Finding Your Authentic Voice and Scaling Your Food Blog with Rachel Cunliffe

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Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week, Bjork is sitting down with Rachel Cunliffe from Cre8d Design, who also happens to have a highly insightful Substack called Best Served Hot that delivers weekly snapshots of food, blogging, trends, recipe ideas, and platform updates. We’ll include the link to her Substack in the show notes, so be sure to check it out. This episode is packed with wisdom on thriving in the current food blogging landscape. Rachel emphasizes that you absolutely have to stop chasing every trend out there and lean into your own style. Your authentic voice and irreplaceable human touch are the only things guaranteed to truly resonate with your audience. Even as AI enters the mix beyond the content, Rachel reminds us that the basics still matter. Website usability and good design are often neglected, but they are crucial for keeping users happy and staying monetized with the food blogging landscape. Constantly shifting success requires balancing that strong, unique voice with paying attention to new monetization opportunities. It’s time to make sure your website is a welcoming, easy to use home base for your brand. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Rachel, welcome to the podcast.

Rachel Cunliffe: Thanks Bjork, it’s great to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’ve both been doing this for a while, our own respective businesses in all things web and design. For you, that’s a lot of what we’re going to be talking about today. When did you start, I know that you’re doing it with your brother. When did you start or officially form the business? Tell us a little bit about the origin and then we’re going to talk about some of the things that you’re learning today that are relevant for food creators and their websites.

Rachel Cunliffe: Yeah. Long time ago, back in the early two thousands, I think 2002 or three, I started a blog and I really saw the power of it that you could get your voice out. This was before social media, this was before any other way to really get your voice out on the internet and how easy it was to build a platform, build connections, build a community, and we started a bunch of different websites and built community around it. And then I saw there was a real need as I think the first people who came on board were like the original kind of personal journals. And then it was the tech people who came on board and I worked with TechCrunch. I worked on their designs for a while. Blogger.

Bjork Ostrom: Was that like with Michael Arrington?

Rachel Cunliffe: It was indeed, yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Wow. You were working with him to work on TechCrunch?

Rachel Cunliffe: Yeah, and directly working with him back in the day, if you remember Darren Rouse from Blogger as well. Totally. So a lot of these people, they were the first ones to get on board. They could see the power of getting news out through these blogging platforms. This was before WordPress, but eventually all the platforms changed, and then I think the mommy bloggers was the next big thing that came out. Women were like, actually, this is a really good space. There’s a lot of issues we need to talk about. There’s a lot of shared resources we can create. And so they started developing. And out of that came probably the DIYers, the people who are doing their home renos and they’re still going really strong or the crafters, the knitters, the crocheters, they sort of branched out. And then food and food, particularly around 2010, 2012, that really came into its own as people realized, Hey, we can actually put our recipes online, share them with other people. And it really came out of that love of cooking and sharing and getting feedback well before monetization was on the scene. And then in the last 10 years, it’s really become a viable business for people, a way to quit their day job and fully focus on that. And so I started the business back in 2005, I think, and carried all the way through. And we don’t just work exclusively with food bloggers, but there are a lot of the people we work with. I love working with them because they’re just so much passion. People are doing this out of a real love for doing it. People don’t get into cooking because they don’t like it, and there’s kind of what they’re stuck with. So they’re always passionate people, they’re always interested in experimenting because all good cooks want to experiment and try new things, see if it works, if it doesn’t, try another approach. So that kind of philosophy of how they cook comes into how they do their work as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s great. It’s fun to scroll through the list of logos on your site, see a lot of familiar names here of folks that you’ve worked with, and that’s created design.com created spelled CRE eight D dash design. I love hearing about and talking about the history of what it’s been like to build businesses online, whether you go way back to free WordPress and talk about people publishing on Blogspot. And Lindsay, back in the day, I was just talking today to somebody in Spain about how Lindsay’s first blog was a Blogspot blog about her time in Spain 20 years ago. But just the evolution of this business through the years. And we inevitably will be going through another significant evolution here as we enter into the world of AI, which we’re going to talk about. But the thing that is consistent through it is that there have been opportunities for people who are creative, who are motivated, who are willing to work hard to use the tools that are in front of them, and to create things that get attention on the internet. And with that attention, you get to then make a decision. Do you want to create a business out of that? If you do want to create a business out of that, what then are you going to use to monetize the attention? It could work with the sponsor, you could work with display advertising, you could sell your own product, which is a great thing to do if you have the ambition to grow your own product business. But through it all, there’s always these opportunities. But the important thing is we need to be aware of how that attention is shifting, how things are changing. And one of the cool things that you’ve been working on is a Substack, almost like an industry newsletter that helps people understand some of the evolutions and changes within the context of design on their website. Is that more or less accurate, or maybe you can speak more specifically to what Best Served Hot is all about and your focus for that and really that newsletter and branch of the business for what you’re doing.

Rachel Cunliffe: So Best Served Hot is a weekly snapshot of what’s happening in the industry. So we are tracking about 2000 of the top food blocks, and by that I mean the interactive ones that are just focused on food. So I’m not looking at cocktail sites, lifestyle sites or ones that are much more broad in their focus. It’s

Bjork Ostrom: Like within the niche of

Rachel Cunliffe: It is

Bjork Ostrom: Food. It’s really specific. It’s not cocktails, it’s not drinks, it’s like these are food.

Rachel Cunliffe: Yeah. So these are people who are posting recipes and I guess they’re all in some ways in competition with each other, but also they’re part of that ecosystem. And so there’s no real way anywhere else to track what the trends are, what people are posting about, what people are talking about, what they’re focusing on, what kind of industry standards there are, so that if you are wanting to build your business, you can say, well, this is what the food bloggers are doing. You don’t have to copy it. You can do the exact opposite if you want, but it gives you sort of a benchmark as to what people out there are doing. And I don’t want it to be an overwhelming report. So every week it’s nice and short and we also cover kind of the news that food bloggers need to know about as well.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So an example, it looks like the two kind of primary focuses, and then maybe we can talk through the most recent things that you’ve been seeing. I think that’s where it’s most interesting is to talk through, Hey, here’s literally what’s happening. One is a news roundup. Hey, here’s some of the news from the week that’s important to know. I see one from October here talking about new recipe AI overviews, linking to that, some Instagram news ChatGPT weekly users, Food Blogger Pro interview link. Thank you for that. Appreciate that. YouTube releasing podcasts. So it’s like, okay, you’re a creator and you’re a creator in the food space. Here’s some news that would apply to you, and then there’s the best served hot email that goes out. Talk to me about what might be in one of those and some of the things that we could be aware of right now as food creators that we should be implementing or aware of or almost like best practices as it relates to web design, kind of what you’re thinking about each and every day.

Rachel Cunliffe: So I’m doing research every single week, running through what those people are posting about and then doing some analysis as well of what they’re doing on their site. So each week we’re tracking what they’re posting, what they’re posting about. So it could be categories, trends. At the moment, Turkey just jumped out of nowhere into we’re not out of nowhere is one the top rankings, but chocolate and chicken and cheese are always really high up the top every single week. So that’s really interesting to show what is resonating with people, what they’re posting about. We also do some tracking. So this week we’re having a look at what is the mailing list platform they’re using and 43% are using Kit, so they’re really dominant player are Flodesk and Mailerlite and MailChimp come in behind each under 20%. So it’s really dominating there. We’re also tracking things. I think it’s about 6% of authors, 6% of blogs have multiple authors posting in this past week. So that’s a really small thing, having a team posting lots of content. I think when people start looking at food blogs, they think, gosh, there’s so many different things, but half of food blogs don’t post each week, which is

Bjork Ostrom: In this season. Probably an example of that. Yeah,

Rachel Cunliffe: I think in the past people thought, oh, you need to post on your site three times a week. But now it’s more shifting to promote your content on socials multiple times a day and link back to that content, which you don’t need to be posting as often anymore because you’ve got other ways of drawing people back and you’ve got so much evergreen content. I looked at one week, what is the average number of recipes? And for those top 2000, it’s about 443 is the average number of recipes. So you have so much evergreen content, you can point people back to that

Bjork Ostrom: 443 published recipes?

Rachel Cunliffe: Yes, that’s the median. About 20% have more than 1000 recipes, and none of those top food blogs have really less than a hundred. I think it’s about 10% of people. It’s not a lot. So you need that content to be able to build out the traffic.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s so fascinating. So I think of in the ad world, there’s Adweek, that’s an example of a industry newsletter and it’s like, Hey, here are the different trends and happenings within the world of ads and advertising, and it could be commercials, TV advertising, it could be traditional display advertising. In this case it’s like this really unique world, which is food creators, specifically food blogs. And looking at the top 2000, do you define that as top from a traffic perspective? How are you defining top?

Rachel Cunliffe: So at the moment, because Raptive had that 100,000 plus, I saw them as the premium ad supplier. Of course that’s not exclusive to ’em. It’s going to be a little different now that they’ve dropped that down to 25,000. But I was looking at within all of a thousand, I think it’s 15,000 or something sites that Raptive are the ad agency for. I was just looking at the food blogger subset of that.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. Okay. So Raptive has a huge bank of content creators who are publishing to a site, might be pet owners, it might be DIY, it might be travel filtering from that huge pool of Raptive sites that are posting about food. Then you get this smaller subset, which is 2000 that you’re tracking more or less. There might be that number changes, but generally speaking it’s Raptive creators, which the filtering was a hundred thousand to your point. That has changed recently. And then food-specific creators. So you have this filtering mechanism, then you bring that in, my guess through technology. This is getting into the specifics, but I’m so curious about it, like a dashboard that you can filter based on the monitoring of these sites to see how often are people creating and what are they publishing about? There’s probably some AI tools involved with it. What does that look like?

Rachel Cunliffe: Yeah, I’ve got a bunch of scripts, and so I’m looking at all their RSS feeds for those because almost every one of those sites is publishing an RSS feed, which used to be a big thing in the day, but it’s still super important. And WordPress does publish it by default. And for many food bloggers, they’re using that to push out their newsletters automatically through their RSS feed. And that shows what they’ve published in the last week. It includes lots of metadata with it, which I’m analyzing as well, who the authors are when it was published, categorization, keywords and so forth. So yeah, that’s a big part of it. And then I’ve also got a bunch of scripts that are looking at changes to those sites that are happening as well.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. So there’s a script that’s looking at that, and would you be able to then pick up and see how often are people not publishing a new post but updating an older piece of content as a part of the monitoring that you’re doing?

Rachel Cunliffe: So that can also go out in those RSS feeds too. It shows the publish date and the updated date as well. So yes,

Bjork Ostrom: A lot of that would be if they are republishing it, but not if they are just updating it. Is that right?

Rachel Cunliffe: Yeah, so the other part of that is you’ve got your site map, so that gets submitted to Google and Google regularly recalls that site map, and so anytime you make an update on your site, it’s XML site map behind the scenes. So I’m also tracking that, and that’s how I could see that there was sort of on average about 400 posts on there. I’m not looking at the number of pages and other things on the site, but in terms of recipe posts,

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. It’s actually interesting to see. So all of this is public.

Rachel Cunliffe: Yes,

Bjork Ostrom: You can go to sitemap. A lot of times it’s sitemap index, xml, and essentially it’s like where you can see the map of the site, which is the site map and it outlines. You have posts, you have pages, you maybe have category – Pinch of Yum has web stories and video, but it’s an interesting place to look at if you’re curious to know, hey, what’s kind of the makeup of a site? Where are all the different posts that they have, what are all the different pages? And you can scroll through and see it. Most recently, I did this with a site that was an AI replica of Pinch of Yum, took all of the content, replicated it, and I went and looked at the site map and it was like, oh, this was all published on June 1st, 2025. You can see the last modified date within the site map. And it’s like, okay, this is obviously somebody who’s just scraping it and just republishing it. But for anybody who’s interested in learning more about a site, that’s an interesting place that you can kind of explore and look at obviously public information. And so you can just type that in to see what it is. What are some of the other things that you think that we as food creators should be aware of that are shifting ways to think about content creation? Because part of it is, hey, there’s a trend. This is shifting. People aren’t publishing as much new content, they’re updating older content more. But that could be a trend and that might be because it’s impactful, maybe it’s not. But I’m curious to know what are the things if you could distill down that are like, Hey, these are actually things that are changing that are also really impactful for creators, whether from a traffic perspective or a growth perspective or maybe types, maybe even ways that people are structuring their site in order to find opportunities for more search traffic or anything that would be kind of interesting that has bubbled up from some of this monitoring that you’ve done at the sites.

Rachel Cunliffe: Yeah, I think one of the things, well, not from the monitoring, but just in general, a shift in what people are talking about is, and you’ve said it on your podcast many times, going back to authenticity. And my criteria for that is if you strip away all the branding, you strip away all the photos and the author information and you just read the post content. And in my research it shows it’s about just over a thousand words per post on average that people are publishing at the moment. This is in the last week or two. And you read that. How unique is that? Could it have been written by anyone? Could it have been written by AI? Is there anything about this which says, Hey, this person is kind of funny, or they’re quirky or they’re weird, or they’re just something unique about them. And it could be any kind of way. I think the real kind of wake up call is that it’s not unique for a lot of sites anymore. And I’m not saying you need to talk about your grandmother’s recipe history. I’m saying when you and I talk, we have our own quirks and ways of talking and personality and people come to know that voice. And if someone writes you an email, you can kind of get a sense of what they’re saying without what they’re saying sometimes, especially when you know them. And so if you’ve got an audience that’s so connected to you, is that actually coming through in your writing? And I think that’s something to really think about. If you strip away all those other external things, some of them you can really tell they’re really funny. Really. I was reading a recipe the other night and it was saying, cottage pie is just so loved by everyone. It’s the best recipe ever unless you’re a vegan in brackets. It was just like, yeah, that’s the kind of comment you would say to your friend. And if you were to bump into your friend at the supermarket and they’re saying, oh, what are you cooking tonight? You probably wouldn’t say this easy, family-friendly dinner is going to be on your table in 30 minutes. You would feel very awkward hearing it talk to you like that. This is a marketing pitch. This is an advertisement on television. Just speak to me like a friend. Oh, this is so easy. My kids love it. And all of those types of things are what we need. We need more voice in there in terms of the design and features. There’s so many different directions are going, but I still think that’s the core that EEAT that is important, but your voice is what makes it human uniquely you that no one else can do.

Bjork Ostrom: Why is that? So I think people conceptually understand that, and I think the spirit of it, we understand when we read something. I think of my friend Matthew, he started this company called Wimp Decaf, and it would be a great example of what I feel like in the world of product, which is different than the world of content creation, but he still is creating content in order to promote it. His writing in the newsletter that he sends out once a week-ish is really compelling, and I know it’s him, and it’s also aligned with how he’s trying to position Wimp Decaf. And so that to me is a great example and people could sign up for that just to see what I’m talking about. I feel connected with Matthew. I feel aligned with the brand. I want to live what he calls a decaf life, and I still drink caffeinated coffee, but I aspire to this aesthetic of decaf, which is a lot of what he talks about. And so I get it, I feel it, but why is that important? Now, people are saying it, people talk about it, but what’s the why behind it?

Rachel Cunliffe: I think if we go to a networking event, we’ve all been around those people that they’re right in your face talking at you, and it’s like you just feel kind of slimy, icky, uncomfortable being in their space because you know that they’re trying to get you to do the next thing or they’re trying to make this connection and then it’s going to turn into business from a very human basic level. We can smell when something’s authentic and not when it’s BS or when it’s actually, this is actually genuine coming from a place of genuine wanting to help you. And if you are not a hundred percent passionate about your product and you’re just marketing it, people can feel that even if they can’t figure out why. And that’s, that’s the why. If it’s not authentic, people will eventually find that out. Your friend is extremely, he just believes it a hundred percent what he’s saying. And that’s coming through to you in many ways that you probably could never put your finger on and articulate it, but it’s there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and I guess my follow-up question to it is, do you think that has always been true, or are we now moving into a season of that where that is more true? Because in our world, it felt like if you rewind the tape 3, 4, 5, 6 years ago, it felt like one of the things that was working pretty well was creating a post where you have seven different sections, one of which is the history of potatoes and it’s a potato soup recipe. And I think this is a thing that I wanted to sit down in front of. So many people who were like, oh my goodness, recipe bloggers, they tell their whole life story, and all I want is just the recipe, or there’s so much information here and all I want is the recipe. And it’s like, you don’t need to be talking to recipe bloggers, you need to be talking to Google. Because the reason that recipe sites are including so much superfluous information is because there is a pattern around creating additional context around a recipe in order for it to rank well. And maybe not so much the life story stuff, but definitely the content that would be like, okay, if you also include this section that’s going to be considered to be more comprehensive and therefore you’re going to rank higher. And a lot of it felt pretty transactional and informational, but it worked. And then you’d get people who’d get millions of page views creating pieces that weren’t really genuine voice of somebody sharing their experience. But it was more like, can this be freeze-dried? Here’s the instructions to freeze dry. Here’s how all of these things that didn’t really feel very interesting or compelling, but they ranked for things that people would search. So maybe it’d be helpful to talk about that a little bit and even to hear from your experience, what you’ve seen as the shift to kind of explain the why a little bit more.

Rachel Cunliffe: Yeah, I mean, it’s very true that people started writing for Google rather than writing for their audience because they needed the audience and so they needed Google. So it’s this kind of complex relationship where you don’t want to, but you do because you want people. I think I’ve noticed a lot of food bloggers recently saying, I am starting a Substack because I can connect more authentically with my audience over here, and I’m not writing for the algorithm. I’ve seen that probably come in half a dozen emails from people. And I’m thinking to myself, great use is an awesome platform, but it doesn’t actually solve the root problem because, as I’ve seen on Substack in the last six months, people are complaining, Oh, no, Substack changed. It’s now all about notes and all these different social media aspects, and now I was getting the reach and now I’m not, and I have to play this new game on Substack. So it’s the same with blogging. At first, people were just putting up the content and there wasn’t so much competition for an apple pie back then. So they were getting the traffic from Google, and then it became, if you want to get seen, you must play this game. And Substack is the same. So it’s not about authenticity on a platform. I mean, we saw that with people still reminisce about the old days with old filters, and it was just following your friends and seeing an insight into their life. And now when you look at the feed, I think they said 43% of it is ads. Now in your Instagram feed, authenticity has always been important, but playing the game has always been important in order to get your audience. And so there’s this kind of competing reality here of what do I do if I want the audience, but I want to say it’s true to myself. And I think if you go too far in one direction, you are going to miss out.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that to me feels like it hits on the most important piece, which I had this long conversation. I think I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, long conversation with my friend who’s a child psychologist and we’re driving back from this trip that we’re doing and we’re going back and forth, what’s the right way to raise a kid? And the conclusion that we came to is it really depends on the kid. And I think I’ve thought about that a lot within the context of other scenarios in my life, which is there is this mix and there is this spectrum of how rigid are you? How rigid or strict or how much do you let the kid discover on their own right and wrong? It’s like, oh, it really depends on the kid, how you interact with them. Similarly, I’ll get back around here, stick with me for the analogy. As a content creator, how much do you play the algorithm game? How much do you write authentically? It really depends on the creator, and it’s never completely binary. It’s never completely authentic, and it’s never completely just algorithm. If the intent is to build a business, it can be completely authentic in the sense that you aren’t thinking about algorithms at all. The example that you gave, which is coming across this Blogspot food blogger who’s been doing it for 20 years and she’s just trying to document her family’s recipes, great. She doesn’t think about algorithms, she doesn’t think about ranking, she doesn’t think about SEO or social media. She thinks about publishing a recipe so it’s available for her family. But as soon as you enter into the world of content creation, in order to build a business by necessity, you have to think about how are you trying to balance creating in the most authentic way possible and being aware of the fact that there are mechanisms on every platform that prioritize content based on certain variables. That’s true with Instagram, that’s true with Substack, that’s true with Google, any of these platforms. And so my point with it, and I think a really good outcome of that back and is like there is a scale and we need to decide on each respective platform, where do we land as a creator and what feels like the best iteration of that? And there are going to be some people who publish content to their blog that are very much so analytical, they do keyword research, they are trying to figure out how to rank well, and they might have success with that. But I think, and this is my follow-up question to you, the enduring nature of that might not be to the degree that they want it to because part of the benefit of authenticity is connection, relationship becoming a true follower as opposed to transactional content. So I’m curious to hear your reflections on that a little bit as well as a component of what we are doing, it’s not just trying to get a visit, it’s not just trying to get a quick hit, it’s also trying to get somebody who engages with you as a brand, as a creator, as a person.

Rachel Cunliffe: So all of that I completely agree with. I think there are short-term gains and long-term gains, and so you really need to think about that. And if you start playing the algorithm game too much or the SEO game too much or the GE game too much, people can get a short-term spike and then people are just like, oh, I don’t really like this, and they just leave. So that long-term relationship is something you really need to be focusing on if you want to be in it for a sustainable business. And I think food bloggers are actually pretty good at weighing those up. When sponsored posts came in a few years ago, there were other people saying, oh, you’re selling out using a brand in all your videos or your products. But if it’s something that they actually feel aligns well with what they’re doing, they already use it. It’s a good product or a good ingredient, there is no conflict there and they are still being authentic. But when you say yes to everything and then you have sold out and your audience will probably see it and feel it because you don’t have that same genuineness about the products and things that you are out working with always a give and take. But I think food bloggers have always felt these tensions, and I think most of them are doing it because of a genuine love of cooking and they’re not in it just to make a quick dollar. So I think most of them are weighing up these long-term ways of building their audience, whether it’s through email or through stories or other ways of connecting with your audience.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. Running your business can feel like a constant balancing act between making great content, keeping up with platforms, and actually earning enough to keep doing what you love. That’s where rap comes in. They’re the team behind thousands of the Internet’s top, including Pinch of Yum, and they help creators grow their traffic, boost their revenue, and protect their content. In an AI-driven world, Raptive creates tailored growth strategies, helping with SEO, email, and audience development. They’re serious about supporting real human-made content. And now it’s easier than ever to join. If your site gets at least 25,000 monthly page views, you can apply to become part of Raptive’s creator community and get the kind of support that scales as your business grows to learn more or apply, visit Raptive.com. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode. I’m curious to know. So I’m working on a website with my daughter. We have a frog podcast for family and friends and so just this morning we were working on the site a little bit, and it’s fun for me because back into the weeds of creating pages and seeing it in a fresh way again, which is really fun. What it makes me think about is, man, there’s a ton of opportunities for us to think strategically about the content that we’re creating. And one of the things I’ve thought more and more about for Pinch of Yum is we are not just content creators, we are content syndicators and we are content remixers. So examples of that would be in the world of social media, you create a video, we syndicated it to multiple different platforms. In the world of a website, we create a post, but also after creating hundreds of posts, you can create a post that is linking to other posts. You can have a roundup, you can have category pages, you can have your about page. All of these are valuable assets for a website. I’m curious if you could speak a little bit from your position. You’ve seen a lot of different websites, you’ve seen a lot of different successful people creating these food websites. How do you think we should be thinking about the different parts of our website and maybe opportunities that you see to place more attention onto neglected parts of a website? Where are the places that we should be paying more attention to that we currently aren’t? Because I think a lot of people are probably focusing on the next posts that they’re doing or updating an older post, but there’s also a lot of opportunities to create really compelling places on the website that aren’t just a post. So anything that you’d have around advice or insight for people who have a website and other areas that they can focus on.

Rachel Cunliffe: So when you think about your – it’s frogs, isn’t it?

Bjork Ostrom: And for the fans? Yeah. Yeah. So

Rachel Cunliffe: When you think about that, at first, yes, you are creating content, but at some point there needs to be a strategy of what happens when we get a lot of content on our website. We’ve got hundreds if not thousands of posts. How do we actually get people to look at that rather than here’s our most popular, or here’s our most recent frogs don’t have that same sort of evergreen nature of it’s Thanksgiving week

Bjork Ostrom: This week. You can talk about it within the context of food. We don’t have to do frogs,

Rachel Cunliffe: But in general it’s like, okay, what’s the season that we’re in right now? So Thanksgiving and what things can we surface from the past? But then also what kind of problems do people come to us with? So for example, it could be just I need some 30 minute dinners that are for my family. How do we make that easy? And so category cages, which you mentioned earlier, used to be just like this big long grid of things that most recent first, but if you can put them into verticals or similar themes, you can pull out things that are related to each other. Yes, you can do that in a roundup as well. But these category pages are super important so that if someone lands on a page, they can actually surface what I mean. I love going to a dessert site and going to their desserts category and seeing what are the most top 10 recipes. I don’t want to wade through all the most recent ones. Being in the southern hemisphere, winter desserts don’t make so much sense as summer desserts for me. So I’m not interested in necessarily the most recent ones, but I am really interested in what’s popular or what is the reader’s favorites or which is the ones that have been tried the most by readers. The New York Times cooking app has set really well defined as to how many people have made this. They have the benefit of a login system so they can do that, which most food blogs. So there’s plenty of ways to think about it. Once you get a lot of content and a lot of blogs get super disorganized over time like a pantry, it kind of all just gets pushed in there. And that reorganization is needed to tidy things up to help people find things that are connected and related or giving people a next step when they finish reading something. Here’s something that’s actually the next step in the process. A lot of blogs don’t even say what to serve with it. So if I’ve got a main dish, what kind of salad or side should I serve with this? And so simple things like that which can connect people to other content. In terms of though what things people neglect. So many food sites still have really basic things that they could work on for the user experience. And I think that’s because you start off with the site and you keep adding little bits and pieces to it. You embed some code, you put something in copy and paste, add a plugin, and soon enough everything doesn’t fit with your brand. Exactly. And little things, little details like that, that care and attention to the small things, even if it’s just sometimes check boxes are so tiny, it’s impossible to check or to read things or things are overlapping or just hard to read. Color contrasts, they all sound basic things, but they’re actually needed. Just watch, get a friend, say, grab your phone and pull up one of my recipes and just watch what they do. And if you feel uncomfortable or a little cringey or embarrassed at some of the things that they see, notice that and go, right, I need to work on that. It’s just a little tiny spacing issue. Or it could be that the site’s taking forever to load and a lot of, I think, what did I say? Something like 75% need an improvement in their speed scores and 16% are poor. I mean, and 70% are poor with their page loads. And these are the top food blogs. That’s their Largest Contentful Paint metric from Google. 70% are poor, more than four seconds. And if you’re on a slow internet connection or you’re just in spotty wifi, not everyone has amazing speeds all the time. So those things kind of add up and there’s a lot of room for improvement there. Just the tiny little details that, again, people may not notice it, but they can feel it and experience it when things don’t work as they expect. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Quick takeaway. So, for people who haven’t done this before, you can go to PageSpeed Insights, just Google that. And this is something that Google looks at and says like, Hey, these are things that we consider to be important. What you don’t know is how does that factor into the ranking algorithm? But it’s just helpful to see here are the metrics based on our Google saying this, our assessment of your site. You can just enter in your site, you can get a feel for it, enter in a post that you’ve done as well to get a feel for what that looks like. A great way to just see what are things looking like on your site. The other piece that you talked about is more of usability. So is the site something that’s easy to navigate? One of the things that I feel like is a good practice to get into is just to sit on the couch for 15 minutes and use your own site with a mobile device. I think so often we are using our own sites on a desktop computer on a big screen with fast internet. And I remember the first time or early on when I tried to pull up Pinch of Yum when we were at the cabin with Lindsay’s family on my phone, I was like, this is terrible. This is a terrible experience. It was slow. The connection wasn’t great. This is years ago, but it was like, oh yeah, not everybody is at the office using fiber internet to pull up your site. And so it’s a great way to, and there’s even ways that you can replicate slow internet to get a feel for what it looks like or depending on the browser you’re using, you can also have on Mac OS, you can do iPhone mirroring. I don’t know if you ever do this, but it’s super helpful if you are working from your desktop to have your iPhone mirrored so you can see it on your desktop computer. You don’t have to actually physically be using it, but a lot of opportunities there to make improvements. I’m curious to know. I think it’s one thing to say, alright, great. We have some ideas of how we could make these improvements. Maybe somebody’s signed up for the newsletter and they get an idea of a way to make an improvement. What would your advice be for people to have a system to get that update made? And I know that part of what you do is you work with creators and food sites to help them get well-designed sites. Do you also work with them ongoing on a retainer? And maybe you could speak to how food bloggers can solve that problem of I have an idea. I think this wouldn’t be an improvement on my site, but it feels a little bit sticky to know what to do next in order to solve that problem if they’re not going to go in and try and figure out the code themselves.

Rachel Cunliffe: Yeah, great question. So we definitely work long-term with food bloggers, something we’ve been working with for 15 years now. And I think the great secret that’s not talked about in food blogging circles is that almost every food blogger says, I am really scared about tech. I am not a tech person. They feel very uncomfortable working with code. They’re scared of mucking up. They think it’s just them and all the other food bloggers are really good with this stuff. They always say, I’m so sorry, I’m not really a techie person. Can you work with me? And I wish there was more talk about this, that it’s okay, you don’t have to be all things. You don’t have to do it all. If your website is your core business, don’t muck it up yourself accidentally and get into a panic or spend hours frustrated trying to get something to work alongside people who can support you just as you would in other businesses focus. There’s so many other things you can focus on anyways. And there’s so many moving parts with the food blog, the content, the cooking, the cleaning, the photography, the videography, the social media. So if you’re able to partner a beside someone who you can just entrust that work to who’s an expert, who’s not going to muck it up, who is going to have your back? If there’s a problem, if things go down, they’re taking care of it. Some of them are also, so this is their words. I don’t even want to talk to my web host. Can you talk to them for us? Can you deal? I don’t understand their techie words. They’ll come back and they’ll say some things. So we are often the middle person between the tech support team on their hosting site and the food blogger because it’s just not part of your wheelhouse. And that’s fine too. We just want food bloggers to focus on what they love and take care of that side of things, and we support them on the tech side. And I think a lot of ideas, people sometimes install plugins and then it becomes this jumbled mess and it adds to the load and the UI and the UX problems on their site. And so I’m like, just get someone to take care of it for you and offload that part of your stress. You don’t need that.

Bjork Ostrom: Specifically for how you work with people is that you’ll do usually a redesign and then work with those people ongoing. Or let’s say there’s somebody who had a site and they said, Hey, I know that I need the equivalent of three to four hours a month to work towards improving my site. Would you also work with people like that or do you first go through the process of designing, architecting, developing the site and then work with those people going forward? I think there’d probably be need for both harder for you in the situation where you’re coming in after.

Rachel Cunliffe: Yeah, our preference is the first for sure, because we work really hard on making our code very lightweight, very flexible. We don’t use big bloated frameworks, which can kind of slow things down. We are definitely open to the second type, but we often do an assessment first. Let’s have a look at the lay of the land, see what’s been set up here. Is it a tangled mess or is it something that is worthwhile working with? And sometimes it’s like when you buy an old apartment, the whole place needs rewiring it. Yes, you can plug the hole, but it’s actually the whole infrastructure here is needing to be redone. Not always the case, but sometimes if it’s a DIY job kind of botched, it can be better to say, look, let’s export all your content, put it into a new framework and say goodbye to all those headaches.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Just earlier today, we do this thing called Coaching Calls for Food Blogger Pro members, and once a month they’re released. Sometimes I’ll do more in a month just kind of batch. But I had a coaching call this morning and the conversation that we had was around somebody who had started in 2023. It was kind of trying to figure out what do next steps look like? How am I going to kind of level up? And one of the questions she said is like, is this a pipe dream for me as a creator in 2023 building a site? Is this a pipe dream? What would you say to somebody who’s an early creator now, knowing what you’ve seen, tracking the trends is number one, is it a pipe dream? And then number two, if it’s not, what is the best approach for somebody who’s in the first stage of business building as a content creator?

Rachel Cunliffe: Yeah, great question in terms, is it a pipe dream? Certainly not. I’ve seen people still 18 months of very hard work. I’d say give it at least 18 months, probably two years minimum of really hard work before you start seeing things really start to do an uptick. So it’s not an overnight success. The only way it can really be an overnight success is you’ve already got an established brand and now you’re launching off another brand. So some food bloggers do start more businesses and they’ve got that giant audience they can push over. So for someone starting out new, consider at least 18 months to two years of very hard work and think carefully. There’s more monetization options than ever. When blogging first came out, there was very little, and it was a real hustle, like personal connections, little deals, that was bit piece. Now there’s so many different ways, whether it’s on social media itself, selling products, courses, workshops, speaking cookbooks, eBooks, display advertising, the list goes on and on. And Substack is another one. The subscription models, quite a few food bloggers. We’re working with the static membership platforms where you can turn off the ads if you’re a member, a cookbook, clubs, all sorts of different ways to monetize. So I think in terms of what should they focus on, that’s a personal question. If you are a person who loves being on camera, focus on video. That’s really a big lead today. All the stories and reels, YouTube shorts, if you’re a writer, focus on supplementing with your Substack, a membership there that’s separate from your blog. Really think to play to your strengths. Don’t copy other people because it’s worked, because they started six years ago or two years ago. You’ve got to figure out

Bjork Ostrom: They have a different skillset.

Rachel Cunliffe: Yeah, they have a different skillset and things are constantly shifting. So it’s about figuring out what is the things that you love doing the most. And some people have built very successful businesses out of photographing other people’s food. They realize actually it’s the photography that I love, or it’s the food styling that I love. And so they offer that as a service to other food bloggers as well.

Bjork Ostrom: That to me feels like one of the most important things for somebody who’s thinking about creating an income as an entrepreneur is thinking about how do you get to income as quickly as possible? And the answer is almost always going to be time for money. The benefit of time for money is that it’s also refinement of skills if it’s aligned with the eventual place that you want to be. And so if you can figure out how, if you want to be doing video more, if you can figure out how to find three people who are content creators that want to outsource video, you get paid to do that. You get better at doing it. And then incrementally, you build your own organic editorial content that you are publishing. That can be a really incredible way to grow your business, starting with an agency mindset, but over time, moving towards more editorial content that you’re monetizing via sponsorships or ads or whatever. So I love that, and I think it’s important to point out and kind of reflected the advice that I was giving, which is it’s going to be a lot of hard work for a long time in order to build a content business that is where the content production is the sole source of income via ads or sponsorships or affiliate or whatever it might be. So I think that’s great. I think the other thing that people will come up against, and they’ll say is like, man, it’s kind of a scary time to be a content creator because of AI. What is your response to people who are nervous about AI, whether they’ve been having a content business for 10 years, or they’re coming into it new and being like, this is kind of a scary thing because of the world of AI. Would be interested in your take on that.

Rachel Cunliffe: Yeah, I think it’s something no one should deny. It’s a very realistic part of the landscape right now. I’m aware of it as well. How is work going to shift for many people within the next five to 10 years? That being said, if you look at the AI food blogs, which are out there, they are a mess. They’re not great quality. It’s a problem that food bloggers had years ago, which was these scam or spam blogs that were just scraping content, republishing it, which was terrible because you had duplicate content on the internet, but those sites never built an audience. They got accidental traffic from Google, people coming across there, but no one said, this is a great experience. I’ll be back. So there’ll be a very sharp divide between the ones that have fake AI blogs. They just don’t put the same care into it because they’re not doing it. They’re making a quick buck. They’re not there to build an audience at all. So think about that in the way that you put your site together, how intentional it is, how deliberate it is as a very different point of view. And I think very soon we’ll see all of these AI disclaimers not made with AI. No generative AI was used in this content.

Bjork Ostrom: When people do a recipe, part of it is I think it’ll get harder to distinguish. I remember two years ago listening to some AI music, I was like, oh, this is not very good. And I was like, oh, actually, it’s really good. I listened to some AI music this morning. I was thinking about doing a jingle for our podcast, and I pulled up Suno, SUNO. I started listening to one of the songs, and I was like, this is actually kind of, not only is it good, but it was a little bit moving. I was like, oh, no. Or last night I was listening to a song, it was called, I forget the artist’s name. It was called Let Go, Let God. And I was reading in this Yahoo article about this artist, and it’s like she, I think the AI artist, she got an offer for $3 million for a record label. So part of me is like, it’s bad right now, but it probably just becomes better and better. And I think part of that sounds not very hopeful, like, oh no, we’re all doomed. But I think part of it drives home the point to which we talked about before, which is I think that is why in order to differentiate yourself, you need to become more human, because that will be one of the variables that people look at is, do I know that this is a person and it’s a person? Because you can watch a video of them because they tell a story, because you’ve been following them for a long period of time. All of those things, I feel like will become more and more important. And that didn’t exist five years ago. You didn’t really need to prove your humanity in the same way five years ago. So it is so interesting to see how it’s all evolving. I think food is a little bit protected today when we are recording this in 2025, but probably won’t be as protected just from a transactional perspective five years from now when whatever AI system it is is actually really good at coming up with a recipe. Do you feel like that’s true? I feel like it’ll get there. It’s just a matter of time.

Rachel Cunliffe: If you think about food, it’s a little different to music because there is food for entertainment and food for utility. So if you’re watching a reel on Instagram, I’ve seen a guy doing amazing things with chocolate. He’s a French artist and he’ll make these incredible sculptures out of chocolate that is food for entertainment. There’s no way I’m ever going to be making anything like that. That kind of stuff. That’s at risk of AI taking over because it’s purely for entertainment. It’s aspirational. There’s no way you’re going to make it. But when it’s actually food for utility, I want to make this for my family. I’m going to be putting in real money real time, and I don’t want to waste my time. And if you have given me a recipe in the past that I don’t like, or it doesn’t work out, I’m not going to go back to you over and over again if I notice that your recipes just are wasting my resources. And AI has still got a lot of hallucinogen hallucinations in the middle of their algorithms. And I’ve seen research coming out saying that that is a feature that cannot be removed from AI that is part of the AI modeling. So it’s a problem that cannot be eliminated. And I think there’s a little bit of people saying, when people say, this is the worst we’ll see of AI, it’s only going to get better, it’s not going to become perfect, and no, I don’t think there is any way that those models can become perfect. AI cannot taste it, cannot experience human things. It can just sort of summarize an average of what people are saying. So I think, why is it that we still go to our friends and ask for book recommendations rather than just going to the internet, Reddit, and AI? It’s because humans still really value human opinions.

Bjork Ostrom: Even I think of Reddit as an example, the rise of Reddit world where there’s also the rise of ChatGPT that’s like a competing thought against ChatGPT, which is like, I can go to ChatGPT and get answers. But actually I’ve noticed of myself, of my friends actually going to Reddit, a decent amount to get people’s opinion on what are the best headphones. And it’s like, that feels like an example of that where it’s not some AI answer, it’s actually people with a bunch of grammatic errors talking about their experience.

Rachel Cunliffe: Yeah, everyone still loves a story that’s genuine. If it’s a made up story, it doesn’t resonate as well. And people are wanting that, looking in the comments of the recipes, oh, this didn’t work. I made this mistake. Well, the AI doesn’t necessarily know that people are going to make that mistake, which is just a misreading of things. But I can learn from other people’s mistakes in the comments section. So there’s a lot of valuable stuff in food blogging comments as well, just like there is on Reddit. And I think food bloggers are utilizing the comments that are on their site at the moment, that I could be pulling out more of those rich comments that are on there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeha, that’s great. Rachel, we could talk for another hour probably, because you have so many insights. You’re in this world in multiple different ways. Understand the complexities of it, understand the opportunities of it. So we’ll have to have you back some time talk about all the things that are happening from an industry perspective. But for now, where can people follow along and sign up to get some of the updates on your Substack channel? And then if people want to work with you to do design and development, how can they do that?

Rachel Cunliffe: Yeah, thanks for having me. So for the Substack, it’s BestServedHot com, and that will take you, so that’s our weekly snapshot report into the top 2000 food blogs. And for custom WordPress design and development, we are at crea8d-design.com. That’s cre8d-design.dot.com.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Rachel, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.

Rachel Cunliffe: Thanks so much.

Ann Morrissey Hey there, Ann again from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, we would so appreciate it if you could share it with your community and leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. We’ll be back next week with another episode where we share the replay of our Ask Bjork Anything Live Q&A from last December, where he answered your top blogging questions from business strategy in the early years to trends in 2025, common blogging mistakes, and more. We’ll see you back here soon, and in the meantime, we hope you have a wonderful week.