Episode 728: What Most Creators Get Wrong About Audience Growth (+Turn Casual Followers Into Superfans) With Ethan Monkhouse

EBT728 – Ethan Monkhouse

[00:00:00]  Megan Porta 

Are you tired of creating content that gets views but no clicks or no sales? What if you could identify the 10% of your audience that is quietly ready to buy from you before they even follow? In this episode I am joined by Ethan Monkhouse, behavioral systems engineer and co founder of Naviro.ai. He’s here to share a psychology backed strategy that helps food bloggers turn casual viewers into super fans and paying customers. If you want to monetize smarter, not harder without burning out, this episode is for you.

[00:00:40]   Intro

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

[00:00:57]   Sponsor

Hey food bloggers. What if three days away could completely shift the way you show up in your business? The Fall 2025 Eat Blog Talk retreat is happening October 9th through 12th and you are invited. This is a three night, all inclusive experience designed to give you exactly what you have been craving. Space to breathe and think big, deep connections with like minded creators, powerful strategy sessions, hot seats and honest conversations. And of course, delicious food. Curated by my favorite private chef, Ryan from Cookery Amendola and plenty of laughter included. Past attendees have called this retreat transformational, pure magic and the best investment I’ve ever made. If you are ready to refill your cup, gain clarity and reconnect with why you started this journey in the first place, this retreat is for you. Spots are extremely limited. Head to eblogtalk.com retreat to to grab yours now. I cannot wait to see you there.

[00:02:00]   

Ethan. So excited to have you on the podcast. I’m so intrigued by your topic. How are you today?

[00:02:05]  Ethan Monkhouse 

I’m doing great, thanks. Great to be here.

[00:02:07]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. Today we are going to talk about turning those casual viewers into super fans. I think this is something we all want. Every day we think about this. Excited to learn more from you. But first before we do that, do you have a fun fact to share with us?

[00:02:22]  Ethan Monkhouse 

I’d say my most recent obsession, and quite random, is I became fixated on learning how to fly a plane. So all my time outside Naviro is spent up in the air and I love it, but it is seeing everything from a completely different perspective.

[00:02:39]  Megan Porta 

Oh, I love that. Okay, so I have a question about that. What prompted you and yeah, like why did you want to get started in the first place?

[00:02:47]  Ethan Monkhouse 

I had a few friends back home who were wanting to learn how to fly and they had started and I always had put it to the side. I always put everything that was in my vicinity first. And I think. I think it was my 25th birthday in February and I was like, you know what, we’re going to take it up, we’re going to do it.

[00:03:07]   

And I did a trial lesson and I was hooked. I absolutely loved it. And ever since then, it’s all my time that’s free goes into flying right now.

[00:03:16]  Megan Porta 

Oh, amazing. I love that. I think it’s so important that we all have the. Those things that light us up that have nothing to do with our work that we can just kind of disconnect, disengage. Right. Oh, love that you do that. My husband and I are skydivers, so we’re used to getting in those planes and jumping out and we always talk about, like, would we ever be interested in flying?

[00:03:39]   

And I don’t know. I mean, I can see maybe someday getting into it because there’s something so magic about being in the sky.

[00:03:46]  Ethan Monkhouse 

But yeah, yeah, that’s so interesting because I actually contemplated getting my A license a while back, but I chose to stay in the plane.

[00:03:55]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, most people do. Yeah, that’s normal. Well, cool. I love that about you. Now let’s move over to your business. So your business is called Naviro, correct? Would you tell us a little bit about it?

[00:04:09]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Yeah. In short, we are the audience growth agent for social teams or anyone looking to grow online. And where that came from is I’ve spent years scaling creative agencies, high performance agencies, so like focused on ads and saw a lot of success with that, worked with some massive brands and that was all cool to actually implement campaigns that really moved the needle.

[00:04:35]   

But the one thing I always found was it wasn’t very even the people or the brands who could afford my agency retainer. It was a very small segment. So the best quality marketing was reserved for the people who had the budget. And with Naiera, what we wanted to do was level that playing field and you can do that using technology.

[00:04:59]   

So that’s where we started off and that’s one of like, that’s been quarter entire business and now we’re starting to really see those results flow in at a rate where people can actually afford, irrespective of whether they’re an individual, whether they’re a massive brand, whether they’re a multinational, they’re still getting the same quality marketing and it’s of a really high standard.

[00:05:22]  Megan Porta 

So what kinds of clients do you serve? Give us an example, I guess maybe of some of your main clients.

[00:05:29]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Yeah. So we started off in music that just so happened to be where our network lay and we initially served the labels, then that value would trickle down all the way to the individual level with the artists and the management companies. And quite soon after tapping into that industry, we realized that, oh wait, what we’ve built here applies to the creator economy as a whole.

[00:05:52]   

Everyone, everything from singers to influencers to food bloggers to sports personalities to everyone, everyone needed to refine their audience because everyone, everyone has their story. They need to broadcast that story to the world or they choose to. And you want to make sure that that story is being heard by the right people and filter through that noise.

[00:06:17]   

And that’s what we’re kind of set off to do initially. And since then we’ve worked with everyone from labels to artists to sports, sports personalities to influencers to brands to more enterprise like to venture capital funds. And so it varies immensely because the core of what makes marketing good doesn’t change across industries. And you can just adapt a few things and apply it to your industry to make it work.

[00:06:42]  Megan Porta 

Amazing. So you get quite, quite an array of different types of businesses. So if I’m a food blogger and I come to you and I need, I don’t know, support in some way, I need to expand my brand, how do you help me?

[00:06:56]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Yeah, I think one thing that I made sure we didn’t do with Naviro is fall into the trap of being a service based business in the sense where. Because that’s where costs get expensive for the customer. And when a customer comes to say, Naviro, the idea is that you decide on the direction and you do all the decision making.

[00:07:21]   

But Naviro is going to do the heavy lifting for you, guide you and do the parts of the strategy and implement the parts of the strategy that is usually very time consuming and gate kept from. Well, there’s imperfect information out there. So say a food blogger. You came on, you logged into the platform, you signed up.

[00:07:38]   

The first thing to do is position yourself to find out where in my current state am I positioned online, what image am I putting out to my audience, how am I being perceived? And then the people on the other end, like, who are they, what do they stand for, what do they interact with?

[00:07:57]   

And all of this needs to be done before you even start moving well, before you even make your strategy very much like the blueprint of a house. So you’re building a house, you need to lay out everything before you break ground. And so that’s what we do first. And that gets quite in depth.

[00:08:17]   

It usually can be quite scary. To see what the platform will come up with because the tech is so advanced. And it usually. Well, actually, it never has not done this, but it tells you more than you actually realize about yourself. There’s been times, like I was on a. A call yesterday, and we’re talking about the personality type identification because that’s a big part of resonance between.

[00:08:39]   

Across between content and audience. And it nailed the personality type of the user, the customer, and also nailed the personality type of their audience. And they had a question for me. They were like, oh, but it’s kind of weird because they’re completely different personality types. And I was like, well, that’s actually really interesting because we had a similar occurrence a few weeks ago where there was a conflict in the personality types.And I’m not too sure. Are you familiar with pattern interrupts?

[00:09:08]  Megan Porta 

Yes.

[00:09:09]  Ethan Monkhouse 

So what is really interesting is everyone strives to have a pattern interrupt in their hook on their opening scene, regardless of what content you’re producing, whether it’s taking a sip out of a cup of coffee or clapping your hands, something there to interrupt. And what we found was that conflict between personality types was itself an organic pattern interrupt, because it wasn’t.

[00:09:35]   

The content that people were seeing was so different to what they usually would resonate with. That in itself was friction, and it in itself was an interrupt, which ended up being a hook. And that’s what we found when we started to look over more and more audiences, that this discrepancy or this conflict between personality types is.

[00:09:57]   

Just because you are a particular, particular personality type doesn’t mean that’s the type of content that you should be putting out. And that’s the first part is figuring out, okay, where do I all stand? Where do I stand? Who am I? And how do my audience perceive and digest my content?

[00:10:14]  Megan Porta 

Wow, that’s so interesting. Yeah. And a lot of us are solopreneurs, and we tend to think just from our own experiences and beliefs. So we assume that that is what everyone wants. Right. Like, they want us. This is how everyone thinks the same as I do. But that’s not necessarily true.

[00:10:34]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Yeah. And like, that’s. It’s very easy to fall into that trap as well when there is so much data and signals and information out there, it’s almost an information overload. And with food bloggers, like, what you want to do most is just create really, like, good content for what you’re passionate about and.

[00:10:55]   

And you don’t want to have to kind of get into the weeds when it comes to the data side of things. And that was something that we also kept kind of core to the platform we were building, is we wanted people to actually pursue their passions, pursue what they’re doing this for, instead of having to be like, oh, did I optimize that correctly?

[00:11:13]   

Did I make sure I was posting this at the right time with the right caption or the right hashtags, even though you don’t really use those anymore? And. But like those small nitty gritty things and allow them to actually, hey, I just want to focus on what I like doing and then let the optimization bit of pushing it out to the right people at the right time in the right place happen itself.

[00:11:36]  Megan Porta 

So your platform is AI, I’m assuming, and kind of settles all of these details into place. Like, it gives you a full picture of who you are, who your business is, and your brand, I guess, and then who you’re serving, and then it sorts through the details and what does it deliver.

[00:11:58]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Yeah, so the, the, the general flow is you sign up, you pop in all your socials. If you’re missing any, it’s fine. We’ll. The system will go out and find any. Any mentions online or things that potentially could have gone missed. And then we put together an identity which is like, who are you online?

[00:12:13]   

What do you stand for?

[00:12:14]  Megan Porta 

What.

[00:12:15]  Ethan Monkhouse 

What do you actually. How do you position yourself? And that’s where you tweak a few things. Like, we generate our interpretation and you go and correct it. And usually it is a very accurate match, but it just allows people to tweak things if they’re trying to go down a particular route. And that’s when we move on to a blueprint, which is your audit, pretty much defining what we talked about earlier, where you are your foundations.

[00:12:38]   

And then we move on to, okay, time to strategize, let’s create some content. And one of the things we do is, with the kind of surge of AI, it’s very easy to tell when content’s written by AI, So a lot of people steer away from it. And the way we decided to approach that was for every account and every brand, every user, we create a custom AI for that user, which is trained on their tone of voice, it knows their cadence, it knows how they communicate and who they communicate to.

[00:13:14]   

So that when we’re generating content and content ideas, we’re not just creating a caption that’s going to ChatGPT. It’s bespoke to that user. It talks like you. So it means when you’re going to draft it and go approve it, you can actually you feel a lot more comfortable because you’re like, actually know what that is.

[00:13:34]   

Speaking like how I would say this. And it just makes things a lot more. It makes it less driven by AI, but more so an AI aid with a ridiculously high degree of accuracy.

[00:13:51]  Megan Porta 

Okay, interesting. So it helps you to not only compose maybe like blog posts, but like any sort of project or what projects would it focus on?

[00:14:04]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Yeah, mostly social. So if we kind of stick with food blogging, like you might have posted a couple different. Of say five different posts in the last week and there’s ones that did particularly well. So our system will pick that up and it will have produced out a post analysis which isn’t just, hey, you got X amount of likes.

[00:14:22]   

People seem to like this. But it’s eliminating vanity metrics. It’s focusing on, okay, did people relate to this? What was the virality score? What was the shareability score? And it puts together that in depth analysis, but then it does take action on it. So it goes off and says, okay, so this post did well because of X, Y and Z.

[00:14:42]   

What can we do? That tackles and addresses those points, which did well, but in another form of content. So when it gives you content ideas, it has a look and says, okay, well you posted a photo when you were in, let’s say Sorrento, Italy, and it was a career with some really nice food spots.

[00:15:02]   

It did quite well. How could we. What could we take here that does quite well? Have a look at what other people are doing so you can actually keep an eye on peers or competitors and just cherry pick what is going to do the best. So with every post it’s getting smarter about the decisions that you’re making when it comes to putting content out there, but with less and less effort and lift.

[00:15:25]  Megan Porta 

Okay. Oh, interesting. So for Instagram, TikTok, what are some. Are those the main platforms that we would.

[00:15:34]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Yeah. So at the moment we’re Instagram, TikTok and X and then we’ll soon to be soon to have LinkedIn and YouTube shorts is another roadmap.

[00:15:43]  Megan Porta 

Amazing.

[00:15:44]  Ethan Monkhouse 

But yeah, it is definitely a. It’s a difficult one to get right because the algorithms are always changing across channels and it takes a lot of time and effort to stay up to date with them. Whilst that’s all done automatically for us.

[00:15:58]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. And we tend to want to please everyone on all of those platforms. Like I want everyone to like all my content, but that’s just not realistic. Right. We have to kind of figure out who is liking our content and engaging with it and focus on those followers.

[00:16:15]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Yeah, exactly. And like, at the end of the.

[00:16:17]  Megan Porta 

Day.

[00:16:20]  Ethan Monkhouse 

The people who like your content aren’t your most valuable followers. It’s the ones who are cooking your recipes, buying your cookbook, who are never really saying a word. Those are the ones you want to find and resonate with. That doesn’t just apply to food industry or food blogs, it applies to every industry in the creator economy.

[00:16:40]   

It’s the ones who take action and are generally a bit quieter when it comes to online.

[00:16:46]  Megan Porta 

Hmm. Yeah, that’s interesting. So the quiet, why is that? Why are they quieter?

[00:16:53]  Ethan Monkhouse 

So it’s a mix of the action takers tend to be less vocal, but then also how you would engage your audience is an aspect of it in terms of how you’re activating your audience to say hi to Surface. And I think there’s small things that can be done, especially when it comes to, say, food blogging, for example.

[00:17:18]   

One instance would be the way, say you’ve got a new recipe or there’s some recipe you want to push out instead of just posting that online, that recipe online, and saying it’s fantastic, it’s your go to that sort of thing. You want to gatekeep it a small bit. You want to instill a bit of not exclusivity, but ambiguity and link it to some form of action.

[00:17:45]   

And what I mean by that is if you have a new recipe, don’t just post it in the caption, put up a story which is showing that post saying that I’m thinking of letting people know what this recipe is. It’s my go to every weekend, I cannot live without it. And then at the end, put a CTA and say, DM me.

[00:18:05]   

And I’ll say, DM me, you want it and I’ll send it to you. Because what you’re doing there is you’re getting people to not just read over something and click, oh, save. They’re going, oh, I need to dm because I want that recipe. And what they’re doing there is they’re then leaning into your content, which is what you’re trying to optimize for.

[00:18:24]   

You now have them in your DMs. You know, they’re more engaged than your average follower and you’re starting to identify who is it that those kind of valuable followers who are more quiet because the quiet ones aren’t going to be commenting because they don’t really care about the public appearance there or the public engagement.

[00:18:44]   

They care about what you’re doing and when you give them an action to take, be it dming for a recipe that you swear by, that is going to be what activates them.

[00:18:54]  Megan Porta 

So Naviro helps you sort through all of the, all of this and just refine how you’re delivering your content.

[00:19:02]  Ethan Monkhouse 

It’s all to do with audience growth. So growing your audience, but growing the right audience. Okay, so establishing, okay, where do you want to grow your audience and what steps are we going to take to get there? And it starts with, well, diving deep into your audience. So we’ll pick up on high K Factor fans, which are the ones that are essentially high value.

[00:19:21]   

We do that automatically. So, so we don’t need access to say, your socials and stuff like that. It’s all based off the public data side of things. And the reason for that is, well, that’s how you’re perceived. You’re perceived from a public appearance online. So we want to take on our analysis from that.

[00:19:39]   

And I think that’s the mistake that a lot of platforms make. They rely too much on that behind the scenes data, when at the end of the day, the person on the other side of the screen is just a person, they’re just human. And you want to make sure you’re not excluding any of those human aspects by looking at backend data.

[00:20:00]  Sponsor 

Hello friends. Let’s take a really quick break to talk about something that could seriously lighten your load and boost your traffic. Pinterest management. I know a lot of you are trying to do it all right now, but if Pinterest is one of those things that keeps falling to the bottom of your pile, your to do list, then listen up.There’s an incredible team I want to tell you about. They offer quality, affordable and effective Pinterest management. And the best part is that their packages are designed specifically so you don’t have to wait until you’re making six figures to get support. You can start getting help now. They take a true set it and forget it approach.

[00:20:44]   

Handling keyword research, copy template designs, scheduling, profile and board optimization, all of it. You stay focused on what you do best and they keep your Pinterest account humming behind the scenes. They even send monthly reports so you’re always in the loop. And get this, packages start at just $400 a month for full organic Pinterest management for all types of content creators.

[00:21:10]   

This is such a smart, high ROI move. If Pinterest has been feeling like a choreograph, let the team at Grace Lane Co take it off your plate. You will thank yourself later. Head to eatblogtalk.com/resources click the button under the Grace Lane Co logo to get started today. Eatblogtalk.com/resources and look for that Grace Lane Co logo.

[00:21:39] Megan Porta  

So how can we utilize platforms to do other things instead of just like, here’s my recipe, here’s DM me. What about creating products like, I don’t know, ebooks are very common in our space. Or other digital products?

[00:21:55]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Yeah, I think when it comes to digital projects, it’s quite. It’s a very saturated industry, not just for the food blogging, but for every industry which can use digital products. So where I’d say to start, and I’m sure a lot of people already do, is leveraging AI in the sense where you don’t want to lose the edge that makes you unique with your products, but you do want to use AI to do all the heavy lifting that it can do in the sense where if you’re drafting an ebook in terms of going to ChatGPT and being like, hey, can you write me an ebook?

[00:22:36]   

Or on this, this, this, this and this and this, that’s not going to come out with much because what it’s going to do, it’s going to put a very generic template onto that. It’s going to throw in a few EM dashes which are very obvious that it’s chatgpt.

[00:22:50]  Megan Porta 

The EM dash. Yes. Every time I see those in, in paragraphs I’m like, oh gosh, that was written by ChatGPT.

[00:22:57]  Ethan Monkhouse 

What’s quite funny is I didn’t realize that my co founder actually used them grammatically and I just, I always thought she was rising in a. I was like, seriously? It turns out she genuinely just uses them. So it’s been quite a confusing one. But yeah, I’d say that is a definite no go because that’s what everyone does.

[00:23:16]   

I think where you can even, even just taking that approach and changing it slightly is break it up into your paragraphs. So if it’s going to be a chapter, if it’s going to be sections, don’t feed everything into ChatGPT because it’s going to freak out and it’s going to lose context. You want to plan it out yourself, then you want to pass it into ChatGPT to focus on coherency first.

[00:23:43]   

So does this structure even work? And that’s where, yeah, ChatGPT can actually analyze that whole structure and be like, yeah, we’ll change the order of that, change the order of that, and that’s okay, cool, you got that. Now then, when it comes to the delivery of Those chapters, I’d take each chapter or each segment and put it into Claude, which is Anthropic’s ChatGPT.

[00:24:05]   

And the reason for that is because it’s much less mathematical, it’s much less quantitative. ChatGPT is very good when it comes to analysis and data. Anthropic is very, it’s a lot more human in a weird way, in the sense where it’s very conversational, which is what you want when it comes to delivering segments of a, a book that people are going to read.

[00:24:28]   

And so I would take each chapter and get Claude to advise on how to make this more conversational and delivering it to a specific locale or wherever. If it’s US English, if it’s UK English, whatever that niche is. And where I think people fall into the trap is they then lean on AI too much.

[00:24:49]   

It’s very important to take the outputs it gives you, put it back into a word doc, make a couple changes and then bring it back to AI. Because otherwise, before you know it, you’re yelling at ChatGPT, saying, I change this, change that, and you’ve lost, you’ve lost the edge that makes your digital product unique.

[00:25:10]   

So that’d be the main thing when it comes to actually drafting that stuff. And then the other thing would be pushing that product out. So how do you actually monetize it? It’s all well and good building these phenomenal digital product products, but if you can’t push it out, you’re going to have a bit of trouble.

[00:25:25]   

And so I would lean on ads if you have the budget, but if you don’t, I would lean straight away to TikTok, because TikTok is the one platform which prioritizes randomness in the sense where it also prioritizes inconsistency in the sense where you can have an account with zero followers, put something up and 24 hours, have million views on it, other than YouTube shorts, every other platform can’t do that.

[00:26:03]   

And that, I think is a perfect opportunity to test your funnel, to test how are you going to get people you’ve got this product. I would push out seven different TikToks. It can be all at once. To be honest, it doesn’t really make a difference because of TikTok’s algorithm and test different ways of hooking people in, test showing the value of it, or say you’ve a recipe, actually film the end result, or create a bit of exclusivity or FOMO and different ways to test that.

[00:26:31]   

And then pretty soon, within maybe half an hour or ten hour, you’ll know which one’s going to be the best. You just delete the rest and scale that one up. And the main thing you want them to do there is you want them to leave. I call it a breadcrumb. Whether that be a comment, whether it be sending a DM or with a particular keyword.

[00:26:54]   

You see quite a bit like comment, recipe and I’ll send it to you. But all of these are kind of examples of breadcrumbs. And the reason we want them is you need some low touch point to contact people. Again, we don’t really have the attention span anymore with TikTok users in the sense where you need to capture that attention, get them to take action and then they’re going to forget about it.

[00:27:16]   

And that’s okay because what you need to do is then reactivate them. So that’s where ads can come in. So you’ve pushed out your TikTok, you’ve got your recipe, you know, the one that’s kind of working. It’s getting a bit of traction. You’ve told them, like my post, like this, if you want me to send it to you or comment this, if you want me to send it to you.

[00:27:31]   

And that’s where you tie in the ads then. Because what you do is instead of spending all your money on cold audiences, you spend your money on retargeting the users who commented on your posts. So that’s when you can catch them at a much less, a much more focused time. I say this because when people are kind of scrolling on TikTok, you’re not really focused on the content there.

[00:27:55]   

You’re just going, you’re trying to get that dopamine hit and you want to target them. So one thing we do is we target with ads only people on WI fi because realistically, when you’re on WI fi, I mean, I’m going to be at home, I’m going to be more relaxed or I’m going to be in a familiar environment.

[00:28:12]   

And what that translates to is I’m more likely to make a decision which is monetary. And so if it’s purchasing an ebook or purchasing a product, it’s going to happen when I’m in that comfortable environment. And that’s a way of filtering it down to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to your ads.And then test with all this, it’s changed one variable at a time and repeat. That would be my kind of end to end flow of how to push something out and monetize that brand that you’re building.

[00:28:40]  Megan Porta 

So TikTok is the main testing ground, you would say?

[00:28:44]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Yeah, okay, yeah. It’s so affordable compared to others.

[00:28:47]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. And then can you translate that over to X and Instagram, once you’ve kind of got a handle on what’s going on there, you can move it.

[00:28:58]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Exactly what you do. You just, you know, by that stage you’ve done enough testing to know, okay, this is what demographic works, this is what my niche works in my niche. And it’s a copy paste job. But at least you’re going into the more expensive platforms, be it Instagram, meta, maybe even LinkedIn.

[00:29:15]   

But you’re going into it with a lot more knowledge as to what’s going to work.

[00:29:19]  Megan Porta 

What about Facebook, does that apply to.

[00:29:21]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Arguably more than Instagram? And look, there’s the benefit there that Meta does run. It’s the Meta suite, so it’s run between both platforms. But when it comes to Facebook, you’re going to get an older demographic, but you’re getting a demographic that’s more fiscally responsible. Just the way we’ve seen the data go in the sense where getting them to purchase, say an ebook is going to be, it’s going to be different because the way you capture TikTok sale is FOMO exclusivity and urgency.

[00:30:03]   

That’s how you address it. They, there’s times where people, I’m sure I’ve done it, I’ve bought something and halfway through my Apple Pay is going through and I’m like, wait a minute, what have I actually bought? And it’s because it ticked all those boxes. And one, I forgot there is affordability in the sense where if it’s a low ticket and it’s enough for you not to validate or justify, you’re going to click double click Apple Pay and it’s done.

[00:30:28]   

With Facebook, you’re going to be able to sell higher ticket products, be it a recipe book or a product, say in excess of $50, and have a lot more success with it because the people there are more fiscally responsible, but they do have more disposable income, but they need to be sold to more methodically.

[00:30:52]   

So they’re expecting a more a sales process that is not FOMO exclusivity and urgency. They’re expecting a sales process which is, well, does this give me value instantly? And that’s where you want to really get that message across with the copy that you’re putting out on Facebook.

[00:31:13]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, that’s interesting too. Do you consider trends when thinking through all of this and then how do you find trends? I think this is such a hard piece of it too.

[00:31:24]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Yeah. So I had the exact same thing with finding trends, which is why we built that into the platform. So we have like a social listening tool. So we pick up on what trends are relevant to your audience and how you can piggyback off them. It was a big part of when we were rolling out the creator economy.

[00:31:41]   

And the short answer is a lot of time spent crawling and keeping an eye on TikTok. Not to push Navero, but the quicker way of doing it is using that platform. But it all boils down to knowing what trends to jump on and which ones to let die down. And in the sense where certain trends are going to score you fantastic reach, fantastic engagement.

[00:32:13]   

But is it going to instill action? And that’s where you have to start balancing okay, likes, comments, engagement versus conversions. And I think a lot of actually food blogs as well optimize for okay, I want to get X amount of comments. I want to get a certain engagement rate. And that’s good. But first start with comments.

[00:32:33]   

You should be maximizing that like to comment ratio. You want to have a lot more comments because that’s where the sentiment lies. That’s where the action you’ve as much as it’s not an action towards conversion, it’s an action taken. It’s the biggest action you can take other than reposting, actually. Arguably, I would argue that it would be more than reposting because unless you’re giving your thoughts on that repost, it requires a lot more cognitive load.

[00:32:56]   

And then I would look at, okay, what is my conversion rate? And that’s where a lot of people fall short because they’re not generally tracking my impression to conversion. And I think that’s super important nowadays because everyone drops off. But you want to know, you want to start to collect information as to why those people dropped off, but collect it at scale.

[00:33:22]   

So it means that over time you’ll start to realize, oh, wait, whenever I ask a question at the end of my captions, people just don’t engage with it. Like, oh yeah, they get a load of likes, but no one really converts because conversion, the. The number at the end of the, at the bottom is the one that matters because that’s what allows you to keep doing what you love.

[00:33:41]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, all of this stuff is not on my radar. I don’t think that it’s on a lot of our radars. I don’t want to be analyzing. I don’t want to Be, I don’t know, just looking at all of that I want to be creating and I think a lot of us are in that same boat.

[00:33:57]   

So this is where your platform could really help us, it seems like. And it kind of takes the load off and allows us to do what we’re good at and what we want to actually be doing.

[00:34:10]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Yeah, no, exactly. And I think that’s what we set out to do in the sense where it’s all about leveling the playing field in the sense we’re making it affordable for anyone who wants to grow and just have access to the tools that were previously just reserved for the brands with the big budgets and makes the ability to compete with them a lot.

[00:34:32]  Megan Porta 

More achievable because we have a lot going on. And like I said earlier, a lot of us are doing this on our own and it can be super overwhelming. I’ve entered that burnout stage far too many times in my 15 years of food blogging. It’s almost like a just common now, like, oh, here we go again.

[00:34:53]   

So something like this could really take that out of the equation for you so you don’t have to think about it, which is so appealing.

[00:35:00]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Yeah, it really is. The heavy lifting. Eliminating the heavy lifting.

[00:35:05]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, exactly.

[00:35:06]  Ethan Monkhouse 

To stop, like, there’s still direction that will need to be like. Agreed. In the sense where, like, it’s not that Navera’s completely hands off, it’s that it’s doing everything that you look at now and then, like, oh, that’s gonna take so much time. That’s what Naveira is trying to eliminate. So that energy that would be depleted from doing those time consuming tasks can just be funneled into actually creating the content and the interest that you have, whether it be food, whether it be sports, whatever it may be.

[00:35:42]   

But that’s the primary aim with what we’re trying to do with the platform.

[00:35:47]  Megan Porta 

What kind of an investment is it? Because you’ve mentioned it’s not just for companies with big budgets. So I know that’s something that people will be wondering.

[00:35:56]  Ethan Monkhouse 

It’s a really like, it’s a blanket number. So it’s $49 per month for an account. We did have a higher price tag initially. And then we realized that the way we had built it allowed us to. As we brought in more kind of B2B and enterprise clients, it allows us to pass that saving down.

[00:36:16]   

Because of just economies of scale, you can actually pass down the saving to the individuals and that gives you access to everything on the platform. So social, listening to post Creation to the monitoring side, the audience analysis, all the features. I won’t go into depth on it, but it is definitely a no brainer if you’re feeling a bit lost when it comes to the amount of decisions, data and just noise there is online.

[00:36:44]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. I think everyone’s like, yep, me, that’s me. Decisions, decisions, data and noise. There’s so much noise. So just cutting through that a little bit I think will be appealing to a lot of people. Do you have food bloggers on the platform?

[00:36:59]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Currently we don’t, so that’ll be interesting to see. I, I know I have some friends who are food bloggers as a hobby rather than a full time job.

[00:37:11]  Megan Porta 

Yeah.

[00:37:12]  Ethan Monkhouse 

And I do remember just getting messages from them being like, oh my God, I had no idea that made a difference. I was like, yeah. And I tell them to look at a specific metric and we’ll just have a look at before and after. It’s just like. It’s crazy. Just the smallest things.

[00:37:24]   

Everything from like for instance, when you’re putting up a story, type all the keywords. Say you put up a, some, let’s just say a prawn linguine at some restaurant. Instead of just tagging the restaurant, type prawn, type linguine, type spaghetti, typed pasta or Italian food and then drag them all off the screen.

[00:37:45]   

Because what’s happening there is. It’s not going to affect your photo but it is giving. There’s a lot more semantics to the photo and it’s a lot easier for the tech and the computer to understand. So when it comes to who do I show this to the right people. It’s going to be like well, it says prawn, it says linguine, it says Italian food.

[00:38:03]   

Okay, I’m going to show it to all the people here who are interested in that and, and some small things like that which really affect reaching the right people.

[00:38:12]  Megan Porta 

Okay, I’m intrigued. Is there anything else you need to tell us about the platform or just I don’t know any talking points for this topic in general?

[00:38:23]  Ethan Monkhouse 

I think like I’m not really with, with Naviro as a, as a whole. Like it is. You’ll know fairly soon if it’s something that is gonna like something you need. So it’s not see it as a kind of salesy approach we don’t need. We kind of like the realization that oh wait, we don’t have to get a team to do this or I don’t have to spend all this time doing this.

[00:38:45]   

I think with the content side of things I would prioritize, and this is completely outside Navera, but prioritize batchmaking content. But it like make it a ritual in the sense where it’s very easy to stop being consistent. And at the end of the day that’s what makes every account, not just Food Blogger sustainable is the consistency.

[00:39:10]   

As soon as you stop being consistent, irrespective of how frequent, that’s where the momentum, the motivation starts to dwindle. And I would say find a day, find an hour slot or two hour slot, three, whatever it may be, start small but be consistent with the content that you’re making. Say I’m going to make X amount of these posts, X amount of these posts and stick to it because that’s going to be your accountability.

[00:39:33]   

As soon as that metric stops, then you got to take a step back and ask why did I stop that? Because that’s going to be what keeps you motivated to keep exploring more content ideas. When you have that consistent content delivery already just happening, that process is already going.

[00:39:52]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, consistency is a theme. I mean with everything, it’s just ab. An absolute must these days. You have to figure out how to be consistent with whatever you’re doing. So thank you for that. This was really. I’m very intrigued and I feel like I have a million more questions for you, but we can say goodbye.

[00:40:12]   

Thank you for all of this, Ethan, really. And I’m so grateful for this platform and I’m sure you are just serving so many people and helping their businesses thrive. So thank you. Do you have either a favorite quote or words of inspiration to leave us with today?

[00:40:29]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Consistency over creativity. When you’re tired, I think that’s just topical to what we were just talking about. I think it’s creativity is fantastic, but when you’re tired and sometimes it’s just not the day for it, prioritize just being consistent.

[00:40:43]  Megan Porta 

I love that you added when you’re tired because we all have those days. Right. Well, we’ll put together a show notes page for you, Ethan. If you want to go peek at those, head to eatblogtalk.com/naviro tell everyone where they can find you if they’re interested in the platform or just want to look at it and browse. Where can they go?

[00:41:06]  Ethan Monkhouse 

Yeah, yeah. So I mean you can visit our site, which is Naviro.ai. All the information is there. You can sign up to the waitlist, we drip feed access, depending on who’s. Who’s trying to get access, just to keep everything even. And if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn as well.

[00:41:22]   

I don’t know my LinkedIn URL, but I’m sure I could put it somewhere. It’s Ethan Monkhouse, but I think my surname should make it a bit easier to find. And yeah, any questions that anyone has as well, like any questions about content creation ads, happy to answer them. Just you can DM me on LinkedIn or [email protected] is my email Great.

[00:41:43]  Megan Porta 

Well, thank you again Ethan and thank you for listening food bloggers. I will see you next time. 

[00:41:50]  Outro

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat BlogTalk. If you are craving accountability, focus and connection at a low monthly cost, join the Eat Blog Talk accountability group at eatblogtalk.com/focus. I will see you next time.