Episode 794: The Smart Way for Food Bloggers to Use AI in 2026 With Chris Pieta

EBT794 – Chris Pieta

[00:00:00]  Megan Porta 

If AI has felt overwhelming, confusing, or even a little bit scary as a food blogger, this episode is going to shift your perspective in the best way. Chris Pieta from Food Blog Coaching joins me to break down how to actually use AI. And not just use it, but use it well without losing your voice or your credibility or your creativity.

[00:00:21]   

We talk about the AI adoption ladder, how to avoid publishing AI slope, and what it looks like to build systems that actually support you and don’t replace you. And just a heads up, there is a screen share walkthrough in this episode, so if you can pop over to YouTube for the full experience, trust me, you will want to see it. Enjoy the episode.

[00:00:47]   

Hi food bloggers, I’m Megan Porta and this is Eat BlogTalk. Your space for support, inspiration and strategies to grow your blog and your freedom. Whether that’s personal, professional or financial, you are not alone on this journey. 

[00:01:00] Megan Porta  

Hi Chris, welcome back to the podcast. How are you today?

[00:01:02]  Chris Pieta 

Hey Megan, thanks so much for having me.

[00:01:04]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, good to see you again and have a chat about AI. I think this is extremely relevant right now, as you know, and something that I think will help a lot of people. So thanks for showing up for this. Chris, what would you say? Why are you people pressing play on this episode?

[00:01:21]   

What problem are we solving today?

[00:01:25]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, so AI is all over social media, all over the news, and with this call, I want to make it clear that AI is a tool. It’s not your enemy here, it’s not here to replace you. What I’ll be talking about throughout this call is using AI ethically and helping it with your workflows rather than all the for your mongering of like AI taking over Google traffic, all of that.

[00:01:50]   

Like that is something that is happening. But we want to talk about how do we actually embrace this technology and use it within our business to help with our workflows and even free up some of our time and increase our own creativity too.

[00:02:04]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, amazing. Good. You’re solving all our problems with your episode today. And then I do want to mention that part way through our chat today, Chris will be sharing his screen and showing us some things visually. So if you want to join us over on YouTube, it might be more beneficial for you.

[00:02:21]   

You might get the most out of it if you just watch the episode on YouTube. So just to give you a heads up on that, tell us a little bit about food Food Blog Coaching. I know that you and Kayla run that. Correct. Can you tell us a little bit?

[00:02:36]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah. So me and my wife, Kayla Burton, we run a group coaching program for food bloggers. So within that we provide them with tools, strategies, coaching calls, community with a focus of really turning food blogs into a thriving business and also becoming a confident entrepreneur. So that includes all the AI stuff that we’re going to be talking about today, but also access to just general blogging strategies.

[00:03:01]   

Whether that’s different blogging workflows or even pitching to brands, or helping you grow your traffic through different channels. All that’s involved in building a food blog business we help with in that program.

[00:03:12]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, that’s amazing. Thank you for doing all that you do and showing up for the community. We appreciate you guys. Well, should we just dig into AI or where do we start with this? Maybe we could start with some. You mentioned kind of some, I don’t know, like fear and misconceptions being tossed around. Maybe we’ll start there.

[00:03:33]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, I think that’s a really great starting point. I just want to kind of like touch on what like I’m not advocating for because with AI there’s a lot of ways to use it poorly. We don’t want it to become this like slop factory where you’re producing a ton of content that’s generic and not personalized to you.

[00:03:52]   

Pumping out like 10 AI written blog posts a week. We’re definitely not advocating for that. AI is a tool and like any tool, we can like make it work with us within our business. So kind of like how I think bloggers should approach AI is rather than it being a replacement for like your creative writing or certain workflows, AI handles the redundant work and gives you more time for the creative work.

[00:04:21]   

So we want to use AI almost like a virtual assistant. If anyone’s worked with a virtual assistant, you understand that you have to train them on certain tasks, you give them clear instructions on what to do and you delegate tasks to them. AI is kind of similar. You have to train up the AI to kind of understand your business, your voice.

[00:04:40]   

You have to give the AI clear instructions. You’re creating the ideas here, you’re developing the recipe, you’re shooting the photos and you’re still the core personality of all the writing. AI just kind of helps with distribution, repurposing, um, and all of the tedious things involved in like the day to day blogging world.

[00:04:58]   

So that’s kind of how we approach AI. You maintain the authenticity and AI kind of handles the redundancy here. So like AI should never replace you. It should be a tool. You’re the creator and AI is just your assistant.

[00:05:10]  Megan Porta 

Here are you finding that creators are getting frustrated, like you’re not understanding me AI and then just giving up on it and not continuing to give it feedback.

[00:05:23]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, I see that a lot, A lot of people get bad results from AI and then they tend to just blame the AI because that’s why they got the bad results from. The reality of AI in March 2026 is it’s really, really good. Like it’s much smarter than me in many, many ways.

[00:05:43]   

It still has a lot to go. But the key in getting good outputs from AI is really the prompting and the context you give it. Like the more information the AI knows about you and your business and how you talk, the better outputs you’ll get. Now given that like there are like, don’t give AI all of your data, like, understand that anything that you do give AI, it will train on that.

[00:06:06]   

So just be careful around that. But at the same time, like the more context you do give it, the more, the better output you will get and you’ll have much, much better results.

[00:06:16]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, I mean, that’s a good point. So the more, the more information we give it, the more it trains and then the better, more accurate information it can give collectively. Right?

[00:06:28]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s like hiring a new team member or like a ghostwriter. If you give your new team member a ghostwriter zero context about you or your business, you’re going to get generic outputs. But if you give it good onboarding, good training, you’re going to have the AI nail your voice and understand your needs and what you want out of it.

[00:06:46]  Megan Porta 

So if people are feeling the frustration of you don’t understand me or the outputs are not making sense, just giving it more detailed information is the way to go. It sounds like.

[00:06:58]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, if you don’t want any framework of this, the simplest way to do it is just to get a voice to text app on your computer and just talk to it and like give it as much context as you want and just that like just brain dumping into the AI will give you much better results.

[00:07:16]   

But taking that like a step further, further having like structured prompts and then adding in context profiles, which we’ll talk about more on this call, will give you really good outputs.

[00:07:26]  Megan Porta 

Okay, excited to learn about that. Are there any other details you want to mention about just frustrations or ways to kind of get over that initial hump?

[00:07:36]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, I mean it’s. AI is such a, you can go anywhere with it, right. You open up ChatGPT, you open up Claude, and it’s a Blank page, blank text box, and you can ask anything. And that’s frustrating. That’s like intimidating. So having like that blank page in front of you, you don’t know where to take it.

[00:07:52]   

So having like some guidance will help. So for prompting specifically, I teach like a three part prompting framework. Some people will tell you you need like five, 10 parts in it. I tried three just to keep it simple. So like if you want better outputs, the first thing to do is just prompt better.

[00:08:10]   

So like the first step of prompting is giving it a clear goal, so telling it exactly what you want. So that might be create Instagram captions for this new pumpkin bread recipe. Right from there you also have to give it some context to understand, like who you are, who your audience is, what niche you’re in.

[00:08:28]   

So you might want to describe like who your ideal reader is. Are they like busy moms between the age of 30 and 45 and they have 30 minutes every night to make recipes, like, give it context around like who makes your recipes and like who you are as well. So that context will help with making the outputs more personalized.

[00:08:47]   

And then part three of the prompting framework is giving it some constraints around formatting. So if you want like 3 caption options to choose from, or you want to keep everything under 150 words, or you don’t want to use emojis or any rules you want to give it, that’s the third part.

[00:09:02]   

And by just like running through those three parts every time you talk to AI, you’re going to get much, much better outputs there and hopefully less frustration.

[00:09:10]  Megan Porta 

Okay. Yeah, those are really good. I’ve noticed that AI isn’t consistent yet with some things. Like there are some things I tell it that I’m like, I told you this a million times. Like, I get so frustrated. But then there are other things that it’s super consistent with. It’s so weird. I’m sure that will fix over time, but it’s not always consistent.

[00:09:32]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, and that right there is like a really interesting problem with AI. Like the memory is sometimes there, sometimes not. So like if you told it something previously, it might forget it. Sometimes it’ll remember. So like, until we get to like perfect memory, I still recommend people always feed it those memories or context they want.

[00:09:52]   

So if you told in the past that you’re like you’re what you are and what your business is, it might not remember that. So I will give it that information every single time I prompt it so that it remembers that. And that helps a ton with not

[00:10:05]  Megan Porta 

Getting mad at it.

[00:10:07]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah.

[00:10:07]  Megan Porta 

But I’m always like, you’re a robot, you should know this. And it’s like, I’m sorry, Megan, I apologize,

[00:10:15]  Chris Pieta 

That won’t happen again.

[00:10:16]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, but then it does happen again.

[00:10:19]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, every time.

[00:10:21]  Megan Porta 

I know. So you have something called the adoption ladder, right?

[00:10:28]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, yeah, the AI adoption ladder.

[00:10:30]  Megan Porta 

Yeah.

[00:10:31]  Chris Pieta 

So this is something, I think it was end of 2024 when I first like presented on this to like a few different like coaching groups. But the there’s like five steps to it. And when I was first presenting on this, like step five, like just wasn’t a thing. Now in 2026 it does exist and it’s capable.

[00:10:52]   

So the first part of like the adoption ladder is chat. So chatting with AI. We’ve all done that. Like we talk back and forth, asked it for like an email, subject line, idea, whatever. We’re chatting back and forth. It’s like level one and with that we might be saving some time. It’s kind of like a glorified search engine at that point.

[00:11:12]   

The next stage is tasks. So giving AI actual tasks to do. So thinking through what has to get done. As a food blogger, kind of taking some stuff off your plate and handing it over to AI so that it can help with those things. So maybe you’re using it for captions, maybe you’re trying to help with my descriptions for your blog posts, whatever.

[00:11:35]   

You’re occasionally prompting it with specific tasks. The next step from there is using it as more of like a system. So level three, I call system. So you’re basically taking the tasks that you were previously doing it, but you have a more systemized way. So meaning you prompt it like the same type of way every time.

[00:11:55]   

So if you have a email newsletter you want to write, you’re going to have like a pre written prompt and like a weekly cadence that you do this on. So you’re going to paste in that prompt, paste in any extra additional context into that along with like the email, email topic for that case.

[00:12:12]   

And this is like a more systemized way of using AI. You’re getting more predictable outputs from it. So that’s stage three. And the savings there, you’re saving, maybe you’re saving hours of time. Right. You’re probably doing, you’re using AI multiple times a week to help with lots of tasks. I think a lot of people want to get to this stage where they’re actually seeing those real, that real ROI from AI being able to prompt it and get predictable results every single time.

[00:12:43]   

That’s kind of what a lot of people are after. So for most listeners, I would encourage you to get to like stage three, stage four. Beyond that, I call a co founder. So kind of having a co founder to like, talk through ideas back and forth. So at this stage, you’re using it more for, like, problem solving, thinking through strategies, things like that, trying to make decisions with it.

[00:13:08]   

So you’re giving it a lot of information around what you’re thinking through. So maybe you’re considering starting posting more consistently on Facebook rather than just Instagram. What’s involved with that? Are you going to have to repurpose content? Are you going to have to create new content for that? So you can use AI as kind of a co founder to think through these problems, these decisions you have to make, and then the savings there.

[00:13:31]   

I say that’s like saving days of time. Because if you make a good decision, that can save you a lot of time in the long run. Also avoiding bad decisions is, I think, just as important. So if you can avoid mistakes, that can save you, like weeks or months of headaches too. And then the last level is level five.

[00:13:50]   

And this is agent. So as of like March 2026, agents are very capable. Now, these are for those that don’t know. Agents are a way to use AI autonomously. So AI will take actions on your behalf. So you can give it a prompt of like, hey, create this blog post for me around chocolate chip cookies.

[00:14:11]   

And the AI will write the blog post. It’ll research your ideal reader. It’s connected to your blog, so it can even input that into WordPress. It can do a SERP analysis, so it can browse through multiple blogs. It can up. You could do keyword research on your behalf. So that’s what an agent can do.

[00:14:30]   

We’re still a ways away from it doing everything I described there, but it can take like those autonomous actions just based off of a single prompt and do a lot there. So those are kind of like the five stages there.

[00:14:44]  Megan Porta 

That’s interesting. So the agent level, that. That feels scary. I think for a lot of people listening, that might feel scary as well. Because if we can do that, then that means other people can do it too, you know, like. Like, where’s. Where does the humanity come in? And how important is that when you get to the agent level?

[00:15:08]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, and I think, like, for most bloggers, like, that’s not really gonna be something they should do. At least right now, I think maintaining humanity is gonna be extremely important moving forward. So building up the brand behind the blog, who you are, that’s gonna be the most important thing. So forming associations with certain things around your personality, whether that’s the people in your life, your hobbies, what you do, like outside of work, what you are fun, all these, like, different things that make you you.

[00:15:47]   

Those kind of have to get incorporated into your blog now because people are going to keep coming back not just for the great recipes, they’re going to be coming back because they relate to you in some sort of way. So people have been saying, like, to build up your brand for a while now, but it’s going to be more important than ever to do that because that’s going to be what keeps people coming back to you over.

[00:16:13]   

Let’s say someone that just has an agent create a million blog posts and just has no humanity behind it.

[00:16:20]  Megan Porta 

Right. Okay, that’s refreshing and encouraging. So for the other rungs of the ladder, if maybe somebody listening is not using AI yet at all, how do you recommend they utilize these? So they start with just chatting and then they move up to tasks and then systems, et cetera.

[00:16:39]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, you’re basically going to be. It’s really hard to teach AI. It’s a really hard thing to do. You learn by doing.

[00:16:48]  Megan Porta 

Yeah.

[00:16:49]  Chris Pieta 

So my advice is to constantly, like, once you start chatting with it, try and push it a bit more and get different types of responses. So if you start by just asking it for like Instagram captions, try and get it to like replicate your voice in that. And if you can, if you’re able to do that, then move on to more like complex things, like maybe a longer email newsletter or maybe helping pick out blog posts for edits.

[00:17:15]   

Depending on the traffic those posts are getting, how they’re ranking and the SERPs, all of that, like AI can be used as like an analysis tool as well, but it all starts with like you chatting with it and trying to get the best possible outputs from it. Because AI is very capable now and pretty much whatever you want out of it, it can do that.

[00:17:35]   

The limitation is prompting it that way. So like starting with baby steps and increasing over time.

[00:17:42]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. So naturally you probably move through those just as you start getting to know it. Sounds like.

[00:17:48]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, exactly. And that’s been my progression in a lot of people’s.

[00:17:52]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, same you mentioned before a context profile. Can you explain that a little bit better?

[00:18:01]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah. So context profiles, this is really how you supercharge your outputs from AI and make them personal to you. So these are going to be like structured documents that you feed AI along with your prompts. So that can understand different parts of your business. It’s kind of like a cheat sheet for AI to read to understand exactly who you are, what your goals are, what you’re after.

[00:18:22]   

So for example, a context profile could be your ideal reader profile. So this describes who your audience is, their demographics or pain points. You can also have one that’s like a voice and tone guide. So this describes like how you talk, sentence structure, vocab, if you use emojis, if you don’t use emojis, like what kind of storytelling style you have.

[00:18:46]   

And then you can also have like a brand overview. So a context profile that discusses like what your niches, how you position yourself, what platforms you post on, what your revenue sources are. So with these like different context profiles, you start to get more personalized outputs from AI. So for example, if you’re, if you want like a full on blog post that AI writes like you can prompt it without any context profiles.

[00:19:14]   

And what you’re going to get is AI is trained on millions of blog posts, so it’s going to generalize all those and give you a pretty generic output. Right? But if you add in your context profiles, if the AI knows who your ideal reader is, their pain points, their struggles, how they make recipes, if you add in your brand voice and tone and brand overview, you start to get really personalized results there.

[00:19:38]   

Now this isn’t to say like you’re just going to copy and paste what AI outputs into your blog. I do not advocate for that at all. You still need to tweak all these outputs to add in your own personality stories, whatever. But you can get really, really good results with these context profiles.

[00:19:56]   

So not only do they help personalize, you also save a lot of time because you can make these like once in Google Drive and then you can just link to them every time you prompt so you don’t have to like retype your super long prompt every time. You can just be like, hey, I need a new email newsletter for these sugar cookies I’m making.

[00:20:14]   

And then you add in the context profiles and you get really good response.

[00:20:17]  Megan Porta 

The linking to Google Doc is such a good idea. I never thought of that. That’s great.

[00:20:25]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s really nice too because these context profiles are living documents. So like as your business grows, as things change, you can update them and they live in Google Drive, so you just link to them and you have the latest update every time you’re prompting to.

[00:20:41]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, I think there’s never been a time when it’s been easier to figure out what your brand is all about because of AI. So I’ve. I love digging into that topic. Like, okay, who am I? What am I? What am I here to create? What do people love? Like, what is Megan as a brand?

[00:21:00]   

And then taking that information and just compiling it. AI does a really good job of this, just putting it into some succinct paragraphs so that you have it somewhere. So taking that, storing it, and then linking to it and then, oh my gosh, you can change the world.

[00:21:18]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, it definitely feels that way.

[00:21:20]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, I know. It’s pretty amazing. Anything else about context profiles that you would want to mention?

[00:21:30]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, I mean, we have a demo that I can show just to compare like the outputs between like a generic and. And a prompt with context profiles so I can like share my screen and kind of walk through that.

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[00:22:29]  Chris Pieta 

All right, so this first one right here, um, I had. I’m using Claude for these demos, but you can use ChatGPT as well. I just find Claude works a little bit better with like natural language. So here I just had a prompt to write a newsletter promoting my new lemon sugar cookie recipe to my audience.

[00:22:49]   

I gave a context. I’m a baking blogger and to write me the newsletter copy and subject line and plain, plain text without any designing. So I didn’t want like a well designed newsletter. I just want the text to test that out. So I’m not going to read through all this because I just want to be respectful.

[00:23:05]   

Everyone’s time here. But if you want to pause and kind of walk through this, feel free. But you’ll notice that this is pretty generic. You’re going to have like a bunch of dashes here. There’s things that are dead giveaways to making it sound like AI. So like the best part, these are generally easy things like that.

[00:23:23]   

So like not awful. Better than it was A few years ago, but still pretty generic. And a lot of people will tell it’s AI. So I’ll pull up the example here with. The context profiles. So this was with context profiles. So if I’ll. I’ll go back here and show you what this is about.

[00:23:49]   

So down here, I added for four different context profiles, ideal reader profile, voice and tone guide, blog post examples. So it knows my writing style as well as some newsletter examples. So it understands my newsletter format. And if we click into this, you’ll see what it wrote. So I’ll let you pause here and kind of read through this.

[00:24:12]   

But this is written in, like, Kayla’s voice, so it’s trained on that. And it understands that, like, I’m her husband and like, I love lemons, because he’s talked about that in blog posts before. And it speaks to her ideal reader. The ideal reader for our blog, Broken Oven Baking, is someone who doesn’t have, like, that much time each night, wants easier recipes, doesn’t need like a million ingredients for that kind of stuff.

[00:24:36]   

So it calls out that it’s like, ready in 30 minutes. There’s no chilling required. These are pantry staples everyone has on hand. So it speaks directly to that ideal reader as well as, like, a lot of other things, like asking it to tag her on Broken Oven Baking to boost that engagement. So you can see, like, the power of these context profiles once you start using them.

[00:24:58]   

You can make really personalized responses here. Now, this is not like, copy and paste ready to go. This still requires tweaks and, like, some humanity to it, but it’s, like, really good compared to that previous example.

[00:25:09]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, much better.

[00:25:13]  Chris Pieta 

I also pulled together a couple of blog post examples. Do you want. Yeah, so for this one, it was also for lemon cookies. So I’ll pull that up here. So we’ll start with the generic example. So the prompt here, this was kind of a long prompt. So at the top I said, I’m a food blogger and I’m writing a blog post for my new lemon cookie recipe.

[00:25:39]   

Please generate me a blog post for the following recipe. And then I listed out the entire recipe. So prep time, equipment, needed ingredients, instructions, all that. And from there, it did generate, like, an okay blog post. Like, it gave me some structure to it. The title, not great intro is pretty generic. Like this copy is.

[00:26:02]   

This would require a lot of tweaking to actually put on a blog. And if anyone here has been writing a lot of blog post, they clearly see all the inconsistencies here. And like, all everything that needs improvement. So let’s run this again through a prompt with those context profiles. Stop sharing that one.

[00:26:41]  Chris Pieta 

Okay, so here, same exact prompt, same exact recipe. And on the left you’ll see the blog post that spit out. So with this I use the same exact context profiles as before. The ideal reader, the blog post examples, voice and tone guide as well, as well as our site map. Because you can actually get AI to do internal linking for you as well, which is really cool.

[00:27:09]   

Like a lot of our members love that because we like share all of these prompts with our community as well. So they’re able to do this kind of thing too. But within this you can see the intro and the title is much better here. So it really calls out why you should make this now and what makes it special, which is kind of like what you want in your intro.

[00:27:31]   

It links to other similar recipes here. The why you’ll love this recipe much better than before. Again like here it talks about the soft and chewy texture of these cookies and it links to the soft almond cookies we have in our blog that also have a similar texture. Calls out ingredient notes. Now with like this part, we only want to call out the ingredients that have specific notes with them.

[00:27:56]   

So it does that pretty well. Subs and variations walks through the process here. Talks about Kayla’s top tips as well. Common questions, storage. So even links to like different types of cookie recipes down here as well as like different meta descriptions. And this was done with context profiles as well as like a bit more instructions on internal linking.

[00:28:21]   

But you can see like this is much better than that previous example actually follows a structure and like if anyone wants to do this with the right like profiles, it takes like 60 minutes to set them up. And then from there you’re able to kind of like replicate these results too.

[00:28:40]  Megan Porta 

That was amazing. What the transformation was from one to the next. Crazy.

[00:28:46]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah. And it’s the magic of prompting there.

[00:28:49]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. So you mentioned interlinking. So do you just recommend. You mentioned the site map too. So AI needs to see your sitemap and then you can ask about interlinking options.

[00:29:02]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, so I have a context profile that’s just our sitemap. So it has all of our posts as well as our categories. And then it will weave in. You have to ask it to weave in internal links and you have to explicitly tell it like, don’t just jam three into one sentence. Like you have to follow best practices with that.

[00:29:22]   

So it does take a lot of like back and forth prompting to like get it to do that. But it’s definitely possible with. With AI.

[00:29:33]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, that’s gold right there. I’ve. Because that is a struggle for a lot of people. And a question I hear all the time, like, how do I do I need to be interlinking? How do I do it? I don’t know where to start. So that would be a huge problem or a pain point, I guess.

[00:29:48]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, it’s like a really nice workflow of AI because that was another thing I wanted to talk about different workflows with AI because we all know, okay, we can write with it. What else can we do with it?

[00:30:00]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. So writing blog posts, obviously you just went through that, but what else kind of falls under that workflow category.

[00:30:10]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah. So obviously writing social captions, newsletters, meta descriptions, content writing, repurposing, all that’s. We know that’s possible. But some things you may not initially think of, like, is pitching brands. So with like context profiles that talk about, like your brand overview and your ideal reader, you can write better pitches to brands that are more personalized to, like, who those brands serve.

[00:30:36]   

So if you have like really easy recipes that you make, maybe that’s like, who that brand targets as well. Like people that are busy, that just want like a quick fix. So you can incorporate that into your pitch. So using these context profiles, the AI can kind of like think through unique pitches to brands that make you stand out, like in their inbox, which is awesome.

[00:30:58]   

One thing that I made like on the back end for us is we have like a recipe to JSON creator. So this makes it really easy to copy and paste in recipes into wprm. If you use that, you can use AI to analyze blog posts for updates. So if you export your updates as like a CSV file, feed that into AI along with like your ideal reader and what your goals are, you can get like a list of which blog posts to update, potential suggestions for updates.

[00:31:29]   

There. You can get help with content strategy. There’s a lot of different, like, workflows you can use here. Um, and everyone’s workflows are gonna differ depending, like on how you run your blog. But really it’s thinking through like the processes. Processes that you have and like seeing like what you can hand off.

[00:31:48]   

Because you’re not gonna hand off like an entire tasks, but maybe you’re gonna hand off like four out of the five steps of a specific task to the AI and then you come in and add in the human element there.

[00:32:01]  Megan Porta 

Ugh. Yeah. Yes, it does save a lot of time. I’ve noticed that I have extra time now because I do have AI do so much. And kind of what you were saying before, that higher level thinking, when you can nail that for a certain project or your brand as a whole, it frees up so much space because you don’t have to dedicate brain power to that consistently.It’s really lovely.

[00:32:30]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah. And just not having unmade decisions on your head too. In your head.

[00:32:33]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. Right, right. Taking clutter away from your brain. So you have a term that you call AI slop. Can you talk about that?

[00:32:42]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, that’s basically generic outputs from AI. If you’re not giving it context around who you are or if you’re not heavily tweaking the outputs after AI gives them to you. I put that in to like the AI slop category. Honestly, a lot of like the Internet is turning into that, unfortunately. Like comment sections on Instagram, there’s a lot of like bots that are just using AI for that.

[00:33:06]   

Like Twitter is filled with that kind of stuff. And even like there are blogs that just pop up that are just like AI generated images plus really generic blog posts. And those are like, it’s very short term thinking for the people that do that. Like, they’re not going to last. Maybe they’ll pop off quickly and then Google will kill off all their traffic.

[00:33:28]   

But really generic outputs is what I put under the AI slop category. And we should like avoid that at all costs because if you put that kind of stuff out there, you just immediately lose all trust with your audience. They assume you’re using AI for writing, maybe you’re also using it for recipe development.

[00:33:46]   

And we don’t want that. Right. We want our audience to keep our trust, keep the trust with our audience. So we want to use AI as a tool and not as like a replacement.

[00:33:56]  Megan Porta 

Yes, Perfectly said. I love that. If somebody listening is more in the fearful I don’t want to use AI, I’m resisting it category. What are some first steps they can take to just start using it a little bit? Like dipping their toes in the water?

[00:34:15]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, it’s. Well, first off, like, if you don’t want to use AI and you truly don’t want to use it, you don’t have to. Like, it’s not a requirement, it just is a tool and it does save you time, it does make your life easier. It gives you more time to spend with your family or whatever hobbies you have.

[00:34:31]   

That’s kind of like my mindset around it. But if you’re just starting out and you’ve never used it. I recommend going with Claude instead of ChatGPT. Actually, Claude is a bit better at being more personalized, a bit better at like writing like a person. It’s still not great, like with those generic examples that I showed, but Claude’s going to be the first one and just explore your curiosities with it.

[00:34:56]   

Because I think people like, AI is a really great learning tool. If I don’t know a topic, I go to AI and I try and learn about that topic and then I have like AI quiz me on it to make sure that I learned about it. So if you’re curious about anything, whether that’s like learning a new hobby or like a new workflow for your business, like ask AI about it and see what it says and just try and have like a back and forth with it.

[00:35:20]   

So that’s like one way. Just start with curiosity and let that lead you. But also, if you have like a tedious workflow that you want to use AI for, just try prompting it with those like three steps that we talked about earlier and prompt it until you get something that you’re happy with.

[00:35:38]   

And that will give you a really good, like, skill set of like, how to actually use this. Because you could watch a million videos on how to use AI, but until you start working with it, you’re not really going to understand how to use it there.

[00:35:50]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, I mean, it can be so simple. I think just like you said earlier, just starting the chat, starting the conversation, like, here’s who I am, here’s what I want, here’s what I’m struggling with, Please help and just kind of go from there.

[00:36:03]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, exactly.

[00:36:05]  Megan Porta 

What do you think about the state of AI and traffic? I know some food bloggers are losing a lot of traffic, a lot of traffic due to AI on Google, but others are gaining traffic right now. So what are your thoughts on all of that?

[00:36:22]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, so that is all that’s true. Like, for us, we’ve like maintained organ traffic over the past year and that’s been nice, but a lot of people have lost a lot of traffic. Like AI overviews have been really hurting bloggers. When we were at Tastemaker, we’re talking a bit about this with people there, but people have like, simpler recipes that don’t require many ingredients or relatively easy to make.

[00:36:53]   

Those are more prone to being hurt with AI overviews, and that’s what we’ve noticed. So if you were hit with like a traffic dip from AI overviews, tweaking those recipes to make them a bit more complicated helps with that, so like, AI overviews are like a real threat, but there are ways to mitigate that.

[00:37:14]   

And then the other threat is people going to ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude to get recipes there rather than food bloggers. Right? Because people, some people would rather not go to a page with ads. They’d rather just have AI tell them what to make. And we’re still going to see how that plays out.

[00:37:35]   

Like right now there’s close to a billion people using AI. Like, ChatGPT has 900 million monthly users, which is a lot, but not that many people are using it for purely recipes. I think people food is this weird thing where for food bloggers specifically, people connect over food. People have connected over food for thousands and thousands of years and no one, like very few people want a recipe that a robot made.

[00:38:03]   

They want something that another person made that’s been tested, they can trust that more. And I don’t think that the people chatting with LLMs, with chatbots is going to be how they get most of their recipes. I think it’s still going to be food bloggers. Now, I, I can be proven wrong here.

[00:38:23]   

Like, no one knows where this is going, but that’s kind of where how I feel things will play out, but I could be wrong there. So, like, AI is definitely a threat there. And to mitigate that, again, it’s bringing in more of our personality into our content, using different channels to kind of distribute our content.

[00:38:40]   

And AI helps us distribute it across more channels because it saves us time and helps us repurpose. So, like, AI is a threat, but it’s also not going away, so we might as well embrace it. And that’s kind of my mindset around it.

[00:38:54]  Megan Porta 

Yes, agreed. It’s only going to get more and more, so might as well. You can’t resist those things that aren’t going away. If you do, I feel like it’s not good. So that’s why we appreciate everything you’ve said today, Chris. Thank you. And I’m so glad that you guys have decided to just dig in, not just for your own business and benefit, but to help others as well.

[00:39:15]   

I think that’s great.

[00:39:17]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, like with the AI stuff, I’ve been using it since ChatGPPT Con 2022 and we’ve had workflows in our business for a while now, and a lot of these workflows we’ve shared with our members in our coaching program and then use them internally as well. So I built an app for this too. So we’re giving access to our members pretty soon around that.

[00:39:38]   

So as of like today. So what is it? March 3, we have some people in our group beta testing the app already. So it includes like all the workflows I talked about here as well as like those prompts. So it started like as an internal tool for us and then I just kept adding stuff onto it that would kind of like automate the busy work and give us more time for the creative work. So that’s been really fun project too.

[00:40:02]  Megan Porta 

Amazing. So how do people get involved in your coaching program if they’re interested?

[00:40:10]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, so for that just go to foodblogcoaching.com and there we have application for a group coaching program. Generally we recommend you have at least 40 blog posts before applying, but if you’re under that, feel free to apply as well. But that’s the best way to kind of get started with that. So like everything I shared today, like the context profiles, the workflows and all that that’s included in our coaching program as well as like the weekly coaching on anything else you need, plus community and resources.

[00:40:42]  Megan Porta 

Amazing. Well, thank you for all of this. I loved seeing your examples too on screen. So hopefully people can see how different things are once you apply those context profiles. Yeah, just thank you for all of this, Chris.

[00:40:56]  Chris Pieta 

Yeah, of course. Oh, and I forgot to mention, we did create a freebie for listeners.

[00:41:01]  Megan Porta 

Oh yeah, right.

[00:41:02]  Chris Pieta 

So that’s just going to be a way to help create your first context profile for your ideal reader. So that’ll be, I guess in the show notes, right?

[00:41:11]  Megan Porta 

Yes, we’ll put it in the show notes. Perfect. And show notes can be found at eatblogtalk.com/foodblogcoaching I think you let’s say food blog coaching too, just in case because I think your other URL is similar. So eatblogtalk.com/foodblogcoaching2. You’ve told us where we can find you. I think that’s all we have for today. So thanks again for joining us and thanks for listening food bloggers. I will see you next time.

[00:41:40]   Outro

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat Blog Talk. If you are craving, learning, connection and increased productivity at a low monthly cost, join the Eat Blog Talk Inner Circle. Go to eatblogtalk.com/focus to join.I will see you in the next episode.