How Kate Shungu Grew to 800k Sessions a Year from Pinterest by Using a Marketing Campaign

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming Kate Shung from the Food Blog Gift of Hospitality. Kate first started blogging in 2017 with no real focus or niche. In 2018, she rebranded to entertaining and hospitality, but as you might imagine, had to make a pretty large pivot again during the summer of 2020. Since then, she has settled into her niche of vintage recipes for modern cooks, and thanks in part to narrowing down her niche. She was able to quickly grow to 50,000 sessions in the spring of 2021 and qualified for Mediavine. Kate has a background in marketing, and in this interview, Bjork and Kate discuss approaching your brand promotion via platform-specific year-long marketing campaigns and how to think about marketing as investing your time versus spending your ad dollars.

Kate shares more about her year-long Pinterest marketing campaign and how she spent a year devoted to growing her Pinterest traffic, and how it majorly paid off for her. Pinterest is now her biggest traffic driver and has kept her afloat through many Google algorithm updates. Kate shares more about her keyword research strategy on Pinterest, her pinning schedule and everything you would need to know if you wanted to run a similar campaign for your own food blog. Kate also shares more about the campaign she ran for Facebook, and her success stories on both of these platforms will be really inspiring to anyone looking to diversify their traffic sources away from Google. There are lots of practical steps and how-tos in this interview. It’s a really useful one, and we know you’re going to get a lot out of it, so I’ll just let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Kate, welcome to the podcast.

Kate Shungu: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to talk marketing today.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re going to be talking about marketing these campaigns that you’ve done, some success that you’ve had on specific platforms and growing your following on those platforms. But before we get into it, let’s talk about the switch of the niche and you made kind of an update in the approach that you were taking with your site and your site content that in the early stages really helped you grow some traffic and to establish yourself as a creator to grow your following. So talk to us about what happened and the benefit of changing up your niche.

Kate Shungu: Yeah, absolutely. So I started the blog in 2017 under my name and my focus was whatever I wanted to focus on. I had no focus before realizing that I really didn’t need one. And so in 2018, I switched the URL to giftofhospitality.com. I wanted to focus on dinner parties, entertaining, having people over, providing recipes for people, giving people ideas for hosting in their home. And I did that for about two years. It grew pretty slowly, but I was working, I had a baby in there, and so it was kind of that the thing I did on the weekends or during nap time or whatever else. And so I was hovering around 11,000 sessions in 2020 and I get a call from my boss from my marketing job that, and this is March of 2020. We all know what happened then that he would be able to make this next payroll, but the one after that he wasn’t going to be able to make. And so I was working in event-based marketing at the time and the pandemic hit and that’s what happened. So I was out of a job and then I had a blog that was focused on entertaining and dinner parties, and in March of 2020, no one was having people over for dinner. So it was

Bjork Ostrom: Both of the things, it was like the side hustle that you were working on, and it was also your day-to-day job being both being event and gathering people focused.

Kate Shungu: Yes, exactly. So it took a turn, the world took a turn, and I knew I needed a pivot. And so I spent that summer really thinking about it, and my grandpa had recently given me my grandma’s old recipe books. So these were those church cookbooks that they used for fundraisers, the spiral bound, everyone contributed a recipe and he had given me those. And then her recipe binder, which were full of typewriter recipes and handwritten recipes and really just a treasure trove of these recipes she’d made for years. And so I got to looking through those and the cookbooks and thought these women, mostly women who contributed these recipes, these were their star recipes, these were the recipes that they fed their families that they had for holidays. No one wanted to try. You didn’t want anyone thinking you were a bad cook, so you submitted your best recipes.

And so I got to thinking what great recipes these would be and that there would possibly be an interest. And so in the fall of 2020, I pivoted and I came up with a new tagline called Vintage Recipes for Modern Cooks. So I take recipes from the fifties, sixties, seventies, and some from the eighties and test them from these recipe books, test them, find the best ones and publish them on my site. It was the fall of, let’s see, 2020 that I started that. And in the spring of 2021, I grew to about 50,000 sessions where I was able to qualify for Mediavine. And granted, can I attribute it completely to the switching my niche? Maybe not entirely because it does take Pinterest and Google a few years to get the ball rolling on your site and gaining traction there. But I will say from what I was able to focus on my perspective, I was able to start running instead of just kind of pitter pattering around and doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that, I had a focus and I could really run in one direction.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost like for people who are creative, sometimes it’s really helpful to have constraints because those constraints result in more creativity and more focus and more traction as opposed to the kind of boiling, the ocean approach where you could kind of create content about anything. Suddenly it’s potentially more difficult to create content like, well, maybe I’ll do some keyword research and see where the opportunity is, or I kind of like this recipe, so I’ll publish that now that those things are bad. But it’s just very different than having a niche where you can say almost like a process. And my guess is in your case, it’s looking through a lot of these old cookbooks, or maybe it’s the church cookbook from First Baptist Church in Cambridge, Minnesota. We have one of those sitting in our kitchen cupboards, and suddenly you can start to say, okay, great, I see 50 recipes that would be good candidates and can kind of move forward with that.

To your point, maybe there’s some traction from having multiple years of content, but usually what we find, especially in 2025, is that you need to have some positioning as a brand, which we all are, that people would look at and say, oh, this is what you’re about. A good example is Food Blogger Pro. If somebody’s starting a food blog, they’re like, oh, I know Food Blogger Pro. You should check that out. That’s a good resource for you. As opposed to something more generic like LinkedIn learning, it’s like, well, there’s a lot of things you can learn Microsoft Word, and you can learn photography on LinkedIn learning, but if you get really focused, it’s easier for people to share about it. It’s almost like a marketing position that you’re, can you talk specifically about the recipes? Are you changing them at all or tweaking them or is it just like as written you’re going through and adding some maybe context around it, some pictures and whatnot? How much are you changing the actual original recipe?

Kate Shungu: Yeah, so I try to stay true to the original recipe for the most part, but most of the recipes are a little vague. It might say for a cake bake until done. So it certainly needs a temperature, it needs some testing on the time. A lot of the recipes might need the addition of salt. They just wasn’t added for whatever reason or just little tweaks here and there. But my goal is for someone to come upon the site and find the recipe that their mom made, their aunt made their grandma made and make it and be able to say that tastes exactly like mom’s is the goal. And so I try to stay true as much as possible.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I love that. And so you had this focus, you’re able to get to the point where I think it’s an unlock for a lot of creators, which is the point where you qualify for some ad company. It’s either a sponsor comes to you if you’re growing a social following and says, Hey, we have a budget of 3000, 5,000, 10,000, whatever it is, we will pay you to create content that’s one of the unlocks. Or if you’re publishing two content to a site, somebody comes to you and says, or you get to the point 50,000, a hundred thousand page views where you’re able to qualify for one of these ad networks. Can you talk about that moment specifically once you qualified, you turned that on, is that when you started to see, Hey, this could be a thing that I could really get after and build into a sustainable business?

Kate Shungu: Absolutely. And honestly, it was always the goal. I had had another food blogger mentor me, and he mentioned that this could be really a sustainable business for someone who wanted, like I did, to stay home with my kids and have a business. And so that has been the goal all along to be able to balance those two. And so actually, I qualified for Mediavine two weeks before my second son was born, so it did work out very well. But it’s very much the hustle that a lot of bloggers do of you’re working during the fringe hours or nap times or after work or after bedtimes or weekends and things like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s one of the great things, if you look at the spectrum of what work could be, there’s the extremely rigid work. It’s like an office job where you have to check in at a certain time and be done at a certain time. You’re watching the clock or a manufacturing line maybe as the ultimate example of one end of the spectrum. And then for a lot of us who are doing this type of work, it’s the other end where it’s like it’s work, it’s effort for sure, and there’s a lot of it, but the flexibility is off the charts. You can fit it in to the margins of your life. Or if you’re in a season of life where maybe you don’t have kids and you don’t have a lot of day-to-day responsibilities, you can just work a lot if that’s what you’re wanting to do and still do that in a portable way where you can show up on vacation and you could work for three hours in the morning or you could work on the airplane, whatever it might be.

It’s one of the great benefits of this type of work. And also that you are building a thing that isn’t in itself valuable. You have this valuable asset, which is this website, and it’s not passive, but you could not work for a week and still earn income. So you get to this point, you’re starting to make sustainable money, you’re able to see this is 50,000 page views that translates depending on your RPM, it might be $500, a thousand dollars. You can start to play the numbers game a little bit and see if I start to increase this, if I start to get more traffic, if I start to figure out ways to get more people to site, I can earn more. And you also have a background in marketing. So talk to me about the strategy that you started to implement at that point where you saw there was these opportunities, you saw you had some traction, and then you said, okay, where can I find additional ways to grow the traffic to my site?

Kate Shungu: Yeah, absolutely. And I talk about this concept of marketing campaigns, not pulling back some magic curtain in the advertising world. We can see this all around us, just the way that if you think of your favorite brand and you think of the way that they advertise to you, it’s really only one or two channels that they get to you. So for example, what’s the last place you saw McDonald’s ad Bjork?

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, man, it would’ve been probably on tv.

Kate Shungu: Tv, okay. Tv or if you’re driving down the highway, you might see a billboard.

Bjork Ostrom: Billboard.

Kate Shungu: Those are the two ways that they advertise you. They’re not necessarily in your inbox. I’m sure they have some sort of email system, but they’re not in your inbox four times a day. They’re not all over social media advertising to you. And so if you contrast that with, let’s say a clothing company, they are all over your inbox and they are all on social media advertising to you, but you can see that clothing company is not advertising to you on TV or doing billboards. So these companies have each figured out what the fastest way, the best way to reach you that makes the most sense for them, and that converts for them. And so I knew that Pinterest had a lot of opportunity. I had heard from other bloggers that there was a traffic to be had from Pinterest. And so in 2022, I decided to focus on Pinterest.

That was my marketing campaign, right? Because food bloggers don’t have ad dollars. The clothing companies, they have the ad dollars, we have our time, and so if our ad dollars are our time, where are we making the investment? So I decided I’m going to invest heavily in Pinterest that year. So I pinned every day. I got new pin templates, I listened to podcasts, I took a course. I started doing those idea pins that they wanted us to do in 20 21, 20 22 that didn’t have the links thinking, well, let me just see what happens from it. But as a result of this year of work, so the December before I started, I started with 41,000 sessions from Pinterest that month of December. The following December, I had 87,000 sessions from Pinterest, so more than doubled that amount from comparing December to December. And then in addition, I got invited to their creator rewards program, which is no longer in existence unfortunately.

But I was invited pretty early on, presumably because I was doing these idea pins and then made another $20,000 from that year from that rewards program. And so this success from that year long investment has really continued over the course of the next couple years. In fact, this past December, I had almost 400,000 sessions from Pinterest, and granted that involved a pin going viral over Thanksgiving. And so I think some of it would attribute to that. And so I don’t want to claim that as an ongoing number, like a normal number for me. But I will say it’s how it has climbed steadily sense is a testament to that year that I invested in it. And that once you spend that time on it and working heavily on it, the next year, you can replicate that success without working so hard too. You figured out your strategy and how you’re going to do it quicker. You can even teach it to a va, which I did in the following year, so she could execute on that strategy so I could work on something else.

Bjork Ostrom: What I love about it is it’s these daily actions that you are taking. It’s taking a course, it’s reading, even reading the documents that a platform’s releasing on best practices or their creator hub, all of these platforms, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, they all have these hubs where they’re like, here’s how to be successful on our platform and taking time to do that. To your point, it’s like that’s the investment you’re making. You’re taking your time, which there’s a cost to that and you’re investing it. And the return on it can be as it was in your case, not only through that creator program, but also just through the traffic attributed to it, literally tens of thousands or potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars from the acquisition of knowledge and the implementation of that knowledge within your business. So can you talk to me what it looked like for you as a mom who was doing, it was early stage, you had young kids In this stage, we have a four-year-old and a six-year-old, so we’re kind of coming out of it. What did it look like to actually create content consistently to learn about this, to create systems with it and to stay on top of all the other things. You’re in your house, people are listening, you have a very organized house. It’s not chaotic to stay on top of all these other things as well. Talk to us about how that fit into your day-to-day in a way where not only we’re able to sustain, but also to grow pretty significantly.

Kate Shungu: And to your point, it was a really consistency of carving out the time that, okay, during nap time, I’m going to spend the hour and a half, or hopefully it was that long, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s always hour and a half or 15 minutes,

Kate Shungu: Right? Yes. One wake window or one

Sleep window or three. So it was the consistency of taking that time. My husband helped an awful lot. I will say he would take the kids on walks when he got home from work. I would work after bedtime, I would work on the weekends. So it was really just fitting it in. I realized that I could browse Pinterest. This was back when I was, or actually when I was focusing on Facebook the following year, which we can get into in a little bit, that I was looking for memes and other things that people used to post on Facebook. We post on Facebook. And so I realized I could do that while I was rocking a sleeping child or there was ways to fit it in, but it came from, if I want to do this, if I want to make this work, I need to put in the time and effort required even if I have a million other things. And so not saying I did this perfectly, housework certainly went out the window some days and things like that, but my goal was to stay home with my kids. And so I needed a business to get me to the point where I could do that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And do you feel like at this point, pretty comfortable in that? Do you feel like mission accomplished?

Kate Shungu: I do. Yep. I sent my youngest off to preschool, and our half day preschool here is a decently long half day. And so I sent him off in the fall, and then my oldest is in kindergarten and it’s working. I can go pick him up every day and

Bjork Ostrom: That’s Awesome. Congratulations.

Kate Shungu: Do the ferry to gymnastics and swimming in the whole bit.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And have this successful business that you’re running alongside that. And I think so often one of the things that I try and bring up a lot on the podcast is we are each defining our own game and what success looks like for us. And for some people, success looks like you are a thousand percent in on your business, and that’s what you want to do. You want to become famous and known and make as much money as possible, and that’s great. But for other people, it’s like I want to have something that I spend the least amount of time on and I’m still able to just pay the mortgage. That’s all that I want to do is pay the mortgage. And so that’s somebody’s game. And for other people, it’s like, I want to be a business owner. I want to grow a thing.

I want to have success with it. I want to really hustle, but I don’t want to hustle to the degree that it eats into time when my kids would be at home. All of us are playing a different game. And so part of it is just defining what game you’re playing and then going after it. And I love hearing from you that your goal was, I want to have this sustainable business in service of me being able to be fully present with my kids and be home with them. And it’s super helpful to hear all the different perspectives of how different people are showing up, and it’s awesome. So congrats on being able to get there and continuing to grow. So you talked about Pinterest this season of Pinterest. I know for a lot of people, they’re like, I can’t figure out Pinterest or Pinterest used to work really well and now it’s not working well. How have you found today in 2025, spring of 2025 or recording to May, how have you found Pinterest to be performing for you?

Kate Shungu: It is my highest traffic driver, and it’s kept me afloat through the Google algorithm changes. I get hit really hard in the March of 2024 update. And so what I’ve found most recently is that keywords are making a difference for me.

Bjork Ostrom: On Pinterest.

Kate Shungu: Yeah, on Pinterest. So as an example, there’s a creamy cucumber salad that has cucumbers, onions, and a sour cream and dill dressing. It might be a Midwestern specialty, it might be a little bit less regional, but it’s a summary salad made with cucumbers. And so if you think about the ways you can position it on Pinterest, cucumbers with sour cream and dill, sour cream, cucumbers, cucumber and onion salad, creamy cucumber salad. There’s all these different ways. And I’ve had success using different keywords for different pins or for example,

Bjork Ostrom: For the same recipe.

Kate Shungu: For the same recipe,

Bjork Ostrom: Different keywords. And so this is what you’re getting into is an important reminder that Google is a search platform, YouTube is a search platform. Pinterest is definitely a search platform, but we don’t often think about SEO as it relates to Pinterest. But it’s interesting to hear you say that’s a huge approach for you is thinking strategically around keywords on Pinterest and how your content correlates to those keywords and getting the maximum coverage for the different iterations of a certain keyword that will exist as it relates to a certain recipe. Is that right?

Kate Shungu: Exactly. Yep. And as another example, I have this old fashioned egg casserole and it’s made with sliced sandwich bread, like wonder bread. And so I made a pin that said egg casserole with bread. And it turns out this is the recipe that a lot of people are looking for if they’re looking for this particular recipe. But they remembered that one unique ingredient, right? Because you can make egg casserole with hash browns, you can make it with tater tots, you can make it with different kinds of bread, but they remembered that it’s this sliced sandwich bread. And so if that’s what they’re searching for, I’m showing up there for what they’re looking for.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about how you go about doing that? Because I think people hear that, they’re like, oh, that makes sense. You have different keywords attached to a recipe. People click on it, they go to the recipe. The recipe name might not be an exact match for what they were searching within Pinterest, but it’s obviously going to be close enough because you wouldn’t do a corn casserole keyword if it’s not corn casserole. But can you talk about what that looks like, that process? How many pins are you doing for a certain recipe? How are you coming up with the ideas for what those keywords might be? What does that process look like?

Kate Shungu: Sure. So for each post I have any number of pins. I maybe do three or four off the bat and schedule them in three or four week intervals. But first I check and see if there’s one thing, like one ingredient in that recipe that’s different. So for example, with the egg casserole, it’s the bread that makes it stand out, so you can look for that. Otherwise, I go to Pinterest and just go to the search bar at the top. And instead of selecting your pins, search all pins and then just start typing and see what comes in. So

Bjork Ostrom: For the auto suggest

Kate Shungu: Exactly, auto suggest. So you type in salmon patties or an old fashioned, an old fashioned cake or something like that. And sometimes it’ll give me ideas oftentimes,

Bjork Ostrom: And you take those ideas and those become the keywords. Now, when you say a keyword, what does that mean within the context of Pinterest, like how you’re crafting the pin?

Kate Shungu: So I would put that item, so let’s say it’s a creamy cucumber salad. That would be in the text of the pin, that would be in the title. And I would somehow weave it into the description as well, in addition to how you can pick keywords on Pinterest from their dropdown menu. So you would choose cucumbers, you would choose sour cream, you would choose, I don’t think dill is currently a keyword, but choose as many ingredients as you can from their list of keywords too.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. And can you talk about the image? I know there’s been over the last decade plus all different ways to create images on Pinterest. Are you seeing any common themes with the best type of images that you are creating in terms of length and layout and text and all of that?

Kate Shungu: Not a big theme, other than I would say my regular size, what 1200 by 800 pins do maybe a little bit better than the slightly longer pins, but for the most part, it’s still pins from two and three years ago that are still doing the best. If I looked at my top 10, it’s just one.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s such an interesting thing with Pinterest. It’s similar to YouTube in that way, where you can create a piece of content that can continue to serve you or a blog for that matter for a long period of time. And so different than a platform like Facebook or Instagram where there’s the lifespan of the content is much shorter. And one of the great things about Pinterest, it also takes time to build that up and to get that momentum and then to get something that catches. So the general process would be, well, and this would be a question, when you are creating a piece of content, are you almost doing keyword research on Pinterest before creating it? A lot of people do keyword research with a tool like Key Search or Atras and saying, Hey, there’s an opportunity here. Are you doing any of that within Pinterest, or are you just creating inspired content knowing that people are going to come across it and you might be interested in it? What does the content or origination process look like for you?

Kate Shungu: Yeah, that actually comes from these old cookbooks. I look and see what recipes keep showing up, and I figure out that these were probably some of the more popular recipes. And so I make the spreadsheet and I still put it through key search and everything like that, and make sure I’m not going after something crazy or not leaving behind a keyword that I could use for my size blog that would work well in terms of competition. But I use that and I actually use Facebook as a little bit of a to create these ideas for posts. And so part of my Facebook strategy is to post photos of these church cookbooks, the un copyrighted ones. Some are copyrighted and I have to say what,

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, interesting.

Kate Shungu: But the un copyrighted ones, and there’s quite a few, it gains a lot of traction on Facebook, and I can start to see what people are interested in and what resonates with people, what people are commenting on. And then I think, oh, this must’ve been a popular recipe.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. And I’m just looking through the Facebook page right now. So you have these cookbooks. Where are you finding these, by the way? We have three maybe at home. Are you sourcing ’em from eBay, finding them at estate sales?

Kate Shungu: Estate sales is a great one. I have been unfortunate enough that family and friends find out that I’m doing this, and they are more than happy to give me their find

Bjork Ostrom: A purpose for their old,

Kate Shungu: When their parents pass and they’re cleaning out their house and they hand me all the cookbooks, I’m happy to take ’em and honored that they thought of me. But for the most part, it’s been family and friends, but I have well over a hundred of these.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. That makes sense. Because of the niche, you always are starting with something that would have existed within one of these old cookbooks. Then from there refining a little bit. Okay, so there’s a rhubarb pie recipe or easy southern pecan pie. Maybe there’s a little bit of tweaking around what you’re actually calling it. You go through the process, you document it, and then this is also keyword research. And I think people sometimes forget, you can use keyword research to refine something that you’re already going to create as opposed to pick the thing that you will create. And so for you, it’s the keyword research around Pinterest, looking at all the different ways that it might be. If you type in rhubarb pie, there might be easy rhubarb pie or rhubarb custard pie or rhubarb, all these different iterations that you’d get. Do you just put those into a little note that then you’re using as your Pinterest content creation note?

Kate Shungu: That’s exactly it. Yep. That I can.

Bjork Ostrom: And then one of the things that you said is you might have three, four, or five different ideas of how you would name it and then schedule those 3, 4, 5 weeks apart. So you’d schedule one of them and then three weeks later you’d schedule another pin of the same recipe but with a different name.

Kate Shungu: Exactly. Yep. And that is just based on some documentation I read. It might’ve been back in 2022. I don’t even know. I don’t want to confirm.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. It’s your process now though, this

Kate Shungu: Current best practice. Right. But yeah, that’s just the strategy I have just to space it out a little bit and to be sure that I am coming ahead of holidays too. I pinned something in early October that went viral over Thanksgiving, and so that jump, that’s what, seven weeks that in-between that to give it a headstart to,

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Anything else from that season of information acquisition around Pinterest, that surface that’s been really helpful as you think about your approach to Pinterest and growing traffic from Pinterest?

Kate Shungu: That pretty much sums it up other than just the consistency of, I still pin two pins a day. It has worked in the past because continuing to work and continuing to grow, and granted these nostalgic recipes, the appetite for nostalgia is really high over the holidays. And so there’s some pretty strong peaks and pretty low valleys to be honest, in this particular niche. But the year after I did Pinterest, I switched my focus to Facebook and I took a year and I focused for the most part on Facebook. I knew there was some traffic potential there. I had heard this. I wasn’t sure if it would work for me, but I figured it was worth a shot, so I thought I’d give it another year. So I started posting multiple times a day consistency. Again, I tried all kinds of sharing. I was talking about sharing memes. I don’t do that anymore, but my own content, others content. I almost stopped in June. I was getting absolutely nowhere. I remember

Bjork Ostrom: June of last year,

Kate Shungu: Oh, sorry, June of 2023. Okay,

Yep. This was the year after that. I did Pinterest. I did Facebook the year later, so 2023, I was getting nowhere. I had 2000 followers. I was getting six or 7,000 sessions a month and it wasn’t going anywhere. And so my husband encouraged me to just stick with it. I decided to give it a year. So I gave it a year and something changed into September. It just probably an algorithm change, but it started growing really rapidly. I ended that year at about 50,000 session, or I’m sorry, 50,000 followers and tripled my number of sessions, which isn’t huge from a traffic perspective, but it was about a little over 20,000 sessions a month. But I realized Facebook and now I met 118,000 followers roughly. But it continues to be where I can connect with my readers, where I get ideas from, like I was talking about earlier, of posting those pages and seeing what’s resonating with people, what people remember, what might be popular.

I have a lot of people send me things to post. They send me their mom’s handwritten recipe card for Swedish meatballs and then a photo of the Swedish meatballs that they made last night and say, can you post this on the page? Because it’s not a group, it’s a page, a business page. And so I’m more than happy to do that. People are happy to share, and it’s where I’ve really found I can engage with readers. So that was less of a traffic growing experiment and more of a branding experiment that year. But I did get invited to the bonus program on Facebook that year. And so that has helped certainly weather the storm of the algorithm in 2024 because that’s continued.

Bjork Ostrom: And can you talk about, we had an interview with Brita Brielle, and she talks about food with feeling really focusing on Facebook, growing that as her following there. She also talked about the benefit of this as a monetization platform, not just from the traffic that you can send, which you talked about, I think you said, did you say 20,000 sessions that you’re able to get, which you can kind of shrug at that, but if you use a $50 RPM, RPMs are all over the place, but just for easy math. So that’s an extra thousand dollars a month. And the other thing that I’m really interested in is the world of real estate. And if you bought a property that produced a thousand dollars a month, that’s going to be an expensive purchase. You might be paying 150,000 for that property to make you a thousand dollars a month. And so not that the value exchange is the same, but one of the things I think about isn’t just like, what is the amount of money that you’re creating for your business, but also if you were to get that somewhere else, what would you have to do to get that? And you’d have to work.

It depends on how much you’re getting paid, but if you’re getting paid $50 an hour, you’d have to work five hours a week. Or if you bought a residential property, you’d have to spend $150,000 to get that. And so I think there’s a ton of value that we are creating in these little incremental things that add up over time. And so anyways, just to shine a light on that, how important that actually is from a business perspective and how valuable it is. Obviously there’s fluctuations, it can go away as easy as it can come potentially, but still very, very valuable. So can you talk about the monetization program within Facebook? You got invited into it. What does that look like? Is there any predictability around how much revenue that might produce?

Kate Shungu: It’s about as predictable as the algorithm that is to say not very, but I have noticed. So on average, I probably make about $2,000 a month from it. It could be 600, it could be 4,000 depending on the month. And the holiday time does a little bit better for me, but it’s just the consistency of posting again, that gets me there. You never know what’s going to be a success.

Bjork Ostrom: How often are you posting?

Kate Shungu: Four times a day.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Yeah, I think Britta said she’s posting eight times a day. And then what types of content are you posting?

Kate Shungu: Yeah, it’s partially my content. So two posts per day are just photos with the link to the recipe. And then the other two are the photos of these UNC copyrighted church community cookbooks,

Bjork Ostrom: Which I’m sure if people see one that really is nostalgic for them or resonates with them, it can become something like, you see a lot of people sharing this, like 22 shares on the chocolate cake mix or chocolate cake recipe, 45 shares on the strawberry salad. It’s like that’s really fun for people. And I can imagine people getting really into that and enjoying seeing some of those.

Kate Shungu: Oh, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: So Facebook, when you think of it could be something that’s producing two, three, $4,000 of revenue for your business by posting four times a day, having a system around it, having a process around it. And it goes back to what we talked about is developing expertise and opinion around a platform and then creating a system to show up and do that every day. And you also talked about bringing in a VA to help with some of that. So at what point did you make a decision, Hey, I’m ready to pass this off to somebody, and how much are you paying attention to that process once you pass it off?

Kate Shungu: Yeah, great question. So it was my youngest, his last year home before he started preschool. I was like, I can’t keep doing this. We’re running around everywhere, brother’s in school. I was just all over the place and it just wasn’t sustainable. So we started, it was just five hours a week, but it was enough for her to make quite a few pins and the pins for the week, basically about 14 or 15 pins, and then to schedule most of the Facebook content. And so I still sourced the ideas for her, the pages of the church cookbooks, but she went ahead and did all the captions and scheduling and everything else. And so it was because I had put these systems in place and had done the work over the past two years, it was a strategy at that point that I could easily pass off to her with a quick loom video, here’s how you do it. And she could replicate it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, loom is great. I think a lot of people are familiar with it. If you’re not loom.com, we use it all the time. Super helpful for not having to write out a document or a process, but just press record and send it over to somebody going back to Facebook. So can you talk about how that functionally works with Facebook? There’s a monetization platform, and then what? You get invited, you get accepted, and then you just start posting on Facebook and get paid.

Kate Shungu: Basically, you have to opt in, you get the invitation, and they might send you an email. They might not. I think I stumbled upon it in one of the professional suites or something. I can’t remember how I found out that I was invited. But you click opt in, and then it starts going and you get paid every month.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. And then are you posting any video content or is it all images?

Kate Shungu: Almost all images. It’s the reels don’t do very well for me on Facebook.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. And then is that true on Pinterest as well? Are you posting any video content?

Kate Shungu: I have found video just does not convert for me. Yeah, it never shows up in the top 50 pins,

Bjork Ostrom: But images continue to do well. I also heard people talking about looking at what performed well on Pinterest and then taking some of that and using that as inspiration for Facebook. Did you see that to be true as well, or do you notice any correlation to a recipe and an image that does well on Pinterest also doing well on Facebook?

Kate Shungu: I have not noticed any correlation. It seems to be whatever you think is going to happen is the opposite. Often is true, right? This is going to be great, and then it goes nowhere, and then this random thing that you just thought to change a keyword on does wonderfully. So it’s

Bjork Ostrom: Just

Kate Shungu: Hard to tell.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s something about, and it goes back to what you’re saying, consistency. And you’re not going to be able to do it by publishing once a week because you have to have a certain amount of frequency on a platform like Facebook or Pinterest in order to have something that pops off and does well. But different than a platform like Instagram where you’re probably not going to want to post eight times a day just because it’s a different platform and it works a little bit differently. So tell me about how you view your business. Pinterest, you’ve talked about as the most important traffic source, but where you allocate your time, where you see the best return on that time. Can you talk about how you prioritize things?

Kate Shungu: Sure. So Pinterest and Facebook are, well, Pinterest is my top traffic driver and Facebook is in the top five. And so I post one new post per week. I update several posts per week, and then I took back over from my va, I Facebook. And so I do the scheduling of that every week.

Bjork Ostrom: Was that because you just had more time to do it? That time was found, and so that’s the thing that you took back over,

Kate Shungu: Correct? Yep. Once my youngest went to school. And so that’s kind of how I structure my week is the new post updating old posts. I still do some freelance work because I enjoy it. We’re a company with not vintage recipes, so I can make air fryer, whatever, or instant pot, whatever. And it provides some creativity for me to be able to work outside the box of vintage recipes.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And we often talk about this idea of building your ideal job, and I think for a lot of people to do a type of content or to work even to work with a team, so many of us are working on our own or in a silo, and to be able to then have these instances where we’re working with a team and alongside other people is so beneficial. So I’m curious to hear as things are right now, if all of this were to go away and you had to start today, what are the things that you would be doing that you feel like would be the best return, let’s say, given the amount of time that you have? So it’s the same amount of time every day, every week, but you’re having to start from scratch. How would you do it? Knowing what and knowing what you’ve seen perform well for your content?

Kate Shungu: Yeah, I would be super specific and super strategic in focusing on just a few things, because I think at first I was all over the place. I was doing Pinterest and Facebook and Instagram and trying to make video and doing all kinds of new posts as many as I could and updating posts when that became a thing too. And so it was a little chaotic because there’s so many things you can do. And so I think figuring out my niche and figuring out, I’ve developed an avatar for my ideal customer. And so she is a woman. She is in her sixties or seventies, she’s retired or almost retired. I’ve named her Judy just because we have several followers named Judy who fit this avatar, but she has a little bit more time on her hands, and she is, she’s on Facebook several times a day.

She does not have TikTok and therefore as a business, I’m not on TikTok either, but she’s on Facebook, and so am I think about her when I’m creating these recipes and thinking, is this something Judy would make? It makes it very easy to, let’s say, pass on what you think might be a really juicy keyword if you find one for gluten-free something or instant pot, whatever, it looks really good, but Judy maybe is not making that. She might not even have an instant pot. And so I’m able to focus really quickly, and so if I were starting over, it would be fine. It would be to find that audience, figure out that avatar, that person I’m marketing to figuring out what platforms they are on and really digging into those.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I love that. And what I love about it is it’s user focused, it’s reader focused. It’s starting with the person that you’re going after and then thinking about how do they use the internet? Where are they showing up on the internet? What type of content resonates with them? What kind of content do they want to see? And then eventually getting to you as the actual creator of that content and saying, okay, how am I going to create this content in a way that resonates with that person that I’ve picked as my target market, which is so great. We often talk about what we are doing, what our job is, is we are creating content, but then we are marketing that content, especially if the content is kind of the end of the funnel. If we don’t have a product we’re selling, if we’re not encouraging people to sign up for a course or a class or whatever it might be, we’re just marketing content and from that content we’re working with a brand or an ad network, we need to figure out marketing as it relates to our content.

And so it’s really cool to hear you reflect not only some of the key components of marketing, figuring out your avatar, but then also thinking about, to call back to what you were talking about before McDonald’s as an example, what are the channels that are going to be most effective for me to market to the people that I want to reach? And if you do that and you’re strategic about it, what you’ll find is if you’re creating content for Gen Z, Facebook maybe isn’t the best place. If you’re creating content for somebody who’s in their sixties or seventies, Facebook probably is a good platform. So you have these decisions that you are able to make that help to remove the analysis paralysis or the overwhelm around, well, there’s 17 different platforms and I’m trying to post to all of them, and it’s like, well, there’s probably two or three that are actually really effective for you, and you should focus on those and even focus on one of those until you really get it down, which is a huge takeaway for me as I hear about your story. So super inspiring to hear. Anything else that you would want to share as we come to close out that you feel like has been important with your journey?

Kate Shungu: Yeah, I would say I get this a lot when I’m talking to other people and something I worry about, but I think as bloggers, we get scared to over promote our content, but no one’s mad when you walk outside and you see that McDonald’s billboard, no one’s mad that it’s been there for a month

Because you might not want an egg McMuffin today, but maybe you’ll want one in five days, which is why it’s up there for a while. And so similarly, if you have recipes that you really like, that you’re really proud of your readers, they have hundreds of five star reviews, they’re a slam dunk, keep promoting it and don’t think, oh, I posted it a month ago. I’m not going to post it again. Or I put it in an email three weeks ago because three weeks ago, I maybe didn’t want that 13 by nine cake recipe, but I’m hosting in a couple of weeks and I’m just starting to think about that party, and maybe I do want that 13 by nine K recipe. And so your reader might not be ready for you in that moment, but the more they see it pop up, they think, oh, this must be a good one, and it might just hit them at the right time. So I would just encourage you to reuse that footage for reels to use different photos. If you’re posting something on Facebook again, or you can use what your readers are saying about a recipe as different marketing copy, there’s great,

Bjork Ostrom: Great. Yeah, if they leave a comment and the comment’s positive to use that as social proof within your writing.

Kate Shungu: Yep, exactly. Yeah. There’s so many ways to remarket a piece of content and you can see other people do it and take notes and think of different ways to do it yourself, but I think especially the recipes that you know are good, and if you want to be known for something, you got to shout it from the rooftops.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, play your hits, right? It’s like if you have these hit songs, you got to play ’em. And that can be one of the most beneficial things. It’s been a reminder for me, there’s been multiple interviews that I’ve done over the last few months where people are talking about strategically reposting, not reposting in the context of a blog only, although that as well or updating, but on social, like in email, going back to these hits that you have and finding the rhythm around remoting those and remarketing those. Because in our world, they don’t go stale. Like they’ll be seasonal probably, but even more so a reason to bring that up and to mention it every season if you have something that really works well in a certain season. So

Kate Shungu: Great. Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Kate, that’s awesome. It’s been super fun to hear about your story. Congratulations on your success. Can you talk about where people can get ahold of you? My guess is Facebook, Pinterest and your site, but other ways that people might be able to follow along with what you’re up to, so we can link to those in the show notes.

Kate Shungu: Yeah, absolutely. So gift of hospitality.com. You can find me at Gift of Hospitality on Facebook, Pinterest, and I do have an Instagram too. I just don’t focus on it.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. That’s awesome. Kate, thanks so much for coming on.

Kate Shungu: Thanks for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast. Episodes, ratings and reviews help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger. We read each and every review and it makes us so happy to hear when you’re enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pro podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it’s on Apple or Spotify or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you’re there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much and it makes such a huge difference for our show. So thanks in advance, and that’s all we have for you today. So have a great week.