Ep #11: How Food Bloggers Can Work with Brands with Rachel Gurk

Is it a goal of yours to work with brands? Maybe you want to do sponsored posts or simply get on the radar with a few brands that you love. It can seem like a difficult thing to do, even for those who have participated in programs in the past. You know you need to dust off that media kit, build up your confidence muscles, and just do it. But you don’t have to do it all alone. In fact, Rachel Gurk is the next guest on the Chopped Podcast sharing tips on How Food Bloggers Can Work with Brands. That’s right. When it comes to working with brands, we’ve got you covered!

If you’ve ever heard a food blogger talking about monetizing their site, sponsored posts is one of the things high on the list. If you’ve ever thought about working with brands and have no idea where to start, today’s interview is for you.

Rachel Gurk is the mastermind behind the site Rachel Cooks, and has worked with a lot of brands and even provides consulting services to other bloggers on working with brands. Translation? She has a lot of expertise on the topic. The thing is, there are lots of ways to work with brands. Some brands may send you some free products in exchange for a post. Some brands may be interested in sponsoring a post from the get-go. It can lead to some tricky negotiations for bloggers. There’s a lot of art to getting it right.

Getting to the place where both the brand and the blogger are happy is kind of an art. — Rachel Gurk

When you’ve worked with brands for awhile, you see so many different types of projects that you can turn that art into more of a science. That’s why Rachel’s interview is so helpful today. For example, if you’re worried you don’t have enough traffic to be of interest to brands, you might be encouraged to hear Rachel say that it’s not the most important metric that brands are interested in.

If you’re looking to add more brand opportunities for your blog – whether just starting out or even if you’ve been at it awhile, getting help from others can mean a lot. We hope today’s interview will be a beneficial part of your food blogging journey!

I want other bloggers to be successful so I’m happy to be able to help. — Rachel Gurk

Featured Content – How Food Bloggers Can Work With Brands with Rachel Gurk

Here are some of the highlights of my discussion with Rachel:

• How Rachel first became interested in cooking and decided to start her blog
• Rachel’s interesting background and how she uses her background in her food blog
• The criteria Rachel recommends when a blogger is considering whether or not a brand is a good fit
• The importance of being authentic and why it makes an impact on monetization
• Rachel talks about whether traffic is the most important thing to a brand…or if there’s something else that is considered more favorable. Hint, it’s not the traffic.
• Rachel’s controversial tip for bloggers who are first beginning to work with brands
• Rachel’s tips for pitching your blog to brands
• Why you should have a media kit and what you should include on it
• The importance of being professional when working with brands and PR companies
• The importance of setting boundaries
• Tips for dealing with scope creep when working on a sponsored post
• We discuss Rachel’s favorite social media sites, including Pinterest. Rachel discusses some of her favorite ways of sharing her content to Pinterest, including how she uses ViralTag to schedule Pinterest shares.

Show Notes

This episode includes references to several resources you might find interesting. Here they are:

• Learn more about today’s guest, Rachel Gurk, on her blog Rachel Cooks.
• Check out Rachel’s How to Start a Food Blog series!
• Learn more about Rachel’s consulting services that she provides to help food bloggers work with brands
• Rachel recommends loading Google’s Undo Send for Gmail. Here’s a post with tips on how to do that.
• Rachel and I talk about our love for popcorn and I mention our favorite microwave popcorn gadget. You can buy this at Target, but here’s a link to the Nordic Ware Popcorn Popper if you’re interested.
• Why not give Rachel a shout-out on Twitter or Instagram and say thanks for the Chopped Podcast interview
• Today’s podcast was sponsored by Best Food Facts. If you have questions about the best way to cook your veggies, or maybe you want to read about the latest on controversial food topics, then head over to bestfoodfacts.org to learn more about all things food straight from university experts!

Announcements

1. Learn about future Chopped Podcast episodes by subscribing to the ChoppedCon newsletter. Just add your email in the subscribe section at the bottom of this page. You’ll be glad you did!
2. Our next podcast interview is with Gerry Speirs of the blog Foodness Gracious, talking about Gerry’s recent strategy to get his food blog to 100K page views and beyond. If you’re interested in growing your traffic, you’ll be interested in hearing Gerry’s tips. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it!

Subscribe to the Show & Feedback

Thanks so much for listening to today’s podcast. I hope you found it informative and helpful to the work you do every day. Make sure you don’t miss out on any of the Chopped Podcast episodes by heading on over to iTunes to subscribe to the Chopped Podcast. While you’re there, provide a review and rating is a great way to help other podcast listeners find it too! That’s it for today’s podcast. As always, thanks so much for joining in the discussion!