Infusing Your Culture into Your Brand and Launching a Digital Zine with Krista Linares

Bjork Ostrom: Allspice is building the next evolution of recipe blogging, an AI-powered experience layer that connects your website, your recipes, and your readers in one seamless flow. By adding Allspice to your site, your readers also get access to a companion mobile app that can notify them the moment you publish a new recipe driving repeat traffic straight back to your website. Readers can save recipes directly from your site, generate smart grocery lists, track their pantry, and get personalized cooking insights all while staying connected to your brand. Allspice, partnering directly with recipe bloggers to roll out features that increase engagement, retention, and monetization while helping creators turn one-time visitors into loyal readers.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This is Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team, and in this episode, Bjork is sitting down to chat with Krista Linares from Nutrition Con Sabor. Krista is a dietitian who made the bold choice to transition back to a full-time job to reclaim her mental bandwidth, but she didn’t just go through a job change. She completely overhauled how she showed up online. This episode is a refreshing take on why stability might actually be the secret ingredient to better creative work, with the nutrition space getting flooded by generic AI content. Krista realized that standard blogging wasn’t cutting it anymore. She opens up about her pivot to a digital zine format, a mix of recipes, hot takes and cultural deep dives. And while leaning into your specific un-copyable voice is the only way to make it in today’s digital landscape. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Krista, welcome to the podcast.

Krista Linares: Thank you for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re going to talk about your journey as somebody who has deep expertise in the world of nutrition, but then also as a content creator online, we’re going to be touching on a lot of things. We’re going to be talking about a pivot in strategy, AI overviews, Google algorithm updates. We’re going to hit all of the hot topics today, but before we do that, give us a little bit of background on your experience, your story as it relates to being involved in the world of food, but also then publishing content online.

Krista Linares: So I am first and foremost a dietician, and so I am always approaching my work with my website and content creation through the lens of nutrition and dietetics. And so I actually started out on social media when I graduated with my master’s of public health. And during the process of becoming a dietician, I realized that the way I wanted to approach dietetics, there wasn’t a nine to five job out there that a hundred percent covered the topics and nutrition I wanted to cover. So that’s why I started getting into self-employment and being a content creator. So I started out on social media on Instagram, and I think I did exclusively that for two, three years. I had a website.

Bjork Ostrom: Website. And when you say exclusively that you’re publishing to Instagram with the goal of building your following or did you have a service or an offering related to that?

Krista Linares: Good question. I’ve always had offerings, so I started out with offering digital downloads also a lot towards other dieticians. So here’s a good client handout to use things like that, or in the nutrition world we do a lot of plate guides, so I had a few of those. So that was kind of where I first dipped my toe into that. And so I started out with using social media to promote that, also grow my following and then had a website the whole time. But that was mostly to sell the digital downloads. And then also when we moved to California, I moved to California about five years ago. When we moved to California, I wound up opening up a private practice, so I was doing one-on-one client counseling at that time. And so then I pivoted my social media strategy at the time to getting one-on-one clients for my service-based business.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Real quick to touch on that before you get too far ahead. I think one of the things that we’re often seeing now is almost exclusively if people are starting within the last five years, they’re starting on a social platform. And one of the great things about it is that it’s super easy to start, it’s competitive, but it’s really easy to start. It’s not like a WordPress site where you’re having to figure out plugins and hosting and all of that. And it also is a great place to test out your idea. So you have this idea of how you’re going to be creating content, who you’re going to be creating content for, what the needs of those people are, and do workshop and do almost like customer development, customer research on a platform before eventually starting to think about a website. So can you talk to me about that stage of starting what you thought it was going to be and then what it evolved into? Was it similar to what you thought it would be or was it different than what you thought it would be when you first got started?

Krista Linares: Both. So I really agree with you that it can be a good way to get rapid fire testing of ideas, rapid fire feedback. So I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet. My content and website and social media is all about nutrition with Latin American foods. I’m Mexican American and Cuban American, and part of my story of why I became a dietician was that I felt like when I was dealing with my own health issues, I didn’t have nutrition resources that spoke to the food that I actually like to eat. And so that made me really rethink how we teach nutrition.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Krista Linares: Totally. So when I decided to, and that’s kind of what I was talking about when I said that there wasn’t any nine to five nutrition job out there that talked about the things I wanted to talk about in this space. And so I was like, I have to be the one to basically create the work for myself that I want to do,

Bjork Ostrom: Create the job and then find the work. It’s like both. Exactly. Which is great that you are able to do that, but it’s also a little bit intimidating because there isn’t really necessarily a playbook. You’re kind of doing it by thinking about what your own experience, but then also trying to figure out other people’s experience. So it sounds like kind of this early stage was that a little bit.

Krista Linares: Yeah, absolutely. And definitely when I was starting out, I had a little, because I was living in North Carolina at the time and I didn’t have a strong Latino community around me. And so I had this thought process at the time of is this, I guess this a self-doubt of like, is this really just my experience or would other Latinas relate to me? And getting on social media and talking about what I saw really helped me validate that yes, there are other Latinas experiencing this and it’s not just me and that there is an audience in a niche here it was more

Bjork Ostrom: North Carolina, it was a blessing. Yeah, which is, it makes sense. And I would assume that also looks different in LA if you are thinking about who are the people that you are working with and want to connect with. Was that any of the thought process with moving to LA is if you want to focus on a certain demographic to make sure that you are aligned locationally with the demographic?

Krista Linares: No. So we moved to Los Angeles for my husband’s job he had at the time, but that was a strong reason why I decided that was when we had decided to move to la. That was a strong reason why I decided that was a good time for me to pivot into full self-employment and private practice because I thought there was more of a market for a tier.

Bjork Ostrom: And did that prove to be true?

Krista Linares: Yes, especially if you’re doing one-on-one nutrition counseling, then a lot of times people are looking for a dietician through their insurance company. And so in that case, absolutely that was the case. There’s kind of a longer conversation around virtual nutrition counseling right now and where do you get your clients from? And then licensing questions about crossing state lines to do counseling, but it is a little bit more possible to get clients in the nutrition counseling space from all over. But there’s licensing things to think about too.

Bjork Ostrom: What’s the short version of that long conversation? I’m just curious

Krista Linares: States. So there’s a nationwide certification to be a dietician. Certification is kind of the wrong word, but so that the nationwide credential is registered dietician. And however, each state also has their own regulations around licensing. And as a dietician, you have to abide by the licensing laws of the state where your client lives. So I was telling you earlier, I’m originally from Minnesota, so I started out my practice by having a lot of clients from Minnesota, like family, friends, things like that. So I had to get a Minnesota license at the time to be able to work with those clients. So if you’re recruiting clients online, you have to basically know all the laws of all the states and figure out if you need a license there or not in order to be able to work with them,

Bjork Ostrom: Similar with some tax considerations as you get into that world, it’s like, man, every state is different. It’s one of the great things about the United States is we have the ability for states to enact their own laws, but then it’s really difficult when you are in a position where you’re trying to build a business that has to adhere to those laws across multiple states because suddenly you’re juggling your case being the perfect example, multiple different kind of considerations. So I think your story around seeing this need and feeling that need personally and then building a solution around it is such a compelling story because I think if any of us contemplate, observe, are aware of how we are moving through our days, where we see needs for ourselves or if we’re curious and ask questions. And it sounds like that was a part of what you were doing too, was asking these questions. Suddenly you start to see in your case, hey, somebody might be working with a dietician or a nutritionist and they’re like, here are three great dinner options. It’s like, well or not, these aren’t necessarily the meals that I would want to eat. I think of an extreme example. My sister-in-law, her parents are Chinese when they’re coming over, one of the things that they’re trying to do is they’re trying to find where the foods that they would make when they’re usually living in China, even more extreme to draw the analogy out, if they worked with a dietician or a nutritionist here in the us, that to me feels like a pretty clear example of that person probably isn’t equipped to guide them through dietary considerations within the context of what they would consider to be their dietary preferences. And so it’s so cool to see a business built around that where you saw the need and then you look to fill the need. And it sounds like then what you’re doing is thinking strategically around how do I create content online to build awareness around my in-person practice, but also potentially build a following in a business that is just strictly online? What does that look like now as you are balancing both of those things? Because you do have a site, and we can talk about this in a little bit, had tens of thousands of page views and those can turn into very real dollars in a passive way. So how do you bounce the idea of being a business owner with an in-person practice, creating content to drive attention and customers to that in-person practice, but also creating content to build a business that is a digital content business?

Krista Linares: And part of the conversation too that I’ve really been having with myself the last couple years is also about my energy and my enjoyment and what do I like and part about what’s really cool and what I’m really proud of about my work the last couple years is that I do feel like I’ve explored so many things and so many avenues, but I also feel a little bit spread thin. And so I have to think about what actually relatable. And for me, it’s kind of hard because what more than anything is writing my blog. It’s my absolute favorite thing to do in my business, and I would love for that to be my main work output. And I’m kind of trying to figure out how can I focus my work and re-strategize my business so that I can spend more time doing what I love most.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And I think there’s an early way back this story. There’s this company called Basecamp. Some people know of it, some people don’t like a project management company. They for a long time were an agency and so they were doing agency work and then they would work on Basecamp kind of in the margins. I think that’s one of the greatest playbooks for business building, which is you have us expertise, a specialty that is adjacent to the thing that you want to do that is digital and scalable, but it’s more time for money. And at the same time you are doing that, you are also figuring out in the margins, maybe it’s a slow month, maybe it’s a slow day, you backfill with the thing that you are most excited about but maybe isn’t paying the bills in the same way with the hope or intent to build that thing up over time. It’s a version of what Lindsay and I were doing back when we first transitioned into doing content full time and it was like a hundred percent W2, and then it was like we did a period of time where it was like 75, 25, 50 50, 25, 75, and eventually we’re like, we just need to make this transition. So can you talk to me about how you’ve balanced that? Because I think sometimes what happens is you can start to see, it gets hard because you know that there’s a dollar amount. Let’s say you’re a consultant and you know that you can earn a hundred dollars an hour or you can work with a client and you can earn 200 recurring a month or I don’t know what it would look like in your world, but that’s very tangible. And you also know that you could spend three hours writing a blog post and it’s a little bit abstract, but you know that you’re building this snowball that eventually is going to get bigger and bigger over time. So how do you make a decision around working within your business with clients in person, maybe a little bit more of the time for money versus the digital side of things where you’re building a following building page views and maybe is not the same transaction where you put money in or put time in and get money out, but over time it could or would be that.

Krista Linares: So actually part of the story we haven’t covered yet is a little bit of a curve ball. I actually wound up closing down the private practice arm of my business and went back to a nine to five job working for someone else about a year and a half ago.

Bjork Ostrom: What was that process like? What was the decision making process with, because it sounds like starting out we’re interested in this entrepreneurial pursuit, building this thing, kind of the freedom around that. And again, I think all of this is super important conversation to have because I know a lot of people are probably in a similar place where they’re trying to make that decision. Really it’s like we’re CEO of our life and we just get to pick how do we want to spend our time? How do we want to make our money? It could be W2, it could be contracted, it could be dollars for hours, it could be entrepreneurial business. So all of it I think is fair game. What was that decision making process like for you?

Krista Linares: So it was definitely my decision, but I felt like personal life circumstances with me and my family kind of pushed me in that direction. So it was really down to thinking about the practicalities of how do I want to say this? So there were some issues with accepting health insurance to be a private practice here in California. Just I kind of kept running into these issues with accepting my client’s health insurance. I wanted to accept their health insurance, but there just kept being more barriers in the way to do it. And I noticed this downward trend, even going back three years now, I feel like I started noticing in 2022 where fewer and fewer people were able to pay out of pocket. And so I kind of saw some of the writing on the wall that I felt like health insurance was getting to be more necessary and it was getting harder for me to utilize that and offer that in my practice. And so I just felt like I was having to spin my wheels harder and harder to get the same income from being a private practice because

Bjork Ostrom: Of the red tape with health insurance specifically.

Krista Linares: nd that’s kind of a state by state issue. So some states, I have colleagues who do what I do, but in North Carolina and they I think have been able to just hit the ground running. And I feel like California gave me a lot of access to clients, but a lot of red tape around being able to work with them. And so I started to feel like I was spending so much of my time on the phone with the insurance companies trying to chase down doctor’s, referrals, things like that. And so I just kind of felt like I wasn’t actually, and that’s all non-billable time, so I felt like I wasn’t actually even able to trade time for money in that case.

Bjork Ostrom: It was like, yeah, time for getting stuff done, but not getting paid for it.

Krista Linares: Exactly. So I was like, well, if I’m going to be having to put in this time that isn’t directly billable, then why is it going toward thing that I’m not as passionate about? And then the other piece of it too, again, just kind of feeling like I was putting in more and more effort for my income from that to stay the same. So that just didn’t feel sustainable for me. And then just a few other things in my personal life where I just felt like I needed to get the stability and the predictability back. So that’s why I went back to a nine to five job. And at the time it was a very emotionally difficult decision to make. I was very, very, yeah, I think emotional is the best way to say it. I was very emotional about it for a long time, but what I’ve noticed is that if I hadn’t done that, if I hadn’t taken the pressure off of myself to be generating all of my own income like that through my business, I don’t think I would’ve had the space to re-strategize the way that I just did. Now I’m like, okay, my bills are covered. I have health insurance, and so I can take a little bit more of a risk to be creative and take a chance on a new strategy.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. There is a story that I think about often Charles Ives who was a composer and he did a lot of really experimental compositions kind of out there stuff, but he was a insurance salesman. He’s a super popular, really well-known composer, and he intentionally decided to have his work be insurance in order to allow his art to be his art and to create in the way that he wanted to create. That’s an extreme version of what we’re talking about, but I also think that there’s something to be said around mental margin to know that you aren’t having that when you are grinding the thing that you are grinding with, meaning working hard or trying to be creative or whatever it might be, that it’s on kind of your creative endeavor, your creative pursuit. And we talk about a decent amount on the podcast. I think really what we are trying to do every day is figure out what does a good day look like and are we working towards things that we are excited about and feel aligned with what we want to be doing? And the way that we put that together is going to look different for every person. It’s going to look different for every season of life. Just this morning actually created this. Have you created any projects in ChatGPT, or do you use ChatGPT?

Krista Linares: I haven’t created any projects with it, no.

Bjork Ostrom: So I’ve created a project and it’s been super helpful. Maybe you can try it out, see if it’s helpful for you. Other people could try it out too. And it’s just called intentions. And the sentiment with it is I want to try to understand a good day and a bad day better. And so that was the prompt that I built it around was like, here’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to reflect every day, what’s a good day, what’s a bad day? Why is that good and bad? And so what I do is I just open it up and I just talk to it and it’s like if I have a feeling like this was good, today was good, this moment was good, why was that? And I talk to it and essentially it just reflects back to me what my patterns, my thought patterns are. And it’s been really clarifying and has helped me nudge and shift how I’m thinking about things. And the point in that is I think that’s kind of what we’re trying to do every day. We’re trying to figure out what feels off, what doesn’t feel good and what do we need to do in order to change and pivot. And it sounds like for you, what felt off was I had this intent to build a business where I was going to be able to work with people who have a need to have dietary and nutrition considerations within a menu of items that they would feel excited about. Awesome. That feels great. What doesn’t feel great is sitting on the phone for 45 minutes with whatever health insurance company trying to get something approved and then feeling like, shoot, I got to the end of the day and I did a lot of paperwork, but I didn’t do the thing that I loved. So point being, I think it’s inspiring to hear you look at that and say, this isn’t serving me, this isn’t what I thought it was going to be. I’m going to make a change, albeit kind of emotional and hard. But my guess is, like you said, the payout long-term is that it put you in a position where you could think more strategically about what you’re doing online. You alluded to this kind of pivot that you’ve been through. Talk a little bit about that as it relates to your website, as it relates to your digital content. Because we’re in this world of things are changing, people are unsure of how to approach their content. So what brought you to this point where you decided to make a change with your business and how you looked at it and approached it?

Krista Linares: So there’ve been multiple phases of this. So I think the last part we left off of this story is I was still mostly social media forward, and then in 2023, I started approaching my blog very seriously and I was put on to blogging as a traffic builder, a business builder by another dietician who also does it. And so I learned from her. And so I really took my blog very seriously in 2023, and I was still running my private practice at the time, but I was very consistent with very informational style nutrition information, blog posts around Latin American food at the time. So I kind of built my blog off of info posts around, for example, what are the nutrition benefits of beauty or other Latin American foods? And that’s really where I got most of my gains. And in that I think 12 to 18 month period, I went from my website traffic being mostly people who were prospective clients, so maybe a few hundred a month to, I think I reached 50,000 in an 18 month period, and I did reach that threshold. The very tail end of that is when I was going back to work for a nine to five. And that

Bjork Ostrom: Must have felt great. You set your mind out, I’m going to do this. Here’s how I’m going to do it. You start to do it, you work hard at it and it works. It goes from hundreds to tens of thousands. And I think anytime you can look at the year chart and see it just generally up into the right is inspiring, and then you look next year and you’re like, okay, if I do this again, maybe it’ll be a hundred thousand, 150,000 and you can start to draw that out. But it sounds like that didn’t happen.

Krista Linares: Right. And to what you were saying, I think why I resonated with blogging so much is I’ve done social media, I’ve done private practice, I’ve done so many different forms of online business, and I felt like blogging, especially in that 20, 23 time period, was the one thing I did where my outcomes were exactly as advertised to me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Krista Linares: And I think partially it’s just what clicks for you and what resonates. And so for me, I was like, okay, the person that I learned blogging from said if I do XYZ, I’m going to have these types of outcomes. And that’s exactly what happened. Whereas with other types of

Bjork Ostrom: What were those things like research keywords, write an informative blog post, do it consistently link your content structure content well, stuff like that.

Krista Linares: Yeah, I’m going to shout her out. She’s incredible. Her name is Erica Julson. She teaches SEO and blogging mostly toward health professionals. I think she started out specifically with dieticians.

Bjork Ostrom: How do you spell her last name?

Krista Linares: J-U-L-S-O-N.

Bjork Ostrom: Great.

Krista Linares: She was very detailed, so it was keyword research, and she also kind of targets it toward health professionals. So she talks a lot about using your expertise as a health professional to kind of figure out what types of keywords would be relevant for you to target and things like that. But then also very structural. She does also coach you with setting up your website and all of that. So I had to do this big migration of my site from Squarespace to WordPress, and I did that with her coaching, so it was very detailed. But yeah, so it was like the keyword research, the overall strategy, thinking about your content strategy, what types of four or five main categories you want to be covering on your website. Also in terms of just the technical details of how you structure a blog post. And then also because she targets health professionals or mostly speaks to health professionals, she does a lot of thinking about speaking to your audience as a health professional and thinking about how that’s going to affect what types of content you put out there, which I think is just becoming more and more relevant right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. And so you go through this process, you build, you have success building and you get momentum. And then is there a point when things shift? Is there a Google algorithm update? What is the point where suddenly you’re like, wait, all this momentum I had didn’t really change anything but an algorithm it sounds like maybe changed and yeah, what was that moment like?

Krista Linares: It was a couple things. So it started to kind of see a downward slope at the beginning of 2025. I wasn’t able to tie it to one specific core update, but it just kind of felt almost like death by a thousand cuts. I was just kind of seeing this downward slope. So I think the biggest thing for me was because I was so leaning so heavily on info content because the way I was seeing it was I’m a dietician, people value my contribution in terms of evidence-based nutrition information. So the issue though with info content is that it’s so easily replaced by AI overviews now. So what I was seeing, which I think you hear a lot about right now, is that my rankings weren’t changing a lot, but just the click-through rate was just diving down

Bjork Ostrom: Because if somebody searched what are the health benefits of whatever ingredient that there’s going to be an ai, their answer is going to be in the search result for them.

Krista Linares: Exactly. And there were a few other factors too. That wasn’t the only one, but I think that was probably the biggest chunk of it. I also did have to slow down my publishing pace because of my nine to five. I also think that this topic of cultural food and nutrition has just gained momentum. And so I am no longer one of the only voices in this space, so I just think there’s a little bit more competition with it too. So all of those things together kind of created this downward trend with my traffic.

Bjork Ostrom: But it sounds like there’s a pivot in there where you started to think about your content a little bit differently and approach it a little bit differently. What did that look like? What was the pivot point and then the result of that?

Krista Linares: So I guess I’m trying to think about when it really started. I think I started playing with content. I think where it started was I started playing with things that had low search volume, but that I felt like I really wanted to write anyway, and that I knew I still, my social media, I knew if I converted this into a social media post that it would do well there or it would do well. My newsletter, an example of that is I did a post on fermented foods in Mexican culture, which the search volume on that I think is like 30, but no one else had written a post about that. If you search that topic, the SERP was all PubMed articles. So no one had written a blog post about it. And so then I was like, I’m really interested in this. This is right up my alley. What I think is super interesting, and I know if I create a carousel for it on Instagram that it’s going to get a lot of shares, a lot of comments, and that my newsletter is going to have really high click-through rates if I share this. So I started playing with that. I would say last year is when I started opening myself up to more posts like that. So fermented foods is one that I did. Edible flowers is another one, or not high search volume, but I think high interest if you put it in front of your audience. And that also comes down to knowing your audience. Sorry.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s one of the interesting things about content and where it performs well, there’s the keyword research aspect of things. You find keyword research, how much are people searching things? But then there’s the inspirational content that would exist within social media. And we’ve had some conversations with people who have millions of followers on social media, but the things that they’re creating aren’t things that people are searching for. The content’s interesting. It’s engaging, it’s unique, but it’s not like a search term that somebody is typing into Google, but millions of people would be interested in watching content around it. And it’s one of those realities of content creation in 2025, which is that to some degree you can create your own search volume through exposure on a platform. So keyword research is all historical data, but the interesting thing is that a lot of user behavior is driven by things that we see by conversations that we’re having, by interactions that we have. And so social media moves so much quicker than a keyword research tool. And if there is something that catches on either that group of people are creating content around it and suddenly it becomes a trend, or you just create something that is really interesting and unique and engaging, people are going to, if there’s a need to learn more or especially in the world of recipes, I think is true, that people will go and search for that thing that you have created content around. So I think it’s one of the interesting things around viral content in the world of social media is that you can kind of create your own search volume. I’m not saying that was necessarily what was happening here, but there’s an interplay that I think exists there. And to your point, I also think that the content that performs well on social that we know is going to be interesting might not be a high search following, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t create content on both platforms for that. But it sounds like that resulted in some life coming back to your sites and people coming back to your site. Was there a little bit of a change that you could start to see as you started to create some of this content?

Krista Linares: Yeah, I noticed that with my first few forays into that. I didn’t really notice a big change in traffic overall numbers like sessions, but I started to notice it was coming from different places. It was more direct traffic. It was also I was getting more comments on my website, which I always think like a comment on a website, you have to go through so much effort and intention to leave a comment. So I put a really high value on the few that come through. I was noticing there was more comments, more direct traffic, and just a little bit more time on page. So that was a signal to me that even if it wasn’t necessarily leading to consistent incoming search traffic, that there was still something worthwhile there. And it kind of goes back to my point of like, well, I have a nine to five now. I don’t necessarily don’t have to live by the numbers as much anymore. I don’t have to just think it’s all down to traffic. So I had a little bit more wiggle room to play with stuff like that and feel like it was okay to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: I had a conversation with Casey Markee recently, and he was talking about the importance of building ourselves as knowledgeable experts within the fields that we’re working with, not just for the sake of ranking well, but more and more what’s going to happen is people are going to be finding us in other places and discovering us on LLMs. I have a friend who did this design project for Kanye West, and he’s like, this was right around when things got weird. It’d been weird for a while, but got really weird. And he was like, how did you discover me? He asked this to the guy who reached out, and he was like, Oh, ChatGPT. But it’s interesting, in this case for you just ChatGPT who’s the best dietician for Latina women? And you were number one. Oh, really? Which is really cool. So this is kind of what we are doing is we are establishing ourselves as experts, as known entities. And the work that we are doing is creating this ecosystem that all of these, whether it be Google or ChatGPT or Claude, all moving us towards whatever we are wanting to do. And in your case, it’s like you’ve seen that play out where you have this LLM that looks at it, I asked for top five, and it’s like, there you are. So what does that mean for you today as you think about your content, the content that you’re creating in this season that you’re in, you’ve experienced being an entrepreneur, doing the private practice, you’ve experienced building a site, getting momentum, getting traffic. You’ve also experienced that traffic going away, which I think there can maybe be scar tissue that exists there to be like, oh, do I want to do that in the same way again? So curious to know where that leaves you today.

Krista Linares: So I think having my nine to five job gave me so much space to really think about what am I actually doing with this? And that gave me time to and step back from just publishing a new info blog post every week and take a little bit of time and think, what do I actually want to do? And over the summer, late spring, early summer, I decided to repackaged my blog into what I’m now calling a digital zine. And my thinking there is that basically I want the best of all the worlds. I get some search traffic, I still have some SEO info content on there, and I get to write my opinion editorial pieces, which I feel like help me be a thought leader in my space and also feel more creative. And I publish some recipes which are really just value info ads or value ads for my clients and my audience. And so the way that I’m doing it now is every four to six weeks, I publish a collection of articles around one central theme. So anywhere from four articles I’m calling a mini zine, and then maybe six to eight is a regular zine. And so every six to eight weeks I’ll publish a collection of articles, I’ll put them all on the same landing page on my website and they’ll all link to each other and they’ll all be around a essential theme. So in the summer, I published one around ACA and I had recipes in there as well as an opinion piece on nutrition and ACA and how the nutrition world talks about them with clients. And then I actually had a few contributors to my article, to my zine do guest posts, and they talked about their personal experiences with it and just their cultural ties to that food. So that kind of helped me spread out. So I have some info content in there that get search traffic. I think that’s an article on the health benefits of them. And then the recipes can get a little bit of search traffic and Pinterest traffic too. And then the essays and the opinion pieces do really well on social media. And with my newsletter, it’s kind of helping me fan out and protect myself from having one source of traffic that can then just go away.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. We have a friend who published for a really long time, has a super beautiful site, and she transitioned into taking a W2 job, great fit for her. It’s like she’s working at a food product company and decided to not publish to her site anymore at all. But one of the things that we were talking about recently, she’s like, I’m trying to figure out what to do with it is a little bit different than what you’re saying, but I was like, oh, I think you can transition it from thinking about it as a blog to a magazine and instead of a blog roll where it’s just all your recent stuff, it’s just a magazine of content that you’ve published through the years. And I think it’s one of the great things that we can do, and this goes back to really at the beginning when we were talking about how you had to be strategic in creating your own job and then creating your own clients. But look at what we can do the landscape that we’re working with, the time, the margins that we have, and then say, okay, what do I want to create and how do I want to create it? And you don’t have to publish a new post every week or every two weeks just because other people are doing that. Similar in the world of podcasting. I know people who will do a podcast series, they’ll record 12 and they’ll publish those and then they’ll go back into the lab and they’ll work and they’ll learn and then they’ll come out and they’ll do, six months later they’ll release another six episodes. So there’s a lot of ways that we can show up as content creators in the world. And what I love about your story and that shift that you’ve made is that you have approached it in a way where you’re working within the constraints that you have. You’re figuring out how to continue to breathe life into your site, not just letting it go completely, but doing it in a way that it feels like is sustainable. It’s actually, when I was talking about that intentions project, that was my reflection today as I was trying to sort through. I feel like I finish every day and I haven’t done enough. That’s just this perpetual thing for me. I’m constantly underperforming. I could always do more. And the thought that I’ve had recently is I just need to lower my expectations of how much I can do and then I will feel better at the end of the day because I haven’t had these unrealistic expectations that I never meet. And so point being, I think as you look at what you’ve done, it feels like a really good job. You’ve done a good job of remixing how you approach your content and doing it in a way that’s sustainable but still allows you to publish content as you look forward. Would you say that your intent as you are working is still to build it to a point where you would love to transition into doing this as your full-time thing again? Or do you like the idea of the balance that you feel right now with having a consistent base for W2 and then building your side hustle adjacent to it?

Krista Linares: My answer to that changes every day.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Krista Linares: Yeah, the stability is really nice. And honestly, the past couple of years have been so tumultuous that I don’t know that I think that I want the stability of health insurance in a predictable check, but at the same time, it’s like there’s no better feeling than when you’re like, I have this project that I want to do and I have all the time that I want to give myself to pursue it and creating something. What I love about it is that I feel like it is fully my voice as a dietician. Even when I was doing very straightforward SEO, I kind of felt like yes, it was within my area of expertise, but I didn’t feel like it was fully my voice. I had to, so for example, if I was writing an info article, the health benefits of enchiladas, I would have to make sure I hit all the points like saturated fat and calories and fillings and vegetables and all this stuff. And I didn’t really have a chance to talk about the intersection of culture and Things like that. So I feel like now I get to be fully myself as a dietician with this work, and that feels so great, and I wish sometimes I do wish that that could always be my professional work. So yeah, my answer on that goes back and forth, but I do have some exciting things that have been going on with it. So I just published my first sponsored mini zine issue. I published it last week. I haven’t even promoted it to my audience yet, but I was working with a brand on a partnership mostly. They were very social media focused and I pitched them blog posts and then I pitched them rolling it into a mini zine. So I worked with them to create a four article issue that’s two recipes that uses their product and then a health benefits info article and then an opinion piece as well. And so that’s something that I don’t think I want every issue to be like that, but I think doing it a few times a year could be a really fun way to make the project more sustainable.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. And one of the huge pivots that we’ve had within Food Blogger Pro is when we started doing sponsorships for the podcast, we were like, Hey, these are going to be podcast sponsorships. Then what we realized is like, oh, we have a really wide reach. It’s email, it’s podcasts, it’s social media in a very specific narrow niche, but started to work with partners within the capacity of like, Hey, this campaign, here’s what the campaign will look like. Here’s what the coverage will be like. And the cool thing with the pivot that you’ve made is there’s a traditional model that exists within the world of magazines, which is magazines. You open up a magazine and there’s ads, and that’s kind of how the model works. And so it makes sense that you would have this series, these multiple different articles that would exist and that would go out. And along with that you’d have a sponsor that would be adjacent to it. How did that connection happen? Did they reach out to you or did you reach out to them?

Krista Linares: They reached out to me. So they were doing a rebrand and a whole campaign where they were working with four or five different dieticians, and I think it’s been a six month long campaign. And so when we were talking about the scope of the is when I kind of was able to pitch and shape it into bringing my blog into it because they came at it from the standpoint of they were looking for social content. I was able to talk to them about my blog and about magazine and shape that partnership to look like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s again, something that I’m learning, which is the initial thought isn’t necessarily what the final product is going to be in those sponsorship conversations. And you’ve done what I feel like a lot of people don’t do, which is think creatively around what is the outcome that the brand wants, and then given all of the different distribution channels that you have, are there ways that you could solve that for them and offer multiple different packages? So we could just do the thing that you said, but also we could do social media and email and we could post something to the blog and here’s what that would look like. So I’ve been trying to do a better job of doing exactly what you did within the work that we do, which is figuring out like, okay, how do you offer multiple packages? How do you think creatively around what people need? So it’s cool to hear that and a great testament to the work that you did to pivot the content and to find business opportunities, and it’s really inspiring to see. So as we come to a close, let’s say you were to go back in time as you first started to work on this, what would be the advice that you’d give to yourself in the beginning stages there? Knowing what now?

Krista Linares: Specific to my website or business in general?

Bjork Ostrom: I think business in general, I’d be interested in business in general.

Krista Linares: This is very, very specific to me. It’s not for everyone, but I think that looking back on it, I did private practice because I needed to start making income immediately, and I had been able to, I wish that I had been able to pursue the parts of my business that are interesting to me earlier, which is the writing. So I kind of felt like I had to spend so much time doing what I had to do just to get income coming in that I kind of felt like I was a little bit behind on the blogging world, which is what I actually like to do, which I don’t even know if that’s advice. I don’t know. Looking back on it, I’m like, I made that decision because I had to, so I don’t know what I would’ve done differently. But

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, It’s an interesting observation and I feel like we’re always needing to make this decision around income now, whether through contract work, W2 time for money, all of that versus income later potentially. There isn’t always the guarantee of that, and so we’re always rolling the dice. But one thing that I do think is interesting and important to point out and is true for everybody is getting really clear on the medium that you are most drawn to. And an example for me, it’s like podcasting. It works well. It works a lot better than writing blog posts. I can’t think of the last time that I wrote a blog post, it was like years ago. Not that I don’t like it, but it’s much easier for me to get on a call and have a podcast interview. Contrast that to when I left today at home, Lindsay was writing a blog post and I was going to do a podcast interview. So we each have our mediums within the world of digital content creation. And it sounds like part of what you’re saying is recognizing and honoring your desire to write and making space for that. Maybe not even necessarily that being the only thing that you do, but just making space for the thing that is of maximum interest and potential upside as well. So really cool to hear your story. Carissa, thanks so much for coming on and a lot of inspiring elements within it, continued success in what you’re doing and excited to see the easing magazine, zine concepts continue to evolve and everything that you have coming down the line. So thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Krista Linares: Thank you for having me.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there, Ann again from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, we would greatly appreciate it if you could share it with your community and leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. We’ll be back next week with another episode where Bjork sits down with Claire Dinhut from Condiment Claire, who will go into the importance of diversifying across different platforms and the role Substack has played in her content creation journey. We’ll see you back here soon, and in the meantime, we hope you have a wonderful week.