Eat Blog Talk

Chris is a product photographer at Pieta Productions and teaches creative business on YouTube. He helps other creative get clients, start their businesses and scale down the road. While he's not a food blogger, Chris has helped other food bloggers seek out clients and has an understanding of the business of food blogging. Join us in the episode to learn how to get clients for a stream of revenue while you wait for other opportunities to pop up. - This is a great strategy to implement if you're currently in the "ad network wait." - The road to monetization can seem arduous and long, so use client work as a way to earn fast money but also build on and accelerate blogging skills. - Clients aren't going to come to you in droves. You need to go find them! - How to find the right clients in the first place.

Chelsea has been blogging at Mae's Menu for 3 years. After a year of posting aimlessly and with no regards to SEO, Chelsea took an SEO course and grew her blog traffic over 2000% in the following year and qualified for the Mediavine ad network within 6 months. Chelsea publishes 4-8 recipes per month and believes in working smarter, not harder. In this episode, Chelsea makes a great case for prioritizing SEO over photography, as improving photos is something you can easily learn as you go. Join us in the episode to hear her best tips for learning SEO and accelerating the growth of your blog. - Take a course, absorb webinars and do whatever you can to learn about effective keyword research strategies and tools. Investing in good SEO information is worthwhile. - Find the content that has SEO potential and put your focus there in order to work smarter. - Add or improve ingredient shots and process shots to give your content an immediate boost in traction. - It is ALL about the user, so always aim to make your content the best resource it can be for your audience. - Get way ahead of seasons and holidays to leverage seasonal and holiday-specific traffic.

Brandon Gaille is an entrepreneur who founded multiple 7 figure businesses in his 20s before becoming disabled by a rare disorder for nearly a decade. He eventually regained his health and started a blog. He grew his blog to over 1 million visitors in just 18 months after his first blog post. Today, he gets 5 million monthly visitors from over 100,000 first-page Google rankings. Brandon has taught his SEO growth hacks to over 20,000 bloggers through his podcast, The Blogging Millionaire. This past year he launched RankIQ, an AI-powered SEO toolset tailored for bloggers and small businesses that have a blog. This year RankIQ was ranked #1 out of all 333 SEO tools by G2 for customer satisfaction and ease of use. In this episode, Brandon shares his incredible story that laid the foundation for his wild success as an entrepreneur. He tackles two SEO-themed topics within the episode, covering the importance of keyword research as well as backlinks. - Why all food bloggers should be doing keyword research. - The biggest mistakes people make when doing keyword research. - Reasons your blog needs backlinks and best tactics for getting high quality backlinks. - An effective 4-stage approach for updating old content.

Kristi is the blogger behind Carrots and Cookies, as well as a Registered Dietitian and busy working mom of three kids, ages seven to fourteen. Her passion for helping parents understand what it means to feed their kids well has grown as she raises her own. Without going crazy, Kristi found a way of developing easy and practical nutrient-dense recipes that she was proud of and kids love but so do parents too! In this episode, Kristi talks through her experience with receiving an SEO audit with under 100 published recipes. Learn from her experience to determine if an early audit is a good fit for your blogging business. - Learn why she decided to receive an audit so early and how this has positively impacted her business. - Kristi shares 5 main takeaways that she carried away from her audit: accessibility, mobile friendliness, general SEO tactics, backlinks and keyword research. - What to expect post-audit.

Dan has been running Joy to the Food for nearly a year now along with his wife Mika. Both have full time jobs and do everything together for the blog in their off hours. Throughout the process of building this brand, together they have learned a lot about each other and the best way to work together. Dan does the numbers, research and styling and Mika creates the content and handles communication. In this episode, Dan shares his strategy for doing keyword research, involving the use of two powerhouse tools: RankIQ and Keysearch. Using the two in tandem has produced positive results for Joy to the Food. Join us inside the episode to learn the ins and outs of each tool, as well as his overall strategy. - Game-changing parts of Keysearch to pay attention to (that will save you a ton of time). - A thorough deep dive into each tool and when to use which. - Deep dive into the robust RankIQ optimizer and how to best utilize it. - Differences between the tools.

Lauren has been a food blogger at Maritime Glutton for a year and a half and a photographer for about 6 months. When she began her food blogging journey, she was partially through earning a business degree. Lauren landed a marketing job for the government because of her "unofficial" skillset built while food blogging (photography, SEO, marketing, content planning). Building a skillset to support her blog allowed her to monetize from multiple income streams, while becoming an "expert" in these fields. In this episode, Lauren sheds a ton of light on this long game known as food blogging and how to take advantage of the "marathon" by building on unique skills along the ride. - Mindset matters. Work on this first and foremost. - Place a focus on learning the right things (for you). - Do a lot of trial and error! Researching and experimenting is good. - Tap into the massive amount of free resources available to you. - Create boundaries. Schedule time for yourself to do nothing. (Don't discount this!) - Find specific skills to build on and offer to other bloggers.

Danielle is host of the Entrepreneur Money Stories podcast, a reformed corporate CFO, and co-owner of Kickstart Accounting, Inc. She helps female entrepreneurs increase their profitability and take-home pay. She's passionate about helping business owners to not think about accounting as the evil tool needed to file taxes but the best tool in your tool belt to help you build the business of your dreams. In this episode, Danielle teaches food bloggers how to build a profitable business. Come learn her secrets! - Dig into your expenses, first and foremost. Your expenses will tell you what your revenue needs to be. - Focus on staying profitable. Know your numbers! Don't allow them to intimidate you. - Consider outsourcing certain services and tasks vs. wasting your time and money learning about them. - Rate your feelings and emotions as you move through your work week. - What gets measured gets managed.

Eden Westbrook is a wife, mom, and entrepreneur. Creator of the food blog Sweet Tea + Thyme in 2016, she has built it from an idea to a six-figure business. Eden's blog focuses on multicultural family-friendly dishes and date night ideas for the millennial family. You'll also find her teaching other food bloggers how to build profitable and successful food blogs through her mastermind course The Food Blogging Mastermind. In this episode, Eden shares how important it is to create that perfect one person who all of your content gets created for. You absolutely must know who you are talking to in order grow your blogging business in the way you desire. - Start with what you love. What do you love to create? What are you passionate about? What does the world need? What makes you money? - Think of your blog like it is a store in a mall. What causes people to come into your store? What would make them stay there and buy your products? - Do not be afraid to be exclusive! This is uncomfortable, but so important. - Create your person, then deliver to him/her! See imposter syndrome as a blessing!

Gregory is the recipe creator, cook, photographer and writer behind the food blog Craving The Yum. In 2016, Gregory was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, achieved 4 years of remission, and today he is working on healing a recent cancer development called Nodular Lymphocyte-Predominant Hodgkin Lymphoma. Inside this episode, Gregory shares how he was able to take his experience with cancer combined with a global pandemic to dive into blogging and explore new creativity, skills and tastes. - Learn how to take life's lemons and turn them into productive, creative and fulfilling ventures. - Sometimes it is better to be authentic than to stick with the path you initially set out on. - Keep chiseling away. This is a long game. - Come ready to be inspired!

Jenna is the content creator behind The Urben Life, a food and lifestyle blog where she shares allergy-friendly recipes and travel guides. She is an early adopter within the blogging space, staying on top of tools, platforms and trends that are unique to food content creators. Inside the episode, she shares about trends food bloggers should pay attention to in Q2 of 2022 and provides updates on Q1 trends discussed in Eat Blog Talk episode 266. - Where web stories are at, along with a few little new details. - New updates and features are being added to Facebook reels, which is a sure sign that they aren't going anywhere. - The opportunity and potential that lies within the marriage of TikTok and Whisk. - Don't toss Pinterest out the window! - Fill in those question gaps by using Google Question Hub. - What's in store for audio. - Different ways to use Airtable, outside of content management.