The Secret to Building a Family Business and Reaching 2 Million Pageviews

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI.

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Ann Morrissey: Hey there, Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team here. Thanks for tuning in to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. In today’s episode, Bjork is sitting down with Echo and Erica Blickenstaff from Favorite Family Recipes. In this episode, echo and Erica dive into the ups and downs of running a family business. They discovered that the key to their success was delegating responsibilities and playing to each other’s strengths. They also discussed the challenges of growing a business while staying true to your roots. After taking a hit from Google’s algorithm updates, they realized the importance of diversifying the revenue streams and not relying too much on search traffic with 2 million monthly page views and a focus on authentic family-driven content, they’ve learned to balance growth with staying genuine, whether you’re running a family business or just trying to keep things organized. This episode is full of actionable tips and inspiring insights. If you enjoy this episode, we would really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom:: Echo and Erica, welcome to the podcast. It’s great to have you here.

Echo Blickenstaff: Great to be here. Thank you. Thanks.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, we’re going to be having a dual conversation. There’s actually three people who are part of your business. You are all equal owners in the business, and the unique thing about this business partnership is you also have grown up as life partners because you are all sisters. So tell us quick about how you came about as sisters owning a business together. And I’ll just say our girls are six and four and I really love the idea of them someday running a business together. Maybe you can speak from the other side around the complexities of it, but as a parent I feel like it would be a really wonderful thing to see. But you guys have a business, you run this business together. So echo, take us through what that looked like for you to get to this point where you have a really successful business and your three sisters together running it.

Echo Blickenstaff: Okay. First I have to say, I wonder what my dad would, how he would respond to how it has been having three daughters work together.

Bjork Ostrom:: Sure, yeah. He is unofficially on the team as a mediator. Is that his role?

Echo Blickenstaff: I think at first all of us would do a little bit of complaining back and forth to him, and then we decided this is not good. We just need to separate.

Echo Blickenstaff: There are some subjects around the rest of the family that are taboo.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, this being one of them. If you’re all on Thanksgiving, you’re probably not going to be talking about SEO tactics around the Thanksgiving table. Yeah.

Echo Blickenstaff: Yes, exactly. So Erica and Emily actually started it before I joined, probably about five years before I joined, just as a hobby. And they had the idea, they’re the youngest two of the family, and when they both moved away, got married, our mom was a fabulous cook and we were all constantly, this was before the internet calling her asking for a recipe. She this cute little recipe box, all of her,

Bjork Ostrom:: One of those classic wood recipe boxes.

Echo Blickenstaff: Yes. And they had our grandmother’s recipes, her recipes. So it was the constant calling, jotting it down on a scrap piece of paper, losing it. So they had the idea, let’s start putting all of our family recipes online. And they did that for a few years and mostly at first it was just our family accessing recipes. And then we started noticing, oh, people are,

Bjork Ostrom:: Somebody else is coming. Yeah,

Echo Blickenstaff: Are coming. And I remember the first time they talked to one of them and they said we had 60 people outside of family visit. And it was just amazing. Wow, this is so cool.

Bjork Ostrom:: And it’s that time when you’re building a thing where it’s pretty magical to be able to say, there are 60 people and we don’t know who those people were. They somehow found your site. I think we get kind of conditioned as it grows where 60 becomes millions and you forget like, wow, that’s a really cool thing that somehow people found our site and discovered it. And so that’s where the name favorite family recipes comes from is because you had these favorite family recipes and you just decided to post those online. Eventually people started to discover those. And so that was in 2007. So you came on in 2012 then Echo, is that right?

Echo Blickenstaff: Yeah, and when I came on, it was kind of funny. I was working full-time as an accountant and Erica came to visit me. There was a blog conference in Salt Lake City and she had just had a baby and she asked me if I would just come hold the baby in the back of the room while was

Bjork Ostrom:: That was your first role within the company?

Echo Blickenstaff: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. Childcare.

Echo Blickenstaff: Babysitter.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yep. Yep.

Echo Blickenstaff: Remember standing in the back of this conference room and hearing that people are making money, putting recipes online and listening to some of the processes and experiences that people had. And I thought, wait, we can do this. We can totally do this. And we talked about it after the conference and that’s when we started doing it intentionally as a business from that.

Bjork Ostrom:: And Erica, tell me about 2012. So it’s this period of time where people are starting to think about, hey, this could be a thing. There’s other people who are building online businesses and blogging is kind of a new thing. What was it like for you at that time and then in 2012, was it enough for you for all of you to go in working on it full time or was it kind of a side hustle for everybody at that point?

Erica Blickenstaff: So like she said, in 2012, I just barely had a baby and I was actually working full-time as a speech pathologist, so I kind of had my hands full and had my baby. I was actually on maternity leave and I was like, I don’t really want to go back to work. And really we weren’t making a whole ton, especially when we put ads and everything on there, CPMs and everything weren’t super high. So it was definitely a risk to be like, I think I’m going to just go all in on this and see what happens and quit my full-time job. My husband was going to law school at the time, so we were already in debt and like Echo said, we went to this conference and we were like, oh my gosh, people are putting these ads on and actually making money. Maybe we can do this and I can quit my job so I can be with my baby. And it was scary and it was a risk, but it’s one I’m so glad that I took and that Echo took and Emily definitely paid off.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. So tell me about that early stage. So you are all siblings. I think this could also apply to friends or just generally business partners. You have this idea, you’re excited about the potential of a thing, you can see other people doing it and you go, you say, let’s go in on this together. First of all, from how do you make decisions around the company? One of the things we talk about on the podcast is I think a lot of us get into building an online business, whether it be a social following a blog, a CPG, food product, whatever the business is, we get into it because we initially think, Hey, my goal is to replace my income. But when you’re building a business and you replace that income, that income is then valuable because a business it, it’s transferable in a way that a salary. So I think a secondary thing, not always but for a lot of people is they get into it and they realize, oh, not only is it valuable because it’s creating income for me, it’s also valuable because you’ve created a business, but then you have to be intentional to say, what’s the ownership structure for this business? And my guess is a lot of people listening might be in similar conversations with a sibling, a friend, a business partner, and going through the process of trying to understand how do we go about doing this? So what did that look like for you all in the early stages or was it a pretty simple conversation of like, Hey, let’s divide the pie equal?

Echo Blickenstaff: In the early stages we struggled to get to a place where we could effectively move forward. I think so many things were coming at us and everyone who has a food blog knows there are so many different elements. They were at that time starting to push video, not dealing with, but taking care of all the social media platforms, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and then also, oh, we need to get an email going. There were so many different things and we really struggled at the beginning with all of us were creating content, all of us were taking photos, all of us were writing our own blog posts. I think a couple of us started fiddling around with trying to make video and then trying to, I think we even had to divided it up, you do Facebook posts on this day, I’ll do ’em this day. And I think that was a difficult time. It was a struggle because we’re all trying to do it all.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. And what time, when you say that time, what season was that?

Echo Blickenstaff: This was probably 2012 to 2000, I dunno, probably the first couple of years I was still working for at least the first year, maybe first 18 months. And so I was trying to do my stuff at night on the weekends and we weren’t meeting regularly, it was just kind of like, okay, you throw your new post up this day, I’ll do this day. And we’ve kind of evolved into, okay, we should probably have a meeting, step one. And then initially I think we started evolving into each of us really focusing on what our strengths were and also our weaknesses, things that we enjoyed doing, things that we didn’t like to do because it kind of became a grind for a little while of do it all each of us individually. And we don’t live well. Eric and Emily do live in the same city and then I live about six hours away from them. So it’s not like we were physically getting together. And that was before Zoom. So a lot of it was just phone calls. So it took a while to figure out who enjoys this the most and is that their strength and dividing up responsibilities. And then the challenge was staying in your own lane, especially as sisters, I think you’re just feel more like you can be more open about things you like and everything. Yeah. A little too honest sometimes.

Erica Blickenstaff: Yeah, right.

Echo Blickenstaff: More than regular business partners. I dunno, maybe it’s just you feel more safe saying

Bjork Ostrom:: The lines are blurred.

Echo Blickenstaff: Yeah. And so we tried to establish some boundaries there too. We were talking to each other all weekend, texting, talking on the weekends, late at night, and we set some boundaries of, look, let’s make this a real business where we work business hours and we’re not taking over each other’s lives with this business.

Bjork Ostrom:: So kind of formalizing it a little bit. I just had a conversation with a connection, somebody that I know yesterday talking about for Lindsay and I, what does that look like through the years and this organic process of us realizing what departments we are in within the business and starting to own those and to not, like you said, step on the toes of somebody else who’s in that department. And I think that even goes so far in so as not a business partner, but just somebody who you hire and just letting them kind of do their thing and finding that balance of weighing in on it versus letting them work in their zone and own the thing that they’re owning. So how about, and I think of two books, one that we talked about before we press record E Myth, and it sounds like Erica, that was a book that you read that was influential. And another book that I’ve read kind of in the similar vein is called Slicing the Pie and it’s all about how you define actual equity ownership building of a business. So first, what did that look like to have the conversation around equity ownership of the business? Was that a pretty simple thing to say, Hey, we’re all going to go in on this equal?

Erica Blickenstaff: Yeah, I think that was a pretty easy decision to make because we were all working hard. We all agreed that we were all working about the same hours and we’re like, let’s just split up the equity in the business. That part I think was pretty easy. And then splitting up the roles themselves. We literally met in person halfway between our houses in a hotel room. We just got a hotel room for a weekend. We’re like, we’re done. We have to get away from our families, we have to just hash this out. And we had whiteboards and sticky notes and we all wrote every single thing that needed to be done in the business and just put sticky notes all up on this board. Drew three lines and we’re just like, let’s just put these sticky notes where they go and group them together and this is how we’re going to split things up. And then we could see as far as equity goes, all of these deserve equal partnership.

Bjork Ostrom:: These are all valuable, these respective departments are all valuable. And then when you talk about writing everything that needs to get done, it reminds me of there’s this business framework called EOS that some people use. And one of the things that’s really helpful that I learned in going through the training with EOS is this idea of you get away from an org chart. So it’s not like you have an org chart that lists people. You have a, I forget what they call it, but it’s essentially a responsibilities chart and what are all the things that need to get done. Like you said, Erica, within the business, you name all of those things. And for somebody who’s listening that doesn’t have any partner or doesn’t have anybody on their team, you list all those things out and then you are the name in the seat for that role. You are doing everything or there’s maybe something and it just doesn’t get done. The great thing about then starting to bring people in, whether it’s an employee or a contractor freelancer or a business partner is then you can go from your name being on everything to start to say, Hey, okay, this is, you own this, you’re in that seat and I own this. And you can start to separate those out. And my guess is for you guys coming out of that meeting, it was helpful to say, okay, now we’re starting to see these clear lines. If there’s an opportunity on social media, I’m not going to try and figure it out on my own. I’m going to email the idea and to whoever owns that and then they’re going to maybe look into it or they’re going to make a decision on it. Does that echo basically what came from that meeting was allowing to have some clarity around roles.

Echo Blickenstaff: Yes. I think for each one of us, we left that experience just feeling relieved. I know I did. Instead of feeling like I was responsible for everything, and I think Emily and Erica felt the same way, it was so nice to think, oh, I just have to focus on my things, my responsibilities. And then I felt like that allowed me to really dive in deeper to each of those responsibilities and learn more about, one of my responsibilities is SEO, so that’s been a huge focus of mine. So it’s been great to learn more about that and not be so scattered across so many different things. But that’s exactly what happened. And then we still meet, meet weekly and when new ideas come up and it’s not my lane exactly something on social media, we pass it on to Emily or we get an email about a new affiliate program we pass to Erica handles that and

Bjork Ostrom:: You know where to route those things, which is super helpful. We’re going to talk about SEO in a little bit in that world because everybody’s always interested in talking about SEO. But one of the things that it sounds like was influential was the book, the E-Myth. And it’s a book I’ve read. I know a lot of entrepreneurs have read it, but Erica, what did you learn in the process of reading the E-Myth that was helpful to help shape up the conversations around who owns what? And even maybe just shifting how you think about the business,

Erica Blickenstaff: It’s interesting that you say that because when I was reading the book as I was reading, it’s broken up into different roles, the entrepreneur and the manager and the technician. And as I was reading this, I’m like, each of us, all of our personalities where we line up in the family, each of us fit perfectly into each of these roles. It was not hard to decide who was each role. I mean Echo, she’s very business-minded and managerial. She obviously takes that manager role. Emily is really good being task oriented and she can complete things and get things done and follow through on different projects. And so obviously she’s a really good person to be in that technician role. And I always like looking to the future and looking for different revenue streams. And I’m just all over the place since I’m like, well, clearly I’m the entrepreneur. And again, it kind of fits in the family. I’m the youngest, I’m the one that’s

Bjork Ostrom:: All over. Yeah, birth order, you all fit.

Erica Blickenstaff: Yeah, Emily’s the middle child and so she’s a people pleaser. She just likes to get things done and just make sure things are organized and things are happening. And Echo being the oldest,

Bjork Ostrom:: She’s managing telling everybody what to do.

Erica Blickenstaff: So I’m really fortunate that there’s three of us and there are these three clear roles within the book. And so when I was reading that, just the light came on and I was like, clearly we need to step into our roles and stop crossing over these lines and beginning each other’s lanes. And once we did that, I think our productivity went so much more smoothly. And I think it went through the roof. I feel like we were working harder, smarter, not harder.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. Yep. The impact of the work that you’re doing was probably deeper because you had a focus area, you knew what it was. There wasn’t overlapping work. Two people weren’t working on the same thing. So I’m going to try and remember the E myth and let me know if this feels accurate, Erica, based on what you remember and echo if you’ve read it as well. But the basic idea, the basic premise is it’s a pie shop owner. And the pie shop owner loves making pies, which fits well with our world. It’s easier to take that analogy and apply it to what we’re doing because a lot of people literally are making pies. But the idea is they build this pie shop and it’s successful because this baker bakes incredible pies. But then eventually that baker becomes a manager because it has grown and then they just don’t like the job because they’re no longer doing the thing that they love, which is baking because the business requires management. And the idea is that as much as possible you want to move from, if you are an entrepreneur, you want to move out of that role of manager execution and stay in that entrepreneurial role because that is unique and it’s something that can’t be offered in the world and find somebody who’s managerial. Or if you are naturally managerial, you want to find the other roles like somebody who’s more visionary entrepreneur. And then remind me the idea of the technician. So the technician is somebody who is more project management oriented as opposed to manager who would be more like people management.

Echo Blickenstaff: So the technician is the one who continues to make the pie.

Bjork Ostrom:: Oh yeah. Like implements the vision of the Yeah. So it’s almost like we think of the world of individual in corporate speak, individual contributor, the person who’s making the pie. We just went to, in Minnesota, I did this trip up north with two good friends and we went to my friend’s cabin, shout out to the Minne Stuga, short-term rental, if anybody ever wants to go up north on the way there. On the way back, we stopped at this place called Betty’s Pies, and they do pie shakes. That’s one of the things they do, which is essentially like a piece of pie and ice cream and then they blend it up into a shake. It’s delicious. But I always think of, when I think of E-Myth, I think of that story and when I looked back in the kitchen, my guess is the person that I saw, I don’t know, there were maybe 20, a 20-year-old that probably wasn’t the business owner. That was the technician implementing probably an idea that the entrepreneur that owned the place had, but it’s not like they’re the ones actually making it. And potentially there was somebody who was then managing that team of the technicians, the people who are implementing it. And so it’s fun for me to be able to think about the application of that within an actual pie shop. So what would your advice be to people who are navigating a similar situation? Echo would be interested in hearing your thoughts around how to divide their labor and divide the areas of focus within a business. And then maybe insofar as you’re comfortable, any advice for people around thinking about compensation within that? I know that’s an element as well.

Echo Blickenstaff: Well, for your first question about how to divide is that yeah, I feel like I don’t have in the business world probably the best answer for that within a family, with us working with sisters and everyone who works for us is a friend. That’s just how our business has evolved or a family member. My daughter’s worked for us and I think we’ve really tried to focus on what you enjoy and maybe that’s not always the most profitable way to do it, but what you enjoy, what you’re good at, and not that everything we all do is we love doing it, but just tried to focus on the strengths of those people. And the people that we’ve brought in are people that we are already seen those strengths in them and said, Hey, would you like to work for us? We see how this could really benefit our business and I’d love to work with you and have your input. So does that answer your question?

Bjork Ostrom:: It’s great. And I think it applies a little bit to this idea of they talk about where your great passion and the world’s great need meet is where you should try and find your work. But I think it also works within the context of a business where your great passion, the thing that you enjoy and the need for the business where that overlaps as much as possible. If you can be working within that zone, that’s great. We should all be seeking to do that, not just for ourselves, but also for our team members and the people that we work with. Because the end result of that is somebody’s going to be doing a thing that they like they’re interested in learning about, they enjoy doing it, they’re not going to dread it the next day if they have to get up and do it again. That just feels like a healthy pursuit for any business or individual. How about when it comes to, and some background on this is, so Lindsay and our friend Nate have this side hustle project they’re working on called Snackdive. And it’s like they just review snacks. It’s like a show and one of ’em will pick out a snack and then they’ll review it and rate it one through five. And it’s just been a really fun thing for them to work on. But one of the questions is what does that division look like in terms of business ownership as trying to navigate, it’s working more, who’s paying for what? There’s a lot of considerations around how to divide that up. Would you have any advice for people who are trying to navigate that? And then the secondary question within that is advice for people on how to figure out how do you get paid within the business? Then as you have partnerships or people that are working together, and you don’t have to share specifics about your scenario, but just advice that you’d have for people that are navigating partnerships and divvying up the pie and allocating the salary or the income that’s coming in.

Echo Blickenstaff: I think that is just where a lot of people, some people that we know of, and it’s just you run into trouble because it’s very hard to say What I’m doing is more valuable than what you are doing. Especially with the food blog, obviously the person who is creating content, that role is very important and very valuable because, excuse me, because that’s how we get traffic in. And then people who are working on dating posts, is that as valuable as someone who’s doing a new post? And we found that it is. And then is the traffic coming from social media maybe isn’t as much. It’s really hard. And what we have decided to do, and I won’t claim that we are perfect at it, we’ve just said we’ve just had to the three of us together decide, like Erica said, divide it up three ways and try and make it where we’re each spending the equal amount of time. And I think we probably focused on time more than the actual revenue responsibility.

Bjork Ostrom:: Well, and it’s impossible. You can get, it could be become a full-time job to manage and allocate and track hours. And so at some point you have to be like, alright, do we all generally feel like this is fair? Yes, let’s move forward knowing that we all generally feel like this is fair because if not, you can get bogged down forever in the specifics around what is the value of this hour that I’m spending here? And if you can get past that, it’s like anything in the marketplace, does a buyer agree and the seller agree, great, then a match is made. And I feel like the same could be a said for business ownership. It’s a little bit different I think when you’re navigating it with a family, but we’re just in that world a little bit. We’re having those conversations more because it’s always just been Lindsay and I and it’s like, well, that’s easy. We’re just marriage partners. And so it’s like 50/50 on everything. But now for the first time it’s like, Hey, what does that look like if we start a thing with somebody else and divide that up before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. If you’re a food blogger or if you have a social media following and you’re looking to boost your income and grow your business, you need to check out member, full member full seamlessly integrates with your website, giving you full control and ownership of your brand, which we all know is so important. You can create tailored membership offerings like exclusive content, cooking classes, meal plans, private podcasts, so much more. It’s a fantastic way to provide more value to your audience and create new revenue streams for your business. And the good news is it handles the tough stuff like content protection, payment processing, subscription management, so you can focus on what you love, which is creating amazing content. Plus, you can build a loyal community with private spaces like a Discord chat or exclusive member forums. And there’s also in-depth analytics and super easy payouts through Stripe, which is awesome because then you have these valuable insights and you also have a reliable way to get paid. And if you ever need any help, the wonderful thing is they have real humans there to help you. No chat bots guiding you through support forums. It’s real people who understand membership sites, who understand content creators, and they are there to help and to lift the burden of some of the technical stuff, which not a lot of us love to deal with. So if you’re ready to monetize your passion, take your business to new heights, head over to memberful.com/food, that’s M-E-M-B-E-R-F-U-L.com/food. Moving on. One of the things we talked about that we’re going to share about is this idea of SEO. I know that that’s an important part of what you’re doing. So tell me a little bit about the landscape of the site right now. What does it look like? If you were to say percentage of revenue, is it primarily advertising? Do you work with brands? If you can talk about page views, just tell us a little bit about what the site looks like today. And then we’re also going to talk about helpful content and everything that came along with that. And maybe this would be a question for you, Echo.

Echo Blickenstaff: Okay, I was going to ask Erica to answer.

Bjork Ostrom:: Okay. Maybe it was Erica, I didn’t know within the roles, if the entrepreneur is the one that knows the data or the manager, which one is it? Erica, we will send it to you, Erica.

Erica Blickenstaff: We both like to keep tabs on how things are going with the website. And it’s funny because earlier when we were talking about this altogether, I wish you would’ve asked us this before. The helpful content update was not very helpful to us.

Bjork Ostrom:: Well, and we’re going to talk about the before and after with it, which will be great. So let’s start with the now and then we’ll rewind to hear a little bit of the season you guys have navigated with that

Erica Blickenstaff: Right now, we have, as far as page views, we have between one and a half and 2 million people coming to our site every month. I dunno, what was your other question?

Bjork Ostrom:: Oh, in terms of the business as a revenue allocation, is it primarily advertising from the site? Do you do any brand partnerships or product or anything like that? You have cookbooks if you were to look at the pie of revenue for the business?

Erica Blickenstaff: Yeah, definitely. Very. On the ad-heavy side, that’s probably the most prominent source of income. We do have cookbooks. We actually just released our third cookbook.

Bjork Ostrom:: Cool.

Erica Blickenstaff: In October.

Bjork Ostrom:: Congratulations.

Erica Blickenstaff: Thank you. And then we have worked with brands. I feel like a lot of the brand work was more in the past. I feel like those connections and the big affiliate partnerships with brands, I feel like we did that a lot more maybe five, 10 years ago. But now we’ve become a lot more picky who we work with, and that’s really slimmed down a lot. Just the amount of work that it takes to put in to sponsored content and stuff, how much they’re willing to pay. A lot of times it’s just not worth the work. So that’s kind of how it all shakes out. I’m trying to think of any other, I mean, of course Amazon affiliate links, there’s some revenue there.

Bjork Ostrom:: So take us back a year, maybe this is a painful revisiting of the results of the Google gods, but what did that look like a year ago from a page U perspective or sessions?

Erica Blickenstaff: So since the Helpful Content Updates, which we actually hit the hardest in September of 2023, that’s when we really started to start seeing decreases. And we’ve probably gone down like 30%, but lately we have been recovering, these last updates have been helping out. So hopefully we’ll keep seeing that upward trend going as we’re going further into Q4.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, so September of 2023 before that, was it kind of just a process of continual slow and steady growth with the site? And then is this the first time that you’ve navigated for Pinch of Yum? We had this season’s pre helpful content, but we had a season of continual slow decline. It was like, oh my goodness, what do you do? You try everything. It’s like what works? It’s hard, especially after season of just kind of growing. But was that your case where it’s like, hey, generally speaking month over month, there’s a little bit more this month when compared to the same month, the year before, was it the first season of navigating an extended period of decline?

Echo Blickenstaff: Yes, it really was. So it’s been frustrating because we’ve continued to add content over the last 12, 13 years. Well, ever since in 2012 regularly ad content and update content. And I felt when you look at the numbers, we just had this gradual growth and probably most food blog we really took off during C when people were cooking at home and saw great traffic, 20 20, 20 21. And then even into 20, 22, 23, we’re still seeing growth until the September update.

Bjork Ostrom:: And can you talk about, maybe this is less of, there’s two ways to focus on this. One would be tactics like, hey, what are some of the things that you’re doing and what do you think some of the things that you’re doing that are working? The other is Headspace, mentally, what is that like to navigate that? So maybe Erica, you can talk a little bit about for that last year, you look back and you’re like, it would’ve been more fun to talk about page views in September of 2023 than we’re recording this in November of 2024. How have you individually or collectively navigated a situation where it feels like we’re doing good work, we’re showing up, we’re doing the same things we’ve always done that have rewarded us, but now that it feels like the game has changed, how have you navigated that from a Headspace perspective?

Erica Blickenstaff: And I don’t know if you feel this way, but a lot of it is just like, don’t panic, Start seeing those numbers going down and we’ll get on meetings every week and we’re like, okay, don’t panic. It’s going to be okay. We’re going to be fine. We just have to navigate this and figure out what Google is looking for and supply that to our readers. And a lot of that is just doing a lot of testing and trying to be productive that way. Trying to figure out, okay, what were we doing before that doesn’t like anymore? And then just doing lots of that AB testing and trying something new. And some of it was working with different SEOs and getting advice and trying things. And I mean, you probably know this, working with SEOs some advice was great and advice was not so great.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, totally. Well, and it’s like maybe it’s the exact opposite of the advice that you got from somebody else. Hey, you need to do this. Yeah.

Erica Blickenstaff: I mean there would be conflicting advice all the time. And I think a lot of it is when you’re an owner of your blog, you just kind of know, just have that feeling and you also have to trust yourself and trust that you know what you’re doing. And there were a lot of times that we would stop and be like, listen, we’ve been doing this for 17 years and we’ve navigated this before. We are professionals. And sometimes it’s hard to admit that to yourself to be like, no, I know what I’m doing. I’m a professional, we can figure this out.

Bjork Ostrom:: Well, especially you have developed a sixth sense around what works, what doesn’t work. And I feel this way in the world of finance where it’s like I’m continually interested in learning about finance, personal finance, opinions on things. But I would say for every 10 pieces of advice I take in from a content perspective around finance, there’s maybe one that I’m like, oh, I’m going to hold onto this. And I think if it was 20 years ago, I would kind of be holding onto everything. I haven’t really developed an opinion or an edge around my beliefs as it relates to personal finance. I feel like in our world of search and content, it’s probably similar. You all have been at this 10, 15, 17 years and you’ve taken in a lot of content. And in the early stages you kind of take it all as gospel. And then over time you start to realize, wait, this doesn’t feel like it applies to either what we’re doing. Maybe it’s like industry specific or maybe just seems a little bit off, or maybe it’s a way to get a result, but it feels temporary as opposed to long-term beneficial. So you start to develop these opinions, but it takes time to your point, and you probably don’t even realize the depth of your own expertise. So from a tactics perspective, you have gone through the process of learning a lot of different things, hearing from a lot of people. Echo, can you speak to right now, what does it look like for you in terms of what you’re doing day to day and maybe some things you could point to that are working well if you do have those things?

Echo Blickenstaff: One of the tactics I think that we’ve employed over the past year is going back to our roots. And when I say that, just when we first started out, we would write about where we got the recipe, how we came up with it, add some more personal touches. I mean that’s really all it was. There wasn’t a lot of information about the recipe within the content of the post. And over time, as you know, all the changes and the things we’ve been told from SEO experts in the field do this and then the next year, no, you need to do this. And I felt for a long time we were just chasing that, oh, we’ve got to go through all of our posts and posts and change this, and then something else comes up. We’ve got to go through all of our posts and change this and hire people on to help us get everything fixed for this new way to rank higher on Google. And I think this process with the Google updates has taught us, let’s stick with what we feel good about instead of what everybody else is telling us to do. And

Bjork Ostrom:: Do you have an example of that when you say something, an example of something you feel good about?

Echo Blickenstaff: Well, I think, and I could be wrong, but I think a lot of the people who followed us, especially from the beginning, enjoy hearing a little bit. And I’m not saying the whole life story. I personally enjoy when I read on Pinch of Yum or their website where they came up with the recipe or was this a family recipe? Where did it come from? Or we like to do a lot of copycat recipes on our site and I think people would like to know why did we pick that recipe to copycat? What’s our experience with that dish and why we would go to the trouble of trying to copycat it? Those kinds of things I think people find interesting. They don’t necessarily need a repeat of a bunch of things that are already in the recipe cart. So I think that seems to be something that Google prefers to see.

Bjork Ostrom:: It’s one of the hard things is like we talked about, you have almost two decades now of running the site, and so you have an intuition around readers, engaging with readers, interacting with readers. And what Google is trying to do long-term is serve content that is most helpful for the people that are using Google. Now, there’s a lot of questions around the long-term play of AI overviews and how much content is Google going to include in their search results. But generally speaking, the goal of Google is to give people helpful content outside of the context of helpful content update, but content that is truly good fit for people that people want. But the hard part, to your point echo, is it felt like there was a long history for a couple years of creating content that it kind of felt like people didn’t want, but Google rewarded. And then the question is, what do you do? Do you do the thing that you know is working in the moment or do you do the thing that you feel like is more aligned from a user perspective that feels a little bit maybe more organic, but maybe more engaging or useful or helpful for somebody coming to a piece of content at the risk of that thing not performing as well within Google. And so you kind of are forced to make this decision around how do you want to show up and how do you create content? Do you create it just for Google? Do you create it for just for people without Google or do you kind of find that middle ground? And it sounds like that’s where you’ve landed is this middle ground of creating user forward content from a ui ux and just what the content is about perspective, but then also keeping a search engine in mind from best practices standpoint. Does that feel accurate as to what you’re trying to do now?

Echo Blickenstaff: Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do now.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. Wrapping the content with, yeah, go ahead.

Echo Blickenstaff: I think that’s what we tried to do all along, but I think we got a little too distracted with what everybody else was doing.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. Which is I think everybody can relate to that, especially when you see a thing and it’s working, it’s like, oh, maybe that’s something that’s worth pursuing. So as we close out here, you have been doing this for a long time and you’ve been doing it successfully for a long time. Erica, you alluded to that as you’re working with these SEOs and it’s like getting some great advice, but also then getting some advice maybe in certain situations it’s like, oh, it doesn’t feel like necessarily something you’d say, yeah, we’re going to do this, no questions asked and move forward with it. Point being, you have a lot of insights, expertise, you have a lot of success. Tell me about when you look out another five years or 10 years, how do you guys think about the site that you’ve built, the strategy that you have? Erica, you’re in that entrepreneurial role, so maybe you’re thinking ahead a little bit, looking at new opportunities, anything that you’d point out or shine a light on for other creators as you think about what’s to come down the line?

Erica Blickenstaff: I’m always looking for different ideas. I mean, we’ve been looking into different product ideas or different, just a lot of different revenue streams, especially because of these last updates, how quickly Google can just take something away. So focusing on email and just different revenue opportunities, but also doing what we’ve been doing and really providing good content for our readers because I feel like people are always going to be wanting to find the recipes that they knew when they were growing up, those true favorite family recipes that they had. And I don’t think that’s going to go away. I don’t think that’s something that AI can take away. AI has never had those feelings and experiences around food we have, and I think people are always going to search for that genuine content. And so looking down the road, that’s what we want to keep providing is genuine content. And like Echo said, maybe even getting more back to our roots and being more genuine and building more for our readers instead of always trying to please the SEO gods.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, totally. Which there’s something that’s really nice about that to be writing for readers first before search. I think especially for people who enjoy the process of less structured content that’s not 17 sections on all the different ingredients and the history of those ingredients, it feels like a good way to be creating content. Last thing that I want to ask about, it’s a section that we’re trying to talk about more. I think it’s fun for people to hear about, and part of this comes back to Echo. We were at a conference, we were sitting across from each other and you were like, do you guys know a tool that brings in Google Analytics data, Google Search Console data, WordPress data? And for a minute I thought you were joking, you essentially read off the header of Clariti, the tool that we’ve been working on. And so I was like, oh my gosh, we either need to do a better job of marketing or we need to position things better. So you don’t have to say clarity, I dunno if you’re still using the tool, but this made me think of that moment. But what are the tools that you are using in your day to day that you especially, and it could be communication tools for your team, it could be an AI tool that helps you think of new ways to create content. Anything that you’re using that is kind of a fun thing that you think other people might find helpful. Echo, you can start and then Erica, if you have thoughts too.

Echo Blickenstaff: Okay. Well we have used Clariti and we use Clariti almost every day. It has been.

Bjork Ostrom:: Okay, great. Shameless plug. Yeah, glad to hear it. Yeah, I’m glad that we, it’s the most in-person marketing I’ve ever done. It’s just like sitting across from you explaining the tool.

Echo Blickenstaff: That was such an amazing experience because it was so on my mind and I’m glad that I brought it up to you and you had a great answer for it. And it’s something that we’ve used. We were actually in a meeting yesterday and all three of us, I said, okay, you look up this, you look up, you look up this on Clariti and let’s compare. And it’s been

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, awesome.

Echo Blickenstaff: A great tool for us. So thank you.

Bjork Ostrom:: Great.

Echo Blickenstaff: We also use SEMrush, and that’s been a good tool for us, just mostly for researching keywords for new posts, trying to, if there’s a recipe that we’re wanting to explore, what are the keywords around it, what’s the volume people are searching? Is it already completely washed out on the internet? There’s no way we would ever rank for it. And sometimes we still create content even if just because we feel like it’s a good fit for our site and it’s something that we want to have on there. For example, Erica just went to Switzerland and brought back some recipes.

Bjork Ostrom:: Awesome.

Echo Blickenstaff: That have been fun that we’ve put on the site. I don’t know how they’ll do, but we’ll see.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. Great.

Echo Blickenstaff: And then for delegating responsibilities, a tool that we’ve used a lot with our team is Asana, just the free version, and that’s worked really well for us. I really like that tool for just making assignments to the team.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. Cool. That’s great. Erica, anything you’d add?

Erica Blickenstaff: I think she covered it pretty well. Just back to Clariti. I remember when we were at that conference, I remember Echo came bursting through the hotel room and she’s like, Erica, it’s like what I found,

Bjork Ostrom:: We talked about the tool and we created it on the spot. It manifested itself.

Erica Blickenstaff: I know. And we’re like, where was this a year or two years ago? How come we didn’t know about this?

Bjork Ostrom:: That’s really funny. And it’s so funny. It was a really fun story for me to bring back to the team, I think partly because it’s like, oh, this is the tool that’s needed for people in your position. It’s the exact tool that we built and now it’s just our job to market to get it in front of people.

Echo Blickenstaff: Just one more plug for it. Really enjoy looking on Clariti and finding broken links. That’s something one of the first steps with Clariti. We went through and fixed a bunch of broken links that we had no idea where those broken links were there. The thing we love about it is that it showed us alt tags that were missing. We thought we had covered alt tags,

Bjork Ostrom:: Everything. Sure.

Echo Blickenstaff: Everything. And that was so helpful. And just going in and changing a few of those things on a post makes a big difference in traffic.

Bjork Ostrom:: That’s great. Even for Pinch of Yum, and I feel like we’re relatively aware of all this stuff, right? It’s like I talk about it every week on the podcast, we had a decent amount of orphaned content, so content that wasn’t linked from any other post or page on the site. Obviously there’s going to be deep archive pages on the blog archive, but there was no organic text link within other pieces of content. So that’s been a huge project for us and one that we probably wouldn’t have done if not for the tool. So that’s super great. Asana, we use Asana. I’ve actually started using it personally. I’m starting to work with my brother-in-law on projects. And so it’s like my mantra is everything in Asana, all processes, all tasks, all projects, putting that into Asana. So yeah, definitely a great tool. Echo, Erica, it’s great to connect. It’s fun for me to have these conversations when I have a first touchpoint in person and then it transitions into digital. That’s a rare thing. And it was so fun to sit down with the two of you when we had that dinner at the conference. And just a huge amount of respect for what you’ve done, the business that you’ve built, and also to do it as a family. And it’s a uniquely wonderful and challenging thing. And so appreciate you sharing your story there as well. This will be the actual last question. One piece of advice that you’d have for somebody who’s interested in doing a thing for a decade, we talk about all the time, it’s showing up, getting a tiny bit better every day forever. And people underestimate what they can do in a decade. They overestimate what they can do in a year, and you’re a testament to that. Having worked on a thing for a really long period of time, echo, what would you say? And then Erica will go to you, that one piece of advice to encourage somebody to show up for a decade and continue doing the work.

Echo Blickenstaff: I think my advice would be start out with your goal in mind and then break it down. That’s a tool that has really helped me a lot in this business is starting having the big vision and returning to the big vision. There’s a lot of motivation there to keep going. And then breaking down, what am I going to do year one, year two, year three? I’m a very visual person. I like to see things mapped out. And then when that’s broken down into what does that look like every week that needs to be accomplished. It’s like taking a bite of the elephant one at a time. It really breaks it down and makes it more doable. And you see the rewards when you do that. I remember one of our first, when Erica was talking about when we kind of put all of our responsibilities into individual lanes, one of the things we did at that meeting too is we set some goals of what we wanted to see next year. And in five years, I don’t think we went as far as 10 years, but that was really helpful. And then we track, are we keeping up with what we wanted to do year one, year two, year three. So that was it.

Bjork Ostrom:: That’s great. And it sounds like something that somebody in your role should say, when you talk about, you all naturally line up with what you do, somebody who’s kind of in that manager position, that is ideal answer. Take a big vision, divide it up into manageable tasks, spread it out over a long period of time, take one little step each day. I love that. And I think it’s a great way to look at it. You can cover a lot if you do a little bit every day. So Erica, how about you?

Erica Blickenstaff: For me, I would definitely say set boundaries for yourself. When we were first starting, like Echo said, we were just working all hours and weekends and it was a lot of hard work and we were just burning the candle at both ends and it was too much. And I feel like just a couple years in, we were all feeling burnout And we weren’t being as productive as we could have been. And so drawing those lines for yourself and those boundaries and just saying, when the kids get home from school, I’m done. I’m done. I’m not going to be working on stuff until they go to bed or I’m going to focus on my family while they’re here so they don’t feel like they’re second to the business. And I found that that has brought me a lot more joy in what I do. And I think that because I set those boundaries, we’ve been able to be, I mean all of us have, I think we’ve been more successful because we’re not burning out and we’re putting our priorities in order, starting with our families. And I think that by doing that, it’s ultimately helped the business.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, totally. And there’s this idea of you give to the business, but you also want a business that gives to you. And if you’re only giving to the business, that’s going to be like any other relationship. It’s probably going to be unhealthy if you are the only one investing into that relationship. And I think about that from our relationship with the business. There needs to be situations where it gives to us as well. We can’t always just be giving to it. So that’s great. And I think a really good reminder, Erica Echo, thanks so much for coming on. It was a joy to talk to both of you and really appreciate your time.

Erica Blickenstaff: Thank you. Okay, thanks.

Emily Walker: Hello, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. I wanted to pop in today and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We are so grateful for you for listening. Before we sign off, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Food Blogger Pro Forum. In case you didn’t know how it works, if you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you get access to our amazing forum. It’s one of my favorite places on Food Blogger Pro. I spend a lot of time there myself. And on the forum we have tons of different topics for you to explore. We have a building traffic section, a photography section. We have an essential tool section. We chat about generating income and essential plugins, all sorts of areas for you to ask questions and chat with your fellow Food Blogger Pro members. It’s a great place to connect with fellow members, troubleshoot any issues you’re having, and brainstorm together. Our industry experts are always popping into the forum to help members with their questions. Casey Markee and Andrew Wilder are always popping in, and so is Danielle Liss, our legal expert. It’s a really great place to get access to these experts and have them help you with your concerns. The forum is also just a fantastic place to find a community in this food blogging space as you’re working to grow your site and your business. If you’re ready to join Food Blogger Pro and get access to our wonderful forum, head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about our membership. We really hope you enjoy this episode and can’t wait to see you next week for another great episode. Have an amazing week.