Which all begs the question: have you ever wanted to publish a book?

Writing a book is a natural segue for many bloggers, but the journey can seem large and long.

In Summer of Live 2019, we talked to two Mediavine influencers who are both published authors: Jen Ruiz of Jen on a Jet Plane and Valerie Stimac of The Space Tourism Guide and Valerie & Valise. Jen and Valerie pack this episode with their honest individual experiences in publishing their own books, and give action-packed tips on how you can get started today.

Make sure to tune in!

Helpful Resources

• Jen On A Jet Plane
• The Space Tourism Guide
• Valerie & Valise
• Become A Published Author with Jeffrey Eisner | Mediavine On Air Episode 16
• The Solo Female Travel Book
• Dark Skies 1

Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] JENNY GUY: Happy Thursday, everybody. It is July 11th, and we are in the Summer of Live. I’m Jenny Guy, Mediavine’s marketing manager, and it is our month of beyond blogging. So we are talking about the things that tie to your blogging career but might be a little bit outside just the nuts and bolts of operating your website. But we are here and we are so excited today to be talking about book publishing. And I have two amazing guests.

But book publishing can seem like a really natural segue for a lot of bloggers. It’s an extension of you sharing that expertise that you’re already sharing with your audience– that’s sometimes it– and then other times, it can be the impetus for people to begin blogging in the first place. We’ve heard a lot of publishers tell us they’re great authors, but they aren’t able to quite navigate the system and get published, so they decide to start a blog so they can make use of their expertise and their writing skills.

But whatever your experiences with book publishing, I’m here with two guests who are both highly successful publishers. We’re really excited to have them– both on their websites and with their books. So first I have Jen Ruiz. Hello, Jen. Welcome.

JENNIFER RUIZ: Hi, Jenny. Thank you.

JENNY GUY: Awesome. So she is the Mediavine publisher with the site Jen on a Jet Plane, where she writes about affordable female travel solo– which I think is so fierce and amazing. She’s a frequent conference speaker, and she also has her own TED Talk. No big deal there. And, exciting news, she just told me she is doing another TEDx Talk, which I’ll have her tell us about a little bit later. But her current TED Talk that’s already available for release is “The Power of Flying Solo,” which is advocating for travel as a cure for what ails you.

She’s also a lawyer and the author of the books You Need a Vacation, which is about how to travel with a full-time job, which we all could use, The Solo Female Travel Book, which is tips and inspiration for women who want to see the world on their own terms– who doesn’t?– and The Affordable Flight Guide, which is how to find cheap airline tickets and see the world on a budget. That last one I just mentioned, The Affordable Flight Guide, just happens to be a number one Amazon best seller.

So she has a few things she’s worked on. Jen, welcome, and tell us just real quick, what’s going on with you in your life right now? I know that I spilled the beans on your TED Talk, but what else is going on?

JENNIFER RUIZ: You did. I just got that notification minutes before logging on today.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

JENNIFER RUIZ: Hot off the presses, important news. Otherwise, I have a couple of press trips coming up. I’ll be, actually, taking a food trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan next week, which I’m so excited about. I worked out really hard today to try to earn my right to eat all the delicious things next week.

I have a big move coming up. I’m actually relocating to Puerto Rico, which is supposed to be a great place for digital nomads. It’s where I’m from originally, so I’m excited to both kind of go back to my roots, and also explore just living on an island. I’ve never really done that. I’ve lived in Florida. It was close, sunny all the time. But I think Puerto Rico will be a whole different story. And that’s coming up now in August. And then I’ll be at the TBEX conference in September speaking on self-publishing there, as well.

JENNY GUY: That is awesome and so exciting. And congratulations again on your TED talk. That’s really incredible. I think we’re posting– we posted all of your links. I think we’re going to post the link for the TED talk, so we want to get that out. I’m sure people want to see that. And I’m going to introduce our other remarkable guest.

Valerie Stimac is also a Mediavine publisher. She has two sites, Space Tourism Guide, which provides the most accurate and accessible resources for space-related travel around the world– cool– along with Valerie & Valise, which is a blog for smart travelers who want to make the most of their time on the road. She’s an accomplished travel writer and conference speaker, with bylines in publications like Lonely Planet, NatGeo Travel, San Francisco Chronicle, Afar, Travel & Leisure, The Globe and Mail, and speaking engagements with WITS and Bay Area Travel Writers.

Valerie is also the author of Dark Skies: The World’s First Guide to Astrotourism– it’s published by Lonely Planet– as well as the travel journal Maps, Not Apps. They’re both available on Amazon, although Dark Skies is not out yet. And she’s got an exciting thing that she’s heading to next week. So Valerie, welcome to the Summer of Live.

VALERIE STIMAC: Thank you.

JENNY GUY: And will you tell us a little bit about what’s going on?

VALERIE STIMAC: Yeah. So if you’re not a space nerd, that’s OK. I’m happy to get you up to speed. But next Saturday, the 20th, is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. So the very first time someone stepped on the moon was 50 years ago. And so I am headed down to Houston, Texas. They are having a huge– basically, a week-long party to celebrate the Apollo moon landing. And we’ll be meeting with astronauts, touring Johnson Space Center, seeing Space Center Houston– just getting a lot of space and space-nerdy moments with people who are as excited about it as I am.

JENNY GUY: That is incredible. And tell me a little bit about Dark Skies and when it will actually be able to be in people’s hands.

VALERIE STIMAC: Yeah, so Dark Skies, because Lonely Planet is a traditional publisher, they have a very large lead time. So we actually worked on the book last summer, turned it in last fall, and it’s not even going to be available until roughly mid-September. I don’t know that there’s an official date. I think Amazon says it’s available the 1st of September, but I am not totally certain of that. That might have just been a placeholder date, and that might be adjusted within a couple of weeks once we get closer to the publication date.

JENNY GUY: Awesome. And what is Dark Skies about?

VALERIE STIMAC: It is a guidebook to experiencing the night sky and outer space on Earth, organized by activity. So there are sections about stargazing, seeing the Northern Lights, seeing eclipses– which, there was one last week– seeing rocket launches. And then there’s even a section about space tourism itself that kind of details what are the different destinations in space, and who can take you there, and how much is it going to cost?

JENNY GUY: Awesome. So it sounds like– yeah, as the brief description that was on Amazon, it’s a comprehensive guide to just all things space, and space lovers. And that’s amazing. That sounds great.

So ladies, we’ve got– we always post this, but If anyone has questions about book publishing or wants to tell us about their book publishing journey, please post it in the comments. I will put your questions to these experts, and we will get you answered.

But I’m going to go ahead and start with one of my own questions. So for both of you, how do your journeys fit into this publishing narrative that I talked about a little bit when I first started, about were you an author before you were a website owner? Were you trying to publish books before you started your websites? Did you always want to be an author? Tell us your back stories a little bit, your journey, and what led you to book publishing and then to Mediavine. And whoever wants to start.

JENNIFER RUIZ: Do you want to take that first, Valerie?

VALERIE STIMAC: Sure, I’ll go first. So I actually started with my blogs, I started with Valerie & Valise, which is my own travel blog. And I started writing that because I wanted to work for travel magazines, and my mom, who is a very wise woman, said, well, until you get a job at one of those magazines, why don’t you start your own website? You know how to do that. You know how to write. You know how to edit. You know how to shoot photos. Do it, prove that you can do it, and that’ll help you get the job.

So I started Valerie & Valise in 2013. And then I was getting a little frustrated with writing about the same places everyone else was writing about, and that was what really brought me back to space, because it was this new destination that nobody was writing about from a travel perspective.

So I launched The Space Tourism Guide in 2017. And then I had the chance to pitch books to Lonely Planet last summer, so that was the summer of 2018. And I basically walked in the room– they had brought me in because I had written for them before– and they said, what ideas do you? This is not, what book do you want to write, but it’s what ideas do you have? What could we publish?

And when I pitched them the idea for Dark Skies, I said, I run a website about this, people are really interested in it, they sort of realized that they not only had a great topic, but they had the right person in the room. And so within a few weeks of pitching it, they came back to me and said, definitely want to do it. Do you want to be the person to write it? And I said, of course.

So yeah, I was a blogger before I was an author. But I was also freelance writing almost the whole time, too. And that really helped me be in the right place and know the right people to pitch Lonely Planet.

JENNY GUY: And we will definitely talk more about pitching and how to make those contacts a little bit later. But that is a good journey. So you were not necessarily trying to get your book published, but you were trying to get on a staff to be a writer. So being an author, being a travel author, has always been your goal

VALERIE STIMAC: Yeah, and I really thought, especially with the idea of Dark Skies, because I run my own website, I thought, you know, this is a good idea. Even if they don’t pick me to write it, if Lonely Planet publishes it, that topic actually helps me because people who search for their book would also probably find my website.

And so it was a little– it’s been more than great because I got to write the book also. But I was saying, look, if people are interested, anything that gets people interested in this topic and gets them googling, and going on Facebook, and joining communities where my links are present, that’s going to help my website– which, of course, helps my ad income. The more people I get, the better.

JENNY GUY: Yeah, absolutely. OK, and same question to you, Jen.

JENNIFER RUIZ: So mine was a little bit similar. I was a blogger before I was an author, and I had set out to take 12 trips in 12 months before my 30th birthday. That was my big challenge, because I had really big issues with aging and just wanted to send off the year with a bang and have something to look forward to, versus, like, panicking every day.

So I did that, and then I ended up finding a lot of really cheap flights. And people kept asking me, well, how did you find all these deals? Oh my god, this is crazy. And I was like, it’s really– once you know how, it’s not that hard. But when you have knowledge that other people don’t possess, suddenly, you have the makings of a best selling book. Go figure.

And I think a lot of us have that, but we just don’t realize it. And we just think, oh, everybody knows this, or this is information that people can easily find. But people don’t want to go and have to hunt down and search through 20 different websites. They just want one reliable source from one person that they’ve come to trust.

So I unknowingly had spent a whole year promoting this book, essentially, sharing my flight deals with my audience, my friends on social media, just informally. Not with anything else in mind, but just thinking, oh, this is so wonderful, I want to share with the world what I’m doing. And then that ended up being really great for me, because that’s what you’re supposed to do as an author to help build buzz about a book. And then I had this kind of built-in audience that wanted to know my secrets for cheap flights.

And I thought about maybe just doing it in a series of blog posts, or presenting the information in a different way, but I realized that there was nothing stopping me from making a book. I mean, as a lawyer, I’ve written lengths of books before for a random assignment. So I’m OK with writing. I have that part down, I felt, in general. I’m still working on it creatively, but I felt like I can be structured enough to get a product out.

And then, from there, it was just a matter of learning how to publish it myself. And I did research into both aspects, self-publishing or traditional, and ultimately, I went with self publishing, because I thought, it’s my first book. It’s something that people who know me know that I’ve established this expertise here already, but maybe it would be harder for me to prove that at this stage, right now, before I was really that established, to a major publishing company. So let me just try and do it myself.

I started learning everything I could about self-publishing I went on– I listened to podcasts in my spare time. I just read articles on Sundays when I was sitting there eating brunch. And then I managed to get the book published, and that’s how I got started.

And then once I published one and it did so well, I entered it in a book award competition. It won an award. And I just decided, there’s a market here for this. People liked it. Let me try to continue with this and do related books along this line. And this is how I ended up an accidental author.

And it worked out so well, and it’s such a great passive income stream, and it brings me clients to my website from Amazon that is just this huge database of people, millions of people, that go there looking for somebody with your expertise, versus when you’re on Facebook paying for ads and you’re having to convince somebody to stop and go to you. People go there looking for you and what it is that you’re talking about, and then they go to your website because they see you as an authority. So it’s just worked out so wonderfully, and it was a happy kind of accident, in a way, that led me down this path.

JENNY GUY: We love happy accidents almost as much as we love passive income. So that’s always a good thing. So tell me a little bit about how you guys get your ideas for your books. And then, that can be just very specifically with the books that we’ve already talked about. And then also, if you’re going for different books, new books, how you brainstorm, how you figure out where that expertise lies, like you were saying, Jen.

And then, we say this all the time on both Teal Talk and the Summer Of Live, that it’s usually the thing that you should be doing and teaching people is the thing that you think is common knowledge, and easy for everyone else, and intuitive, and it’s not. It’s just intuitive for you, and that’s why sometimes it’s so hard to recognize.

So yeah, Jen, do you want to start with that one and tell me where you get your ideas and how?

JENNIFER RUIZ: Yeah I think initially, when I thought about writing a book, I had this big romantic idea that it would be an Elizabeth Gilbert type of novel, and it would talk about all my travel adventures, and people would just die to hear these stories. And then I realized, my friends like my stories, yeah, but for the most part, they really care more about how they can benefit from this. So what are the tips that I have for them?

And I realized that what my audience was looking for, rather than just travel entertainment in that sense, was more travel knowledge, travel tips. And so I started just asking questions. What is it that you want to know? And I polled my audience, I polled my readers, I polled my email list, what is it that’s stopping you from traveling more? Because I knew I wanted to write a book related to travel. That’s what my website is in. So what is it that’s stopping you? What’s your biggest pain point? And trying to identify that for them.

With that, I identified three pain points. Number one was money, so I did my first book on how to get cheap flights, essentially. I put “affordable flights” because people didn’t like the word “cheap.” I’m doing polls this whole time, every time. A title thing, I’m just asking people for their comments, feedback the whole way, and it’s really helpful.

The second problem I identified was people didn’t want to travel by themselves. People didn’t want to travel solo, especially women who were maybe in their late 20s, professionally established, having the means to travel now, but not necessarily the friends with the same time off. That was my audience there that I nailed in that sense. And then the third problem was time off to travel, from work.

JENNY GUY: Yeah.

JENNIFER RUIZ: So I just did three books based off of the problems that people told me were their biggest problems, And I realized that it wasn’t necessarily about the story that I wanted to tell– although I could still tell it, in a way, through those mediums– but more about what people needed to know. And that’s where you get the sweet spot for actually monetizing a book.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. I love that, And I love the advice about crowdsourcing and talking to your people, that you already know. You have that built-in audience. And Valerie, to you?

VALERIE STIMAC: Yeah, so I actually had ideas for books pretty early on after starting Space Tourism Guide. Because I would say to complement what Jen has said, that answering a user’s question or addressing their pain point. The other one is organizing the information in a way they can’t find somewhere else. A lot of books, a lot of things that I would say bloggers don’t realize, that you could take these articles you’ve written, and by simply putting them in one place, you can unlock value that people are willing to pay for.

So for example, I write these Stargazing City Guides. And with very little additional work, I could take those city guides, add in more places around each state, and write a book about stargazing in Washington State or in the Western US so that people who are traveling in the region could have that information.

Another example from, more generally, travel is, if you’re an expert in a certain destination, you can write your own guidebook. Especially if you’re self-publishing, it’s really easy to keep them up-to-date, depending on which route you go and who you’re publishing through. Submitting second editions and third editions is not as complicated as people realize when you’re self-publishing once you figure out the steps. Like Jen said, It’s not this great labyrinth. It’s actually meant to be pretty simple because, of course, self-publishing, Amazon has developed tools to do that because that helps them. They want authors. They want more books. They want people to come to them to get every answer.

It’s kind of like courses, too. A lot of times you find a good blogging course with someone who just took all that information and organized it really nicely for you. You could do the same thing and put it in a book or ebook format based on whatever knowledge that you have that people would be willing to pay for.

JENNY GUY: And we are actually going to talk about courses in a couple of weeks, which is awesome, but it’s another excellent revenue stream that we’re going to be discussing. But I love the idea that a lot of bloggers don’t have a grasp on how much of this work they’ve already done, that’s already done for them. It’s not like you sit down with the proverbial blank typewriter and the blank sheet of paper, and you’re trying to–

Which leads right into my next question, which is, how is writing a book different from all the writing you’ve done for your website? And I know that a lot of it, as you just said, is synthesizing the work that you’ve done, but what steps do you then take to make it into a book? And I’ll start with you, Valerie.

VALERIE STIMAC: Yeah, the first thing that I do and that was done for me by my editor at Lonely Planet was I make a flat plan.

JENNY GUY: OK.

VALERIE STIMAC: And the flat plan is basically this– it’s a spreadsheet the way I do them, and each cell is a page in the book. And so what you’re trying to do is figure out how many pages are in the book and what’s on each page, very roughly. And then you start to fill in the gaps.

You just say, OK, well I’ve already written this chapter on booking flights to Alaska. That’s something that I write a lot about. So maybe I need a chapter on finding good hotel deals, and that’s going to be this many pages. And you just start to fill them in, and then you can see what you’ve already written that you can repurpose and what you’re going to need to write.

And then I like to make it a kind of puzzle. I’m just filling in the gaps, and I just take it piece by piece and fill in those gaps. And it’s not so much I’m sitting down to do a NaNoWriMo and write 100,000 words. This week, I’m writing that 5,000-word chapter, and then that’s my task, is that I’m not writing a book, I’m writing a chapter. And that makes it like writing a blog post. It makes it life easier.

JENNY GUY: Absolutely. I love that. I love that. And just to kind of– how do you keep a continuity going through the whole thing? Is that a concern when you’re dealing with it more? You’re pulling some from your site and then adding some in. Is there a strategy that you employ to keep the continuity going?

VALERIE STIMAC: Yeah, I would certainly pass anything I’d already published through my own editor lens. But I might do that at the very end. I might do that as the final pass, or just to get the book done, the first draft done. Because that’s the biggest hurdle, is getting that first draft finished. I would say OK, look, I’ve already written that section. Just put it in there. Put it in the document, and mark it in italics, and come back to that in two weeks when everything else is done, and read it as though you’re trying to make it cohesive from end to end now that you have all the pieces lined up.

JENNY GUY: Yeah, absolutely. OK, Jen, same question to you.

JENNIFER RUIZ: Something similar, but just not as extensive of a process. I just do my rough outline of what are the chapters, what are the sub-chapters that I want to cover, and then filling in the content. I’ve seen bloggers with table of contents and 5,000-word articles on their, you know, magnus opus for this amazing location. And they have all of this content already written in bulk. And really, you can start selling a book for $0.99 at 5,000 to 10,000 words. So if you have an extensive guide like that to a city, that could be a $0.99 book that you have permanently $0.99, permanently on that special list of $0.99-only books that’s getting in new readers that just want something to test out and if they like you. So that’s a good way to dip your toes in it without necessarily having to do this big grand compilation.

But I fill in the blanks, and I go through, and I’ll put an introduction. I’ll put in some bonuses, some things that will lead them to my site. So when you’re self-published, you want to make sure that you have a link to your website before the fold in the free preview of Amazon, whatever bonus content that you’re offering. I have a bonus page where, once people are in the free preview, they can click. So A, it brings me traffic, and then B, if they download any of the things, it gets them on my email list. And that’s all coming before they even purchase my book, just from a preview free on Amazon.

So those are specific places where I know I have to work on. So I have the intro, I have some kind of lede or something that I have to do to get people interested to go further. Then the chapters, usually I’ll break it down into– all my books have had, maybe, five to six chapters and then a set of bonuses. And then the chapters are broken down into four or five subsections.

I think it’s really not that hard when you’re in nonfiction. I think when you’re in fiction, it’s a lot more difficult, because you’re sitting here being like– I don’t know how J.K. Rowling– like, somebody picked up a cup in chapter 3 of book 1, and then in book 7, chapter 9, it came out to be the most important cup ever. And I could never have that kind of continuity with a story. So I think in non-fiction, you’re really very lucky, because it’s just a matter of filling in the content and getting right information out to people. And then you can start to see, oh, well, maybe I already covered [AUDIO OUT]. This is redundant here, let me change this outline a little bit, and edit as you go along. But there isn’t as much of a problem with continuity as there would be if you’re telling a story of some sort.

JENNY GUY: Right, absolutely. And so, to follow up, since you’ve written several of these books, would you say that it’s formulaic now? Do you have a really strong, this is how I do this, and this is the way– obviously, the content is changing up, but is there a strong outline that you have come up with that works for you?

JENNIFER RUIZ: Yes, and that’s partially also because I have been– so I’ve been figuring this all out as I go, doing all this on a budget. And so after I paid for the first person to format the book well, I was like, well, I could just delete and fill in the blanks with new content, and then it’s already formatted, and I don’t have to pay to have it formatted twice. So that’s part of the reason why I kept that format.

But I’m hoping to venture out into other things, and I’m learning as I go, still. Which is kind of the fun thing about this job and being an online creator, is that there’s always new things. It’s never mundane, like law. So it’s really wonderful, and I’m trying to learn how to do things better at this point.

But moving forward, I’d love to have, maybe, some pictures in the books a little bit more. That can be a little bit more costly when it comes to printing, and so I’ve been careful with that. Even just having black-and-white versus color ink is a problem in terms of what the revenues are and how much more it’s going to cost to print that book. So it may not be cost-effective for you, especially depending on your audience and the price point you want to keep it in. That’s why you see all these photo books and they’re, like, $50 photo books. And you’re like, oh my god, that’s a lot of money for a book. But they pay a lot of money for that printing to have these quality, shiny, amazing photos. And that’s what costs that money.

So I think it’s just different challenges moving forward that I’d like to work on it, like formatting the books in different ways, like maybe doing something besides nonfiction, like adding different images. And those are all things that I look forward to exploring in the future.

JENNY GUY: Good. That’s great. And so Jen just give us a little bit there. What types of things might you be interested in looking into in the future, Valerie? Are there certain things you’re wanting to add, maybe, next time around?

VALERIE STIMAC: Well, Dark Skies, that’s technically Lonely Planet’s book, so that’ll be up to them. But I definitely foresee– and actually, as Jen’s talking, I’m like, oh my gosh, I need to do this for my travel site. I’ve got all this information that I’ve just never– so I always thought you had to write a general travel guide, but whatever niche you happen to be, you could write a very specific $0.99 guide for that one subset of your audience. I can imagine that in cooking or in parenting, there’s this one little lesson that you’re somehow this expert on because you live it, and you could create your first book and start to learn these lessons that way.

In Dark Skies, I could see us expanding the space tourism section. That’s a huge opportunity. Rocket launches is a huge opportunity as more countries start to do their own launches, start to get into the space game. Personally, when I look to self-publishing, I really want to get my stargazing guides out. There is no one else in the market doing that. So in addition to being convenient and having it all in one place, it would also be providing a product that, right now, nobody else has done. And I’ve already done so much of the work that it’s worth it for me to take the last few steps and get the book out the door.

And I would love– I’ve actually totally started to look outside of book publishing already, too, because I think as bloggers, we realized diversify, diversify.

JENNY GUY: Yes.

VALERIE STIMAC: And so I’m looking at podcasting and storytelling through podcasts, because I know that for me, I’m not a fiction writer, I’m maybe not the most compelling storyteller in writing, but I have a good idea for a podcast that I think is storytelling-based and uses these lessons of how you organize stories and how you promote the stories you’ve written. So I don’t even know if you’re having another session on podcasting and impromptu podcasting, but that’s the other one I’m looking at.

JENNY GUY: We actually had a session on podcasting during Teal Talk during the year, and it’s on our YouTube channel. So let’s post our YouTube channel, just in case people want to check out, and let’s post our podcasting Teal Talk. That’s perfect.

So let’s talk about time, because you’re running a website that you’re still posting on. Both of you are. Valerie, you’re running two. So in addition to writing on those websites, you’re then creating content for your books. How do you balance that out? How long does it take to write a book? I know that this is probably the– and getting the lawyer answer from Jen, it depends. But how long did it take you to go through your process, and how did you balance your websites with your writing of the book?

VALERIE STIMAC: You want to go first, Jen?

JENNIFER RUIZ: Sure. So at least my first book, I was just kind of whenever the mood struck me. Because sometimes you get– if you’re a writer, you know. Every now and then, the Muses come out of nowhere, and you’re like, oh my god, it’s flowing. And then other days, you’re just like, I don’t speak the English. Like, what is happening?

So really, I would just kind of go with the surge. I would try to write a little bit every day, but how much I wrote would vary. And then, what really put a fire under me was that I missed a trip to Spain because, like a dummy, I had actually left my passport in my home, which was two hours away from the airport.

JENNY GUY: No.

JENNIFER RUIZ: And I had gotten such a cheap flight that they couldn’t reschedule me because I paid so little for the fare. So I missed that flight, and I was steaming driving back to my apartment. I mean, I was pissed off, OK? And I was like, goddamn it. Excuse me, my language for Facebook.

JENNY GUY: That’s OK.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

JENNIFER RUIZ: I’m still angry. I’m back in the moment now. But I was like, I’m not letting this weekend go to waste. If I’m not in Spain, so help me, something’s coming out of this weekend, and it’s going to be my book. One way or another, come Monday, that book’s going to be finished.

And I just hunkered down, and in my anger, I wrote as much as I could. And by the end of that weekend, it was done. So I think it can be done in a weekend if you have the proper impetus. I think it can be done in a month if you are regular with your writing. Writing 500 to a thousand words a day, you can really get a good chunk of writing done. 30 days, a thousand words, that’s 30,000 words. There’s your book right there, especially at a non-fiction.

So it can be done. I think the key is just pushing yourself to write and carving out the time where you’re most productive, I learned very quickly that I do not write well at night. At night, I do not want to think. I just want to have something alcoholic and watch TV. I don’t want to have to be creative. My brain shuts down at that point.

So I try to get all my writing done before noon, knowing that the more time passed, the less steam I would have. And changing my tasks around. So maybe doing that first, and doing something else, something mindless like social media promotion of my posts, or things like that, at night, when I didn’t need the brain to work. And that helped.

So I got it done. Overall, my first book I got done within, I’d say, about three months from the time I officially started kicking around the idea, with that last weekend really being the home stretch. And then my second book was a smaller $0.99 book. That one I got done within a month. Maybe even less than that, because it was a smaller book. And then the third one was larger. I would say that one took me about two months or so, because at this point, I had already gotten it down to a science.

JENNY GUY: And how did you balance that out with Jen on a Jet Plane? Were you still publishing content there?

JENNIFER RUIZ: I was. And so it’s been tough. And what I’ve actually done, sometimes, now to give myself a little bit of a break, I repurpose content from the first book. So I had so many amazing tips that I put in the first book that if I just take a page out of the first book, I can make that into its own blog post. I don’t really have to make up the stuff again. I just reword a little bit.

So I’m kind of plagiarizing myself, but it interests people. So I had a section on– I have one chapter on budget airlines. I’ve just published a post just recently– this is now– but I just published a post on 10 budget airlines still worth flying with, mainly based off of my list that I had in the book. I just repurposed that content.

And I think we all worry because we want to have everything be so original and so different, but absolutely no one is reading every single word you post and being like, oh my god, can you believe that Jen said this again? Nobody. That is just –

JENNY GUY: Your mom.

JENNIFER RUIZ: Not even.

VALERIE STIMAC: Not even Mom.

JENNIFER RUIZ: Not even your mom.

VALERIE STIMAC: Not even Mom.

JENNIFER RUIZ: Not even.

VALERIE STIMAC: Yeah, I 100% agree with that, that if you are using your own blog content, I don’t even consider it plagiarizing. It is your copyrighted material. You own it. You can do whatever you want with it. That is yours. Repurpose it, stick it on billboards, tweet it, put it in a book, do whatever. It’s yours, definitely.

I was just trying to pull up– Dark Skies was a little bit unconventional. So because Lonely Planet is a traditional publishing house, they have a very strict schedule when they commission a book, and when they expect that draft in, and when they need it done so they go to the designers, and the printers, blah, blah, blah. So I had 10 weeks to write the book.

JENNY GUY: Wow.

VALERIE STIMAC: And as Jen said, I learned that it had to be the first words I gave. So I don’t know if anyone else will feel me on this, but I only have so many words in a day that I can write. There is no set number, but I know when I hit that limit. And if I didn’t give my words to the book, I didn’t have them to give later in the day. So it was always the first thing I did when I sat down to write each day.

And if I had extra words, I was writing for myself. I was writing for freelance clients. I was trying to give that extra energy. But usually, I didn’t have those extra words. I had spent myself. So you wouldn’t actually know this, but in the 10 weeks that I was working on the book, I think I was publishing about once every two weeks, which is about 10 times less frequent. I publish, like, twice a week. So it was substantially less than I normally do, I guess 25% of what I would normally publish.

And I just gave myself permission to not feel bad about that. I had a deadline, and it wasn’t even my deadline. And I’d heard these horror stories that if you don’t make your deadline with Lonely Planet, you get blacklisted, and you never get any work again. So I just motivated myself tremendously. I found a really, really good album. My recommended album, and it won’t work for everybody, is Album Title Goes Here by deadmau5. I could put that on– and it’s, like, trance, heavy trance music– and I could just let the words flow.

When I write my own books, I think I’m going to need to be the same way. So I haven’t actually written any more self-published, but I think that I’ve learned now that if there’s no deadline, like everything, I’m just going to let that deadline stretch. It’s going to take as much time as I give it. And so when I sit down, I’m going to actually try and get ahead on blog posts so that I can basically pause writing anything else and just focus on getting those books done.

Because if you’ve identified a market opportunity for a book, if your audience is asking for if, if they’re saying, look, we want to pay you for this information, and you already have your site, it’s already making you money because presumably you’re on Mediavine or you’re trying to get on Mediavine– I know there’s lots of folks who watch this that are trying to get to Mediavine levels– once you hit that and your site’s doing its own thing, you can step back and say, OK, keep going in the right direction. I’m going to do this other thing because I need to build out this other part of my business.

And the only way, personally, I can do that is if I don’t write anything else for anyone else. That’s hard, because I like to give my audience new things, but it’s what I think is the only way that I can– like Jen, in that weekend, you’re like, I’m going to get it done. I have to get it done, because if I don’t do it now, I’ll never finish it.

JENNY GUY: I think that that is great advice, and I completely feel you guys. I’m not authors like you are, but in terms of writing, whether it was papers for school, or blog posts now, or whatever it is, you have the minute where you’re like, I must write this minute. Everything is happening, it’s happening right now. And then when you’re there, you’re like, and I’m saturated, and I’m writing the same thing over and over again. It’s terrible. Nothing sounds good. I need to stop. I need to just stop. So then–

VALERIE STIMAC: And– sorry– I’ve found that’s the case. And I can imagine that there’s some people who watch this that their full-time jobs do that to them, where their full-time role takes their words. And so if you have flexibility, like when I was blogging and working full time for someone else, I would go in an hour later and stay an hour later so I could have that hour to myself in the morning to be able to write whatever I was writing. Otherwise, I didn’t have it. I didn’t have it for myself. And that wasn’t fair to me and my blog.

JENNY GUY: Yep, that’s excellent advice. So you guys both– and there’s different ends of the spectrum, and I know that there’s pros and cons to each. So one of the biggest debates I’ve heard in all of the book publishing and the people I’ve heard talk about it is to self-publish or not to self-publish. So let’s talk about that.

First of all, tell me what it is to self-publish. What does that mean, versus working with a publisher? So maybe Jen, can you talk about self-publishing? Valerie, can you talk about working with a publisher? Does that work? Great. Jen, start out for us.

JENNIFER RUIZ: So self-publishing means that you put the book together from start to finish. You are responsible for the content. You’re responsible for the editing.

And you can outsource some of these tasks. So you can hire an editor. You can hire a cover designer. You don’t have to sit there and draw your cover, but you’re responsible for administering the process that is publishing your book. And that requires you to be the kind of person that likes to have a say in everything. So if you like to have full control over what your cover looks like, self-publishing is for you. No one else will have the red pen over you. The final choice is yours. It’s up to you what you do with that book, and it’s great because you have complete freedom.

And especially for a lot of authors that have already established themselves with traditional publishing companies and have a readership, they find that it’s so easy to transition to self-publishing. They do a lot of the same things already, and then they make way more money because you get a substantial more cut of the profit. You just pay Amazon their small percentage for printing the book, and then you get, like, 70% of the book’s profits. Whereas, when you’re with a publishing company, it’s kind of split out amongst the people that all took part in making that book come to life.

And self-publishing is also really unique. People need to take in mind that you are responsible for marketing 100%. And so that’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing. So again, if you’re one of those authors that has an established base, you already know you have all your readers, you know they’re going to buy your book, why would you bother paying somebody 90% of the profits when you’re bringing in 99% of the readers? And so it just doesn’t make sense. And that’s why a lot of some of the traditional, more established authors have switched over.

But when you’re starting out, you may be nervous, and you may be thinking like, oh my god, I don’t know if anybody’s going to even read my book. I wouldn’t even know where to start with book promotion. And it’s not easy. It’s a whole other world, book promotion. Like how you get book, reviews, how you get beta readers, how you get into book fairs, how you get into libraries. I got into my first library, and oh my god, that took so much work, and I’m not even in the travel section. They put me somewhere with airplanes. And so I’m like, this is so hard. Like, come on. Like, this is not a book about airplane engineering, this is a book about cheap flights. I don’t understand.

So it’s a lot of work, and you have to learn it. And you have to figure out what the problem is. And you have to be the person that makes the phone calls. It all comes down to you. I’m super type A. I love being in control of everything. So that works out really well for me. But I think it could be anxiety-inducing for some other people.

But I will just note that for people who think that these kind of big publishers are the end-all game, like I’m going to get the book deal and then that’s it. They’re going to promote me, I’m going to have a book tour– they put in a lot of their promotion efforts into celebrities and people that they know already have big audiences. So they’re not going to set you up on the same multi-city book tour that Rachel Hollis is on, you know? It’s going to be still, to a certain extent, up to you to get the readership and people interested. And that’s why these publishing companies pick people with a big audience to begin with, hoping that you can have that to rely on to make your sales.

So I think self-publishing is a lot of work, but it can be substantially more financial reward for the people that have it in them to really pull a book through from start to finish.

JENNY GUY: Awesome. Valerie? The other side of that coin.

VALERIE STIMAC: Yeah, traditional publishing through a publisher is very, very different. And a lot of what Jen said is true. So I don’t know if you’ve looked at publishers, but you’ve got it spot on. So I can’t speak for every publisher, but typically, when you are working with a traditional publisher, they are paying you. Probably just for your words, possibly for your photos, but you should be paid separately for those, because they’re two different types of content. And they pay for every piece of the book, so if they’re paying for words and they’re paying for photos, they’re going to pay you for both of those.

And then it’s not really yours anymore. It is and It isn’t. And it’s up to the publisher to decide how much you’re involved, will you be re-contracted for any updates, especially if you’re writing nonfiction, and especially, some of these industries change regularly like travel. But it’s up to them to decide that.

So for example, Dark Skies have been a little bit unusual for Lonely Planet in that it’s a book with my name on the cover. And that sounds really fancy, but if you ever look at Lonely Planet books hearing you are going to have names on the cover. That’s not the typical book they publish. They typically produced roundups. They work with multiple authors.

And Jenny, you and I were talking about how I’ve been contributing little pieces to other books. None of those have my name on the cover. This book has my name on the cover. And so Lonely Planet has sort of leaned back toward me saying, you brought us this. This is your idea. This is your child. We are happy to help, but we need you in on it, too.

And so they are not– Lonely Planet, at least, they don’t do book tours. They don’t do a lot of promotion. They’ve done something that they traditionally do when they promote books, but anything extra is on me. So I am, in some ways, just a hybrid. I’m the one pitching podcasts, who has to do interviews. I’m the one pitching my local media to become an expert. I’m running a social campaign to promote the book. I’m doing giveaways of advanced copies. They’re also doing some of those things, but I’m doing it, too.

I’m actually really lucky. I have a friend, and I’m just going to give her a little plug. She’s not in our industry at all. Her name’s Katy Rose Pool. She got a very, very large fiction book deal. I believe it’s Hoighton Mifflin. I might be wrong on that publishing house, so forgive me if I’m wrong. But Katie has a book coming in September. We used to worked together at a company I worked for, and we both got book deals within a month of each other.

Hers is a very traditional book deal. So huge splash campaigns leading into it. Tons of presale. They are leading with her forward because they believe that she is the author, the face of this universe that they’re trying to promote. And they’re talking film rights and all this stuff. And fiction is that whole other world where they do that sort of thing. She’s going to Comic-Con. I’m like, Comic-Con sounds great, but I’m just me. Like, that’s not what they do with travel people.

So there’s a real range, and it depends a lot on your publisher, too, as to how do they normally promote books? And is the book that they’ve decided to get from you going to follow the mold? Is it going to break the mold? Is it going to be somewhere in between? And that’s going to vary a lot. And it should, also, be in your contract that you negotiate if you are working with a publisher.

JENNY GUY: Excellent. We are going to talk about contracts in just a moment. But do either of you have an agent? Is that a thing that you’ve ever dipped your toe into? Can you give an opinion on that? How do you navigate proposals? How do you get out there and start? How did you land Lonely Planet? How did that become a possibility for you?

VALERIE STIMAC: So as I mentioned– or you mentioned– I freelance write. I’m a freelance writer. And what I would say is if you are very keen on getting a book deal with a traditional publisher, start freelance writing in the topics you want to write about in your book. Those portfolio pieces cross the desks or screens of more people than you ever realize.

The way I was invited to the– there was literally a room, an actual room in the Lonely Planet office, which is not how you would typically propose a book. But Lonely Planet does actual meetings in person to brainstorm book ideas. I was invited because I live in Oakland, California and their office is in Oakland, California. So they brought me in because I was physically present and I was able to be in the room to propose my idea. That is not traditional, I would say, by any standards of any industry.

But the fact that I had built this portfolio, that there was all this evidence, not only could I write for myself– this is sort of the other thing. You want to work with the publisher, they’re going to give you an editor. If you can’t work with editors, if you can’t prove you’re capable of working with an editor, that is a risk to the publisher because they don’t know whether you’re a primadonna writer who won’t take feedback, and they’re going to have to commandeer your draft, or kill it. Or they don’t know.

If you have a set of clips in your industry that show you’ve written for editors, they’ve been happy with work, the quality of your work off-site, off your own site, is high quality, you’re building this case that you are the right person to hire for the book. Because that’s really– they’re hiring you to write the book. They’re going to pay for it, too, which is great. But that’s what you’re doing, so you need to build your portfolio to get the invite to the right meeting, or the name of the right person to send that proposal email to.

JENNY GUY: Absolutely. And I think that there’s definitely, for myself personally, a misconception that once you land the book deal, it’s done. I did it, I’m the great author. I’m going to be Stephen King. And it sounds like there’s quite a few more steps in the process.

So I also want to talk a little bit about promotion. You guys have mentioned several steps, and a lot of them sound very foreign to anyone who– it’s not an easy transition or an intuitive transition from blogging when you’re talking about beta readers, when you’re talking about book tours, when you’re talking about all those things. So talk to me a little bit about that. Jen, will you start with that?

JENNIFER RUIZ: Sure. Promotion, I think, is the most important part. I’ve said this quote at my WITS. seminar. I said Robert Kiyosaki, it’s just always stuck with me. He’s getting interviewed by a woman who was a master’s in fine arts, an amazing writer. Everybody just thinks that she’s amazing. But she’s sitting there interviewing him, and she’s thinking, what is it that you have that I don’t have? Why are you successful and I’m not? And he just goes the and he said, well, it’s called the best selling book, not the best written book.

And at the end of the day, Fifty Shades of Gray had so many spelling errors in it. It was written horribly, and it sold so well. So it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to say it doesn’t matter, but your content is secondary to your sales, unfortunately. That’s just the way it is with books. And so if you know how to sell something, that is what’s going to make you a best seller.

So I just started learning everything I could about how to sell. So instead of being a brick and mortar tour, I did a podcast tour. The first month, I had about, maybe, two dozen or so different podcast interviews that I set up. They all aired at different times, so in my mind, I was going to have a different podcast interview every single day of that month, and it was going to line up so pretty. No. I have an interview coming out of in August, and my book launched in March.

So it was a mess, but it was great because some of those podcasts still get me exposure. People listen to podcasts, they’re evergreen. So when people like an episode, they’re going to go back and see what other popular episodes are. And I have people– I’ve done some big travel podcasts– Zero To Travel, Extra Pack of Peanuts, things like that– and people find me through these podcasts and contact me– so, podcasts tour.

Amazon itself has a ranking system. And the thing is, I think a lot of people put a push on immediate sales. Like, OK, my book just launch and get everybody and their mother that I know to buy my book, I’m gonna sell 3,000 copies, I’m gonna be a best seller, life is gonna be sweet. But then you do that, and then Amazon’s like, something’s fishy because 3,000 people bought your book yesterday, and today, zero people bought it, so something is wrong. And their algorithm is going to pick up on it, and it’s going to punish you for it.

So you have to know how Amazon’s algorithm works. Space out your book sales. So maybe you want to push sales to your Facebook group one day and go really hard on Instagram the next week. But it’s over the first 30 days. So how you do in the first 30 days is going to determine where you rank forever on the Amazon algorithm.

JENNY GUY: I know.

JENNIFER RUIZ: And so many people get this wrong. And this is just book marketing. This is what it is. It’s just take some time to do some research, and do it right. And if you pace out– let’s say you have those 3,000 sales versus having it on the day that you launch, you have 10 sales a day for 30 days, you’re going to rank really highly. Amazon’s going to see consistent traffic from your books. It’s going to see people are interested. If your reviews are being left sporadically through there, you’re going to do well.

And once a book ranks highly– for Amazon, ranking highly, I would say, is anywhere from 100,000 up. So from the first most popular book by Amazon to the hundred thousandth most popular book on Amazon. I think those ranking well. You’re still showing up within the top 20 lists when people click on a category, and they don’t have to go look for you extra in other places. If your book is number 1,800,342, nobody’s ever going to find your book.

And I think even people, sometimes, with traditional publishers, they don’t understand this because they think, somebody else will do this for me. So for anybody who’s writing a book, you have to do this. And all you have to do is– It’s just so magic– it’s just a matter of spacing out your sales and reviews and getting it so that within those 30 days, you have robust, consistent results that Amazon can be like, this is a book that’s worth promoting. They put you at the top of their list, and then people are still finding you at the top a year, two years, three years later.

JENNY GUY: And you said the first 30 days, and that’s what determines your ranking on Amazon. First of all, when you were saying algorithm on Amazon, I was having shades and flashbacks of social media algorithms. And it sounds like it’s a very, very remarkably similar.

JENNIFER RUIZ: It’s so much worse.

JENNY GUY: Oh, no.

JENNIFER RUIZ: There’s so much to Amazon.

JENNY GUY: And everyone leaves.

JENNIFER RUIZ: Honestly, I’m still– I’m in a course with Kindlepreneur. His name is Dave Chesson, and he has a ton of books on it, researches on it. He helped me a lot when I was getting self-published, just all his stuff that he has. And I’m still on his course a year later, his AMS marketing course. And I get emails every week like, you’re only 60% through this. And I’m like, I’m really trying, but it’s so complicated, and it’s so–

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

JENNY GUY: My brain!

VALERIE STIMAC: The good thing here– so people have built really good resources about this. Some people, that’s what they have actually built their expertise in. So they sell books on Amazon about how to sell books on Amazon. This is a thing. There are tons and tons of resources.

The other advice that I would give is, I agree, it’s Lonely Planet book with my name on it, but I’m still promoting it. I don’t assume they’re– what’s interesting is I don’t get royalties for this particular book, just the way that they structured my contract. And that was fine with me. I had people take a look and tell me that that made sense. However, I’m still vested in that book doing well because it has my name on it. I want my name to be showing up high on the list.

The other thing I would do is see if you know anyone, or ask in the Facebook groups you’re part of in your community, does anybody know a book PR person?

JENNY GUY: Uh-huh.

VALERIE STIMAC: It may be worth $1,000 for a two-month contract with that person for very light PR and consulting for you, especially if you know your book is going to make you that money back, to get somebody whose job it is to know all of these secrets, and know all the tricks, and have the right introductions. That may be well worth the investment for your book, because once you get it established in Amazon, it’s there, and it keeps making you money for a heck of a lot longer than that 30-day launch window.

So you can also– I mean, I took out a PR friend for a beer. I did the cheapest option possible, and she was very generous. She came up with a plan and everything. I was like, this is worth way more than a beer. I owe you five more beers at least.

But that’s another way you can sort of bootstrap your marketing and your PR. Because the other thing that’s important is PR and marketing are different in this case. Marketing is giveaways, and social media, and email lists, and PR is like, can you get articles? Can you give interviews? Can you get on TV as an expert?

Those things also raise your profile as an author, and you can promote your book, or your book can be the thing that gets you on that media spot, whatever it is. Those public relations, press relations people have a totally different world that they work in, and that stuff is even harder to break into sometimes. So having someone help you with that can make a huge difference.

JENNY GUY: Another layer of complication. So I want to go ahead and I want to know you guys’ best resources so we can share those links. Jen, you mentioned one which I’m going to get one of my colleagues to share that. And then, when you think of best resources, where can people go?

JENNIFER RUIZ: I do think Kindlepreneur is a great resource for self-publishers. I don’t even know him, but he just has good stuff, and is very thorough. And he has a podcast. His name is Dave Chesson. Kindlepreneur, like entrepreneur. Kindlepreneur.

JENNY GUY: Oh, I’ve got it.

JENNIFER RUIZ: Yes, I figured may I’m not saying it clearly, but it’s witty. I would also recommend any of the podcasts, self-publishing podcasts.

And then, there’s a lot of really good tools. So Goodreads is good if you want to do a, giveaway if you are active on Goodreads, but it can be kind of complicated for people. So I would suggest getting it into Facebook promotion groups, things like that. I would suggest– one of my best kind of resources for cheap covers is a website called 99Designs. So I can pay 300 bucks for a cover that I have people bidding to get my design, and then I don’t end up getting stuck with one design I don’t like, like you would on Fiver, if you just picked one person.

So 99Designs, Kindlepreneur, all of the Facebook promotion groups like Free Kindle Books, whatever, get on all of them. And whenever your book launches, promote on all of them, because you never know who’s going to buy through that.

And another great website I’ll just mention, it’s called Adazing– like “amazing,” but with a D. And they’re great for book cover mockups. So you see all these images of books, and they’re somebody holding your book in a park, or somebody holding your book while sipping coffee. That’s a mockup. That’s a picture, and they just put your book cover in the placeholder. And everybody has those, but mockups can be hard to find them to look professional. So if you’re doing your own, Adazing is a great website for that.

JENNY GUY: Awesome, OK. Valerie, same to you.

VALERIE STIMAC: The one that I just found that I have on my to do list is a company called PR By The Book. So they position themselves, based on what I saw on their website, as working with authors at different levels of influence. So they have three tiers. There’s celebrity writers, people who are already a little bit established or have an audience– which, as a blogger, you probably fit in that category, and then people who have a good idea but have no audience built out. And they have different options of what they offer to help you market your book based on what level of influence you currently have.

And that’s really helpful if you have a topic you’re not an expert in, or if you have a topic that’s perfectly aligned with your book, or with your blog, or you’re maybe, actually, really well-known. There are travel bloggers I can think of that if they wrote a book, they would totally fit in that top tier. And that company will do the PR for that specific project.

And that’s the other thing that’s really interesting, is if you’re an author and you have all these other assets, you may get a PR person who wants to focus outside of the book. And at the end of the day, it’s the first 30 days, the first 60 days of book sales are so important to establishing the success of the book that you want to make sure that you keep them focused. And so PR By The Book is a great– I don’t know, I need to get a quote from them, but I think that’s who I’m going to go with because I want someone who’s with me, leading me, telling me where to go.

I went to WITS, the Women In Travel Summit, and I attended a talk on PR there. So I’ve really focused on the PR side because I want to leverage the book to get more expertise and more media placements, because I think that’s this nice cycle. you can start to build your personal presence and brand through.

So I’ve been really focused on PR. I’m reading PR blogs. I don’t have any favorites right now, but I trust the marketing machine of Lonely Planet to do its job, and I’m going to focus on the PR side, because that’s the area that is different about my book, too, that they are not necessarily thinking about the same way.

JENNY GUY: Love those tips. So let me just make it real, real plain. Your book is getting ready to launch on Amazon, whether it’s self-published or through a publisher. What three things do you need to have in place well before that book launches? Or give me times. Maybe it’s not well before. Maybe it’s fine if I get it in under the wire, but the book is going live tomorrow at noon. What do I need to have in place? Start with Jen.

JENNIFER RUIZ: Your launch team, your team of people. This is where you get your friends, your readers, whoever really loves you and wants to push for you. They need to be on a separate team that you can reach them separately, just them, and use them to help you promote.

So you’re not selling to your launch team. You’re not asking your launch team to please buy my book. They should already have your book for free as an advance review copy because you love them that much, and you value their opinion that much, and you’re hoping that they’re going to leave you a review in return.

And they should be ready to help promote your book to other people because they love you that much and think other people would really benefit from your book, and they feel invested in it because you’ve worked with them over the last couple of months to put this book together. So they had a say in your cover. They had a say in the chapter names, all of that. Your launch team is number one.

Beyond that, I would say if you’re launching tomorrow, having your promotions set up. So what it is that you’re going to promote. If you’re going to do a giveaway on Goodreads. If you’re going to do a Bookbub ad. Bookbub is really expensive. It can be, like, $600 to $1,000 but it’s cost-per-click, and it gets you tons of sales. So that’s a good– you know, what are you going to do for marketing? What’s your promotion schedule like?

And I think those are your two most important things. So the people who are supporting you, and how you are going to promote it yourself.

JENNY GUY: Do you guys have any blog posts on your site talking about who would be a great person for your launch team? Because we’re almost out of time, and I want Valerie to have a chance to share that. But have you guys written any posts about writing?

JENNIFER RUIZ: I’m working on putting a whole new section in the website about that after giving some of these speeches, so I will link and send you any links I have, Jenny.

JENNY GUY: Thank you so much, Jen. OK, Valerie, from you?

VALERIE STIMAC: Yeah, the first thing I would have– the last-minute thing I would have ready, is a press release. So no matter who you’re pitching, this weird thing called a press release– and you can google how to write these and how to write them well– is this one sort of certificate you need to be able to prove that you have.

So if you write your– this is at least where you can get really creative. Like let’s say you wrote this book. It’s going live tomorrow. You could send a press release to your colleges, your postgraduate school, your high school, your local newspaper, all these little places that look for news, and it’s the press release that says, like, hey, this person we know wrote this book.

You could send it to fellow bloggers, like people you know that have been supporting you in the background, and say, hey, not sure– if you can just give this a shout, like, here’s all the information. The press release just organizes everything for people. It gives them quotes, it gives them links, it gives them the visual assets. So it’s all in one place that they can get to.

And press releases are kind of intimidating, but when you build a good template and a good formula, and then you build out your hit list of everybody you want to email, you’d be shocked at how many people will take what– they just like, oh, great. She gave me everything I need, and I can promote it tomorrow without having to think about it. Because they are at 9:00 PM, and they don’t want to be using their brains. They want to just schedule whatever’s going on Facebook tomorrow.

The other thing that I’m doing– I agree with Jen, I’m going to have a week-by-week promotion schedule leading into the launch and coming after the book is officially live. Because there are some things Lonely Planet’s doing, there are some things I want to do to keep people interested and to– Once the book is physically in my hands, then I can start to be like, no, I really am a publisher. I have these advance copies, but here’s the real thing.

And then lastly, I would say– I’m just looking at my list, actually, because I’m working on this right now. And this is– could be a little bit careful, but make sure that your friends and family have a link to buy it, right? This sounds kind of like you might miss it. And they could be in your army of promotion people, but I haven’t sent ARC copies, advance reader copies, to my friends and family because– it’s actually my advance reader copies from Lonely Planet are not in color, and I want my friends and family to have the good ones in color.

So having a plan for your friends and family, because they are going to be so proud of you that they’re going to call your grandma, and your grandma’s going to call your aunts and uncles, and then all the cousins are going to find out, and your best friend’s going to tell their friend at work, like, oh, my best friend from college wrote this book. And you’ll get that word of mouth started. Making sure that, hey, today’s the day. Here’s my Amazon link.

Be careful if you use your affiliate link, because Amazon is very particular about having friends and family purchase through your link. So you may want your closest friends and family, you don’t get to affiliatize, but your distant reaches can use the affiliate link. And that’s something you need to make sure you just understand who you’re promoting and which link you’re sharing. But those people, on the day you launch, are very, very ardent, vocal supporters. And if you didn’t already give them a copy, that’s the day they should be buying a copy. They should be the first, easiest push. Not a hard sell at all.

JENNY GUY: That is fantastic advice. You guys, so we just got a comment from Karen…She said, even though this is not my blog type, these ladies had excellent info to share. You both have passion and intelligence about writing, and you made it interesting and fun to listen to the subject. Thank you, Jennifer, and Valerie, and Mediavine for hosting this live.

JENNIFER RUIZ: Thank you.

VALERIE STIMAC: Thank you.

JENNY GUY: I could not agree more. You guys have been incredible. This has been a jam-packed hour. We have links galore in the comments. We had so much to cover, and you guys gave us such a great overview. I hope that you’ll both keep writing about writing and share those resources so people can learn more from your expertise. Keep speaking at conferences because you’re both fantastic.

And we wish you both incredible luck, with your Dark Skies coming out officially in September. Jen, with your move, and your trip to Grand Rapids, and of course, with the Apollo thing, that’s so exciting. Thank you ladies for being here.

Next week, everybody, we are going to be talking about product creation. I clicked into the wrong window, product sales. So we’ve got Chloe Macintosh of Boxwood Avenue and Aaron Chase of Five Dollar Dinners. Both of them are very well experienced in creating products and selling those, and we’re going to be talking about that as another revenue stream that you need to be exploring into.

We are always grateful to have you here at the Summer Of Live. If you have any suggestions for us on more topics you’d like to see, post in the comments, send us an email, any way that you want. Tag me, I’m Jenny Guy. And we are so, so grateful to Valerie and Jen for being here. Thank you ladies so much.

JENNIFER RUIZ: Thank you.

VALERIE STIMAC: Thank you.

JENNY GUY: And everybody have a wonderful week.

After being a content creator for a while, you realize pretty quickly that you don’t have control over many things. You’ll never be able to control how many likes you get on a post, or how much engagement your blog pieces get But, you can always optimize your brand to be in the best position possible day in and day out.

Back at MVCon 2019, Jocelyn Delk Adams took the stage to talk all things brand. She’s the founder of Grandbaby Cakes, a brand inspired by her grandmother which shares classic recipes in a modern and accessible way.

In this podcast episode, you’ll hear her top tips on how to align your brand with your personal passion and create a community that you love. You don’t want to miss it!

Helpful Resources

• Grandbaby Cakes
• Jocelyn’s Cookbook
• Grandbaby Cakes Merch
• Mediavine On Air Episode 49

Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] JOCELYN ADAMS: Good morning. Yeah! I’m the only one excited to be here? OK, I just want to apologize for the weather in Chicago. It sucks. I am sorry.

[LAUGHTER]

I am sorry. It will get better tomorrow. How is everyone doing? Yeah, I feel like I’m doing the Oprah-like thing.

Well, first of all, we’re going to go from high energy to probably some kind of cooler energy. And we’ll go back and forth because this is a serious topic. So for you guys who are blogging a year or less, raise your hands, a year or less. Oh, so everybody is like OGs up in here?

[LAUGHTER]

Right? OK, so what about four to five years? OK, yeah, y’all need this. You burn out. Anything above that? Oh, my gosh, and you’re still doing it. OK, clap for yourselves for real, right? Because this is hard.

Staying fired up about your brand is very, very difficult to do. You’ve got the ebbs and flows. I mean, I’m sure most of you are not waking up every single day like, oh, my gosh, I can not wait to do SEO today. No? No, right?

This is difficult. And it’s like, oh, my gosh, I cannot wait to go out and do 20 more Instagram shoots today. It gets difficult to stay in the mix. So I have a presentation, and I have all of these thoughts about things you guys can do to externally keep the fire going and internally keep the fire going.

But this morning, I had a lot more revelations. It was at like 3:00 in the morning. And I was up with my daughter. And I started writing in what looks like my eighth grade journal. Does anyone still do that?

And so I have more stuff to offer too. And the first thing that came to mind for me is that staying fired up about your brand, that’s inner work, right? So when you come to these conferences, you’re going to learn so much about strategy, about how you can do all of the things, the things that keep your brand growing.

But what about the things that keep you invested? What about the things that keep you excited about what you do every day? Because it’s difficult. How many of you guys do this full time? A lot of you– so the first thing I like to do is I recognize the gratitude.

Because how many of you guys love what you do, right? Do you ever talk to some of your friends who go to a 9:00 to 5:00 or whatever, work weekends, not like us? But and their jobs suck.

[LAUGHTER]

Right? That is real. I’m talking about the people who are at the cubicle right now. And they are going to go get coffee. They’re going to talk to somebody at the water cooler– big fun. They’re going to be on the phone later. And this is what they do day in and day out.

But you guys are here, right? Think about the fun things you get to do. You get to interact with people online. You get to speak to them from your blog. You have this personal voice. You have something to offer.

And you get to do all this stuff like work with brands. You get to be creative, and you can make this industry whatever you want. Is that not amazing? Is that not inspiring enough, right?

So that’s the first place I start with. Every day, I wake up. I’m like, OK, I could be at a cubicle. I know this sucks. I know the Google update sucked. I know the algorithm change sucked.

But I get to do this. And this is incredible. I actually make a living from this. Today, I’m talking to you guys. This is awesome.

I was so excited this morning that this is my job today. I get to talk to you guys about this. And I think that is so incredible. So I’ll actually start with some stuff– I should– that I did here.

Oh, there it is. So I want to start with the personal passion part. That’s the inner work, the thing that we start with that gets us to start our blogs in the first place. What was the thing that made you say, you know what? I want to write a blog.

I know there’s millions out there. Because it is oversaturated, right? Do you guys feel that pressure seeing that there are so many blogs out there?

AUDIENCE: Amen.

JOCELYN ADAMS: Yeah, I heard some amen. I heard some of that out there. And you feel like, oh, my gosh, what am I offering that someone else isn’t offering, right? How many cookies can I write about? How many dresses can I wear? Because we all do different things.

But you’ve got to stay committed to who you are. That authenticity is so, so, so important. And that is what helps people connect with you. If you look at your communities, whether you have 10,000 followers, whether you have 100,000 followers, how ever many followers you have, they clicked follow, or they subscribed. Why?

Ask yourself that question. Are you bringing that to them every single day? Are you continuing to bring them what makes you so special? Why they clicked follow in the first place, that was a personal choice. You made them believe that, hey, I can relate to this person. Something is drawing me in.

So are you finding that every single day in the material that you post? Are you continuing to get excited about the things that you post? And let me tell you. It is really, really, really difficult to continue to do this year after year after year.

So most of the time, from a personal standpoint, I am super excited about my job. But then there are days and there are months when I’m not. That’s just real.

So for me, my grandmother was the inspiration on my blog. And when she passed away at the end of last year, I was so done. That is just the truth. I did not want to blog anymore. That excitement just wasn’t there.

So what were the things that kind of got me back in it? One– this was some of the stuff I wrote down in my notebook this morning– you will not be motivated every single day, right? You just won’t. What are the things that will continue to push you when you don’t feel motivation?

Motivation is fleeting. It’s the people who go to the gym three times a week, and you’re like, do you want to get up at 5:00 AM? That’s what you want to do. How do you do that, right?

They don’t feel like it. No one feels like running in the mornings. Just stop.

[LAUGHTER]

Just stop. But there’s something pushing you beyond that. There’s something that gets you up in the morning. So for me, I started a ritual. And everybody can start a ritual.

Whenever I feel like, OK, I just do not want to do this, I play music. I’m like, OK, let me just play one hype, get up, get me fired up song for like three minutes. And if at the end of that I still don’t feel like doing the work that I have to do, then fine I’ll give myself a pass.

But what happens is I usually do feel pretty fired up and excited by the end of it. And then I end up doing some work. And then as soon as you start, you kind of get into it. You’re fine. You just have to get up and start.

So that’s the first thing is just really figuring out ways to continue to push yourself and find the thing that makes you excited, the thing that really makes you feel that personal passion each and every day. So here’s another thing, charity. OK, how many people have actually given back through their brands? Not a lot of people, right?

And I don’t mean like you have to like go out and do like a bake sale or something. I don’t mean that. But actually doing something that feels good, that feels good. I know whenever I give in any capacity, I feel good about it. I feel like it’s beyond me.

This is why you have Fortune 500 companies that have charitable divisions. You know what I mean? They do this philanthropic work because it feels good. They have all of these billions of dollars, but they have these arms devoted to doing something, giving back in some type of way.

So is there a way that you can connect your brand when you’re like, OK, I’m doing this? And my goal is– so for some of you, it could just be I want to make money for my family. There is nothing wrong with that. You do not have to have some huge, lofty, amazing, like make everyone cry why.

You don’t have to have that. It could just be like, I just want to pay my bills. Thanks. It could be that.

But is there something else that makes you feel good about using your brand to help? Or maybe it’s writing a blog post about something that means something to you or a charity or a cause that means something to you or actually using your audience to promote something that’s going on or helping an event that’s raising money for a cause that you’re interested in that connects back to your brand. Those are ways to maybe keep you excited about the work that you do when it’s just about the money or it’s just about getting the ins and outs done every single day.

What else can you give? What else can you give? I wrote this line this morning. And this one was so important to me.

But how many of you guys have goals that you truly love and not someone else’s goal? But I wrote this this morning. I was like, you can not stay inspired chasing someone else’s dream. That was an aha this morning in the Lyft, OK?

Because how many of you guys are doing what you think you’re supposed to be doing within your business? Yeah, I see some hands. Seriously, how many of you guys are like, OK, I’m just going to do this because I see these bloggers doing this?

And I just feel like I just need to continue because that’s what’s hot. That’s what I need to do. This is what everyone else is doing. Everyone’s following this path, so I need to jump on it too. A lot of people, yeah?

So how can you keep up true inspiration if it’s not for you, if it’s not something you truly want to do? This is the thing I love about this business so much. You do not have to follow one path, right?

This is not like being a lawyer. This is not like you have to go to law school. You have to pass the bar. There is no A to Z here.

I love when I see so many people in this industry do their own thing. And they are all successful. Is there anyone here that you guys love or recognize?

And you’re like, OK, I have a blogger in mind. I love that they have just decided to do their own thing, and they are really making it. Anybody know, follow people? Her? Hi. Someone pointed to you, girl.

AUDIENCE: Did you point at me?

JOCELYN ADAMS: You inspired somebody. OK, what do you love about what she does?

AUDIENCE: She’s very funny.

AUDIENCE: Everything. [LAUGHS]

JOCELYN ADAMS: Well, is there something where you say she doesn’t follow the crowd?

AUDIENCE: Her focus and goal is environmentalism. But she does it in an accessible way through recipes and craft projects. So people have recipes and craft projects, but she’s got a sneaky way to get environmentalism into every project she does.

JOCELYN ADAMS: That’s pretty dope.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

[LAUGHTER]

JOCELYN ADAMS: I mean, no, that is. I haven’t seen that. Has anyone seen that? I haven’t. I haven’t seen that.

Anyone else? Is there anyone else that you guys are inspired by? They don’t even have to be in the room but someone that you follow that you’re like, wow, I really love that they do this unique thing. And it works for them, and they’re successful.

If you can’t think of anything, that’s fine. But you guys want to start following people that inspire you. How many people go online, and you immediately want to get off because you hate everybody and–

[LAUGHTER]

You’re like, oh, gosh, why did I do this? This was a bad decision, right? Where you feel like immediately so bad about what you do, so bad about yourself– you start comparing your photography, your work, your captions, your blog, your recipe, everything, to what these other people are doing. And I hate that social media sometimes makes us feel that way.

But sometimes it’s a good way of understanding, how can I be different? I love that this person does this. I don’t like that they make me feel like crap, but I love that this person does this.

And let me just say this too. This is not like a fun thing. But for those people who do feel like crap– because I actually have talked to like at least 10 people in the last couple of days about this– you guys know you guys can mute people, right?

Use the mute. Use the mute. Feel good about yourself. It’s hard in these streets. Use the mute. If you look at someone’s feed every single day and you don’t want to do what you want to do or you feel like your work isn’t valid, stop looking, right?

You don’t have to do it. You don’t have to do it how everyone else is doing it. So I think that that is really crucial, finding a way to connect with yourself. This is inner work, y’all. Who thought that your business was about inner work? But it is.

Creating a community with people means you have to find the things about yourself that you want to share. We all have to share. That’s what we do, right? Well, most of us– well, all of us, all of us share.

Some of us are like, well, I don’t feel like I want to share too much of myself. And that’s fine. But I appreciate and connect with people who tell me that they’re normal too. They’re normal people. Everyone’s out there sucking. It’s fine.

[LAUGHTER]

It’s fine, right? So I did write that down. And you guys remember that. You can not stay inspired chasing someone else’s dream.

OK, here’s another thing. How many of you guys have like a posse, right? Y’all have posses?

[LAUGHTER]

Y’all are like, yeah, we’re all together, getting drinks later, posse. So you guys need homies in this industry. And I mean not just people who you talk about this business with, because of course, you need to be able to talk that out, but people you can just talk about your feelings in general, right?

Because you are not just your business. Your worth is not just tied to your brand. You are a complete person with a brand. And you need to have that division.

But for people talking to the different people in your inner group and you’re continuing to connect, that is so crucial for me. It is so crucial for me. Because then it’s like– this is what my therapist says, because I fully embrace therapy 100%. My therapist, I will be like, oh, my gosh, I’m having the worst day, right?

It’s like, I don’t feel like doing anything. My business sucks. I’m just not into it, right? And I don’t feel like I’m affecting anyone. I don’t feel like I’m giving anything, and I just feel like I should just stop because it doesn’t even matter.

Anyone ever have one of those days? Or am I the only one? A lot of you are like, said that this morning.

So this is what my therapist says. She’s like, mhm, mhm. She’s like, OK, so that’s how you feel. She’s like, but can we look at the evidence now?

Oh, my god, I love that so much. It is such a Oprah thing because it’s like we all feel that. We’re always like– there’s the days when we’re like, oh, my god, I’m not into it. I don’t think I’m giving anything. This person over here is doing all of this.

And like, who cares about what I have to offer? Who cares, right? And then she’s like, uh-huh, those are your feelings. But where is the evidence that backs that up?

And there never really is any. When you actually look at the facts, it never is the same. You actually find that people are connecting with you, that people do appreciate what you do. Then you get an email from someone like, oh, my gosh, I love what you do. I’ve been following you for years.

Please never leave the internet. And then you’re like, oh, you care. You care. But it’s like you’ve got to find ways to continue to, outside of those things, remember the evidence. Look at the evidence of what you do.

So growth mindset, going back to this, growth mindset, how many of you guys feel like you’re stagnant sometimes, stagnant? A lot of people, OK? So how many of you guys think it’s connected to how you feel about your business versus what is true about you? Yeah, yeah, OK, so if you guys looked back even a year ago– a lot of you guys have been in the mix for like five.

I saw even 10-year people, bloggers, which is incredible. Do you look at how far you’ve come? Does anyone ever do that? Do you? Because I know we’re always chasing the next thing. It’s so hard to like, you get something. You have a goal. You have a dream.

And then you get it. After all this time, you finally get it. And you’re happy for like five seconds.

[LAUGHTER]

This is 100% me. And then you are on to the next thing. But do you ever say, oh, my gosh, I did this? I remember when I was this small. Look at this growth. Look at this. Look at where I’ve come.

Look how far I’ve come. Look at where I was a year ago. Look at where I was six months ago. Does anyone look back? Not really, right?

Because we want to beat ourselves up. We do. It’s fun sometimes but not so fun. But here’s the thing.

It’s like you’ve got to look at the strides you made, because that’s going to keep this healthy. That’s going to keep you excited about continuing. That’s going to keep you fired up, because you’re going to see the progress.

You’re going to see the progression. You’re going to see that you hit these benchmarks. You actually did it. You wrote some goal down four years ago. And you may have like, oh, my gosh, I actually surpassed that. I didn’t even realize it, but that was my goal four years ago. And I’ve done it.

So I do vision boards. I love vision boards. And you don’t have to do it with magazines and the old-school way where you cut stuff out, and you put it on the board and everything. You don’t have to do it that way, but a lot of people do Pinterest boards.

Anyone do that? Yeah, so it’s like, for instance, you have a brand that you want to work with. Slap the logo in the board, this private board that you create.

Or if it’s like, OK, I want to do this. I want to take this trip, because it’s not always blog-related. It’s not always brand-related. The other stuff too helps you to build a better brand. Being fulfilled in life in other areas helps you to become a better brand.

So if it’s like, I want to take this trip because I want to learn about this type of cuisine and I know that I can apply this to my recipes and I can learn, like I went to Paris a couple of years ago. And I took a croissant class. And that was so fun because my husband took it too. He was terrible.

[LAUGHTER]

And it was for my enjoyment basically. But it was so fun to do something that was not necessarily strategy-related. It was just something that was going to broaden my horizons and make me excited about what I do and maybe possibly inspire some recipes, right?

But it’s something that you can think about. What are the things that you want to do? Start dreaming again. Start writing those things down again. But also, as you get closer to those dreams, don’t forget to step back and look at how far you’ve come. Do not forget that step. It is crucial.

And dee, dee, dee, I’ve got more. I’ve got more, yay! [LAUGHS] OK, this thing is slow. But it’ll pop up in a second.

But also, this was another thing I wrote down too. You’ve got to play the long game, right? And some of you guys are playing that, so I won’t spend a lot of time on this. Because if you’ve been doing this for even two or three years, you are in it.

You are in it. And I am sure that you’ve had the ups and downs and the feelings along the way, because it is difficult sometimes to continue on in that way. But you guys are killing it. You guys are killing it, no?

Does anyone ever just clap for themselves? I do all the time. I’m like, girl, you did that. You got to do that. You’ve got to hype yourself up sometimes.

OK, the community aspect, and I kind of touched on this too, because I’m kind of working around as I feel it, kind of going off of the feelings. But the relationship with your community is crucial, the relationship with who you’re building out.

Like I said, it doesn’t matter how many followers you have. That’s not even what it’s about. If you have like 100 followers but they love the hell out of you, you are winning. It is not about like– and you guys have seen people with millions of followers, and like half of them don’t care.

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It’s about the ones that continue to back you up and be invested. Ah, yes, this was the other quote that I found the other day.

Someone actually told this to me. I was at a retreat. Because I was telling you guys about having a posse, that was crucial. It gets you excited and motivated every single time you talk to your posse and leave, you are so excited and motivated.

So I heard this quote. “If 9 out of 10 things fail, start 10 things.” Is that not great? Oh, my gosh, am I the only one who had coffee this morning?

[LAUGHTER]

So I love that quote so, so, so, so, so much. Because sometimes we don’t even give ourselves 10 things. We do like two things. Right? You are like, mhm, I see your head for real, girl.

You give yourself two things. And then you are over it. You’re like, I am not doing this no more. I learned my lesson. Mm-mm, I’m not going down that path.

You have got to get really comfortable with failure. I fail all the time. I just keep putting myself out there. It is so fun to fail.

It is not. But it is not. But it is so fun to win. And you can’t win if you don’t take a risk, if you don’t try, try new things. Take a risk. Do something new.

If there is something where you feel like, OK, I do feel stagnant in my brand– I feel like maybe I’ve been kind of teetering here. It feels safe. I feel comfortable. I do really well here. But gosh, if I really let myself dream, I would really love to do this thing over here.

But this seems really hard and scary. And maybe I’ll just let these people do it. No– I sounded like a kid when I said, (WHINING) no. You’ve got to try too.

And here’s the thing. It may not work out, right? It may not work out. In fact, 9 times out of 10, it probably won’t. But if it does, guess what? It probably lit a fire under you to try something else new that you want to do.

It’s like that’s how you kind of start moving yourself out of that comfort zone is just attempting little things every day that is something that you normally wouldn’t do. Normally wouldn’t do because you’re so afraid, or you’re a little scared.

Or what will people say? That’s always the thing I hear from people. Well, what will people say? What will people think?

I don’t ever care what people say. I know that is a trait that most people don’t have, but I have it. And I will give a little sprinkle to all of y’all not to care what people say.

Because the moment you start caring about what people say, you are failing yourself, because it’s stopping you from doing something you may really want to do. Because you’re like, I don’t know how people will perceive it. I don’t know what people will think of me. Who cares? Who cares?

You are doing this. It started from a personal passion, and it’s grown from there. Remember that. Remember that.

Oh, there’s my grandma. There’s my big mama. And I talked about that. And I love her so much. I feel like she’s my angel now. So she’s in the midst of everything that I do.

But the habits, like I talked about, creating the habits, the things that keep you pushing when motivation is gone– motivation is fleeting. You will have it some days. Other days you won’t. You’ve got to figure out systems that will continue to push you in spite of that.

And that’s my baby. She’s also a part of my new inspiration. But I talked about taking a risk. I talked about constantly learning, evolving. Those are things that you want to do in your business, trying to keep yourself fresh and new and excited.

It’s something that you have to work on every day. How many of you guys have a hobby? And don’t say blogging too.

[LAUGHTER]

Like it’s my business and my hobby, it’s everything, because I do nothing else. OK, you guys have a hobby for real, like a hobby, like a separate thing?

AUDIENCE: And then I started a business about it, so now it’s not my hobby.

JOCELYN ADAMS: See? See, you need another hobby, girl. You need another hobby. Who has a hobby? Who has like a great hobby that they want to share? Why did all the hands go down?

[LAUGHTER]

Everyone was like, me, ooh. What’s going on? What time is it? Who, for real? OK, let me ask you.

AUDIENCE: I do acrylic painting.

JOCELYN ADAMS: Oh, you do acrylic painting? That’s awesome. So you just do it like you just do it at your home. And do you have a room, and you lock yourself in, and you do the whole shebang?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

JOCELYN ADAMS: That’s dope. That’s dope. Yes?

AUDIENCE: Camping and fishing.

JOCELYN ADAMS: Nice. Anybody else? What do you do?

AUDIENCE: I sing and do theatre plays, musicals.

JOCELYN ADAMS: OK, that’s dope. I do tap dance. That’s why you saw that picture of me like that. I tap dance. OK, who else? Who else? Anybody else? Yes?

AUDIENCE: Knitting.

JOCELYN ADAMS: Knitting is great. And I remember I told you. I was like, I want to learn to knit. I never learned to knit. Anybody else? Anybody else? Yes?

AUDIENCE: Running.

JOCELYN ADAMS: Oh, you’re the one.

[LAUGHTER]

She’s the one that actually runs for a hobby. I love that. Can you teach me how to do that?

AUDIENCE: I know, right?

JOCELYN ADAMS: Right? OK, but do you see? Do you ever feel like, OK, you’ve got this one thing for yourself that doesn’t fall into the business, that doesn’t have anything to do with the business, and you can totally turn off the business brain for a second and do that, have fun? And then when you step back into the business and back into your brand, you are inspired. You are excited because you have something else.

When you are 100% invested in one thing, your business, you are going to burn out. You are going to burn out. That is what keeps most of us from continuing to have that fire lit, because we have nothing else.

We are obsessed with our jobs. We are. Most of us are. A lot of us are, because we think that it’s like, OK, if I don’t put 100% in, then I’m not going to be successful. And that’s not true.

You’ve got to be able to have a life. Have a life. Get a life. That saying is true. Get a life.

Get a life. So remember that. One last thing I wanted to say to you guys, and this is something that I wrote.

You guys can own your magic here. And I was going to talk about going way up, way up, way up energy-wise. But can I have you guys do something?

And don’t think this is weird, but remember I said I don’t care what people think. Close your eyes for a second. Everybody, close your eyes.

OK, now for one second, first, I want you to breathe in and breathe out. One more time, breathe in. Breathe out. Now visualize yourself five years down the line. What is the dream that comes into your mind? What is the thing that you see yourself doing?

Are you laughing with your kids? Where’s the place that you’re at? Are you at home having dinner with them? Are you doing something so crazy, so exciting, that you always dreamed of doing, but you finally got the courage, and now you’re doing it?

What is that dream? What is that vision you see for yourself? Now open your eyes. Did you guys find anything? Did anything pop up for you?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

JOCELYN ADAMS: There are some things that you guys are maybe thinking about that you really want to do, but you’re not ready to. Or you’re just scared to.

But one thing I do do every day is I have a moment where I just breathe. We never take those times, right? Who just takes a moment? Because we’re up, and we’re looking at our phones, and we’re checking emails right away, and then we’re off running into the day.

And then, oh, my gosh, it’s time to go to bed and do it all over again. But I want to challenge you guys from this standpoint of being fired up and continuing to stay fired up about your brand that you take these moments, even if it’s like two minutes in a corner. Lock yourself in the bathroom, which is what I have to do now.

You lock yourself in the bathroom for two minutes, right? And you have a moment, and you visualize something. And then I write it down in a notebook. And I keep it front of mind.

And it’s the thing that for me right now is helping me to continue to get fired up about my brand because I’m seeing new possibilities. And every time I close my eyes and I don’t think about what’s realistic right now, what’s happening right now, it allows me to dream again. It allows me to see new and exciting possibilities.

And when you see those and you have those in front of you, it helps you to stay excited about what you do. So that’s really all I have to say to you guys today. I want to thank you so much for letting me speak to you.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you. Does anyone have any questions? Probably not– that’s not like a question type of speech. But if you do, I will be walking around and can talk to you guys or whatever.

But I just want to challenge you guys to just do you. Be you. Figure out your own path in this. And that will continue to help you light that fire. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

As we usher in the privacy-centric era for the web, the winds of change are blowing more strongly than ever, but what does it all mean for publishers?

On this Teal Talk, Jenny is sitting down with Mediavine CEO Eric Hochberger for a no-holds-barred conversation about the state of the blogging industry and everything Mediavine is doing to ensure that content creators not only survive the coming shifts but THRIVE.

Make sure to let us know what you think and check out the helpful resources below!

Helpful Resources

• Helpful Resource Slide
• Grow and First-Party Data
• Exclusive Content with Grow
• Grow Product Tour
• Mediavine x Slickstream

Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] JENNY GUY: Hello. Howdy, friends. Welcome. Welcome, one and all, to another episode of Mediavine’s Teal Talk. For any of our first-time viewers, welcome. This is our live program where we feature experts from around the blogging industry on any and all topics that could help content creators build sustainable businesses. So basically if it concerns publishers, we are talking about it here.

I am with you as always as your host, Jenny Guy. So happy to have you here today. We have a very big show for today, so we are just going to kind of speed through our little opening. But I did have to say that believe it or not, however you feel about the various memes announcing it, like it or not, it is already May. Mother’s Day is Sunday. 2022, I have to say, is winning the award for Bat Out of Hell years. Like, I don’t– I don’t know if anyone– like, how is it already May? That’s insane to me.

This is our final episode of Teal Talk before we go on our hiatus for our fifth annual Summer of Live. So I don’t know how that happened, but it is happening. It is the truth. And in a world this crazy where time has no meaning, it can be comforting to rely on traditions. And from Mediavine, for Teal Talk, for this show, we traditionally start things and end things with a certain guest. He’s here with me today. He’s Mediavine CEO and co-founder. Please welcome the one, the only Eric Hochberger back to the program. Eric, welcome.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Thanks, Jenny. Good to have my usual anchor spot.

JENNY GUY: It is.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That’s the anchor, right? Yeah, OK.

JENNY GUY: Yes, anchor. You’re batting cleanup, for all you sportsball fans out there. Eric, is this year happening in a bananas, like, flying by crazily to you, too? Are you in shock?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I feel like the last three years, so why make an exception to this year. Don’t even– is it May? That’s great. Awesome.

JENNY GUY: What does time mean anymore? It doesn’t mean anything. And I also– I’ve said this repeatedly. I’m sorry for people who are hearing me say it over and over again, but I feel like anything that has happened in the last three years, like significant milestones, shouldn’t count. Why? I turned 40. Why? That shouldn’t–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That means I’m not turning 40? Is that the good news?

JENNY GUY: That’s what that means. That’s what that means. It’s crazy. OK, everybody. We are going to be talking about some important stuff today. We know you have questions about all of this stuff, because I certainly do. All of us at Mediavine do, so please post those questions for Eric or myself in those comments. We will get them to you. But let us without any further ado, Eric– we usually have you here to talk specifically about Mediavine updates, but today we have really widened our scope to talk about important things that are impacting the whole blogging, content creation industry.

There are some big changes on the horizon for publishers, and we wanted to break them all down. So I want to just start here at the top. I don’t know, again, with anyone else, it feels like we’ve been talking about the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome for thousands of years, definitely since dinosaurs walked the Earth, and the rules keep shifting and changing.

Now there is no denying that it’s an incredibly complex issue that will impact multiple industries and requires a multifaceted solution and collaboration like never before from people who don’t typically like to collaborate. So to start out with, Eric, will you just give us the TL;DR version of where we are right now? What’s Google’s current deadline for the deprecation? Will it stick?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Well that last one I cannot predict, but I can tell you the stated goal for Google is still mid-2023. So in the middle of next year they’re going to start a gradual deprecation of third-party cookies that will be completed before the end of next year. So we have– I don’t know where we are. In about one year from now, since we did establish it is May, right? That is the month we’re in?

JENNY GUY: It’s not going to be May, it is May.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: OK, it’s May. Good. Then yeah, starting about a year from now Google is going to start deprecating third-party cookies, again, assuming that everything is alive and well in the Privacy Sandbox.

JENNY GUY: OK, so it’ll kind of be like what it was with Core Web Vitals, like a slow roll. We’ll start a little bit, and then we’ll just kind of expand out from there.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So it’s going to be a little more interesting, because it’s going to be almost like an individual cookie is going to be– so as you start to set third-party cookies, the ones you set then are going to have a certain length of lifetime to them. So you won’t be able to set anything that will last longer than that year. So yeah, I mean it’s a very clever way of slowly putting an end to them without an overnight drop in third-party cookies.

JENNY GUY: OK, question that we have up there is for our audience. Are you currently taking steps to prepare yourself for the Cookiepocalypse? Let us know in the comments. And we have a perfect question from Paul Stamp. Our audience is honestly, the best, because they always predict where I’m going. It’s so good. I love them. But Paul said, “Uncertain times are ahead for display ads. How worried are you about third-party cookies going away? Can you give a percentage drop on revenue?”

And that is actually what I was going to ask you. We have heard some pretty dire predictions about what’s going to happen to programmatic advertising revenue from Google themselves. So what is the scoop? What can we potentially expect, understanding that all of this is prediction? We’re all gazing into our crystal cookie balls.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Right, so I think we all like to start with the scary number, and that is the 60% number that Google quoted. And that is 60% drop in revenue if third-party cookies go away and there are no mitigation efforts or no solutions or no alternatives. So if tomorrow we turn them off and nobody came up with any other solution, revenue would drop 60% on Chrome traffic.

So I’ll reiterate. I think the state of blogging is awesome and alive and well. And one of the reasons why is because first off, none of us have 100% Chrome traffic or Android traffic. Most of us have Safari, where third-party cookies are already gone. So you really only have about 50% of your revenue is at-risk from a third-party cookies go away. So that’s really a 30% drop, even using that Google number. But again, we’re working on a ton of mitigation efforts as an industry. Mediavine’s working on mitigation efforts as a company. Hopefully our publishers are working on some of their own.

And combined, we think all of these solutions mean an opportunity. Because again, remember, Safari already has no third-party cookies. So we can come out of this better than we were before as an industry. If we solve for a lack of third-party cookies, we don’t just unlock Chrome traffic in the future. We unlock that Safari traffic that we previously have not been monetizing well. So we can all use this as an opportunity to make more money, not less.

JENNY GUY: We are getting some of the best comments in here. When we asked what are people doing to prepare, Adrian said, “sure, working with the best ad network.” Adrian, we love that. Sarah said– Sarah, who I just saw last week in Los Angeles– said, “I’m taking the step of watching this video.” Nice. Michelle says, “I am just avoiding thinking or worrying about any of this cookie stuff and trusting Mediavine will have this covered.” All right, all right. This one– I feel, Susan. “I’m ready. I think I’m ready. I’m sure I’m ready.”

I feel you, Susan. We all feel you, because it’s been confusing. And one of the things I think that has been so confusing for everyone is Google’s solution has been a little nebulous. Things have been kind of shifting quite a bit again with the timeline has been moving around, but also we had– the birds were really big last year, the FLoC birds. They were in the Privacy Sandbox. So the birds are gone, but the Privacy Sandbox is still there. What about Topics? What is FLEDGE? That’s the newest thing I heard about, too. What are all these things? Where did the birds go, Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, I think Google even got sick of the birds. So the Privacy Sandbox, for those who don’t know the bird jokes, are that they named every one of those solutions after a bird, and they use an acronym. And they were extremely complex, like FLoC was a Federated Learning of Cohorts, but the really cute name of FLoC instead. And they did this with a ton, including FLEDGE, formerly known as– or, I guess, TURTLEDOVE.

So there are lots of bird names still around from the ones that have not been killed off, but FLoC, which is not going to see the light of day, is being reborn as Topics, because I guess they’re getting away from the bird theme. So what is Topics? Topics is not really FLoC, but it is the replacement. So the idea is without third-party cookies advertisers will be able to learn what the topic of your site is about. And as a user browses multiple sites, it will pick out their top topics without necessarily giving away all of their browsing history, not having any sensitive categories, and sharing the limited data.

So Topics is still in its, really, testing phase or proposal, mostly, and we are working with Google on that. There are some issues. I think even Google will admit it’s not going to be a full replacement for third-party cookies, just one part of the solution. So that is one that will hopefully be live before that 2023 date of next year.

JENNY GUY: And we’re planning to– we’re working with all of these Google solutions, correct?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Absolutely. We work very closely with Google. We’re in the W3C, where these discussions are happening. So we are working actively on everything in the Privacy Sandbox.

JENNY GUY: Pause. What’s the W3C?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Do you want me to define every acronym? This is going to be exhausting. Or maybe I should stop using them. That would be the better thing.

JENNY GUY: Not a bird.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So the W3C is actually who sets the standards for most of the web. So you’ll see W3C mentioned not just when it comes to ads, but W3C is who defines things like HTML and the things that actually power the web. So it’s a big deal. Google is very vocal and active in there, as you can imagine, on all aspects of the web, and now with ads. And it’s not just Google, though. This is where companies like Mediavine can join and have these discussions. And most of it’s in a public forum, even.

JENNY GUY: OK, so we are in the room where it happens, for anyone– I was listening to Hamilton before I came on. So we’re definitely where the decision makers are, and I know, and I can say this, because I’ve been listening to the conversations behind the scenes at Mediavine. Our goal is to ensure through all of this that independent publishers have a voice as we move into this new era for the web, yeah?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: No, 1000%. I think we are uniquely positioned. Again, we are– so there was a recent internet giant article that we posted on, but we are the only internet giant that is an independent company. We actually are still started with the same founders that started this company, I don’t even know how many years ago. In 2004– someone else could do the math who’s better at that. 18? Does that seem like 18 years? Again, time has no meaning anymore. So 18 or so years ago we founded this company, and it’s still been the same founders. We are still an independent company, which is why I think more than anyone we care about independent voices.

And we are making sure that’s why everyone– we all have a seat at the table through Mediavine. That is our goal. We are making sure that the independent voice does not get lost. Because I can promise you a lot of the other voices there who have the money to join these boards are not small, independent publishers. They are the largest names. They are The New York Times, they are The Washington Post, people who are a little less concerned about third-party cookies, and I could explain why, but they don’t necessarily have all the same interests as Mediavine Publishers, and we are here to help represent the voice of the independent publisher.

JENNY GUY: Their business models are totally different. Their audiences are totally different.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Exactly.

JENNY GUY: And what we’ve talked about a lot of times is that switching to a paid model or a paywall, like The New York Times, it’s just not going to work for all of the independent content creators necessarily that we work with, so we have to look for other solutions.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Exactly.

JENNY GUY: OK, I’ve got a few questions here. This one is from Teagan, and we’re going to shift to– well, let me take a look at where we are. We’ve talked about revenue. Oh, before we get into these. We’ve talked about how we’re cooperating with all of the privacy solutions. We’re more than cooperating, we’re testing. We’re working on incorporating it. We’re doing everything that Google has coming out. Is there anything else other than Grow, which we are going to talk about, that we are doing? What else is out there that we are– I talked a little bit about collaboration. What collaborations are we working on?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Sure. I mean, I can tell you one collaboration is there are what we call the authenticated traffic type solutions. And as we have partnered with names like The Trade Desk, which may not be the same household name as Google to a lot of people. But The Trade Desk is actually the second largest buyer of ad inventory, and it’s slowly actually becoming the number one for some of our sites, even. So if you haven’t heard of The Trade Desk, it is a publicly traded company. It is large, but again, not the household name of Google.

And we have partnered with them on a lot of their initiatives, including Unified ID 2.0, which, as an industry, The Trade Desk is pushing to help support the independent web. And that’s making sure that when a user logs in to any of these sites with either Grow, or we can talk about the Identity API, or our integrations with things like Slickstream, if a user logs into your site, we can make sure through Unified ID 2.0 we can get a lot of the power of third- party cookies, thanks to that initiative. So we’re partnering with big names like The Trade Desk, and we are also working on our own initiatives of first-party data and, of course, our Grow product.

JENNY GUY: Is it OK if I rewind and go real basic here for a second?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Sure.

JENNY GUY: Because I just want to– OK.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I live this stuff, so you need to make me–

JENNY GUY: I know. You, too, and I do, too, to a certain extent, but not nearly to Eric’s extent. So what is the problem with third-party cookies? Why is those going away going to impact independent publishers so much?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so third-party cookies are what power personalized ads as we know them today. So a third-party cookie is what gives an advertiser the ability to say, hey, this user browsed both, or whatever you do, and “The Hollywood Gossip,” so maybe they’re interested in cooking even though they’re on “The Hollywood Gossip.” That has been what has allowed what’s called third-party data, or the ability to give advertisers the ability to target.

When they’re on your site without third-party cookies, when a user is browsing an article on “The Hollywood Gossip,” all an advertiser knows this is a user on “The Hollywood Gossip.” They can’t guess their age. They can’t guess gender. They can’t guess income. All the things that advertisers love to buy against, they won’t have any of those abilities without third-party cookies. All they can say is, well, this person’s browsing a Kim Kardashian article, so they’re probably x. And that’s really what they’re going to be losing a lot of, that powerful targeting that they’re used to.

JENNY GUY: OK, so that’s the problem. The problem is– because we talk about that all the time with programmatic advertising. It’s not related to what your content is– the content creator’s content– it’s related to what the user is browsing.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Exactly. And in programmatic advertising they’re buying on the user, not the content. And they’re going to lose that ability, which is how most transactions are today. So that’s a drop in revenue.

JENNY GUY: And why they pay, because we know that they’re talking to somebody who’s a hot lead. If I’m Honda and I’ve seen someone searching for tires, car safety, all of those things, oh, this is a hot lead for me. I’m going to serve my ads to them, so I pay more.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Absolutely. It’s why you can see– this really exists in all forms of advertising. There are certain sections in newspapers that are more valuable, because you know what a reader is reading at that time, so the same concept. We need that ability to offer a premium that advertisers are willing to pay. Otherwise to be able to find their user, they’re going to have to spray and pray, if you will, or blanket the entire internet with ads, hoping to reach that one user, versus before, they were able to say, hey, I found my user. I’m willing to pay a lot more. They’re not going be able to do that without third-party cookies.

JENNY GUY: Thank you. That’s helpful. So everything that we’re doing, all of these different mitigation efforts, are looking at ways to maintain the privacy that audiences and everyone is demanding but still give advertisers the ability to have some targeting in what they’re doing?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Absolutely. So that is the delicate balance that we’re all trying to walk. And where we see things like Topics that maybe aren’t as powerful I think as advertisers want, or even what publishers want, but because we have to recreate the web in a privacy-centric way. Users have made it clear they don’t want to be tracked. They don’t want all the creepiness that was third-party cookies, where I put a shoe in my shopping cart, and then I go to a website, and I have an ad for that exact shoe telling me to check out.

Those were the types of ads that made users uncomfortable. They thought their phones were listening to them when they were on Facebook, all sorts of things that weren’t necessarily happening, but that was where users’ minds jumped to because we weren’t transparent as an industry. So that’s the idea. Let’s be more transparent. Let’s offer some form of targeting but not the full, more privacy invasive ways.

JENNY GUY: We definitely have all had conversations about how everyone is being listened to. And I just talked about cookies, I didn’t even type cookies, and yet I’m getting ads for cookies. How did that happen? Why do people– how do they know? This is actually a great question from Noreen. She said, “I understand privacy, but wouldn’t the user prefer ads that are of interest than generic ads?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So 100% agreed. It is a better experience to have ads that are more targeted to you. Nobody wants to see the gross, untargeted ads. We’ve seen them. If you browse your own site, as many of you do, for hundreds of hours a month as you’re looking at how everything is on your site, you start to run out of ads. Mediavine ads are very premium.

But as you start to get to the bottom of the barrel, you start to see things like a toenail fungus ad, or gross ads you certainly don’t want. And I promise you that’s not what a majority of your users see, but that could be the future of the web if advertisers have no targeting. You’re going to get lower quality ads that you don’t want to see. I just think users want that balance, protecting their privacy but still seeing ads that interest them.

JENNY GUY: Absolutely. OK, here we go. We’ve arrived at our favorite topic, Grow. Please give us our elevator pitch. And what I want to really target in on here is why we are devoting so many resources to this and talking about it so much. We’ve already said we’re doing things with Google in Privacy Sandbox. We’re working with The Trade Desk in UID. We’re doing a lot of mitigation efforts. Why is Grow so important?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So Grow really puts the power that a lot of large publishers have always had in the hands of small, independent publishers. And remember kind of what we talked about before. Something like The New York Times has the ability to generate millions of users logged in. We know we can do that with Grow as a combined effort. So Grow really gives the ability for independent publishers to build authenticated traffic and first-party data, and we all do it together as a community. So we’re giving you tools for your website to help you generate first-party data while at the same time actually helping you build up your audience of users that will come back. So it’s a suite of engagement tools that help your users stick. They help them come back to your site, all while making you more money.

JENNY GUY: OK, you said a couple of terms in there that I want to talk more about. So Grow is designed to help independent publishers collect first-party data, or authenticated data, or traffic, or both, or what?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So both. So I think a lot of the times those two get conflated. So authenticated traffic is simply the idea that a user logged into your website. And that is really the start of your ability to create first-party data, or using partnerships like the Unified ID 2.0 I talked about, to give advertisers targeting abilities. Those are going to be your most valuable users, because they are logged in.

You know who they are. You have a relationship with them that hopefully is a long-term relationship. You could be able to send them emails in the future, get them to come back to your site. That is the idea of authenticated traffic, your most valuable traffic. But that’s probably only going to be our ambitious goal of 5% to 10% of your traffic. So what about the rest? That’s where first-party data really comes in.

So if you can get a reader to accept personalized ads but not maybe give you their email address or log into your site, we can still start to build privacy-centric profiles about that user. So it’s no longer going to be hey, this user put this shoe in their shopping cart, but again, they browse a shoe site that’s running Grow, we can suddenly start to serve them shoe ads when they come to your site because they agreed, again, to these kind of personalized ads without necessarily saying, hey, I’m willing to log in and do everything you want me to do.

JENNY GUY: OK so it’s not just my site, though. That’s the beauty of Grow. If all of these different publishers are using it and then you come to my site, you don’t have to sign up individually for every person’s site. Is that right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That is the most beautiful part about Grow, it’s that it is a community, that we’re building all of this together. So we have millions of users, when previously if we were all doing this on our own, the most successful Mediavine publishers maybe have tens of thousands of readers. Most of us probably have tens of readers, if we were to build our own login system. It’s very hard to get people to create an account.

But all of us together, times the 8,500 publishers here at Mediavine and soon growing even beyond Mediavine, Grow allows us to hit millions of users in a much quicker rate. So our goal is to hit in the tens of millions of users, obviously, by the time third-party cookies go away and have a meaningful amount of users able to log in with one click. They don’t have to create an account. It’s very easy. They’ll see Grow. They’ll be comfortable logging into your site.

JENNY GUY: OK, helpful. All right, I’m going to start hitting some of these user questions. We have a ton. This is Teagan. “I already have thousands of registered users on WordPress, my most dedicated readers. How can I make sure these are first-party for the purposes of serving Mediavine ads?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So there’s going to be two ways to do this. That’s a great question, Teagan. You can use what we call the Identity API today. So that’s been live for over a year, and that is the idea of want to own the login system for your site. You want the users more siloed to your site. And that’s great if you have a following of tens of thousands of users or thousands of users, and you can already use that Identity API. We can put in a link for that, and that is the idea of simple, little code. You can make sure when a user is logged in. You communicate with us, and we’re able to make sure they’re served those personalized ads. You’ll make more money on those users.

There’s the alternative approach, where you could actually move over to Grow. This is something we’re working on when you’ll be able to import your users over. They won’t lose anything that they had. The idea is they’re just going to upgrade their account, if you will, to a Grow account. So it doesn’t just work on your site but across the thousands of other sites that are running Grow. So you have both solutions you can use.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. Julie. “Is there any way to compare Safari traffic revenue versus Chrome traffic revenue from within Mediavine?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Not yet, but that is something we definitely want to be able to show you guys, because I think that’s important. I think once people start to see that’s where Google is getting its 60% drop, it’s real, I think that should help a lot of publishers realize the importance of why things like Grow are so urgent to install now and not just wait until third-party cookies are gone. So short answer, no, not today, but in the future.

JENNY GUY: We have a lot of questions floating around about revenue. The 60% that Google said, they’re wanting– I think everybody is wanting you to give a percentage with all the mitigation efforts. What might it mean? And are we talking about only Chrome traffic losing the revenue, or is it all traffic? Is it your total RPM? Help us.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So again, that’s only going to be on your Chrome and Android traffic and Chromium browsers that currently have third-party cookies. So things like Edge are actually just built, are just reskinned Chrome. So Microsoft Edge, formerly known as IE, is now just Chrome. So there are going to be other browsers, but they’re a small percentage of the market.

We care most about is what’s happening with Chrome and what’s happening with Safari. Those are the two main players. Safari, again, third-party cookies are already gone, so when third-party cookies go away in Chrome, your Safari traffic isn’t going to be worth less. If anything it might be worth a little bit more, again, because of all these mitigation efforts. Can I give you an exact percentage? Not entirely, because that’s all going to depend on sites and how involved everyone gets in Grow.

So I can tell you that users that are logged in to Grow are worth just a ton more when there’s no third-party cookies. They might be worth two to three times as much as a user who isn’t logged in. Are you going to make two to three times as much money if you get everyone to log in? Sure, but that’s not realistic unless you have a site that, again, has an incredibly dedicated base.

Maybe you have some sort of exclusive content that users are willing to log into, but if 5% to 10% of your users are making you three times more, that can be very nice towards mitigating a 30% drop by making 30% more money. We don’t have exact figures because it’s going to depend on site, but we think that this is an opportunity to make more, not less.

JENNY GUY: OK, this is a great question, and we already talked about this a little bit, but I want to get really granular. If I can’t get– Tanya says if I can’t get a significant decent portion of my users to authenticate via Grow– not a lot of people seem to sign up create accounts from what I’ve seen– how does grow still help with the Cookiepocalypse?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So that’s a great question. So again, first we’re going to say that Grow, where it is today, is not necessarily where Grow is going to be in two years. I think you’ve seen a ton of developments coming to Grow just really over the last year and a half or so we’ve had this product. But over the next two years it’s going to change even more, not just because we’re developing it but because the internet as a whole is going to be changing.

I think users are going to come to expect to log in, consent to personalized ads, or something more similar to what Grow is already introducing today. We’re just very early on in what the future of the web is going to look like. So don’t stress when you can’t get a ton of users to log in today. This is going to be a slow build. So your goal is to try to slowly introduce them to it.

You’re going to be adding more and more features that Grow has today, and again, more features that it adds in the future to encourage these readers to log in. So it is still going to help, and one of the beauties, again, if other sites are all running this together, those are shared users. And hopefully some of them can even come logged into your site automatically with some ideas we have in the future as well.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. OK. We’ve got more questions, but I want to break in with this one. Who is Grow for?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Grow is for everyone. So this is going to sound crazy. Our goal is not just for Grow to be for Mediavine publishers, but we really think Grow should be for the web. One of the reasons why is our industry as a whole has not come up with a lot of great solutions to third-party cookies. The Privacy Sandbox, as we mentioned, has one real proposal right now, maybe two, and none of them have gone live.

So there’s been a lot of outside interest– you’d be surprised– to run Grow, even from names you wouldn’t think. So not a traditional Mediavine lifestyle blogger, but large-name publishers don’t have their own solutions to this. So we partially want to offer Grow to help more of the web monetize with this first-party data.

But really because as a user, if you want Grow to be successful, you want to Grow on as many sites as possible. You don’t just want your login to work on 5,000 sites that are running Grow. Let’s get that login working across the web. So that’s one of our goals, getting Grow as universal as we can across the web so that a reader gets more benefit from creating and logging in with Grow.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. OK, so what that means– can you take that from the high level into a more specific level? What does it mean with people not– so first, Mediavine publishers can use it right now, yes? Anyone can be using Grow?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: If you’re a Mediavine publisher, go right in your Mediavine dashboard. You can toggle it on, and you’ll be running Grow within minutes, maybe seconds if you’re already logged in. If you are a non-Mediavine publisher or you have a second site that’s not yet with Mediavine, we are introducing Grow for the entire web, for the entire world. It is coming soon. It is actually being actively tested today on non-Mediavine sites, and we hope to have that live as soon as we can for more people to be able to sign up for it.

JENNY GUY: And if you’re interested in that today, we have a link that we’re going to be sharing that you can put your name down if you– so if you’re a Mediavine publisher and there are non-Mediavine sites that you’re interested in having Grow on, or if you’re not quite ready for Mediavine yet, or you’re working with another full service ad management company– whatever your circumstances are– if you’re not working with us for ad management, we are going to share a link towards the end of the live and again in the resource doc that you can sign up for.

We are pulling names from that as we move forward and expand our testing efforts to make Grow for non-Mediavine publishers. So just signing up doesn’t mean that you’re immediately going to get an invitation, so don’t expect that. But do put your name down if you’re interested, so as we’re adding more testers we can consider you. All right, lots of questions on Grow. Here they come. Are you ready? Do you need to take a sip of that coffee?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Oh, it’s almost gone. That’s why I’m so excited right now.

JENNY GUY: All right, Samantha Ashley, “if we have Grow installed right now, what does that mean?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: It really depends on how you’re using Grow. So just enabling Grow, what it’s going to do by default is turn that widget on in the bottom right-hand corner, allow users to favorite things across your site and across the web. That’s a great set of features to run, and it also enables social sharing and so many other things that are just built into that widget.

But really to use Grow you’re going to have to look beyond just turning it on. You have to look into features like Spotlight Subscribe. Spotlight Subscribe is the ability to grow your newsletter and logged in users at the same time, and that one does extremely well. It is a non-pop-up that converts nearly as well as a pop-up through a really good user experience.

So without necessarily having the bad user experience of a pop-up you can get near those conversions. And of course we have recommended content, search, and a lot of other features as well that you can opt into right from your Mediavine dashboard just by, again, simple toggles you can start opting into these things, and they’re all free.

JENNY GUY: I want to rewind, because you said Spotlight Subscribe. We’ve seen incredible results, and I can attest to it. We have it on the Mediavine corporate site, and it does incredibly well. But what if I don’t have a newsletter? Should I not turn on Spotlight Subscribe?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So one of the things we say is turn it on now and set up a newsletter in the future. One of the things we’re actually working on is the ability for publishers that don’t have a newsletter to kind of get a newsletter lite– name still pending. The idea is Grow will be able to send emails on your behalf if you don’t have a newsletter today. So another thing you have to run– so if you have a great email list set up with something like ConvertKit– you can continue to work with ConvertKit and not even turn that feature on. But this is for publishers that don’t have a ConvertKit account, don’t have their email series set up. Let us help you build it with Grow. That’s going to be our goal in the next few months.

JENNY GUY: Awesome. Love to hear that. OK, Terra or Tara, I’m not sure. She says, “What are your top tips for getting readers to log in with Grow? Exclusive Content? Something else?” I would love to talk about Exclusive Content. I don’t think we have yet.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So that is the number one way to get users to log in definitely is going to be Exclusive Content. It’s also going to be the number one way to drive your newsletter growth. If you thought pop-ups had good conversion, you have no idea what’s in store for you when you turn on Exclusive Content. I think Nicole, or whatever you do who works here, on her personal site I think she saw like a 500% increase in her newsletter sign-ups just by locking down about 30 of her top posts. So not every post, not all of her new posts, just some of her more evergreen content, she made it so you have to log in order to be able to see.

Has she gotten complaints? Only a few, and meanwhile her newsletter growth has been explosive. And a lot of us run into these issues where our newsletter growth gets stagnant over time as people unsubscribe. Are you growing more than you’re losing? And that’s why a lot of us hit a wall. We might have 10,000, 20,000 subscribers and never be able to get to more. This is your chance. Exclusive Content is live now, and it’s something you can test. And again, test it on just a few of your posts. You shouldn’t see necessarily any drop in rankings, because we tested and conform to Google’s SEO standards, and see how it does with your audience. It might do as well as it does for Nicole, so it’s something worth testing.

JENNY GUY: Even if it doesn’t do quite as well as it does for Nicole, it’s still pretty darn worth it. There’s a big margin here. All right, Jessica, “You mention that Grow will change in two years, but how will we expect that to help in one year when Google implements changes? Are there more changes sooner that will help us keep on top of these transitions?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Again, definitely. I think Grow is changing before your eyes. So when I say it’s changing over the next two years, I really mean by the time that rollout of third-party cookies, I guess the phaseout, is complete. I think then all of these features will begin to make a lot more sense. Exclusive Content, or what is really called a freewall across the internet, is not common right now. Most sites require you to pay or just give you the content for free.

In the future you’re going to see more of this, or more exclusive content. We’re just really early on into the industry. So if Exclusive Content is working for you now, awesome. But in two years it’s probably going to be a lot more expected of your users, and they’ll complain a little bit less. And so that’s kind of what we mean by it’s going to change over the next few years. You’re going to watch a change before your eyes. So it can help you now run these features today and run the new features that we continue to build.

JENNY GUY: Well I was going to say that one, it can more than help you now in terms of a preparatory way. It can help you now in terms of earning more money because advertisers are paying premium for these users, yes?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so again I’m going to keep coming back to Nicole’s site. She’s already at nearly our goal of that 5% of users logged in, which is insane. She’s there almost a year and a half to two full years early just by running Exclusive Content on a handful of her posts.

You make more money when a user is logged into your site, even when third-party cookies exists, because you have that one-to-one relationship with that reader. And you’ll make a lot more on Safari, where there are no third-party cookies. These are live solutions today that the industry has already created. You’re already going to make more money when third-party cookies exist and when they don’t. So if you start adopting these things now, it’s going to increase your RPM today.

JENNY GUY: So you’re going to start making more money now. You’re also going to be getting your readers used to these new features and building up that authenticated traffic as we go through time, yes? We can’t just flick it on when Google does it and go, shazam. That’s not how it works.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Right, which is why, again, places like The Washington Post and The New York Times, not as nervous when you’re in these boards– these meetings with them. They have been doing this for years. They know as well as anyone, you can’t do this stuff overnight. You have to start now. It is a slow process. Even with the explosive growth I’m mentioning for Nicole’s site, that 500% increase is still going to be a small overall percentage of her traffic. So grow it today so by the time third-party cookies disappear, you’re in very good shape.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. All right, another question. Oh, there are people saying all sorts of great things. We have somebody who says I have it on my non-Mediavine site. It works great. I just want to be able to offer a download upon signing up.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So that is a great champ. OK, well first off, thank you for running it as a non-Mediavine site and helping us test this. In terms of downloads upon signing up, so there are ways you could do that today. We have a Zapier integration where you could email them that downloadable right now.

We’re working on a direct ConvertKit, API Integration, where you would be able to do the same thing, and that will allow you to instantly send your user the download. But we’re actually working on through a feature similar to Exclusive Content, building downloadable directly into Grow. So that’s going to be one of our goals, hopefully later this year, is be able to offer downloadables directly to your users in Grow in exchange for them signing in to your website and, again, that you get it for free.

JENNY GUY: It’s the same thing with the email list. It’s an opt-in. It’s a freemium. You’re offering people– we’re doing that value exchange with your readers. If you will consent to being served personalized ads, give me your email address, I will give you the 15 best places to go in Italy backpacking. I’m just saying that, and that maybe that was just on the top of my mind. I don’t know why, but–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Woo, Italy backpacking. That’s going to be fun.

JENNY GUY: I’m ready. Let’s do it. Maria says, “Is Grow fully accessible?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Is that in terms of accessibility features?

JENNY GUY: I’m not exactly sure what she means. Maria, can you give us some clarification there? All right, I’m not sure who this user is, but it says it has blog articles suggestions too, and Spotlight Subscribe’s amazing. Love hearing that. And I’ve got another beautiful question that our readers are leading us right where we wish to go. Do you have visibility into how many users are actually using Grow to save articles, revisit them later, et cetera?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So one of the things that we are working on as we go to unveil Grow for non-Mediavine publishers, is a Grow dashboard. And that’s one of the reasons why we have not previously released this to non-Mediavine publishers because it’s in the Mediavine dashboard today.

So I think once we open up this Grow publisher portal or the dashboard, we’re going to be able to offer more analytics and show you more of this data. Today the best way you can get is through Google Analytics, and we can show you a help article that’s not going to give you a full picture. So we’re working on making sure you get the full picture of how Grow is helping your site today. So it’s something we working on.

JENNY GUY: Happening. It’s coming. It’s coming soon. Don’t worry. All right.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I’ve seen it. It’s real.

JENNY GUY: This is a great question from Sarah. Can you tell me more about Exclusive Content? Sounds like it doesn’t have to be paid, just behind a sign-up wall. Is that right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Correct. So today the way we’re launching Exclusive Content as what you would call a freewall. So all they have to do is sign up for Grow and subscribe to your newsletter, where applicable by law, and they get access to your content. So when I do that quick little disclaimer in the EU, they are able to get your content without signing up for your newsletter. It becomes optional, and that is a requirement of GDPR. But everywhere we can we’re going to lock down your content with an email subscription. So they don’t have to pay, but in the future we are exploring the idea of memberships or the idea of allowing you to lock down content as paid content.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. Is it possible to have more than one Spotlight Subscribe form? I have several different email funnels and currently have to turn off Spotlight Subscribe and therefore Grow for my minor funnels and sub niche pages.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I have great news for you. You don’t need to turn it off. Yeah, Spotlight Subscribe does support multiple widgets. Right now it’s a little manual in the way that you’ll have to target them on your different pages. And I know– again, I’m going to keep pointing to Nicole. She does this on her own site. She just uses Grow so well. Great example. She has done this, I think, with a plugin called Ad Inserter as a way of inserting that code.

But one of the things we are working on is the ability to do category targeting directly inside of Spotlight Subscribe. So you’ll be able to pick a category and assign this widget to it and then complete your funnel that way. But you can do it today. You can create multiple widgets. You can manually insert them. They’ll come through differently in Zapier, so you can do the rest of your funnel appropriately.

JENNY GUY: Awesome. All right. Samantha. When you say logged in, it’s logged in with Grow, correct? Are there any tutorials we can see about using Exclusive Content?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, I think we have help articles today, but yeah, when we’re saying logged in, we mean logged in with Grow. And remember, when they logged in with Grow, it’s that Grow account they could have created anywhere on the web. It’s very easy for them to pretty much click one button if they’re already logged in. And even with third-party cookies, they might come automatically logged into your site today and just be able to click one button to subscribe. So it’s not as intrusive as it sounds, especially as more of us begin using this feature.

JENNY GUY: OK. We got some clarity from Maria. She said is Grow fully accessible for people with disabilities, the visually impaired, et cetera? Great question.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: As much as we can be we definitely focus on all things accessibility here at Mediavine. So small examples, in Grow when you pick the widget, we make sure your colors that you choose are accessible, so making sure for the visually impaired that you have enough contrast. We work wherever we can. If you find something that’s not accessible or you run into an issue, please let us know. But absolutely everything we’ve built here at Mediavine, we try to do to accessibility standards. Very important.

JENNY GUY: Can I put a download link behind the login option so that I’m giving away a PDF that way?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That’s actually one of the ways we see people using Exclusive Content today. So they’re locking down download links, so that is the way you can get it today, before we even build a downloadables feature. So you can have it right now. Again, go to your dashboard, set up Exclusive Content. It can be marked around anything. So in Gutenberg you could do it around any block. In non-WordPress sites, even, you can do it with just HTML around any content you want. So a download link is a great example. And in the future we’re working on ways to make downloadables like a first-class citizen or built right into Grow.

JENNY GUY: Excellent. Byron. If a user gives their email via Spotlight Subscribe, will they be authenticated, identified if they return to your site?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah. As long as they consent to personalized ads and hopefully create that full account, they will be authenticated or identified. We’re working on ways to make sure that that will happen more often than not. So to shortly answer that, yes. Our goal is to make sure as soon as they complete Spotlight Subscribe, they are going to be authenticated in the future. That is our goal with that product.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. All right, so if someone has signed up for Grow on another website and they come to yours for the first time, they’ll still need to click something to sign up for your/our newsletter?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so again, one of the things we’re building with Grow in mind is for this privacy-centric web. So we don’t just want when a user shows up on your site you get access to their email. That would make users lose trust in Grow, and I think this is one of the things we tried to explain the best at the beginning of this product. Grow is about not just the publisher but also the reader.

So one of the things they’re going to have to do is consent to having that email address shared with your site. So that’s where Spotlight Subscribe is incredibly beautiful. If a user is logged in, Spotlight Subscribe gives them a one-click button to subscribe to your site. They don’t have to type in their email address even, because we know it as a Grow user. So yes, if they’re logged in with Grow we make a lot of really easy ways for them to subscribe to your content, including some new features we’re building soon. So Spotlight Subscribe built in with that exact idea in mind, Ashley.

JENNY GUY: All right. “A while ago I set up a Google Analytics for the Grow feature. Is there a tutorial to understand what each element is in that Grow dashboard in Google Analytics?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, I think in the help article we define what all of those obscure event names are for that exact purpose.

JENNY GUY: We definitely do, and we’ll make sure that we share that. OK, question for all of our audience. If you are using Grow, which feature performs the best for you? Give us a little feedback on that. And while our audience is talking about features, I want to talk about features as well. So let’s go through what is available currently in Grow. Because as you mentioned and as we talked about, just flicking it on is not the end of it. What you have to do is go in and look at all of the different things that are available, choose them, and test them on your site. So what’s available, and is there something can’t miss that you want people to use?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So Grow really is a tool kit that is designed to build Grow into your site as natively or organically as possible. You want it to fit in with your particular audience, which is why we offer so many features, to make sure we can find the ones that resonate best with your users. And no one’s going to know your users better than you. So try out a lot of these tools and see what works best.

So some of the tools that we have today, again, built in. Everyone’s going to have Favorites and Social Sharing. Those are built in to Grow into the widget. You turn on Grow, you get those. But some of the things you can opt into. We have Recommended Content. We have a lot of great experiences of Recommended Content, whether it’s the What’s Next feature on mobile, whether it’s In Line that performs the best, whether it’s the carousel at the top. There’s a lot of different ways you can show content to your readers, and that performs really well.

JENNY GUY: Time out. What is Recommended Content? Can you tell us a little bit more?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so Recommended Content is similar to something like Netflix where after you watch a Netflix show or a few Netflix shows, they get to learn what type of Netflix shows you watch, and they start recommending things to you. So they’re not always really related to the show you’re watching, but they are going to be recommended for you.

And that is the beauty of Grow’s Recommended Content. If the user is logged in it’s personalized to them. If it’s not, it uses users like them to figure out, OK, you are most likely to want to click on this next, which is why it performs so insanely well compared to Related Content, especially as you run it for a long time. It’s going to get to know your site, get to know your content. So I encourage you, if you run Recommended Content, don’t just turn it on and be like, oh, I hate the content this thing is recommending. Give it some time. Let it learn your site, and I think your users are going to love it.

JENNY GUY: And also if there are pages for sure that you don’t want recommended, like privacy policy, like that, you can go in and exclude those, right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, absolutely. You can list any individual pages. Coming soon in the new dashboard are ways to even do mass blocking of different pages. So there are a lot of ways in which you can block content you don’t want showing up.

JENNY GUY: Can you tell us more about why Netflix thinks I should watch John Wayne Gacy documentaries? Because I don’t know what I’m watching, but that’s what they keep recommending to me.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You should give one a try. Let’s see what you think see.

JENNY GUY: See if they’re right. Let’s test the algorithm OK, we have a lot of Spotlight Subscribe fans in the audience. And talking about features, you’ve already said that Spotlight Subscribe is probably your top. Why do you love Spotlight Subscribe so much? Why is it for everybody, not just for people who are currently focusing on newsletters?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I just love Spotlight Subscribe because I’ve never been a personal fan of options, or sorry, pop-ups, I should say. I don’t love pop-ups as a reader. When I get to a site, I’m struggling to find the ax as quickly as I can. I get those convert very well, and it’s certainly not a thing I’m going to say no one should use. Obviously if you want to run those on your site, go for it, and maybe a thing we’re even exploring in Grow itself over time.

But what Spotlight Subscribe does is get you near those conversions without having to do that to your user, and that’s what I love most about it. You can still get insane newsletter growth without upsetting your readers, which is really the best balance you can have. And again, if you don’t have a newsletter today, we’re working on solutions for you. So turn it on. Start building that list now for your email in the future.

JENNY GUY: OK, this is a question for me. What if I don’t want to use Grow? Are there alternatives to moving forward on this if I’m using something else that I like, maybe like a similar product. Is there something– what are the alternatives?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Thank you for interrupting what’s become a 30-minute pitch on Grow, so yeah. So going back to– obviously we do want everyone to be able to use Grow. It’s a great community effort. It’s an awesome tool. And it’s a tool that pays you, as opposed to a lot of the other tools that you’ll be paying a lot of money for. So isn’t it better to get paid? So I certainly would love you to run Grow.

But if you don’t, we’ve had the Identity API out for over a year now. So Identity API is the idea that you can integrate with any tool you’re running today. So that could be whether it’s OptinMonster, or whether it’s Slickstream, who we have an official partnership with, again, over a year old. If you prefer to run Slickstream, you can do so and know that those users, if they log in, are coming in logged in through the Identity API automatically for you. So you get those integrations, whether it’s Slickstream or whether it’s something you want to build yourself, and we’re continuously trying to make that easier for publishers as well who don’t want to run Grow.

JENNY GUY: What is the difference if I want to keep paying for Slickstream, or like you said, OptinMonster or something like that. What is the difference between a tool like OptinMonster or Slickstream in Grow.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So I think the biggest difference, hands down, it’s going to be the fact that grow is a community-based thing. We’re all in this together, the idea that we’re all building one pool of authenticated users. There’s nothing else like that right now. It is very tough, again, as I’ll keep saying, to get a user to log into your site. So if you are running Slickstream, I encourage you. Go into your dashboard. How many members do you actually have on your site? I challenge anyone to have more than– even at the largest of sites here at Mediavine– more than 1,000.

So we’ve seen even smaller numbers than that. Again, you might have eight users, for all you know, and you’ve been running this product for months. What Grow is built around is that exact purpose. How do you get a user to log into your site? These other tools are great. They’re great at what they do, but they’re not designed as a first-party data solution. So if you run Slickstream and you love its search, awesome. You should continue to run that product search. But what you should really look into is running Grow as your first-party data solution, because it’s going to be the one that gets you the most logged in users.

JENNY GUY: And that’s the whole purpose of it. Every feature that we create, everything that we do is trying to funnel towards this one common cause, denominator, while at the same time you’re getting paid more, and you’re keeping users on your site for longer. You’re strengthening that relationship with your readers. You’re gluing them in to you and to other Grow sites. All right, what do we have coming up for Grow? Because I know we’d said that this is going to be– when we released Grow we released it with– OK, I’m going to drop an acronym. Is it MVP? Is that right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yep, minimum viable product.

JENNY GUY: I’m such an engineer. When we released Grow we did it with a very low minimum viable product. There wasn’t a whole lot of there there. But over the past 18 months, two years, we’ve been growing features, Grow adding features, compiling, taking feedback, changing, all of that. What’s coming up, though, because I know that we actually have quite a few things that are on tap in the next couple of months?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so I think one of the reasons we did this as such a minimum viable product was to learn from our publishers.

JENNY GUY: That’s an MVP. I would like for you to just call it the right thing.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: As an MVP, we want your feedback. Again, nobody knows your audience as well as you, and that has what’s been driving the Grow roadmap so much. So that’s where these features are coming from. You see it even in this live. We talked about Exclusive Content. People are asking about Downloadables. It was a natural fit for us to start working on Downloadables, so that’s one of the features that will hopefully be coming out soon.

So again, if you have a downloadable, you’ll be able to upload it, lock it behind Exclusive Content, automatically all through Grow and easily show that on your site, get users to log in, make sure they subscribe to your newsletter to get access to that downloadable. And previously you probably had to work together with a ton of different plug-ins and get them all jumble together to hopefully do this on your own. But now it’s going to be done beautifully and easily, directly through Grow.

Another one I’m extremely excited about, and I know our publishers are, are some ESP or email sending provider integrations. So I know a lot of people don’t like paying for Zapier, and they don’t like how a little complicated it can be. But remember, Zapier got us hundreds of email-sending providers with one integration. But now we’re looking at the top email sending providers our publishers use and working on integrations with them, including ConvertKit, which is the first one we have coming, and that is coming very soon.

JENNY GUY: And Samantha just asked a question, “does the subscribe with Grow integrate automatically with any email providers?” That is what we are working on in the mean, so ConvertKit will be first. Then we have others coming after that. In the meantime you do have Zapier to get those email addresses zapped directly into your ESP. We had a question here. “Is there a way to use Grow.me non-WordPress sites?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: One of my favorite things about Grow is that it uses similar technology to our ads, and that is what’s called software as a service, or SAS, if we’re going to play lots of acronyms today, and the idea being you put one line of code on your site, and you can run Grow. By launching it that way, the same way Mediavine ads work on non-WordPress sites, Grow works on non-WordPress sites.

So you can run Grow on Vlogger, on Squarespace, on SBI, whatever fun other CMS you have, it will work with Grow. And one of the greatest parts again about Grow, though, is that it can be enhanced by Grow Social, so our plug-in. If you are running Grow Social, you get some cool things out of WordPress, but not required.

JENNY GUY: We actually had some feedback here. One of the questions that we asked our audience is, what is Grow missing? The best way to help us shape this product is to be using it and to give us feedback. Give us all the feedback and tell us what is it missing. Ellen said, “I use Grow, but what I like about Slickstream is the heart feature on the search.” So OK–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: –that’s great feedback.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: There you go.

JENNY GUY: We’ll take it all in. We’ll take it all in and be looking as we go forward. Eric, how is the best way, what’s the best way for people to provide feedback on Grow features or ideas that they have?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Well we got to ask the product team. I believe–

JENNY GUY: They’re here.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: –we have– yeah, we have a link that they can submit feedback through. Worst case scenario, you can always send an email to grow.me@mediavine.com. But we have a feedback link, and we’re going to have that feedback link directly in the dashboard, hopefully soon, that new Grow dashboard.

JENNY GUY: It’s coming. OK, we always like to close everything out with action items, and we are closing out Teal Talk for Summer of Live with this episode. So Eric, if you are a Mediavine publisher, what should you do? What is the thing you need to go do now as you leave?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: If you are going to be worried about third-party cookies, then the first thing you should be doing is building up that relationship with your readers. And there is no better way than signing up for Grow or enabling if you’re already a Mediavine publisher, running things like Spotlight Subscribe, and start thinking about owning that relationship with the reader yourself.

So rather than having your following live on things like Pinterest or Instagram or Facebook, things that are very fickle in nature, and you could lose your entire following in a day, instead think about owning it yourself. And that is the beauty behind Grow and owning your own newsletter. So really own that relationship with your audience. Start running Grow today so that your audience is used to this idea, and they’re excited by this idea and it’s a long-term relationship with third-party cookies go away.

JENNY GUY: If you are not a Mediavine publisher, what’s a good thing to do today?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You should definitely sign up for that link that we provided earlier so that you can begin running Grow. Because again, we want to make sure that non-Mediavine publishers can run Grow and find ways that they can monetize that audience as well, even with other ad providers, as crazy as that sounds.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. Love it. All right, everybody, this is the part of the show where we talk about the next Teal Talk, but the next Teal Talk isn’t until after Labor Day because the Summer of Live starts in June. Please stay tuned for an amazing lineup. We have so many great guests coming your ways, all the topics. We are also still looking for a couple more guests later on in the summer. We’re pretty booked up at the beginning. But we’re going to drop that link into the comments so that you can– if you are dying to come on a Summer of Live episode and talk about– you’re an expert in a topic. All of our publishers are experts in various topics, so please come on and share your knowledge with us. We’d love to consider you, so we’ll drop that link in as well.

We’re also going to be dropping the link to our resources document that will have everything together that we’ve talked about on this blog post– help docs, the sign up for Grow if you’re interested and you’re a non-Mediavine publisher. It’s all going to be right there. So we’re going to drop that in. Thank you so much for making this a absolute delight every month and every week in the summer to get to come to talk to you guys. Eric, thank you for coming and enlightening us on everything that is coming for our industry. We are excited and ready. We’re going to be ready, right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: We’re definitely going to be ready, and thank you for having me. And more importantly, thank you for translating me, which is always very important.

JENNY GUY: It’s what has to happen in my brain when you talk. It goes beep, er, beep, er. Those are the sounds that it makes.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Making me define every acronym is appreciated. Thank you.

JENNY GUY: It’s acronym soup. It’s alphabet soup around here with ad tech, and I love to, I love to define it. Guys, thank you so much again. We will see you in just a few weeks for the Summer of Live. Have a great rest of your day, everybody.

The first blog post you publish is huge. The first time you place ads on your site? Amazing. Finally going full time as a content creator…WOW.

Then, there’s the first time you land your dream sponsored content gig! Congratulations!!

…Now what?

In this session from the Mediavine Influencers Conference in Austin back in 2019, attorney Jamie Lieberman of Hashtag Legal LLC gives tips to negotiate the best deal you can get, the terms of the contract you should include and what you should look out for when reading a contract.

Jamie’s a treasure trove on knowledge being in the business for over 15 years: you don’t want to miss it!

Helpful Resources

• Hashtag Legal
• Negotiating Contracts
• The Art of Negotiating | Mediavine Summer of Live
• Getting Legit with Legal | Designed for the Creative Mind

Transcript

MUSIC PLAYING: I just feel so good, good good. Just feel so good, good, good. Just feel so good.

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: Y’all just had drinks. Come on. I think it’s suspect that the lawyer has to talk after the drinks. I get it, it’s not as exciting. We’re going to do our best.

So, today, we’re going to talk about covering your assets. And we’re specifically going to talk about sponsored content. And I’m going to talk about it from start to finish. So let me tell you about me. So I am Jamie Lieberman. I’ve been a lawyer for about 15 years.

I run #Legal, which is, like they said, a full-service law firm. We are dedicated to making legal accessible. We work with entrepreneurs. We work with influencer marketing professionals. We work with creatives, content creators. The thread that sort of binds all of our clients is there aren’t a lot of lawyers out there who speak that language. And so that is really our goal.

There we go. So we’re going to talk about contracts. And pretty much instantly, everyone went to sleep, right? We’re going to make this as interesting as I possibly can. There’s going to be some technical stuff that we talk about. I’m going to leave space for questions, because in a really weird turn of events, people always have questions for the lawyer.

So if you do have questions, I will happily take them and answer them as best as I can. Although, famously, I like to answer questions with, it depends, if anyone has ever heard me speak. So I will do my best not to use that answer, but I might. You’ll have to forgive me.

So I want to talk about contracts from start to finish. I want to talk about the sponsored content deal. So the last time I stood on a Mediavine stage, I talked all about negotiation. And this is a really powerful topic, one that I love more than anything. I love to negotiate.

And so I definitely say– I know all the talks are up on YouTube. I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about negotiation, but I feel like it’s something worth touching on. If you want to go in-depth about negotiation, go to the Mediavine YouTube channel. My whole talk is up there. I have a whole framework. And I am going to offer you guys a chance to download my negotiation framework so you can see it. But a couple points I want to touch on before we get to the actual contract part of this talk.

So the most important part of negotiation, and this will help you in your contracts, is research. So the thing that you have to pay the most attention to before you literally do anything– I mean, before you make a phone call, because we’re all going to be making phone calls after this. I know. It’s OK. You’re going to do it. It’s going to– yes, you are. Yes, you are. Now I know you, and now I’m going to find you. We’re going to make some phone calls.

So research is our first thing that we want to do. And that can be done in so many different ways. One, you all know each other. We kind of live on the internet, right? So talk to your friends. See what they’ve done. See how they’ve approached certain situations for sponsored content, whatever that looks like. And that can look like– I guess we should really define what that looks like, right, before we even start talking.

So what I’m really thinking about is you entering into an arrangement with a brand who wants you to talk about them in some way, and they’re going to compensate you. And you can be compensated in a lot of ways. You can be compensated through straight up dollars, which we like dollars. And they could be just flat-fee payments. It could be something like an affiliate relationship, because those can be very lucrative. We leave so much on the table without spending time on affiliate relationships, and those can be and are like-sponsored content.

We’re also going to talk about shares, social shares, things like that. But anytime you’re entering into a financial relationship with a company or brand or person or whoever who wants you to talk about their products, that’s really what we’re talking about.

So for a lot of people who’ve done it before, it may be that it sort of just fell in your lap, which was kind of cool. Or maybe you went through an amazing agency, or maybe you had a friend who referred you. Maybe some of you pitch. But the most important thing for all of those arrangements is research. Know your market. Spend time talking to each other, and find your crew. Find the people that you can trust. Find the people who are going to tell you, this is what I did here.

And I understand, talking about money, that makes us all feel a little squirmy, much like legal talks make people feel a little squirmy. But if you find the right people, you can have those conversations. And sometimes you just talk about it generally. It may not be the actual dollars, but there’s lots of other currencies that you can use to negotiate. And so just take your time, do your research.

A big part of the research is not just about what other people have done. Because frankly, all that really matters is the deal that you want to strike. So that’s a really important thing. But the other thing to know is, who am I talking to? Who is the person that I’m going to get on the phone with? Who is the person I’m going to get on the phone with, or who am I emailing back and forth with? Do they make the decisions? Are they passing my information along to someone else?

You need all of this information before you start this negotiation process so that you are sort of not behind. It enables you to sort of have a much easier, streamlined negotiation. Because most people think of negotiation as just the bargaining, right? You go to a car dealership, and you’re like, I would like this Buick. And they say, it will be 10,000. You say, I will be pay you 5,000, and then you pay 8,000.

That’s not negotiation. Negotiation is a very long relationship that you formed. And frankly, if you do the work upfront, you’re going to do very little of the back and forth. So do your research. Talk to your people. Use Google. Use LinkedIn. Use social media. It’s what we do. And figure out who you’re talking to, what you’re looking for, what your best-case scenario is, and also know when you’re going to walk away.

And then the pieces that you can’t fill in, ask those questions. So get the information. Because what you’re essentially looking to figure out is what are all the important things to the brand, and what are all the important things to me, and how can we make them align? And so you’re going to ask a lot of questions, and you’re going to do a lot of active listening. Meaning you are going to be asking these questions so you can find out information so you know which currencies that you want to negotiate.

Some of those currencies we’re going to talk about in the sponsored content contract. And we’re going to talk about what a lot of those pieces are going to look like. Currencies are not just money. It’s so many different things. It’s exclusivity. It’s use of your intellectual property. It’s payment terms. It’s all negotiable. And so knowing what everybody’s position is– if you don’t know what it is, you ask those questions.

And my last piece of advice for everybody is reach really high. There’s too much self-editing that happens. There’s too much. second-guessing yourself. You know your number. And this is why I don’t know that necessarily talking money with everybody makes a lot of sense, because your number is very different than somebody else’s number. Your processes are very different than somebody else’s.

The numbers on your website are not the only factor that should go into that. It should go into time. It should go into how well it fits into your site, into your brand, all of those things. So reach really high. Because the most important thing to remember is just because you make an offer and it doesn’t get accepted doesn’t mean the deal is completely going to go away.

No doesn’t necessarily mean I’m never going to talk to you again. It just means we have to keep working through this deal. So stop being afraid of hearing no. No is a really comfortable place to be in. It’s perfectly OK. It doesn’t mean that the relationship is ending. It doesn’t mean that it’s all going away. Just means you still have to keep working on it.

So when you’re afraid of hearing no, when you’re trying to anticipate what the other side is going to say, that’s when negotiations fall apart and when you end up cutting yourself to low. So let’s talk about contracts. We’re going to hang on this slide for a while, so get really comfortable with it.

So everybody should know how to read a contract. I got it, it is not the most exciting thing. Sometimes you get these contracts, and it’s just like this massive wall of text. And then you fall asleep, and then you make a deal with yourself like, I’m going to get through this. I can read it. But you can absolutely read a contract, I promise you. Or at least have a bare-bones understanding of when you get a contract that feels wrong or off.

And so that’s the most important thing. As small business owners, you need to know some of the lingo and what it means. So I’m going to start and we’re going to walk through each of these.

So representations and warranties. You’ve all seen them, right? They’re in your contract. Who here reads their contracts? Let me start. Do you guys, really? I should go. No, you’d be shocked. So many people just sign. They don’t read. And who negotiates their contracts? Who red-lines their contracts and goes back? I love you guys. You’re like my people. We’re going to have a group hug at the end. I see you, Phil. I know you do.

It’s important. So I want to actually start with that. I want to back up a little bit. Contracts are meant to be red-lined. This is not just the lawyer who’s trying to make billable hours. They are negotiable. You do not have to accept those terms immediately. Frankly, there’s probably about 30 terms in that contract you never talked about. And so it’s really important. You are not going to blow a deal if you red-line a contract and send it back.

You’re also not going to blow a deal if you ask a question. So these are really important, to understand how to know what you’re looking at and to know when you do need a little bit of extra help. Because sometimes you get a contract that feels wrong. You’re not quite sure how to change it. You may not know what something means. So it’s important to know when those situations come up.

What is a representation and warranty? So a rep and warranty is almost like the bones of a contract. It isn’t the thing that you are promising. If you break a representation and warranty, you have most likely materially breached your contract. Nobody wants to do that.

So reps and warranties are the thing you put out there saying, I’m 18 years old, and I’m allowed to enter into this contract. You say nothing is conflicting with me entering into this contract. All of the content that I’m going to create is mine, and I own it. That’s a huge one. And so if you are hiring someone to create content for you or someone is hiring you, that should always be a representation, that they’re not stealing content. And you should feel comfortable repping that to whoever is hiring you to create content for them.

Another really important one– and this is one that often gets overlooked in sponsored content– your client, as a brand, should be repping and warranting that all of the claims that they’re making– this is advertising dollars– they can back up. So what if you post about– I think we all heard about the energy drink that blew up, Monster and the other one, right? That is going to hinge on the reps and warranties of that contract. Because it’s really important that if a company comes to you and wants you to create content about it, that the claims they’re making about their product are true and they know them to be true.

And so that’s a rep and warranty that I probably add in about 80% of all contracts I review on the side of an influencer. And so it’s important to know that. Because what if something goes badly? You need to be covered. Because how on earth are you going to check and see if that energy drink actually does what it says it does? You’re relying on their representation and warranty.

So those reps and warranties that most people glaze over are actually very important. And they are often the thing that will be the easiest to show if someone has breached a contract. And when we say breach, that means that they violated the contract. And we’re going to get to term and termination, but oftentimes, in many contracts, you can only terminate in the event of a breach, in the event of a violation. And I’m going to talk a little bit more about that later, but this is really important.

So representations and warranties are actually really important and should be read. And you should know what you are repping and warranting to, and you should also know what your client is, as well. So bear that in mind.

Another really good example of this is I’ve had clients who’ve created subscription boxes. For a little while, that was a bit of bucket list item. Everybody wanted to create a subscription box. And so what would happen is companies were coming to bloggers and saying, we’re going to create the subscription box for you, and we’re going to curate it for you. And you’re going to just sell it on your site.

And the most important thing, I’m like, what if someone gets poisoned by eating the food that’s in the subscription box? That is a representation and warranty that’s really important to have. And so nobody wants to think about what if, what if, what if. My brain was trained that way 15 years ago when I graduated law school. And so these are the things that we think about. So reps and warranties are important.

And sometimes they may ask you to rep and warrant something you can’t, because you don’t know. So read them and pull them out if they’re not appropriate.

Deliverables– so the deliverables are really the way that you protect yourself from scope, from the scope creep. It’s the way that when your client’s like, I just need one small video. And then two months later, it’s six videos, and you’ve redone it 50 times. You’ve been paid $500 for something that you should have been paid $5,000, and you are frustrated, and you want to quit. So the deliverables are where you avoid that.

So there’s a few really great ways that you can do that. Number one, if you don’t know your exact deliverables when you enter into a contract, that is OK, all right? So I’m not saying that you can’t enter into an agreement if you don’t know what they are. But make sure you agree to them later. So you can have this handy little clause that you put in that said, to be decided later, and you have to mutually agree upon it by mutual agreement of the parties.

And to do that, timelines are a great example, right? You ever have a client come to you and they’re like, all right, I need this. But I just don’t know when it’s going to be due, and we want to get you on board so you’re ready to go. We’ll agree to the timeline later. I assume many of you have pretty extensive editorial calendars, so sliding someone in can sometimes be really hard. So you’re sort of juggling that act of I want this money and I want this relationship and I want this to go forward, but I’ve got to make sure that I can actually do it.

So if you put a line in there that says mutual agreement of the parties and the parties can’t mutually agree, you can get out of it. And so if you’re unable to put in these important topics, make sure that not only do you say you’re going to agree to them later, but you actually have to agree to them later. So press the client and say, hey, I’m going to need that schedule from you, and I’m going to need to approve it, and I’m going to need it by this date.

And those things are movable. And you can do all these movements by email as long as you have an agreement. So I’m not saying every single time you have to amend a contract, you’re going to need a brand-new contract. You can create these amendments, so long as both parties agree that these emails amend it. And so that’s a really important thing.

Define your deliverables well. Go over and above. Be as specific as you possibly can. And within those deliverables, drafts are really important. Does your client want to read drafts? And what are they allowed to read the drafts for? And if they send a draft, what kinds of revisions are they allowed to give you? And after the post is live, are they allowed to ask for revisions? And are they allowed to ask you to pull it down?

So these are a lot of things that I frequently see missing in a lot of these contracts, because nobody really has thought about that or wants to think about that. And so it’s really important that you define what a draft looks like, how long your client has to respond to a draft. So if you give your client a draft, you can say they must give us a reasonable response within three business days or else the post goes live.

So make sure there’s an or else so that you have something you can do other than sit there and email your client and say, hey, I haven’t heard back from you. This needs to go in. This needs to go in. And then, very last minute, they’re like, it looks great, but we need you to change five paragraphs of it. So that’s really important. And so give yourself that space and put that into your contract, as well.

And so revision– drafts. That’s drafts. Revisions– so what I like to do in revisions, in a specific paragraph that says revisions in the deliverable section, is I like to include a clause that said the revisions are only permitted as it relates to copy or messaging relating to the product, or whatever it is that you are creating. So you specifically say, this is my style and tone, and it cannot and will not be changed. Because they’re hiring you for your style and tone.

If they’ve done their legwork and they’ve done their research, they know what your videos look like or what your posts look like, what your tone looks like, and so they shouldn’t get to change that. And if they want to change that, they should pay to change that. And so that’s another important thing.

If your client comes back to you and says, this revision’s not OK. We want to be able to change everything and all the things. You say, great. That’s an extra x number of dollars. And then you will get the extra x number of dollars or they’ll say, actually, it’s not that important. And you can go ahead and leave it that way. And so deliverables are really important to be specific.

In your deliverables should also be your timelines. And include timelines for revisions and drafts, and include timeline for when posts go live. And so make sure it’s clear. Make sure number of words for a post. Make sure the dates that you get, the marketing materials.

Because a client will often send you marketing materials, say we want you to just get the messaging or here’s some images for you to use or something like that. Make sure you have that date set so that if they don’t send it by that date, you have the ability to move the post to when it’s more convenient for you. And that’s the language that you would actually use. So deliverables are what you sort of live and die by in your contract, the one that makes sure that you are not in that situation where you feel intensely frustrated because you’re constantly getting things changed on you all the time.

Payment terms so this is a really important one. And it’s not just when you get paid, but it’s also how you get paid. It’s whether or not you get paid via PayPal, ACH, check. All of those things should be listed and what your payment terms are. In payment terms, you’re going to see net something. Most of you who read contracts probably know that. That means the number of days they have to pay you after you’ve sent an invoice.

And when do you send the invoice? Do you send the invoice the minute that you sign the contract, or do you send the invoice after you’ve put up your deliverables? That’s more and more time. So build that in. If you want money upfront, make sure that it’s upon execution of this agreement. So it’s simultaneous.

If they come to you and they’re like, well, it takes us 60 days to pay someone, that is not upon execution of the contract. And so make sure, when you’re having– and this is what I’m talking about currencies. This one’s huge. Because if you have something that’s net 60 after you’ve posted something, which may have been 30 days before that you put up, that’s 90 days before you’re getting your money. That’s a negotiation piece for you.

And so you say to them, well, I’m actually net 30. And so since I need to get this done, I’m going to send you the invoice now, upon execution, and then it will be executed before that time. And then you guys can process it, so I can get paid much faster. And these are negotiation points that you can put in place. And so those are important. So knowing payment terms.

We’re going to talk a little later about what to do when your client doesn’t pay, because that is a very common question. Another beautiful thing to put into your payment terms is that in the event you do have to chase a client, all of your fees are going to be paid for. Everybody likes to put the interest in. You can put it in. It’s never going to get paid, even if they’re late. I mean, very rarely. If it’s a very large amount and you’ve gone to court over it, you may get interest. But to try to get somebody to actually pay that is extremely challenging outside of court.

I’m not saying take it out of your contract. I’m just saying know that it’s in there, and it’s probably in there as a placeholder in the event that you have to go to court, which no one ever wants to do. But put a clause in there that says, in the event that you have to deal with collections, in the event that you have to get an attorney to get paid, make all those fees payable to your client. And that’s a clause I often see that’s not there.

So term and termination. So the term is how long is this live. How long does this contract actually apply to me? And so the important thing about a term of a contract is not only when it starts, which is usually upon execution. Sometimes it’s not, though, so you should note that. But when does it end? Is it when you do your deliverables? Is it six months later? Is it when the parties decide to terminate the relationship?

So it’s sort of important to know, because you have certain obligations, under that contract, that are going to actually go beyond termination. One of those, which we’re going to talk about, is confidentiality. And so you may have confidentiality requirements for 10 years after you’ve entered into this contract. So it’s actually really important to know how long your contracts go and if you actually need to terminate them.

People ask me this question a lot. They’re like, I’m not going to work with this person anymore, and so do I need to actually terminate the contract? Yes. You must terminate your contracts. So if you decide you don’t want to work with someone anymore, don’t just stop working with them, but actually let them know. Yes, that is uncomfortable. Nobody wants to do that.

But there might be some obligation in there you don’t even realize, like an exclusivity provision or something about a non-compete or a non-solicitation, something like that. Those are actually really important. And so you want to make sure that you actually terminate that contract so those provisions actually terminate, too.

There is a clause in contracts called survival, which always makes me laugh, because it makes me feel like I’m actually trying to survive reading this contract, because they’re usually at the end. But survival essentially means there are certain clauses that last forever, right? They’ll keep going. Intellectual property, confidentiality, certain other– non-solicitation, non-compete. Some of them survive termination of the contract. You need to know what your obligations are.

I’m going to talk about confidentiality, but I’m in your groups. I hear people talking. I’ve read many of those contracts, and I watch people violate confidentiality left and right. And so it’s really important to understand your confidentiality requirements in your contracts and when they expire. So know that.

Also know how you terminate. And there’s two provisions in a contract that are going to talk about termination. One, it may be it just may self-terminate, right? This agreement terminates upon the posting of the deliverables. And I like those that way, because then they’re done. You don’t have to worry about it.

It may say this agreement may terminate upon agreement by the parties. It also may say this agreement may terminate upon a breach of one of the parties. So what does a breach look like? A breach doesn’t mean that somebody is one day late on an email to you. So a breach, in lawyer terms, like I said, is a violation. And a breach is actually what we call a material breach. It matters to the guts of the contract.

Without that piece, you’ve lost the guts, like what the contract stands for. And so a material breach isn’t if someone’s late by a day. That is not the way that you get out of a contract. It isn’t if you don’t like what someone said to you. It isn’t if someone performed, but not amazing up to your standards. That’s really variable. It really depends.

And if there’s a clause that talks about sub-par work in your contract, that might be. But if there’s not and they’ve actually completed the deliverables, it’s a little bit harder. It becomes a little bit grayer. So understanding how you can terminate. If you have a contract that you can only terminate for a breach, you’re likely not going to get out of that contract without a bit of a fight and also without somebody doing something pretty bad.

That could be like missing of a payment, like a full missing of a payment. It could be if you completely blow your deadline and you just don’t upload the deliverables. Or it could be if they never send you the marketing material, so you actually can’t complete the post. And it would have to be a certain amount of time. You’d want a certain amount of reminders.

How you terminate is also important. There is a provision in a contract that are called notice provisions. This is something no one has ever read. They’re always just blown right by. There are, in most contracts, they don’t let you terminate by email. You have to terminate by overnight delivery in an actual letter.

And so knowing how you properly terminate– and if you think you’ve terminated and you just send somebody an email and you say, I’m terminating this contract. And they never answer you, and you go along your way. And then, all of a sudden, you find yourself in a situation where you think you’ve terminated. The first thing we’re going to look at is the notice provision. How do you provide notice under this contract? That’s what that means.

And so it’s important to know how am I supposed to provide official notice under this contract. This is also the same way with a breach. And so if somebody breaches, if your client doesn’t pay you, you may only be able to tell them that via an actual physical letter that you mail via overnight delivery, and you have to show proof that they received it. Many contracts do not allow for official notice through email. And so know how you have to have that communication with the other parties so you know that you’re properly giving them the notice that they need.

And so understand both your term, how long it lasts, and how you terminate, how it terminates, what happens when it terminates. Sometimes when it terminates, you’ve got to give them all their materials back. And so it’s important to know whether you have to do that. Or give them some proof that you’ve destroyed their materials. So that’s an important thing to understand, as well.

Exclusivity– this is another one. Sometimes you’ll see it, sometimes you won’t. And what does exclusivity mean? It usually means that you cannot form a relationship with another sort of group or party while you’re in this relationship with your client. And so you typically see it in the context of– I’m going to use breakfast for example, right? So you get an amazing sponsorship, and we’re going to say it is with Kellogg’s.

And so Kellogg’s comes to you and is like, we want to work with you for the next year. We love working with you. And we’re going to have this huge, amazing deal, and it’s like you’re in heaven. They say, but we don’t want you working with any other breakfast food companies.

What is a breakfast food? I will eat pizza for breakfast. So does that mean I can’t have pizza? Because that’s not right if I can’t talk about pizza on my site. And so a clear definition of what breakfast means is smart. Narrow those exclusivity clauses. This is another currency. This is a big currency, because exclusivity clauses are dollars out of your pocket, right?

If Kellogg’s says to you, you cannot work with another breakfast company, and you have another company that comes to you that’s maybe– I’m trying to think of what would be– like eggs. That’s a lot of money, right, if an egg company comes like, we want you to create all this stuff, that now you can’t do because Kellogg’s has you locked into breakfast. What does that mean? And so now those exclusivity clauses is really important.

I like to ask for specific competitors. So I like to make them have a list and say, OK, you can’t work with companies one through five. And then, that way, if a smaller company or something else comes along– and another great thing is if you have a good relationship and you’re not sure, ask. I had a situation where many, many, many years ago, I used to work for a blogging conference company who also had a blogging network. This was a really long time ago.

And they entered into a very long relationship. We put together this year long campaign. And it was for a certain– it wasn’t a medicine, but it was sort of an over-the-counter kind of thing that we were talking about. And it had a pretty strict exclusivity provision in it. And one of the bloggers wrote about something that nobody would ever think would be a competitor. It was just another company that sort of was kind of– it was not even close, but it was included in that exclusivity provision. And that blogger didn’t know, and she had committed to two different contracts that she had a really difficult time with.

And so it’s just important to understand. And if you’re in doubt, you need to talk to the existing client that you have to ask them. Because the last thing that you want to– or talk to a lawyer and get an opinion, if you feel like that makes you a little bit nervous. But at least know whether or not that could potentially be a part of that exclusivity clause, because it can cost a lot if you violate an exclusivity clause. And brands don’t take that lightly. That’s one of those things that they will actually be pretty upset about, and that’s the last thing that you want.

So understand your exclusivity. Understand how long exclusivity lasts. So some people– this is another currency– it could just last during the time of the campaign. So if you’re working with the brand and you say, OK, I’m posting for the next month. My exclusivity lasts for a month. Brands are going to want it longer– two weeks after, three weeks after. Sometimes they want it four or five months after.

If they want that, that’s more money, because that’s money that you’re giving up potentially for something else. And honestly, it may not even be money. It may just be content for your site. So if you can’t talk about breakfast foods for the next four months and you’re a food blog, that’s kind of a big deal. Because that’s one of the meals of the day, and my favorite, in fact.

So you want to make sure that you are making up for what they’re asking for, you’re being paid for. So that’s really important with exclusivity, as well. So not only what the category is, but how long it lasts.

Intellectual property– so intellectual property is the big one. Who owns the content, and what does it mean? So when you create something as a contractor– which most of you are, right? Is anybody here an employee that does this in their business? Most people are contractors. If you’re an employee, this is different, because that falls under the work for hire doctrine, and I’m going to explain what that is.

So, as a contractor, by default, what you create is yours. You own it. And so if you create a blog post, you are the owner of the copyright of that blog post. That means you own all the rights to it. And you could do whatever you want with those rights, right? You can give it away. You can ask somebody to pay for it. You can keep them all for yourself. And so what you see when you read an intellectual property clause is you are seeing one of two things.

You’re going to see the words work for hire. If you see that, it means you don’t own your content at all. Your client owns your content. So if you see those words, that means– I’m going to say it again– you can do nothing with it. They own it completely. They could turn it into a billboard in Times Square. They can make it into a cookbook. They could do whatever they want with it.

If you maintain ownership of your content, they’re, then, your client, going to want a license to do something with it. And there’s a lot of things you can do. You can display something. You can perform something. You can publish something. And you can create a derivative work. And so this is the important other buzzword that I want you guys to look out for.

A derivative work is when you take one work and turn it into something else. So the Harry Potter movies are derivative work of the Harry Potter books. JK Rowling got paid many dollars for Sony to let her make those movies. And so derivative works have huge value. And so in your license, I can almost guarantee it, the brand is going to want to be able to create derivative works with what you’ve created. They’re going to want that license.

That means they can put it wherever they want it. They can put it in a billboard in Times Square if you take a beautiful photo. They can splash it all over the internet in Facebook ads, including your face. All of those things. And so it’s really important that you understand what you’re giving away or selling, frankly, because that’s what you’re doing. You’re selling. And so understand how to read that license.

So if you see– typically, I think the most restrictive is what the use is. So you typically should allow your client to display the deliverables for the purposes of promotion on their social channels or their website. That is a really solid license, where you own everything. You’re not going to see it going everywhere and all of a sudden wonder what happened. And so understand what you’re allowing the client to do.

So if you start seeing use, display, perform, public, all those things, knock them out. They’re not necessary. They’re giving them a lot more rights. Unless you’re being paid for it. And if you’re being paid for it, if your client wants a work for hire, make them a work for hire. Just make sure you’re getting paid for a work for hire.

Because you can’t do anything else with it. And they are going to– it’s called exploit, which is just such a terrible word. But they’re going to exploit your content, and that means they’re going to use it and do it in a lot of ways. And they may not, but they have the right to do it, and you no longer do. And so that’s a really important thing to remember.

Along the lines of the intellectual property is likeness. I just got a call from a client who said, I just saw my face on a Facebook ad for this client I did work for, and I don’t remember giving them permission. So I went and I looked at her contract, and sure enough, likeness and biographical release. That means, and depending on how it’s written– and the thing you want to do when you read an intellectual property provision and a likeness provision is understand what they can use.

Likeness is usually your face. It could be your voice. It could be your signature. I’ve seen signature. I’m like, why would you want someone’s– I’ve taken it out. Or your biographical information– your name, where you live. If you have children that you post about, your children. You’ve got to be careful of that, right? The last thing you want, if you post about your kids, is your kids appearing somewhere without you having control over that.

And so understand what portions of your likeness and what portions of your biographical information the client is permitted to use and how they can use it. Not just anywhere in any media at anytime. Have you ever seen that one before? That’s my favorite. I was like, where am I going to end up? But what you want to make sure is how they can use it.

And in this one, in particular, it was in connection with marketing promotion of their goods. So her face was on a Facebook ad, driving people to a post that ended up, at some point, going to her post, but far down the line. And that contract allowed for it. So know what your likeness and know where your biographical information is going, as well.

Confidentiality– this one’s really important. Those confidentiality clauses, they’re like this long, right? They’re huge. And so know what has to be kept confidential. It’s really important that you maintain and understand what the definition of confidential information. If you read nothing else, read that. And make sure that whatever you’re talking about is not included. Sometimes the very terms of the contract are considered confidential. So that is a really important point, as well.

The last point I want to touch on before I leave contracts is non-solicitation and non-competes. Most people have a common misconception that non-competes are actually not enforceable. That’s not true in all states. If you write a non-compete– there are some states they’re not enforceable, and it’s a very state-by-state thing. However, if you write a non-compete correctly, it can be. And if you write a non-solicitation clause, those are typically enforceable.

A non-compete typically means if you do work for one person– it’s very similar to an exclusivity clause– you can’t you work for a whole bunch of people afterwards. They don’t come up as much, but they may come up in other contracts that you read, like a contractor, like if someone works for you or you’re going to go work for somebody else. But a non-solicitation clause, that means you can’t solicit somebody’s clients. And so if you are working with someone and that’s in there, just make sure you understand what that looks like and what that means and how it applies to you.

We’re done with contracts, everyone. Phew. FTC. I told the Mediavine folks about this. There was an FTC update that literally just happened, like, a day ago. The FTC put something up. There’s nothing new, by the way, because why would the government do anything new?

And I think, one, I will happily answer questions about FTC. But I think the most important thing to bear in mind is when in doubt, just disclose. And I’m going to go to the bottom. But lots of people don’t disclose. Why should I? Because at some point in time, the FTC is going to care. And also, it’s the right thing to do.

Transparency is right. It’s the same thing with privacy. It is good for people to know when you have a relationship with someone. Because frankly, it keeps your credibility going. So it really just is the right thing to do. I am very inclined and very excited to click on sponsored links, because I know I’m supporting somebody who creates content for free. And I’m supporting them and making their living and able to give me the amazing content I read for free.

And so it’s just the right way to go. It’s the right thing to do. But I do actually really believe the FTC is taking this very seriously, and they are starting to crack down more and more. And you just don’t want to be a part of it at all, so disclose.

The disclosure has to be clear and conspicuous. #ad always works. You don’t have to use it. You can use plain language. Another thing I want to point out is Amazon Affiliates just changed that language. I will drop that in, as well. So I’m going to see everybody writing this one down, because no one knew about that. Amazon Affiliates just changed the language that you have to use in order to disclose as affiliate links, and they are very strict. If anyone’s ever been banned from Amazon Affiliates, it’s hard to get back. So it’s important that you use the right language.

Clear and conspicuous means my mom, who has a flip phone, understands that that is sponsored content. And so we use the Mom Test. She’s in her 70s. She does not understand what I do it all. But she has to understand that your post is sponsored. That means it’s before the clickable link. Plain language has to be truly plain language. It can’t just be “thanks.” That doesn’t work. People don’t know what ambassadors are.

That FTC language, it’s really good. It’s very helpful. There’s one or two things that it made me pause for a second, but for the most part, I think it’s really helpful and worth looking at.

Late-paying clients– this is, honestly, the biggest challenge, right? So, at some point, this is the cost of doing business as a service professional if you don’t get paid upfront. There are going to be clients that don’t pay. There are going to be clients you can’t collect on, period, end of story. If you’re going to be in business, you just got to get used to it. It sucks, and it hurts, and it’s emotional.

But when you take the emotion out of it, my biggest piece of advice is think about the dollars. If you have a $300 invoice, which I’m not saying is a small amount of money, that might be one that if you can’t get anywhere, there’s not a lot you can do about it. Because chasing that, at some point, the time value of that money just sort of goes away. So look at the amounts.

You can send someone to collections. You can have a lawyer send a letter. I will tell you, if someone gets a letter from me, they’re a lot more inclined to act quickly. And so that works. But you have to make sure that it makes economic sense. I turn clients away all the time who come to me with a dollar amount, and I was like, you’re just going to pay it all to me, and I’d rather you not do that, because that sucks. That’s not right. And so evaluate the amounts.

And lastly, if it is a large enough amount, it may be worth considering going to court over. It really is. Because if you have that amazing fee shifting clause that I talked about– I brought it full circle– you could get your attorney’s fees back. And while that’s frustrating and it’s out of pocket and it’s not great, sometimes it’s just the way you have to go for a large enough dollar amount. But talk to a lawyer about that if you do have a late-paying client about what makes sense.

Don’t do public shaming. That doesn’t work ever. That always backfires. It’s frustrating. I get it. It’s emotional. But it also is business, and it happens. It even happens to lawyers, as frustrating as that can be.

So I wanted to leave a little bit of time for questions. And this is my negotiation work site. We have a whole framework that we do on negotiation. This is me. I would love to hear from you all, and I will happily take questions, if anybody has them. And thank you for listening to the contract talk. [APPLAUSE]

AUDIENCE: Thank you. I just had a quick question, because–

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: Sure.

AUDIENCE: –it seems like, oftentimes, it goes in waves with a lot of the networks or a lot of brands, where they will actually start adding in this derivative– like now this is like a trend, with brands adding in this derivative, as well as the kind of taking your likeness.

Now, in your negotiation, it may be here or may be something you can– how do you push back and/or is there a, well, that’s going to be x dollars times two? How do you push back to that? Because some of these people, I don’t even think they realize what they’re ask–

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: It’s true.

AUDIENCE: It’s just a– you know. How do you push back to that?

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: So you could do it in a couple of different ways. You can red-line the contract and just cross it out, honestly. Just take it out. And when they push back on that, you could say, oh, yeah, I mean, that’s just, that’s not what– my fee didn’t include that. And if you want to talk about that, I’m happy to. And so that, I think, is really effective.

9 times out of 10, when I pull it out, they don’t put it back in. If they want it back in, then we have that conversation. But I would make it so matter of fact, like this is just– you didn’t ask me for this when we talked about dollars, and that’s not sort of the standard contract. So I think that’s the best approach. I don’t want to scare you.

AUDIENCE: Hi.

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: Hi.

AUDIENCE: Sorry. Would you recommend collecting a retainer or advances to help with clients who don’t pay or do not pay?

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: I think those are really great tools. Another really great tool that I find is you don’t– if you’re creating for someone, say a work for hire, you don’t release the intellectual property until you have full payment. So they’re not able to exploit what you’ve done without having that full payment. So that’s another way to do that. But yes, work upfront, even if it’s just like a good faith deposit, is always great. And there’s no reason not to ask for it.

I will tell you, most of my clients do. At least, a lot of them ask for at least half upfront.

AUDIENCE: Hi.

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: Hi.

AUDIENCE: I haven’t done any sponsored posts directly with brands, so I’ve only worked through activators, so I haven’t seen a contract like these yet. Is it usually the companies that make the contracts, or are we making the contracts?

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: I get to say it depends. It depends, honestly. Some companies that are sort of dipping their toes in, they don’t have contracts. And sometimes they come back with hilarious contracts, where you’re like, I’m not sure what this is for. So a lot of bloggers or creators have their own so that they have it. Frankly, when you have your own, it’s kind of on your terms, so it’s going to be skewed a little bit more towards you. And so you don’t worry about knocking out the derivative works, because you’re never going to put it in there to begin with. So it’s good to have one.

Many huge brands will never look at your contract. So it really is a conversation and a question to be had. And also, if, in your negotiations, you find out that the brand doesn’t have one, you’re likely going to have to pay to get one. Because I wouldn’t advise trying to sort of piece one together yourself. So, in some capacity, build that in, because that’s a cost. And so it’s something to think about in your negotiations, as well.

AUDIENCE: Do you guys do that?

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: We do, yeah. Any other? Wow. Ah, you guys love me.

AUDIENCE: Hi.

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: Where’s–

AUDIENCE: I’m right here.

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: Oh, there you are. Hi.

AUDIENCE: Two questions. The first one, with those new FTC guidelines that just came out that aren’t new, but one thing I noticed that they clarified is they said likes and pins.

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: That was my head scratch.

AUDIENCE: OK, because like you can’t disclose a like.

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: No.

AUDIENCE: And if I worked with Jamaica and then Kirsten wrote a post and I pinned her post about Jamaica, because I’ve had a previous relationship with Jamaica, am I supposed to disclose on her pin?

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: Yeah. I honestly was like, I don’t know how a human does this, other than you don’t do the pin is the problem. Because you can’t disclose a like, right?

AUDIENCE: Right.

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: I think if you were to just, in passing, give someone a like, I’m less worried about that. But it is very clearly written there. So I will tell you, I honestly don’t have– there’s going to be a lot of questions and pushback on that. So I feel like we may get some clarity on that, hopefully. But that one was the one that was like, I don’t know how that’s going to happen. Yeah, it’s a strange one.

I mean, I think, at the end of the day, what they’re really trying to say is if you do have a relationship, don’t do anything that is in furtherance of that relationship without people knowing about it. So I know a lot of people are like, well, I have a relationship with Jamaica, but they didn’t pay me for that. But you still have that relationship, and you may not have liked it if you didn’t have that relationship. And so it just may make people pause a little bit more on that. But I think that one would be probably a harder one to enforce.

AUDIENCE: And then the second question was, with travel situations, have you noticed– because I’m in a travel writer’s group, and they were just talking about how magazine writers, editors, newspapers, none of them could care less about disclosing. Their writers go on trips all the time, and there’s nothing said about it. So why is it the FTC is identifying this one level, but not realizing that there is a whole other level of publishers that aren’t disclosing?

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: So that the answer to that, as given by the FTC, is people know that that happens. And frankly, in true journalists, it’s not supposed to. And so I think the issue was, and continues to be, if you look at my mom under the Mom Test, my mom doesn’t know when someone goes on a trip that they’ve probably been given a trip. But if my mom sees something written about in a magazine, she’d probably think they might have been.

And so that’s really– it’s consumer perception, because that’s what the FTC is about. They’re all about protecting consumers. That’s their whole point. That’s why. It’s because social media and the way that this world has grown so much, this whole market has grown so much, we are living in it. But the majority– like how many of you have friends who are like, you do what? Still. I’m married to a lawyer, and he’s like, you do what? They just don’t get it. And so that’s honestly the reason why. 10 years from now, it might be different.

AUDIENCE: We’ve got time for one more quick question.

AUDIENCE: Got it, right here.

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: Oh. Hi.

AUDIENCE: Hey as far as for a work for hire in a contract, say you entered into work for hire with a spaghetti sauce brand and you developed a spaghetti sauce. Does that mean you can never write about spaghetti sauce again? Where are those parameters for work for hire that you don’t want to cross?

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: So those are two different things. Work for hire just means who owns what you created. Exclusivity is who you can and can’t work with. So if you create a work for hire, like if you create– let’s say for the spaghetti sauce company, you’ve created a blog post for them, and it’s work for hire. They own that blog post. They own everything about it– the copy, the picture, whatever you’ve written. That’s different than exclusivity.

AUDIENCE: If you wrote a different type of spaghetti sauce with different ingredients, then you’re fine?

JAMIE LIEBERMAN: Yeah, as long as there’s no exclusivity provision. Like if you have something saying you can’t work with another spaghetti sauce company for six months, then don’t do it over that six month period. Cool. Thanks, guys.

How do you stay passionate when your hobby becomes your job?

Digital content creation offers the opportunity to share our passions with the world, which is deeply rewarding, but just like any job it has its pitfalls. Clients don’t pay on time; internet trolls leave mean comments; and sometimes, the content you work so hard on barely catches an audience.

Over time it can start to feel like, well, work. Sometimes it feels overwhelming. What should you focus on? What’s the best way to divide your time? How can you tell what’s important and what’s noise?

At the Mediavine Influencers Conference in Austin back in 2019, Andy Dehnart of reality blurred took the stage and tackled this very topic. In this episode of Mediavine On Air you’ll hear all about Andy’s strategies, techniques, and tools to help you center your focus on what matters most.

Check out the episode below!

Helpful Resources

• reality blurred
• The Four Tendencies Quiz
• Elizabeth Gilbert’s Framework
• Bird By Bird by Ann Lamott

Transcript

MUSIC PLAYING I just feel so good, good, good. I just feel so good, good, good. I just feel so good.

ANDY DEHNART: Oh, welcome everybody. Thank you so much for coming to this session. I know that the competition is Pinterest, which is basically the– I don’t know. That’s tough competition. So thank you all for rejecting–

[LAUGHTER]

–the Pinterest cult for a moment, at least. You can go back to pinning things in the next 45 minutes. But I’m excited to talk to you today about passion in our lives, and how we work the most effectively, and how we can improve on the stuff that trips us up sometimes.

My name is Andy Dehnart. I publish a site called reality blurred. As the title maybe suggests, it’s all about reality television. And I’ve been publishing it since the summer of 2000, so 19 and a half years of blogging now.

That was back in the days before there were blogs. Or we called them web logs– two words– as I heard someone say yesterday. And most of them were personal diaries, not really about a subject.

So I’ve seen this industry change, and grow, and shift over time. And it’s been really exciting to be part of it and really, ultimately, a beautiful experience at first to take my passion for reality television, turn that into something that I create myself, that I control. I’m kind of a control freak. So I love to make everything mine and look exactly like I want it to. And it’s amazing.

And then also, sometimes, making a little bit of money from it, too, and being able to discover– and that was in the BM days, before Mediavine was the– a little bit of money. And then now, obviously, it’s become more sustainable and more than just something that can pay for itself. So yeah, all really good, and really exciting. And I think it’s such a privilege to be able to do this kind of work and for all of us to be able to share what we care about with the world.

That said, over the 20 years– probably over the time that you’ve been doing this, however long that’s been– sometimes the storm clouds come in. Sometimes there is an occasional lightning strike or two. So my goal today is to talk through some strategies, tips, techniques, tools that have helped me weather those storms– if you’ll excuse the cliche– over those 19 and a half years.

So let’s just talk first about the stumbling blocks and then get those out of the way. So these are basically the things that come up over time and that just trip us up. Maybe they’re actually weeds that we need to get rid of. Maybe they’re actually beautiful flowers that we think are weeds, and we still have to get over the fact that they’re not just weeds that we need to pick out. So let’s talk about some of those and what they’ve been, for me, over time.

The first is this idea of expectation and obligation. At first, when I started publishing, it was so exciting. I could just do this whenever.

And then people started showing up and reading it. And I’m like, oh, now I have to do this every day, where I set a set a schedule? And now people are expecting me to– when they go show up at work on Monday morning at 9:00 AM, there better be a new post up for them. And if I’m five minutes late, they’re never going to come back, and the whole thing is going to collapse– not that I’m prone to thinking in that kind of disastrous way. I am.

[LAUGHTER]

So also that sense of obligation, maybe– that now it’s the thing that’s controlling me, instead of me controlling it. Back to the control freak thing, I want to be in charge at all times.

The failure to keep up with everything and everyone. I have seen this, definitely, over these two decades or so. But even just in a few months or weeks, there is new ideas, new technologies, new things that people are trying, new ways of thinking about the work that we’re doing. And it’s like, how do I do all of that in addition to what I’m already doing?

And it’s like, I can never keep up with all of it. So how do I decide what to do and what not to? And that’s what we’ll talk about today.

Perfectionism– I’m a perfectionist. Any other perfectionists in the room? Ooh, there is a lot of us. Yes.

[LAUGHTER]

And I think perfectionism, for me, goes hand-in-hand with procrastination. I procrastinate a lot, so I can definitely set myself up for failure, so I don’t have to be perfect. And then that just creates a miserable cycle that is no fun for anyone, including me.

The fear that it will all suddenly fail and fall apart– you look at your Google Analytics one day, or your Mediavine numbers, or your traffic. And all of a sudden, it’s a little lower than the day before. And it’s like, it’s broken. What happened? I can’t do this anymore. I’m not going to be able to feed my cats anymore.

[LAUGHTER]

This is the end of this experiment. It just feels like, is this real? Is what I’m doing held up by anything? And that’s true, again, even after almost 20 years.

What I call the black hole of advice– how many of you have done this, where you see something, or you Google something, and then you find someone who has advice? And then you follow. And then there’s another person, and they suggest this.

And then you can buy a course for that, and then buy this workbook. And then, all the sudden, now you’ve spent $3,000 in six days. And you’re like, and what did I learn out of this? And even when it’s not that dramatic, it can still be– there’s a lot of advice out there in the world.

There’s also, oddly enough, a lot of people out in the world giving advice about how to teach other people to give advice. So now we have this weird tail-being-eaten-by-the-head situation where it’s like, if we’re all just learning to give advice to each other, what are we actually learning? So that can be a problem, too.

And then, finally, what I call the perils of popularity, which is the sense that, once you have readers– and what popular is for any of us is going to be very different, depending upon what you read about, how long you been doing it, et cetera. But when you have people actually reading, now there’s this sense that, oh, I was doing this thing that interested me or that I thought would resonate. It has resonated. But now I need to serve those people, and they are going to tell me what they want to see. And I need to make sure that I’m doing everything everyone needs.

This can manifest– someone sends you an email with a complaint about something. And you’re like, oh, no, I need to fix this. I have screwed up. All my audience is going to hate me.

Or a negative comments can trigger this. Or it’s just the sense that, what does my audience want? What do they want? What can I do to serve them?

And– at least for me– I found that, the more I chase that, the less successful I am. I’ll be like, oh, everyone’s going to love this. It’s going to be great.

And then it doesn’t go anywhere. And then the thing that I’m just interested in and do for myself– that can sometimes get a lot of traction. So the perils of popularity can you leave us being pulled and pushed in various directions.

So this is a picture of me on location with Survivor in 2008. I was rehearsing a challenge, which the press got to do. This is something I got to do as a result of blogging and writing my website.

You’ll notice here that I’m tied to other people. That’s me hanging off the end of this. And that’s a camera filming my butt–

[LAUGHTER]

–dangling there. And this is kind of how I feel sometimes– is stuck, and just like, I can’t move. I don’t know what to do. Are other people holding me back? Do I need to cut the rope? What are we going to do when we’re in this situation where we feel like we are just dangling.

So I have advice, and emojis, and a line for Mrs. Doubtfire– shout out to Mrs. Doubtfire. So let’s talk about some solutions, breaking these up into various categories. And have some resources, and tips, and websites, and stuff to share with you along the way.

Let’s start with leading with your strengths. That’s a photo of me on my dad’s lap, playing with our Commodore 64. Anyone have one of those?

Ooh, nice. Awesome. And you’ll notice that it worked with cassette tapes. I don’t actually know what I was doing there– probably writing about reality TV, or Sesame Street, or something.

I was at a workshop recently where the person leading it said, think back to your childhood, and think about the thing that you did when no one was asking you to do anything. No one was requiring you to do it. No one was telling you how to spend your time. And then see, does that connect all with what you’re doing today?

And so I thought about that for a moment. And I was like, no. When I was a kid, all I did was sit around, and watch TV, and read the life section of USA Today, and create newsletters for my family.

[LAUGHTER]

I’m like, oh, wait. Holy shit, that’s what I do now.

[LAUGHTER]

That’s my actual job. I have turned the thing I loved all along into a day-to-day occupation career thing that actually helps support me and those aforementioned cats. So leading with your strengths is all about knowing what you’re good at, and then doing more of that, instead of doing more of what you’re not good at. So I have a piece of advice for how to figure our way through this.

The first is StrengthsFinders, the book on the right over there. This is from Gallup. And basically, you buy the book. It’s $10 or $15 bucks on Amazon. And it comes with a code to take a quiz online– takes about 30 or 45 minutes.

And at the end, they give you your top strengths out of a group of 34. So instead of Myers-Briggs, where you’re I of 16 categories, here you’re one of several million possibilities. And it’s saying, here are the things that you’re best at.

What’s really cool about the book is that it says, if you have this strength, here’s how to interact with the world, and also how other people can interact with you. So it gives you a good sense of how to deal with your strengths and what to do with them. That’s very much about strengths based on skills, whereas the VIA Character Strengths Survey, which is the second bullet point there– that’s all about the strengths relating to your character, to your personality, to the way you maybe interact with other people.

I mean, that’s definitely a part of StrengthsFinder, too. But it’s getting us a little bit more into the personality zone, instead of the skills and output zone. But both together will give us a lot of good information and tell you, here is the stuff that you’re really good at.

With StrengthsFinder, they actually lock the strengths off into four different categories. And it turns out that my top strengths are in a category called ideation, which means just coming up with new ideas. That’s where most of my top strengths are. And then I have one in the communication category. I don’t have any in the executing category–

[LAUGHTER]

–which is totally me. I would love to sit around and think about ideas all day. And then, when I actually have to do it, it’s like, ugh, OK. I eventually will do it and find a way to do it. But I can realize that my strength is actually in thinking about these things and trying to figure my way through ideas.

It’s also fun to do if you’re in a group, or in a project with other people, or with your team, especially if you graph it there. It’s so fascinating to see, oh, we have no strengths in executing. That’s going to be a place that we’re going to really struggle, so we’re going to need to figure out how to do that. Or here’s where all of our strengths are. And how can we align people based on that?

The last resource that I recommend here is a book called The Four Tendencies. Has anyone taken The Four Tendencies quiz? What’s your tendency?

AUDIENCE: Well, I know that my husband’s a rebel. That’s what I remember.

ANDY DEHNART: Yes. Yes, the rebel. So Gretchen Rubin divides the world into– or divides people into four categories based on how we deal with expectations– internal expectations, and external expectations. I’m a questioner, which means that expectations, for me, are all about trying to figure out. I have to do the research. I have to ask questions. I have to spend time figuring out what all of my options are.

There are obligers, people who will absolutely automatically do what other people want them to do. Rebels will do what no one wants them to do, including themselves. They’re the most challenging to deal with. I know some rebels, so I feel for you.

Honestly, taking this and figuring this out has revolutionized my way of thinking about relationships in my life, both professional, and also personal. Once my husband and I did this, and we found that he is an obliger and I’m a questioner, it made everything make so much sense all of a sudden.

When some family member says, do you want to do this this weekend? He will say, yes, immediately. And I will say, what? No, hold on, brake pedal. We have to look at our calendar. We have to think about this. What about–

I have to look at all of the options first, and know, and feel comfortable. And that’s just my tendency come on into play. So it’s really useful just to think about, how are you going to deal with expectations? Do you need external motivation? If you’re an obliger, it’s going to really help you to have accountability partners in the world.

By the way, obligers don’t really have good accountability partners with their significant others or spouses. They become merged in with who you are. So you’re not going to be obligated to yourself. So thinking about where those expectations are– or if you’re somebody who questions, just build that into your schedule, that I need time to plan to do research.

OK, the next– embrace who you are and what you want. And there’s a unicorn picture there. I guess that’s a unicorn.

[LAUGHTER]

So the idea here is that I want you to start thinking about what you do and what you want out of this. When you started your site, what was your goal? Where is it now? Is it changing? Is it going to be changing in the future, or something like that.

The best framework for this that I have come across is– Liz Gilbert’s framework for what she wrote on Facebook– how we spend time in life. She’s the author of Eat, Pray, Love, and several other books, including one we will talk about in a moment. But she breaks down our work and how we spend time into four categories. And I bet you will notice that your blog, your site, falls into one of these categories.

First, hobbies– hobbies are just the things that we do that give us joy and pleasure. We might not be good at them. They might not give us anything externally. But they give us some internal satisfaction, and we do them, and they’re fun.

Would anyone say that your blog or your site is a hobby at this point, so something that you’re doing? One person? That’s OK. And maybe that’s just because people, traveling here– you might think of it as something a little bit higher than that.

The next category is jobs. Jobs are the things that pay us money that we need in order to pay our bills, in order to get food to pay our cats– or I mean, to feed our cats.

[LAUGHTER]

It’s basically the same thing though, right? They are demanding, and they want it.

Jobs– some people have multiple jobs. Some people have one job. And sometimes, it’s good to think, is your blog a job?

Is it something that just brings in money for you? Or is it a career? Is it a job that you love? Is it the thing that really does give you fulfillment?

And I’ve noticed that, over time, my site and reality blurred is switched between these two categories sometimes and felt like– some days, it’s kind of jobbish. And then, some years, I think it’s definitely moving more solidly in that career direction.

But it’s good to know. It’s OK to have a job that you don’t love, as long as it’s giving you money and giving you the thing you need. And then you can spend your other time on your hobbies, or your careers, or on– the last category– your vocation.

Vocation is your calling. It’s the thing that you will do no matter what, no matter what anyone else says. You’re going to always do it.

For me, I think that’s writing. Obviously, you saw me writing on a keyboard before I knew what letters were, probably. And that’s the thing that’s going to always be there. It doesn’t matter if someone never publishes another word that I write. I’m still going to be doing it.

So thinking about, what is that in your life? What’s the thing that you’re here to do? And how does that make you feel? And does it connect it all to the work that you’re doing on a day-to-day basis?

So in addition to Liz Gilbert’s post on that– which is right here, if you want to go read the full thing for yourself. That’s a short link. I highly recommend her book Big Magic. The subtitle says it all– Creative Living Beyond Fear. It’s basically a great book for anyone in any kind of creative profession about how we get over the stumbling blocks that really do prevent us from moving forward or from doing the things that we really want to or we really care about.

And it’s just a wonderful reference to pick up and read parts of. You can read it all the way through, or you can return to it over time. She just has, I think, advice that feels like it gets right into the core of who I am and the problems that I sometimes come across.

For anyone doing any kind of writing, I highly recommend Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. The subtitle, Some Instructions on Writing and Life, is one that I think undersells the book. It’s so beautifully written, so engaging, so fun to read.

But she also gives you some incredible specific, pointed advice for writers, including– and I think this is the one that I’ve taken away the most– is to give yourself permission to write what she calls a shitty first draft, to allow yourself to just do it, and let it be bad, and then go through and do editing. Then go through and make it better– because sometimes, if we try to make something perfect right away, it’s not going to be that way. That perfectionism thing is going to get in the way. So just allow yourself to try a little bit.

So those are the two resources there. So let’s move on to the next category, which is identifying what’s important. What’s really important is Schitt’s Creek, the sitcom.

[LAUGHTER]

If you haven’t watched it, that’s your homework for when you return. It’s on Netflix. If you don’t have Netflix, it’s also streaming for free on Pop TV’s website. It’s amazing. It’s just wonderful, charming, and everything that I need in life– also just a constant source of wonderful gifs.

So when we think about what’s actually important in our lives, there’s some questions that I want you to think about and ask. First, if your blog is a job, here’s some things to think about– or if it serves job-like functions in your life. Number one, what’s my minimum viable audience?

This is a phrase that comes from Seth Godin, who talks about this idea of thinking about, what’s the smallest group of people that I can address and really meet their needs? And the reason you do that is because, if you try to be everything to everyone and as popular as you possibly can immediately, you’re going to fail at that, because that’s impossible. But if you really target, and think about that niche, and think about, what’s that audience I need to be viable, to produce the revenue that I want to produce the kind of content that I want– what is that?

And what’s going to happen, once you actually reach that audience, is that it’s going to expand. They’re going to tell other people. Other people who are peripheraler, periphal– I can’t say that word right now– that are related to that, that come in from the periphery, it will grow past that. But that’s the egg. That’s the seed in the center. And you have to think about that first.

Next is, am I getting work done, or am I wasting time? Especially if this is a job for you, if this is something that’s just about making money and really just producing some revenue behind the scenes here, think about that. What am I actually doing right now? Is this something that is work that needs to be done, or am I wasting time?

And a great question to ask as part of that is, what makes me money? This comes from Paul Jarvis. I will recommend his book and newsletter in just a moment. But basically, the idea is, if you’re going to do something, do it because it’s going to make you money, not just because it’s there to be done.

Pinterest, next door, good example– not that I’m still jealous of them, and all of their popularity, too. But Pinterest is great, if it works for you, and if it’s making you money. I’ve tried it. I’ve played around with it. It just doesn’t drive any traffic for me. It’s not worth the time or money.

And maybe I realized that it’s not my strength. Maybe I can learn a little bit something about it. But is it making me money? Is it worth that time? If not, let it go.

If your blog is more of a career or connects to your vocation– some questions to think about here. Why did I create this in the first place? Why is it there? How does my vocation manifest in my work? And how can I make it manifest there more?

If you’re deciding what to write, maybe write something that really does feed your soul, instead of just feeding the Google search engine or the keywords that you think need to be met. You can still find the keywords for the thing that meets your soul needs. But you can connect those two things together.

Do the Marie Kondo thing. What sparks joy for you? If it sparks joy, you keep it. If it doesn’t, you thank it, and throw it away forever.

Sparking joy– whatever. You can replace joy with another word, or define joy however you want. But just think about it like, it’s essentially what works for you. If it doesn’t work for you, stop doing it, by all means.

Just one more thing on the questions– so in the workbook, I have an entire page on page 31 of questions and reflections to think about. I suggest doing this by writing it out by longhand, just because that changes the way your brain processes information. It slows you down, but it just gives you a chance to reflect on some big-picture ideas. If that is useful to you, use them. Maybe come to one or two of those questions once in a while when you need a little bit of reflection.

So the next tool here I’m going to talk about is this friend, the Eisenhower Matrix, or the Eisenhower Box. How many of you encountered this before? Oh, a couple of you. Great.

It was developed– I don’t think Eisenhower himself drew this box. But there’s a quote where he talked about doing things that were important and urgent. And then someone created this template out of that.

The idea is to think about, in your life, what are the important things, and what are the not important things? And then, what is urgent, and what’s not truly urgent? There’s a copy of this also in your workbook that you can use to actually write in. I actually don’t sit down and actually write things out in this, although some people do, and it can be really useful. But I just like to keep it in the back of my head to think about, what exactly is useful here, and what am I doing?

So if something is really, truly, important and urgent, that’s the thing we’re going to do right now, because– and is it truly urgent? I think that’s a question, though, that we need to ask ourselves often. Is this urgent, or does it just seem urgent? Because things can seem urgent, especially in our era of notifications and dinging bells all the time.

If something is not important but it’s urgent– so it’s demanding attention, but it’s really not important– that’s the thing to delegate to yourself or to your team. When I try to delegate those tasks to my team, they just stare at me and ask for more cat food, because they’re not a great bunch of co-workers. They’re just really demanding.

[LAUGHTER]

So my team is me, and me alone. I don’t work with anyone else. But I can delegate something to myself and say, I will work on that next week, or I have a block of time this Saturday when I will work on that. But if you have a team, think about giving those tasks to them.

If something is not important and not urgent, why are we dealing with that? Let it go. It’s bad. It’s that brown color. It’s yuck. We don’t need to even pay any attention to it.

And if it’s not urgent and it’s important, that’s something that you really need to make time and space for, and to really just give yourself those moments, to think about what– these are usually the things that really matter to us in our lives and that we really want to be doing. But because they’re not urgent, they’re not going to get our attention. And that can be frustrating.

Sometimes, that can even be something as simple as just going out for a walk to clear your head. And it’s like, I don’t have time to do that right now. I have to do all this other stuff. But those walks can be extremely important. I’ll come back to that in a second with some resources.

So this is the Eisenhower Matrix. I just created a another version of it that’s also in your workbook for you. I switched the axes to make us think a little bit differently. But I broke it down into things that must be done for your site, and things that are optional, and things that you love to do, and things that you dread doing.

So breaking it down into these categories can help us think about, what should I actually prioritize? What should I give my time and attention to? What should I delegate to my cats?

[LAUGHTER]

If it must be done, and you love to do it– amazing, yea, win. Let’s do that. If it’s optional, but you love to do it– that’s probably where creativity and vocation really lie– go for it. Enjoy that. Embrace that creativity. And find time for that.

If you dread doing it, but it must be done, that’s– again– the time to delegate to your team, to yourself, to external people who know how to do this, to experts. And if it’s optional and you dread doing it, just say no, and let it go. And don’t proceed past go.

OK, some recommendations here– so I mentioned the idea of just going on a walk for a second. I highly recommend Manoush Zomorodi’s book Bored and Brilliant. The subtitle is, How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self.

She talks so well and just in some fascinating ways about how we have essentially cluttered our minds full of things to do. And as a result, we don’t have time or space to be creative in the same way that we used to be. And so she gives us a lot of good advice there. This was born out of a podcast that she did called Note to Self, which I still highly recommend to go back and find it, and to listen to the episodes about being bored and brilliant. She works through some different exercises there.

I also recommend Paul Jarvis’s book. He was the person to asked that question, what makes you money? That actually came from his Sunday Dispatch. He writes a once-a-week newsletter that goes out to people who subscribe to it. And he’s really great at talking to people like us– to solo entrepreneurs, or people who are individuals running small businesses.

And he just came out with a book called Company of One which, as you can see from the subtitle– Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing in Business. As you know, our society and our push from venture capitalists and from everybody else is grow, grow, grow, get bigger, bigger, bigger. And his thing is, why do that?

Why not just find out what actually works for you, what gives you the kind of money or income, or just makes you feel good about things? And that’s enough. So he has lots of good strategies and tips, both in his newsletter, and in the book.

OK, the next thing is about focusing your attention and awareness. I want you to try to be as focused as this cat is, clearly, because that person– who’s being annoying– is not bothering it at all. I have a thing with cats, as you can see.

[LAUGHTER]

There’s several more cat things coming, so I just want to prepare you. So the first thing here is just actually being focused.

I think many of us have maybe read about the idea that multitasking is not real. Our brains are not capable of it. I know this. I’ve read about it. I’ve read the research. I still try to do it. I do it all the time, and try to catch myself when I’m doing it, because your brain is just switching back and forth between things and not being as good at either of those things as it would be if you were just focused.

So how do we actually focus? I will suggest briefly that I think mindfulness and meditation are wonderful, especially for those of us who are staring at screens all day. I used to think of mindfulness and meditation like, I have to clear my mind, and sit in a lotus position, and be zen, which is impossible. So how can I do that?

And then I was introduced to Dan Harris, the journalist from ABC News, who wrote a memoir called 10% Happier about having a panic attack on air and then finding his way to meditation as a way to deal with that. And the great thing I love about his work is that he talked so much about meditation in just a really simple way. And he basically says that meditation has a marketing problem, and that we’re not talking about it well. He now has an app called 10% Happier, and then a new book, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics–

[LAUGHTER]

–if you are that person, which is very much the how-to book. But I’ll just paraphrase some of his advice, which I think is so, so valuable, which is the idea that doing one minute of mindfulness most days can start to change your brain and change the way that you deal with the world. And what that means is just sitting, focusing on your breathing– just sitting there, your brain will wander away, start thinking about something that you have to do. And then you’ll notice that. And you’ll bring it back and start focusing on your breath again.

And what Dan says that I love is the moment when you notice your brain has moved away– that’s not the failure. That’s the win. That’s us training our brains to be focused to be really on the center line when we need it to be.

A couple other things that I found to be useful for helping my focus– this comes back to knowing yourself. I work really well when I’m around other people. I belong to a coworking space for that reason. So I know I can’t go take a nap, or sit on the couch and just watch TV, because there’s other people watching me. And I am more motivated in that environment.

That can’t always be the case, like when I’m in a hotel room. So this website, Coffitivity, I sometimes pull up. And basically, it makes the sound of a coffee shop come out of your speakers, including people talking and clanking glasses. And I feel like I am now suddenly being looked at by people, even when I am sitting in my hotel room. So that is really useful for me.

If you also like noise, but not coffee shops, this is a fun app called Noizio, where basically you can create your own sounds that will make you happy as you work. You probably can’t see this, but this person has chosen summer night, deep space, a sailing yacht, and blue whale, and mixed those together and created their perfect soundscape for their working. I know that blue whales are motivational to me, so that would be great. And then you can also buy sounds if you don’t want to just mix your own.

If you need just to get the writing done– if you’re like, I just need to do this now, but I need some motivation– this is a great website. It’s called a Written? Kitten!. I’ll show you the web– the URL is writtenkitten.net. I’ll have it up in a second.

Basically, you set a certain number of words. And then you pick either kitten, puppy, or bunny. And every time you get to that number of words, a new picture pops up and rewards you. And it makes you just so–

[LAUGHTER]

You’re typing away. Since of course, this is just in your browser, it’s not saving. So just be mindful of that. Copy, and paste it, and save it frequently. But it can be a nice way just to get through. I got to get through this post, so I’m going to get some motivation here.

If you work better with consequences instead of motivation, I have some advice for you– or a tip– which is this website, called Write or Die.

[LAUGHTER]

As you can see, you can set various things– a word count, words per minute, a time goal, a grace period– for how long you can pause. If you fail at this, you can set different consequences, like a horrible noise coming out of your speakers, spiders running across your screen. There’s other options. But my very favorite option here is kamikaze mode. If you turn that on, and you don’t meet your own goals, it starts deleting what you wrote–

[GASPS]

–backwards, one letter at a time. So there is some motivation.

[LAUGHTER]

I’m motivated by cats, not by that. But if this will help you, please do use it. So here is the URLs for these various things. 10% Happier, by Dan Harris– he has lots of products under that banner. Coffitivity– Noizio is the app. And then writtenkitten.co is the site, or writeordie.com, if you want to check those out.

OK, a few more things, then I’ll take some questions here. So next is just know that it’s OK to seek out help. At the beginning, I talked about the black hole of advice. And I think that, sometimes, it’s good to just– I’m just going to focus on what I’m good at, and what I want to do, and make it work.

But it is OK also to reach out when you need help from other people and to know when to press that button. It’s helpful to sometimes think of it as a button– you’re actually calling for help– rather than the first thing you do, though. Do I really need to ask somebody else for this? Do I need to hire somebody to do it? Or is it something that I can do? But when you do need that help, reach out. Let experts handle things for you.

And then, finally, give yourself permission to try and to fail. This is probably not a good image to choose for failing–

AUDIENCE: It’s not. [LAUGHS]

ANDY DEHNART: –because I don’t want you to get on a fun ride and then have the chains break. Terrible image– forget the metaphor. But the idea is the same. Give yourself permission to just try things out, and see what happens. And also, give yourself permission to not be good at them and to fail at them, whether that’s the just crappy first draft that we were talking about earlier from Anne Lamott, or just trying a new type of thing on your site and seeing if it works or not.

Over 20 years– both on my site, reality blurred, and just in life– the biggest moments of success that I’ve had have always come after my biggest failures. And I do improv as a hobby– very much a hobby– in that framework there. And that’s something that we practice all the time– is how to fail, and just enjoy it, and have fun with it.

And it’s something that our brains like really don’t like doing. But when we do fail at something, we learn so much. And we can grow from that.

So be OK with the fact that sometimes, you’ll do something, and it won’t work. And then you’ll figure out why, and you’ll do it better next time. Or it will help you. I promise it will.

So that is all I had. Thank you so much for your time and attention.

[APPLAUSE]

We have about eight minutes for questions. So I’d love to answer anything– or have any tips or advice, if anybody wants to share, that came up for you as we were talking, I’d be glad to talk about those. Yes?

AUDIENCE: Thanks for the book recommendations, by the way. That’s really helpful.

ANDY DEHNART: You’re welcome.

AUDIENCE: I’m just curious. With your site, as long as you’ve been at it, do you have some examples of things from that quadrant– or things that must be done and you dread to do, or any things like that– that you just personally experienced?

ANDY DEHNART: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it’s changed so much, too. Sometimes, it’s just the– well, since we’re at a Mediavine conference, there’s lots of great advice for how to optimize posts.

I have 15,000 stories, going on 16,000 now. And so just thinking about that, I’m like, that’s important, but it’s overwhelming. And I can’t possibly think about how to do that. So I have to break that down into what really matters. What are my top things? How can I figure out what to focus on?

I’d say that I love the creation part of it. I love writing some stories. I do a lot of interviews. I’m a journalist by trade, also, and do freelance journalism in addition to writing on my site. And so I do a lot of interviews for the site.

I hate transcribing so much. It’s just the worst thing. Thankfully, now, that’s one of the things I’ve found to outsource. There’s a website called rev.com, which– for $1 a minute– will have a human transcribe it. Now they have, for $0.10 a minute, a machine will transcribe that, which is good enough to go through a transcript.

So I just found ways to– that’s the thing I dread doing. I love this interview. I love talking to the person. I can’t wait to share what they have to say with my readers. The middle part is the dread. And so I have to find a way through that.

And for me, it’s just been a tool. That’s totally worth $3 to let a machine transcribe 45 minutes or– my math is wrong there. But anyway, you get the idea. Yes.

AUDIENCE: So I was a food blogger for a really long time as well. The motivation and the process behind food blogging has definitely been changed over that time. I’m assuming it’s the same in the reality TV world, because reality TV has changed tremendously in that time. Is there anything that you keep going back to to keep yourself motivated on the subject matter?

ANDY DEHNART: Yeah. Let me answer your question. I actually think I don’t know what’s going to work really well, because so much of my traffic is driven by what people are asking questions about or looking at. And sometimes, I get surprised. And I’m like, oh, people are interested in that show, that kind of thing.

And there’s just so much TV. And it changes. There is something like 400 or 500 new scripted shows this year. And there’s probably two or three times that many unscripted shows. It’s impossible for me to even cover anymore.

So what I have to do is go back to that thing of, why did I get into this? It’s, I love reality TV. I’ve been watching Real World since I was in high school. That show changed my life. Thinking about it, even just being in the city, I’m like, the Real World house from Real World Austin is right over here.

[LAUGHTER]

We can go tour it later, and just see if anyone who’s in that restaurant now knows the piece of real estate that they’re actually sitting on and how amazing it is. But it’s trying to connect with that passion again, and just remember, this is the reason that I’m doing it.

And not every story, not every post, is going to be that for me. And I think I often come back to, what interests me? Because if it interests me, it’s probably going to interest someone else. Maybe not, but I’m going to try it anyway.

AUDIENCE: The older– Food Network shows that we reviewed or recapped on Food Fanatic, and we don’t do it anymore. But sometimes, I know that it’s rerun somewhere ’cause, all of a sudden, we’ll get a flurry of comments. And I’m like, what is happening?

ANDY DEHNART: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: That show’s, like, six years old. That actual episode is six years old.

ANDY DEHNART: Yeah, exactly– just like that one, single thing. And I would love to write about more. But there’s also too much, sometimes.

If you tried to– like, this week, Food Network premiered three holiday baking shows. How do you even keep up with that? And that’s on one night. So it’s a lot.

And that’s why I think the prioritizing is really important, and just thinking about what does matter to you. Great question. Over here, and then– oh, sorry.

AUDIENCE: I’m sorry.

ANDY DEHNART: That’s OK.

AUDIENCE: I was just going to follow up with his question –

ANDY DEHNART: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: It was, I’m curious to know, what are the things that you did that 19-year span that really pushed you forward? And I guess I would say, every career has their big spikes and stuff. So what were those for you?

ANDY DEHNART: Yeah. That’s a fantastic question. I think a lot of it tended to be external to me, and then noticing how that affected me.

So I started as just someone who loved television and was just writing about it. I also got fired from another job recapping the Real World. And I wrote about that on my site several years ago. So I just needed a place to do this. And so it started as this one thing.

About eight years into it, I applied repeatedly to join the Television Critics Association– which provides some level of access to talent and producers at events that it puts on– as a television journalist. I got rejected multiple times. And once I actually got accepted, and my criticism and my writing was validated externally, that just changed my own mindset– like, oh, maybe I’m good at this. And so I hate to say that external validation helps, but it does.

And now, 10 years after that, I’m on the board of directors at the Television Critics Association. So I’ve gone from just writing about TV and before-and-after work in my spare time to now helping to shape what TV critics are seeing and doing. And that’s really amazing and surprising to me. So I think that’s been one thing that I found that’s helped.

I think you’re both asking great questions. And it’s hard to pinpoint, just because that time period is so long. And I think I’m so much just focused on sometimes the daily grind of it, too, that I need to stop and step back and focus on my intentions, think about what I actually want out of this. Because even here, I’m like, what’s going up for today?

I have to write my newsletter. I have to do this. And it’s like, when do I have a chance to just actually think? When do I have a chance to be bored and just let those ideas come in?

So yeah, I wish I had a better answer. But I appreciate you getting me to think about this and helping me find my way through it. Yes?

AUDIENCE: So my blog, it wasn’t exactly– I started it from a hobby. It’s DIYs, crafts. But it wasn’t actually a hobby when I started. I started with the intention of hopefully making money off of it.

And now sometimes, though, because– I mean, I love to create. It really is– what drives me is creating. But sometimes now, creating feels like a job. So how do you bring your passion back to your passion? [LAUGHS] Does that make sense?

ANDY DEHNART: Yeah. One, I think, just knowing– one, that if it is a job for you, and you want to turn it into a career, reconnect with the things that got you into it in the first place. What were those things? Some of those questions in the workbook might help you find your way to that. But just, what was it that gave me that spark of joy originally?

What are the things that really got me excited about this? And how can I find my way back to those? Or how can I find new things that do something similar? Or it’s also just being OK with the fact, I think, that sometimes jobs just have parts that suck.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS] Yes.

ANDY DEHNART: And that we don’t exactly– and so all of our work is going to be, sometimes, things that are monotonous, or not that thrilling, but are necessary. And just balance those with things that do give you that full spirit and that really do connect with your vocation, passion, hobby, whatever it is.

So I think we’re out of time. Thank you so much. Glad to answer questions in the hall before the next panel comes in. But thank you again.

[APPLAUSE]

Without further ado, please allow us to introduce Mediavine University, where we teach content creators how to build sustainable businesses. 

Our debut course, Growing Traffic, is now live and available to purchase. In honor of that, we’re celebrating with Mediavine’s VP of Support Heather Tullos. 

She and Jenny will be dishing on all things Growing Traffic and Mediavine University (MVU), talking about how the course is set up, the different topics that are covered and what’s up next. You don’t want to miss it!

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Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] JENNY GUY: Hey. Hello. Howdy. Hi, long lost friends.

It feels like it has been about 500 years since we last saw each other. How are you all? Hello. The last time that we were all together for an episode of Teal Talk it was February and cold, and we were having a terrific conversation with two of the founders of Black People’s Recipes as part of our Black History Month programming.

Now March and the whole of Women’s History Month has passed us by and it is already spring. The days are longer and all kinds of things are blooming from flowers to seasonal allergies. And I am suffering on the regs.

But I just wanted to first say thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to join us for another episode of Mediavine’s Teal Talk. I’m with you as always as your host, Jenny Guy. Our goal with all of the programming we put out at Mediavine is to provide education in service of our company mission statement, which if you don’t know what that is, here it is, helping content creators build sustainable businesses. It sounds so noble.

And it is noble. We’re very passionate about it around here. And I have to say that our topic today falls absolutely in line with our Mediavine mission. And it’s really been a dream of mine for a whole lot of years. So I will try to keep any squealing or pinching myself off camera, so y’all don’t have to watch.

So that’s right. If you missed any of the times in the last few days that we blasted it out over social media, we have officially launched Mediavine University, where we teach content creators how to build sustainable businesses. Yes! We need an applause track.

OK. Our first course of many is available for purchase right now, and the long title is What I Wish I Knew When I Started My Website About Growing Traffic. And while this one is designed for content creators earlier on in their blogging career, we have many courses coming up that will be perfect for wherever you are in your publishing journey. Our goal with this is to have to be meeting people in different places wherever they are, whether it’s they’re just getting started or they’ve been doing this for many years.

In fact, part of the reason that we are here today is to ask you, our always incredible audience, what courses and instructors do you want to see on Mediavine University? So say, hey, let us know in the comments. We are taking notes. My incredible team is writing it all down.

So tell us, we want to know as always. We always ask you guys what do you want to see? What are your next ideas? And that’s what we’re here for. So please put that in there.

And now that I have been yapping away, and a lot of yapping, it is past time to introduce my wonderful guest with me today, is Heather Tullos, Mediavine’s VP of Support. Heather is not only one of the featured instructors in the growing traffic course, but she and I worked together to plot the course out. So it truly would not be happening without her.

So I want to welcome you Heather and thank you and the whole support team for all of your support in bringing Mediavine University to life. So thank you. They support they’re good at supporting. That’s what they do.

Let’s talk growing traffic and be you, and whatever else comes to mind. So yay. Hi, Heather.

HEATHER TULLOS: Hi. I’m excited to be here. It’s been a minute since we talked. Was it Halloween?

JENNY GUY: It was. It was the last time we were costumed. And we did set a precedent with that. So I don’t know, maybe that should be our thing, to just always have costumes.

I don’t know. We’re wearing spring costumes today. These are our costumes. The weather is nice.

OK. If you have questions for myself or for Heather, drop them into the comments. I’m going to do a quick bio for my friend, Heather. She is the VP of Support at Mediavine. She authors the food blog Sugar Dish Me, and is the keeper of all the dogs. She has been optimizing site since before Mediavine had health checks and works best with 94 tabs open. I think that is a company standard at Mediavine University. If you don’t have a lot of tabs open, what are you even doing with your life?

HEATHER TULLOS: What are you doing?

JENNY GUY: Not enough.

OK. So let’s start with an easy one. What makes you so excited about Mediavine University? And I’m assuming that you’re excited.

HEATHER TULLOS: Yeah, I’m excited. I feel like this is a thing that you’ve talked about, I’ve talked about, the support team has talked about in various iterations for as long as we’ve worked together. So I’m super excited that it’s finally launching. Yay. Shout out to the marketing team for getting that all put together and a huge high five to support team for helping us to create all the content in the first course.

I think the thing that makes me the most excited is that we put together like one place with a dedicated path for people that are looking to grow and expand, or really just are at the very beginning of their journey into blogging as a business. Over the years I’ve spent so much time talking with people at conferences or retreats or over email, or in the last couple of years I know you and I have worked a lot of virtual events together, and a lot of times I feel like I’m just rattling off like 1,000 overwhelming things. And we’ve never really had one solid place to point to for resources or answers or information.

Jenny, you and your team have always done such a really amazing job of putting together free resources for just about everything Mediavine. But there’s never been a place to point people to if they maybe haven’t been with us for the whole journey, or they’re not already a Mediavine publisher, or they just need a more organized format. So I think this is going to be a game changer.

JENNY GUY: Absolutely. I was actually thinking about that the other day how we’re asking our audience here to tell us what things they want to learn about from us. I mean, our whole job is bloggers. That’s what we do every day. That’s what we’ve done for years. And whether it’s virtually, or all the emails that the support department has, or now that we’re finally starting to get back out in conference the people that come up and ask questions, we’ve just had so many people just ask, what do I do?

And now we have the ability to put things together because the blog is a great resource. But it’s a guided tour. It’s a way to go through step by step–

HEATHER TULLOS: Only because on the blog you have no way to search. You have to know which button to push. You have to know exactly the thing that you’re looking for unless I send you articles in the right order. And then you don’t have action items from a blog post. You don’t have a takeaway or a worksheet or a dedicated way to track what you’re doing and how you’re changing things.

JENNY GUY: So every one of the things that we are teaching in Mediavine University, it was really important– just like we do here on Teal Talk is we want action items when we end. What are your key takeaways? What do you want to walk away and do immediately? And every one of the different course modules that Mediavine University has a one-sheeter that is listed with all of the–

So let me step back and say for those who are wondering now how to get involved with Mediavine University, how to access it and some of the other details, I’m going to say that really quickly. Here it goes. First, we’re going to drop the link to join us in the comments, and it will also be on the Resource Guide that we share at the end of the episode.

Someone said, thank you for doing this, love your hair. I’m going to assume that that’s Heather’s because her hair looks amazing right now. But I will also say thank you. I think these–

HEATHER TULLOS: Jenny’s hair also look fab.

JENNY GUY: Mediavine University runs on a platform called Mighty, and it is where all of our courses will live as we put them out, and it’s also where– one of the aspects why we chose Mighty is the Mediavine University community will live and it’s where you can crowdsource, interact, talk with other people at different phases in their community.

So the first step before– it’s absolutely free. It’s to just create an account. And so go to Mighty, create an account, put your picture in there, tell us why you’re there, tell us how long you’ve been blogging, interact, say hi. And that’s your first step.

And then you can explore what courses we have available. Right now it’s just the one, and it is What I Wish I Knew When I Started My Website About Growing Traffic. And it is $85 and it’s really designed for content creators who are at the beginning of their journey.

And I wanted to ask Heather this, why did we decide to start with this course?

HEATHER TULLOS: There were a few reasons. Like I said before, I wanted to have a place to point the people to, the people that I talked to that have a beautiful beginning, but maybe have a ways to go, or people that are working towards building their blog as a business. They’re trying to figure out how to get to that level where I can actually have a paycheck. And growing traffic, it’s really like one of the very first obstacles that you face as a blogger.

So like where do you find that audience? Who is going to reach your content besides your mom or my mom? Because she will definitely read your content. How do you grow the thing that you just built? And so we really just wanted to address that part first.

JENNY GUY: Yes. And we will have some courses that are on Mediavine University that are for our publishers, for sure, and some that are more for people who aren’t yet our publishers who– and this one specifically is for people who want to be our publishers and aren’t there yet with traffic. So if you have a friend out there that’s wanting to get started that’s been asking, they’re not sure what to do, this is a great place to send them.

So Heather, will you tell us what different topics we cover in the growing traffic course?

HEATHER TULLOS: We cover a lot of topics in the growing traffic world. I will say the growing traffic course is great if you’re not our publisher yet, but I think it would also be great for somebody like me that has not actually launched a website in a hot minute. I started blogging in 2011. So if I started all over again, I feel like I know all the right pieces for content creation, but the way that I got my audience when I saw the biggest growth is a little different than I would find my audience now. The industry has really changed since I saw my traffic kind of boom.

So my approach would be different. So if you’re starting a new website and you feel like you don’t remember how you found readers, then this also might be good for you.

So the topics that we cover are things like diversifying traffic sources, making sure that mobile is first, SEO building blocks, that’s super important– we all know that. Site navigation is a big deal– and then user experience and the metrics behind it, making database decisions, and site speed.

JENNY GUY: So that’s a pretty broad– there’s a lot of things there. And I wanted to say I think that even if you hit a wall, I think it could be a good resource for you. If you feel like you’re doing the things and you’re getting frustrated, this could be a great resource for you to say, I’m just not sure. And there are some great tidbits with each one of the modules to say, oh, man, I might not be doing that exactly the way. And it’s different. I mean, for as young as the blogging industry is, how many times does it change like seismically since you’ve been doing it?

HEATHER TULLOS: I mean, we always are having to shift and change and adjust. And I also think to that point– sorry. Remember when I said, I have all the dogs? They’re barking right now.

JENNY GUY: You do have all the dogs. They have feelings.

HEATHER TULLOS: They have a babysitter, but he’s not on task.

JENNY GUY: Yeah. You were saying that actually before we started, which I thought was such a profound thing, was that we go blind to our own websites. We just don’t see the things we’re missing. And that makes it really hard to self diagnose. It’s part of the reason why it’s so good to have a blogging network, a group of your mastermind or whatever so you can say, this is what I’m trying to do. And they could say, well, this is what is happening. So it’s different. It’s hard.

Heather, you’re muted.

HEATHER TULLOS: I muted myself because–

JENNY GUY: Dogs, dogs, dogs.

HEATHER TULLOS: It’s better momentarily.

JENNY GUY: That’s good.

HEATHER TULLOS: I was just agreeing with you.

JENNY GUY: Oh, OK. Great. Perfect. Great. I wanted to hear audible agreement. So I appreciate it.

OK. So one of the ways I know that– and I’m going to go off script a little bit like I always do. One of the biggest ways that people say to grow traffic, or at least in the past was a way to grow traffic, particularly for a lifestyle blog, was Pinterest. And I don’t know that I want to dive into those controversy laden waters, but Pinterest has not been as great a performer for– a lot of the people we hear they say it’s not performing the way it used to.

So why is it so important to diversify your traffic sources?

HEATHER TULLOS: So Pinterest specifically– I know that every time this pops up in the Facebook group, which hello all my Facebook friends. I’m your moderator.

So this conversation I feel like it comes up a lot, especially recently, and people are trying to figure out, what in the world is going on with Pinterest? What are we doing here? And there will always be a few people that are just finding a lot of success with it. I don’t know if it is because they’ve just been at it for a long time because their content really is very Pinterest friendly content.

I think it kind of varies. But for most people I think we feel like we’re spinning our wheels. And I know for me, Pinterest stopped being fun a really long time ago. I enjoyed it as a user and then I didn’t enjoy it as a user.

And so it was really hard for me to make myself want to do that. So I really shifted focus to SEO, where I felt like I had more control, and I do enjoy creating content. It’s the thing I like. Google at least gives you a roadmap to follow unlike other social network platforms.

So having diverse traffic sources is really important because it lets you pull readers from various places. You don’t have all your eggs in one basket. You want to kind of spread it around a little bit. But I think it also gives you the opportunity to be creative because the way that you approach something that is really hitting on Facebook is really different than the way you approach something that is content you created for Instagram or an extension of something you did for a TikTok, or all the different ways that you get people to your website give you the opportunity to approach your content and be a little creative in a different way.

JENNY GUY: We’re going to talk a little bit more about that when we get to the module that you taught. Yep, we’ve got a question for our fellow content creators out there. I want to know how long you have been blogging. And I know that people celebrate different anniversaries kind of like when people talk about how long they’ve been together as a couple. Was it your first date? Was it when you said you’re boyfriend or girlfriend?

Was it when you decided to do it as a career? So let us know in the comments how long you’ve been publishing.

And this is something that a lot of people might not know. I’ve heard it said, but I would love to hear you explain it. I have heard that traffic from different sources doesn’t monetize in the same way. Can you explain that?

HEATHER TULLOS: Yes. I think it’s important to know if you didn’t know it let that be the thing you take away.

Holy cow, 18 years.

JENNY GUY: That’s a long freaking time. Your blog can be sent to the army.

[LAUGHTER]

HEATHER TULLOS: Sorry, that just totally distracted me. That’s amazing. High five. I can’t see who you are.

JENNY GUY: High five.

HEATHER TULLOS: That’s awesome.

So yeah, different traffic monetizes at different rates. Its advertisers just spend money on different traffic sources. But I think it also has to do with the way readers engage for those traffic sources, or sometimes when you come in from social media, sometimes you’re still like in an iframe.

So it’s harder for advertisers to know who they’re reaching because you’re operating inside like– when you click through from Pinterest, you’ve landed on the blog, but you’re still in a little Pinterest bubble.

So it’s harder for advertisers to understand who your readers are and if they’re spending correctly versus search traffic. Search traffic monetizes really well because it is much easier for advertisers to know who they’re marketing to and also what your reader is looking for.

There’s more information for them to go on. They’re not totally flying blind. Email and direct traffic also monetizes really, really well.

If you have dipped your toes into the Web Stories pool, if you’ve ever had a Web Story, take off and be really successful and then you’ve actually managed to get that traffic to your website, not just to the Web Story, it usually monetize– high five if you managed to do that. It is awesome. But that traffic spike will monetize really well because it’s direct traffic and it is also not Safari traffic.

So it’s Android traffic, which monetizes at a higher rate because Safari traffic is already– it’s all the privacy things.

JENNY GUY: All the privacy things, right.

So the other thing is they behave differently, right? The traffic from the different places tends to behave differently. Not always. It’s not absolute.

HEATHER TULLOS: When you think about how you– so put yourself in the shoes of a user on Pinterest. If you’re on Pinterest and you’re pinning because you still actually enjoy it and you’re maybe saving ideas for a party you’re planning or saving recipes for dinner ideas or whatever else people do on Pinterest, your goal is to stay on Pinterest. It’s not really to leave that platform and go to a website.

So you might click through the pin and verify the link, but then you probably just go back to where you started. If you’re looking at a recipe you might scroll down, you might read the ingredients and be sure you have them on hand, then you’re going to go back to Pinterest and keep looking. So most of the time people do not leave Pinterest and stay on your website.

It’s the same thing with Facebook. Think about the last time you opened an article on Facebook. Did you read the article and then think, wow, I’m on a really amazing engaging website? I want to stay here for an hour and read all the things. No, you just go back to Facebook and mindlessly scroll some more.

JENNY GUY: I have to see if those people are really breaking up. Hold on.

HEATHER TULLOS: I know.

JENNY GUY: All the people you went to high school with.

[LAUGHTER]

HEATHER TULLOS: So the way that advertisers spend is really relative to how that reader is using the site, what the behavior is like.

JENNY GUY: OK. That was very helpful. So I’m actually going to go through each of the little modules here because some of them– so we put together the modules sitting in front of a fireplace outside of Phoenix, and we were sitting there typing in front of this fire and we decided that one of the things we had to talk about was mobile. How does that relate to traffic at all?

HEATHER TULLOS: Mobile. I mean, I feel like we say this a lot. So I don’t feel like it’s going to be like a revelation right now. But if it is, then I’m glad you’re here and I’m glad you’re listening. Please take this with you.

Mobile is where your readers are. Mobile traffic is important. Looking at your site on mobile, it should be the first thing you do, not the last thing that you do. So we look at our sites on desktop all day.

We really experience our most recent content. We experience our home page. We’re the site owners. You know where all your stuff is and you also are not looking at things you created three years ago. You probably don’t need to.

Most of the time your readers are not experiencing your site that way at all. They’re on a tiny device. They are hitting your home page as a second page view, not a first page view. So they’re finding you on your content first, and it’s probably not your most recent content unless you are a really masterful marketer.

And so it’s probably content that’s been flying around and being shared for a while. And so it is really, really important to focus, well, not all of your energy, but the majority of your energy on creating a really excellent mobile experience for your readers.

JENNY GUY: Yep. And that is also a reason why we threw in the last module in the course, which doesn’t necessarily seem like a great connection, which is site speed. Why is site speed? And I think people know, but I do think it’s helpful to hear it because we do spend all day looking at our desktops. And I think that it’s easy to get trapped and forget that your content looks different on a phone, and that’s where your readers are.

So site speed, why? How does that connect to traffic?

HEATHER TULLOS: I mean, the title of the course is, What I Wish I Knew. So what I wish I knew at the beginning. If I could go all the way back to the beginning and not have had to fix all the things that I broke, I was learning along the way, site speed would be one of the things I would put at the top of my list of stuff that I wish I’d done correctly because for anybody that’s had to fix it, it’s a pain in the ass.

And it feels technical and it feels unapproachable. So if you just had a few tips and tricks about not putting Instagram widget that’s loading a whole bunch of unoptimized images with every post that nobody’s ever seeing in your footer, I wish I had known those things sooner. They do really impact user experience, and so they really impact your traffic.

JENNY GUY: Yes. Every time someone says, why is site speed important, it’s the same thing that you always say with mobile, think about it as a reader. When you’re clicking on a search result in Google, how long do you wait for a site to load before you click the Back button? It’s not long. That’s just the truth. There’s another bajillion results, I’ll just go back.

HEATHER TULLOS: Well, the site speed is important. Your reader does not know what they’re waiting on to load. So if you have something really cool but really slow that is not lazy loaded that’s at the bottom of your page, they don’t know what’s holding up the program. They also don’t care. There are a bajillion other search results. They will find another option.

And the other thing that I think for me really impacts mobile experience as a user is when somebody wants me to opt-in to email before I can even see the content. Before I can even read the first sentence, you’ve got a thing that covers the whole screen on mobile. It frustrates me as a user.

JENNY GUY: Is that an automatic back button? Because I’ll do it. I’ll be like, nope.

HEATHER TULLOS: So if you’re checking your Analytics and you realize your bounce rates look a little high or your session duration is looking a little low,”? I would check your opt-ins because opt-ins are another thing that are often cached for you as a user. So you forget they’re there unless you visit from an incognito window because you’re not in survey.

JENNY GUY: Translate.

HEATHER TULLOS: OK. So if you don’t visit your site from a private or incognito window, you won’t be served. Like most of the time opt-ins have like a 30 day cookie or you won’t be served that opt-in once you’ve got it all set up, at least not for a while. So you can kind of forget what the experience is like. It’s like you set it up, you check it, you think OK, that looks good, it works, and if you’re not served that thing again, you never see it on your own site, you kind of forget it’s there.

So visiting your site from a private window on your phone is ideal. A lot of times in Support we will take screenshots of things. We’re like, well this happened. And they’ll go, oh, I forgot that was there. I didn’t mean to do that.

JENNY GUY: Yeah, exactly. And the other thing that we talk about a lot– and actually Nicole Johnson teaches our module on mobile first, and she has some great tips in there for what to look for. But one thing that we’ll say is that when you’re visiting your site on mobile from that incognito window, make sure that you can X out of everything that you might have that’s an opt-in popping up. You have to. If it’s not easy to get out of, people will just leave.

HEATHER TULLOS: Try to figure out how to exit, you think like, how do I get out of here? And most of the time you experience that when you click through sites from social media.

But, again, that’s another good tip is to use your site. If you are generating Facebook traffic, go to your business Facebook page, click through the post that you are sharing on your phone, and see what that experience is like for your readers.

Is it slow? Is it weird? Is it buggy? Does the font look funny? Did you forget that you implemented something that slides in from the side that you’re like, wow, that wasn’t cute?

JENNY GUY: I was having some wine the other night and I said yes, and then the things– yeah, you don’t know. You never know.

The other thing, definitely like make sure that you can cross out of anything. And we’re going to do a little plug here. But if you’re looking for an opt-in solution that isn’t a pop up, we have an incredible thing if you’re a Mediavine publisher and you aren’t running Grow or you are running Grow, you should be. But there’s something called Spotlight Subscribe, which doesn’t require readers to X out of it and gets a very similar effect with opt-in rates. So check that out if you haven’t already. I can say with absolute certainty that it will help your opt-in rates. We’re running it on a medium on corporate side and it’s magic.

HEATHER TULLOS: It also doesn’t cost you anything. I have paid for various other email opt-in solutions. And it’s not going to be the same rate of return as said pop up that’s in your face covering things. I guess that may convert some readers, but it is definitely better for the people that will just back right out of it.

JENNY GUY: It may convert. It also may piss off. So try some Spotlight Subscribe.

OK. So we have a couple of different courses or modules in here that are about SEO and site navigation. Obviously everyone talks about SEO. SEO is related to everything.

So why is it important we did basically some building blocks in this course?

HEATHER TULLOS: I mean, again, going back to the beginning of what I wish I knew, I think early on when I started blogging, I would hit keywords and I had no idea that was what I was doing. I didn’t really understand it. I was just like, oh, cool, people are reading this content that I created. I didn’t really realize why or how they were coming to me, and I really wish I had understood that sooner and better because I could have grown faster, which is the point of this course.

So I think it is a really nice beginning understanding of how to correctly structure your content, how to sort of write for SEO without losing your own personal voice.

But I think we were talking about before we hopped on here, my sister has a site and it’s a hobby for her. She dabbles, but eventually she might want it to be more, and she doesn’t know what to hyperlink the keyword text and link to herself. She doesn’t know how to correctly use H1, H2, H3. So those are all things that people that are just sort of learning to navigate a blog, they got put it somewhere. Everybody needs to learn.

JENNY GUY: I think that sometimes actually– and this is another story about Nicole, who’s one of our instructors. She blogged for a long time and she actively ignored SEO because it was so freaking overwhelming and there are so many courses and so much stuff on it. All the marketers are talking about it with all the acronyms, and it just feels like it’s so much that I’ll deal with that at another time.

HEATHER TULLOS: And I think it’s definitely a thing that people make feel unapproachable. And I think one of my biggest takeaways from just working with Mediavine as a publisher, but also working for a Mediavine, is SEO it’s not a complicated order. It’s not. It’s best practices and putting those into place and doing them over and over and over again and creating content, and just doing more of that, but also creating good content.

So when I think about those times of growth with my own personal website, the times that I have seen the most growth were when I was checking off all those boxes. I was really publishing very regularly five times a week. I was really doing my best to connect with my readers in my writing, and I was also managing to hit the little SEO checkboxes. And it pays off.

JENNY GUY: It does pay off, and it’s a long game. But really the vast majority of SEO best practices are rooted in Google best practices that are to make a better experience for your readers and to give them what they want. It’s not like a magic button that you can push. That’s not it.

HEATHER TULLOS: Yeah. And it’s a format that lends itself to answering questions. So it helps me create content. When you sit down in front of your computer and you think OK–

For me, I’m like, OK, I made this cake. What do you want to know about this cake? It was good. I liked it. I like cake. It was like, what else do you want me to say?

Google helps you to answer questions. You’re like oh yeah, I do know more about this cake than just that I like to eat cake.

JENNY GUY: Yeah, exactly. It sets it up in a way it’s easy for your readers to get through to find the things that they want and that they need, and you’re answering the questions in advance before they ask them.

What if I want to make this delicious cake gluten free? What if I don’t drink alcohol? What happens if I over beat? Why do I need to use this kind of butter? Stuff like that.

HEATHER TULLOS: Yeah. And if I think about all the things that I had to go back and Band-Aid after learning how to do things correctly, and then I was like, oh, cool, I have like two and 1/2 years worth of content that I need to fix. And I see people talking about fixing their content all the time in the Facebook group. People are always like, well, half of these posts that I’ve made and they’re stupid now and I don’t know how to fix them.

So that was really what we were thinking when we put the SEO course into this what I wish I knew in the context of growing traffic. Obviously SEO is a really excellent way to grow traffic, but also obviously if you just do it right from the beginning, you’ll make your life way easier.

JENNY GUY: Yeah. It’s your firm foundation on how to have a good place to grow from when you go forward. And we have an SEO course. The navigation course is taught by Mediavine CEO Eric Hochberger, and the SEO building blocks is taught by Mediavine cofounder, Amber Bracegirdle. So some really great content in there.

We have a comment that I wanted to share, which is my subscriptions for email quadrupled when I first heard on Spotlight Subscribe and I love how you can see which posts they were on when they did subscribe.

That is amazing. I can’t see your name. I think you’re coming from the group. But if you want to tell us what that taught you, what you learned, that would be incredible.

And I actually have a question for our audience, which is, what has moved the needle for you in terms of growing traffic? What has actually done it? What was the thing? How did you reach the Mediavine threshold, or how did you put yourself up over 100,000 or whatever it was, whatever milestone it was? What made the difference for you? What did you invest in that paid off?

What I wanted to say was the long title of this course is, What I Wish I Knew When I Started My Website. And Heather has been saying that, that we hear that all the time because we have quite a few bloggers on staff at Mediavine. In fact, the cofounders were content creators. So all of that has kind of come through, which is a lot of people and a lot of rooms and a lot of places across the country in the last however many years saying, I wish I’d known that when I first started my blogs. I wish I’d done that.

Which is why we started the course with that title, which is why I thought of it, which was like, this is the stuff that we wish we could go back in time and do. And our goal is to try to help everyone out there, be able to do it sooner than us.

OK. So we’ve covered why it’s important to diversify your traffic and mobile first. We did a little SEO site speed. The last two, one of them is your module that you teach in the course, and the other one is Christina, who is one of our Premier account reps.

So it’s all about metrics and data. And there’s a lot of that happening in this course, and you are the unofficial data queen here at Mediavine. So why do you love data so much? And I hear you say it a zillion times, use your data to make your decisions for your business. So why is that so important?

HEATHER TULLOS: It’s so important. So unofficial data queen is for sure. Christina is really, really, really good at nominated most likely to make a spreadsheet and solve your problems with it. She’s very good at data. I think I’m good at translating it into easy action items.

I think if you were running a brick and mortar business, you would not guess about what inventory you needed on your shelves. You would not guess about what store hours you needed to be open. You would know. You would know the answers to those questions.

And I think we should approach our digital businesses the same way. Google Analytics will tell you a whole lot. And I think when Nicole and I used to do lunch and learns, which hopefully one day we will manage to get back to those because they were super fun– but one of the questions that we would ask people is like, who opens your Google Analytics? And you look at sessions or page views or whatever number makes you happy, and you might like bop over and look at real time Analytics and then you’re like, OK, cool, all right–

JENNY GUY: Which is fun. We’re not going to deny it. It is very fun to be like there are 75 people on my site right now. This is so exciting, and you want to say hi to all of them. Totally understandable.

HEATHER TULLOS: And so you’re like, OK, well, I guess I’m doing good. But I think Google Analytics is a really insanely powerful tool. It will do a million zillion things. You can set it up in 100 ways.

But even if you’ve just got like the basic standard implementation, I think it’d be really hard to be like, OK, here’s a bunch of information. I don’t know where to look. I don’t know what to do with it. But I really think that is the information that tells you what you need to know. It helps you not guess. We should not be guessing.

You don’t have to guess at making good decisions for your websites or for your readers. The numbers are always going to point you in the right direction. You just have to figure out where to look.

And I kind of see this, again, in our Facebook group. People will just be ruminating. My traffic dropped. Is anybody else seeing their traffic drop? The Analytics will tell you why your traffic dropped.

Crowdsourcing is not going to answer your question because your traffic is different than my traffic is different than her traffic. If you just figure out how to poke around in your Analytics details and you notice like, oh, well, it was my search traffic that went down and it was this post that was different, and then you can use a keyword tool and see like, oh, well, somebody else is beating me now, and then you can just look at who’s beating you and figure out why. What are they doing differently?

And so I think it’s really important to figure out how to extract the information and then also apply it. So you can’t fix it if you don’t know what’s wrong.

JENNY GUY: OK. Let’s say that your traffic goes down and it’s not just a day. Let’s say you’re seeing it over the course of a week or two because it is important that whatever it is, if your traffic drops real quick and then bounces back up, there’s different things happening here. What do you do if I see my traffic start dropping?

HEATHER TULLOS: So the first thing I would do if I noticed that my traffic was dropping, I would compare year over year. Look at the same time frame last year. So look at this week. There are a few tutorials– one of the managers on the support team entered them into an actual help article for me.

But it was definitely a post in our Facebook group where I sort of laid this out. If you’re in the group you can search it. But you want to look at whether or not there’s a holiday. Do you normally have a spike on Sunday and then a dip on Monday? That’s one that we see a lot. It’s pretty common.

A lot of times people will be looking day over day. And that can help, but it really depends on what you’re looking at. Most of the time you need to be looking at a bigger time frame. So if you feel like your traffic is down or you see that graph kind of dropping, compare it to the same week last year.

Another tip that I have is to make sure that you’re laying the same days of the week. So you want to be comparing like Sunday to Sunday, Monday to Monday, which means every year you have to kind of shift the dates a little bit. You’ll see an increase in traffic as well as an advertiser spend when there’s a holiday, and then there will be a drop off after that.

So I think just troubleshooting those little details can always get you pointed in the right direction, and then you can flip to the acquisition section of your Analytics. And you can see, OK, well, what’s the difference in sources here? It’ll tell you where you’re down.

Are you down across the board? Is there something going on in the world? I know like in 2020 crazy increases in traffic. So in 2021 traffic was down, but for a lot of people, it was just like returning to a little more normal. Wasn’t really down, it was just that people are doing more than baking bread.

So just go step by step. Compare week over week, compare month over month, compare year over year. Line up the dates, line up the days of the week, make notes about the differences. Google Analytics will tell you if it’s a post that is different, and then you can see what to fix.

After you look at all those details, you might just notice, well, this post it was performing really well for me and it was all Pinterest traffic. And Pinterest is not doing great right now. So what can I do to maybe corner this with search traffic? How could I optimize this post to get readers in a different way?

JENNY GUY: Yes. And appreciate the caveat that you shared, and just to caution again, we all know that absolutely nothing has been normal for the last two years at this point. So when you’re going into your Analytics and trying to set a baseline, it’s hard to have a baseline when literally everything is just completely upside down. So establish the baseline with that caveat.

Fantastic. We actually had a great comment from our friend who had quadrupled their email sign ups from Spotlight Subscriber. I just wanted to say they say, seeing which post readers subscribe from shows where I get the most engagement and loyal followers, and then I create more of that type of content.

HEATHER TULLOS: Yes, snaps.

JENNY GUY: I figured you’d probably snap on that one. That’s one of Heather’s favorite things to do is to see where– and you break down in your course module– because Google Analytics is very overwhelming. You go in there and there is so much. I don’t know, but you go in and very much isolate like how to do more than just look at your active users on your site and your page views, but how not also just to go into a rabbit hole of I could spend six years learning how to use Google Analytics and still not know at all.

HEATHER TULLOS: Well, because if you’re looking to grow your traffic, you need to know what your readers like and where those readers are coming from, and then how to create more of it. So just like this person is looking at where they’re getting the most subscribers and then they’re creating more of that kind of content, you can look at where you’re getting the most– if your goal is to increase your search traffic, what kind of content are you getting Google traffic from, and can you create more of that kind of content or adjacent content?

You can dig into keyword research. If you’ve got said cake that’s performing really well on Pinterest and it’s really nailing it for Pinterest, is it the format of the pin that’s sending you the content? Is it just like a really Pinterest friendly recipe? You can try to duplicate it.

JENNY GUY: Yeah. You can start to figure out why. I mean, sometimes something will go viral, but when you have something great that’s performing really well, try to figure out why it is and how you can do more of it because it works.

HEATHER TULLOS: And the data will help you do that objectively. You don’t have to just be like, oh, I don’t know, I guess it was a good cake.

JENNY GUY: Which it could have been really good cake. We’ve talked a lot about cake and now I want cake. So that’s happening.

OK. But sticking to the task at hand, your lesson in traffic, beyond just in growing traffic, beyond just data, it’s about user experience. Can you tell us how user experience in working to optimize that is so important from your traffic, particularly when you’re just starting out or looking to make moves to turning your website into a business?

HEATHER TULLOS: Yes. So obviously creating a great user experience is really important, but especially when you’re trying to make that great first impression, it’s when you’re building your traffic that is first impression territory. It also translates really well if you look at the percentage of new versus returning users. I think for most of us the majority of our readers are new users. And so you want to make sure that the first time they visit your website that experience is good.

So we get a lot of emails and I see a lot of discussion where people are talking about user experience. And obviously we want readers to keep coming back. But most of the time these conversations sort of gravitate towards like what we think or what we feel or our own personal experience, which I can’t emphasize it enough. The way that you use your website is not the way that your readers use your website. It just is not.

And so using the data to kind of navigate that user experience and figure it out is really important. It gives you the answers. You don’t have to guess.

JENNY GUY: Because like you said, just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean your readers don’t.

HEATHER TULLOS: It’s totally subjective. What is good user experience? And I think Christina talks about this in her course, which is just like, what are your goals? Your goals and my goals are probably not the same.

So if your goals are to have x amount of traffic and make x amount of money and you don’t feel like working with brands, so display ads are the ticket for you, then your goals might look different than somebody else that really likes to do brand work. And so traffic is still a goal, but they might go lighter with advertising placements if they’re in that space.

It’s like you just have to decide, what is your goal with your website? And then you can use that to kind of let the information guide you. So if you notice the session duration on a post is really low, you might notice that it’s not that big a deal because it’s all Pinterest traffic and it’s going to be kind of bouncy anyway.

But also you might notice it’s search traffic and the session duration is kind of low, and are you losing people? Could you be doing something to pull them in? So the information gives you the answers?

JENNY GUY: OK. That is very helpful.

All right. So we are almost out of time, but I kind of wanted to spend our last little bit of time together doing a bit of a preview on what we might have coming up for Mediavine University. And I know that you both as our VP of Support and a long time blogger yourself, I am guessing you have some pretty terrific thoughts on what type of courses we can create. And I would love to hear what your thoughts are.

HEATHER TULLOS: We have some really good courses coming up. There are going to be some courses that are specific to revenue and RPM. So I think that will be a really good one. And there will be some courses about Grow.

What am I missing? What else did we talk about doing?

JENNY GUY: Yeah, absolutely. We have coming up that is super specific to earning through display advertising, which we know some things about, and the person that is going to be teaching that course is our CEO Eric Hochberger.

So we’ll have that one coming out. It’s a perfect course for Mediavine publishers. It will be loaded with action items and help you navigate through all of those different ways to maximize your earnings. So that’ll be coming up.

We also have in two weeks from today announcing our next episode of Teal Talk. It’s going to be on Tuesday, April 26 at noon Central. And we’re going to have Andy Dehnart from the website Reality Blurred, who is actually our next upcoming professor for Mediavine University, and he is bringing to bear his over a decade of publishing to teach a course in writing reboot. So people who have been publishing for quite some time have a lot of that content that we were talking about that they may want to optimize to change.

And it is going to be a five day course that’s actually going to be virtual, a workshop style. So we’ll have 10 people sitting together. He’s going to teach, you guys are going to work together on optimizing your writing, your About page, how to start from scratch with an article, how to optimize an existing article, all of those things will be covered. And as I said, it’s going to be for people who’ve been publishing for quite a long time and are looking for maybe a refresh there.

So he will be here to talk with us about that on the next episode of Teal Talk; and then we have Eric’s course coming up; and then after that Heather said Grow. We’re going to talk about engagement. But the sky’s the limit, so please let us know what you would like to hear about. We are open into the comments down there.

Tell us where you’re struggling, what you would like to learn from and who you would like to learn it with because Mediavine University we will be doing some courses that are staff courses, like the one that is currently up there where we have several different Mediavine people teaching, then we’ll have some that are with just one person teaching like with Eric’s course coming up, and then we love using our external publishers because we know for a fact that our publishers are experts in so many different areas.

And we know that we’re not the experts in everything. So we would much rather share the expertise of our incredible publishers and have everybody grow together. So let us know if you have an idea for a course or a instructor that we definitely should talk to. We would absolutely appreciate that the most. And if you are interested in creating an account and joining the Mediavine University community, we are going to share how to get the link to do that and then also a Resources Guide for you to be able to see some links from this episode.

In the meantime, happy learning. Heather, thank you so much for joining us today and for talking to me.

HEATHER TULLOS: Oh. Thanks for having me. It was fun. I’m excited about this.

JENNY GUY: I’m excited too. And I’m excited to see all of the different suggestions we get and how we’re going to be able to make this grow in the coming months and years. Beyond that you guys, have a wonderful rest of your day. We will see you in a couple of weeks with Andy.

How would you feel about 5x more audience reach?

Yes, really! At Mediavine we constantly talk about the importance of video and it’s time to get on board.

On a former Summer of Live episode, Meredith Marsh from VidProMom sat down with Senior Director of Marketing Jenny Guy and talked all things video: she showed us how to take video content beyond YouTube by quickly repurposing it, how she got started integrating content within her own business, and what she’d do different if she was starting today.

Make sure to listen to the episode below. You don’t want to miss it!

Helpful Resources

• VidProMom
• The Video Pursuit Society Course
• Meredith’s Youtube
• Video Player FAQ & Best Practices
• How to Fill Out Video Details to Improve SEO and RPM

Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] JENNY GUY: Hello, everybody. It is Thursday, July 9th. How did that happen? Welcome to the Mediavine Summer of Live. I’m your host, Jenny Guy. How you doing?

Tax day, day two, is next Wednesday. Where are you guys at with that, all of that? Are you already filed? Are you filing an extension? Tell us in the comments, what– if you are all set to go with your taxes, part deux.

As a year, 2020 it’s been a bit of a doozy. But for today’s episode, we are not going to be focusing on all of the less than positive things that 2020 is known for. We are going back to a simpler time, a time before masks and quarantine hair, although my guest today’s hair is impeccable, when we kicked off the second Roaring 20s in an all-new decade of video, on an echo, video, video, video. I’ll do my own.

Here at Mediavine, we have never made our passion for video a secret. We had the Year of Video, which led to a Decade of Video. And, on New Year’s Eve, this past year, we celebrated a brand-new Decade of Video. So we are forever encouraging, pushing, pleading with Mediavine publishers to produce more original video content so they can cash in on those industry high CPMs and keep up with advertiser demand for their pre-roll.

But those digital advertising dollars are not the only reason to prioritize video creation. Anyone who spends time online– and with social distancing, that is all of us, all the time– knows that video is everywhere, on the social media platforms, on all web sites. So create video content, right? What do you have to lose?

Record scratch. Video is hard. It can be expensive. And the vast majority of us are doing it solo, without a team of filmmakers standing by to help. So how can you make video easier and, beyond creation, make sure that you’re getting the most bang for your video investment buck? Enter my guest, the VidProMom herself, Meredith Marsh. She is here to teach us how to quickly reach a wider audience with multi-platform videos, and I am here for it. Let’s meet her.

Meredith Marsh is the creator of the Video Pursuit Society, a membership community for bloggers who want to reach a wider audience with YouTube and social videos so they could impact more people and make more money in their online business. Don’t we all want all those things? On the VidProMom YouTube channel and blog, Meredith teaches video editing tutorials and camera how-tos while your thriving side-hustle podcast listeners learn about growing an audience and earning passive income as a content creator.

Meredith, welcome. Thank you for joining me.

MEREDITH MARSH: Thanks for having me, Jenny.

JENNY GUY: It is so good to see you. Guys, if you have questions for myself or Meredith, please post them in the comments. We will get them asked. Otherwise, you know that this is kind of special because, as with all Summer of Live 2020, we’ve brought over our guests and topics from our canceled-due-to-COVID Baltimore conference. So we are going to be sharing the link in the comments from Meredith’s slide presentation. She was one of our awesome presenters, and she’s been kind enough to pivot and join us here. So please open those slides in another tab, and you can follow along or bookmark or download for later. But we are going to– we’ll do a screen share if we absolutely have to, but you guys can’t read them anyway, so we’ll just tell you what slides they are.

OK, question for audience, and then we’re going to start doing questions for Meredith. Are you producing original video content, guys? Who out there is doing it? What platform are you using most often if you are doing it, Instagram, YouTube? Please tell us in the comments.

Meredith, all righty, how did you get into video? Where did you start? How did you learn? Did you have formal training, or did you teach yourself?

MEREDITH MARSH: No, I had no formal training. So I’m a total introvert. I’m not an on-camera person at all.

JENNY GUY: Great.

MEREDITH MARSH: (LAUGHS) So I started back in 2014-ish. I knew I wanted to start a blog. I thought, like, oh, I can do that. I had a background in web design, so I did like all the nerdy stuff, but I thought I could probably create content. So I set out to start a blog, and it was just a matter of figuring out, what am I going to blog about?

And I happened to buy a GoPro camera for my family, I think, on a whim, like on a Cyber Monday deal. And I was like, we’re going to use this and we’re going to record stuff and we’re going to go do fun things. And so I created a video with it and I showed my kids, and they were in awe of this video of them. Sledding and making Christmas cookies.

And I thought, I have to teach other people how to do this because I wasn’t seeing– you know, Facebook, at the time, people were just, like, dumping their kids’ photos and dance recital videos on Facebook and using Facebook as an archive. You know? And I thought, we can do better than that. And I’m sure there’s other parents that are like techie, nerdy, gear-type people that are like, yeah, let’s get a GoPro.

So once I did the keyword research to figure out, could this be my blog thing, I realized it could. It was kind of a good time, a good topic. So I started doing GoPro tutorials, like how to use a GoPro camera and then how to edit GoPro videos, which I was kind of just learning my way through that myself. But it seemed like a no-brainer that I should create video tutorials and not just blog about it, and so that’s what I did.

And I kind of just– I applied what I knew about SEO for blogging to my YouTube channel, and I started gaining subscribers and getting comments. And every couple of weeks, I’d go over there and be like, oh, look at, there’s more subscribers. Oh, people are asking me questions in the comments. Maybe I should respond.

And I wasn’t– I didn’t think of it– I didn’t realize how powerful it would be. I just thought it seemed like a no-brainer that I should put my videos there. And so once I started seeing that I was kind of racking up an audience there, and GoPro reached out to me to do a giveaway, and I just was like, oh, this YouTube thing is– this is a thing. Like, this thing people should be doing.

JENNY GUY: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

MEREDITH MARSH: So that’s kind of how I started, but I never set out to start a YouTube channel. I never thought, I want to be a YouTuber. And I just– it was like something I felt like it made sense to do in conjunction with my blog, so I just did it.

And I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. And, I mean, it was really weird. It’s awkward talking to a camera. It’s awkward, you know, like, seeing– you know, I’ll run into people in my town, and they’ll be like, oh, I saw your video. And I’m like, really? Like, which one? Like, what do you– like, don’t talk to me. Like, I don’t talk about it. And it’s just awkward. It’s so awkward.

So it’s not natural. It’s never been natural, but it’s been really, really fun. And so, now, I help other people figure out how to create content, and what content to create, how to start and grow their YouTube channels. And it’s really– it’s fun helping other people get– be where I was at, but get kind of like out of their comfort zone faster than I did.

JENNY GUY: Yeah.

MEREDITH MARSH: So that’s what I do and how I got started.

JENNY GUY: I love hearing– it’s really inspirational to hear that it wasn’t a– I wasn’t– I didn’t take– I didn’t go to film school. I didn’t spend a lot of time learning a ton of tech in college. Like, you learned it on your own just by putting things together.

And we actually have a bunch of questions. Matt Freund is saying, “How about using a GoPro for a food blog, cooking videos?” This, we’re actually not doing a ton of talking about GoPro today. But before we dive into your topic, let’s actually– do you mind answering that, real quick, a little bit about GoPro?

MEREDITH MARSH: Matt, you could. There are people that do that. The problem with GoPros is they’re action cameras. They have a really small sensor, like a light sensor, so they’re really best outside where you have lots and lots of natural light. Otherwise, you don’t really get the best image like you would inside with a DSLR camera or a mirrorless camera. So but there are people that do, so I’m not going to say you can’t, but there’s probably better options.

JENNY GUY: Better usages for it. I mean, what if you had if you’re cooking on the grill or you’re cooking outside?

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: That would be great. We have a Mediavine, a Publisher Support Specialist, Karla Greb, who said, “I just ordered a GoPro. I’m going to need to check out your blog to help me figure out how to use it.” Yes.

Matt Freund just said, “So I’m probably better off using my phone,” for his cooking videos.

MEREDITH MARSH: Possibly, yeah.

JENNY GUY: OK.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: Alrighty, we’ve got a bunch of people that are saying YouTube and Mediavine. I have Facebook and YouTube– where they’re posting video content. Mediavine Facebook, and YouTube. YouTube, videos two times a week. Yes, Facebook and YouTube. Adding it to blog posts.

And we also, everyone, posted the slides for Meredith’s presentation, so please grab those. There’s some great information there. We’ll be telling you when to look at what, but we’re just having a conversation, right now.

So I alluded to this a little bit ago, talking about the impact video is having on digital content creation in general. But why is video creation so important? I want to hear it from you, and why should our audience be prioritizing it at this point in time especially?

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, well like you already said, video’s on every platform. And I think it’s because it’s so– it’s engaging. It’s like the next best thing to talking face-to-face with somebody. And it’s so easy to create, now. And it’s easy with, you know, everyone has, like, 3G, 4G, 5G internet everywhere they go, so it’s easy for platforms to serve up video really quickly and easily.

So it’s– every platform as a video platform, now. So, you know, even if it’s not your face on that video, it’s still the content that those platforms are favoring, in a lot of ways. So that’s why I like video.

JENNY GUY: Totally. I mean, in terms of busting the algorithm, you do with video. When people are talking– it– we experience it on the Mediavine page. We get the most reach with video. Like, that’s where you can break through with postings, so it’s a part of every strategy. It’s prioritized everywhere.

And we’re going to talk more about YouTube in a minute, but as you’re going to tell everyone, and most people, though, at least know this. You’re going to get into the nitty-gritty of it, but at least most people know that it’s the second most powerful or most popular search engine on the internet is YouTube.

MEREDITH MARSH: Mm-hmm, yeah.

JENNY GUY: So it’s worth it. Guys, how would you– audience, how would you rank your experience with making videos, on a scale of 1 to 10? Drop that in the comments. Tell us how you feel in terms of experience.

OK, Meredith, for those who are Video Pursuit Society members– and say hey to us in the comments if you are– your MEGAphone Method is very familiar. But for anyone who isn’t, will you give us a crash course in your MEGAphone Method? This is where we’re getting into the repurposing.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. So with the MEGAphone Method, you can turn your– I like to say you can turn your message into a megaphone with video content. But there’s so many different platforms, different ratios, different expectations. Like, if you open up TikTok, it’s a very different expectation than YouTube. And so, like, how do you manage all that with your content?

So with the MEGAphone Method, the MEGA, M-E-G-A, in MEGAphone stands for– the M stands for start with your Main platform. So probably for a lot of Mediavine publishers, your main platform may be just your blog, just writing your blog posts. And so if that’s what you focus on first in terms of creating your content, then focus on that. And then turn what you have into a video.

So, for me, my main platform is YouTube. So when I’m thinking of content, I’m thinking in terms of a video. A lot of people, it’s podcasting. And so plan that main content, and then figure out what to do with it. So start with your main platform first.

And then the E stands for Edit once, and then repurpose. So– and everyone has a different workflow and everything– but, for me, I create a YouTube video and I focus on the edit of that YouTube video. And then I turn it into an IGTV video. And I could also turn it into a Pinterest pin, but I don’t. I just don’t do that (LAUGHS). I could.

JENNY GUY: You could. I just don’t.

MEREDITH MARSH: So I’m focusing on the one thing, and then turning it in to all the other things. I will also embed my video through Mediavine, sometimes, not all the time. I haven’t trained my VA to do that yet, so not every video goes that route. But that’s kind of the workflow there. Focus on one thing, and then turn it into all the other things. Make those other things kind of fit what you’ve already done.

And then the G stands for Go long, Go wide, and Go deep. And what I mean by that is use your videos to– go long is like look at the longevity. I mean, we all hear, Mediavine publishers, I’m sure you know a lot about SEO. You know the value of creating evergreen content that people are searching for today and five years from now and 10 years from now.

And with your video content, you want it to be the same thing, right? YouTube is a search engine. It’s owned by Google. It’s the second largest search engine, second to Google. So when– if you’re just focusing on, let’s say, Instagram Stories and that’s the video strategy that you’re adopting, there is no longevity there. Those stories are gone after 24 hours unless you save them to a highlight, but they’re not searchable. Whereas, if you focus on that long-form, long-term content, then you’re going to attract people down the road.

Go wide is just go on all the platforms that you want to. It might make sense for you to post your YouTube videos to LinkedIn. A lot of people do that. I do it sometimes, but I usually forget that LinkedIn exists, so–

[LAUGHTER]

But it might be perfect for your niche. If it makes sense to post it on IGTV, post it on IGTV.

And then Go deep is just a reminder to always be getting people to go deeper with you. Get on your email list, join your Facebook group, like what– wherever it is that you’re creating a community or getting people onto your own sort of property, if you will, so all your eggs are not in one basket. Then you can use video and you YouTube to get people to go deep with you.

And then A is just Alignment. You just always want to make sure that your– and this is more for a beginner content creator, but you want your content, your video content, to be aligned with what you’re doing. So, you know, don’t get lost in like Search Engine Optimization-land, where you’re like, oh, I can rank for that. But if that has nothing to do with the people you want to attract to your channel, the people you want to have in your audience, then there’s no point doing that.

So make sure that your content’s aligned with your ideal audience, your ideal client, aligned with if you have a digital product or program or a service. Or make sure it’s all aligned with that and not just like, oh, this looks like it’s trending, I think I can go viral, because it just won’t make any sense.

JENNY GUY: Having a goal in mind for what you want these people to do, you can get these people to look at you, but once they are looking at, you what do you want, and how do you retain them? And, like you said, with going deep, you don’t– get yourself an audience that is not subject to an algorithm shift, a social media algorithm shift or a Google– like any of those things. Make sure that you– and your email is where those people live. Those are your people, so do it.

OK, let’s talk a little bit about different formats and orientations for the different platforms. And let me grab that slide. OK, so you’re talking about landscape first, and how you worked through all that. You talked about the orientations here?

MEREDITH MARSH: Mm-hmm, yeah. So, for me, this is an example of what I do, visually.

JENNY GUY: Oh, great.

MEREDITH MARSH: So I have my YouTube video. It turns into an IGTV video, the full video, the full thing, so I put that on IGTV. I also send an email to you my email list to let them know I have a new YouTube video, and I link it back to the YouTube video. If I’m sending the email, like right when I publish it or within the first couple days, I send them directly to YouTube.

| then I can, and sometimes do, put that video as a Mediavine video on my blog, but I always embed the YouTube video either way, right, into my blog. So it’s going to– those are my three kind of main places that I sort of distribute my video to.

And so that would be perfect for somebody who’s creating that landscape content first, so a YouTube video, a Mediavine video, Facebook Lives, you know, that’s landscape, or horizontal.

If you were going the other way, which I think there’s a slide for, if you were focusing on doing Instagram Lives, for example, if that was your main platform– and so now you’re vertical. All your videos are vertical. You can turn them into a landscape video pretty easy with almost any video editor. And so you have– you can kind of see, in that slide, on the right, you have your vertical.

And then where your video is not, you can have a background, you can have branding, you could have slides with words, back there. You could have like, I don’t know, stock video footage or something back there. So you can create a video file that is horizontal that you could put on YouTube or put on wherever you want to have your landscape video. So embed it into your blog post or upload it to Mediavine.

I’m not sure if the Mediavine video player is optimized for like if you put a vertical video. You’ll have to tell me, Jenny, because I’m not sure. And then, the same thing, you can send it right to your email list. And you can also use your email list to– so you’re sending videos to your email list. Then you’re also using your videos to get people to sign up for your email list, so it’s like a little bit of a cycle there, which works with any dimension of video.

So that’s a workflow that you could use if you’re focusing on vertical videos first. So Instagram Lives or Instagram Stories would work for that as well.

JENNY GUY: So in terms of– we are getting confirmation on the vertical video format, I would encourage everybody– so, Meredith, where are you with YouTube subscribers currently?

MEREDITH MARSH: I am, I think, just under 47, something like that, 47,000.

JENNY GUY: 47,000, right. OK, so you are already in a good monetization place with your YouTube strategy. For those that have smaller channels and are working on growing it, and even those with larger channels, the monetization and the ROI is going to be much higher when you’re uploading the videos through the Mediavine dashboard. So we would encourage you to do both and to– especially if you’re creating longer-form content for YouTube– then edit it down to a 30 to 45 second video clip, and put it into your blog post there. That makes sense for that.

That way, you’re still reaping the benefits of those. The highest CPM, basically, that we can offer for a single ad unit is with pre-roll inventory, so do that, please. And then you can also put that title card at the end. With the Mediavine video player, you can put that title card at the end, which enables you to direct people to your YouTube where they can subscribe to your channel there, see the full video there, however you’re doing this.

We don’t recommend those long-form videos. Like, we would not upload a– this Facebook Live would not be uploaded through the Mediavine video player. No one would watch that on your website. No one’s going to watch an hour-long video on your website or a five-minute-long video, really, for the most part. It’s a different platform, so you’re wanting to edit to the greatest hits or the 30 to 45 seconds of the best thing, stuff like that.

We have a lot of questions. Let me go back. OK, we’ve got people saying that– they’re ranging from the 3 to 5 range, a lot of people. We’ve got some 9’s, people that are super into video. Vikkie Lee says she’s a 9 for YouTube. She shares DIY videos to put back in the community what I get out of it too. She now has about 50,000 subscribers. And then she tries to write posts after and optimize them on her blog.

So that’s really a good workflow. That’s similar to what you do, Meredith. Lori says she’s about a 2. She’s made a few videos and knows the basics of editing and Premiere Pro, but is still struggling to understand the big picture and how to put them to use. I think that Meredith would have a lot of tips on that, both on her website, in her Facebook group, in her podcast, all those things.

OK, we had a question here from Vikkie Lee. “Meredith, what’s your stance on Facebook pages such as Bored Panda and LadBible asking if they can share one of your YouTube videos?” And Larisha said, she’s not sure what Meredith will say, “but my understanding is that it goes against Facebook’s new terms or original content and you could be penalized.”

MEREDITH MARSH: I don’t have a stance on that. I’ve never done that. They’ve never– I don’t make viral videos, so they have never approached me (LAUGHS). So but I know people who have, and I think– man, it’s so easy, I think, to– for them to find people who don’t know that they should, like, research it or ask around. They’re just like, oh, yeah, cool, sure, go ahead. Take my video. And then they’re like massively profiting from it. So I don’t really have a stance.

I mean, if it’s something– it’s totally, I mean, it’s a personal decision. I don’t know that it helps you grow in any way. I’m not totally sure on that.

JENNY GUY: I mean, from an SEO standpoint, we talk about syndication all the time in terms of– but you’re getting the backlinks, you’re getting– which gives Google, gives authority to your profile, whether you’re letting them take an excerpt of your post or– but if a brand or someone wants to use your video content or your recipe or your craft or whatever it is, they need to be paid.

So Morgan Smith McBride says, “I have started creating one-minute videos for Mediavine from my longer videos. I was embedding YouTube videos in my blog posts, but I believe they’re slowing down my page and hurting viewability because of decreasing page speed. Should I just leave the full video on YouTube only and not put it on my posts at all?”

I talked about this. Morgan, no, I think you should edit a small clip of your video and upload it up through the Mediavine video player, and tease to that. Tease to go into your YouTube channel and subscribing there where they can see the full video. But if you’re creating this video content, you want to monetize it in every possible way that you can. And you’re going to get much, much higher returns on your investment that it takes to create a video by uploading it as well at the Media– I mean, double-dip, triple-dip, quadruple-dip.

That’s Meredith’s whole thing. You gotta get a multi-dip sundae.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: Do that.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, and I think it’s– I mean, YouTube is a discovery platform because it’s a search engine. So, in a way, it’s almost like you don’t even have to embed your YouTube videos into your blog posts, especially, obviously, if you have access to Mediavine’s video player. But it’s more so your publishing a piece of content on a discovery platform and bringing people into your overall audience. So it almost– it’s totally up to you whether you put it into your– it may have no benefit having it in your actual blog post because the benefit is that that YouTube video is on YouTube, not that it’s in your blog post.

So but I like Jenny’s advice of create a shorter video, use the Mediavine uploader, and benefit there. But, I mean, you can always link out to your YouTube video and– but it’s more like the other way around. Use YouTube to get people into your overall audience, onto your email list, and so forth.

JENNY GUY: And Morgan was clarifying there. She was saying, “I’m definitely putting the one-minute video on Mediavine.” She meant embedding the full-length video into the post as well. I don’t know that I have a strong– I mean, Meredith would you embed an hour-long video into–

MEREDITH MARSH: An hour-long video?

JENNY GUY: Or a long video, a full video, let’s say five to seven minutes?

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. I mean, that’s what I do now.

JENNY GUY: Yes.

MEREDITH MARSH: But, honestly, I do that because it makes sense in terms of that video is my main– that’s my main piece of content. So the blog post is kind of a supplement to the video. So I don’t think– if a reader landed on my blog posts, I think if they just read it, they would be like, yeah, I don’t get it. I’m lost. They kind of need that video. So it’s, you know, I think it depends a little bit on your content and on your readers.

JENNY GUY: Definitely true. OK, we’ve got a question from Sue. OK, we have an answer on the vertical video. People are– to the Mediavine video player, we believe you can upload that vertical video to the Mediavine video player, but you need to choose the 16-by-9 format so you get the black, or whatever color you choose, for your box.

OK, Christina said, “We upload our whole video tutorial to Mediavine and YouTube. If the videos are long on Mediavine, are there less ads? Would short ones mean more RPM?”

So yes. In short, yeah. The sweet spot is about 45 seconds because we believe that’s pretty much what audiences are anticipating and what their attention span holds. Plus, an ad runs as a pre-roll to that and then runs afterwards, in-between.

So when you set up the playlist, you’re Up Next feature– I’m sorry, not playlist, your Up Next feature in the Mediavine video player for the way you want your videos to play. It will auto go to the next one, but another ad will run. It’s somewhat similar to having a short sidebar. You want to give a chance for that ad to refresh with another premium paying ad. So a 45 second video, as opposed to a five minute video, you can have an ad. So yes, correct.

OK, let’s– we’re getting a lot. “Could you show a screenshot for people to click to view the long video on YouTube?” We will work on getting that in for you. In the meantime, I can’t get that here on mine now.

OK, Sue says, “Should my videos that I upload to–” well, we’ll talk about– let’s talk about video uploading in a minute to Mediavine video player before we get too lost in that, down that rabbit hole.

“How much editing do you recommend doing as you repurpose videos for different platforms? Is there a universally recognized sweet spot for video length on each one? Speaking of that, how much time is reasonable to spend editing for repurposing, and do you have any favorite video editing tools? Because editing is kind of the name of the game. You can get out and shoot it, but–

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. Yeah.

JENNY GUY: How do we make it usable and professional-looking?

MEREDITH MARSH: So what I have been doing, I don’t edit anything– I don’t re-edit things for other platforms. So I’ll repurpose it, turn it into a vertical for IGTV, but it’s the full YouTube video. So I’m even, in that video, I’m saying like, this is– welcome to my YouTube channel, or whatever. I don’t actually say that, but you know I mean. I’m referencing the fact that this is a YouTube video or subscribe or whatever, and that’s going on IGTV the way that it is.

If I had to do more than that, then I wouldn’t do it. And so it’s like done is better than perfect, for me. So for your brand and your audience, it might be totally different.

So how– what was the question? How much time?

JENNY GUY: So I asked a lot of things, all at once. Yeah, how much time is reasonable? So with the MEGAphone Method, you’re creating the content. Then you’re editing it for the primary platform, for its primary use. Then when you’re repurposing it, how much time are you putting into that repurposing?

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. So to repurpose it into a vertical format, I use ClipScribe, so which entails uploading it to ClipScribe and then choosing the template that I want, and so a vertical format. When I put my video in the middle of that vertical, because it shows up in the Instagram feed, so I want it to be in the middle so people can actually see it as they’re scrolling through the feed.

And I– with ClipScribe, you can create your template so you can like– you have a spot for your title and you have a spot for your captions. It does automatic captioning, and so it’s pretty quick. My VA does it. I don’t know how much time he spends, but it doesn’t– I’m not really editing it. I’m just uploading it, changing the title, checking the captions are spelling my name right and–

JENNY GUY: That’s helpful. I mean, always.

MEREDITH MARSH: And, yeah, and then I export it, and then I upload it to IGTV. And so I usually save it as a draft in IGTV. I just, same title as my YouTube title usually, same– the top description, top part of my YouTube description is usually the caption for IGTV. I just– like, it’s just copy and pasting. And then I’ll save it as a draft so that I can publish it whenever I want to publish it.

But you can schedule IGTV videos through Facebook’s Creator Studio, which is something that I recently found that I could do. So there is that option as well. So it’s just a few– I mean, it might take half hour, 45 minutes to do that part.

Like I said, I could put that on Pinterest. I just don’t. I really don’t have a reason. I just don’t. So but that same video could be put on Pinterest because it’s in that vertical format already.

And then, yeah, does that answer your question?

JENNY GUY: It does. Yeah, talk to me a little bit more about ClipScribe and why you love it and how much expertise you need to have to really make use of it, would be great.

MEREDITH MARSH: Oh. Yeah, you don’t really have to have much expertise. And I have a couple of videos on my YouTube channel about this, about using ClipScribe and repurposing your videos into vertical. So there’s– and there are– there’s ClipScribe, there’s Kapwing is another one. There’s one called Zubtitles. There’s Quicc, but it’s not spelled like the regular quick. And there’s a couple others, and they all basically do the same thing.

And a lot of them have the automatic captioning, which is really handy. So, with all of them, you upload your video. Or, like in the case of Kapwing, you can actually just pull your YouTube link to that video, and it will just like pull it in and download it. And then you just choose how you want your vertical video to be laid out.

Like, I put title at the top, video in the middle, captions at the bottom. You could put your logo on there. And then you export it, download it, and then upload it wherever you want to put it. It’s really pretty easy.

JENNY GUY: We love hearing super easy. And there are videos, like you said, on your website that people can get quick tutorials on starting ClipScribe. You’ve mentioned a lot of different editing tools. What made you arrive on ClipScribe? What made you land here?

MEREDITH MARSH: I think I just had a friend that was using it. And I was like, hey, how do you do that? And so she told me what she– it’s kind of– it’s hard. They’re all new tools. They’re all like– it’s like the Wild, Wild West. So they all work differently, and it’s hard to kind of like search for the type of tool that you’re looking for because this is– like, repurposing your videos, it’s sort of like a new concept because of all of the different platforms that we have.

JENNY GUY: Very, very true. We had other people– so could you do a rundown of some of the other programs that you listed in addition to Kap– ClipScribe? I’m sorry, I was thinking– I’m thinking Kapwing. I’m thinking all– this is it, Quicc spelled differently than quick. So I’m trying to go through all of them.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. Yeah, there’s ClipScribe. There’s Kapwing, Quicc.

JENNY GUY: Can you spell that, or come close to spelling?

MEREDITH MARSH: Kapwing is K-A-P-W-I-N-G.

JENNY GUY: Got it.

MEREDITH MARSH: Larisha has it in there, in the comments.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic.

MEREDITH MARSH: There’s Quicc, which is, I think, Q-U-I-C-C, or something like that. Zubtitles, with a Z, is another one. That’s all I can think of off the top of my head.

JENNY GUY: They’re all good, and they’re all– we’re dropping links in there for people to grab them and go check them out. See what you like the best. I think a lot of it is what interface makes you happy the most.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. Yeah, and you can also create vertical videos in a regular video editor. Like, not all a video editors, but a lot of them– Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush, Final Cut Pro, Filmora– most of them allow you to create a vertical video. So you can edit your horizontal video just the way that you would, and then just pull it into a vertical format and do whatever you want with it.

But the other– like Kapwing and ClipScribe have that automatic captioning, which is really helpful.

JENNY GUY: Super helpful. OK, well that’s really helpful. So just try things out and see what works the best for you.

OK, so what is your filming and editing and publishing schedule like? When do you publish videos? Do you post all in the same day or do you drip them out? And everybody’s biggest question, how do you stay consistent with your creation?

MEREDITH MARSH: Hmm. I don’t stay consistent with my creation. (LAUGHS) That’s the answer to that.

JENNY GUY: I mean, yeah, that’s very– it’s– we love honesty here on Summer of Live.

MEREDITH MARSH: So I have had varying, like, schedules. So back when I started my blog and my YouTube channel, I had a full-time job. And I was much more consistent when I had a full-time job because I knew that I had to do a little bit every day.

So I would publish videos on a Thursday for no other reason other than the first one, I think, was a Thursday. So I was like, OK, the next one goes up next Thursday. And so I knew that in order to have it published on Thursday, by Wednesday evening, it had to be done, edited, ready to go. The blog post had to be created. So in order to be ready for that, then, on Tuesday, I had to edit the video, or at least create a rough edit. And so, by Monday, I knew I had to have had it shot.

So, over the weekend, I would usually figure out, what am I creating this week, and then spend a little bit of time, if I could, to shoot the video on the weekend. If not, I would just do it when I got home from work on Monday and then worry about editing it on Tuesday.

And so that kept me consistent because there was no way to just wait till the last minute. There just wasn’t time for that. So, now– and those videos that I was creating were like how-to videos.

JENNY GUY: Right.

MEREDITH MARSH: I was talking to the camera. Hey, this is Meredith, blah, blah, blah. And then, a lot of times, it was a screen tutorial. So that’s easy-ish to record because you don’t have to do your hair and your makeup. You don’t have to have good lighting. You can just do it when your kids go to bed. And you do it at midnight. Nobody knows.

So– and that’s what those were. So intro, screencast, outro. I call it a tutorial sandwich because it’s just easy.

JENNY GUY: Sounds delicious.

MEREDITH MARSH: Now, my videos are a little bit different. They’re not really a tutorial sandwich. It’s a lot more talking head, a lot more B-roll. The videos I create now are more difficult to create, like from a creative standpoint. So I spend a lot more time shooting and a lot more time editing my videos now because it’s like an art form. You know, it’s like it takes more time to draw– like to paint something, to paint a real painting, than it does to draw a stick figure. But you have to start with a stick figure, right?

JENNY GUY: Yeah.

MEREDITH MARSH: So my workflow, now, is I shoot a video, and I try to get one up every week. And so I kind of spend all week stressing over getting my video done for the week, but I don’t have a regular schedule. But they usually come out on Friday or Saturday.

JENNY GUY: So one of the biggest things we talk about on all, the SEO like a CEO series and on Theory of Content that our co-founder, Amber, was involved with and all of those things is that the best way, the best SEO strategy is to continue creating content. And that’s the truth with YouTube as well. YouTube really values content, new content being pushed out and consistent content being pushed out. So, yeah, it’s something that the best thing you can do to have good SEO and to improve yourself in those search results on all platforms is to make more videos constantly. It’s a monster, and it needs to be fed.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, and I will say, too, that I spend a lot of time upfront planning a video, doing the keyword research and figuring out what I need to cover in the video, what I need to say, like exactly what I need to say in the video. So I kind of– I’ll do that on my computer, and I’ll kind of batch plan a handful of videos so that when I am ready to film, when I do have my hair done–

JENNY GUY: Yeah. Yeah, you can knock them out.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, I– it’s, yeah, because other– there’s– the more time you spend planning and preparing, then the quicker it’s going to be on the back end when you’re editing. Because it’s not– like, you could spend 12 hours editing a video. But if you were super-prepared and you had a script and you knew what you needed to say and you knew what B-roll you needed or what tutorial screen thing you needed, then you just have all that stuff ready to go and you can greatly shorten your editing time.

JENNY GUY: And so you answered one of my follow up questions in with what you were saying. You do script yourself, then?

MEREDITH MARSH: I script– yes, I do script my videos. And I just recently sort of changed how I do it. So what I do is I think, like, what is the actual content that I’m covering? What are the three tips or what is it, like the actual content, the meat, right? And then I will go in and figure out what to do for the intro and what I need to do at the end to finish the video.

So one of the things on YouTube that can be kind of tricky is you don’t want people to leave your YouTube video. So you want people to keep watching as long as possible. That’s what YouTube wants. That’s what you want. And so when you start saying– like wrapping up the video, like, thanks for watching, hope this was helpful, the viewer knows they can get off the bus now. There is no other value coming. And so they’ll leave to go watch something else, and you don’t want that to happen.

So I don’t really do much of an outro. I just kind of like get to the end of the content and be like, OK, now go watch this video. So–

JENNY GUY: Yeah, love that.

MEREDITH MARSH: So, yeah, so and I have an iPad Pro.

JENNY GUY: You Irish goodbye your YouTube videos basically?

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. I have an iPad Pro, so I’ve been writing out my scripts lately, which I find to be really helpful, versus typing them out. So, yeah, that’s how I do it.

If I don’t– and I don’t necessarily say word for word what my script says, but if I haven’t run those words through my brain already, like, I can’t spit them out. Like I just can’t. It’s like 12 takes, and I hope I got it and I have to figure them out ahead of time even if I go off-script, and which I do a lot. But if I don’t have those words there, then I find it takes me a lot longer to shoot.

JENNY GUY: It does.

MEREDITH MARSH: And I feel– like, I get sweaty and I get stressed. Like, did I really cover everything? Did I say everything I needed to? So, yeah, I like to be as prepared as possible.

JENNY GUY: I– yeah. Again, it’s not fully scripted by any stretch of the imagination, what we do here with our lives, but I know generally what I want to talk about. I have some points. Of course we go off script and read comments and do all the things, but if I don’t it’s– it’s just throw and smearing stuff at the wall and hoping something sticks. Like, you don’t want that.

I also wanted to circle back around and ask you about SEO research on YouTube. When you’re talking about doing research for your videos, are you doing it in YouTube? And tell me how you do that, please.

MEREDITH MARSH: So SEO, so keyword research, you can just use YouTube for that. If you were going to do that, you’re basically just typing in stuff into the Search bar in YouTube and seeing, are people watching videos on this topic? Yes or no?

You know, look at the videos that are in the search results. Does your video belong there? Does it make sense for it to be there? Are there other videos there that have a million views, hundreds of thousands of views? That’s a good sign that people are watching videos on that topic. And so that’s kind of the simple way to do it.

There are other tools. Like, TubeBuddy is a favorite of mine, where you put in your keyword or what you’re thinking your keyword will be, and it will tell you. Like, basically it tells you yes or no, either, yep, you’re good to go or, no, you should really refine that or change it up a little bit. And what’s really nice about that is, if you have the paid version of TubeBuddy, it’s actually looking at your channel and the data on your channel. And it’s comparing and saying, like, for you, yes, you should do this or, no, you shouldn’t.

So the other thing about TubeBuddy is it helps you to optimize. So I mean, like, it’ll tell you, yep, your title looks good, your description looks good, or you need to add some more of your keyword in there because you said this was your keyword, but it’s not in there. So it’ll tell you those things to help you optimize.

JENNY GUY: Kind of like Yoast for YouTube.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, exactly. Exactly, and it can be hard, at first, to– when I just got off of a group of coaching call with my people, and they’re like, but it says there’s too much competition for these things. So I’m like, that’s because you have a channel with no videos on it. So it doesn’t matter what you choose, it’s going to be too much competition because you don’t have anything to compete with. So you have to start somewhere.

So it can be kind of, I guess, sort of off-putting or disappointing to use tools like TubeBuddy at first. Because it’s like, of course you can’t compete with that. You never created a video before, but you have to start there. So I more so like to look at, are people really searching for this and really watching these videos? More so than, can I compete, when you’re first starting out.

JENNY GUY: That makes a lot of sense, and it’s very helpful. And I love the idea that they’re analyzing your channel. Are they analyzing your subscribers and seeing what types, other types, of content they’re consuming and helping to–

MEREDITH MARSH: That, I don’t think they go that deep.

JENNY GUY: OK, I was just curious.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, they’re kind of– I think they’re mostly looking at your topics and how those topics have performed for you. Yeah, and they’re not all, it’s not always accurate. Because, sometimes, I pull it up for a client who’s like– does archery, and I’ll put it in and it’ll be like, yeah, VidProMom you should do an archery video. And I’m like, what? Why is it telling me that? Like, that’s kind of concerning.

[LAUGHTER]

JENNY GUY: It’s a personal recommendation. They just want you to learn it. Why not?

OK, Sue wanted to know, “Can you re-explain what the sandwich video is?” You were talking about the how-to tutorial, that you made the tutorial sandwich. She said, “What is in the middle of your tutorial sandwich?” It is not bologna.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, it’s not bologna. So the middle of the sandwich is the actual content. If you’re doing a– for me, my tutorials are usually a screen recording, so that’s the meat of the sandwich. If you’re doing like a craft video or cooking video, it’s the crafting or the cooking part.

And so you have your intro, where you’re talking to the camera. And, you know, it’s a talking head video like this, and then you have the meat part. And then you would have an outro. And so–

JENNY GUY: What about condiments? I’m just saying.

MEREDITH MARSH: (LAUGHS) Yes. So, yeah, that’s what I just call it a tutorial sandwich.

JENNY GUY: No, it’s helpful. It’s good because your bread is your intro and your outro. And then your meat, it’s the stuff in the center. Although, I’m a carb lover, especially during the time of Corona, so I will take just the intro and outro because I love carbs.

All right, Larisha was saying, “When we added a second video every week on YouTube, we noticed faster growth. It’s exhausting, though.”

MEREDITH MARSH: Mm-hmm.

JENNY GUY: Yup. She also was commenting, they do so much video content, Larisha and her husband Andrew, was talking about shot lists and scripts, so helpful, very much so, and storyboarding.

We’ve done some storyboarding in the Marketing department when we need to create a video. Susanna, our Senior Graphic Designer is amazing at that. And this is what you want. Think about what your goal is. Think about what kind of adjectives, what you want people to feel when they’re watching the video. That’ll help you, like all of those things. Use feel words. Have feelings.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, storyboarding is something I just started doing.

JENNY GUY: Yeah?

MEREDITH MARSH: And because I have a fancy iPad Pro, I write out my script, and then I go back, kind of like in the margins, and just draw in what I need to have on screen there besides just me talking.

JENNY GUY: That’s awesome.

MEREDITH MARSH: So it’s kind of like storyboarding in the margins. And then I’ll go back in and make little notes on things like emotion, as like little reminders of, this is the emotion that the viewer should be feeling, so make sure you’re putting that emotion out there, just as little reminders. It’s sort of like lazy storyboarding.

JENNY GUY: I think it’s awesome, and now I want an iPad Pro.

MEREDITH MARSH: You should. It’s great.

JENNY GUY: It sounds amazing. I think that, yeah, it’s like a neglected part. Like even if it’s a how-to video, you want to think about what experience you want your viewer to have, always. And when we’re writing, we think about that too. Answer it, take– think about your viewer. Put yourself in their shoes. Why do they want to keep watching, and what do you want them to take away from it? And how do you want them to feel?

MEREDITH MARSH: Right.

JENNY GUY: April said, “What do you use to make the videos were the top part is video and the bottom part is a photo? Can you add music to that?”

MEREDITH MARSH: You could use any video editor to do that. You could also use the online editors that we mentioned. Like, I think you’d be able to do that with Kapwing. I’m not sure about the others. I think you’d be able to do that and ClipScribe too.

And, for music, you can add music and Kapwing. I think if you’re going to be doing music stuff, to me, that sounds like I would just pull that into a regular video editor rather than using an online tool, unless it’s like– I mean, if it’s like a 30-second video, that might be different.

But, yeah, I’ve never added music using those online tools because I’m always doing it in my regular editor, which I’ve been using Final Cut Pro.

JENNY GUY: Awesome. OK, so all sorts of options there for tools. Let us have another question for Meredith. So how do you drive your email list to your channel and blog and videos? How do you keep that loop closed and keep things moving?

MEREDITH MARSH: So my– when I publish a video, I open up my email editor, which I use Kajabi because that’s where my courses and stuff are, so just use their email platform. So I just– I take– usually break up my– the top part of my YouTube description into something that’s a little bit more like human, like it sounds like an email. You know?

JENNY GUY: Right.

MEREDITH MARSH: Copy, Paste, do a little bit of rejiggering of the words. I usually put in a screen grab of the thumbnail, and then link out to the video, and only to the video. I don’t link out to other stuff. And so that’s how I send people from my email list to go watch the video. If it’s– like, I have some old, not old, but I have email sequences, like evergreen sequences.

JENNY GUY: Sure, drip campaigns?

MEREDITH MARSH: Those I extend to my blog, because those I’m like, go watch my media finance. Right?

JENNY GUY: Yeah.

MEREDITH MARSH: Whereas with a fresh YouTube video, I really want those eyeballs on that video right then. And so, yeah, that’s how I do it.

JENNY GUY: Because that first 24 hours is really important on YouTube, correct, in terms of where you’re going to get placed in search results?

MEREDITH MARSH: It is important because, yeah, I mean the more views that you have, YouTube recognizes like, oh, this must be a good video because look at all these views we’ve had in the first few hours.

So, yeah, it does help, for sure, the first 24 to 48 hours, usually.

JENNY GUY: Do you ever prime your audience for a new video? Like, get ready, this is going to drop, to try to boost those views?

MEREDITH MARSH: I never have, but I know sometimes people do. I’ve seen people they’ll do like an Instagram Live, like 10 minutes before the video is scheduled on YouTube. And so, which I think is really smart. I just have never tried that before.

JENNY GUY: Interesting, I just was wondering because I’ve heard many people attended a lot of sessions on YouTube, and I heard people talk about that that 24 hours, not 48 hours, or YouTube places a lot of weight on the traffic on that first time period, so it’s important to get a good start.

Michelle Platt says, “Do all of your current videos feature your face? That’s the hardest part, getting myself camera-ready. Any tips or filters?” No.

MEREDITH MARSH: Tips or filters (LAUGHS), I like that.

JENNY GUY: It’s like cardboard box.

MEREDITH MARSH: So my videos do feature my face. Hopefully, they feature my content and my face is just delivering it. But, yeah, I– this, being camera-ready is definitely a barrier for me, for sure. And, sometimes, I just don’t feel like doing my hair or doing my makeup. Especially now, when I don’t even have to leave the house, sometimes, I am like doing my hair and makeup at 3 PM to shoot a video or to like join a live.

JENNY GUY: Today, yes.

MEREDITH MARSH: And then–

JENNY GUY: I was like, bye, guys. I’m about to go get 20 minutes and do this.

MEREDITH MARSH: And then I’m like, have dinner and go to bed, and it’s like, why did I spend all that time on my hair? So, yeah, it’s definitely a barrier.

One really great tip that I have is if you have– if you get your hair done at the salon, just plan to shoot a couple of videos that day.

JENNY GUY: Very smart.

MEREDITH MARSH: I have done that before. And I always– I’ve done it like once, and then I think I’m going to do this every time, but I never have videos ready to be shot on my salon day. So it hasn’t happened, so–

JENNY GUY: And you can never make– I mean, I’m not saying you. I’m saying any, me. I can never make my hair look the way my hairstylist makes it look ever, ever, even when they’re like– I’m like show me how to do this, step by step. . Like, I’m five, show me, and they do. And then I get home, and it never– I would say, Michelle, yeah that’s a huge barrier.

Ring lights are huge. Natural lighting is a big thing, so always go into a place that has natural light, and then augment it with a ring light. They’re not expensive. There’s a ton of them on Amazon, and it’s a game-changer.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, I am a big fan of really like flooding your face with light. It really does hide just like little skin imperfections and blemishes and stuff. You just have to make sure that, like, if you wear makeup, that you put on a little extra eye shadow, a little extra lipstick and blush so you don’t look ghostly.

[DOG BARKING]

JENNY GUY: Contouring is helpful, too, a little bit, just a little bit of like, you know.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. And, also, too, if you can, just plan to batch film some content. And so that you’re only doing your hair and makeup once and then recording three videos, instead of doing it every week or something like that. But, yeah, I guess those would be my tips. But I totally– you’re not the only one with that barrier, for sure.

JENNY GUY: No, everybody feels that way. Like, everybody feels that.

Is that your puppy, Meredith?

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, my dog is barking. I think maybe my husband’s home. I’m not sure.

JENNY GUY: Is there a name?

MEREDITH MARSH: Somebody could be breaking in.

JENNY GUY: Is there a name for that dog? Well, I hope someone’s not breaking in.

MEREDITH MARSH: No, his name is Aries.

JENNY GUY: Hi, Aries. It’s good to hear from you.

OK, we’re almost out of time, but we’re going to tell everybody where they can find you, coming up next. And then what is the number-one thing you want someone who is just starting out with video to know? Like, a crash course, they’re going to start or they’ve just started creating video and they want to get into the repurposing game?

And I’m going to have you come back in one second. I’m going to say that. I’m going to quickly announce– and I’m going to mute you while Aries is making his presence known. It’s for your thinking.

Guys, we have had an awesome episode today with Meredith. We are going to share that link to her presentation one more time so you’ve got it, and we’re going to share some more links of where you can find Meredith. The Summer of Live continues next Thursday, July 16th.

We have guests, names that you’ve probably heard before, Eric Hochberger and Amber Bracegirdle, our Mediavine co-founders, we’re going to talk playlists and indexes and Grow.me and all sorts of fun stuff about where we are, give everyone an update, and it’ll be a lot of fun.

I don’t think– I’ve never had the two of them on at the same time. It’s going to be a party!

Meredith, back to you, please tell us– first, thank you for all of the amazing information. You are such a resource. Please tell everyone where they can find you and what you can offer them in terms of services if they need help, and then how to jump-start their video content career.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, so thanks for having me, first of all. But the best way to kind of dive into what I have to offer is just go to my YouTube channel, if you search VidProMom if you just search Meredith Marsh, you’ll probably find it.

And I have a really great download called the Social Video Blueprint–

JENNY GUY: Yes, please do that.

MEREDITH MARSH: –which it gives you some kind of ideas of different ways that you could repurpose your content, whether you’re going from horizontal to vertical or vertical to horizontal. So that’s where I would tell people to start, if they’re like, oh, I don’t know how to wrap my head around all of this.

And, of course, reach out to me on Instagram. My handle there is @meredithmarsh.co. I love to get DMs from people and questions, and that’s kind of where I really like to connect with people.

JENNY GUY: And we’ve got all those links shared in there. You’ve got Meredith’s presentation, you’ve got her YouTube channel, we’ve got your Instagram. And then that Social Video Blueprint is shared in there. It’s a free download. Pick that up and get started.

Just get making video. It is, it’s hard for everyone. Like, everybody does not like this.

All right, Meredith, thank you so much. You’ve been great to have.

MEREDITH MARSH: Thank you so much for having me.

JENNY GUY: All right, and go tell Aries hi. It sounds like he needs some attention. We’ll see you next Thursday, you guys.

The answer is the brand new site Black People’s Recipes. 

On this episode of Mediavine On Air, Senior Director of Marketing Jenny guy is sitting down with two of the creators, Brandi Crawford of Stay Snatched and Tanya Harris of My Forking Life, to dish about what they’ve got cooking with their new venture. 

We’ll hear how the seven women are blending their visions and backgrounds to empower one another and their readers, while building a new online destination for African, African-American and Caribbean cuisine. 

Listen to the episode, watch the Teal Talk or read the transcript below!

Helpful Resources

• Black People’s Recipes
• Stay Snatched
• My Forking Life
• Resource List from the Livestream
• Brandi’s Appearance on Good Morning America
• Tanya’s Appearance on BFF with the Chef

Transcript

JENNY GUY: Hello. Welcome one and all to another Teal Talk Tuesday in almost March. I have to take a moment and ask an important question. Am I the only one that finds it incredibly rude every single time I’m reminded that we’re already almost in the third month of the year 2022? I can’t be the only one. I feel assaulted every time.

To be perfectly honest I was struggling like pre-COVID to accept that 2008 was not just a couple of years ago anymore. But with everything that happened in 2020 and 2021, like any hope that I had of knowing the date or not feeling just completely attacked by the date went out the window. So that’s where I am. So I hope I’m not alone.

Anyway, here we are on 2/22/22. It’s a palindrome day. I’m your host for Teal Talk, Jenny Guy, and I am so happy that we are all here together, whatever the year or date may be. Today I am joined by two powerhouse content creators who have done something incredibly brave and maybe just like a little bit crazy.

They have partnered up with five other extremely successful publishers and done an additional website. So Black People’s Recipes debuted at the end of January in 2022, and we cannot think of a better way to continue with our Black History Month content than to hear the story of how it all came to be.

So please join me in welcoming back to Teal Talk the wonderful Tanya Harris and for the first time Brandi Crawford. Hello, ladies. Welcome.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Hello.

TANYA HARRIS: Hey.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Thank you so much.

JENNY GUY: I’m going to read the very incredibly impressive bios for each of them. So Brandi Crawford is the recipe developer and food photographer behind Stay Snatched, where she shares quick and easy healthy recipes that do not compromise on taste. Very important.

She’s a CPA with a background in corporate finance and financial planning. So her love is real for numbers, data sets, and Excel spreadsheets. She is also the author of the Super Easy Air Fryer Cookbook and has been featured on Good Morning America, Women’s Health Magazine, Shape Magazine, Parade Magazine, Essence Magazine, Country Living Magazine, Southern Living Magazine, BuzzFeed, Delish, the Kansas City Star, Kansas City Spaces, Greatest, and more. Brandi, welcome for the first time to Teal Talk.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Thanks, Jenny. So happy to be here.

JENNY GUY: So happy to have you. And now for another incredibly impressive person. Tanya Harris Fleming is a mom, wife, attorney, recipe groupie, photographer, and traffic whisperer who took a love of pressure cooker and air fryer recipes and turned them into a full time income on her part-time blog, My Forking Life, which she began in 2016.

Devoting between 5 to 15 hours a week to her site, she reached up to 500,000 page views a month and she now averages over a million page views a month. She reached the Mediavine threshold in April 2018 and was able to quit her job as an attorney in 2019 to blog full-time and spend more time with her family. Tanya, welcome back.

TANYA HARRIS: Hey, Jenny. Thanks. I’m glad to be back.

JENNY GUY: All right. So we are very excited to have everyone. As my wonderful team has said in the comments, if anyone has any questions about the topics or for Brandi or Tanya, please drop those into the comments and I will talk with them about them. But in the meantime, I want to start out like we typically do on Teal Talk, which is by going beyond the bio.

Both of you are incredibly successful content creators in your own right. So please give us a little insight to your own journey in the blogging industry and what made you seek out this career. And we heard a little bit from Tanya. So let’s hear a little bit more with My Forking Life. You are an attorney?

TANYA HARRIS: That’s correct. Yeah. So I’m an attorney and I’ve been practicing since 2009, and I started my blog as a hobby when I just started to really learn to cook and I wanted to share those experiences. And one of my main motivations was when I was looking at recipes or looking at other bloggers at that time, I didn’t see that many that looked like me or had the kind of cuisine that I kind of grew up eating.

So that kind of motivated me to want to build my site to be bigger and stronger so that it could actually reach more. And then in the process I started to meet more bloggers and did come across a lot of bloggers that did look like me, like Brandi and some of the women that I’ve connected with. So that’s been kind of one of the main motivations for my site and building it so that I could, of course, be also represent myself in the space as well.

JENNY GUY: I love that so many of our publishers and content creators who have successful careers in other places find that there’s a vacancy in the content creation space. And so they just fill it by making their own thing. I think that’s so inspirational and wonderful to hear about.

Brandi, same question to you. How did you get started with Stay Snatched?

BRANDI CRAWFORD: I started in 2016. And so I grew up cooking and in the kitchen and things like that. But I was at a point in my life a couple of years prior to starting my blog, but I wanted to make all of my family favorite recipes healthier. And so I sought out like healthy eating blogs. At the time, Instagram was very meal prep of chicken breast, brown rice and some carrots, or something like that. And I’m like, nope, I’m going to need some flavor. So I started creating my own healthy recipes that were well seasoned, have a lot of flavor, and I was just sharing them kind of with family and friends.

And I wanted to start saving the recipes, so I started a blog. Had no idea that it could take off until I started listening to podcasts. And so I started in November 2016. Within six months I qualified for Mediavine, and two years later in 2018 on the same anniversary date of starting my site, I quit my job as a CPA. And so here I am now.

JENNY GUY: And never looked back. I love both of you totally successful in a professional capacity, CPA and an attorney.

Actually I’m going to go off script and ask a question. I hope you don’t mind. That’s what I do. Tanya knows. How have you taken those skills from CPA and attorney and brought them into your career as content creator? I’m going to start with Brandi on that one.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: So for me because I love spreadsheets and analyzing data. I did a lot of financial planning and analysis. I’ve translated that right to my business. And so I do forecasting models in terms of revenue and expenses and things like that on an annual basis, and then on a monthly basis too.

And I’m my own CPA. So when it comes to doing my taxes and bookkeeping and stuff like that, I can do it myself. And so it’s really just enabled me to step out of the creator and artistic element of what I do and really focus on the business, which I think has helped my growth and success tremendously.

JENNY GUY: It’s amazing that you have both sides. And it had to make it less scary, less intimidating because I know that we hear that a lot when– like a lot of our publishers, their goal is to step out of their full-time day job, but there’s a lot of fear there and also no safety net, no insurance, no 401(k), all of those things that you have all that experience.

And Betsy just said actually in the comment, sounds like Brandi could start a side hustle doing a CPA stuff for bloggers because it’s in need.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: I thought about it, then I was like nah, that’s too much time. But that’s interesting that you mention the safety net thing because I thought that I would never leave. Even after I qualified for Mediavine and my blog was taking off, I had a fairly successful career in doing what I was doing. And so I was like, there’s no way this blog will ever make more money than what I’m making now, especially taking into account the benefits and 401(k) and things like that.

And so when I saw that I was approaching that horizon, I put together a spreadsheet. And so I did kind of some analysis of what I would need to make from my blog, including real health insurance costs because I was only paying $25 a month for health care. I would dream to pay that.

And so I was like, how much is it really going to cost when I step out on my own for health care? How much is it going to cost for me to actually fund my retirement on my own? And so once I ran the numbers and I also paid off my debt, then I felt completely fine kind of taking that job.

JENNY GUY: I love to hear that. And maybe even if you didn’t want to offer like the CPA coaching, maybe even an e-book or a course and how– I’m just saying.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Call Black people’s recipes.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

JENNY GUY: Maybe you have another side hustle going yet. Tanya, same question to you. How do you bring those attorney skills into your air fryer skills?

TANYA HARRIS: Well, I do not have the skills of spreadsheets, but I was a criminal defense attorney. That was the only law I practiced, and as a criminal defense attorney I had to learn how to take complex legal issues and facts and break them down and explain it in a way to clients, judges, whoever in a really easy way. So when that translates to recipes and recipe development, that’s kind of where I went with my blog.

So things that may seem complicated to certain people I would create the recipe, but then I would be very detailed when it came to that. That was one of the skills I had as an attorney and I do it on my site. That’s why if you come to my site, you’ll see a lot of step by step photos where I explain all of this stuff. So that was one of the main skills I took.

The other is that I had to speak to strangers in front of people every single day, and I had to think on the cove. So that’s kind of helped me when it comes to being on video. So I was one of the people early on that embraced video content.

And then people like, well, how do you do that? And I’m like because I used to have to do this in front of judges in very scary situations. So filming like a YouTube video in my home kitchen is not that hard for me. So those are I would say the most important skills from being an attorney that I’ve translated over to the blog.

JENNY GUY: I love that. And I’m thinking that hopefully, maybe a audience or a reader who’s saying that your recipe, their recipe didn’t work out is not as scary as a judge made your case. But maybe I don’t know. I’ve read some of the comments that you guys get and I just– I love– I bought my air fryer earlier this year, and I was on your site constantly, watching all the videos, to make sure I was buying all the things that you were recommending. So you help a lot of people, help–

TANYA HARRIS: Oh, well thank you.

JENNY GUY: –a lot of people. OK, so speaking and seguing into what Brandi was bringing up, we know everyone on this live and in the comments knows that being a small digital business owner is a more than full-time job. 24 hours in a day is not enough to learn all the things that are classified as need to know for you guys. That’s not even close.

With all that being said, you both decided to take on another full-time job and start an additional website, Black People’s Recipes. So will you tell us more about that decision? What was the inspiration for the new site? I’m going to start with Tanya on that one.

TANYA HARRIS: Well, we actually, we had been meeting with each other. And I think a lot of us wanted to start second sites already. And it just made sense for us to actually join forces and start one together. That way, we would each be able to contribute, and it wouldn’t be as time-consuming as taking on a site on our own.

And we just had this common purpose and goal that we wanted. And so it just made it easy for us to join together and decide to create the site. And it’s been going very, very well.

JENNY GUY: Tell us, before I move on to Brandi, what was the common purpose and goal?

TANYA HARRIS: Oh, OK, so one of the things that– I mean, it’s one of the purposes of why I even started blogging as well. A lot of cultural recipes, the way that we grew up eating and that we were familiar with, they were out there, but they weren’t pretty much– I want to say– I hate saying the word authentic, but they weren’t really true to the culture of the way the foods were. And so we would talk about these things, especially me, as I was born in the US, but my dad is from Africa, and my mom is Jamaican.

So I grew up eating certain Caribbean dishes. And then I would go to Google, and I would look, and they would be completely modified from the version that I had growing up. So I just felt like it was important to make sure that I was presenting these dishes, especially the way that my Jamaican mother made it and how I remembered eating it and preparing it.

JENNY GUY: Yeah, I love that. I also have to say, we’re going to share a resource doc at the end, everybody, with links to everybody’s sites, all the founders, and Black People’s Recipe, so you can look at them. But I have yet to click on your site, and the content is going up fast.

But every time I go there, mouth starts watering instantly the second I get there. There are so many things I want to jump in and try. But Brandi, same question to you, what is the method behind the madness?

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Yeah, I think so actually, two years ago– I feel like this month or maybe last month, Tanya– we collectively, all of the founders of the group, were just seeking a resource for each other, of like-minded women, where we could just talk about things like these recipes and then just talk about being a Black content creator in this space and being a Black food create– food blogger in this space. And so we were going to meet monthly.

But then the pandemic happened, and everyone needed more closeness. I think everyone in the world just needed a little bit more friendship. It turned into a group of just like-minded business women getting together to talk business to friendship, that also has a business element to it. And so just in natural conversation, this opportunity just came up. And we honed in on it very quickly and were able to turn it into what we have now.

And so what I’m just thankful for is when you bring together seven women who’ve been successful in their own right, you have seven different sets of ideas, seven people who have experience starting something from the ground up, and seven women who made mistakes, who know, oh, we’re not going to do that again, or we know what works really well. We are going to do a lot of that. We’re going to go ham on that type thing.

And so that part of it is just invaluable. And I’ll just echo everything Tanya said about the recipes. We want true– and I am going to probably use the word authentic– authentic Black cultural recipes that my Granny was making, that my Granny showed me how to make, that I can share with the world.

JENNY GUY: I love, I love all of what you said. And I love hearing the way that you have seven different expertise, ideas, inspirations, and that you’re able to make all of those sing in harmony. And we’re going to talk more about that in just a second.

But I wanted to ask. I’d love to hear a little more about how you guys found each other, in the first place. Was it a conference? Was it searching each other online and asking specific questions in Facebook groups? Brandi, I’ll start with you on that one.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: When you are Black in the space, it’s not hard to notice each other, especially when you’re Black and doing well. And so I think most of us were already following each other on Instagram. And we literally just were sliding in the DMs– like, hey, we’re looking to connect, maybe form some type of group where we can just bounce ideas off of each other type thing.

And it literally just happen that way. And then it turned into us just meeting. We’ve actually taken trips. Some of us have gone to Mexico City over the summer, so just really nice bonding experience.

JENNY GUY: Oh, I love that. Any additional to add to that, Tanya? Anything that you have noticed? Sliding in the DMs– I love this.

TANYA HARRIS: Exactly how she said it, we’re sliding into DMs, like, hey, girl, hey.

JENNY GUY: That’s terrific. OK. While we have the privilege of talking with you two, two of the founders of Black People’s Recipes today, there are five more wonderful Black content creators that aren’t with us on the episode. So will you tell us a little more about each of them? Tanya, will you start? Tell us about the people who aren’t with us today. Hopefully, they’re watching.

TANYA HARRIS: OK, I’m going to get them all to. We’ve got Jocelyn of Grandbaby Cakes. And she’s been blogging for a good while. She does a lot of Southern generational recipes.

We’ve got Shannon of Fit Slow Queen. And she does a lot of Whole30 recipes. And she does, also, a lot of gadget recipes stuff in instant pot slow cookers, air fryers as well. We’ve got Jessica of Jessica’s in the Kit– Jessica’s Kitchen– sorry. And she does vegan recipes. And she’s Jamaican as well. So I love seeing her recipes.

We’ve got Davinah of Dr. Davinah’s Cooks. And she does a lot of comfort food that fits the low carb way of eating. And we have Imma of Immaculate Bites, who’s also been blogging for a good while. And she does a lot of Southern Caribbean, as well as African cuisine. I think I covered everybody.

JENNY GUY: That is a killer lineup, a killer lineup. Brandi, are each of these creators bringing their own take on their recipes to it, and so you have some that are vegan, some that are gadget, some that are low carb? Is that how you guys are going about it?

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Absolutely. And so I love that we all have a different level of expertise to bring to the table, being able to create vegan versions of recipes that are historic and authentic and true to our roots, but just using different ingredients, low carb versions that can still be considered comfort food, but maybe just don’t have the sugar or the all-purpose flour, and stuff like that. And then it’s just amazing.

We can do gadget recipes. We can have it ready for you in 15 or 20 minutes instead of two or three hours, in the kitchen all day. And so you’ll see a wide mix of everything on the site. And that’s another thing that I love, and I think that sets us apart.

JENNY GUY: I would say that yeah, what I love that I’ve seen the most so far is a lot of the recipes that I see are with the Southern, and things like that. They are all-day recipes, or they are all-month recipes. You’re making three different things that you’re keeping, and you’re storing, and then you’re putting it all together.

So that makes it to where there’s special occasion meals where you have to have. But I love that you guys are taking that and making it to where it doesn’t have to be a four-day cooking affair or a gut buster that you only feel like you’re going to want to eat once a year at Christmas. You can have these flavors and these flavor profiles all year round. I love that.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Mm-hm, exactly.

JENNY GUY: OK. One of the most comm– and you’ve already said this actually, Brandi, one of the most common refrains we hear around amongst the blogging community and the Mediavine staff is, oh, I wish I knew, when I started my website, is x, y, and z. Gosh, I wish I knew more about SEO when I started my website.

So for all of the creators of Black People’s Recipes, as you brought up, this is your second go round, at minimum. So what were your priorities, starting out? Are there any must dos or must haves in terms of setups or programs? I’m going to start out with Tanya on that one.

TANYA HARRIS: I would say I think, especially– and I think we started out this, having a particular goal or purpose, like, what is your reason why you’re doing this? Because of course, part of it may be monetary, but I think you still need another goal, whether it’s to preserve and share authentic recipes, whether it’s to show successful Black women in the space running a business together. You just need some kind of purpose as to why you’re even starting this website.

I think, when I started My Forking Life, it was like, oh, this is just for fun. But I didn’t even know like– completely hone down what my goal and overall purpose for the site was. I know now. But the first day I started, I had no clue. I was just doing stuff. And so I think that’s one of the things you want to make sure you know when you’re starting out.

JENNY GUY: I would imagine it’s also probably– oh, sorry, Brandi– I would imagine it’s also probably something that is helpful, when you have seven different voices coming together, that you have to be extremely clear about what it is that you’re trying to do, otherwise all over the map. Because all of you guys are all over the map with your– so Brandi, same question to you, were there any musts that you felt like you guys needed to start out with?

BRANDI CRAWFORD: I would say, I wanted us to focus on owning one platform. We’re not trying to be everywhere at the same time. So I’d say, when I started my site, I was like, oh my god, I’ve got to take over Instagram. I’m going to take over Facebook. I’m going to take over Pinterest. Ooh, I’m going to do some YouTube videos, too.

So I was like, I’m going to be in all of these places. And within three weeks, I was like, I’m not doing that. I’m going to focus on my site, And I’m going to post to Instagram. And once I got really good momentum with my site, I really honed in on Instagram.

And then when I was doing really well on Instagram, then I focused on Facebook, and things like that. And so just understanding that you don’t have to be everywhere at the same time, because championing one platform takes so much effort, so much time– and so just making sure that we’re focusing on the right things and at the right time and not feeling the pressure or FOMO of being everywhere. Because you can’t.

JENNY GUY: That FOMO is so real, too. Every time you see somebody post, I got 500,000 page views from x, y, and z, and you’re like, I have to do it. I have to do it now. I know I don’t know anything about it, but I’m going to go buy a camera, a new video camera. I need to have lighting.

It’s so hard not to run around in that way. So I appreciate that you guys– so where are you focusing? I actually saw somebody in the comments say, TikTok. Yeah?

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Maybe individually, I think we’re trying to work on our sites for TikTok. But I would say, in terms of social media, probably Pinterest and Instagram. But the site is the main goal, actually having good content.

Because that’s another point, another thing that we’re working on, too, is just having– and Tanya spoke to this, too– really good recipes. And so a goal is, to someone who’s never cooked anything before, can they read your recipe, read your tips, your blog posts, and make that recipe successfully without even having to ask you a question? Can they just go through everything, because it’s so well-written, so well-outlined?

And so to me, that’s a focus. A good content is something I feel like that’s like a broken record thing, is, oh my god, you have to have good content. But for a recipe creator, good content-wise in the recipe– like, how well is it written? Are your instructions clear? Are they easy to follow? Even for complex traditional soul food and Southern recipes, you can write that recipe so that someone with no experience can still make it, even if it’s complex.

JENNY GUY: And that all, yeah, that’s one of our biggest SEO tips that we ever give, is have good content, write good content, and like you said, answering those questions, that you know readers are going to have, preemptively. So that when we’re talking about, I can’t write more than the recipe, well, when you’re answering all those questions in advance, when you’re anticipating them, you can. Because they’re all there. It’s all written right into it. I have to do a little plug. Because I’ve noticed that your site is built on a Mediavine product. It is on Trellis?

TANYA HARRIS: It is on Trellis.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: It sure is. I emailed. I was so quickly, was that, we’re going to need Trellis. We’re starting Black People’s Recipes. We’re going to need Trellis. So that was one of the first to-do items on our watch list. So yes, it is on Trellis.

JENNY GUY: And it’s going well– I mean, it looks good. It looks great to me. I love it. So you guys are happy with the end? So it’s going well for you and working for your purposes?

TANYA HARRIS: Absolutely, yeah. We both have Trellis.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: We both have Trellis, yeah.

TANYA HARRIS: So it was no brain. Trellis is– we love it.

JENNY GUY: All Trellis all the time– I love to hear it. The nice thing about Trellis, from my perspective, is that don’t have to worry about things like the Core Web Vitals, and all that. It’s done– because again, with all of the different things grabbing your attention.

OK, so one of the primary goals you guys mentioned, you set out for your mission. And that’s your core, what you’re going for. But one of the goals is also monetization with that. So how are you handling that with Black People’s Recipes? Are you looking for sponsored content, wanting to work with specific brands? Are you doing ads? What about affiliate? And I’ll direct that to Tanya.

[LAUGHTER]

I’m sorry. I promised I would do it and then I didn’t do it. I said I would direct things so they weren’t both trying to answer at the same time. I fell down on the job.

TANYA HARRIS: Definitely, our main, I think, priority is through ads. Ads is one of those. Although it’s not necessarily completely passive, it’s one of the more passively forms of income. And so that’s our main one, affiliates as well.

And then, of course sponsorship work, we’re new. So it’s not like we’ve got sponsors knocking– well, we do have a few already reaching out, actually. But our main priority for now is ads. And then in the future, who knows? But I feel like there’s so many ways to monetize a website and a brand, that just the possibilities are endless. But right now, it’s mostly ad income.

JENNY GUY: Yeah, I just started out with a few basics, to begin with. You’ve got products. You’ve got courses. You’ve got all the things. Anything to add to that about monetization, Brandi?

BRANDI CRAWFORD: I don’t think so. Tanya covered it all.

JENNY GUY: All right, fantastic. All right, since we’re talking about monetization and in honor of Black History Month– we talked about this a little before we came on. But I wanted to bring up that advertisers are earmarking ad spend, ad dollars, specifically for Black and Brown content creators. Tanya, you specifically spoke about this for a couple of media minds, ad partners, TripleLift and GroupM, in June of 2021, and this, where you were talking about their Underrepresented Voices initiative.

And what you said, then, was, as a Black woman business owner, I have firsthand experience as to why initiatives such as this one are so important. I started my blog five years ago, and I noticed a lack of diversity in the blogging industry. That’s starting to change, but much more could be done to level the playing fields. Underrepresented Voices is a huge step in the right direction, and I’m thankful that TripleLift and GroupM started this initiative.

I would love to hear more from both of you on your thoughts on the importance of initiatives like this one, where we’re talking about specific ad dollars that are earmarked for Black content creators, Brown content creators, API content creators, women, LGBTQIA, and I would love to hear about your feelings on that, and as well as how you feel about the self-identifying. Because in the Mediavine world, that’s the only way to know. That’s the only way we can attribute, is if you self-identify. I’m going to start with you, Brandi.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: And so with the self-identifying, you’re meaning in the Mediavine dashboard, you can check a box–

JENNY GUY: Correct.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: –if you’re a Black creator. OK.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

JENNY GUY: Thank you for checking your box. Yes.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: My box is checked, because just in general, I’m Black. I’m proud of being Black. I live an authentically Black life. If you follow me on social media, you’re probably reminded of that unintentionally every single day.

And so for me, initiatives like this are important because I feel like we’re asked all of the time, how can we pass the mic to Black creators, Black business owners, Black entrepreneurs? How can we share this space and be inclusive? And just to be frank, putting money behind us and other creators is one way to do that. And so initiatives like this can help propel people that look like me to follow their dreams and to actually be able to share their talent and to get paid for it, as they should.

JENNY GUY: As they 1,000% should. Pay content creators. Tanya, same to you.

TANYA HARRIS: Yeah, and I guess to follow up, echo what I said earlier, as well, and as Brandi said, money talks. And so right now, the playing fields isn’t equal. And that’s not just in the food blog industry, that’s a lot of industries.

As an attorney, there’s less than 2% Black women that are attorneys. So you can imagine how it is in the blogging community. So initiatives like these are important, if we want anything to change.

And as far as identifying, I love the fact– I know initially, when I started blogging, I think before, it was just a logo. No one knew I was behind the site. But then I realized the importance of showing who I am. Because if you see me down the street, I am a Black woman. And that affects every little aspect of my life, when I walk down the street, how I feel going into the space, how I felt being a food blogger in the space.

So I think it’s important, because I do think people need to see that it is a Black woman that’s running the site and how I work hard to make sure that it is successful. So that others can also be inspired and know that they can do the same as well. Because if you don’t see us doing it, then you’re going to think, well, there’s no one like me doing this. I can’t do it. So I think it’s important to actually show who you are, check the box. And that way, of course, you can get the money to help further their mission as well.

JENNY GUY: Absolutely. That was incredibly poignant. And I can’t imagine how hard it must to feel like you’re breaking into an industry and to struggle where there aren’t people that you feel like that’s represented, and you’re paving the way. And you’re making the road easier for everybody who follows behind you. And that’s incredibly, incredibly inspirational and important. So thank you for doing that.

Let’s talk workflow for a bit. I’m going to pivot from the emotional topic. Because I think we’d all agree, it is a journey to establish a workflow for yourself, especially when you’re the one-woman band, that so many content creators are, how to devote the right amount and what even is the right amount of time and attention to all of the myriad important things, without getting bogged down.

And as we talked about before, without the FOMO, your attention is constantly getting pulled from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing. As a result, content creators have to be, a lot of times, a one-woman or one-man army. You have to be in order to achieve success. So how does that translate now with seven independent people and workflows coming together on one site? Brandi, I’ll start with you there.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: One thing that works well for us is that we meet regularly. So we have meetings regularly, where we can discuss, what are our hot button things that need to be done this week, next month, and that kind of thing? We also have an editorial calendar, so we all know what we’re working on for the next few months.

And we just tapped into each other’s zones of genius. And so we’ve just delegated roles and responsibilities, as it pertains to the site, based on who’s good at what and divvied it out that way. And so it’s been awesome. It just been awesome having other people to help with all of the tasks and not having to do it on your own, as clearly, we both did with our site initially. And then things that we don’t necessarily need our individual zones of genius for, that we can farm out, we have help for that, too.

JENNY GUY: I think that the best part of zones of genius and working on a team is that it’s something that you feel is so easy and natural, that you don’t even think that it’s– don’t think about it as a skill. Because you’re so natural at it. But other people are struggling.

Just hearing you talk about spreadsheets and coming up with budgets, and everything, makes me go, oh my god, I’m so glad that that’s your zone.

[LAUGHTER]

It’s definitely not mine. So I love hearing that. Same question to you– and I also wanted to ask, to drill down a little bit further, is there a specific editorial calendar that you’re working through? How do you guys do that? Because that’s something we are always struggling around here to– all publishers I hear.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Literally, just a basic spreadsheet with a month and all of our names on it.

JENNY GUY: Got it.

TANYA HARRIS: That’s Brandi’s zone of genius. She creates the spreadsheets. And I know how to enter stuff in a spreadsheet, so that’s what I do.

[LAUGHTER]

JENNY GUY: Yes. But don’t ask me to add it all up, because that’s not– it’s tough. Highlight it anyway. OK, same question to you, Tanya, how have you found making the workflow work for you guys?

TANYA HARRIS: I think it works, since that we all have established blogs. And the majority of us, our blogs, we have our own content calendars that we do. We do our own SEO research, so that, that way, you can feel strong that everyone’s bringing the same, I guess, quality of content and quality of ideas that belong on the blog.

And as Brandi said, we meet weekly. So we are able to discuss the kind of content that we’re going for the next month or the next few months, and then the topics that are going to get covered. And then if we’ve got other things that are outside of our zones of genius, we talk about who we’re going to hire to help us with that, as well.

Because I mean, that’s what successful businesses do. If they need to delegate, they delegate. And so I think it’s good that we’ve all had our blogs enough and have grown them significantly enough, that we just– or we know what to do. And we are able to work together.

JENNY GUY: I love hearing all of that. I love the weekly meetings. Communication is definitely key. I’m going to put that down as one of the things. We also have people that are now posting in the comments that, “Now it makes me wonder why not everyone is doing a group blog, designating tasks according to strengths.” So you might spur– we may have a rash of group sites happening after this.

I wanted to ask, for SEO purposes, if you guys had a tool that you specifically like, or tools. And how much new content were you working to put out when you launched? And how often are you posting? Brandi, I’ll ask you.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Some of us use Semrush. Some of us use Ahrefs. So I don’t think that there’s just one tool that we use. In terms of the content we wanted to start with, we wanted enough to where people who came to the site, there could be a good mix of different types of recipes, appetizers. I think we had a drink. We had a couple of desserts and things like that. And we’re doing that same style for the rest of the year. So we’re basically just making sure that we have very well-rounded categories, and we’re covering everything.

JENNY GUY: Love it. And so you establish your category as establish the site navigation, based on the type of experience you wanted your readers to have when they arrived. And then you’re just filling the categories accordingly. I love hearing that. OK. And Semrush, we’re Semrush fans around here at Mediavine, too. We use that one, Google Search Console as well.

As I talked about the workflow– I didn’t put this on the sheet either, on the pre-questionnaire– but I wanted to ask, what is it like getting seven founders together? And is it something to where, as each of you are independent and successful in your own right, are there contracts? Is there mission? How do you work on that together? Because that could be a challenging thing to navigate. And I’ll ask Tanya about that one, as our lawyer.

TANYA HARRIS: I had to put a disclaimer on that’ You’re a lawyer, but–

JENNY GUY: Oh, this is not our lawyer. Oh my goodness, no.

TANYA HARRIS: This is not legal advice.

JENNY GUY: No, this is not. Thank you. No. And the only thing that’s left now is to say, it depends, is your answer. Because that’s my favorite answer to everything.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Oh yeah, I like that one. I like that.

JENNY GUY: It depends. It depends.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: It depends.

TANYA HARRIS: Yeah, like any business, we have our general contracts and agreements that we have. And that wasn’t hard to come about. I think another thing, outside of the legal part of it, I think another thing, that Brandi mentioned, is that we’re not just people that like, hey, you’re successful, let’s work together. We are actually friends. We speak weekly.

So it’s one of those things where we knew that it wouldn’t be an issue. And then if we have any disagreements, we have, I guess, bylaws that tell us how to handle those as well. There are seven of us, so there’s never going to be a tie if we ever have to have a vote. It works out that way as well.

So we did cover those. But I think one of the biggest things that makes it work is that we both know– we know that we all work hard. We all are going to meet our deadlines. And speaking with us over two years– Brandi and I have known each other longer than that– we just know that we’re not going to just blow the other off. We’re actually going to work hard to make sure that the site is a success. So I think that’s the main thing that has helped us be successful in this site so far.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Yeah, I think it’d be a lot different if it was just one person going up to six people, like, hey, let’s start a blog. Like, no.

TANYA HARRIS: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: It was an organic idea, right? You guys were together as a sort of mastermind. Then you became friends. Then it built into a business idea. But I loved hearing about bylaws. Yes. Yes, lawyer talk. It’s there. You hope you don’t need it. You probably won’t. But it’s there just in case. That is very, very exciting.

OK. I also wanted to talk about one of the recurring themes that we’ve had around here for Black History Month. We’ve had some incredible speakers. We’ve talked to Black teammates that we have at Mediavine, Black content creators that we work with for full-service ad management.

And one of the recurring themes has definitely been a scarcity versus abundance mindset and how important– how a lot of what we see reflected in the instances of hate and the instances, come down to fear of having whatever it is that you perceive as yours taken away from you. And I would love to hear how that scarcity, versus abundance clearly manifests in having seven people, who are all successful on their own, come together. And I’ll ask you, Brandi. I’m not sure that what the exact question is there, but I just– more of a general talk about scarcity versus abundance.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Well, when I hear of scarcity mindset, I know, just in terms of– we were just talking about keyword volume. And when we think about ranking on Google and things like that, a lot of people want to hold on to their rankings, and stuff like that. And with an opportunity like this, it could present itself to be competitive, even amongst each other.

But at the end of the day, we all want each other to win. So if Tanya’s recipe is beating out mine, cool. Another Black woman is at least getting that keyword in that recipe. And so if I win, she wins.

And one of the Mediavine quotes is, what is it? The rising tide lifts all boats, and things like that. And so I love that reference, because I feel like if someone else in this space is winning, then I’m winning, too. And so there’s never any scarcity. There’s always enough room, and there’s always a seat for me at the table. That’s just how I feel and think.

JENNY GUY: Yes. And also, hearing that there aren’t just five people searching for the chocolate chip recipe. There are enough people who want some chocolate chip cookies, that it’s OK that her– yes, yes.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: And there are going to be some people who want my chocolate chip recipe, because there’s something that I can make that will distinguish it as mine to be different.

JENNY GUY: Yes, your chocolate chip recipe is yours. And it’s people who want your– yes, yes. I’m going to leave that where it is. Tanya, same question to you– scarcity, versus abundance, and how that’s manifesting here.

TANYA HARRIS: Yeah, I agree with Brandi. And I think, for me personally, I think scarcity was just inbred in my mind. When I was growing up, I would always be fearful that– we would budget everything, because the idea was you only would get a certain amount.

And then when I got older, I realized there is an abundance of people in the world looking for recipes. And like Brandi said, when one of us wins, we all win. It’s just it’s super excited.

So I’m even one of those people like, I don’t have every single recipe out there. And I don’t want to make every single recipe out there. So if people say, hey, do you have a recipe for this? I’m not going to go and create that. I’m going to share another blogger’s recipes, especially one that I trust.

So that happens to me a lot. People will come and say, do you have this? And I’ll be like, no, but Brandi has one. Here you go. Try this out. And that doesn’t hurt me, because there’s 50 other people that want to get another recipe on my site.

And I do believe, honestly, when you have that mindset, abundancy comes. But I do think that’s something that you have to teach yourself. Because a lot of times, we’ve– not everyone, but some people have been raised to just feel that if I don’t win, then there’s no more out there. And I feel like you just have to have the proper mindset of abundance and like she said, the tides and the boats and the–

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Yeah, I think I butchered it. I knew what I meant. I knew what I meant.

JENNY GUY: That’s right. That’s what I’d say. And it’s one of those sayings right? Rising tides raise all ships.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Yes.

JENNY GUY: Because I–

TANYA HARRIS: Yeah, that one.

JENNY GUY: –butchered it so many times on different things. And you don’t even realize it until you’re midway into it. You’re like, rising.

TANYA HARRIS: I’m going to say the the ship quote, the quote about the ship, that one, that one.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: That one.

JENNY GUY: Exactly.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Yeah, that one.

JENNY GUY: And this– we’re all going to be higher, is really what I’m saying, with water. We actually had a speaker who is the senior vice president of brand strategy and marketing at BET. His name is Tiyale Hayes. We had him last week, and he was magical.

But his analogy that he talked about with the scarcity, versus abundance mindset, was the idea that you’re a parent, and you have one child, and whether that– a niece, or whatever. But if there’s a scarcity mindset, you won’t have love for the second child. Like, it’s just the first child, like, I’m done. I’m out. My love is gone.

But the idea that somehow, that incredible amount of love that you have multiplies by two or by three or by five– and that’s how it happens. It’s like somebody said. The universe is infinite. It’s not pie. That is the truth. Unfortunately, a pie is good.

[LAUGHTER]

I love that. OK, we actually had a Search Console question from Jenny Field. She said, “Do all of you guys have access to your new blog Search Console, or do you have a designated person who is your Search Console genius? Brandi?

BRANDI CRAWFORD: We all have access to it. I think that they’re varying. Some people care about looking at it all the time, more than others. But we all have access to it.

[LAUGHTER]

I haven’t looked at it in a week, though. I can say maybe I’m not the person. I haven’t looked in a week or two.

[LAUGHTER]

JENNY GUY: That’s amazing. Some people might want to look at it every day.

TANYA HARRIS: It’s me.

JENNY GUY: I don’t. But someone does.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Now, normally, I would be. I’ve just been busy over the last week. So I’ll get back to checking it every day.

JENNY GUY: All right, so you all launched a little under a month ago. Looking forward to the rest of 2022 and then beyond, what are some of your goals for Black People’s Recipes? What would you like to accomplish? I’ll start with Tanya on that one.

TANYA HARRIS: Well, I want Google to rank us. That’s– rank us, Google. But the other thing is I just want to reach as many people as we can, so that: they can come to the recipes and basically, learn a lot. So I’m going to piggyback off of one of the articles that has gotten a lot of interaction, was one that Brandi wrote, which was why do Black people wash chicken?

And it’s a conversation that happens a lot. It’s a very controversial topic. But then I feel like a lot of people didn’t know why there was this stigma of washing chicken or why people wash chicken. But Brandi broke it down and was like, you guys, this is why. And I don’t think there’s a lot of content out there that explains that.

So I just hope that we reach as many people as we can, so that they can learn more about our culture of food, our culture traditions, and things such as that. So that’s the overall goal. As long as Google ranks us, it will happen.

JENNY GUY: Speak it into existence.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Abundance, abundance Google mindset. Just rain down the Google abundance.

JENNY GUY: Exactly. Brandi, same question to you, what are some of your goals?

BRANDI CRAWFORD: I’ll definitely echo what Tanya said. The educational piece, I think, is invaluable. And it’s a large reason why we started this site, to teach people. It’s not even just about teaching recipes. It’s teaching our traditions, our customs, and why we do the things that we do.

And I had a feeling that that “Why Black People All Wash Chicken” post would be really popular. And it really speaks to the historical reasons and the history of Black people in this country, how we were treated and things that were done, and just things of that nature. If you haven’t read that article, blackpeoplesrecipes.com/whyblackpeoplewashchicken. It’s really, really good.

And so I shared it. And within 30 minutes, we were getting comments after comment on the post, where people were just like, oh my god, I never knew any of this historical background, and things of that nature. So just knowing that you can reach people and that they can learn something is invaluable. And so that’s probably first and foremost goal, for sure.

JENNY GUY: All right, yes, that is an incredible goal. And I love, setting that out as being your mission, then all the other things are going to follow, all of the other. The Google and the monetization and all of those things are going to come when you’re pursuing the mission that you have.

OK, so we are almost at the end of our time here, which is a big old bummer. But we always like to leave our incredible audience with action items, so that they can walk away and immediately be able to put your expertise into practice, when they walk away. So today, I would like to ask for your advice on content creator allyship.

And how can we, as content creators, best use our influence to support sites like Black People’s Recipes? And as you said, how can we pass the mic beyond checking the box– every Mediavine publisher, go check the box and get the money, but beyond that. So I’m going to leave you guys for just a second and make a quick announcement. I will come back, and I will start out with Tanya on that one.

Guys, for our next Teal Talk, we are gone for a couple of weeks. When we come back, it will be March, again, with the rudeness of the dates. But it will be March 15, Tuesday, at 1:00 PM Eastern, noon Central. We will have Andy Dehnart, of Reality Blurred, with a possible surprise guest.

We are going to be talking about a new venture that we’ll be releasing. It is called Mediavine University. And we will be releasing that out in the next couple of months. We are very excited about it. Please join us. So we will see you then.

But for now, let’s go back to my incredible guests that I’ve had today. It’s been a wonderful conversation, and I’m so grateful that you guys have been here. I’m going to start with Brandi. People who say they want to help– and I believe they do want to help– how can you be a good ally?

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Yeah, I think it starts with being genuine, as you just said, taking a genuine interest and helping, and making it not a check-the-box task. Because I feel like, during the Black Lives Matter huge movement, that we saw June, May of 2020, lots of White content creators were sharing our content. Hey, follow this person. She’s Black, makes recipes, and things like that. And that lasted. That was cool for a month or two.

But it’s like, what steps are you taking past that? And are you sharing people on a consistent basis from a genuine place and not a check-the-box place? Evaluating your friendship circles, evaluating your blogger circles, how do those people look? Are they all White? Is there any diversity there?

Mastermind groups, retreats, when you reach out for people to be a part of your mastermind group or in your retreat, are you looking to create diversity in those spaces and lift up the community that many people say they want to lift up? But it needs to be more than a check-the-box. It needs to be an ongoing thing that’s at the forefront of your mind.

If you scroll Instagram, how do the people look? When you like a photo or engage with the photo, do you scroll past the Black content creators? And I feel like we’re easy to find. And like I said, we all knew about each other, because we’re Black in this space. And so we found each other the same way other people can find us and uplift us.

JENNY GUY: Very helpful– so it is not just about checking the box. But it is just about checking the box when you are trying to identify–

BRANDI CRAWFORD: In the dashboard.

JENNY GUY: In the dashboard. But that’s the simplest part. Beyond that, it’s about the starting from a genuine place. And it’s more than just– I love that because the people you’re surrounded with, that’s going to seep into what you’re doing. It’s going to seep into every part of your life. And if you’re not looking at that, yeah, absolutely great advice. Same question to you, Tanya.

TANYA HARRIS: Wow. Well, Brandi’s response was incredible. Yeah, and I do agree about the being genuine. Because that is what allows you to stay consistent. And what she said, as well, is surrounding your circles. I know for me, myself, I went to an HBCU for law school. And I went particularly, because it was the most diverse law school that I ever saw and went to.

And the experiences I got there were incredible. And I think people need to think about that, just that when you’re going to– you’re forming a mastermind. Who is in it? Is it diverse? How could you make it diverse?

And also, supporting– a lot of Black food bloggers also have books. Brandi has a book, The Air Fryer Cookbook, that’s the title of it.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Super Easy Air Fryer Cookbook.

TANYA HARRIS: Oops, Super Easy Air Fryer Cookbook. She’s got a bok. And now Grandbaby Cakes also has a book. And so purchasing their products, sharing their recipes, things such as that, if you want to make a recipe for your own site, maybe rather than just creating it, maybe spotlighting someone else’s recipe in that on your social media, or whatever, I think if you do that consistently and not once, then that’s definitely a great way to be an ally.

JENNY GUY: Not just in February, right?

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Or Juneteenth. February and Juneteenth, those are the days we see the spike in shares.

JENNY GUY: Yeah, it’s not– no, that’s not the way to make changes, that consistency showing up. Thank you so, so much for sharing and for the work you’re doing and for creating this wonderful website, that is not only delicious, but inspiring to all of us out here. We’re very, very excited to be working with you at Mediavine, and we’re very appreciative for taking this time to talk with us today.

BRANDI CRAWFORD: Thanks for having us.

TANYA HARRIS: Yes, thank you for having us.

JENNY GUY: All right, ladies. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. We’ll see you in a couple of weeks. And have a great rest of your February.

But that’s not going to stop us from our favorite annual tradition: spring cleaning!

Whether it’s your office or your bedroom, it’s important to stay organized, clean, and throw all the clutter away. As a content creator, your website is no different.

On today’s episode we have Mediavine’s Sr. Support Engineer Manager Jacob Feltner and Once Coupled’s Lauren Gray. Jacob and Lauren are talking spring cleaning for your site, with everything from auditing your plugins to their favorite tools to use.

This episode is packed with actionable tips so if you learn something, make sure to let us know and share what stood out to you!

Helpful Resources

• Once Coupled
• Our Help Guide to Site Speed
• Lazy Loading Ads
• How To Do A Plugin Self-Audit

Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] JENNY GUY: Hey everybody, welcome. It is Thursday, March 12. It is a little bit crazy in our world right now. But we are here. I am Jenny Guy. I’m the Director of Marketing for Mediavine and the host of Teal Talk. And I’m very grateful that you are joining us today.

In current events, daylight savings time started for most of the US states over the weekend, which coincided with International Women’s Day and resulted in more confusion and deprivation for females, perfect. And then in other news, spring starts officially one week from today, the season of rebirth, and fresh starts, and green grass. And I think that that’s something we could all do with right now in our lives.

I know that on everybody’s minds and thoughts right now is what’s going on in our world and in our country. But what I’m excited about is we can have a whole hour to just sit in our home pods and talk about our websites and not the big elephant in the room, the virus elephant in the room. I’m so excited.

So as I was saying, spring, rebirth, green grass, fresh starts, which means it’s time for spring cleaning, which could be your closet, your pantry, pockets of your winter coats. Unless you are me, and you love the dollar pocket lottery to happen when the next year– you know, when you put on your coat that you haven’t worn in eight months, and you stick your hand in the pocket, and you’re like, $5. It’s– it gets me every time.

But what we’re talking about today, us being Mediavine, is your website. Have any of you guys ever done this? A deep and thorough cleansing to get rid of the things you don’t need anymore that are just taking up space and weighing and slowing you down. It sounds like a great idea. But how do you make this happen? Enter my amazing guests.

Lauryn Gray is the founder of Once Coupled and believes in doing everything with passion and transparency, which mostly means she sends really long emails riddled with exclamation points. Girl, same. She’s worked with over 500 plus bloggers on projects from reducing above the fold white space, to taking a site from a zero-page speed optimization score to green.

When she’s not making your site faster and easier for you to manage, Lauren enjoys crime TV, mojitos, and long walks on the beach with her dog. Hi, Lauren. Welcome back to Teal Talk. It’s been a while.

LAUREN GRAY: It has been. I think we did a spring talk like this last year.

JACOB FELTNER: We lost Jenny. She was the glue. She’s what kept it together.

LAUREN GRAY: She is. I can’t even tell if we’re still live.

JACOB FELTNER: Yeah, I don’t know. Andrew just waved at us. So–

LAUREN GRAY: OK.

JACOB FELTNER: –potentially.

LAUREN GRAY: So that might mean we’re still here. We don’t know where Jenny is.

JACOB FELTNER: No.

LAUREN GRAY: Jacob, should I introduce you? I’ve got your–

JACOB FELTNER: Dude, that’d be awesome.

LAUREN GRAY: –info here. Great. Well, I’m here with Jacob Feltner. He is a Support Engineering Manager at Mediavine, as well as a husband and dog dad. He’s an expert in all things Mediavine ads, more specifically what plays nicely with them and what breaks them.

He spends his day trying to make publishers all the dollars and his nights adding to his knowledge as a movie buff and all around info junkie. Welcome Jacob to this Facebook Live.

JACOB FELTNER: Thank you Lauren. This is– it was a good recovery, very good recovery. We’re doing great.

JENNY GUY: That was super new.

JACOB FELTNER: Ooh, there she is.

JENNY GUY: I am– my computer legit went black screen for no reason.

LAUREN GRAY: Well, we made the best of it.

JENNY GUY: I’m sure you guys were brilliant. And I’m sorry that I had to come back and wreck whatever awesome conversation flow you had happening just now. But I am here, hello.

JACOB FELTNER: It was perfect timing.

JENNY GUY: And I apologize for that. I was about to introduce our amazing intrepid Jacob Feltner, who is our support engineering manager at Mediavine. He is also a husband and a dog dad.

JACOB FELTNER: Let’s do it again. Let’s do it again. Let’s do it again.

JENNY GUY: He’s an expert– I’m so sorry.

LAUREN GRAY: I did technically read his bio out for you.

JACOB FELTNER: You know, Lauren actually already did that but if you want to do it again–

JENNY GUY: Oh, you read his bio.

LAUREN GRAY: I did.

JENNY GUY: Oh my gosh. Awesome. Girl, you don’t need me.

LAUREN GRAY: Couldn’t have him not having an intro here.

JENNY GUY: I don’t even need to be here. This is awesome. OK. So I’m glad– I just got all the comments that I’m reading all the things. We’re so glad you’re here. OK. Let’s talk about– let’s dispense with the formalities. We’re going to be doing some fun stuff here where we ask a good audience interactive question.

So the one we’re going to start with is just a pretty simple one, which is how is your site speed right now? Post your late– your last mobile score in GPSI in the comments, if you dare. And then any other questions you have for Jacob or Lauren, please feel free to post in the comments. We will be talking about all the things.

So to start out with, let’s kick off with telling me a little bit about yourselves and why I’ve asked you– why you think I’ve asked you to share your expertise on this particular episode of Tale Talk– Teal Talk, other than the fact that you’re lovely humans. I love hanging out with you and spending time with you. So Lauren, will you start for me please?

LAUREN GRAY: Yeah, absolutely. I’m Lauren with Once Coupled, as my bio originally introduced me. I just love working one-on-one with clients, personally. I really like getting to build relationships with my clients. I’m personally very intrigued by complex problems.

So I love bigger projects where we get to solve stuff and a big part of that has been site speed. And I’m personally a perfectionist. So as high as we can get your scores, with as much compromise on functionality as possible, really what drives me. And I don’t know, kind of what I like to do in my day-to-day.

I’ve got a team of another three to developers, depending on the projects, that work with me. And they are experts– their expertise is either in custom themes or in site speed. And we’ve done a ton of site speed projects. I mean, all of my custom themes focus on that.

But Eric, a couple of years was like, site speed’s going to be big. Get into site speed now. And when Eric tells you to do something, you better do it. So we started doing site speed. And it did become a big trend. And I’m so excited there’s so many other– because it became such a big trend, so many solutions have been put out to help everyone do better with their site speed.

So we’ve done a lot of audits and a lot of work with clients. And we love to see that clients have come, not even just clients but through blogs in general have come so far.

JENNY GUY: I mean, there’s so many things there. But it’s so wonderful to hear that people outside of those that he is paying are– do the thing that we do, which is when Eric said something we do it. It’s good to know, good to know. We– yes, I don’t live in a world, I’ve never lived in a world where speed was not a thing.

It just is, the need for speed Hochberger lives that life. OK, Jacob, same to you. Tell me what you do on– on the daily, and why I invited you to be here, other than your delightful beard.

JACOB FELTNER: Oh boy, well, yeah. I joined Mediavine just under two years ago. And I came with a background in web development for a couple of years. And that was my initial, kind of, professional goal in life. But, you know, I’ve always loved helping people.

I’ve had a job since I was about 15. And the vast majority of those jobs were about helping people in some way, shape, or form, you know, directly connecting with people and helping them out. It’s always something I’ve enjoyed, that I’ve had a passion for.

And this opportunity came my way. And with the time that I’ve been with the company, I have become pretty familiar with not only our technologies, our plugins, our script, all the fun tech. I’ve also seen how it interacts with the myriad of possibilities, whether it be other plugins, other themes, just every situation imaginable, how it interacts, how it can affect site speed, how it can affect ad performance, you know, all those fun things.

And typically when it comes to people thinking, you know, oh, my site speed’s gone down because I’ve done this. It usually ends up in my lap or my department’s lap, and same if, you know, something changes and the ads go bad, or it’s not performing as well. So get to troubleshoot the Wild West of the world wide web.

JENNY GUY: Wow.

JACOB FELTNER: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: That is an–

JACOB FELTNER: That just came to me.

JENNY GUY: –awesome tag line. Holy cannoli. That– you’re flowing. I’m not going to stop you. And marketing team, brand team be writing this stuff down. We’re hitting gold. OK. So we have– we’ve got some brave folks who are sharing their site speed scores with us.

We have, let’s see, we have Andrew Eaton said, 44 mobile, 94 desktop. Janice Luke Smith said, 64 on mobile, 97 on desktop. And Mary Elizabeth, I think it’s Woita, said “63 on mobile and 92 on desktop.”

And then just for another comment that caused both Lauren and I to smile while you were talking. I think that’s what she was smiling at. YoriNo said, “who is this delightfully bearded man? I need his digits.”

JACOB FELTNER: Oh, boy.

JENNY GUY: So you’ve already got people watching that are asking for your phone number so.

JACOB FELTNER: She said she was going to do that.

JENNY GUY: And should we tell them who she is? Or just let everyone know that you’re the stud that you are?

JACOB FELTNER: Oh, that’s my lovely wife.

JENNY GUY: All right, well.

JACOB FELTNER: That’s my lovely wife, partner in crime.

JENNY GUY: I was going to let it ride with just the fans asking for your digits. Because–

JACOB FELTNER: No, no, nobody needs my phone number.

JENNY GUY: Well, I have it. But I work with you.

JACOB FELTNER: Oh, Oh, OK. All right.

JENNY GUY: So OK, Fay Osborne said, “56, 93.” And she has a sad face with that one. OK. So what– let’s talk a little bit about what are some of the most common site speed issues that you’re coming across, Lauren, and how can we fix them.

We’ll start with Lauren. And then Jacob will kind of take that from an ad perspective. But let’s start with speed. What are some of those most common things we’re seeing?

LAUREN GRAY: I mean, the biggest thing that we always see is images. There’s always more that can be done with images. At the simplest form, you can turn on lazy loading for images. And that can make a big impact on your speed scores and how quickly your site can load initially.

It’s kind of like a– I don’t know, it’s kind of like putting a blanket over a problem. Because if you’re not actually optimizing your images, you’re just kind of ignoring it. And it looks a little better and things are feeling better. But there’s always more that can be done with your images.

So ShortPixel is a good optimization tool. There’s a whole bunch of them. ShortPixel is just the one that I used, I did a bunch of tests with a few years ago. Who knows if it’s still the best now, but it’s the one that I typically refer to. But ShortPixel can compress your images. If you’re inserting really large images and you can insert smaller ones, that makes a big difference.

Andrew Wilder from NerdPress has talked about– I don’t know if it was on the talk here, but has talked about how because images are you– if you– I don’t know how to do this math. I should not talk about math. The larger–

JENNY GUY: I love talking about math, my favorite.

LAUREN GRAY: I don’t believe you. You’ve said–

JENNY GUY: It’s a lie.

LAUREN GRAY: –a lot of things now, beforehand, that now I know not to believe anything you say.

JENNY GUY: Oh.

LAUREN GRAY: But essentially, if you multiply width times height, you get a larger number if it’s two times the square– OK, you know what? I can’t do math. Let’s not talk about it. Exactly, the image size is twice as large, but it will be four times larger in file size.

I’m sorry I sent us down that rabbit hole. But what I’m trying to say is that a smaller image is better. Compressing images with ShortPixel is better. Lazy loading is better. We see huge gains. That’s always the first thing we work on with clients is images. So–

JENNY GUY: So size does matter, period, definitively. Size matters. And size mat– smaller is better. And you heard it here. So that’s just the way it is. OK. So we had a question. But then I want to go to– we’re getting a ton of questions. OK.

Wiktar says, “hi, what’s more important, a better score at PageSpeed Insights or the actual speed of site measured with Pingdom?” So for example, I get a score on PageSpeed Insights. I can see it by eye or by measuring that website is actually slower.

We’re going to talk a little bit about where’s the– from what I’m gathering, Wiktar, is that you’re asking where is the best place to measure page speed. And we actually have a question about that. But Jacob, tell them where we like to measure page speed please.

JACOB FELTNER: It’s primarily Google PageSpeed Insights. The best thing about that is it’s basically hitting two of the most important groups of people that can impact a website, which are the readers and Google themselves. These are the metrics that Google likes, that they want people to judge against.

So you always want to make Google happy. But it’s also a way of better replicating the user experience. Because a lot of other site speed tools, they kind of wait for literally everything to load, including the ads, which can kind of skew the scores a little bit to make it seem drastically worse than what it is. Because all of our ads are lazy loaded.

So when a user experiences it, when they go to the site, you know, they’re seeing it as they see it, as they scroll, as it comes into view. Whereas some other site speed tools, they don’t view it the same way. So overall, start with GPSI. You’ll be in good shape.

JENNY GUY: I mean, exactly, yeah. No user cares what’s loading on the bottom of your site when they’re visiting your site. I’m not scrolling to the bottom and being slow, I don’t not like this site. That’s not something I do. I don’t check the bottom of a website when I’m trying to get something to load on my phone.

So it’s measuring what a user actually does. Lauren, do you have any thoughts to add to that on Pingdom or anything?

LAUREN GRAY: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s interesting, because a lot of those other tools will take into account those ads, like Jacob was saying. So there can be variation based on how optimized an ad campaign that’s being tested is. So you’ll see larger amount of variations.

We get a lot of questions from clients that are asking why Search Console or Google Analytics is telling them that a site, that a page on their site is suddenly loading much slower. And , I can’t tell you why because I’m not testing it with ads.

So if you haven’t done anything different on that site, it’s probably not that the page is loading any different. It’s probably at that different ad is being tested. And we don’t really see the impact of those ads. Because we’re using PageSpeed Insights, and it doesn’t use those. It doesn’t analyze those. And also because of the changes that they made to ads to make them more user friendly.

But I know beforehand, before Google PageSpeed Insights changed six times and got updates every month to make our lives harder–

JENNY GUY: Lighthouse.

LAUREN GRAY: I used to email Mediavine regularly. Because I would see an unoptimized campaign that would be crazy pulling scores down. And I think that those could be factors. And I know Mediavine is always working, if they see those campaigns, to reach out and ask them to optimize this. Don’t try and upload a giant image, et cetera.

But, you know, that’s a factor, too. It’s like you’ll see those warnings. But you can’t just take them at face value. You’ve got to be monitoring those scores on your own, looking at your site, and– one other thing I want to mention, based on this question, was kind of, they were asking if they should be looking at their own site and kind of seeing how it feels to them.

And I think that that’s a little difficult. Because throughout the world and throughout the different internet connections and whatnot, if you’re looking at your site at a really good– if you have a good internet connection and you’re looking at your site, it’s going to load really quickly. But you’ve got to consider people that are on mobile devices and things like that.

And as much as possible, optimize for those connections that they don’t have the same resources. And that’s part of what PageSpeed Insights does, too, is they have throttled connections. So they’ll tell you your site is slower than you’re seeing it. Because they’re throttling that connection to something that they find to be more of an average user.

JENNY GUY: Right. That’s a lot designing your site or create writing content based on a desktop, when most of your readers are doing it on mobile. You’ve got to think about what the experience that your reader is having, as opposed to the experience that you’re having when you’re sitting at your laptop or desktop doing the creating.

Jacob, you mentioned lazy loading. And I know that we have 800,000 blog posts, help docs, various things about it. But I think that it’s possible that there are some of our audience who do not know what you’re talking about and why it matters. And I think that there are also some people who think that that is the norm, that all ad companies use lazy loading for their ads.

So why does it matter? What does it mean? Why is it good to be lazy?

JACOB FELTNER: Well, it’s great to be lazy. But it’s primarily, you know, it’s the whole idea of if you just let everything on a site load at once, it’s going to take much, much longer than it needs. And all of that content, you know, people are going to be seeing a fraction of your website at any given time. So you might as well just be giving it to them piece by piece.

You don’t need to do that with a lot of other things, like text and stuff like that, but with images and especially with ads. You know, since ads can be relatively heavy compared to everything else, you know, you only want to deal with it when it’s necessary, when it’s within view, when it needs to be on the eyeballs of people.

And so it’s crucial. It’s absolutely crucial. Because, you know, you have a nice beautiful website with amazing content. And things are coming in to intrude on your space and give you money. And we want them to be as friendly as possible. We don’t want there to be a true give and take.

You shouldn’t have to sacrifice user experience just to make a little bit of money or a lot of money. So doing lazy loading is just getting closer to the world where you can have your cake and eat it too. It makes the most sense.

It’s the modern, kind of, approach to web. It’s kind of crazy to not have ads that are lazy loaded. It just makes all the sense in the world. It’s best for everyone involved.

JENNY GUY: And I know that when you are– so the story of Mediavine and why we have lazy loaded ads, and we were the pioneers on that technology for advertising. And the reason why we did it was because we built– when we designed the ads, when Eric designed ads, he built them for our own sites.

Meaning he knew that if he put on ads that tanked page speed and killed user experience, we would lose all the traffic that we were attempting to monetize. So there would be no purpose. There would– playing the short game was never for us, because we were putting it on our own site.

So we would have– we’re eating our own dog food, that disgusting developer term that Eric says every time he comes on to talk about a new plugin. He’s like, we have to eat our own dog food. I’m like, I don’t need you to say that.

JACOB FELTNER: No.

JENNY GUY: We need a– that’s not. But that’s why. It’s because we knew that playing a short game and making our viewers say, I don’t want to be here anymore. There’s no point. OK. We had a– Ben Heath said Squoosh apps. S-Q-U-O-O-S-H dot app, have you guys heard? He said it’s from Google Chrome Developers. He said it’s awesome. It sounds for images, I’m guessing.

LAUREN GRAY: I have not personally heard of that.

JENNY GUY: Haven’t heard of it.

LAUREN GRAY: I don’t know, if it integrates WordPress, then I’m generally a fan, as long as you can easily revert your images. So ideally I recommend clients to take the extra time, it’s not even time. It’s really just a little bit of money to save their original size images on their site, on their server, so they can always revert if they want.

That way if they ever decide they need a higher quality or larger size in the future, then they can always revert those images and recompress for whatever reason. Generally, if you’re compressing images beforehand and then uploading them to WordPress, it’s generating thumbnails from those, and they’re OK.

I like ShortPixel, they are plugins that integrate with WordPress. Because once those thumbnails are generated, it will also tend to compress those. So those images are auto-created by WordPress. WordPress, kind of, sort of, limits image quality to reduce file size.

But you can save, you know, you can get a better file size if you also have an app that’s compressing the thumbnails that are generated from the original that you’ve uploaded. And most sites have 10 or more thumbnails that are being generated by their theme, or plugins, or whatnot, being used throughout the site.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. OK. No, that’s really helpful. Then he says, it’s for optimizing images. But there is no plugin for WordPress currently. We have a question from Luke Ward, who is asking if ZergNet ads are lazy loaded, too. Chico.

JACOB FELTNER: That is a good question. I honestly don’t know. ZergNet is a pretty rare thing that comes across us. I know someone asked about it not too long ago, so I could probably just do a quick search. But honestly, I don’t know.

JENNY GUY: Well, Eric is lurking. He might know. He’s commenting in the comments. And he thinks your new project– he is always lurking. I can feel him like a presence in the ether. He said, you need to coin a new term for eating your own dog food. So that is your new assignment.

JACOB FELTNER: All right.

JENNY GUY: And then if you coin in and come up with something as good as the last one you just said, the Wild West on the world wide web, then we can ingrain it into him. And I don’t have to hear that again. So please get on that. Thank you.

JACOB FELTNER: Fair enough.

JENNY GUY: OK. So we kind of started to go down this trail a little bit. But when we’re talking about testing for page speed, we talked about why we should use Google PageSpeed Insights as a starting point to test. What are– what exactly are we testing?

When we’re– when we’re going to get a good overall thermometer, take the temperature of our site and figure out how site speed is, what are we testing? What exactly? Lauren, will you start with that please?

LAUREN GRAY: I don’t know what you’re asking. What do you mean what are we testing? We’re testing your site speed.

JENNY GUY: So I think that a lot of people– what I’m trying to give– to get you to– Jacob, do you know what I’m trying to get her to say?

JACOB FELTNER: Yeah, I mean, it’s basically, you know, it’s measuring– I think I know what you’re saying. It’s measuring pretty much every user experience. It’s not just taking desktop into account. It’s taking mobile into account. It’s testing different kind of experiences, whether it be with throttled speed or not. Is that what you’re getting at?

JENNY GUY: Partially. But I’m also just getting at, you can’t just test your home page through your page speed. You need to go into your popular poll. A lot of times I’ll have people that are like, my speed is rockin’. It’s bangin’, lightning fast. You’re like, it’s your home page. And no one is there.

So you need to check– check your most– I think checking your most popular posts would probably be smart. That’s what I would say. But I’ll leave it to the experts.

JACOB FELTNER: Yeah. It definitely makes a lot of sense. I mean, usually a lot of people’s home pages are going to be fancier than their blog posts, probably a little more intense. So they might have things on there that they don’t have anywhere else, larger image sizes, who knows, maybe some fancy animation and whatnot.

But if you’re getting a lot of traffic to your home page, take it into consideration. But really, I think simplifying your site overall, even the home page is worth doing. You know, people– you’re making great content. That’s why people are coming to your site. That’s why they typically stay on your site, not because you have a fancy slider on your homepage. Because that will just kill speed.

JENNY GUY: They’re not just there for my slider.

JACOB FELTNER: I know, right.

JENNY GUY: What?

JACOB FELTNER: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: Dropping knowledge bombs.

JACOB FELTNER: But yeah, definitely– definitely focus, you know, if you don’t know where to start, in terms of which exact spot on my site do I test, start with your most popular post and just kind of build out from there.

JENNY GUY: So you are saying, simplify. I think that would be a really great– quote from Eric Hochburger, ZergNet is not lazy loaded, according to him. So that’s–

JACOB FELTNER: There you go.

JENNY GUY: There you have the answer. So when you say getting started, I know we talked about images would be– is there any other place to get our teeth into on our sites to start, Jacob, where you would recommend starting with page speed?

JACOB FELTNER: Yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s a big thing. That’s why we’re– that’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re talking about it. But I think another thing, especially as it relates to our ads, is probably asset optimization, script deferment, CSS deferment, stuff like that.

Which is basically just a fancy way of saying, shrinking the size of the scripts that are loading on your site. Or basically telling them, you know, let your page load before the script has had time to fully load. You know, you don’t want anything blocking your script or your site from actually loading. You don’t want to wait on a specific script to load.

Because sometimes that can just completely destroy a user experience, because all they see is a blank screen. But if you look in the network tab of DevTools, I’m using fancy words right now. But you’ll see something is just taking forever to load. And that’s just because it isn’t being deferred.

But the big thing to keep in mind with that is, while it is important, the asset optimization, the minification, the shrinking of these scripts will, and often does, impact, whether it be– it could potentially affect our ad script. It could affect grow or create. It could alter it in some way.

So while you do want to do that, you know, like with anything that’s pretty powerful, and it’s going to make your site quicker. And it’s going to affect other things functionality. And you have no kind of insight into it. You know, just tread softly. You know, turn it on, test all the functionality on your site.

Make sure ads are loading properly. Make sure your create a card looks good. Make sure your opt-in forms are behaving properly. Because you just never know what’s going to happen when everything is kind of smashed together and shrunk.

And you want to plugin that gives you leeway, that gives you access to say, OK, don’t touch Mediavine stuff, or don’t touch jQuery. Because a lot of things are dependent on jQuery and if it doesn’t load in a certain way, it’ll cause things to go hooey.

So just anytime you get into that world, don’t be afraid of it, just be logical about it. Be kind of clinical about it, step by step. If something doesn’t go right, there are ways to make it better, if you have a good plugin. By excluding it from being optimized, and you still get the benefit of shrinking everything else.

It’s just a lot of plugins are really good about telling you that upfront. If you turn this on, this could break something, you know, tread softly. But they’re not always that nice.

JENNY GUY: Speaking of plugins, let’s segue. Actually no, I wanted to grab one more quick question from our audience. OK. Amelia Meier says, question for you, my team is pumping out awesome content. Good to know. We are using Pinterest and SEO best practices. My site speed is fast.

My question is, my blog is eight years old. I deleted hundreds. And I’m slowly going through the rest of them. But what do I focus on as far as updating them, tags, photos, length? Could old content still be, quote, weighing down my site? And as I am making these changes, how long do I wait before I should see a big difference, a couple of months, a year?

Who wants to take it? Who wants to jump in? Lauren, you got it?

LAUREN GRAY: I mean, I would say that old– like delete– are we talking about deleting old posts?

JENNY GUY: I believe that’s what she’s referring to. She’s saying she’s got an eight-year-old blog. She has deleted some old posts.

LAUREN GRAY: And she deleted–

JENNY GUY: And we actually have a question about that further down. Because it’s a hot topic always when people have been blogging for a long time and had a lot of content they may not be as proud of in the past. Right.

LAUREN GRAY: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: So what do we– I mean, the dark photos of the food that you took. You know– you know, it’s OK. We all have things that we’re– like I look at some of my middle school ensemble choices and I’m appalled. So do you– do you– Lauren, can you talk to that a little bit?

LAUREN GRAY: Yeah, I mean deleting posts is– your site speed is going to be like independent on every individual page. So like every page has its own speed. And if we’re saying that Google is considering that page speed, it’s only considering it per that page. So if you’re deleting old posts, then it’s not going to hurt or improve the page speed of other pages on your site.

Like removing old content, in terms of updating old posts and inserting smaller resized images, or basically deleting old embeds that might be in there that you don’t really need anymore, like a lot of people used to embed the Pinterest widget for their, like to follow them. And like that’d be in all their old posts.

Well, if you don’t need that and you go back and you remove it, that’d be great. But I don’t think deleting old posts is really going to be helpful. And there are some cases where like cleaning up your database, like getting a smaller database, would be helpful. But usually deleting old posts is not going to be the impactful way to do that.

Like just removing some posts isn’t going to make a huge difference. Like we’re– my team is literally working on the database of one client. We’ve gotten her down from 8 gigabytes to 3.5. And it’s not because we’re deleting old posts. It’s because there’s plugins that are being used, like Thrive Leads was huge.

Because it records like every action that people– every time something pops up on your site, whether people do or don’t opt into it to generate statistics for you. And as far as we could tell, there was no way to turn that off. So like we dropped that table and deleted that plug-in.

There was one other. Oh, she was running contests through Gravity Forms. So she had– if she had 10 contests running at a time, and they each had 70,000 entries in them, there were a ton of roads in her database related to that, old plugins, stuff like that that were really increasing the size of her database.

So on older sites, we’re more likely to see something where either plugins you’re not using anymore, or just like plugins that are adding a lot of data you probably don’t need could be increasing your database size. But I wouldn’t say that deleting old posts is going to be impactful for speed.

JENNY GUY: Very helpful. Jacob, do you have anything to add to that, based on that question?

JACOB FELTNER: No, no that really well covered it. It’s kind of adjacent to making sure your database isn’t bloated or out of control. But really the posts in and of themselves, removing them probably won’t do too much. But it could, you know, leave a trail of breadcrumbs to something you should be doing.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. OK. A question from– this may be a comment. I don’t know if anyone– either one of you has anything to say. Andrew said, when I click defer render blocking JavaScript in SG optimizer, it breaks the ability to leave a star review on WP Recipe Maker.

JACOB FELTNER: I mean, that’s definitely possible. You know deferring– you know, it– there’s just– sometimes it works great. Sometimes it doesn’t. So really, as long as SG optimizer has a way of excluding individual scripts, there is likely a way to resolve that conflict.

I don’t know exactly where the conflict is. But, you know, there is an avenue of fixing it. It’s not unfixable, potentially.

LAUREN GRAY: I mean, I haven’t seen it with a lot of other plugins, that same issue. So I’d say, well, I don’t want to get too technical. But there’s probably something in the configuration, like Jacob’s saying, that could be adjusted. Or that plugin isn’t taking into account that another plugin might.

So like if it’s deferring jQuery but not deferring the WP Recipe Maker script, then that– yeah, that was the technical stuff I was trying to avoid. I apologize.

JENNY GUY: No, it’s good. It’s helpful. And we’re having questions on it. So you guys can– you guys are rock stars and know those answers, so it’s very helpful to have. OK. So audience participation question number two, true or false, it is bad to have a lot of plugins. True or false, it is bad to have a lot of plugins.

There is no wrong answer, except there is a wrong answer. And you will be judged for it. So we’re going to talk about plug-ins now. Because when we talk about spring cleaning and removing weighty things on our site, Amelia, who was asking the question a moment ago about deleting old posts, said she went from a hobby blog to a business and deleted a lot of old, old stuff that was not relevant.

Understandable, I will say that I’m going to guess that they probably weren’t prominent those– the old posts weren’t prominently displayed on your home page or easy for people to find. So if they are still getting traffic, they’re probably not hurting anything other than your own personal aesthetic, knowing that they exist and are ruining your flow or your feng shui on your site.

But I do understand that. OK. Question on plugins, so what– are there some that are just consistently causing problems in your guys’ world? When you look at a site and you see a problem, are there some that are just consistently like, oh, that is always a thing? Jacob, we’ll start with you. Because you get to deal with these things a lot.

JACOB FELTNER: Sure. I mean, it’s a big question. But I think anything that is basically running services in the background, that you have no kind of direct input over, like something that is just constantly running and checking and running a lot of database queries, saving a lot of database records, something like a broken link checker or something like that, just anything that is just persistently running in the background that you honestly don’t really need to run, you know, there’s always different ways of approaching the solution.

But typically the ones that take up a lot of space are ones that are just consistently running. And sometimes you can just run it for a little bit, get your information, and deactivate it. Get on with your life. Use the information that you get– that you’ve gotten. But anything that just kind of lingers in the background and does stuff, it usually has the potential of really slowing your site down.

JENNY GUY: And how would I identify that?

JACOB FELTNER: That’s the tricky part, right?

JENNY GUY: Oh, yeah.

LAUREN GRAY: You know, sometimes it’s just using kind of good sense, kind of logic to look at it and be like, OK, what is this thing trying to do, and how is it accomplishing it? Is it because it’s just magic and it’s just happening in the background? Or am I telling it to do something?

You know, and if it’s logging a lot of redirects, per se. Like one prominent issue that we warn about in one of our health pages is some sites that have redirection plugins, that log every time someone gets redirected, but they don’t have the ability to only do it on kind of internal links.

And so, you know, our ads are doing stuff in the background that sometimes do involve redirects or 404 errors. It doesn’t impact anything. It doesn’t hurt anything. But each one of those is being logged. And it’ll log. And it’ll log. And it’ll log. And it’ll log. And it’s just– it is too much.

So that’s another thing to keep an eye out for. If your redirection plug-in, like as long as you have a way to kind of target specific kind of 404 errors or specific posts where you’re wanting to monitor the redirection, those are great. But if it’s just an all encompassing plug-in that just catches anything and everything, that’ll definitely slow things down for you.

JENNY GUY: Awesome. Great feedback. OK. Same with question to you, Lauren. Are there any perpetual offenders that you’re seeing or things to look out for?

LAUREN GRAY: Um, those are really good ones Jacob. I just want to say that. Because those are really hard ones to identify.

JACOB FELTNER: They are, yeah.

LAUREN GRAY: So that’s a good one to call out by name. I’d say, with us, I don’t see any as problematic. Google’s being a little more forgiving with some types of features that we see a lot, like sliders. Those plugins we try and recommend against. We try and say, like, here’s the compromise that you’re making to have this sort of experience that you want for your users or this visual. Here’s the impact it’s going to have on speed.

Usually it’s not too big of an impact anymore. It used to be like it would crazy drag your scores down. Now that could be the one compromise you make on your site. But like sliders is something, pop-ups. So a lot of external scripts, like your convert kit, and I’m not saying to remove this.

But your convert kit pop-up, like it uses a JavaScript call reference that is pulling that up. And you’re usually going to see that, because it’s an external script. So you don’t have control over optimizing it. You’re going to see it in your PageSpeed Insights, your Waterfall analysis, anything like that. Again, it’s not a huge impact.

So the benefit, I think, outweighs the impact that’s there. But that’s the sort of stuff that we are generally regularly talking to clients about is like, where do you want to make these compromises? Do you need something similar to sliders? Is there’s like the tab. There’s like– I see this a lot. It goes up and down in trend.

But it’s like, there’s like three tabs at the top. And you can switch between recent posts and those like three categories. That’s based on JavaScript, sliders are JavaScript, pop-ups are JavaScript. Hotjar is something we see clients use a lot. It’s JavaScript. And it’s– like Hotjar is something I would definitely say only use it while you’re using it. Don’t just let it run in the background forever.

But anything JavaScript based, which if you’re pasting in code that ends with dot JS, that is JavaScript. And it’s going to have an impact on your site. And a lot of functionality is, unfortunately, JavaScript based. So if you can be plain, plain is cool.

JENNY GUY: Plain Jane. OK. We actually, in talking about sliders, which we’re referencing a lot. I’ve heard tell that potentially our WordPress framework Trellis might have that option to include some really righteous sliders that won’t drag your site speed down. Jacob, is there anything you can share on that?

JACOB FELTNER: I actually haven’t seen it in action. One of my teammates, Matt Howe, is really spearheading that charge and starting the onboarding process for the people in beta. But like with everything that Mediavine tries to solve, it is with page speed in mind.

And particularly with this theme, it is the pride and joy of so many engineers in our company. And we don’t want to give people the most boring web site in the world just to fulfill the promise of site speed. So some of these things that have always given people a headache in the past, that’s kind of our goal.

Recipe cards gave people a headache. Social share gave people a headache. Themes gave people a headache. And, you know, we’re going to address it with the slider.

JENNY GUY: We’re trying to create a unicorn for you. So we know it’s taking a while, but that’s our goal. And then I also know that a lot of the things we’re talking about that are causing some of the page being slow with a convert kit, I know that there are plans to develop in that way as well, to solve the email– email equation.

So that’s happening, too, just so– just so everyone knows. OK. Amelia said, if we have old Gleam widgets for giveaways, is it worth it to get rid of those? And should she stay away from Thrive Leads? Follow-up question on that is, can tons of comments on a blog post be slowing it down?

LAUREN GRAY: Those are three questions.

JENNY GUY: Yep. So let’s start with the first one, Gleam widgets for giveaways, is it worth it to get rid of, yes or no? Lauren.

LAUREN GRAY: Are those posts ranking? Does it matter? Do you want the page speed– I mean, yes. If you want your page speed to improve, those widgets are loading JavaScript that you don’t necessarily need anymore, because no one can enter those. But unless those posts are ranking, which might depend on where you tend to insert your giveaways, I’m not sure it’d be worth it or not.

JENNY GUY: OK.

LAUREN GRAY: It will improve your score, may or may not be worth your time though.

JENNY GUY: Thrive Leads, opinions on those. Jacob.

JACOB FELTNER: Thrive Leads, the only thing that’s jumping out to me with that is that this is a kind of a side point to make. But only because I only have– I have ad performance on my mind.

JENNY GUY: And we’re about to get into it like whoa.

JACOB FELTNER: No, it’s more, there’s one particular Thrive Leads option where it doesn’t in line form, which basically places the form in the content. And what that will do is actually nest all of your content into an additional div, which can kind of essentially hide all of your content from our script.

So our script will just see one big fat div, and it won’t see all of your content. So if you run Thrive Leads and you’re like, wait a second, why did my in content score suddenly fall off a cliff? Why am I only seeing one in content ad now, at the very, very bottom? That is because of that.

Very fixable. We’ll make the adjustment. But if you then walk that back, you’d have to come back to us. And we’d have to readjust it. But yeah, when it comes to whether you should remove it or not, I mean sometimes you just have to take a hard look at it and figure out, are people actually using this. Is it, you know, greatly benefiting, you know, the goals for my site.

And what is the kind of sacrifice that I’m making in terms of site speed. Disabled it, see what your scores are, compare, contrast and just make a value judgment. That’s not the most glamorous answer. But, you know, a lot of it does come down to what makes the most sense for you.

JENNY GUY: And we can’t make that determination for you. We can just let you know what the options are and give you the data. And you fly– fly from the nest with your data. OK. Then finally, I don’t– whichever one of you wants to jump in with this one. But can tons of comments on a blog post be slowing it down?

LAUREN GRAY: Yeah.

JACOB FELTNER: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: OK.

JACOB FELTNER: I’m sorry, go. Go ahead.

LAUREN GRAY: You can go. You can address it if you want.

JACOB FELTNER: OK. Yeah, it’s just, I think the big concern with that is probably just how many database queries are going out and if it’s well optimized. I mean, I don’t know how much of an impact it would really have, because I haven’t really dug into that too much. But there are ways to see how much a given plug-in or a given thing is setting out database queries.

And if it’s pretty extravagant, it can definitely slow down your site. That’s kind of related to– related to post plug-ins as well. Those can sometimes send out a lot of unnecessary queries and slow down your site in a way that you may not really anticipate. Because you look at a related post, and it’s just three things.

You look at comments. It’s just plain text. Why would it be slowing things down? But depending on the implementation, it definitely could.

JENNY GUY: Luke Word is actually jumping in and saying that there is a great basic plug-in for lazy loading comments. It’s actually called, aptly, lazy load for comments by Joel James. They really spent a lot of time on that title. But that is– there’s that.

And then Rose, who is one of our publisher support, she said, if you have Gravatar enabled, more comments can slow things down more because of the images. Jacob, will you talk about Gravatar real quick? Oh, he just ate a groan. Tell us about the Gravatar groan you just let out.

JACOB FELTNER: Oh, no, no. I just remember what Gravatar does. I mean, it’s just– it’s adding a lot of unnecessariness, basically–

JENNY GUY: Extra.

JACOB FELTNER: –to the comments. Yeah, it’s just– it’s just extra. It’s one of those things, it– it feels like a bell and a whistle. But really it just– it’s adding unnecessary load. So definitely don’t use Gravatars. Plain text is great. People will still be engaged. They don’t need to be represented by an icon or an avatar.

JENNY GUY: You also can’t really see them. So it’s not–

JACOB FELTNER: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: You’re squinting at those little tiny round picture. Like it’s not– it’s not necessary.

JACOB FELTNER: No.

JENNY GUY: Also Heather, our publisher– Director of Publisher Support just said, Trellis lazy loads comments so, just saying.

JACOB FELTNER: Like I said, there’s a solution. They’ve got a solution for everything.

JENNY GUY: There’s a solution. So Lauren, what are the features of a, quote, good plug-in? What– if you’re shopping for plug-ins or you need– you know you a need, and you’re going through the WordPress repository, what are some of the things you should look at, that earmark something that is– could– we can’t have every eventuality but giving us, in general, rules.

LAUREN GRAY: Yeah, generally you’re looking for a plugin that’s been updated recently. I wouldn’t say that’s always the case. But in most circumstances at least, especially for functionality that’s happening on your front end, or something that’s maybe more like trending, you want something that’s had an update recently.

So recent updates, I’d say responsive support. Or like some indication that the person that’s writing the plugin cares about anyone else other than themselves. Because plenty of people write plugins that they need. And then if it doesn’t work for other people, you’re out of luck. You don’t want to be in that situation, if you’ve heavily relied on a plugin.

So you can, in the WordPress repository, you can look through like, there’s a reviews tab and there’s a support tab. And there’s just a lot of people giving feedback in there. And I’d say that’s really, really representative of where the current status of the plug-in. Because people will definitely share their opinion in there. They won’t be shy about that.

And then personally as a developer, I like to look for documentation on a plugin. I wouldn’t say that it’s like really a requirement. Like you can have good plugins without documentation. But plugins with documentation, so there’s a long description. There’s images at the bottom. There’s like question and answers.

You’d go to an external site, and it’s got a whole page on how-to. They’ve got hooks and filters, if you want to get a little nerdy, that sort of stuff. If you see that, and they’re writing it out, it generally means they’ve got a longer term plan or like a more, like a stronger foundation that they’re writing that plugin on when they’re thinking about it at the beginning.

So I would say those are something when I see, I’m like, OK, this person is taking this seriously. This is higher on my list. But that’s a developer thing. I get it.

JENNY GUY: Jacob, anything to add to that?

JACOB FELTNER: Yeah, this is a little more advanced. So if you want to dig into it, the opportunity is there. If you’re looking at a site, you can right click kind of in the margins of your site and view the page source, view the kind of raw code on your site, the HTML and everything.

And from there, you can see if a plugin is only applying scripts and loading things when it actually needs to. One of the things in particular about Create is that Create won’t load its JavaScript or its CSS or anything. It won’t reference it in the background. It won’t even be loaded unless there’s actually a card on the post or a list.

So, you know, it’s nice when plugins don’t try to just apply itself everywhere, unless it actually has to. Something a little more intelligent, smart about how it uses itself.

JENNY GUY: Love that. Great advice. OK. We just shared– yeah, Jacob, get it. We just shared a great blog post that Lauren did for us about how to do a plug-in self-audit. It’s a great post. it gives you step-by-step what to look for, what to make notes on, how to diagram your thoughts and put it all on paper or however you want to do it, Google doc, whatever, whatever floats your boat.

But to put everything out so you can see it in black and white and really make a plan, then, of attack on how to get that plugin, get out the things that are just bloat on your site. Jacob, question for you. I know that there– we already talked a little bit about how Thrive Leads can play nasty with Mediavine, our ad script.

What– do we have any other ones that are conflicts that can cause some tricksy trouble on the back end of your site if you install?

JACOB FELTNER: Mm-hmm. I mean a great place check is definitely our help pages, you know, conflicts. There’s a particular– there’s a Mailchimp pop-up that causes issues. But it really all comes down to– there’s also a Rocket loader from Cloudflare that we’ve seen have issues in the past.

It’s really just anything that promises to make things optimized or faster that affects JavaScript, particularly as it relates to ad performance. You also want to watch out for CSS as well, if say your grow buttons are displaying weird, or not clicking or doing things properly, or create looks really messed up.

It might be because either one or both the JavaScript and CSS are getting optimized. So really just keep an eye out for anything that promises that. And if it doesn’t offer an option or a common sense option or an easy option to kind of exclude specific things from it, then try a different one. There’s a lot of different options out there.

Some of them are great. Some of them are less great. But really, you just want something that is– that you have a lot of control over and that you have a lot of insight into. Even if you don’t have direct control over it, you know, just shoot us an email, we’ll take a look for you. We’ll tell you.

JENNY GUY: Always, they’re honest. They’re painfully honest. They’re going to tell you. They’re going to tell you what’s up. So outside of plugins, what are some– and this is unfortunately you guys, and I know I was gone for like probably 60 seconds, the longest 60 seconds of my entire day and maybe my week when I–

And I apologize. So you guys handled it though, you’re amazing. For our last question, I wanted to have you guys talk about some areas outside of plugins on the page speed that we’ve already talked about, that people can focus on if they are committed, right now, to spending some time cleaning up their site and improving the speed and the weight of it.

And I’m going to let you guys think about it for a second while I make a couple of quick announcements. For our next episode of Teal Talk, it is two weeks from today. That is Thursday, March 26th at 2:00 PM. I’m being joined by the wonderful and very intelligent Amy Norhard. She is a CPA and the accountant for Creatives.

What are we going to talk about? Taxes. You’re just going to be a few weeks out at that point from the deadline. And we’re going to talk about if you’ve waited until’ the last minute, we will not judge you. We will just talk about it and help you.

And then we’re going to get into some things that, if you’ve just done your taxes, and you’re already in good shape for this year, stuff you can start doing now while things are fresh and you’re starting all over to keep yourself in great shape moving forward.

Please like us on Facebook. That way you can get all of the updates on our Teal Talk. And subscribe to our YouTube channel. Because I don’t know if you guys aren’t subscribers to our YouTube channel, you don’t know that we have a ton of video content. Not only do we edit all of our Teal Talks and upload them, we also have Eric’s video series.

One is Go for Teal, which talks about ad optimization and media products. And then the other which started a few weeks ago is SEO like CEO where he’s offering great SEO tips and digestible chunks, so you’re not overwhelmed. And you’re getting those coming every week or every other week. So that’s a great place to subscribe.

And let’s go back to my awesome guests who steered the ship while I was off in the ether somewhere. They’re amazing. They’ve given so many great tips and actionable items. Lauren Gray from Once Coupled, let’s start with you really quick. If there are some places outside of plugins where people want to focus their attention, where would they go?

LAUREN GRAY: Like I said before, images are my first to go-to. After that, it’s probably any sort of script or embed that you’ve got, either site wide or on a post by post basis. So someone mentioned Gleam. But there’s a lot of other plugins that get added into your posts, like RewardStyle or Pinterest.

Or there used to be like the fancy tweet like little call out and stuff like that. Any of those things that you don’t need anymore, especially if they’re site wide, like header, sidebar, footer, removing those would be my next big go-to I’d say.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. Same for you Jacob. Is there anything people can do not only to reduce the weight of their site or speed themselves up but earn more?

JACOB FELTNER: Yeah. In terms of speed, like Lauren said, you know, like not too long ago, we dealt with a site where they had just a simple kind of Amazon tracking script hanging out in one of their widgets. And this was causing everything to load very, very, very, very, very slowly.

And sometimes it’s working great. Sometimes it’s not. That day it wasn’t working great. So sometimes you just have to be aware of whatever script you’re putting on your site that isn’t coming specifically from a plug-in, not like Google Analytics or anything like that, but you know just anything that you’re throwing into your sidebar, into your footer.

But also see how well your theme is performing. You know, switch to 2019, the 2019 theme in WordPress and see how much of a difference it makes just by switching the theme. You know, all the plug-ins stay the same, but the theme changes. Is there a dramatic difference? Sometimes there definitely is.

And also talk to your host about what they’re caching options are. If it can integrate with your WordPress admin, fantastic. So you don’t have to keep calling them. Just see what your options are. Because you don’t want to put four caching plugins on your site, because it won’t make your site quicker, I promise.

But just in general, you know, any kind of duplicate functionality, it won’t make it X times better. So just be a little judicious. Pick which works best, you know. And then look for another avenue to pursue to make things a little faster.

And all of these things will help because people will stay on your site, and they’ll see ads. And they’re going to keep coming back. And Google will love you. And everything will be awesome. At least– the last thing on my mind, at least when it comes to page speed, turn on desktop page speed optimization in your Mediavine dashboard.

And just, if you don’t see both of your sidebar ads after you do that, just email us. And we’ll be able to either help get the ads re-targeted so that they display properly, or we’ll advise you on what to do. Basically, the end goal, especially with that setting turned on, is to have all of your– have enough space so that all of your sidebar widgets will load. And then there is at least one widget fully out of view, under the page, under the initial view when you load the page.

And if you do that, then we can put both ads underneath there. And you’ll get better desktop page speed. And you won’t sacrifice any revenue, unless you’re running leaderboard. But you shouldn’t be running leaderboard – if you don’t know why, we’ll tell you.

JENNY GUY: So all of those things to be said, email Jacob at Publishers@Mediavine.com if you have questions on any of the amazing things that you just heard. And we are here to help. Also Lauren is available at Once Coupled if you need a little more personalized attention. And I mean, let’s be real, who doesn’t.

You can reach out to her as well. Guys, you’ve been amazing. I so appreciate you being here. And everybody at home, thank you for joining us. If you’re joining us on the replay, howdy. How’s it going? Hope you’re having a great day. Everybody stay safe out there. And we will see you in two weeks. Bye, guys.

Fortunately it’s not the only important metric anymore, but it’s still a vital component for website success.

Whether you’re a Mediavine publisher wanting to increase your revenue or a content creator ready to reach the 50k sessions* and apply, today’s episode of the podcast is all for you!

Senior Director of Marketing Jenny Guy interviews guests Jennifer Fishkind of Princess Pinky Girl and Tanya Fleming of My Forking Life know how to grow traffic, as they share their secrets with you on how to build successfully.

*Since this episode of Summer of Live, the requirements to join Mediavine have been adjusted.

Helpful Resources

• Princess Pinky Girl
• My Forking Life
• Growing Your Traffic – Summer of Live 2018
• Why All Traffic Doesn’t Monetize The Same
• Behind The Numbers With Brad

Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] JENNY GUY: Hey, everybody. Welcome. It is Thursday, August 29. I’m Jenny Guy, the marketing manager for Mediavine. And it is hard to believe, but another summer is almost gone. It is Labor Day weekend, which means that our second annual Summer of Live is wrapping up. Crazy, crazy, crazy.

So just to remember where we’ve been, in June, we talked about all things Mediavine. We talked to Create, which is our most valuable WordPress plugin. A couple other things that are coming up. In July, we went beyond the blog talking book publishing, and content creation and philanthropy. And then, all through this month, we’ve been talking about making it rain.

We’re basically a broken record when it comes to diversifying your revenue stream. So we talked to video, affiliate marketing, SEO, RPM. And we are closing out this Summer of Live extravaganza with the metric that impacts all of the above metrics, traffic.

As I was talking with my – before we started, we all have a love hate relationship with traffic. But I don’t think any of us would deny that more of it is better. Traffic – from Instagram’s swipe up feature to more lucrative campaigns with brands.

Plus, for those that are out there wanting to join Mediavine, we have the traffic threshold of 25,000 sessions in the previous 30 days to work with us for full service ad management. So if we’ve got anyone out there looking to reach the traffic threshold, post in a comment and say, hi. But I’m got to go my two amazing guests.

They know traffic. They know how to grow traffic. And real traffic, not bought traffic. And they’re here to tell all their secrets– or at least some of their secrets– to our wonderful audience today. First, I’ve gotten Jennifer Fishkind. She is one of the OG’s of Pinterest, where she has over a 3.5 million followers. She shares all things food, entertainment, fashion, and family on her website Princess Pinky Girl.

Which, by the way, is celebrating its six year blog birthday today. Happy birthday to Princess Pinky Girl.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Thank you. Thank you, Jenny.

JENNY GUY: She came to be a full time blogger after 20 years in the corporate nonprofit industry. And now she blogs full time. And she – blog expertise is one-eighth of Bloggers Tell All, which is the advanced mastermind group for educational – for other influencers who aspire to financial freedom and blogging success. She lives in Michigan with her husband and three boys. Hello, Jen. Thank you for joining us.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Hey, Jenny. Thanks for having me.

JENNY GUY: So great to have you today. And my other guest, Tanya Harris Fleming, is a mom, wife, attorney, recipe groupie, photographer, and traffic whisperer who took the love of pressure cooker and air fryer recipes and turned them into a full time income on her part-time blog, My Forking Life. Which she began only in 2016.

So for devoting 5 to 15 hours a week to her site she reads up to 500,000 page views a month. She reached the medium on threshold in April 2013, and was able to quit her job as an attorney earlier this year to blog full-time and spend more time with her two daughters. Thank you for joining us, Tanya.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: Hi, Jenny. I’m glad to be here.

JENNY GUY: All right. So if you have questions, you guys know the drill. But if you have questions– they’re saying the sound quality is low. What’s going on?

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: Uh-oh.

JENNY GUY: Jen, can you put on headphones? I think they’re saying that it’s echoing.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: I sure can.

JENNY GUY: Thank you. Fantastic. All right, guys, we’re going to work on it. Sorry, everyone. We’ll work on it. My apologies. OK. Hang on a second. Let’s see if that helps. Give us one moment.

Let’s see. Is that better, everybody? Maybe? All right. Let’s give it a shot. I’m going to go on with questions. But as I always say, if you guys have questions, please post them in the comments and I will ask my guests, Tanya and Jen.

But let’s start out, first, just with that basic question. Let’s talk about your journeys. Your sites. Your brand and how you initially started out with the traffic growth. And I will start with Tanya.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: All right. So I started my blog March 2016 when I was working full time as an attorney. And I just had a general food blog. I didn’t want to niche down, so it was all types of food, whatever we were eating. I guess I had a general quick, easy family-friendly recipes. And I was also doing restaurant reviews.

But over the time, I would post like once a week and I had no direction. And my passion started to wane. So I took a break about June 2017. And I came back to the blog in February of 2018 with just the main goal of actually growing my site to enough sessions to be able to qualify for Mediavine.

So I did my research, looked at my Google Analytics, realized people loved pressure cookers and air fryers. So I kind of just went that route and just used that to grow my site. And I was able to qualify for Mediavine in April of 2018.

JENNY GUY: Yay. And so I love to hear that you were kind of blogging just as a hobby. And you were doing what you want, following your passions and wherever those led you. And then you got really intentional with it, and that’s when you started– So is it accurate to say that’s when you started to see the growth and the impact in your analytics?

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: Yeah. That was my whole intention. At that time, I think I had like two pressure cooker recipes, and I kept on getting comments when I was on my blog break. And they were always towards those recipes. So it was like, oh, this is what people want it for me.

And so at that time, I decided to make a content strategy, which making that the majority of the content that I shared. I still shared other recipes, but I knew that those were going to be my moneymakers. So I really just focused on those.

And then the other recipes I would still post just to show my audience that I could do more than just pressure cookers and air fryers. But I knew that that was going to be the ones that brought me the most traffic.

[RINGTONE]

JENNY GUY: Awesome. Oh, Sex and the City? Heck yeah. Hey, there’s no shame in that game. All right. Jenn, same question to you. You talked to us a little bit, I don’t know if you heard, but I want to hear a little bit about your brand. How Princess Pinky Girl came about and– Tanya, I don’t know if I said this already. My Forking Life, it’s a great site and we’re going to share that link, too.

But, Jenn, will you share a little bit about how you initially started Princess Pinky Girl and you’re journey with it?

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Yep. Can you hear me OK with my earphones?

JENNY GUY: We can hear you great. And we are also not hearing 75 echoes, which is a plus.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Right. Awesome. OK. So as you heard, it’s my blogiversary today. So it was actually two years before this– before my blogiversary. So about eight years ago, I was planning my son’s bar mitzvah, and I was doing so using Pinterest.

And my Pinterest board blew up. It was like you said kind of like in the good old days of Pinterest when I was highlighted as– I guess as a feature board. And all of a sudden, I had a million followers on there. So I got really lucky.

I’m very different. I have a very different story than most people because my social came first, and my blog came second. So I was monetizing my Pinterest through affiliate marketing, and then decided that I needed to diversify it, and started the blog. And I didn’t know what I was going to blog about. I didn’t know what a blog was, but I just decided one afternoon in my backyard, to start one.

And I’m not going to go into the name, because that’s a whole other story. It’s my girl. I have three boys, it’s my girls. Let’s leave it there. And then I really relied 100% on social traffic. And really had no idea how to blog until a couple of years ago when I started learning that social traffic is great but you’re relying on someone else.

So it was time to start relying on myself and focusing on SEO and other ways to get traffic outside of Pinterest, which was good because Pinterest, again, can be like a bad ex-boyfriend.

JENNY GUY: It so can. You can not stop texting them.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: You love it, but hate it.

JENNY GUY: You have a couple of glasses of wine definitely –

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: –and all that. It’s not that good old days of Pinterest, so you have to really to kind of take it more in your own hands. And within that time is when I started with Bloggers Tell All, which we talked about for a minute, but we’ll talk about it more, hopefully, later.

JENNY GUY: Yes, we definitely will revisit that. So let me go ahead and just jump in and talk a little bit more about your journey with Mediavine. How long have you been with us, and how has media impacted your business? Jenn, let’s start with you this time.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: OK. I think I had been with Mediavine for three years.

JENNY GUY: We just celebrated our third year of shifting to full service ad management. So that is possible.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Maybe it was two years. It was either two or three. It wasn’t right when you guys shifted. Yeah. So I’ve been with media events for probably– at least two years. And what was the second part of the question?

JENNY GUY: And how has Mediavine impacted your business? And really the nitty gritty of that question– of the question that I want to get into is, how has ads– have they impacted your traffic?

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: I mean, 100%. First of all, my RPM has been better than ever. My traffic, I I’ve made a shift from traffic, again, from social to trying to get my own organic and direct traffic. So there’s been definitely some ups and downs there, but even when there were downs in traffic, because my RPM continues to go up, my income has been steadily increasing throughout my journey.

So that’s been really great. And for me, the community at Mediavine is so important to me. I was having a lot of issues with my site speed. I was having a lot of issues with other funky stuff going on with my blog because of the way that it was built. And I think that– because I didn’t know what it was doing.

And Mediavine not only was concerned about my ads, they were concerned about the whole health of my site. And that was what kind of drew me to them and has continued my love fest with them.

JENNY GUY: Love fest. I mean, I’ll take it. I’ll take it.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: [LAUGHS]

JENNY GUY: Tanya, what about– obviously, there are so many people beyond me that go into making Mediavine what it is, clearly. But I will be the personification of Mediavine and take the love at this time. Tanya, what’s going on? Talk to me same. Question to you.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: So I joined Mediavine right in April of 2018. And since then, every single month of my traffic was growing, as well as the– so to kind of give you a standpoint of where my ads were beforehand. I was with a different ad agency and I had one very small ad in the sidebar, basically, because I was terrified to put ads on my site because I thought they would slow them down.

So I had heard so many great things about Mediavine, not just on a monetary side, but also that it wouldn’t slow down your site. So that was my goal. Once I joined, that’s when my site had a ton of. Ads and my first reaction was like, oh, my gosh. I can’t believe this. And I immediately– initially wanted to turn them down, but I was like, you know what? Let me see what the response is.

And honestly, I’ve never had a complaint about my ads at all. Because my– [AUDIO OUT] we’ll I wouldn’t say Mediavine impact on my traffic, because my traffic still grew. My site is fast. My users are happy. As well as monetarily wise, even if my traffic fluctuated– we all know we have traffic spikes and there’s slumps throughout the year– my RPM continued to grow because I just follow the best practices.

I’m also heavy into video. I think last year was the year of the video, and I was here for it. So that helped a lot with my RPMs and my earnings as well. And so, just like Jennifer stated, I love the community because probably 95% of the things I know about site speed or SEO or even Pinterest, I learned by watching lives or just being in the Mediavine group.

So, again, I love you all. I love you, Jenny, too. So here’s a heart to you, too. I’ve learned a ton since I’ve joined Mediavine just following the best practices that you guys preach.

JENNY GUY: Just checking in on Jenn’s dogs. Sometimes there’s going to be a mute. We love you, too. And hearing about both of your journeys is super inspiring. I mean, I don’t think that anyone is going to say that people are coming to their site for the ads. So I don’t know that anyone’s going to go, yeah ads. We love ads.

But to hear that it’s not impacting you negatively and you’re not getting negative feedback. And that your speed is still good and all the things that your viewers can still come, for the amazing content that you’re providing but not getting adversely impacted through the ads I think is the goal that we’re shooting for, at least. We have not yet found a way to make ads the most awesome thing on your site, but we don’t want too.

The whole point is for you guys to be compensated for the incredible work that you’re doing. And, yeah, the year of video has become the decade of video. I think that video is still incredibly lucrative, but in addition to that, it is driving the traffic.

And I’ll ask that. That’s actually not on my questions list, but do you find– are both of you leaning into the video and are you finding that video is positively impacting your traffic? I’ll start with you, Tanya, since you brought up video in the first place.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: Absolutely. I think it’s still the case. But the social media platforms like Facebook, whenever I would share a video would have a much further reach than other links or even photos. Pinterest now, if you look, sometimes it’s just ripping a topic, you’ll see the videos at the top. So that’s helpful there.

As well as even in Google if you’re searching for recipes, you’ll see they have a little Play button. So it’s helped with click through to my site on social media platforms, as well as in Google. So I definitely don’t think I would have the same amount of traffic I have if I wasn’t incorporating video into my content strategy.

JENNY GUY: Love hearing that. And same question to you, Jenn. How is video in your world?

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: I guess video for me it’s not as big of a happy fest right now as it was. Because I just hear two and three years ago when video really did– it was it was a viral sensation. And I would put up– that’s where I got my first virals and I was getting 10 million views on a video and seeing the traffic to follow it.

So, yeah, I mean, that was really when video was really first came out, especially, in Facebook. The Facebook videos for me have not really been– the ROI on them has not been as good for me. Now, I’m not doing the long form videos, I’m doing more of– I’m still doing the hands and pans, and those are just not– again, the ROI isn’t there as much. But I continue to do it for kind of specific reasons. Obviously, for Google.

And for Pinterest, I’m on the fence and on video for Pinterest right now. Because I’ve seen the impressions and I’ve seen the saves, but I am not seeing traffic from it.

JENNY GUY: OK.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: So for me, I’ll continue doing it. It’s not going anywhere, but I’m not seeing the benefit that I was seeing from video.

JENNY GUY: OK. Fair enough to say that in terms of a traffic standpoint. But just to clarify, revenue is still good from video, right? In terms of–

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Revenue it’s still good, yes. Revenue is still good from video. And the video player for Mediavine has been very profitable for me.

JENNY GUY: Good. Fantastic. OK, I want to talk a little bit nuts and bolts traffic wise. Not traffic wise traffic, content wise, and how that impacted traffic. And, Tanya, you kind of already touched on this in that when you began intentionally changing your traffic– changing your content strategy up, and creating a content strategy to begin with is when you started to see those traffic growths.

So I want to talk about that a little bit more specifically with you. And then with Jenn, I want to talk about specifically what you did with your content to switch from that social model into an organic traffic model. So let’s start with Tanya and then go to Jenn.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: So when I started, I mean, like I said, I studied my Google Analytics and I saw the– luckily, I’m a gadget junkie, so I had a pressure cooker. I liked it. I saw that that was also a trending topic. I also used Google Trends, not quite as often, but just look to see, OK what is getting higher searches in Google and what’s churning at the time.

And luckily, for me, it’s stuff that I actually– it’s already food related so I can actually do that. I also am in like a ton of Facebook groups with my people– with my gadget people. Because that also shows me what people are excited about, what type of recipes people are creating, what kind of questions they’re having. And I use all that to help also me with the content strategy in addition to my keyword research.

So once I started to do that, I only– because I only posted once a week because I was still working full-time. I would use all that information to make sure whatever post that I posted I knew that I had a higher probability of ranking in Google, a higher probability that people in these niche groups would get more excited and I’d get more engagement on my content as well.

So it basically was really driven by my prior post, but also, by what was trending in the community as well.

JENNY GUY: And just to stay on top of all of those things, what is your– how do you keep track of everything that people are talking about? Would you immediately go out and create whatever it was that people were talking about? Did you have a little diary? How long did you have? What was the shelf life of that hot thing that you’d find?

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: Usually, like maybe within that month maybe. Because I don’t really– I suck at creating content calendars. They’re not that far out. But if I’m in a Facebook group and everyone’s asking these questions, I will go, and then I will test it. And then if I had great results, I’d be able to write a blog post– I do step by step photos– and share that content.

So I mean, I’m always in these groups because I’m passionate about it. I have lots of gadgets. So whenever I would get it, I would usually run to figure out if it’s a good topic or not. I also use Airtable to keep a long, long, long list of different topic ideas. And it helps me stay organized on top of different content that I’m creating.

JENNY GUY: We like Airtable, too. We actually had a live about Airtable. So we, I think, can post that in there. We love Airtable. OK. Jenn, same question to you. Talk about that intentional content shift going from the social traffic to organic traffic.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Sure. So when I started, I did a lot of roundups. It was all about roundups. We didn’t have a lot of content hooked to them and took people away from our site. In the last, I’d say, three years or so, I’ve really shifted to do more food blogging and travel. So those have been my two real focus areas, especially with the food.

And with the food I really have worked on– rather than what I used to do, which was write a little blurb, post a recipe, done. Now, I’m really doing a lot more keyword research. Seeing what’s out there what I need to be focusing on. What questions to answer. Making sure my content is long, especially for ads. Google likes that.

Worked on my age H2’s and all that. So I spend a lot of time with that and also, researching what type of recipes are not just going to get social traffic, but are going to get organic traffic as well. And which ones I feel like I can actually have a chance to rank for.

That’s been a big focus.

JENNY GUY: You’ve both talked about keyword strategy. And I think that that’s something everyone agrees is important. But I would like to hear more nuts and bolts of how you do keyword research. Where are you doing it? Are there specific sites you like to use? Specific programs? Talk to me a little bit. Give us a general overview of your keyword strategy. Jenn, we’ll start with you.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Sure. SEMrush is– and I never know if it’s SEM rush or S-E-M rush, but whichever one it is, I use it.

JENNY GUY: We know what you’re talking about.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: [LAUGHS] So that’s my first go to. And I love, love, love the plug-in that they have in WordPress, where you can use the float mode for it. And it has it right alongside while you’re writing, which has been mind-blowing changing for me– life changing for me.

JENNY GUY: Yeah.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: That’s really nice because it’s all right there for you. So if you’re not using that, it’s a great tool.

JENNY GUY: How much then? How much is it? Because we have a lot–

JENNY GUY: It’s free if you have SEMrush. It’s a plug-in. And it’s a lightweight plug-in, so it doesn’t hurt anything. It’s really great. If you’re not using it, I would absolutely look into using it. Keywords Everywhere I really like. I just use it when I use– through Google and that gives you kind of a sidebar of what else is going on, what other kind of keywords are. I really like that, too.

I use Google a lot just for keyword research. Because I want to use it like the intention that a user would have and see what’s pulling up for them. And then Pinterest, I do a lot of keyword research just in Pinterest, too, to see what people are searching. Because Pintrest is a visual search engine.

It’s not just simple– they really have made a shift from being a social media platform to a visual search engine. And you need to see what people are searching when they’re going there, because they’re not going in their feeds anymore and just scrolling. They’re going there with intention. They’re going there to look for something specific.

So I want to know how they’re looking for that and what’s coming up in the top results, because that will help me decide what I’m calling a recipe or what kind of keywords I’m putting in there.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. Love it. We’re going to talk more about Pinterest in a second. But, Tanya, will you jump in and talk a little bit about your keyword strategy?

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: Yeah, it’s Pretty similar, to say Jennifer’s, except I use Ahrefs rather than SEMrush. And Ahrefs, the plan that I pay for– I think it’s like $180. I pay for the more expensive one but, initially, I didn’t. Before I grew my blog to the point where I could afford it, I was using Keywords Everywhere .

And I also use– I think it’s called, keysearch.co. That’s also a cheaper option. But I use those. And one of my favorites even though– Ahrefs I like because it’s super, super powerful. But I really like Keysearch because it does give me a little green light, red light or whatever. And whenever I type in a term it will kind of give me a, yeah, you definitely want to go for this. And then there will also be ones that are medium, but I’m like, OK, I guess I can try and hopefully hope for the best. Whatever.

I also do regular Google searches. And I use AnswerThePublic, as well, to know what people–

JENNY GUY: I love AnswerThePublic.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: It’s great. I love the little guy–

JENNY GUY: Me too. It makes me so happy.

[LAUGHTER]

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: He does. But I also use that, definitely, so I can make sure I’m answering users queries for whatever post that I’m posting about. And like Jennifer said, I also use Pinterest. I’ve never been a big feed person anyways when it came into Pinterest. I’ve always used it as a search engine.

So I always do that when I’m doing my initial keyword research. That helps me to do it from the beginning so I can see like what kind of images are popping up. So I have a better idea of what my images should look like or what other images may be missing that I might want to incorporate into my pins to get people to, hopefully, click on it.

JENNY GUY: I love that. So it’s just even from your inception period, before you’re even writing the post. Because I think, a lot of times, people strategy with Pinterest is creating those pins at the end. And now, you’re saying creating– so both of you do that. Talk a little bit more about that, Jenn. Are you similar in that way?

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Yeah. 100%. I mean, it’s the same with Google Search. You want to see what Google sees as the intention of that particular recipe. If it’s going to be that you’re on target with what they’re showing. And a lot of times it’s, is it a plated version or is it something that’s in a casserole dish that you should be showing? Because what is Google actually showing you when you search for that?

And if you have any hope to rank for it you need to be right on their– in their mindset so that you can get with it. But then the same thing, again, with Pinterest. Because if you’re talking about a recipe–

And I can’t think of an example right now. But I think, actually, one that someone else has told me when we’re talking about intention was like, a chicken chili recipe. Is it white or is it red? And you need to know what they’re looking for because if you’re doing a red one and ever other one is white, it’s not going to show up in those results.

JENNY GUY: Could you talk a little bit about the same thing through the travel lens since you do that as well? We’re doing a lot of recipes, and I love recipes. And I could talk about food all day long, but let’s give a little shout out to some of our non-foodies out there. Jenn?

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: I mean, just in terms of searches searches and stuff like that?

JENNY GUY: Yeah. So when you go in to look at Google and you’re looking to see how things are being plated or what type– you said white or red– what type of searches are you looking for with travel?

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: I mean, for me when I’m doing my research for travel, it’s less about the photos and more about the questions people are asking that I’m trying to put in there as H2’s. So for instance, I’m writing a post right now on Italy. And I’m trying to think about the questions that we had when we were going.

How do you get from Positano to Serrento? Or, where can I store my luggage at the airport? Things like that. Again, I’m trying to put myself into the shoes of the traveler, because it is– it’s a different mindset than recipes, 100%. And my travel posts actually do really well and rankings.

Alaska cruise packing list, are they asking for an Alaskan cruise? Are they looking for Alaska cruise? What kind of searches are coming up? And I’m trying to go after those or put them in in different ways so that it’s hitting the search engines in those ways. That make sense?

JENNY GUY: Very helpful. Yeah. It absolutely does. So let’s shift a little. Tanya, tell me what is your breakdown of organic versus social in your traffic– your overall traffic? And same question to you, Jenn.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: For organic traffic– I had to look this up– but about 50%–

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: I did, too.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: 50% traffic from Google, and about 40% traffic from Pinterest. And, actually, only about 4% from Facebook, which surprised me. So, yeah, I think initially when I did start, I had more percentage of Facebook traffic. But as my site grew and I focused on SEO– and like I said, my SEO strategy goes the same to Pinterest– that’s when those Google and Pinterest numbers just pretty much took over the amount of traffic that I bring into my site.

JENNY GUY: Excellent. Same question to you, Jenn.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: And I had to go look this up as well. And I just looked from like the last six months, and I’m probably a high 60% on social between Facebook and Pinterest. And, interestingly– because I’ve had some really good runs on Facebook lately– my Facebook is outperforming my Pinterest right now. and I’m about I’d say 20-25% organic search traffic.

JENNY GUY: So have you– just to narrow in here since Facebook is somewhat of a– I don’t even know how to put it. It can be a little bit sketchy and a little bit out there. You never really know what’s going to work. So what changes have you implemented? Have you done anything in particular to get those numbers better on Facebook?

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: I mean, the last couple months– and I think that’s about to change, so I wouldn’t go run out and try this. But link posts have killed it for me.

JENNY GUY: OK.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: But now, we’re starting to see dings from Facebook on linked posts, which I don’t know why. So, again, I wouldn’t go run out and do it. It just happened over the last few days. So now I have to go and rethink my strategy there. The thing was social is you’ve got to ride out what’s happening at the time. And then come up with an exit.

You don’t know how long it’s going to go, so just enjoy it when it’s going. And then–

JENNY GUY: Pivot.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Yeah. Pivot.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

JENNY GUY: Awesome.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: But it was a good summer.

JENNY GUY: Well, that’s really exciting. We’re always looking for that. So I’m going to ask about social in general, but Karen Lee, said hi, Tonya Harris Fleming Esquire.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: Hi, Karen.

JENNY GUY: Courtney Odell said, I love all of Jenn’s cruise posts. She puts in so much great info. Yay. Love for you guys. So talk about social in general as a traffic generator. And where do you go to test all these things out? You’re saying you’re riding things out.

Are you making these little discoveries on your own or are these Facebook groups? Where are you finding this information on what’s working? And how do you then capitalize on it and change your strategy? We’ll start with Tanya on that one.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: You mean as far as getting traffic to my site?

JENNY GUY: Yeah. When you’re doing social experiments, which– you said, Pinterest is your number one performer in terms of traffic generation. What is your Pinterest strategy? You said it’s similar to Google.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: For Facebook, what I did– because I do so many niche like recipes, I’m in the niche groups for two reasons. One is for research. So I want to know what the people are talking about and what they get excited about. And then I will drop out my recipes in there.

I haven’t been doing that as much as I used to, mostly just because I haven’t focused on it. But when I was doing it a lot, I did see a lot of uptick in traffic when I did it on the weekends. And when I drop really engaging videos.

And the more engagement that I got– like if somebody comments it, I made sure I responded to comments because that helps with traffic to my site. The only issue that I have with Facebook traffic when it comes to sharing in two groups is that, that traffic lives for about a day or two, and then it just disappears.

I think back in the day, initially, it would last a lot longer. But now it’s not as strong as it used to be. But I still don’t give up on Facebook, because we never know when you’ll just get that– I had my highest earning day was a day where I dropped a holiday recipe. I think it was St. Patrick’s Day. Dropped it in a niche Facebook group and it went crazy.

And then after that, my videos didn’t do as well. So I think they’re– and my strategy is just basically to make sure that every weekend I put something in the group. And I also engage with the community as well. Partially, because I actually like gadget recipes and I like commenting on them, but also just to kind of get– just to be involved.

JENNY GUY: So you are a big proponent of covering your bases. Even if it’s not necessarily working right now you’re not giving up on it, you’re continuing to invest time in those different places. And then just waiting for the moment when it goes great, and you strike, and that’s good to know. Good to know.

I think it’s going to be easy to really feel like you’re screaming into the void, especially, on Facebook sometimes. You’re just talking and nothing– the reach is strangled or you had great one day, and then the next day it’s terrible. So it’s encouraging to hear that you’re still devoting time to those things.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: And I will say that I’m not the voting hours into my Facebook.

JENNY GUY: Sure.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: It’s literally like 10 minutes. So I would put more of my energy into making sure my Pinterest and my Google is doing really well. But Facebook, I think it’s still worth it to show up. I wouldn’t just say, I hate Facebook. I’m never posting there. I definitely think it’s important to just make sure you cover all your bases.

JENNY GUY: Jenn, same question to you. Talk about your social strategy and what you’re finding most effective these days.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Sure. I mean, I do spend a lot of time on Facebook. I spend a lot of time in Pinterest. And I spent a lot of time just on a post. For every post I do, I do multiple images for Pinterest. I’m sorry, I’m getting this weird sun on me.

Facebook is the short game for me, Pinterest is a long game. You don’t when a pin is going to hit. It might be a pin that takes off right away. But more frequently now, it takes a little while for it to take off. So I’m doing my Christmas stuff right now and I’m redoing pins– constantly redoing pins. I’m constantly trying new formats.

I’m trying new formats. I’m trying new to pin dimensions. I’m trying different fonts. When I see a pen that’s taking off, I’m going to go and make five new pins for it. So if I see one that’s kind of fallen off, like an old post that had gone viral, I’m taking new images. Or I’m taking old images and I’m reformatting them to do whatever is working in that current– currently.

Because what’s working today isn’t going to necessarily work tomorrow. And what worked yesterday isn’t going to work today. So I do spend a lot of time on my Pinterest images. and on my descriptions. And distributing the information to groups, to tribes, to multiple boards and WhatsApp and all that.

So I spend a lot of time on social, but it brings me a lot back. So for me, it is a big part of my traffic. I would love to– what I would really love is to have that’s social traffic and to really boost– at the same time I’m trying to boost up my direct traffic as well.

JENNY GUY: Sure. Yeah. I think that the stereotype oftentimes you hear about– especially, Pinterest. Social in general, but especially Pinterest– is that it’s a great way to get a lot of traffic in the beginning and fast. So do you guys agree with that? Was it something that you– I mean, I know, Jenn, it was somewhat your experience, but you were in at the very beginning of Pinterest.

And I would like to hear how your Pinterest strategy has adjusted now that your several years in. You can get that first blush of traffic from Pinterest, and then how do you continue to sustain growth and stay active within the platform? And we’ll start with, Jenn.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Well, I mean, back in the day, I would literally pin something and I would immediately go look at my Google Analytics. And it would go up. It was like the best ever. I could only wish for those days again. It was like a game.

But obviously, that game has changed. And I wouldn’t say for Pinterest that it’s an immediate push of traffic, because for me, it’s not. It’s usually– again, it’s more of the long game. And it’s getting into those search results. So it’s a lot of trial and error there to see what descriptions are going to get you there and what image it’s going to get you there. What was the other part of the question?

JENNY GUY: So basically, I was asking about the strategy for you going forward. You said it’s a lot of trial and error now?

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: It’s a lot of trial and error and it’s getting it out in a lot of different places. I still do a lot of share groups to try to get my images out there. And especially when I see one going, then I want to get as many people dependent as possible. So for me the share groups are really important with that for Pinterest, along with tribes and interval pinning and loops.

I use Tailwind, I’m in it every day. And I’m constantly evaluating what’s going on. I’m constantly looking and scrolling through my feed. I’m constantly going in and looking in my analytics within Tailwind to see what’s working and what’s not. Stopping doing what’s not, and doing more of what is.

Especially with loops. There’s a lot of talk about loops. Are they effective or are they not effective? If you’re using loops like a fix it and forget it, then no, it’s not effective. It’s not a Crock Pot. It’s something that has to have a lot of love and a lot of attention. And you need to spend a lot of time making sure that the stuff that you’re putting on there is quality.

And then cleaning out your loops and revisiting them at a really regular basis if you want them to work. So I spend a lot of time with those.

JENNY GUY: I mean, it’s good– yeah, but you still see value and you’re still seeing a return on your time investment there with Tailwind?

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: 100% I do. Because if you can get some clean loops out there that are turning quality content on a regular basis, you know your good stuff is getting out there. It’s when you’re just putting the stuff in there and not spending any time to give it attention and to make sure that you’ve got adequate stuff going on and that it’s stuff that people are responding to. So that’s where I see people who aren’t having luck with that.

JENNY GUY: Tanya, same question to you. Talk to me about your Pinterest strategy.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: Well, I guess, my experience was a little bit different. Because when I started my blog, I think Pinterest had changed. And so when I would post I was pinning like crazy and my traffic wasn’t increasing like crazy. But when I took the break, I did notice that a couple of my pins that I had put out in the universe, months later, they started to bring in traffic. And I was like, oh, this really is a long game like everyone says.

So when I came back, my strategy was to continue like I had been doing. Doing my Pinterest research when I created– whatever content I created, I looked to see what pins were out there. I would look to see what keywords I needed to keyword my pins. I probably only created two pins per post.

I used Tailwind, so I’d make sure my Tailwind queue was full. And I was also using SmartLoops. I did see good return on SmartLoops. And I do the minimum of tribes. I don’t do share threads only because I just don’t have– well, initially, I had a really slow computer and it was taking me way too long, so I just stopped. And the growth of my traffic, I just chose to not focus on shared threads, to just focus on creating more content and really trying to optimize my site for Google.

So that’s pretty much how my strategy is. I’ve now hired a VA to take over my Pintrest because I just got– I would always forget to keep my queue full. So that’s my advice for anyone to use. If you have a strategy, great. But if you are a person like me, and you just hate, hate, hate, remembering to keep your queue full, it’s not a bad idea to hire help to help out with Pintrest.

I know how to operate Pintrest great, but at the same time, I just don’t necessarily like making sure that my queue was full.

JENNY GUY: If it’s not your love, then not your thing. I mean, even if you know how to do it, if you’re not– if you can outsource it and it’s– Can I ask where you found your VA?

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: Yeah. I think someone in the Mediavine group recommend to her. But as Nicole Barker, virtual VA. She does my Pinterest and she’s been doing an amazing job.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. Good to hear. OK. Switching to another social platform that we all love, that can be a great traffic generator. Let’s talk a little bit of Instagram, because nobody’s mentioned it. Oh, I just saw two really awkward faces like everyone wanted to do the Homer Simpson fade into the bushes move.

So I’m getting a sense from both of you that perhaps Instagram is not your most popular platform. Is that accurate?

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: So I mean, I personally love Instagram as a user. Brands love Instagram so I will always put time into Instagram. I don’t have a huge ROI for it as far as traffic.

JENNY GUY: OK.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: But for sponsored work, it’s super important. They want it. They love it. They need it. So I will do it.

JENNY GUY: Tonya, same question. Instagram for you?

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: Yeah. So I think it really depends on your business strategy. I don’t work with a ton of sponsors because that wasn’t what I really wanted to focus on. My business strategy, I love ad income and I love affiliate income. So that’s where I’ve focused mostly on.

So Instagram is not a big traffic bringer for me. I still show up there because I do love the community on Instagram. So I do like posting there. But I do agree, brands love Instagram and they’re always wanting to know that you have a presence.

Even if it’s not a user account, they want to know that you got engagement and that you’re there all the time. And I will disappear from Instagram for weeks at a time. Not on purpose, but since it’s not the main function of my business, I don’t show up as much as I should.

But when I do show up I actually do get really good engagement. So I do like that platform. And I do intend to hopefully start focusing more on that in the future.

JENNY GUY: So do both of you have to swipe up? Just asking for– you both have the track– no, you don’t? Tanya? OK. So is that a goal for you to achieve the swipe up? Because I have a question asking how– if you have any great strategies? And if you don’t, it’s OK. But if you have any good strategies for getting to the swipe up level?

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: It’s not necessarily. It’s a goal, of course, because I would love an additional method to get more traffic. But I’ve noticed that I can still get traffic without having it. Not tons and tons of traffic [AUDIO OUT] food blogger. I do post a lot of images of my food. And I’ve also been putting my whole recipe a lot in the actual caption for Instagram because I guess the most engagement.

And the way that I do get traffic is, I may do like two of those posts where the whole recipe is in there. And then the third post will probably just be a link or directions saying, hey, to get the recipe, click on the link in my bio, and then click the image. And if I’ve got a post that has really good engagement. I’ll actually get a lot of traffic on that day.

JENNY GUY: Excellent. Jenn, same question to you. You do have this swipe up, yes?

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Yeah. I mean, it’s just being present there and it’s being active. I mean, I think that’s how you get the followers there. Well, I don’t have a VA for Pinterest because I keep that pretty close to me. I do have someone who works with me on Instagram. And it’s actually a high school student. And I’ve used a high school to every year.

And they’re great because they’re on it and they get it, and they’re constantly on their phone. So that’s been really good. Yeah. The biggest thing about Instagram is that if you don’t baby sit it, everything goes away. Like if you are not on it– like, I was not on it when– in between high school students, I was not on it for a couple weeks and it killed my engagement. So now, I’m climbing back uphill.

OK. Good feedback. So shifting, before we move on from social platforms in terms of traffic growth, do you have any other tips or platforms you want to mention? Or anything social before we move back to organic? Either one of you?

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: I’ve got one. It’s not necessarily social, but email. I started focusing more on growing my email list. I still use my email to tell my audience about affiliates. But growing your email list and having an engaged list, you will see an influx of traffic if you’re sending out the right kind of emails and enticing them to click.

And what I’ve noticed is that people will email me back, but they will also share– they’ll make the recipes and they’ll also go and share it on social. So I would not forget email list as a platform– well, it’s a platform. But you pretty much control it. And if you are always show– I show up twice a week in people’s inboxes, so they will always remember you if you’re showing up and making sure you’re sending out your emails.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: I want to piggyback on that because I’m so glad you brought that up, Tanya. Because I ignored my email for years. Like, up until about a month or two ago I was just doing the RSS feed. And I recently started working with Matt Mullin, and we’re doing– I’m in like the kindergarten class for email right now with him.

And that’s actually my 4 o’clock call today that I have with him. So literally it’s like holding my hand through being a big girl emailer. And in the 4 weeks I’ve been working with him I’m seeing like really, really great things. I’m super excited about it. And I’m excited about– because it’s the one thing you own. I mean, once you have those names, they’re yours.

And unless they unsubscribe to you, that’s a very captive audience who want to be there. They’re not just pressing like and something, they’re having to actively put their email address in and saying, yes, I want this. So now I’m working on multiple welcome sequences, forever sequences, and understanding it. But it took me– I had to put my big girl pants and say, you got to do something about this, because what you’re sending them is not good. And that’s not fair.

JENNY GUY: I can’t say enough good things about Matt Mullein. He spoke at our conference in Chicago. He’s been on live with me before. We have those episodes, we’ll be sharing those. He’s awesome and he knows his stuff, for sure. I can also say that he will excuse you for being a few minutes late because he’s a good guy.

So email, for sure, we can’t encourage enough to have you guys grow that email list. Because an algorithm is never going to hit you. Nobody’s arbitrary changes– or not arbitrary, but you are in control. It’s what you can sell the brands. It’s what converts oftentimes with affiliate. So it is something–

So talk a little bit. We’ve got a couple of questions we’re going to jump in there, but talk to me a little bit about how you incentivize your email. How do you get people into that funnel? Tanya, we’ll start with you.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: So beforehand, I wasn’t sending out any emails. Not a RSS feed or anything. And then I did watch the live with Matt Mullin. And what I took from that was the welcome sequence. And so I actually didn’t even create a lot. I created one welcome sequence on my most popular post. And I just have it– it’s not even a pop up or anything, it’s just right below my hero image.

And I did that on purpose because I want the people that sign up for my emails who really want to get there. And I did a startup guide. So it’s like a guide that people get. They’ll get an email one day for five days. And then they get funneled into my– is really my air fryer email sequence. They get funneled into my air fryer list.

And so, once a week, they get a dedicated air fryer email. And I tell you, those are my biggest fans. Those are the people that are telling everyone about my email list, everyone about my recipes. And it’s grown like wildfire and people in my neighborhood apparently know about this email list.

[LAUGHTER]

My husband got stopped at the store and they’re like, oh, yeah. I know your wife. She’s got those air fryer emails and whatever.

JENNY GUY: That is so awesome.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: It was. It was actually really cool. So before, I really wasn’t paying any attention to it. But once I watched that live, I realized how valuable email is. And the reason why it’s so important is, you’ve grown these dedicated fans. So when you want to sell them and affiliate that you think will help them– or even a product– those are the people that are wanting to buy from you.

I have people even ask me like, when are you going to drop a cookbook or whatever? So it’s been pretty much a game changer. Not just for traffic wise, it helps. I get a lot of clicks through when I do send out a recipe or whatever post, but I also think it’s great for just growing an audience and showing your audience you’re an expert in whatever you’re talking about.

JENNY GUY: They’re your people, man. Those are the people that are going to buy. They want to hear from you, and you got to give them what they want. It’s so good to hear. So how long have you been focusing on emails? Just since that live, Tanya?

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: Yeah. Whenever that live happened, that’s when I actually started and I saw my sign-ups skyrocket. I was getting initially like maybe five sign of a day. And now, I get it about 40 to 50 sign-ups a day just by–

JENNY GUY: That is awesome.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: –implementing that strategy. I probably need to take his course and his coaching, because just that little bit of information– I would say, anyone, if you haven’t watched that live, watch that live if you are having trouble with email because it was a game changer for me.

JENNY GUY: And hearing that email is a huge source of traffic is super exciting too. And people in your neighborhood are randomly talking about it, so brilliant then. Jenn, same question to you.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Yeah. So like I said, Matt has been a game changer for me. Tell him I sent you. And it’s Matt. Marisa was asking, what’s his name? Matt Mullin, that’s his name.

JENNY GUY: Yep. We’ll share it. Yeah, we shared the live, and we’ll share his link, too.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Yeah. He’s been great. So I do have a popup and I didn’t before. But he had suggested one, and I have a tech guy who was a little worried about it bogging my site down so he suggested Bloom for the popup, and that’s what I’ve been using. And my sign-ups like also skyrocketed like Tanya’s.

For a month I was probably getting– I don’t know– 500 or maybe more than that. But now, I’m getting about 1,500 a week–

JENNY GUY: Awesome.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: –since having the popup. And he’s helped me put them in some key places on my posts and stuff like that. He’s been great. And like I said, he’s been really holding my hand through it. So I knew for me– I buy courses– I’m a course hog– and then I don’t do him. So I knew if I’d buy I bought the course, if I got stuck somewhere I would just stop, which is why it was worth it for me to spend the extra money to get the coaching, because I know it’s that important to do.

And he really has kind of walked me through, not only the how to do it, but the why to do it. And for me, if I don’t understand the why, then I’m not going to– it’s not going to be successful. So, yes, that’s kind of where I’m at.

But I do– like I said, I do the welcome sequence. I have an easy dessert welcome sequence. I’m starting an easy appetizer welcome sequence. And I’ll start a couple other ones as well. And then they get funneled into my forever series, and then I also do a broadcast email once a week.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. So many I love. I love hearing that those are engaging and that some of that came from the live, which is super exciting to hear. Eden Westbrook asks, what you put in the emails to get more engagement besides recipes? Tanya.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: I usually will just do like a paragraph intro. So if it’s like a recipe that has a story behind it, I may put that in there just to get people excited about the recipe as well. Just like you would do on a typical blog post. And then I’m usually a one link person for most recipes, unless it’s like– just recently I did a back to school, because my daughter started middle school on Monday. So I just sent out an email with a lot of different links that way.

And then some of my emails will have related affiliates in the email as well. So it’s really just– I kind of just make sure I have a directed email like, hello, whatever your name is. And it’s like I’m talking to a friend. And my particular purpose would be like, this is why you shouldn’t make this week.

And you’ll be surprised how many people will click and literally make it that week if you are talking to them like it’s your– if I talk to it like it’s my– they’re my friends.

JENNY GUY: That’s great. And, Jenn, same question to you.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Well, I mean, it’s a formula that Matt uses so I don’t really want to necessarily throw it out to the group.

JENNY GUY: You don’t have to say exactly.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: Don’t share the secrets to the sauce.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Yeah. It’s kind of one of the benefits of working with him. But it’s obviously, linking to particular recipes but he kind of has a structure that he’s found successful. So we’ll check out his live. I’m sure he talks about it.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

JENNY GUY: Yeah.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Michelle asked a question about Bloom and what makes it better than others. According to my tech person, it just was a lighter weight, it didn’t bogged down the site as much. And he tells me what to do, and I do it. So I trust him. He’s my spirit animal.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. Good to hear. Good tech people are worth their weight in gold. So we’re starting to run a little bit low on time. I want to get both of you to give me your favorite resources for traffic building tips. Are there podcasts? Are there websites? Anything that we can toss to our audience just to share. Or just favorite blogging resources, in general. We always like to ask that question. Tanya, you first, please.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: Podcast, I love podcasts. I’m a podcast junkie. But my favorite for SEO building, of course, Theory of Content. It’s great. And I just listen to those– I listened to it on the way to work when I was trying to build and learn everything. On my commutes to work, my poor daughter she had to listen to Amber and Josh talk about SEO. But it helps a lot.

And just the Mediavine blog posts helped as well. If you are a Mediavine member and you’re in the Mediavine about a publisher or a group, anytime I have a question I usually just go to that group and do the search for whatever I want. Just to see if anyone’s has asked and answered that as well. But those are generally– I’m trying to think of the other podcast I like.

Chopped is one that I listened to as well. And there’s probably other– any blogging related podcasts that, if I like the topic, I’ll usually give it a listen while I’m commuting.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. Jenn, anything to you? Any questions to you?

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: I mean, I’ve been working and listening to Ty Kilgore from Everything Digital Marketing. And I’m going to be attending a retreat with him. And it’s almost similar to what I’m doing with Matt for SEO. So I really like what he’s been saying, he’s been doing lives all summer. So I’ve been watching those. But I’m not a big podcast person or anything like that.

And this is 100% not to toot our own horn, but the Bloggers Tell All group is the majority of my information. Because not only do the ladies that I work with have amazing insight and ideas, but the members there– that’s where I get a lot of great content and what’s going on at the very minute.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic advice. OK. We’re sharing links, but we are reaching the end of our time, which stinks. And you guys have been sharing so many great things. But the last question I’m going to ask you both, aside from sharing where we can find you and any special offers or exciting things we can share with our audience is, if someone out there is struggling to reach the Mediavine traffic threshold, what can you advise them to do today that might help them get there?

So that’s going to be the final question. I’m going to give you guys a second to think about it and give a couple of announcements. And then we’ll come back and say goodbye to the rest of you to answer those final questions. But before I get that final question, as we always do every time we’re on live, I’m going to say our farewell.

And I’m also saying farewell to the Summer of Live 2019. It has been swell. It has been great. We are so incredibly grateful to all of our guests. I’m going to do a quick overview. Thank everybody in person and in particular, because we are so grateful to them.

Week one, we did our three year celebration for Mediavine lines moved to full service ad management with two of our original publishers. They were Brandy O’Neil with Nutmeg Nanny, and Jocelyn Brubraker from Inside BruCrew Life. Week two, we had two co-founders. We had Amber and Eric on, and they were both sharing all of our secrets and talking past, present and future.

Week three was Trellis with our engineering manager, Jordan Cauley. Week four, we talked about create. We had our vise president of publisher support, Nicole Johnson, on and our Mediavine publisher Tara Jacobson of the site Marketing Artfully. We talked philanthropy and turning passion into compassion.

Week five, with Julie Tran daily of The Little Kitchen and also her philanthropy, which is blogging for kids– or Cookies for Kids’ Cancer. And then we have a site– a link for her too. Get involved with her amazing fundraiser that she does yearly, and Mediavine is also a contributor. And then Betsy Eaves of Java Cupcake and Operation Gratitude.

Week six, was books and publishing with media publishers Jen Ruiz of Jen on a Jet Plane and Valerie Stimac of Space Tourism Guide. And Valerie and Valise. Product sales was our next week with our experts Chloe Macintosh from Boxwood Avenue. And Erin chase of $5 Dinners was followed in week 7 by Course Creation with Jessica Festa of Jessie on a Journey. And Hilary Erickson from Pulling Curls.

Decade of video, as always in week 8 with on camera aces, Meredith Marsh of VidProMom and Kristen McDonnell of Studio Knit. We crushed affiliate marketing in week nine with Mediavine publisher Amanda Williams of A Dangerous Business and Jeannine Crooks from a Awin. We covered all things SEO and Beanie Babies in week 10 with Josh Unseth from Theory of Content and Morgan McBride from Charleston Crafted.

And last week, we talked about more acronyms– as always, we can’t ever get enough– with our top RPM maximization tips with Lance Cothern of his blog, Money Manifesto. And Dorothy Kern from Crazy for Crust. And finally, we had amazing guest this week, Jennifer Fishkind from Princess Pinky Girl, and Tanya from My Forking Life. Ladies, will you please share your final thoughts before we say goodbye to the Summer of Live 2019? We’ll start with, Jenn,

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Sure. So as far as getting that Mediavine threshold, I’d say focus on your SEO 100%, but your social traffic, Pintrest can help you. So really, for me, I would say you know spend some time on your Pinterest and try a lot of different pins out there. And maximize that those pins, because it can help you get there, that’s for sure. Did you want where to find us, or no?

JENNY GUY: We did. We’ve gone ahead and shared the Bloggers Tell All, but tell us a little bit more about Blogger Tell All and that special offer…

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: So really quick, yes, it’s eight bloggers who are actually blogging. And we are there giving– it’s more of an advanced group. And we have a lot of people– we have a lot of questions that come up about getting to that threshold. So that does come up a lot. We’ve had a lot of wins of people who’ve made it to Mediavine based on some of the stuff they’ve learned there.

But we do have, right now, an offer that we are putting out there. It’s $1 trial for a week. So you can see if it’s something that you like. And if it is, you can decide if you want to join. And the link should be in there, and it should take you right to the $1 offer.

But you’ve got eight really talented bloggers who are from– have all very different experiences and different strengths who can really– are in there and active and answering questions. We do weekly lives. And we do weekly audits as well. So I hope, if anyone has any questions, feel free to message me about it or just check out the link.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. Tanya, same question to you. If someone is struggling to reach that 25,000 sessions, what can you tell them?

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: I’m going to echo SEO, of course. And what I would say to piggyback off of that, what I focused on was just basically three. I picked the number three and that’s three traffic bringing the tools that I– that’s what I focused on when I was trying to reach 25,000, which is why my Instagram game is pretty weak.

So when my goal was, I really want to join Mediavine, I made sure that I was optimizing my post for SEO. I was doing keyword research to make sure that I could actually rank for recipes. So I wasn’t targeting those high certain keywords. I was sticking around 2,000 or less. And it was easier for me to rank for the lower keywords than it would be for higher keywords.

And so I did that to build my authority in a lot of related content so that I could interlink like crazy. I think that helps as far as, what I was a sharing to Pintrest, what I was sharing to Facebook. Creating similar content that was well keyword researched, that will help you grow your site faster if you’re trying to reach the Mediavine on threshold to get that 25,000. I guess it’s sessions per month.

JENNY GUY: Correct. In the previous 30 days. It doesn’t have to be from the beginning of the month to the end of the month, just the previous 30 days via your Google Analytics. Thank you so much. And where can we reach you, Tanya?

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: Oh, I’m My Forking Life. That’s M-Y-F-O-R-K-I-N-G-L-I-F-E .com I Have to spell it out because I know sometimes people hear something differently.

[LAUGHTER]

JENNY GUY: What did you say?

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: And I’m on Pinterest. I’m on Instagram. I’m on Facebook. Don’t find me on Twitter because I barely tweet anything, but I’m on there too. So, yeah, that’s where I can be found.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: And princesspinkygirl.com, I forgot to mention that.

JENNY GUY: We’ve got all of that shared in the comments if you have any questions on that and want to get in touch with our amazing guests. I am so grateful to you guys for being here. Thank you for sharing all of that great information, and we appreciate it. It’s such a great exciting time to see bloggers lifting each other up. It’s what we’re here for. We’re all about education.

And I want to also thank an incredible audience. You guys are with us– you’ve been with us every week this summer. And if you were looking for these episodes, they are always available on our Facebook. And once we have the edited versions, they will go up on the Mediavine YouTube channel. So subscribe to that and make sure that you’re not missing an episode.

We are kicking off Season 2 of Teal Talk in a couple of weeks. It’s going to be Thursday, September 12th, at 2:00 PM with our CEO, Eric Hochberger. We’re going to do an overview of all of his RPM increasing strategies to get you guys ready to kick all the butts in Q4.

If you have any suggestions for content or guests for an upcoming episode, please email in. We’re here for you at sponsored@mediavine.com. And I just want to say thank you for an incredible summer. Everyone, have a great Labor Day weekend, and we will see you in the fall. Thank you guys so much.

JENNIFER HABER FISHKIND: Thank you, Jenny.

JENNY GUY: Thanks for coming.

TANYA HARRIS FLEMING-ESQ: Bye.

JENNY GUY: Bye, everyone.