108: From Struggling Podcast to Six-Figure Success with Natalie Eckdahl

Welcome to episode 108 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork talks to Natalie Eckdahl about growing her podcast into a six-figure success.

“If you build it, they will come.” That’s what Natalie thought of her audience when she first built her podcast back in 2014.

While that wasn’t exactly the case, Natalie started to understand her audience and quickly grew her struggling podcast, The Biz Chix Podcast, to a six-figure business.

Along the way, Natalie has coached many different types of women entrepreneurs, and she has learned about their struggles, issues, and tools for success. The lessons she has learned helps her educate, encourage and promote entrepreneurial women looking to grow their businesses.

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107: How to Go Viral, Kill Your Blog, and Start Over with Sarah Wu

Welcome to episode 107 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork talks to Sarah Wu about her viral blog and why “going viral” quickly might not be the best thing for everyone.

Going viral. It’s the dream for all bloggers, right?

Not exactly.

Sarah Wu experienced what it’s like to have a viral blog early in her blogging career. She was featured on news outlets like Good Morning America, AOL, and Yahoo, saw her page views quickly grow, and started getting more comments. However, going viral wasn’t what was best for Sarah and her blog about school lunches.

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106: Discovering Your Unique Brand with Carol Cox

Welcome to episode 106 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork talks to Carol Cox about refining your brand and sharing your story.

How would you define your brand?

It’s an interesting and important question to answer about your business. Carol, however, thinks its even more important to gauge how your audience defines your brand.

Once you understand that, you can then refine your brand and use your expertise to support your audience. Carol’s advice will show you how you can help your readers by choosing the stories you share and the niche you pick.

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105: How Food Bloggers Use Courses to Build their Businesses with Randle Browning

Welcome to episode 105 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork talks to Randle Browning about creating courses to generate income and leads.

What are you an expert at? Maybe it’s cake decorating. Or maybe it’s vegan cooking. Or perhaps it’s cooking with the ever-so popular Instant Pot.

Regardless, you can make a course about it. And building that course is a great way to build your online presence and business.

Randle Browning works for Teachable, a site that helps you build and sell your own online courses. She has so many tips that will help you pick the perfect course topic, create your course, and then successfully launch your course.

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104: How Bloggers Should Handle Their Taxes and Accounting with Cathy Derus

Welcome to episode 104 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork talks to Cathy Derus about tax advice for bloggers.

Photographing, cooking, connecting, writing…these are typically the aspects of blogging we all love. Cathy, on the other hand, loves spreadsheets, tracking expenses, and talking to other bloggers about taxes.

Cathy started her businesses, Brightwater Financial and Brightwater Accounting, as a way to help small business owners like bloggers navigate the confusing tax side of their businesses. It’s a topic that is incredibly important for all bloggers to understand, and Cathy’s goal is to make the process a little easier. From setting up a bank account for your business to tracking expenses, this episode is a crash-course to understanding taxes and accounting.

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102: Write More, Write Better, and Write Smarter with Gabriela Pereira

Welcome to episode 102 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork talks to Gabriela Pereira about becoming a better writer and building a community around your writing.

Gabriela got her MFA in 2010, and after she graduated, she realized that a lot of people don’t actually need a formal education process in order to write. If you give yourself permission to own your creativity and writing, and if you learn a few key skills along the way, you can be a writer.

She started DIY MFA to teach others how they can do exactly that.

By focusing on the work at hand, Gabriela has been able to practice, evaluate, and fine-tune her craft and teach others how to do the same. Gabriela’s strategies about finding the right writing system, tracking productivity, staying inspired, and understanding strengths and weaknesses all play into finding one’s voice and writing style.

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101: What I Learned After Five Years of Income Reports with Bjork Ostrom

Welcome to episode 101 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork talks about the lessons he learned after five years of publishing Income Reports on Pinch of Yum.

The Pinch of Yum Income Reports chronicle the experiment Bjork and Lindsay started as a way to find out if it was possible to create an income from a food blog.

Spoiler alert: It is.

After five years of publishing these income reports and sharing the process of turning Pinch of Yum into a business, Bjork has learned quite a few lessons. From learning to trust his gut to building their own path to learning how to learn, the 20 lessons Bjork discusses will help anyone in pursuit of starting their own business and becoming their own boss.

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094: How to Keep Going with Bjork Ostrom

a headshot of Bjork Ostrom and the title of this podcast episode, How to Keep Going

Welcome to episode 94 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! In this episode, Bjork talks about how to keep going when you’re not sure you can continue.

Whether you’ve been blogging for a few months or a few years, you’ve no doubt had the thought at some point or another: How do I keep going?

Blogging can be tough. You might be fitting it in after your regular full-time job hours. You might be running your blog as a business with not enough hours in the day. You might be juggling it on the side while trying to raise a family. Whatever your situation, you’ve likely found out that blogging isn’t easy, and on some days it’s tough to imagine how you’ll keep it up.

Today, Bjork talks about some techniques that he and Lindsay have used in their businesses to help them get up in the morning and do The Work.

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089: How to Build a Plane with Alexa, Jasmine & Raquel from Food Blogger Pro

Welcome to episode 89 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week, Bjork interviews FBP team members Alexa, Jasmine, and Raquel about what goes on behind the scenes, and what they’ve learned about blogging during their time as FBP employees.

Alright, alright. This episode is not really about building a plane. Not a real one, at least! But “building a plane” is an analogy we use nearing the end of the episode when we talk about the most important advice we would give to new (or experienced) bloggers. This advice is so important, in my humble opinion, that I’m wiling to give you a free pass and tell you to skip right to the end if you only have 5 minutes to listen.

If you’ve got more than 5 minutes, settle on in for a listen about how we run Food Blogger Pro behind the scenes, and how you can use the same tools, processes, and techniques as we do to take your blog to the next level.

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088: How We Run Pinch of Yum with Alana Woolley & Jenna Arend

Welcome to episode 88 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week, Bjork interviews two key Pinch of Yum employees, Alana Woolley and Jenna Arend, about what goes on behind the scenes of Pinch of Yum.

If you’re not a food blogger, it might seem like it’s a job that would be easy to do in your free time. If you are a food blogger, you know that there’s way more time that goes into it than that!

Many people are surprised to hear that Pinch of Yum employs a team of people, 3 of whom work full-time, to keep the blog up and running. Alana and Jenna are two of those people – Alana is the Pinch of Yum Video Specialist, and Jenna is the Pinch of Yum Office Manager. Today, they’re here to break it down for us and talk about how it all works.

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