How Molly Thompson Grew Her Email List from 15K to 100K

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are really happy to welcome Molly Thompson from the food blog, What Molly Made. In this episode, Bjork and Molly dive into Molly’s strategies for growing her email list. She managed to grow her email list from just 15,000 subscribers to over 100,000 subscribers in just one year, and she has managed to turn that growth in subscribers into an increase of over 300,000 page views per month. On her blog, Molly shares all of her tips and tricks for developing lead magnets, how to survey your audience and use that information to create more effective lead magnets, how she uses Instagram to drive growth in her email list and all of her strategies for driving traffic back to her site. It’s a really practical and useful episode if you’re thinking about diving more into your email marketing strategy, which with the ever-changing Google algorithms is never a bad idea. I know you’re going to learn a lot in this episode, so I’m just going to Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Molly, welcome to the podcast.

Molly Thompson: Thank you so much for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I had the honor of being on a Kit webinar with you. This is maybe a couple months ago,

But as soon as we got off that I said to our team, Emily, who helps manage the podcast, I was like, man, it’d be great to have a conversation with Molly. One of the things that I’ve found is I need to constantly be in a state of learning because things are always changing in the world of content creation, social media, publishing content online, and there are people doing really creative, unique new things in this world, and you are one of those people. And so it’ll be fun to talk to you about your expertise in all things social content creation and whatnot. But before that, let’s talk about what you were doing before you started your site. A lot of times we find that there’s a correlation or some learnings that we can have in our previous career as it relates to a new career. That’s very true for you because you were in social media.

Molly Thompson: Yeah, for sure. So I graduated with a degree in communications and immediately worked in PR and then worked at an agency where I was a social media strategist, and that was right when I had started my site. So many things overlapped because I also worked with CPG brands, like Tollhouse was one of my very first clients, and we were doing Pinterest photo shoots for them while I’m over here creating pins for myself. And it was kind of cool because we got to learn directly from Pinterest on some of those things. Now, this was over 10 years ago, so obviously things have changed, but at the time it was super helpful because the things that I was learning in the blog world helped my career at the time.

Adding the pin button to your website and things like that that they didn’t have, and then vice versa, learning some of these strategies from the brand side and from all of these super smart people at an agency being able to apply those to my site. So it was kind of cool now that I’m getting into kind working with brands and things, or I guess I have been for a while, there are a lot of overlaps too, and I’ve kind of understand a little bit more about what brands are looking for. So yeah, it’s been kind of cool and I feel like that background really helped shape my site from the beginning, and I even feel like I pull some from some of that now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so can you point to anything specifically?

Molly Thompson: Well, a lot of the times with the brand, just thinking about how brands are working and the way that they’re doing, I don’t do any paid on Pinterest, but I learned a ton about how paid works and I’m planning to do it for products for Facebook, so I learned a lot about Facebook ads too, that I’m planning. I’m going to launch them soon for some of my products. So I feel like it was just kind of an overall understanding of the industry and the landscape as a whole, and also how brand strategy works and the ecosystem of a brand being the website and then all the socials around it. I feel like that’s definitely how I built the business, and we did a lot of that for brands back in the day, so I feel like it just helped brand strategy too.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, you’re able to see toll halls as an example. They probably have their site, but then they have their supporting social around that. Thinking back to that agency work, when you applied that to your own site, what were the combination of the site and social and strategy as it relates to all of that cohesive ecosystem? Can you talk about your mindset with that? What did you learn that you brought over that applied? Because obviously you’ve had success with your site and you there’s probably some gold there that you maybe even don’t know that.

Molly Thompson: I think one of the things that I learned was repurposing content and using your site as the hub and then the ecosystem around it and repurposing and recreating content that always drives back to that. So I wasn’t ever, I feel like I always was creating for my site and my audience first, and then just repurposing on all the social channels. So I felt like it was super efficient with the minimal time that I had working in the margins of my day. I feel like in the beginning, that’s kind of one of the biggest things I’ve learned, and I still do that

Bjork Ostrom: Now.

Molly Thompson: Just super helpful.

Bjork Ostrom: So the site being the leading consideration, creating content for the site, and then looking at all of the social that’s around that and saying, great, how do I spin off this content and point people back to the site? In the case of let’s say Instagram where you’re having short form video content, that short form video content is showing up on your site, not showing up on your site, or do you view it almost as a mashup or a syndicated version of the original content which is on your site?

Molly Thompson: Yeah, I feel like it’s a syndicated version of what’s on my site, but I also will edit it a little bit longer and put it on my site as a value add. But I also feel like there’s some times where the stuff that may be working on my site from a Google perspective isn’t necessarily exactly what my audience wants on Instagram, so sometimes I’ll change the name or tweak it or market it in a way that is more appealing to my Instagram audience. So I may say something like high protein, whereas on the site I may not have high protein highlighted

Bjork Ostrom: Called out.

Molly Thompson: That makes sense. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that makes sense. Yeah, it’s one of the interesting things about the different platforms is that certain content can perform better or worse on those platforms, even if it’s the same recipe. And with Instagram as an example, you could create a piece of content that has some virality with it, but it might not be something that number one, people are interested in actually making. Or number two, searching for search being one of the primary mechanisms for discovering content on a website. Do you find that, let’s say you are creating a piece of content that will perform well on Instagram, it might not perform well from a search perspective. A lot of people won’t be searching for it. Do you find that you are able to get people from Instagram back to your site, or are you more viewing it as, Hey, this is something that’s going to live on Instagram, I might grow my following, I might get some engagement.

Molly Thompson: I don’t tend to create just for Instagram, I pretty much will only create something if I feel like it’ll do well on my site or has some sort of search volume a little bit. But I do find that things that go viral on Instagram, I always end up ranking well for and even maybe ranking for terms that I didn’t think I would. So for example, cottage cheese bagels, I went viral for those a year and a half ago, and to this day, that’s my number one blog post when the search volume, I don’t think at the time I wasn’t like, this is the best search term, I’m going to go after this. So it kind of worked out that way.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you feel like part of it is that if you have a piece of content that goes viral, it creates that search volume? Do you imagine people are then going and searching for that because they see it? Or is it like there is also this understanding for you around the industry of, or the trend is maybe a better way to say it and to know that you caught that at the right time?

Molly Thompson: I think it’s a little bit of both, and I also feel like I now rank for three ingredient bagel or protein bagel instead of cottage cheese bagel alone. But when I was going after that term and thinking about that, I wasn’t trying to rank for all of these things. And then I feel like also that trend is really popular right now. So ation, I think.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yep, that makes sense. We often talk about this idea of catching a wave,

Molly Thompson: But

Bjork Ostrom: You have to both catch the wave and also know how to surf.

You can’t just be out there waiting for the wave, you’ll get washed over. And so it’s the combination of a good piece of content at the right time after having the reps of creating lots of content, building following and whatnot. So that makes a lot of sense. Talk to me a little bit about the landscape of your business. So you have your site, that’s the core of what you’re creating for around that. You have social, you talked about Pinterest and learning at the agency world about Pinterest, Instagram, my guess is an important platform, but how would you view, rank, order the most important platforms for you right now? And I’ll start. My guess is site is number one.

Molly Thompson: Yeah, my site’s one, and then it’s kind of like that’s the middle, really. And then I mean still

Bjork Ostrom: Middle meaning like a hub and

Molly Thompson: Spoke. It’s like the middle of an ecosystem. I view it as this is my site. Then all the things around it, I guess. So I would say Instagram’s right up there with email. Instagram I find really helpful for brand building and for getting my content out there and having those viral moments. Google obviously is still very much important to my overall business, but just under that is direct traffic, and I feel like that is attributed to a combination of email and Instagram. So I would say those two come next. And then Pinterest is kind of in there too. So those are the four, four-ish areas that I really focus on right now with the bandwidth that I have.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure. Which is one of the things we often talk about. You can’t do it all right, so what are you going to focus on? What’s the highest impact? The site being really important, but then also email. I think that’s one of the things that over the last year or two years, especially in the world of food content, it’s become more important, number one, just because you can earn more from people who are coming through email. A lot of times we didn’t have a product to sell. That’s becoming more common now for people to have product to sell and email is a great way to sell product. But I also know that you’ve grown your email list significantly and strategically over the last year, year plus. So when we were doing the kit webinar, I think it was like 15 K, 15,000 to 130,000 in a year. Is that right? Yes,

Molly Thompson: That’s correct.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, which is amazing. And if you break that down, it’s like multiple hundreds of people signing up for your email list today. One of the things that I’ve, I haven’t spent a ton of time doing this, but I would be interested to get to a dollar amount that I could say like, Hey, one email signup is worth this amount. Do you have a sense for that within your business?

Molly Thompson: I can tell you how many page views I get from email,

Bjork Ostrom: That’d be great. Yep. And I would say that’s a really clear indicator of

Molly Thompson: 300,000 page views a month from email alone right now, which I guess it depends on what your RPM is, but the math definitely checks out in terms of time, energy, and all that,

Bjork Ostrom: Depending on the season, depending on RPM, that could be 15, 20, 20 $5,000 that you are making from email, which pretty quickly starts to justify whatever thousands of dollars a year it is to pay for an email subscription. When you can start to look at that and say, okay, I’m going to consistently be able to know as long as I continue to send these emails that I’ll be able to get people who click on these links and come back to my site. And the predictability around that versus a Google algorithm is really reassuring. So talk to me about the peace of mind that you have and then also maybe the different traffic sources. So you’re getting 300,000 from email in so far as you’re willing.

Molly Thompson: Yeah, for sure. So I got hit by the Google update this time last year, pretty bad. I lost about 60% of my Google traffic. Thankfully I got it back. But in that meantime, I was just, I don’t know, three or four months into the journey of really growing my email list. We’re sending these meal plans, and I felt like I barely saw a dip in my revenue because of that. And I feel like since then I’ve felt so much peace. All the experts have been telling us for years plus email, build your email list. And I was just like, but why? And then that happened to me and I was like, thank goodness that I did. And I mean, there’s Google updates all the time, and that’s still my number one traffic driver, but I feel like between, so I get 300,000, 300,000 page views from email a month, but I also get 600,000 from direct traffic. So between the two of those, I’m almost at a million page views just

Bjork Ostrom: Without Google,

Molly Thompson: Without. Yeah. And I think that is a testament also to email too. So someone may be getting my emails frequently, but they’re not clicking through and then they have something that they need to make, so they’ll go directly to my site. Obviously it’s not super easy to track that, but I’m assuming that that’s kind of how it’s been happening, noticed as my email list grows, so does my direct traffic. So I feel like I just feel so much more at peace knowing that I kind of have this stable system that if Google and Pinterest completely went away, I would still have an audience. And then, yeah, so Google’s obviously my number one traffic source, and then it’s direct, and then it’s Pinterest, and then it’s email.

Bjork Ostrom: The interesting thing about that would be, I bet that’s flipped in terms of RPM, like email Pinterest, like email number one, Pinterest. I wouldn’t know off the top of my head, maybe you would on direct versus search what the RPM would look like. I don’t know what that would, but my guess is not that it evens out, but you get a higher RPM for email, and so that traffic is per visit is worth more as well, which there’s another case in point for building an email list. Talk about in terms of actually sending email, so how many emails are you sending and what have you learned in the process of consistently sending email in order to then consistently get traffic?

Molly Thompson: I send three emails a week too consistently, and then some ad hoc emails. Occasionally I send one on Saturdays that’s a meal plan, and my audience loves that one. My open rates are like 60% and my click through rates are really high, and those have only grown as I’ve been more consistent. I think people expect it and they know that it’s coming and they plan for it and they click through. So that’s a big one. And I do a Monday through Friday dinner with a grocery list. And then I also include gluten-free, dairy free customizations

Because a lot of my audience tends to have some dietary restrictions, so that’s on Saturdays. And then on Thursdays we send what we call our seasonal email, but it’s kind of like whatever’s relevant to the time or whatever is meeting our audience’s pain points, which we talked about in the kit. The kit panel, we found that click-through rates for holidays for us are always really well received. So if we just had Cinco de Mayo or Easter, so we always send obviously a seasonally relevant food focused email around the holidays, but then with it, with Evergreen stuff, we’re sprinkling in what is our audience struggling with? A lot of them are struggling with finding meals, their kids fitting it all into that short window between bedtime. So we kind of try to reiterate some of their pain points in the subject lines and really create the content to help them with whatever they’re struggling with.

And then at the bottom, we do always include a what’s new? And then I just recently started a one on Tuesdays that’s really just iPhone photos of what I’m making. I found that on Instagram and Pinterest and even Facebook, just iPhone photos of recipes have been doing really well. So I’ve been testing that out and sending, here’s what we made for breakfasts, here’s what we made for lunch. A lot of the times I cooked directly from my site, so I’ll just snap a picture and then I’ll also share some behind the scenes of what we’re testing. So that’s been

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Molly Thompson: Doing well too. Yeah, and it’s fun.

Bjork Ostrom: When you’re doing the meal plans, is that a link to a PDF or is it a link to a page on your site?

Molly Thompson: I have been putting the meal plan directly in the email with links to each recipe directly Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then the grocery list is A PDF.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Molly Thompson: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So people link to, they go to your site to get the recipe. Grocery list is a pdf DF, yeah, you wouldn’t want that attached. That makes sense.

Molly Thompson: Exactly. And because the meal plans have been performing so well, we were like, how can we take this to the next level and offer an even better experience for the people that love the meal plan? So that’s why we launched the membership where then they can add everything directly to Instacart and they can swap out recipes and add those to Instacart, and then they get some exclusive recipes and things like that. So we’re still testing that, but it’s going well.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. Can you talk about the membership? What have you learned in that process? It’s always such, always so much learning and propping up a new component of your site. It’s a new way to create content. There’s also new plugins to manage and processes and stripe accounts.

Molly Thompson: Oh my god. So

Bjork Ostrom: What are you using for that and what have you learned?

Molly Thompson: So I’m using member press

Plugin, and it’s basically just a paywall behind. So then we’ll put the meal plans on the site then, so they’ll click through to the site, they’ll get the meal plan, all the customizations links to add each recipe to Instacart. And then they also, what’s nice, and I love it as a user when they’re cooking from the site, then they get everything ad free, which is super cool. So I’ve been using the WordPress recipe maker elite bundle to be able to get some of those functions. And then combined with MemberPress, and then I had some developers do some custom dashboard things. So those are the main things, but there was definitely a lot of technical learning curve to it, but it’s been great. I’ve only launched it to my email list. I have it announced it on social. We launched it in January and we have 200 members right now, and the goal is 5,000 plus eventually.

But we’re kind of just in a learning phase right now of what are people liking the operations, how everything works. It’s not that much extra work for us. We just have to basically copy paste the email to a blog post and then they get all the added functionality really automatically. The only extra work is some exclusive recipes. So far so good. We’re getting some good feedback, and I plan to continue to tweak things and learn things and figure out what messaging is converting the best to be able to launch in the fall around back to school time. That is totally something that is completely new to me is sales and conversion rates, sales copy. I’m like, I have no clue. So it’s been a learning curve for sure, but

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and the interesting thing is all of us, we are marketers. We’ve just been marketing a free product, but we still have to market it. There’s competition and there’s other people who are interested and even if it’s just attention in general. And so we all have that, it’s just a little bit of a shift. Like you said, you’re looking at new metrics, suddenly it’s not like click-through rates on search. It’s like conversion rates and sales copy and all of that stuff. But also one of the things that’s so helpful is the predictability of it. You have people who sign up, you start to know what the churn rate is, how many people cancel, how many signups you get. That’s a who I

Molly Thompson: Learned recently.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, yeah. Great. And so it builds in predictability again, and as far as businesses go, they talk about this idea, the most valuable businesses to sell or the most valuable, best businesses to own. And so as we think about our businesses as assets themselves to have recurring revenue as a part of it, that’s a good business to run, but it’s also a valuable business that we are then creating as we think about that as a component as well. So you have all these different pieces. You have the social around the hub, which is the website. You also have the membership that you’re starting to build up lots of different traffic sources. And you talked about this process of building your email list. What have you learned in the last year around effective email growth? And I know on the kit webinar you talked about chat GBT and using that to understand your audience, which I think is super smart Grocers list, who we’ve gotten to know Ben in that product. And a little bit of a spoiler alert, but we’re going to do a little series with Grocers List and talking about effective email growth strategies, but also just transactional ways to interact with your audience. We’ve started for a long time, we held off on ManyChat and any of the transactional type

Of services, but have started to experiment with it, and it’s like it’s effective. You can get people to sign up and interact. So what have you learned in the last year that’s been helpful in your process of growing your email list?

Molly Thompson: Yeah, when I was presenting at Tastemaker, I really had to sit down and think about what is this strategy that I’m doing? And I feel like I’ve got a really good grasp on, it’s kind of like a four-part system. So you start with building your email, you start with surveying your audience. I did it at the beginning of last year and used this strategy to grow my email list. Basically it’s a four to six or however many you feel like is necessary. Survey really to the goal of it is to get to your audience’s biggest pain points when it comes to food or recipes, cooking, whatever your niche is.

Bjork Ostrom: And what I love about it is it could be anything like Food Blogger Pro, we could use this as well, but within the context of recipes.

Molly Thompson: Totally. Yeah. And even if you’re stuck, you can ask Chachi, bt, what are some questions that I could use to really get to my audience’s pain points? These are the types of recipes that I make. This is kind of my audience, my niche. Can you help me put together a survey? And then you can kind of tweak it, but it’s a good brainstorming point if you are kind of feeling stuck. So I just used a Google survey. You could use SurveyMonkey or one of the other ones and send it out. I sent it out to my email list on my Instagram stories, and I think those were the only two places I did it. You could post it on your Facebook, you could post it anywhere. If you don’t really have a large audience, you can send it to your friends. And I think any feedback from someone who may be some ideal audience is helpful. And then I took all of the answers and dropped them into chat GPT, and I said

Bjork Ostrom: In a spreadsheet, did you upload a spreadsheet?

Molly Thompson: So I didn’t upload a spreadsheet, but I wonder if you could do that. Now, what I did was just copy each question individually and all of the answers. This year I had 2000 responses, and I would just like one of the questions, what’s your biggest struggle when it comes to cooking dinner for your family? I think that’s what one of them was. And I just copy and pasted all of the answers to that specific question into chat GPT, and I said, bubble up the biggest themes that you’re seeing from all of these answers. And it gave me five or six, and I did that for each question. And then because you can’t do it all at once, at least at the time I couldn’t, and maybe you can now.

And then at the end I said, okay, now that all the answers give me all of the pain points all together, a list of however many. And that was kind of like, then it gave me bullets under each one. It was so helpful. And even one of them was not having enough time. That’s one of my audience’s biggest struggles. So I always think about that when I’m creating recipes, to be honest, just to make sure that I’m really meeting that need from the beginning. But I also asked, can you include a list of quotes that people were using when they’re talking about this struggle or this pain point? And a lot of times we’ll use those in email subject lines because the goal is to be like, oh, that’s me. I feel that I need to open this. And so we have this list of pain points, and then from there you can even ask chat gt, okay, now that you know this, what are some email opt-ins that I could create? Or you can, I did it in a way where my audience really wanted high protein, specifically breakfast. So I did a series on Instagram of high protein, high fiber breakfast recipes, and then I put them all in one ebook and I said, comment and I’ll send you this ebook. And I think I’ve shared it two or three times since September. I’ve shared it twice I think, and I think I’ve gotten 30,000 subscribers just from that one.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s amazing.

Molly Thompson: Yeah, just from that one. So of course we do ’em around the holidays because our audience, I know my audience loves cookies, so I did a Christmas cookie one that did really well, but we’re planning to do a high protein dinner one because we also got that feedback. So you can kind of go as granular as you want and ask chat GPT, what are some email subject lines or just what are some opt-ins? And they’re just really, really helpful to start the brainstorming process around what your audience really needs and what kind of opt-ins are actually going to convert to your email list. And I think the key though is to not just, you have to have a long-term email strategy beyond just the opt-in because once they join, you want to continue to serve them. And I think that’s where those meal plans or the weekly series of some sort is coming in, and I think that’s where we’ve seen growth and page views and click-through rates because we’re consistent. They’re expecting that we’re going to meet their needs and serve them things that they need or that they’re struggling with. So we did that last year for the first time, and that’s when we really started growing our email list and we did our survey again and have been doing the same thing.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s super smart. One of the things that is so exciting for me to hear about that is it feels like the best use of it. Ai. Lindsay has this theory as a side note that I have a theory, I’ve shared this on the podcast before, but I have this theory that if you start any Pandora station on any musician and then you listen long enough, then it gets to yellow by Coldplay.

Molly Thompson: I think I’ve heard you say this before,

Bjork Ostrom: But Lindsay also has this theory that if you talk to me long enough, it’ll get to self-driving cars or ai. So to hear you talk about AI in a use case like this, which is awesome because you’re not having it do the recipe for you, you’re not having it the complete email for you, you’re not having it talk to your audience. What you’re doing is you’re using it to take a bunch of data and help you understand that data. And then for you as the expert in the loop, the expert as it relates to your audience and recipe development and food content, you’re then taking that information and using that, but you’re cutting down the effort of what would’ve been a complete day of reading through everything and creating, pulling quotes and synthesizing it. It’s doing that in 15 minutes and it’s not more valuable for you to spend eight to 10 hours doing it. What’s valuable for you is to understand it and then to take that and create content around it. So it’s a really great use case of ai and I think all of us that specifically, it’s like we could end the podcast. That would be a huge takeaway.

Molly Thompson: I think the other thing,

Bjork Ostrom: Because there’s more.

Molly Thompson: Yeah, and I think the other thing it does too, which I was just an added benefit that I wasn’t trying to do at the time, is that I feel like I’m really helping people. You know what I mean? I feel like, which is so important to me, is obviously I want to make recipes and it’s a business, but what drives me through any burnout or overwhelm is knowing that I’m actually helping people and knowing what their problems are and being able to use your content to help them. I feel like that has been the most rewarding thing in the process for me too, which is cool.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m not a baseball player and I’ve never hit a home run, but if I was a baseball player who had hit home run, my guess is the feeling that you have when the bat connects with the ball perfectly and you feel the trajectory of that start to leave the stadium, there’d be a content equivalent of creating a piece of content that you press publish on that resonates with your audience. And I feel like part of what you’re doing in this process is it’s like you’re getting a bigger bat. You’re increasing the probability that you’re going to make contact

And you’re going to have an impact with the content that you’re creating. Because what doesn’t feel good is to warm up, to get ready, to get in the game, to put your baseball outfit on, and then to get up to the bat to the home plate and then swing and miss that doesn’t feel good. And part of it is it’s what the cost of playing the game is swinging and missing, and we’re all going to swing and miss, but the amount that we can increase, the probability that we’re going to get a base hit or a home run, this I think is a process that will help us do that better because we can understand our audience in the world of software that talk about this idea of customer development, and essentially it’s just conversations with people to understand what their problems are and then creating solutions around this. And this feels like a scaled version of that. Can you talk about functionally within groceries list? What’s happening on that side that allows email signups to happen?

Molly Thompson: Yeah, it is kind of a little bit of a confusing process, but basically how I’ve kind of found the sweet spot of using Instagram specifically to market and create these Optums and opt-ins and share ’em, I think my website does okay, but the conversion rate from Instagram to my website doesn’t even compare.

Bjork Ostrom: You mean the email signup rate of people who see content on your website versus how many people sign up if they see

Molly Thompson: It on Instagram?

Bjork Ostrom: On Instagram,

Molly Thompson: For sure. So what I do is I’ll create an ebook or an opt-in. Sometimes it’s just an email with a list of recipes, which is a little bit of a lower effort. I find that eBooks, for whatever reason, really convert the best for me. But we’ve tried a lot of different things. We’ve done emails, there’s all sorts of different kinds of lead magnets you can create, but you create your lead magnet and then you create the backend I use kit, so I’ll set up the, once you sign up, you get this email and it has the link to download the free PDF. So you create your landing page for people to sign up, and that’s the landing page that I will share on grocers list. So basically the process is create your freebie, set up the backend in your email service provider, and then once you have your email, your landing page where people would put in their email address, that’s the link that you would share using kit.

So I’ll create a little reel, a little roundup reel usually of 10 or so recipes that are featured in the ebook or whatever, opt-in using, and they’ll say, comment and I’ll send you this ebook. And so they’ll comment recipes. And then on the backend of grocers list is kind of where I set up the up the automation there. And so when they come at recipes, groceries list will automatically DM them that landing page where they can write their email address. And once that’s submitted, then they automatically get the email. So it’s kind of like a four-part system. It is a little bit confusing, but once you do it, once, you kind of have the flow and then you can really just duplicate emails and duplicate things, and it makes it kind of simple. And then I usually call out email’s the easiest way to share this with you, occasionally I’ll get people complaining, I don’t want to put in my email address, but for the most part, the conversions are incredible and they love, it’s an instant problem. I’m instantly solving a problem. So it’s a positive interaction with my brain,

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s the highest probability of your audience having that problem based on the questions that you asked.

Molly Thompson: Yes,

Bjork Ostrom: And then the answers that you got from them. And then after that, just to kind of talk through the process, they get that sent to them as a resource. And they’re also now on your email list and they are getting those emails that you are sending on Tuesday and on Saturday, maybe getting some marketing around joining the membership. Do you also have a series that initially welcomes an onboarding series that they would go through?

Molly Thompson: So once they get the email, here’s your freebie, then they get dropped into my welcome series and I think it’s like a four or five part email series where they get one every single day. And while they’re getting those, they don’t get the meal plans or the other email just because they don’t want to overwhelm them with emails already a lot of emails. So the first email is really personal. It’s introducing myself and the brand and how I approach recipe development, kind of like a shortened version of my about page and a picture of my family to just make it feel a little bit more personal. And then I do another one that’s talking specifically about getting dinners on the table fast and how I specialize in developing recipes that are quick and easy and healthy. And so they kind of just get a feel for my brand. And then I talk a little bit about meal prepping, which is a little bit tied to the membership. And then I think there’s one specific membership sales email. So they really get three about our recipes and websites, and we do link back to some of the most popular recipes within those. And then after that, then they get dumped into the email where they get the Tuesday or Thursday Saturday emails.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that makes sense. Do you have a sense for, let’s say you have a piece of content and it’s published and then it just lives on the internet, people might come across it, the long tail continued signup from previously published content. And what I’m wondering is how much is it a short window where it’s like seven days and people are signing up between the day you publish and seven days later versus it becomes this snowball where you have this content that exists, and so an average day today is going to have more email signups than an average day a year ago, as long as you’re still publishing consistently to Instagram. Is that true?

Molly Thompson: Yeah, that’s completely true. I don’t know exact numbers off the top of my head, but I would say I get 200 plus subscribers a day. I mean, that does include some of the, save this email, save this recipe email things on my site. But I see signups from, I did a 2024 viral recipes. I’m still getting signups for that, and I posted it in January. And the ones that do really well, we repost every other month or so, and they always do well. So I’m about due to do repost the high fiber, high protein one again, and then we do one new one every week, every month, not every week. So we have a calendar for the remainder of the year that we went through all the pain points and we figured out what are these email opt-ins this year, and are there any specific recipes I need to develop to fill this out? Then, so we have one new one that goes live every month, and then we fill in every other week with an old one. So we’re definitely seeing some recurring, and the ones that I’ve done well do well every time we post ’em. And on top of that, we’re also attracting the right Instagram audience, which is super cool

Bjork Ostrom: That it’s the type of content, the type of content is the type of people that you’d want to attract. Yeah,

Molly Thompson: Exactly. And it’s not like a random, just repurposing the content I already had, but marketing it in a way that solves their problem.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, point being, you might do a roundup of high protein breakfast items that you already had these, and what you’re doing is creating a playlist. You aren’t necessarily marketing the song, you’re marketing the playlist, but the playlist is still valuable to people, and so they’re going to be interested in that. But it’s nice because you don’t have to go through the process of creating 10 recipes or even one recipe. You’ve already created them. You’re just thinking strategically about how to compile those together when you’re resharing. I’m not an Instagram user. Lindsay’s a heavy Instagram user. She would maybe have opinions on this. I don’t. Can you just reshare a previously created piece of content and then do you continue to have it exist three months ago in your feed if you scroll through?

Molly Thompson: I do.

Bjork Ostrom: And is it the exact same or do you change anything about it? It’s just like republishing it.

Molly Thompson: I think a year ago you could post the exact same thing and I would post the exact same thing, exact same caption, exact same voiceover, everything, and every single time the same ones would go viral. I’ve noticed that that’s changing a little bit now where I just posted one that I thought would do really well that didn’t do as well.

Bjork Ostrom: That was a repost

Molly Thompson: And it was a repost, but I still feel like they do okay. They don’t tank and they don’t hurt me, and I’ve been changing the captions or maybe you can use a different piece of music, but I find that no one’s really scrolling from four months ago or six months ago. And a lot of times people, I mean, how many people or what percentage of people are seeing your content? So maybe they didn’t even see it the first time you posted it, so

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that

Molly Thompson: Makes sense. It’s worth a try if you haven’t tried it.

Bjork Ostrom: And I’ve talked to a handful of people who are doing that and seeing success with it. From what I’ve heard, it’s similar to what you’ve said, which is I had this piece of content, it did well. I’m taking this. And almost within that content addressing the fact that I’ve talked about this before, Hey, this is some of my most popular recipes. Some of you maybe seen these before. The reason that I think these are so great is captions may be a little bit different. And yeah, there’s something about the reality that like, Hey, if it works, it’ll probably work. Again, you could either go through the effort of creating something from scratch, or if you find something that works on a cadence, make sense to revisit that.

Molly Thompson: And it makes me think about Pinterest. I feel like all of my same specific recipes and pins always do really well no matter what. So I may create a new pin for that same recipe, but it does well every time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah. That’s great. So let’s say that you were to go back, this is one of our favorite questions to ask on the podcast, have a conversation with yourself. When you were just starting this as your full-time gig, what would be the advice that you would give to your past self knowing what you know now?

Molly Thompson: I would tell I would, oh gosh, this is hard. I would say focus on my audience and ask good questions and create for them, and not for what I think people want or what I think is popular or what I should be doing because other creators are doing it. And I think I would tell myself to just trust the process because I think along the way, I really honed in on my recipe development and my approach to recipes and development, which I think my audience really appreciates, and I don’t think that that comes without just trial and error. So to be patient with myself would be,

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Specifically that to be humble around the idea that your audience will tell you what they need. You don’t tell your audience what they need.

Molly Thompson: Yes. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Is such a breakthrough concept for so many people, because I think one of the things that we see often is people have an idea and they say, I think this is needed. And what doesn’t happen is this exists within food, it exists within content, it exists within software, within the product world. What doesn’t happen is those conversations where you sit down with people and say either one-to-one, Hey, here’s what I’m thinking about. How does this resonate with you? Or in your case, one to many where you’re sending out an email and saying, what are the issues you’re having? What are the struggles that you’re experiencing? And then letting that shape the decisions that you make around how you’re creating content. Obviously, it’s not bad to create content that you think is a good idea, you just have to have the expectation that maybe people aren’t going to find it helpful, and it still can be a great process and a creative process, but it might not be the best business strategy if you’re looking for growth. So super great takeaway, Molly, just huge amount of respect for all that you’ve done and what you’ve built and how you approach all of it. If people want to follow up with you and or give you a shout out and say, thank you for sharing your expertise and insight, what’s the best way to do that?

Molly Thompson: My Instagram handle is What underscore Molly Made and my website is whatmollymade.com.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Molly, thanks so much for coming on.

Molly Thompson: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast. Episodes, ratings and reviews help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger. We read each and every review and it makes us so happy to hear when you’re enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pope Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it’s on Apple or Spotify or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you’re there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much, and it makes such a huge difference for our show. So thanks in advance, and that’s all we have for you today. So have a great week.