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119: How an Accidental Entrepreneur went from $0 to $80,000 in Five Months with Brian Gardner

Welcome to episode 119 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork talks with Brian Gardner from StudioPress about building his business, dealing with competition, and practicing minimalism.

Brian was the pioneer of premium WordPress themes, and it happened a bit by accident. He was balancing a full-time job and his WordPress theme business at the same time. But once he realized that it would be “financially irresponsible” to work both jobs, he decided to jump head-first into his WordPress business.

From there Brian built StudioPress, which powers over 500,000 WordPress sites with its Genesis Framework. Learn how he dealt with competition, how he built his business, and why it’s helpful to use a framework and child theme for your blog.

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095: How Embracing the Mess Propelled a Career with Jillian Tohber Leslie from MiloTree

Welcome to episode 95 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! In this episode, Bjork interviews Jillian Tohber Leslie from Catch My Party and MiloTree about making successful career changes by embracing the mess.

Last week, Bjork talked about 5 techniques you can use to keep gooing when you’re feeling overwhelmed with your blog. To go back and listen to that episode, click here.

Embrace The Mess

As with life, business isn’t always pretty. No matter how put-together someone’s business looks from the outside, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ve had their own fair share of messy affairs to deal with in their business.

Jillian Tohber Leslie learned early in her career that the key to moving forward was embracing this messiness and using it to help propel her career and her businesses forward. She and her husband started Catch My Party, the largest party ideas site on the web, and went on to found MiloTree, a social and email growth popup that’s perfect for bloggers.

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091: Optimizing Recipes for SEO with Joost De Valk from Yoast SEO

Welcome to episode 91 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week, Bjork interviews Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast SEO, about optimizing SEO for your food blog.

SEO is something we bloggers hear a LOT about. It’s so important! But it can also be really confusing, even with the abundance of information out there.

Fortunately, there are tools such as the Yoast SEO plugin to help us navigate this often confusing landscape. Yoast SEO was founded by Joost de Valk and is one of the most popular WordPress plugins in use today. That’s… kind of a big deal. Joost met with Bjork for this interview to discuss a wide range of SEO topics, including why SEO matters for your recipes and how you can optimize it.

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077: How To Stay Inspired by Using New Tech with Joel Comm

Welcome to episode 77 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week, Bjork interviews Joel Comm about how embracing trending technologies has kept his business fresh.

In the internet world, things move at a very fast pace and new technology – think social platforms, media, and gadgets – come out all the time. So do you jump on the bandwagon and try these new technologies, or wait until they’re vetted by others?

Joel Comm has found that trying new technologies not only increases your chance of success (just think about his iPhone app that went to the top!), but that it can also help you stay inspired with your business.

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076: Using Analytics to Build Your Blog with Jeff Sauer from Jeffalytics

Welcome to episode 76 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week, Bjork chats with Jeff Saur from Jeffalytics.com about how you can use Analytics to increase your chances for blog success.

Oftentimes, when new bloggers start blogging, the only stat they really care about is whether or not their content is being seen by someone.It’s satisfying to see the first day we get 50 pageviews, or 100, or even 1,000. We check our analytics to make sure our content is getting seen.

However, Analytics can be much more powerful than this. Used correctly, they can help you generate ideas for content, show you what’s really working, and help you guide your business overall. In short, proper use of Analytics can really help you accelerate your blog and business.

Jeff Sauer has made his career out of helping people use Google Analytics. Today, he’s here to give us some of his best tips.

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075: How To Effectively Share Your Content on Social with Garrett Moon from CoSchedule

Welcome to episode 75 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week, Bjork chats with Garrett Moon, cofounder of the popular social media and editorial planning tool CoSchedule.

When it comes to blogging, there is a lot more to do than it would initially appear. Not only do you have to create content, you have to plan it out (preferably well in advance) and promote it after it’s done (preferably for a long time after).

Keeping tabs on everything you need to do – including promoting it now, in a couple weeks, and around those holidays when it would make good shareable content – can be really tough. So, Garrett and his cofounder Justin created CoSchedule to make this process easier. Along the way, they discovered some unique insights into the world of social sharing.

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057: Viral List Building with Josh Ledgard from KickoffLabs

Welcome to episode 57 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! In this episode, Bjork interviews Kickoff Labs founder Josh Ledgard about finding the right idea and growing your audience.

Josh Ledgard started his entrepreneurial journey while still working at Microsoft – he would start projects, bring them in, and then gain support for the project from his superiors. He then slowly and methodically planned to start his own business, saving up money for a year and dreaming up big ideas.

The business he and his cofounder eventually started was not one of their original ideas. Instead, they “happened upon” a product that people really wanted to use, and they ran with it. Learn more about Josh, his awesome story, and their amazing marketing product, Kickoff Labs, in this enlightening interview.

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041: Ninja Email Marketing for Bloggers with Barry Moore from The Active Marketer

Welcome to episode 41 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! In this episode, talks with Barry Morre, an expert in email marketing.

Have you ever received an email and thought “Wow! That was just what I needed to hear right now. How did they know?”

To put it simply, whoever sent that email to you at the exact time you needed to hear it is practicing something called Ninja Email Marketing, and it’s definitely something you want to get familiar with real quick.

In this episode, Barry Moore from TheActiveMarketer.com talks about some ninja techniques for email marketing and how they can change the way you see your website visitors and customers – and how they see you.

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026: How Pinterest Analytics can Boost your Blog with Kate Ahl from Simple Pin Media

Welcome to episode 26 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week marks the 6th month anniversary of the FBP podcast – so exciting! We’ve learned so much in the last 6 months, and we’ve really loved sharing it with all of you. Thank you thank you for being our loyal subscriber!

This week on the podcast, Bjork is talking with Kate Ahl from Simple Pin Media about Pinterest!

For most bloggers (myself included), Pinterest Analytics are really just used as a comparison tool – how the blog did this week versus last week. However, Kate from Simple Pin Media specializes in digging deep into Pinterest Analytics to really see what works – and then she coaches her clients on how to use that information to grow their blogs.

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020: How to Secure Your Food Blog with Andrew Wilder from Blog Tutor

Welcome back to the Food Blogger Pro podcast! In this episode, Bjork talks with Andrew Wilder from Blog Tutor about blog security.

When you’re starting and maintaining your food blog, there are so many things to do. From getting your website designed just right to making that batch of double chocolate cookies 5 times to make it perfect, a food blogger pretty much always has a full plate (har har).

So when someone tells you that you should take some of your precious, precious time and use it to create strong passwords and back up your blog, I’ll admit that I’m not the first person to jump up and down in excitement.

However, these things are so, so important. It only takes one small event – which are often caused by factors out of your control – to bring your blog down. And if you don’t have it all backed up, you could lose all of your hard work just like that.

Andrew Wilder specializes in blog security, and today he’s here to tell us what we need to do to make sure our blogs are safe from both intentional and unintentional harm.

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