Eat Blog Talk Megan Porta

In episode 416, Megan chats to Amanda Polick about how to write a cookbook and intentionally build your platform without getting overwhelmed.
Amanda Polick is a cookbook and food memoir coach. Through their work together, clients have landed Big 5 publishing deals and secured media clips for publications including Food 52 and The Los Angeles Times. Her work has been featured by Cooking Light, Time, Southern Living, and Food & Wine, and she’s a proud member of the Cherry Bombe community. In this episode, you’ll find out more about the process of writing a cookbook, including how to write a book proposal, identifying why people would love your cookbook more than others and what happens once your book proposal gets accepted?
- Tell stories beyond the recipes you include.
- The book proposal is your cookbook’s business plan.
- Why will people pick up your book rather than others?
- How to get a publishing deal?
- How can you stand out in a saturated market by owning your voice?
- You can truly show your personality in your email marketing.
- Write through your resistance when you feel blocked during the process.
- What’s the first thing you should do to start your cookbook writing process?
Connect with Amanda Polick
Website | Instagram
 

In episode 415, Ryan Allen teaches us how to monetize our sites and get 100k page views in 30 days.
Ryan has been a food blogger for just under a year. Ryan knew when he started blogging, he wanted to be able to monetize as quickly as possible. So he planned to leverage Facebook and Facebook groups to reach 100K page views in his first 30 days. In this episode, Ryan shares in detail how he used Facebook to gain traction for his blog. Find out how you can implement his Facebook marketing strategy to increase traffic and monetize your own blog.
- Be able to look at your content objectively.
- What is the quickest way to grow as a new blogger?
- Use Facebook groups socially.
- The more you help and interact with others, the more they’ll do the same for you.
- The more consistent you are, the more success you’ll find.
- What are the advantages of Facebook groups compared to your own pages?
- How to get quality traffic from Facebook that won’t affect your RPM?
- What types of recipe content performs best?
Connect with Ryan Allen
Website | Instagram

In episode 414, Megan chats to Eric Samuelson about common mental health issues food bloggers struggle with and how they can keep on top of their blogs regardless of what they experience in their day to day life.
Eric runs the blog, Eat Like No One Else - the place to learn how to enhance the way you eat through learning of specialty foods and ingredients and how to make the most amazing food at home. At Eat Like No One Else, they solidly believe in the philosophy "if you teach a man to fish..." . In 2022, Eric introduced a podcast, Eat Shop Waste Not, that teaches people how to source the most delicious groceries without wasting food or a single penny. In this episode, you’ll learn about common mental health issues bloggers experience, including feelings of isolation, anxiety, low self-esteem and depression.
- Why is food blogging so mentally tasking?
- Evaluate your work-life balance.
- How does income affect your mental health?
- Tips to deal with the anxiety of blog analytics.
- Perfectionism increases your stress-levels.
- Everyone’s life situation is different - identify what you struggle with mentally.
- Understand your “why”, it will keep you on track.
- Don’t try to do more than you are realistically able to do.
Connect with Eric Samuelson
Website | Instagram

In episode 413, Aleka Shunk teaches us effective keyword research strategies, sharing tips about which search volumes to target, how to analyze competition and which mistakes to avoid.
Aleka is the founder of Aleka's Get-Together, a food and entertaining blog, and Keywords With Aleka, a keyword research school for bloggers. She has a Master's Degree in Teaching, Learning and Curriculum and was a teacher for ten years. Aleka took her expertise as both a teacher and blogger to create courses to help others learn how to navigate and excel at a small, but important, piece of SEO: keyword research. In this episode, you’ll learn how to do keyword research to maximize traffic coming to your website no matter where you are in your blogging journey.
- You can naturally rank for more than one variation of a keyword.
- What do you do if the search volume is low for your particular keyword?
- What should we do with keywords with high competition?
- Track your higher ranking posts.
- It’s really important to keep readers on your site.
- How should you analyze your competition?
- Why you should invest in keyword research tools.
- What are common keywords research mistakes?
Connect with Aleka Shunk
Website | Instagram

In episode 412, Megan chats to Kristin Weeks about how to set healthy habits that help us push through hard times and grow our businesses in the long-run.
Kristin started her blog 3 years ago with the passion to teach others how to cook more homemade meals, bake with sourdough, and how to start a backyard garden to grow fresh produce. Since then, Kristin’s journey has had a lot of ups and downs. A year ago she decided to take her blog and business seriously and that had a lot to do with habits, routines, and mindset. By working on herself first, she found she was able to focus. The hard work turned her hobby into a viable business, going from a few thousand sessions a month to qualifying for Mediavine within a year. In this episode, you’ll learn how to identify areas in your life you’d like to improve, setting positive, lasting habits that will help you achieve your goals.
- Do you feel ready to put everything you have into your blog?
- Which areas of your life would you like to improve?
- Your strengths are just as important as your weaknesses.
- How important is your morning routine?
- Have you incorporated fitness into your routine?
- Tailor each morning to what you need in the day.
- Habits that you enjoy are easier to keep.
- Focus on the result in order to love the process.
- Why is it important to remember the milestones we achieve along the way?
Connect with Kristin Weeks
Website | Instagram

In episode 411, Sabrina Currie teaches us how to up our writing game by focusing on clear, concise blog writing that shows our personalities while providing accurate information about our recipes.
Sabrina started her career in food right after high school by attending cooking school. After doing a few different jobs in the food industry, she went into the healthcare field. She eventually found herself needing a creative outlet so she picked up a DSLR and started photographing food and nature. After taking a Wordpress blogging course, Sabrina decided to start a food blog and after a while wanted to make it more than a hobby. She has steadily increased her web traffic by scheduling an audit by Casey Markee and using tools like RankIQ and Keysearch. Her days are spent working half time in a hospital and half time blogging and writing while enjoying being a wife and mom. In this episode, you’ll learn about small tweaks you can make to your writing to make it more accessible and appealing to your readers.
- Answer simple questions about your recipe to create a clear context.
- Who will your recipe be great for?
- Where will you enjoy eating a given recipe - use vivid visuals.
- Why should they make a recipe?
- Along with your step-by-step photos, answer: How do you make this?
- Be descriptive but concise.
- Show EAT (expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) through your writing.
- Should we use AI to help us write blog posts?
Connect with Sabrina Currie
Website|Instagram