How Storytelling Helps Creators Stand Out Online with Brita Britnell

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Ann Morrissey: Hey there and welcome back to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I’m Annefrom the Food Blogger Pro team, and today’s episode is such a good one. Bjork is chatting with Brita Britnell from Food With Feeling, and they’re diving into how storytelling has completely transformed her content strategy and helped her quadruple her Instagram following in just the past year. Brita shares the behind the scenes of that growth, how she shifted her approach to focus on real life moments and why leading with authenticity has made all the difference in building a loyal, engaged audience. They also talk about everything from the power of repurposing viral content to building a thriving email list and why follower count isn’t always the most important metric, especially on platforms like Facebook. Brita is super open about the ups and downs of her journey and her insights into blending strategy with storytelling are both inspiring and incredibly practical. So whether you’re looking to grow your audience, stay consistent with content or just feel more connected to your work, be sure to stick around for this episode. And now without further ado, I’ll pass it along to Bjork

Bjork Ostrom: Brita, welcome back to the podcast.

Brita Britnell: Thank you, Bjork. It’s always a pleasure to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, these are conversations that are fun for me because we have known each other for a long time.

Brita Britnell: Long time.

Bjork Ostrom: We have multiple touch points along the way. Has it been a decade? Is that

Brita Britnell: I think over a decade. I met you in person for the time in Cancun at that little retreat that we went to

Bjork Ostrom: The conference.

Brita Britnell: And I think it was in 2014, 2015 maybe. So about a decade,

Bjork Ostrom: Just a little bit over a decade. It proves the point, which I believe to be really true, which is conferences can be the catalyst for so many people. That’s what I know is true for myself. Many people. Absolutely. And there’s just something about meeting up in person and learning from people in person. You can listen to a podcast, which I would encourage everybody to do, listen to lots of food, bugger Pro podcasts. You can watch a YouTube video, but there’s something undeniably impactful about gathering in person, learning from people, connecting in person. Absolutely. So what were things like for you at that time? Take us back to that moment and I’d love to talk through what that was like for you.

Brita Britnell: Yeah, so I loved that little conference. If anybody wants to organize a conference in Mexico, please do it. I want to attend. I always think about organizing retreats and conferences, but then I get bogged down by all the details.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a huge commitment.

Brita Britnell: It really is.

Bjork Ostrom: That is hard to do profitably as well.

Brita Britnell: Yes, but like you said, they really, I feel like I am where I am today because of meeting people in person and connecting with other bloggers, and I’m very grateful to have had so many opportunities to do that. But at that time, in 2015-ish, I was working full time. I was working in, I got my degree in politics and I was working at in-state government, so I was doing what I thought I wanted to do, but I really was unhappy. I wasn’t liking it, I wasn’t getting the promotions I was trying to get, which I look back on now and I feel very grateful because I think if I had gotten those promotions, I would not have had the time to work on my blog, but I was really looking for a creative outlet, something to fulfill me creatively. And also, I realized through the Pinch of Yum income reports and talking to other bloggers that you could do this as a business because not a lot of people were doing it full-time then, and there wasn’t a lot of information out there, which is why I wanted to go to that conference. And one of the focuses of that conference or that little retreat was video. And at that point I had done, I don’t want to say I had done no video but next to no video and it wasn’t really a thing. I don’t even think you could post video on Instagram yet, but I remember around that time just realizing I think video is going to be a thing. In all honesty, I feel like it ended up being way more of a thing than I ever realized, but I knew it was going to be important, and so I actually took a week off or a few days off from work and taught myself video because at that time I had this full-time job, but I really wanted to make my business. I taught myself video. I managed to get a couple clients who were looking for hands and pans type videos, and that was the catalyst for me being able to quit my job. I always love to share that part of my story because I say I went full time with my blog in 2016, but that’s not really, I went full with my creative business in 2016 and it was very fulfilling and it was a great path for me to do my blog full time. But the reality is I want to say my blog was making on a good month, it was making 2,500 at the time on a good month, but I would say from ads I was making maybe a thousand. So it definitely was, I couldn’t live off of it, but the taking on that freelance videography work really allowed me to have that extra. I had a client who was like, I’m ready to commit to this amount of videos every month for the foreseeable future. And that was enough that I felt safe, like, okay, I’m just going to dive into this and take this risk.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Two things I love about that. Number one, that intense week of learning. I think sometimes we have these things that are spinning for us and we’re like, gosh, I would really love to figure out this project, or I’d really like to learn this thing. And we try and fit it into the margins and it just doesn’t work. And sometimes what it takes is clearing the calendar and doing an intense course and courses similar to conferences. I think courses can change lives. Lindsay was talking about a course recently that she took just about short form video content on Instagram and how impactful that was. Even just two or three things, thinking about hooks and timing and things like that. And so love that short intense idea of information acquisition. The other thing that’s I think really important for anybody who’s in a similar place right now to where you were 10 years ago is to think not just about how do I grow a site and make money from ads or how do I work with brands and create income on social, but instead thinking about what do I need to earn from an income perspective and then what are the pieces that I could get to within the next three months that would get me there? And usually what it’s going to be is it’s going to be a combination of something kind of passive. Maybe it’s some of the ad income from your site, maybe its some brand deals. But a lot of times if you’re looking to compress that period of time where you start your creative business, I love how you called it that, then what it has to be is something services based. And so I love that piece as well. So point being that we need to think creatively around our creative business and number one, what we need. Is it 5,000 a month? Is it 10,000 a month? It’s going to be different depending on where you are, life stage, where you are living, all of those things. So we need to think about what we need on a monthly basis and then think creatively around how can we put that puzzle together to get to the point where we feel confident that we will get close to or get that number consistently. So for you, it happened, it sounds like in a relatively short amount of time that you were able to get there because of doing some of the video services that you were doing. Can you talk about then the transition, the next chapter where you were doing services-based business? You can talk about number one, are you doing any of that still today? And then number two, how you kind of transitioned to that being the primary thing that you were doing and then over time that being the secondary thing that you were doing and focusing primarily on your own owned content.

Brita Britnell: Yeah, I did freelance videography work for a long time, and I will say I actually still do it. I work with a brand I’ve worked with for a long time. We have a really great relationship. And then I actually work with two bloggers I’ve worked with for a long time, and at this point I do about three videos a week for clients, and I used to do eight. It used to be a really big part of my business, but now I’ve kind of slowly transitioned it out, which I’m very grateful I can do. I personally only spend about five hours a week on it, and then I have my business partner does all the editing, but it was such a great, I’m so grateful for that. So for a long time I had a kitchen assistant that would come Tuesdays and Thursdays and I would do client work all day, and then I had an editor that would edit all the videos, which is kind of the only way I was able to do so many. But I kind of just did the math on if I hire an editor, I could do more videos and ultimately make a little bit more money than if I’m doing all of the editing. But that client work was just so great for me. And I also was really fortunate that I had a lot of clients along the way who were very generous with their time. Lee from Fit Foodie Finds was one, I worked with her for a long time and we would do check-ins and she was so generous sharing knowledge with me and she mentored me a little bit, which I really appreciated and I feel very grateful for that. So I made a lot of great relationships along the way as well. And it’s why I still work with a couple of the bloggers that I do, but I

Bjork Ostrom: Lee’s great. Minnesota, Minnesota creator. We know Lee.

Brita Britnell: Yeah, she’s amazing. So it was just great having that. And I always tell people, if you can find that thing that you’re really passionate about because it’ll make doing that freelance work so much easier. And I just loved it and I feel like it really showed in my videos, and I will say I feel like I held onto the freelance work longer than I should have. It was just regular income that it was like a comfort. I stayed in that comfort zone a little too long. I think I kind of wish that I had pulled back from it and taken a little more, I’m kind of risk averse, but I wish I had taken some more risks with it and spent

Bjork Ostrom: A little bit of risk meaning transitioning that out of that sooner in order to work on your own stuff sooner.

Brita Britnell: Exactly. I wish that I had given up that consistent income to pursue potential opportunities on my own blog that I didn’t quite have yet, but I needed to spend the time working on them.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about why in reflecting back, why do you wish that you would’ve done that sooner?

Brita Britnell: I mean, quite honestly, I look at a lot of the creators I worked with and I know that my videos really helped them grow their platform. And sometimes I look at it and I’m like, well, what if I had spent just a little bit more time making more videos and more content and strategizing a little bit more for my own blog and everyone Fault? I’ve had friends, I had a really good friend at the time who had a blog and we kind of grew our blogs together and we both started videography at the same time and she ended up dropping her blog and going full time with videography because she loved it. And I think I toyed around with that for a while. But in hindsight, I do kind of wish that I had just stepped back from the freelance work a little bit and taken that risk with my blog of, okay, I’m not going to make money working on my blog right now. It’s not quite there, but I think it had the potential to get there and it’s always a hard decision. You just never know what’s going to happen.

Bjork Ostrom: You never know.

Brita Britnell: At the end of the day, the freelance work was amazing for me and there’s so many more opportunities for it now. People looking for VAs and there’s just a lot of opportunities I think, for freelance work. And so I love to share that part of my story for people that are wanting to do this full time but are in that same place I was where their blog just isn’t quite there yet and it needs quite a bit more work.

Bjork Ostrom: The thing that I think is relatable with that story and worth pointing out is I think for anybody who has even years, but especially decades of showing up, building a business and looking back and reflecting on it, part of the table stakes for doing that, it’s just the cost of doing it is reflections on what could have been if you made a different decision.

Bjork Ostrom: And so wo when I hear you saying that is like, oh my gosh, yes, a hundred different points that I could look back on in our journey and say, gosh, if we would’ve done this differently, I can see now that might’ve resulted in more growth or being in a different place or whatever it might be. And so I think anybody listening can kind of relate to that. If nothing else, it’s nice to hear somebody else say that because I think we all feel it to some degree and you can’t not feel it if you’ve been doing it for a decade.

Brita Britnell: Absolutely,

Bjork Ostrom: For sure.

Brita Britnell: And to go back to what we had said a minute ago about how I took that time off from work and I really focus on videography, I do like to touch on that as well because I used to always recommend that to newer bloggers, just focus on Pinterest and then just focus on SEO. But now I’ve realized that how important that still is for me, 13 years into my blogging career, I’ve actually done it a lot this year. I’ve really wanted to revamp my email and I wanted this much better welcome series and I ended up, I kind of put all of my blog responsibilities aside in January of this year, and I just worked on my email. I did a lot of research, I spent a lot of time making this welcome series that I’m really proud of, and I’ve done that actually a couple times this year. And I feel like I’ve found a lot of success from it. And so I just wanted to mention it even for seasoned bloggers that I think that there’s a lot of value in taking a step back from your day to day tasks and really focusing in on something because I think that there’s a lot of value you can get from it that you can’t get without giving it a hundred percent of your attention.

Bjork Ostrom: And there are those little things that will always need to get done, but you can delay those by a week or two weeks. We’ve all done it, but this is just in service of a different thing that is maybe creating a new system or I always think of this idea of a factory line and we have on our line, the manufacturing line is content and it’s going through this, it’s almost like a, you could imagine as a widget thing, and it comes in as metal, and that’s the idea. And it comes out the other side as something valuable that you can use and share. But what you’re doing in that one week process is you’re adding something to the manufacturing line that forever moving forward, the email series being an example, forever moving forward, it will be a new feature on that widget that makes it more valuable and more helpful. And so it’s worth it to pause and focus on that.

Brita Britnell: We in this industry constantly have new things being thrown at us. I know for me, sometimes I take a step back and I’m like, okay, I’m going to wait this one out. Do I need to dive into learning that new social media platform or whatever. But then when I decide to do it, I’ve found that if I just spend a little time on it, that time is wasted than if I just really dedicate some even just a day to it where I don’t do anything else.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Do you have things that you could point to that were the most helpful? We’ll call them sprints. So obviously, the catalyst for all of it was that learning video sprint. Have there been other sprints that you look back on, whether it was a few days or a week, that you can say, this was really helpful for me to acquire this knowledge, to create this process, learn this thing?

Brita Britnell: Yeah, I’ve really done it a lot over the past year and a lot of it has come from talking to other bloggers, which I really appreciate. I feel like there are some people who are kind of hoarding their knowledge and I can understand that, but I feel like there are a lot of people who are being really generous right now sharing their successes, and I’m very grateful for that because I’ve learned a lot from bloggers the past year, but one of them that I really did was Facebook. I learned from a friend that people were making money on Facebook and I was like, I thought Facebook was dead. I had no idea. So I took the time and I really learned it. And I feel like this is something we could talk a little bit about today, maybe later. That’d be great.

Bjork Ostrom: We could talk about it now as long as we’re here.

Brita Britnell: Yeah, I’ve made Facebook a really important part of my business where I’m consistently making three to 4,000 from ads there. And then it’s also been a really great traffic boost for me, and that was one of the ones where I was like, I know nothing about Facebook, but I took some time off, I think it was two or three days where I reached out to a bunch of people, I went on everybody’s Facebook page to see what are they doing, how are they having success, what kind of posts are doing well for them? And then I did a lot of trial and error, and a lot of it can be frustrating just trying to figure out how to use Meta Business Suite – clunky and kind of annoying. But that’s one of the areas I feel like I’ve had a lot of success in was taking some time to learn it, asking a lot of questions to other bloggers and then really diving into it. And it’s been a really consistent income stream for me for about the past year.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s amazing. So at least as far as I’m aware, we don’t really make much money from Facebook. We’ll make occasional bonus money from Instagram, which is like, you have a video go viral, and it’s like you have $172. It’s like, okay, this covers part of the groceries that we needed for this video. Can you talk about functionally how that works within Facebook? Because I think a lot of people would be interested in learning, you talk about it as ads, so my guess is it’s similar to YouTube in that you have content that plays on the platform and there’s an ad revenue share with the views and the ad views that come from it. But what would your advice be for somebody who wants to learn how to create income from Facebook videos?

Brita Britnell: So I want to give a shout out to Lexi from the Crowded Kitchen because she is the one who introduced this to me, I would not have dove into Facebook without her, so a lot of credit to her. But one of the things that I to mention is just that I have taught my strategy to a lot of friends and most of my friends have had success with it, a couple of them. But a lot of it is consistency. I feel like I worked on Facebook for four or five months before I really started seeing results. So I want to throw that out there that it’s not something you’re going to go on post a video and instantly make money. In fact, I think you have to be posting consistently for a while before you can get accepted to the program. But quite simply, they have what they now call the content monetization. I feel like the way that they monetize, they keep changing it, they keep changing the words of it. It

Bjork Ostrom: Feels like every three months Facebook is going to just switch up how they brand something. It’s where the button is

Brita Britnell: Interesting. Yeah, exactly. So right now I’m posting eight times a day and I’m just making, it’s kind of similar. It’s very similar to YouTube. You get paid per view, whether it’s a photo, a video, or a reel. And I don’t think a lot of people realize this, but there’s a difference on Facebook. On Facebook between a video and a reel, which is arbitrary and I don’t really understand it. I think it has to do with where it’s shown to people. They look exactly the same on your timeline, but they’re technically different.

Bjork Ostrom: So

Brita Britnell: You just get money for,

Bjork Ostrom: Are you posting them in a different spot as well? You post a video and then you post

Brita Britnell: Everything is done through Meta Business Suite, but I will post the same video as a video and then I’ll also post it as a reel. Most of my friends seem to have success with videos. They’re making most of their money from videos. I’m having a lot more success with reels, and I don’t know if that’s just my audience or what, but it’s really interesting. So I always suggest that people do everything. I actually cut back on the amount of videos I was posting and I’m posting more reels because videos just weren’t making me as much money. So I mean really it’s just getting onto Facebook and a lot of it honestly is going to be just learning how to use Meta Business suite and how to schedule everything out. But to get into the nitty gritty if people are really wanting to try the strategy is just, I started out posting four times a day and then I’ve upped it a little bit as time has gone by, but I’m posting the video. Typically I keep the caption kind of simple, just like I love this Marry Me tofu dish. We made it for dinner last week and it was amazing. I try and keep it very conversational and I often say, I made this for dinner just to be, I dunno, kind of down to earth and real. And then sometimes I’ll share the recipe in the comments, but I always put the link in the comments. And something that’s really important to know is if you put the link in the caption, it will kill your reach and your video will never do anything. It has to go in the comments.

Bjork Ostrom: Facebook is like, I don’t want you to be linking out. And there’s maybe something within the algorithm that sees a link within a caption or a caption and they say, no,

Brita Britnell: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re not going to show this to other people leave. Whereas that isn’t

Brita Britnell: Interesting

Bjork Ostrom: A part of it if it’s in the comments. Sure,

Brita Britnell: Right. So put it in the comments. People seem to know to go there. You also can do the comment for recipe on Facebook. I don’t just because I haven’t toyed around with setting it all up, it’s not quite as easy as doing it on Instagram, but a lot of people have had success. And then the other thing I’ve been having a lot of success with, and it’s actually where I’m making most of my money on Facebook right now, is from photos. And the thing I’ve been telling people to do is I went onto my Pinterest and I looked at my top pins and I took those photos. I didn’t use long pins, but I used anything that was a normal-sized image, whether it had text or not. And almost always, if it was viral on Pinterest, it’ll go viral on Facebook as well. And what I’ve really loved about photos is that they bring a lot more traffic than videos. I don’t know why they also make a lot more money if I get a hundred thousand views on a photo, it’ll make a hundred dollars, but a hundred thousand views on a video will only make $15. It’s really interesting. But what I’ve been noticing is I’m getting a lot of traffic and what’s been really fun to watch is that traffic also has been translating into Google traffic. So I posted one tofu, air fryer, tofu, and it went viral on Facebook and it’s just an image, and not only was it just an image, but it was a cell phone image. It was one that I just snapped in my phone. Those actually seem to do better. I posted that with the link in the cap with the link in the comments, and then it rose me in the rankings. It was a new blog post for me, and I bumped up into the carousel almost instantly, which is kind of a new thing for me. Usually it takes me a few months to really get in the top of the carousel. So that was really neat to see that not only was I getting a lot of extra traffic from Facebook, I made $600 from that photo on Facebook, and then I made a lot of money from people going to my blog and seeing the ads.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I love that. One of the things that I think a lot about with what we’re doing is strategic and smart syndication and we have all of this content that we’ve worked so hard to create and there’s all of these different platforms that we can post that content to and get it in front of people. And not only is it helpful if it’s just awareness, so people see it and then they search for it on Google or they click on the link and they come to your site. But also some of these platforms are starting to pay you for creating on the platform as well, which is super nice. Yeah, you imagine that. A couple things that I wanted to ask as follow up questions. You said you sometimes share the recipe in the caption or the comments in the caption?

Brita Britnell: I do both. I’ve experimented with both. If you go and you look at my page and you scroll back a little bit, it’s a little all over the place. I’ve been experimenting. It’s kind of to go back to what we were talking about, I just trying to try a lot of different things, give it a little bit of time because Facebook works a little bit slower. Sometimes it takes 24 hours for a post to start taking off or even a little bit more time. So I try and give it a little bit of time and then go back and analyze how different things work. But what I have found is that it seems like I’ve just been sharing the ingredients so people can see the list of ingredients, but they have to go to my blog to actually make it. That’s kind of been the sweet spot for me and I just feel like it gets people to click over a little bit more.

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Brita Britnell: Like the Meta Business Suite.

Bjork Ostrom: Meta Business Suite is an all encompassing thing, and then is there a section within that has the monetization application?

Brita Britnell: Yeah, there’ll be like a little money sign on the left side and I think it looks a little bit different for everybody, which is another one of those weird meta things.

Bjork Ostrom: Just look for the money sign. That’s what we need. Yeah.

Brita Britnell: I honestly don’t know how it works now, but when I was really diving into this a year ago, you had to apply, which applying is basically just clicking a button that you wanted monetize, and there were requirements at the time, but the requirements have changed and I’m not a hundred percent sure. I don’t think that they’re very hard to reach now, but you have to prove that you’re posting consistently, basically. You don’t make money instantly. I think it’s somewhat similar on YouTube. You have to have X amount of subscribers, but it’s not a lot. I think it’s a thousand followers and it’s not a high threshold.

Bjork Ostrom: And so you have on Facebook 160,000 followers posting eight times a day. Are you scheduling that content and what are you using for that?

Brita Britnell: It’s all scheduled actually. So my assistant does it all, but we’re using Meta Business Suite and it just all gets scheduled and sometimes you have to go back and add the link later, which I think holds a lot of people up. There is kind of a weird workaround, but

Bjork Ostrom: Can you explain what you mean by that? Add the link? You mean like it posts and then you go and comment?

Brita Britnell: Yeah, exactly. I mean you can’t put the link in the caption as we said, so you have to put it in the comment, but you can’t really comment until after it’s posted, but just quickly, and people can play around with this. If you go and you schedule your post, then you can go and click on the post like say, view this post before it’s been posted. And it’s basically like what will your post look like once it’s posted?

Bjork Ostrom: And then you can comment

Brita Britnell: Spot for comments and you can basically schedule a comment so that when it does post, it posts that comment as well, which is a weird workaround.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Have you noticed? So I think what’s helpful for people is to get an idea to say, okay, and it’s super generous and super helpful. What if I could make $3,000, maybe I’m going to try and get my account up to a hundred thousand followers or 150,000 followers on Facebook. Do you notice we talk about this separation between a platform starting to become content first with the algorithm as opposed to follower first where you could have a smaller following, but if you’re posting consistently and you have videos that go viral or content that’s seen by a lot of people, that follower count doesn’t matter as much. What is your opinion on that as you I know have also grown your Facebook following over the last year? Like 10 x?

Brita Britnell: Yeah, I was at like 33,000 and those 33,000, I got almost all of those eight plus years ago. My follower account had not grown in a long time. I actually wasn’t really posting on Facebook. I kind of neglected it completely, but I do think that I have quite a few people I’ve talked to at conferences that have a million followers and are making a lot less money than me on Facebook. So I do think that Facebook is one of those places. I think kind of similar to Pinterest where your follower account really doesn’t matter. I’ve grown a lot, but I feel like most of my content is shown to non followers. So I would say if you have no followers on Facebook, it doesn’t really matter. You’ll have a ramp up period and it’ll take you a while to gain some traction, but I don’t think really don’t think that followers matter on Facebook.

Bjork Ostrom: And then the type of content that you’re sharing, so you’re working with your assistant who goes in, schedules out those, let’s say eight different pieces of content a day. Are you picking that one month you sit down and together, you look through it and you say, Hey, what should we post each day for the next 30 days? And then what’s, okay, go ahead.

Brita Britnell: We don’t have the best system. I’m not the,

Bjork Ostrom: Which I think is true for most people out there.

Brita Britnell: Yeah. I’m in a really special situation. My assistant is my ex-husband. We’re really good friends, and so he works with my business, so he does all of it.

Bjork Ostrom: You trust him to do it?

Brita Britnell: He loves spreadsheets. Oh, I trust him so much. He loves spreadsheets. So he made the spreadsheet. And one of the things which actually this is important to note is that we repost content a lot. If something went viral, we repost it at least once a month because it’ll usually go viral again. And it’s like I said, most of my stuff is being seen by non followers, so it’s not like people are like, oh, she posted that again. But he has this spreadsheet and I noticed actually a couple weeks ago he was posting multiple different pumpkin recipes and I was like, listen, I know you’re following a spreadsheet and I know you want to follow that spreadsheet, but I don’t really think we should post pumpkin in April. So he was like, okay, cool. I think I can

Bjork Ostrom: Noted.

Brita Britnell: Yeah, I was like, okay, yeah, maybe in the summer we’ll avoid soups a little bit maybe, but for the most part, just common sense, but for the most,

Bjork Ostrom: But it’s in the spreadsheet,

Brita Britnell: So when I make new videos, I give them to him, he adds them to his spreadsheet, and then we just go seasonal. We often will have a quick strategy meeting where it’s like, okay, mother’s coming up, just go through and find anything that makes sense for Mother’s Day, but we don’t have the best organization with it. He does have a spreadsheet where he tracks anything that’s gone viral, so it’s easy to just go through that list of virals. Then we’ve done the same thing with posts that do nothing. We’ve posted them 10 times once a month over the past year and they just never do anything. We flag those as well, so we’re not really wasting our time with them really. Facebook seems to do best seasonally. So just sharing seasonal content, which is kind of similar in most platforms, but seasonal content does really well. Any holiday coming up share a lot of holiday content and it seems to do well.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Super helpful. And I think for a lot of people, anytime they hear that, they start to say, okay, what would that look like for me? How could I think about the way that I’m sharing content and post to these platforms For the type of content that you’re pulling in, it is not necessarily the new content that you’re doing. You’re always posting new content there, but it might be something you did three years ago. It might be something you did six years ago. I’m missing a lot of old content. Sure. It’s seasonal. And then the takeaway would be if you are including the link, it’s in the comments, not in the caption. And we’ve started to experiment with some of the DM type features using grocers list within Instagram, but Facebook is different because you can just include links, so clickable links. So all of that is super helpful. Can you talk a little bit about, we touched on Facebook growing from 30,000 to 160,000 also growing as a revenue platform for you, which is great. Can you talk about just your business right now? What does that look like in terms of the most valuable departments of the business? It sounds like Facebook is a valuable one because you get traffic and income from it. My guess is your blog is also an important source of revenue. You do some of the freelance work. So when we talk about your creative business, what does that look like now? And then we’re going to talk about short-form video, how that fits in within all of it.

Brita Britnell: And I want to be really transparent that I’m having successes this year in a lot of different places, but it’s only because I’ve forced myself to really be resourceful. I’m in the same boat that a lot of people are in where my Pinterest traffic is down a lot. My Google traffic is down quite a bit, and it can be really discouraging. I’ve had some moments with it this week, but I am so determined to not give up and to not be left behind. So I’ve really been focusing on where can I have successes and where can I kind of capitalize on things that maybe other people aren’t doing. And Facebook was kind of one of them where I realized, oh, this is a great area and I’m grateful for Facebook this year. It’s been such a nice success for me. And some months I’ve had a couple months where I only made 2,500, but then I had a month where I made 5,000 from the ads. And that’s a considerable chunk of extra income that I’m very grateful for. So overall though, my business is, I’m still doing that freelance work just because it’s easy and I have these really great relationships, but

Bjork Ostrom: Make a lot of, yeah, you probably enjoy it. That’s a huge component of we are building our own job descriptions. And my guess is that if you were miserable in doing it, you’d stop doing it. But it’s like, Hey, if we love doing there’s, it’s one of the great things about what we do is we get to kind of build our own job description to the degree that we have that flexibility, and you have had that. So anyways, yeah, you were saying doing the freelance work,

Brita Britnell: I’ve really focused a lot on brand work, which I know this is something we’re going to transition into, but I’ve done a lot of storytelling and I think that that’s something brands are really grasping onto are people that have a personal message or have somewhat of a message. I think I, I’ve noticed that a lot of my friends who their accounts are purely about food are not having as much success with brand work. I’m not saying that they’re not, but I just have noticed it’s like brands are trying to, I think, find somebody that has something to say, I think to a certain degree.

Bjork Ostrom: And when you say brand work, you mean you as a creator partnering with a brand to talk about their brand to your audience? So

Brita Britnell: I kind of had a dry spell with that last year, but it’s picked up a lot for me, which I’m really grateful for. And I’ve been doing a lot more sponsored work and a lot of it has been actually really most of it has been specifically on Instagram and I’ve had a lot of success upselling brands by being able to pitch my Facebook, which has been really nice, just showing I’m having, I can get you this extra reach on Facebook and then also on TikTok. And so that’s been really nice. So a lot of what I focus on in my business is video because it’s just where I have success on Pinterest and Facebook and TikTok and Instagram. It is such a huge part of my business. And then a lot of people I’m really focusing on, my biggest goal this year was to put my user first, was to put my reader first and how can I serve them? How can I be the most helpful in every way? And in everything that I do, I’m analyzing that. Even with Comment for Recipe, I was like, is this best for my audience? Does my audience like this? And I try and ask a lot of questions and people love to give their opinion, which is really nice. It kind of boosts engagement, but then it also gives me some good feedback, which I really appreciate. And so I’ve been really focusing this year on user, on my user and how can I best serve them? And a lot of that has translated to my email list as well. I’ve been doing a lot there and I’ve been using all of my platforms to help grow my email list. And a lot of what I’ve been doing there is meal plans and just trying to be really, really helpful. I know you interviewed Molly from what Molly made and she’s a really good friend of mine and we’re in a mastermind together and I kind of followed her strategy on email and gaining subscribers to my email list, but not just growing that number, but also how can you provide the most value to them and what they really need in their lives. And that’s something I’ve really been focusing on in my business.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. What has worked well for you within email? And then we’ll talk about video within the

Brita Britnell: In email and growing my email list, again, I’ve really followed Molly’s strategy and I’ve had a lot of success using Instagram to make the roundups where it’s like, these are 10 of my most viral high protein vegetarian recipes. I posted a video with high-protein vegetarian recipes, and in it, I linked to my email list. So in order to get all the recipes, which you could get all of them, you had to sign up for my email list. And I had a lot of success. I think I gained 10,000 email subscribers from that. But the thing I didn’t expect was that it was going to do so well on Instagram. I gained 50,000 Instagram followers from that post, which was really neat. And I know, I think it’s my highest followed post ever. And that was,

Bjork Ostrom: You see that within, I should know this. Can you see that within Instagram, the number of followers that you got from,

Brita Britnell: Which is really neat. And I have really used that a lot to guide the content that I create. I have videos go viral. I had a video that got more views than that high protein vegetarian one, but gained me less than 10% of the followers, which I thought was so interesting. I’ve really been analyzing what makes people click follow on my content, and it’s been really helpful because something can go viral, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to followers.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s super fascinating.

Brita Britnell: Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: We are having a conversation. I did a Kit workshop with Molly, and then having a podcast conversation with her coming up, also doing a series with Grocers List, which we’re excited about, just talking about email and email list growth. And the thing that’s so important about that is you talk about all these other fluctuations happening, algorithms, SEO, Pinterest, is your video going to compute or not to have email as something that is kind of a direct line to people? There’s always the ability for some of these platforms like Gmail to create a marketing tab. And then, so in some ways there’s still some algorithmic impact around whether your email gets seen or not, but generally speaking, to have the ability to directly connect with people through email is a really valuable thing. So super smart for you to be thinking about doing that. Let’s talk about video. So in your story, you’ve had multiple ways that you’ve evolved your business and your creator business, but also if you double click into the things that you are doing, you’ve also evolved kind of the way that you’re creating content. And it’s been really fun to see the success you’ve had in a recent evolution for you around integrating story as a part of the way that you approach food content. And can you talk about how you kind of came upon the realization that that was something that you wanted to do and the result of that within your business and on the different platforms that you’re posting to? Yeah,

Brita Britnell: I’ve honestly been reflecting on this a lot lately, and it feels really, I dunno one of those life moments that’s fun to reflect on. But I started my blog because I watched YouTubers. I loved watching daily vlogs when they first started. I don’t know why I had a boring desktop and I would just watch these daily vlogs and I felt really,

Bjork Ostrom: Who were some of the daily vloggers that you watched?

Brita Britnell: I don’t even know if they’re still around, but I watched Charles Trippy. He would vlog every single day and just everything. And the vlogs were about nothing. Half the time it’s been going to the grocery store, but they were just interesting, which is, it’s interesting now because it’s kind of common. I feel like people just video all the most random stuff, but at the time it was this glimpse into someone’s life that you never would get before. So all of that to say, I was really drawn to the idea of doing that, but I was not in a place where I was going to get behind a camera. I mean, this is like 2011, 2012. So I started my blog. It felt like I was kind of like, okay, I can do this. I can sit behind my keyboard behind my computer, and maybe I’ll transition into doing video. So fast forward 12 years, 12, 13 years later, I kind of had this sense of I want to go back to that root of why I started, which was I guess storytelling. I kept thinking, I want to share a little bit more of my life, and I’ll say that I know that this is not for everyone. A lot of people don’t want to share their life and that is absolutely fine, but it was just something that I was drawn to doing.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s a pull there for you. And there’s also on these platforms, there’s a desire and an interest for people to learn about other people and to see other stories, and so there’s a match there.,

Brita Britnell: Absolutely. And most of the stories, my storytelling, I’ve tried to do it in a way that will really connect with people and touch them either in a way that’s like, wow, I didn’t know anybody else had the same experience, or some of them I think are just interesting to listen to. But I was not having any success on Instagram beginning of last year. I was really frustrated. My views were really down and I just felt like I had no connection with my audience and I was just posting random stuff. I was really jumping onto the virals, which would sometimes do well, but I just felt, I was like, who do I want to be online and how do I want to present myself? And I really went back to that idea of being a YouTuber and sharing my life a little bit. So I had done to post in stories all the time, and I had one time shared this little glimpse into my past that I was in the convent and people asked so many questions. So one day kind of in an attempt to rebrand myself, I guess I didn’t think about it a lot in that moment. I just knew, I was like, what I’m doing on Instagram isn’t working. I’m going to try something new. And so I decided, I was like, what if I make a video and I don’t talk about the video? And so I had a video, my first one, it was for these tofu burritos and I wrote it out most of my voiceovers when I come up with an idea for kind of a story and I write it out, and I honestly spend a long time on it. And I will say, for me, it really fills my creative bucket because it feels like poetry to me. A lot of my voiceovers. I wrote this very intentional way and I practiced where I put the inflections in my voice that I think make a huge difference. And it’s art to me a lot of my voiceovers, and I love that. So I just told this story about how I used to be in the convent and I talked a little bit about it. It was less than a minute, but that video got 15 million views and More engagement than I’ve ever received. Just, I mean, I think I got thousands of comments both on TikTok and on Instagram. And I mean, first of all, it was a great strategy. It worked well and on top of that, tons of people were making that recipe. It was getting the most traffic to my site. So it was like a lot of people attached to the story, but then it also just helped other people generally find that recipe. Then it just opened up this window for this new part of my life that I was surprised, but that people really attached to it honestly was very therapeutic for me in a lot of ways. It was a part of my life I hadn’t talked about a lot. I processed through a lot through a video.

Bjork Ostrom: For those who aren’t familiar, it’s like you were a nun content

Brita Britnell: For a year. I was in the beginning stages of it, and I was very Catholic at the time, and I went in and then decided it wasn’t for me. And I’ve tried to be very respectful throughout all of it because I have so much respect for anybody with religious beliefs. It just was something I decided to move away from. But that was part of my story and talking about all of it. And then I told a lot of stories about that. So people would ask questions and I would see what are people most interested in? And this story about me being a nun in the convent. And then I would just make these videos where I would talk about it. I seemed to have the most success when I could. I would very lighthearted bring it back around to the recipe. And so I would say in that first one, at the very end, I just had this line that was like, once I left the convent, I could not wait to go get Chipotle for the first time. It was like a Chipotle copycat recipe basically. And people loved that. I don’t know, just throwing that one little line in there about bringing it back around to the recipe just was people really liked. But I don’t always do that. Sometimes I make voiceovers that have nothing to do with the recipe, and it really upsets people on Facebook. I don’t know why. They’re like, why

Bjork Ostrom: But not on Instagram?

Brita Britnell: This is not about a burrito. No. People on Instagram and TikTok love it. I think that they’re more used to it. I think the audience on Facebook is just a little bit different, but

Bjork Ostrom: Different. It’s a different audience.

Brita Britnell: It’s a different audience. And I just have loved this storytelling. And so when I introduced the idea to people, and I suggest that they try it out, so many people are like, well, I don’t want to share that much of my life, or I don’t have interesting stories. And I don’t think that that’s true about anybody. I think everyone has something interesting to say. A lot of my most successful voiceovers have been honestly what I think are really kind of boring or not boring, but very basic ideas. I made one about my daughter and basically how much I love creating a fun childhood for her, which I think is something a lot of people can relate to. And that one did really well, and it was really fun. But I think it was just in the way that I told it. And so I always tell people like, you do have stories to tell, and it also doesn’t have to be a full-fledged story. It can just be, I made this recipe at my wedding, and then you can transition into talking about the recipe. But giving that personal element and providing them this little glimpse into your life people seem to really like. And a lot of it I think right now is going back to how much AI is prevalent. And I think AI is prevalent. And there’s also this really big oversaturation that I really feel like people are hungry for a connection and for something that feels a little bit deeper. And I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with just posting recipes, but I have personally just been finding success in touching people on that slightly deeper level,

Bjork Ostrom: If that makes sense. I love that. And the thing that is so great about it is you found the overlap of something that is meaningful for you. I mean, you even alluded to this idea of it almost being kind of therapeutic to walk through this storytelling process. Obviously it’s resonated with an audience of people, your audience, but also growing audience of people that maybe don’t know about you yet, but are starting to find out about you talking about that one where you got 50,000 additional followers, people being interested in following along with your journey. And that’s almost just like the human element of it where you are saying, this is a really good fit for me. Other people in their response are saying, this is good for me because responding to it. But then outside of that, number one, that would be enough for somebody if that’s good and they want to do that. But also there’s a strategy component to it, which is helpful if you are doing this as a business because you are seeing people respond to it. And you also alluded to the fact that brands are interested in it. And I think all of it comes back to that idea of humanity and us connecting on a human level for certain things. There are certain ways that people have created content that are going away. They don’t need a human element. It’s like, how long do you boil an egg? There used to be a creator who had a post that ranked for how long do you boil an egg? Now there’s a Google answer. There’s somebody using a chatbot. They’re getting that answer. But there’s ways that people are consuming content online and they’re not looking for how to boil an egg. They’re looking to be entertained. And in order to entertain, you have to be novel. It has to be interesting, it has to be engaging. And so much of that is rooted in story, which I think is so fascinating to hear you reflect on that. Can you talk about the brand side of it, that what does that look like and are you getting brands that are reaching out to you? Are you reaching out to brands?

Brita Britnell: It’s mostly brands reaching out to me, and I’m trying to do a better job of asking brands how they found me. Because you just get emails and I’m always a little curious, but one of the things I’ve noticed is that quite a few last year when I would work with brands, a lot of times my brand partnerships weren’t doing as well because people got really used to the storytelling element from me. But then a brand would come and they would just want me to be like, you can get this product at Walmart. It’s new.

Bjork Ostrom: Transactional.

Brita Britnell: And that transaction doesn’t really necessarily fit with my brand. And so what I’ve noticed lately is it’s like as brands are discovering more of who I am and what my brand is about and what my audience wants from me is they’re really attaching on to the storytelling. And so I worked with a brand recently who was amazing to work with and they actually wanted to work with me on my voiceover and I was so weary of it at first, I thought that it was going to be one of those situations where they wanted to dictate exactly what I was going to say

Bjork Ostrom: Tell them it’s in aisle three and it’s halfway out.

Brita Britnell: Exactly, it’s like okay, click this link and be entered into the giveaway. So yeah, they worked with me and they took some of my other voiceovers storytelling and incorporated that into using their product. And so this one was for this mushroom coffee, and they had an old video that I posted six months prior where I talked about how my girlfriend doesn’t like mushrooms, and they were like, can we incorporate that into this same voiceover, which I loved. And so we kind of turned it into this storytelling video that also this brand.

Bjork Ostrom: They had some awareness of your previous library of content

Brita Britnell: And that video did well. I mean it didn’t go viral. It was a brand, but it was probably one of my best brand partnerships I’ve ever posted. And I love that they worked with me and allowed me to have that creative freedom. It’s a little hard with brands sometimes. They don’t always want that, but I have found that the brands coming to me seem to understand what I do and I appreciate that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And see value in it, obviously, not only in reaching out, but then their willingness to now say, Hey, you know what? Let’s figure out how to create a brand partnership version of the storytelling that you’re already doing. So it’s inspiring for me to talk to you, Brita, just knowing how hard you’ve worked on this and how creative you’ve been along the way, and also how generous you’ve been along the way. I know for people listening to this, they’ll feel that as well. I also know that there’ll be people who will be interested in connecting with you. Number one, do you do, if somebody is like, I would love to work with Brita as freelance capacity video. My guess is you’re not doing a lot of that, but shouldn’t people reach out to you?

Brita Britnell: Yeah, they absolutely can. And I like to keep that door open.

Brita Britnell: Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Great. And my guess is there’d also be an opportunity where it’s not just freelance video, but also freelance video within the context of some of the things that you’ve learned around storytelling. It feels like there’s a unique opportunity where you have a niche expertise around that. So best way for people to get in contact around video stuff within the world of freelance would be email or contact form or

Brita Britnell: Honestly, email my Instagram. The nice thing about the storytelling is I get so many dms, which is great, but it’s been hard to keep up with. So my dms are kind of weird right now, but just me right now, Gmail is my email.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. Do you try and respond to people in dms or is it just too much?

Brita Britnell: I try and respond to everything, and that was one of the things is when I shared my first comment story, part of it was just I was in this place. And part of that story, which I touched on a little bit, was that I went from being a nun in the convent to then coming out as queer, and I was shocked how many people I got messages from so many people that were basically in that same position. I used to be super religious and it was a hard part of my growing up, just this whole part of it. And honestly, it was therapeutic for me to connect with people. I was like, no one can understand this my whole life. I’ve never talked to anybody who can understand

Bjork Ostrom: That really. And suddenly you see all of these people who are like, I can relate. And that normalizing that I’m sure is like, oh my gosh, what a great feeling. Not only for you, but I’m guessing for them as well.

Brita Britnell: Yeah. So I get a lot of, sometimes people will send me really long dms and thoughtful. I try and respond to all

Bjork Ostrom: Of them. Yeah, vulnerable, which takes a lot of time to read through it and then give a thoughtful response. ,

Brita Britnell: Yeah, exactly. But I try and do it because sometimes if people are just like, I made this recipe, if I don’t get to that, it doesn’t feel as bad as somebody who was like, your video really touched me and help me a lot realize that I can do this thing. And I’m like, I can’t not respond to that. I tried to not, and sometimes it takes me a month and I’ll say, I’m so sorry it took me three or four weeks to get back to you, but thank you for your message. And I try and just respond to them as much as I can.

Bjork Ostrom: I think people get that too. Yeah, I think so. That’s great. And it’s one of the great things to touch on it really quickly that we have the opportunity to do as creators is a business. And on this podcast, generally we talk about the business components of it, but it’s also a vehicle for impact, for change, for relationships, for connections. And no better example than your story to shine a light on the fact that not only is it a creative business for you that you love, but also it’s the opportunity to impact other people’s lives, help them feel seen or

Brita Britnell: Absolutely

Bjork Ostrom: To share a story that shapes their understanding of their story and that’s a really meaningful, powerful thing that we have the privilege of doing in speaking to an audience of people. So it’s cool to hear that as part of your story.

Brita Britnell: I think it’s something that a lot of people are really craving right now is just this connection that oddly enough, social media has made connection harder, but also easier in this weird way.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. So email address, but also you have your site, you have different social accounts that people, so do a quick shout out on those. We’ll link to those in the show notes as well.

Brita Britnell: Yeah. I don’t even think I said, but my blog is Food with Feeling, so foodwithfeeling.com, and I’m Food with Feeling on pretty much all of the platforms. I’ve been spending a lot more time on TikTok lately and just kind of focusing there, which is people storytelling lends itself well to TikTok, so I’ve enjoyed that. And then I’ve also been kind of experimenting with YouTube shorts a little bit more, so I’m there on feeling as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. Brita, thanks so much for coming on. Great to talk to and we’ll do it again. It’s got to be sooner than what, six years, so we’ll have on again here in the near future. So thanks for coming on.

Brita Britnell: Yeah, thank you so much.

Emily Walker: Hello, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. I wanted to pop in today and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We are so grateful for you for listening. Before we sign off, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Food Blogger Pro Forum. In case you didn’t know how it works, if you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you get access to our amazing forum. It’s one of my favorite places on Food Blogger Pro. I spend a lot of time there myself, and on the forum we have tons of different topics for you to explore. We have a building traffic section, a photography section. We have an essential tool section. We chat about generating income and essential plugins, all sorts of areas for you to ask questions and chat with your fellow Food Blogger Pro members. It’s a great place to connect with fellow members, troubleshoot any issues you’re having, and brainstorm together. Our industry experts are always popping into the forum to help members with their questions. Casey Markee and Andrew Wilder are always popping in, and so is Danielle Liss, our legal expert. It’s a really great place to get access to these experts and have them help you with your concerns. The Forum is also just a fantastic place to find a community in this food blogging space as you’re working to grow your site and your business. If you’re ready to join Food Blogger Pro and get access to our wonderful forum, head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about our membership. We really hope you enjoy this episode and can’t wait to see you next week for another great episode. Have an amazing week.