Unlocking the Hidden Value of Your Recipe Content with Sandie Markle of Blueberri

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Member Kitchens. Let’s talk about real results. Member Kitchens creators — actual food bloggers and social media chefs — are adding an average of $2,500 each month to their revenue, with some consistently surpassing $10,000. These aren’t hopes or guesses. These are documented numbers from creators transforming their brands into thriving, sustainable businesses today. How? Member Kitchens offers a fully branded platform that looks and feels like you, your recipes, your style, and your unique message. Members get dynamic meal plans, automated shopping lists, and much more. All within an ad-free mobile app they’ll rave about. Getting started is simple. Using AI, Member Kitchens imports your existing recipe library so you can start selling subscriptions quickly. Plus, before you launch, an expert will personally review your app to ensure it’s ready for the spotlight, ready to see results for yourself. Visit member kitchens.com today to start your free trial, and you can get a special discount by being a listener to our podcast. You can use the promo code Food Blogger Pro for 50% off the first two months.

Ann Morrissey: Welcome back to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This is Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team. In this week’s episode, Bjork is chatting with Sandie Markle, the founder of Blueberri. Sandie brings a unique perspective on the food content world, and in this episode we’re diving deep into how creators can unlock more value from the content they already have, whether it’s repurposing old recipes, optimizing posts for discoverability, or licensing content for new revenue streams. We’ll also explore the power of being a nano or micro influencer, how to build brand partnerships with confidence, and why platforms like LinkedIn might be the most underused tool in your content strategy. Sandie also shares actionable tips on working with tech companies, formatting your content for visibility and understanding the true worth of a single recipe, even if it’s just sitting in your archive. If you’re looking to diversify your income and make smarter moves with your existing content, this episode will be right up your alley. And now without further ado, I’ll pass it over to Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Sandie, welcome back to the podcast.

Sandie Markle: I’m so excited to be here. It’s been a long time, but I’m really happy to be on the podcast again.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, glad to have you back. Tell us a little bit, give us an update on your journey. Last time you were on, we were talking about SideChef and that platform. Some things have changed in your life, still working in the general same genre of content, but your day-to-day looks a little bit different, so give us a quick update before we dive in.

Sandie Markle: Yeah, that was five years ago. I can’t even believe so much time has passed. And during that broadcast I was in Shanghai and I ended up moving back to the United States in 2023 after nine years of being in Shanghai, which I loved. So yeah, my journey took a really interesting turn when things in your life changed as they do. So my role was based out at Side Cheff and I found myself in a situation where I was looking for a new opportunity, but I really loved the space of working at the intersection between content tech and working with creators as well. And even though I was looking for opportunities to work with other organizations, something cool happened where people started reaching out to me and asking me what I was doing next and if I could help them with whatever they were working on, whether it was a creator, whether it was another tech platform. And I found myself really being able to engineer my own next journey in the space that I love. So that’s when I decided to start Blueberri, which is scary, exciting, but also really amazing. So that’s what I’m doing now. It’s very much what I’ve been doing and really trying to support both parts of food in the innovation side and also in the creation side and trying to build bridges and creating more memorable meals that people love.

Bjork Ostrom: I mean, it’s one of the realities of the work that we do, which is it is content forward, it’s recipes, it’s food, it’s publishing content to these different platforms, but it’s also a huge consideration with technology and understanding platforms. And so you have what you see is like there’s occasionally you have an individual who is just sharp with all of those things. They know recipes, they know content creation, they know these platforms, and they just kind of have this holistic skillset where they’re able to do all of those things more commonly. I think what you see is almost divisions sometimes that could be relational. This isn’t exactly true, but for Lindsay and I, generally speaking, I’m more interested in the technical considerations when it comes to food and recipe content. Lindsay is more interested in the recipe side of things, the actual content production side. And we both within business and our life have married those together. And then a lot of times you’ll have people who will be content creators and then they build team around them. So they have somebody who comes in who’s technical, they have somebody who comes in who’s good with operations and systems, and they build that team strategically around them. I’m curious to know, when you talk about your new role that you’ve kind of built in your new business, it’s Blueberri, B-L-U-E-B-E-R-R-I. I’m curious to know what your day-to-day looks like with the work that you’re doing right now and the way that you are helping food creators with their businesses in that stack that we talked about. If somebody comes to you and they work with you, what is the expertise that you bring and what are the things that you’re coaching people through?

Sandie Markle: So through my journey working with content creators, I saw a lot of different things happening with different size creators. Either if they were on the nano or micro size, maybe their experience was just really thinking about things from a brand level, like Heinz Ketchup reaches out to you for example, and wants you to do some recipes. But they don’t, beyond that, they weren’t really exposed to the other possibilities of what their content could do. Even if they have a media kit, what that can do for them. Maybe they’re really anxious about their reach and growing their followers and they don’t know if companies do reach out to them, should they license their content exclusively? Should it be non-exclusive? Should it be in perpetuity? And especially in non-traditional things like if a tech company comes up to you or reaches out to you and wants to license your content. So those are the types of things that I worked with a lot in my last role. And as I was engaging with content creators one-on-one, even though maybe they wanted to go with the creators with a bigger reach, sometimes it was the creators who were a bit smaller that their content was a better fit for the platform. And so I’m definitely a advocate for the nano and micro influencers.

Bjork Ostrom: And when you say nano or micro, what does that mean? Could you kind of quantify that?

Sandie Markle: So nano meaning under 10,000 followers and micro being anywhere between 10,000 and like a hundred thousand followers. So I feel like that’s the hardest ized to really get the type of opportunities that you really want outside of just ads or SEO impressions that you get on your website, just external brand opportunities. But when I talk to or engage with other tech platforms and companies like that in tech, meaning like anywhere where a company digitizes a recipe online or on the web or on other devices, they want content, they need content. And a lot of the times it has nothing to do with reach. It has to do if it integrates very well with their brand and what they’re trying to accomplish, their features or whatever. And so

Bjork Ostrom: In that case, so you’re saying nano or micro, so let’s say a hundred thousand followers or less. And so this is on let’s say a social media platform like Instagram. What you’re saying is that’s the most difficult because you don’t have this huge amount of reach or don’t have a huge amount of followers, it’s often the most difficult for a creator in that size range to really get established with these brand partnerships. But you’re saying actually brands a lot of times if it’s a good fit, they’ll be incentivized to work with you as a creator because they themselves as the brand need content that they can publish. Is that what you’re saying?

Sandie Markle: Yes, that’s what I’m saying because for example, if you were thinking about a meal planning platform of some kind and creating a meal plan is a very complex, nuanced thing, and so many creators are doing it wonderfully, but they don’t have that domain expertise. They wouldn’t even know where to start to curate those recipes together into a meal plan. Who cares about the reach? It’s really about getting that content to activate the experiences that they want in their platform. So over the years, in one way or another, I have really tried to help support creators in trying to figure out how can they reimagine the value of the content that they already have. And so that’s what I’m doing with Blueberry now and advocating for this whole idea of I’m not an SEO expert, I’m not marketing or anything like that, but I do know content and I know a lot of creators are sitting on hundreds and hundreds of recipes that they’re not doing a lot with hardly anything because they’ve niched down for SEO, they realize their followers really focus on a group of recipes and they’ve really kind of leaned into that. Or maybe they ate meat meat before and now, so they can’t do anything with those recipes, but there’s inherent value in the content sitting in those libraries. So because my specialty is content, the principle of content is create once published everywhere, that’s a principle. And so it’s actually not a good use of the content if it’s just sitting there. So why not find somebody who actually needs it and structure it in a way that’s valuable for the platforms

Bjork Ostrom: That could use it. That’s great. Yeah, it’s one of the things I think a lot about is, let’s say I knew for the next 10 years that for Pinch of Yum, nothing would change. We wouldn’t get more traffic, we wouldn’t get more followers, we wouldn’t increase our email list. What would be the things that I could do or that we could do to increase the value of the business if none of the other variables changed? And it’s an exercise that’s helpful for me because what it forces you to do is think beyond just increasing page views or increasing followers, but instead starting to think creatively around where are the sources of value within the things that I’ve created over the last 15 years that we can tap into? A really small example is like what if you start to do email sponsorships when you’re sending out your emails every week, okay, you’re going to do those anyways. What if those are always sponsored? And then what if you filled up your sponsorship for the year and then you added another email because you knew you could sell more sponsors into that list? We even did that with Food Blogger Pro. We looked at what are the things that we are doing already and where are the ways that brands might be interested in partnering with us? And inevitably, once we stood up the system around having a conversation around partnering with brands, there was interest because there are people who want to, brands and companies who want to reach an audience of food creators. And for all of us within our businesses are making a certain amount. We could without anything else changing, just us thinking creatively around how we distribute our content, how we license our content, how we sell our content, where we publish our content could potentially reach another audience or earn additional income from that. Do you have an example of a way that you have tapped into or helped a creator tap into some of this value that they’re kind of sitting on? It’s like this gold mine, and they’re like, wait a minute. You go outside and there’s a little gold nugget on your sidewalk, and you’re like, I didn’t know that I’m actually sitting on a gold mine. And so you got to dig it out and actually extract that value. Do you have a story or an example of how you’ve done that?

Sandie Markle: Yeah, I’m working with two people right now. Their situations are very different, but the end goal is the same. So I’m working with one, a creator who came to me and was really struggling with brand reach. They’re approached all the time, but the amount of money that they’re being offered is pennies in comparison to the large library of content that they have, number one and number two, how long they’ve been around and the niche that they are in. They’re really, really positioned very well in their niche. So they originally reached out to me and said, can you help me with this because I feel like there’s so much untapped potential with what I can offer. And so we started talking about that, and then I started looking at their website and I saw a lot of great recipes, but I saw a lot of unstructured content, a lot of creators, they structure their content for a lot of reasons. They structure it for SEO, but also structuring your content in a way that, and when I say structure, I mean making sure on the backend, making sure the titles and the metadata are in certain places actually opens up a lot of opportunity outside of the web. So in the past, I did a lot of work on integrating content for experiences on apps, on smart kitchen devices, on kitchen appliances because the content was structured in a way that it could be used everywhere. So after a few months of just trying to figure out if how to help them with deals, I realized that actually we need to take a step back here. We need to get in on the actual content itself. And so for the last six to eight months, I’ve been helping them with structuring their content to re-establish a good foundation, and then having, I’ve already connected them with one emerging startup cooking platform where they’re serving as a brand ambassador and advisor. So because also inherently is their expertise about food and the way experiences are supposed to be done, what a recipe is supposed to look like, how those inputs are from users or followers should be coming back. So he’s serving in that capacity as well. So it’s not just helping them with their own content, but also re-imagining what they can do, consulting, advising, establishing themselves as a partner, a strategic partner with these tech platforms as not just a one and done creator for a campaign. And then you walk away, another client that I’m working with now, she’s doing well, there’s nothing really wrong, but she’s thinking ahead about where cooking and recipes are going to be in the next five years. And so I connected with her and she said, I want to make sure that my content is being licensed instead of just scraped without me having any control of the process and really being deliberate about where my content lives and what brands are using them. So I’m working with her to really find companies who can use her content. She has cookbooks and all of that other stuff. Again, there’s nothing really wrong and she has that 10% of bandwidth to consider these licensing opportunities to the right person or brand. So I’m not working with a lot of creators in that way. I do do fractional work from content with other tech companies. The reason why I’m doing this is because these two groups of groups cannot be siloed. They have to work together. So I’m only going to be working with a few people to do this and to find those opportunities to bring awareness that these things can actually happen. So that’s the way I’ve been working with people so far. But also just bringing awareness to this topic. I created a playbook on my website, which is some tips about how to engage with tech companies as well. I think the more education and awareness about this is the better because the thing I like about the blogger community and people in food, there’s two types. One is they’re happy to do the done for you type of service. You just do it for me, I don’t have the bandwidth, but then there’s, and neither one is wrong. And then there’s this other group where if you just need a little nudge, a little education and you just run with it, you just do your own thing. And I think that’s amazing, and that may be all it takes, and I’ve seen so many opportunities just wasted or experiences that could have just been so much better if both sides would come together and create them. So that’s what I’m trying to accomplish and what I’ve been doing so far.

Bjork Ostrom: It makes sense with your experience with SideChef that this was a platform and the platform in your role, it’s like there’s creators who are creating recipes. What does it look like to have a platform that is kind of a partner in bringing those together? People can go back and listen to that episode if they want context around that, but a couple of things that I feel like are important to pull out and ask questions about. Number one, you talked about the structuring of the content on your site. A great example of that is a lot of us think about it from the standpoint of SEO. And so we have a recipe card in our world, Tasty Recipes, WP Recipe Maker. What that does, if you use the recipe card to put your recipe information in is that not only does it make it look different to a user, but it also makes it look different to a bot from Google that comes and crawls your site. I talk about it as this idea of, it’s kind of like if you have a garage sale, you could just open up your garage and sit out in front and scatter stuff about and put price tags on it. But people would walk by, some might figure out this is a garage sale and they would come in, but it’s going to be a lot better if you put a sign out that says garage sale. And in the same way using structured data or structured content within your post or within your pages puts a yard sign in front of whatever that content is and tells these platforms, Google as an example, what that is. So it’ll say recipe, that’s the yard sign. It will say ingredients, it’ll say video. All of these are things that you can give as a tip as insight to the platform around what that content is. But your point, which I think is an important one, is that all of these different platforms could potentially use structured data. Another example would be Pinterest. Pinterest brings in structured data. They’re not using as much as Google would, but they definitely are using some of the structured data that you’re putting onto your site. The one that you mentioned, which I would love to double click on and learn more about, are some of these devices like an Amazon device. I won’t say the name so I don’t trigger it in everybody’s house, Amazon device, maybe a Google Home device that are bringing in recipe content. Can you talk about how you as a creator can get your content onto those types of platforms? And then what’s the benefit of doing that? Because we live in this world where we think of page views and ad impressions generally. So what’s the benefit? How do you do it and what’s the benefit?

Sandie Markle: Well, like you mentioned, the structure of your content is where it starts. I started a Substack, and the last issue was called What if your Blog went down tomorrow? And the next one is going to be who’s JSON and what is he doing in my recipes?

Bjork Ostrom: You mean what? I don’t get it.

Sandie Markle: So JSON is a coding language like

Bjork Ostrom: J-S-O-N.

Sandie Markle: That’s right. And that’s where if you look at the back end of a recipe, it’s code and this is the language. This is the universal language of all platforms. And so in your recipe development process, if you have a template where it’s not just living in a Word document or a Google Drive, but it’s in a spreadsheet, which in my tech partnerships playbook, I have a template in there and it’s just a spreadsheet and you just kind of really putting in the metadata or the fields already there. And that helps you kind of export your recipe content to other platforms. Because platforms like the Amazon device and other platforms, they use js. They use a lot of the same languages that exist in these plugins. The great thing about plugins is that it’s plug and play. It doesn’t go as deep as you would need to if you are going to put it into transfer into another platform. That’s why going one step ahead, not too much. If you do a little bit more detail into those spreadsheets, it solves two problems, two things, which is, one, it makes your content ready to be used in other platforms. And two, it’s just a good backup to have. I know many content creators, their content only lives on their blog, and so that is just, that’s just not good at all because platforms come and go. And so it’s just good to have something stored someplace. And there’s also platforms that haven’t come yet that they’re emerging every day. I speak to new emerging platforms, startups all the time, and maybe it’s not you. They don’t need the whole package of what you’re offering. Maybe they just need your recipe notes. Maybe they just need your tools, maybe they just need something else. And so if it’s modularized in that way already from you, make that a step in your recipe development process. You’ll be ready for the next thing because you’re like, oh, I know how to curate that really fast. And also it increases the value, like when you’re pricing your content, the ease of ingestion is very valuable. I remember I worked on a project years ago with a now defunct meal kit company, and at the time they were thinking ahead, they wanted to be on a new platform outside of the web, but all of their content lived on PDFs that you could access on the web. And so it was me and 10 interns and the engineers. We had to figure out how to now convert this PDF into some kind of spreadsheet that would feed into the backend to now somehow come onto an app interface. So that’s a heavy load. So the benefit also is that if you do that, it prices your value a lot higher. You can say, yeah, I’m ready. It’s structured, it’s ready to go. You just let me know what you need and who wouldn’t want to pay premium dollar for that.

Bjork Ostrom: Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors, what if your content could earn more and do more for your business audience and your future? You might know Raptive as the ad management platform behind thousands of the world’s top creators, including Pinch of Yum. But today, Raptive is so much more than ads. They’re a true business partner for creators, helping you grow your traffic, increase your revenue, and protect your content. In an AI-driven world, unlike one-size-fits-all platforms, Raptive customizes strategies for each creator, whether you’re growing a niche food blog or running a multi-site business. They offer expert support in SEO, email, and monetization strategy. And they’re leading the charge on AI advocacy to protect the future of creator-owned content. And the best part, Raptive supports creators at every stage from rise, their entry-level program for growing sites, to their top-tier luminary level, their offering scales with you so you can get the right support when you need it the most. Apply now at Raptive.com to get a personalized growth strategy and join a creator community that’s shaping the future of the open web. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode. So to paint the picture, I think for people listening, it might be like a mindset shift around what the value exchange is. And what you’re saying is you could have a site that gets zero traffic, but you are a really skilled recipe developer. You are a really skilled creator, and you are creating recipes that people would love if they made them and if they discovered them, your problem as a creator is discoverability. It’s not the problem of creating good recipes. Maybe those recipes are also in a certain category. Maybe you are gluten-free or like you said, maybe you had recipes with meat and now you have recipes that are vegetarian and what you need to do as, or the opportunity as a creator with what you’re saying here is those recipes that you have created, there are platforms and there are companies who would really value 500, 750, a thousand, 250 recipes that they would then bring into their platform and would have available for people to cook, to bake whatever it is because they are a technology platform. They are not recipe creators, but they need recipes in order to compliment their technology platform. We can talk through maybe some examples of what those platforms would be, but I think it’s important to paint the picture of what we’re talking about here. And what you’re saying is the thing that you have that is valuable in this instance isn’t traffic, which is monetized via ads. The thing that you have, which is valuable is content and it is recipes. And that becomes more valuable the better it is organized and the more structure that it is given and the medium that you would use to deliver that would be a spreadsheet. And so what you are doing is ensuring that every one of those recipes that you have is documented in the spreadsheet and in that spreadsheet, the ingredients, the instructions, the notes, maybe the recipe image is all marked up in this language, JSON, in a way where that it could easily be ingested into one of these platforms. And the other thing that you said that’s important is the easier it is for them to do that, the more valuable it is for them to do that because they’re not going to have to do as much work in order to bring it into their platform. Is that an accurate recap of what we’re talking about here?

Sandie Markle: Absolutely. One of the things I think is important to emphasize is that it’s something that is not an extra step necessarily. It’s very much what they’re already doing. Wherever your documentation lives for your recipe, you just replace that with now documenting it in this way because it’s still going to be very much readable to you as the content creator. It’s not just in your code that you can.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. Alright, so we have the general value exchange established. We are creators, we have recipes. Many of us have hundreds if not thousands of recipes. And what you’re saying is even if those aren’t getting traffic, they’re still valuable and they’re valuable to these tech platforms that are creating some solution. It could be a hundred different things that they’re doing, but they need recipes for ’em. And an example would be, this was years ago, but when Amazon was starting to do devices with screens, they reached out and they were like, Hey, we you to be an early adopter at Pinch of Yum to have your recipes on our devices because we’re launching this new recipe thing. How much would you charge for that? And weren’t asking about how much traffic we got, they’re not asking about if a video went viral.

Sandie Markle: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And what you’re saying is there are all of these opportunities out there for us as creators. We just need to make sure, number one, that we have our content packaged in a way where we can sell it to them. And number two, that we find these opportunities and then establish these partnerships in a similar way to what we would do if we were working with a sponsor and they were paying us to do an Instagram reel. But instead what we’re doing is, my guess is it would be considered licensing the content that we have. So let’s talk about what that brand relationship actually looks like. Is it licensing? Are you doing it for a certain amount of time? Are you doing it a dollar amount per recipe? Help us understand how these agreements work between tech companies and creators.

Sandie Markle: Yeah, so instead of the traditional one to a few recipes for a specific campaign, this is definitely something that would happen in bulk. I would say a minimum of a hundred recipes. I think a hundred recipes is a really great number. In the past platforms have said, oh, we want a thousand recipes. And I think that just say that. And then I ask them, what do you actually need a thousand recipes for? But a hundred is a good number because it really makes sure that there’s a variety that there is. When you think about filtering, it really makes sure there’s enough recipes across different filters. So 100 I would say would be the minimum to think about licensing. And yes, it would be licensing. There may be a situation where you may want to sell them, but that’s a very unique situation and not many people will want to do it, but it just depends. And then with the licensing, because I believe in long-term opportunities, so one year or more, so it wouldn’t be anything that would be short term. So at least one year of licensing, maybe you want to do it in perpetuity, that means forever or you want to do it exclusive versus non-exclusive. Again, it just depends on the creator and what they’re willing to do and what opportunities they want to continue to leverage with the content. And then sometimes some creators may want to white label their recipes because again, they’re not using them anyway. They don’t necessarily need the attribution, they just need some kind of long-term opportunity where the content is just not sitting there. So it just depends on what the content creator is willing to provide, what the platform needs and how they’re going to use it. And also I think the longer, the other really big benefit that I see is really expert positioning for content creators because there’s this whole feeling that I’ve observed, understandably so, where it’s like there’s not a lot of recognition or acknowledgement of the work and the creativity that has been put into creating all these amazing recipes. And so establishing the creator as not just someone who’s cranking out recipes but has this expertise in partnering with a brand of that kind. And so looking for opportunities to do that too. So even if a recipe is white labeled, meaning it’s the attribution is not directly tied in with the creator, maybe there’s other opportunities to get recognition from brand ambassadorship. Maybe they’re an advisor, maybe they’re on the board, who knows. There’s a lot of things that creators can do to really influence a platform much like a content creator or recipe developer, maybe a menu consultant for a spice brand or something like that. So they can do the same kind of thing in the same principle with tech companies in food.

Bjork Ostrom: And you can imagine people are coming to the table with all sorts of different needs from the creator standpoint. You maybe have been creating for 10 years, you’re burnt out, you don’t want to create anymore, and you’re just like, Hey, if I can get some additional money from this work that I’ve done, great. I don’t care if I have attribution, I don’t care if my brand’s mentioned. I don’t care if me personally that I’m mentioned, then you have people who are like, I’m building a brand and I want that brand to be front and center. And the most important thing for me is attribution. And I want to be in as many platforms as I can because I want to be widely known. I want my logo, I want my company to be everywhere that it can be. And so that’s actually really important to me because I’m in the building stage and I want to have as much exposure as I can. Similarly, from the brand’s perspective, you might have a brand that’s like, we want to get as many well-known creators on our platform as possible because we want to position ourselves as the source for the most popular recipe creators on the web. Or you might have a brand that says, we actually don’t want any creators to have their faces or any other logos other than just our logo. We want it to appear as if all of these recipes are our company’s recipes on our platform or our app. And so the key it feels like is then finding the connection that is what your hope would be, and the platform’s hope and finding that sweet spot where it overlaps and you say, yeah, this will work. We can do a deal here. So how are you finding these tech platforms? That’s a little bit of what your role is, is the intermediary, but what does it look like to go out there as a creator and try and find these opportunities?

Sandie Markle: Yeah. Well, I have to mirror a lot of my suggestions to my own experiences and just what I’ve done in my life and professionally. So I’m a big advocate of being on LinkedIn, and I know some creators are, but it’s honestly hard to be able to balance your presence on all the other social media platforms with then just a new one. But I tell people, your approach to LinkedIn could be really different than it is on other social media because to me, Instagram, Facebook and all of those other things, those are B2C. LinkedIn is B2B, you are a business, you are a brand. So when you set up your LinkedIn profile, you don’t have to post like you do on B2C platforms. First of all, having a strong LinkedIn profile already increases your visibility to different companies. The way you set up your headline in your profile and what you’re open to using words like innovation and food tech and whatever else. So that’s one thing. But also, and this is something that I’ve done over the years. No matter what project I’m in, no matter what, whenever I’m CC’d in an email or I’m pulled into a meeting and I see whoever is on that email or a video, I add them on LinkedIn right away. The reason why I do this is because when an agency reaches out to you and says, Hey, I really want you to do this thing with this brand, whatever, it’s an agency or some person in marketing that’s not really the person you want to talk to about what I’m talking about. Now you really want to know who the other people are, but you don’t have visibility into that if you’re just talking to the agency. So the great thing about LinkedIn is the connections and what they write about and the behind the scenes look of what’s going on in their company. And so when you connect with people on LinkedIn or just follow brands that you just really like, what also surfaces in the feed is what’s going on with the company that they’re not necessarily sharing with you as a creator because maybe they don’t think you’re even interested in those kinds of things or that you’d be open to knowing so that it also increases awareness when you like a post or you say, wow, their culture, the things that they’re talking about, the things that are in the pipeline, and also who’s actually people that you need to really target and speak to on the senior director level, VP and above the VP of innovation or the, well, Walmart has the hugest content team I’ve ever seen. There’s so many different levels, Walmart Tech, there’s Walmart Creators, there’s so many different things, but you don’t know who they are from that email. So first and foremost, I think LinkedIn is a very underutilized platform that you could just, this is over your morning coffee. You’re just kind of going through and seeing what’s going on, and it could just spark ideas and then it’s a DM. In my tech partnerships playbook, I have outreach templates for emails and for dms, like what you can do, what you can say to reach out to them. And because this is a long game too, so it’s not something that you have to invest a lot of time into, and it could be something that just emerges out of the blue, but there is some intentionality towards it. And so that’s why I think people should just start really go onto your LinkedIn, dust it off, see what’s going on in there, and just see where it takes you. Just start following brands you like and see what starts surfacing up on your feed. I think you’d be surprised all of the intel you get about what’s going on in the food space.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And you talk about the, there’s resources, again, it’s Blueberri, B-E-R-R-I dot co, Blueberri.co. You have that tech partnerships playbook. I think one of the things that I want to remind the listeners of is what we’re talking about here is a similar relationship to what you’d have with a brand partnership where they’re paying you to create content, except this is a category I think for a lot of unfamiliar, which is you’re working with these tech companies and they’re paying you to license your content. It sounds like you also work as an agent to help make these connections and put together these deals. Is that part of how you are working? Part of what your role is is being the in-between, between these tech companies that are looking for recipe content to license and recipe creators who have a bank of recipes that they could license to these platforms.

Sandie Markle: That’s certainly a small portion of what I’m doing now. Again, just rolling out with a few creators to do so, and for those who want the do it for you service, again, I want to make sure that I provide both resources. One is like, okay, I can help you out or I can just tell you how to do it yourself. So both of those things I provide.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool and the tech partnerships playbook, people can buy that on your site. It says a practical guide for food bloggers, exploring licensing platforms and tech focused revenue. It goes back to this idea that we have all of these different revenue streams that are untapped, and there’s some really cool potential for us as creators to lean into those. It just takes a little bit of effort. It takes a lot of expertise of which you have. You can also become an expert if you take the time to learn about it and explore how to do it. But all of these are resources that are at our disposal and they’re not reliant on getting a bunch of traffic from a search engine, which that’s the thing, which can sometimes be great, but other times not.

Sandie Markle: I think for myself, every time I talk to a creator over the years, it’s the same story. Oh, there was just an algorithm update. Oh, I feel like this brand has given me pennies and I’m not dismissing any of those income streams. I think they’re still valid and really working for a lot of people, but this desire to help has really come from just hearing people over and over kind of say the same things. They’re tired of spinning their wheels, they’re tired of certain things happening over and over again, and again, it’s not for everyone either, but this is just one thing that you can do with, you said it before what you already have. And I think that that is the key to how can you leverage what you already have to make it work for you.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. How about what you can expect to get paid? That’s going to be a big question I think that people would have is we understand the concept now of what you’re talking about, which is we have these valuable resources, which is content, specifically recipe content, and there are people in companies and brands who need recipe content. There’s a hundred different variations of the content side and the brand side, what that might look like. But generally that partnership makes sense. We have content, people need content, we can license that content. They pay us for that. Content is revenue for us. What should you expect from a pricing standpoint? Do you have a range or maybe some examples of what you’ve seen around licensing and the amount that a creator could potentially make?

Sandie Markle: Yeah, so I think when you think about licensing, I’ve seen from bulk maybe from five to 10 recipes. People charge from 5,000 to $10,000 for the development and the testing and the ingredients, blah, blah, blah, blah, between five and $10,000 for that kind of thing. But of course when you’re purchasing in bulk, there should be a discount already. That’s why it’s actually key for things you already have. You’re not creating anything. So if you were to think about anywhere between a hundred to $250 per recipe at a hundred dollars a recipe that licensing one year license, that’s $25,000, right? Doesn’t matter. Just boom, excuse me. And if it’s non-exclusive, it’s still doing whatever it’s doing on your website. And the key that I want to point out as well, the partnerships that I think are key for creators are companies who do not have a web presence that’s directly competing with your content. And they exist. They exist. So that’s the key because this is why models don’t work in the past, this whole thing, well, it’s competing with my revenue. This is off the web,

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s like it’s not going to eat into your discoverability as a creator because

Sandie Markle: Right, it’s going to increase it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s going to increase it and you’re potentially going to get paid for it. Obviously there’s the considerations we talked about before, attribution, how’s that going to show up? But it’s not going to be somebody who licenses this, and I should say this. What you’re saying is there are opportunities where somebody’s going to publish it within an app and that app’s going to be a walled garden. Maybe it’s MyFitnessPal and they’re not going to publish it on the web. So the only way that people are going to find that is if they’re browsing the recipe section of MyFitnessPal and they come across it and they’re like, oh, interesting. Or in the case of Amazon devices, maybe they’re asking for a recipe and they want a chocolate chip cookie recipe and it surfaces one that you have licensed to Amazon. And that range I think is really helpful. Okay, a hundred to $250, you can start to play the numbers game, even if it’s $10 and you have a thousand recipes,

Sandie Markle: This is what I’m saying,

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not going to show up on the web. It’s like, and like you said, you have that preexisting spreadsheet with all the information and you say, yep, okay, we’re going to license it. It kind of is similar to a very different world, which is Pixar and Pixar licenses the to create Buzz Lightyear to a t-shirt company. It doesn’t cost them anything more. They just are giving that t-shirt company the ability to make this buzz Lightyear shirt and they get a certain amount on that. And so huge opportunity here. And the two ways that I really see that you could go forward with it, you could learn how to do this on your own. You could develop an internal process, a system, you could develop your own outreach and see if you can get these connections with the brands. Personally, we’ve had inbound things occasionally, not often, but people will occasionally reach out and say, we’re trying to build a recipe database with this stuff. Could we license your recipes? Or you could work with somebody who kind of is out there trying to make these connections. So can you talk about as we come to an end on this conversation, what it’s like for you and kind of your role with both marrying tech platforms and food creators and maybe other ways that food publishers are working with you?

Sandie Markle: Yeah, so I’m so deeply entrenched in this space. I feel like I talked to these emerging founders just as much as I talk to food bloggers and content creators. So they’re popping up all the time in my feed and sometimes I just reach out and I just talk to them and I talk to one woman where she’s launched a recipe platform for baby food. So in my mind I’m thinking of all the baby food, which is actually not that many recipe sites that I know of, And talking to them and just trying to understand their goal, not necessarily with something in mind particularly, but that’s kind of how it works for me. And then introducing people to each other when the time is right. I work talk to a lot of people, but I also want to make sure, because I’ve always been in the middle, so I’m not really leaning towards any particular side. I just feel like people should come together and make really good experiences. But I will never introduce people if I don’t think it’s the right fit for both sides, especially from the creator side. I guess I’m kind of leaning over to that side just because I know how hard it is to try to, and then tech is overwhelming too. It can be really overwhelming. There’s a lot of tech talk going on and really trying to navigate that space too, but also supporting the tech companies and saying, if you want to create an economy, here are the pain points that will really help you to make that bridge work. So that’s kind of like my day to day. Sometimes people will introduce me to new people. Sometimes I check in and out with companies that I know are, they’re kind of stealth startups, meaning they’re not public yet or they’re plugging along, they’re trying to get investment, they’re trying to figure out different things just to kind of see how things are working out and what their roadmap is in terms of when they want to start bringing creators in or their content in, because some of them need the advisement before the content because they want to make sure that their platform works well. So that’s how I am working with both sides in my work right now.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Super educational for me. Something that we had kind of looked at before, didn’t really have strong opinions on where that existed, but not in this way. So it’s been super helpful for me to fill out the picture on what this looks like if people are interested in connecting with you. You mentioned a substack, I signed up for it as you were talking about that so people can follow along there if they want to reach out to you. What’s the best way to do that?

Sandie Markle: You can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it.

Sandie Markle: That’s my plug for LinkedIn. Also, you can send me an email at [email protected]. That’s Sandie with an IE and a blueberry with an I. Yeah, you could just email me and we can chat about different things and you don’t know what you don’t know. So I’m happy to have a free discovery call and just answer whatever questions and see if there’s the opportunity to work more together.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Sandie, thanks so much for coming on again. Really great to chat with you, and I know folks will get a lot out of it, so thanks for coming on.

Sandie Markle: Thank you so much.

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. As always, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your community on social media or your email list or even just text or email it to your friends and family. Getting the word out helps so much with our podcast. Since we are kicking off a brand new month, I wanted to fill you in on what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership this month. If you are not yet a Food Blogger Pro member and interested in joining us, you can head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more. First up, on Thursday, July 3rd, we’ll be releasing a brand new Coaching Call with Lynn from the blog Family Tree Foodie. You can watch the video replay in the membership or listen to the audio-only replay on our members-only podcast Food Blogger Pro On the Go. Next up on Thursday, July 10th, we’ll be hosting a live Q&A. The theme of this Q&A is I have my blog now, what? It’s particularly well suited to beginners, and it will be just with Bjork answering all of your questions about getting your blog up and running. Last up, we have a course update that will be going live on Thursday, July 24th, all about time management. We hear time and time again that managing everything you have to do as a food blogger is one of the biggest barriers to success. And so hopefully this course will help you manage your time more efficiently. And that’s it for July. It should be a great month in the membership, and we look forward to seeing you there. See you next week for another podcast episode.