Achieving Quiet Success as a Six-Figure Food Creator with Elizabeth Emery

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: Are you a food blogger looking to boost your site’s visibility? With Yoast SEO Premium, you can optimize your blog for up to five keywords per page, ensuring higher rankings and more traffic. You can enjoy AI-generated SEO titles and meta descriptions, automatic redirects to avoid broken links. I love that feature and real-time, internal linking suggestions. Plus take advantage of Yoast AI Optimize, which is their latest AI-driven feature. A simple click provides you with actionable suggestions that help move your SEO score closer to that green traffic light, which we all love so much. It’ll streamline your process and reduce manual tweaks. Additionally, you can get social media previews and 24/7 premium support. Now here’s the wonderful thing for Food Blogger Pro listeners. Yost is offering an exclusive 10% discount. You can upgrade your blog’s SEO game today with Yoast SEO Premium. Use the Code Food Blogger 10 at checkout. Again, that’s FoodBlogger10, the number ten one zero at checkout for that 10% discount.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are chatting with Elizabeth Emery from the Food Blog Vancouver with Love. Elizabeth first started blogging in 2015 as a side hustle and then took her sight full-time. In 2018, Elizabeth shares more about the burnout that she experienced in 2021 and how she really fell out of love with her job. She talks about how she worked with a business coach to adjust certain parts of her business that she wasn’t happy with, and how leaning into the joy in her business helped her both find renewed excitement about her job, but also helped her business to grow. She chats about the importance of adjusting her sources of revenue and prioritizing passive income, how qualifying for an ad network has really transformed how she thinks about her business and how she’s worked to grow her income for her blog to a six-figure business This year, Elizabeth also talks about what quiet success means for her and why you don’t need TV appearances or cookbook deals to have a successful career as a food creator.

I really enjoyed editing this episode and love the perspective that Elizabeth brings to food blogging and think you will too. Without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Elizabeth, welcome to the podcast.

Elizabeth Emery: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s an honor.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Whenever we do a podcast, we do a little bit of a check-in before and talk about some of the things that we’re going to talk about and all of the things that we recapped as we kind of built the agenda. They’re all things that I’m really excited to talk about because I think they’re important topics for a variety of reasons. We’re going to be talking about money and making a sustainable income. We’re going to be talking about burnout. We’re going to be talking about diversification of revenue sources, quiet success, that phrase that you used, but I want to start is 2021, because it sounds like that was a season for you where you had been blogging, publishing, building this business for at that point, maybe six years, seven years. You’d been at it a while, is that right?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, less full-time. I’ve been doing the blog from about 2015, 16, but full time end of 2018. Okay,

Bjork Ostrom: Great. At that one. So you’d been working on it side hustle initially and then full time, and it sounds like that was a season where you, in your words were burnt out. What did that look like? What did that feel like? Tell us about that season in 2021.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, I mean, it was awful. There’s no other word for it really. Obviously, we were still going through the pandemic, so there was sort of lockdowns in place, but by that time, I think it’s safe to say the novelty of lockdown had well and truly worn off for most of us

Bjork Ostrom: That first month. It’s like, we’re going to get so much done. Everybody’s going to exercise, it’s going to be a great thing, can watch day. Yeah. Now it’s like, oh, I just want to hang out with my friends and not feel weird about it and wonder if everybody’s okay.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah. So by that point, I think as many of us did, I’d just sort of really gone hard into work and had got to this point where I’ve realized I was waking up in the morning, just dreading the day, and that is just a horrible place to be literally waking up thinking, oh, I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to shoot this content, got to do this on Instagram, got to do this for a client, and I’d basically just completely fallen out of love with the job, I think, and it looked very different to me to what it does now. My business has changed somewhat, but it was the worst feeling I could see. I was getting sort of depressed with all of it, and yeah, the best way I can encapsulate it though was literally waking up in the morning, dreading it, not wanting to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: What do you think you were dreading? Can you pinpoint the things in your day that you were dreading or was it just kind of this general sense of dread?

Elizabeth Emery: I think it was both, to be honest. I think it was a general sense of dread, and then I think there were elements of my business that just weren’t working for me, and

It wasn’t further on that we’ll come to until I started working with a business coach that I realized it was a wake-up call for me to just adjust those parts of my business that I wasn’t happy with. I was putting too much energy into certain parts, like freelance recipe developments for clients and stuff, and it wasn’t my work. It wasn’t giving me the same sense of creative fulfillment. And I think the business coach I work with now, she’s brilliant, and she has this phrase where she says, if you are feeling burnt out, it’s always a sign that something isn’t working in your business, whether that’s a specific area that you’re giving more time to or whether it’s just something you need to stop doing altogether, not necessarily, but that for me, there were definite areas that I wasn’t enjoying, and I think Instagram, for example, was becoming a big drag by that point. It was relentless back then it was. You’d be posting every day or I was, and it was just hard to keep on top of it. I basically felt like a hamster on a wheel at that.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you feel like at that point, part of it was you felt like you had to, it was a thing you have to do and other people are doing it, and so this is what I have to do. What was it that kept you doing it? If the thing was making you feel dread or a certain level of like, oh, this is really depressing, or I am depressed doing this work, what was the driving force behind it to keep you doing it? Well,

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, I think as you say, there is definitely an element of that’s what you think, that’s what you have to do. That’s what everyone else is doing, so surely I must have to do that as well. Therefore I will do it. This is just how it’s done. I think also at that point, my business wasn’t particularly sustainable. My income was very low from it, hadn’t discovered ad revenue at that point. I was quite late to the party with that, so I was really sort of focused on sponsored content and then freelance recipe development, both of which very labor intensive, you’re, there’s no passive income there. It’s you’re exchanging your time for income, and I think that

Bjork Ostrom: Every month is a blank slate. You have to show up, you have to earn it. There’s no kind of foundational layer of recurring. It’s up and down with ad revenue, but there’s no base level of like, yeah, I know generally speaking, I might earn a couple thousand dollars this month, and then you can layer on additional things on top, which that feels different than if I don’t earn any money from sponsored content this month, then I don’t earn any money.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, a hundred percent. You’re really having to hustle and put yourself out there and do it, and I think if someone’s not been in that experience before, it’s exhausting. It’s really exhausting, and there’s no element of being able to coast at all. Not that we coast, but with ad revenue, it is kind of passive in a way, and you can take a month off and probably terrible things aren’t going to happen. You’ll still have that income coming in, and I wasn’t there at that point. It was very much all on me, and I think I really felt that pressure big time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So let’s talk about your site a little bit. Vancouver with Love. So you’ve been working on it for nine-ish years, full-time, about half of that. Does that sound right more now, but tell us about your site and what the focus is with it and maybe anything that has evolved with it as you’ve been working with this business coach, if at all. And then we’ll get back into some of the changes that you made as you worked out of this season of burnout.

Elizabeth Emery: For sure. So my site is primarily vegan recipes, all vegan recipes, a little bit of lifestyle and plant-based travel with that, but vegan recipes are the main focus. It has been since I started it really originally the focus was vegan, gluten-free recipes because that’s how I was eating. Now all the recipes always have gluten-free options, so that hasn’t changed, but it’s primarily a plant-based focus, and that’s really my niche. I don’t specialize more than that perhaps I go more for dinner recipes and breakfast recipes, but the idea being that they’re easy and accessible for the most part because I know that my community, the audience I have, they’re not generally the people that are interested in spending three hours baking a four-layer cake. That’s how long it takes to make

Bjork Ostrom: Sure

Elizabeth Emery: They want quick and easy

Bjork Ostrom: They want, if there was one that took that long, your people wouldn’t be doing it.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, it’s not who they’re, so yeah, it’s much more simple dinner recipes, overnight oats recipes, that sort of thing. I think whatever makes plant-based, eating more accessible to people, really, that’s what I

Bjork Ostrom: Do. Yeah, and you started eating vegetarian when you were four, is that right?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, yeah, I was four.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you tell us about that? So we have a three-year-old and a five-year-old. So right around that age, was it something that your parents had done or your family had done, or were you somebody who was aware of animals and animal product and that at a young age? What was that like?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, it’s a funny story. I went to the butcher with my mom one day, and it’s weird, I can still remember it. I assume there were turkeys, birds strung up in the window, and I remember just looking at them with horror, why? What is that? And my mom was like, well, that’s meat. That’s what we eat. That’s where it comes from. I just sort of went, I don’t want to, if that’s what it is, I don’t want to eat that anymore. And she went, okay. And to her credit, neither she nor my dad ever tried to dissuade me. They were

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Elizabeth Emery: Very supportive. They weren’t plant-based themselves, but I think they had been thinking about it, and I think they decided if their 4-year-old daughter could do it, they could probably give it a go as well.

Bjork Ostrom: So did they start eating vegetarian at that point?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, yeah. My dad’s still pescatarian. He still has some fish, my mom and my sister fully vegetarian.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow. What a pivotal moment in all of your lives watching. I mean, you think about what could have happened if you didn’t walk into that witch store as a 4-year-old.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, I do wonder because I think it’s very hard to make the distinction, the understanding of what meat is if you don’t have that kind of vis visual.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah. I wouldn’t have known, I wouldn’t have understood what the chicken and my stew meant. I think it’s little kids naturally I think often don’t always want that. So it felt very natural to me to say no. And I can only say I was very fortunate that they didn’t try to make me meat. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Dissuade you. Our five-year-old who’s very aware of things and feels things on a very deep level is starting to ask questions about the food that we’re eating. Is this, I forget the phrase she uses real or made, is chicken real or made? And it’s like, oh, chicken is real. It’s like the chicken that is outside, or is bacon real or made? It’s like, oh, it’s real. And I think what she means by real is is it an animal? And so we’ve always thought she has, as she starts to learn more the potential to be somebody who makes a decision to eat vegetarian.

One more quick example, we just got a frog recently, a tree frog, and she’s been really excited about it. Its original name was tree a tree frog named tree. And then when she went to stay with my parents for the weekend, she came back, she had renamed it to Rice, so now that’s its permanent name, rice, the tree frog. But we needed to get food for it. And so we got crickets and we were bringing the crickets in and she had this moment where she stopped and she looked at me and she goes, dad, so we feed these to the frog. And I was like, yeah, that’s what the frog eats. The frog will eat crickets. And she had this long pause and she said, do you think they’re happy? And I was like, oh my gosh, and it was for me. Then suddenly I’m wrapped up in the moral implications of feeding cricket, sewer, frog, and yeah, it’s a little four or 5-year-old, you feel those things and can make those decisions.

So anyways, a little bit of a tangent, but it’s really cool to hear as part of your story and now part of the work that you do, you help facilitate that for other people. And we talk about that with Pinch of Yum. So much of what we do is driven by, Hey, we want to have a successful business, but we also want to make a difference in people’s lives. And a good example is we do meal plans and the testimonials that come out of those meal plans are empowering and motivating for us to continue to do that because it makes a difference in people’s lives. But in order to do that, you have to be at your best as a creator. And there’s this person that I followed for a long time, he’s now moved into semi-retirement. His name was Michael Hyatt, just talked about leadership and creating and things like that.

And he always talked about the analogy of putting your oxygen mask on first. And he always talked about for himself it means fitness and health and making sure that he has margin and he’s not overscheduled. And I think about what you’re doing, the success in your business as you’ve grown that over the last few years, but also the mission of the business to help people eat vegan and to do that in a way that is sustainable and not overwhelming. None of that can happen if you are at a point where you feel like burnt out or you’re not passionate about it. So when you were working with, well, let’s go to the coach first. How did you have the idea to find a coach as a way to facilitate your way into maybe a better future? And even why did you make the decision to work with a coach versus just like, I’m burnt out, I’m going to wind this down and go in a different direction?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think the honest answer is desperation. I couldn’t go on the way I was, but I knew I loved the job. I am in my late thirties. I’d done a lot of other jobs before this, and I had pretty much hated most of them, and I’d never had a career I felt I truly wanted to be doing. This was the first one I felt I could see myself doing for years to come, and they excited me. And I thought, and

Bjork Ostrom: You had tasted it, you knew you liked the taste of it, but it had soured a little bit, but you knew that there was something there that you wanted to get back to.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, I knew I could have some sort of success with it, whatever that was going to look like. I knew I could make it sustainable. So I’d got to this miserable point where I just literally was dreading the day and I knew something had to change. I wasn’t prepared to give the business up. And I thought, right, business coach, I’d followed this woman on Instagram. I’d listened to her podcast for several years, and as we know, the podcast is such a powerful method I think, of reaching people and it really made me want to work with her. She’s based in the UK and

Bjork Ostrom: What’s her podcast or the name of the coach?

Elizabeth Emery: So her name is Jen Carrington. Like I say, she’s based in the UK. She’s done various podcasts over the years. Her most recent one, I think the one I listened to was Your Simple and Spacious Business, and she’s another joint podcast called Letters From Hopeful Creative, which is a really good podcast. They’re both great. So I really knew that her style fitted me. She actually, she works with a chronic illness. She’s had a chronic illness for years, so she manages stay in her business by working around 10 hours a week. And it’s sustainable, it’s successful. She makes the income she needs to make, and I don’t have any chronic illness. I’m very fortunate in that regard. But I remember listening to everything she was saying and just thinking, that’s what I need. I need a more human approach to running this business because I’m being a hideous boss to myself. I’m forcing myself to do things I don’t want to do every morning because I feel I have to. And she takes such a more calm, kind, joyful approach to it that I thought, yeah, that’s the person for me. If this can help me find joy in the business again and joy in life really, because so much of our work is life. That’s what, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So I remember reading this book, I think it was maybe Stanford professors who had this class that was really successful, and then they put it into a book and it was called Designing Your Life.

They’ve also recently published one I think called Designing Your Work Life, which is more specific to career versus just life. And one of the exercises they have you do is there’s empty to full kind of like you’d see in a car, and they would have you go through and do an inventory of the different things that you were doing throughout the day. Does this make me empty? Doesn’t make me full. And it’s just a way to reflect on what you’re doing and how you as a creator individual respond to it. And things that I would love to do, sit down and do a finance review with Lindsay, she’d be like, please know, poke me in the eye a hundred times of the stick. But point being people really enjoy different things and get life from different things. What did it look like for you as you started this process of re-analysis or just analysis for the first time and working with a coach to get a lay of the land of what was happening, to even understand where things are at? Was there an exercise you did? Was there a process you followed?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, it was more holistic, I would say. There wasn’t a formal exercise as such, but she was great at talking me through literally as you say, what is filling your cup and what is taking away from it? And it was completely eye-opening to realize that, for example, doing a lot of client work, doing a lot of recipe development. It’s a really important part, but it wasn’t, I was doing so much, it wasn’t filling my cup at all. It was really draining me. I felt like I had virtually no time for myself in terms of creating my own content for the blog because I wasn’t monetizing it through ads at this point. As I say, I was late to the party with that. So basically all my time was getting spent on client work and then sort of brand sponsored deals all for other people, which again, great work, but I was never, ever left with any time to build up my own block

Bjork Ostrom: At the end of, so in realizing that in your case, Hey, I’m doing a bunch of client work. For some people it might be really life-giving for you. It wasn’t, but it was monetarily significant. You saw this opportunity of, Hey, I want to work on my own thing and build that. That’s important. But a lot of times we are in a situation where it kind of feels like golden handcuffs. I have this income that’s coming in, but I also want to build this thing adjacent to what I’m doing because I think the long-term return on that both for my own wellbeing and maybe from a business perspective is going to be better.

And I think the equivalent could be a W2 job or a 1099 job or a freelance job. You talked about having a lot of these in the past, and I think a lot of people could relate to this idea of I want to build the momentum with the thing that I own that is like, that’s maybe not necessarily passive, but has some passive functionality built into it, but I also have to pay the bills and I have to keep this income coming in. What did it look like for you to adjust the dials on the different sources of revenue that you had in order to focus on your site, which doesn’t have an immediate return, but maybe has a better long-term return once it becomes a little bit more passive?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah. Well, I will caveat this with saying I got very lucky with it. So because I’d had my site for quite a few years and I was sort of just about managing to do a bit of work, I’d recently learned what keyword research was totally. So actually attempting to do something with each post rather than just randomly putting out recipes, it was slowly building in traffic. And coincidentally, I think as I started working with this business coach, I hit the amount of page views that meant I was able to qualify for Mediavine. So that made all the difference. And I do think it was a bit of a fluke. I want to be very honest about that.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and to your credit, I think luck, we say this often, luck has dressed in overalls. You also talk about being burnt out, working so hard and putting in all this effort. And so it’s not like you opened your email account and somebody said, Hey, we’ve gifted you a website and now you qualify for Mediavine. It comes from years of doing hard work and showing up and creating good content. And even freelance recipe development plays into your ability to craft a recipe in a way where people respond to it and it’s a good recipe. And so there’s always a luck component with anything that we do, but we will never get lucky to the degree that money just randomly shows up in our bank account or traffic randomly starts coming to our site. It still requires hard work and effort in showing up for 6, 7, 8 years. I want to point that out as a part of your story, but I also appreciate you being humble and acknowledging that for all of us, our success probably has some degree of luck, but also a lot of hard work. But nonetheless, you got to this point as you’re working with a coach where you’re able to qualify or Mediavine started to get some of that feeling of like, Hey, even if I don’t work this month, I’ll get a thousand dollars, $2,000, $3,000. What was that like at that moment? How did that change things for you?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, I mean, it felt like gold dust, to be honest. It changed everything. And as you probably know, when you first start with ad revenue, the amounts aren’t that high. I think it takes them a little while to figure your site out, figure out who you are. So it was sort of a few hundred dollars. At first, it was still fantastic, but it wasn’t higher numbers, but it was enough that I thought, oh, okay, this could be doable. This must be scalable. And the absolute key piece for me was being able to drop down the amount of sponsored work and client work that I was doing to a level that felt like it wasn’t burning me out, that I felt like I could manage. And then still having time to create content for the site and really, really focus on building that up and that I didn’t expect it to feel so different, but it was like night and day. It was suddenly I was actually looking forward to what I was doing. I really personally enjoy keyword research. I find that really fun. And when you hit on that phrase, that’s low competition and high search volume, it’s simple pleasures, I suppose. But I really enjoy that. And obviously it’s difficult with helpful content updates, and we never quite know what’s going to happen with Google with the algorithm. Not as you say, it’s not sustainable income, but just knowing I had that, what felt like a safety net, I think from ad revenue real game changer, for me it was the missing piece.

Bjork Ostrom: It feels like art and science. I think of the movie Moneyball, which is about the Oakland Athletics, I think baseball team. And it was the whole idea of it was kind of the first, I forget his name, but it was the first person who really came into baseball and made data decisions around players, but there’s still an art and science to it. And before it was kind of like art, you think this person’s pretty good? You can see some of their stats, but not really into data. And so much of content creation is similar in that regard where there’s an art and a science. You could come across a search term with a super high search volume, really low competition, but if you know it’s not within the realm of what your people would want to make, it’s not something that you’re going to use or if it even feels like maybe they wouldn’t make it, but it’s not brand aligned.

And so it’s almost like this additional data point that you’re able to fold in to the process to make decisions and to inform it. And sometimes that will rank, then sometimes it doesn’t. No true formula for it, but especially for people who like that type of analysis, like yourself, it’s a really great tool to fold into the process. Some people, they start with it, it’s the first thing you do, and then you go down the content production line. Some people would have a hundred pieces of content they want to make and then they’ll inform their decisions based on keyword research. Can you share just at a high level the tools that you like to use and what the process looks like for you?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah. I mean, I’ll be honest, I’m pretty basic with it. And I use key search. That was always my go-to and to be again, transparent with it, I live in Canada. I’m British, but I’m based in Canada. And a lot of these tools are based from the states and the exchange rate from Canadian to US to Canadian. It’s not kind to us at the moment. We don’t get an easy deal. So I think quite a lot of these tools are just out of the reach of a lot of Canadian-based creatives. So for me,

Bjork Ostrom: You mean US dollars to Canadian?

Elizabeth Emery: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yep, yep.

Elizabeth Emery: It’s a challenge. I know it.

Bjork Ostrom: You get like an upcharge.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, always, always. It’s a frustration for Canadians.

So for me, key search was an obvious choice just because it’s an affordable one, and I know there are much more comprehensive ones out there, but just in the beginning it wasn’t really an option for me. So I’ve had KeySearch stuck with that. It seems to have served me quite well. And more recently I started using RankIQ as well, but I use it more. I don’t really use it to write my posts as such. I’ll write the full post and then I’ll pop what I’ve written into RankIQ and if there’s any glaring areas that I’m missing out on, kind of use it for that rather than literally writing the post in,

Bjork Ostrom: See if there’s any gaps or ideas for additional things you could add in.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah. But yeah, that’s what I do. KeySearch is usually my go-to and then just Googling stuff as well because

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure

Elizabeth Emery: Can only tell you so much, can’t they?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, there’s little things even that I feel like every day I’m learning different ways that you can approach keyword research. Idea being like for example, looking at the order of if you search a certain term, an example not in the food world would be like how to do a backflip. Not that I was actually searching that make no attempt to do a back flip, but then looking at the tabs up above and seeing what order they’re in. So I’m looking at Google right now. I search how to do back flip and it says videos, images, forums, shopping news books that informs you a little bit on the user intent around that keyword. They’re probably going to want to see a video, whereas if you do something like school bag that’s going to show images and then shopping and then videos and then news. But as we’re doing keyword research, part of it is just understanding user intent and user behavior.

And so if you do a keyword search just using Google and you see videos is close there, that might be something that helps you understand, oh, that’s an important piece of content to include a video for. So I think sometimes that we don’t give enough credit to just almost like exploration research. It’s like, let me see what’s out there and how Google is structuring things and what content, how it’s being presented around the web. And so I think it’s great. It’s the art and science with what we do. It’s understanding the data that you have, but then also you at your core are a creator, you’re an artist. And then using that to inform some of the decisions that you’re making with the things that you’re creating.

Bjork Ostrom: Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. When starting out a new business, it’s a pain to get through the LLC part forming that limited liability company. And my guess is it’s painful enough that many of you listening to this haven’t gone through the process yet. Well, the good news is that Tailor Brands makes it so much easier. Not only is it easy, but it’s also affordable to get your LLC with Tailor Brands. Tailor Brands offers all the legal requirements for LLCs such as a registered agent, annual compliance, EIN, and an operating agreement. All of these are really critical components of forming that LLC and having a nice and tidy business structure. Tailor Brands also walks you through each step of building a successful business and has everything you need all in one place, bookkeeping and invoicing, business licenses and permits, business documents, bank accounts, and so much more. And our listeners will receive 35% off tailored brands, LLC formation plans using the link tailorbrands.com/foodblogger, that’s T-A-I-L-O-R-B-R-A-N-D s.com/food blogger or just search, build a biz with Tailor. So get started today with Taylor Brands.

Bjork Ostrom: To go back, you start this process of kind of rebuilding and you get accepted and are starting to earn ad revenue. And it sounds like the business revenue grows kind of adjacent to your love for the business. You’re falling back in love with the business. Does that feel like it was true that was happening in lockstep? And do you think as you fell in love with the business, the natural outflow of that, it’s like you enjoyed the work and it was able to grow and thrive, or was it actually now that you’re able to see the business growing and creating income from it, it makes it easier to invest into the business? Or maybe both? What did that look like in that season as you came out of this 2021 burnout period?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, I think spot on really. It was a combination of both for sure. And again, I will be honest, I was quite motivated by the money. I knew I always wanted to do something I loved, but I always wanted to make a good income as well. And seeing the money that you can earn increase from ad revenue is hugely motivating. I think when you haven’t really come from money as well, there’s a different sort of motivation behind you to some other people. And

Bjork Ostrom: Is that true for you? You feel that implying not coming from money?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, we never had a lot of money growing up and I think having been keenly aware of how much other people have had in comparison and things like that and just kind of growing up and seeing that around you, it’s always made myself and my partner as well really prioritize wanting to build a stable, sustainable income for us. So it is definitely been a big driving factor for me. I think it’s really influenced some of the decisions I’ve made. They’ve been more from a place of business sense rather than, oh, this would be a great exposure opportunity. For example, like writing cookbooks and stuff. I’ve gone more down the business route thus far because it’s been much more of a priority to really stabilize that. But yeah, I was motivated by seeing the income increase that was huge, but also just having more joy with it, falling back in love with business, like you say, realizing that I could take Fridays off and it wasn’t, the sky wasn’t going to fall in and just realizing I could have more breathing space. It’s all just given me the space to actually enjoy the business I’ve created and really find more joy in continuing to build it. I think.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so much of what we’re doing I think comes down to individual priorities. And one of the things I love about your stories, it feels like you really discovering that what’s important for me as a person, as a business owner for my life, for my business, and to let go of maybe some of the things that you see happening online and saying that’s that person and that’s important to them and that’s the game that they’re playing. But really to think of it as we are in a video game and we get to decide what the, not all of the rules, but even what the rewards are within the game that we’re playing. And for some people it’s purely monetary. I want to make as much money as possible for other people. They anchor around flexibility. I want to have as much autonomy as possible, or we’ve heard people say, I want to be famous, I want to be known.

And that’s a motivator. But to really look inward and for other people’s impact and for all of us, it’s probably a mixture of all of those considerations. Not that everybody wants to be famous, but just like I actually don’t want to be known at all, and that’s one of the things that I’m optimizing for, but to really look inward and to say what are the different things that I’m after? And to center on those. But it’s hard when you look outward and you see other people doing a thing and it’s like, oh, they released a cookbook and they’re doing a book tour that looks really cool and everybody likes it, or they launched a product, I don’t know what a hundred different examples. And one of the things that you talked about as we were checking in before was this idea of quiet success and that that’s something that’s available for people is quiet success. Can you talk about what that means to you? And was that always something you were aware of or did it come up over the last couple of years as you reflected on what you want work to be?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think truth be told, I wanted all those things. I wanted the cookbook deal. I wanted, I don’t know, present TV shows and stuff. I wanted to do the high profile stuff just for whatever reason. I was not in the right place at the right time for those things. And I have worked on pursuing some of them and it just hasn’t really worked out. So I think that has kind of pushed me down a different avenue. It’s kind of shown me that, okay, well these aren’t available for me right now, so going to do what I’m going to work on, what I can control and what I can control is building a quieter business. So I don’t have huge amounts of Instagram followers, I don’t have all of these high-profile achievements, but I do feel that it’s something that isn’t modeled to people. We’re taught that you have to go after the book deal, and those things are wonderful. They’re really wonderful. The person that’s just launched this book that’s doing well and all seems very high profile, what they’re not telling you is how little they got paid to write the book and

Bjork Ostrom: Or stressful. It was

Elizabeth Emery: Exactly how they had to work nights and weekends just to get this thing done. And there’s huge, huge value in books. I would love to write a book one day, but it’s also a very specific business choice I think that you’re making often. Advances typically aren’t high, sometimes they’re incredibly low and not feasible if you have an income that you need to maintain. So I think we’re sort of fed this idea of shiny success with all the achievements, and particularly as bloggers, we’re not really told that you can build a sustainable business like ad revenue can be very lucrative. You can do occasional sponsored posts on Instagram and things, and you can charge appropriately for those. You can do freelance work. There’s so many avenues I think you can go down to build up a reputable business. You’re just not necessarily becoming a star at the same time. But I do think it’s important to say it because it was something I never saw modeled and it wasn’t shown to me that that was possible.

Bjork Ostrom: And so often it’s not modeled because the people who are experiencing that quiet success aren’t out there talking about it. It’s a natural function of being quiet is that you can’t be heard. And I think about that in the context of business, broadly speaking, that there are millions of examples of people who have different businesses that are really successful and allow incredible autonomy. And you don’t know about ’em because they’re not on Instagram talking about it. They don’t do book deals, but they’re out there just kind of in the background running their businesses. So much of what we do, it’s on Instagram, it’s Pinterest, it’s showing up high-end search results. But even in our world, there’s a hundred different businesses that you could create that are successful, and you could, whether it’s doing something with photography or small boutique workshops or whatever it might be, endless examples of different ways that you can build a successful thing.

And so I think it’s great. It’s great that we talk about it. One of the things that you had talked about is this, as you’ve started to figure out the things that bring you joy, the growth within your business happening alongside that, and slowly but surely building up revenue income from your business and being on track to hit that six-figure mark this year, which is incredible. Congratulations. Thank you. And that coming from a variety of different places, it sounds like maybe primarily ad-driven, but talk to me a little bit about how you fill in the different parts of your business to get to that sustainable income level.

Elizabeth Emery: Of course. I mean, yes, ad revenue this year is the main portion of it. It’s probably about 60% of my income I think will be coming from ad revenue. And then the remaining 40% would probably be split between sponsored content, maybe a little more sponsored content on Instagram for brands. And then the other part is the freelance recipe development I do, which I don’t do a ton of anymore. I have one client that I do it for every couple of months. It’s quite nice because it’s a sustainable income and I believe in what he’s doing. So it’s nice to work with that. But yeah, that’s pretty much the split. I have those three income streams really.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Am I looking into this correct that you are with Raptive as a Raptive publisher?

Elizabeth Emery: I am, yes. I switched to them this year and it’s different experiences for everyone. I hear different things about different agencies. My earnings have gone up certainly since working with them. I can’t deny that, but I’ve, both of them, I’ve worked with Mediavine and Raptive and had great experiences with both.

Bjork Ostrom: And we talked a lot of creators who say the same thing, have had good experiences with both. And then when you are doing the sponsored content working with brands, is that primarily Instagram and how do those deals happen?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, it’s fully Instagram for me. My TikTok account is almost nonexistent. I have about 150 followers on TikTok. Yeah, it’s primarily on Instagram. I haven’t done any blog sponsored content in years. I just find brands that anymore. Sometimes I will pitch. Sometimes it’s brands that find me. Sometimes it’s returning brands that I’ve worked with previously. I did go through a phase where I did a heck of a lot of pitching and that I would say if someone’s starting out and kind of wondering how to go about it, I do recommend pitching brands to start with because then you’ll start getting responses come back in. And that was the way I sort of did it with that. But fortunately, I do get found by certain brands now, which is really nice. So in that way, but I do think people chronically under charge for sponsored content. Maybe it’s more of a Canadian thing than a US thing, but I know some people that will charge a couple of hundred dollars for a sponsored reel on Instagram. And again, not to be sniffed at if that’s where you feel

Bjork Ostrom: Comfortable. We got our first brand sponsorship was free bags of frozen vegetables.

Elizabeth Emery: Yes. Everybody

Bjork Ostrom: Starts somewhere in

Elizabeth Emery: There. Yeah, sure. I think the first one was a hundred dollars and a couple of three things maybe. But it’s one of the things I think is actually fascinating is I have some other blogger friends that I speak to and we realize how much people don’t talk about fees, we don’t talk about money. I really understand the desire not to talk about that stuff, but sometimes I think we’re kind of just not helping ourselves because you have no idea what somebody else is charging. I know friends, like I say, who will charge a few hundred dollars for a sponsored post. I know friends that charge a few outlets, several thousand. The spectrum is enormous. And I think generally we should all be charging a bit higher because all we’re teaching to brands otherwise is that it’s okay to really be willing to pay $300, which doesn’t cover our time. It doesn’t cover the resources. And I think it’s just important to know our value.

Bjork Ostrom: I had a conversation on the podcast recently with folks from Tastemaker, and Chandice is the person who does a lot of the Tastemaker Conference. Chandice does a lot of the brand deals for them. And I asked her, how do you know what to charge? How do you figure that out? She’s generally speaking, the best way to get better at understanding what your rate should be is to have conversations with other people. Find a group of five or six people and form a Slack group or a Facebook group or get together in person and say, what brand are you working with? What are you charging? Because what it does is it allows you to see, and the example I gave is like Zillow. Would you use Zillow for Canadian real estate? Okay.

Elizabeth Emery: No, no, I didn’t know

Bjork Ostrom: That. So it’s a real estate, residential real estate application. So you’d be able to go around and look and see how much is a house in my neighborhood selling for? But they also have this thing called an estimate, and the estimate is like, what’s the estimate or what this house is worth or your house is worth based on millions of data points of what other houses are selling for every year, square feet, things like that. But we don’t really have that in the world of sponsor content or brand work. And if we did, it’d be really helpful. Then we’d all be able to see, oh, actually this person who has a million followers is charging this. And so we kind of have to form our own little marketplace and do the analysis with a group of 5, 6, 7 people just to get an idea of what are you charging? And to say like, oh, maybe I need to be charging more or to sell somebody else. Maybe you need to be charging more. How did you go about increasing your rates and then when to stop? When are you at the point that feels appropriate?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, I mean, that’s a really difficult question actually. I think I talked to friends to start with and it felt pretty good about what I was charging. Then spoke to some more friends and started to feel kind of rubbish about what I was charging because they were managing to charge so much more. I usually quote perhaps a little higher than I think some brands will go for. And then if they come down, that’s absolutely fine. If they say yes, that’s amazing, but then I’ve got that wiggle room. I’m willing to come down a bit. In terms of knowing when you’ve reached the right level, it’s really hard to say. I think what I’ve noticed in the last year or two is it is so different. The spectrum of what brands are willing to pay and what is just, it’s so vast. It can be quite hard, I think, to know what to charge. But I would say as a general rule of thumb, given that I really think most creators are undercharging for our worth, I would state charge more than you think you should be. Pick the amount you think you should be charging and then go a thousand or go several hundred over that because you’re most likely undercharging. And I hear this again and again from experts on this as well.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And one of the things I’ve learned, so we’re working with some people, anybody who listens to the podcast knows that you’re starting to hear more podcast ads. So we’re thinking of ourselves as somebody who can do brand partnerships, which we hadn’t done for years, which seems like so obvious, but it just took us a while. But one of the things that I’ve learned in working with them is they’ve really said like, Hey, you’re not just selling podcast ads. You’re able to sell this kind of holistic exposure for this brand. And so they helped us kind of expand our view of it to say it’s on Instagram, but also you could include it in an email and you can, well, for us it would be on the podcast, but you can include it in email, you can include it in Instagram. There’s all of these platforms that we have as creators.

And so I think one of the other avenues that we can all think about is if a brand approaches us and they say, Hey, we would love to work with you, or we approach a brand and say, we would love to work with you. We might immediately say, how many followers do I have on Instagram? But really if you start to collectively say, and we can send an email out and the email will include a mention, and here’s what that looks like as a line item. It costs this much, and maybe there’s a blog post and you can start to put together these packages. I have a friend who has a site smaller traffic, smaller following, a little bit more higher value in the things that they’re selling. But he talked about putting together these million dollar packages for brands, but there’d be these holistic packages that would have an event and all of these different components. And so I guess it’s just encouragement for anybody listening to think strategically, not even just about pricing within one area, but to think about all the different areas and the pricing that you can build into a package for a brand. And I think it helps communicate the value when you break it up and show how it’s going to live across the web in different ways, and then also report back on that. So

It feels like you’re in a good place, especially when you look back to 2021 and what that season was like. What does it look like for you looking forward when you think of the next two or three years, what are the things that you’re excited about and moving towards within your business?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, honestly, ad revenue is a huge part of it. Just scaling that really has been very exciting, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what I can do as we are going into Q4 and Q4 and Q1 weirdly is a really good quarter for me. A lot of people are going, I suppose, sure. But seeing what I can do in terms of scaling that, it does excite me. It’s motivating because for the first time in my business, that feels like a thing. I don’t want to jinx it, say I’m in control of it, but because who knows,

I feel more in control of that than anything else. And it’s really exciting to build that. And within the last year, I’ve seen my ad revenue start a certain figure in the hundreds, and I’ve seven Xed it in the last year. And it’s such a good feeling to do that. It really excites me to know where that could go. So yeah, continuing to make the business sustainable. I’d love to do something like write a cookbook one day. Any other higher-profile opportunities would absolutely be welcome. I actually used to have a podcast very briefly, so I’d really like to bring that back because

It would be so fun and just kind of round the business out a bit more. I think really focus more strategically on different areas that I want to. I’ve definitely taken a bit of a break from, well, not a break, but I haven’t been posting quite as regularly in the last couple of years on Instagram. So I’ve just been getting back into posting a lot more consistently on there and kind of seeing what comes with that, but just sort of continuing to stabilize and build the business, which doesn’t sound really sexy to be honest, but

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Yeah,

Elizabeth Emery: It works.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s awesome. And then last question for you as we round it out. Let’s say somebody is in a similar season where they’re feeling burnt out, maybe they’re where you were in 2021, what would your advice be for them now having been three, four years out from there?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, my heart goes out to them if they are, because I remember how it felt vividly. My advice would be you don’t have to listen to all the advice that’s out there. There’s a heck of a lot of advice, and I wish I hadn’t paid attention to everything, because some of it won’t apply to you. You don’t have to do all of it. And some of the advice that is being given out by people in the know is plain wrong. I’ve found in my experience, for me, it’s not been helpful.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have an example of something that was reached as true that you felt not to be true?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, and I’m not going to name any names, but

Bjork Ostrom: No, yeah, just generally speaking the thought or the advice or Yeah,

Elizabeth Emery: For sure. There was a very specific example I can think of. I remember listening to a podcast once from someone who’s very well-known expert in this field.

Bjork Ostrom: And

Elizabeth Emery: Somebody said,

Bjork Ostrom: I’m nervous that it’s going to be me. That’s going to be this story. Wouldn’t that be lives in Minnesota? Yeah. Name rhymes with New York. Yeah,

Elizabeth Emery: He has a food blog. Yeah. So this well-known person, someone asked the question on the podcast and said, can you do sponsored work on Instagram if you have less than 10,000 followers? And this person kind of categorically said, no, I’m sorry. You can’t. It’s just not going to happen for you. It’s not worth trying. Focus on building up your followers. I wouldn’t bother. And I remember listening to it at the time and thinking, but I started doing sponsored work when I had just over a thousand followers. And for granted, they’re not the same types of deals that I do now. They’re different brands, but it was perfectly possible for local brands and things like that, or newer brands. All of that stuff I think is possible. And that was just an example of a time I remember listening to that and thinking, but I know that’s not true. I know that’s inaccurate. And this person was sort of flatly saying, yeah, less than 10,000 followers, you’re not going to get any more. I wouldn’t even bother at that level. And I have less than 30,000 followers on Instagram. I don’t have a huge account, but I make a significant part of my income from sponsored content. It is perfectly possible, for sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Well, and even the brands that we work with, I don’t know what the count is for Food Blocker Pro 12,000 people. It’s valuable for them to get in front of that audience because it’s like B2B, a single sign up for Yost is a really valuable thing over lifetime for them. And I think of, there’s this Alex Hormozi, he’s like a sales. He was really into gyms and then got into business. And I don’t know if you ever come across Alex and I forget his wife’s name, who also does a lot of content, generally great content, but any influencer content, it’s like they’re a 200% human. The opposite of quiet success. They’re loud success. But he talked about, nobody should quote me on these numbers, but it was a Instagram person, a person who had an Instagram account, it was under a thousand followers, but was making a million dollars a year.

And he’s like, we can find it and link to it in the show notes if anybody wants to see it. But she was helping dieticians. She was an expert at medical billing, and she was helping dieticians bill and invoice to insurance companies appropriately. And it would make the difference, it’d be like tens of thousands of dollars for these dieticians that they’d be able to make more in a year. And so they’d be willing to pay per a lot of money in order to work with her. And it was this great example of, it’s not about numbers, it’s about who are you talking to and what are you teaching and what is the value that you’re creating? And you could have 10 million people, but if it’s a certain subset of people who are, it’s like 10 million people who never want to spend any money in a year that’s going to be different than 10,000 people who are billionaires. Really extreme example. But so much of it has to, there’s a thousand different variables that play into it. And so I think it’s important to point out, broadly speaking to your point, to look at every piece of advice intentionally and say, is this true? And it might not be true. And a lot of times that general advice that’s meant for everybody isn’t necessarily great advice. And the best advice really is that advice, kind of one-on-one, somebody who understands your situation in the case of a business, understands your audience.

Elizabeth Emery: And to that point, I was just going to very quickly say, the second bit of advice I would give is don’t do it alone. If you can invest work with someone like a business coach, that can really help guide you through because they’ll help you find the joy in it again. And you have to love what you’re doing, otherwise you’re not going to want to do it. You can’t force yourself point. That is your system telling you something if you’re hating what you’re doing.

Bjork Ostrom: So that’s great. I think there’s all of these different experts in the world, and I think, and I’ve talked about this idea of a personal board of directors before, who are the people that you go to get advice on health, spirituality, business, finance, relationships. We can have all these people in our lives, some in a paid capacity like a business coach, others in a friend or a mentor capacity. But I think in any situation, if we’re intentional with building out those connections or establishing those relationships or paying for those mentors over a long period of time, let’s say a decade, we will be better for it. I was thinking of in bets, and if I were to place a bet on if somebody was working with a business coach or they weren’t working a business coach, would your business be more successful in 10 years? My bet would always be somebody like, you’re working with a business coach or personal trainer, would you be healthier in 10 years or not? Probably if you’re working with a personal trainer. And so thinking in bets as it applies to a long period of time, applying that idea of a business coach, it’s like, yeah, your business is probably going to be better

And you’re probably going to be happier if it’s a good business coach.

Elizabeth Emery: It’s an investment in everything. Your health, your mind, they’re all linked. Yeah, for sure.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So if people want to follow along with what you’re up to, where can they do that? How can they reach out to you? How can they connect with you? Let us know all the places that people can go.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, so the blog is Vancouver with love.com and on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook. If anyone’s on Facebook anymore, it’s at Vancouver with Love, so you’ll find me there.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Elizabeth, thanks so much for coming on. Just great to talk to you. Thank you

Elizabeth Emery: So much. It’s been an absolute privilege.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I wanted to take a minute and just ask that if you enjoyed this episode or any of our other many episodes of the Food Blogger Pro podcast, that you share it. It means so much to us as a podcast if you share episodes with your friends and family, or if you are a food blogger or entrepreneur, if you could share ’em on social media or even in your email newsletters. It really helps us get the word out about our podcast and reach more listeners. Thanks again for listening. We really hope you enjoyed this episode and we’ll see you back here next week.