Ep #127: Building Your Food Blogger Tribe with Kay Featherstone

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Can you imagine starting your food blog and then a little more than a year laster you build it up to over a million page views per month? Does that sound like fiction? Well, it’s not. And today I’ve got Kay Featherstone on the show talking about how building your food blogger tribe can help garner you better engagement, more aligned content, and yes, even more traffic. If building your blog into a business is your thing, be sure to listen to me chatting with Bridget Edwards about Growing Your Niche Food Blog. Or how about these tips for Driving Engagement Through Storytelling.

Kay Featherstone of Pinch of Nom is joining me today to talk about Building Your Food Blogger Tribe.

Have you been trying to find the right playbook for building your blog? Maybe you’ve spent time studying successful blogs to figure out how they do things. A sort of reverse engineering for food blogging. Trust me, I’ve been there too. How DO they do what they do?

And it’s easy to think there is some recipe (pardon the pun) for how to put together a successful food blog. And if only you HAD your hands on that recipe. Right?

What would you give for the recipe to turn your blog into a success?

Well, today’s guest, Kay Featherstone, is with the site Pinch of Nom (see link below), and she’s got some advice on this topic. She’s also got some very good experience behind her advice. Kay and her partner Kate, launched the site in January of 2016 and just a little over a year later are experiencing millions of page views every month. Yeah, you read that right. Millions.

You could rush to their site today to try to figure our how they did it, but Kay would probably tell you not to bother. Not that you shouldn’t rush to their site. You should. It’s a lovely site and you’ll see how engaged their audience is. But Kay would rather see you spending your time and energy focused on delivering an awesome experience to your audience.

You see, Kay and Kate have spent time focusing on their story — how they collectively lost 200 pounds on a specific diet called Slimming World — and sharing advice for their readers on how they can do the same.

It’s that story and how they’ve built an entire tribe around it, that has made all the difference. Now, Kay and I also talk about a few other things, such as building up their internal tribe (their team), dealing with comparisons with other sites, monetizing a fast-growing site, Facebook, accountability and more.

It’s a delicious listen!

A goal of the Chopped Podcast is to build inspiration into the work you’re taking on. We hope today’s show about building your food blogger tribe is helpful to the work you’re doing each and every day.

Featured Content – Building Your Food Blogger Tribe

Here are some of the highlights of my discussion with Kay on Building Your Food Blogger Tribe. Here are some of the specifics:

  • How Kay and her partner Kate started their blog
  • How their diet caused the inspiration for their blog
  • Kay and Kate figured out a complex diet and shared it with their readers
  • She describes the Slimming World Diet
  • Kay describes their weight loss journey, having lost 200 pounds between the two of them
  • She talks about the Big Green Egg
  • Kay describes how Facebook is a major source of traffic
  • They built a team that they work with regularly
  • Kay talks about how video has bee helpful for their growth
  • She also shares about Facebook Ads and how that has helped
  • Kay talks about USP — Unique Selling Point
  • They use MediaVine to run their ads
  • We discuss the ways to monetize a food blog
  • Kay talks about building trust with her audience
  • How do you handle it when someone copies your content? We talk about healthy responses to situations like that
  • Kay’s advice to food bloggers is to create your own plan rather than following what other food bloggers are doing

Show Notes

This episode on food blogging inspiration includes references to some resources you might find interesting. Here they are:

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Posted in Food Blog Resources, Food Blogging, Podcast