Welcome to episode 89 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week, Bjork interviews FBP team members Alexa, Jasmine, and Raquel about what goes on behind the scenes, and what they’ve learned about blogging during their time as FBP employees.

Last week, Bjork interviewed Pinch of Yum team members Jenna and Alana about what it’s like to run Pinch of Yum behind the scenes. To go back and listen to that episode, click here.

How to Build a Plane

Alright, alright. This episode is not really about building a plane. Not a real one, at least! But “building a plane” is an analogy we use nearing the end of the episode when we talk about the most important advice we would give to new (or experienced) bloggers. This advice is so important, in my humble opinion, that I’m wiling to give you a free pass and tell you to skip right to the end if you only have 5 minutes to listen.

If you’ve got more than 5 minutes, settle on in for a listen about how we run Food Blogger Pro behind the scenes, and how you can use the same tools, processes, and techniques as we do to take your blog to the next level.

In this episode, Alexa, Jasmine, and Raquel share:

• Why you need to be using a recipe plugin on your website
• What the Happening Now videos are and why you should be watching them
• How Jasmine manages the affiliate programs
• What deals you can find as a member of Food Blogger Pro
• What purpose the Trending Now articles serve for food bloggers
• How we communicate with our customers
• What tool Raquel uses to optimize email
• Why coupon sites aren’t allowed in our affiliate programs
• How Raquel felt giving up her career in microbiology
• What makes working at Food Blogger Pro really smooth for Jasmine
• How to build a plane!

Listen to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast below or check it out on iTunes or Google Play Music:

Resources:

• Asana
• Asana course on Food Blogger Pro
• Food Blogger Pro Blog
• Google Trends
• Ahalogy
• FBP Podcast Episode 019: How to Master Pinterest for your Food Blog with Susan Wenner Jackson from Ahalogy
• Intercom
• KickoffLabs
• Inbox by Gmail
• Mixmax
• ShareASale

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to [email protected].

Be sure to review us on iTunes!

If you’d like to jump to the comments section, click here.

Transcript:

Bjork Ostrom: In this episode, we talk to Food Blogger Pro Team member Alexa, Jasmine, and Raquel about all things behind the scenes at FBP HQ.

Hey everybody, it is Bjork Ostrom. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast, and I am so excited that you’re here, and so thankful that you’re here. This is one of my favorite things that we do each week, is the podcast. And we get to shoot it out around the world. And wherever you are, whether you’re running at the gym, or driving in your car, or listening while you’re doing the dishes, I just really appreciate the fact that you’re here and listening. It means a lot.

We are talking to the Food Blogger Pro Team today. If you didn’t listen to episode number 88, we talked to the Pinch of Yum team, Jenna and Alana specifically. Today, we’re going to be talking to Alexa, Jasmine, and Raquel. The intent with these podcasts is to let you know a little bit about what happens here behind the scenes. Knowing that, there might be some things that you could take away and apply to your blog and your business right away. Maybe there aren’t. Maybe there are things that you learn and you say I’m going to put it in the back of my pocket. And I’m going to come back to that at another time. But there might be some things that you can take action on right away today. And I think that you’ll find some of those in today’s podcast.

Before we jump in, I want to let you know about a position that we’re actually looking to hire for at Food Blogger Pro and Pinch of Yum. It’s actually somebody that’s going to oversee the different brands that we manage and that we run on a day to day basis from a visual perspective. We’re calling the position Visual Designer. And this is somebody who needs to be really, really skilled at web design both for desktop devices, and especially for mobile. Mobile is so important as you know. If you know anybody, or maybe it’s you, would really encourage you to go to foodbloggerpro.com/design, and that will redirect you to some more information about the job, and how you can apply for that.

All right, let’s turn to today’s podcast. It is the first that we’ve ever had four simultaneous voices on a Food Blogger Pro podcast, so it’s going to be fun to do a group podcast here. So without further ado, let’s jump in. Alexa, Jasmine, and Raquel, welcome to the podcast.

The nice thing when you have three people, is like it’s a legitimate cheer. It sounds like a group of people, which we’ve never had before. So this is the first time we’ve ever had four on one podcast, which is pretty exciting. I will do my best job as interview facilitator here to direct questions at you guys. I’m used to just asking a blanket question and then I don’t have to direct it at anybody, because there’s only one person, at the most two people. But in this case, what I’ll do is I’ll be really intentional to direct questions, so we know who’s coming up and who’s to talk about the question that I ask.

What I want to start with first is, just kind of the foundation. So let’s start at the very basic level. I’d love to hear a little bit about what you guys do in your day to day, and for you to share that with the audience. I’m looking at my screen. We’ll go right to left, and for me that is Raquel. So Raquel, do you want to jump in and talk a little bit about what you do on a day to day basis with Food Blogger Pro?

Raquel Smith: Yeah, sure. The thing that’s been taking up the majority of my time lately is working on WP Tasty, and Tasty Recipes. WP Tasty/Tasty Recipes is a subset of Food Blogger Pro. I actually haven’t been working on Food Blogger Pro that much lately. But for WP Tasty and Tasty Recipes, I have been working with our developer to find bugs and help get those solved, and to bring future requests to the front that we’re getting from our users. And then I’m also managing the sales process for that, and trying to sell copies to our customers in a way that allows us to really get some really great feedback, and listen to what people want without releasing it to the masses before we get something that we really feel like is going to solve everyone’s problem.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure. I’d love to jump into that a little bit before we go on. And we can talk a more about this a little bit later. For those that aren’t familiar, I’m guessing vast majority of people are, that listen to this podcast is especially. Tasty Recipes, so kind of at a high level, can you explain what that is, and how that works, and why it’s important for Food Blogger?

Raquel Smith: Yeah, so Tasty Recipes is a recipe plugin that you use on your food blog. And a lot of bloggers when they’re just getting started, they say why do I need a plugin for my recipes? Can’t I just type out the recipe title, and then type the ingredients? It’s simpler, it’s easier, it makes sense to me. While you can certainly do that, and visually it might look fine. Using a recipe plugin does something really, really important for your SEO, which is your search engine optimization. And it tells Google all about your recipe.

Google can see the text on your page, but it might not necessarily know what it is. So, when you use a recipe plugin like Tasty Recipes, that plugin tells Google explicitly what is on that page, and what it means. So that when people search for something of that sort, say it’s a chocolate chip cookie recipe, Google knows on this page, there is a chocolate chip cookie recipe. It makes it a lot easier for users to find your content.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s a way that Google … Like Google’s really, really smart, but there’s certain limitations. If you just put a bunch of text on a page, and it’s not marked up, they call it mark up. So if it’s not marked up in a specific way, it’s not going to be smart enough to know that it’s a recipe. So then it couldn’t display those really cool things, like maybe an image, or some of the other things like the calorie amount, or the time it takes to create the recipe. And you’ll notice that as you get into building a blog, for those that are listening building a food blog specifically, that that structured data is really important. And even if you don’t have a food blog, there’s still different things that you can do to mark up an article. We won’t dive too deep into that. Little bit of a rabbit trail, but I thought that would be important to touch on because it’s such a cool little niche of food blogging.

That’s not all that you do, though. You also juggle some other things in a typical day.

Raquel Smith: Yeah, so another thing that I do every week, is I publish the podcast. Bjork is obviously the voice, but I do the editing for that. And I work with Jasmine to create the images. This one’s going to be really weird hearing myself talk.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure. Podcast exception, right?

Raquel Smith: I know, then I also have been publishing the Happening Now videos that go out once a month. And then finally, I help maintain the Food Blogger Pro website, and work with our designers and developers for any changes that we need there, or make those changes myself. I do a few different things here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, yep. You’re juggling a few things. And a couple things that I want to point out with those last couple things that you said, one of the things that we get asked a lot is with Food Blogger Pro, what is it that you run on? So, we are in a little bit of a unique set up, in that most people think WordPress, right? Every site is run on WordPress. A lot of sites are, maybe one and four. But not Food Blogger Pro. Can you talk a little bit about the content management system that Food Blogger Pro runs on?

Raquel Smith: We use a CMS called ExpressionEngine. ExpressionEngine is a little bit more extensible, and a little bit more … I guess, I don’t want to say it’s more customizable than WordPress, because WordPress is extremely flexible and customizable. Honestly, if I had my druthers, I would rather be on WordPress. But ExpressionEngine is definitely another powerful CMS that’s kind of similar to WordPress, but a little bit less user friendly. If you are looking to start a blog, and you’re not looking to be a developer, or really get into web development, I would definitely go with WordPress. Because from the get go, it’s a lot easier to use. There’s infinite plugins out there that can help you achieve what you want without really getting into any code. But for us on Food Blogger Pro, we do use ExpressionEngine.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, the quick back story with that of those that are curious, we connected with some designers and developers that had a membership site that we really liked. We said we love what you guys are doing. We’d love to replicate that. Not in the sense of the content, but in terms of the structure. They said great, we can do that. We use ExpressionEngine. I said all right, let’s go. Let’s jump in. And it’s very different than WordPress, and it works well, but it’s a smaller niche than WordPress is for sure. It means the day to day work that we do with ExpressionEngine looks a little bit different, and even the way that we produce content looks a little bit different.

Raquel Smith: I must say, they have fantastic support, though.

Bjork Ostrom: That is a big plus.

Raquel Smith: That’s one thing you don’t get with WordPress. Before we move on, I just want to clarify WP Tasty and WP Tasty the website, is built on WordPress. And Tasty Recipes is a WordPress plugin. While we are using ExpressionEngine for Food Blogger Pro, for WP Tasty, we are using WordPress.

Bjork Ostrom: We are all in on WordPress for WP Tasty. It’s actually like the focus of WP Tasty is like WordPress Tasty. This idea that it’s all WordPress tools.

Raquel Smith: It would be kind of funny and ironic though to use something else to build the website.

Bjork Ostrom: Just to throw people off.

Raquel Smith: Just to throw people off.

Bjork Ostrom: You had mentioned Happening Now videos, and I’m so curious to, or not curious. I bet there are people that are curious that aren’t Food Blogger Pro members as to what those are. What is a Happening Now video? Can you explain a little bit about what those are?

Raquel Smith: Yeah. So it’s a video that normally Bjork publishes every month that just talks about some things that are going on with Pinch of Yum, and Food Blogger Pro. With the internet in general, and with food blogging, stuff moves really fast. Things change more often than once a month, but every other week, weekly even, things change so fast. And it’s really difficult to stay on top of everything if you’re also managing your own blog, and you’re really just trying to stay on top creating content for your blog. What Bjork does, is he takes a kind of step back and he looks at what’s going on with Pinch of Yum that he thinks our members would find valuable to hear about.

And so he talks about those, and why it’s important for you. And he talks about … Is this weird to be talking about you in the third person?

Bjork Ostrom: No, it’s fine.

Raquel Smith: Okay.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s reflective for me. I’m like, “Oh, interesting.” This is what I do, isn’t it?

Raquel Smith: So that’s what I do? I thought I was just chit chatting? No, so anyway. And he talks about things that are important for you to know as a blogger, and whether or not those things are important to take care of now. Some things are really important to take care of now. Other things, he’s like here’s this general information. Bookmark it, save it to pocket, so whatever you need to do to have it for later when it will be valuable to you. Even though right now, you might not need to do anything about it this instant. He does that for things that are going on with both Food Blogger Pro and Pinch of Yum.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Those are really fun for me to do because I talk about it as like this coffee shop conversation, where I’m sitting down with somebody that maybe has a blog or a website. And I do this with people here in the Twin Cities we’ll get together, and we’ll sit down, and we’ll go out to Red Cow, which is a great restaurant that we’ll take you guys, too, when you come to the Twin Cities here sometime. It’s all meat products, which isn’t ideal.

Raquel Smith: That’s going to be a problem for two of us.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s not ideal now that I think about that. But …

Raquel Smith: I was wondering if that was just a cutesy name or if it was like literally Red Cow.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s really good hamburgers.

Raquel Smith: If you order it well done, I’d glare at you.

Bjork Ostrom: So maybe we won’t go there. But, the idea is you sit down and have a coffee, have conversation. Those for me are some of the ways that some of the conversations where I learn the most. It’s trying to figure out how do we replicate that for Food Blogger Pro and the members that we have? Those are the Happening Now videos. We can talk a little bit about kind of the behind the scenes of those, and how we do those later.

That was great. Thanks for letting us dive deep into that a little bit Raquel. And I think that’s really interesting for people to hear. A little bit behind the scenes. We have two more people to check in with. And would love to hear from you, Jasmine. Would love for you to share a little bit with the audience what some of the things that you focus in on are, and both with the affiliate side and also some of the other design related things that you do.

Jasmine Lukuku: Sure, yeah, so I am officially the affiliate program manager. That started with the Food Blogger Pro affiliate program. And now we’ve expanded to the NutriFox affiliate program. And soon to be launching the WP Tasty/Tasty Recipes affiliate program. Managing three eventually, two and a half kind of right now. On top of that, I also do graphic design kind of on an as needed basis for Food Blogger Pro blog. And some of the materials that we release like e-books and things like that. And also I source the deals and discounts and try to communicate with companies about offering special deals for our members. Yeah, so those are kind of the main things that I dive into.

The day to day really for me looks like first thing is kind of checking in with the rest of the team, and kind of getting a lay of the land, and seeing what everybody is up to, and if anybody has anything they need urgently. Because sometimes design things come up that are needed, or something needs to be responded to in the help that’s related to affiliates, so on Intercom that I didn’t see it went into a general inquiry, not directly to me. Just checking in, seeing if there’s anything urgent.

Then I usually pop into my Asana, which is a tool that we all use to kind of project management, and kind of keep on top of what’s due when, and see what’s the priorities for my day are. Then I usually will pop in to my email, so I don’t usually jump in email right first thing. I kind of look at the other things first. Then go into email. It’s where I get indications whether people have applied for the affiliate program or not. Then I go into ShareASale, which is where we manage our affiliate programs, and approve, or don’t approve. If they’re not approved, it’s usually because they’re like a coupon site, or the content doesn’t make sense for our brand.

Affiliate stuff when it’s not launch time, so in between the times when the program is dormant, versus accepting new members. It’s a lot more passive in the sense that I’m checking on things, and kind of seeing if people have applied. And recently, I started to make a schedule so that we can start planning for the launches. But there are periods of time where the affiliate stuff is a bigger focus, and other times where it kind of goes into the background a little bit, a little more passive.

Bjork Ostrom: For those that are just following along recently, the idea with the launches for Food Blogger Pro, so Food Blogger Pro the membership portion, obviously the podcast is free. But we have these really big public enrollments. And what I hear you saying Jasmine is like those are the times where we’re connecting with affiliates, or maybe doing some type of give away, where we’re saying if you get to this number. Or it’s kind of like a raffle where every person you refer to Food Blogger Pro, you will get an entry in this raffle, and you maybe get … Or what are some of the examples of the giveaways that we’ve done? Like a Blendtec Blender.

Jasmine Lukuku: Yeah, we’ve done like a Kitchen Aid mixer, things like that. So we do try to incentivize around the launches, and get people really excited about participating. It’s been great since we switched to the kind of open/closed system. We used to have it open all the time. And you know, it just is nice to have a concentrated area of time where people know they can plan. Like this is when I should be focusing hard on Food Blogger Pro promoting. They can fit it into their schedule rather than having to stretch it out over the year, and kind of it trickles in. They get more of like a push, so that’s kind of cool.

Bjork Ostrom: The other thing I wanted to jump in and have you explain a little bit, this was a little bit ago. But can you explain the deals and the discounts, and for those that aren’t familiar how that works?

Jasmine Lukuku: So we have a members, it’s only available for members on the Food Blogger Pro site. What it is, is a page of exactly what it sounds like. Deals and discounts that are Food Blogger Pro exclusives, and they are for companies that have products or services that are beneficial and useful to food bloggers. If that’s your scheduling tools, or your email management services, it could be in some cases props and backboards for photographs.

Bjork Ostrom: My dad’s pottery site.

Jasmine Lukuku: Pottery.

Bjork Ostrom: My dad does pottery and ceramics. And then we launched a site for him. We put that up on there. That’s my favorite deal on the site.

Jasmine Lukuku: There’s everything from real physical objects like that to more tech stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, email services or things like that.

Jasmine Lukuku: Yeah, exactly. Constantly trying to grow that list. Sending out emails, inquiries and trying to connect with the businesses that people say they’re interested in, and the services that we hear about people talking in the forums. I’m always open to suggestions. I can never guarantee that a company’s going to say yes, but if you’re a member of Food Blogger Pro …

Bjork Ostrom: Reach out and let us know.

Jasmine Lukuku: Yeah. Reach out and tell me.

Bjork Ostrom: For sure.

Jasmine Lukuku: I have a deal.

Bjork Ostrom: For sure, yeah. This is also one of my favorite Jasmine fun facts, is that you were in Canada, which makes us officially an international company. I appreciate you and your location because it allows us to have this little fun fact about Food Blogger Pro. We are an international company. We have hired internationally, which is pretty exciting.

Jasmine Lukuku: Yeah, and we’re in three time zones.

Bjork Ostrom: Three time zones, which is also good for the customer support side of things, which was totally unintentional. But the other thing that I appreciate about it is that there’s a huge group of Canadian bloggers. Like there’s a Canadian bloggers website, and there’s this really awesome group of people from Canada that have come together and said we’re going to form this kind of group. It’s fun to have a connection with those people through you, and your work Jasmine.

Jasmine Lukuku: And the questions do come up time to time about can I do this in Canada?

Bjork Ostrom: That’s because it’s different. Yep, for sure.

Jasmine Lukuku: It’s like, yes, I usually know the answer to that. So that’s because of my own experience with my blog and stuff. So yeah, I think it’s handy to have like a token Canadian.

Bjork Ostrom: The hardest part is Amazon. Come one Amazon.

Jasmine Lukuku: Oh yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Figure out what you’re doing. It’s so hard to ship to Canada.

Jasmine Lukuku: Yeah, that’s a challenge.

Bjork Ostrom: We feel for you guys. Cool, awesome. Thanks for sharing Jasmine. Alexa, want to jump over to you and share a little bit about what you do day to day. I’m guessing a lot of people in some way, shape, or form, have maybe connected with you, whether it’s through Intercom, or email, or all of the different places where you are interacting with and touching customers.

Alexa Peduzzi: Yeah, so I’m the community and event specialist. On both of those sides, I’m the community part, which is the Intercom chat bubble that you see at the bottom right hand of the corner. With email, with the forum, I’m kind of all over the place interacting with members, and fielding questions for people who might want to join, but they don’t know what exactly the program’s about, or what kind of services we offer. It’s awesome that I’m able to connect with people literally from all over the world, and just tell them about all the cool stuff that we’re doing, which is really fun.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s really amazing when you look at, so within Intercom, which we can talk about in a little bit what that is and how we use it. When you look at, you can see based on IP address, like where people are from. And it’s so fun for me to look at that, and see there’s people from all over the world that we’re connecting with and talking with. And that’s true if you have a blog, too. If you go into Google Analytics you can look, and you can see where people are coming from. And I remember the first couple months when we had Pinch of Yum, and we had analytics installed for the first time. We looked, and we’re like somebody came from Malaysia. Like this is so awesome. We live in such an amazing world where that can happen.

I’m excited to talk to you about Intercom, and how that works. But there’s also a few other things that you do. I’m thinking specifically of some of the stuff that you’re doing with Trending Now, and would be interested to hear a little bit about that, and where you source those, and get that information.

Alexa Peduzzi: Sure. One of my favorite things about this job is that it gives me the opportunity to write. And that has been one of my loves for forever. It’s really awesome that I’m able to write both on the Food Blogger Pro blog, and also the NutriFox blog. The Trending Now in food blogging is something that I write on the Food Blogger Pro blog. And that just kind of recaps the trending searches that people will be searching for in the upcoming month. I get this information from various different paces. The Google Trends website is really nice. Ahalogy also has some really good resources that I use quite a bit.

Yeah, I just think it’s helpful for bloggers to know what they’re readers will be searching for, so they can just better serve them, and kind of be up on all of the trend that people are interested in that time of year.

Bjork Ostrom: And the nice thing about those is that you are doing the work and you’re compiling that and saying here, specific to a food website, or a food blog, some of the things that you should be considering for this coming month. And those are actually, it’s public posts that we put out that anybody can come and look at, and anybody can read. Which is awesome, and I think we’ve heard from a lot of people that have just really appreciated those.

There’s two things that you mentioned there as a little rabbit trail that I’d love to go ff on to hear you talk about Google Trends. Can you talk about what that is, and how people could use that?

Alexa Peduzzi: Yeah, it’s a website. It’s a Google website. It’s really interesting, because you can put different search terms in there and kind of compare how they’ve performed over time. And I really like using this for my personal blog, just so I could kind of pick my keywords and pick my titles. But it also gives data over many years of what people are searching for. I mean Google has been such a great source of information for everybody. But it can also be used for business decisions, too.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and for example, this is not a food related decision. But, if you were to look at Google Trends and like do a search for Justin Bieber, who I saw perform in concert in the Twin Cities. And it was a really terrible show. Not like easy to say Justin Bieber like bad show, because obviously I’m paying a lot of money to go and see him in concert. But there was times he would just literally not be singing. He’d be holding the mic and it would be his vocal track going, and he wouldn’t be singing. If he comes …

Jasmine Lukuku: As a Canadian, I apologize just for the export.

Bjork Ostrom: Apology accepted.

Raquel Smith: I don’t think you need to apologize for him Jasmine.

Bjork Ostrom: But, point being, if you looked at Google Trends, you would see there wouldn’t be many mentions of Justin Bieber in 2006, or whatever. And then in 2008, then I don’t know when it was that he started to come onto the scene. But then you’d see it start to spike and get a lot of mentions. But also if you were looking food specific things, let’s say corn on the cob, then it would maybe be a little bit more even, but seasonally it would go up down. So you’d see it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do a corn on the cob recipe in January versus in August. It would maybe make more sense and you could tell that by the trends in Google, or using Google Trends. Great resource, we’ll link to that in the show notes.

And then you mentioned Ahalogy. Can you talk about that?

Alexa Peduzzi: Ahalogy, I actually used them as my Pinterest scheduler for a while. But they’re just a really great resource for blogging, information. But they have a lot of, like they’re just PDFs, and they show you what trends are trending in different months. And it’s really simple. Just kind of go down the list. In March, we have peanuts, and cake, and Bailey’s. And I could write about all of that because we have a St. Patrick’s Day to look forward to. Something with Bailey’s, like a Bailey’s cake would do really well, because people are looking for both cake recipes and Bailey recipes. So something like that. I don’t know, I like having those kinds of information.

Bjork Ostrom: For sure. And we did, this is way back in episode 19. We interviewed Susan Wenner Jackson from Ahalogy, and she talks a little bit about the tool, and how bloggers can use it. If you want to check that out, that is a podcast episode that we have live and available, so you can do that. I would love to transition a little bit. We talked actually just in the intros about some of the tools that we use. But I would love to spend some time talking about some of the specifics around the things that we use. And the idea here is with this podcast, and the one that we did with a Pinch of Yum, the Pinch of Yum team as well. One of the things I hope comes from it is exposing some of the tools that we use, that people maybe aren’t familiar with. A lot of people are familiar with and hear a lot about things like email services for instance. Or they’ll talk about hosting.

Some of the tools might be a little bit more behind the scenes and not as common for people to hear about, or be familiar with. Like we talk about in the Happening Now videos, and you mentioned this Raquel, some of these things might be things where you say, “Hey, that really applies to what I’m doing right now in some way. I’m going to take action on that, and I’m going to look at implementing it.” Some of the things might be more of like a back pocket kind of thing, where you say, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” That kind of applies to an idea that I have, or maybe something that I would do down the line. I’m not going to take action on it right now, but I’m going to be aware of it, and know that it’s something that I could potentially implement.

The first tool that I actually would be interested to hear about was a tool that you had mentioned Alexa, specifically was, and spend a lot of time with, is this tool Intercom. And this is one of my favorite tools. We use it for NutriFox, WP Tasty, for Food Blogger Pro. I’ve tried to figure out ways like can we use it on Pinch of Yum, and there’s probably a way that we can. We haven’t started using it yet, though. Can you talk about what Intercom is, and kind of how you use it on a day to day basis, and why it’s a powerful tool?

Alexa Peduzzi: Yeah, well, I think we sort of live in the time where I have a question, and I want an answer now. And Intercom kind of facilitates that for us, which I think is awesome. It’s basically just like a chat. I know I was talking with Apple Support over a chat the other day. They don’t use Intercom. But it’s very similar. But we get a lot of information about our customers, and what they’re interested in. And we even have our like support pages hosted on Intercom. It’s all kind of intertwined to make people getting their questions answered easily.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. One of the things I love about Intercom is that like you said, it’s all intertwined. It’s the chat support. If you go to any of the sites that we use, you’ll see a little bubble down in the bottom right. And that’s on mobile or desktop. And you can click that, and you can start a conversation. And that would ping us, and it would let us know. Fun side bar, we have that connected to Slack, so we can also see, even if somebody’s not in Intercom, and we have Slack open, there’s a little notification that somebody asked a question within Intercom.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves. We haven’t talked specifically about Slack yet. It’s all intertwined in that it’s the chat. But it’s also email. That’s one of the things I love about it. We can send an email to people and say, “Hey, there’s an update,” or, “Don’t forget about the Q and A session that we have today.” And when people respond, it goes into the same area as the chat area, so it’s all organized in there. Then like you said, it’s also the support documents. We used to have all of our support stuff on HelpScout. Then we said, “Hey, you know what? It makes a lot of sense to transition this over.” And this was something that you brought up Alexa. You said, “They have this new feature, where you can have all of your support stuff on Intercom. Let’s all bring that together in one massive tank of customer support and customer success.” So we transitioned that over.

Can you talk a little bit about with Intercom specifically with a team what it looks like? Let’s say you have a question that comes in and it’s maybe a better question for Jasmine to answer because it’s affiliate related. What does that look like in terms of a hand off for that? And how do you handle that process?

Alexa Peduzzi: Right, so the question will come in and it’s sort of like in this unassigned bucket. That’s the first thing I do in the morning. I go through my email, and then I open intercom just to see if anybody had a question overnight that nobody got to. All of those questions go into this unassigned bucket. And I can just go in and literally just click Jasmine’s name, and then it goes into her bucket. She’ll be notified via email. Or like Bjork was saying via Slack. It’s just awesome to be able to kind of pass off all of those questions to whoever can answer it best.

Bjork Ostrom: And the other thing that’s really powerful with Intercom is that this would be for anybody that has any type of service, or website, or membership site, where there’s different segments. A great example is Food Blogger Pro. We have monthly members, and we have yearly members. If we want to connect with our monthly members and say, “Hey, just a reminder, it makes a lot of sense to upgrade to a yearly account because it’s more affordable. And you get a free year to NutriFox.” We can do that without having to bug the yearly members, because we don’t want to have to send untargeted emails to different groups of people. That’s another thing I love about Intercom that’s really nice.

Another example would be with NutriFox. Somebody signs up for a free trial. We can talk to them, knowing they’re in the free trial stage versus a paid customer. Intercom really, really powerful tool, and one that we use a ton for all the different brands that we have in the different areas that we work with. Cool.

Alexa Peduzzi: Yeah, and just to bring … Before we leave Intercom, just to bring that back to our listeners and how it’s applicable to them, if you have any sort of subscription service like a meal planning service, or if you have a store on your blog, and you sell any of your own products, or if you have anything commerce related that you want to be able to know who your customers are and keep in contact with them, then Intercom is definitely something you should look into using. If you’re simply a content based business, for instance Pinch of Yum, they don’t use Intercom because it doesn’t really make sense for them for their business model. If you are doing something that’s a little bit different than just a food blog, then definitely take a look at Intercom.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure. Great. That’s a really good thing to point out. Thanks. Raquel, I want to jump over to you and talk a little bit about some of the tools that you’re using on a day to day basis. I know that you’re, especially in this last month to two months, you’ve gotten into some especially geeky things, which you can touch on those. In a typical day, what does it look like in terms of the tools that you’re using and even maybe some of the processes that you have?

Raquel Smith: Yeah, so I do also use Intercom a lot. I use it a little bit differently than Alexa does. Alexa I think uses it more in response to customers, whereas I’m using Intercom a lot for outreach to customers, specifically people who are on our wait list for Tasty Recipes. And one thing that kind of works in tandem with that, is how we’re collecting people leads for our wait list for Tasty Recipes. And a tool I use for that is called Kickofflabs. Kickofflabs is a really easy to use tool, and it allows you to put a little popup windows or even create just static landing pages for whatever it is that you want to collect email addresses for. It’s intended to be used with a wait list type system. If you’re coming out with for instance a new meal planning program, and you want to collect people’s names before you actually publish your new meal planning program, you could use something like Kickofflabs to get that done.

There’s a variety of ways to use Kickofflabs. You can just collect leads. You can also kind of make it a game, and say if you refer someone, then you’ll move up the wait list. That is something we’ve used in the past. Yeah, Kickofflabs, Intercom. I also am in my inbox a lot. One thing that I really like, I use the inbox by Gmail skin, instead of just Gmail. That’s something that I really like. It works better for me mentally because it’s a little bit more clean and streamlined. But another email tool I use is called Mixmax. And Mixmax does a variety of things, but the thing I like most about it is email automation in a way. I can send an email, and if someone doesn’t respond, then I can say in two days put this back in my inbox, so that it reminds me that I need to reach out to this person again, and say, “Hey, just making sure you got my last email.” That’s really helpful.

Another thing I really like about it, and I don’t know if this is creepy or not, but it does email tracking. I can send and email to Bjork and say, “Hey Bjork, I need your input on this.” And then I can see in two days that he hasn’t even opened the email. And I’m like, okay. He’s not just ignoring me. He just hasn’t seen my email. And so it’s actually a feature that I use a lot when contacting our developers or emailing people within the team, or just if I have to reach out to someone to get a logo for the podcast. It’s a really helpful tool for me to use.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it informs the response, right? So the follow up. You can see somebody’s opened it, and looked at it. Maybe you can respond and say, “Hey, just a quick reminder about this.” Or if they haven’t, maybe you can respond and say, “Hey, just wanted to bump this up in your inbox in case you missed it.”

Raquel Smith: If I see that you have not responded, but you did open it, I yell at you for not responding. Not really.

Bjork Ostrom: And rightfully so. The other thing that Mixmax does that I thought was kind of cool is you occasionally will link to an email in a certain message. If you were in Asana, which is where we track tasks and stuff, you might include a link to an email. Can you explain how that works with Mixmax?

Raquel Smith: Yeah. This wasn’t a feature that initially sold me on Mixmax, but it’s been something that has really come in handy. A lot of the time I’ll be emailing with someone about whatever development on the Food Blogger Pro website. And I need to ask someone else their opinion on a certain thing regarding that. If I just forward the email, it’s really difficult for that person to kind of scan through. There’s usually a lot of extra markup that comes with a forwarded email, and it’s not that clear. What Mixmax does is it provides a link for every email that comes into your inbox. So you can copy that link and I can send it to someone, and I can say, “Hey, check out this email,” and give them the link, “And let me know what you think about whatever’s in the email.”

Like I said, it wasn’t something that initially sold me on it. Even talking about it right now I’m like, “Well, that sounds kind of dumb. Can’t you just like copy and paste?” But it is something that I’ve used often, and it really does come in handy.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure. And especially when it’s looping somebody in on a certain message. It’s easier for me to, like you said, scan through that as opposed to having to copy and past, and then kind of sort through that. Versus a link, which is something that’s really nice. You click into it, it’s easy to understand. I use Boomerang, and it does some similar things. And it’s like so ingrained into my habits, but when I look at that, it’s like it would be worth switching over I think because of some of the positive benefits that come along with it, like that one for instance. And then to be able to creepily track people and see if they’re opening your emails or not. It’s totally email ninja move.

Raquel Smith: I do it on my husband, too.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s maybe the best way to use it is with family. If nothing else, than you can use it for family. Jasmine, I’m interested to hear you share a little bit about the primary tool that you use for the affiliate program. And for those that aren’t familiar with the publisher side of an affiliate program … So, there’s the publisher … That aren’t familiar with the merchant side, excuse me. Most people are familiar with a publisher side, right? The promote things and they get a commission. What about the merchant side? What does that look like? You’ve set up a couple affiliate programs now. Can you talk about the tools that you use for that, and how that works?

Jasmine Lukuku: Yeah, so it is similar looking, or it used to be very similar looking to the affiliate side, because I have affiliate ShareASale accounts. And I also have merchant ShareASale accounts that I run for Food Blogger Pro. Essentially, what it does is allow me to upload things like artwork, which is the banner ads that you would post on your site. It allows me to go through and see how affiliates are performing, which links are performing well, or banners are performing well. It allows me to make sure people are getting paid on time, or that transactions are going through correctly. And it allows me to get a little bit of information about the affiliates when they apply, so it shows me their links to their site, and whether or not they have a good standing with ShareASale. Most people that apply to our program do. Every once in a while there might be a person who might be doing something shady, who just applies for every affiliate program out there, and hopes people will say yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about that specifically? The idea of a shady affiliate. For those that if you have anything that you’re offering online, you can set up an affiliate program, whether it’s a digital product or a physical product. And we have a couple different posts that we’ll link to in the show notes around why that’s a good thing for bloggers to do, to have a merchant affiliate account. Especially if you have a product that you’re offering. But can you talk about this idea of the shady side of affiliate marketing, and one of the things you need to be aware of if you do decide to get into that?

Jasmine Lukuku: I’ll start with the semi-shady. They’re not illegal or anything like that. But a large number of applications that come through are from coupon sites. The coupon sites, what they like to do is get affiliate programs. And they just kind of hijack coupon codes. They might not even actually have a coupon code, because we don’t have any special custom coupon codes for only … Any coupon code we have, we also have available on the Food Blogger Pro website. There’s no secret codes out there. But what they’ll do is pretend they have a code, and ask you to click on this thing to get the code, and when you click through, they use their affiliate number and they send you to the site.

Essentially what they are doing, is just trying to incentivize you to use their link. And sometimes they rank very highly, because people are always searching for coupons. It’s one of the first things we do when we’re looking to sign up for something new. To see can I get a deal on it somewhere. The problem is that they can often rank really highly, but they don’t actually offer anything special. They’re usually not people that are part of our food blogging community. It’s kind of like why reward these people who they’re just doing it for every company that they can get an affiliate account with.

Coupon sites are not allowed to join the Food Blogger Pro, and any of our affiliate programs. And that’s very common with affiliate programs, whether or not you want to allow that type of affiliate. And recommendation is usually no. Because it’s kind of just a numbers game for them.

Bjork Ostrom: I have a friend that is the affiliate program manager for Target. He talks about how difficult it is because what will happen is people will go through the check out process, and they’ll get to the … And we’ve all done this, right? You’ll get to that last page and you see here’s your total, and then there’s this little empty field that says coupon. And you’re like, “Interesting.” Then you’re about to purchase it, and then you leave, and then you go and search coupon for XYZ, right? And you go to this page, and everybody knows this. There’s that little coupon button, and it has the little graphic page curl on it. And then you hover over it, and it looks like it’s going to reveal it, and you click. And then there’s like three windows that popup. You don’t know if it has applied the coupon or not. But essentially what it does, is it embeds the cookie. So then they get a commission without doing any of the work other than having this database of coupons.

Jasmine Lukuku: Swooping in.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, at the last minute.

Jasmine Lukuku: Those ones I just flat out say not to. And they’re kind of the easiest to deal with. They’re not usually sneaky. It’s usually the websites called bigcouponsavings.com, something like that. I’m just, okay no. There are people who are sneakier, and so most of the time … Sometimes I’ll get a site where I’m like, “This website doesn’t feel right.” Like they don’t really have any information about who they are. Like there’s maybe one or two posts, and they’re really old. They’re contact information doesn’t feel right. Those are often ones that are kind of flagged, too. But it can be harder to spot those ones. And sometimes we’ll have to go through and do a take down. They might have snuck through, because they maybe have set up a specific site that kind of looks like a food blog. Like it looks like a new food blog. And what they end up doing, is like a bunch of redirects. These are companies that are quite savvy. They are actually signing up for affiliate programs and then breaking all kinds of rules by bidding on keywords, and all this stuff that they can do to …

I’ve seen someone setting up a fake Facebook page with that looks like a Food Blogger Pro page, and then calling it Food Blogger Pro coupon codes. Then you click on it, and you’ll see this like series of URLs when it’s loading. It’s cloaking where the actual affiliate, whoever applied for, and then it lands on the site. Somebody’s getting credit for it, but it’s very hard to go back in time and catch who it is. Sometimes I have to do a lot of digging and try to spot the sneaky culprit.

Bjork Ostrom: The bottom line if you’re thinking about starting an affiliate program, number one, I would really encourage people to look into some type of affiliate network like ShareASale. Like you talked about in the beginning Jasmine, like all of these different things that you can do with ShareASale. Easily manage your digital media, like banners, and things like that. You can see statistics. They handle all of the payments, which is really, really nice. And they also handle all of the tax form stuff at the end of the year. We don’t have to worry about sending out 1099s and letting people know that if they earn more than $600 we’d have to issue an official tax document to them. They handle all of that stuff, and they take a small percentage of each affiliate payment that you pay. I forget what it is. I think it’s maybe 10% of each payment that you make. If you pay an affiliate $10, then ShareASale takes one. And don’t quote me on that. Does that sound right?

Jasmine Lukuku: Yeah, I can’t remember off the top of my head either.

Bjork Ostrom: But it’s a small percentage. But it’s well worth it in order to have them manage all that stuff. For the listeners, if you’re thinking of doing an affiliate program, I’d really encourage you to look at an affiliate network that you can tie into, and hook into. That’s awesome, and I think really helpful for people.

We have some time left. One of the things I want to do, I wanted to drill in and kind of talk about some of the tools that you guys are using on a day to day basis. But I also am interested in a little bit of a shift to talk about kind of this maybe potentially, I don’t know if it is or not, kind of strange job that you hold here at Food Blogger Pro/the other brands that we were working with. And I’m curious to hear a little bit about some of the things that surprised you in the first year or however long that you’ve been here. Some of the things that from people from the outside, they see what we do, they maybe listen to the podcast, they’re members of Food Blogger Pro. Maybe they follow along with Pinch of Yum. But then there’s this reality of saying okay, now you’ve kind of come in and you see what it looks like when Bjork is talking to with messy hair, then puts a hat on to cover it up. I want to hear from you guys a little bit about what that’s been like to transition in to some of the things that you’ve learned, or surprised you, or just kind of a general analysis of what that kind of first year period looked like for you.

And Raquel I see a little smirk on your face, so I’m going to start with you.

Raquel Smith: I was just laughing at the messy hair comment. That is one thing that’s really nice is that I a lot of the time I don’t have to go into an office. And unless I have a video meeting, I can be in my pajamas all day if I want. But that wasn’t all that surprising. I think that’s expected when you work from home. One thing that did surprise me when I started working for Food Blogger Pro was how easy and right it felt to give up my career that I went to college for. And that’s something that some people may or may not struggle with. If you went to college, or maybe a trade school, or maybe you just invested a lot of time and money in this other career that you were going down. Sometimes it can be really hard to just give that up, and go in a completely new direction.

But if you feel like you have a calling somewhere else, then you really won’t even think twice once you make that move. For me, I’m not saying that’s the case for everyone, but for me, that was the case. I quit my job in microbiology and came to work for Food Blogger Pro. And I have never once looked back.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s a big change, too, right? It’s not like a little pivot. It was in terms of the stuff that you’re focusing on, working on, it was a really big change. I think that’s important for people to hear, because so many people, myself included, come out of school. And we have this degree, or maybe a specialization, and it’s like I need to do this in order to justify the time that I spent here. And I think it’s important, like you said Raquel, to remind people that you change, your interests are a little bit different. And to pursue that, because they two options are to not pursue it and continue to do what you do, and have that potentially, maybe not be a good fit even though it applies to what you were doing in the past. Or to make those subtle or not so subtle changes, and start moving towards the thing that you’re really interested in, and potentially passionate about. And the long term benefits of that I think almost always outweigh the short term benefits of sticking to it. Cool.

I will jump to you Jasmine. Anything that kind of surprised you, or things that were a little bit different once you got inside, then you realized from the outside? It could be positive or negative. It doesn’t have to be …

Jasmine Lukuku: Yeah, no, no. I have positive things to say, so that’s good. It’s interesting because when I started, I was also working remotely for another company, like a local company. I was working remotely for them because I had such a hard time working in the office for them. Just the company culture. It was a travel agency, and they were a little bit more old school in the way they operated their business. I had a lot of problems with them as far as like the way they would communicate. Their expectations did not really align with reality sometimes. I really tried to make it work, because they thought they were good people.

Once I started working with Food Blogger Pro, I realized how important culture is for me within an organization. And feeling kind of in tune and aligned with the overall vision. And the communication side of it is so important, and I think that’s one of the things that as a remote team, we’ve been really successful in. Is communicating in a way that is efficient, and clear. That was a big problem for me with the other place. It was like you’d get these long emails, and it’s like no clarity, and no direction, and everything would just pile on, and there was no priority structure. I feel that’s really different. And I think it’s a combination of just knowledge of the tools that are out there, like the Slack, and the Asana, and actually committing to using these tools I think is a thing. Because we used Asana at the other place, but I was like the only one that would use it.

I ended up leaving that position because the realization that it didn’t have to be like that, I didn’t have to be frustrated every single day, and dreading doing these tasks. Whereas, I don’t really feel any sense of dread, even if it’s a really boring task that I have to do for Food Blogger Pro for something like spreadsheet of some kind.

Bjork Ostrom: Curse you spreadsheets, right?

Jasmine Lukuku: Stupid spreadsheets. Yeah, the culture makes you want to do your best work. I think that that’s really important. I think if anybody’s going forward with hiring a team or working with a team, sometimes … Like I had no affiliate program experience before. But if you can find good people who are smart people, who are willing to learn and take the time to train if you’re wiling to train, and if they’re a really fit and maybe have some parallel skills that can be applied to what’s new. I think that’s a really important thing to think about because personalities … People will stick around, right? If you can all get along.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s a great concept by Jim Collins in his book Good To Great. For listeners if they’re not familiar, it’d be a great one to check out. Pun intended there. It would be a great book to check out. One of the worst jokes I’ve ever said on the podcast. But we’re going to leave it in.

Raquel Smith: No, there have been more worse ones.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, yeah you know. You’ve heard them all. But I was going to say he talks about this concept of getting the right people on the bus. And how important it is to get the right people on the bus, and then find a seat for them. Sometimes what we say is like, “Hey, we got to get this person exactly in this seat, and it has to be the perfect seat for her.” And that’s what I hear a little bit of you saying, Jasmine, is find really good people that you enjoy working with, that are a good match culturally, that fit in with what you’re doing, that are passionate people, good people. And I would put all of you guys in that category. And then bring them on and say, “How can we figure out what works, and how can we integrate this in?” That’s great, and appreciate that.

Then, like I said, I’d be interested to hear from you. As you’ve kind of transitioned in some of the things that maybe surprised you, knowing that you were at least somewhat familiar with Pinch of Yum/Food Blogger Pro from the outside. Then you get kind of brought in and you say, “Okay, here’s what it is.” Maybe a little bit different than it looks from the outside.

Alexa Peduzzi: Right, well so I left a job in IT auditing, which is sort of what I went to school for. It definitely was not a good fit. So when I left and told everybody, “Hey, I’m leaving to focus on my food blog and to start working on a food blogging membership site,” I just kind of got blank stares. Like what does that mean? Why would you do that? Like it doesn’t make any sense. I totally took for granted there how awesome it is to work with people who get you and understand your passions, and are passionate about the same things that you’re passionate about.

That has just been something that has just been so eye opening, and so awesome to come to work, or open my computer every day, and just work with these people who just love the stuff that you love.

Bjork Ostrom: And not only for a team, but also the people that you’re interacting with. There’s a lot of alignment there.

Alexa Peduzzi: Exactly. Just the position that I’m in, I’m able to talk to all of you who come to Food Blogger Pro and have questions, or comments, or suggestions. It’s just awesome to be able to connect with everybody here. And it’s just such a cool position to be in.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, cool. One of the things that I want to end on as we’re kind of coming to the end here, which is crazy. I feel like this could be a four hour podcast that we could do.

Raquel Smith: We could do like two segments.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things that I wanted to hit on, so I have this belief that one of the best things that you can do is align yourself with people that they themselves have a lot of … Like I envision a wheel, like a wheel on a bike. And there’s the hub, and then the spokes. Then in their position they have al of their spokes going out to other people in a certain niche.

A good example would be like for Tony. We have a friend, acquaintance, somebody we’ve interviewed on the podcast. Tony Rulli who does Facebook advertising. You know, Tony in general like lead stuff and funnels and things like that. Tony has this business where he has let’s say …I’m making this up. I don’t know how many clients he has. Twelve people that he interacts with, and managed Facebook ads for. He’s a really good person to go to for Facebook ad. It’s because he’s the hub and he has this spoke of all these different experiences and understandings of Facebook.

Another example would be like somebody who specializes in ads, or ad networks, or certain ad company. They really understand ads more than I ever will. One thing that’s interesting for you guys, is you understand the world of building a blog, and businesses online, in a way that not a lot of other people do because not only is it something that you’re working on day to day, but you also get to see and observe other people that are doing that.

What I would be interested to hear from you is if you were to step back and say okay, from my personal experience, from my work experience, and then also from my experience interfacing and connecting with bloggers and people that are building a business online, what would you say are some of the important takeaways for people that are interested in building a bog, or interested in building a business? Or it could be a membership site, too. And Alexa I’ll start with you, because I can see you nodding your head here.

Alexa Peduzzi: What’s that one quote, like if you launch and everything’s perfect, then you’ve launched tool late? Something like that? Like there are so many people on forums who are like hey I have six recipes already shot before I launched my blog. How many do I need to have in order to launch my blog officially? And I always tell them just do it. Just go, get out there, and start promoting your stuff. You can fine tune later. If you have a drive and a passion for this stuff, just like go do it. You can fine tune later. That is the number one piece of advice.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. It’s building the plane as you’re taking off, which feels really scary, both in real life, right? If you’re actually doing it. But also as you’re building something because you want it to be 100%. Like you said, if you’re launching and something’s 100%, chances are you’ve done that a little bit too late. I think that’s great feedback, and insight, and would totally agree.

Jasmine, how about you?

Jasmine Lukuku: Okay, so mine is kind of a life rule, or a quote that I have started to follow. It’s actually I saw it on Instagram as a quote by Rue Paul.

Bjork Ostrom: Ooo, throwback. Nice. Was it a Throwback Thursday?

Jasmine Lukuku: No, but it was a quote that she just posted that was like your fear of looking stupid is holding you back. I often go back to that when I’m like trying to talk myself out of like doing a live video or like writing a post, or something like that. Or sending and email. I often go back to this. Is this just me and my ego being worried about getting embarrassed or putting myself out there in a way that maybe is unflattering, or seems unflattering in my head? And I think a lot of people can probably relate to that thing where it’s like a video, I don’t want to do live video. But it’s really a fear of messing up and looking kind of silly. I won’t say stupid. You know, and I think if we can kind of remind our selves not to take ourselves so seriously all the time and give ourself some room to play and be human, and make mistakes, and say dumb things, it’s okay.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I at least ten times per podcast I think I wish I wouldn’t have said that. I’m right there with you, and totally agree. That’s been a huge thing for us is like just press record, or just press publish. So often that’s really, really hard to do. I think it gets easier as you do it more and more. But it’s a difficult thing. I think that’s really good insight. Raquel, how about you?

Raquel Smith: Yeah, I think my biggest piece of advice if that’s what we’re giving, is maybe going to sound a little bit contrary to what Alexa said, but I think it actually goes together really well. And I’m going to use your analogy Bjork about building the plane as it takes off. I think it’s really important to know that what you’re building is a plane. So many people they just start doing stuff. You know, I think it’s totally okay to launch with only six recipes, or only one. But I think you really want to take an hour or a day, or however long you need to really think about what is my end goal? What am I building here? How is this going to be valuable for me in the future?

Your end goal might be to work from home as a food blogger, but what does that look like? How are you making your money? Is it simply through ads, because if it’s simply through ads, then the way you’re going to go about it is a little bit different. If it’s by creating some sort of product or service that you sell, then the way you’re going to go about it is a little bit different.

I think it all ties together. You shouldn’t wait to get started. You should get started now. You should also keep doing stuff even if you feel like you look stupid. But you should know that what you’re building is a plane. Because if you don’t know what you’re building, all you’re going to do is kind of like zigzag around and end up back at where you started again. But if you have a direction, then you can make a lot more progress.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I feel like this was, we could have a little like three part book on this. And we could call it Building a Plane by the Food Blogger Pro team. If nothing else, that’s …

Raquel Smith: Let’s do it. We’ll make an e-book.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s what we got out of this podcast. That’s awesome. I feel like a great note to end on. I just want to say this, thank you guys so much for coming on the podcast today. It was a fun one for me to do, and always really fun to check in with you guys. And I know that people will get a lot out of it as well. Thanks for coming on guys, and sharing your insight, and advice. It was really fun.

Jasmine Lukuku: Thanks for having us.

Raquel Smith: Yeah, this was awesome.

Alexa Peduzzi: Thanks Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: All right, thanks for editing this in the future Raquel. I appreciate to. I’m going to press stop and then I’m going to send you this, and like here we are.

Raquel Smith: Yay.

Bjork Ostrom: All right, thanks.

Raquel Smith: All right, thanks Bjork. Bye.

Bjork Ostrom: Hey. That’s a wrap for this week’s podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in and for listening. Really appreciate it. One more quick plug for that position that we have opened, the Visual Designer position. You can go to foodbloggerpro.com/design to learn more about that. And if you know anybody, or if you are that person, we would love to either get in touch with them if it’s somebody that you know, or get in touch with you if it is you, because that is a really critical job that we are hiring. And it’s a really critical role on our team. We’re really excited about it.

Thanks so much for tuning in. Make it a great week. Thanks guys.