Recent Makin' Bacon Food Blogging Articles - Page 16

I was speaking at the Everything Food Conference (if you haven't gone, definitely check it out!) and during the conference several people talked about "Serving Your Readers". One blogger mentioned how hard they find that concept, especially when people are being critical, rude, or just plain mean. They were asking for tips on how to handle them.

It was actually this question that got me to mentally shift my focus, from "Serve Your Readers" to "Serve Your FANS".

"Readers" is too generic of a term and includes way too many people. Just because someone stumbles upon your website (or watches your YouTube video, listens to your podcast, etc.) doesn't mean you created that content for them or that they are part of your tribe.

To paraphrase what Tim Schmoyer from Video Creators said during a presentation he gave - if you know your belief statement, you can easily ignore everyone that disagrees with it, because they aren't your audience.

I wanted to discuss the advantages, and disadvantages, of self publishing compared to traditional publishing.

Financial

The largest difference, and why many people choose to self publish even though they could find a traditional publisher, is financial. The two financial components are the royalties, which is the amount you get per book sold, and the advance, which is the money you get paid upfront.

For traditionally published books, the advance and royalties are negotiated ahead of time and depend on how established an author is. In most cases, the advance will be between 5 and 15 thousand dollars and royalties usually falling in the 5% to 8% range. These royalities are usually based off the profit of each book sold, not the list price.

Turning to a self published book, all of the profit is yours. For most printed cookbooks this is about 20% to 40% of the list price, and it's closer to 70% for ebooks. Because of these higher royalties, you only need to sell a fraction as many books in order make the same amount of money as with a traditionally published book.

Now the advance is something that you can't replace through self publishing, but it's important to remember that the advance is not in addition to the royalties, it's just the royalties you are paid upfront. So the higher royalties mean you can often make more in the long run through self publishing.

Have you ever thought of simply asking your biggest fans to help fund your website?

The concept of patronage goes back thousands of years, when the elites in a society would help support artists by paying for them to work. The creations would still belong to the artists, but the patrons believed enough in the value of the work to help fund it. As more and more small, niche bloggers and artists try to make a living through their work, the patronage model has made a comeback.

I recently tried out a patronage campaign and had pretty decent results, with about 30 of my fans signing up to contribute a total of $100 a month. While it might not sound like much, that is $100 a month I didn't have before, plus I also know who my biggest, raving fans are.

In addition to the money, I also use them to help proof and test out upcoming products that I can give them for free, as well as collect testimonials from them. All in all, it was a good experiment and one that I think would be even more successful if you have a more tightly knit community than I do.

I talk to many people who think you require some perfect set of skills to be a successful food blogger. Whether that is professional training as a chef, a lifetime of cooking in the kitchen, or a magnetic personality that draws people in. I think it can be valuable to share a little bit about myself, which should give you hope that if you put the time in, anyone can make money as a food blogger.

I graduated from college with a degree in Psychology at the University of Utah. Go Utes! I then followed a very atypical post-psychology path and got jobs doing programming and web development, mainly with a focus on fantasy sports. I only seriously started cooking about 14 years ago, just a few years before I started blogging. So basically the training and background you would assume you would need to be a successful food blogger, right?

A little over 12 years ago I started blogging in my spare time and after a year or two I was making some money, but certainly not enough to live off of. I was experimenting with AdSense, paid ads, affiliate links, sponsored posts, and all that fun stuff we all enjoy so much. Then in 2009 I decided to try something a little different and see if I could move beyond ads, and focus on my readers.

It often feels to me like our society has split views on making money. One group puts making money above all else, and they will do anything to make more. The other group views making money as almost a bad thing, and never focuses on it, and it can be really hard to be successful with that mindset. Many people who get into food blogging initially seem to fall into the later group because of all the negative connotation around making money, and it can be a hard transition to start focusing on making money.

I believe there is a happy medium in between the groups, where you are actively serving your fans, but also growing your income. You are providing your fans so much value, and they are happy to pay for that because you are giving them what they want and need.

I love making money, but focusing on making money does NOT mean putting out an inferior product. I've found the best way to make money, hands down, is to consistently surpass your reader's expectations. A lot of my business comes from repeat customers. Putting out a shoddy product would prevent all of that from happening.

I've started to dive into Facebook advertising and other areas where you are making critical decisions based on the conversion rate of sales pages. As I've gotten into this, I've become more and more concerned about how accurate that number actually is, and what it really means.

The issue is that the conversion rate tells you what just happened, but not how likely it is to happen in the future. It's ability to determine the future is largely dependent on how many people visited the page. And this is something that makes intuitive sense to us.

Imagine we decide to play a game where we flip a coin and I get a dollar for every heads and you get a dollar every tails. If after 4 flips it has come up heads 3 times, you probably aren't going to be worried. But if after 1,000 flips it has come up heads 750 times, you're going to call me a cheater!

The same thing is true with conversion rates. Most of us would agree that if 10 people came to your sales page, and 4 of them bought, it's a little hard to say that in the future 40% of people will also buy. And if a million people came, and 40% bought, we'd feel very comfortable basing predictions on it.

So my question was how do you get a good idea of what the actual conversion percent is, without needing a million visitors. After a bunch of research, I came across the Wald Confidence Interval, which is a pretty neat metric. At a high level, it tells you how many conversions you can actually expect if you had the same amount of visitors again.

There are many options you have when creating transcriptions, and in this article, we look at the free transcription methods. In other articles, we also cover paid services, both Automated Transcriptions and Manual Transcriptions.

If minimizing the cost is the most important transcription factor to you, then there are a few ways that you can get a transcription done with little or no cost. However, the old adage, "You get what you pay for", holds true for this approach.

There are many options for creating transcriptions, and in this article, we look at paid manual transcription. In other articles, we address Free Transcriptions and Paid Automated Transcriptions.

If accuracy is your most critical decision factor, paying for professional transcribers will be your best option. Also, if the quality of your source audio is poor and includes multiple speakers with a noisy background, manual transcription may be your only option.

Some people have a flair for design and others, like me, don't!

But a good design can make or break a product, so I highly recommend turning to professional help when you need a little boost of professionalism. I'll often reach out when I need a fun logo or design for branded products, a book cover design, or even video intros or voice overs.

The two I turn to most often for design work are Fiverr and 99designs.

I think affiliate links are the second things bloggers turn to, behind only ad networks. Because they are often implemented so early, and by new bloggers, many times they aren't used as effectively as they could be.

I know when I got started I would throw in a bunch of “You can buy this now!” links in random places on my website and hope for sales. I definitely had some success, but I’ve found much more effective ways to do it now. My affiliate payouts have gone from a few hundred dollars a month, to often breaking a thousand or more. Here’s a few of the areas I attacked to accomplish that.

Equipment or Ingredient Reviews

I found affiliate income really started to take off when I would use it in equipment or ingredient reviews. This is mainly because you are writing about a product, preferably one you like, and then provide links to purchase it. The review should have your audience’s interests at heart, but if it is truly a product that would help them, sharing it with them is doing them a favor.

Our reviews range from 500 word “quick hit” reviews to 5,000 word super-in-depth reviews. They are all effective in their own right, and for some products we actually do both.

The affiliate link just needs to be displayed prominently at the top and bottom of the article, and sometimes sprinkled in throughout, if it is a longer review.