Episode 279: Why Whisk and TikTok Are Useful Tools For Food Bloggers with Julie Tran Deily

279 Julie Tran Deily

Julie Tran Deily: Hi, this is Julie Deily from The Little Kitchen and you’re listening to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. 

Megan Porta: Hey, awesome food bloggers. Before we dig into this episode, I have a really quick favor to ask you. Go to your favorite podcast player, go to Eat Blog Talk. Scroll down to the bottom where you see the ratings and review section. Leave Eat Blog Talk a five star rating if you love this podcast and leave a great review. This will only benefit this podcast. It adds value and I so very much appreciate your efforts with this. Thank you so much for doing this. Okay. Now onto the episode. 

Hey food bloggers. Welcome to Eat Blog Talk. The podcast for food bloggers looking for value and confidence that will move the needle forward in their businesses. This episode is sponsored by RankIQ. I am your host, Megan Porta, and you’re listening to episode number 279. Today, Julie and I are going to have a conversation about Whisk and TikTok and why Whisk and TikTok are useful for food bloggers. Julie Tran Deilly started her blog, The Little Kitchen in December 2009.

She was a software engineer for 10 years before transitioning to full-time food blogger and content creator in 2012. On her blog, she loves to share recipes that are accessible to the home cook and only works with brands she loves. She has spoken at and taught workshops at the Mediavine conference, Blogher and TBX. She recently started working part-time as a community growth manager at Whisk. She lives in central Florida with her husband and three rescue pets, two dogs named Angel and Eddie, and a cat named Clone. Oh my gosh. I love that you have three pets. I love knowing that you live in central Florida. I love Florida. But aside from everything that I’ve already read, Julie, what is a fun fact that you have for us today?

Julie Tran Deily: I actually have two fun facts for you. So in college, I worked at my college radio station and I was the promotions director. Then in high school, I was a photography editor on my high school yearbook staff. So I feel like it’s come full circle that I’m a food blogger and a food photographer. So, it was written in the stars.

Megan Porta: That’s so funny. I’ve had other people say fun facts that are similar to that. Things that they did in childhood, or maybe like early adulthood actually pop up now. It’s almost like it was a base for becoming a food blogger, which was so interesting. So I love that. Thank you for being here. I am so grateful to have this conversation with you today.

Julie Tran Deily: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited. I love your podcast. 

Megan Porta: Oh, good. Thank you. You are a community growth manager at Whisk, and I told you before we recorded that I know absolutely nothing about Whisk. So I’m truly showing up today in a spirit of knowing absolutely nothing and ready to learn. So why don’t you just tell us what is Whisk and yeah just describe it in detail. 

Julie Tran Deily: Yeah. So Whisk is a consumer application. You can use it on iOS, on Android. It’s available in the Samsung app store also. There is also a new iPad version. So it’s actually an app that was started in the UK and bought out by Samsung in 2019. So users that download the app and create an account, they can actually save recipes from all over the internet. What I love about Whisk is you can save the recipe to your own little personal recipe box. For bloggers and content creators, only the ingredients are stored and there’s a link back to the food blogger or publisher website. But users can also create meal plans and grocery lists and it’s very much an app where you can save your recipes. When you’re getting ready to cook, you can create a meal plan and then also create your shopping list, which is really exciting. But there’s also a social aspect to it. There’s communities. We can talk a little bit more about communities later on. But I’m just really excited about the Whisk app overall and the partnership with TikTok. I feel like it’s very valuable for food bloggers. That’s why I wanted to talk to you about it today. 

Megan Porta: Okay. So a couple of questions. So Whisk is food focused only?

Julie Tran Deily: Yes.

Megan Porta: Okay. So it’s for people, like home cooks, who are maybe wanting to put together recipe compilations or meal plans or some sort of list surrounding food. 

Julie Tran Deily: Exactly. 

Megan Porta: Perfect. Thank you for explaining that. Am I the only one that doesn’t know what Whisk is? When I saw it pop up, I was like, I have no idea what this is. Should I know this? 

Julie Tran Deily: It was actually new to me earlier this year also. I saw that you could actually link to recipes on TikToK. That’s when I first heard about Whisk. So how you link to things on TikToK in your TikToK videos, it’s called a jump, actually. So we’ll do a little education today. It’s called a jump. So there’s a few other partnerships that TikTok has with other brands. So the Jump in TikTok allows you to link to recipes, which again, like I said is very exciting for food bloggers in general, especially established food bloggers who rely on ad revenue, who are with networks like Mediavine and Adthrive, so it’s really exciting in that aspect. That’s how I heard about it. But when it first started, they rolled it out to a couple of hundred creators on TikTok. Then it was February 2021. I’m like, what year are we in? February 2021. Then in the spring they rolled it out to a few more thousand. So October 2021, just a few months ago, they roll it out to all creators in the US, in the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. So five countries that have a lot of creators, a lot of TikTok creators. So anybody can link to a recipe on TikToK via Whisk, which is really exciting to me. I’ve talked to other creators about this so that anybody can link to your recipe. So if somebody is on TikTok and they’re like, I made Megan’s recipe on her blog and I’m just gonna create a little video. I’m going to share it on TikToK and they can link to it. If they go viral, you get the benefit for that. So that’s what’s really exciting. It’s not just limited to creators who are constantly creating content. Because you know, on TikToK, everybody’s a creator. If you create an account, you’re a creator. But you might be more of a consumer watching videos. But that’s what’s exciting for me. Anyone can be a creator, anyone can make recipe videos on TikTok and link to it. So if they link to mine and we’ve actually seen some of that in the data, we’re trying to see oh, who created this video? This video went viral on TikToK, and then it went viral on the Whisk platform and went back and looked at it. It wasn’t the original food blogger who created the video on TikTok. It was somebody else. So that’s where it was like, this is such an exciting time for food bloggers in general with TikTok and Whisk.

Megan Porta: Okay, cool. I love that explanation. So how exactly do you integrate Whisk into TikTok? How do they work together? 

Julie Tran Deily: Yes. So when you’re getting ready to publish a video on TikToK, there’s a little area near the top third of your screen, called the post screen. There’s a little post button at the bottom. You’re about to publish your TikTok video. There’s an add link button and if you tap on that. You’re able to choose all these different ways to link. Because it’s an alphabetical order with cause at the bottom. Once you select Whisk, you can actually copy and paste your link to your blog there. I recommend another way of doing it, of actually creating a Whisk account. I feel like that’s like the anonymous way of sharing the recipe and that’s the least amount of bandwidth, if you just want to link to it. That’s great. But if you want to see how many you receive and how many people are interacting and maybe they’re leaving reviews on the Whisk platform for your recipe, I would definitely create an account and you can create a community and share your recipe in there. Then you can actually, there’s two ways. There’s a second little button when you’re sharing, you can actually search for the recipe in your communities after you share it and link directly to it. So once anybody taps on it and they save it to their own Whisk recipe box, you’re able to see those saves and interactions, which is exciting. 

Megan Porta: Super exciting. I can see this being something that a lot of food bloggers will be really happy about. Have you heard of any food bloggers specifically who have found a lot of traction this way or new traffic?

Julie Tran Deily: Actually I’ve talked to a couple of creators who have actually seen the Whisk platform in their Google analytics. So that’s really exciting. Then I’m constantly having conversations with creators. That’s part of my job, which is really exciting because one of the things that’s going on right now, it’s really hard to attend conferences or see people in person. Just to be able to interact via Zoom with other food bloggers and content creators, and talk about the struggles that we’re dealing with, but also at the same time, this new thing that we can all work on via TikTok and Whisk is really exciting. There’s creators like Gia from Skinny Taste. Mya from My Healthy Dish and Britta from Food With Feeling they’re using the Whisk Jump on TikTok. Gia has already created a community on Whisk and I’m working with other creators to get them on board and create communities. 

What I love about the community feature on Whisk is that every other social media platform, we either love them or hate them or whatever. We have our thing about them that we love or we don’t like. What I love about Whisk is that it’s all about the food. It’s just about the food. There’s no other noise. There’s just leave all that noise behind. It’s just talking about the recipes and the food. As food bloggers and food content creators, that’s what we care about. So that’s where it’s exciting for me. 

Megan Porta: So whisk communities, tell us how to start building one of those. Do we have to do that within the app? How do we get traction with that?

Julie Tran Deily: Yeah, you can actually just create an account, a Whisk account, and then you can start creating communities. Jenna from The Urben Life, a friend of mine, a mutual friend of ours, she actually has several communities that she has started.

Megan Porta: That does not surprise me. Jenna is on top of everything immediately. 

Julie Tran Deily: Yes. She started them last year and they’re doing really well. You literally can create a community for, I’m thinking of an analogy of a Facebook group. So you could either have a community for just cookie recipes or dairy-free recipes, or you could do one for your brand for your blog.

So I have one called The Little Kitchen friends, and I’m sharing my recipes there. I’m thinking about maybe doing a baking one because I love baking and I love cookies and I don’t want to just say cookies. I love baking breads and cookies, all sorts of types of baking. So I’m thinking about actually creating another community, just focused on baking. It’s really easy to do. Then if you want to share your recipes to it and share other bloggers recipes to your community, that’s up to you. It’s easy to share a link to your community on Facebook or on Instagram and your stories and say, Hey, you can come find me over here on Whisk and join my community.

So there’s different ways where you can build that community, but definitely if you’re looking into, okay, why should I as a food blogger, why should I start on TikTok? If I’m like, everyone keeps saying, I need to do videos. I’m thinking about doing videos, but why should I do it? I feel like the opportunity is here. Because TikToK has over a billion users. I was trying to check it for you, just because it changes so much. But there’s certain hashtags, like food talk just the hashtag food and hashtag recipes. There’s just a ginormous amount of views on those videos. If you’re an established food blogger, who’s been blogging for a while and you’ve got a lot of content that you can create video for, but also be able to directly link to the recipe via Whisk on the TikTok platform, I feel like there’s just so much opportunity there.

As a food blogger, who is in her forties. I’m in my forties and when TikToK first came around and it was all about dancing, it’s not just about dancing anymore. So if you’re not listening and paying attention and have your ear on the ground and listening to what other food bloggers are saying, they’re being able to grow on TikTok, then you’re not listening.

I feel like I’m campaigning here, but it’s like something that I’m really passionate and excited about just because there’s other platforms. Then, there’s frustrations with SEO and ranking. This is what’s exciting me about food blogging at the moment. If that makes sense. I feel like I went on a real long tangent there. 

Megan Porta: No, that was so great. I love hearing the passion in your voice about it. That’s why I love having guests on to talk about this sort of thing, because you’re bringing passion to the table and all of the information that’s going to help us. So thank you for all of that. So it sounds like the communities are similar to what a Facebook group would be. Correct? 

Julie Tran Deily: It’s not exactly the same, but when I’m trying to explain it, just using that analogy. If you think about the communities that are on Facebook it’s similar to that. You can create one based on your brand. We have a 30 minute meal community that has a lot of people in it. There is a TikToK recipe community that has thousands of people in it. You can create a community based on whatever type, a food need, a cooking technique, like sous vide or baking or roasting. I mean like the options are limitless, just like in food blogging, you can create a food blog about anything.

Megan Porta: That is all great. So you said a lot of members in that one group. How much is a lot, would you say for Whisk? 

Julie Tran Deily: Oh, in the TikTok community? 

Megan Porta: For the communities. 

Julie Tran Deily: Let me go look really quick.

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Megan Porta: I’m just trying to think of what we would consider a lot in a Facebook group versus what is a lot over here. Is it the same, different?

Julie Tran Deily: Yeah, so I just went to the communities. It’s my.whisk.com/communities, and I just looked at the different communities worldwide. So there is a weeknight standbys community and it has 209,000 members in it. Homestyle comfort food has 64,000 members. I’m trying to see where that TikTok community is. Then there’s creator communities. Bellows Italian food Cooking with Bellow is a TikTok creator, and he has 11,000 members in his community. 

Megan Porta: Okay. That gives me a good idea. Is there anything else about communities you feel we should know should food bloggers, content creators definitely do this? What if we feel like we’re stretched for time? Is it worthwhile? You can answer any or all of the above.

Julie Tran Deily: I’m always going to be honest, if you’re stretched for time and you feel like this is another thing I would say at the very least use the Whisk Jump on TikToK. If you’re just going to link to your recipe anonymously, I call it anonymously. I’m not sure if I’m using the right term, but basically there’s a way you can just add a link and you just paste in the URL to your website, directly to the rescue. Do that at least. If you’re already creating content on and you’re doing the vertical format and say you’re doing a Instagram real. Why not pop that over on your TikToK account and link it directly to your recipe? What is it going to hurt? Because if you get, I don’t know, 20,000 views on that one video, which that’s the thing with TikTok, we just don’t know how many, what video is going to go viral. If you get 20,000 and say a quarter of those people tap over and tap over to your blog say, those are not the specific stats, but if they click over you’re getting that traffic. So you’re leaving traffic on the table. So if you’re creating TikToK content at the bare minimum, make sure you’re linking to your blog, to your recipe directly through the Whisk Jump on TikToK is what I’m going to say. 

If you have a little bit more bandwidth, if you have somebody helping you, maybe you can create a Whisk community. I created a little mini guide on how to do it and how to grab the recipe from the community when you’re sharing it in the TikTok Whisk Jump. You can always reach out to me. You can find me. You can DM me on Instagram. I’m the Little Kitchn. There’s no E in kitchn or you can send me an email. We’re going to have it in the show notes. You can send me an email, at my Whisk email and we could set up a time and I can chat with you. Just because I feel like that’s part of my role is also educating other food bloggers and content creators that this is here. Definitely use the Whisk Jump because why not? I don’t know, if I’m making a recipe from my blog that I already have on my blog for dinner and I’m creating a quick video on it, I just feel like why wouldn’t I link to it? If I’m creating a post on Facebook, I would put the URL there, right? It just seems like a very simple thing. It’s my job to also educate people on that, that there is this Whisk Jump on TikToK. Because I feel like a lot of people don’t know or feel like they don’t have access to it yet. So you should have access to it. If you have a TikTok account.

Megan Porta: That is all great and that’s super generous of you Julie, to offer help. So I would say if this is on your radar and if you have any questions, definitely reach out to Julie, take her up on that. What do you expect for 2022 with Whisk and with TikTok?

Julie Tran Deily: I’m really excited because there’s going to be new features on the profile and on the platform that creators are going to be really excited about on the Whisk platform. I just can’t wait to share more. Obviously I can’t share anything right now, but we’re looking at the strategy for 2022 and the plans, the new features, and it’s really exciting. I feel like it’s a really exciting time. What’s even more exciting for me is, and I feel like hopefully other people will see this as exciting too because I’ve been a blogger and a content creator for 12 plus years now. I can’t believe that. Then I started this part-time position with Whisk and I love that my coworkers really want to hear about what makes creators tick and what they want to see on the platform.

So I’ve become, internally, a voice for creators within the Whisk organization, which is really exciting, all around. So yeah, more to come. You have to stay tuned. And yeah. Maybe if you’ll have me back then I can talk about it more. 

Megan Porta: Maybe we’ll do like a followup mid-year or something. That would be great. That’s exciting. It sounds like you guys have plans to roll out some great stuff for content creators, and I love that you’re the voice for content creators. You can bring that perspective to the table. So I just feel, like you said earlier, why not at least go into TikTok and use that Whisk Jump feature. If you don’t know about it, now you do. I didn’t. I don’t use TikTok. But what do you think about the importance of that, Julie? Should I be using TikTok? For me it is like one more thing that I don’t want to do and I’ve been putting it off. But how important do you think it is?

Julie Tran Deily: I do think it’s important. It’s the last few months where it’s brought into focus. The more I spend on the TikTok platform and the more I see how amazing their algorithm is, I’m just constantly bowled over. Because I’m watching a video and then another video comes up and I’m like, how did they know I was going to like that? What I really love about TikToK and I feel like this is being discussed in different food blogger groups. I feel like we’ve talked a little bit about Clubhouse, right? Megan and I met on Clubhouse, y’all. Basically it’s not about your follower graph. It’s about what you’re interested in. What you’re interacting with. So the longer you watch a video, the more TikTok knows you’re interested in that video, and it’s going to serve you up more similar content. 

Whereas on other platforms it’s based on who you follow and what they share. So that’s really exciting to me. I’m watching other content creators, it’s really exciting because I created a list and okay, I’m going to reach out to this creator on TikTok about Whisk and let’s have a chat about Whisk. Then I go back to look at their account and they’ve grown in like a week or two by 10,000 followers. I’m not a stalker. But I’m paying attention to this kind of thing because of my role at Whisk. I’m just like, wow, this is so insane. It’s amazing. So for me, as also a food blogger, I’m always wearing that food blogger hat, I want to do this. I’m excited by the content that I’m seeing. So I’m trying to figure out my place in creating videos for TikTok and whatnot. But yes, we need to get on this train and I feel like more food bloggers are growing week by week.

Megan Porta: The ones who are on there, I don’t go on there often, but when I do, I see the most amazing food blog videos put together on TikToK. They’re so creative and so cool. I know a handful of food bloggers from, is it Feel Good Foodie? Is that right? She just crushed it. Oh my gosh. I can’t even believe the amount of followers she has and the amount of content she produces and how high quality it is. There’s so much good food stuff there that if that is up your alley, then you should probably dig in.

Julie Tran Deily: I want to also preface. It doesn’t have to be high cinematography level, overly produced. The TikTok platform and TikTok users really like non very real looking videos too. So that’s helping me buy in more because I feel like this could be a whole nother podcast topic too, but perfection, perfectionism and overthinking things. That’s my problem when it comes to food blogging and life in general. So I feel like the hill for me to climb over and be like, all right, I’m in. I’m going to do this TikTok thing so that they don’t have to be perfect videos. It’s okay and people actually like that. People like the realness of the platform too. And like you said, there’s so much creativity. 

Megan Porta: It’s amazing how creative you can get with food videos. It’s mind blowing. This is all great. Okay. What did we miss? Is there anything that we missed about Whisk or TikTok or both before we start saying goodbye?

Julie Tran Deily: I think we covered it. Again, if anyone has any questions about Whisk and wants to start a community and have specific questions, they can always reach out to me via email or DM. I’m here for you. 

Megan Porta: Ah, so while you’re talking about that, why don’t you just share where we can find you. Your website, your handles, all of that?

Julie Tran Deily: Yes. So I’m the food blogger behind The Little Kitchn and the website is thelittlekitchn.net and on all social media, I’m The Little Kitchn. But there’s no E in kitchn. You can also follow Whisk on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook, and the handle is Whiskapp. My email is [email protected].

Megan Porta: Oh, you are so generous, Julie, thank you for all of that. Thank you for being here today. It was so fun to talk to you. I’ve so enjoyed our Clubhouse chats. So it’s fun to get a chance to talk to you on a different platform. So thank you. Do you have either words of inspiration or a quote that you love to share with food bloggers before we say goodbye?

Julie Tran Deily: I actually have two quotes. So my first favorite quote of all time is a quote from Oprah and she says, “you get in life what you have the courage to ask for.” 

Megan Porta: Ooh. 

Julie Tran Deily: I think that one’s so good because if you don’t speak up for yourself, no one will. But if you don’t ask for it, you’re never going to get a yes. 

Megan Porta: Oh, I love that. Oh my gosh. I actually just wrote that down. Thank you. It’s so good.

Julie Tran Deily: I have it on a coffee mug. 

Megan Porta: It’s that good. It’s coffee mug worthy. What’s your second quote?

Julie Tran Deily: Then this other one that I saved in my notes. I like to save quotes when I find them like that. I really like whether they’re screenshots on my phone or in my notes on my phone. But this one is from gold medalists Gigi Marvin from the 2018 winter Olympics. She said how they were able to win was, “instead of focusing on the negative, we just focused on the joy and hope and our belief in each other.” That last part is my belief in each other and I feel like my motto. If I really believe in someone or I really am pulling for someone, I really make a point to let them know whether it’s a reach out over DM or text message and say I believe in you. Because I think that it is so important to tell someone that. A lot of times we don’t believe in ourselves enough to cross it over, but someone just says that. I think, for me as a little girl in elementary school and even middle school, I had teachers that told me that they believed in me. So that’s so important to me to say that to other people. So when she said this, she was like, and our belief in each other. So they believed in each other as a team. It’s the USA women’s hockey team.

Megan Porta: Oh, that’s so great too, Julie. You are lifting up the food blogging community. I love that because not to say that food bloggers don’t do that, but we get so involved in our work and just trying to figure it out and hustling and getting all the things done that kind of slides by sometimes. To just stop, like you’re saying and notice when somebody else is doing something that inspires you or that’s really great, they’re doing a really great job with their TikToK videos or whatever, fill in the blank. You are stopping and noticing and not just noticing but following through and telling people. So I just got goosebumps. Thank you for being just a light in this space and for lifting us all up. 

Julie Tran Deily: Thank you so much, Megan. You’re amazing yourself. So I appreciate you.

Megan Porta: We’ll put together a show notes page for you, Julie. If anyone wants to go peek at those, you can find them at eatblogtalk.com/thelittlekitchen. We will include an E in kitchen, I think, just to make it easy. I was going to ask you why the no E in kitchen, was it just because there had been another handle taken or? 

Julie Tran Deily: Oh, no. So Twitter only allows you 15 characters. We’re like, you should be the same handle on every social media. So I just kept it uniform. 

Megan Porta: No, that’s smart. I love that. Perfect. 

Julie Tran Deily: But you would think that the little kitchen all spelled out is 15 characters, but no. It’s 16. 

Megan Porta: Oh my gosh. So consistency is important. So thank you for everything today, Julie. Have a wonderful day 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.