From Pandemic Hobby to Full-Time Hustle with Danny Dobrzenski

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Ann Morrissey: Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This is Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team. If you’ve ever wondered how to turn a passion project into a profitable career, you’re in the right place. Today, Bjork is chatting with Danny Dobrzenski, the creator behind Cooking in the Yard, who did exactly that. After getting laid off at the start of the pandemic, Danny transformed his cooking hobby into a successful full-time business. He’ll share his secrets for building a highly engaged audience on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, which led to lucrative brand deals. He’ll discover his strategy for staying consistent, navigating social media algorithms, and the key to scaling your business by buying back time through delegation. This episode is a must listen for any creator looking to monetize their content and grow their community with intention. And now without further ado, I’ll pass it over to Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Danny, welcome to the podcast.

Danny Dobrzenski: Thanks, Bjork. Happy to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re going to be talking about your journey. It’s relatively recent. Sometimes we’ll have conversations with folks who have started a site 13 years ago or for us, it’s what, 15 years ago and talk about, well, it’s 13 years ago for us too, but talk about this journey of like, Hey, what has it been like for you to show up every day for a long period of time, grow this business, but it’s always really to talk to people who have a more recent transition into working full-time as a creator, that is your story. You got started in 2020 and within the last couple of years it sounds like have transitioned into being a full-time food creator. You’ve built a following on social platforms, but you’ve also built a site that’s getting hundreds of thousands of page views. And we’re going to talk about all that today because people who listen to this podcast want to know what is that like, how did you do it? So first take us back to the pandemic. When you first started things, what was that like? Was it kind of that classic pandemic story of like, Hey, suddenly I have a little bit more time and there’s not as much to do, and so I need to find some things to fill my calendar?

Danny Dobrzenski: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So I started this journey in April of 2020 actually during the pandemic and the lockdown, and really came from a place of, I didn’t have that office environment to go back to anymore to show my buddies in the office what I cooked the previous night, how good does this steak look or look at this rack of ribs that I cooked, and we would always have that little bit of internal competition between us. And that was immediately gone. So I was cooking more during that time while we were all at home and working from home, et cetera. And my wife encouraged me instead of sending out texting out all these pictures to your friends before we get to eat dinner, why don’t you just put these on Instagram and everybody can follow you and you can follow them and you can go there and see what that looks like. And at that point, that was actually my first experience with Instagram. I didn’t have an Instagram profile. Oh, wow. I had a Facebook profile, but I had no idea that any of this was a business at that point. It was just something for fun and something to do, like you said, to fill that void and that free time. And I was lucky enough, and it’s kind of one of those blessings in disguise sort of thing. I was lucky enough that my wife and I, our first child who’s now six, was a baby then and was just an absolutely terrible sleeper. We were up with her,

Bjork Ostrom: Our youngest Lena, was that it was like nine months of us just trading back and forth.

Danny Dobrzenski: Exactly right. For us it was like 18 months. And so taking advantage of that time, there were many sleepless nights. I’m sure you remember what this was like, right? You’re rocking the baby to sleep and you’d have to wait a while before you put her down. So I’d throw in my headphones and pull up YouTube and see how to work Instagram and how to get followers on Instagram and what to do there. And long story short, it just continued to grow and grow and grow. And that was a great time to be on social media as well. Everybody’s on their phones constantly pretty much. And one thing led to the other and Instagram turned into Facebook, turned into TikTok, turned into YouTube, and then eventually turned into the website, and we’ve been off and running ever since.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s cool. There’s two things that I feel like are worth pointing out in that little section that you just talked about. The first is taking something that you’re already naturally doing and just amplifying it. It wasn’t like you suddenly we’re like, now I need to get inspired to share food content. It sounds like you were already doing that. You were already excited to talk to people about it. You’d go into work and you would swap stories around what you were making. And there are people in my life that I can think of who aren’t creators. They aren’t trying to build a food brand online, but they love talking about the recipe they have for smoking or this new product that they have and why it’s so great for grilling or a new recipe that they have. And so part of it is for us as creators thinking about where do we naturally already go? For me, I love talking about business. I’m super curious about online business, and so this ends up being a hybrid. I’m not a food guy. People were like, I did this houseboat trip recently, and they’re like, oh, you got to cook all our meals. And I was like, no, you do not want me cooking any of the meals because really what I’m passionate about is the business side of it. And so that’s why I have a podcast on it and we do a business with it. For Lindsay, it’s food. She loves talking about food and thinking about recipes and how to help people get recipes on the table. So for anybody listening, I think that should always be an indicator, like a lead indicator around what we should be creating. It’s like where are we already naturally drawn to? The second thing that I think is important, and I heard somebody talking about this recently, there’s an entrepreneur named Dan Martell, and he talks a lot about what it looks like to be an entrepreneur, and he has this book called Buy Back Your Time, and I’ve seen some of his short form content, but he talked about how one of the things that people often say is like, oh, social media is such a waste of time. You got to get off it. You got to focus. And he said, actually, I think TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, these are all an incredible use of your time if you are training the algorithm in a way that it is giving you helpful content. And so he talked about this process of figuring out, and it’s not that hard figuring out how to train the algorithm. And usually it’s like you share a piece of content or you comment on it. And so for him, he was talking about it within the context of AI wanting to learn ai. Whenever he saw a short form video on TikTok, he would just leave a quick comment. It was almost like an acronym or something that would train the algorithm to give him more AI content. And so when you talk about up late at night, you’re rocking your baby to sleep, you have maybe half an hour or two an hour after where it’s that kind of middle ground and you don’t know if you can lay him down yet. And so what do you do? And could just kind of veg out and watch whatever the algorithm feeds you. Or you could really intentionally say, I’m trying to learn this. How do I dive deep onto something or into something that I want to understand better? So two really intentional parts of your story that I think are worth pointing out because so much of it starts with that. It’s us learning, it’s trying to figure it out. And for anybody who’s listening to this podcast, you have the skills and abilities to grow a thing to reach an audience, but it’s really finding the middle ground between something that you can continually learn and something that you’re passionate about. So at what point did you start to see or believe that it was worth your time to create the content to post to these platforms in service of, and was it in service of building it into a business?

Danny Dobrzenski: So going back to 2020 when strangers started following me, that was completely, I was mind blown at that point. I was like, oh, wow, there’s other people that are interested in this. And that was kind of the start of, well, let me see if there’s more people interested and then let me see if there’s more people interested. And then one thing kind of led to the other, and this was back before Instagram was video focused fully. It was all images back in the day. So then I had to learn how to do videos, and then I learned that the algorithm helps you out when you kind of help it out. So being a quick adopter to videos certainly helped with that also. And I didn’t really see it as a business until about a year, year and a half after I started doing it. It was all for fun. It was kind of that thrill of the hunt sort of thing of like, oh, lemme see if I can get another a hundred followers this week and creating content to be able to put out there for that. And then it built and it built and it built and then come March of 2023, that’s when the full-time swing happened. For me, that was in a big way, that was the biggest shift in my business is that I was laid off from my corporate tech sales job when the economy took a dive and I’d been in sales all my life, that’s what I knew, that’s what I love, and worked with some really great people and that was just all taken away. So I dove really far into my food content as kind of that safety blanket for me or that comfort place and in job hunting and so forth. At that time, my wife sat down with me and was like, well, you’re kind of doing two jobs now in and of itself, you’re looking and then creating the content. If you just focus on the food content, do you think you could grow this and make a bigger business out of it? And I was like, yeah, I think so. I really do think I can turn this into something bigger. And that’s eventually where cookingintheyard.com came from, and the additional platform growth and so forth by just being, like you said, intentional and putting the focus in those individual buckets of where the time is best spent. And I was a reader of Buy Back Your Time, and that’s been a big leap forward in my business as well, of knowing where to allocate my time and at what points to be the most successful with it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. I would love to talk to you about some of the things you’ve learned as you have been buying back your time. One of the things that before we get there that I’d be interested to hear about is what was the state of your business when you did go full-time with it? What did it look like from a follower perspective? Did you have the site up at that point, or to what degree did you have the plane? You were flying your full-time job plane, and then you also had your business plane that you had built and you just jumped over to the plane versus you landed the full-time job plane, you got into the social media and content business plane and started to build that. As you took off, was it already at the point where it could sustain you or did you have to build up to that point?

Danny Dobrzenski: No, that’s a great question. And to finish out the analogy, my full-time job plane caught on fire. I had a parachute with me and I was able to parachute out and land on the social media plane and specifically speaking, speaking,

Bjork Ostrom: As I got into that, I was like, I don’t know if this is going to work, but you

Danny Dobrzenski: Set it up perfectly. We should do more of those. That’s great. Okay. Specifically speaking, it is from a follower standpoint and size of audience, I think I was around probably 150,000 followers on Instagram at that point. Facebook was really just starting up for me, which has really kind of taken off and up to this point been my main point of focus, and we can go into more of that later as we talk about the strategy and so forth, but didn’t have the website. I was about a year, nine months to a year out from having the website started and launched. It was kind of rattling around in my mind and as I was thinking about, okay, how do I grow this right? My wife has faith in me, I’ve got the support, the things that I need to do. I’ve got it all in front of me now, just let me put these pieces of the puzzle together. So I was thoughtful about growing out the other platforms. Instagram was doing great, but it was time to get audience on the other places. And then what do I do with this mountain of content that is sitting in a Google drive just collecting digital dust and not making me any money? How do I monetize that because I’m still creating new content. I’ve still got three, four, sometimes five recipe videos coming out per week. And how do I not forget about the other stuff? Well, the natural progression into that was into cookingintheyard.com into my website to have the recipes there and to get that monetized. And it was an easy transition from a standpoint of it all made sense. Then I just had to learn it and get the technical acumen and lots of long hours there and studying, and that kind of took off from there.

Bjork Ostrom: So it was at the point where you had built it up, you had some momentum with it. Were you monetizing the content that you were creating at that point, working with brands? What did that look like? Or did you also have to build up that at that point?

Danny Dobrzenski: Yeah, so that was in need of building as well. And in hindsight, which is a very powerful tool, obviously I wasn’t ready to be a full-time content creator at that point. I was just thrown into the deep end of the pool and I had to learn how to swim. I was basically living off of brand deals at that point, which in 2020, 2021, all companies were throwing their money into marketing, and social media was a big part of that, where people’s eyeballs were. And that’s kind of waned over time and shifted a little bit, but running all off a brand deal. So continuing to hope that my outreach to brands was landing and that I was still getting inbound emails. And if I was to go a few days or a week without an inbound from a brand, I was walking around the house pacing like crazy, like, oh man, the whole thing’s burning down in front of me.

Bjork Ostrom: You kind of live and die every deal.

Danny Dobrzenski: It really, really was. And that was also part of the website as well of I need to get some passive income coming in here. And to be able to have that additional revenue stream, it was huge. It really was a game changer. To answer your question, 95% of my business was brand deals at that point, and the other 5% was a mix between platform and affiliate revenue.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s one of the things that we often hear over the years. It’s shifted where when we first started doing these podcast interviews, having conversations, people would almost always start by building a site and then you build social around it. And now what we’re most often seeing is people start with social and then eventually come around to building a website for the reason that you pointed out, which is that it provides some level of predictability that doesn’t exist in the world of social. If you are monetizing that through brand partnerships, it’s great to do. We still do brand partnerships primarily on social. I know a lot of creators who get to a certain point with traffickers of their websites start to do less of that, but we’ve always continued to do ’em and have some great partners that we love to work with, but it’s not our main thing. And to your point, the hard thing, if it is your main thing is most brand partnerships don’t go on forever. You’re lucky if you have one that’s maybe a year long agreement, but you don’t really see them longer than that. And so you kind of feel like you’re having to go out and continually sell and continually close. And I think that can kind of burn people out, especially if they love doing content. So talk to me about, well actually one more thing that I want to point out. You talked about this idea of starting, maybe you were too early to actually go full time with it, but one of the things that’s great is because you did go full time, you were able to give it more time and energy and compress the amount of time that it took you to get to the point where now you have over 300,000 Instagram followers, almost 400,000 TikTok followers, 600,000 Facebook followers, 200,000 page views on your site. So you compressed that time period and there’s somebody named Paul Graham who started this company called Y Combinator, which they invest in early stage startups, and he talked about that for startups, which a lot of it is compressing your working years. He’s like, for people who do startups, you kind of compress your working years and most people work 10 years and for somebody in a startup, they’re probably going to do the equivalent of that in four years. And you reference that before we jumped on the call where you’re like, it’s just a lot of really long days of working. So can you talk about what that was like in that season where you made the jump knowing that you had to build up to a point where you were getting enough revenue to justify continuing to do it from a job and career perspective?

Danny Dobrzenski: Like you said, it was a lot of long hours, it was a lot of research. YouTube was my best friend. The Food Blogger Pro podcast was huge for me to use as a reference guide to say, okay, now I’ve heard email is a really big thing. Let me dive into some email episodes. And I went through some of your courses as well to see how to launch all that. And It was really just about trying to be a dry sponge, so to speak, and absorb everything I can, but while still leveraging my skills from sales as well, brand outreach and everything, building relationships and everything that goes along with that. And it was a tough go of it. And there were times when I was like, I’m probably going to hang this up. I’m going to give myself another month power through and just kept building. And I had an idea of where I wanted it to go, and I set some goals for myself and kind of backtracked from what it was going to take to get there. And it’s led us to this point so far and continuing to knock out those goals.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, can you talk about that when you goal set and then working backwards from there? I think that’s a valuable takeaway for people.

Danny Dobrzenski: For sure. So the big hairy audacious goal is always what I start out with, and that’s probably the one that’s going to be unreachable, but that’s the one I’m working my crazy to get to. So to identify what your utopia world is, if I had a magic wand, what is that going to look like?

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about what yours is?

Danny Dobrzenski: It’s early retirement. It’s fully funded college funds. It’s the kids, not it’s the kids. They’re four and six now. It’s them working because they want to and what they are passionate about and living a comfortable retirement with my wife. And if creating food content is the way to get there, that’s amazing. Going to, I do it for fun. We talked about this before. It was a hobby, before it was a job, but what I would also like to do is spin my experience off into something that other creators can take advantage of as well, because there’s so much compartmentalized tribal knowledge I think in the content creator community that everybody wins when that’s shared. So to be able to have a place and a way for other people to make money as well is really cool. So when I get to the point of being able to build other people’s businesses, I’ll know that I’ve been a success.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Yeah, I know that it’s, we’re going to talk about that towards the end, this kind of new concept that you’re working on, which I’ll be really interested to hear about. But I know for us, one of the things that’s most valuable from a meaning perspective is hearing from on the food blogger pro side, a food creator who’s like, Hey, this was, I heard something on the podcast and it was super pivotal or learned something within the Food Blogger Pro community and it helped change my business. And it’s like those are the non-tangible but significant things that we get to do as content creators is like impact people’s lives. Similarly, on the pitch of Yum side, if somebody comes up and they’re like, Hey to Lindsay, wouldn’t be to me, I’d maybe be with, but it would be director to Lindsay, like, Hey, you’ve made dinner accessible for our family. We’re able to create, make recipes and put it on the table in a consistent way, then we never were able to do that before. So there definitely is super impactful things that we get the privilege of doing because we are creating content and then amplifying it and reaching it out, spreading it to the world, and then people see that and they consume it. And then a lot of times people take action on that. So tell me a little bit about the moment where you decide, hey, you’re going to work on this full time. Where do you start to focus on, you talked about the website a little bit, you talked about each of the platforms and building those up. And then also I’d be curious to know about Facebook. You kind of alluded to that being a really important piece of the puzzle. So take that where you will and talk to us about those early days of in 2023, starting to focus on building those different platforms. And what did you find worked well?

Danny Dobrzenski: For sure, in my experience of being a content creator for the three years before that experience, as we all do some pretty wild swings in the algorithm, things changing rapidly without much notice, and it can be kind of frustrating. And to what you said earlier, Bjork, you really have to love what you’re doing to stay with this because otherwise the burnout rate is nearly 100% if you’re not. And to be able to have that experience of like, okay, am I really going to be fighting the algorithms for the rest of my life doing this? It’s like, I don’t think so. I don’t want to, it’s the equivalent of a hamster running on a wheel. I just hope things are going to be the same tomorrow as they were today sort of thing. And I’d heard a lot about the importance of a food blog and having recipes posted online for a number of different reasons. So that was on my mind for a lot of time and I just hadn’t had the time before that to do it. So the shift there was, instead of Instagram or social media being my main focus and having everything there, it’s okay. The website cookingintheyard.com is now going to be my main hub for everything. My recipes are going to live there and I’m going to use social media as my driver of traffic to get people there. Facebook was monumental in that because there’s clickable links, there’s no really better way to say it than Facebook gives us clickable links in the captions and the comments that we can drive people to it. So the ability to have my recipe, whether it’s a video or carousel images, I’m still doing some of that with the link to take people directly to the recipe was just absolutely huge. And one of the reasons I believe that my Facebook took off the way it did as well. I went from 5,000 followers or so in 2023 on Facebook to now I’m almost at 700,000. And to be able to provide something to somebody very quick, efficiently and easy is just like saying, Hey, this recipe looks really good. Click this link and you can get all the information and how to make it Was huge. And it was a mind shift of getting everybody to the website. That’s my central hub. I’ve got my cookbooks on there, my ebook, my things that I sell, my affiliate links, et cetera, and building the community around. I’m going to be here almost every day bringing you a new recipe and here’s exactly how you get to it and here’s how you make it. And building that consistency on Facebook as well has been a complete game changer. And monthly, at this point, I’m getting between 70 and 75,000 link clicks per month off of Facebook directly to my website, which has been a tremendous win as that was always a focus of growth, and it still is. I’m looking at growing that every single month. I’m looking at the numbers of it and not trying to get too wrapped up in the metrics, so to speak, because there’s ups and there’s downs and there’s seasonality of it, but making sure that things are generally going in the right direction has really helped.

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Danny Dobrzenski: Absolutely. Well, if I could tell you specifically what the exact formula was, I’d put it in a bottle and sell it, and I would be a very rich person. What I think has worked well for me is consistency of being on the platform and what may not work well for someone else who’s solely focusing on just the Facebook platform has worked well for me in reposting my content on there. So as an example, my wife who talked me into this whole thing in a number of different ways now stays at home, and she’s part of the business as well, and she runs the Facebook and I tell her every day she’s making way more money than I am because she’s in charge of the Facebook account, which is kind of like the keys to the kingdom right now. But I’ll post between 10 and 15 pieces of content per day on Facebook, and that has worke.d

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s images, that’s galleries, that’s video, that’s read

Danny Dobrzenski: Everything, stories, everything is monetized. So I try to take advantage of everything there and 10 to 15 pieces of content per day. And look, they’re not all home runs. I know that, and you can see it in the numbers and so forth. But if I post a repost video that I made a year or two ago and it gets two or 3000 views, well there’s two or 3000 people standing in a room is a lot of people, right? So there’s the link clicks that are coming out of that, going to the website to where it might not make sense for somebody else to do it. It’s worked very well as part of my strategy. And the other part of that is I am getting monetized from Facebook by meta. And to have that ability to double dip on that from the Facebook content to the website also through riv has been huge. And it’s been really great to see grow. Like I said, I don’t know exactly what it is, but reposting, a lot of my content has worked very well thus far. My captions are very, very simple. My caption is recipe, website, link, and that’s it. A lot of people get lost in the comments if you put a recipe link in the comments and you get a thousand comments on there and nobody sees it and then everybody’s upset. So I put it in the caption. Facebook says that the reach may be limited on those. I haven’t experienced that. My good pieces of content that I can say go viral on a regular basis are still going viral. What by doing that as well. So to be able to have that kind of double dipped income there is both amazing, but it’s also kind of terrifying as well because if the first domino goes away,

Bjork Ostrom: It’s centralized.

Danny Dobrzenski: Yeah, exactly right. So that’s where the other avenues come into play of Instagram is a good referral source from me. I use Grocers List to get people from my Instagram post to the recipe, building up Pinterest, which has been a slow burn, but still going. YouTube has been good for me. So really having that well-rounded approach of whatever I do, every piece of content, the number one focus is to get people to see the recipe on my website has paid off so far, and it’s going to be that way for the future until something changes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so when you say reposting on Facebook, you are taking a piece of content that was previously posted that probably performed well, and then what are you functionally doing in the backend when you talk about reposting?

Danny Dobrzenski: So it’s just that simple. It’s taking an old piece of content, putting it on Facebook, assuming that I’ve got it on my website, and then putting that on there with the link. And I’ll post one to two brand new or debut sort of videos per day most days. But the other times it’s reusing content that I’ve already created and having that drive revenue for me as well.

Bjork Ostrom: And so does that content exist twice on Facebook? If you were to scroll back then you’d see six months ago you posted that exact same piece of content. I’m not like a Facebook expert. I’m trying to figure out is there something where you’d go back to the piece of content that was posted let’s say in February of 2025 and it performed well, and so February, 2026 rolls around. Are you finding that piece of content and sharing it to your own page, or is it literally uploading that same piece of content in February again and pressing post?

Danny Dobrzenski: Correct. It’s a brand new post. It’s not a share of the old one. That’s an important distinction, and I’m glad you called that out because Facebook reels, for example, have a monetized shelf life of 90 days. You get the first 90 days of revenue on there, and then if it goes viral on day 91 on that goes to the house basically.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, I didn’t know that. Okay. So when you’re posting content, it’s only is that for all content posted or just reels?

Danny Dobrzenski: It’s just reels. So you can do video posts on Facebook, for example, and get paid on. It’s kind of like the YouTube Wong form algorithm. You can kind of get paid on that for as long as it’s getting views. And it’s interesting, one of the very first videos that I had really pop off on Facebook for one of my recipes that has gone viral a number of times, which is bacon cheeseburger, pickle poppers, love it. It’s a recipe about three years old that I did. And it was about the fourth time that I posted it. And I don’t know what happened this time, what changed or what it was, but it went for about 7 million views as a video post. And that video alone, just off of the views it was getting on Facebook, was paying between like 400 and $500 per month that I had posted six months ago. So yeah, there’s some strategy that goes around that as well. And making sure you’re filling all your monetized buckets on Facebook.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about that? And Facebook just recently changed how they are. Facebook is so confusing, like meta in general, if I get into that meta dashboard, I’m just like, maybe I’m going to go do laundry. It’s so overwhelming. So there’s the monetization, let’s just talk about Facebook right now. So they just recently changed how they’re monetizing. It used to be by medium, so it was stories and then reels and images. Now it’s all just one thing. It’s under one program. All of your content is monetized as long as you’re a part of that program. Is that right? Or how would you explain it to people who aren’t familiar with it?

Danny Dobrzenski: It, it was a change. It almost seemed like it was more of a marketing change for them though, because while they’re in the previous world was you’re paid on your images, you’re paid on your reels, you’re paid on your posts, et cetera. Now they call it content monetization. And when you click into that, you see a dollar amount for your reels, your posts, your images, and your things that are on there. So really it just seemed like it was just kind of a rebrand for meta themselves and what they’re calling the program. And you read things online of like, well, I made less and people complaining about the change and so forth. For me, it pretty much stayed the same. I didn’t really see a huge launching pad off of it and it didn’t drop any. So yeah, from a monetization standpoint, really it’s pretty much business as usual. And then it’s a matter of making sure that you’re trying to maximize each individual bucket underneath that.

Bjork Ostrom: And when you talk about the buckets, what you’re talking about is the different medium content, medium like reels, what would they all be? Stories, reels, images, video, which reel is technically a video. But

Danny Dobrzenski: Yeah, there are nomenclature on it. It leaves a little to be desired. They call it a post. So you can post a video as a post Or you can post images as a post and why they’ve left it that way and not just all gone the reels or what is well beyond me, but there is some strategy in Facebook specifically, and I think it’s a good thing to talk about of how so many link clicks have gone to the website. And when I record a piece of content, I’m getting three edits out of it. I make three pieces of content for everything that I record in my kitchen or out by my grill. I get a three minute-ish long cut for it, which those do really well on the Facebook posts. So I’ll post that three minute video as a post and Facebook seems to really pushing those. I’ll take that three minutes and do an ASMR post where there’s no voiceover on it. And then I’ll do another voiceover post and I’ll post that maybe a week later. So there’s that one, and then I’ll do a 30 to 40 second reel from there. That’s another, and that’s also the one that’ll usually go to Instagram, and that’s also part of my strategy. And then the shorter one, I’ll get a 15 to 20 second just quick cut, quick shot, ASMR edit done. And those are the ones that ultimately end up driving the most traffic to the website because it builds curiosity. And one of my intention with that was when I first started doing those and how I’ve had to evolve is I thought those videos were just going to be a little bit of a teaser. Like, Hey, here’s the teaser of the video that I’m going to be launching next week or on Thursday, get excited about it, be ready, it’s coming. And what I learned was those went viral at an incredibly higher rate and drove a ton more links or clicks to the website. Just because you’re building that curiosity, you’re not necessarily saying, Hey, I’m pouring two tablespoons of salt into this recipe right now. You just see me dumping something in there and it drives that traffic from the platform to the website. So I’ve really been intentional about maximizing my time and the efficiency that I’m bringing to this as well in that I’m ultimately getting six posts, six pieces of content that I can put on social media every time I go cook a steak or wrap something in bacon and smoke it, that sort of thing. So the efficiency part of it has been huge as well. And that’s one of the things I’ve learned probably the most in being this business owner is that unfortunately we only have 24 hours in the day to work with and eight of those if we’re lucky or spent sleeping, and then we’ve got family time, et cetera. So being able to manage the hours that I have to get things done, it’s always a matter of can I get things done quicker and more efficient while still producing the same or nearly the same level of quality of content that people expect from me?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think there’s something around general quality of content. Are you producing something that is engaging, interesting? Is there a strong hook? There’s kind of the art of it. And then there’s the side that’s a little bit more science, which is like what is your syndication strategy? How are you getting multiple pieces of content? How are you thinking strategically around reposting this to multiple platforms and that it feels like people talk about tips and tactics only go so far. But I think actually once you nail the content side of it, the tips and the tactics can actually be a huge multiplier because so much of what we’re doing is repurposing content, it’s reediting content, so it’s a little bit different and it works better on different platforms. So when you talk about having those three different types of videos, like a shorter ASMR, a longer three minute video and then a shorter reel on Facebook, is that just for Facebook that you’re doing those specific types of contents? Or would you also then post the same recipe with different types of video like on Instagram and TikTok?

Danny Dobrzenski: So it has been Facebook pretty much solely up to this point, but I’m going to start moving some of those other cuts over to Instagram as well. Now, one of the interesting things about me specifically is that for whatever reason, I’ve never monetized on Instagram at all. When Adam says, well, we can’t pay every creator out there because we run out of money. Well, I’m part of that every creator bucket. So my strategy on Instagram is that of which I’m there for brand deals. That’s where the brands are living. That’s where they want to see advertising done. So my content on Instagram has been very brand friendly and I make it an intent to do that. I’m showing a lot of labels of products and I’m being very intentional, even if it’s

Bjork Ostrom: Not a brand deal or using your platform in a way that brands are present. So a brand can see it, but also probably so that audience is used to it.

Danny Dobrzenski: Yeah, exactly right. So that this way when that brand deal does come along and I’m showing you the bottle of seasoning, it doesn’t feel too foreign. It doesn’t feel like it’s something completely out of the blue. But the other side of that too is as I’m making the organic content that goes on there, I want a brand to say, oh, okay, this is a guy that he’s going to show off our product. And there’s no screaming about politics or religion or anything else on there. It’s all food all the time. And I wanted to create kind of that safe haven for brands to come to me on Instagram. So that’s been the focus for there and the style of content that I put on there thus far.

Bjork Ostrom: How about TikTok? Is that kind of brand focused or, I know TikTok has some kind of monetization arms that they have as well. What does that look like for

Danny Dobrzenski: You? It does. So TikTok is more about the process. The minute plus videos that you have to have for TikTok to be monetized there, kind of lend a different feel to the videos. And if I was to record the same voiceover for my 22nd short video to the one minute TikTok video, it just doesn’t work. So I had to really adapt my, not only my strategy, but my personality to be able to slow things down, explain things in more detail. And TikTok has changed a lot over time. And it’s one of those things where it was my number one at one point, but now it’s moved down the priority list. I still post content on there. And

Bjork Ostrom: Number one, in what way?

Danny Dobrzenski: From a platform perspective, I put a lot

Bjork Ostrom: Of the importance of the platform, correct? Yeah. Why has it moved down?

Danny Dobrzenski: It’s because it’s not monetized as well as the others. Facebook is way more important to me than TikTok is because I can drive a ton of traffic to my website where I can’t do that on TikTok every once in a while. If I have a TikTok video go wildly viral, I’ll see my Google Analytics numbers spike during that day or two while that’s going viral. But there’s not a way for people to get directly from TikTok to the website, so it’s not as valuable from that perspective. Well, I should say from the recipe to my website, you can go to my bio and click the link there, but I found that a lot of people just simply don’t do that. If is there for them to click right there, they will click right there.

Bjork Ostrom: So can you give the current order of importance when you think about the different platforms? Sounds like Facebook is pretty high up there.

Danny Dobrzenski: Yeah, Facebook is number one at this point, and if we sit down a year from now and do this again, it might be completely different. But Facebook is number one because of the monetization that lives within the platform. Also the referrals to the website. Instagram is my second at this point because it’s the place where for brand deals and sponsorship opportunities. And then from there, TikTok would be probably third at this point. We talked about YouTube. Shorts has always been a challenge for me, but that’s beginning to come around Right now. I’m about to hit 20,000 followers or subscribers on YouTube and then trying to start and grow a Pinterest footprint as well. So that’s kind of my order from one to five at this point.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. That last question on the social media side of things, are you scheduling this or in what app are you using? Can you talk about your social media stack for software tools that you use and things that you do to help make it all easier?

Danny Dobrzenski: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t use any to be very honest with you. And part of that is, I don’t know if this is still the case, but back when I first started up in the first couple of years, if you used any sort of app or plugin or anything to plug into your Instagram or your Facebook and your reach got shut down or your account got shadow banned or whatever the term was at the time. So I’ve gotten into this rhythm now of doing everything manually. Like I said, my wife Chanel runs the Facebook account, which is the biggest chunk of time. So I’ve bought back my time there with that. I never really like the Instagram scheduler, so I do that manually just to make sure that goes off without a hitch. I think really as far as software for Instagram at this point, I’m using groceries list, like I said, to get people from the recipe to the website. But really that’s about it. I track follower growth and that sort of thing kind of by hand in a spreadsheet. I’ll go in and update it monthly or every so often and just keep track of things like that. But for the large part, it’s done manually.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. I love that. And I think oftentimes I’ll hear from people who are like, Hey, this is just me showing up and doing it every day. I think of my friend who’s been consistently going to the gym and working out every day and I’m like, what do you use to track it? What app do you use? And he showed me this picture of his really crusty old notebook. It’s just like a $3 notebook that he uses and that’s what he tracks his workouts with. And I think it doesn’t have to be fancy in order for it to be successful. And I think the other thing that it actually does is it puts you inside of the app in a way where if you get too far outside of any app, I think you kind of lose the understanding of what’s happening within it to have a feel for content that’s performing well or even different types of media that they’re prioritizing because of where it is. And it just feels like if you want to get good at a thing, it’s best to be in the thing that you are wanting to get good at. So makes a lot of sense.

Danny Dobrzenski: I agree.

Bjork Ostrom: I wanted to just because we said we were going to touch on it real quick, the buyback your time. Is there anything from learning that, reading that book that you’ve learned? And maybe you can just talk a little bit about what does an average day look like for you as a full-time content creator?

Danny Dobrzenski: Buy Back Your Time was one of the most pivotal, I think, moments of my business career. Going through that and learning the lessons there, and the biggest thing that came out of that is that this business is my baby. I’ve started it from zero. I never intended it to be a business or to grow the way it has. So I want to be very protective of what I’m doing in my brand and so forth. That’s why my wife runs my Facebook because there’s no way in the world I could trust anybody else to do that sort of thing. What Dan Martel tells us is that that’s pretty normal. Their business is their baby and they expect a certain level of work, level of quality to be put into that, and that’s something that we need to kind of loosen our grip on a little bit. And he says 80% is the number that you’re shooting for. So if you’re able to buy back your time, meaning that you’re having somebody do one of the tasks that doesn’t excite you and they’re doing it to a level that’s at 80% of where you are personally, if you were doing it, then that’s really good. And to be okay with that and not have to turn every wrench to get every thing to be exactly the way you want it to. And so I’m reaching for analogies like we did before here, but the other ranch,

Bjork Ostrom: I see it.

Danny Dobrzenski: To see the work being done and the things that need to be checked off and using that as a force multiplier to be able to grow the business is really, really big. And speaking of the business aspect of it and learning, there was another book that was just as pivotal, which was The Psychology of Money. And when I read that book, it was more of, that wasn’t the time when I was like, is this really going to work? It seems like we’re spending more money than we’re making and yada yada, and how to think about the money coming in versus the money going out. And one of the quotes that was in that book that I live by, it’s really, really important. Morgan Housel is the author of this.

Bjork Ostrom: He’s got a great podcast as well.

Danny Dobrzenski: Absolutely. And the quote was, nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems in that moment. So you have a video go viral that gets 10 million views that good, stay grounded because next week it might be on the other end of the roller coaster. So keeping that middle ground and never really getting too high or too low, but just staying the course and knocking out those goals and things that need to be done is really how things get accomplished. So going back to your question about buying back your time, I really do focus on the things that I hate. There’s a lot of the little minutia of the business that just absolutely just drains my energy and it’s not creative focused and it’s admin work and other people do really well at that and those sorts of things. So that’s what I’m looking to offload. And at this point, my day to day is creating content, researching recipes and working on the blog. And that’s what I like. I’m drilling down to the areas that I get really excited about and to be able to have still all that other work done and those other things going on while I’m doing only the things that I’m excited about and just overseeing the others has been huge. And one really good example of that is editing my videos. I found a really good editor now that I like to use for almost all my content to where I never could have imagined doing that in the past. The edits, especially on social media, it’s a really important part of getting videos to go viral and keeping people’s attention and building the hook and the rehook three seconds later, et cetera. And that was always the biggest energy drain for me. It’s 10 o’clock at night, the house is quiet, wife and kids are asleep, but I’m up editing videos for a couple hours and it’s just like, this isn’t sustainable. So I was able, it took some time and it took some training and so forth, but to be able to find someone to do that has been huge. And I’m looking to continue to emulate that in other parts of the business as well.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I think one of the things that we don’t do is give ourselves as much time as we would with other skills. When we get into the world of working with somebody on a creative endeavor, whether it be video editing or drafting emails that they’re going to send out or working together in whatever capacity, I think oftentimes we expect it to click sooner than we think that it should. And not that you would if it’s not going well, that you should stick with it. But I think the point is, if you have a couple experiences that don’t go well, that doesn’t mean that it won’t continue to go well. You just need to figure out, okay, what didn’t go well in that last experience? How do I shift? How do I change? How could I make it better? And over time, you’ll start to figure out how you want to work with people, how you best work with people, because it really is such an impactful thing that helps for the long-term you to continue to show up and continue to create every day, which is really what it’s all about. Exactly. Right. Before we close out, tell me a little bit about this new endeavor that you have here. It sounds like you’re working on a new site based on some of the things that you’ve learned and would just love to have you have the opportunity to do a little shout out for that, as it sounds like a new creative endeavor, experiment, whatever you might want to call it. So what is that?

Danny Dobrzenski: Yeah, I appreciate it. It’s called TrustMeTryIt.com. And what I’m doing here, as I talked about before, really trying to impact others and help other people grow their businesses. The problem for creators and specifically food creators, as you’re well aware, it’s been talked about a number of times on the show, is if you don’t have the technical acumen or you don’t have the budget to get a website started and built when you don’t have the time to learn it, that is a barrier of entry to a really nice revenue stream. And the flip side of that is there’s people who have really great ideas and really great content that are sitting collecting dust that’s not being monetized and making the money. And there are creators that work a hundred hours a week to get a blog up and running and never are able to get enough traffic to get it monetized. Well, what I’ve done is I’ve created a blog that is contributor driven and I’ve got it monetized, and when creators post their recipes through a simple form to the site, then it gets loaded up. I’ve got a team that’s working on that. We’re going to do the blog writing, we’re going to format it, we’re going to edit it all. So it’s a very low touch from a creator’s perspective. They submit their information, it goes on the blog, and then there’s a revenue share that’s done with that. So people who haven’t had the opportunity, or for whatever reason, any of those other barriers of entry into having monetized blog content and revenue coming in there, I want to offer them a way to do that and to see that money come in right away from the content that they’ve been making.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Yeah, it’s one of the things that we see a lot, which is people are creating a ton of content for social media, but they don’t have a site that they’re posting it to. And to your point, the technical lift with that is pretty significant. I think of actually Leslie, who was on the podcast years ago, she has a site called Her View from Home, and it’s all about, it’s what’s the tagline for it? It’s like for moms, it’s a site for moms and talking about all the different aspects, everything from little kids to kids transitioning in college, grief, marriage, all of those things, but it’s contributor driven, and so kind of in that same way, she knew that there’s a lot of really skilled writers who didn’t necessarily want build their own thing. The other thing is, if you’re able to post to a platform with a preexisting audience, there’s a benefit to that, and so that’s cool. If people wanted to check it out. I know that it’s kind of in the building stage right now, but if people wanted to follow along or learn more about it, would they just go to the website? We can link you it in the show notes.

Danny Dobrzenski: Yeah, absolutely. TrustMeTryIt.com and everything will be up and running. I’m sure by the time the show airs, I do actually already have a waiting list of content creators that are wanting to be on there. I’m wanting to be really intentional about the way I release it and the way I scale it. I want to do it slow and I want to do it right and make sure that it’s a success for everybody involved, so I’m going to be scaling it pretty slow, so if you want to put your name on the list for more information, go there, put your email in, and we’ll get you info and let you know when the bigger rollout’s going to be.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Danny, great to talk with you. We’ll have to have another conversation here down the line after all the algorithms change and things switch around and kind of a state of social media as you continue to grow on all the different platforms and to do what you’re doing so well. So thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Danny Dobrzenski: Thanks, Bjork. It’s been a pleasure. Talk to you soon.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. We are kicking off the month of September, which means I am here to fill you in on what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership. This month we are kicking off the month with a new Coaching Call that will go live on Thursday, September 4th, and this is with Mish Sen from the food blog Eats with Mish. Next up, we’ll have a brand new course that goes live on Thursday, September 18th. Natalie will be covering everything you need to know about how to write an effective about page for your food blog. Now, more than ever, it’s really important to have an about page that shows who you are, explains your brand and your niche, what problems you can solve for your readers, and just what everyone can expect from your blog. Last up, we are hosting a public webinar with Grocers List on Thursday, September 25th. This webinar is all about unlocking new revenue streams as a creator, and Bjork and Ben from Grocer’s List will be talking about all of the latest tools that can empower creators to earn even more money from their content. If you are interested in signing up for that webinar, you can head to the show notes for this podcast episode and click on the link to register for free. If you’re a Food Blogger Pro member, you already have access to the Q&A. You can just head to the Live page within the membership to add the event to your calendar and submit questions in advance. It’s going to be a great month. We’re really excited about all the content we have coming up. If you’re not yet a Food Blogger Pro member, you can always head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more about the membership and join us. That’s it for this week. We’ll see you again next week for a brand new podcast episode. Make it a great week.