Coffee, Correspondence, and the Morning Habit Behind RecipeTeacher’s Most Loyal Audience

Allea Grummert (00:12)

Hey there, welcome to Happy Subscribers, a podcast that explores how bloggers and content creators can create more purposeful relationships with your audience through email marketing. I’m Allea Grummert email marketing strategist, copywriter, email platform expert, and founder of the done for you email marketing agency, Duet. I started as a personal finance blogger in 2016 and have since helped hundreds of bloggers and creators like you maximize your email marketing for more impact, more traffic, and a better connection with your subscribers. Be prepared for some advanced email talk, as well as tactical tips to help get your valuable content into the hands of your audience faster and easier. I’m excited you’re here, so let’s do it. We can create a deeper, more meaningful connection with the community you love and serve through email.

Allea Grummert (00:59.822)
Welcome listeners to our final installment of this year’s Foodie email series. Today, I get to have a conversation with Jason Norris. He’s the owner and founder of recipeteacher.com where he shares easy to make comfort foods. Jason worked in graphic arts for a nursing home company for 23 years before going full time with recipe teacher in 2020 of all times. And it would prove to be one of the very best decisions he ever made. I had to look it up I first met Jason in 2021. So over five years ago, he came to me to write and set up his welcome nurture automations. So we have a lot of wonderful history of working together. And I’m excited that you’re here, Jason. Thanks for being here.

Jason Norris (01:41.83)
Thanks so much, Ali. Yeah, I cannot believe it’s been five years. I mean, it feels like we’ve been working together for a long time, but how five years have passed so quickly, I don’t know. it’s cool to have you as someone to be working with all this time. It’s been a great help.

Allea Grummert (01:57.518)
Thank you. and okay, so when you started your blog in 2020, working with an email professional in 2021, like shortly after, that’s not most people’s routes when they’re kind of like, you know, slowly go like gaining momentum with a website and a blog. Where were you in that phase of your business that you were like, I actually want to bring somebody in?

Jason Norris (02:18.19)
So the website actually started a few years before that. It started in 2016. But it was really not doing much at all. And in fact, I think I may have shared this with you. I put it up for sale. I put the site up for sale for a thousand dollars and nobody, nobody hit it. What? Yep. And thank goodness because, um,

Allea Grummert (02:23.714)
Got it.

Jason Norris (02:48.11)
The site makes a little bit more than now. So yeah, actually what had happened is that I had been doing the site for a couple of years and it was never really taking off. Then I heard about the Instant Pot and I bought an Instant Pot and I learned about it as much as I possibly could and started doing recipes for it. And that’s when the traffic started to really take off that’s when the for sale sign came down immediately and it’s like i’ve got something here body related air fryer started become a thing so i learned everything about those and again traffic just skyrocketed so i had been using just a a free emails thing having no idea what i’m doing i i maybe had a thousand or two subscribers or whatever but i had been heard interview with you on the food blogger pro podcast and i thought this is someone I need on my team. And I reached out and we’ve been working together ever since.

Allea Grummert (03:50.1)
Ever since I remember that when you came to me because it was it was primarily Instant Pot and Air Fryer and we’ve since gone back and like updated it to be a little bit more broad, especially after Instant Pot went up for bankruptcy or something like that.

Jason Norris (04:03.182)
Yes, so you know the instant pots are still out there. I’m actually not sure who owns them right now. No, I mean who owns the actual company, but yeah, and a lot of people own instant pots and the recipes still do well. They are not the jogger knot that they were a few years ago. Instant pot did a fantastic job of marketing those things when they came out and I think they’re awesome appliances. I but I think that the panache, the excitement kind of wore off after a little while. so I don’t do as many of those recipes now, but they still do very well. So that was a big turning point for recipe D.

Allea Grummert (04:44.204)
Yeah.

Allea Grummert (04:48.438)
When I remember when we worked on your strategy, it would have just been me. I didn’t have my team yet.

Jason Norris (04:55.072)
No, I don’t think you did. You may have had one person you were working with.

Allea Grummert (05:00.334)
I had Laura was on my team as a virtual assistant. She’s now one of our project manager strategists and Liz was my business manager. So there were the three of us, but I was like, no, I remember having my hands deep in this project because remember we also allowed people to say whether they, if they didn’t have an air fryer or if they didn’t have an instant pot that they could exclude themselves from certain emails. It so slick. that way we weren’t emailing them with an entire appliance, a recipe required requiring this appliance that they don’t even have.

Jason Norris (05:33.838)
I didn’t even know that was an option before speaking with you. You know, I had seen various email subscription things on other sites before, but I never really looked too deep. But when you told me that we could start splitting the audience into these different categories and give people the option to get all the recipes, Instant Pot, Air Fryer, whatever it may be, that really helped.

Allea Grummert (05:55.438)
Yeah, it was like, and then you also created a couple of guides. I just remember being like, Jason, you sit on this plethora of knowledge and you’re like, I guess I haven’t really created a PDF guide on how to use an Instant Pot or how to use an air fryer. So I remember you being excited of like, oh, I have a place to put all of that and a way to give it to people.

Jason Norris (06:15.17)
Yeah, and it’s really cool. I came up with an air fryer quick start guide and an instant pot quick start guide because I would get a lot of correspondence from people that says that would say, I got an air fryer from my daughter for Christmas and I haven’t opened it because I don’t know what to do with it and I’m afraid and blah, blah, blah. And so a lot of times I found myself answering these emails pretty much the same way. Don’t don’t worry about it. They’re excellent appliances. Start by doing this, then do that. And then this is your key to success. So when we were brainstorming, you know, five years ago, that was really the perfect opportunity for me to then put these together, offer them as incentives when people signed up for the email subscription, and to also have available on the site just for users, you know, at this point to be able to have, because I was finding all those questions were so common. Here you go, here’s your answer.

Allea Grummert (07:11.662)
Mm-hmm. And it makes your life so much easier. You’re like, here’s a link.

Jason Norris (07:15.182)
Yeah, because I don’t, you know, I don’t like to just copy and paste into emails. I want to when people reach out, I want to be able to reach out back to them personally. And if it’s just, you know, a copy paste template, it’s not the same. So it’s it’s really allowed me then to not have to go into all that.

Allea Grummert (07:34.942)
Mm-hmm. Well, let’s, now that you’ve mentioned your audience, can we talk about how special your audience is?

Jason Norris (07:40.978)
audience is amazingly awesome. Yes, let’s talk about my audience.

Allea Grummert (07:45.85)
my goodness. Well, just go off. Tell us about your people. Who’s on your list?

Jason Norris (07:52.16)
One of the things that we did early on was we sent out a survey. And I don’t remember the specific questions off the top of my head now, but you know, it was asking people what they want and various different demographic things. One of the big things we found out early on is that I have generally an older crowd, a lot of retired folks empty nesters who find it might be just, you know, them and their husband or wife. And maybe the adult kids come over once in a while. But I found myself really reaching the senior audience, really. And by senior, I, you know, I don’t necessarily mean senior citizens, but, you know, an older crowd, you know, I’m 55. So a lot of people my age and up and the correspondence I would get from them and still do, is it’s extraordinary. I know I’ve sent you some copies of these before. Every time I get an email from someone like this, you know, hi, I’m 85 years old and I just got an air fryer and it just, warms my heart every time. I love reaching out to them. They love reaching out to me because they like to be able to share their successes and their failures too and and i i love how they look to the recipe teacher for help and it just it it warms my heart so much i always show my my fiance those emails and she loves them to death to its it’s so cool so yes we’ve got i mean we’ve got a demographic all over the place but the this the senior crowd the older crowd has really found a home with recipe teacher for their Cooking Adventures.

Allea Grummert (09:48.918)
my cheeks hurt just hearing these stories. Like I’m just it makes me so happy. I remember one that you forwarded to me. It was a gentleman who said that the neighbor family with like their young kids would invite him over for dinner. And finally, he was like, Okay, now I want to have them over for dinner. And he used a recipe from recipe teacher and felt so equipped to host them the way that they hosted him.

Jason Norris (10:10.926)
that we yes and within when i get those kind of stories like you just said this this smile you know almost almost makes my cheeks hurt and india you get all choked on the goosebumps just talking about it yeah when i when i hear that stuff it it makes me feel like of course this is a business of course this is my livelihood but you also want your livelihood in your business to be fulfilling and it’s correspondence like that that makes it absolutely fulfilling.

Allea Grummert (10:43.662)
I love it. What else? know, I could probably whip up some of those questions that we did send to your audience, the survey questions, but what just off the top of my head, but what stood out to you that has really shaped your content strategy from what we learned?

Jason Norris (10:59.566)
You know early on when I first started the site my idea was to offer a place where people could learn to make the basics of food. Remember one of my very first recipes was actually and it’s still called how to make French toast. I haven’t gone that route that was the original route all the recipes were gonna be how to make French toast, how to make a cheeseburger, how to make this that or the other thing but one of the ones was the french toast recipe and i i wanted to use regular ingredients i want to use like regular bread that people have they didn’t have to go out by special bread or you know not by any kind of weird cream or anything like that pork chops was in other early recipe and again i used really common ingredients onion powder garlic powder paprika salt pepper that sort of thing and I did that because when I look for recipes, I’m looking for easy recipes, easy to understand recipes, not a bazillion ingredients. Now there are times when maybe you do want to make a real fancy dish and that’s fine. And I do have a few recipes like that, but most of them, you’re going to have all these ingredients in your pantry you know the spices, protein or whatever is gonna be really easy to get whether it’s chicken legs or pork chops. And I found that those types of recipes resonated with the audience. Not as few of ingredients as possible, but keeping the ingredients to a minimum and keeping them to be all common ingredients. Keeping the steps simple, but not too simple. Not turn on stove, step two, turn it to medium. Step, no. So that’s another thing. My writing style tries to keep all of that simple and put together in a way that I would want to find a recipe myself. And that recipe has worked with my audience.

Allea Grummert (13:10.752)
Yeah, your recipe for recipes. Right. I love that. Well, and you know, and we used that audience research really to answer some of their biggest questions that people come to you with, which is like, I got an air fryer and I don’t know what to do with it. We did. We had a lot of people who were like, it was a Christmas gift and now it’s collecting dust. Can you help me? So we answered those questions. But something else I loved about your automations with your nurture sequences is we were able to feature your pork chops and then offer a side dish so we kind of menuized it so that every week they didn’t have to think about what to put with the pork chop.

Jason Norris (13:46.804)
Absolutely, and that was also an incentive to me when we started doing things like that to start to branch out and make sure I’m not doing just pork chops and chicken legs and meatloaf and whatnot to say, you know, this is going to be great with these green beans or with these potatoes. In fact, I remember when we started working together, I had had a recipe for Instant Pot Parmesan Ranch potatoes and it was in desperate need of an update. And when we started working together, I updated it and started putting it into some of the emails. And that really gave that recipe new life. that was also, so working with you then also got me into the habit of making sure to update some old posts from time to time. Because you have to take people’s comments and feedback into consideration. You may think a recipe is the bee’s knees, but if everyone is saying it’s got too much of this or not enough of that, you have to adjust it. You know, I want my recipes, I want them all to be five star recipes that everybody loves. So if everybody’s saying something, you know what? I’m gonna take it back into the kitchen and work it as necessary and put it out there. So working with you and the emails really got my correspondence with the audience. It brought it to a whole new level.

Allea Grummert (15:10.99)
That’s so fun. And well, and I mean, I’ve always admired you, Jason, because of how much you care about your audience. I think that we can definitely hear that, right, of listening to what people are saying and taking it back to the kitchen. I remember finding out you buy a different cut of meat from every different store or you used to in order to test out different recipes, like just going above and beyond.

Jason Norris (15:12.428)
And that’s been huge.

Jason Norris (15:35.272)
Yeah, well, so my approach to that is I want to make sure that the reader is going to have the same results both on the plate and visually how the recipe looks on Recipe Teacher. you know, I’ve got a couple of really great butcher stores that I go to, you know, all over and you can get the premium meats and stuff and I’ll do that. But more times and i i find myself at wal-mart or you know target or some of the other law cost goes another great one because that’s where the audience shops and you know i can go to the butcher store and ask for pound-and-a-half pork tenderloin and they’re gonna wrap it up all night for a lot but that’s not how my audience necessarily is going to see that when they go to the regular supermarket i’d want them to be able to in my recipe post, yes, this is what he’s talking about. It’s very easy for me to get it. So yeah, I will go into the different stores and try all the different meats. And sometimes I’ll say, you know, this particular store has these for the best price, you know, for it or had been the best quality that I’ve used. So yes, I do shop around.

Allea Grummert (16:51.97)
Yeah

Jason Norris (16:59.122)
and try the different meats and whatnot from the different stores. And that goes for seasonings too. You know, I’ve got a couple of higher end spice places in the area that I like to go to, but I don’t necessarily feature those when I shoot the photos. Because if someone has onion powder, it doesn’t have to be some Bangladesh onion powder that’s $10 or whatever. It can be 99 cents from the dollar store and it’s going to be just

Allea Grummert (17:29.356)
Yeah, well, I just absolutely love hearing about how much you care about your audience and to all of those details and that you’re providing a consistent experience for people from post to post email to email. And I say all that knowing you are also such a good business owner, y’all. Jason hasn’t led with this, but like you’re so good at what you do. mean, the way that you talk about SEO and you you’ve monitored how much traffic comes from email just share with us a little bit about the data side of the work that you do.

Jason Norris (18:05.43)
data side. Well, I started getting interested in websites in the late 90s, in the mid to late 90s. almost 30 years ago, I’ve always been an avid fisherman. In fact, I’m hoping to take the kayak out this afternoon and try to catch some some large mouth. But in 1998, I started my first website, it was actually a well at the time offered a space where you can have your own little website thing and it wasn’t a w w w had to go to the whole a well-addressed thing but it about chicago area fishing and i started learning how to do that for all that up i eventually created the domain name windy city fishing dot com and built message boards on it and built a whole community of people and and met so many other fishermen went to people’s weddings and, I mean, became friends with a lot of these people. It was super cool. But doing that from, you know, so early on in the late nineties, I started learning all the steps of the way, of what’s necessary to get eyes on your website, whether it’s a weird little fishing site on the end of an old AOL address or, know, domain like recipe teacher what makes people go to the site so i’ve i’ve been. The mill year with the whole SEO thing really from the beginning when i started doing web stuff google wasn’t even in existence yet. All to this the i think was one of the big search engines and of course i use my next browser and all that but you know learning all of that along the way really allowed me when i started doing recipe teacher and some of my other hobby sites and what not that.

Allea Grummert (19:44.12)
Yeah.

Jason Norris (20:02.926)
The search engines want to give readers the information they’re looking for there used to be tricks to kind of do stuff that may not have been completely on the up and up to get eyes on your website. But the number one thing I learned from a long time ago is create good content. It’s as simple as that. Talk to your readers and be an authority

Allea Grummert (20:10.05)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Norris (20:32.372)
on the topic of which you’re trying to to convey whether recipes are fishing or or anything else and so it’s it understanding that has allowed me to get off on a good foot with recipe teacher because from the very beginning i was able to shape it in a way that i knew would hopefully get in front of as many people as possible and that’s an ever changing environment to the whole SEO thing. Yeah. And now with AI, that’s been a whole other a whole other thing in the equation. I’m continually working with the best people to with that on how we can grow and move forward. So the data aspect of it is fun.

Allea Grummert (21:27.414)
If you are interested in getting my help to grow your email list, send traffic back to your website and create a more meaningful relationship with your subscribers through email marketing, visit duet.co slash happy to book a free call with me. I promise you’ll learn a lot, even in the process, just about your own business, your own goals and what could potentially be next for you and the growth of your email marketing strategy. Go ahead and book a call with me. I can’t wait to meet you.

Allea Grummert (22:03.032)
Let’s talk about your pop-up because first of all, SEO and pop-ups are usually a conflicting thing that know, the SEO person says, no, no pop-ups, but you’ve always cared a lot about SEO and you’ve had a very successful pop-up on your site. What’s been the correlation there or why are you okay with having both? Yes. Yes.

Jason Norris (22:22.668)
You mean the pop-up for the email subscription? Yeah. you know, that’s yes. Pop-ups are annoying. We all, you know, that’s another thing to keep in mind too. We are all internet users and we are all customers of and readers of other websites. So we always want the user experience to be as good as possible and you don’t want a lot of pop-ups. We’ve played with some stuff over the years with the timing of the pop-up does it come up after a certain amount of seconds does it come up after reading a certain amount of the pages come up when you exit the page that sort of thing and i i think we’ve landed in in happy range of what’s not annoying for people because i don’t know if i want to use work unfortunately but the best way to capture email addresses is if if there’s a pop-up and I also make sure it’s not some kind of weird pop-up that stays there for 10 seconds. There’s a clear X that you can click away. So while it may not be the most loved method, I try to keep it as lovable as possible, or at least so that you don’t hate it. But it’s worked. And we try to keep it fun. I’ve got the little cartoon logo of me on there. And do you want more recipes? And at least with my audience when they sign up, a lot of times I’ll get an email back from them that says, just signed up for your recipes. really love them. I’m looking forward to them. My son loves them too. Blah, blah, blah. that’s, while the pop-ups can have a negative in some people’s minds, I think it’s really helped a lot of my audience feel like they’re truly connecting with me. So that’s been okay.

Allea Grummert (24:13.91)
Yeah, I love that.

Jason Norris (24:15.338)
A long-winded answer to your question. I’m sorry about that, but yeah, it’s been okay. That’s been the exception of the pop-up rule.

Allea Grummert (24:23.37)
Yeah, well, because that is often the balance of, you know, your SEO pros, your email pros were like, pop ups just work so well. But like you said, like you haven’t built something that’s deceptive or hard to exit out of. It does have a really friendly face. And then something else I think is interesting is that your pop up is like a generic, like general newsletter pop up. It’s not it’s not that you’re even like testing a ton of different incentives with that, you’re keeping it really simple and straightforward and that has worked.

Jason Norris (24:55.308)
It has, and you we’ve played around with a few ideas and we’re going to continue to play around with a few more ideas. You know, we’re, we’re, we’re in the middle of working on a project now and I think we’re going to make some adjustments as, internet usage changes all, all the time. so yeah, I’ve, I’ve tried to keep it very friendly and it’s, it’s not some, big customized pop-up form. It is one of the templated forms through the email service that we use.

Allea Grummert (25:25.251)
Yes.

Jason Norris (25:25.65)
And you know, we’ve got a nice graphic on there and keep it simple. So yeah, it’s no rocket science, but it’s personalized enough so that it doesn’t look like just another generic form.

Allea Grummert (25:36.396)
Yeah. Well, and yeah, I love hearing that your audience responds well to that too, because I know something else that we’ve had a conversation about is not confusing your audience either. So you use Kit and we’ve talked about using whether or not to use the Kit Creator Network. And that’s where like once they sign up, they get referred to other bloggers, go follow their emails. And I just appreciate that you’ve had, I mean, you know, your audience and you’re like, that’s it’s not exactly the rabbit hole I want to send them down if they’re coming looking for this particular thing. And as much as it could help you grow your list or whatnot, I appreciate that you’ve drawn the line there.

Jason Norris (26:18.392)
So that’s an excellent point. know, if I were running like another phishing website and that would be a completely different audience and that would be an audience where it would be a good idea to network with other resources through email. That would be really ideal, especially for running a Chicago area website. Maybe someone’s going to be coming to Chicago. So it may be worth it to network from other fishing sites in the local area and whatnot but being that people have come to recipe teacher and generally in you know in older crowd and like i said earlier that older can include me at fifty five because i’m also at the you know where i don’t want to have to go through a bunch of stuff i just wanted yet what i’m looking for not not overwhelming my audience too many options, click this, click that. Here’s what you’re looking for. If you need a little more help, maybe, you know, I’ve got a page on that. But yes, I try to keep the user experience, which has become a huge metric for business success and to search engine success, is to keep the user experience good and top notch. And sometimes less is more than that.

Allea Grummert (27:42.22)
Yeah, well, I think you’re an exceptional example of this. I share you as an example often with people. so, yeah, thank you for sharing a little bit more about your heart and your reasons behind that. Well, let’s talk about emailing your list because I want to share how often are you emailing your list? What does that look like now? I know you’ve gone through a season where you emailed every day. Kind of where have you landed?

Jason Norris (28:07.566)
So I’ve gone back and forth with the emailing every day to emailing once a week, emailing twice a week. And I probably do three to five emails a week. And I guess four would be a real safe number. I actually did send out an email this morning on Monday, which I don’t normally do because a lot of times people are just getting back on the computer or getting back to work when they open their emails. So a lot of the weekend emails will be opened on Mondays. So at least with my audience it is. a lot of times I don’t send out an email on Monday. I let people catch up. But I think as much as I’d love to do seven days a week, I think that can be a little bit pasty so I try not to do that unless maybe there’s a big event like you know Super Bowl coming up or something like that Thanksgiving or whatever but I would say four emails a week has been kind of a happy zone.

Allea Grummert (29:20.226)
Yeah. And then what’s your cadence? know you write, still, you’ve got your new recipes. What are those different emails look like? What’s your kind of your menu of ideas?

Jason Norris (29:29.654)
Generally new recipes always go out as you know subject new recipe You know best chicken legs or whatever it may be And then the email will usually those new recipe emails will just focus on that recipe I’ll have a short intro just one or two sentences And then a nice picture of it and you know the link to the recipe But a lot of times I have found a lot of success sending out emails with roundups or sending category emails. In fact, I’ve been doing a lot more of that where I’ve been authoring emails about, you know, how delicious salmon is and there’s so many different ways you can make it. And I think I’ve got over a dozen salmon recipes on the site. So that’s an opportunity then for people to be able to peruse a specific category and, I want to try this honey garlic salmon or I want to try this barbecue salmon or the blackened salmon whatever it may be, those have wound up being very successful in terms of interaction with the users and good for the numbers as well.

Allea Grummert (30:41.142)
Yeah, so in that email, are you linking to the 12 separate recipes like as a bulleted list or you’re linking to a category page?

Jason Norris (30:50.006)
Yeah, I’ve done a little bit of both. have found that the linking to a roundup post or to a category page has probably been the most effective. It’s also a little easier too than having to write an email and putting 12 different specific recipes in it. But there also are ways to do that, you know. I actually started playing around with AI a couple of months ago, asking it to help me write custom HTML that I can put directly into kit that would generate those types of emails that would have maybe a dozen different recipes in it. And it’s taken some tweaking and I’m still playing with it. It makes a really nice email. I mean, styles the email out nicely. It’s had a little trouble being able to to draw out the image from the specific post and put it in his self but going back and forth with it with the a i i have been able to get it to do that just not as as nice that like it yet it’s been a very fun process to learn this too and to see how the readers respond to maybe a more colorful as opposed to maybe a little more generic one that i might you know do myself but to answer the specific question i’ve done a little bit of both but a bunch in one email or send it to a roundup i think sending to around the per category page probably been a little easier and and gotten better results

Allea Grummert (32:30.358)
Hey, when you go to sit and write an email or schedule it, what are the few things you think of before creating or before hitting send?

Jason Norris (32:43.038)
My method of doing the emails is probably a little unorthodox in that I generally don’t schedule them out ahead of time. have and I do. I like to get up in the morning and I have my coffees ready for me. know, the coffee machine goes on at 720 AM and I’ll get my coffee and I’ll sit down and I’ll catch up on my emails and then i will think what recipe if i don’t have a new one what recipe or what corresponds to i want to send out today well today’s a monday it’s the day after mother’s day people may have been cooking over the weekend so they don’t want to be complicated thing or or they might they might want something more like comfort food related today not a big presentation so that’s why coming up with an email this morning or each day i think works to my advantage i think that it may be there’s a big cold front that’s been coming through the whole country in the whole midwest then let’s send out a super chili recipe because i know everyone’s going to be inside if the weather’s gonna be extraordinary everyone’s gonna be outside let’s send out an email for a grilled pork tenderloin or something like that so i i do come up with the recipes that with the email ideas almost all the time that morning that I send them out.

Allea Grummert (34:17.144)
I didn’t know that and I love that so much because you’re being really intentional. So when you’re saying I’m sending four emails a week, like I, Jason, sat down and decided what feels like it’s worthy of sending, what feels timely and how it might be responded to from your audience.

Jason Norris (34:39.79)
Correct. it’s one of the first. And you know, actually sitting down each morning and doing that, it’s fun and it kind of helps start the day off on a good foot. You know, you get your brain kind of lined up thinking without having to go too crazy. You know, I’m not dragging myself into an office somewhere. You know, I’m up here at the office of my new house and looking out at all the beautiful trees and everything. So it’s nice to sit here with my coffee and start the day doing something positive for my business. And that’s what it feels like.

Allea Grummert (35:13.292)
Yeah, and it’s, it’s, I mean, I want to point out like you’re doing something positive, but you’re also circling. I think that would probably center your day around who you’re doing it for.

Jason Norris (35:22.286)
It does and you know for a brief time I’ve worked with a couple of freelancers and different companies who have offered to do that and I’ve done that for some brief periods of time but they were very brief only because it made me feel like I was losing contact with my readers. So that is something that I would not farm out in the future i think that’s always important now that doesn’t mean i can’t work with others to always make the emails better and and i i i i work with several different you know experts you included to make the emails better so i’ll always be doing that but the at the actual writing and offering of them yeah that’s coming from me

Allea Grummert (36:16.532)
no wonder you get so many responses, Jason.

Jason Norris (36:20.237)
Yeah, it’s cool and I love it.

Allea Grummert (36:22.466)
I remember one of the stories you told me and it was early on, was so sweet because it’s a senior audience, you’ll have 90-year-olds replying to you. I remember because somebody basically received an email saying, hi Betty, they’re like, Jason wrote to me. It’s almost this endearing thinking that it’s specifically for them and not this court-coded thing on the back end. But you treat that with such care and intentionality because I mean, you could you could be sending two emails a day and really like getting all this traffic. But you have found, believe, to be a really happy medium with serving your audience, supporting your business, but like doing it in a way that feels good, do you say?

Jason Norris (37:09.41)
well it right and and that’s an interesting balance and you know like we talked about a little bit too it’s it’s an ever changing and ever evolving environment as well as is the s e o stuff we talked about and just the audience habits internet usage always changes but being able to have a direct communication with the audience and when they do see an email that says hi betty and a lot of times they will respond back like you said you know i’d use them inside of the said to be on the site a lot of times i’m checking those emails on my phone and i try to respond to them as quickly as i can all that it was so happy to have you thanks so much i’m glad you like the pork chops i think if you like that you’re gonna like this that’s all me typing away on on my iphone so if someone does get an email back from me and it says sent from iphone that that’s me I could be out on my kayak fishing responding to that, but I want them to understand that I am here and I’m so glad you’re here too.

Allea Grummert (38:20.236)
I love that. What an exceptional picture of nurturing and caring for your audience.

Jason Norris (38:27.96)
Well, thank you, and as the internet has evolved, especially the last couple of years, authenticity is becoming a real thing. There are a lot of fake or congregated websites out there that just take, they either take content from other sites, and this doesn’t happen to just recipe sites, it happens to travel sites and to parenting sites and home improvement all that kind of stuff but it’s very easy for websites to spit out generic content and then claim that there’s some big authority when they’re not and it is more important ever than ever especially with a i that aside like recipe teacher that people can identify with the real person really doing this and and i try to do that through my post through my emails and social media all you know all of

Allea Grummert (39:25.064)
I love that. And there’s no one like you, Jason. I’m glad that you’re doing the work that you’re doing. My final question, I forgot to bring this up earlier, and we’re getting short on time. So we’ll make it quick. But y’all one of my favorite things about Jason is his recipes have the word have a have a curse word in there. Yes, word in there. Was it like best damn pork chops or pork loins or something like that? Yeah.

Jason Norris (39:43.566)
First word

Jason Norris (39:50.152)
I don’t remember exactly. I’m pretty sure it started though with the best damn Instant Pot pulled pork because when I made that it was the best damn pulled pork I ever had and those were the words that came out of my mouth. So that’s what I named the recipe and that really drew in people’s attention. So I don’t name every recipe best damn because if every recipe was best damn then they would all just get lost. Then nothing is really the best damn.

Allea Grummert (40:17.036)
Yes.

Jason Norris (40:20.226)
But I do get some correspondence once in a while, especially with the older crowd. Why do you have to swear in your recipes? And usually I just explain that I’m not using it as a swear word. I’m using it as an emphasis. And I also don’t do anything that would be against Google’s terms or any search engine terms I don’t say anything that wouldn’t be said at seven o’clock on over the air TV. a few people will say things here and there, but overwhelmingly people get excited when they see the best damn pork chop. Then they want to make it.

Allea Grummert (41:02.198)
Yes. I just that’s our that’s our note on authenticity. Just be you. And I remember having that conversation being like, are people going to be offended? And if you are, but also you are Jason Norris and people get to come into your orbit and stay there as long as they want. Right. Yeah. And get the best day in park jobs.

Jason Norris (41:23.982)
damn pork chests because they are. They really are. So try them.

Allea Grummert (41:28.814)
Well, I’m going to send everyone to recipeteacher.com to get on your email list and to get your recipes. Is there anywhere else that people should go to connect with you?

Jason Norris (41:37.4)
You can find Recipe Teacher on Facebook, just search Recipe Teacher on Pinterest, on TikTok and YouTube. Yeah, just search for Recipe Teacher and you’ll find it and come on board. I like to have a little fun on social media. Sometimes share pictures of, yesterday I shared pictures of an old Dairy Queen and remembering it through the years and that sort of thing. So I try to have a little fun on there and not just here’s a recipe, here’s a recipe. yeah you know join me on face book that’s what that’s where most instagram as well so uh… you can find me in also

Allea Grummert (42:11.488)
Awesome, thank you so much for being here, Jason. I appreciate you sharing your time and your wisdom.

Allea Grummert (42:20.558)
Thanks so much for listening to happy subscribers in our conversation about email marketing today. I hope you feel inspired to take action, even if it’s a small change, so can more confidently share your valuable message with your community through email. Special thanks goes to my team who makes it possible to produce and share these episodes with you. Seriously, thank you guys. If you want to hear more email marketing tips, strategies, and success stories to help you develop deeper, more meaningful relationships with your email subscribers, be sure to subscribe to have me subscribers so you don’t miss an episode. If you have a few seconds, I invite you to share this episode link with a friend or post it on social media so your peers and community can benefit from it as well. And if you have a few minutes, I’d appreciate if you’d leave a written review of the podcast since that helps more people hear about it. And I believe we need more creators sending more valuable emails to their audience with more confidence. If you want to reach out to me directly, the best way to do that is to join my email list through one of my top freebies listed in the show notes. You’ll get regular emails from me that are packed with value. And if you hit reply to any of those emails, it’ll land in my inbox and I can’t wait to chat with you there. Until next time, let’s duett!