The Journey to Reaching 30 Million Views a Month with Jeanine Donofrio of Love & Lemons

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This episode is sponsored by Member Kitchens and Raptive.

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Welcome to episode 536 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Jeanine Donofrio from Love & Lemons.

Last week on the podcast, Bjork chatted with Madison Wetherill. To go back and listen to that episode, click here.

The Journey to Reaching 30 Million Views a Month

In this episode, Bjork chats with Jeanine Donofrio, the creator of the massively popular vegetarian food blog Love & Lemons, which now receives over 30 million monthly pageviews (!!!). Jeanine shares the story behind her blog’s evolution — from a personal creative outlet that she started in 2011 to a thriving business with multiple employees.

Bjork and Jeanine also talk about how Jeanine balances creativity with content strategy, manages the pressure of staying consistent, and how she navigates seasons of burnout.

Three episode takeaways:

• How and why Jeanine started focusing on SEO — Love & Lemons was monetized solely with sponsored posts for the first 8 years, before fellow food bloggers and friends convinced Jeanine to focus on SEO and monetize with ads in 2019. Jeanine explains more about why she resisted ads and SEO for so many years, and how she navigated the transition to creating content with SEO in mind.
• How to anticipate and navigate burnout — Jeanine has experienced four intense periods of burnout in her time as a food creator, often related to the creation and promotion of her cookbooks. She shares how she plans for these seasons, why she views burnout as a necessary step to making creative space, and how she avoids rushing herself through burnout.
• How Jeanine has grown her team and batches content — Jeanine explains how she has hired teammates over the years and why she decided to prioritize outsourcing certain tasks, like photography, to free up her time for recipe development, writing, and spending time with her family. She also shares a peak behind-the-scenes into her content batching process (and why she batches 30 recipes at a time).

Resources:

• Love & Lemons
• Love & Lemons Cookbooks
• Smitten Kitchen
• 101 Cookbooks
• A Couple Cooks
• Semrush
• Lemon Water on Substack
• Register for our webinar with Grocers List
• Follow Jeanine on Instagram and Facebook
• Join the Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook Group

Thank you to our sponsors!

This episode is sponsored by Member Kitchens and Raptive.

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].

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 FoodBloggerPro 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 thrilled to welcome Janine DeRio from the FU blog, love in Lemons. Chances are you are already familiar with love in lemons. Janine has been blogging there since 2011 and shares a lot more about her journey from starting her FU blog to hiring her first employee to growing her food blog into one of the most popular food blogs on the internet. Love and Lemons now receives over 30 million monthly page views, which is truly just insane to think about. And what’s even crazier is that Janine did not start focusing on SEO until 2019. Before then, love and Lemons was monetized solely with sponsored posts, and it took the convincing of a few fellow food bloggers and friends for Janine to start focusing on SEO and monetizing with ads.

She explains more about that decision and her transition into creating content with SEO in mind. In this interview, Janine also chats about how she anticipates and navigates burnout as a creator. She’s experienced several really intense periods of burnout in recent years, especially tied to the creation and promotion of her cookbooks. And she has a really refreshing take on how to deal with these feelings of burnout and how to avoid rushing yourself through those seasons. Janine also explains more about how she has hired teammates over the years and why she’s decided to prioritize outsourcing certain tasks like photography to free up her time for the tasks she really loves. We’re big fans of Janine and everything she does at and lemons. So let’s just dive right into the interview. Brk, take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Janine, welcome to the podcast.

Jeanine Donofrio: Thank you so much for having me. I’m such a fan. I’m so excited.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, awesome. Thank you. So you are somebody that I’m excited to talk about because I get to ask you some of the questions that people often ask me, and a lot of times they ask him as the collective, like me and Lindsay, we’ve worked on something for a long period of time. You were in that exact same boat. You started Love and Lemons in 2011. Is that right?

Jeanine Donofrio: 11? Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So we’re on the 15 year mark. We’re coming up to the 15 year mark of creating content in some way, shape, or form, probably almost every day. It’s an incredible feat to be able to do what you’ve done. Not only that, but the site itself, the following that you have, has also grown exponentially through that time. So I want to hear about how you’ve figured out how to do that over a long period of time, and also related to that, any insights you have related to burnout and overextending yourself and how you found that kind of balance along the way.

Jeanine Donofrio: Yeah. Well, I think it’s crazy. The 15 year mark, that’s crazy because in my head it’s 14, which makes me seem a little less old. If anyone would’ve said, you’re going to be doing this 14 years from now, I probably would’ve been like, I’m out. No way. I started on a whim and things change all the time, and I think that’s why, I don’t know, I started and then one thing led to the next, and one thing led to the next, and one thing led to the next. So I feel like it is just been of almost 15 year evolution of the next thing presenting itself to keep.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting.

Jeanine Donofrio: And then it was just at some certain point where it’s like you look back and go, oh, wow, this is a whole career, this whole business, and the business isn’t really going anywhere, but But at the beginning it’s, it’s wild.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So when you started it, talk a little bit about what that looked like. What did day-to-day look like when you’re in the early stages? And then we’ve heard from people who have said, it would be really great to hear what it’s like for a day-to-day creator today. So maybe they would be interesting to contrast, Hey, early stages. What did that look like and how different or similar does it look today for you?

Jeanine Donofrio: Well, at the beginning it was chaotic and random, and it was Jack and I in a kitchen cooking dinner and trying to take pictures of it. And I had different photo equipment I had maybe bought that day or the next new thing. I was trying out, trying to just figure out, I don’t know what we were doing. I was inspired to cook with vegetables. I was inspired to come home from the farmer’s market and somehow make what I was making look beautiful and share it. And I don’t know why. It certainly wasn’t a business when it started, although I had an idea that it would become something. But I also, at the time, it wasn’t anything. Nobody was making money and food on the internet, so it wasn’t like a career choice or a career path. It was here’s this cool thing that some people are doing that I think is interesting. I was following Smitten Kitchen and 101 cookbooks, and I just thought it was interesting. And so we just started it. And so Jack and I would shoot our dinner at night and it was, it was so amateur hour because

Bjork Ostrom: As it is for everybody who starts, it’s like everybody starts as an amateur, which is one of the great things about it. It’s also hard because you’re an amateur when you start, but

Jeanine Donofrio: Well, and we would also have family or friends over for dinner, and then we’d take a picture of that dinner and make quick

Bjork Ostrom: Five minutes, step out, take a quick picture. Yeah,

Jeanine Donofrio: Yeah. We’d be like, oh, sit over there. It was Christmas dinner. I had the family over for Christmas once, and I was like, okay, everybody, we’re going to go over to our kitchen island and flip on the lights. And I was thought Jack’s family was like, my family was more on board with that, and Jack was like, what are you doing? What is going on here? And you’re like, trust me, this is insane. And my family was just like, okay, we’re going to eat cold food, whatever. The food is always cold. And yeah, that’s what it was. And it was like kitchen fires and dropping cameras, and it was total amateur hour. And then that would be the cooking part. And then I’d spend my day trying to Photoshop, not Photoshop, make it different, but try to adjust the lighting or saturation or something just to try to make our terrible photos look decent. I was a graphic designer, so I felt like I could kind of fudge it, not make up stuff. It wasn’t ai, it was just sort of enhanced to make the photo look kind of professional. So I would do that during the day and spend way too much time doing that and not doing my regular job,

Bjork Ostrom: Which was what at the time

Jeanine Donofrio: I had a graphic design business.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, got it. So you had kind of history, graphic design, you’re starting to experiment with what does it look like to document some of these recipes you’re creating? You have some sites that you follow, there’s some inspiration there. What do you feel like were the unlocks along the way, meaning the moments along the way where you look and say, this was something that we did, something that we learned, something that we implemented That was really helpful because a lot of times I think we can look back, it’s the culmination of a thousand, a hundred thousand little things, but oftentimes there’s some bigger things that we can look at and say, actually this was super helpful in the journey to getting to today.

Jeanine Donofrio: Yeah. Well, I think what was helpful, and I don’t know what I always wonder because people always ask me, do you have advice? Do you have tips? And it’s so hard because I’m like starting now. I have no idea. I’m not there. I’m not starting now. I mean, it would have to be how to go viral on TikTok, and I’m hardly even on TikTok. But at the time, I think having a graphic design background helped, I should say I played to my strength, so I kind of knew my weaknesses. We were not professional photographers, we weren’t professional anything, but I knew that I could design a website and Jack is a programmer, so I know he could program it. So those were our strengths. So we used that to get started, and then we had a nice looking website. So then once people got there, it was a nice experience. So I think that was something I could look out to what everybody else was doing. And at the time it was like, everybody’s on blog spot.com and things like that, and I thought, okay, we can make a nice looking site and it’ll look different and it’ll seem different. And so my whole strategy at the time was really just trying to do something a little bit different to stand out than what everybody else was doing.

And I think that’s been my strategy. I mean, it was my graphic design strategy. It’s not so specific. It’s just the way I think try to think about things. It’s what are other people not doing and what can I do different? And I actually think that’s also really hard now, and that’s something I struggle with a lot presently, is that I think a lot of social media requires you to do the same. It requires you to create things that are just like everybody else’s to hit. And I struggle with that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s one of the really interesting conversations in the world of content creation, which is what’s working, what’s best practice when you are observing, not just even within the food world, but just generally speaking content creation. What are the things that are hitting, okay, we need to take note of that. We need to be aware of that as content creators because probably there’s some variable that exists within that content that is working from an algorithmic standpoint. But how do you also be novel? How do you be interesting? How do you be unique? How do you not just do the exact same thing that you see somebody else doing? And I think there’s an art to that as a content creator to figure out how do you show up in a unique novel way, but also not so novel that you’re creating something that gets published into a void because it doesn’t have some of the mechanisms that exist from on short-term video side of things, like from an algorithmic standpoint. I’d be curious to know today, how do you look at content creation because you have your social platforms that you’re publishing to, but you also have your site and there’s considerations around that as a discovery tool, but also social as a discovery tool.

And to the degree that you’re comfortable, you can talk about your site and traffic to your site because it’s a really successful site and you have hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram as well. So I would be interested to hear you speak to that. And if you could share to your comfort level, high degree of what your site traffic looks like as well.

Jeanine Donofrio: Our site traffic, we have 30 million page views a month now,

Bjork Ostrom: Which is mind blowing. And it’s to the point where it’s established companies that are operating in New York are media companies publishing content with the small big team. And you’ve built that up as a small team, you and Jack, and obviously some folks that you’re working with. We’ve met some of your great team members, but that is amazing. And yet you also have social as well, you have your Instagram and you have all these other platforms. So talk about how you are viewing yourself as a content creator today. What does that look like?

Jeanine Donofrio: Well, and then I have the books too, because that’s an important piece of, I think, the creative puzzle, because for a while I was creating, like you said, a lot of recipes into the void because we didn’t have ads on our site. We weren’t doing any kind of SEO for years. Like I said, it was kind of a sort of misstep for me, but I was really into the look and the feel of my site. And I went down, I was monetizing with sponsored posts, and it was doing really, really well at that, and I didn’t want to, and I liked that because I could control who was showing up on my page. I didn’t have McDonald’s showing up on a healthy food blog, that kind of thing. So that’s what I set out, and that’s what I did for years. And it wasn’t until I started getting burnt out with that that we started looking at. And then I had friends, Catherine Taylor walked in from Cookie and Kate walked in one day and said, do you know what RPMs are like right now?

Bjork Ostrom: When was this? What year was this?

Jeanine Donofrio: 2019.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Jeanine Donofrio: So we had no ads. I was not making anything on our site. What was our page views by, I think we had 400 uniques at that point. So it was established, but I wasn’t doing anything special to drive everybody there except for pushing through my social networks and all the different press and things like that, all of their still organic sort of things. So that was the year that we started. We started doing SEO, and it was also the over Sonia and Alex, a couple of cooks, they’re good friends, and they came and said, here’s SEMrush the tool, and here’s how you should be using it. It took me a while to get out of my head of here’s my look of my site and here’s what I’m doing on my business to have other people going, look what’s going on around you and what you should be doing. Get your head out of the sand, kind of. And I was like,

Bjork Ostrom: You should buy them a DoorDash gift card or something.

Jeanine Donofrio: Yeah, yeah. Well, and I was burnt out. I think I had just finished my second book was about to launch. The sponsored posts were going crazy because then you have to manage those clients and the schedule isn’t consistent. Somebody needs to move from this day to that day or didn’t approve the thing on time, and it was just this juggle and you’re like, oh my God, I need this to go up now because this has to be over here. And so that’s what it was, and I was burnt out. And then the idea of like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know what I’m leaving on the table. When we stopped, and I say we by this point, so Jack is involved in the business, he does the backend tech. Phoebe, my first hire, and I we’re partners now, so Phoebe and I was like, here’s what we’re going to do.

We’re going to do SEO. And when we got in there, we realized, okay, because of all the early work, I had done a lot of early free work. I was featured on a lot of sites early on, so our web authority score was high and I didn’t really realize it. And then we had a lot of accidental keywords that we figured out, and then we just started at the top of what are all the high volume vegetarian keywords? And we just started going down one by one by one by one, and organizing, prioritizing our time to do all the things you’re supposed to do, content keyword research. And so that’s where we pivoted from there. And I forgot that the second part of your question.

Bjork Ostrom: No, it’s great. I feel like

Jeanine Donofrio: I was going to say a key moment too was hiring somebody who ended up being a really great, the best decision I ever made was for me to stop doing everything myself, to hire people that were a little bit, not opposite from me, but have skills that I don’t have.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, complimentary skillset. Yeah,

Jeanine Donofrio: Complimentary skillset.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So one of the things you said, you talked about this idea of operating as a partner. Phoebe, is that official business partner or were you saying, Hey, this person knew the business so well that it was working with a partner to build a thing?

Jeanine Donofrio: Well, she started out part-time as a sort of assistant, and eight years later, she’s cut into the business now. So she partner like we partner, we worked closely together, but she is involved now.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think that there’s a couple of things that I think are worth pulling out there. Number one is the idea of working insanely hard on something. And you already had success in the category of sponsors and working with sponsors. It was a sustainable business from that point. We’ll come back to the sustainable part because you talked about the burnout variable and what that looked like to move through that, but there was a significant pivot that you had, which was showing up, doing sponsored content to pivoting, to thinking about ads and search optimization. And the thing that I think is important to point out is that came after eight years of content creation and not monetizing with ads at all. And so man, you think of that span, and we can talk about it on a podcast interview, but if somebody’s starting today, you talked about that idea of what would your advice be if somebody started today and they show up and they’re creating TikTok content, what would your advice be?

Well, we don’t really know. One of the things we could say though is there’s going to be a long period of time that you may have to create content in order to become excellent. And my guess was at that point, after eight, nine years of creating content based on the skills that you had before you even started creating content online, which were around graphic design, which you probably had 5, 6, 7 years of experience before that with graphic design that you parlayed into graphic design around food, that is a really long arc just to get to the inflection point of you figuring out this opportunity of doing keyword research and focusing on search. And the reason that I say that is because I think sometimes people don’t understand or don’t get the full picture around how much time is actually involved in the arc of a career.

And here we are now talking to you 14, 15 years into your work as a content creator, but multiple decades into your work as somebody who is excellent in graphic design and content generally. And so I think that’s an important piece to point out. And then the second piece is this unlock that comes from working with somebody and partnering with somebody is a complimentary skillset. And finding that person who can come in and is doing the things that you probably wouldn’t be as excited to do that allow you to do more of the things that you are excited to do. So as it relates to that, can you talk a little bit about what does day-to-day look like for you when you show up and are running this business as a content creator, but also not just creating content, you are a business owner, you’re doing other things as well. So what does day-to-day look like for you now?

Jeanine Donofrio: Well actually, well, it’s kind of all over the place because now at this point, and I should say the arc wasn’t 2019 was the year that we decided to put ads on our site and start going for SEO. But by then I had two books out by then the sponsored post business was really successful. So I think it was, and I would’ve been happy, the money I was making and everything, I was perfectly happy with that. So it was just sort of like I’ve been monetizing since the second year in. So I would say yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Through sponsored relationships. Yeah, that makes sense. So it wasn’t necessarily like a business unlock, it was just an evolution of the business and how you’re monetizing. Yeah,

Jeanine Donofrio: Exactly. It was an evolution and like you said, an evolution that started with a whole career in graphic design where I made, by the way, a lot of mistakes that I was able to put into this. I already knew how to work with clients, I knew what the pitfalls would be. I knew when somebody would want to change something or they wouldn’t like something how I was going to handle it ahead of time. And that was in the contract ahead of time, everything like that, I feel like a lot of early people were complaining about. I was like, oh, I’ve already handled that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, been there, done that,

Jeanine Donofrio: Right, because of running a business before that and then working at a small business before that. So it’s all really hands-on. But the day-to-day now, because I have two full-time people and then I outsource a bunch. So now we outsource our blog photography, which is amazing. That was a huge change. That also allows us to create more content. It allows us to put more time into the recipes to have, I’ll shoot things myself for Instagram and that kind of thing, but it allows me more of the fun. It allows me to do that more for fun and less on a schedule. So we have a very specific, we’ll do four blog shoots, three or four blog shoots a year now and batch a bunch of that together.

So we work in basically these month-ish chunks where we’ll be depending on what the time of year is and when the next shoot is coming up, we’ll test. Phoebe and I test recipes together. We test every recipe together and we’ll test recipes for, so we’ll do like 30 blog recipes at a time, so everything’s batch. And then we finished a book in May that will come out next year. And we tested that pretty much all winter from less on and off. So we have times where we’re testing so many recipes. There are so many leftovers in the fridge. It’s crazy. And then that allows us time. It’s summer and now we have a child. So I don’t like to work a lot in the summer, and I definitely don’t want to be stuck working on a book all summer long where I’m going to be grinding it out. So we did that all winter when it was in Chicago. It’s dark and snowy.

Bjork Ostrom: It

Jeanine Donofrio: Was the perfect time and it was the perfect time to

Bjork Ostrom: Great time to be productive.

Jeanine Donofrio: Yeah, go really fast. The winter flew by. You never have enough time to finish a book. So it’s summer right now. I mean, it’s the end. It’s a beautiful day. So we took the kid for a walk, we had lunch. I’m here talking to you. And that’s today. I might shoot a video for Instagram tomorrow, we have some travel coming up later. Then at the end of October we have a shoot. So we’ve started testing some recipes for that. Then toward the last two weeks of September, we’ll knock that out.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think it’s a really good answer. And the answer it sounds like is that you’ve been intentional to not, the question that I asked was day to day, but I think the best response is actually what does it look like on a yearly basis? Because what you’ve been doing, what you’ve been able to do, and it’s one of the great freedoms that we get when we have a business that we’re running, is crafting what our schedule looks like. And for you, what I heard you saying is summer’s important. So it’s not like you’re going to maximize work at that point winter. It’s not like you’re going to be super excited to be out as much. Some people would, right? Skiing, whatever, it’s like ice skating on Lake Michigan. Not that you can do that, but so it’s like, okay, how do we shift the majority of the work?

If there’s a hundred percent of work is a hundred percent, what does it look like to have 70% of that land in the months that you are least interested in being out and about? And then taking the other 25, 30% of that, you’re still going to be working, but that work is going to look different and you’re going to prioritize other things in different seasons. And sometimes we think of batching as like, Hey, on Mondays I’m going to do emails. But I love that idea of actually we’re going to batch and do a week where we are going to dedicate to creating the media for the next three months of recipe content that we are going to create. And that rhythm is going to be different for every person based on how they like to work, what it looks like for them to show up consistently.

But I love what you’re saying around the importance of figuring out the times that are most valuable for you and protecting those so work doesn’t sneak in, and then the times that are least valuable. And then prioritizing work in those seasons, which I think is a really great answer that if we work a W2 job, most W2 jobs, it’s not something that we have the option to do. Usually the schedule is decided for us and then we show up. But what a luxury to be able to say, Hey, these are some of the ways that I view my year and prioritizing those in that way. So if you were to say from a percentage standpoint where the majority of your time goes recipe development, there would be actual article, content creation, social media, would you be able to do on a year kind of a percentage allocation?

Jeanine Donofrio: Well, I mean recipes for, I am involved in every Phoebe and I, like I said, do every recipe together. Phoebe does a lot of the email and SEO writing and I do the book proposals, the overall sort of strategy, everything visual except for we’re also seeing photography, but I’m managing and coordinating sort of all the visuals and putting that all together. You ask for numbers. I’m not a numbers person. And every year has been different. It’s different because it depends if there’s a book in it or not. So this year,

Bjork Ostrom: In the book years, my guess is that’s going to be a higher percentage.

Jeanine Donofrio: Well, it’s like cooking us and it’s writing. And then this year was a lot of writing because we finished the book and we’re doing this substack now that’s a little bit more casual, fun writing. So the percentage is hard, but I would say it’s cooking, it’s planning, it’s strategizing. I think the thing is, a lot of my work or my part of it or the brainstorming or the coming up with it’s, it happens in the middle of the night. It happens while I’m on the block. It happens, not when I’m sitting down at the computer and I’m definitely not sitting down and clocking hours, working hours. And then what’s changed entirely or rather, we have a child now and he’s four. And that’s really when I started prioritizing my time and where it has to go because I work about, I would say I have a part-time job right now and it took me, that’s what took so many years to get there, because I want to be with him after school. He does half days and I don’t want to miss out. He’s four, he is never going to be four again. So after we’ve had all this massive success, it was like two summers ago, that’s when I took the summer, basically the whole summer off,

I was in a burnout. A book had just launched. So I was burnt out anyway, and I was like, I don’t even know if I’m going to come back to this. I, I’m dead and I need to spend my time with him because what else do I even want? The blog is plenty successful. I have three books out now. What am I even doing? But he’s the most important thing. And it was sort of after that and the fact that now by then I had, that was the year that we started outsourcing the photography, which was a major, major shift because it used to be, I’m sorry, I’m all over the place, so I’m not

Bjork Ostrom: Even No, that’s great. It’s great. No, it’s super interesting.

Jeanine Donofrio: Yeah, the year that we started before we started outsourcing the photography was, it was total chaos because it, we’d be shooting something that would be posting tomorrow or the next day and that life we lived for so long, and it was only because when I signed the third, not when I signed it, but when we were negotiating the third book, the money that I asked for, I was like, this time I thought I would outsource the second one, and then I ended up not, because it’s hard to lose control of these things. It’s hard as a visual person. And I think it’s safe to say that anybody who starts a content creator is kind of a control freak. A do yourself.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes. Totally. Totally.

Jeanine Donofrio: Because you have to do everything yourself. And so to break out of that, to get help from somebody else or even hire somebody, it took me forever to even hire somebody. And that was not an easy flippant thing. It was like a lot of, I’m going to do this. I know I need to do this. I’m not going to, so I was going to outsource the photography for the second book and then I didn’t. And it’s so hard. It’s too much for one person to a couple of people to do. A few people do. So the third one, I was like, I am not even going to let myself move forward.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s not an option

Jeanine Donofrio: For a range. I knew who I wanted and I’ve getting priced out. I’m not doing this for sure not. So we work and I have a great photographer and food stylist and everything, and it’s so lucky and amazing, I should add to be able to get to the point or I guess to work with really talented people and people I really want to work with and also have really talented people. I’ve hired Phoebe to be able to do this and to have this creative life. So the third book, they shot it, it was great. And then after that was going, we do a lot of it over Zoom. Sometimes we’ll fly in and do it, but it’ll be like a Zoom photo shoot. And it was working so well that I was like, oh my gosh, this is going to end and now we’re going to be back to shooting our own blog stuff. And it was just so nice to have not in my house, in my kitchen, to not have all the food mess in the living room. And so I was like, okay, can we make this work? Can I afford this for my regular content? And then we figured out, I was like, we have to figure out a way to make this work. And then we did. So where was I going with that? That’s why I have sanity now is because that was a big move and now we have to work batch things out by months because we have to get recipes to them by a certain time two weeks before the shoot, and it has to be a five day shoot or a six day shoot to make it the whole thing worthwhile. So I’m not sending two recipes at a time or five recipes at a time. I’m sending 30 recipes at a time. And you have to be kind of organized to get 30 recipes done at a time. And that’s not including the social stuff or anything else. That’s just one blog shoot.

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I think the thing that is so often can happen is you get to this point where you have been successful because you show up, you work hard, you continually ship, even if it means a chaotic shoot, and then the blog post goes out the next day. I don’t know if this feels true for you, but I think what often happens is you do that, you do that for an extended period of time, it serves you well in some way, and then there’s a variable in your life that shifts. And in our story, the variable is kids like, okay, we have kids now and suddenly when I’m grinding, we are grinding 12 hours, 14 hours, 12 hours in a life. That is hard work, but I’m not morally conflicted about it.

Jeanine Donofrio: But

Bjork Ostrom: As soon as I started to become morally conflicted about choosing work it during a time when I could choose time with my kids, that suddenly there was a variable that made it more likely for me to fall out of good relationship with the work that I was doing. And you can call that what you want, burnout, you can call it becoming disenfranchised with your work, whatever it is. For me, it was realizing there’s this variable that changed. It could be different for everybody. Maybe you have parents who are becoming ill or you have your own life considerations or health or relationship that going through a separation or something. But I’ve had to realize that I need to honor the changing variable and making changes within my own life. And the question could be maybe you just reduce all the way. You say, okay, I’m going to just do less.

Or if I want to continue to do to have the same amount of output within the business, the way that that’s going to happen is by replacing some of my hours in work output by having somebody else come in and do that output. But the hard part, like you talked about, especially as a creative person, is what a hundred percent feels like. And it’s really hard for somebody else to come in, especially right off the bat, but even long-term to come in and do that same a hundred percent. Sometimes you get that. Sometimes you get somebody who comes in and it’s actually 120% is better than what you would’ve done. But oftentimes as a creator, it might be 80%, it might be 95%. You can work to get that up. But I think the hard part is to say, okay, 80% is a hundred percent awesome if it means that I’m getting that time back and I’m able to use it for something that feels more aligned in this season. So can you talk a little bit about how you came out of that season of burnout and some of the things that you learned coming out of it? I think everybody listening has either probably been through that or if they continue to hustle and work hard will maybe come up against that. And so what did you learn through that season that has informed how you work today?

Jeanine Donofrio: Well, I have had four major burnout sessions. There’s been four books, four burnouts, and I think there’s been something different to learn about each one. But I think what it is now is now I know it’s coming, so I know it’s coming and I will plan for it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, no, it’s coming. Like no, it’s unavoidable or know that avoidable. Okay.

Jeanine Donofrio: Yeah. If there’s a big, and it doesn’t have to be a book for me, and this one surprised me a little bit because the book hasn’t even come out yet, but it was like it came at a different time. So it’s always going to be there and it’s going to be a little different every time. But it would be maybe for somebody else, just after some other big push or big, I don’t know. It would be different for everybody, but for me in particular, it comes what I know to expect it. It doesn’t make it better because it’s a little bit debilitating. So I need to plan the runway and also not know when it’s coming. This doesn’t make me sound terrible, but this time I turned the book in May and I couldn’t cook. I couldn’t think about food or making something. I thought I would never cook again. I ate noodles from Elizabeth Street Cafe for a month, and I was like, I don’t know. Jack’s like, are we going to the grocery store? Are you going to ever cook again? And he doesn’t, it’s fine. But I was like, I don’t think so. No, not today, not we grilled a little something or whatever. But I’m like, I just can’t, can’t think about it. I can’t do it. I can’t even stomach it. And I’m like, I don’t know when it’ll be over. Maybe this time it might be done. I might be done for it this time. But other times, after the first year, the first book, we didn’t have a kid, and I was at my mom’s house for a family, a summer incident that was going on with my family and I slept. I couldn’t get out of bed for two or three months and I was tired. And I’ve never been that type. I’m not that way. So I just was like, I guess I’m going to keep sleeping until this is done,

But I can’t do that. Not with a child, obviously, but I could order DoorDash in every single day until I feel like cooking again. And that’s what I did. And two years ago, at the end of the last book launch, I stared, this is when I get into trouble, is because that one I planned like, okay, I’m going to do nothing. I’m not going to plan a creative

Bjork Ostrom: Process. You knew? Yep. You made the space.

Jeanine Donofrio: Yeah. And I don’t even want to allow myself to brainstorm something new because I need to mentally just zone out. So during all these naps, I would stare at, we had this lake place and I would stare at the water, stare at the water. I’m like, I’m just going to stare

Bjork Ostrom: Meditative almost.

Jeanine Donofrio: Yeah, yeah. I am not going to bring a pen. I’m not going to bring paper. Definitely not my phone. But I don’t even want a place to write anything down because that’s what, this is what I need. I need total mental, I just need a break. I need a mental break and that’s when, so I sat day after day after day and stared and stared and stared. And then it was like I was driving to Target and the whole next book just came in and then I was looking for a receipt to write it down on. Wow. So I would say the burnout, it’s like a necessary step. And then, I don’t know, make some space, allow it to come in, and then I have to let it finish before I can cook again or think of a new idea again. And then I think becoming fine with that, okay, I might not cook again, so then I’ll figure that out. I’ll do something else if I don’t want to cook again,

Bjork Ostrom: To not force it, it feels like is a really important piece with it.

Jeanine Donofrio: Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: It almost feels like as you’re describing it, it almost reminds me of, I’ve had some friends who have had bands and when they describe what it was like to tour and to come off of tour, what that was like, the intensity of that season and then their interest in music post touring was so low. Not always, but I think it’s kind of a similar thing in that you have this massive creative energy that you are needing to exert in a season that talking about it within the context of a cookbook that requires it, you have to have this output. You have to show up, you have to be creative, you have to produce this content. Knowing that on the backend, whether it’s a tour or a cookbook, publishing it and then marketing it and whatever, that there will probably be a recovery that is needed from that stretch where you are putting in an abnormal amount of creative energy and time and whatnot. I can see a lot of similarities between the two. So you have your fourth cookbook that’ll be coming out in a year, is that right? Okay. So what do you plan? Talk a little bit about the cookbook and then how do you set yourself up knowing what you know now that you’ve had three reps with this before?

Jeanine Donofrio: Oh, right. Well, this one, I already had the burnout after turning it in.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. That’s when it was. Okay.

Jeanine Donofrio: That was early. That was a surprise. I’ve never really had it right then before, but it’ll come out. I mean, it’s too soon really to talk about, but it’s a concept that I’m really excited about. It’s all about flavor and vegetarian cooking, and it has a really unique organization that was really fun to make. And it made for coming up with recipes, not just like, here’s an arbitrary list of recipes, but here it’s a fun organization. So that’ll be fun to come out. But I think the thing that I’m planning for that is just knowing it’s a lot of work. The launch is a lot of work, and I want to create the content around the launch, pace that out ahead of time so that it’s not October and it’ll be out next October, wait for it so that the season of the launch is a little bit easier because we’ve shot recipes, we’ve done a lot of that ahead of time, which that’s usually the stuff that every other time I’ve waited, it’s because it’s so much work just to get the book done. I’ve always underestimated the part where the amount of time it takes to create the content to launch the book. So I wanted to get ahead at a lot of that, but I haven’t thought about then after, it’ll be October, November because I’ve never launched in the fall before. So it’ll be new. I don’t know. I guess I’ll take a Christmas break at that time. Perfect

Bjork Ostrom: Time.

Jeanine Donofrio: Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Perfect. Time to take a break. I

Jeanine Donofrio: Dunno. But it’s just, I think leaving space, so whatever, knowing it’ll be one month, it’ll be two months, I’m not sure. And then not planning something so big that’s due right at kind of that space.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think a lot of it comes back to the conversation where we started things, which is how do you continually show up and create over a long period of time? And I think we have this phrase that we talk about a tiny bit better every day forever. How do you show up? How do you continually create? I think one thing that’s important to add to that is it’s not always about every day. You need to think about it on a yearly basis as well. And there are seasons of rest for us. And I think maybe one of something that could be a disservice with that concept of showing up every day is people feeling like, well, if I don’t show up, is that bad? And I think on a macro level, the goal is to view something as a journey three years, not three months or 10 years, not 10 months. And part of that is like, oh, it requires really consistent effort, really consistent improvement, willingness to evolve, but also within that, one of the great risks for our businesses is true burnout. Let’s say you did get to the point where you were like, I never want to cook again. That’s a liability for any of our businesses. And so we also need to protect our creative energy. And sometimes what that requires is rest and retreat. And it sounds like one of the biggest things that I hear from you processing it is an understanding of your own needs as a content creator and not being afraid to honor those needs in service of sustaining yourself, your business over a long period of time, which is great. And I feel like that’s for us as content creators, something that will always be important is our creative energy. So speaking of creativity, as we close out, one of the things that sounds like you’re doing that’s kind of a fun thing that isn’t, I know a lot of creators talk about this as being something like they look back on, it’s like, Hey, it’s like blogging 10, 15 years ago is substack, and you kind of referenced. Can you talk a little bit about your substack that you’re launching and some of the thought process behind why

Jeanine Donofrio: This is not like a how to or a professional? It’s a little bit, it’s just a fun thing. It’s called lemon water and buy love and lemons and it’s lemon water. It’s like I drink lemon water in college every day. And it’s little ritual. I think it’s people’s daily ritual. Sometimes it’s not a daily read, but it’s a place where I feel like sometimes I miss that blogging 1.0 the days where you just posted something and wrote a little story because it’s certainly more involved than that when it was. So it’s just a space to write about just CBE and I writing it together. And it’s just a place to put what we’re into right now in the moment, because I’ve already talked so much about how planned out everything is now, and it’s a bit of a machine. And so it’s just a place to put something, a seasonal idea or something I like to do on Instagram are these no recipe recipes? Or I’ll post, here’s some photos of some things I’ve made. And then people are like, where’s the recipe? There is no recipe. So I’ll do simple things that are like, okay, well here’s a place for the no recipe or the simple thing. Or here are three tomato salads that you don’t need a recipe for because you can just

Bjork Ostrom: Lemon water. Here’s the recipe for lemon water.

Jeanine Donofrio: Yeah, exactly. That’s great. So it’s just something fun I think just to have, I don’t know, an outlet because I think just content creation has become complicated into where does certain content go? What goes on the blog? What’s in an email? What isn’t a book? What is on social and how does that work?

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s a really nice, I haven’t thought about this until now. I think there are a lot of people who loved creating content that was almost more of a letter versus an optimized SEO post.

And one of the things you hear people talk a lot about is like, oh, making sure that you’re deleting content on your blog that doesn’t have traffic, and making sure that it’s only the best posts that exists, but it’s like, man, what if Lindsay, for a long time would write an update and it’s like, here’s an update on our dog Sage, and here’s eight pictures of her. And that’s fun to write and it’s fun to create. And where does that go? Now it could go on social, but even then I feel like people are wanting to have kind of a curated experience. So setting aside another platform to say, Hey, if I want to have this creative outlet, here’s a place where some of those things can land. I love that. And so we’ll be sure to link to that in the show notes. Is there anything that you feel like we missed or that would be important to point out as we’ve had a conversation around your story and your journey as a content creator?

Jeanine Donofrio: Yeah, I don’t know. I’m not sure This has been fun to talk about.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think for me, like I said, when we got started, what’s great is to be able to have a conversation with somebody who has had these multiple evolutions along the way and is still today showing up and creating content. And you talked about what it looked like 15 years ago versus what it looked like today. It’s very different. But what has maintained throughout that entire experience is you are still the owner of this business. You are still creating content that people are consuming that’s making a difference in their life. And that’s required for us if we’re going to have a decades long business no matter what it is, but especially on the internet, it’s going to require us to change and evolve along the way. And you and Jack, who’s a big part of the business as well, have done such a great job of that and excited to continue to watch as you guys move forward with your journey of building 11 elevens. So where can people find you? Is there anywhere that you substack? We will link to that. Anywhere else that you’d point out that would be a good place to follow along.

Jeanine Donofrio: Love and lemons.com, love and Lemon on Instagram, just the normal places.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. Janine, thanks so much for coming on. Super fun to talk to you and I’ll have to do it again sometime soon.

Jeanine Donofrio: Thank you for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I wanted to pop in and let you know about a special event we’ll be hosting on Thursday, September 25th. We will be hosting a joint public webinar with Grocers List. This webinar is free for all to attend and will be at 1:00 PM Eastern Time, 12:00 PM Central Time, or 10:00 AM Pacific Time. Bjork and Ben from Grocers List will be talking about the latest tools that are empowering creators to earn more from their content. And we’ll be answering all of your questions about things like deep links, affiliate tools and paid membership and meal plan features that are designed to boost recurring revenue. It should be a really great q and a. There is a link in the show notes for this podcast episode if you would like to register for free, or you can head to food blogger po.com/event/grocers-list-qa to sign up. Feel free to send this to your friends and fellow food bloggers. The more the merrier. We look forward to seeing you there. Again, that event will be on Thursday, September 25th, and that’s all for us this week. Hope you have a great week and we’ll see you back here next Tuesday for a new podcast episode.