How Mary Smith Uses Her 500k Instagram Followers to Monetize Across Platforms

Disclaimer: This transcript is generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: If you’re a food creator, chances are you’ve come across Comment for DM tools. Using that functionality within Instagram can result in some huge wins, but the tools are really complicated and they’re oftentimes built for marketers, like people who are in the tool day in and day out, not built for food bloggers or recipe creators specifically. That’s where Grocers List comes in. It’s built from the ground up for food creators. So if you’re looking to grow your email list, get more traffic to your site, or maybe earn more affiliate sales all without spending a ton of extra time or having to learn a complicated tool, then Grocers List is for you. And what’s really cool is they’re seeing some pretty impressive numbers, like 75% click-through rates, which is kind of mind blowing, and 5% opt-in rates from people who are engaging with content that is sent through the Grocers List platform. And they’re actually doing an Office Hour session soon. So if you want to see the behind the scenes of how creators are using it, you can sign up at grocerslist.com and a little bonus for you as a podcast listener, if you use the promo code podcast, you’ll get your first month completely free. Again, that’s grocerslist.com promo code podcast.

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 is our third and final episode in our miniseries with Grocers list. In this conversation, Mary Smith from the food blog, Mary’s whole life shares her journey from being diagnosed with celiac disease to becoming a super successful food blogger. She discusses the importance of consistency in content creation and the strategies she’s employed to grow her audience on Instagram to over 500,000 followers. Mary chats about the significance of understanding her audience’s needs, how she’s leveraged tools for engagement, and how she maximizes revenue through affiliate marketing and deep linking. Mary also chats about how she switched to Grocers List in January and has since grown her email list by 3000 subscribers and also shares how she’s uses Grocers List to create a meal plan with a customized grocery list for her email subscribers. Bric and Mary also chat about Mary’s experience with using a management company for her brand partnerships, and she shares her advice for other creators on how to price your work and get the most out of brand partnerships. Mary’s an example of a food creator who really has done a fabulous job diversifying her income and bringing in revenue through ads, affiliate links, and brand partnerships. It’s a really great interview with practical steps that you can take to create multiple revenue streams for your own business. Without further ado, I’ll just let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Mary, welcome to the podcast.Emily Walker:

Mary Smith Thank you so much.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re going to be having a conversation around your business, believe it or not. It is a food related business as we do here on the podcast. And one of the things I’m really excited to talk to you about with your journey and your story is getting to this point where it’s like you’ve, not only are you talking about something that you’re passionate about and that’s a part of your life, it’s making a different in other people’s lives, but you’ve also built your business into a really solid, sustainable, profitable business. And we can talk about what some of those numbers look like, but before we do that, I want to hear a little bit about your story as it relates to starting to eat gluten-free Celiac. When did that happen and then when did you start publishing content around that?

Mary Smith Yep. So I was diagnosed with celiac disease back at the end of 2016, and it was a complete lifestyle overhaul for me. I love gluten, I love food. I’m a huge foodie. And so getting that diagnosis, I just felt kind, lost. They say, okay, you have celiac disease, you have to eat gluten-free the rest of your life, but there’s no plan. They kind of just are like, okay, have a good day. And then you walk out of there like, whoa, where do I even start? And so I found myself really leaning on other creators and going on Instagram and Googling and just following people where I could relate to their journey. And I thought to myself, what have I started sharing about my journey? So that was kind of what prompted the start of Mary’s whole life. I was really enjoying sharing just tips and tricks and how I was navigating everyday life, being gluten free, kind of new to this lifestyle, and just sharing it on my personal Instagram.

And then I saw all these other people, food bloggers doing this, and I’m like, wow, that seems like what an amazing job that would be to do. I love to cook, I love food, but now I also have this other piece of my lifestyle where I’m navigating something completely new and how fun would it be to share that with other people? So that was kind of how it all got started. And so it took me, I would say probably six months of sharing on my own personal platform to actually switch over, come with Mary’s whole life. And in my mind from the beginning I was like, I can be a food blogger. It can be called Mary’s whole life, but that doesn’t pigeonhole me into just food. I can also share about my health journey and just being a mom and things like that. So a little bit of everything, which is still what I continue to do today. It took me probably about a year to get my blog up and running. I didn’t start monetizing the blog until 2019, so it took about two years.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. We’re going to talk about that journey, what it was like when you first started to monetize and then where it’s at now. But one of the things that I want to point out that I think is great about the type of work that we do is when you are able to find a thing that you are naturally curious about, you’re naturally interested in and you have a need and somebody else has a need around it. And it sounds like in that season, what you were doing is you were simultaneously helping and learning. You have this new reality that you have to navigate. So you go out and you start to learn As you are learning, you are starting to share what you are learning and helping other people. And that to me feels like one of the massive benefits of what we’re doing.

Same for me with this podcast. So much of what I’m doing is we have a need within our businesses, which is we need to understand what’s working, what tools, what tactics people are using. And these interviews for me are just as beneficial as for anybody else who listens, hopefully beneficial for the people that listen. It’s one of the reasons why we continue to show up a decade later continuing to do these interviews is because they’re really beneficial. I think for a lot of content creators, one of the things that’s super helpful is you are able to learn and share around a thing that is important to you that you are maybe learning and sharing or learning and consuming content around as well. So you got to this point, you had this new reality, you started to learn about it, you started to realize there’s other people creating content around this. You start to create content. Did you start on social primarily? And did you know relatively early on that you wanted to build this into a business?

Mary Smith So I did start on Instagram. I didn’t have a website right off the bat. It took me about six months to realize, hey, maybe I should have some place to house all of these recipes and ideas outside of social media.

Bjork Ostrom: Talking about your website is super helpful because that was kind of 2019, is that right?

Mary Smith Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Mary Smith So that was when I started monetizing it. Monetizing. So I started, yep, the blog May, 2017 was when I actually published my first post. And I remember googling how to start a blog, and I think I read the blog post from the minimalists about how to start a blog. So I got my WordPress, I got all that stuff set up and just kind of started publishing things, not knowing what I was doing, not knowing anything about SEO or anything like

Bjork Ostrom: That. And I think the important thing within that is sometimes there’s two approaches that I think we can take when doing a new thing. This isn’t even when starting a blog, it’s just doing a new thing. One of the things we’re thinking about is WhatsApp. Okay, so there’s this new channel, WhatsApp, there’s billions of people who use WhatsApp. What does it look like to get started there? There’s two approaches we could take the approach of Ready, aim, fire, and the aim part is learning, educating, getting information, feeling like you understand it, or you could do Ready, fire, aim. And I think the ready, fire, aim approach in this world, this type of business is more often than not the best approach to take, assuming that a part of what you’re doing after you fire is aiming and adjusting and shifting. And so in those early stages for you as you were showing up, you were pressing publish, you were releasing things.

Can you talk about the cadence that you had around creating content, publishing content and understanding how do you build a content business? Because what we’re going to get to is we don’t want to bury the lead, but you have a site that gets multiple hundreds of thousands of page views. You talk about 600,000 pages, but it’s not just ad income that you’re earning. You’re also working with a management team getting affiliate income, sponsorship income, multiple six figures type of business, which for you look at any job in the market and it’s like maybe you need to be a brain surgeon to have a W2 salary that’s earning the equivalent of that. Super impressive. And so I think people want to know and hear about how do you go through that process of both showing up, publishing, creating, but also iterating your business in a way where you’re getting, we talk about a tiny bit better every day. What did that look like for you?

Mary Smith Yeah, so it’s been a constant learning process from day one. To answer the other part of your first question, I never went into this even hoping to monetize. I think it was more just like a side hobby. I was working as a recruiter helping people find jobs. That’s what I did for 12 years prior to quitting and working on my blog full time. But I just kind of went into it just sharing from my heart and not going into it from the side of, oh, I need to make money out of doing this. But then once I learned about the potential, when people used to do those income reports and they would put them on their blog and you could see how much they’re making, I was blown away, wow, you can make that much money from food blogging. That’s crazy. So I was like, I’m going to do that.

So basically what I’ve done over the years is just show up really consistently on social media. I’ve posted really consistently on my blog, and once I realized that the ultimate goal to monetize the blog was to get in with Media Vine or Ad Thrive at the time, then it was the page views. You got to get to that certain threshold. And so I was just all in. I told my husband, if I don’t quit my recruiting job to focus on this full time, I’m never going to be good at either of them to my fullest potential. So I was like, I just need to try. I need to try. And so he was like, okay, we’ll give it six months and see what happens. But honestly, it just kind of started taking off the more consistently that I posted, I was finally able to get in with Media via in 2019 and have slowly just kind of increased over the years. And I’m sure we’ll get into it a little bit more, but my Instagram following, I think a big reason why my page views have also gone up. There’s a multitude of reasons, but my social media following, I was looking back at numbers today. I was at 137,000 followers in February of 2023, and I’m almost at 500,000 now.

So it’s been pretty rapid growth and honestly, I attribute that to, I had a one-on-one coaching call with Bailey Campbell, she’s Basics with on Instagram for reels and really how to grow your account using reels, going viral, things like that. And so I did a one-on-one call with her and just implementing those couple tips and tricks that she said and posting consistently, things just kind of took off, which led to viral reels, which led to more traffic, which led to more people coming to my account. And they’ve come and they’ve stayed for various reasons.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Are there things that you look back on that you think were most impactful? And then we’re going to talk about some of the ways that you can capture some of that value from the attention that you have. Are there things that you look back on that were most helpful? When you talk about creating a viral reel, what are the things that between a hundred and 500,000 that you did that allowed you to help grow quick?

Mary Smith Oh, I think it’s important to look at what’s trending. There’s things that are going viral, and I think there’s a fine line between just recreating all the viral recipes with your own spin and then also trying to come up with new different ideas that other people haven’t done before. I think showing a little bit of yourself in the videos instead of just, I feel like the days of the Hands and pans videos where it’s just literally making a recipe. Those are kind of gone. People want to see the person behind the camera who’s creating the food. So usually whether it’s taking a bite of the food or just showing myself at the beginning holding the dish or whatever it might be, I try to keep them short and sweet, usually somewhere between eight seconds and 20 for most of them. And then using trending audio, I’m not sure how much that affects it anymore. It’s always changing with the algorithm. But for a while there, making sure I was using trending audio that had less than a thousand views for a video that had used it. You can see all the videos that have used that audio looking for one that hasn’t been used too much. So it’s kind of like that middle ground. Those really helped a lot of reels take off.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. It’s one of the things that we are constantly having to do or you as creators is understand best practice on the platform, what’s working well, kind of on the tactics side of things, but then also understanding the art of what you’re doing and the art being what resonates with your audience. What are things that people would look at and be interested in? What are the things that would really resonate with people? And you’re not going to find that through looking at trending audio. You’ll find a trending audio and then you pair that with something that will resonate with your audience. So can you talk about the audience side of things like understanding your audience and what your audience wants and even a niche and being able to speak to that specific audience and how those, when paired together, the audience and the tactics work well to allow for growth?

Mary Smith So for me, I’ve always thought it’s kind of interesting when I look at my audience, I feel like I have two different branches that I’m kind of catering to, and sometimes they overlap. So one of those is the Celiac community, people that have to be gluten-free for medical reasons or they have non celiac gluten sensitivity or they have a child who has it or they have another. I have a ton of dairy-free recipes, so a lot of dairy-free people follow me. And then there’s that other branch of busy moms who want to get dinner on the table that’s healthy, easy, quick, that don’t necessarily have a dietary restriction. So kind of putting both of those together. That’s what I try to do when I come up with my recipes. Does it check all of those boxes to cater to what all these people are looking for?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. On the tactic side of things, this is a little mini series that we’re doing with Groceries List. I know that you’ve been working with Grocers List, Ben and the team there for five months now. You are a perfect example of a creator who has grown it following. You are directing that following to your site previously as kind of the main mechanism for capturing some of the value. We’re going to be talking about sponsorships too and working with a management company and how you do that. But introducing then a tool that allows you to, within the platform, reduce some of the friction in capturing the value that you are creating for the audience that sees your content, especially with a viral video if it’s not somebody that’s already following you. So talk to me about how you are using the DM functionality and how you’ve seen that impact play out traffic email, what has that looked like for you as you’ve been growing your Instagram audience and then simultaneously thinking, okay, how do I take these views and followers and bring them into my ecosystem?

Mary Smith So I started working with Grocers List back at the end of January of this year, so it’s only been about five months prior to that. I was using ManyChat, I think for the last year and a half about, and I listened to Lindsay’s episode also talking about this, but I got super, super frustrated with the amount of dms I was getting saying, where’s the recipe? I’m not getting the recipe. Literally my inbox was filled with that every single day, and I stopped being able to communicate with my readers at that point because I’m missing all these other dms from people asking me questions or commenting on recipes. And so I was like, something needs to change. And I heard about Grocers List and I think I hesitated on signing up with them for a little bit just because I was scared of how that transition was going to look. I didn’t want to have any downtime in between. I didn’t want people to be commenting on a reel from a month ago and not get the recipe because it wasn’t connected. So anyway, I had a call with Ben and it was the most seamless transition within 24 to 48 hours. All of my previous reels were hooked up so that there wasn’t any downtime at all. So I’m kind of kicking myself for not signing up sooner because there are seriously so many great features to Grocers List and what they’re doing. So I use the comment for recipe feature all the time in all of my videos. They make it really easy because you don’t have to go into Grocers List to set it up. Once you have your keywords there, whether it’s recipe recipes, those are the ones that I have in there all the time. As long as your link to your recipe is in the caption of your reel, it’s automatically going to send that to the people that comment. So you don’t have to constantly be in there setting each one up like you used to do with ManyChat. And I also love that on the button that gets sent for the recipe link, there’s the save to email feature, so people have the option to save the recipes to their email, and so many people take advantage of that. I was looking at numbers and I believe using that just since the end of January, I’ve grown my email list by about 3000 subscribers just from that feature where they’re clicking on the save to recipe.

And then another thing that I’ve been doing is I’ve only done it twice actually, and Molly, from what Molly made told a bunch of us about this at the Tastemaker conference this year, so I owe this to her, but creating a free ebook, people love free stuff. So what I did, the one that did really well was my top 10 most viral high protein recipes. So I made an ebook just in Canva using a template that I got on Etsy, and it took me a couple of hours to make. And then what I did was I made a reel with a clip from each one of those 10 recipes with a trending audio posted it, and I said, comment ebook to get this for free. And then in order to download the ebook, people have to sign up for my email list. So that strategy is amazing because people are getting something in return and then they’re put into my welcome series and then they’re part of my email list.

They get the weekly meal plans that I’m doing. They get my weekly emails. So I think it’s just great. And one other tactic that is really great, I feel like Instagram rewards you for posting less stories as opposed to more so something that has worked really well is letting my stories expire completely so that there’s none, and then posting one slide, promoting the ebook and saying Reply to this story with the word ebook, and one of them had like 75,000 views on my story, which is huge. I mean on average, normally I get like eight to 10, but because I only had one slide up, they push more views to that. So being really strategic about what you post in that one slide for me, it’s usually trying to get people to get the free ebook or sign up for my email list.

Bjork Ostrom: And the theory with that is that Instagram is prioritizing more concise story segments or when you don’t have 20, but instead you have one for who knows why, maybe people watch through it more. Maybe people are more inclined to look at something if they know that they don’t have to commit to 30 different stories to see everything there, but for whatever reason it’s working. So all the stories expire. You share one because you know that that’s going to be kind of a high visibility story. You can decide what you want to do with that as a creator, but the tactic is after all your stories expire, a single story has a high probability of having high views. Then the question is, what do you want to do with that? One of the things you can do is share about that ebook because that will get people to convert over.

So important thing for people to test out to try to look into. So a couple more things with Grocers List and I think important context here, we’re doing this miniseries with Grocers List. We came on as investors and advisors with the company for a lot of the reasons that you shared. You are a user, you don’t have any incentive to share the story other than being generous and kind with your time and sharing with the audience. So appreciate you showing up and being willing to do that. It’s a huge gift whenever people come on and do that. Two of the other things that I think are important to point out, the idea of creating meal plans and then Amazon deep linking. I think deep linking, we’ve talked about it before in the podcast. I think a decent number of people are aware of it, but I think it’s important to continually bring up within the context of affiliate on social specifically Instagram because of number one, how easy it is to use deep linking and the impact that it has on your earnings and the only, it’s a really small change that has potentially a big impact.

So can you talk about those two things and to the extent that you’re using those?

Mary Smith Yep. So prior to two months ago, I had no idea what a deep link was. I literally had to ask some of my blogging friends. I have no clue. So essentially I’ve learned a lot and it’s so worth it to use them a deep link. So basically when you post an Amazon affiliate link just as normal in Instagram, it opens up Amazon within the Instagram app, and a lot of times people aren’t actually signed into their Amazon account, so they’re less likely because all these steps they have to take, they have to sign in, they have to link payment, whatever. There’s all these steps, they’re less likely to go ahead and make that purchase right then and there because you’re still in the Instagram app. So with a deep link, what it does is it actually takes them to their Amazon app. So when they click on your affiliate link and you’re using a deep link, it takes them to the Amazon app where they’re already logged in, they already have their payment info. It’s a one click experience for them to be like, wow, I loved those shorts that she was wearing. I want them, they’ll arrive by tomorrow. Boom. And so it’s basically I think three to five times more likely that someone will make that purchase or it’ll convert if you are using a deep link. And that has shown true for me. We were looking at my stats and previously with regular Amazon affiliate links, I was converting maybe 5% of the time. Right now I’m at 21%.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow.

Mary Smith So it’s

Bjork Ostrom: Literally four times

Mary Smith Literally. And so I’m averaging about 11 cents per click, which is 10 times the ROI of what I’m paying to use the deep links. So it’s 1000% worth it.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Can you talk about where you’re finding that information? I’ve never looked into it. I probably should for what we’re doing, where do you pull that and then are you looking at that frequently or is it more of a test that you went and looked at it just to see how it’s performing?

Mary Smith So you can look on your Amazon affiliate dashboard and it will tell you. So I was just kind of comparing this past month versus previous. Also, I made a goal for myself just because now that I’m seeing the return on investment from sharing deep links, I told myself I’m going to post something from Amazon every single day in the month of June, and so far I’m averaging about a hundred dollars in revenue per day from doing that.

Bjork Ostrom: I love that,

Mary Smith Which is great. And prior to that, I mean I would share things here and there, but I wasn’t, again seeing the return on investment, it was like 15 cents per something I share. So I’m like, what’s the point

Bjork Ostrom: Previously? So that’s so awesome because this small change that you made, two small changes, one using Deep Links, two, committing to share a certain type of content. What you’ve done is you’ve from doing that, and I don’t know how much time it adds to your day, half hour, hour to have a list of you probably could create a list of things that you want to share about. You don’t have to share all new things every day, but sharing the things that you already like and know. I think generally people are interested in seeing what other people like from a product perspective. I mean there is a TV channel just around that shopping network kind of stuff. So naturally we like that you’re creating a piece of content that people are interested in and the two small changes showing up and doing it every day and then using a different type of link.

And what that’s done is it’s allowed you to go from earning 25 a day, or when you look at that on a monthly basis, it’s like, oh, suddenly you’re earning $3,000 a month, 36,000, $40,000 a year within your business by making one of these small changes. And I think so much of what we need to do as business owners, if our interest is increasing the revenue within our business, if that’s one of the things that we’re trying to figure out is we need to find out the ways that we can make those little changes that have win compounded a big impact. And so this is a great example of that. There’s all these little ways that we can be looking at, Hey, if I adjust this ad unit or if I get more traffic in this way, or let’s say I can’t get any more traffic, what are the ways that I can be creative in sharing certain products that I like? Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors.

If you’re a food creator, chances are you’ve come across Comment for DM tools. Using that functionality within Instagram can result in some huge wins, but the tools are really complicated and they’re oftentimes built for marketers, like people who are in the tool day in and day out, not built for food bloggers or recipe creators specifically. That’s where Grocers List comes in. It’s built from the ground up for creators. So if you’re looking to grow your email list, get more traffic to your site, or maybe earn more affiliate sales all without spending a ton of extra time or having to learn a complicated tool, then Grocers List is for you. And what’s really cool is they’re seeing some pretty impressive numbers, like 75% click-through rates, which is kind of mind blowing, and 5% opt-in rates from people who are engaging with content that is sent through the Grocers List platform and they’re actually doing an Office hour session soon. So if you want to see the behind the scenes of how creators are using it, you can sign up at grocerslist.com and a little bonus for you as a podcast listener, if you use the promo code podcast, you’ll get your first month completely free. Again, that’s GrocersList.com promo code podcast.

I think one of the things that’s important to point out is you talked about the return on the cost, so can you talk about that a little bit in terms of how you do that calculation and even the cost inherent in deep linking?

Mary Smith Sure. I don’t know the exact information regarding how much each Deep Link costs, but if you go into your Grocers Listdashboard, that’s where you create the deep link. So you’ll go onto your Amazon app, copy your affiliate link there, and then copy and paste it into Grocers List and create the link so all of your deep links live in Grocers List. You can go in and grab them whenever you want, and then it shows me how much I’m being charged per month for using that feature. But I don’t know per link how much it costs,

Bjork Ostrom: But the idea being that there’s a cost with it, but what you’re saying is the return that you are getting, which in your case is 10 cents, 11 cents per click, which is actually pretty amazing. Obviously that’ll depend on the product you’re recommending, how you’re recommending it, your audience’s likelihood to click and purchase it. The return that you’re getting far outweighs the cost of using that tool and that functionality. I think one of the important things to point out within that, which would be kind of an additional tip with Deep Links, is they’re going to have the highest return when you are using those in a place where people are the least likely to have the link open in the Amazon app. And I got an email from somebody, we did a whole episode with a company called URL Genius who does deep linking, and she was saying it actually is getting super expensive.

Why is that? One of the reasons was because there was a lot of links that existed on her website that she switched over, which isn’t bad, but there’s a higher likelihood that somebody is using Safari or Chrome on their phone and they’re going to click on a link. That link is already going to open in the Amazon app, and so there’s less of a need within your web browser to use it versus within Instagram that it’s going to open within that little Instagram browser and people probably aren’t going to be logged in. And so a tip for people who are wanting to reduce costs is to at least start with the places where you know that people are not going to go into the Amazon app if they click on a link. Instagram being a great example. And then what you can do, and you’re such a great example of this, Mary, is start to test.

You can use a different Amazon link, maybe you create a little, you can create in the Amazon Associates account, different areas, I forget what they’re called, a different ID kind of. And you could create one for maybe email and you could track and see, okay, what is the value that I’m getting from each click within email versus Instagram versus my website? And what you might find is there’s still a good return on your website, but it looks a little bit different. My guess is that there’s not going to be as much need for the deep linking on your website. So all of it to say helpful to track and start with the platforms that are going to have the highest probability of people being stuck within the app itself. So that’s great. Yeah.

Mary Smith Oh, can I add just two ways that I use the deep links? I just wanted to throw that out there real quick because I’m kind of playing around with different ways to share. So one of the obvious ways is just on stories, and for me, I’m a food blogger, but it’s so funny because I will get literally 10 times more people clicking on clothing links than I’ll do food a recipe. So I could be talking about the most serious thing on my stories and someone will be like, where’d you get your shirt? Where’d you get that shirt?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure.

Mary Smith So I’m always linking clothes there. But then also a great example of how to incorporate it and use all of the grocers list features that they offer is, so I posted this reel the other day for McGriddle muffins, which went viral, and not only did I link the recipe to it on my site with of course the save to email feature there, but there’s an option in Grocers List to add like a carousel. So other than that first card that’s sent to people, you can add the plus sign and add either another recipe link or link to whatever you want. So I actually linked the deep link for the protein gluten-free pancake mix that I use to make the recipe. So now not only are people going to my site to look at the recipe and I’m getting traffic from that, but they’re also buying, I think over 550 people bought the protein pancake mix from my Amazon link so that they could make the recipe. So it all kind of comes together.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Would you ever link your clothing in that? Have you ever tried that?

Mary Smith I haven’t in reels just because I really try to stick to food and that’s something that I need to get over. I think if I did start being like, if you like my shirt, I’ll link it there or tap for the recipe and also get a link to my shirt or something like that. I haven’t played around with it yet.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. And then anything that you’re doing with meal plans?

Mary Smith Yes. I just started doing those two months ago and it’s been absolutely incredible. So with Grocers List, basically what I do is I do one breakfast, one lunch, five dinner recipes Monday through Friday, and then a dessert every week. And I send it out Friday mornings at 8:00 AM So when you go into Groce’s list, you can upload each URL for those recipes and it will pull a curated grocery list within five seconds for all of those recipes. And they actually just came out with a new feature where they will actually put it into a PDF, so they’re doing the work for you. This is a new feature as of this week, but what I was doing previously was just copying and pasting the grocery list into Canva. And what I do is I send out an email every Friday and it’s a two page document and I’ll just link it through Google Drive.

The first one is the graphics of all of the recipe photos so people can see what they look like for each day, and those photos actually have a hyperlink they can click, and then the second page is a printable grocery list that they can print out. I’ve gotten so much amazing feedback just saying Thank you so much. It saves people time. Again, it’s a freebie, but now I don’t separate my email list into just weekly meal plans and my normal weekly newsletter, it’s all together. So when they sign up to be a part of my emails, they’re getting those meal plans too. All

Bjork Ostrom: Of those. That’s great. And it’s a great way not only to include links back to your site to add value for people who are following you, but you can also link to, it can be affiliate links that live within there. Super smart. How much tweaking are you doing of the ingredients? Are you finding that go in and kind of fine tune? That’s something that I would imagine. This is apart from grocery list, but just I would want to make sure that go through and we’ve done other stuff. We had an integration one time with Target, and we would always kind of go through and fine tune. So any advice that you’d give for people around the process of you create a thing, brings in ingredients? I was talking to Ben about this too, then going in and if you want to, you can fine tune things. Are you doing a little bit of that?

Mary Smith So basically it pulled the information from your site. So it kind of just depends on how you have ingredients listed in recipes in the recipe card. But for me, what I’ve found is it’ll do one pound of ground beef, but if I have it listed as grass fed ground beef in another one, then it’ll list that as. So I just kind of condense things like that. And then for the everyday spices that most people have, salt, pepper, garlic powder, I don’t include those because I feel like it’s just adding, it’s making people think that they need more than they actually do. So I kind of just leave those general things off there.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Love that you kind go through. And I feel like, I don’t know if this would be technically ai. I think probably there’s some AI happening within it where it’s matching all this stuff up, but I think that’s AI at its best, which is doing 80% of the work, but then having the 20%, I think that’s where you get in trouble as a creator is if you don’t take what would be a draft and then really fine tune and match it up exactly and say it’s this specific beef that you want to get, but allowing something to go from zero to 80% and then taking it from 80 to 100%, 99%, 95%, whatever your marker is, to fine tune that so you feel good about it and then pushing it out, but saving the effort of like, man, you can imagine if not that you’re going in and manually creating within Canva, copying and pasting ingredients over and whatnot, and just,

Mary Smith Yeah, it literally, it saves hours. And they also have a new feature where you can link for people to just grocery shop directly on Amazon Fresh and you can link your Amazon affiliate account. So that way if they’re just wanting to grocery shop straight from the list, they can do that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s super helpful. So your site itself is at the point now where it’s it’s day to day-to-day, it’s a really successful site. You show up and you are making, I don’t know, a thousand dollars a day. Maybe some days it’s $2,000 a day. That’s a really good feeling. It’s also great because it’s diversified. You’re getting affiliate income, you’re getting ad income. The other piece that you have is partnerships, and I think people are always interested in hearing how people are working with brands, how they’re doing partnerships. I know that you have a management company that you work with for Pinch of Yum. We’re doing all our own management for brand deals, and I’m talking to brands and it’s a lot of work. And so what is that like for you? How do you do brand partnerships? And talk to me about what it’s like to work with a management company.

Mary Smith So I’ve been with Echo Digital Media since 2021, which is crazy. It’s been four years now. I think I was one of the first eight people on their roster, and now they have a lot more influencers on there, but they’re great. So basically I have a team of two people we’re on a text chain together and every morning they send me an email saying, here’s what you’re posting today or what company you’re working with, and here’s the link and the talking points. So they kind of keep me on track, which is amazing. It helps me stay organized, but really they do all of the communication. They are the middleman between me and the brands. So they bring a lot of work to me. Echo works with a lot of brands and they’ll say, are you interested in promoting X, Y, and Z next month? Here’s what they’re offering, and I have the option to say yes or no. And then if a brand reaches out to me directly, the deal is that I respond to the brand and CC my manager and they take 15% of everything that I’m bringing in, which is 100% worth it because they’re doing all those negotiations. They have gotten me what I am worth. I had no idea what to charge when I was on my own previously, back in the day, I was happy just to get a free box of pasta in exchange for doing

Something,

But you just don’t know what to charge. So really they handle kind of all the legal stuff. I’m not signing my life away without knowing what I’m signing, and they really do have my best interests at heart. So it’s been incredible working with ’em, and I’ve really gotten to a point where I’m comfortable saying now, there was a time there where I was like, yes, yes, this is great. Yes. And then you really have to weigh what is going to resonate with your audience. Is this something that you are truly using? They know if it’s something that you’re just kind of like eh about, people know they want to see you excited. They’re not going to buy something if you’re not excited about it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you talk about the frequency? How often are you doing brand partnerships and brand deals, and then where are companies that you’re working with most interested in working with you? Is it primarily Instagram? So frequency and then platform?

Mary Smith Yeah, so an ideal partnership for me, honestly, is doing a reel. Just some examples of ones that I’ve loved recently have been Applegate promoting their chicken apple sausages and hot dogs for summer jovial, gluten-free pasta. Things that I use in my everyday life, creating a recipe for a real, that’s a dream partnership in my mind because it’s just, it’s easy, it makes sense, it’s fun. I don’t feel pressured, and I think it’s a win-win for everyone involved. So there’s that side of things where I’m doing reels for brands, and then there’s stories where a brand will say, okay, we want you to post three to five slides on Instagram. We’ll give you X, Y, and Z amount of money for doing this, and it’s just kind of a flat fee. So I’m not getting paid an affiliate income for that. It’s not based on how many clicks and things like that. They do want to see insights and that kind of determines whether or not they’ll work with you again in the future. They want to see that ROI and making sure that people are actually buying the product as well. But usually I’m doing for stories, I would say on average 10 to 15 partnerships a month, and then for reels on average three to four

Bjork Ostrom: A month.

That’s great. And that’s kind of consistent inflow that you’re getting either from these brand partnerships that they’re bringing to you or outreach from brands coming to you, CCing your management company. You don’t have to talk about specifics of your rates and what your numbers would be. But I think maybe if you could talk about generally for people who are out there and they maybe have a hundred thousand or 500,000 or a million followers, how in, let’s say it’s somebody who isn’t able to get a management company. If you’re at that point where you have 500,000 gauge followers, you probably could, but let’s say it’s somebody who’s wanting to do it on their own. What would you say is some advice that you would have for them? I know that you aren’t the management company, and this isn’t, we should probably have a conversation with Echo around this, but what would the advice be that you’d give to them around packaging pricing? You talked about not being sure what you were worth. I think when people hear that, then they wonder, am I getting what I’m worth? So what would your advice be for people who are wondering that and maybe some general guidelines you could give them or advice or maybe some of the things that you’ve learned as you’ve done quite a few partnerships?

Mary Smith Yeah, so what I did before I was with Echo was just make friends in the blogging community, talk to people, figure out people that are in your niche or that have a similar status following. What are they asking for? I think it’s important to just kind of see what other people are doing. That’s honestly how I realize, whoa, I’m not charging nearly what I should be. So really just talking to other people and I don’t know, I think always asking for more, the worst they can do is say no or come down. I think it always works to aim high in the beginning and then you can negotiate from there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we had this just yesterday. I was having a partner conversation with a brand that was interested in working together. They kind of needed to move quickly. We said, Hey, here’s what it would look like to work with us to do a reel. They were like, great, can we work on this now? And before we have the agreement, I was like, oh, we usually, as much as possible want to sign the agreement. And then they’re like, okay, we’ll put one together quick. They were able to send it over within it. It had complete ownership of the content, and it also had the ability to use name image likeness kind of in perpetuity or something like that. And so it was like, oh, actually if that’s going to be included, it’ll be like this amount more. I think I said for certain elements within certain parameters, 11,000 more.

And they were like, totally valid. Thanks. Makes sense. Let me check with the brand. And they’re like, actually, we don’t actually need that as a part of this partnership. And so they dropped that. All that to say there’s these opportunities where in a really kind way, we can come to people and say, Hey, here’s what our rate is. And to your point, they can say no, or you could say, this is what it would look like if you did want to do that, if you didn’t want to do that, we can just back it out. Or I think so much of negotiation isn’t drawing this hard line and being like, this is what it has to be. It’s like, let’s think of all the different options that we can come up with and find one that works for us where we feel good about it, where you feel good about it. If you’re working with an agency and a brand, everybody feels aligned on it and you can go and do whatever you can to deliver value on that. So that’s great. Anything that you would say advice for people who are interested in working with an agency, wondering if they’re at the point where they can do that or they should do that, and then maybe speak a little bit to where you’re following was at when you started to do that?

Mary Smith So I’m trying to think back. I was probably somewhere around that a hundred thousand followers, mark when I signed on with them in 2021, maybe a little less. I’m not sure what their parameters are now for accepting or if they’re even taking on new talent. I would have to ask, because I know a lot’s changed over the years, but just in terms of working with any brand management company, I think if you approach them and you do your research and you can show them what you have to offer, even if you have a smaller following, if they’re engaged, if your audience is engaged, someone could have a following of 30,000, but if 50% of those people are clicking on your links, then it might be just as many clicks as I’m getting. So it really just kind of depends on the person and what they have to offer. But I would have those numbers written down so that you have it ready to show them.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Maybe a good example is Food Blogger Pro. We have a small audience, everybody who’s coming on, almost everybody that we’re interviewing has a larger follower count than we do. Pinch of Yum definitely does, but we’re still able to find brands and partners because of the nature of the content that we’re creating and the impact that in a lot of cases, one additional signup, two additional signups can have for some of these businesses. And so a lot of it isn’t necessarily to your point around how many followers do you have. A lot of it can be how engaged is your audience and also what type of audience is following you, like who are the people and what are the problems that they’re trying to solve? What is the budget that they have? And that’s going to look very different for every specific niche. So Mary, this is super helpful. There’s a lot of incredibly actionable information. I know it’s going to be very beneficial for people. Is there anything that you feel like we didn’t cover that would be helpful to include as you’ve kind of covered your journey in building this successful, impactful business over the last few years?

Mary Smith I would just say, and I am someone that has to kind of bring myself back to it every now and then too, is just really coming back to your why of why did you start this? And I think when you do that, it brings you back to just connecting with your audience, making sure you’re giving them exactly what they’re looking for because I don’t know, again, there’s a fine line. I never even consider myself to be an influencer, even though that’s, I guess what I am at this point. I’m just a regular mom and so many people tell me, we appreciate you because you’re real. You show up, you show the good, you show the bad, and you just share your everyday life without it being a show, I guess, or I don’t know. And all I’ve ever really done since the beginning has been myself. And so that’s my greatest piece of advice.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great, especially in a world where we are transitioning into content being distributed differently. We talk about AI a lot. We talk about chat platforms like Chat, GBT or Gemini, or people are getting their information in different places. One of the ways that you can differentiate yourself is by being human, your humanity. And I think a lot of that also, there is an advantage to the medium of video and social media. And so one of the shifts that I really see happening is people growing their following, not necessarily discovery through search, although I think for a lot of people, that’s still the vast majority of the way that they are getting discovered and producing income. But I think over time as that changes, our main mechanism for it being discovered, and we’re seeing this a lot with the people we interview, it starts with social and then you eventually create a site downstream as a platform and a place for people to go. So you’re a great example of that continued success and all that you’re doing. If people want to follow along, Mary with what you’re up to, where can they do that?

Mary Smith Mary’s whole life on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, and then my blog is mary’s life.com.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Thanks for coming on, Mary.

Mary Smith Thanks for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey there. 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 Pope 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.