Episode 198: Why and How to Launch a Second Blog with Christine Pittman

Intro:

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Megan Porta:

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Hey food bloggers. Welcome to Eat Blog Talk. This podcast is for you, food bloggers wanting value and clarity to help you find greater success in your business. I have Christine Pittman from cookthestory.com with me today, and we are going to have a super fun chat about why and how to launch a second blog.

Christine is the founder of Cook The Story, where her passion is to create recipes that take less time in the kitchen, giving you more time at the table. Christine’s love for cooking started early, watching and listening to her mother and grandmother in the kitchen and working in her parents’ restaurants starting at age 12. But before launching her lucrative food blog and business, Christine was doing something entirely different. 10 years ago, Christine was on maternity leave from a PhD program, when her family relocated from Canada to Orlando. In a new country, armed with a master’s degree in linguistics and a new baby, Christine struggled to find a job opportunity that matched her skillset.

While she figured out what to do with her life, she started a food blog. It was an exciting hobby and kept her connected with friends and family back home. Since then, what originally started as a hobby has turned into one of the top ranked food blogs in the world with more than 2 million monthly readers. The journey from hobbyist to full fledged lucrative business had many twists and turns and a lot of learning curves, but now Christine has figured it out and has great tips and great strategies to share to help other online businesses grow. Love your bio Christine. I love your story. I’m so excited to dig into our topic today, but first we all want to hear a fun fact about you.

Christine PIttman:

Okay. Well, you said that I was doing a PhD program in linguistics, but I think what’s really interesting about it is that I am doing a degree in Inuktitut, which is the language spoken by the Intuit people, Eskimo people way up North. And I would regularly be way up near the Arctic circle doing field work before I was immersed in the kitchen and the photo studio. That’s where I was.

Megan:

Oh my goodness. Okay. Say that word again. Say the language.

Christine:

Inuktitut.

Megan:

Oh my goodness. That is the coolest thing ever. I’ve never even heard that word.

Christine:

Yeah. It’s really neat. Yeah, I really miss it. I mean, I don’t miss the super cold weather. But it was a really great experience.

Megan:

Yeah. Oh, that’s so cool. I love that. I love knowing that about you. So this is a topic I want to talk about because I have never considered launching a second blog, but I just want to learn from you today, Christine. Would you mind starting by just kind of telling us your journey, your blogging journey. We know that you started as a hobby and that turned into a booming, lucrative business for you. Can you just talk through that a little bit? Like how it has evolved?

Christine:

Yeah, it started as a hobby and I think that was pretty common back then. We’re talking 2009, 2010. I think that maybe some people were making money from blogging, but it wasn’t a well-known thing. It was more about sharing and maybe some strangers actually finding your recipes and wow. How amazing if somebody you don’t know comments on your site, way back then. So because I was Canadian and my now ex-husband, but my husband then is British and he had a work permit in the States and I did not. I was with a newborn, so whatever, we just came and started this hobby and I wasn’t even allowed to work in the States then. It was even more inconceivable that it would turn into any kind of money making business, this hobby that I started.

But then I started going to conferences and I started getting some, not really sponsorship work, but giveaways and people would give me some free things. It was all very exciting. Then I had a blogging concentrated event. That’s Dan Morris and Rachel Martin who used to do that. I don’t think they still do exactly the same thing, but they are still in the helping blogger world. I went to one of their sessions out in Phoenix, Arizona, and they just blew my mind, somehow for the first time convinced me that this was a business, that I could treat it like a business that I should be looking at my stats to figure out what I should be publishing. That I should be a business person, entrepreneur. That’s what I was. I remember flying home from that conference, long flight, Phoenix to Orlando and just making so many notes about all the things I could do and then came home and started implementing it.

It wasn’t just what I learned from them, but it was that mindset of, Whoa, this is a business. I need to treat it like one. If it’s a business, how do I grow it? Working on that and it started to get really huge. It was around then that I realized that I’d made a lot of, I don’t want to call them mistakes, but because it was just a hobby and not a lot was known about blogging. I just did a lot of strange things on my site and I had all these great ideas for if I was going to do it again. Then one day, wait a minute, I could do it again. That’s when I launched the second site, The Cookful, kind of implementing what I had learned and what I would do differently if I did it again. That site has been very successful also. So that’s a really cool thing that came out of that.

Megan:

Okay. So say your second site again and say the name of it. Okay.

Christine:

It’s the Cookful T H E C O O K FUL.

Megan:

Okay. The Cookeful, what a cool name. I love that. That’s very creative. So I’m curious, how did you decide what content to put on your second site?

Christine:

This went through a funny little stage. So what I was seeing on Cook The Story was that the things that were most popular on that site, it was very low numbers back then, but the things that we’re growing and we’re doing well were my stuffed pepper recipes, my soup recipes and my fish recipes. So the original idea behind the Cookful was actually three separate websites, one called, Stuff The Pepper, Flake The Fish and Slurp The Soup.

Megan:

I love it.

Christine:

I had Cook The Story, right. So it was all riffing on that thing. I was going to do these three sites, each with a focus on, like a niche. One was just stuffed peppers. One was just soup. One was just fish recipes. One of the things I’ve learned and, you know, we hear this all the time that you should have a niche and Cook The Story was so broad. I thought I would keep doing the story, but then I would really focus on these new sites, you brainstorm, you keep going. The realization of having to maintain four websites and all the social media platforms. Then like at some point it was like, Oh, and then it was through some brainstorming with Katie Woodrick, who is just a wonderful person.

She worked on my team for a long time. We were talking and she was saying this is going to be too much Christine. I was really disappointed that I agreed with her. Then it was one of those moments, I’m in the shower, after a run and it just popped into my head. One site that dives into a different topic every month. So we launched with a series on popcorn where we just had popcorn recipes for a month. A series on margaritas, where we just had margaritas for a month. And a series on stuffed peppers, where we just did stuffed peppers for a month and so on. That’s where it came from. So it is a site where we dive into different topic every month and just do recipes and information on that topic. That one is contributor based. So I brought on other bloggers, they submit recipes and articles and photography, and I pay them. I do some of it myself,

Megan:

Christine, I just had this light bulb moment. I’ve met you. I have totally met you before. I met you at a Blogher conference, I don’t know, this was probably five, six years ago. I sat at a table with you. I cannot believe I did not realize this until this very moment. But you were talking about your peppers and you were talking about how you wanted to start a site just on peppers and a friend talked to you out of it and said, no, you should really revolve around different topics, not just peppers. That’s so crazy.

Christine:

That’s fantastic. This sounds familiar. I had just gotten the business cards for The Cookful and you know the mood cards that have, I’m guessing this is what it was. That you could have the different pictures on the back of the different ones. Some of them just had just a whole bunch of peppers from the top and another one’s like a whole bunch of popcorn from the top but I was so excited about the business cards.

Megan:

Oh my gosh. That’s funny. I probably was too, because I think I started my mood cards around then too, so, wow. Okay. Crazy connection there. All right. I’m glad to see you again, to talk to you again. So you decided that The Cookful was your idea. You wanted to run with that. What were the logistics involved? Because I wouldn’t even know how to sort through it. Did you take content from your original site or did you start completely fresh or how did you do that?

Christine:

A little bit of both. I will say, people ask me all the time for advice when they’re starting a new website or anything. This is my own personal take on this. I felt like I needed that site to launch with a lot of content already on it. I felt like I’d already done this thing. I’ve been doing this thing for four or five years at that point where I’m like, Hey, friends and family, look at my blog, look at my hobby, look at my, and I wanted this to be, Hey, everyone, look at this thing I did. You know, boom. I really think that that has something to do with why that site was so successful, but that’s sort of a separate question, you could ask me about that in a bit. But yeah, to get that, I think we launched with I want to say 60 or 80 recipes on the site and to do that, I did dig into what I already had on Cook The Story.

I took underperforming or things that had never really done anything on that site. I used the pictures and then I rewrote the recipes and rewrote the blog post content. I mean, rewrote the recipes in that I reworded them so that it doesn’t look like duplicate content exactly in the same way. Although I’m sure the Google algorithm is so smart. It’s like, Oh, Christine Pittman works at both of these sites and these are the same stuffed pepper pictures. This is the same recipe. But just keeping it a little bit fresh. I still do that sometimes. I’ll still notice that there’s a whole bunch of recipes on Cook The Story that are related in some way, that have never really done well. I’ll be like, Hmm. I wonder if I should repurpose these over to The Cookful and see if I build a whole thing around them, will something come of that.

Megan:

Super interesting. So people like you and I who have a ton of content sitting in our original blogs, this is really a good option because I’m constantly going through my content and just combing through all of that old stuff, the photos and the writing. That writing. Oh my gosh. So this really would be a great option. So you saw traction very quickly, right? Once you started your second blog, how many followers did you have within, I don’t know, six months or a year after launching?

Christine:

So it was around the three month point that we started getting a hundred thousand page views. I measure in page views. I just want to say, you said followers, I’ve never been social media for that one because I don’t know. That’s a whole other story. Social media is not my strong suit, but yeah. Page views. It was around a hundred thousand page views a month by the third month, fourth month. Then within a year it was up at 500,000 a month. Part of it is, when you have the experience having done it, there’s something different for a second site. I think that’s true. All the content on it and then of course I did leverage the other site. By then, Cook The Story was doing fairly well. I don’t know the exact numbers, but it probably was getting 600,000 page views a month. So I would link, not too much, but I would link a little bit from Cook The Story to The Cookful. So if I was doing a new soup recipe on Cook The Story and we were doing a soup series on The Cookful, I’d say, check out this soup over here on my sister site. Then the same thing, like the Pinterest account does a little bit more pinning from The Cookful than it would do from just a stranger and the social media sharing in general. So I think that that’s all leveraged together, you know?

Megan:

That’s really cool. It’s an enticing idea for me, because do you ever feel like this with your original site that you just want to throw it all away? That’s probably why you did this because I feel like newer bloggers have such an advantage over us because they don’t have that huge pile of rotting bananas. I sometimes see my site as just a heap of garbage because I have so much to go through that is not current or combed through, so much old stuff. So I love this conversation. You are giving me new eyes to think about this with. I really don’t need another thing on my plate right now, but it sounds really intriguing. So what are some basic tips that you’ve learned that you would like to impart if somebody listening is like, Oh, yes, I definitely want to do that, but I don’t know where to start. Do you have any nuggets to share that you’ve learned along the way?

Christine:

For launching a second blog? When I launched The Cookful, I guess I should step back and say that all of that inspiring The Flake, The Fish Slurp, The Soup, all of that idea came about because I hired somebody a few months before that. It was our babysitter. Her name is Madison and she was looking for a summer job and I was like, huh, do you think you could learn to edit photos and whatnot. So I hired her for the summer and what we did was I just cooked all day and shot pictures all day and she was editing pictures. Then I would go for a walk every day. I would speech-to-text the blog posts for the things that I’d cooked that day. Then I’d email them to her and she could then put the blog post together.

I don’t know if that makes sense. Then, we scheduled that out. So we were doing three to six recipes a day and she was putting them together and then we sort of scheduled it out. So I was having, I guess, two to three new posts go up a week for six or seven months. The idea was that then I would have more time to just keep up, do one or two new recipes a week and cook one or two new recipes a week. Then just keep adding to that thing in advance. What ended up happening was I freed up my time so much that my brain started doing this like, Oh, new idea, new websites, new, whatever. That gave me the space. So I would say, if you’re thinking about doing it, you need to make sure that you’re in a place in your current site, whatever that publication schedule is, whatever it is that you’re doing, that you are free to focus on something new. Because the new thing is going to take a little bit more energy and more thinking, strategizing. If that makes sense.

Megan:

That does make sense because we don’t like adding things to a full brain; that doesn’t work. That’s not a good equation. I feel like right now would not be a good time to start a second blog just because I’m trying to protect my sanity lately more than ever. You know how that goes. But eventually I think that this would be a really good option for me because I have so much content, need a way to manage it.

Christine:

The other thing like I do, I just actually started diligently doing this, but I got a plugin and I can’t remember what it was, but it was easy to find, but it’s a plugin that gets your whole database from just a list of all the content in chronological order that you have on your site published. I downloaded that as an Excel spreadsheet and I’ve been slowly working through and I dunno, it’s easier to see in this spreadsheet, sugar, warm sugar, step salad. What is that? Should I consider deleting that? Should I look into my stats and see if it gets any traffic at all? Wait, let me look at those pictures. Oh, those aren’t so terrible. Can I do something with that? Instead of looking at it through the dashboard, you don’t click on all posts and you can see it there. Instead of doing that, but looking at it in a spreadsheet in this chronology, I think I’ve been much more able to get a handle on the old content, figure out what I want to republish, figure out what I want to maybe think about getting rid of. Maybe even noticing trends that I could put some things over onto The Cookful. That’s really helped me recently.

Megan:

I have a spreadsheet. This is exactly what you’re saying, but I did it manually. Literally. Yeah. It took me a long time to get it, but it’s gold. I live by it. I look at it every single day and you’re right. You can’t look at your dashboard and get the same information and same glimpse of what is on your blog as you can with a spreadsheet. I love my spreadsheet. So if you can remember the name of this plugin, we can save other people all of that stress because between my VA and I, we spent a really long time on that, as you can imagine. That was like, at the time I had like a thousand recipes, that’s a lot of logging.

Christine:

Oh, it’s so much content. A lot of it is dead weight, as you were saying. It’s too bad. I mean, obviously everything was a good idea at some point.

Megan:

I think this is the best quote ever. At some point, everything was a good idea. It’s true!

Christine:

I find it a little heartbreaking sometimes. I’ll go into one of these old posts and I’ll read what I wrote and I have to, you have to be kind to yourself, but you know, I’ll be like, really, what were you thinking? Who were you back then?

Megan:

Oh my gosh. I know. I made these like gross. I just found these the other day. Thankfully I’ve taken them off my blog. I took them off a while ago, but I found these photos. I made these gross refrigerated biscuit dough. I put chocolate inside and then some other weird ingredient. What was it? It wasn’t strawberries. It was something really off the wall. I was like, what was that? The photos, you couldn’t even tell what it was. It looked like a little cocoon of some sort. What was I thinking?

Christine:

It’s really tricky. I started this as a hobby. I wasn’t testing recipes back then. I was making dinner for us and taking pictures of it with my point and shoot camera. That’s what the purpose of the site was. So on the one hand that feels like, that’s authentic and that’s real. That’s what I was. But now I have a business and I do test the recipe. If I start getting comments on a recipe that isn’t working or something like that is, there’s a big caution put on it. I’ve pulled a recipe.T hese things have to work and people are coming to my site and they trust me. It’s like a whole different world. But there’s this war in me. This was where it started and this is real. So it’s a hard decision to make about those old things.

Megan:

It is, it is so hard. Cause you’re right. It was authentic back then. I was truly just, like you said, making dinner for me and my family. I loved what I put on there at the time. At the time it was a great idea. But now in retrospect, I’m like, Whoa, that was very interesting. You mentioned not investing a whole lot of time in social media, on your second site. How does that change? Or how much do you invest there versus your first site?

Christine:

I do not like social media. When Facebook first came on my radar back in whatever year that was, 2002 or something. Before I was blogging, I was excited about Facebook, personal life, and Facebook. But at some point I stopped liking that and then it became this job along with my blogging and I was never able to make social media work for my site or for me. I constantly just have my mom thumbs upping everything that I do and nobody else. I’m just not good at it and I don’t love it. Now I have a social media person. I guess a VA, but she specializes in social media and she does both accounts, both Cook The Story and The Cookful. This is really for the first time in forever, do I have somebody that I think is doing a great job, that I work well with. I look at my own Facebook account, my Facebook page and I go, oh, that’s cute. I like that.

Megan:

That’s funny.

Christine:

I would either try to be doing it myself and then forget or not want to, and it would stagnate and then I’d try again. Or I would try hiring somebody. Because I don’t like social media and I’m not good at it. I never am super happy with anybody else trying to do for me either, if that makes sense. So I think that nowadays I have somebody else doing both of them now, but I still gravitate towards Cook The Story. If I am going to share something, if I’m going to say something myself, if I’m going to go in there, it’s always Cook The Story and The Cookful, probably because it’s contributor based. I almost feel like Cook The Story and Christine Pittman are synonymous in my head on some level. Whereas The Cookful is a whole bunch of different people and a whole bunch of different things. So I don’t feel that draw to it.

Megan:

So Cook The Story is almost like your baby, your original blog baby, that you’ll always consider yours.

Christine:

Yes, it is mine.

Megan:

I can see how that would evolve for me too, because I feel such a strong tie to my blog that I too started over 10 years ago. I mean, I’ve stuck with it all this time and I’ve poured my heart and my soul into it. So that would always be probably my original tie as well. But I do see benefits to doing this. I’m curious, do you know of any other bloggers who have really dug into this?

Christine:

I do know that there are people doing it all over the place, right? I don’t want to name names because I can’t remember which ones have turned out to be successful and which ones have stopped doing it. But I do know that people have started niche blogs. I think it was a trend probably around 2015 or even a little bit before that, when that niche word started coming out and you go to Blogher food and there’s somebody who’s been blogging for three months and already has a million page views a month because they focus on, I’m going to say green smoothies, but whatever it was. Kale chips or something. So I think a lot of people either niche their own blog more or rebranded, or started a second blog that was more niche.

I do know that that was a thing that was happening. What I’ve been noticing more now, from the Adthrive, Facebook group and Mediavine Facebook group, and different places where it’s not just food bloggers, you see people talking about having six or seven blogs and they have maybe 10 or 20,000 pages a month for each one, but they’re doing affiliate sales and they’re super niche. So the people who come to them are buying the things that are affiliate linked. I just saw a conversation about people buying already established blogs, like small, like 10,000 pages a month. They’re buying them for not very expensive, but they already have the backbone in place. I’ve seen a lot of that.

Megan:

That’s intriguing too. That’s stuff to ponder. So I am trying to get my husband to join me in business. I mean, it will eventually happen, but it’s just a matter of when, and we’re talking about what could he do because he’s not that typical coming in with a technical background or anything like that. Like some spouses are, so my wheels are turning about this because he could really do a spinoff on something that aligns with my content because he loves to cook. He loves making drinks, he loves making appetizers. So thank you, Christine. This is great.

Christine:

You’re welcome. If he did some niche blog related to yours, and then you link from yours, linked from your social platforms. People debate whether it makes more sense to just start niching more on the first site that’s already doing well or to expand. I had a lot of success and I’ll say there’s different things that I like. I just mentioned that I’m in the Mediavine groups. I run Mediavine ads on The Cookful and I run Adthrive ads on Cook The Story. I get enough traffic on both that I have points of contact in both places. I’m not being weird about it, but if ever I run into trouble with one, I have instant access to the other to switch over, or I also get the benefit of seeing what both platforms are doing. We know we have this crazy the cookie thing that’s changing in the near future where our advertising stuff is changing. I am getting insight from both. I’m seeing what’s happening in both worlds. I think that’s really valuable.

Megan:

That’s smart actually. I never thought to do that either because once you get into one network, it just kind of is in your brain that you need to stick with that network. But not necessarily. I don’t know why I thought that; just one of those things you get stuck in.

Christine:

I’m not advising that people jumped ship or anything. I’m just sharing that I think I benefit from being in both.

Megan:

No, I saw your point of view. So what other kind of general tips do you have? You’ve given really great tips. Hire out, get help. Make sure you are in a place where you can actually dedicate time to a second blog. I think that’s a huge one because so often we dive into a project and we don’t have time for it and then we get burned out. So that’s a big one. Create a spreadsheet. If you have that plugin, we can put it in your show notes maybe.

Christine:

I’ll find it for sure.

Megan:

Just to save a lot of time and hassle because wow. That’s a lot of work. Then you’ve given good reasons to why it would be a good idea to do this. So any other things that we can put in people’s brains about how or why?

Christine:

It’s interesting. If you are already blogging and you’re already seeing success in what you’re doing, I feel like often, when you want to do something new or engage in something new, we jump off into something completely new. All of a sudden I’m going to start making Tik ToK videos, or I’m going to start a podcast or I’m going to start. I think all those things are great. If you’re passionate about it, do it. But here’s something that you actually already know all about. You’re now an expert; you’ve spent however long learning all of this. If you want to jump into a new, creative, exciting project, you can do this and it can be totally new and totally exciting, but still use all of those skills you already have instead of having to go and get new ones, you know?

Megan:

Oh, that’s a great point too. Absolutely. Especially if you’ve been doing it for even a number of years, even two years. You likely know a lot more than anyone else who’s never been blogging. So yeah. That’s a great point. This has been great, Christine. Wow. Thank you. I just have a fresh new perspective on this. When my time opens up a little bit, hopefully later this summer, I will be considering this. So you have some words of inspiration, not along the lines of our topic today, that you were talking to me about a little bit before we pressed record. So I want to hear those and so does everybody else?

Christine:

So I feel like when you and I both started going to blogging conferences and all of that way back when, there was a lot of conversation about finding your voice and they meant in terms of writing, you’re blogging, you’re writing blog posts, finding your voice and your audience will come. I think that’s all true, but I want to spin that on its head. I want to say to bloggers, like find your own blogging voice and I mean, what you’re good at. Is it YouTube? Is it a great recipe? Is it SEO? Really focus on that. Don’t worry so much about what everybody else is doing. I feel like we’re all a little incestuous. We’re in all these groups, we’re doing all this stuff and you see, Oh, she’s really successful on Facebook. Oh, he just jumped on Tik ToK and Oh, she’s doing that. We feel like we need to chase everybody and do what everybody else is doing. My biggest piece of advice is figure out what it is that you’re great at and what’s working for you and your blog and what you like and focus more on that, than on worrying about what everybody else is doing.

Megan:

Shiny object syndrome, right? There’s so many different things that pull us away, pull our attention away from what we love every day, if we allow it to. So that is really solid advice. Thank you, Christine so much for taking the time out of your day for this. This has been amazing. We will put together a show notes page for you, and we will put in there that plugin, if we ever find it, because I think that would be awesome to deliver to people. Your show notes can be found at eatblogtalk.com/cookthestory. Christine, I know you’ve already kind of said this, but will you reiterate where everyone can find you online?

Christine:

The best place to find me is Cook The Story everywhere except for Tik Tok. I’m not there yet. But yeah, all my social media is Cook The Story. If people can email me [email protected] is actually my favorite email address to give out. That goes directly to me. If people have blogging questions or anything like that, I am happy to talk with people anytime.

Megan:

Oh, that is so generous of you. Thank you so much. And thanks again, Christine. Thank you for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you next time.

Outro:

We’re glad you could join us on this episode of Eat Blog Talk. For more resources based on today’s discussion, as well as show notes and an opportunity to be on a future episode of the show, be sure to head to eatblogtalk.com. If you feel that hunger for information, we’ll be here to feed you on Eat Blog Talk.