if flour goes up another 30 cents a pound, I can’t pay my bills or something. So that was kind of the progression into that teaching online stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. And so through that, your mission, your vision, the heart for what you’re doing didn’t change but almost like the canvas for which the business was painted on did previously it was retail restaurant, same mission, but looked at that world and said maybe this isn’t a good fit moving forward both from a macro industry perspective but also for you personally.

Adam Sobel: Yeah, I mean that stuff is exhausting. It’s like a thankless job and I mean it’s not a thankless job. We were very, very lucky to get a lot of love throughout the run of that business, but I mean there’s probably no shortage of one star Yelp reviews for days that I had worked a 20 hour day and put a lot of care and love into. It’s just how that goes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think anybody who has gone through that experience of building something over a decade like you did to the point you have 60 employees, it’s a successful business, you’re working really hard, the idea of reinventing yourself or business seems really daunting. How did you do that? How did you start from not zero from skills or expertise or even business experience, but it’s in some ways starting from zero in a new area of business and building that up.

Adam Sobel: It’s kind of just a different dimension of the same business. And I’ll be honest, I barely crawled out high school alive. I’m mad dumb and I don’t think I could do a lot of things. Even a lot of things that I think are in my industry. I do culinary consulting for restaurants and food manufacturers, but not at the level that somebody who really needs food science degrees needs to be at and really deep understanding of automated food manufacturing systems. I have a very rough understanding of that. And so even those jobs, which are kind of the bottom line of what I would need to keep my family afloat on, even those are kind of out of my league. So it was like, do I bet on myself or do I try to really reinvent myself and do some whole other thing? And what I reflected on in my long walks with my dogs is that I am still really passionate about helping prevent avoidable harm to animals. And this is one skill I can share with people that if I believe in myself about it, I can kind of create this new business online around that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. So tell me about those first few customers. So you start to do these classes, you’re teaching online, you’re selling through Eventbrite. How did those first few customers come in and then how has the business evolved since then?

Adam Sobel: So I mean, as you know, first of all, during the pandemic people were something to do online, sign me up. It wasn’t really that hard. And then we had a very loyal customer base. There was a year, I think it was 2014, we were the number one highest rated place of any kind to eat in New York City on Yelp. And we had amassed this very loyal following. And so the first couple classes I did, there were a lot of people signed up. I think the second class I did, I maybe made 10 grand on it, which was awesome. But I didn’t have an email list. I didn’t really, I just pushed it out to social media pretty much, which I kind of suck at to be honest. Social media is like I am from the old social media when you could put something up and you had a MySpace account.

Bjork Ostrom: Just like me.

Adam Sobel: Yes, you can find me on Tribe.net

Bjork Ostrom: And I think you’re probably being humble, but because obviously you did something that really resonated with people, you created a restaurant, a culture, a community that people felt they wanted to be a part of that they were interested in and that’s a really hard thing to do. So I feel like you’re obviously being humble, but it’s a really incredible thing that translates different places, social being an example, this community wanting to support you and what you’re doing there. My guess is that first time that you did that class, you make $10,000 that feels different probably than profit of $10,000 within a restaurant just in terms of, I dunno, you would know better than I would, but my guess is it was a moment of like, wow, this is interesting. Was that a pivotal moment for you around a new world that you could potentially access?

Adam Sobel: Yeah, I mean I also really did not know what I was doing when I first started thinking about doing it. I was like, man, I got to figure out how to have more than one camera and switch between cameras and I wanted to at least get it looking halfway decent and luckily there’s a whole generation of 10-year-old boys who think they want to grow up to have the world watch them play video games out there who are all spending their time making tutorials for you on YouTube on how to do live streaming, how to do multicam setup, how to deal with lighting for, so I binged really hard on all of that sort of material to at least get some basic setup and then it’s evolved a lot as I’ve gone, I now incorporate OBS into my kind of workflow where I can do all kinds of overlays and bring up the ingredients written on the screen and all kinds of sexy stuff like that. But OBS being OBS is, I think it stands for Open Source Broadcast System or something like that. It’s free open-source software. It I guess competes with, what is it, Stream, Stream labs. There’s a couple other Stream Deck. That Stream deck is the controller that that Elgato makes for that that you can kind of pre-program with different buttons anyway. It’s a very powerful free software that you can load up with different plugins for doing all kinds of different transitions and having different intermission screens or what have you. But more than that production side of things, what’s changed over time is how I go about acquiring new customers and selling to them and stuff like that.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that is a really interesting topic where that touches on that idea of content as marketing for a product and it diverges from a lot of the conversations that we normally have, which is marketing content, which isn’t bad, but the idea of marketing content is Pinch of Yum. The food and recipe site that we have that my wife Lindsay publishes to, she’s, what she’s thinking about is how do I market this content? We’re not as often thinking about how do we use the content to market a product unless it’s maybe a brand partnership or we’re doing meal plans or something like that. But usually it’s thinking about how do we market the content In your case, my guess is a lot of the content that you’re producing, you’re thinking about how do I create this content to market my product? Can you talk about what that looks like and even how you approach and think about content as you talked about your site being top of funnel for you and what that looks like?

Adam Sobel: Well, I mean first of all, just like anyone else with a food blog, I am trying to bring in traffic generally just because if I can convert a certain percentage of those people onto my email list, it’s easy for me to put them into automated sequences to pitch them some of my most popular classes or even slightly more slick things than that. One example is you hear people like Matt Molen speak about having these kind of more specific lead magnets for different categories, right? It makes sense that if somebody’s looking at a Thai recipe on your blog, they might be more interested in some kind of Thai lead magnet. But what I’ve done is I’ve created a whole opt-ins for every possible category on my site and then each one is a sequence that offers a discounted rate on a recorded relevant class to that topic. So somebody might opt-in for my five top Thai recipes, which is going to come out over five days, and during that time they’re also going to be getting pitched through those emails like a 50% off discount of a recorded Thai cooking class I have. And even though it might be a very low ticket sale, I’ve created a lot of order bumps and upsells so that the average person who purchases that is also tacking on a few other things. Sometimes somebody will go through one of those opt-ins and I wake up and it’s like somebody spent $200 on that or whatever,

Bjork Ostrom: Which those are fun emails to get. I don’t know if you get the actual emails for those. Can you talk about, do you have an idea of when you talk about top of funnel, how many people percentage-wise sign up for email, do you have a sense for how many percentage-wise end up purchasing after they sign up for email?

Adam Sobel: Not holistically enough. It is definitely time for me to set up UTM tracking in a much slicker looker studio kind of dashboard to see based on acquisition source, what the conversions are like right now I’m not really analyzing it that deeply. I can see, I can go in and see what tags the person has and whatever, but I couldn’t you based on the specific source, what the conversion rate is and stuff like that.

Bjork Ostrom: But if you had to guess, let’s say a hundred people sign up for the email list, how many of those, if you had to guess, would be people that would convert to paid one out of a hundred, two out a hundred?

Adam Sobel: It’s super depends. I would guess it’s under 1% taking into account things like print pass signups and save this recipe because it’s just such a different user intent. I do pitch to those people and something I’ve gotten a lot slicker in the last year about is split testing the way I pitch to those people, which has been really fun. I kind of really enjoy that data-driven decision side of this type of marketing. So in ConvertKit, which is what I use for email, it’s not really so well suited out of the box to do split testing. Pretty much all they allow is the subject line split testing on broadcasts, but there are clever, weird wacky ways you can split the incoming flow of people in an automation and put them into two different sequences and one of them has one offer, one of them has another offer or they both have the same offer and it’s positioned slightly differently. So kind of one of my reoccurring tasks every month is to check in on those split tests and kind of pick my winners and keep on optimizing and tweaking all those different parts of the funnel.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s really cool. So let’s say it’s somebody who just signs up for the generic email list. What you’re saying is ConvertKit’s not great at offering AB testing, but you could split that initial group and then they would each go into their own respective funnels that would be a little bit different and at the end of it you’d be able to see which one performed better. Do you have an example of how to

Adam Sobel: Bend the system? Yeah, one way of doing it is you create a condition that looks at the time they set up as a binary and whether it’s an odd or even second that they signed up or entered the automation from, you can create a little filter within your automation and then branch it off like, okay, if it’s odd seconds or even seconds they go to this or that different part of the automation.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. And then you see, I love that. So you see then they split, you look at the performance of those, the one that wins after a certain amount of time performs better, probably becomes the new number one in the box and it’s like then all the other tests have to see if they can beat them out and it stays there. You run another test and you continue to run that until that one beats it out and then that goes in the

Adam Sobel: Number. Well yeah, and sometimes it’s not like at the end of every month you have a clear winner, you really want to have enough traffic go through both of those and enough conversions happen in each of them to statistically see some. Your decision is not just going to be a shot-in-the-dark type of thing. If only a hundred people pass through both branches and one has four sales and one has three sales, it’s kind of hard to say, but if you’ve got 3000 people through each side of that, it’s a little bit clearer, which is the winner.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. Then are you doing all of the product sales within Kit? Is that what you’re using for your commerce or what are you using?

Adam Sobel: I don’t use Kit for, the only thing I use Kit for is occasionally some fundraising thing. I’ve asked for help from my subscribers before. If one of my animals has an insane vet bill that is going to sink our family and people will throw us some cash about something like that, which is really sweet. Or I used it for, our friends just lost their house in LA to those fires and stuff, so we raised money that way. But no, I use SamCart as kind of my sales engine, which is for those of you guys who don’t know, it’s kind of like I would say the main competitor is ClickFunnels or maybe thrivecart primarily a checkout system. You can use it as a page builder for actually making sales pages though it’s not great for it, but where it is great is for embeddable checkouts that you can plug into WordPress or wherever else and give yourself kind of a whole flow where if somebody is looking at this product, it’s going to suggest these other relevant products as kind of order bumps they can grab and then if they purchase it, you can have it go to an upsell page that offers them a free trial of my membership or whatever. So yeah, that’s what I use for the actual sales.

Bjork Ostrom: So Kit is obviously emails are going into, their funnels are happening there or automations I guess people are getting tagged sending out broadcasts there. You were saying with the only transactional thing you do with Kit is hey, we have this fundraiser or raising help for a friend who lost their house in la. Otherwise you’re sending people to your products on SamCart, so you’re still using kit to email

Adam Sobel: Kit is not terrible. I mean it will do the job if somebody is already using ConvertKit and they don’t have the budget for adding some kind of sales system to their world, it could do the job, but I don’t think it allows you to add order bumps and things like that and those upsells and all that you can tack onto a product is really what makes the difference in average order value. And once you have a higher average order value than just your base product, that’s when you can really pour fuel on the fire and run Facebook ads to a class or whatever, which can be an incredible, if nothing else, an incredible way to build your email list because you can have a cheap product I do every year, like a vegan January program, a month long kind of vegan cooking program that’s all sent out by email other than an office hour session I do for that and it’s like pay what you want. People take it for as little as a dollar and some people pay more and then they tack on all these bundles that I have and it makes it so that even though somebody could potentially pay a dollar for it, the average order value of that is like $37 a person. So if you know what the average person is spending, it’s much clearer to be able to know what you can pay to still profitably acquire a customer through paid advertising or whatever.

Bjork Ostrom: And is that something that you’re also doing is paid advertising as a part of Yeah. Can you talk about that? Because that’s another thing that is really a mindset shift when you’re only used to thinking about organic traffic acquisition. How do I get more people to my site, make money from ads or sponsors to then say, actually in your case, I know that on average people pay $38, so if I can get a customer and pay $30 for them, you could do that all day long.

Adam Sobel: Yeah, you

Bjork Ostrom: Could do it on repeat

Adam Sobel: You’re just printing money at that point.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So talk about what you’ve learned in that process, having a product that you can attach a dollar amount to and then running ads against that.

Adam Sobel: Alright, what I can tell you about is that Facebook is always elusive. It’s always shifting and changing and an ad that works great for three weeks can all of a sudden just kind of fatigue and you have to experiment with new creatives or whatever to find something that works. One thing that really helped me a lot is this method that this marketer named Josh Coffy teaches and he has this program called the Ad Lab method. He has a podcast called E-Commerce Alley, which is great for anyone who wants to learn about Facebook advertising, but he teaches this method in his course. That’s basically a testing method where before you actually make a live ad that you’re running to a sales page, you make a ton of different variations on it and you test each part of the ad kind of on its own, not as a sales campaign, but as a traffic campaign, which is the only time you’d ever want to run an ad like that on Facebook or Instagram where, and you set a very low threshold, you don’t want any of these variations to spend more than a couple dollars each. And so you’ll do, each one will be the same picture with 20 different headlines and then the same headline with 20 different pictures and the same picture and headline with six or eight different primary texts. And then you find which ones give you the highest outbound click through rate and then kind of combine them and be like, Hey, that picture or video with this headline and this primary text is going to give me the highest outbound click through rate. Then you have something a little bit more scientific to work with rather than just like, that’s the nice thing about digital marketing. It’s not like the old days where you’ve got to guess what to put up on a billboard and hopefully you said the right hook or had the right picture and there’s no real way to know if it could have been better this way you can do all these short little tests, find the winning thing, and then what’s going to give you the best bang for your buck in Facebook advertising. But yeah, it’s always changing. One thing that’s really changed in the last year or so is they came out with what’s called Advantage plus shopping campaigns, which I think they just recently changed the name of to something very similar, but it’s their kind of AI-powered, just trust us and we’ll try to find you customers. And it works, at least for right now, it works really well. It works because before then I was really had to learn how to create Facebook look alike audiences of previous purchasers or different demographics and stuff and it’s made it, it’s kind of putting people who are in the ad buying space out of a job a little bit. It works at least for right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so in that case, let’s say you have the vegan January you could go to Facebook and you could give it some general media assets. It would take those and create campaigns and those would kind of run in the background and then you’d be able to go in and look and see here’s how much I’m paying in Facebook ads. And are you also able within Facebook then to see how much you’re paying per acquisition? Are you using a confirmation page in SamCart as the success variable within that campaign?

Adam Sobel: Yeah, I mean, well Facebook has their Pixel thing, which makes it very easy to track what the row as the return on ad spend is because you can see actually not just when there’s a conversion, but what the value of that conversion is. If somebody paid a dollar or paid $200, you can kind of see. But the other thing that works super, super good is driving paid traffic to something that’s free, some type of lead magnet that has a trip wire offer on the thank you page. And you can still do that the same way. You can still have Facebook or Instagram track those conversions that happen kind of on the back end. And I do that for, I do a vegan Thanksgiving program every year that’s totally free, but there’s a bundle you can purchase on the thank you page and I think this past year 7,000 people signed up for that program. So that was 7,000 new people on my email list that were free because I made my money back on the thank you page. And then later in that program I did a free live cooking class, like a prep along with me for Thanksgiving type of class that at the end of, I pitched them a small discount on my membership and that’s where I really made my money on that funnel. I made the acquisition side of it cover the cost of those new people onto my list, but where I really made my money is through the membership, which is potentially recurring revenue. If you do a good job with your membership, those are people who now are going to be paying you every month or once a year, a big chunk or whatever, and that’s nice. That makes for a much more sustainable revenue stream because it doesn’t fluctuate as much month to month. No matter how popular the classes I teach in a given month, I always have the hundred plus people in my membership who are ultimately paying for that class.

Bjork Ostrom: Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. We know that developing testing and publishing a blog around food can get costly, which is where Cookie Finance comes in. Did you know you can write off ingredients like flour, butter, and chocolate chips that you’re using to produce content? Cookie Finance specializes in helping content creators like you maximize tax savings while handling all your bookkeeping, quarterly tax payments and personal and business tax returns. Plus they’ll help you uncover deductions you might be overlooking, whether it’s kitchen tools, camera equipment, ingredients, or even your Food Blogger Pro membership. So you never miss out on savings month-to-month plans with no long-term commitments. Cookie Finance makes managing your taxes and finances simple so that you can focus on what matters most, creating amazing content ready to start saving. Book a free consultation with Cookie Finance today by going to cookiefinance.co and clicking on the book and intro call button. A couple of questions with that because there’s a lot to talk about. Number one, so you’re talking about a lot of marketing stuff and it sounds like you kind of got into this in 2020, 2021. I’m curious to know your information acquisition process, because you’ve done a lot and learned a lot in three, four, maybe five years around running an online business and while also producing content, doing the classes. What has raising a wallaby, how would you recommend other people who want to not only learn a thing but then do a thing? What has your process and mindset been with that over the last few years?

Adam Sobel: I mean, so it’s twofold. One is really giving myself the room to play with it and try things and sometimes it sucks. Sometimes my sale page is gone, dude, if I look back at my original sales pages, I started first building after I stopped selling on Eventbrite. They’re like terrible looking. They’re really hard to read and they’re not really to the point and they took me a long time to make them and stuff. And so part of it’s just like it’s through getting your reps in and experimenting and seeing what works and doesn’t work. And then as far as learning it, there’s tons of killer resources for a little while. I was part of your paid membership of Food Blogger Pro before my blog.

Bjork Ostrom: Great, appreciate the shout out.

Adam Sobel: Yeah. It was super helpful. And we’re lucky that our industry, not just blogging but online business, there’s tons of killer podcasts and resources out there that it’s really easy to chain smoke that now every week I publish five recipes a week to my blog, which is crazy and I batch it. There’s one day of the week where I’m just in my kitchen doing food photography for 12 hours and I put on tons of podcasts and I listen to that while I’m doing food photography.

Bjork Ostrom: Is that primary or one of the primary forms is podcasts? Like podcasts? It sounds like YouTube.

Adam Sobel: YouTube less so I definitely listen to my share of podcast. I mean, do you want me to mention a few of them?

Bjork Ostrom: That’d be great. That’d be helpful. Great. Yep. If you could mention

Adam Sobel: One Person who is awesome is this lady Gillian Perkins who has, she did a YouTube course and then she created a whole course and membership thing around selling stuff online and she has a very actionable, helpful podcast. A lot of these podcasts you got to sift through the weeds because a lot of them, it’s a lot of fluff and it’s a lot of people selling some snake oil or whatever, but there are some great ones in there. Gillian Perkins one is awesome. Who else is super good about funnel-y stuff? Some of the stuff that Russell Brunson from ClickFunnels puts out is good, but he’s also, he talks like a mile a minute and you’ve got to drink mad coffee to keep up with that flow.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one where you don’t put the podcast player on 1.5.

Adam Sobel: You can’t do it. You’ll have an aneurysm for sure. No, there’s really some good podcasts. There’s some good courses out there as well. But yeah, I mean I just kind of look at it as lots of different pieces. I’ll try to focus on who I can learn the best landing page optimization stuff from and who I can learn the best email marketing stuff from and the best copywriting related stuff from, and it’s just lots of little pieces. The ads are a whole other piece that I just went to the ad experts to learn that stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of the things I’ve started to get better at specifically with listening to podcasts is not coming into it with a show in mind, but coming into it with a problem in mind and searching within the podcast app, which it sounds like you’ve done around what the thing is that I’m trying to learn and then building a cue and then listening through that, your idea of chain-smoking, certain categories or topics. I love that idea because I think too often I get caught, this would be for everybody, take this advice other than the Food Blogger Pro podcast, continue to subscribe and listen to every Food Blogger Pro podcast or else. But to listen through categories has been helpful for me lately. And I think that’s a great little takeaway for a shift in how you can consume information. The second piece that I was curious about is you mentioned your membership. Can you talk a little bit about that? And we’ve talked a lot about the importance of community, how it’s a great way to create a defensible business from AI-generated content and all the benefits that can come from community. How do you facilitate that? Is there a tool that you use for that? Tell us a little bit about what you’ve learned from building a community in a membership.

Adam Sobel: Yeah, my membership, I really first started offering it not long after I started selling classes online. And initially all it was was a discounted subscription to my live classes. And during your membership period, whatever live classes happened during that time, you got it for a little cheaper. You were paying either a monthly or yearly plan and towards the end of 2023 was it? Yeah, I was thinking about how helpful that recurring revenue really is. You don’t have to keep acquiring those customers. Some of those people have now spent thousands of dollars with me over time. And so I thought for the sake of having better retention, always the issue with any kind of recurring revenue business is you want to retain those customers as long as you can. Otherwise you are always filling the bucket up as it’s leaking out or whatever. And so I wanted to make a much better experience for my members that was more than just a discount to my classes. It’s very easy for you to then be like, I’m too busy for this now let me move on to something else, or let me cut that bill or whatever. So I made my membership better two different ways. One was that now in addition to you having access to whatever classes has happened during your membership, all of my recorded classes are in a massive library that you can access. And there’s a learning roadmap I’m creating to help direct people through that material in a way that’s actually helpful to them, where it’s helping them tackle fundamental cooking problems that will make them a more effective vegan cook. And when I say effective, I mean something that you can tangibly measure in that our goal, our purpose in the membership is to help spread vegan cooking, not just getting better at cooking, but getting so much better that the families of the people who are in my membership and their coworkers are getting turned on to really impressive vegan food that could potentially make them more open-minded about not eating animals anymore. So I created this huge resource library and then I’ve kind of built it out in Mighty Networks, which is, it’s like a membership software. It’s similar to Circle if you know circle, they’re almost indistinguishable from one another as softwares. There’s other ways to do it. And before I had it on Mighty Networks, it was just this thing with email tagging that I was doing, but I just thought it wasn’t a great experience and it didn’t give people the community platform to connect with each other. And I really love to see that in my membership. People learning from each other and sharing what they’re struggling with or what they’re working on and are proud of. So that’s where I do that now.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I have a friend, Daryl, who’s gotten involved with Mighty Networks, and so I’ve gotten to know what they’re doing a little bit more. So give me an overview of when your business, right now, you talked about membership, talked about ads, talked about product, you also do consulting. What does that pie chart look like? Is there one that you view as kind of the leading north star within the business that I barking dogs? Yeah, that might be the cue for your editor. No, we can keep it in. It adds good, good adds good background, realistic background.

Adam Sobel: Alright. So catering and culinary consulting are big for me and the SEO benefit of having this huge traffic source from my blog post. It really has had a very profoundly positive effect on acquiring more catering and consulting clients. And it’s also given them a place where when they land on my site, they see, oh, you do all these different kinds of food and wow, your food looks really beautiful in a way that a lot of other caterers and consultants don’t have that vast of a library of stuff on display. So those still remain to be the hugest because I could do a culinary consulting job for somebody that’s like a hundred thousand dollars creating a whole menu for a restaurant and creating SOPs for their staff to follow the execution of it. So that can be really super good. It’s not like every day that I get a job like that though. Hold on one second.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, you’re good.

Adam Sobel: I got Border Collies. That’s my weakness in life. And this time of day when the sun’s coming through my windows, I have this one really quirky border collie who chases the shadows and this is the time she’s going to start getting nuts

Bjork Ostrom: Activated. Okay.

Adam Sobel: Sorry. What was the question? Oh, consulting? Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah, the kind of breakdown of things. So consulting and catering are really big. I do a lot less catering now on purpose than I used to do because I used to cater three weddings a weekend sometimes. And now I really do a very customized approach to my catering and it’s a much higher ticket kind of catering, and I have a much higher minimum guest count. So I only do very large weddings and corporate events, and I do five or six of them a year and I’m great with that. I don’t want to be doing more than that. But between that and the catering consulting, that’s a huge piece of the pie. Then the classes and membership, they fluctuate a little bit right now on a good month they’re like, I might do 14 grand in that and on a less good month I could do as little as maybe 6,500 bucks on it or something like that.

Bjork Ostrom: But the thing that I want to point out that’s so great about that is, and you can tell me if this feels accurate, it feels like a really great balance between recurring, somewhat predictable. It’s not passive because it requires a lot of work, it requires a lot of effort, but it’s a little bit more of this idea of shoveling coal into the engine of a train. It’s work, you do it, but after it picks up speed, you have some momentum with it, momentum with the content.

Adam Sobel: Oh, for sure. And especially with a lot of automation and especially if you choose to not do things the way I’m doing it. If you do, rather than doing live classes all the time, if you build out a couple very good purpose built courses, you do some market research and really find a problem that you can solve for people, maybe it’s freezer prepped meals or maybe it’s how to cook for somebody with this type of medical condition or whatever is your area of expertise and you just build a one and done thing or maybe a couple little courses and stuff. That’s very something you could get automated and have part of your email flows and you’re not constantly launching and doing new things. I just love overcomplicating stuff for myself as much as humanly possible. It was no different with my restaurants. It was super hyper-complicated, more than necessary. I’m just really into as much chaos as I can possibly handle. But yeah, you could do it in a much more sane way that makes it so you could be in Sicily in a pistachio gelato while the money comes in, but I’m just about that hard work.

Bjork Ostrom: But the other thing with it that you are able to do is you’re able to, and I was at a conference once and somebody talked about this where he was talking about as people who have businesses, we need to be thinking about not only what are the singles and doubles, but what does a grand slam look like? And I think for a lot of us, us being food creators, we’re pretty good at singles and doubles like, Hey, we are slowly incrementally building traffic. We’re monetizing that via ads. Maybe we have some affiliate income that comes in. But what you’ve also layered in is some of these grand slam pieces where you talk about these consulting gigs that you can get. And I think there are opportunities for us within our existing audiences to have those really outsized outcomes from our expertise and our knowledge that we could deliver to somebody if we wanted to create some type of package or offering around that. And so you have this great combination of both of those things. You have the recurring piece with membership, with ads, with the automations that you’ve created that allow for this baseline to come in, but you also have some of these offerings above and beyond that with the consulting or which it sounds like you can still use your existing audience to market to those people to some degree, or not necessarily,

Adam Sobel: It’s different.

Bjork Ostrom: Catering is probably different.

Adam Sobel: And so is consulting because the audience for that are culinary professionals and really food industry people.

Bjork Ostrom: How are those people coming in? Is it through your industry connections?

Adam Sobel: There’s some degree of word of mouth by now because I was doing culinary consulting long before I had a blog and long before the pandemic. But I would just let that come to me. If somebody emailed me and was like, Hey, I need help setting up a food truck, or I need help launching a vegan product line of this thing that we’re already selling, I would take those on, but I never even had a consulting page on my website until during the pandemic and now it trickles in and 80% of the requests are kind of not worth my time. It’s people who they have a fantasy of one day doing a thing and they just want to pick somebody’s brains. But I’ve kind of figured out how to filter out the noise and I try to be helpful to everybody. I was also one of those people once upon a time not knowing what the heck I was doing, starting up some food business. And I’m happy to get on the phone with somebody for half an hour and give them some kind of nice mentoring in the right direction. But yeah, it just comes in kind of organically through people googling recipe development or whatever are the kind of keywords they’re finding me for.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. And it’s a great example too of the skills around a recipe posts publishing that SEO, getting traffic there also applies to when you’re trying to build out landing pages for consulting or for vegan restaurants, that same concept still applies. The nice thing is the competition is a lot lower than vegan chocolate chip cookie when it’s vegan restaurant consulting. Or maybe it’s not, I guess I don’t know, but that would be my assumption.

Adam Sobel: Probably the search volume is considered, it’s also less two, but it’s just a different business and I think they work very harmoniously with each other. So yeah, I’m glad to be doing it is keeping me doing lots of fun, creative stuff I love, and it’s keeping me snuggling with dogs more than it is keeping me in HR conversations with 60 employees, which I also love.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is mission accomplished. Yes. And the great thing about this conversation is it’s such a good example of diversifying income and this series that we’re working through right now is thinking about, okay, if we are good at creating content, building an audience, capturing attention, the question is always then what do we do with it? There are a lot of different things that we can do with it. You’ve demonstrated lots of different ways that you can direct that attention, whether it be consulting classes, membership, or even just the advancement of a mission, which is what I hear kind of as a through line for what you’re doing is the mission of how do we encourage and spread the good word about eating vegan in order to encourage people to eat less animals. And that is a huge part of what we do as well with the audience that we have is spread the word around the things that we care about. So Adam, it was awesome to talk to you. Really appreciate you coming on.

Adam Sobel: Good time for me too. I’m so glad we talked so extensively about Darryl Strawberry. I think his Wikipedia page is like blowing up right now. We got it done, Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: We got it done. We’ll link to it in the show notes for sure. Adam, if people want to follow up with you, if they want to connect with you, what’s the best way to do that?

Adam Sobel: So you could go on my website, it’s called snopes.com. It’s a cinnamonsnail.com, and you could send me an email the old fashioned way.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it.

Adam Sobel: A carrier pigeon.

Bjork Ostrom: And send you a message on MySpace. That would be the last one.

Adam Sobel: Yeah. Myspace.com. I’m still there. Only guy left.

Bjork Ostrom: I might still have a MySpace. Maybe I’ll do that after this as login to see if I still have it.

Adam Sobel: Yeah. It’s going to be our five big group chat will be the only ones then there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’ll be a new thing, a new marketing channel. Thanks, Adam. Really appreciate it. Super fun. Have a marvelous day. Thanks.

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. Thank you so much for listening and tuning in today. I wanted to chat a little bit more about one of the perks of the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you likely already know about these, but maybe you’re a new member or you’re thinking about becoming a member. And I just wanted to let you know about one of my favorite things in the membership. Every month we host a Live Q&A over Zoom with an industry expert and usually Bjork. They chat about topics ranging from republishing content to Google, algorithm updates, Pinterest or advanced SEO. Sometimes we’ll do an Ask Bjork anything or even questions about creating content plugins, site speed. Really, we cover every topic you might need to know something about as a food creator, as a Food Blogger Pro member, you’re given the option to submit questions in advance or you can submit questions during the Live Q&A and the guest and Bjork will answer your questions and provide feedback. It’s always a really awesome opportunity to get advice and feedback from experts in the food creator community, and it’s just a really fun way to connect as members and get to know each other better these Q&As are hosted live. But we always post replays on our site and for our members only podcast if you can’t make it live. So anyways, it’s just a really great feature of the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you aren’t yet a member, and this sounds like something you would like access to, head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more. And that’s it for this week. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Make it a great week.