Eat Blog Talk

In episode 421, Megan chats to Caitlin Ritchie about how to establish a blog's identity through strong branding and photography. Caitlin is a brand strategist/professional photographer turned blogger. While continuing to work as a branding and photography consultant, she is growing her blog The Rooted Farmhouse, a gardening, food and slow living blog. In this episode, you'll learn how to stay true to your voice and niche as you establish your brand identity. Caitlin also shares tips on how to strengthen your brand through using photography. - A strong brand is essential to help you grow a bigger audience. - What is branding? - Can you have a strong brand with a limited budget? - Why should you stay cohesive with your branding on social media? - Tools to help you stay on brand and consistent - How templates increase your productivity and help you stay on brand. - Create an identity in your photography. - What are presets and how can you use them to save time with your editing workflow? Connect with Caitlin Ritchie Website | Instagram

In episode 420, Megan chats to Marley Braunlich about how to stand out to brands and establish long-term partnerships with the brands you love. Marley has been food blogging for a little over 1 year. She started working full-time for an SEO agency one month later. During this time, she grew her Instagram audience to 13k followers and started working with brands to earn a side income while the blog matured and she continued to pour into the blog. Marley has learned how to successfully land brand deals and form long-term partnerships and shares her tips in this episode. You'll learn how to land your first brand partnership, what to include in your pitch email and ways in which you can set yourself apart so that brands want to continue working with you. - DM brands on Instagram, show genuine interest and knowledge of the brand. - Create your pitch email early on and revise as you gain experience. - Have a portfolio you feel proud of (doesn't have to be perfect right away). - Should you include examples of past client work or successful social posts/metrics in your pitch? - How can you add a human touch and stand out even more in your pitch? - Why does it help to ask a question or have a CTA in your email? - Stay consistent and keep trying, sooner or later you will land your first brand deal. - What are the best practices when you work with a brand? - What should you do if you don't hit target metrics with content for brands? Connect with Marley Braunlich Website | Instagram

In episode 419, Rob Finkelstein teaches us how to protect our business and brand name by forming a business entity. Rob is a lawyer, practicing for over 20 years in NYC. In 2017, Rob decided to pursue his passion of baking and went to culinary school for pastry arts. After graduating, not wanting to leave the law, Rob got started blogging at, http://www.cinnamonshtick.com, which was also his entry into food photography. He worked with a number of brands and came to represent lots of food photographers in connection with their contracts and business set ups. They all inspired Rob to create an online course about contracts specifically for food photographers. In this episode, you'll learn more about the details of forming a business entity, including liability protection, finances and the differences between various entities. - Why form a business entity? - The importance of having a separate business bank account. - How to choose a name for your business/brand. - Why searching your brand name on the USPTO website is critically important, even if you have been using your brand name for years. - Types of business entities and which is best suited for food bloggers. - How to form an LLC and useful resources to do so. Connect with Rob Finkelstein Website | Instagram

In episode 418, Megan chats to Allie Petersen about strategies to grow our domain authority as bloggers. Allie is a plant-based food blogger who creates small batch vegan recipes for the busy individual. She has followed a plant-based lifestyle for 6 years and loves sharing her passion for easy, healthy cooking. Allie is dedicated to teaching others about the plant-based diet and showing them simple ways to cook vegan meals. In this episode, you'll find out how to increase your domain authority by using backlinks, keywords and other strategies. - What is DA and how to use it? - Do's and don'ts for backlinks. - Use HARO or Quora to reply to expert questions. - How to build posts to top ranking positions for natural backlinks. - Which keywords to go for to increase your DA? - Why Facebook roundup posts are effective. Connect with Allie Petersen Website | Instagram

In episode 417, Vinessa Knabbe teaches us how to be confident food bloggers, talking about our jobs without hesitation, regardless of where we're at in our blogging journey. Vinessa and her family live in Long Beach, New York, a barrier Island on Long Island. Vinessa loves the beach and everything that goes along with it, heat, tan skin, sand on her feet and being outside as much as possible. She loves the heat in the kitchen also as she comes from an Italian family full of cooks. Inspired by her love of cooking, she shares family recipes on her blog, Vinessa Rae. Her skills come mainly from her grandmother, Annette, who is no longer with us but she feels close to her every time she's in the kitchen, and her mom who still amazes her with things she makes and comes up with. In this episode, she shares how she went from feeling uncomfortable talking about her job as a food blogger to being able to promote her blog without fear. Learn more about being a confident blogger and treating your blog as a business from the start. - When and why you should treat your blog as a business from the start. - Don't downplay your blog because otherwise others will do the same. - Businesses take time to grow and become profitable. - Why you shouldn't be afraid to talk about and promote your blog. - The positive feedback you'll receive from sharing "what you do for work". - What opportunities will you find once you overcome this? - Understand the value that you provide to your community. Connect with Vinessa Knabbe Website | Instagram

In episode 416, Megan chats to Amanda Polick about how to write a cookbook and intentionally build your platform without getting overwhelmed. Amanda Polick is a cookbook and food memoir coach. Through their work together, clients have landed Big 5 publishing deals and secured media clips for publications including Food 52 and The Los Angeles Times. Her work has been featured by Cooking Light, Time, Southern Living, and Food & Wine, and she's a proud member of the Cherry Bombe community. In this episode, you'll find out more about the process of writing a cookbook, including how to write a book proposal, identifying why people would love your cookbook more than others and what happens once your book proposal gets accepted? - Tell stories beyond the recipes you include. - The book proposal is your cookbook's business plan. - Why will people pick up your book rather than others? - How to get a publishing deal? - How can you stand out in a saturated market by owning your voice? - You can truly show your personality in your email marketing. - Write through your resistance when you feel blocked during the process. - What's the first thing you should do to start your cookbook writing process? Connect with Amanda Polick Website | Instagram

In episode 415, Ryan Allen teaches us how to monetize our sites and get 100k page views in 30 days. Ryan has been a food blogger for just under a year. Ryan knew when he started blogging, he wanted to be able to monetize as quickly as possible. So he planned to leverage Facebook and Facebook groups to reach 100K page views in his first 30 days. In this episode, Ryan shares in detail how he used Facebook to gain traction for his blog. Find out how you can implement his Facebook marketing strategy to increase traffic and monetize your own blog. - Be able to look at your content objectively. - What is the quickest way to grow as a new blogger? - Use Facebook groups socially. - The more you help and interact with others, the more they'll do the same for you. - The more consistent you are, the more success you'll find. - What are the advantages of Facebook groups compared to your own pages? - How to get quality traffic from Facebook that won't affect your RPM? - What types of recipe content performs best? Connect with Ryan Allen Website | Instagram

In episode 414, Megan chats to Eric Samuelson about common mental health issues food bloggers struggle with and how they can keep on top of their blogs regardless of what they experience in their day to day life. Eric runs the blog, Eat Like No One Else - the place to learn how to enhance the way you eat through learning of specialty foods and ingredients and how to make the most amazing food at home. At Eat Like No One Else, they solidly believe in the philosophy "if you teach a man to fish..." . In 2022, Eric introduced a podcast, Eat Shop Waste Not, that teaches people how to source the most delicious groceries without wasting food or a single penny. In this episode, you'll learn about common mental health issues bloggers experience, including feelings of isolation, anxiety, low self-esteem and depression. - Why is food blogging so mentally tasking? - Evaluate your work-life balance. - How does income affect your mental health? - Tips to deal with the anxiety of blog analytics. - Perfectionism increases your stress-levels. - Everyone's life situation is different - identify what you struggle with mentally. - Understand your "why", it will keep you on track. - Don't try to do more than you are realistically able to do. Connect with Eric Samuelson Website | Instagram

In episode 413, Aleka Shunk teaches us effective keyword research strategies, sharing tips about which search volumes to target, how to analyze competition and which mistakes to avoid. Aleka is the founder of Aleka's Get-Together, a food and entertaining blog, and Keywords With Aleka, a keyword research school for bloggers. She has a Master's Degree in Teaching, Learning and Curriculum and was a teacher for ten years. Aleka took her expertise as both a teacher and blogger to create courses to help others learn how to navigate and excel at a small, but important, piece of SEO: keyword research. In this episode, you'll learn how to do keyword research to maximize traffic coming to your website no matter where you are in your blogging journey. - You can naturally rank for more than one variation of a keyword. - What do you do if the search volume is low for your particular keyword? - What should we do with keywords with high competition? - Track your higher ranking posts. - It's really important to keep readers on your site. - How should you analyze your competition? - Why you should invest in keyword research tools. - What are common keywords research mistakes? Connect with Aleka Shunk Website | Instagram

In episode 412, Megan chats to Kristin Weeks about how to set healthy habits that help us push through hard times and grow our businesses in the long-run. Kristin started her blog 3 years ago with the passion to teach others how to cook more homemade meals, bake with sourdough, and how to start a backyard garden to grow fresh produce. Since then, Kristin's journey has had a lot of ups and downs. A year ago she decided to take her blog and business seriously and that had a lot to do with habits, routines, and mindset. By working on herself first, she found she was able to focus. The hard work turned her hobby into a viable business, going from a few thousand sessions a month to qualifying for Mediavine within a year. In this episode, you'll learn how to identify areas in your life you'd like to improve, setting positive, lasting habits that will help you achieve your goals. - Do you feel ready to put everything you have into your blog? - Which areas of your life would you like to improve? - Your strengths are just as important as your weaknesses. - How important is your morning routine? - Have you incorporated fitness into your routine? - Tailor each morning to what you need in the day. - Habits that you enjoy are easier to keep. - Focus on the result in order to love the process. - Why is it important to remember the milestones we achieve along the way? Connect with Kristin Weeks Website | Instagram