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This episode is sponsored by Clariti and Raptive.
Welcome to episode 440 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, we’re rewinding back to our episode with David Crowley from Cooking Chat, which was part of our Blogging with a Full-Time Job series.
Last week on the podcast, Bjork chatted with Joe Pulizzi. To go back and listen to that episode, click here.
Blogging with a Full-Time Job — Optimizing Your Time
For today’s FBP Rewind episode, we’re bringing back our February 2022 interview with David Crowley from Cooking Chat!
In addition to sharing hundreds of recipes with wine pairings on his blog Cooking Chat, David also runs Social Capital Inc., a non-profit organization that strengthens communities by connecting diverse individuals through civic engagement initiatives.
In this episode, you’ll hear how David has found balance with his work over time, why he’s been focusing so much on republishing old content recently, and what he’s looking forward to next with his blog.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- What David does for his full-time job
- How he got into food blogging
- How he’s found balance with his work over time
- Why he’s been focusing on republishing old content recently
- What specifically he updates when republishing content
- What he’s currently struggling with when it comes to blogging
- Why it’s so important to document your processes
- How to find the right people to hire
Resources:
- Social Capital Inc.
- Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
- Cooking Chat
- 261: Managing Sponsored Content – How to Work With Brands with Bruno Bornsztein
- 159: Different Ways to Create an Income Online with Mark Daoust
- Gentleman’s Gazette
- Wayback Machine
- Tasty Food Photography eBook
- Curbly
- Clariti
- NerdPress
- Foodie Pro Theme
- Mediavine
- Your World-Class Assistant
- Loom
- Google Drive
- Delegate and Elevate Exercise
- Updating Blog Posts and Other Food Blog Strategies
- Follow David on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter
- Join the Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook Group
Thank you to our sponsors!
This episode is sponsored by Clariti and Raptive.
Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode!
Sign up for Clariti today to easily organize your blog content for maximum growth and receive access to their limited-time $45 Forever pricing, 50% off your first month, optimization ideas for your site content, and more!
Thanks to Raptive for sponsoring this episode!
Become a Raptive creator today to start generating ad revenue on your blog and get access to industry-leading resources on HR and recruiting, SEO, email marketing, ad layout testing, and more. You can also get access to access a FREE email series to help you increase your traffic if you’re not yet at the minimum 100k pageviews to apply to Raptive.
Interested in working with us too? Learn more about our sponsorship opportunities and how to get started here.
If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to [email protected].
Transcript (click to expand):
Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. If you’ve been frustrated trying to discover actionable insights from different analytics and keyword platforms, Clariti is your solution. Clariti helps you manage your blog content all in one place so you can find actionable insights that improve the quality of your content. Not only does it automatically sync your WordPress post data so you can find insights about broken images, broken links, and more, it can also sync with your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data so you can see keyword, session, page view and user data for each and every post. One of our favorite ways to use it, we can easily filter and see which of our posts have had a decrease in sessions or page views over a set period of time and give a little extra attention to those recipes.
This is especially helpful when there are Google updates or changes and search algorithms so that we can easily tell which of our recipes have been impacted the most. Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast get 50% off of their first month of Clariti after signing up. To sign up, simply go to clariti.com/food, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.
Emily Walker: Hey, there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Today on the podcast, we’re doing something special. Every once in a while, we like to publish what we call our Food Blogger Pro rewind episodes where we shine a spotlight on previous episodes of the podcast that really seem to resonate with listeners, that got lots of downloads and listens, and people just seem to find lots of actionable insights or takeaways from them, and we want to make sure that they get as many listens and into as many earbuds as possible. So we are republishing them today and hoping that you get a lot out of it if you haven’t already listened to it. This week, we are highlighting an episode with David Crowley from the Food Blog Cooking Chat.
This is part one in our blogging with a full-time job series, and slight spoiler alert, next week, we will be highlighting part two of that series, so make sure to tune in then as well. In this episode, Bjork and David chat about what David does for his full-time job and how he got into food blogging and how he balances his full-time job with his blogging responsibilities. He also shares more about how he republishes old content and what he updates when republishing that content and the importance of documenting your processes as a food blogger. It’s a really amazing episode. Bjork and David have lots to chat about, and if you haven’t listened to it, highly recommend tuning in. And even if you listened to this episode when it aired a few years ago, I definitely think it’s worth a re-listen.
And for our Food Blogger Pro members, in just a few short days on December 21st, we’ll be releasing our blogging with a full-time job course, which is a brand new course. So if this episode resonates with you, if it gets you inspired or you’re just curious to learn more about blogging with a full-time job, definitely check out that course on Food Blogger Pro. Without further ado, I’ll just let Bjork take it away.
Bjork Ostrom: All right, let’s jump into this conversation. David, welcome to the podcast.
David Crowley: Hey, it’s great to be here. I’m a long time listener, so glad to be on this end of it.
Bjork Ostrom: It’s fun too for me to see people who I know the online them really well and I know the online them with profile picture really well, but it’s like, wait a minute, this is a moving talking David, which is really fun to see. So we’ve been connected in the online world for a long time and have overlapped in the different online spaces where we operate, but here we are on Zoom. Super fun to have you. So we’re going to be doing a series of sorts talking to people who are successful in blogging and also successful in their career. We chatted about this a little bit before we pressed record, but you’re in this great position where, hey, what you’re doing in your day-to-day job, you’re not trying to escape. There are some people who are trying to escape the daily grind, but you’re not, but also you love your blog and are continuing to work on it and build it and have been successful with that.
And so we’re going to have a conversation with these folks who are in that space. Some are trying to, hey, leave the 9:00 to 5:00. Some are like, “I love what I’m doing. I want to continue to do that and have a side hustle.” And we’re going to see if we can extract some valuable nuggets to learn from you and how you’re doing it, and then also towards the end, have a conversation around, hey, what’s working? What’s not working? Which will be a fun conversation. So before we get into that, what do you actually do? What is your full-time job? And then take us back to the day that you started your blog.
David Crowley: Yeah, sure. That sounds great. So my full-time job is running a nonprofit organization called Social Capital Inc that I actually founded almost 20 years ago. We run programs that get people more connected to their neighbors and more active in their local community. So that is my day job.
Bjork Ostrom: And this was a nonprofit you started?
David Crowley: Yeah, yeah, in 2002.
Bjork Ostrom: Cool. And the name of it again is?
David Crowley: It’s Social Capital Inc. So it’s basically taking this term that probably a good amount of people have heard, social capital, the value of our connections, really putting that in a local context. There’s a lot of evidence that says the more people know their neighbors and are active in civic life, the better off you’re going to be across all kinds of outcomes. And you’re living in one of the highest social capital states, so-
Bjork Ostrom: Minnesota.
David Crowley: Minnesota scores well in those-
Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome and I love hearing that. One example of that, very small example, it’s like negative 10 today when we’re recording this, super cold. And yesterday I stepped outside and it had snow and our driveway was completely cleared off and I was like, “Wait a minute.” Somebody had cleared it. It’s like, wait, this is the best feeling ever in Minnesota, is when you don’t have to do the shoveling or snow blowing. And I texted Rob, our neighbor, I was like, “Did you come? I followed the snowblower tracks back to your place.” But what’s interesting though, we’re in the suburbs. One of the things that I’ve heard is there’s a correlation to opioid addiction and suburbs due to the isolation that results in people living in these huge homes. They don’t have to go out, they don’t have to interact as much, and the solution, the proposal in this situation from this individual is social connection because people aren’t feeling lonely and needing to accommodate for that in a way.
So what a significant and impactful thing, and you really feel that when you start to have that connection with neighbors and you can text them and say, “Hey, we’re going to be gone tomorrow. Can you watch our house?” And you trust them and have conversations out on the yard or whatever it might be. When you started it, what was the reason behind doing it? Was it a personal story or did you just see it as a need?
David Crowley: Actually, I moved back to the town I grew up in. We’re in a suburb of Boston and I grew up here. I went to school in there, but I lived in Kentucky for five years and then also did apartment living and when we first moved back to the Boston area, so then my wife and I bought a home in the town I grew up in and thought I’d never be back to except to say hello to the folks. Lo and behold, it actually looked better and better when you’re in that stage of thinking about buying a home, having children and that sort of thing. So doing it really got me thinking deeply about how the community had changed and evolved, much more diverse than when I grew up here. And a good thing, but it does create challenges as to how do you bring folks together in an increasingly diverse and changing community? And so I was having that personal experience.
I also read a book called Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, which talks broadly about this phenomenon of people being less connected to their neighbors and less engaged in community life over the last third of the 20th century. So I had this idea of trying to address this bigger problem locally with the idea of trying to develop something that might scale in some fashion, and we’ve grown from the town. We still do a lot. We actually have volunteers out shoveling for senior citizens today at First Snow Day in the area, but we serve communities throughout the greater Boston area currently.
Bjork Ostrom: Gosh, that’s awesome. I’m going to add this book to my reading list. So this isn’t obviously Food Blogger Pro podcast. I feel like we could do an entire podcast episode on this subject and it would be equally as valuable on talking about blogging business or whatever it would be. Reason being, I feel like what I’m learning more and more is our wellbeing is also ties into everything we’re doing, and so much of our wellbeing has to do with how connected we are. There’s tons of studies like that, you probably know more than I do, around the variable that matters most isn’t how much money you earn, isn’t the work that you’re doing. What it really is is the strength of connections that you have with individuals, the people who you know, like, and trust and are well-connected with. I’m curious to know, how do you do that better? If somebody’s listening to this and they’re like, I want to be more connected with my neighbors and my community, how do you do that?
David Crowley: That’s a great question. Part of what our organization tries to do is serve up a menu of all kinds of ways people get involved locally. So I think part of it involves taking a little bit of risk, checking out what’s out there and some people are very comfortable just, hey, I’m going to go to a discussion for Black History Month at the local library. And some people are really comfortable, but a lot of people are a little reticent to get out of their comfort zone. I think pushing yourself a little because in the short run, the easiest thing to do is the default, is to stay home or stay-
Bjork Ostrom: Netflix.
David Crowley: Netflix or whatever. Or even as COVID numbers are going up again or even jumping into a virtual program where you can get into discussions, that’s one silver lining in this time. I think our organization has figured out a way to put a lot of our programming online, so look for those opportunities. This is a great time to just dive in and try something. A lot of organizations are offering very interesting ways to connect and engage with people virtually as well as in person, so taking a little risk and trying something and until you find something that resonates.
Bjork Ostrom: I love that. One of the things that often comes up in the podcast is this question of how do you connect with other people? How do you connect with other bloggers? How do you connect with other creators? And I think one of the easiest ways to do it, but not the simplest, I’ll say, not the easiest because there is a comfort zone factor within it, is being the person to invite other people in, being the facilitator, the organizer. And you don’t have to be somebody who’s super charismatic, but to send a message to reach out to people and say, “Hey, would you be interested in getting together once a month to talk about blogging?” That’s how I connected with three different people who have been on the podcast. Bruno, he does InfluenceKit and he’s been on the podcast before. Mark, who has a company called Quiet Light and he buys and sells website. He’s the founder of that. And Raphael, who has a site called Gentleman’s Gazette.
Somehow realized they’re all in Minnesota and I just sent a message, was like, “Hey, do you guys want to meet up?” And it turned into this once every couple months we’d get lunch and just chat about stuff and it’s like, oh, those are great connections that came out of it. And it reminds me of my neighbor, John, who when we moved in, he’s like, “Do you want to go for a walk? Do you want to walk our dogs together?” I was like, “Great, that sounds awesome.” But it’s not something I would’ve done, and I really appreciated him doing that. So it makes sense when I hear you talk about that. Being the founder of a nonprofit that’s 20 years, is that right? You said it started in 2002?
David Crowley: Yeah, 20 years this year.
Bjork Ostrom: So coming up on 20 years, and deep impact and important work that you’re doing. And so it’s not like you’re going into an office and doing this miserable work that you want to get away from. It’s hey, I want to keep this because it’s really important and it’s what I want to be doing. And you have your blog and you have success with your blog and you’ve been doing that for a long time. So how does that fit into the puzzle and when did you start that and then when did you double down on hey, this can actually be something that I could do?
David Crowley: I think the backstory to it, I think, starts with just I quickly developed a love or interest and enjoyment of cooking shortly after graduating from college and all of a sudden figuring out I had to fend for myself.
Bjork Ostrom: You did, right? Yeah, you don’t have a food court that you can go to and…
David Crowley: Exactly. And food’s always been important to me. In fact, talking about meeting people, I remember in college the joke would be I’d sit through three cycles of people coming in and out of the dining hall, so I met a lot of people that way out.
Bjork Ostrom: Just hanging out.
David Crowley: Well, and I was eating.
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.
David Crowley: So anyway, but in terms of getting into blogging, I think the early days for me… Honestly, I forget the exact year ’cause it started out very informally, definitely as a way to almost journal my cooking and also, as we’ll get into, I have a focus on wine pairing with the recipes I do, so learning about that as well. So it was a way that opened… One of the things I came across, I forget what even I was doing, the idea of sharing your journey through blogging, open source, you’re learning. Put out there, hey, this is what I’m learning. This is a recipe I tried or wine I tried, and getting feedback from people that share the interest. So a way of some of the earlier days of the internet being a thing where that excitement of, hey, I don’t have to be limited by the people in my family just wanting to eat meat and potatoes, but I can connect with people who love curry or whatever else it might be. So that was the-
Bjork Ostrom: At that time it was pre–2010, 2010 even because you started a little bit before then, but 2010, ’11, ’12, there still was this journal mentality of blogging, which is informal. There’s maybe a couple casual pictures of what you ate, weren’t really thinking about SEO optimization or content structure. It was like you’d follow people who were journaling. It was almost like Twitter. You’d have a follow on a blog and you’d see, hey, here’s what they did today and they post it at night, and just a little journal entry. Is that close to what-
David Crowley: Exactly. Yeah. I was on BlogSpot initially, and so I did that for several years. I know sometimes you seem to know all the obscure websites. I had my blog on that and I was also on a site called gather.com. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that. It was actually-
Bjork Ostrom: I don’t know gather, but I love anytime I can use the wayback machine and pull up a 2008 really popular platform. The one that a lot of friends were on around that time was Xanga.
David Crowley: Oh, I think I heard of that one.
Bjork Ostrom: X-A-N-G-A, but I love that stuff, so I’ll look it up for sure. So you were posting on Gather?
David Crowley: I did an actually early taste that you could actually make a little bit of money on this, at least if not more. I was posting on there and got asked to do a bimonthly column on… It was called Wine Chat and I think I got $100 a month for doing two articles on there.
Bjork Ostrom: And it was making money on the internet, which at that time was-
David Crowley: It was like wow.
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so cool. So when you think of, hey, I started this in what year? What was it? When was it?
David Crowley: Honestly, I tend to think more of when I really started seriously, and that was 2014, because then I switched to WordPress. I started following you and Lindsay, but I did that, I forget what that online… It wasn’t a course, it was like an ebook on food photography. Got that. Started really drinking the… I don’t know if it was Food Blogger Pro quite yet, but started to get learning some of that stuff and starting to see it as a business and a chance with the idea of trying to monetize. So that date sticks. I also know I bought a computer that’s finally in need of a Mac. Macs are so good, but it’s finally in need of replacement, I think finally here in 2022. So I have harder markers for that date, but I think… Because in part of it, I’ve gone back and either deleted most of those early, here’s some good cheese I found at the store.
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, exactly.
David Crowley: That looks… I’ve either deleted those or updated the dates. I think I have a few. I think I intentionally left a couple posts early on with the original dates that resonated, but I suspect… And I forget how it works, I think even when you do that move over, all of a sudden, I think maybe that kicked all the dates to the date I went to WordPress, if I’m not mistaken.
Bjork Ostrom: And I think maybe depends exactly how you did it. And we just went through that actually with a site called Curbly. It’s a home DIY site that we acquired actually from Bruno or from Bruno that we’re going to start working on and made the switch. He had built it on a custom platform and then did the big WordPress switch. So can relate in regards to that being a pretty significant thing and changes to dates and stuff like that are made along the way. So 2014 really is the point where it’s almost like dabbling a little bit, it sounds like. Doing a little bit of this, doing a little bit of that, but all in the category of food and wine and then being like, wait a minute, there’s something here. I could actually do this. And starting to think a little bit more strategically, learning a little bit. Food photography, how did you get better at food photography?
What did that look like once you had made that switch to focusing a little bit more on the site? And knowing that, hey, you like what you’re doing, you know that you’re not going to leave the nonprofit you founded, what was your mindset with it in terms of optimizations and time and effort along with it? Was it purely side hustle at that point?
David Crowley: Yeah, I think in the early days of making that commitment to doing it more seriously, I think part of the idea was there were a couple factors, I think, for us. One of our goals was definitely in wanting to stay for a nonprofit that’s successful, but still relatively small and not super lucrative in terms of what…
Bjork Ostrom: For sure.
David Crowley: Seeing there wasn’t a huge growth salary for me sticking there, but on the other hand, things like projecting college and retirement type things that it’s hard to invest in as much when you’re choosing to work in the nonprofit sector. So it was my wife and I having a conversation a little bit, like “Hey, this could be a way to keep the day job you love with more or less the same salary range, but still help bring in the increased revenue we really need to meet our family needs.” It seemed like maybe blogging had that potential. And especially hearing the Pinch of Yum story and other folks that were successful, it was like, wow, okay. It was almost like dabbling forever probably doesn’t make a lot of sense ’cause I was spending enough time on it just as a hobby. So it’s like, hey, can we get serious and have this be a part of our family’s financial equation in a meaningful way and let’s give it a shot?
So I think what I would say though about the early days of that, it was like drinking from the fire hose of all these ideas of photography, how to get more traffic, dah, dah, dah. It was almost like trying everything and this feeling like, man, I could be doing this all the time, and sometimes it was like-
Bjork Ostrom: 20 hours a day.
David Crowley: Yeah. So that, I think was hard, but sometimes my first instinct to solve a problem is work more, work harder kind of thing. My dad at various points had three jobs, make ends meet kind of thing. So it’s just the way you do things, but that’s not always the best way to roll. But I would say there were a couple years where that was my blogging was frenetic energy, maybe not. Totally trying to figure out which of the things I was putting time and effort into were going to have traction and really to test the hypotheses that this could actually be some kind of meaningful revenue stream for our family.
Bjork Ostrom: Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors.
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What did it look like to transition out of that? Do you feel like now when you look at what you’re doing, you have a little bit more clarity on, hey, here’s what I focus on, here’s what I do, here’s what I don’t do? Or is it like fire hose stage or is it like garden hose stage or on the spectrum of-
David Crowley: It’s at least garden hose. It’s definitely not fire hose. I would say, definitely, I think I’ve been able to figure out over the last few years where… I think it’s always an evolving question, and I always think whether it’s blogging or my day job, the most important resource we have is our time. So for the most part, I get in frenetic stages where I forget about it, but I try to be pretty mindful of where I’m allocating my time and I feel like I have a better grasp at this stage of blogging as to, okay, these are things that make sense. This is where I need to be spending the biggest percentage of my time versus the stuff that’s, okay, if I have a little extra time, I’ll do more of that. If I don’t, I let it go and not only is the world going to keep revolving, the blog is actually going to keep thriving as a matter of fact.
Bjork Ostrom: What are those things that in the limited amount of time that you have? So you have, when you slice it, looking not at your schedule, but in general it’s people who are doing full-time. If it’s a normal 9:00 to 5:00, you have mornings, you maybe have a lunch sprint, you have evenings, and you have weekends. So in that time that you have, what does that look like for you in regards to what you’re focusing on and what you’ve found to be for yourself, it’s individual dependent, the highest ROI for your time?
David Crowley: I definitely feel like, and it chips over time, but I think in general that category of producing well content that has some SEO potential that’s based on some SEO concepts, and lately that’s meant a lot of updating. I probably spend more time updating old posts than creating new content ’cause that seems like when I look back at… I was looking back at my 2021 stats, I think I had to go down to about rank order number 30 out of traffic that was actually new recipe this year. The other 29 were older posts and within the top 10 there I can see, oh yeah, great. That was a good investment of time. I updated that sauteed arugula. Beautiful. I’m glad to see it’s getting some attention. I was just going to say, I do feel like maybe in the coming year, I think to some extent I picked a lot of the low hanging fruit when I figured out that that was an important space of time.
So I’m feeling like the year ahead maybe it’ll be a little more balanced, but I do feel like I have a little bit more of an idea of how to… I might not be able to get a post that’s going to bump my top couple posts out of those slots right away, but at least that are going to perform pretty well within the year as opposed to never or over multiple years.
Bjork Ostrom: What does that look like in terms of your process for finding those? So you say, hey, I’m going to update a piece of content and I know that there’s a good chance that if I do the right things, which would be interested in your thought process with that, that I’ll maybe spend less time and get more return on it then if I was creating something new. So first, how do you identify with those posts that you want to focus on? And then what are some of the things that you like to do once you get into it?
David Crowley: I’ve gotten in the habit the last few years of doing around the turn of the calendar year, try to pull both the Google Analytics and search console data and really look for those where I’m ranking. Originally I was looking where I’m not quite on page one of Google, maybe 11 to 15 or something like that, trying to bump where I can bump up. But also now, I think from listening to your podcast and others, some guests, and other things I’ve read also, realizing how much it means to go from five to three or three to two, whereas I think before… I think my earlier on in this process, I think I was, oh, page one, I don’t want to mess with that, but you’re realizing low down on page one’s not really doing all that much for you.
My top performing post that brings in the most revenue is a pork ribs recipe, and one of the reasons why it does well is it just ranks for so many things. So that’s another factor too. I think some of the newer things I’m targeting, it’s a little more niche from the get-go, but you don’t have that benefit of… And that’s where, I suppose it is a science, but it also seems like an art of figuring out, well, this is something I could be in the one slide on, but it’s not going to so many people looking for steak piccata recipe for instance, versus something where, geez, various iterations on mushroom risotto, if I can even be on 10 on something like that, it’s got 100,000 searches per month. That’s something to consider.
Bjork Ostrom: There’s no exact formula for it. That’s what’s hard is, I think some people are like, “What’s the formula? What do you do?” And to your point, it’s the art and the science, and I think one of the things that people forget a lot is the art in content is the actual content itself. So there’s structural best practices, like you should only have one H1, you can have multiple H2s, you can have some H3s. It’s probably good to have an FAQ section, those type of structural type things. But super extreme example, if all of that is filled with a random assortment of characters that you mash on your keyboard, it’s not going to matter how you structure it because it’s 0% helpful. There’s a spectrum of the most incredible piece of content that would be 100% helpful. And part of what we need to do is, okay, we have best practices, but what does it look like for them, us, for you, the artist, the creator, to backfill those best practices with things that are truly helpful, impactful, unique?
And that’s where it feels like the art and science comes in because sometimes you can do all the things that you read in articles or hear in podcasts, but it’s, if you’re not doing it from a source of authority or expertise or value, then it’s not going to be super helpful. When you do go into it, I’m curious to hear, let’s say you do identify something from 2015, you’re like, “Hey, there might be something here.” Are you going in and essentially adding content? Do you reshoot photos? Do you update the recipe or does it depend for every piece of content you look at?
David Crowley: It depends a little bit, but I would say the majority of ones I’ve really prioritized for an update, I’m probably shooting new photos at least ’cause I feel like I’ve gotten better at that. There are a few I’ve updated where it’s only been a year, but I feel like maybe I’ll just add process photos, but I’m happy with the finished dish kind of thing. But I think the majority where I’ve seen good results, they’ve been old enough, they’ve been sitting around long enough, maybe getting some traction, but maybe not page one or low page one, and then doing a pretty comprehensive redoing the photos. And I’d say within the past couple years I’ve got probably what? There’s a playbook. I know Casey and others have talked about on your podcast of the flow of a good post. And so I’ve been blogging for a long time as we discussed, so I have 550 or so posts on there. So there are a lot that don’t have that kind of format.
So most have been ones that I’ve been looking for a pretty thorough redo, although I am interested in this idea of… But that takes time. It takes almost as much time to do that as if from scratch, sometimes even a little more. If I had some really long-winded intro stuff that just is not pertinent anymore ’cause then trying to rework that instead of just starting fresh.
Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost like cleaning out an old closet and then reorganizing it versus just having an empty closet that you fill in.
David Crowley: Yeah, yeah.
Bjork Ostrom: But depending on how unorganized the closet is, it could potentially create more time or require more time.
David Crowley: So one of the things I’m interested in maybe as I think to the coming year, is a way to work into the workflow, some middle ground. And I recently signed up for Clariti, and I think it’s Ben that I did a call with, he was talking about… We were looking at some examples of how to organize doing holiday post updates and we were brainstorming stuff for a checklist, and I’m like, “I could probably get some lift to some old posts without needing to make the dish again, shoot it again and the whole nine yards because…” Anyway.
Bjork Ostrom: No, that’s great. And appreciate the Clariti shout out. Ben is the product manager, GM of Clariti. Clariti with an I, we’ve talked about on the podcast before. But that’s really the idea with it. That’s what we’re trying to get at, is how do we help people discover areas of opportunity that would be the quick fix, quick enhancement type stuff, but also to guide people along the way in more project-based things where it’s like, hey, I want to do this holiday posts, I want to go through and update these, or whatever it might be? So it’s been fun to craft that tool and continually evolve it. I’d be curious to know, as it stands right now, do you feel like your blog, your business is serving you in the way that you hoped that it would be in that you didn’t have the intent of this replacing your job and don’t want to do that moving forward, that’s not the goal, but it’s more of, hey, number one, is this engaging, fun, interesting?
Number two, does it allow for this additional backstop? I come from the nonprofit world. Lindsay was a teacher. One of the things that I found was all of my friends who were in nonprofits would work side hustles and all of my friends who were corporate would volunteer for nonprofits. It feels like this balancing act that always exists in that world. Do you feel like that is, for you, serving the purpose right now and in a way that you would hope that it would be?
David Crowley: Yeah, I think it really started to get there over the last couple years, and I think that’s been encouraging. I guess it’s a little bit of a testament to keeping the faith long enough. And I mentioned 2014 was a key benchmark for me. Another one was around 2019. I was definitely at a little bit of a place where my traffic had actually taken some dip, dropped a bit, and that’s discouraging for a variety of reasons. Part of it was how much time… I think I had some others in addition to the day job, I was also doing a lot of coaching in my son’s baseball, which was consuming a lot of time for about eight months a year. So there’s definitely just less time I was able to put into it, but I think part of it was the not enough content, but it was also taking care of the under the hood stuff.
And I was at a moment where it’s like, okay, I think I need to do some investments. If I’m in, let’s go. Let’s take care of some things. And I did that. Actually, I heard Andrew from NerdPress on and I’m like, “I think I need that.” ’Cause I do not love the under the hood technical stuff part of blogging.
Bjork Ostrom: Like many people who are creators, food people, it’s not uncommon for somebody who loves photography or writing or recipe development to not love WordPress management as an example.
David Crowley: So I signed up for NerdPress and I posted some problem I was having actually on the Food Blogger Pro forum, and I think it was Skyler who popped in, was like, “Dude, you really need to update your theme.” Because I was like, “Yeah, I hadn’t done it in a while.” And that’s sometimes, I think, especially maybe as a difference as when you have another full-time thing, sometimes something that seems like a daunting big project, in addition to just creating the content, it’s easy to put off. If it were my core source of income, I guess I would feel like a little more like I have to, but at the end of the day, if you want to be serious about it, even as a side hustle, you got to invest. So I did. I went to the latest Foodie Pro theme and spent a lot of time totally revamping my categories to fit that scheme and stuff.
And so that positioned me nicely, though I did start. I was able to qualify for Mediavine right around as 2020 hit. So right before the pandemic, basically, I had taken care of a lot of that stuff and was well-positioned for everybody being at home learning to cook.
Bjork Ostrom: At home making food and drinking wine.
David Crowley: So it worked. So particularly the last two years I’ve seen nice ad revenue pretty steadily and growing and to a point where it feels like, yes, boom. And hopefully you want to keep it growing, but definitely of course, we’re, like all bloggers, commiserate about the, oh, now it’s January, and the traffic is actually still there for me. Fortunately, I have some recipes that perform well in the holidays, but it’s not all about Christmas cookies and stuff like that. I have a roast recipe that does great on Christmas and New Year’s, but any Sunday till April, it’s going to perform well.
Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And I think to your point, what a testament to sticking with it. I think so often in the content world specifically, you’re shoveling coal into the engine of the train for so long, and it’s moving, but not to the point where it feels like you’re getting in shoveling coal all day and then getting out, and you’re like, “It feels like I got out at the same spot that I got in.” But if you do that every day and continually improve your craft, eventually, the train will pick up speed and will get enough momentum where you’ll hop on and then you’ll be like, “Whoa, I traveled three miles today.” But in those early stages, it just feels like, whoa, the train hasn’t moved, but good for you for sticking with it and getting to that point where, oh, man, what a validation to start to see that start to pick up.
And you start to realize that where it’s like, okay, now it’s not just coffee money anymore. It’s not a meal out anymore. It’s, oh, this could actually be college fund money. And that’s a really good feeling. So I’m curious to know, as we transition in the second half here, where you are right now. You’ve solved a lot of problems, you’ve had a lot of plateaus that you’ve unlocked and gotten to the next level. You talked about working with Andrew and NerdPress and Skyler from Feast Design Company and making these improvements, investing in the business, which is really cool. I’m curious to know, what are the things you’re looking at right now and the problems that you’re trying to solve? And I’d be curious just to have a conversation about those in real time to see if we can find any, not magical solutions, but just any potential opportunities or just interesting conversations. So I’d be curious to hear your reflections on that.
David Crowley: Yeah, sure. This is helpful to have some free consulting on air.
Bjork Ostrom: Live. Yeah, totally.
David Crowley: So I can think of two big areas. One is definitely thinking about, okay, I’m seeing revenue stream coming in and nice thing the way the ad revenue, I know what I made in December, that cash isn’t coming until March. I can say, oh, how might I reinvest some of that in the business? Kind of a question. And I play with the idea of, are there things I can think about outsourcing? I also think about do I love my day job? Do I want to essentially buy some time to do a couple days a month where I’m able to knock out a few recipes pretty much as a full-time? Somebody blogging with another full-time job. I sometimes get a little jealous when I hear of full-time bloggers who do their photo shoots on a day and do five recipes. It’s we’re photo shooting what I’m making for dinner maybe.
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.
David Crowley: Sometimes maybe I’m-
Bjork Ostrom: Almost done. Yeah, I promise it’s not going to be too cold when it comes out.
David Crowley: Exactly. And I hate cold food.
Bjork Ostrom: Totally.
David Crowley: So do I invest some of it in funding some of my own time? It was one idea versus getting help on different things. I don’t feel like I’m ready to… I know you’ve had some sessions on building a team, but I always think in part because of my day job orientation team as those are my full-time staff, certainly a long way from that unless I want to go seriously in the whole, but okay, are there things… I did outsource. I do have somebody doing Pinterest for me, just something. And sometimes I start crunching the numbers, am I getting enough now, especially with all the changes on Pinterest where it’s paying for itself? But then there’s also that I don’t have to worry about Pinterest.
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. It’s a brain space.
David Crowley: So that makes it worth it. But thinking about is a VA, is that something I want to do, or is it maybe I want help on a specific piece of the work? And one of the things I’ve found hard is I feel like I’ve tried to ask a few times in different forums, but it’s hard to sometimes even know. I guess I feel like I want to be investing a portion of the money that I know is coming in. I guess that’s a fairly conservative way to do it, as opposed to saying, heck, I’m going to go hire somebody-
Bjork Ostrom: I’m going to take money out of my 401(k) or 403(b).
David Crowley: And I know that to some extent, I did that sort of thing to start my nonprofit. I took a little while before I was raising enough money to pay a salary and a little further along in the journey where I feel like I need to be thinking about how do you invest money that’s either coming in or pretty sure where it’s going to come in? So one of the things I find hard is I’ve found it hard to find… And one things I like about you, I think, and some of your guests are a little more transparent, but I think sometimes it’s just hard to find. I tried Googling, I did try getting a temporary VA for the holiday season, but just even how much should I be paying somebody?
Bjork Ostrom: Paying a VA.
David Crowley: I have no idea. And how to find them, how to hire them, is that a good fit or would it be better to a general VA or outsourcing? Or would it be better to invest in getting somebody to do a few videos for me for some of my posts that don’t have one that are good performers?
Bjork Ostrom: Love that. And it feels like time, obviously, we’re all thinking about time. How do we optimize around time? I’m thinking about that a lot. As we move into a season of having a three-year-old and a one-year-old, right? So it just looks different. Lindsay and I talk about that, we just don’t work until 7:00 every night. Either Lindsay or I every day goes home at 4:00 because that’s when our nanny’s done, and we might have some time at the end of the day, but usually we’re pretty gassed by the time that we get to nine o’clock at night, we’re not going to do a three-hour stretch ’cause then we’re having to get up with them when they get up in the morning. So time, team… To your point, it might not be team in the sense of, hey, you have your team at your job, your nonprofit, but it’s, how are you being supported in the work that you’re doing?
One of the things that I think a lot about is I think usually we compartmentalize and we go like, hey, blogging, work, home and think of those as separate. But one of the things that I try and do is I try and think a lot about the reality that all of that stuff is just mixed together. So for you and for other people listening, one of the things I would encourage people to think about is what are the recurring tasks? And just by chance it’s open on my second monitor here, a recurring list of the things that I do on a weekly or monthly basis just to have as a starting point, as a reference. So these are really basic examples, but change the furnace filter, drop Sage off at the groomers, our dog, Sage, brush Sage, which we don’t do as much as we should.
I have this recurring task that I always just put off. Bring the cars in for maintenance. I had to do that recently, so I added that in, pick up around the house, organize the room, unsubscribe from physical junk mail that comes in. Anyways, point being, I think you could start to list all of that stuff potentially within your daily work and then also within blogging, and you can start to sort order that stuff to say, hey, your time, it’s just linear. Time is time, but the value of those things isn’t linear. Some of those things are really low value, even though they take up the same amount of time. And one of the things I’ve thought about is great, so how do we then take the things that are lowest value but take up a consistent amount of time and find somebody to come in and help with those?
An example being for some of these things, we could hire a high school student to come and help out with it. Or an example, being in the office, we had somebody who was just out of college and she was in this transition period and she came and did office management stuff. So she would deliver packages and send stuff out and even personally around the house. So I think that would be one area of opportunity. I think around the price, I think there’s a huge it depends with that, and I think the it depends is around what they’re doing and how much direction is involved with that. So the price of hiring somebody is going to go down the less direction they’re going to have to get. And the more that you’re like, “Hey, here’s how you clean the air filter on the air purifier. Once a month, takes 15 minutes, this is the process for it.”
Great. Somebody comes in and I think you can start to section some of that stuff off. So that’s on the home front/recurring tasks that could be separated out. One of the things I’m doing right now is I’m reading a book called Your World-Class Assistant. It’s by Michael Hyatt. And actually we just hired Mary, who’s an executive assistant, and this book talks about some of that stuff that you’re talking about and it’s all about time and how do you gain back some of the time that is most important? And I think everybody listening to this podcast, let’s say if you’re at the point where you have, let’s call it $250 of disposable income to invest into your business, I think there’s an opportunity for people to strategically do higher value work and find somebody to come in and to take some of the lower value work off of your plate.
And that book sets up a lot of the systems and processes that you can think about for doing that stuff. For me, a big thing was email. Now Mary’s coming in twice a day and looking through my email, organizing, forwarding as needed, and we create a system. She has a little spreadsheet that’s like, “Here’s what you do with email that lands in this category.” And what you’ll realize if you find somebody who’s good is that they’ll be able to help. I’m not super special in my ability to do many things, even as much as I would like to think that I’m special and they’re able to come in and help and support you in those. So I’ve talked a lot. I want to pause. What do you feel like are either the thoughts you have around that or additional questions or just straight out unanswered questions that I didn’t actually get at within that?
David Crowley: I think that definitely resonates about that really needing to map out or define those tasks. I found when I did for the holidays, as I mentioned, have a VA helping with just, it was a narrow scope, but the stuff that you’ve been doing it for so long it’s just in your head, it does force you to write it down. And I definitely see parallels in my day job thinking more institutionally where it’s something… I tend to move quickly from one thing to another and it’s easy. My instinct is to keep a lot of just going in my head of how to do stuff. So it does seem like a preliminary step that’s necessary to make effective use of any kind of hired help to define. So that book sounds interesting too as far as scoping.
Bjork Ostrom: And one of the things that I’ve learned is I also don’t love the idea of documenting the thing that I’m doing. And so in my most successful relationships where somebody comes in to help support something, I have probably 50% of what the role will be documented in terms of the specific tasks. You can define high level what something is, like helping out with email, helping with calendar. In your case, it might be discovering content optimization opportunities. It might be Pinterest, it might be social. We can list off all of these things, but we might not know the process. We might not have the process documented. But what I’ve used that’s been helpful is a tool called Loom, L-O-O-O-M. Loom and Zoom, so these are the two video tools. Zoom, we’re talking right now on Zoom. Loom is an extension that allows you to do a screen cast.
And so what I’ve done is when I come up against something where I’m like, “Wait a minute, this isn’t something that I should probably be doing.” I’ll use Loom, I’ll press record and I’ll essentially take what is in my head, to your point, and then record that as a Loom video. Here’s how I handle this. Here’s the reason for that. Two things will happen with that. Number one, it documents it and then it allows somebody else to then create a process around it. But number two, it also forces me to formalize some of the loose opinions that I have around a process because sometimes I’ve realized, oh, I actually don’t know how to handle this and I haven’t made a decision around it, like every time this happens, here’s what I do. And so it forces me to also say, wait, what is my opinion on this specific task and how do we handle it in a process related way?
So that’s been super helpful to use Loom and then to work with somebody to say, hey, can you create a process around this? Process meaning we use Google Drive, and essentially you’re documenting the 20% of what you need to get the 80% of the value. So you’re not wanting to do super, super specific detail type stuff, but it’s hey, somebody who’s going to be looking at this is going to have a general knowledge of the system and they’re going to be smart and you know, oh, it’s okay. It’s one, two, three. It’s a simple list, here’s what the process is. So that’s been helpful from a process and documentation standpoint. In terms of finding those people, we have this really unique privilege. I say we in regards to anybody listening to this podcast, in that we have an audience and you have your true fans, David, who are really into what you’re doing. And some of those people are also people who probably have the desire and interest in having flexibility in the work they’re doing.
And there’s probably somebody in your audience who wants to work five to 10 hours a week doing the thing that you don’t want to do. And that’s been one of my biggest realizations in what we do, is there are people who love spreadsheets and if they spend eight… My sister-in-law’s boyfriend, was just talking to him. He’s like, “I love doing spreadsheet analysis.” And I’m like, “Wow, we’re so different.” And that’s awesome. And I’m learning that more and more. In the book, he talks about the freedom compass. He talks about four different areas, desire zone, disinterest zone, drudgery zone and distraction zone. And I won’t get super into details on it, but as much as possible, he talks about wanting to work in your desire zone, which means you’re proficient and you’re passionate. If you’re not passionate about something like Pinterest might’ve been this for you, that goes into your disinterest zone where you probably were good at Pinterest but not passionate about it.
And the other side is distraction zone, which is you’re passionate about it, but you’re not proficient. That would be me for QuickBooks. I’m interested in books and bookkeeping, but I’m not very good at it. And then the drudgery zone is you’re not passionate and you’re not proficient. And as much as possible, be thinking about how do we work in our desire zone? And then finding people who my drudgery is their desire, I feel like is the other win within that. So I’ll pause again. Curious to hear your reflections on that and any kind of ponderings you have coming out of it.
David Crowley: Yeah, I think that definitely resonates. I think something you were saying earlier also, that idea of the documenting the process, I like. I got to check out this Loom tool, but one thing I’ve found is, and I’m thinking a little bit more about my day job. It’d probably apply if I get into it more with the blog, which is that documentation process, sometimes when you’re trying to define that ideal way you do a project, it’s the best practice. But sometimes I’ve realized this a few times on projects when I’m trying to train somebody at work, the best practice is not what I’m always doing. And it’s-
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.
David Crowley: It’s reminder your to yourself, oh, I really need to be sure that I send that thank you note within 24 hours of an important meeting, and I haven’t been. And I realize I’ve been slacking on that, but writing it up to somebody else to do it, I need to, A, I put it in there, it reminds me, it’s important and then reinforces the importance of it.
Bjork Ostrom: And part of it is for you, the thank you note might be distraction zone or disinterest zone where you could do it, but you’re not passionate about it and passionate, not about thank you notes, but about, hey, a system around… It’s almost like a content system, like, hey, thank you notes have to go out a week before or two days after you meet with somebody. And this just happened for us when I was chatting with Mary and I was like, “I’m not great about birthdays and significant events that are coming up in that a day before, I’m like, ‘Shoot, what am I going to do for this?’” And so in talking with her, I realized, oh, this is generally a broken system that I have because it always ends up with a little bit of a scramble. So what does it look like to work with somebody who is more system oriented?
The idea of gifts and gifting and getting those ahead of time and having them ready is desire zone. There are those people. It’s not me. And the other piece is, I think for a lot of us who are listening to this, we’re creators, we’re maybe visionary, artist potentially. There’s a broad category of people, but that might be some people listening to this. And no matter how much you bend yourself, you’re never going to be in that position of hey, this is awesome, I get to follow this really rigid system, but there are people out there who like to create those and follow those. And then the key is how do you find those people? Yeah, go ahead.
David Crowley: I like the idea of tapping my audience. And I was just thinking of an example where, especially on the wine side of my content, I actually started a monthly wine blogging group, and there’ve been a few spinoffs from it that we have fun, very collegial stuff, but I was just thinking, I’ve had some ideas for building out some of the wine content on my site, but again, it’s I don’t have time to do it. But that could be a great example where I might be able to source that out if I scope out the work.
Bjork Ostrom: And somebody in that group, the idea that they would get paid to think about, write about, organize wine, oh, it would be so awesome. And I think the hard thing, and this doesn’t have to be for everybody, but I feel like there’s a transition that exists and we come up against it. And the question is, do we want to continue to be the maker? Yes, totally. Some people do. They want to hold onto that. That’s what they want to continue to be. And as much as possible, then I feel like the effort is around how do you bring people around you so you can continue to be the maker as much as possible? I feel like that’s different problem solving than if you want to think about how do I become the manager, which some people want to do.
And in the case of some of the content on your site around wine, the question would be, would it feel good to have somebody come in, organize, create content, and for you to manage that process and for you to see something go out into the world that you didn’t create, what would that feel like? And for some people that would be like, oh my gosh, that’s awesome. I can start to play the role of organizing the calendar, queuing things up, somebody else comes in and creates it. For other people, they’re like, “Wait, I don’t want to give that up.” And that looks different to support different types of roles in regards to what you want to do, but I think it really comes back to that what is the desire zone for somebody?
What are you passionate about and proficient with, and how do you do as much as that as possible? So I’d be curious as we come to the end, do you feel like you have an idea of what that would be for you? What are the things that you want to be doing more of? And potentially along with that, what are the things you want to be doing less of?
David Crowley: Yeah, definitely, that example is helpful to think about. In fact, you can do analysis paralysis on things, but your gut… Just as you’re talking, I answered very strongly, I’d be excited to have somebody come in and crank out this wine content I have. Because my passion, I love the process of creating recipes that go with a certain wine. I love that. And some of these wine related groups, I’m involved in. It’s very good. People can write for a long time about the soil type where the wine was sourced. I glaze over a little bit, I have to say.
Bjork Ostrom: Totally.
David Crowley: But I could see. And part of what I’m thinking about is at the end of the day, most people get to my site. They’re looking for a recipe and I think that there’s a second… Although people are probably my most loyal like that matching process of both the food and wine, but the wine content I’m thinking of is, so I can be writing an article and reference a term and then link to somewhere else where you can learn more about what is kava. I don’t really want to write an article on what is kava or how is champagne made or something like that. But if I could build out some of that on my site… Because I’ve done some keyword research where I have an idea of some terms where I could probably rank pretty easily and it would be useful to my audience, but it would be in the drudgery zone so…
Bjork Ostrom: And I think a lot of us have come to accept the drudgery zone when we don’t need to. And especially when you’re at the point where you can start to think about, hey, what if I used some of this money that I’m making to have somebody pick this up? And it’s hard ’cause you have to speak in generalities because it’s going to be different for everybody. Some people want to hold onto the books as long as possible and do the accounting and taxes. Some people want to get rid of that as soon as possible. We’ve done podcast interviews where people are like, “It was so nice when I finally hired a writer ’cause then I didn’t have to write.” But there are some people who love writing and they want to hold onto that.
But I think what people will find in general is that there’s going to be people who when you come up against the thing and you’re like, oh, I don’t want to do this, there is somebody who wants to do that, and depending on how long you’ve been doing this, there’s a good chance that person exists either within your audience or within your circle of friends or friends of family. You probably don’t want to hire friends, you probably don’t want to hire family, although that’s debatable. But within those circles, those people might exist as well. For Megan, who we’re working with as an office manager, it was our nanny’s roommate and she’s awesome. She was great and worked with us until she went to PA school, and it was a really good fit. So I guess for people listening, that would be a great exercise, is to start to catalog those things that you’re doing on a recurring basis. And you could even say desire, disinterest, distraction or drudgery.
It’s similar to EOS. We’ve talked about the delegate and elevate exercise. Those are basically the same thing. So you could just pick one that you feel like is a better fit for you in terms of how you operate, but love that. So here’s my way to round out this conversation. What do you feel like your action item is out of this as a first step into potentially filling a role or finding help to backfill some of the drudgery activities you have?
David Crowley: That’s a good question. I think maybe a step is, I think I have in my head, but writing down some of the, what’s my weekly… I think I’d probably plan my blogging stuff mostly weekly and monthly and some annual as well. But as far as workflow, it’s my weekly and monthly workflow and maybe doing some of those labels to it, I think, could be an interesting activity to help think about. Because I think that’s been a little bit of the piece for me, is figuring out how identifying those things I could potentially outsource, how to be grouped together in a logical job description, but also making sure that I feel like I feel confident I’m going to at least over time see the return that’s enabling me to do more of what’s eventually really driving more traffic to the site. But I think it should, because I feel like a limiting factor is I’m never lacking of… I feel like I’m limited in terms of how many new recipes I can get on the blog ’cause it takes me the time it takes me to do all the steps. So if I could-
Bjork Ostrom: All the other things that… This is something else that I’ve thought a lot about, is what are the things that are… Then we can wrap up here. I could talk to you for a long time, David, but what are the things that don’t matter if I’m doing them or not? And there’s a lot of those things that I’m doing every day. An example of one thing that does matter if I’m doing it is a podcast interview. If somebody randomly showed up and it wasn’t me on the podcast, there’s a lot of people who could do it really well. But what the podcast is, it’s me interviewing people or having conversations around blogging. One thing that doesn’t matter if I do it, extreme example is clean the air filter at the office, which is, I can still do that. It’s still the task that I have, or ensure the accuracy of the books. Or I could go on and on and on about all these things that don’t really matter if I’m doing them.
And my guess is a lot of people listening, there’s also a lot of stuff that they’re doing that doesn’t matter if they’re doing it, as opposed to writing photography, being on social, things like that. Any final thoughts on that before we move into the last section here and wrap up?
David Crowley: No, I definitely think I’m excited to do some of that planning and thinking about it. I think it would be interesting, and I don’t know if it’s a thread on the Food Blogger Pro forum or something, just to pick up on. I was even thinking about maybe having it on FBP as opposed to create something else I need to manage. I had some thought of getting people to have a common interest. Maybe people are maybe at this early phase. Not a support group, but well, sort of, bouncing ideas, ideas, hey, how’s it going? That could be interesting if there’s a space for doing that.
Bjork Ostrom: It’d be a great live Q&A. We’re switching over to Zoom for the Food Blogger Pro live Q&A’s. And one of the things I’m excited with that is being able to have it be more conversational, versus we used Crowdcast before, but it would be a great Q&A for us to do around, hey, hiring, what does it look like? What’s worked for you? What hasn’t worked for you? Or even in the forums too, I feel like would be a good place for that. So love that idea. We’ll make a note and follow up on it. David, where can people follow you? We’ll talk about your site obviously when we tee it up, but can you talk about where folks can find you and follow along with what you’re up to and your favorite wine? That’ll be the ending question here.
David Crowley: All right, sure. So the cookingchatfood.com is the URL for the website. And in part, because I wasn’t on… it’s not perfect across all the channels. On Instagram, it’s actually cookingchatwine. So I guess-
Bjork Ostrom: It’s both the things you love.
David Crowley: Yeah. And I know Twitter, not all the bloggers are into it these days. I love Twitter. I’ve been able to connect and engage with people in a way. I’m not as a visual person as a lot of folks listening, so I love Twitter. So at Twitter I’m just @cookingchat. So any of those places are great places to find me. And I know you do show notes or I did write an article at one point about that process I go through for analyzing.
Bjork Ostrom: Oh, cool.
David Crowley: Analyzing which posts to update and stuff, so I can share that with you for the notes.
Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Yeah, we’ll link to that. And then I’d be curious actually to hear just a little bit more about Twitter as a last final piece. A lot of us, I think, neglect Twitter ’cause it’s, hey, it’s not a traffic driver. I think one of the reasons it’s awesome, I don’t use it, but I think one of the reasons I see people have success with it is connection and conversation. Do you feel like that’s true for you in terms of the value that you see from it?
David Crowley: Yeah, definitely. I find it’s a quick way because I feel like I don’t need to have a pretty picture. I can just boom, hey, here’s a great recipe. Or try and see if somebody shared something, quickly engage. I find it very user-friendly. And I mentioned we have wine groups that meet. The one I started is second Saturday every month @#winePW for wine pairing weekend. Every month we have a topic, people can… It’s just open source. You can join the conversation. You don’t have to register. That’s, I guess, part of what I like about it. It’s an open source way to connect with people that share an interest. I guess that’s my thing, why I like it.
Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Cool. Great to connect, have a conversation after all of these little micro interactions that we’ve had over the years, seeing you on the forums and in various places around the web. It’s fun to finally connect and chat here and really enjoyed it. So thanks for coming on, David.
David Crowley: It’s been a lot of fun. Good to do it.
Emily Walker: Hey there, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed this week’s podcast episode and really appreciate you taking the time to tune in and listen. In case you didn’t know, in addition to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, we also have the Food Blogger Pro membership, which is where we teach our members how to start, grow, and monetize their food blog. We have lots of incredible resources to help you on your food blogging journey, including our courses, our community forum, our member-only live Q&As, our deals and discounts page, and so much more. You’ll get instant access to all of this when you sign up for our Food Blogger Pro membership. We have two awesome membership options available to you; our yearly membership or our quarterly membership, which is just $99 a quarter and allows for some more flexibility if you want to try the membership out and see if it’s a good fit for you.
If you’re interested and want to learn more or to sign up, head to foodbloggerpro.com/join. We are so grateful for our Food Blogger Pro community and we would love to have you join us. Thank you so much for tuning in this week, and we’ll see you back here next week for another episode. Have a great week everybody.