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Episode 161: How to Grow an Audience and Master Recipe Videos by Using the Platform Jumprope with Lauryn Piemonte and Jake Poses

In episode 161 we talk with Lauryn Piemonte and Jake Poses from the new innovative platform Jumprope about how content creators can share their content in a new, easy way.

We cover information about the ins and outs of Jumprope, how to get started and learn how to save hours on each video you create!

Listen on the player below or on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast player. Or scroll down to read a full transcript.

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Guest Details

Connect with Jumprope
Website | Instagram | Facebook

Bio Jake is the CEO and co-founder of Jumprope.

Lauryn is the Food Content Director of Jumprope and she’s a food blogger herself at Plantivore Kitchen.

Jumprope is a platform to create and discover how-to content. It makes the process of producing video for your audience easier, and you can get discovered through our millions of monthly views. As an added bonus, not only can you edit and share how-to content within the Jumprope app, you can then export your videos in the sizes and formats you need for YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, blog posts, and more.

Takeaways

  • Jumprope is made to help everyone make great content and get it published quickly to all the different search engines and social platforms easily and quickly.
  • Creating video on Jumprope is easy and takes away a lot of the technical know-how you have needed in the past, along with expensive equipment. You can use your phone.
  • Soon you’ll be able to monetize your content further. Right now, some of your options are to share affiliate links and put brand content up.
  • You create once and you get everything from horizontal videos to vertical videos, to four by five videos, to images, to HTML, to split screen videos, toTik TOK videos all at the same time.
  • You can use content you already have shot within the app as well as just use process shots you’ve already taken on your phone.
  • A Jumprope is made up of cards that you can add text, links, photos and video to.
  • After creating your product, you’ll receive HTML via a WordPress plugin that displays the text and videos. Jumprope has a player that lets you add the Jumprope format to your blog.
  • More detailed Jumpropes that are 12 to 20 cards in length are getting high engagement. Each card can be up to 60 seconds but you can link as many cards as you’d like.
  • There’s a concept of linking Jumpropes together. An example would be a Jumprope for your cake and then a Jumprope for a frosting could be linked together.
  • Jumprope helps creators build an audience and established creators build a wider audience.
  • Overall, content should be helpful, entrusting, and detailed. Other platforms you are creating more entertaining content and Jumprope leans towards detailed, informative content.

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Transcript

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Intro:

Welcome to Eat Blog Talk, where food bloggers come to get their fill of the latest tips, tricks, and insights into the world of food blogging. If you feel that hunger for information, we’ll provide you with the tools you need to add value to your blog. And we’ll also ensure you’re taking care of yourself, because food blogging is a demanding job. Now, please welcome your host, Megan Porta.

Megan Porta:

Food bloggers. Hey, are you looking for new ways to make money as a blogger? If so, we have got your back. We have launched an ebook called Conversations On Monetization. Inside this resource, we take your favorite podcast episodes about monetization, and we put them all in one easy accessible package. We threw a few exclusive interviews in as well. Friends, there are so many ways to monetize your food blog. Inside this ebook, we have interviews with success stories like Todd Bullock, Alyssa Brantley, Kelly McNelis Jena Carlin, and more. All of these examples have become successful through completely different monetization strategies. Whether you are a brand new blogger or looking for your very first revenue stream, or you are a seasoned pro wanting to diversify, this ebook is for you. Go to eatblogtalk.com to grab your copy. And we can’t wait to hear your success story with monetization.

What’s up 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 Jake Poses with me today. He is CEO and co-founder of Jumprope, and we are going to talk about how to grow an audience and master recipe videos by using the platform Jumprope. Jumprope is a platform to create and discover how-to content. It makes the process of producing video for your audience easier, and you can get discovered through their millions of monthly views. As an added bonus, not only can you edit and share how-to content within the Jumprope app, you can then export your videos in the sizes and formats you need for YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, blog posts, and more. Jake, I’m so grateful that you are joining me today in this episode and sharing so much about the amazing Jumprope platform. But first we all want to hear your fun fact.

Jake Poses:

First of all, thank you for having me. It’s fun to get to spend time with the amazing food blogger community. My fun fact is I am obsessed with chicken. I eat a tremendous amount of chicken and I have sort of gone down a bunch of rabbit holes around, maybe called them chicken holes. I’m learning a lot about the industry. I will give you my favorite fun fact about chicken, which is that there are about 30 billion chicken on the planet at any one time.

Megan :

Did you say 30 billion?

Jake:

30 billion. Right. But there are about 7 billion people on the planet, right? When you put it in that perspective is not that many chickens per person

Megan :

Four per person. Okay. That’s kind of a mind blowing thought. That’s a lot of chicken.

Jake:

It is well more, I forget the exact stat, but it may be 10 times more populous than the next most populous bird on the planet.

Megan :

That’s awesome. So do you have favorite chicken recipes? Do you like cooking with chicken? I’m assuming you like eating chicken as well?

Jake:

I do. I do really like eating chicken. I really like this kind of lemongrass Thai inspired but kind of California, chicken recipe. I don’t really know how to describe it other than that, but I love fresh, spicy Asian inspired flavors with healthy food that I describe as like Northern California food.

Megan :

Oh, that sounds amazing. I’m hungry for chicken now. Well, thanks for sharing that. I’ve never had anyone confess a love for chicken. I love chicken as well. So you are not alone, but I did not know that there were so many on the planet. Very interesting. Well, you’re here actually to talk about Jumprope, this amazing platform that food bloggers are discovering. You and Lauren are teaming up to provide information about Jumprope here. In this episode, Lauren will be answering a few questions about the Jumprope app as well, but we want to hear what you have to say about it too, Jake. So why don’t you start by explaining Jumprope just more in-depth and telling us what we can expect from it from a content creator perspective?

Jake:

Absolutely. So our vision for Jumprope is we want to be the place you go and learn how to do anything. So whether that be your recipe, craft project, beauty tutorial, parenting hack, there’s no great place for people to go when they think I need to learn how to do something. Whether they’re just kind of curious and want to be entertained about it, want to be inspired or decide what they want to cook for dinner or whether it’s actually dinner time and I need to figure out how to do this right now. The reason why nothing existed before is because we think the format is broken. Videos are kind of really hard. Traditional videos are really hard for creators to make and therefore they don’t do them very often. They’re actually really hard to follow along to, right?

You’re sort of cooking, your hands are dirty. You’re trying to stop the video with your elbow. Your traditional blog posts without a lot of video content, aren’t that visual. So very inspired by the format of stories, we said, there’s a better way to learn how to do things. We’ve sort of built the Jumprope platform around that. The added benefit of that is that kind of more constrained step-by-step stories format, is also enabling us to empower people. Many, most of which like tens of thousands of people, most of which who’ve never created a video before to easily with just their iPhone or their Android, create beautiful, inspiring, professional feeling videos in a fraction of the time. Compared to traditional video editing tools. Just to summarize, the vision is to be a platform where everyone goes to learn how to do things. We do that by making it easy for creators to create awesome content. Going forward, we want to be and are working on ways to make Jumprope a place where creators can directly monetize their content on the Jumprope platform. As we know that for creators, they do this for both passion and love, but also to build a business.

Megan :

So the main phrase I’m taking away from what you just said is fraction of the time. My ears went, hello, because creating video traditionally, like you mentioned, is a process. It takes a long time. I mean, hours and hours, it could be a full day of actually, you know, creating it, producing it, editing it, all of that.

Jake:

I think what we typically hear from food bloggers and sort of creators in other verticals, is things that would take a day are now taking an hour. A fifth to a 10th of the time to get it done on Jumprope. The reason for that is that we’ve just put all of the tools you need at your fingertips, in one place, giving you the structure that helps you sort of break your video content into these clear steps and sort of makes the process of filming and then editing easier. Then it’s even more of a time-saver for those who want to create videos in multiple formats. I know you mentioned this in your intro, but one of the creative things we did, because we heard this from creators, was it’s really frustrating to edit and then have to re-edit for YouTube versus IGTV versus Pinterest. So the app does all of that for you. You create once and you get everything from horizontal videos to vertical videos, to four by five videos, to images, to HTML, to split screen videos, toTik TOK videos all at the same time.

Megan :

That’s amazing. I haven’t jumped into Jumprope yet. Every time I hear about it, I hear someone talk about it, when I was talking to Lauren the other day, I’ve also heard food bloggers talking about it. I am so interested. It’s just one more thing though, because we already have so much on our plate. Make a case for adding this one more thing to our lives, because from what you were saying, it is definitely worthwhile. Once I hang up, I’m going to say, oh, I don’t have time for it. So make a case for that.

Jake:

So I think what we’re hearing from food bloggers is, Jumprope is helping them take other things off their plate. One of the things we realized is we had to do that, right? You all have a lot on your plate. We had to do that in order to get amazing food bloggers using Jumprope, right? By enabling creators to share their videos to YouTube, to Instagram, to Instagram Stories, to Pinterest Stories, to Facebook, to HTML on their website and build an audience on Jumprope all at the same time, what we’ve done is we’ve actually simplified and reduced the amount of other tools creators have had to use We’ve reduced the time they’ve spent to get awesome engaging video content, not just on Jumprope, but on all the platforms that they want to engage an audience on.

Megan :

All right. Sold. I need to just do it because video is overwhelming for me. I’ve produced a lot of videos like hundreds. It’s so time-intensive. We are not currently producing videos for my food blog, but I want to get something out there. So you just convinced me, I actually put the app on my phone as I was talking to Lauren the other day, so I’m going to do it today. I am committing to creating a video on Jumprope, because I’m curious about how fast the process is, and also your different formats are so intriguing. So how does that work? So you create something maybe vertical in a vertical format. How does it produce a horizontal format? Do you have to do a lot of tweaking yourself or how does that work?

Jake:

Jumprope up is a bit different conceptually than traditional timeline based video editors. Whether it’s Premier or Final Cut Pro or I Am Movie, in that what we’ve done is, creating in Jumprope, you create a series of cards. Each of those cards has a media area, and that can be a photo or a video. It has a text area, up to 150 characters of text. We have some special cards where you can make a list of the products you need and where to buy them and those types of things. But the structure of Jumprope basically is the structure of these cards. We hear from creators that structure A- simplifies their life of creating a video.

They just think, okay, in this step of the recipe, I need to add two cups of flour, three cups of sugar and this and that to a bowl. You get your camera out and frankly, you can do this with a makeshift tripod. You don’t even need a professional tripod. You put your camera there, you hit record, you add the ingredients, the bowl, and great, you have that step, right? You just make the steps of your recipe, with the camera in the right position in decent lighting, at the end you’ve got this video footage. Then you can choose to crop that a little differently. You might speed it up, might put a filter on it, trim it a bit and can quickly go through your recipe steps in the app and make those edits.

The advantage of us having the content in this hyper structured format of these cards, is then it enables the app to lay it out differently, depending on what kind of platform you want to be on. So for example, for YouTube or horizontal, and we know for people on media vine and ad thrive, they’re kind of uploading these videos to those players and making more money. We’ll put the step tax, write the text, the instructions on the side of the video, right. Whereas for IGGB, which is vertical, we’ll put it on the bottom and sort of that square format, you know, where we’ll actually overlay that sort of texted nice sort of white lettering, um, um, sort of overlaid on the bottom of the video, right? For images for Pinterest, we’ll lay that out for you in kind of a long draft, like kin with little thumbnail images of each of the steps for your website.

We’ll give you HTML via our WordPress plugin that displays the text and videos. We have a player that lets you add the Jumprope format to your blog, if you want to. So the fact that you’re creating in a structured format, gives the app the flexibility to give you back the content in a bunch of different formats. We’re adding new ones every month. We recently added a split screen video for Pinterest, where the cover photo of your recipe at the bottom with the text over it and then the video is kind of playing on top. I don’t know if you’ve seen those on Pinterest, but creators said, I’m having a lot of success with this. Can you build this?

We built it for them. It is hard. I will admit it’s hard. My best advice is, download the app it’s free in the play store or the app store. Take a little bit of content that you have on your phone and flick it into Jumprope. You don’t have to shoot in the app. You can pull stuff from your photo library, you can shoot on a digital SLR and pull it into Jumprope. Just play with it. By playing with it, you’ll get a sense of it. A picture’s worth a thousand words and apps worth like a million.

Megan :

Yeah. It’s one of those things where you do just need to dive in. I remember when Instagram reels came out, not too long ago and somebody was trying to explain it to me. I said, that doesn’t really make sense because I wasn’t actually looking at it. I wasn’t doing it myself. But when you get into it, I’m sure it’s much easier to wrap your head around.

Jake:

We hear this all the time, once food bloggers try it. Wow. That was surprisingly easy. I’ve been intimidated by video for so long, and this was magically easier than I thought it ever could be. I think that surprisingly easy, shockingly easy is something we hear every day.

Megan :

That was a good endorsement. Wow. That was surprisingly easy. Yes, something you definitely want to hear when you’re launching into something new. From what you have seen so far, Jake, which content is the most engaging content on Jumprope?

Jake:

The most engaging content on Jumprope, we’ve come up with a three word summary of this. It’s content that’s really helpful, right? People come to Jumprope to actually learn how to cook new recipes, learn new kitchen skills, et cetera. So things that are helpful. The second thing that does really well in Jumprope are things that are detailed. People want to know all of the ingredients they need and how much they need to complete the recipe. They want to know little details, like when you’re mixing something, when it’s done, it should look like this. So really detailed and then being creative. I think creativity can sort of come in all sorts of different formats, but things that are creative and inspire people. Things that inspire people to try new things. A couple more specifics, right? We say there’s no magical length of a Jumprope. Something that’s a kitchen skill or kitchen hack can be done really well in five steps. We are seeing these more detailed Jumpropes that are 12 to 20 cards long are the ones that are actually getting the most engagement. It’s because our audience wants to learn new things.

Megan :

Does each card have to have a certain time associated with it? Or can you determine what time goes with it?

Jake:

So each card can be either a photo or a video, first of all. So there is some great content on Jumprope for those that are even intimidated by video and maybe even have a whole bunch of process photos for recipes that they want to be able to turn into videos. That’s a great way to get started. The little secret is you don’t actually need a single piece of video, to create a video or create a Jumprope, though we do find that the video content, the Jumpropes with videos tend to be more engaging. So any step can be up to a minute of video. The reason we cut it off at a minute was because people want detail, but they have limited attention span and that’s to sort of guide the creator to be a little more concise. One thing we see a lot in food videos is speeding things up, right? So you may have three minutes of a lapsed video that you speed up quite fast and condense it down to 20 seconds. That’s a very common pattern. You can do that super quickly by just sliding a little slide around.

Megan :

Is there a time limit for the entire video that you put together?

Jake:

Time limit? I think we’ve seen things above 50 steps. Maybe even 70 steps, but realistically we don’t see a ton of stuff that exceeds 30. Just because it sort of gets really long. We also have a concept of linking Jumpropes together. So let’s say you are baking a cake and you may want to do the frosting versus the cake as two separate Jumpropes. So you do a frosting Jumprope, a cake Jumprope, and then you can actually link between them. When it’s time to frost the cake, you say, find the frosting recipe, click here that takes you to another Jumprope for that frosting recipe.

Megan :

And are there a lot of chicken recipes, Jake, on Jumprope?

Jake:

There are a lot of chicken recipes. Our audience is primarily American today. I think we have creators around the world, but you know it’s sku’s Americans, and Americans eat a lot of chicken.

Megan :

They do, clearly. Well that’s good. So what are your favorite chicken recipes that you’ve seen on the platform? Are they something cheesy? Do you see any that you say, Ooh, I need to try that?

Jake:

I also really like almonds, so some almond flour crusted chicken tenders. So a slightly healthier chicken tender. I saw those recently. What else have I seen? I think there was a chicken piccata recipe that looked delicious and I think got more than a hundred thousand views on Jumprope. Those are people clicking in views, not impressions. Something that’s going to get a hundred thousand views may actually get 10 million impressions, where someone saw maybe 5 million impressions where someone saw their cover photo, but that’s actually a hundred thousand people clicking and watching your content.

Megan :

Can you talk a little bit about Google web stories, what they are first of all, and then how you guys are tied into those?

Jake:

Totally. So Google web stories are a little bit different than stories on Snapchat or Instagram or LinkedIn or Twitter or Pinterest, in that they’re not videos. So Google’s built an interesting format. We’re thinking about Google web stories as mini little webpages that can be displayed in a sequence. What we did with Google is we partnered with them and we actually rebuilt the Jumprope player experience. You can’t create in Google web stories, or you create on the Jumprope app, but the experience of clicking through a Jumprope step by step and having that be interactive, where you can create a profile and you can click on buy buttons to buy products. You’re welcome to put affiliate links in those buy buttons. Basically we rebuilt the experience of consuming the Jumprope app, with Google into Google stories.

We were one of several companies that partnered with them to launch web stories on Discover. The other companies were primarily media companies; USA today, Washington Post, Forbes, all those types of folks. We’re seeing creators get just a tremendous amount of exposure on web stories. It’s awesome to see food is our biggest category that we’re seeing on web stories. So I hope I explained it, but it’s a little bit complicated, but I hope I explained that ok.

Megan :

I think so, so I’m not super familiar. I haven’t learned a whole lot about it. So what you were saying kind of made sense. Again, it’s one of those things I think in order to really understand, you have to actually see it with your own eyes, but yeah, that’s cool that you guys are working alongside Google. I mean, that’s pretty huge, right?

Jake:

Absolutely. It’s been really fun to partner with them on that and a few other things and a few things that we have in the works. They value us because we’ve built a pretty amazing consumption experience of the Jumprope app within Google web stories, that is super engaging. Obviously it’s incredibly valuable for us to sort of have millions of users exposed to Jumprope every day, via Google web stories.

Megan :

So you mentioned just really briefly earlier, monetization, do you guys have monetization for creators on your radar?

Jake:

It is more than on our radar. I think we announced this at creator town hall, just a sort of a week or so ago. Helping creators make more money on Jumprope is our number one priority for 2021. We already have creators that are making money on Jumprope several ways. One is, creators are doing brand partnerships and using Jumprope as another way to get those brands exposure. They’re also, in many cases, using Jumprope as the creation tool to help create that content for a brand that then they share to Pinterest, to Instagram, to YouTube, et cetera. The second way creators are making money, is that Jumprope is shoppable, right? One of the advantages of the Jumprope format not being kind of traditional video, is you can include buttons and links and things like that.

We have creators that are adding their affiliate links in there to products that show up in the Jumprope. They report to us, they’re selling $400 blenders, et cetera, and getting a nice affiliate commission off of that. As we think about monetization in 2021, we’re thinking about several things, and we’ve told creators, Hey, we’re not going to get it all right on day one, just like the creation experience on Jumprope wasn’t all right on day one, and we need their feedback. We need them to work with us to make it better. We’re working on ads as one form of monetization. The second thing we’re doing is working on making it easier and better to add products and earn that affiliate revenue, including creating a shop on Jumprope.

I think we see a lot of food bloggers have shops on their websites. So enabling them to bring that over to Jumprope and make those affiliate commissions as well as helping creators who don’t have affiliate relationships sort of make money via our own affiliate relationships. Then third is a tipping model and that we believe that consumers on Jumprope or viewers on Jumprope are super appreciative, especially when they cook a recipe, do a beauty tutorial, complete a DIY project, and enable them to tip creators, to thank them for helping them learn and do something.

Megan :

The tipping model, I never in a million years would have thought of that. That’s brilliant. Nobody else is doing that.

Jake:

I think that’s true. I’ve actually seen a few plugins or integrations on a few food bloggers websites. So I know there are things out there. I think there is some precedent for this right now, where, in a lot of ways, Patreon, while you are getting some specific things for being a patreon of a creator, a lot of it is the consumer’s desire to show appreciation and support. We’re not going to stop there. We know, and I know, that we’re only successful as a company, if creators on Jumprope are successful. Full stop. If creators are not successful, there’s no way we are successful as a company. Therefore we have to just keep trying every single day to make creators and bloggers as successful as possible. We’ve done that so far by building, what we hear is sort of the best and easiest creation tool. We’re now bringing creators’ audiences that they’re monetizing via affiliate links and brand partnerships. The next stage of this is to bring creators direct monetization, which we know can sort of simplify their lives and expand their business.

Megan :

Well, I’m excited about this, just from the standpoint of being a creator myself, but I’m really excited for you guys, what an awesome idea. I’m so glad that you are seeing success with it. Lauren, when I chatted with her, mentioned that you were rated a top app, right?

Jake:

We’ve gotten a fair number of accolades. We were one of Google Play’s choices for best of 2020. Which is really awesome and they picked, uh, they picked sort of a theme of apps that really helped people through 2020, which was a hard year. Again, in our town hall, I really thanked our creators for being some of the people that helped me and the world through what was a challenging year. We’ve been Apple’s app of the day three times, including most recently they wrote a big feature on us around Halloween. So we’ve gotten a lot of love, but the love I love the most is when it’s from actual real people, whether they’re creators or viewers, who find Jumprope helpful, inspiring, et cetera.

Megan :

Aw, I love that. What a great way to end. Well to kind of wrap up, is there one main takeaway or call to action that you would deliver to food bloggers listening?

Jake:

Just try Jumprope. Take 10 minutes. Even five minutes, download the app, flick in a few pieces of content from your camera roll and fool around with it. I think you’re going to be, even if you’re one of these people that’s tried video before, you’re going to be pleasantly surprised. I think it can really help you expand your business and grow your audience in 2021. We look forward to having more of you join the amazing community of food bloggers we already have on Jumprope.

Jake:

Awesome. Okay. Before you go, Jake, we want to hear either a favorite quote or words of inspiration for food bloggers.

Jake:

My words of inspiration are authentic. Don’t worry about people. What we find is that people don’t want perfection. They want authenticity. Just be authentic, be yourself. Don’t be afraid to show your personality, whether that’s you talking to the camera or the way you mix something in a ball or sort of the background you use to shoot your content on, be yourself, be authentic.

Megan :

Jake, tell my listeners the best place they can find you.

Jake:

The best place is to DM me at Jake Poses on Instagram, you can also email me at [email protected].

Megan:

Today I have Lauren Piemonte from Jumprope and Plantivore Kitchen with me. Lauren is the Food Content Director of Jumprope, and she is also a food blogger at Plantivore Kitchen. Lauren, I am so grateful to have a little bit of time with you today, but first we all want to hear your fun fact.

Lauren Piemonte:

Absolutely. I’m excited to be here, Megan. My go-to fun fact is that I have dual citizenship with Italy. My dad’s side of the family is from there, and I think that’s kind of where my love for cooking and food really started. I grew up just going to my Nana’s house and we would cook this amazing Italian food from scratch, using ingredients in her garden. Now I actually love to kind of remake her classic recipes with healthy alternatives that are really food allergy friendly. So that’s a lot of fun for me now, too.

Megan :

I love that. I love how you’ve incorporated that in and also given it a twist. I love giving recipes a twist to kind of cater to what I like or to make it a little bit healthier or more seasonal. So I love that you do that. That’s really cool. So I’m excited to talk about Jumprope. I was mentioning before we pressed record that it’s something that’s created a lot of buzz in the food blogging space, and I personally have not checked out your platform yet. I apologize, but I will. I’ve heard a lot of people saying such great things about it. It’s like all over the place from really experienced bloggers who have done recipe videos before to really new bloggers who are just kind of launching into that. Jumprope is a free platform used to create and discover how to tutorial content and it’s relatively new, right? How new is Jumprope?

Lauren:

We’ve been around for about two years or so. Most recently, we are on the Google play store for less than a year now. We were actually just announced as one of their best apps of 2020, which was really exciting. We’ve been on Apple’s app store for a little bit longer.

Megan :

That is such a great time too, to be announced one of the best because 2020 has not been the best of years in many ways. I absolutely love that you guys had that little nugget of awesomeness delivered to you in this year. So good for you. Congratulations on that. That’s such a huge thing. I’m excited to learn a little bit more about Jumprope. So tell us how are professional food bloggers leveraging this platform to create their content and build an audience?

Lauren:

Sure. So to give some background here, food is the largest category by far on Jumprope. We have thousands of food, craters and millions of monthly views just on our food creators content, aside from everything else on the platform. It’s everything from established bloggers like you noted, that are with AdThrive or Mediavine to newer food creators that haven’t ever created content before. So we have a really wonderful food creator community. I think that that’s been something that’s really developed even in 2020, due to people being home and being able to explore their passions a little bit more and use Jumprope as an outlet to share that. So for food bloggers, Jumprope is a platform to create content and build an audience. So I would say food bloggers right now are leveraging Jumprope mainly to get discovered, while they’re also benefiting from our video creation tool and our exports that we have.

A food blogger will create a Jumprope around a recipe, which is the most common use case that we see. They can create one around a technique around up or a sponsored post. Our creation process is very simple and straightforward. So within every Jumprope, you can also add a link to your blog posts. You can also add affiliate links. We really take all of that into consideration to make it the best platform for our creators. Then you publish your Jumprope to your profile where anyone can discover it. I would say that our really great food content that’s following our best practices, typically gets viewed anywhere from a few thousand times to 200,000 views in a few days. So we just had a Jumprope actually hit 250,000 views, which was really exciting. Bloggers are leveraging that reach just to get discovered and build an additional audience on our platform.

Megan :

How many people are on your platform right now?

Lauren:

We have thousands. I don’t know the exact number, but we have thousands of creators, especially in food. It’s quite a lot of creators. It’s growing every day exponentially, especially in 2020. It has just been a really great year for us.

Megan :

Oh my gosh. I bet you could not have ever foreseen that this would be a good year for a platform like this, but what a great combination, where people are home more, they’re needing to cook more. Food is your top category, so perfect for you guys. What a great combination and I am just thrilled that this is taking off for you guys. You mentioned that you’re seeing a lot more people hop on every day. Are you able to handle it? Is it ever a point where you’re like, Oh my gosh, we have too many people getting on at once.

Lauren:

That’s a great question. I honestly love it because I love being busy. Everyone on our team loves being busy too. It’s just so much fun. This is my absolute favorite job I’ve ever had. I love that I just get to talk to food bloggers all day. The volume has been quite great and fantastic, and it’s a lot, but we’re more than happy to have it.

Megan :

That’s so awesome. What a good problem to have. Too many people are hopping on. What are Jumpropes’s best practices in order to increase those views?

Lauren:

This is my absolute favorite topic, to support our creators on. We’re constantly learning and evolving our best practices based on our viewer engagement and feedback, because our viewers are really responsive and open and share with us exactly what they want. So overall content should be helpful, entrusting, and detailed. Those are kind of the three pillars that I share. Then, for specific best practices, because I know we all like the specifics on what we’re seeing get the most views. There’s a few that come to mind. What we’ve seen right now is eight to 30 cards, within your Jumprope. So your Jumprope is made up of however many cards you’d like. And eight to 30 tends to do really well. So viewers come to Jumprope specifically to learn and discover.

So they’re looking for content that looks complete and looks and feels complete. They want a lot of detail. So that’s something to keep in mind. It’s a little different than maybe other platforms where you just want to be really snappy and more like entertainment. This is more informative. Then, just like a blog post, think SEO friendly on Jumprope. So you want to do descriptive titles. You want to be descriptive in your text. That’s all very important because we take that and utilize recipe markup too. Another best practice would be, if you’re reusing content. So a lot of our creators will leverage video content that they’ve either outsourced or they’ve shot in the past. You want to avoid burning in text. Meaning, if you have a video that you already edited and added text in Final Cut Pro, that tends to not be the best fit for Jumprope, you can absolutely still put it on Jumprope, but I would just tell you that I think it would be a better use of your time to take the raw content before you’ve added the text, and use that in Jumprope.

It’s a better viewer experience that way. We actually have a text box on each card instead that you can use because our platform and Google can read that. So it’s quite preferable and more beneficial for you to be leveraging our text box rather than having pre added text over your videos. Then I would say detailed recipes that include both the ingredients and the quantities do best. 100%. So our creators have learned that a more detailed and complete recipe actually translates to more engagement. Viewers are way more likely to view your profile. They’ll watch your other content. They’ll click on your links, if you’re detailed. It establishes this really strong relationship between you and the viewer. Because like I said, our viewers are coming because they want to learn. We actually have a product card that you can add, which is a template that allows you to share ingredients, appliances, affiliate links, really anything that you would like, that pertains to the recipe all in one space. So be sure to take advantage of that because it’s nice and clean. Lastly, like any platform, consistent creation is important. Obviously that allows you to build a relationship with your viewers and Jumprope is no different, people want to see consistent content coming from you.

Megan :

Is there a time limit? I’m sorry, what do you call them? The cards are the individual pieces that go into making one video. Do you call them just videos or do you have a term for it?

Lauren:

We actually call them a Jumprope.

Megan :

So it is actually a Jumprope. Okay. Hello, little slow today. So do you have a time limit for each Jumprope?

Lauren:

We do not. The actual Jumprope itself can be as long as you’d like, however, each card within your Jumprope, if you’re adding a video, it’s a 60 second max. We’ve just found that there’s really no instance in which one of your cards should be over 60 seconds because we know people, although they want detail, they do have short attention spans. So we need to be mindful of that as well.

Megan :

Is there a time limit you have noticed, from your standpoint, that’s most successful?

Lauren:

Sure. When I’m creating and what I see some of our top creators do, is anywhere from three to eight to 10 seconds. It’s typical for the cards to be quite quick. I wouldn’t go any shorter than three or four seconds though. Especially if you have a lot of text on that card, or if you’re trying to show something with detail. You can actually combine several photos or videos into a card. Say I’m adding all of my dry ingredients for cinnamon rolls. I could do a video of me adding the flour, the sugar, the baking soda, whatever it may be and put that on one card. You can actually splice that together in Jumprope. Sso that might be a total of five or six seconds.

Megan :

Okay. What if somebody listening, like me, has not gotten started yet with Jumprope? What is a good way to do that? What’s the typical workflow as far as getting into it?

Lauren:

So for your first Jumprope, start with process shots or videos that you already have, just so you can play around with our editing and get really comfortable. I always say, don’t come into a new tool and be creating your most complex recipe that you’ve never done before. You want something that you already have. Once you’re familiar with the tools, I mean, bloggers typically create Jumpropes in less than 30 minutes, once you know where everything is and you feel good about it. A blogger workflow will definitely vary, but the typical one that we see work for our creators is broken down into about four steps. The first would be to storyboard your recipes, step-by-step just to ensure you’re not missing any shots. If you’ve done video before, as a blogger, you’re probably already doing something like this, but if you happen, that’s a really good practice to start.

The majority of our creators actually use their phones to film and they shoot vertically. I would say maybe 10 to 15% of our creators use their DSLRs, but even some who started with DSLRs, they’ve switched to their phones because it’s much easier. So keep in mind, you can reuse footage or process photos, like mentioned before, but if you are filming from scratch, storyboard would be the first thing. Then second, you’re going to go into the app and create a Jumprope. So break your recipe down into steps and tips. We have numbered cards which are typically used for the steps and then cards without numbers on them, that are used for an introduction, a tip. This is what your dose should look like, anything like that. So for each card of your Jumprope, you’ll add video or a photo and then text explaining that step.

That’s where you want to get as detailed as possible, including the actual ingredients that they should be looking for, the quantities, anything that’s going to be helpful to your viewers. Then you can add our product card for any affiliate links, which we recommend you take advantage of. You can link to your blog posts. We give you some styling options to match fonts and colors to your brand and add music. It’s whatever you’d like. Really we give you a lot of fun ways to customize. After that, the next step is just to publish your Jumprope to your profile and you’ll include any relevant tags there, especially trending seasonal tags. I would highly recommend including that as well to give it some additional traction and exposure. After it’s on your profile, you can actually use our exports to share on social media and your blog.

So anytime you create a Jumprope, Jake will speak more to this, but you essentially get 15 plus exports that we give you. We automatically generate and format these for you. So I’ll create a Jumprope once and I’ll get content for my Pinterest, for my Facebook, for my Instagram, for my blog. Literally anything. YouTube, Tik Tok, anything you can think of. We have it. It’s honestly like so much content that you probably, you won’t use all of it. You’ll pick your favorite things, but we give you a lot. So the most popular exports for food bloggers are horizontal exports. We title it YouTube on our app, but it’s actually really just a horizontal video. We see our bloggers use that for ad network video players on their blog, as a nice, easy way to get up that and make some additional revenue there. Then Pinterest video pins. We have several formats. Those are huge. Story pins are really big right now because it’s a nice way again, to just get it up there without spending too much extra time. Instagram stories too. Those are all quite popular for our bloggers.

Megan :

I can see this feature, this part of your platform being the most valuable for food bloggers, because you can literally create a video on your phone. You don’t have to get out all of your camera equipment and your sound, you don’t have to do any of that. Create it on your phone in 30 minutes or less, and then literally you just export and you can put it anywhere. You even provide horizontal formats, which is amazing. I was going to ask you, thinking there’s no way they do horizontally, but that’s incredible.

Lauren:

It’s really nice. I have to say, I used to do marketing consulting and for some of my clients, I would shoot on two different devices, one vertical, one horizontal, because it was just really annoying to edit it after, honestly. So to have this automatically generated, when I saw this, my mind was blown, honestly, I was like, this is amazing.

Megan :

Absolutely. Well, I’m currently installing it on my phone, so I’m going to check it out later, after our interview. So I am pumped.

Lauren:

I can’t wait to see what you make.

Megan :

Yes, I’m excited. We ran through all of our questions. Jake is going to cover some other important stuff about Jumprope, but I did want to ask you, what is one main takeaway about your platform for food bloggers listening that you would recommend today?

Lauren:

So the most common thing that I hear from creators and bloggers who haven’t tried Jumprope, is a list of all the reasons that they can’t do video. It’s too much time. It’s too hard. The editing is a nightmare and I completely relate to and get that, because that makes sense for traditional video. That’s how it’s been. But the most common thing that I hear from creators that have tried Jumprope, is that they wish they had this years ago. Jumprope saves them so much time. They would have added video from the beginning. To me, in hearing these conversations, the biggest takeaway that I’d like to share is that our biggest obstacle is often ourselves and how we perceive a challenge. There’s so much opportunity right now by stepping into this world of video. The great thing is just like what you were saying. You don’t need tons of equipment. You don’t need a studio kitchen. Get yourself an overhead tripod on Amazon for your phone, use natural lighting or a simple light set, if you’d like, and you’re good to go. Less produced content often does best, which is something that’s shocking to us because the content we spend the most time on sometimes flops. Then the one that we’ve just thrown up on stories does quite well. That rings true for Jumprope. People like authenticity and accessibility. Really, we made this awesome free platform and tools specifically for creators. It was with creators in mind. So take advantage of it and try creating your first Jumprope.

Megan :

Well, I’m already signed up, so I’m on my way. Thanks Lauren. Thank you for being here. I really appreciate you just talking to us about Jumprope in this awesome new platform. And again, congratulations on being a top app. That is incredible. Before you go, I always like to ask my guests, if they have a favorite quote or words of inspiration for food bloggers. Do you have anything to share with us?

Lauren:

Sure. So this is something I have to remind myself every day. Progress over perfection. Perfection is the enemy of profitability. Whenever I find myself getting caught up in it, with my own food blog, I often say better posted then perfect.

Megan :

Lauren, I think we all know where to find you, but reiterate where we can find you on line.

Lauren:

So you can download our free app, Jumprope in the app store or Google play store we’re available on both. You can follow our food accounts at Jumprope Eats on Jumprope and Instagram. And then our main account on Instagram is, Let’s Jumprope. Then you can find me everywhere at Plantivore Kitchen, and that’s pretty much everything. So thanks so much for having me, Megan. It was really great to connect with you.

Megan :

Great way to end. Well, both Lauren and Jake. Thank you so much for being here today and sharing this value with food bloggers. They will be well-received. We will put together a show notes page listing all of the resources and things that we’ve talked about during these chats. So if you want to go check those out, you can find them at eatblogtalk.com/jumprope. Thank you for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you next time.

Intro:

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.


💥 Join the EBT community, where you will gain confidence and clarity as a food blogger so you don’t feel so overwhelmed by ALL THE THINGS!

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pinterest image how to grow an audience and master recipe videos by using the platform jumprope

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Megan
Megan

Megan started her food blog Pip and Ebby in 2010 and food blogging has been her full-time career since 2013. Her passion for blogging has grown into an intense desire to help fellow food bloggers find the information, insight, and community they need in order to find success.

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