In episode 290, Megan chats with Stephanie Rutherford about her quick growth as a new blogger during the pandemic and she shared some action steps towards growth that you can implement for your blog too.

We cover information about how people eat with their eyes so photography is important, showing up consistently with all that you do as a blogger is super important, how to gain traction with web stories and how Pinterest can still be valuable.

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 Stephanie’s Sweet Treats
Website | Facebook | Instagram

Bio Stephanie started her blogging journey in January 2020 because she thought having blog could be fun. After being furloughed, Stephanie decided to go blogging as a hobby to turning it into a business. After spending a year growing on building her photography skills, it only took 4 months to go from 5,000 to 50,000 page sessions to qualify to be part of the Mediavine ad network. Stephanie did all of this and had a toddler during the pandemic.

Takeaways

  • Your “why” will help give you energy to find the will to work hard on building a solid business.
  • Photography is important on a blog because people eat with their eyes so invest in your skills.
  • Core web vitals are very important – your website needs to be optimized for Google and the user.
  • Dig into key word research – many tools out there to help you and courses to teach you about SEO.
  • Growing your traffic is never just one thing. Everything is connected.
  • Instagram can help you build a strong, engaging community. They can help you get star ratings, give you feedback on what to focus on and how to grow.
  • Be very engaging on IG and be consistent. You can do this with polls, asking questions, return DM conversations, use video, Reels, Stories and photography.
  • Pinterest is a helpful source of traffic and it doesn’t require you to do Idea pins.
  • Have a reputable, good host.
  • Key search is affordable and a useful SEO tool. You can use multiple tools to get different benefits.
  • Check out what techniques successful bloggers are doing on their sites and use that information to help you grow too.
  • Batching web stories is valuable because when you stay consistent, they help you drive traffic.

Resources Mentioned

Blogger Millionnaire Podcast

RankIQ

Cooking with Keywords

Midwest Foodie Pinterest ebook

Big Scoots

Life Long Learning

Episode 277 covers how life long learning can be a strategy to accelerate growth in your blog.

Transcript

Click for full script.

290_STEPHANIE_RUTHERFORD

Stephanie Rutherford: Hi, this is Stephanie Rutherford from Stephanie’s Sweet Treats. You are listening to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. 

Sponsor: On the simplest level, Clariti helps you keep your blog content updated and organized. Because instead of broken links and images that knock your blog down in search results, instead of an unoptimized blog posts that if updated, could otherwise boost revenue and increased traffic to your site, instead of a long list of things to do or create so that you can actually start updating your blog content, Clariti gives you a one-stop dashboard that brings together all the information you need to make decisions about where to spend your time. Clariti also shows you the Google analytics information about your content without all the setup hassle of doing it yourself. Clariti also provides an actionable to-do list so you know exactly what you need to do to optimize each blog post or site page. Clariti saves you hours and hours of manual blog post tracking so you have a clear task list for what to update and where, on your blog. If you’re interested in checking out Clariti, head to clariti.com/eatblogtalk. Clariti is spelled C L A R I T I.com/eatblogtalk. To sign up for the waitlist and take advantage of their $25 a month forever plan. Go to clariti.com/eatblogtalk or check out the resources page on eatblogtalk.com/resources. 

Megan Porta: Hey there, food bloggers. Welcome to Eat Blog Talk, the podcast for food bloggers looking for the value and confidence that will move the needle forward in your business. This episode is sponsored by RankIQ. I am your host, Megan Porta, and you are listening to episode 290. 

Today, Stephanie Rutherford and I are going to have a chat about her journey in blogging and how she was able to grow her traffic from 5k to 50K page sessions in just four months. Stephanie started her blogging journey in January 2020 because she thought having a blog could be fun. After being furloughed, Stephanie decided to go blogging as a hobby, turning it into a business. After spending a year building her photography skills, it only took four months to go from 5k at two 50K page sessions to qualify to be a part of the Mediavine ad network. Stephanie did all of this and had a toddler during the pandemic.

Wow. That is a lot to manage and to have on your plate at once, Stephanie. That is really impressive. I can’t wait to hear your story and how this has all unfolded for you. But first we want to hear what your fun fact is. 

Stephanie Rutherford: Yeah. So my fun fact is also related to my journey. So I had no idea how to bake until I had my son in 2018. I was a cake box mix girl. I had no idea. But I had my son and I had really bad postpartum depression and I needed something for me. I started watching the great British baking show. I love that show. Then I just decided to start trying more recipes and it just kept growing and growing. I didn’t take any classes or anything like that. I just kept experimenting and it developed into this now, this huge passion into baking. Now I tell other people how to bake recipes and stuff. So pretty crazy. 

Megan Porta: That’s amazing. Yeah. So baking really was a part of your healing, right? 

Stephanie Rutherford: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Because you know, with having a baby, for me, I had to exclusively pump, so it was just very hard for me. So I wanted something that made me feel basically like a human again. So I started baking and I loved it. One, it was delicious. So that always helps. 

Megan Porta: Yes, that’s always a strong point, that you get to actually enjoy the treats that you make. 

Stephanie Rutherford: Exactly. Then it was fun to make them. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. You’ve turned it into a hobby and then now a business which we are going to learn about today in a really short amount of time. So would you mind just starting there Stephanie and telling us how you started your blog. You said in your notes that you really didn’t know much about blogging and you knew you’d love to bake. So how did things go for you? 

Stephanie Rutherford: Yeah, so I started my blog in January 2020, so right before the pandemic. I was like, oh, that could be fun. Maybe I didn’t know anything. I was taking pictures using my iPhone. My skills of how to even develop a recipe has greatly improved. I really didn’t know anything when I first started. But I was going along and then I realized that people eat with their eyes. So if I was going to really grow, I knew I had to increase my food photography. So May 2020 first I signed up for photography school is what I signed up with. I learned a lot, got a camera, stopped photos on my iPhone and then learned a ton. But that first year was just a lot of growing into how I actually do this. Then January, 2021, I took advanced photography school which then really greatly improved everything. I got artificial light because natural light is such a beast to tackle. Artificial light and it made my photos much more professional. Then still at that same time, I was still about like 5,000 page sessions at the beginning of 2021. Then around June, I realized one, a lot of things that we’ll go over, but a lot of things that I needed to change and grow to grow my traffic. Anyway, so that is where I started with, knowing nothing and then learning about food photography. 

Megan Porta: That’s amazing. So your journey is so condensed. So many people listening to myself, included, it took way longer to learn these things, learn about photography and learn what actually needed to be done to move your business forward. So I just want to say I am so impressed and kudos to you for figuring it out in such a short amount of time. I think you’re amazing for doing that. There’s this new wave of food bloggers. The really fresh, like one to two to three year old food bloggers who are coming onto the scene and they are just crushing it. It is so fun to watch and see you guys just figure it out. 

Stephanie Rutherford: Thank you. That is so sweet. I think it’s probably related to the pandemic. Like me, I was furloughed, I was a restaurant server. I got furloughed. So I had all this time and I was like, so what am I going to do with this time? A lot of people baked bread or whatever during the pandemic. So I went really hardcore in to that because I didn’t want to go back to my job. I wanted to actually make this a thing and I had the time. At the time I had a 15 month old so I was doing that too. But anyways, that’s what I think a lot of these people are growing so fast and just crushing it is that very scary, negative thing of the pandemic and turned it into something positive.

Megan Porta: Wow. That is such a great perspective. I hadn’t really thought of that before, but the pandemic potentially could have nudged a lot of people there. Then once you got the momentum going then you were like, wait a second. This is really cool. I don’t necessarily want to go back to a job. So out of just necessity and a need to be efficient and streamline and get it done so you just did it. That is so cool. I love hearing you say that. So photography was a first focus for you, which is I think really smart, because like you said, people eat with their eyes. So I love that you focused on that first. Then what happened in June? You said you had a realization in June. What did you realize and what happened after that?

Stephanie Rutherford: Things just clicked in my brain in tune. Lots of different things that I knew that I needed to do to get traffic. Like for example, before I switched everything over, I wasn’t passing core web vitals. My page speed was really low because things weren’t optimized. I thought I knew what keyword research was and then in fact I did not. I found this podcast, actually, Eat Blog Talk and The Blogger Millionaire, which I love. So I was listening to all that stuff and just realizing, wow, there’s actually a lot more things than I need to do. So then I did this deep research dive into all these things that we’re going to talk about. Realizing one, growing your traffic is never just one thing. Everything is connected and so I did everything at once. The needle just went super fast to higher page sessions.

Megan Porta: I think it’s great that you realize that it’s not just one thing. There’s not one thing you should be focusing on. That you need to have your eyes on a couple of different things. So keyword research, SEO. What did you think about socials and how they played into your growth? Did you focus on those to start? Or how did you go about that? 

Stephanie Rutherford: Yeah, so actually my first year I was very focused on my Instagram because my mindset was, I wanted to build a community on Instagram so that when I made recipes, people got excited and wanted to make my recipes. So I did that first year where I was still less than 5,000 page sessions. I grew to 10,000 Instagram followers. Then the second year I grew to 58,000 followers. Now I’m at 69,000 at the beginning of this year. 

Megan Porta: How in the world did you do that? 

Stephanie Rutherford: Oh like I said, the community. So I was very into engaging with others. Other food bloggers, constantly engaging, constantly sharing my stories. Like behind the scenes recipe testing, to get people excited about what I’m making. Then people related to me. Actually, I was their best friend, even though I haven’t met them before. So then they would make my recipes and then they would get excited about the next thing. I went to engage in that. So yeah, honestly building community, showing up consistently on Instagram was a huge ticket item for me. Then I did short sweet Instagram reels, like seven second long videos of opening up a cookie or anything like that. They got me a lot of views on my reels as well, which led to a lot more followers too. So all that’s connected too. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, absolutely. Did you use Instagram to connect with brands and do sponsored work? 

Stephanie Rutherford: Yes. Yes. So that’s also another big reason why I wanted to grow my Instagram because I knew it’s tough to grow your traffic, but if I had a strong Instagram following, then I could make money from brands, which is exactly what happened. The end of December, 2020. Of course it was Christmas time. So I did have a lot of brands starting to reach out to me then and tons of pitching and everything, because I grew my following to almost 10K by the end of the year. That really helped too, because I wanted to make money and I didn’t want to go back to work. So that’s why it was such a big focus for me. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, that makes sense. So how did you navigate Pinterest right off the bat and how are you dealing with Pinterest now? 

Stephanie Rutherford: So when I first started, I was still using old methods you can say. When you make a fresh pin, that just goes to one board and then it was honestly just so much work. But part of this journey is also, my Pinterest grew a ton because I strongly recommend anyone listening to go check it out. But Midwest Foodie has a Pinterest e-book because she kills it in the Pinterest space and she makes so much money. She has quarterly traffic reports on her blog and it’s so inspiring. But anyway, she has this ebook that teaches you how to make everything. So I bought that and then I started doing it consistently. Now I get like a minimum 1000 page views from Pinterest every day. I stopped doing idea pins and my Pinterest has just exploded, so it’s not dead.

Megan Porta: Okay. So you don’t do idea pins at all? 

Stephanie Rutherford: No, I don’t do idea pins at all because I’ve talked a lot of other food bloggers and I’ve seen Facebook groups or whatever people talking about it, but basically, from my personal experience, is that whenever I post an idea pin, Pinterest will say, okay, let’s only show users the idea pin, but there’s no links to the idea pin. So I just stopped doing them. Once I just focused on actually pinning my pins consistently, long text pins, my link clicks just grew. It grew from about a hundred a day to now over a thousand. So it grew a ton. 

Megan Porta: Oh, wow. Okay. That’s really inspiring. It’s really ironic because just about two hours ago, someone in my mastermind group was like, Hey, has anyone heard of Midwest Foodies Pinterest strategy? That’s so crazy that I’ve heard about it now twice in a day. So I think that’s a sign that I need to go check it out.

Stephanie Rutherford: It is really good. It has everything broken down exactly what you need to do. Of course, Pinterest is a long game like SEO with Google. So you’re not going to see results as soon as you post it, but wait two months and then you’ll start seeing those results. So I highly recommend that.

Megan Porta: Oh, that’s super inspiring. Okay. A fresh perspective there because Pinterest is very disheartening for a lot of people right now. So I think that will be encouraging for everyone to hear. You said you went deep into SEO and keyword research. Can you tell us more about that? Are there certain tools you use? Certain strategies? What do you have to share with us about that? 

Stephanie Rutherford: Yeah. The very first thing I had to do was I needed to upgrade my site because I wasn’t passing good site speed. I was like around 60% for site speed. Then my site wasn’t upgraded and I wasn’t passing core vitals, so I needed to change a lot of things on the backend because I believe it’s really hard to rank if you don’t have an optimized site.

So I did a whole overhaul of my site. So I got the feast plugin, which is built for food bloggers. It lets you completely have an optimized site. Does all those things for you get you to have a modern home page, a recipe index. .The list goes on for all the things this plugin does for you. So highly recommend that feast plugin. It’s really changed my sight. I also got WP rocket, which is a paid plugin that helps with your site speed, with your JavaScript, a whole bunch of things this plugin does for you. So I got that. I was able to pass Corvo Cora vitals after that. Then I was still about 70 on my site speed, but the big factor in that was my hosting.

I was using Bluehost. So there are a lot of problems with Bluehost. So Casey Markee, he suggested Big Scoots. So I switched over to that and then I went out and then my site speed went up to 98%. So I really improved that. So everyone should switch to Big Scoots off of BlueHost, if you are on Blue Host.

Megan Porta: Oh, agreed. So Just Host is actually a sister company of Blue Host and I was with them from the beginning for many years. Oh my gosh, the problems. They didn’t come often, but when they did come, they were so intense. My site was down for days at a time. Nobody would do anything about it. There was nothing we could do. Oh my gosh. I still get all jittery when I think about that. It was so painful. So yes, it is so worthwhile to invest in a good host. Big scoots are top notch so I second that. 

Sponsor: Food bloggers, let’s take a really quick break. I’d love to tell you about just a few things going on at Eat Blog Talk that might benefit you and your business.

First of all, if you would take the time to go to your favorite podcast player to subscribe or follow rate and review Eat Blog Talk. I would be so grateful and it adds so much value to this podcast. Also go to the free discussion forum at forum.eatblogtalk.com to get in on the conversations going on over there with other food bloggers, like-minded peers, you can ask questions, answer questions, and just contribute to great discussions.

Lastly, if you would like to get in on the next mastermind group that will be put together in spring of 2020, to be sure to get on the waitlist, to now go to eatblogtalk.com and follow the buttons for a mastermind. We’ll be in touch as spring draws closer. Now, back to the episode. 

Megan Porta: What did you use for keyword research? What do you use now? 

Stephanie Rutherford: When I was growing up, I did use Key search, which I know a lot of people on your podcast have talked about key search, but it’s really good. It’s so much cheaper than SEMrush or any of those others because I only pay $17 a month for it. Which is really cheap compared to the other ones, but it allows me to search for content. So I wanted to offer this little nugget of advice when people are doing the keyword research on key search. So of course I will look for things when I have ideas. I’ll look for something and then I try to see if it has at least a thousand in monthly volume and then up to a score of 35, because it’s a color based system. So I look for a maximum score of 35. But the other thing I do is that I will look up generic terms. For example, cheesecake. Cake. Cookie, something like that that’s generic. Then you can press the score button twice to show you everything you can rank for, which allows you to get like a big bank of ideas. So that’s what I did. It was so helpful. 

Megan Porta: Oh, that’s a great little nugget. Do you use anything else in conjunction with key search or is that your main tool? 

Stephanie Rutherford: When I was first growing, that was the only tool I did use. Now I’m actually actually looking into RankIQ because you were talking about it on your podcast. So I actually went and I looked at it. Now, I’m personally not as much a fan about the keyword research part, but I love the content optimizer. Part of RankIQ is because you can plug in your post and then it will tell you what your grade is. Then it’ll give you a list of different keywords you should use for your posts to help with ranking with your competitors and everything like that. That has helped my ranking with a post I’ve already posted so much. I highly recommend that too.

Megan Porta: Yeah. With that optimizer, putting your content through that tool in RankIQ, you can get your content ranking so fast. It’s amazing to me how fast some of my posts rank. I will look back like I’m not kidding, a week later. I’m like, what? I’m on page one on Google already. Granted it’s not always something that has a huge search volume. But my strategy right now is planting those little seeds with lower to medium search volume. But doing a lot of them. Over time, I’m hoping to like, just kill my traffic and triple it this year. That’s my goal. So I am glad you’re looking into that too. That optimizer’s so powerful. Isn’t it fun to see your grade? Because it scores you. You usually start out, I start out as an F, go to a D and then up to A plus, and then you’re like, yes! It feels so good to get that. 

Stephanie Rutherford: Yes, I completely agree. I actually did that recently with my Biscoff cake. I was ranking number 12 and now I’m ranking number three for it because I literally just used the content optimizer. Oh, anyways, I use that. Man, it was a huge traffic result. My actual traffic for that post increased by a hundred link clicks in the past two weeks because I upped it. So I highly recommend it. 

Megan Porta: Yes. So glad you dug into that. I love hearing people’s success stories with RankIQ because I’ve found so much power in it. It’s like a hidden little gem. Like the emerging gem in the food blogging space. It’s just fun to hear that. Anything else about SEO or keyword research? I was going to ask you about web stories, but wanted to make sure we covered everything inside of those realms first. 

Stephanie Rutherford: Yeah. So I started creating content that I wanted to rank for. So this was in June. I did go very hardcore into it. I was making three new recipes a week because I knew I wanted to get to Mediavine ASAP and I knew the only way to do that was to have content I could rank for. Crazy. I did three new recipes a week. It was a ton of work, but it led to really big results. So do what you can consistently, but it really helped me make a lot more traffic. But then I also needed to make sure all my posts are written correctly for what Google needs for its metadata. So I actually, when I looked at my peers who were on Mediavine and saw how they wrote their posts. I realized most of these people were writing their posts the same way in the terms of headers and the outline for their post. I was not. So I completely changed that and that has also really helped me as well.

Megan Porta: Oh, that’s so smart of you to just see what the successful people were doing and then following suit. That was brilliant. I commend you for that as well. Okay. I want to hear about web stories because I know that you’ve dug into web stories a bit. So how much has it helped you? 

Stephanie Rutherford: So web stories is actually one of the big reasons why I got to Mediavine so fast, and if you’re listening to this and you’re not doing web stories, you need to jump on it immediately. Because it was amazing for me. So I started making, when I was first starting, I was doing one web story a day, five days a week. When you make them, you can schedule them out for the week. So you can batch them all at once. You can make templates and you can knock these out pretty quickly. They do need to be at least 10 slides per web story because Google wants it to be like a strong source of traffic. So doing three or four slides or five slides won’t be enough. So do at least 10 slides. Anyway, so I started to do that and then most of that traffic was coming from my direct source. Another note, when you do web stories, you need to make sure that you filter out the web stories because web stories do live on your site, but that doesn’t count for your pay sessions specifically with Mediavine. So make sure you filter those out. So it counts when people click on the web story to go to your actual blog posts and that’s what counts.

So I went from like my direct traffic being from 50 to at least 1000 every single day. Sometimes it was two or 3000 and that was just from web stories because I had several go viral. I was just doing them consistently. It made for big results. 

Megan Porta: Have you noticed a theme with which web stories take off or is it just random for you?

Stephanie Rutherford: I think it’s definitely random. I try to post things with seasonality in mind. For example, I have these lemon poppy seed cupcakes, and I posted a web story for them. Even though it’s not technically spring, I think people are just feeling those spring vibes and that went viral. In one day I got 3000 link clicks from that web story. That went really crazy. So I’m starting to do more of those spring things. But I think doing it consistently, without a doubt, every single week, you are posting five web stories a week. All of my web stories are getting traffic. None of them are no hitters, all of them are. Some of them are really big hitters, but anyway, so yeah, I guess just trying to think of it as, what do you think users would like? That’s what I’m doing. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. Thinking like the user. One of the themes I’m pulling out of our conversation with every platform that you’re talking about and every tool, every strategy, is consistency. You’re showing up and you’re doing so consistently, and that is such a big piece of food blogging. That is no different from 10 years ago. Showing up consistently is going to pay off. I love that that is a theme for you as well. Have you intentionally done that? 

Stephanie Rutherford: Yes. This started when I was on Instagram. If you show up consistently, then your audience will know what to expect from you. They’ll know, hey, you’re going to post on this day. Oh yeah. I can’t wait to see what you post. The same thing as with Google. Same thing with Google web stories, same thing with Pinterest, everything you need to be consistent because then Google will know exactly if you post two recipes a week, Google will say, oh, okay. I see you. Then if you do five web stories a week Yeah, Google just will expect that from you. Not in a bad way, but in a really good way. You’ll get more traffic when you show up consistently. 

Megan Porta: Wow. That’s a great mindset to have. Not just people, but the platforms are noticing how you show up as well.

Stephanie Rutherford: Yeah, exactly. 

Megan Porta: That’s creepy, but cool. Okay. What are we missing? So you have talked about a lot of things that you’ve put a focus on this year. You’ve grown massively. You’re now in Mediavine. Is there anything we’re missing that contributed to your amazing success? 

Stephanie Rutherford: Let’s see. So with Instagram, I feel like lately, one thing has changed so much since the beginning of 2020 when I made my Instagram to now. Things are way different now. A lot of other food bloggers, I feel, are having the wrong mindset when it comes to Instagram. The mindset that I have is that while Instagram is pushing reels. They want to be like TikTok, but they are doing that. But photos aren’t dead because I just hada post literally last week that had 10,000 likes on it. Because people were really excited about it. So I believe, when I think about Instagram, users do like to see their content in video form. So I try to make videos. It was a big goal of mine to learn how to make entertaining recipe reels. It was a big goal of mine because I knew my users wanted to do that. Then I still post photos, like four days a week. Then I post reels two other days and I take Sundays off. But anyway, I just wanted to let people know that changing our mindset and trying to do what your user or your followers, your audience, your community, what they actually want to see from you versus trying to just please Instagram. That’s how I’ve been doing it and I’ve been really growing because I think my users can relate to what I’m doing for them. 

Megan Porta: In what ways do you feel like you tap into what your user wants? Do you ask a lot of questions? Do polls? How do you figure that out? 

Stephanie Rutherford: Yeah. So I do ask actually a lot of questions in trying to have an engaged community. I do polls a lot. A lot of my polls are related to do you think these cookies need extra topping? I dunno. It’s silly, but people really like getting involved in that process. Lately, I asked my followers, do you guys like voiceovers or just trending music on recipe videos. For that result, it was actually the people who don’t like voice overs were food bloggers, the people who do were regular people. Just people who actually make my recipes. So that was very interesting to me. So people like to hear voice overs and stuff. This is just for my audience. Maybe it’s totally different for your audience, but that’s what I figured out, what my audience wants. Then when things go well, I’m like, okay why do I think they liked it so much? How can I do it again, in a different way cause they liked it. So that’s kinda how I think about it too. Then for me, for example, people love chocolate, so I give them the chocolate. They are very happy about it. Anyway, that’s my mindset about it. 

Megan Porta: Then you mentioned, I saw something in your notes about how you use Instagram to get people to give you star ratings on your blog. Is that right? 

Stephanie Rutherford: Yes. Yeah. Star readings are really important for ranking on Google. Every time somebody would make something and that’s all part of this engaged community, literally everything is connected. Yes, having this engaged community who gets excited and makes my recipes, then I just say, Hey, would you mind leaving me a star review on my blog? That would help me so much with Google. Thank you. Every single time I ask that because 50% of the time they’ll go and do that for me because they think we’re best friends, even though I don’t know them, so that’s what I do. It has helped me a ton as well. I have this Oreo chocolate chip cookie that Instagram went crazy for and now has 21 five star reviews on it because I just asked people on Instagram to do that for me. Now number four on Google for it, because of all those star reviews. That’s very helpful. So I strongly recommend just asking your user that made it. Just say, hey, would you mind?

Megan Porta: Ask and you will receive, right? It doesn’t hurt to ask. Wow, Stephanie, this is all so great. So what are we missing? Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about yet? 

Stephanie Rutherford: There was actually one more thing I wanted to mention. So I took this course after I got on Mediavine, but Casey Markee recommended the Cooking with Keywords course. Have you taken it, Megan? 

Megan Porta: I haven’t, but I’ve heard from many people who have loved it. 

Stephanie Rutherford: Yes. I’ve learned a ton about that stuff. A lot of the information I did know because of the blogger millionaire podcast. He’s amazing. There’s a lot of things I did know already from free information from podcasts, but there was also a lot more things that I didn’t even realize, and it totally changed my mindset on how you write your title tags and actually when you’re trying to pick your keyword for your title, you don’t just pick the keyword. You want to do something called syntax, which allows descriptive words to make the user want to click on yours versus other ones. So it was a really amazing course, so I strongly recommend doing that.

Megan Porta: Okay. That’s a great recommendation and backed by a lot of other bloggers as well. So thank you for all of this. Oh my goodness. This episode is gold. It is pure gold. From Stephanie, one of the people who has just crushed it in the last few years with blogging. You were like the new up and coming amazing type of food blogger. We love you. Thank you for joining me. It has been such a pleasure. To end our conversation, do you have either a favorite quote or words of inspiration for us Stephanie? 

Stephanie Rutherford: Yeah. I planned to talk about being consistent. Actually, we were talking about that earlier, but If you stay consistent and you don’t stop something because it doesn’t work the first time, you keep trying, you keep going. It will lead to big results because showing up and trying to be consistent and trying to learn and grow, it’s going to make you stand out from everybody else, which is exactly what I did. Every time I do something, I try to learn from it and grow and just keep going. In my opinion, if I can do it, you can do it. There’s space for everyone here. I think it’s so amazing seeing everyone’s journeys with food blogging. 

Megan Porta: Same and yeah, isn’t it fun just to see how everyone’s journey comes together differently? So that’s one of the things I love about being in the position I am with this podcast. I get to hear so many different stories. It’s fascinating to watch just how different journeys unfold. I think showing up and being consistent is such great advice to end on. So thanks Stephanie. We’re going to put together a show notes page for you. If anyone wants to go look at those, you can go to eatblogtalk.com/stephaniessweettreats. Why don’t you tell everyone where they can find you on your website and on social media and everywhere else. 

Stephanie Rutherford: Yeah. So on Instagram, I’m Stephanie Sweet Treats. And then my blog is stephaniesweets.com. I’m very active on Instagram, so I love when people send me messages. If you have questions I’m here for it. Yeah, let me know if you have questions. 

Megan Porta: All right. Thanks again, Stephanie. And thank you for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you in the next episode. 

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


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