Food Blogging News Roundtable: Core Updates, GEO, and Content Syndication

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Ann Morrissey: Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I’m Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team, and this week we’re doing things a little differently and introducing a new voice and format. For the first time, we’re welcoming Emily Walker, the Associate General Manager of Food Blogger Pro, to the podcast to chat with Bjork about the latest news and trends shared in the blogging newsletter that went out last week. Emily is the engine that keeps our small but mighty team running, and if you’re listening to this, chances are you’ve interacted with her in the forum before, read one of her blog posts, or you’ve even seen her pop into your email inbox to share the latest FBP happenings if you missed a newsletter or just want a quick engaging way to get caught up. This episode is a great way to be briefed on the most recent blogging developments and why they matter for food bloggers. From Google’s most recent core update to how AI is showing up in content creation plus tips for expanding your reach across platforms like LinkedIn and Threads. It’s a super informative conversation, full of insights you can start to use right away. And since this is a brand new format for us, we’d love to hear what you think. If you enjoy the style of episode and want to hear more like it, let us know. Your feedback helps shape what we create next. And now without further ado, I’ll pass it over to Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Emily, welcome to the podcast.

Emily Walker: Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be on the other side of this.

Bjork Ostrom: This is just all time excited for me. I saw this, I’m oftentimes most of the time excited to get on a podcast interview with people, but especially excited about this because you have never been on the podcast before, but you are in the Food Blocker Pro team. Really the way that the podcast exists, you’re a team member, you keep the trains running, all of this critical stuff that’s happening behind the scenes, and now we’re going to do a podcast together. So welcome. How are you feeling about it?

Emily Walker: It’s great. It’s weird to be on the other side of this. I hope you don’t regret it already, but I’m really happy to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: So far it’s going really well.

Emily Walker: I’ll sign off.

Bjork Ostrom: Outstanding. Just real quick, give us a little bit of a background. Where’s home for you? Maybe some of the stuff that you do day to day with Food Blogger Pro your family to the degree that you’re willing to share. Give us a little background and then we can jump into some of the news.

Emily Walker: Sure. So I currently live in the East Bay area, California. We moved out here a couple years ago for my husband’s job, and I have two little kiddos, Theo, who’s about to turn five, and Ramona, who’s a little over one. My background before Food Blogger Pro, I have a degree as a registered dietician and a master’s in nutrition. I worked on the clinical side for a while in hospitals at a cystic fibrosis clinic and then joined Food Blogger Pro three years ago, which is crazy. Before I became a registered dietician, I worked in marketing and communications. So this is kind of the perfect combination of all of my interests. In addition to being the Associate General Manager of Food Blogger Pro, I work with food bloggers on the side, helping write emails, write blog posts, manage social media, that kind of thing. So yeah, I just really love food blogging and yeah, I love this job, so I’m happy to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: And now podcast is on the resume as well. Yes, you have this great skillset of all of the different things that we talk about. Food, you talked about communication, marketing, and one of the things that you work on is compiling like, Hey, what’s the relevant news and information that’s happening from an industry standpoint? It’s something that I am always curious about, always listening to, whether it’s articles, podcasts, I feel like it’s an important piece for us, not only from the perspective of me doing a podcast for Food Blogger Pro, but also and maybe most importantly for the perspective of Pinch of Yum, because we need to know what’s happening and how the industry is shifting and what information is coming out. And one of the ways you can do that is read articles. But I’ve always found personally, it’s always fun to hear people who are in the industry talking about it. And so what does that mean? What do you do with that information? You have this news. One of the perspective we’ve always taken is you take a new account, you understand it, you are aware of it. It doesn’t necessarily mean some news comes out about AI and the changes that might be coming down the road for ai. It’s not necessarily like you redirect the ships and everything that you do focuses on AI right now, but I think it’s important to know and have that understanding in your back pocket around what is happening within the industry so you’re aware of it and when those shifts and nudges do happen that you’re not caught off guard. So our hope for this is for the people who are creating food content, how can we have a conversation around the relevant news that is happening in the industry? So you can be aware of it, you can put it in your back pocket, maybe you can take it out when the time is needed and make those changes and shifts and adjustments. But generally awareness around what’s happening I think is really important. Anything that you’d add to that that you feel like is important or even your process in curating some of these stories that we’re going to talk about.

Emily Walker: So there may be some podcast listeners who aren’t on our email list, A good reminder to join it, join if you aren’t. And we send out a blogging newsletter once or twice a month with usually four to six news items and then our brief summary or recap of that news article or whatever it may be. I get newsletters from I’m sure the same sources a lot of listeners do, Search Engine Journal, Ahrefs, all that good stuff, and Tastemaker and TopHatRank everything. And whenever something really piques my interest or I think that there’s an article that might be especially valuable, I bookmark it and then we include it in the newsletter. So I mean, lately a lot of those topics are AI or social media, SEO stuff that the stuff that’s always kind of been in the news and hopefully it’s a nice little distilled email of this is what you should know if you don’t have the time to be reading all of those other newsletters or whatever it may be, just to keep, like you said, in your back pocket. And

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a great thing about curating those. You think of Search Engine Journal, Hey, great resource. They’re also going to talk about the impact of local SEO for the most recent release of this core update. And it’s like, this is kind of interesting. It doesn’t really apply if you’re a recipe site. And so curating those, surfacing that information for people who are food creators, and then now we’ll have conversations about ’em as well, which is kind of fun. So let’s talk through that and jump into this first article. Marie Haynes is a well-known publisher creator influencer in the world of SEO. Frame this one up a little bit and then we can dive in and talk about it.

Emily Walker: Sure. So as I would bet most of you’re aware, there was a Google Core update that started at the end of June, June and ran through mid-July, I think it seems to have rolled up or ended on July 17th. This core update seemed to have a pretty good outcome for a lot of food bloggers. And Marie Haynes has a really thorough article. I do recommend reading it where she kind of analyzes what sites seem to perform better in the update and what common features they had. And you’ll see this is kind of a theme in the newsletter that strong eat the experience, expertise, and trust me,

Bjork Ostrom: It used to just be EAT, which is great, and it was for all sites, not just food sites.

Emily Walker: And

Bjork Ostrom: Then they’re like, we’re going to add one and we’re going to call it long eat EEAT. Yeah,

Emily Walker: Not quite as catchy, doesn’t really roll off the tongue, but that sites that had strong EEAT indicators seem to have ranking increases because of this core update. So in Marie Haynes’s article, she summarized what kind of the main factors that I think, and these are the ones I think are especially relevant to food bloggers and what you can include in your blog posts if you didn’t see a ranking increase or just what to focus on this year. And it was firsthand experience. So personal stories, anecdotes, tips of you preparing the recipe, maybe even something about your recipe testing process, that kind of thing. Useful visuals, so step-by-step photos, things that most food creators are already including in their content. Maybe like a how-to guide for how you prepared the ingredients or charts of how much each ingredient in a recipe cost, that kind of thing. An FAQ block, this is nothing new. And then an easy to navigate structure, which I think is coming up. I’m seeing more and more people mention the importance of blog post structure and website structure, especially for AI pulling from your site. And so anyways, those were kind of her takeaways of things to focus on after this core update and it was really useful, so I recommend it.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s something like this helpful to frame it up. So a core update rolls out core update meaning significant update for Google, and you talked about kind of the period that it rolls out. It doesn’t just happen in one day. It’s not like a light switch. It’s more of, I don’t know, we’re in the middle of a kitchen edition project. It happens over time. And same thing for these core updates. So you might hear some people say, oh, I logged in and I saw all these changes in my keywords, and then somebody else logs in and they’re like, oh, well, it didn’t happen for me. It might not happen until the core update is completely rolled out. A lot of times Google will just say, here’s when it’s happening, here’s when it starts, here’s when it ends. Then for people like Marie who are experts in this, they can go through and look and see maybe there’s sites that they work with and that they manage and have access to Google Search console or maybe they’re using third party tools and to see what changed with this core update for these sites. From there, you can kind of triangulate around, okay, what is the guidance that Google’s giving us this idea of Eat EEAT experience, expertise, authorit trustworthiness, so we kind of know these are important, and then what can we distill as the common traits that we see existing in the sites that had a positive outcome from this core update? And so there’s some hypothesis that comes out of that from these experts that they say, here’s some common traits that we see with these sites. So all of that, just framing it up for anybody listening to, as a reminder, this is kind of what’s happening here. It isn’t necessarily saying if you include an FAQ block, you will perform better. But it is saying, Hey, generally triangulating on these things that we know there was an update. We know this is best practice EAT, and then when we analyze these sites, we see this as kind of a common trait. You can kind of start to pinpoint and say, here’s some things that you might want to consider as creators. One of the things that I try and constantly go back to is this idea that really what we are trying to do as content creators is create something that is helpful. And a lot of times if you look behind those things that they, in this case Maria saying were some of the things that were associated with quality or a positive outcome from it. A lot of the times it’s things that are just like, oh, this makes for a more helpful post. I’m trying to remember the list that you talked about. It was like FAQ. Okay, that’s great. That’s helpful to have

Emily Walker: Step-by-step photos.

Bjork Ostrom: Step-by-step photos. It’s not necessarily saying Google has some mechanism to, in their algorithm, it might be we don’t know some mechanism to prioritize step-by-step photos. When I hear that, I think of it as step-by-step photos help people have success with the result of going through and making a recipe. And so a lot of this is not necessarily you need to do all of these things exactly like this in order to have a positive outcome. It’s a little bit of like, Hey, just a reminder, these are things that are good for you to consider because it makes for a better user experience. And of what we always need to be thinking about is this idea of user experience. So I always find it helpful to have specifically what are some of the things that we could be doing, FAQs, step by step strong EEAT in general, but then always coming back to this idea that, hey, the reason that we are doing that is because the way that the humans consume content is they want to consume it from people they trust that they know have the authority to speak on that content, and in a way that’s really clear and useful and helpful, and over time, more and more, we continue to come back to that. So we always link to these in the emails can dive deep on that. It’s not just about recipe content. There’s some other stuff that they talk about in that article, but anything else that would be worth pointing out in that or talking about or anything else kind of interesting

Emily Walker: In that article? Yeah, I think like you said, none of it is revolutionary. It’s kind of some of the best practices for blog posts that we’ve known for a long time. But I do think it’s always useful to have that reminder of how to create content that, in our case, how to create recipes that your readers will have success with and just, yeah, I think a good reminder, especially when I feel like we’re in a very turbulent time for creators online, and it’s in a sense comforting to me to read stuff like this because it’s like, oh, I know what this means. This is something that’s easy to deliver on. And in a way it’s like a back to basics almost kind of.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. And I think the other thing that I thought about when I was reading through this is some of the sentiment around this update, and I haven’t dug into it deep enough to know the data to know, but some of the sentiment that I’ve seen is like, Hey, Google is looking, or there has been some corrections to sites that maybe were a little bit smaller, that were negatively impacted by some of the helpful content updates, and there has been some recovery foresight. And I think as I was reading through that and that sentiment, the sentiment, not even just specific for SEO, but specific for us as creators in general that I came back to was this idea of continuing to find ways to show up and to create meaningful, impactful, engaging content. And if you do that over a long period of time and continue to find ways to do that, eventually that will be rewarded. It doesn’t mean you can do the exact same thing. It doesn’t mean you can show up in the exact same way. You definitely have to iterate and change whether it’s on a platform like Instagram or on a platform like a WordPress blog. But if you continue to do that, there will be ways that you can get discovered. And a lot of it, this is all it comes back to, this idea of discoverability. SEO is just a mechanism for discoverability. Instagram is a mechanism for getting discovered, and if you can find ways to continually improve the content that you’re creating, show up consistently. All of these platforms are trying to figure out how to surface the most interesting, engaging, best content. And so just a reminder for us, it’s always what we should be thinking about, not necessarily the platform itself first, think about the content, but then also think about what’s working on the platform. But it’s always content first and then platform. And that was one of the thoughts that I had as we talked through this. Speaking of different types of platforms, there’s this new platform that everybody’s been talking about, broadly speaking, it’s ai, but there’s this new term that it was new to me as you surface this article, GEO Geo, which is fun that you can kind of say it as a word.

Emily Walker: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you explain what GEO is and then we’ll talk about this next article?

Emily Walker: Yes. So GEO is generative engine optimization, so it’s SEO except for replacing search with generative. And it was relatively new term to me also, but this was a search engine land article that was talking about if GEO will replace SEO or will they integrate together. And I think one of the main takeaways for me from this article was that they said, while this is a new engine, the goal is the same and it’s just what you were saying to answer user’s question quickly, effectively, and thoroughly. This is not, there’s no new end game here. It’s the same thing, and it’s just a different way of getting a user an answer, a better, hopefully better answer. So yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. And I think that there’s this interesting convergence that’s happening where if you think of traditional SEO, they talk about this idea of 10 blue links. That’s a phrase that they use to encapsulate this idea that traditionally, as long as we’ve used the version of Google that we use, you do a search and then there’s some paid links and then there’s below that or integrated into it depending on how those show up. Sometimes at the bottom there’s organic listings, and that’s a link. You click on the link and it takes you to the page, which has the information. So that we think of as a discovery mechanism. SEO traditionally, if you’re good at SEO, you show up more, you get more traffic to your site, you get attention, and that attention is valuable for multiple reasons. Maybe you’re a nonprofit, maybe you’re for-profit and you do affiliate or you have a product, maybe your services company and your roofing company shows up, or maybe you’re a food log and you get advertising income or affiliate income from that. And so what we’ve seen over the past five years really, but different versions of it over the last decade is this slowly starting to see some generative content showing up early. It was kind of this idea of position zero, which was like a blurb taken from your site that shows up at the top with a link to your site. So it wasn’t necessarily generative, but now what you’re seeing a lot of times is within a traditional Google search, you, in our case, we have a great tree frog named Rice one day. Emily, you might be so blessed within your family to have a tree frog and do, oh gosh,

Emily Walker: No offense to Rice, but I really hope not. I heard how you feed him and no.

Bjork Ostrom: Daily or weekly runs to Chuck and Don’s for a dozen crickets paying a $1.90 and then bringing them home in a plastic bag, putting them in their own separate enclosure

Emily Walker: What a life for a cricket

Bjork Ostrom: Where they get their own water and feed. But if I do a search on how many crickets should a great tree frog have a day, now Google might have a result that is generative, meaning it is looked at 10 articles that exist across the web that talk about how to feed a great tree frog. And it puts together kind of a mashup version of all of those, and it shows a little bit of it at the top. You can click to see a little bit more. And so there has been this integration around generative experience within a traditional search experience. So that has, if it’s a spectrum, and that’s on the right side, Google has moved a little bit to the left. Interestingly, you’re starting to see some of these generative first engines. ChatGPT is an example, starting to experiment with going from the very left side, which is like no links to potentially including some references to the content that they’re producing. And so we’re in a season where it’s really the wild, wild west. What is fair use of that content? Meaning can you just remix content that you’ve trained on and include it in a search result that’s still being defined? And then there’s these agencies or companies in the middle, one of which is the company’s called ProRata, and the search engine that they are creating is called Gist. If people want to check it out, it’s gist.ai. And important to note, because they’re experimenting with this idea of crediting the sources that they’re training on and also compensating the sources that they’re training on. So we’re in the early stages of having a conversation around signing off and saying, Hey, you can include Pinch of Yum content because we know that then they’ll train on it and compensate for it. So there’s really a lot of unknowns right now in how this will all play out. But I think the important piece here, and maybe the takeaway is number one, to understand that that’s happening, and to your point, going back to this idea of if you want to on these certain platforms have a higher likelihood of showing up some of the same best practices apply. I think one of the interesting things, and I’m trying to remember if this article talked about it, one of the considerations is what are the types of companies that are showing up here and how valuable is it for them to show up? And an example would be, I know there’s some friends that I have who are in the world of e-commerce, and they talk about how if somebody is doing a product related search, they don’t care if it comes from Google or if it comes from ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever, search engine or AI chat interface, as long as they are able to show up as the best tweezers for feeding crickets to frogs, right? So if that’s your long form search, it’s not like that search process ends with a purchase. I think one of the interesting things with the world that we live in is the value is in the visit, it’s in the attention where there’s either, usually it’s going to be advertising revenue. I’m trying to remember with this article, it was just generally around the concept of GEO. They didn’t talk specifically around genre and the value of different traffic.

Emily Walker: No. And I would love to read this if someone would like to write it who’s listening, I would love to read this article from a food creator perspective, just because I do feel like the value of being included in a generative search result for a food blog is totally different, especially if you’re not cited clearly because you want people to click and come to your site. So I mean, this is also new. I think we’re still figuring it out. But yeah, this article did have some strategies that you can start right now for geo on your site. And again, it’s stuff that everyone’s probably pretty familiar with, like understanding your user, answering their question quickly, making your content scannable and kind of easy to read through and keywords still matter, but this is just kind of a new era of that.

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Emily Walker: Whoa. Interesting.

Bjork Ostrom: Whoa. So now what’s interesting about this is number one, it knows through historical conversation that I am associated with Pinch of Yum.

Emily Walker: It’s pandering to you.

Bjork Ostrom: I don’t know. It’s totally, I don’t, side note, I just watched the clip from Her. I haven’t actually seen that movie. Have you seen Her?

Emily Walker: Yeah, ages ago. But yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: It’s crazy that it was 12 years ago.

Emily Walker: Yeah, very prescient.

Bjork Ostrom: I was hearing people talk about there is this subreddit called, it’s called AO, I think it’s called AO, my Artificial Other, where people are developing these relationships and oh geez, one of the threads was this person who was posting to Reddit and saying, I’m trying to work up the courage to ask out my AO. And that’s where I was like, oh, we are into Her territory. And the clip that I saw was when I think, I’m trying to remember the name. Do you remember the name of whoever she is? Like Joaquin,

Emily Walker: I think it was Scarlett. That was the voice,

Bjork Ostrom: Like Stephanie or something like that. And when he can’t get through to her, there’s a system update and he starts to panic and then she comes back online and she’s like, oh, I’m so sorry. I was running an update. I didn’t want to bother you. And he’s just panicked. But anyways, the point within all of it is these systems are built in a way where they’re wanting to please us.

Emily Walker: And

Bjork Ostrom: It is great from a relationship perspective because then you have this artificial other who’s always saying nice things about you and listening to you and

Emily Walker: A Pinch of Yum style cookie.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, exactly. So I’m going to say yes, yes. Can you share that? And I’m just curious to see if there’s any reference to it. So it’s now giving me the ingredients, it’s giving me the instructions. And I don’t know to the degree that this is similar to the blog,

Emily Walker: But no link has appeared yet, correct?

Bjork Ostrom: No link has appeared yet. Correct. Obviously in Google there would be links within this, but there would also maybe potentially, we’re not at the point yet where it’s including entire recipes, but Google has experimented with that. We’ve seen that. Where, do you remember what that was called when they were doing those cards?

Emily Walker: They just rolled it back a couple of weeks ago,

Bjork Ostrom: But they’re experimenting essentially with the entire recipe being in the search result and then rolled it back. There’s a lot of pushback against it. But just to see this experiment through, I’m just going to say, can you cite the source from where you got this? And my guess is it’s going to be like, I got this from cookbooks and wrote it by myself. So it says, I wrote it myself based on common baking techniques, my own recipe development knowledge and flavor tweaks, often used in Pinch of Yum style cookies. It’s an original adapted recipe rather than something copied directly from a blogger cookbook, and then it kind of cites some of the things that it changed. It says, if you want, I can link you to a few publicly available brown butter cookie recipes from trusted sources, including Pinch of Yum.

Emily Walker: I feel like it’s little defensive there.

Bjork Ostrom: ChatGPT is defending itself saying, Hey, back off, I can see what you can doing. Look, this is what I changed.

Emily Walker: Changed.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

Emily Walker: This is not a copyrightable recipe.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. So anyways, all that to say in this instance had to work pretty hard to say like, Hey, can you cite it? It says, after asking what site did you get these from? It says, no sites. I just kind of made it on my own. But I can include if you would like some links on the other end, there’s Google, you’re going to have those results. And then somewhere in the middle are some of these experiments like Gist.ai where maybe it is creating a generative response, but it’s citing the sources within those. So I would play place this in the category of good to be aware of, good to be monitoring. It’s hard to know as a creator, this isn’t an answer. It’s just hard to know what the right answer is because so much of it is being defined in real time. What if ChatGPT suddenly in three weeks starts to include links everywhere? Okay, that’s going to be a different story than what it is right now where there’s no compensation for training on your data. There’s no links that are included, but super helpful to be aware of this. The term itself I think is a good one to start to think about. The future is probably more GEO than SEO, although today for recipe sites, SEO is still very much so important and a great mechanism for discovery. Anything else on this one? That would be

Emily Walker: Yeah, I just was going to say, I feel like the Venn diagram of geo and SEO is still almost a circle. I’m sure that they might drift apart, but yeah, this article was not overhaul everything. Keyword research is dead. Yeah, it’s just slightly different right now.

Bjork Ostrom: And the quote here specifically around keyword research is keyword research still matters because it tells you about the words people use when searching, and it helps you figure out what information people want to see on your site about a topic. It can also help you quantify interest and search demand when prioritizing what topics to cover. So one of the things that we talk about in Food Blogger Pro, we’ll often do Coaching Calls. One of the things that we do on a Coaching Call, which is like me just getting on a call with somebody and talking through their business and what they’re trying to do, and then we publish that within the community. One of the things that sometimes comes up is this idea of keyword research. And some people are like, oh, I just really don’t like the idea of doing keyword research, creating content. That for me is uninspired, but I just know that there’s a keyword opportunity. I think sometimes it doesn’t have to be that maybe you think through a hundred different recipes you’re super excited about, and then you do some keyword research to kind of quantify to what extent are people actually searching for this thing. And then you use that to make a decision around what content you’re publishing versus starting with keyword research. So it doesn’t always have to be the place that you start for content creation, but just a variable that you’re aware of.

Emily Walker: And I definitely think that the days of keyword stuff, blog posts are over. I think we are trending back towards more personal, more organic kind of writing, which I think everyone is probably happy about. So that’s another good outcome.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. And especially as creators, I know there was a season where people felt like they were writing for search engines as opposed to writing for people. And this is maybe a good tie in to the next conversation we’re going to have about Substack. A lot of times people have talked about this idea of substack and how refreshing it is to create on Substack because you aren’t trying to create in a way where you are trying to rank high based on what’s included or what’s not included. What you’re trying to do is create the most compelling information that will either cause people to open an email or to subscribe and pay to get additional information from you. Might be storytelling, it might be information, it might be really great recipes. So this is kind of a hybrid of the last conversation in this kind of Substack AI report. What was this all about?

Emily Walker: Yeah, so I thought this was interesting. They surveyed 2000 of their publishers on substack about AI and their AI use. And I love this because I’m always just kind of curious how others are working, and this tells you. So they had some helpful graphics and stuff in the post, which again is linked. But in the survey, they found that 45% of their publishers are using AI and that men were more likely than women to use AI. And then in line with that, women had more concerns about the use of AI than the men that they surveyed. They found that most of the people who were using AI were using ChatGPT, which isn’t shocking. And then they were mostly using it for research brainstorming and writing assistance, which they defined as proofreading, and they weren’t using it as much for content generation, which is a good thing. So yeah, anyways, they had some just interesting how people were using it, what platforms they were using, that kind of thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I am in a stage now where I have a ChatGPT Pro plan, pay for that, Claude ProPlan, pay for that and use them on a daily basis. One of the things that I’ve noticed is, and I’m not creating content in the same way that I think a lot of people like on Substack would create content, which is writing. So there isn’t even the need for me to use it as a writing tool. There are some instances where you would use it as a starting point to create an outline or I’m trying to think. An example. It would be, here’s an example, and I’ve talked about this in the podcast before. There’s a brand that reaches out to Pinch of Yum. They’re interested in working together. I’m like, great, let’s jump on a call. Always try to get on a call as quickly as possible if we feel like it’s a brand that we’re interested in partnering with and that would be a good fit. I’ve been using a tool called Granola, which is great, a really great note taking app. And for anybody who’s doing calls would really encourage you to check out Granola, they’re awesome. If anybody knows anybody at Granola, we would love for them to be a sponsor of the Food Blogger Pro podcast or Food Blogger Pro in general. You can reach me at [email protected] or send an email to [email protected]. Great note taking app also has a transcript of the conversation that then you can use. I’ll then have a conversation with Lindsay and I’ll say, Hey had this conversation with the brand. Here’s what they’re thinking for you as a creator, what are you thinking? Can you see this working best? How could things be integrated within Pinch of Yum? What are the opportunities you see? Reason being not having Lindsay be on the call is a lot of times it’s a scheduled call. Try not have as many meetings as possible. For Lindsay, the call that I have with her is she’s driving our kids to a doctor’s appointment. I’m like, do you have seven minutes so we can talk about this brand deal and we’ll just jump on the call quick? I take those two calls and then I’ve created a custom GPT that has our rate sheet within it. It has how we partner with brands, some kind of contextual information. And then from there, I can take those three or two, the two conversations, and then it has the contextual information about how we work with brands can bring those in. This is the other key nerding out here. I am one of those guys that likes talking about AI in the Substack AI report. That would be me. Lindsay would be like, it’s okay if we’re not talking about AI. We’ll use this tool called superwhisper, which allows me, as somebody who would prefer to talk versus type to just explain what I am trying to do. Hey, here’s a conversation I had with this brand, some additional context around it. Can you help me put together three different packages and create a V1 follow-up email that we can send to them explaining the brand packages and whatnot. Now within that, it’s like this idea of 10 80 10 where it’s like I give it 10% of what I want to happen. This is a Dan Martell thing. It does 80% of the work to get there, and then I’ll do 10% shaping that to make sure that it, and sometimes it’s deleting an entire paragraph. It’s probably touching every part of the email and rearranging it a little bit, but it’s a lot less work than ground up. So in that instance, there would be some examples of how I would use it, but the research piece to me is like, man, it is so good at compiling a huge amount of information and really quickly analyzing that and surfacing that information. I think of the interview we did with Molly, from What Molly Made, where she talks about helping it using ChatGPT to help her understand survey data. Other instances that you can think of that would be important to point out, or maybe even from podcasts that we’ve done, you are so in tune with those interviews or even from this article. Anything that was interesting that you feel like would be worth pointing out? For folks who are in our space,

Emily Walker: The theme is always time saving and also to make sure you’re not using it to do things that you enjoy doing. So I think one of my favorites is just generating captions for social media posts or email subject lines or things that can sometimes just be like, oh my gosh, if I have to write another email subject line about a cookie recipe, you just run out of ideas eventually. And so using it for those things that aren’t writing whole paragraphs or things like that, but just sometimes the things you get hung up on in the content generation process can be really useful.

Bjork Ostrom: Those things that would be blockers for you as a creator, but still need to get done. I was just having a conversation with my sister-in-law, and we were talking about this idea of these just in life in general, but also for as a business owner or as a creator or whatever, as a human, we’ll say as a human, generally speaking, this would apply to humans. So anybody who’s not a human listening, this wouldn’t apply you.

Emily Walker: If you’re a ao, whatever, then for any

Bjork Ostrom: AOs, this does not apply to you. But for everybody else, this is great advice, but the idea being that there are quadrants of how we work, and the quadrants are the x-axis is capability, and then the y-axis is enjoyment. And so there’s one quadrant which is not capable and don’t enjoy. It’s like, okay, as quickly as possible, let’s not do those things. And then the other quadrant that we’re trying to get rid of as quickly as possible is capable of doing, it’s like doing but not capable. It’s like, okay, we probably shouldn’t be doing that if we’re not as a business owner or a person doing your own plumbing. It’s like you like doing it, but you’re not capable of doing it. I’ve been there when we were first married, I installed a water softener and sweated the pipes and it was terrible.

Emily Walker: But did you enjoy it?

Bjork Ostrom: I didn’t enjoy it and not capable. Okay, that’s that. And that was the last time that I did it. The other quadrant that, especially in the early stages that we probably end up doing a little bit is we don’t enjoy, but we’re capable of doing it. And then there’s this sweet spot where it’s like really enjoy doing it and capable of doing it. And to your point, as much as possible, it’s good for us to be doing that type of work. So yeah, a good one to check out. I think it’s always interesting for me to see how people are using AI. Even as we talk about it. One of the things I’m always trying to do is surface little ways that we are using tools to see if we can be helpful. And it’s complicated though because it’s like, man, we’re creators. Is this a good thing? Is it a bad thing? It’s not simple. It’s not one or the other. So good to be aware of. Anything else on this that would be helpful to talk through?

Emily Walker: No, I think that covers it.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. So we’ll hit this last one and then we’ll wrap up. So pulling up the email, we’re talking about Threads. We’ve been posting to Threads and LinkedIn on Pinch of Yum. It ties in a little bit to this idea that I’ve been thinking a lot about, which is like, how do we not just become good content creators, but once we have good content, how do we think strategically about syndicating it? How do we show up in multiple places? There’s so many opportunities for us to get in front of people, and usually the lift is around creating the content, not around publishing it to other platforms, but sometimes we just forget about these other platforms. So Threads, LinkedIn, this is the article from Later, I believe, but what’s the general sentiment?

Emily Walker: Yeah, so I’m excited because this is not about AI at all.

Bjork Ostrom: Right? There’s zero mention of ai.

Emily Walker: Oh, I promise if we haven’t lost you already that we are moving on. But yeah, this is just a great article about I feel like sometimes the forgotten platforms like Threads and LinkedIn, even though they have very little in common in terms of what they look and feel like, and LinkedIn has been around for decades. Threads is even a couple of years old now, which is crazy. But both platforms are seeing a big period of growth right now. And I think especially we were talking about GEO earlier, and I’ve also seen in search everywhere optimization is kind of a relatively new thing that the way that your brand shows up on many different platforms, including LinkedIn especially I, is important for being, oh my gosh, I’m back to AI, but being included in generative search, that’s it, I promise. And so if you’re feeling fatigued with Instagram or Facebook or Pinterest or YouTube and are in the mood to try something new, that Threads or LinkedIn could be a good option. And this article had, I thought really great descriptions of what the vibe is on both of these platforms. And that Threads is, I think they described it as a group chat energy that it’s probably more what Twitter or Instagram were like 10 years ago, casual, where you can try new ideas or concepts. And then LinkedIn is really where you can build your credibility as a brand more. And it might be, especially if you’re like a dietician or something like that, someplace where you can share more of your knowledge for a different audience and where you might have better luck reaching out to brands and that kind of thing. So anyways, just an interesting perspective on a couple platforms that I feel like are underutilized by most food creators.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think that for us as creators, how we are showing up to these platforms is kind of like how do you show up as a part to a party? It might be black tie, it might be casual, it might be a pizza party, it might be a kid’s birthday party. You’re going to show up differently in all those ways, but realistically, you’re going to show up with the same interest, the same passions, the same conversations that you’re having, but it’s just going to feel a little bit different. I think that’s a reminder here. You’re probably not going to post a recipe video on LinkedIn, but you might post about what goes into the business of creating a recipe video, and it takes a little bit of work to translate that to a different platform. There are some platforms where it takes less work to translate to, but worth looking at all of these as we think about syndicating our content, we’ve started to experiment with WhatsApp super high level, almost just opening the door and being like, Hey, who’s here? And Threads as well, so people can follow along with Pinch of Yum if they’re interested in checking that out. Let’s do this, Emily, where’s the best place for people if they want to follow along with these newsletters? Obviously people who are listening follow along with the podcast, but if they want to get these recaps that we do, best place for them to sign up for that. And then hopefully we’ll be able to continue to do these and shine a light on the podcast as well moving forward.

Emily Walker: Yeah, I would just say to head to the homepage, foodbloggerpro.com, there are a couple places you can put in your name and email and you’ll be added to the email list. And I think for the rest of the year, we’re planning to do newsletters twice a month, so there’ll be a lot of good content to see there. And also shoot us an email. I’m [email protected] if you like this format of podcast episode. If you don’t like it, please don’t email me.

Bjork Ostrom: Email, yes, email [email protected].

Emily Walker: Yes, please put a typo in there. I don’t want to get it. But yeah, we’re all ears if you like listening to this kind of content more than reading, we’re up for doing it again.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. This is great, Emily. Thanks for doing it. Really fun for me to have a chance to talk through this stuff with you. And also it’s really helpful. It’s a chance for me to review and process news and like I said at the beginning, it’s always something that we’re thinking about and it’s really important. So thanks everybody for tuning in. Thanks Emily for joining, and we’ll see you next time.

Emily Walker: Hello there. Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed listening to this week’s episode of the podcast. Before we sign off today, I wanted to mention one of the most valuable parts of the Food Blogger Pro membership, and that’s our courses. In case you don’t already know, as soon as you become a Food Blogger Pro member, you immediately get access to all of our courses here on Food Blogger Pro. We have hours and hours of courses available, including SEO for food blogs, food photography, Google Analytics, social media, and sponsored content. All of these courses have been recorded by the Food Blogger Pro team or some of our industry experts, and they’re truly a wealth of knowledge. We are always updating our courses so you can rest assured that you’re getting the most up-to-date information as you’re working to grow your blog and your business. You can get access to all of our courses by joining Food Blogger Pro. Just head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about the membership and join our community. Thanks again for tuning in and listening to the podcast. Make it a great week.