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This episode is sponsored by Member Kitchens.
Welcome to episode 504 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Mika Kinney from Joy to the Food.
Last week on the podcast, Bjork chatted with Ansley Beutler. To go back and listen to that episode, click here.
Leveraging Analytics to Gain 250K Instagram Followers in One Year
Mika and her husband Dan launched their food blog, Joy to the Food, in 2021 with the goal of building a successful brand and business. Just a few years later, Mika has left her full-time job as a civil engineer, they’ve qualified for Raptive, and their Instagram following has soared to over 250,000.
In this interview, Mika reveals the exact strategies that fueled her rapid growth—from 1,000 to 250,000 followers on Instagram in just one year. She also shares how they’ve weathered the recent Helpful Content Updates and come out stronger, plus how she leverages analytics to drive key decisions.
This conversation is a must-listen for anyone eager to supercharge their social media strategy in 2025 or seeking affirmation that they, too, can transform their food blog into a full-time career with the right approach.

Three episode takeaways:
- The importance of diving into analytics — Mika’s engineering background is evident in her Instagram and SEO strategies. She explains her process for navigating Instagram analytics and how she uses the data to drive content decisions (including niching down to protein recipes with protein powder) and to predict which types of content will achieve certain business goals.
- How to go from 1,000 to 250,000 Instagram followers in one year — Mika walks listeners through her Instagram strategy, including the importance of consistent daily posts and her strategy for posting Reels that fall into four “buckets” — for reach, for growing an audience, for existing followers, and for outbound clicks/sales. Mika highlights key elements like trending audio, video duration, text overlays, and optimized captions with keywords.
- How to recover from Helpful Content Updates – After the September 2023 HCU caused a steep drop in page views for Joy to the Food (from 80,000 to 3,000!), Mika and Dan turned things around by doubling down on high-quality, niched-down content. They focused on site improvements, refined keyword research, and stayed adaptable, ultimately recovering and growing beyond their previous traffic levels.
Resources:
- Joy to the Food
- RankIQ
- ManyChat
- Grocers List
- Joy to the Food High Protein Meal Plans
- Substack
- Follow Mika on Instagram
- Join the Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook Group
Thank you to our sponsors!
This episode is sponsored by Member Kitchens.
Member Kitchens allows you to build a thriving membership community on your own-branded platform — no tech skills required. 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. Member Kitchens imports your existing recipe library, so you can start selling subscriptions quickly.
Ready to add a new revenue stream to your business? Visit memberkitchens.com today to start your free trial, or use the code FOODBLOGGERPRO for 50% off the first two months of any plan.
Interested in working with us too? Learn more about our sponsorship opportunities and how to get started here.
If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to [email protected].

Transcript (click to expand):
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, 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 memberkitchens.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.
Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming Mika Kinney. Alongside her husband, Dan Mika launched her food block Joy to the Food in 2021 with the goal of building a successful brand and business. Just a few years later, Mika has left her full-time job as a symbol engineer. Their site has qualified for Raptive and their Instagram following has soared to over 250,000 followers. I love this interview because often on the podcast we hear stories of food bloggers who’ve been creating content for years or even over a decade and have found success, but I think it’s really important to hear stories of creators who’ve had success more recently because it can be particularly inspiring For those of you who are just starting out as food bloggers.
This interview is also really useful because Mika shares the exact strategies that she has used to fuel her rapid growth on Instagram, including how she uses Instagram analytics to guide her decisions and how she posts reels that fall into four specific buckets to help achieve certain goals. She also shares more about how they’ve recovered from recent helpful content updates, including the September, 2023 helpful content update that just decimated their traffic from 80,000 down to 3000 monthly page views and how they’ve recovered from that traffic and even gone beyond it in recent months. This is a really useful interview. I think you’ll want to have a pen and paper nearby to take notes, so I’ll just let Bjork it away.
Bjork Ostrom: Mika, welcome to the podcast.
Mika Kinney: Hi, thanks for having me.
Bjork Ostrom: We’re going to be talking about some of the themes that we’ve talked about on the podcast before. Things like finding a niche. We’re going to be talking about Instagram growth. You and your husband have had a lot of success with that and also building traffic on your site. And the great thing about your story is sometimes we’ll do interviews with people and it’s like when I started my blog in 2013 and it’s like, okay, that’s great. It’s fun to hear about people who have been showing up for a long time, and that’s often what we talk about. It’s all about showing up continuously for a long time and improving things along the way. But your story is relatively recent. It’s just within the last few years that you’ve started to work on your site to build your following and you’ve had some success in these early years. So when did you start and what was your mindset when you started your site and your social account?
Mika Kinney: Yeah, so we started in 2021, so we were after the covid boom and all of that. We started it with the intent of building a brand, building a business, but when you start, no matter what, I count the first year as just a wash because you literally don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t know what’s happening. So I started that, started the socials at the same time, spent a lot of time in the first year on socials and then did nothing. Trying to build traffic to the site, hit with the Kel content update in September of 2023 and quit my job at the same time and now we’re
Bjork Ostrom: Here. Interesting for those two things to simultaneously happen. So before we get too far along, you had said in 2021 you started the site and social, it sounds like you focus primarily on posting to social as opposed to the site in those early years. Did I hear that right?
Mika Kinney: No, not necessarily. I think I just put time all of 2022. I just didn’t put any time into socials at all.
Bjork Ostrom: Oh, no time into social. It was all on the site.
Mika Kinney: 2021 when I first started. We started in February of 2021. I put time into both, but very low quality stuff. We didn’t have a niche at the time. We didn’t do anything like that. We were just keyword chasing essentially.
Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So you do some keyword research, you see an opportunity, let’s create a piece of content around that, which it can work. It can kind of work, but I think
Mika Kinney: It did work for a while,
Bjork Ostrom: And what we’re going to talk about is this idea of a brand and a niche and a following versus just search traffic and you can get search traffic as the main thing, or you can get search traffic as a symptom of brand building and establishing a following and being a source that people go to. And that to me is where it’s really exciting. That’s long lasting. It’s not that you don’t do keyword research with that, but we’re going to get to that. It sounds like 2023 helpful content. You had been working on building traffic, sounds like you had built up some traffic doing this keyword analysis, seeing opportunities, creating a recipe post for a keyword. You’d maybe get some traffic to that. Tell me about what happened, number one with helpful content, and then number two at the same time as you were leaving your full-time job.
Mika Kinney: So my husband and I are both civil engineers by trade, so we’re very into numbers. So we did keyword research, we took courses, we listened to your podcasts, listened to all this stuff, and had a lot of success in that. Enough for me to leave my job as an engineer and I left in September and September. Helpful content update came a week later. We didn’t actually feel the full impact of that until after the holidays. Thankfully because of Pinterest, traffic was enough to carry us at least a little bit. And then January it really hit, and at the time we had no niche really. We had a couple protein recipes, we had a couple, but everything else was all over the place. So that hit and then I was like January the year, the word of the year is brand
Bjork Ostrom: Of the
Mika Kinney: Brand.
Bjork Ostrom: Why was that? Did you just intuitively know? Had you heard people talk about that? Yeah, so this was January of 2024. So this would’ve been at the time of the recording this just a year ago. Is that right? Yep.
Mika Kinney: Yeah. So I had always known that Instagram, that’s where I consume my content. That’s where I spend time. So I just knew inherently that that is where I was going to have success if it was going to be any social platform,
Bjork Ostrom: Because you knew how the platform worked and you were spending time there. It’s like the party that you were hanging out at.
Mika Kinney: Yeah, and I don’t know, I think I was part of the crowd that was there, but I still didn’t bother to figure out that there was an algorithm to it, that there was a strategy to it, that there was learning involved. That was more my husband who was like, you spend so much time there if you’re going to build a brand, like you keep saying you should learn it.
And so I did and it just took off. So there was two things that happened as I learned Instagram, which through intuition, a lot of that is just looking at your numbers and then getting a feel for what works and what doesn’t. A lot of that is posting as much content as possible initially to have enough numbers to back up what you’re doing. The more data you have, the better in my opinion. And then the other part of that is we really niched down. So we started realizing the protein stuff is taking off. Obviously that is a big trend right now for good reason. Then we realized that protein recipes without protein powder was taking off even more. That’s where we really hyper niche down and it just exploded from there.
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, what I love about that is this idea that there’s waves in the world of content creation. We’ve talked about this before, and one of the waves is a platform wave. Where are people spending their time and within that platform, what type of content are they producing? Example being short form video on Instagram. A lot of people are there consuming that type of content. That’s a type of content that’s working. It’s a medium that’s working. Another wave is this wave of protein which you identified and also related to, okay, you are naturally, it sounds like eating this way already. What does it look like to refine that around the edges a little bit? Tighten that up a lot and say, Hey, we want to focus on creating content that’s high protein recipes without added protein powder. You can start to see what we talk about is this idea that if somebody comes and looks at what you’re doing, are they able to quickly opt in or opt out? Is this for me or is this not for me? And when you get niched down that people are able to say, Hey, this is for me. I want to eat high protein. And I’ve always felt kind of weird about additional protein powders and I don’t like maybe that they’re not F FDA a regulated in the same way.
And so I want to say it again,
Mika Kinney: Or they just don’t like the taste.
Bjork Ostrom: So I want to eat high protein, but I don’t feel like protein powder is the option for me or it makes me feel weird. All of these different reasons why, and what you said is things kind of took off. That’ll be kind of our, we’ll put a pin in that and that’ll be our lead, which we’ll come back to. But what I want to talk about is the helpful content update because some people, especially if you got to this point where you had just left your job, and if I’m looking at your notes here, and it sounds like at that time September the site was getting 80,000 page views, you’re kind of getting to that point where you are able to sign up for a ad company, you’re starting to play with those numbers that becomes full-time equivalent revenue that you are producing from your site, and then you get hit with this helpful content update. Talk me through your mindset in that season. Did part of you think, Hey, I need to go back and start my job again? Were there other life situations where you had said, no, I know this is right for me and I’m going to make it work to build this company and to build this brand? How did you sort through that decision to continue to build your site and to build your following after a hard experience with helpful content?
Mika Kinney: And to put numbers in perspective, we went from 80,000 page views down to 3000.
Bjork Ostrom: Oh, wow. It
Mika Kinney: Was a big hit. Like I said, Pinterest carried us some of that, so we didn’t feel the real impact until January. And
Bjork Ostrom: So when you say 80,000, that’s from search, 80,000. Yep. So you had 80,000 page views from search and it went down to 3000. And I think a lot of people who got hit by helpful content can relate to that because it was like you look at the graphs and it’s like it just falls off.
Mika Kinney: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I kind of quit my jab in that weird in-between where it wasn’t quite enough to match my full time, but
Bjork Ostrom: You saw the trajectory and the trend, so
Mika Kinney: It’s like, okay, we’re going to go for it. But I also had the luxury that I work for clients’ writing, and so I had that to fall back on so I could ramp that up. So it’s interesting that I never once was like, oh, I’m going to go back to my job always, even though I did love my engineering job, in my head I was like, well, now I’ve developed new skills, so if anything, I’ll do more writing. I’ll do more short form video, I’ll do things like that. And I expanded on my knowledge base in those areas. And then in January I’m big into goal setting and things like that. We sat down and we had our annual retreat, just me and my husband, we sit tv,
But I was like, I just know that if I can build this, I know what’s possible with Instagram. I know I can get people to the site, things like that. And the protein thing, we’ve always ate like that. Back in 2022 or something, we were using Rank iiq and we actually asked them to create a protein category with this, okay, maybe we should do this, maybe we should go in that direction. But we never could commit because the mental block of the more niche you are, the harder it is you think to get people when in reality, like you said, that gives people a reason to be there. So we just doubled down on it. I’m like, what do we have to lose? So after that, we just took off. But yeah, helpful content update, mental block was really just getting committing to the niche.
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Great. So let’s go back. We’re going to take that pin out and we’re going to look at the Instagram growth. I think that’s a really interesting case study. So January of 2024, you had 1300 Instagram followers. As of today I looked and you are almost to 260,000. So that’s in one year a quarter of a million new followers that you’ve added just on Instagram. And so what has that been like and what would you attribute that growth to? And then we’re going to also talk about the correlating page views on your site that have come along the way.
Mika Kinney: Yeah, so in January I started posting consistently. I started posting every day to Instagram, did a couple protein recipes. They did well, did some more lifestyle. So Instagram reels, what I have learned over the time is that they fall into different buckets. So you have one that’s for reach and that gets people to see you. And then you have one that’s for your current followers and then one that’s for sales that gets people to your site. So at the time, I was working on the reach ones, so I had a couple of reels take off and then one in particular that had text overlay explaining what I do. That really started to skyrocket. So you gain 10,000 people in a day and then 20,000, then 30,000. So this all happened in,
Bjork Ostrom: And this was views on the piece of content are when you say, yeah, so you get 10,000 followers after you have this piece of content that gets a lot of reach.
Mika Kinney: Exactly. And it also gives them a reason to follow because what I found for my account in particular, recipe videos do not give me a lot of followers because it’s a lot of people are like, oh, that’s cool, I’m going to save that. I’m going to ask for a recipe, but I’m not actually going to go to your page or your account. Whereas if it shows me and it shows a little bit about what I do, people are more likely to go there and get the breadth of recipes
Bjork Ostrom: Go there, meaning to your profile
Mika Kinney: On Instagram to my profile, and then you follower and then in turn go to the site.
Bjork Ostrom: So I think it’s worth talking about each one of those. We think of Instagram as an example and we think, okay, it’s this platform and you produce content on Instagram. But to your point, there’s all of these different ways that you can produce content, all of these different mindsets you can have going into it. Really you need to understand what type of content you’re creating and what the purpose of is it. And you said three different things, reach, audience and sales. Can you talk about each one of those and how you view those differently when you are creating content and maybe an example of what each one of those would be?
Mika Kinney: So reach videos, and I should say when I started this, I didn’t know any of this until you start to try different videos. So to me, reach is something that you’re going to use like a trending audio. It’s typically a very short video that’s less than seven seconds. So it increases your watch time because people are like, wait, did I watch the whole thing? So it’s a little bit of a trick. And then for me anyways, it works well if I have text overlay and it always has the term like protein recipes without protein powder. So that is what triggers essentially a viral video for me. And then in the caption, what I’ve figured out for my account, and it does vary in this space, a lot of other bloggers, for me, I need to have a long caption that has a lot of keywords. I don’t actually use hashtags that often, and if I do, I use them in line, but it’ll have a story. Here’s why I eat protein without protein powder. Here’s my son who likes to eat like this so I don’t have to worry about it. Here’s what this means. We’re going to have hemps seeds, we’re going to have Greek yogurt, we’re going to have other things. So when I explain that, that’s a reach for me that is getting to people who wouldn’t see me otherwise. It’s using the algorithm to my advantage with trending audio, short videos, things that cause you to watch it again and again.
Bjork Ostrom: And my guess is does this play into it? If you have a longer description, does that play into watch time? The idea that people then read through the description, there’s a compelling story. So you’re pairing your ability to create compelling, really short form videos with compelling text that maybe has a story. It keeps people around. And the idea with that is it plays into the algorithm by increasing watch time, Hey, people are sticking around, they’re looking at this, and therefore the theory is that Instagram is going to display that to more people. Like, hey, people who watch this stick around Instagram wants people to stick around, have more compelling content. And so you’re breaking beyond your audience. And they talk about that with Instagram a lot, that it’s not a social media application anymore, it’s an algorithmic media application and it’s driven by an algorithm more than social components. And you’re saying those are some of the pieces that are important that you’ve seen with creating a video that gets broad reach. Does that feel accurate?
Mika Kinney: Yeah, and some people say that it also, another key factor is the saves. I have not found that to be true, but again, it does vary slightly from account to account. So I have a friend who she never puts a long caption and she just says, short and sweet, and it does really well. So it is going to vary.
Bjork Ostrom: And what you’ve said that I think is important is you are looking at the numbers and every account’s going to be different. You might are creating food content, but the theme is for busy parents who don’t have time to make a meal, and it’s like that type of content is probably going to have different variables that you need to be aware of versus people who are creating content around slow cooking and how to take your time in the kitchen. And just as one example of a hundred different examples. Can you talk really briefly before we talk about the other two, where you are looking at those numbers and if there’s a process you’re using to analyze those or if it’s more of just exploration of the numbers and extracting common themes a little bit more subjectively as you look at the numbers.
Mika Kinney: So Instagram is a real beast when you try and look at numbers. Their analytics platform is not uber helpful. It shows things in 30 day increments or you just scroll through because you can’t sort by give me the video that has the top reach, the top likes and the top comments. You can’t sort by all three, you have to pick one or the other. So you end up clicking through each one within your insights in your profile and then get a feel for like, oh, okay, this brownie one had really good reach. This lifestyle one had good follow count, but this brownie one had good likes, so I’m going to try more brownies. The other thing that I look at is when a viral video takes off, there’s multiple reasons why it could take off. It could be the music, it could be your hook, it could be that it’s a brownie recipe.
So there are multiple things. So what I typically do is if I get a hunch, now I have a better idea of what’s going to do well, chocolate always does well, so I’m just going to do chocolate. But initially I had a brownie batter recipe that went wild, and so I did an entire brownie series of that. So every day I posted a new brownie butter recipe to see if brownie was the thing that took off. And I did okay, but not superb. And so testing those sort of things too. So it’s a little bit of intuition, it’s a lot of looking at the numbers and then a lot of trial and error.
Bjork Ostrom: Part of it is developing the craft and the skill around starting to understand the numbers. This is a call out for anybody who’s seen the show Severance. Do you know severance?
Mika Kinney: I’ve heard of it. I haven’t
Bjork Ostrom: Watched. Okay, this is great. It’s like my all time favorite. The last episode of season one is maybe my favorite episode of all time of any TV show, but Lindsay and I are rewatching it because they’re going to come out with season two. This is only for people who watch severance, so it’s not going to be super helpful. But they work in this department called Micro Data Refinement, and one of the things nobody really knows, they don’t even really know what it is that they’re doing, but there’s a bunch of numbers on the screen and what they say is when, and then they’re kind of categorizing those numbers and then there’s this new girl and eventually she’s like, wait. Then I see it point being it feels like what is happening for them is they’re looking at the numbers a lot and they’re like, what am I looking at? What am I doing? And they’re like, you’ll just know eventually. And I think part of what we do is a version of that where even when you get started, you don’t even really what’s the process? What am I doing? You kind of are figuring it out as you go, but eventually you start to get some intuition around, wait, I can start to see our brains naturally start to do pattern recognition. And one of the things that you said is you start to understand how a certain piece of content performs and in what way it’s performing well. And you talked about reach. My guess is reach means, hey, you’re getting a lot of views on this piece of content. It’s shorter, there’s a longer description you said that works well for you. And so you start to see, okay, in this bucket we’re getting more views on this type of content. It sounds like in another bucket there’s this audience growth and that’s looking to say, Hey, did I create a piece of content that a lot of people ended up following me because of that content? Is that what that audience bucket is
Mika Kinney: With the reach? An example of one that did well but didn’t follow into the audience bucket would be, I have a chicken salad recipe and it literally is just dipping the chip into the chicken salad and that’s the whole video and then a long caption. So that’s a reach, but it didn’t result in followers, followers, audience video to me, and this can be taken two ways, so some people would say the audience is to get the followers, the other people would say it’s to make your current audience happy. So those are two separate things.
Bjork Ostrom: Can you say that again?
Mika Kinney: Audience could be taken as people who you’re getting to follow you. So new people, it could also be making your current audience happy once they get people to follow you. It typically is a compilation video or a lifestyle video. So an example is you didn’t understand the cottage cheese trend until you found me. That would be an example of something that would get people to follow you because it’s giving them enough of a teaser with multiple recipe videos that they’re like, oh, I should follow and see what else there is. Single one-off recipe videos don’t typically do that
Unless it’s hyper viral. So smash Brussels sprouts for somebody who went really viral and they gained a lot of followers because it had 30 million views. So that’s a different sort of thing. The other side of the audience making your current audience happy is pulling your current audience, figuring out what it is that they want, and then getting ones that have putting out videos that really have a lot of engagement. So for me, dessert stuff and breakfast typically do really well, but people don’t tell me that they want dinners and stuff. And so when I do dinners, it has a way lower reach, but the engagement is much higher
Bjork Ostrom: Engagement meaning when you say engagement, what does that,
Mika Kinney: The amount of comments likes people going to the site from it, things like that.
Bjork Ostrom: Sure.
Mika Kinney: People interacting with the actual content. So engagement, you can track in your insights and Instagram pretty easily per video. Again, you can’t look at it all together, but you can look at each one. So say a video has only 40,000 views versus another one has a hundred thousand, but one has 2000, the 40,000 has 2000 likes and 2000 comments, and the a hundred thousand has a thousand likes and 500 comments. So you start to look at those numbers audience wise, and you could see what is resonating with your current audience. So I guess maybe you would have four buckets, but the reach is kind of, I like to try and combine reach videos with ones that will also give followers.
Bjork Ostrom: Sure. It’s almost like it’s not even so much something is exclusively in one bucket or another. It’s almost like I think of my nephews were over, nephews and nieces were over this last weekend and they really like to play Madden football and they can create their own players and it’s like, okay, are they going to be really strong or really fast or are they going to be really good at catching the ball or throwing the ball and you have these, but if you use all of it on strength, then there probably aren’t going to be very fast. And so it’s kind of a similar approach when you are, it sounds like creating content, it’s not exclusively in one bucket the other, but if you’re really going to go after reach, then you might sacrifice some of the audience. But the goal is to get all of those as high as possible. So we have reach audience. When you said there’s four, if there’s a soft fourth, what would the fourth be?
Mika Kinney: Yeah, so soft fourth would be, oh, sales. So the fourth one would be sales. So videos that actually get conversions, whether that be to your site or we also have a paid meal plan, getting people there to your email list, things like that. Sales can sometimes happen in videos in reels and short form videos. A lot of times the sales portion happens in stories, so it can be kind of both, because videos are entertaining. It’s really hard to get people to click out of Instagram. With the advancements of automated chats like mini chats and groceries list, it makes it a lot easier, but it’s still really hard to get people to click out or go search. So some people too, when they’re doing that with their sales videos, that’s typically where you’re going to have a full length of video that’s like, here, watch me make this. I’m going to give you tips about it. We’re going to sear our salmon skin side down, blah, blah, blah, blah, long form video that is like, oh, this looks really easy to make. I’m going to go comment and I’m going to get the recipe.
Bjork Ostrom: Yep, got it. So we have reach, we have audience, we have sales. When you said fourth, what was the one within there where you’re like, there could be four technically buckets,
Mika Kinney: Two types of audience. So if you have one and one to make your current audience happy.
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Audience, new followers, audience, current followers. Got it. That makes sense.
But basic idea being, hey, these really viral videos that’s Reach, then you have videos for your audience growth and then videos for audience satisfaction that could potentially be too. And then if you have a thing, are you selling that thing? Your point is it actually works really well within stories because it’s a little bit of a different medium. People consume content differently. Maybe even just the ability to put links in looks at a little bit different. You can also do that within reels, but that type of reel is probably going to look different. And to the building a football player analogy, you’re probably going to sacrifice reach for sure. And maybe some of those audience buckets if you’re going to increase on the sales side of things. Are you using ManyChat Grocers list? What does that look like for you from a strategy perspective with some of those automated bots?
Mika Kinney: Yeah, I use Grocers List. For me, it helps. There’s just no way I could get that many people to the site. It’s biggest help is within stories. So one of the biggest, I don’t dunno if you call it a hack or trick or whatever, is when you let your story expire and then you post For me, I’ll post an iPhone photo of a recipe. So while I’m testing it maybe, and it’s like, and then a review of it and say, here’s an easy dinner, reply to the story with chocolate, I don’t know, maybe it’s not a dinner, but you’ve reply to this and then I’ll send you the recipe. And it increases story views from 2000 to like 60,000. So having the groceries list for that or automated chat is huge for stories for me anyways. I also use it on reels too. There’s no way I could keep up with the comments. But it also takes training your audience. I think Lindsay doesn’t use it, right? Or she,
Bjork Ostrom: Correct. Yeah. We used ManyChat for a little bit, but then we decided not to. It was more of, there was two things that really stood out. One was just the mass influx of dms that then resulted in, which was kind of the point, but what was hard then is to actually respond to people. And then there’s a little bit of black magic question around what does hooking into this do to the Instagram? It’s based in zero science or numbers, but hey, if we’re using this to lift a reel in terms of engagement, does that have an impact kind of long-term? So that was more of like, ah, is there a way where eventually this stops working for some reason? I think that’s proven in zero fact, and I think it’s probably something we would revisit at some point
If we just wanted to be a little bit more thoughtful in terms of how we used it. But I think to your point, I see people using it and I think there are ways that when you plug it in, becomes a really great referral engine for traffic to your site. And also a great resource for people who don’t want to go through the process of looking something up or Googling. That’s actually the third piece that we thought about is, is there some inherent benefit in people in branded search? And so the fact that people would leave to do a search would be beneficial as opposed to just getting the link. But again, none of it is, it’s all kind of squishy in terms of whether that’s true or not.
Mika Kinney: Yeah, no, I would agree with that. And some people in their caption, I think it’s Crowded Kitchen, they go both ways. So they put the recipe in the caption, but then they also have the many chat set up for groceries list, and then they also say, go Google, crowded Kitchen, whatever, salad recipe. And so I know a lot of people who can see, look in Search console and see people searching the branded term. And I can’t imagine it wouldn’t help, but I think because our growth is so new, we needed something that would quickly get people there because they were not, Lindsay’s follow is a long time, very established following. And so I think because we were really new, we needed an easy way to get rid of that barrier to entry for people because now they’re starting to search it. Now they’re starting to search our name, brand it, things like that. But initially it wasn’t. And at this point, if I don’t put the thing or put the automation, they’re like,
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, they expect it. Now they free.
Mika Kinney: So now it’s like I have to, yeah.
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.
And I think what’s great about what you just said is understanding that on this podcast, when you see best practices, when you watch somebody do a growth hack on Instagram, they teach you about what to do. All of it is these are all tools. And what we need to do is we need to decide for our business, for our stage, for how we are approaching growth for the type of relationship we want to have with our audience. What’s the decision that we are going to make? And the tool is a tool. And similar to you walk into Home Depot, there’s a thousand different tools and they all have a different use and they’re all probably pretty great, but if you are building a bathroom remodeling business, you’re not going to go in and buy all the tools just because they’re awesome. You’re going to have some tools that you learn about and you’re like, I’m going to pick these up.
These are perfect and they make my job easier. And then there’s going to be other tools like a hacksaw, I don’t know, maybe bathroom remodelers use Hacksaws. They probably do, but you might look at it and be like, I don’t actually need this tool, but I do need a tile cutter or whatever. And I think what you’re saying is, Hey, we realized for the type of business that we had for the stage that we’re at, for how we wanted to be in relationship with our followers, this is a really important thing for us to do and it’s proven to be helpful and useful. The thing that I want to go back to that I thought was interesting was what you were talking about with stories. So you were talking about when your story expires, then you keep it and then you refer back to it with an image that is in stories or an image that is in your feed. Can you talk through that again? I want to make sure I understand.
Mika Kinney: And again, it will vary based on your account. So if you have a very established account who people really want you, which I think food bloggers tend to lean towards people who just want the food, they don’t necessarily care about you.
But if you, for me and for a lot of other food accounts, I’ve heard you let the story expire whenever you’ve had, give it like an hour or so, and then I post an iPhone photo of the recipe on stories. Sometimes I will do the video for it, not as a reel, but just the actual video into stories, but it has to be at least 15 seconds so people have time to read it. So an image tends to do better, an image of it, very homemade image, not one of our hero shots. And then explain a little bit about the recipe. Why do you need to make this, are there these good reviews? Give user feedback, things like that, and then say, reply to this with recipe or whatever it is. So people reply to that and automation comes in and sends ’em the recipe. And it’s really great because it increases your overall engagement of your account because you are getting your most loyal followers who are typically the ones on stories actually to see more of your content because it’s always a constant struggle to get Instagram to show your content to all of your people. If you think about it as a consumer and stories like say I follow a thousand people, I’m not going to scroll through a thousand stories. I’m going to see those top 10 or
Bjork Ostrom: Whatever. And is the link that you were sending them when they send you the dm, the link to the story, there’s
Mika Kinney: A link, the recipe,
Bjork Ostrom: And then how does that increase the story?
Mika Kinney: So the algorithm thing again, where Instagram is seeing more engagement on that story, so it’s going to start pushing it and it starts showing your story at the front.
Bjork Ostrom: Oh, got it. And the story is the actual, just the image itself. Yeah. Okay. And then can you talk about why you need to let the first story expire?
Mika Kinney: That one’s a little bit of black magic. I don’t know what it is with Instagram and that, but that is something that’s been talked about in a lot of food blogger or Facebook groups. People have realized this, things like that. For me, it particularly works well on the weekends, which works well because I say I don’t post content on the weekends. I don’t post short form videos. So instead I just do stories and it spikes thousands of people to our site just from these stories because that’s where your most loyal people are.
Bjork Ostrom: Interesting. And so because normally what you’d think is like, Hey, you are posting a video with this recipe in stories where you talk about it
That you would just do it there and say, Hey, DM me. But what you’re saying is you post a sequence, it’s a video, it’s maybe explaining about the recipe that expires. You produce another piece of content that says, Hey, if you want this recipe, here’s where you go. And it’s the image. Maybe there’s something to do. It’s always interesting to think the psyche of the user, maybe it’s something to do with people see it, they look through it, they have kind of familiarity with it. It’s almost like pre-selling somebody on something and then it’s telling them, Hey, if you want to check out, if you want to actually get this, here’s where you can do it. So I see what you’re saying now that makes sense. And to your point, it’s like we don’t really know why, but what you’re saying is there’s been evidence in your content creation process that is something that has worked.
So you’ve gone through this journey of starting with a thousand Instagram followers in a year ago, essentially to 260,000 Instagram followers. Tell me about what that has looked like for your business. What has your mindset been as it relates to building this following, getting this engagement? Are you thinking about, Hey, how do I direct people to the site? Is that still the main focus or are you starting to think about how do I partner with brands? It sounds like you’ve also developed some products, so as our reach to an audience increases, so do our options in terms of what we do with that, what decisions have you made around deciding how to monetize a following with your brand?
Mika Kinney: Yeah, so I guess last summer I hit, I dunno, like 80,000 followers or 60,000. And so at that point I started to have brands reach out to me. I started doing some brand work. I realized how lucrative it can be. And so that became another bucket because our other big thing for last year was diversify. After the Google helpful content update, we were like, we cannot put all of our eggs in that basket. So I was like, brands are a really good way to increase this and keep us afloat. So I started doing that in September of, was it September, August of last year? Shortly around that time, we had a positive outcome from a core update, and so we gained back 1.25 times our traffic again. And so
Bjork Ostrom: That was 1.25 of where it was the month before or of where it was.
Mika Kinney: So we were at 80,000 and then we jumped to 90,000.
Bjork Ostrom: Got it.
Mika Kinney: So if you looked at our chart, it looks like a big hole we just dug ourselves out of.
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, interesting. Is there anything you would attribute that to? One of the reasons, again, we don’t know for sure, but why do you think that you benefited on the other side?
Mika Kinney: A lot of time, I spent a lot of time updating content, no index or deleted any content that didn’t perform or was not protein related unless it was a top performer,
Anything that could be converted to high protein, we made it high protein. We built out our homepage to make it really clear we’re high protein rewrote about us, things like that. And then social proof I think is a big component of that. Both. We had some stuff go off on YouTube too, and then the Instagram obviously. And so I think a culmination of all those things helped. It’s interesting because we have about the same amount of pieces of content now as we did back then, except they all perform much better. So instead of just having two one-off things that perform in Google, we have 2030 that are all performing well. And what we’re seeing now, just as of January, is now we’re starting to rank for high protein dinners, which is a huge category. So it definitely solidifies that Google sees us as a protein resource, and so we’re starting to rank for these bigger things.
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s such a testament to the importance of focusing on a niche, making sure that when your audience comes, they knows what type of content you talk about. In Food Blogger Pro and the membership, we do these things called coaching calls. And one of the things is like a once a month call with a member to do a tear down of their site and their business, one of the things I constantly come back around to is who are you to? What is your niche? And it doesn’t have to be that way forever, but all the great businesses, the biggest businesses in the world, all in a similar way. It’s like Amazon was books, Zappos was shoes. And I think what’s hard is in a lot of ways, especially with Food Blogger pro, people maybe know Pinch of Yum and they say, well, it’s kind of this general recipe site.
And I think if everything were to go away and we were to start again today, we wouldn’t start a general recipe site. We’d start a niche, and maybe the best example within the work that we do is Food Blogger Pro. It’s a really specific niche. It’s like food creators on the internet, and there’s a lot of those now and enough that you can support an industry and even work with ads or brands and sponsors on the podcast. But it’s a small niche and it’s a small focus, and I think what you’ve done is a great testament to the importance of that focusing in and the resulting growth that you’ve seen along with. And I think this is important, really good content because it has to be both of those things. It’s not like you can just pick a niche and then show up and then you’ll grow.
You have to have that good content, but having the niche as a multiplier on your efforts in creating good content. So how about looking forward, we’re at the one year mark of a really fun year for you of growth and reaching new heights for your business. When you look to next year, let’s say January, 2026, what does that look like for you in terms of what you hope to be doing, what you hope to accomplish in this year, and even the things that you might do different this year than what you did last year, if there are those?
Mika Kinney: So looking to the next year, right now, I’m not really focused on Instagram growth. I’m more so focused on engagement and getting the current people, the current users, to convert more to the site and more to our meal plan. Our big push is our paid meal plan right now, and we use Substack for that. So that’s our big push because it’s a lot of work, and if it doesn’t produce, we’re not going to keep doing it. I mean, it’s all ROI, right? I think the things that I would do different is I have like to call myself a serial hobbyist, and so I continually try new things on Instagram, and I know what works at this point, and so I just need to double down on it.
Bjork Ostrom: But sometimes it’s less fun.
Mika Kinney: Yeah,
Bjork Ostrom: You’re not learning. It’s not a new thing. It works, but part of what we do there is an element of exploration and fun.
Mika Kinney: Yeah. Yep, exactly. And then the other thing I want to work on is videos that, so in the Midwest, sometimes sunlight can be less than ideal
When you’re filming. And so I want to work on ways to film that, take that into account, because the other thing with video content is a lot of it’s visual, it’s video content. And so I have questions from people who are, my videos aren’t taking off, and it’s very clear to me that it’s a low quality video, it’s blurry, it’s low light, things like that. Maybe they added a filter and that stuff isn’t going to work on Instagram. What tends to do best is these bright lights, things like that. Or even if you’re in your kitchen, having a studio light in there so you can clearly see what’s going on and make it look really appetizing. So I think that’s the other thing I’m going to really work on this year, is figuring out the best setup for me that isn’t so reliant on sunshine.
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. It’s like it’s great when it’s great and then it’s not great. A lot of times, especially in the winter here,
Mika Kinney: Very
Bjork Ostrom: Sunny days are more rare than they are common, so that’s great. One of the things that we constantly come back to on this podcast, we’ve talked about it before we mentioned it here, is this idea of getting a tiny bit better every day forever. And I think with your story, one of the things I want to point out is when we started, we talked about this idea of 2021, you started in 2021, you continue to show up, you continue to iterate. And in 20 23, 20 24, that’s really when you started to break out. And what you experienced was, if you look at that chart, it probably is kind of like a hockey stick where it’s two to three years of kind of trying to figure it out, and then you figure it out. And oftentimes I think people get to that two year mark, they get to that three year mark, and they feel like, gosh, I’ve been trying to do this and I’m just going to call it quits.
And not that that’s a bad thing, but for those who are in the middle of it, stick with it, continue to learn, continue to iterate, continue to find ways to improve because there are these opportunities that come down the line where you could break out and suddenly you could find something that clicks. So as we wrap up, what would your advice be to somebody who’s in the midst of it, they’re kind of in the stage of feeling like it’s a grind. They’re trying to figure out how to really lock it in. What would your advice be to people who are listening in that headspace?
Mika Kinney: One of my favorite terms that has taken off on social media is this idea that in order to be a great entrepreneur, you have to be delusional. You have to be delusional enough to believe that you can succeed in crazy amounts, that you can reach for the moon and reach for the stars. So I think that’s what I really hope to push onto people is that you need to be a little bit delusional and you need to have this inherent desire, I guess, to continually push because nobody else is going to push you. You can push yourself like my husband, he told me to go learn Instagram because he believed in me, but it takes me doing that and continuing through 8, 9, 10 months of being crushed.
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, totally. And then to feel that and continue to show up and say, I’m going to figure this out. I can do it. I know that I can. That’s great. I love that. If people want to follow along, Mika with what you’re up to learn a little bit more, my guess is Instagram is a good place to go, but also the site itself, joy to the food. Anywhere else that you would point people.
Mika Kinney: You can go to Pinterest or YouTube, but I’m definitely most active on Instagram. If you have questions, you can shoot me a DM or send me an email.
Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Mika, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story.
Mika Kinney: Thank you.
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 the episode, it makes a huge difference if you share it with your friends or community. Since we are kicking off a new month, I wanted to take a moment to highlight what will be going on in the Food Blogger Pro membership this February. This Thursday, we will be publishing a brand new Coaching Call. Our Coaching Calls are when Bjork takes an hour to spend with a Food Blogger Pro member, and the member submits three questions in advance and Bjork and the member will work through those three questions over the course of the Coaching Call. On Thursday, we’re releasing a Coaching Call with Jessica from More Than Meatless Monday. As a reminder, you can watch the video replay of the Coaching Call on our site or on our members-only podcast Food Blogger Pro On the Go. Next Monday, on February 10th, we’ll be hosting our monthly Live Q&A. This Q&A will be with Casey Markee and will be about all things SEO. Remember that you can always submit a question in advance. Last up in February on the 20th, we will be releasing a new quick win course all about using Chat GPT as a food creator. We are really looking forward to everything we have going on in the membership this month. That’s it for now. Hope you have a great week.