Episode 426: Why You Should Repurpose Content and Why AirTable Makes It Easy with Alexandria Drzazgowski

EBT426 – Alexandria Drzazgowski

Intro: Food bloggers. Hi, how are you today? Thank you so much for tuning in to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. This is the place for food bloggers to get information and inspiration to accelerate their blog’s growth and ultimately help you to achieve their freedom, whether that’s financial, personal, or professional.

I’m Megan Porta and I’ve been a food blogger for over 12 years. I understand how isolating food blogging can be at times. I’m on a mission to motivate, inspire, and most importantly, let each and every food blogger, including you, know that you are heard and supported. 

Do you feel like you have a handle on your blog content? This can be something that can create so much mental clutter. at least for me personally and the bloggers I talk to, that it stops us in our tracks from actually producing quality content moving forward. So this is a topic that I talk about with Alexandria Drzazgowski from The Foreign Fork. In this episode, she talks about her amazing Airtable knowledge and how she uses Airtable to keep track of all of her blog content, and how she also uses it to repurpose content from different platforms and season to season and anyway you can repurpose content. She talks through so many valuable things in this episode. She gets really deep. Also, she talks about how just to simply get started with Airtable because it’s not as overwhelming as you might think. So tune in. This is episode number 426 sponsored by RankIQ. 

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Megan Porta: Alexandria Drzgalski is the food blogger behind The Foreign Fork, a project where she is cooking a meal from every country in the world. After backpacking to 15 countries in Europe and taking cooking classes in each one, Alexandria decided to take her project of cooking around the world home with her.

She started her blog in 2018 and to date has cooked over 400 recipes from over 85 countries. The Foreign Fork has been featured in BuzzFeed, the Detroit News, and Elite Daily, and is the recipient of the Savour Blog Award for Most Groundbreaking Voice. Most importantly, Alexandra is proud to have helped over 5 million readers across the world put some culture in their kitchens. Alexandria, hello. How are you doing? I’m so happy to have you here again.

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Hi, Megan. I’m great. I am so excited to be here again. I always love chit-chatting with you, so I’m really excited. 

Megan Porta: The last time we talked was in 2020 on the podcast, so it’s been nearly three years. That’s crazy.

Alexandria Drzazgowski: I know. 

Megan Porta: Time flies. Today we’re going to talk about Airtable. I know you’re the Airtable queen. I heard you present at Tastemaker and it was such a good presentation, so I am super excited to get into that. But first, we want to know if you have a second fun fact to share with us. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes, I do. So I was trying to brainstorm the most obscure, random, fun fact I could think about myself. This is what I came up with. When I was probably around maybe eight or so years old, my aunt, she owns a horse ranch in California. So we would always go out there to visit her for a couple of weeks in the summer and ride her horses and things like that. She used to compete in barrel racing in rodeos when we would go to her house. So one summer we went to her house and we went to one of the rodeos that she was competing in. She had me compete in mutton busting, which is, as a kid, you get onto the back of a sheep and ride the sheep around similar to how an adult rides a bull. You ride the sheep around until it knocks you off and then whoever stays on the longest wins. I was the champion of the rodeo in the mutton-busting competition. 

Megan Porta: Okay. I have the funniest visual in my mind of little Alexandria, just arms flying in the air. That is hilarious. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: So they have these rodeo clowns so that when you fall off the rodeo clowns will keep the sheep away from you. So when I was riding I slipped off of the sheep but I still really wanted to win. I’m very competitive and so I was holding on to its belly like underneath it riding it like a sloth and the clowns kept telling me, let go! But I really wanted to win so I did not let go and I did in fact, win. 

Megan Porta: Okay. That was a fun fact like none other. I don’t think anyone will ever beat that. Visuals we all have in our minds are great. I love you even more. That just says so much about you. You’re unwilling to not lose, right? You’re just determined to win, even if it requires holding on to the underbelly of the sheep.

Alexandria Drzazgowski: My mom said when I got off, I had fur underneath my fingernails. 

Megan Porta: Oh my gosh.

Alexandria Drzazgowski: It hits me hard. 

Megan Porta: Wow. Okay. That’s amazing. Thank you for sharing that. I love it. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: My pleasure. Thanks for giving me that. 

Megan Porta: Yes. Rarely do you have an opportunity to share such things, right? This provided you with that outlet. Okay. So Airtable, you are the queen. I love all that you have to say about Airtable and how you utilize it. It’s so powerful. I think people are intimidated by it because they think it’s more complicated than it is, but it’s really easy and simple to get into and it’s free and I know you use it to repurpose content and that’s what you’re going to talk about today. So how did you get into this? How did you start getting into the powers of Airtable to repurpose?

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. So I absolutely love Airtable. But I didn’t start using it specifically as a reason or as a method to repurpose my content. That just came from using Airtable in general after a little bit. So the original reason that I started using Airtable was that I did not really have a list or a master log of all of the content that I had on my blog for a really long time. I kept that list running in my head, and when you’re the one making the content, you remember what you have and what you don’t have, up until a point. But at some point in time, I ended up having over 350 blog posts and recipes. At that point, it starts to get a little fuzzy. For a couple of years, I could rely on my memory. But after a couple of years of blogging, I had so much content that I would get confused and I couldn’t remember if I’d made something or not. Then all of my content was just getting lost. I was forgetting what I had and what I had to share and things like that. So my original purpose for using Airtable was I just wanted to have a system where I just had one big list of all of the content that I had on my blog with some defining information about it. So I had originally started by using Google Sheets, and I had tried to use Asana and a couple of other similar types of formats for keeping control of my content. But it wasn’t until I found Airtable that everything really clicked.

So for people that maybe haven’t used Airtable or don’t know what it is, it looks like a Google Sheet, so it has a similar grid format. But it is so much more intuitive to add additional information and sort through that information. So when I tried using Google Sheets, it just felt very archaic. I didn’t have the knowledge to figure out how to sort by the information that I had or anything. I was not trained in how to do the coding and things like that on Excel. So when I came across Air Table, it just was so much more intuitive to me. It had the pretty colors, but it still had the very familiar setup of a Google Sheet, but then learning what to do with that information was a lot easier on Airtable than it was on Google Sheets. So that’s how I came across Airtable, and then I used it to set up a master post log of all of the content that I have on my website. Then repurposing content came after that.

Megan Porta: Okay. The price, I know it’s free up to a certain, is it a number of cells or do you know how that works?

Alexandria Drzazgowski: I think it’s free. I don’t know. I have a lot of bases and views and things like that on Air Table. I have not had to pay for more yet. So I don’t know the exact number, but I do know that I’m still using the free version. Some areas that you might have to consider doing a paid version is for example if you want different colors, there are some colors that come with it, which is fine. Then if you want like the pretty pastel colors, you have to pay for the paid version. Similar to that, there’s also, if you have other employees or virtual assistants or something like that, that you want to give them their own private access to Airtable, then you have to pay per additional person that’s using your Airtable. I personally don’t want to pay to do that. It can get rather expensive. So there’s nothing proprietary in my Airtable. I just give my VAs my login and then I don’t have to pay for it. 

Megan Porta: I did that accidentally once. I did the share, but I did the share wrong. So make sure if you’re sharing a template, you do it the correct way. Because I shared it as if I were adding people to my team, like collaborators or something. I didn’t know it and I shared it with 10 people. Then I got the bill and it was like, you owe a thousand dollars. I freaked. But thankfully their customer service is so good. I reached out and explained. I was like, I did not mean to do this. This was a total accident. They’re like, no worries. They reimbursed me for the whole thing. And then they showed me how to do it the correct way. So if you are sharing, I always Google, how to share with read-only access or something like that. So something to keep in mind. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: That is a very good tip.

Megan Porta: So you now use it to repurpose. So let’s talk about that. What is repurposing? Can you define that for us? 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes, so repurposing content is the act of reusing or reformatting the content that you have to give it as much life as you possibly can on as many platforms as you possibly can so that you can have more content for the same amount of work. We love that, work smarter, not harder.

Megan Porta: Yes, absolutely. Then do you have an idea in your mind about how many posts you should have before you start thinking about repurposing? 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Ooh, that’s a good question. I don’t have a singular number that is this is the number that you, just start repurposing content. I feel like you could start repurposing content right away because there are different methods of repurposing content. So you are going to have different audiences on different platforms. You’re going to need the same information to be coming in different formats based on what platform you’re using. So there are a couple of different definitions of what you could think of as repurposing content. But at its very base, to me, you can get more complicated, but at its very basic level to me, repurposing content just means using that same information that you have and sharing it in as many places as possible and as many different formats as possible, to reach a larger audience and make sure that you are spreading the word about the thing that you’re teaching about far and wide. So with that being the definition, you can repurpose your content with your very first post. You can do something different on Tik TOK than you do on Instagram. Then you do, for example, if you’re going on a podcast and you have something to share, et cetera. 

Megan Porta: Okay, then why do you think it’s so important to do this constantly? I’m assuming that you have an ongoing loop of repurposing and why is it so important to do that?

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. First of all, I really need to rely on my systems for repurposing content because I’m at a point in my blogging career where I, you know I’ve hustled a lot, but now I’m tired of the hustling. So I want to be able to do the same amount of work but have five times the content that I can share. So what I have right now, just to go back a little bit so that you can understand, is I have this master post log on Airtable and it does have the URL to my blog post. It has the name of my blog post, but it also has a lot of defining characteristics of the different blog posts so that I can group them in ways that I need to keep track of them. So for example, my blog, the premise of my blog is that I’m cooking a meal from every country in the world. So one of my columns on Air Table is keeping track of what country that recipe is from. I also have columns that are based on holidays or seasons. So repurposing content for me is really important as well, because when I do, for example, if I have an Italy week on my website, I have this list that shows me all of the content I have for Italy that I can repurpose, even though I made Italy a couple of months ago. Or if it’s winter time and I want to start sharing winter recipes, this is one big master log that just has all of my winter recipes. So having a system is a way for me to make sure that I am continuing to go back to the content I already made before and give it a new life, make sure that it’s seen on my platforms. Then also if there’s ever a time in which you want to start a new platform, that’s a great method as well to make sure that you use the same content that you already have to get in front of a new audience. 

Megan Porta: All of this requires organization, right? So I think you need a system in place in order to do this effectively. Otherwise, like you were saying earlier, your brain can only handle so much. Then there’s a point where it’s like, Oh my gosh, I have no idea what I did or what I need to do. Then I encounter food bloggers like this all the time that are in that space where they’re like, I’m just so confused. I don’t know what to do next. They don’t have this log or a master sheet for them to refer to. So it’s super important to have a system. Yes?

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. I will admit the first time that I heard about doing a post log, I was listening to a very old episode of Food Blogger Pro, I think like maybe a couple of months into when I started my blog. Bjork was talking about, every single time we post something, we put it in this content log and we have a list of the name and the URL. He was explaining the idea of a content log. I remember I was like driving for my day job and I was listening to that podcast and I was like, I don’t need to know this. This is not something that I need. I know what my content is and a couple of years later, I was having flashbacks to the episode. I was sitting at my computer and I was trying to remember how I could make a content calendar for the entire winter. I couldn’t remember what I had and I had actual flashbacks to listening to that podcast. I was like, okay, I do need to do this. Sorry. Sorry for thinking that I didn’t need to. 

Megan Porta: I know. I think somehow we feel like, oh, I don’t need to. I can remember. I was that way with podcast guests forever. I was remembering everyone I talked to and remembering the episode. Then there was a point where I’m like, Oh crap. Because you just get to this mental place where you can’t take in any more information. So I actually have an Air Table base for all of my podcast episodes and the guests and the number and the date and all of the information that I need because we just need that. We can’t assume that we’re going to be able to handle that in our minds forever. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Exactly. Especially when now that you’ve had your podcast for so long and you have so many episodes, you definitely need a way to just keep track of that. So that’s awesome. I know you use Airtable too and you really like it as well. So that’s cool to hear that you use it for the podcast too. 

Megan Porta: Yes, I love it. It’s my favorite. Okay, so talk to us about how you use Airtable to do repurposing. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. Okay. So because this is an audio format, I’m just going to try to talk through how I have my Airtable set up and the different methods that I use as examples. Some of the things I’m going to share with you are just examples of how I use it, but there are infinite ways that you can store your content on Airtable. So this is how I do it, but also keep in mind that the things I need to know might not be exactly the things that the people listening to this need to know, and they’re, it’s really easy for them to take this knowledge and then adjust as necessary. So on my Airtable, I have one master post log. That has the name of each article of mine, the URL to it, and then, like I said, some defining characteristics of each of those blog posts. So that could be things like I mentioned, holidays, seasons, country, etc. Then I also have some different columns that are just very simple checkboxes. So there will be a check box column, for example, shared on Facebook or shared on Tik Tok, shared on YouTube shorts. Then I also have a column next to each of those that have the date that I last shared it on those platforms. So based on all of that information, there are then different functions that you can use on Airtable to sort all the information that you have in your master post log based on the different columns and the different check boxes that you’ve inserted into this page. It sounds really complicated. It is not complicated at all. There’s a little button at the top that says filter or group and you can just select the things that you want it to pull out. What will happen then is it will show you only the information that matches the criteria that you’ve set.

Megan Porta: You’re doing a good job of explaining this. I’m picturing it in my mind. Yeah. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. Okay. So I was going to ask you any questions on that, but that’s good to know. For example, my favorite function on Airtable that I use the most frequently is the filter function. So once you select the filter button, there will be a list of all of the columns that you have on your entire Airtable. You can go through and check them and check which ones you want the content to be filtered by. So for example, if I wanted to show all of my seasonal content that needed to be reshot. I would have a column on my Airtable that’s just on my master log, and every single time I put an article into my master log, there would be a column on my Airtable that has a place for me to fill in the season. I would fill in every time I post a recipe, if I think that this is winter-leaning content, or summer content that fits like a summer food, I would put that season in that column. Then I also have a column that’s called up-to-date photos. So every time I post a new article, I have my up-to-date photos, the checkbox is checked there because all of my photos, in that case, are new. But going back to my blog, there are a lot of photos that are not up to date. The checkbox in that column for those really old photos would not be checked. For example, if winter’s coming up and I want to filter my content by the winter content that’s coming up that needs new photos because the photos are bad, I would just be able to filter based on those two columns. Where I could say show me all of the columns that are winter and also all of the ones that are not having up to date photos and it would just pull up all of those specific posts that match that criteria and then I’d be able to use that as a checklist to go through my content from there. So that’s a basic example of how the filter function works. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, that’s amazing. You can filter different columns at the same time, is what you’re saying. I feel like in Google Sheets, it gets a little more confusing. Like you were saying, I don’t know all of the equations or whatever they call it there. But in Airtable, it’s just you just filter and that’s it. It’s so easy. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes, my fiancé is a data analyst by day and so his entire job all the time is going through different Google Sheets or Excel spreadsheets. He has to literally key in code in order to have it filtered by columns and stuff. So on this, it’s just so much more user-friendly, and intuitive. You don’t have to be a data analyst to be able to do this. You can just click the button and it will do all of that hard work for you. 

Megan Porta: I haven’t even had to pull up Airtable. That was such a good explanation. I think everyone’s going to know exactly what you’re talking about.

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Thank you. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, so nice. I know it’s hard to describe visually something when people can’t see what you’re talking about. So you did awesome. Then as far as you mentioned the view, it’s like a spreadsheet view that is the default. But you can also switch views. So can you talk about the different views?

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes, there are a few different views. Also for anyone that’s listening to this, if you’re really interested in Airtable, you can also pull up an Airtable on your computer while you’re listening to this and click through the views while I’m talking through them if that’s helpful for you. There are different views. So the main one that I use is the grid view. That’s why I’m speaking to it. That’s my personal comfort zone. I like to see my content displayed that way, because like I said, it’s very intuitive to me. We’ve been using a grid format for a long time, in school and stuff like that growing up.

I do personally look at the grid view the most, but if you are not keen on having your information displayed in that grid format, there are also different ways where it will take that exact same information. You don’t have to do anything to make it show up differently, but it will show you different ways of seeing that same content in a different format that speaks better to your brain.

For example, one of the different views that they have is a calendar view. So you can have all of that same content that’s on your main log. Instead, you can have it show up on a calendar based off of the date in one of your columns. So if I want to see the last time that I’ve posted something on Instagram, for example, I do use the calendar view for making a content calendar coming up. So I will put in my master post log, I will put a column that says share on Instagram and then put the date in. Then I’ll be able to view that on a calendar view instead of on the grid view so that it can be more visual for my brain. So that’s one way. There’s also a Kanban view, which is tiles that you can move the tiles around based on, in this example, let’s say you have your master post log, but you have the example I was using before of the content needs to be reshot. You could have these little tiles that all show in a row and then you can drag and drop them down the page as you move through your checklist of things you need to do for the post. So that’s another way that you can sort them. Those are I think the two main other ones besides the grid. 

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Megan Porta: The one you just mentioned is similar to Trello, right? So if you use Trello, I think that would be something that made sense to you. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. Yeah. It’s very similar to Trello, but then you also have the added bonus of having the other Airtable methods of using it, so if you like Trello and you like the view of Trello, you can emulate that exact same thing on Airtable, but then also have the added capabilities of Airtable, so I still really recommend it.

Megan Porta: Something I use occasionally is the form. So it’s a really easy form that you can just pull up and then you can type in specific questions. So if you wanted to send out a survey to your audience, for example, you can set it up so it looks like a form, it actually looks like the survey, but then you can switch to the GridView and see people’s responses in GridView, which is so cool. It’s like magic when people fill out the survey and then submit it. It just magically turns into this amazing grid with all the answers. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: That is awesome. I actually have not used the form. I know that the form exists because I’ve filled out an Airtable form for other people if they’ve sent one to me. So I’ve been a user on that, but I have never been the one to set up a form and have it populate. So that’s really cool to use that. 

Megan Porta: I’m a neglectful food blogger these days, but I do it more for surveys or if I’m trying to, just gauge responses for something for Eat Blog Talk, I’ll just send out a quick survey that way. It’s so easy. I highly recommend checking that out too. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yeah. That’s cool. I’ll keep that in mind. 

Megan Porta: Yes. Okay, so you talked through some of the different views that people can use, and then before you mentioned the filter function, are there other functions that we should have on our radar? 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes, so the filter function is the one that I love the most, but there are also a couple of other ones that you can use. So there is the group function. In that case, it will take all of the content that you have on your post log and just reformat it to be grouped by whatever criteria you want it to be grouped by. So another example of this would be, because my blog is cooking from every country, a lot of the tags that I do on my content are based off of what country the food is from. So when I do the group function, I will just say group by the country column and it will pull up all of my Afghanistan dishes in one group, and then right below that will be my Armenian dishes in one group and it will just go through the entire alphabet and have all of my content with all of the rest of the information about it also still on the sheet, but now it is just reformatted to be grouped by whatever criteria you want to be grouped by. So you could also do that for the holidays. So you could have all of your Mother’s Day ones and then your Father’s Day ones and your Fourth of July ones, all in different little groupings so that you can still see them all together. So that is the one that I use the second most.

Megan Porta: I don’t use that one. I feel like I get confused with filter and group. So the group is more like just chunking them together in little batches? 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. The filter gets rid of all of the ones that don’t match specific criteria. The group keeps all of the exact same information on your spreadsheet, but it just reformats it to be in a different order based on the criteria that you want.

Megan Porta: So the group doesn’t eliminate anything.

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Correct. If I wanted to see only my Italian posts, I would filter based on Italy and it would only keep my Italian posts on there. If I wanted to see every single country I’ve ever cooked with all of them being grouped with the rest of the recipes from that country, then I’d use the group function.

Megan Porta: Okay. Gotcha. Okay, any other functions you love? 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. One of the last ones that I use a lot is the sort function. So that, again, keeps all of the content that you have, but it puts it in order, so either you can have it be in order alphabetically based on a column that you have, but what I use it most often is putting it in order based off of date by a specific column.

For example, I have a column that is labeled last shared on Instagram. Then every time I share something on Instagram, I will just go into my Airtable and put the date that it has been shared on Instagram. Then I have a subview of my main post log, so it has all the information that my master post log has, but instead of it being formatted by the article that has most recently been shared on my blog, instead, I have the sort function enabled on this subview. So it takes all of the content that I have in my blog, but instead, it will sort it based on the date that it was last shared on Instagram from oldest to newest. So there’s always a running list of Oh, I have this piece of content that I really like, but it hasn’t been shared on Instagram since 2021. It’s now 2023. My audience has grown by many thousands of people. That would be a good reminder of, Oh, this is something that I could reshare. So I use the sort function based on dates a lot. 

Megan Porta: Then if you combine some of those functions, can you save them as a template or something? Do you know what I mean? 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. So if I was going to use the sort function for the last shared on Instagram, I only wanted to share the ones that have beautiful date photos or something. Or for example, now that Instagram has reels, say I have a column in my master post log that is, I have a hands and pans video of this recipe. So I could sort by the last shared on Instagram, and it will show me my last shared on Instagram. But then I could combine the sort function with the filter function, and I could filter out any posts on my entire website that I don’t have a video. So now it will show me all of the posts I have a video for, and it will put them in order of the last shared on Instagram. So then I could share one of the recipes that I have that has a video that hasn’t been shared on Instagram since 2021. Then that is something that I can pull from to just put on my content calendar. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, and then there’s a little handy clickable button on the left if you’re looking on the desktop. Do you use this on mobile? I don’t use it on mobile. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: I use it on mobile just for my content calendar because I need to access that every day. But other than that, I don’t love to use Airtable on mobile. It’s mostly a desktop application for me. 

Megan Porta: I feel like that would make me crazy, so I just do it on a desktop.

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yeah, it’s hard. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. But if you click on views, if you’re following along with Alexandria and everything she’s saying, you can experiment with that. As she said earlier, it’s not overwhelming. This is so much easier than it probably seems. That views panel confused me at first because I was like, where do I find the Kanban or the calendar? But it’s just right there. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yeah, and going off of that too, I always have a ton of views saved on that left-hand column like you were talking about. So I have my master post log and that’s always the top of my list. That is the main one that I use. But then I also create subviews where it copies that exact same information. Then I use the functions like the filter or the group function or the sort function to meet my needs. But I save those at all times. So I have a forever view on Airtable that is a sub-view of my main one. I just have it filtered based on Christmas recipes. And that’s just like always stays on the left side of my Airtable. So when I add something new into my master post log, for example, over Christmas, if I’m going to be making a Christmas cookie recipe, I’d put it into my master post log. I would tag it with Christmas. Then that sub view would just notice that a new Christmas recipe has been tagged and it would just filter it into my Christmas view that’s just living in my Airtable at all times. So when Christmas comes and I want to see what my Christmas recipes are, the ones that I’ve been making, throughout the last couple of months or whatever, will just automatically be populated already into that Christmas view. I have those saved for so many different things so that me or my VA or whomever, has these already pre-made views that I made years ago that are just constantly continuing to keep updated based on the new content that I add to. 

Megan Porta: Yes. Amazing. Glad you talked through that. Are there any other functions that you want to mention, Alexandria? 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: I think those are the main ones that I use. The filter, group, and sort are the three good ones to know about.

Megan Porta: Alright. So as far as repurposing goes, would you mind talking us through your system? Do you have Instagram, Facebook, et cetera? Then how do you systematize that? 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. So there are a couple of differences. I’m going to show you some examples of different ways that you can repurpose content. So I’ll run through what some examples of those would be and then tell you how I would do that on Airtable.

So for example, posting a cookie recipe on Instagram in 2022 and then again on 2023. That is an example of repurposing content because you shared something a while ago, you have a new audience now. That would be a case in which you could repurpose the same content you already have to be shared on the same platform. So in that case, I use my sort function where I sort by date. I noticed all the recipes that haven’t been shared in the last couple of years, and then I reshared them. So I have a view already set up where it’s, Instagram last shared. So when I’m making my content calendar, I’ll just pull that up and say, Oh, this hasn’t been shared in a while. I just pop it onto my account content calendar.

Another example of repurposing content would be reusing the same content on a different platform. So that would be posting a cookie recipe on Instagram and then reposting it to TikTok, either on the same day or months, years later. There were a lot of things that I shared on Instagram. Once I started TikTok, I had all this content made that had just never been shared on TikTok. So I made a different function of things that need to be shared on Tik TOK. It’s a list of all of the content that I have that has a video. So the column for video has a check mark, but the column for shared on Tik Tok does not have a checkmark. So I filtered my content based off of those two criteria and it gives me a list of all of the content that I already have that has just never been seen by my Tik Tok audience. So I will have that as a view. And Whenever I’m making my Tik TOK content calendar, I will just pull that up and say, Oh, Tik Tok hasn’t seen this yet. I’ll just pull it over. I have two more. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, go for it. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Reformatting a piece of media to be used in a different way on a different platform. So Megan, I actually use you as an example for this because I listened to your really awesome Tastemaker’s speech on podcasting. You were talking about how you can take the content you already have on your blog and reformat that into a script for a podcast. That’s always the example that I think of when it comes to this. In that case, you would be able to make columns based on whether has this been shared in a podcast yet. Does it have scriptable information? For example, a how-to or an explanation type of thing. If you’re having a cooking podcast, you can make a column, would this be a good podcast script and have I shared it on the podcast yet? There will be a column for that. Then lastly, redoing posts after years of improvement is another example of just repurposing content because it’s the same content you already have. You know that your recipe works, you know that it’s a delicious recipe, but maybe you need to have updated photos or updated videos. So in that case, I do have different views on Airtable that are sorted by if I have old photos or if I need a video, or if it needs to be rewritten based on new keywords. I have columns for those things and I have views that combine all of those things that let me know, Oh, this is a post from 2019 that needs new photos. It needs a new video. It needs to be rewritten and I can republish this like a brand new post because it’s so old that it can be re-shared with my audience just like it’s new and they probably wouldn’t even realize. I have views based on that too so that when I am busy and I don’t have time to develop a brand new recipe, I can knock that out in an afternoon because I already know it’s going to work.

Megan Porta: Yeah. Amazing. Then you have one last one. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: The podcast was one of them, and then we’re redoing the blog post with the other one. Yeah. 

Megan Porta: Awesome. How many columns do you have? I feel like hearing you talk through, I’m like, that’s a lot of columns and a lot of management. But I know that making the case for it’s totally worth it, but I can understand someone listening might be just intimidated by that.

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes, that’s a good question. Let me see how many columns I have. I have the post name, URL, country, and then post types. That’s if it’s a recipe, a roundup, or an FAQ. The date it was published, if I have a video for it, the social media platforms it has been shared on, Pinterest and stuff, the season that goes with it, and then If it has a web story.

Megan Porta: Oh, that’s a good one. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yeah. A couple of other things that I personally need to keep track of, because they were things that weren’t done a long time ago if it has FAQ schema or nutrition information added and things like that. So it does sound like a lot to manage, but it’s actually not that bad when you just have a new recipe go live on your website. You just create a new line item. Just go through and fill out the information about it two times a week or so I’m just pulling this up and then I’m typing in the country it goes to. I’m typing in if it’s a recipe or not. Whenever I schedule once a week, I’ll sit down and make my content calendar for the week and I’ll just update the dates in there too. So once you build it into your workflow, it’s not overwhelming to keep up with at all. The initial setup can be overwhelming, but I have some tips for that to get your initial setup rocking and rolling in a really easy and intuitive way. Then after that, it just becomes very part of the process. It takes me two or three minutes to update my Airtable when I have a new post go up after that. 

Megan Porta: Maybe that’s the initial startup is the overwhelming part. So do you want to talk through that for anyone who’s, this sounds great, but I don’t know if I have that time to invest.

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. There are two different ways that you can go about getting an initial Airtable set up. As I said, is the hefty part. Getting it set up and filling in all of the content, all the information on the content you already have, that is an investment of time. There’s no sugarcoating that. But once you have it, then it’s not that hard after that. So it’s just the process of getting it set up that you need to make as easy on you as possible. So you can either do it manually or there’s an automated side to this. So when I set up my personal Airtable, I didn’t know that there was a way to automate this.

So back in 2021, I think I sat down for literally a full week. I was with my parents for the week. So I didn’t have my stuff to be doing my cooking or anything. All my working hours were like me manually making a new line item for every single article that I have, and then filling in all the information and it took me so long. It took me days. Then I came home and I showed my fiance, who’s the data analyst. Oh, look at what I did. I put it all together. It took me ages and he looked at it and he was like, why would you do it like that? Why did you do it manually? I was like, I don’t know. I just thought that was the only way. So based on that information, we actually looked into it together and there was a much easier way to do that. So don’t make the same mistake I did. I’m gonna tell you the plugin for anybody listening to this if you want to do it There is a plugin called WP All export. It exports any WordPress data to like an XML or CSV file and you can select the information that you want it to collect about all of the recipes and posts that are already live on your website. It will just turn that into a big list for you. Then you can just import that directly into Airtable, which is very intuitive. It has a little import function. You click that and you click the Excel file. 

Megan Porta: I did the same mistake you did. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: You did? You did it all manually too?

Megan Porta: I have probably yeah, five times or more the amount of posts that you have. So it was crazy. It’s embarrassing to admit how much time I spent on that. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. Same. It is embarrassing to admit, especially because then once we found this, we started looking through it and I was like, are you kidding me? I could have done this in a couple of hours.

Megan Porta: Oh my gosh, yeah. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: The thing to know about that WP All Export plugin is that it will export all of the information that you have told it to, but it does make it a little clunky to import into Airtable. So it’s certainly a lot easier than what I did. You get a list of information in seconds rather than hours or days. But it still does have a little bit of manual work that can be alleviated a lot if you know how to do the codings and the functions and the formats on Excel in order to get it to pop into your table really beautifully. I personally do not have that level of knowledge. So having that plugin would make everything way better than what I did, but not as easy as it possibly could be because I don’t know how to code how to organize the data that it has given me. So I do also have my fiancee that I was telling you about that helped me figure all this out. He does Airtable setups for food bloggers all the time. That’s something that he absolutely loves to do. He has so much fun doing it and he loves calling me over when one’s done and being like, look at all of this, look at all the cool things I made it do that they wanted. 

Megan Porta: We need people like him.

Alexandria Drzazgowski: He geeks out about it so much. If it’s something that you like, really want to get an Airtable set up, but you don’t know how to do it, or you don’t want to worry about learning the plugin, or you don’t want to worry about learning how to do the additional stuff that you still have to do when you have the plugin, you can reach out to him. He’s very affordable and he loves to do it. So I can give you his email.

Megan Porta: Yeah. Awesome. I know Melissa from Mama Gourmand uses him. It’s Matt, right? 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. Yes. 

Megan Porta: She raves about him. She’s you wouldn’t believe what he did with my content. It’s just magical. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Oh, what a good compliment. He’ll be overjoyed to hear that. Yes. So his email, if anyone’s interested in getting his help, it’s Ulmer, U L M E R M A T. So Matt, but with just one T, at gmail.com. 

Megan Porta: Awesome. That’s awesome. Then what else do we need to know about getting started? 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: With Airtable? 

Megan Porta: Yes. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: I would just say my biggest advice for getting started is to do it before you think you need to do it. Because don’t be like Megan and I, where you think you’ve got it handled until one day your brain is swimming and you’re like, what the heck, I don’t know what to do. It is so much easier to just get it started from the beginning way before you ever think you need it. Then keep it going instead of going back and doing what we did. So if you are listening to this, starting right now is easier than starting anytime after this. So no matter where you are now, start now. Then your life will be easier moving forward. 

Megan Porta: Somehow we all think we’re immune to being overwhelmed by this sort of thing. I was like that. I’m like, no, I am the rare person who can remember everything, every detail about every human that I talk to. We can’t do that. It adds so much clutter to our minds. The more content we create, the more it builds up. It’s crazy. So I work with food bloggers all the time who are just to the point where they can’t. They’re almost deer in the headlights. They don’t know how to function as food bloggers because there’s that mental clutter. But once you do this, it’s amazing how freeing it is. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes, I totally agree. 

Megan Porta: Thank you for all of this, Alexandria. This was so helpful. 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yeah, of course. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to geek out about it. I love Airtable, so I love talking about it. 

Megan Porta: Yes. Same. Go check it out, everyone. We are wondering, Alexandria, if you have a favorite quote or words of inspiration to leave us with?

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. So I have a day-by-day happy positive quotes calendar that’s on my kitchen table. So what it had today was this great little quote that I love is, little by little becomes a lot. 

Megan Porta: Ooh. Yeah. It’s funny how that fits in, right? 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. Exactly. 

Megan Porta: Awesome. So you already mentioned how people can reach out to Matt. Why don’t you share where people can find you and your socials, your blog, and anything else you want to mention? 

Alexandria Drzazgowski: Yes. If you have any questions on Airtable or food blogging or anything else, I am at The Foreign Fork. That’s F O R E I G N, The Foreign Fork. That is on all of the platforms, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, et cetera. Then my blog is www.foreignfork.com. So feel free to DM me anywhere if you’d like. 

Megan Porta: Yes. That’s so generous of you. Thank you so much again for being here Alexandria, and thank you for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you in the next episode.

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat Blog Talk. Don’t forget to head to forum.eatblogtalk.com to join our free discussion forum and connect with and learn from like-minded peers. I will see you next time.