There are many options for creating transcriptions, and in this article, we look at paid automated transcription. In other articles, we address Free Transcriptions and Paid Manual Transcriptions.
There is a wide selection of paid automated transcription services available online, but these are my favorites. Any of these would be a reasonable choice for your transcription needs as a food blogger. The transcribing factors that are most important to you may make one or the other more attractive.
One of the biggest challenges with running a large Facebook group is trying to deal with the spam posts. Even using things like "Member Questions" doesn't keep out everyone.
Lately, the most common type of spam is hosting "Watch Parties", and it was an issue we were running into almost every day. Someone suggested that it was possible to turn this "feature" off, but I couldn't find a way to accomplish that.
Finally, I tracked down how to turn off watch parties, and I wanted to share it with you so you can start to fight back against some of the Facebook spam.
There are many ways to run cooking courses, and the most successful for us was an email course. We opted for a free one to drive newsletter signups, but you could easily charge $10, $25, or even $50 depending on how thorough it is.
Our course consisted of 20 emails containing about 35 lessons, making it a very big course. In fact, we turned the email course into a cookbook, getting double use out of the content!
We used MailChimp, though ConvertKit or MailerLite would have worked as well, to set up a simple auto-responder series. Once the reader signed up, they received an email with the latest 1 or 2 lessons every 4 days.
I hosted the actual articles on my website. They were accessible to anyone (since it was a free course) but I didn't promote them much outside of the course. Though some of them have also become very popular in Google now, leading to more signups for the course.
One of the easiest ways to get into selling products is to produce an electronic recipe book. These books can range anywhere from a short, 20-recipe PDF to a full-sized cookbook available as a PDF or as a Kindle book. I mainly did full-sized cookbooks and almost every cookbook I wrote we sold both as a printed cookbook and as a digital one.
Electronic books come as either a PDF you sell yourself, or an ebook such as Kindle, iTunes, or Nook. Our general breakdown for our books was 79% of sales were from printed books with the remaining 21% from electronic books. The Kindle accounted for 19%, iTunes for 3%, PDFs for 1.5%, and 0.4% for the Nook.
The majority of our focus was on printed cookbooks, but electronic books still brought in thousands of dollars a year for us. The exact numbers varied widely for each book, ranging from $50 a month to $1,000 a month. Most fell in the $100 to $300 a month range. This could easily have been increased with more of a focus on the electronic versions.
I love cooking courses and if you want to provide massive value to your Fans, then you should definitely explore them as well.
I go into a ton of detail about how to create an amazing cooking course, but in this article I wanted to share with you more details about the ways you can actually DELIVER these courses to your Fans.
Cooking courses can be delivered in a few different ways.
There are numerous ways to transcribe audio to text, each has its advantages and disadvantages. When determining what type of transcription service to use, there is usually a tradeoff between the accuracy, cost, and turnaround time of the transcription.
Everyone has different needs, so taking a look at the various factors involved in creating a transcription will help you figure out the right service for you!
I wanted to share with you the secret why creating products and services is the key to growing your income while providing tremendous value to your Fans.
Ready for the secret?
When ads, sponsored posts, and affiliate links are your largest source of income, your main "customers" are the external companies doing the advertising.
I'm sure you have made tradeoffs working with external companies, I know I have. Maybe taking on a sponsored post that doesn't provide quite as much value as you would prefer, breaking up your content with large image ads, or writing a review post for an affiliate link just to have the link. This is part of the tradeoffs of having external companies as your customers, and they can weigh on you.
But when you are making products and services, your customers are your Fans. So you only do things that provide value to your Fans. You will be surprised how liberating of a feeling that can be.
I've been blogging for more than 12 years now, and along the way I've come to realize certain truths. I wanted to share these with you so that you can be armed moving forward trying to grow your income and make more money.
Now, to be clear. Focusing on making money does NOT mean putting out an inferior product or taking advantage of your readers.
I've found the best way to make money, hands down, is to consistently surpass your readers expectations.
A lot of my business comes from repeat customers. Putting out a shoddy product would prevent all of that from happening.
So don't think of trying to make money as a sleazy process, think of it as being fairly compensated for providing your readers with something they need and want. And my goal is to give you lots of ideas on how to accomplish that.
Raise your hand if you have a phone with apps on it!
Almost all of us do, and yet almost no food bloggers have apps out for them.
These apps can take many forms. I've released recipe apps, apps with tools to help my readers cook, apps with cheat sheets and regularly needed information, and apps to help find high quality cuts of meat and effectively store vegetables. The options really are limitless, and finding something that works in your niche, that your readers need, is a great way to capitalize on smartphones.
I've found the most effective apps are ones that provide information or tools that your Fans need time and time again. Packaging it in a manner that makes it easily accessible to them is a great way to serve their needs and bring in money.
The most important key to being a successful food blogger? Hard work!
Number two? Correctly picking the niche for your blog.
If you are competing with Serious Eats, Cooks Illustrated or Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg you are going to have a lot harder time than if you are a big player in a smaller niche.
And honestly, it's more important to pick ANY niche than what that niche actually is. I have talked to so many people that were struggling with their blogs until they finally decided to find a niche. Then their readers started growing, along with their income and success.
