How Rebecca Blackwell Turned Food Blogging into a Six-Figure Digital Business from an RV

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the biggest mindset shifts I see successful food creators make is this. They stop thinking only about traffic and they start thinking about product because traffic is great, but real leverage comes when you get good at selling something you own, recipes, meal plans, a membership, a system that actually helps people. The problem is that creating a product is really hard. You have to figure out the tech, the structure, the payments, the delivery, and honestly, that’s where a lot of really great ideas die. That’s why I want to tell you about Member Kitchens. Member Kitchens makes it incredibly easy for food creators to sell recipes and meal plans at scale without having to build everything from scratch. You don’t need to be a developer, you don’t have to have a complicated setup. They’ve already built the infrastructure for you. You bring what you’re great at, which is creating food content your audience loves and Member Kitchens handles the heavy lifting of turning that into a real sellable product. And if you’ve ever thought, “I know I should have a product. I just don’t know where to start,” then this is your starting point. You can check it out at memberkitchens.com and start thinking beyond traffic and toward building something that actually grows with you.

Ann Morrissey: Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I’m Ann from the Food Blogger Pro Team and in this episode, Bjork is sitting down to chat with Rebecca Blackwell, who started out as a food blogger and traded in a stable paycheck for a life on the road, running her digital business full-time from an RV. She’ll open up about what that transition actually looked like, why she made the strategic decision to manage multiple website rather than rely on a single stream of income. She’ll also share practical advice in growing a newsletter, engaging readers, and landing sponsorships that feel like a natural fit. They’ll round out the episode by discussing the challenges of AI and shifting search algorithms. Why leaning into personal storytelling has been her biggest differentiator, and what she’s learned from building community through mastermind groups and in-person retreats. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Rebecca, welcome to the podcast.

Rebecca Blackwell: Thanks for having me, Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, you are often on the road, but you right now are in Michigan. We’re going to talk about what life is like living in an RV, traveling. One of my good friends still has a site called Tiny Shiny Home and talked about … They’ve now set up in Arizona, but talked about this idea of adventuring and living off grid and super inspiring, but also inspiring your story of creating for a really long time. You started your site in 2013, your first site, but also have recently started some new things, a Substack account, which we’re going to talk a little bit about. But tell me about your site that you started in 2013 and then you started another site later on. Talk a litle bit about the reason why for doing that. Why have multiple sites? Then we’re going to talk about Substack in a little bit as well.

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I’m familiar with Tiny Shiny Home and their family.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, you are? John. Yeah. John was the designer who first designed Food Blogger Pro.

Rebecca Blackwell: Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s amazing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Rebecca Blackwell: They were one of the first people that we started following when we decided to move into an RV back in 2019.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, small world. Yeah. It’s been awesome to see their journey. Now they’re content creators. They have their YouTube account and have created these really incredible buildings. But I remember having a conversation with him. He was living in Tennessee at the time and he’s like, “I think we’re going to just pack up our family and hit the road.” And when they’re in Minnesota, we actually met up with them and I haven’t talked to them for a while, but they’re awesome, super great and really fun to see their arc as an adventurous family and content creators. So fun connection there.

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah, they were very inspiring to us when we were at the beginning and we didn’t know anything.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome.

Rebecca Blackwell: So yeah, that’s a fun connection. So yeah, I started my first site in 2013 at the time I was working as a copywriter and freelance marketing consultant and I was just really tired of writing about things that I didn’t care about that much. I wanted to write about my own things and the things that I was most interested in. And I’d had a background in food and so I started the first site. Really, I would get up at four o’clock in the morning to have some time to carve out in the day to work on it because we had three kids at home and a full-time work schedule. But I really wanted to find a way to get back into food and to write about the things that I really cared about. So Gradually, over a few years, I started to build some traction there and decided to launch the second site for a couple of different reasons. The first site is baking and I love baking. It’s probably my primary passion, but I also wanted to create recipes that weren’t in that category. I saw some value in having two different sites on two different topics, both recipe creation. But one of the things I had been a freelancer for a long time and I knew that a little bit of diversification in where your income is coming from is important. And so having two different sites that were focusing on two different areas of food felt like something that would be kind of smart from a business perspective and also allow me to do some cooking recipes in addition to baking recipes.

Bjork Ostrom: And when full-time with those in 2020, was that the same time that you also hit the road and lived in with your husband and RV?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah. My husband and I had decided that we wanted to be able to work remotely from anywhere in the world a long time ago. Our youngest who turns 25 this month, she was seven when we decided when she goes off to college, we want to be able to work remotely and live from anywhere, but we really didn’t know how to make that happen. We thought that we would maybe rent Airbnbs here and there and stay in a place for a few months. And we house sat in 2019 for some friends of ours in Southern California. Beautiful house. Absolutely loved house sitting for them and learned that we really hated living in somebody else’s house. Nothing’s yours. You never feel like you’re at home. You can’t modify the space to make it work for you. And so we met up with some old high school friends that we didn’t know lived in an RV and learned that they lived in an RV. And it was like the answer. We instantly decided that that’s what we were going to do. And in 2019, I was really close to going full-time with the blogs. I was holding onto a couple of clients and then when we decided in 2020 that we were ready to sell the house and start traveling full-time, that was a really good time for me to say, okay, I’m going to let go of these last couple of clients and just go all in.

Bjork Ostrom: What allowed you to do that? Specifically, I think of people who are on the edge, they’re trying to make that decision. My guess is everybody has different variables they’re dealing with that they would consider to be the major variables. Primarily it’s going to be income, how much you’re making, but then also the risk associated with it. There’s certain levels of perceived safety in a W2 job or a 1099 or freelance work. Some people would be at a point where maybe they would have just enough from the businesses that they’ve created or maybe they feel like I could get there if I have the time to work on it, but there’s some risk there. How did you make that decision and what did that look like for you?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah, it was always as soon as I could monetize both sites, it was part of the plan. And so it was really just a matter of timing. I had been working for myself for a long time and so we already were used to fluctuations in income and kind of a higher level of risk. I’ll tell you, one of the things though that mattered the most to us is the fact that my husband is not a freelancer. He works for a company and they faithfully pay his salary every single month no matter what. And so there is a lot of stability when one partner is generating that steady income and the other one then as a freelancer, I would have months where my income was really high and then months where it was lower and you just kind of learn how to roll with that. So we were already accustomed to that. But also the sites were steady when I went full-time. They had been generating about the same monthly income for a while. And so I knew that unless something unforeseen happened that it wasn’t that big of a risk. I knew I was going to be able to count on the same income that I had been counting on for a little while.

Bjork Ostrom: You have enough runway to look back and say like, okay, I can see relatively predictably this is probably what it’s going to earn next month if there is no major shift or change, which also exists with a 1099 or W2. I have lots of friends within the last year who have been let go, it’s not an algorithm change, but it kind of is similar where things were happening one way and you could expect that predictably and then there’s a change. And so I think the idea of secure income doesn’t really exist anywhere. There’s just varying degrees of it and it’s that diversification piece that I think is so important. One of the things we often talk about is this idea of kind of envisioning an egg carton and how are you going to put all the different income sources in that to get you to the point where you need to get. And maybe that’s if you’re trying to get $6,000 a month to get a full-time income, each egg is $500. Can you get that to the point where you can say, “Hey, through this and this and this, I can build that up.” A lot of times what eventually happens is you have a lead income source that becomes your primary income source, but this idea of diversification within that income so you’re not relying on anything too heavily or you know that if something’s there, you can scale that up. But I think that also exists within a household. We talk about it individually, but if you have a household, you have maybe somebody who has that W2 income and then that allows you to have maybe a little bit more flexibility as an entrepreneur. So obviously everybody in different situations, but it’s always helpful to hear what the decision-making process looks like for people. My guess is the other piece is that you also are then shifting your spend, like you have less expenses, or is that not true when you are doing RV living? Is it essentially the same as what it would be if you had a house or not?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah. So I think the key thing there is that we have more control over our expenses. We know people that live in an RV and really live extremely inexpensively and so it’s doable if we wanted to, we could do that. The way we live is not, I wouldn’t say that we’ve cut expenses. We just are spending a lot more of our money on experiences than-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s

Rebecca Blackwell: Variable.

Bjork Ostrom: So to your point, it’s like things you can control, but it’s maybe not less spend. That makes sense. Yeah.

Rebecca Blackwell: I mean, we’ve been living in an RV now for six years and we’ve gone to just a lot of really amazing, incredible places. And so proportionately, probably the amount of income that we spend on those experiences and on the places that we go and the things that we do when we’re there is probably much, much higher than most people who are devoting more of their income to a house and maintenance of a house, all of those things.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of the things that I think we could do a better job of as people. I’m going to just speak to all people, maybe not you guys, you guys aren’t included in this because you’re doing it well, but just like lifestyle design. And I think so much of us have, because of societal norms or our own not having or creating margin to think about these types of things, but we’ve created lives that are a lot of times difficult, stressful, super high demand. And sometimes that’s just life in general, but there’s this great book, I think it was Stanford Professors called Designing Your Life. And it just walks people through this process of saying, what does a beautiful life look like for you? What does a wonderful life look like for you? And I think so many people who listen to a podcast like this, that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re not just trying to create a food blog or create a big following on Instagram for the sake of doing it. They’re doing it because it allows them the ability to design a life that is something that is desirable. And sometimes it has to do with revenue and finances that unlock certain things for you, but oftentimes it has to do with autonomy and flexibility and creativity and finances are a component, but they’re not the major component of it. And it sounds like a shift that you’ve had recently in the allocation of your time is towards lifestyle design within the context of work, but around creativity and community in launching this Substack. We’ve talked a lot on the podcast about this idea of Substack and people growing a Substack account, but it sounds like your approach to it has been one where it has allowed for you something that has been really life-giving. There’s some income that comes from a two in that you have paid subscribers that are a part of it, but talk to us a little bit about the reason for starting a Substack, when you started it, and what that looks like for you day-to-day now, because it sounds like it’s been a really good thing.

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah, it’s been a really good thing. One of the conversations that my husband and I have been having for a long time is if you found out that you only had a year left to live, how would you spend your time? This is something that comes up often. And it is one of the reasons why we live the way that we live. And last year we came to Michigan to learn how to sail. We’d always wanted to take sailing lessons and we did and then we didn’t intend to buy a boat, but after we took sailing lessons, we were like, “Well, now we need practice.”

Bjork Ostrom: Amazing.

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah, a sailboat. So on the outside, it was a very impulsive decision, but it was motivated by what you were talking about of saying, “Okay, well, if not now, when? And if we’re not spending our time and our money doing the things that we want to do now, what are we waiting for? ” And so that was one of the things with Substack that really intrigued me is I wanted to write about more of those experiences and it just didn’t make sense to do that on a food blog. When we first moved into the RV, I thought, well, I’ll write about some RVing content and travel content on one of my recipe sites. And it’s a weird mismatch. It’s hard to do that. It’s hard to add a totally different kind of content to a recipe site and do it well. And I also realized I didn’t want to be a travel writer. I didn’t want to be the go here, do this, see this-

Bjork Ostrom: Top 10 things to see in Charleston. Yeah. Yeah.

Rebecca Blackwell: I didn’t want to do that. What I wanted to do is write about our experience from a subjective standpoint. I wanted to write about what it’s like to travel, what it’s like to pick up your house and move every couple of weeks, what it’s like to be in all of these different places, to every year get to look out across the year and say, “Where are we going to go? ” And the planning process and the decision making process for how we decide where we go, where we go. And then also there’s some other things that I am constantly kind of wrestling with and I feel like other people are probably having similar would probably relate even if they’re not living in an RV. And that’s like the conflicting desires between freedom and autonomy and connection to the people that you love and adventure. So these are things that we’re kind of dealing with every day. We have two daughters in Colorado and we have friends that are really important to us and we’re also picking up and leaving all of the time. And so how to maintain those really important relational ties while you’re also traveling about the country. So those were the types of things that I wanted to write about in relation to our lifestyle and doing it on a food blog just didn’t make sense. But Substack is great because I can write about whatever I want. There’s so much freedom there to create whatever is interesting to you and a list of people that are also interested in those topics.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s freeing, I think, for people, especially like yourself who have been creating for a long time and for a portion of that time early on, there was more freedom in how you created. Whereas now it feels like because if you are creating for the purpose of business on a blog, there is some really narrow ways that you can create if the desire is to rank and search or to convert people who show up or even to maximize revenue. And it’s a little bit more like science than art. And I feel like a platform like Substack is so purely art. There probably is still some science behind it and some strategy behind it for sure if that’s the intent. But I know for a lot of people who have used a platform or created on a platform like a Substack, one of the freeing things is you get to release the filter of like, will this rank, how will this get discovered? How am I going to get eyeballs on this? Because to some degree that comes as a byproduct of a creative, interesting, engaging piece of content. So you still want to think about title and how do you captivate an audience and attention and things like that. So how did you initially grow? You have 16,000 subscribers now. What did that look like? When did you start? And then how did you initially grow that audience and get exposure on that platform?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah. One of the other, I think, important things to say about why I started too is in 2013 is when I really started thinking about how AI was just changing the playing fields for those of us who published recipes

Bjork Ostrom: Online. This is in 2013 you were thinking about it? Yeah. AI?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah. Wow. I don’t know if this is where it came into my mind or not, but I listened to the Hardfork podcast and I think they were talking about it and I thought this is going to change everything.

Bjork Ostrom: You’re ahead of the curve.

Rebecca Blackwell: I didn’t know how it was going to change everything. I just knew it was. And at the time I had been fairly interested in building being the faceless creator behind the blogs.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like nobody knows … James Clear talks about this. It’s not exactly the same, but he talks about this idea that he wants to have everybody know his ideas, but nobody know his face. He does.

Rebecca Blackwell: Yes. Yeah. I would like that.

Bjork Ostrom: There are different versions of that. In the recipe world, less now than previously, but you could create a site that gets a ton of traffic, but nobody knows who you are. You just rank really well for a bunch of content. Is that kind of in that category like, “Oh, that feels really cool.” You can travel, you can see the world, you can be living in an RV, you can have kind of a system for creating content. A lot of people see that and create it, but you don’t have the burden of a personal brand where people are like, if the recipe doesn’t go well, they don’t think, “Hey, this recipe didn’t work well.” They think, “Hey, this person who told me to make this recipe told me a bad recipe.” Is that the idea?

Rebecca Blackwell: Right. Yeah, kind of. And I like being behind the camera more than I like being in front of it. I don’t know. I wanted to build these two sites mostly based on the recipes and kind of keep my personal self and my personal life out of it to a certain extent. As I was looking at how things were changing, I just thought, I don’t think that strategy is going to work because more and more people are wanting to know that there’s an actual person behind it, that there’s another person on that screen. And so I thought I need to figure out a way to bring my essentially rebrand myself based on

Bjork Ostrom: Me. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. More personal brand. So when was this again?

Rebecca Blackwell: So I started thinking about it in 2013 and then I started, or sorry, 2023.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. This is making more sense. I wanted to come back around to that 2023-

Rebecca Blackwell: 2013.

Bjork Ostrom: 2013. Yeah. And that’s why I was like, 2013, you were thinking about AI in 2013. Were you in a research lab at OpenAI before they launched? That makes so much more sense. 2023, ChatGPT is coming out, people are having these conversations around AI and starting to see the writing on the wall a little bit like, “Hey, this is going to be really easy for people to create content that is … It’s just easy to create that content and you need something to anchor people to which the most defensible thing is your humanity, you’re a personal brand. And that’s where the Substack idea started to develop. Is that what I’m getting?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah, exactly. Social media is not my thing. I don’t like to be on it. I don’t like to create content for it. It’s always been this struggle for me to try and muster the motivation to do anything on social media. But I kind of saw Substack as a place where I could just be a little bit more myself and write about the things that I cared about and create recipes that weren’t based entirely on keywords and all of that kind of stuff. And so I took quite a bit of time to watch what other people were doing to think about how I wanted to show up there. And then early in 2024, I launched my self stack, which is called Let’s Get Lost Let’s Get Lost. My husband and I actually have matching tattoos on our-

Bjork Ostrom: Amazing.

Rebecca Blackwell: Say Let’s Get Lost, which

Bjork Ostrom: We got. That’s

Rebecca Blackwell: Awesome. I don’t know, 10 or 12 years ago. So it’s been a reoccurring theme of our life and our Marriage is travel and going different places. So that was kind of a natural name for the newsletter, but I used Substack lets you use a custom domain and I used my name for the custom domain. So you can find it at rebeccablackwell.com. And that was intentional because of what we’re talking about with needing to attach my name to my work. And I thought, well, if I can brand it, if I can call it Let’s Get Lost, but put it on rebeccablackwell.com, then that gives me a lot more control in terms of how am I attaching this to me as a person.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting on SEO, Twitter a few weeks ago, one of the things that went viral, which it wasn’t like mega viral, but a lot of people were sharing it, was this picture that somebody took from some … It was a search conference, one of the big search conferences. I think it was Google presenting on best practices from their perspective around articles and how you’re creating articles. And it was like good, bad. It was one of those. And the basic idea was that bad now is essentially what you said the travel content that you didn’t want to create was, which is top eight restaurants in Minneapolis. For today, that would be a bad article to write if you were interested in creating a compelling article. I don’t know if they were saying even from a search perspective, but what they said is going to be really important moving forward in the good example is something that is around your personal experience. So how my visit to Charleston changed my perspective on slow living. And that is so different from a user intent perspective. And the reason I think why it’s good versus bad is because of the shift that we’re talking about, which is AI. Now people are going to more and more look for and answer like best restaurants in Charleston through ChatGPT, through Claude, or if not, they’ll search it on Google and there’ll be an AI overview. But what an AI overview won’t be able to do is tell the story of your personal experience as it relates to your travel in Charleston. And I think that was speaking a litle bit more from the perspective of Google’s eyes. I don’t know what that looks like in terms of keywords and how that works and whatnot. But when you talk about other platforms where it’s more story driven, could be to Google Discover, but Substack is a great example of that. That’s where you’re able to create from a more personal perspective and where that becomes more defensible. It doesn’t matter if somebody else creates a top 10 places to visit in Charleston because they can’t create another story which is like, here’s how RVing changed my life and why I’m going to continue to do it for the next five years because that’s your personal story and people are following you for that. So it’s interesting to hear your reflections on that, not only the fit for a creative outlet, but also alignment from an industry perspective around a type of content that can’t be easily replaced. What did it look like in the early years to get started? And I know one of the things that you said is it’s helpful if you think of that egg carton method to have a little bit of supplemental income from it, but your stance would be it’s probably not going to be the main source of income unless you’re going super deep and have multiple tens of thousands of followers. So talk to me a litle bit about that and also how your other sites fit into it. Is that still a strategy for you?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah. Well, when I first started the newsletter, I kept it fairly separate from the blogs and I gave myself a year to go all in. The nice thing about having monetized websites is they keep generating income, whether you’re working on them or not. And it’s a perk that I lean on every now and then and allow myself to do some other things that are a little bit more interesting to me. And so I did that for a year where I just went all in on the newsletter just to kind of see what I could build there. I grew my list by several thousand people and published a little over 200 new recipes there that were exclusive to Substack. And at the end of that year, I kind of looked at it and reevaluated my strategy there. There was a couple of things happening. One, I wasn’t growing paid subscriptions like I hoped I would. I think it’s really, really hard to get people to pay for recipes where there’s so many free recipes. I mean, websites full of free recipes. And so-

Bjork Ostrom: What was your expectation even from a percentage perspective? “Hey, five out of every hundred people will sign up or whatever it might be. ” And then what do you feel like is a more realistic number?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah. Well, when I started, people from Substack were saying 3% or 5%. And what I’ve found from this network of other food writers that I’m now connected to is that that’s extremely optimistic unless you are publishing content that is extremely narrow and very

Bjork Ostrom: Niche.

Rebecca Blackwell: I mean, there are some people that are doing it well if You create meal plans for gluten-free people with food intolerances.That’s a very clear tool that is so-

Bjork Ostrom: We talk about this idea of painkillers versus vitamins. The closer you get to a vitamin, probably the lower the conversion is.

Rebecca Blackwell: That’s right. That’s right. I think the people that are doing well with paid subscriptions are doing that. If you’re publishing recipes and also just publishing other content that doesn’t solve that very, very clear problem for people, then that becomes a different thing. But building your free subscriber list, if you’re putting out good content then becomes something that is well within your reach. I saw my free subscriber list growing and also I was just engaging with people on a different level on so much more personal level than what I was experiencing on the blogs and I really liked that.

Bjork Ostrom: What did that look like when you say engaging with people? How did that happen?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah. So people on Substack are interesting because they want to interact, they want to comment back to you, they want to talk to you. Substack has its own internal social media called Notes, but it’s not driven by advertising because there isn’t advertising on Substack. And so you can build your own little community of people that you’re interacting with on a regular basis and talk about subjects that you’re interested in. Some of that was food, but a lot of it was related to other topics.

Bjork Ostrom: Life and … Yeah.

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

Rebecca Blackwell: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: So you had mentioned this idea of having connection with other food writers. Talk about that. And two things I want to hear about is first the benefit of Substack being this community and community being a beneficial thing, not even from a strategy perspective, but just from a lifestyle design perspective. So I’d be interested in that. And then I’d also be interested, I know you have a mastermind where you are meeting with these food writers to hear about your kind of analysis of the state of food writers. So let’s start with the first one, the benefit of community. And one of the things I often hear is people saying, how do you find people to connect with? How do you create a community? What does that look like? It sounds like you’ve successfully done that using Substack, but then also having some initiatives you’ve done around monthly meetups, gathering people together and facilitating that. What does that look like?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah, that was a very unexpected benefit from being on Substack. And at the moment, I think it’s probably the most valuable reason for me to stay and for me to be there. The network of people of other food writers that I’ve met there is just incredible. And as I started interacting with them and building relationships with them, I thought what I really want to do is get all of these people in one room and pick their brain and ask them for feedback and ideas and brainstorm and offer feedback to them. And so I started this group called Mastermind for Food Writers and it’s a free group. Almost everybody there are Substack food writers, but a lot of them have blogs as well. There’s people that come from all different areas of publishing, traditional publishing, non-traditional publishing. So it’s food writers and recipe developers in kind of a big broad context. And so that’s kind of nice to be able to interact with people that have different experiences and are doing different work from what I’m doing. But we get together on Zoom once a month and for 90 minutes we talk about different topics that are of interest to us. It started out as a little bit more of a free for all where we would just chat about whatever is interesting and pressing to us at the moment. And then as the group grew, I needed to add some structure. So now every month we have a topic that the meeting is centered on and it’s grown to be food writers from all over the country and all over the world. We have members all across Europe and some areas of the Asia Pacific. And so there’s actually another volunteer in the group that said, Hey, I’ll start a second meeting in a different time zone to help accommodate some of the people that were joining meetings at midnight. And so now we have two meetings a month and a book club has started from it. And we even last year, one of the members decided that she wanted to do a food writer’s retreat. And so she organized this whole retreat in Pennsylvania and we had 20, I think 25 of us got together in this house in Pennsylvania from different parts of the country and different parts of the world, flew in for a few days where we hung out together and we did sessions on things from food photography to a cookbook proposal to scaling your business. And the greatest thing about that retreat is all of the sessions were taught by other food writers. And I thought, this is something that I want more of. I want to learn how to do things from people that are doing it. And so just this last month we started the Food Writers Business Lab, which is exactly that. It’s a series of classes and workshops that is for food writers taught by other food writers and all of the instructors have grown out of that group of Mastermind.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. I’m a part of this group, my friend Sean, who’s been on the podcast before, started kind of a similar idea. It was, he reached out to a handful of people and we’d get together in Colorado, all different types of businesses. But what I found is in observing in those meetups, a lot of times that’s the most impactful time as a business owner that you can have is blocking out in this case it was maybe like three days, four days, and just being in the same place as other people who are trying to figure out things alongside you, that would work in a way where you’d do a hot seat. There was maybe 10 people, each people do a 30-minute hot seat where they talk about a specific thing they’re trying to figure out and then people would weigh in on it. But then naturally you continue to talk about it and you just get a lot of really bright people in the same room having conversations around things that they’re trying to figure out. And it’s not quantifiable, but it’s definitely impactful. And the easiest way to get into one of those rooms is to be the one who creates it. And I love that as a outflow of this Substack community. Can you talk about what that looked like initially? Was it sending an email out to your Substack subscribers and just saying like, if you’re a food writer and you want to join, here’s where we’re going to do Zoom, sign up here.

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah, kind of. I started by talking to a few other food writers and saying, “I’d really like to create some sort of mastermind group. I don’t know what that looks like, but are you interested if I do? ” And they were like, “Yeah, absolutely.” One thing that has been just very impactful to me is how generous and open all of these food writers are. There’s no information hoarding. They’re extremely generous with if you have a problem, if you need some feedback, whatever, they want to offer it. And so the idea of can we do this on a regular basis was very appealing to people. And so I looked up whether Mastermind for Food Writers was an available domain and I bought it and I set it up on Substack and then we just started. And I think we started with maybe there’s probably only 10 or 12 of us to begin with and now we have about 300 members. Not everybody comes to every meeting, but every meeting is recorded and the recordings have been really useful to people as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. We’ll link to that in show notes. My guess is if you’re a food writer, then you can sign up for it.

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah, all the meetings are free. Everybody that does things on theirs is completely volunteering their time and it really is a remarkable group of people. And the other thing is that the collaborations that have come about, there’s a lot of non-tangibles as you were talking about non-quantifiable things that have come out of that group, but also some really important collaborations that have moved our businesses forward have come from that as well. When you have a network of people that you’re connected to in the same industry from all over the place, then the value of that of being able to say-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

Rebecca Blackwell: It’s massively valuable. Who can come alongside and help me, who has connections, who knows somebody who can help me do this or accomplish this thing? And that is happening all the time and that’s amazing.

Bjork Ostrom: I mean, this is one of those eye roll phrases, but I think it’s really true, your network is your net worth. I think I always want to be careful of describing financial value to relationships. I think within the context of business, one of the benefits is you can have people you know, like trust, enjoy being around, and you have mutually beneficial interests, passions, you can help each other, you’re motivated to help each other. It’s one of the undeniable realities of building a successful business is having those people that you can reach out to who have a area of expertise in whatever the thing is that you’re trying to figure out or break into or whatever it might be. So talk to me a litle bit about this state of food writers. So we talked about AI, your 2013 / 2023 predictions and for all of us kind of seeing there’s a shift that’s happening here, you can prompt ChatGPT and it will write an article for you debates around how effective that is or generic it is. I think as that is capable of doing that, we also become more suspicious of it. And so there’s all these considerations with it, but it’s undeniable that it’s there. I’m curious to know your reflections after talking with hundreds of food writers, what the state is for food writers, what some of the fears are that people are talking about and also what’s working really well for people right now

Rebecca Blackwell: Well, I’ll answer the last part first. I think what’s working really well is creating personal relationships with our readers and really creating a very personal brand. I think that’s what’s working best for the other food writers that I’m in contact with all the time. And then collaborations is another thing. Going back to the paid subscription model, I think that one of the things that we have to contend with when we have a paid subscription of any kind is the very real situation of subscription fatigue. I am constantly as a consumer reevaluating what are all the things we’re subscribed to and do we need to be subscribed to all of these different things? And we know that our readers are doing the same thing and will not continue to subscribe to the same thing over and over and over when there’s other options on the marketplace. And so how we connect and collaborate then becomes a service to our readers and also- What

Bjork Ostrom: Do you mean by that? How we connect and collaborate as a service to our readers.

Rebecca Blackwell: So things like one of the things that I’m working on with a group of 12 other food writers on Substack are monthly cooking classes available to our paid subscribers. So probably all of our paid subscribers aren’t going to subscribe to all 12 of us, but they can subscribe to one of us and receive a monthly cooking class from 12 food writers. So it’s a lot of value for very little lift on our part. So looking for ways where we can say, okay, so you as a subscriber might pay for these three publications, but you’re not going to pay for 12, but how can we also offer you some value from all of these other people?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. So that’s working well. Personal brand, story, personal connection, that idea of les generic, more personal, moving away from transactional content, moving towards relational content where you feel like you know the person, that’s who you’re following. It’s not just this transactional recipe. How about the things that you hear bubbling up around fears or even things that were working that are no longer working?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah. One of the interesting things that’s happening on Substack right now, and we’ll see how this plays out is Substack is taking a little bit of an SEO focus and that’s been a shift over the past year. They’ve just introduced recipe cards for recipe formatting and there’s a lot of writers on Substack that we all used to format recipes just in the body of a newsletter just in the same way you would format any paragraph. And now the recipe card functionality just gives us the ability to format recipes more like we would on a website. Sure. So

Bjork Ostrom: Then if it’s free, then that means that the URL is available, which means that it could rank in a recipe carousel.

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that’s happening. It’s happening quite a bit these days. A recipe that’s published on Substack is just as likely to show up in search results as anywhere else. And so as we navigate those changes, being able to just kind of lean on the expertise of others, there’s a lot of Substack writers within the Mastermind group that have no … They’ve never paid attention to SEO. They’ve never had to. And so now that this change is happening, being able to learn and kind of teach some of those skills to each other is important. We’ve had cookbook authors launch a cookbook and know that there’s a network of people that will promote it for them and alongside them. And you can do these things on Substack called Substack Lives and we’ve done plenty of those to promote each other’s work and promote each other’s cookbooks. So that level of collaboration I think is essential to finding what is successful and what works well for you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And my guess is that Substack is kind of walking this line where it’s like it doesn’t necessarily want to be a blogging platform, but also they’re trying to figure out how do you get discovery and discovery comes from other platforms like search or social. It also comes from an email going out and maybe on that email you’re featuring some other writer, but even then you’re already in the Substack ecosystem. So it would make sense that there’s some of these evolutions at the platform where they’re trying to figure out how do we grow net new users who have never signed up for a Substack in order to help grow all the other accounts. So looking forward, what do you think your time split will look like? You have the two sites, you have Substack. Have you seen a shift with your sites that has resulted in you wanting to focus more on Substack? What does that look like?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah. After I really put a lot of time into Substack primarily the first year, I kind of stepped back and realized that I needed the three things to connect to each other more. And so I did reevaluate that strategy and now my newsletter is just as likely to include new recipes that are published on Substack and recipes that I’ve published on both of the sites. I really opened things up. There’s very little on my Substack that is behind a paywall so I can link back and forth between all three of them. On both of my recipe websites, I also have a email subscribe option through Kit and when somebody subscribes there, they get an email that is a personal message from me that includes all logos from all three brands right at the top of the email. And the email also comes from rebeccablackwell.com just as a way of saying, “Hey, you’re going to start getting these weekly emails. They’re going to have recipes from all three of these places on a regular basis.” So

Bjork Ostrom: You have a kit email list and the Substack? I do,

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. How do you view those separately? And then also are you publishing recipes on the Substack and then are those different than the recipes on the blogs?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yes. Yes to both. So the Kit email newsletter list, I send that out once a week. If you subscribe on either site, you get the same email and it contains recipes from all three places because Substack doesn’t offer the same functionality in terms of get easy to … You sign up for a Substack newsletter and if you’re just on a website because you were looking for buttermilk pancakes and somebody is like, “Hey, do you want to sign up for this newsletter?” It doesn’t really make sense, but you can give somebody that signs up that’s on your buttermilk pancake recipe, an email opt-in that is in line with that and That makes a little bit more sense. So that’s why I’ve kept both, but I keep trying to blend them both together as much as possible so that people learn my name and here’s the three different places that I publish. In terms of time, I spend probably half my time on the blogs and half my time on the newsletter and there’s some variation there depending on what the week holds for me, but it’s pretty evenly divided and I do publish recipes just on Substack and then also every issue in my newsletter includes links to recipes that are on both of the blogs as well. So one of my goals, I do want to continue to grow the paid subscriber numbers, but really the free subscribers I think long-term are what’s most important to me. Not only does it allow me to send traffic back and forth to all three places, it allows me to build a more personal relationship with readers. And then one thing that I just started doing is some paid sponsorships through the newsletter and really having higher numbers in your free subscriber list is more important to-

Bjork Ostrom: So somebody’s paying you to have their brand show up in the newsletter, Substack and Kit?

Rebecca Blackwell: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Somebody else just recently reached out and was like, “Hey, do you guys ever do that with Pinch of Yum?” Can you talk about how that happens? Do people reach out to you? Do you reach out to other people? Any guidance on pricing? The thing that I always think about is $30 per CPM. So if you have a thousand people who are opening an email, you’d charge $30. I don’t know where I got that and I don’t even know if that’s accurate. And obviously it depends on if it’s finance or insurance or how engaged your audience is or how niche the email is or whatever, but what advice would you have for people as you’ve done that if they’re interested in starting to get sponsorships for their email?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah, I mean, that’s exactly how I thought of it. So the first brand that reached out, they reached out to me and said, “Hey, we’re interested in sponsoring a newsletter.” It wasn’t something that I had thought about doing. I’d worked with brands on the blogs before, but I had never thought about working with a brand as a sponsor in a newsletter. I hadn’t tried their products. They said, “Can we send you some stuff?” And I was like, “Sure, if I like it, then we can talk.” And so I tested it out, really liked what they sent over. And so then I went back and when I was thinking about pricing, I was thinking of it exactly in the way that you were talking about. And I was like, “Well, I think I’ll price it per thousand subscribers.” Because that’s the other thing with a newsletter list is we’re talking right now and I’m just about to cross 17,000 subscribers. My list is growing at about 500 people a month. And so by the time a campaign rolls out, the numbers are going to be higher. And so pricing things per thousand subscribers seemed like the way to go. And so to decide on that number, I just looked at what my blog RPMs are and I said, “Here’s what I get per thousand views on the blogs.” And so that’s what I’m going to say per thousand subscribers. I did price it based on subscribers not on open rate and I’m glad I did that.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is great. Yeah, they accepted it. Good for you.

Rebecca Blackwell: They didn’t blink because the thing about Substack that’s really interesting and I think it’s different from other platforms is my open rate maybe 30 or 40% per email, but that one post is still probably going to generate 20 or 30,000 views because-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it lives on

Rebecca Blackwell: Substack. It lives on Substack. It’s permanent there. People keep coming back to it. And so basing the number on the subscriber number rather than the open rate just seemed like a better

Bjork Ostrom: … Yeah. It’s interesting everybody thinks of Substack as an email platform, which I think its roots are that, but really it’s like a publishing platform. You go in and it’s just like email’s the main mechanism for notification of a new piece of content, but there’s a social media component to it. There’s the actual post itself. It could be discovered via search or Pinterest or social. So yeah, it’s a good reminder for people who are looking to do any type of brand partnerships that it’s not just an email, it lives on forever as long as you keep it up.

Rebecca Blackwell: Right, right. And from the perspective of working with brands, the numbers that I think are the most interesting to brands are the fact that you can look at it in terms of page views on a website. So I’m sending out a once a week newsletter to 16,000 people and 40% of them might open it, but 50 to 60,00 people a month are on my Substack looking at what I’m writing there. So those are two different sets of numbers and if you’re working with a brand, those are the numbers that I think matter.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great and important to paint that picture when you’re having that conversation, which you did and cool to see. We’ll include Mastermind for Food Writers as a link. People can sign up for that. Really cool to hear what’s happening there and I’m sure it’s super helpful for a lot of people and just great to have more connection in the world linked to your sites as well. Anywhere else that people can find you? Sounds like not on social media, but they can on Substack. Where else can people find you and follow along with what you’re up to?

Rebecca Blackwell: Yeah. I mean, rebeccablackwell.com is where you’ll find my newsletter and my baking site is of batterindo.com and my cooking site is a litleanalot.com, but the primary place is rebeccablackwell.com. You can get to everything that I’m doing from that one spot.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Rebecca, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Rebecca Blackwell: Thank you, Bjork.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there, Ann again from the Food Blogger Pro team, thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Bugger Pro podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, we would greatly appreciate it if you could share it with your community and leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. We’ll be back next week with another episode where Bjork sits down with Emily Baksa to talk about shifting food blogger mindsets from giving away all your content for free to selling directly to your audience. We’ll see you back here soon and in the meantime, we hope you have a wonderful week.