How Mika Kinney Turned Her 480,000 Instagram Followers into Site Traffic and Revenue

Disclaimer: this transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: If you’re a food creator, chances are you’ve come across common for DM tools and 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 GRO, spelled G-R-O, 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 GRO 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 GRO 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 gro.co, that’s G-R-O.co and a litle 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 gro.co 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, we are thrilled to welcome back Mika Kinney from the blog Joy to the Food. This episode is part two of our GRO Mini series and Mika is here to chat all about how she has turned her Instagram followers into website traffic and revenue alongside a sneak peek into her current Instagram strategy, which has so many great actionable takeaways. Two years ago, Mika had just 1000 Instagram followers. Today she has 480,000 and both she and her husband work full-time on Joy to the Food. Mika is really intentional about how she uses social media and what it can do for her business, not just as a vanity metric, but as a genuine traffic and revenue source. In this episode, Bjork and Micah dig into the content strategy behind her growth, how she uses GRO to capture the value of her Instagram audience and drive traffic back to her site, how she’s easily increased her affiliate income and why she and her husband recently launched a membership program, all of this without dramatically increasing their workload. This episode will provide you with a lot of tips and tricks for improving your Instagram strategy and making the most of your Instagram following. So without further ado, I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Mika, welcome back to the podcast.

Mika Kinney: Hi, thanks. Yeah, I’m excited to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Having another conversation around Instagram, Instagram growth and you’ve done that really successfully. And one of the great things about having a conversation with somebody like you is it’s been within a relatively short amount of time. And I think sometimes people can come on, we can have a conversation with them and they’ve been creating for 15 years, Pinch of Yum being an example. And it’s like, okay, that’s inspiring for the sake of stick to itness. But this whole food creator thing is relatively new for you and your husband works on it full-time as well. You’ve been interviewed on the podcast before, so we’ll do the big backstory, save it for that episode, but just kind of walk us through your timeline over the last three years of where you are leading up to today. But when you started, when you transitioned full-time, maybe when your husband came on full-time and then tell us the story of what things look like today for you.

Mika Kinney: Yeah. So two years ago we had a thousand followers on Instagram. We started our site back in 2021, so we missed the COVID boom. I left my job in September of 23 and right after that we were hit with the helpful content update. January of 24, I went all in on Instagram. April of that year to April of this year, we grew from a thousand followers to 474,000 followers and it’s allowed both my husband and I to support our family full-time. And yeah, it’s been a whirlwind and I can’t underest overstate the power of social media and social proof in a world of constant Google changes and AI.

Bjork Ostrom: What was that moment like with the helpful content update? And is that what pushed you into social?

Mika Kinney: Yeah, I’ve always been a consumer of Instagram. If you go back till 2015 or whatever, there’s like a photo oatmeal and bowl from my account. So I’ve always been an interviewer.

Bjork Ostrom: Proof that you … Yeah, we’re at least using it

Mika Kinney: On a personal level. And then helpful content update was definitely a push because it’s like, what else do you have to lose? And once we realized, oh, you can have your own distribution channel. And my husband kind of was like, “If you’re going to do it because you seem to believe you can do it, then look at the numbers and figure out how to do it because there has to be strategy. There’s nothing that doesn’t have strategy. We’re not going to throw us. We got to get the wall.” And there is a litle bit of that, but once you figure out what that is, then you just replicate and you replicate until it doesn’t work and then you adjust and do it again.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s such an important thing to point out because I think some people can think it is this great mystery, which to some degree it is. And the mystery is what is working right now,

Bjork Ostrom: But there always is something that is working and it feels like part of our job as creators is figuring out what that thing is that is working. It’s going to be some of the things that we’re talking about today in this episode, talking about Instagram growth, but also then capturing that revenue using a tool like GRO, we’re going to be talking about today, but then actually capturing the value that you have with the attention that you’re getting on that platform. But there always is something that is working. We need to discover what that is. And then the other piece that I think is so important that you said, once you do figure it out, you rinse and repeat and you continue to do that until it doesn’t work and then you move on to the next thing. So tell me about what it was like for you in the discovery phase of trying to figure out what was working.

Bjork Ostrom: How did you do that? And then how did you know when something was working when you had a smaller number of followers?

Mika Kinney: Yeah, I think, and I’ve been thinking back on this a lot because I do do Instagram coaching too. And so when I review this, there’s a big difference between videos that get followers and videos that get reach. And so when you can mesh the two, that’s what was really the unlock for us. And so early on my goal was always reach because you don’t understand that there’s a difference between reach versus followers. And so a lot of food creators put out these amazing videos that get multimillion views, but do they convert followers? Not necessarily because number one, your face really isn’t in it. We’re very inclined to just do the food, the hero image. And number two, it’s not a clear call to action. And so early on I just wanted reach. And once I figured out that, then I was trying to capitalize on that reach and how to get them to stay and be followers and engage.

Mika Kinney: Engagement is always a battle with food because people come and they want recipe and that’s it. And so getting your personality through is another thing. So early on when I had a thousand followers, to me, success meant a 50,000 view video. Six months later, it meant jumping from a thousand to 50,000 followers.

Bjork Ostrom: And you can see that within the Instagram dashboard. I think a lot of times probably people will spend time looking at how many views did my video get. And to your point, that’s important. It’s really critical to understand that. And it sounds like that was the first thing that you focused on. Okay, is there a strong hook? Does it bring people in? Is there curiosity involved within it? Then do people stick around? Do they continue to watch it? Do they engage with it? All of these different things and that changes what works best and there’s a lot of opinions on that. You can test it out. But once you start to develop some opinions on that, what I hear you saying, which I think is a step that not as many people take after is then to say, okay, great. Views are nice, but it’s not as good as then growing followers who are potentially going to have a higher probability of seeing my content, who I can reach in different ways.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re going to talk about GRO and some of the ways that you can reach followers in a little bit. But then it sounds like what you started to do is look at a piece of content to see not only how many people viewed it, but then from that piece of content, how many people followed you? Is that right?

Mika Kinney: You can have a video, like a burrito video we did had a million views and it had a thousand followers. We had another video that is just a seven second clip that’s quite dumb of me and it has text overlay that’s very call to action. So it says POV, you’ve been looking for high fortune recipes without any powder, and now you found me. And that video has 10,000 followers, but a million views. And so you can see a huge gap in how you get views versus followers and they each serve different purposes. So I think both have a place, but you need to be strategic about that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. The call to action piece I think is one that we often forget where we create content, we can get eyeballs on it, but then what? What do you do once you get eyeballs on it and what’s the directive that you’re giving people? Sometimes it might be you want people to follow. Other times it’s signing up for a membership, which we’re going to talk about, maybe clicking on an affiliate link. So talk about if we’re thinking of it as a funnel on Instagram, the top of the funnel is just views. How many people are seeing your content? Maybe a little bit further down from there, it starts to be engagement. So how many people are commenting, sharing, following would maybe be another way to track that. And then down from there, it starts to be ways that you are actually capturing some of that value.

Bjork Ostrom: Talk to me about the decisions that you made as you started to think about the business component, producing revenue from the views that you’re getting, but also the engagement that you’re getting, because that’s the most critical part if we’re wanting to do this as a business is then actually transacting in the marketplace and getting paid in some way for the views and engagement that you’re getting.

Mika Kinney: Yeah. So the first part of that, the reach is really awesome for, especially if you’re going to put on a new recipe and that’s where GRO comes in, write your comment recipe and we’ll send it to you. That’s really helpful. And I would say I think we started using GRO when we were about 50,000 followers and I remember having, it was within three months we had three viral videos so much so the Instagram turnoff comments, which I know you guys have had too. And so I had

Bjork Ostrom: These calls- Yeah, they throttle the amount of comments that … I don’t think they actually technically turn off DMs, but they throttle it. So people will comment and then it will take a little bit for it to catch up, which is a bummer and there’s nothing that can happen. It’s like a universal thing across all tools that exist, but it’s a bummer because people would comment and then it would take a litle bit for it to happen. The benefit though is like you have this ultra viral piece of content and you have a lot of people commenting on it, a lot of people engaging with it and a lot of those going out. The threshold for that I think is pretty high. We’ve hit it maybe a few times, but for most of our content, we never come up against that.

Mika Kinney: Yeah. I think they’ve changed it since from two summers ago when I first started hitting it, when it truly would just turn it off and I would have calls with Ben Grossfounder

Mika Kinney: Because then he would explain it to me. And the reason that GRO works so well here too is because it has multiple responses. So if you’re under a certain threshold of followers, it’s nice to have that auto DM response or auto comment response and the DM. So you’re getting double comments basically on your video, which does help engagement. So that’s kind of your first piece is that reach if you’re talking about a funnel. The second piece with the engagement, I look at saves and sends. I really like sends and I look at retention rate because I want to see how far people get past that three seconds. Retention rate doesn’t always mean that content’s going to do well, but it definitely helps. And then I look at actual follows. I am a firm believer that the number of people that go to your profile is a big indicator in whether video will do well.

Mika Kinney: And then the third part is the actual converting them. And in today’s world of carousels just popping off, carousels are prime for engagement because carousels go out to like 98% of your followers and it’s like the single easiest way to directly reach almost all of them or I should say as many as possible. Stories is your next way and stories used to be the main way, which is where you can do the reply recipe and I’ll send you the recipe in the story. But engagement wise, I always look at followers or visits to profile and sends is kind of my favorite.

Bjork Ostrom: Types of engagement.

Mika Kinney: Yep. And then within the engagement, it’s kind of nice if a video, I mean, you could go both ways. If there’s something that’s kind of controversial about it, like putting avocado in a frozen burrito, that sort of engagement does help, but it also is nice if you have say a baking recipe and people are commenting, can this be made this way or can I use gluten-free flour or whatever. When you get into those comments and engage, it shows you’re a real person and it really helps your overall engagement and I think those people are more likely to come back and follow you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So all different types of engagement. Ben, for this series we interviewed Ben, one of the things he talked about was that stories reply kind of strategy where people are engaging with your stories. They’re getting that DM sent to them if they comment to have that. And so important one to point out there. You also mentioned the two types of engagement, the DM and then the auto comment reply. Can you explain that a litle bit for those who aren’t familiar with how that works?

Mika Kinney: Yeah. So if you comment recipe on a post, some creators can either have it set up where it not only DMs them the recipe link, but it also responds to their comment in the actual video and it says, sure thing, it’s headed your way, or you can set it directly however you want so it’s customized. And I think now you can put almost unlimited number of responses, but that really helps to not only boost engagement, but it doubles down on that person knowing that the recipe was sent. So if somebody doesn’t follow you, that recipe is going to be sent to their requests and they’re going to not see it necessarily. So if it sends them the DM to the comment as well, then it doubles down on like, “Hey, I did send this, go check it out.

Bjork Ostrom: “ Yep. Point being it’s a form of engagement that’s happening on the content confirming, ”Hey, it’s on its way, just sent it, check your DMs.” So then they know there’s also just the general engagement on the piece of content that’s happening and then the message is also sent in the DMs. Talking about the revenue capture piece, do you view that primarily then as a traffic source to your site that’s the benefit from a DM being sent that has a card with a link that goes to your site?

Mika Kinney: Oh, for sure. I mean, being on Instagram, the whole goal to me is to drive traffic to our site. I shouldn’t say … 60% of my goal is to drive traffic to the site. The rest is to create an engaged audience that will continue to come back. Our direct traffic has increased continuously because of Instagram, I think, because once you get somebody, if you have good recipes, which most of us, that’s what we strive to do, they’re going to come back. So with the DM, you go from having no traffic from Instagram because the number of people profile visits, I think I just looked the number of profile visits for our site or for our Instagram is like a 10th of what the number of DMs sent. So if you can reduce that friction, the less friction there is, the more likely people are going to go.

Mika Kinney: And I should note, with our account, other than the last two months, we haven’t had viral videos in six, eight months, and yet our traffic has still continued to increase because of using the DM automation and using story replies. Those two combined has continued to help us rank for posts on Google to increase traffic, to sell or to market eBooks and increase our email lists, all the things without having to have a viral video.

Mika Kinney: A viral video obviously helps, but you don’t need it.

Bjork Ostrom: You can continue to create great content for your audience who is interested in the type of content that you’re creating and they’ll engage with it and follow it and you don’t need that viral video. What would you attribute the virality piece to? Is that something that you’re hearing from other people or just kind of in a new stage of figuring out what does go viral? And I hear from a lot of people who are like, “I just can’t, I’m trying to figure it out and I can’t figure it out. ” So I think a lot of people are in that stage of being like, “Oh, this is so frustrating. This thing worked and then it didn’t work in terms of creating a piece of content that gets a bunch of people visiting it. ” Even Lindsay, I know, talks about like, “Ugh, how can I figure this out?

Bjork Ostrom: I used to have stuff that would get this amount of reach and now it doesn’t,” which is just frustrating.

Mika Kinney: Yeah. I mean, it’s a two-parter. So Instagram did update their algorithm. So it used to be that anytime somebody just saw a video, even for a split second, it would count as a view. Now they have to see it, I think, for a full second or 0.5 second. It’s a longer time before it counts as a view. So your overall views are generally lower, but yeah, for us it was just figuring it out. And I was right there with everybody else and six months ago like, “Oh my God, this used to work. We had all these viral videos and then all of a sudden nothing works.” Which we tend to go through a lull, it’ll spike. I think what happens because we’re in a healthy food space in January and February, we actually go through a lull on Instagram because there’s a huge influx of healthy recipes all of a sudden, whereas the rest of the year it’s like we’re the only ones for that high protein niche.

Mika Kinney: So a lot of trial and error and a lot of being on Instagram, which I know is a bummer to spend more screen time, but you have to research your topic in order to get there. And so I think it comes back to if you’re confident you’re making good videos, try different hooks, try different layouts of the video, maybe shorten it, maybe take out some of those clips, maybe try one where you start with the hero and one where you don’t try carousels. Carousels are really great right now. But one thing I’ve learned in particular in this time, Danny, or this month, is that conversational text is king. Nothing should sound … And I think that’s because of the world of AI, right? You can’t just say 37 high protein dinners, people aren’t going to swipe, people might watch. It’s questionable. If you’re like, “I’ve made these 37 dinners every night for the past three months and I’m still not sick of them,” then people start to swipe. It’s something that is way more conversational that you would tell a friend that you’re like, “Hey, I got to tell you about this thing.

Mika Kinney: It’s crazy.”

Bjork Ostrom: I just came across this, I think it was in our team Slack channel. Let me see if I can pull this up real quick. I had mentioned this on the podcast before, but it was a screenshot from Google and Google had recently done this event where they were talking about, or it was a presentation at a conference and they were talking about just kind of positioning how should you be positioning your content in a world that is AI focused. And they gave a similar example, which is you need to be positioning it in a way where it’s more story driven, it’s more human. It’s not 10 awesome high protein breakfast recipes, it’s 10 high protein breakfast that my kids actually love. Okay, it brings in a little bit of your story, your humanity. And so I think it’s an important thing to point out. And I think it’s also a litle bit of a vote in favor of there’s this AI apocalypse that people talk about, which is AI taking over and that being the only type of content that people consume, which you do see that on platforms like Pinterest and it’s getting really hard to decipher what is a AI image and what isn’t.

Bjork Ostrom: But I also think that people have this kind of AI detector now that is always on and if they get any sense of it, it’s not a good thing. It’s not like people are like, “Awesome, I discovered this is AI and now I like this better usually, especially in the world of food.” And so it’s just another vote in favor of humans creating really good content and figuring out ways to get that in front of people. So traffic to your site, obviously really important. It’s one of the things that we know and a lot of people talk about wanting to get how to get more traffic. And the ways that you can do that on Instagram is through the swipe comment with stories, a swiped comment. It’s through the DM process, the DM automation process. I think people understand that, but there’s a few other ways that we can start to layer in revenue and income for our businesses that don’t necessarily require a huge amount of additional lift.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think this is one of the most important things for us as creators to think about, which is not how do we just produce more? How do we create more? It’s how do we be strategic with the attention and the platforms that we already have and find opportunities to create revenue by introducing a new system, a new plaform, a new way to do things without a huge amount of lift to double the amount of content we’re creating as a for instance. The first one I’d be interested to hear you reflect on a little bit and what you’ve learned is affiliate earnings. How are you strategically thinking about Instagram and the content you’re creating on Instagram or in other places and creating revenue through affiliate income?

Mika Kinney: Yeah. I think to talk about not being strategic with it, just to give an example of how my content structure works, Friday through Monday, I post recipes that I’m super, super proud of that I feel very confident they will do well. That’s just weekends tend to do better for me. I call it this farmer’s market effect. They’re going to do baked goods when they have time. During the week, I post whatever I want because that video is going to carry throughout the week and then during the week I’m sharing more affiliate links. I’m sharing maybe ebooks. I’m sharing about our apps This is on Instagram. Different things like that. On Instagram, that’s kind of my

Bjork Ostrom: Cadence

Mika Kinney: And it really is helpful for not having burnout, but very little lift to still make the affiliate income and to push the membership stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk a little bit about that? It just had a conversation yesterday with Josh, his business is called Creator Coach and we’re talking about burnout. And I think that little piece that you alluded to there helps avoid burnout is really important. So did you say Sunday through Monday? Friday through Sunday?

Mika Kinney: Well, Saturday, Sunday is always like new recipes and then Friday, Monday are recipes that I feel are going to hit are really helpful, maybe like a Roundup or carousel of one that’s already done well. And then the rest of the week is kind of lifestyle or whatever I feel is trending.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s more playground.

Mika Kinney: Super playground. Yep. It’s whatever I feel like doing. It might be a hydration drink. It might be that chicken cutlet sheet pant thing that’s been going on and it really helps with burnout because I can just kind of create whatever I want. And then because I’m creating less new content, that stuff then it can be batched out. So I’ll batch today and tomorrow I’ll batch six recipes and then I’ll be set for most of June.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So then you’ll have these recipes that you’ll share on the weekend, kind of the farmer’s market effect. That maybe feels a little bit more like work. I know that I need to do this. I need to develop these recipes. They’re probably recipes you enjoy, but the lift and the effort is greater there, but that’s also the main marketing mechanism you have, which is recipes. And so you batch produce those. You have maybe a month plus of content, you have six recipes that you’ll do in a few days, that will all be ready. You’ll have that to share in that sweet spot when people are thinking about food or recipe prep or whatever it might be. And then during the week you continue to create, but the things that you are creating are a little bit more, you’re not having to develop a recipe for it. It’s like, here’s this product that I love or here’s a ebook that we have and here’s why we love it. And that’s during the week. So talk about how affiliate fits into that. What does that look like?

Mika Kinney: So every day I share one to two, sometimes three affiliate links. My whole goal was to pick one affiliate platform that I could stick with because I’ve tried doing multiple, it’s just too overwhelming. Again, with the burnout, it’s not sustainable for me.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about, so different platforms, what would that look like for people who

Mika Kinney: Aren’t familiar? Yeah. A lot of people like ShopMy right now. I’ve found that the conversion rate is so much lower than Amazon that it’s just not worth my time. There’s LTK, you could do direction ones like, what is it, ButcherBox or-

Bjork Ostrom: Just sign up directly for their … Yeah.

Mika Kinney: Yep. And those tend to do pretty good, but I chose Amazon. That’s just the easiest for me. People have feelings about it, which is fine, but my whole goal was to not buy anything new that I wasn’t going to buy anyways that I already have in the house and that’s what I was going to link to and it’s done super well. And the strategy with that is my first story today and a lot of people will say to start your first story of the day with something personal, I don’t know that that works with food creators unless they are invested in you as a person.

Mika Kinney: They are here for the recipe most of the time. And I am trying to get away from that so they are more invested in me. I mean, Lindsay probably has a much more engaged audience because of that, but your first story of the day, if you’re a strictly food creator to me should be a recipe photo of the recipe from your iPhone preferably and it has something super conversational where it’s like, I just prepped these peanut butter race crispy bars for my son’s daycare. They have 10 grams of protein. They hit the highlights and then say, “Reply peanut and I’ll send you the recipe.” And then that’s going to boost engagement. So the difference is getting a thousand views to getting 80,000 views, right? It’s a huge jump between starting your story because you have these recipe reply DMs. Once they do that, then I position it with one to two affiliate links and then I end the slide series with either a Roundup recipe with a direct link or we have a page on our site that’s just recipe links so they can sign up for our email there and I’ll be like, “Hey, I’m putting on a new meal plan this week.

Mika Kinney: Don’t forget to sign up with our email list.” And that page also has some ads. So we’re getting some ad traffic there. People are converting to our email list and we have this like three to four series slide that converts every single day.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Mika Kinney: So with that affiliate, we’ve been able to bring in two to 3,000 extra a month.

Bjork Ostrom: Amazing. And I think that what I love about it is it’s a litle bit of a playbook. It’s repeatable. It doesn’t require a huge additional lift because this is content that’s been made. You have it available. It’s in your photo roll. You can pull it up and post it. Let me repeat this back and see if I’m describing accurately what you were saying. So when you do stories in the morning, you are starting with a recipe and building some story around it and having people reply to get that sent to them. And this is a great example of like we are searching for things that are working and from what you’ve said, from the conversation with Ben, this is something that’s working. I would have to ask Lindsay. I don’t even know if she’s done that before or if it hasn’t, then we’ll need to try it out because both you and Ben have said, “This is working really well right now.”

Bjork Ostrom: And you go from the example you gave, you get a thousand people interacting with it. If you don’t have that reply to get a DM within the context of GRO where they would send a DM out, 80,000 if you do have it, 1,000 if you don’t, not always going to work out that way But generally speaking, it’s like, okay, it’s going to be really effective. And then after that, you have these eyeballs and the content and so you want to be strategic in what you show next. And what you’re saying is what you’re showing next is something that is like maybe you have a water bottle that you really love and you just post a quick thing about it and it’s like, “Hey, this is water bottle I love. Here’s what I love about it. Here’s a link to it. ” For you, you’re using that on Amazon.

Bjork Ostrom: My guess is that would also be a link that would be a deep link. GRO can do deep links. Can you talk about what that is and how that works and why a deep link is important versus just a direct Amazon link?

Mika Kinney: Yep. So on Amazon you pull your creator link and you pop that into GRO and it’ll pop out a deep link. What a deep link does is when people open it on Instagram, it takes them directly to the Amazon app instead of shopping within Amazon and Instagram, which means they’re not logged into their account, they’d have to enter their credit card emails. It creates a ton of friction. So I think our conversion rate on Amazon using the deep links is about 13%. But the cool thing that I like with Amazon and the deep links is that cookies are 24 hours so they don’t have to buy the thing that you linked. They just buy whatever they’re going to buy and you get that commission, which is nice.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. We had somebody, this was years ago who bought, it was like a ring and I don’t know if it was a diamond ring, but it was like thousands of dollars. It’s like we weren’t linking to that, but apparently they bought it after looking at a ketchup that we recommended or something. And it’s one of the great things about Amazon versus if you have a direct, then the only direct meaning if you’re working with Element or Butcher’s Box, they would obviously just have to purchase from that company, which isn’t bad. It’s just a little bit of a different strategy. And this is really important to point out. We’ve done a few different episodes on deep links, but there’s going to be somebody who’s listening who’s like, “I didn’t know that. ” And the thing that you said that’s important is if you don’t have a deep link, oftentimes what will happen is in Instagram somebody will click on it and it opens the little Instagram browser and there’s 95% chance, I don’t know what, 98% chance that that person isn’t going to be signed into their Amazon account in that little Instagram browser.

Bjork Ostrom: So it doesn’t open Safari, it doesn’t open the Amazon app, it’s like the Instagram browser and then you close it out. You’re in Instagram the whole time. A deep link causes that little jump that you sometimes see where it goes out of the app and then into the native app. And so 98% of people, if they use Amazon, will be signed into their Amazon account in the Amazon app. And so your affiliate carries with the link and there’s a much higher probability that people will convert because they’re going to be signed in, it’s going to be at the checkout page. Amazon makes it really easy to buy. So a really important thing for anybody looking to do affiliate is to do deep links. And it’s like one of those no-brainer, there’s this commercial that used to run in Minnesota. It was like for a mortgage company and the guy would say it’s the biggest no-brainer in the history of makin.

Bjork Ostrom: That was their tagline. I think this is the biggest no-brainer in the history of man kind. If you’re doing affiliate links, it’s using a deep link in order to increase conversion rates. So that’s great. When you’re doing those links in the stories, is that then for stories, are you just including that link on the story then or are you also doing like a reply to DM and then sending it in a DM?

Mika Kinney: I don’t do the reply. I’ve tested it a couple months ago and it didn’t do super well, so I felt like the less friction I could create, the better. I know some people have, they do do that where they’re like, reply shorts and I’ll send you these or whatever. And something to note with like if you’re going to test out affiliate marketing, people buy on feelings typically. So the number of people who are going to buy a cutting board from me is far less than a number of people are going to buy athletic workout shorts. A lot of our audiences across food creator profiles are women. So think about that when linking and

Bjork Ostrom: Can you explain that a little bit, like what your opinion is on the psychology with that?

Mika Kinney: I should have studied psychology. Yeah. So to me, people already have a cutting board. It’s not something that’s like a fun purchase. It’s not like, “Ooh, that’s exciting,” unless maybe it’s like a really pretty butcher block. What is a fun purchase is maybe like a cool single serve blender like the beast or the food chopper, something like that- Or in your

Bjork Ostrom: Case, shorts, it’s like-

Mika Kinney: Or

Bjork Ostrom: For

Mika Kinney: Me, athletic wear, big time hit. Sick things. When people are sick, they love to buy things because they want to get better yesterday. So if you’re sick, share whatever it is that you take, that sort of stuff. And it also kind of helps to bring in the lifestyle side, which is really helpful for brand partnerships because brands want to see that you’re naturally using their things in more than just like, “Here’s an ad for

Bjork Ostrom: Mail.“ Yeah, that’s great. DeepLink’s really important. And then the last piece that you talked about that you include is a little bit of a catchall. ”Hey, here’s our recipes if you want more, a way to sign up for email. Can you talk one more time about that, what that includes?

Mika Kinney: Yep. So the last one is just a link typically to our recipe links page that has our latest Instagram posts. It has a sign up through Kit to get on our email list, or it has just all our recipes there, you can search them.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Are there other places that you’ve found affiliate to be successful or is that the primary avenue for you? If you look at your earnings in the Amazon dashboard, would you be able to attribute the majority of those earnings to the stories segment that you just described?

Mika Kinney: Yeah. So the only other place that we share … Well, a couple times I’ve done Reels where I’m like, “ Reply and I’ll send you this blender I used or whatever. ”Maybe gets a hundred replies even though the video gets say 200,000 views. I know that people have different success with that. Stories will sell or we’ll get say 2000 links a day between two to three stories or clicks to the links. Email does pretty good. I do a weekly affiliate email, but that accounts for about 25% of the affiliate revenue and then the rest of the 75% is just through the stories. Yep. And the nice thing with GRO is that you pay for a click and so if you don’t want to link a lot, you don’t pay a lot. But if you want to upgrade to the profile and then it’s all included, which is really nice for transparency because I didn’t feel like I was having to pay for another thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Some of the platforms that do deep linking, they’re one of the ways that you could do it within GRO, which you just described as per click. But to your point on a different plan, you don’t have that. It’s similar to what I felt to ChatGPT and Claude where you can have the API subscription and then you’re paying per use and you’re like, well, it kind of creates this disincentive to use it because you feel like every time I’m using it, I’m paying money. You can also just sign up for one of the plans. If you’re on the plan, then you can release that idea of the expense that would be associated with it and it’s all included and so you just can share affiliate links everywhere.

Bjork Ostrom: So affiliate, really important. It’s one of the things I think about that we have, which is this great opportunity as entrepreneurs to think about, okay, how do we change a few things? Okay, let’s think about using deep links. Okay, deep links previously maybe we were making $1,000 a month from affiliate, $500 a month from affiliate, whatever it might be. And then we start using deep links and we might see a 20%, a 30% increase. Maybe we also then start including it in stories and we include it in emails. But the piece that’s important to point out is every little incremental bump that we get from that is for us as entrepreneurs, a salary increase that we get. And we are doing that by thinking strategically and saying, okay, if I can make an extra $100 a month with this strategy, that’s a $1,000 a year raise on my salary.

Bjork Ostrom: Even better if you can figure out, okay, I’m going to increase this by 500 a month. Wow, that’s a $6,000 increase that you’ve just given yourself in your salary by thinking about this strategy that you can implement. So affiliate, really important. It’s one of the great examples of giving yourself that incremental boost. I know another area that you’ve started to do a similar thing with is membership. Can you talk about membership and what that has been like and how you’re structuring your membership?

Mika Kinney: Yep. So we run the membership through GRO. We tested this out six months ago and then kind of stopped and then brought it back because I really felt like in today’s world, you don’t know what’s going to happen with Google. And so having another way to create revenue is really important. So the way that ours is structured is we have exclusive recipes, which we do on a week maybe and we’ve taken a lot of recipes from our site that just didn’t get traffic and they were no indexed and we’ve made those exclusive recipes and then film new videos for them and then those will go up once a week-ish. The fun thing about it is that those recipes, I don’t put a blog post together, right? It’s just the recipe card. I get only the recipe card, I leave the rest ungated. So we do get ad traffic from that, but we also get conversions.

Mika Kinney: So the numbers aren’t crazy, but I’m not pushing it like crazy. I kind of go through, what’s his name? Gary V, I can’t remember his name. Anyways, he has this jab, jab, right

Bjork Ostrom: Hook

Mika Kinney: Reference, right? And so that’s kind of-

Bjork Ostrom: A book that he wrote and also a concept that he talks about, which is like as a creator in the creator economy, you need to get really good at giving, give, give, give. That’s the idea. It’s like a boxing reference, jab, jab, jab. But then what a lot of people aren’t great at is the ask. It’s the right hook and that’s where you’re asking somebody to buy something or join or whatever it might be. And that’s kind of the marketing piece. You give, you give, you give, you give, and then you occasionally ask.

Mika Kinney: Yep. Yeah. So ours is structured like that. We did use Claude to help us build out a nice landing page because we just use fees because we’re not on a custom theme or anything like that, put that a nice landing page. We convert most of our people through stories and then reels. I do try to make the recipes that I share as exclusive be ones that I know are going to hit. So one of our really good ones was like donuts. Baked goods always do well with us. And on one hand, people are like, “Oh, I’m missing out on the ad revenue.” But on the other hand, we had a hundred paid members from that video, which

Mika Kinney: I think our pricing’s 399 a month or 35 a year. So in the last month of doing this with, I don’t know, very little additional work, I think it took us maybe … My husband probably spent like four or five hours just getting the membership side set up and we do do meal plans. We used to do Substack meal plans. So we brought all of those previously paid ones over onto the exclusive. So when people sign up, they get meal plans, there’s like six, then we add one a month basically. They get exclusive recipes, which right now we have maybe 25, it’s not a lot. And then they get our ebooks for free that you would pay for otherwise. All of that gets pushed and we’ve made 2,000 from the last month or so. And the

Bjork Ostrom: Important thing to point out, 2,000 in the last month, and that’s recurring. Now it’s not like 2,000 a month, but it’s 2,000 that you have stacked. Obviously there’ll be churn. Some people will cancel, who knows what the percentage is, maybe 10% churn, but then also you’ll also stack on that new subscribers and-

Mika Kinney: Yep. And that’s

Bjork Ostrom: Been

Mika Kinney: Consistent because

Bjork Ostrom: The video’s gone out.

Mika Kinney: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So talk a little bit about that, what that has felt like. It’s a new feeling, I think as a content creator to have revenue that is as predictable as that membership revenue. Some of it might be month to month if somebody signs up for a monthly plan. If it’s not month to month, it will recur each year, but that’s probably a pretty great feeling to have not only add revenue, not only affiliate revenue, but then now also a third consistent type of revenue, a few thousand dollars a month, but that will grow as you continue to figure out how to market this and the recurring nature of its stacks. What has that felt like and how’s that been?

Mika Kinney: It’s been very exciting. As soon as we saw that video kind of take, we were like, “Okay, there’s potential here.” So that’s when we went all in building out a really nice landing spot because we want this to feel like a premium feature. Not only is it ad free, you get these things, but we want people to come in and feel welcome. One of the big things we did after we trialed it the first time, it was called just membership, right? Membership. We would get nearly no click. We changed the name to Bike Club, something fun. Our emails alone now, every time we send an email, there’ll be like one to 200 people on that page just because it’s named something fun and one to 200 people might not seem like a lot. For us going from zero to that felt like a big win.

Mika Kinney: It’s like, okay, now people are going to the site. Now we just need to redesign that landing page to convert them. So that’s what we’ve been working on now and it has started to track. So we get like two to three new trial members every day and it’s great because we don’t do any extra work and the type of recipe you get to put out are really fun. Again, it’s that playground, right? Yes.You get to just kind of do what sounds exciting or-

Bjork Ostrom: They don’t have to be keyword optimized. They don’t have to be structured in the perfect way to rank well. It’s like, this is just something that’s really fun that I think people would enjoy and you don’t have to pass it through that filter, like that optimization performance filter, which for a lot of creators, it’s really reassuring. I wanted to share this real quick. This is actually in a group that I’m a part of a lot of different business owners, but somebody shared this interview with Conde Nast CEO and it kind of ties into what we’re talking about here. This is going to be me talking through it, which is usually pretty boring when somebody just talks through a tweet, but I’m going to do it anyways, but it’s a recap of it. And he says, the recap is saying that the Conda Nast CEO says the era of turning search and social traffic into profitable businesses is gone and that if you run a media business that doesn’t have an authoritative brand, a very strong niche or a direct audience, you’re going to be fighting hostile algos, algorithms changing all the way down. And then he described that at a recent board meeting, he was saying, “We took a snapshot of search results from seven or eight years ago and what you saw were a few sponsored links and then 10 blue links.

Bjork Ostrom: Do the same today and you get an AI overview, then you get rows and rows of commerce links and then you get sponsored stuff.“ And then he said, ”Each year of the last three years, we would do our budgets and we’d put forecasts in our search traffic declining because we’d seen the pattern of the algorithm changes.“ And he said, and generally those algorithm changes were negative, but he said, every year our search traffic was down more than we had forecasted. So last year, this is the really important part, I told our teams, ”Assume there’s no search. You have to have your business planned as if search is zero. We don’t expect it to be zero. We expect it to be a single digit percentage of our traffic, which is like, whoa, that’s a really big deal.” Google recently announced that they’re rolling out a more AI focused conversational type of search.

Bjork Ostrom: But then what was interesting, our team was talking through it. Emily said, “This is interesting. I wonder what they’re doing instead.” And Jen on our team said, posted this a little recap, but this little piece was interesting. They said doubling down on subscriptions was one of the things they’re doing and their digital subscriptions grew 29% in revenue last year. They’ve raised prices fairly materially over the past couple of years expecting retention to drop, but it actually improved each time and they’re also extending paid subscriptions to their smaller titles like Pitchfork. And so all of this to say, I think these transitions that we’re making into looking at different sources of revenue like membership is a really important one as search as the primary mechanism for monetization continues to change and it’s really cool to see you doing that, having success with it and then being willing to come on and share that experience. Can you talk a little bit about that integration, like how that works with GRO? GRO obviously sponsoring this series, want to make sure that we shine a light on that. So just people know functionally how that works and if it’s all done within WordPress or just kind of what that looks like.

Mika Kinney: Yeah. Super easy to set up within your GRO dashboard at the plugin on your site. They have new features now where you can have the top hat bar that comes in customized to your colors, your branding, things like that. Once you set it up, you set up your Stripe portion to get paid and then you just link it. You start doing, they have the links all right in the dashboard, so it’s really easy to copy and paste it and put it wherever you want on your site. We added our remove ads button to our recipe card too. It kind of converts. I wouldn’t say it converts direct audience. I mean, that’s the power of Instagram and like having that distribution

Mika Kinney: Channel. But what’s nice too with memberships I like is that they take a percentage of what the cost is, but I prefer that model because then it’s up to me how good it does and I don’t feel obligated for a certain amount and it already lives within my WordPress site, which is wonderful because like I said, we tried Substack for about a year and it’s just too much having two email lists and essentially two sites. This simplifies it all. It could be totally passive if you want, but if you do want it to grow, you do need to put some effort. I would say it’s maybe like 10% of our effort per week at this point.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think the other thing you did that was so smart was looking at preexisting content and saying, “Okay, what from this do we want to have the premium content?” And you want to be strategic in that and saying, “Hey, we want really all star recipes that we’re super proud of and that we’re really excited about that for whatever reason don’t have discovery through traditional sources like search or have a bunch of Pinterest traffic or something.” It doesn’t mean the recipe’s not bad. It just means that it hasn’t caught on from some of the traditional traffic sources. And so it’s like, how can we take this really great thing and find a different way to create revenue from it? And this is such a great way to do that. Anything else that you feel like would be important to talk about here? We’ve covered so much and you guys are just so sharp in how you approach this.

Bjork Ostrom: Anything else that you feel like we didn’t cover?

Mika Kinney: I think that’s about it. I mean, GRO really makes it very simple for making more money, which is great.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. GRO for context again, Grocer’s list is now GRO for those who aren’t familiar. So a little bit of a background with that name change, but ties in well, it touches on that previous name of Grocer’s List, but then also this idea of growing, which we’ve talked about. You’ve also talked just briefly at the beginning that you will work with creators in a coaching capacity to help them grow their Instagram account. Want to have an opportunity for you to talk about that. Are you working with clients? If people are interested, how could they reach out?

Mika Kinney: Yep. Yeah. So we’ve got a mastermind. We have two tracks, on growing and one for if you already have a pretty established following, let’s better monetize that. And then we do audits. So I’m capped at the amount that I do. So we only have one audit spot less right now and Mastermind, we have a handful, but the need is clearly there. It’s been overwhelming. And I think what I really try to bring is that analytical background while understanding we’re not just content machines. Let’s be strategic, so let’s get your numbers up, let’s get you more money from it. If you have $100,000, you should be making a good chunk from that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. If people want to check that out, where would they do that?

Mika Kinney: I can find out micacreative.co, M-I-K-A.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Micah, thanks so much for coming on again. Super fun to have another chance to talk with you, to learn from you and we’ll have to do it again soon sometime.

Mika Kinney: Yeah. Thank you so much.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily again. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. Since we are now well into the month of June, I wanted to give you a little update on what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership this month. If you are not yet a Food Blogger Pro member and would like to learn more, you can head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to see all the details about the membership, what’s included and how you can join. On Thursday, June 4th, we released a brand new coaching call with Stephanie Phillips from the food blog Dinner Date. Next up on Thursday, June 11th, we are releasing a brand new course called Mastering Instagram content formats and creating a signature series, which relates nicely to this week’s podcast episode and should breathe some new life into your Instagram strategy. Lastly, on Wednesday, June 17th, we are hosting a public live Q&A with Yoast at 1:00 PM Eastern time, 12:00 PM Central Time and 10:00 AM Pacific Time.

Again, this is a free public webinar, so even if you’re not a food blogger pro member, you are more than welcome to join. Bjork will be joined for this live Q&A by Carolyn Shelby from Yoast and they will be talking about Google updates, AI search, and what actually matters for your blog in 2026. You can register for free, head to the link in the show notes for this episode to save your spot and submit any questions in advance. As always, there are new blog posts, conversations in the forum and lots of other great stuff happening in the membership. We look forward to seeing you there. We’ll be back next week with our third and final episode in this series with GRO with Jenna, the general manager of Pinch of Yum.