Beyond the Recipe with Liren Baker

Learn how to blog beyond the recipe with Liren Baker, the founder of Kitchen Confidante, as we talk about food blogging, her business, and her tips for connecting with her audience in an original way. If you love sitting in on these food blogger chats, be sure to go to my discussion with Catherine McCord of Weelicious. You can also listen in on my discussion with Cara Ansis of Fork and Beans via our regular FriChats series.

Exciting News

Shawn and I have been working to create courses for the Chopped Academy. It’s been a lot of work, but also fun. To me, that’s a formula for the perfect work situation — to be both challenged and yet having fun at the same time.

And I’m also excited because Namely Marly is breaking personal records for traffic.

If you’ve ever run in your life, you know that runners like to set things they call personal records. It’s where you run against yourself instead of everyone else. So I might get lapped by the person who wins the race, but I’m just out to set my own personal record when I run a 5K. If my fastest time for a 5K is 28 minutes, then my goal with the next 5K would be to run it in 27:55.

I think that can be a great idea for food bloggers as well — to not compete with every other blogger out there. Because that would mean every time you achieve the next traffic milestone, you’d think to yourself, “Well, so-and-so has more traffic than me, so this milestone is not a big deal.” Instead, set a personal record and then celebrate like crazy when you meet them!

So, on that note, we’ve broken some traffic-focused personal records at Namely Marly over the last couple of months and I’m really excited about that.

Chopped Academy Book Reading Club

Since I’ve been reading some books lately, and I think they’re books you might want to read too, why don’t we think of it like the Chopped Academy Book Reading Club? Next week I will be talking about the book The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. If you want to get this book and read it between now and next week then you can follow along with me as I give a sort of review of my thoughts on the book and how we can use it as food bloggers.

Supporting the Chopped Podcast

There are several ways you can help the Chopped Podcast. You can leave a review on iTunes (see link below) and now you can even support the show financially for the price of a cup of coffee. Just go to Chopped Academy Patreon Page and sign up to be a supporter today.

Pinterest Survey

You can participate in the survey on how food bloggers use Pinterest. This is your chance to talk about the ways you, as a food blogger, use Pinterest. Soon I’ll do a post sharing the survey results. And one survey respondent will receive free admission to our upcoming Chopped Academy Pinterest Course.

Liren Baker: Beyond the Recipe

So, let’s move on to today’s show. Today I’m talking with Liren Baker. She’s with the site Kitchen Confidante (see link below). Liren is also a presenter for our upcoming Instagram Course. If you don’t follow Liren on IG already, please go do that now. You will love it! Her photos are amazing and her feed is beautifully crafted. I was so happy to have her on the Instagram Course we’re developing!

Today is another in the series of chats with food bloggers. Sometimes, it’s just nice to imagine we’re sitting at a coffee shop chatting about food blogging — what we love, and hate, and how it feels being your own boss. Liren and I talk about all of that and she shared some jewels about the ways she stays connected with her audience.

You know, we can feel pressured to blog to the recipe. Do you know what I mean by that? Google wants the recipe post to be fairly focused on the recipe. And yet, we want to connect with our audience beyond the recipe.

That’s what today’s theme is about, food blogging beyond the recipe. Liren has a couple of ways she does that and she talks about how she goes about doing it and how it helps her stay connected. She also talks about her process tricks and you know me, I’m always in for a good process story!

I loved this conversation with Liren and I think you will to.

So let’s get straight to it. Here’s today’s feature interview with Liren Baker.

Show Notes

This episode on Beyond the Recipe with Liren Baker includes information that will pique your interest:

• Connect with Liren at Kitchen Confidante
• Say thanks to our guest today with a shout-out on: Instagram or Twitter
• Related Post: Listen in as Gaby Dalkin talks about Recipe Development for Food Bloggers
• Connect with Chopped Academy Online:  Instagram  | Twitter
• Connect with Marly: Namely Marly |  Instagram  | Twitter
• Today’s post production, music, graphic art & sound design by Shawn Beelman
• Subscribe below to be the first to hear about future Chopped Podcast episodes and get some awesome tips on food blogging. You can subscribe at the bottom of this page. You’ll be glad you did!

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!