Couple Combine Their Love of Cooking and Blogging Into a Highly Successful Home-Based Business
"If I had to pick one thing that has been the most important thing over the past three years I’d pick grit. The daily grind. The ability to press the publish button again, and again, and again. But not just publishing for publishing’s sake. Publishing while continually improving. It’s one thing to continually create stuff. It’s another thing to continually create stuff while trying to get a little better each day.” -Bjork Ostrom
Lindsay loves food. Bjork loves to help other bloggers. The Ostroms have merged these loves into a growing, thriving business which highlights their passions and builds on their determination to continually improve. In three short years, their business has grown into a $35K per month revenue stream, which is astounding considering that at first they were making about $10 a month.
Their sites: Pinch of Yum, a cooking blog, and Food Blogger Pro, a website for food bloggers looking to make a living from their blogs, are great models for building a successful Some Assembly Required Business from scratch.
I first discovered Lindsay and Bjork over the summer. My wife Patty and I thought it would be fun to start a small sideline business together. Patty is from Colombia, and a fantastic cook. I have spent most of the last 20 years building websites. With those set of skills we gravitated towards the idea of a cooking blog.
I have a habit of doing a lot of research before I dive into new things and started researching the world of food blogs and associated business opportunity. Over the course of that investigation, I discovered Bjork's monthly revenue reports on the Pinch of Yum site which were eye-opening, not only for the level of revenues and the scope of products and services that could be monetized, but because he was sharing all their revenue streams, costs and learnings openly with the public.
The information was so valuable that I immediately joined the Food Blogger Pro site, which is a paid subscriber service full of instructional videos coupled with a great discussion forum. That night, my wife and I sat down and watched many hours of the instructional videos, which were hugely helpful and saved us hundreds of hours as we were built our own site.
But something else happened as I worked my way through all this information. I started to realize that what I was learning from them had relevancy well beyond what I was learning about food blogs; I was learning things I could apply in my consulting practice as well.
Think you can't learn a lot about building a really successful home-based business from a food blog? Think again! (Or even better, read on!)
Begin With Passion
“It’s important to remember that the goal isn’t to arrive somewhere. We’re there. The destination isn’t the prize, the process is. All of us are currently (and forever will be) in the middle of the process. We’ll never “get there,” which is why it’s important to fall in love with the process, not the allure of the destination, whatever you imagine that to be”
Lindsay and Bjork’s passions were already in place, but they wanted to to use them. Lindsay was trained as a schoolteacher and adored teaching, but always loved cooking and experimenting with recipes. Bjork had studied music and was working at a non-profit where he fell in love with building websites when the organization needed a new website. His love of gadgets and devices soon found a new outlet in web programming.
Early on in their journey, the couple determined that Lindsay’s passion for food and her creativity needed an outlet, so they created the Pinch Of Yum website. At the same time Bjork’s love of technology and for helping others led him to turn the project into a learning exercise which could be shared with the world.
Sharing the Chef’s Secrets
About a year and a half after their first blog post and in the spirit of helping others, they began publicly sharing their monthly income reports.
These reports are fascinating for a number of reasons. Since Bjork makes them public, he is forced to add personality to the commentary.
The reports are engaging. They are entertaining. But most of all they are full of valuable take aways. And the benefits are not only valuable for his readers and followers, they are valuable to the business.
When Bjork writes out each monthly report, he is forced to contextualize and organize his thoughts, making things more clear; ongoing themes and trends emerge. Reading a succession of his reports shows an evolution - how the Ostroms have thought about their business and how their understanding of its inner workings has deepened. Over the years, these reports have allowed the couple to develop a crystal clear perspective on how to build a profitable blog.
Most business owners regularly review their results, but few (if any) turn their reports into an ongoing narrative filled with lessons. Don't believe me? Just follow that link to the reports. Open any one of them. You will be entertained by it and you will learn something even if your business has nothing to do with websites, blogs or online monetization. I guarantee it!
Mix in a Little Trust
“The #1 online currency is not cash, it is trust, and the way to develop trust is to build a human connection”
Most businesspeople would immediately reject the idea of publishing their business results for fear of being copied by competitors. Even Bjork has dealt with doubts about this practice, especially when he has encountered replications of their own sites. There is a moment of reluctance to continue sharing, but then comes the realization: “shame on them if they don’t copy us!”
Bjork continues by saying, “It is not really about being frustrated about the people that have copied one of our products or copied the general outline and then put their voice to it. If it works, it works. That is the world we live in and it would be foolish not to reproduce that. But the reality is that with anything business related, it is less about the facts and the tricks of doing it and more about the mindset of doing the work which is the hard part.”
Lindsay and Bjork challenge people to do much more than copy their model. “People can replicate what we are doing, but unless they continue to hustle and really create great content and help others and deeply engage their audience for years, they are not going to see results.”
By letting the rest of the food blogging community into the inner workings of their business, Bjork and Lindsay have fostered something that has no price tag: Trust. Their method of honestly and publicly taking stock of successes and failures has resulted in a running dialogue with other bloggers. As people have learned to trust their expertise, they have received even more of questions from other bloggers which only strengthens the food blogging community.
A Dash of Personality
“You have to be 120% of yourself”
Information is everywhere. It is cheap and readily available. Interestingly enough, the same is true of food and recipes. The parallel is not lost on the Ostroms. They know that a recipe can be really boring: Chop this, mix that, preheat that. These recipes get the job done, but you they don’t offer much insight into the dish you are preparing or the person who developed the recipe. What people yearn for is a connection with another individual and the feeling that they know that person. So Lindsay and Bjork have embraced personality as a competitive advantage.
Lindsay tries to be who she is, but because this work demands a strong voice, she also strives to ‘amplify’ her personality. She intentionally steps outside herself to make sure that her wording engages her readers. To illustrate what I mean, here are two descriptions of recipes for Lasagna Florentine.
Here is a small snippet of content from Lindsay on her Lasagna Florentine recipe:
“This creamy tomato lasagna florentine is layer upon layer of saucy tomato tang and garlic sauteed spinach nestled into a creamy blanket over the sauce, soaked up on all sides by thick and chewy lasagna noodles for a perfectly clean slice of comfort food. And it is giving my whole self a hug today...I’m usually not grossly in love with lasagna, but new lines have been drawn.”
In comparison, here’s is the entire description from the #1 search result on Google for Lasagna Florentine:
"This is a recipe I created for my vegetarian sister-in-law after she ran the Marine Corp Marathon in Washington, DC. I was not able to be there to cheer her on so I sent this dish. It is actually better the next day but I have never been able to keep my family out of it once they smell the aroma!"
That last one is really boring, right? Did you get any sense of what the recipe was like from it? What about Lindsay's recipe? Which recipe would you rather cook? Which site would you rather visit?
Lindsay works hard to have her recipes leave a strong enough impression to keep readers coming back for more. At the same time, personality is one of the great challenges that the Ostrom’s face - the business recipe works as long as they are personally involved. Since their passions and personalities are so perfectly interwoven into this project, this high level involvement makes for a company that would not be easy to sell or left to others to run. But for two people who have used their passions as the fuel for building their business, they wouldn’t have it any other way.
Visuals as a Key Ingredient
Since certain types of information is best presented visually - real estate, home decoration, clothing or food - visuals should take up a sizable portion of these webpages. The images become the main selling vehicle, a fact which makes Pinterest such a powerful medium. It has found a way to offer a catalog of visually rich information. In fact, when you look at Pinch Of Yum’s traffic report, Pinterest is the #1 source of traffic. When looking for things to cook, people are increasingly turning to Pinterest for inspiration rather than searching Google.
[caption id="attachment_18600" align="alignnone" width="400"] Traffic Sources (click to enlarge)[/caption]
Stating that a food and recipe website should have great photography and visuals may seem like an obvious statement, but it is not often the case. On most food sites, the images (if any) are small do not always display the completed plate. Pinch Of Yum has large photos everywhere, giving the reader an immediate sense of whether the recipe is or isn’t what they are looking for.
Understanding the value of high quality images, Lindsay has focused on this aspect of food blogging by investing hours and hours perfecting her food photography skills. Now she regularly crafts photos which draw the audience into the recipe. Her photography is so good that she penned a food photography eBook which is one of their principal revenue drivers.
[caption id="attachment_18599" align="alignnone" width="400"] Lasagna Florentine (click to enlarge)[/caption]
A New Food Forum
Through their interactions with the food blogging community, the Ostroms learned that the community of food bloggers was a lot larger than they thought it was. There are literally thousands of people who are passionate about food and want to share that passion.
Lindsay and Bjork also realized that there is a huge gap between people’s desire to be food bloggers and their ability to achieve that goal. Many have a passion for cooking, developing recipes, photographing food and dream of starting their own blogs. However, for many of them, technical issues are a big enough barrier to keep them from following through on that dream. Technical solutions abound, but there aren’t many that are specific to the food blog niche.
They understood that they would continue to receive more and more questions about food blogging, whether it be questions on photography, monetization or technology. This was taking up a large portion of their time, but seeing so many people who were having similar problems also presented an opportunity: a website specifically devoted to food blogging.
“To be a leader in a vertical market, you have to be really attentive to the conversations that are happening because so often when people are having conversations, its problem-and-resolution based. People are trying to figure stuff out and we realized that if we were attentive to that, we could convert that into an opportunity that would not only be a great revenue generator for us, but would also be great for those people looking to solve a problem and that they would be more than willing to pay x-amount in order to quickly get a solution to that problem.”
Taking an informal lead in the food blogging community led to the genesis of their new product, Food Blogger Pro, a paid membership site that launched in June and combines video tutorials with a discussion forum specifically targeted at food bloggers.
Prepping Their Sites
Having an idea of how to meet a need is one thing, but turning the idea into something usable as well as profitable takes lots of preparation. To prepare the launch of Food Blogger Pro, Bjork and Lindsay spent 3 months making hundreds of instructional videos. Each video is intentionally organized around one guiding principle: Find the one thing that a person needs to learn and figure out how to talk them through that process. To illustrate, here is one of the videos that explains how to check whether recipes are configured correctly with structured data to stand out in search engine results:
The couple also devoted a great deal of time establishing the discussion forums. For the first couple of months, whenever the Ostroms received an email, they would post it to the Food Blogger Pro forum as themselves and then answer the question. They would then tweet their followers that someone had asked a question and they thought the answer would be helpful to others. Also instead of answering a question that had been answered before, they could just started pointing people to the answers on the Food Blogger Pro forum.
Not only was this a more efficient way of addressing repeated questions, this redirection became a soft sell - introducing people to a community where they can browse and see positive interactions. Their hope was that these visitors would explore further and eventually discover ‘subscriber only’ areas that appeal to them and then join the site. This win-win scenario gave them better scalability of their time in answering questions, but it also provided an environment which connected people with similar challenges.
Using the Cloud
Almost all of the Ostrom’s business happens on the web and makes extensive use of cloud based services. As Bjork says, “We can essentially reach out and grab the different pieces that we need and we can put them together, and we can have something that before was maybe thousands of dollars, but now with the cloud we can piece things together and have a really high functioning site or service.“
This DIY (do-it-yourself) approach of using various cloud based services means that some things don’t work as perfectly as they might with other types of tools. About this idea, Bjork says, “...you have to be OK with things maybe being not exactly the way you would want them to be. But one of the important things when you are growing a business is not to obsess over small things and give them too much time. That can happen with cloud based products. You can spend a lot of time trying to get them to work the exact way you want and if you do, you are going to fall behind. You have to be OK with things occasionally breaking or not working.”
Final Ingredient to Home-Based Business Success: Get Going Already!
For many people, getting started is the hardest part of any project. Bjork and Lindsay encourage people to simply do something related to their dreams and goals. Bjork sums it up best in this past August’s three year anniversary report:
“You don’t have to create something incredible today. You just have to create something and then let the world see it. Did you already do that? Good job. Now find one itsy-bitsy way to get better and do it again. Create something and then let the world see it again. Did you already do that, too? Awesome. Keep doing it. Forever.”
