We were lucky to catch up with Jamie Fisher recently and have shared our conversation below.
Jamie, appreciate you joining us today. One of the most important things we can do as business owners is ensure that our customers feel appreciated. What’s something you’ve done or seen a business owner do to help a customer feel valued?
I bake just about every day in order to keep my content fresh and relevant so I always have an overabundance of food! Previously I had been giving it away to the people nearest me, like neighbors or friends/family that live close, to keep it easy. At the same time I had been struggling with finding a way to show appreciation for my readers loyalty. Sure I can offer free printables, but I wanted to give them more than that! After all, they are the reason I am able to live my best life!
So I decided I was going to spread love and appreciation by increasing my delivery radius, including sending treats in the mail! I asked my readers who would be interested in randomly receiving treats and put a list together called the ‘treat train!’ This form of appreciation accomplished so much more than I had expected!
Sending love with treats rekindled old friendships, it gave people free samples of my recipes, it increased engagement and connections with my readers, and it makes people feel loved and appreciated!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
About Me:
I am a wife to my husband, Justin, and mother to our only child, Riley. We live in central Wisconsin where we love to spend time together outdoors enjoying each of the four seasons by fishing, swimming, biking, grilling, and playing sports! We love doing kid things with our favorite kid!
I am a lifelong vegetarian, which has become a popular sought after lifestyle in recent years. All of the recipes on my blog are vegetarian or vegan.
Products/Services:
I am a food blogger with a passion for baking! My recipes target the following: 1) A niche of people who are looking for recipes using vegetarian meat substitutes, 2) People looking for desserts/baked goods, and 3) People looking for easy family friendly recipes.
Problem Solving:
I have removed the ‘fluff’ from recipes. I learned this trick from my Grandma. She will summarize a lengthy recipe on a small index card with only the pertinent information. A lot of bloggers put as much information in the instructions as they can to help their readers. Instead of putting all of that in the instructions, I put it in the notes separate from the recipe. That way the instructions are short and sweet and people feel like it’s actually doable.
I try not to dumb-down the recipe and give the reader some credit. For example, I don’t need to tell them to use a microwave safe bowl. I just say, ‘put it in the microwave.’
I also help my readers with shortcuts. For example, instead of making a box of pudding and dividing it between mini-pie pans, just use store bought pudding cups – one cup per pie, done! There is a time for making things from scratch and time when you just need to check it off your list. It’s all about balance.
And I help them with tips for success. For example, always bake at the lowest recommended time for best results. If the instructions say bake cookies for 20-22 minutes, bake them for 20 minutes. They will continue to bake on the pan after you remove them from the oven for a few minutes. This trick will help you to avoid overbaking!
Most Proud Of:
I am proud of several things:
- I didn’t give up.
- That I don’t compare my failures to other blogger’s success. I don’t sweep my failures under the rug, even though they are embarrassing. I let them refine me. Some of my failures have been massive and I’ve spent a lot of time recovering from them. While some say failure shouldn’t define you, it does become a part of you. You can either put your head in the sand and waste more time on regretting how you got to that failure or you can wear your failure like a crown, tilt that baby upright and march on! I chose to march on.
- I didn’t rush to spend money on things I didn’t need – It only cost $50 for my initial investment. I bought a template to get started. It was terrible, but it was a start. As I got started I realized blogging was like an underground world. You really had to dig deep to get answers without paying another blogger for a course.
I was committed to not paying for someone else’s research or courses, I wanted to do this myself. I knew if I just kept searching for what I needed I would be able to find it without spending $1,000’s. I had previously overspent in time and money on failed ideas and I just couldn’t allow myself to do that again.
Looking back, not spending money on the best layout, the best branding, the best logo, the best of everything was one of the BEST growing pains I experienced in this journey. When people ask for my help with starting their blog my first advice is to not spend a bunch of money on getting a professional website, branding, courses, etc because you don’t know who you are yet. You don’t know how you want your website to be laid out if you haven’t experienced what you don’t want for long enough. You need be able to give a list of everything you hate about your website from memory before you are really ready for that investment.
- Every time I failed I recalibrated and kept going – I’ve always had an entrepreneurial itch. It’s never let me rest. Many times I jumped into ideas just to do something, anything, because my desires were so strong.
I once started a dog walking business. It just wasn’t for me, the pace was too slow and it wasn’t challenging or lucrative. I loved baking so I started an Etsy shop that did so well it was either quit the shop or quit my job. I was young and scared of loosing stability, so I closed the shop. I let go of the regret I had from closing that shop when I had an honest conversation with myself. I was burned out and lost the joy of baking during that time because I was baking on demand. I prefer to bake on a whim on my own terms and around my own schedule!
Then I decided to go big – I knew I wanted to do something creative, challenging, and online. So I decided to start an online wedding consignment website. I thought it was a great idea, but nobody else did. I just couldn’t get anyone to list their stuff! I eventually stopped the pursuit and had an even harder conversation with myself. It turns out you can talk yourself into anything if there are parts and pieces you believe in. You can rationalize anything with yourself if you aren’t being 100% honest because that passion to create just burns so deep inside of you!
So – I got honest. Really, truly, deeply honest. That’s when Baking You Happier was born. It is absolutely everything I needed in an entrepreneurial career!
- What I want people to know – Being honest with yourself and never giving up is what will get you to the level you hope to achieve. The path of least resistance isn’t always the best. Nothing worth doing is easy. If you are choosing easy because you hope it gets you to your end goal faster, you aren’t choosing what will be best for you and your family long term. Really think through things and be okay with ‘no’ when it applies. When one door closes, another always opens.
Give yourself permission to be you. If someone else is making millions off making stickers and you have no interest in stickers but want to be a millionaire so you force yourself to make stickers then you will fail. You don’t have the passion needed that will drive the commitment. You must do what you truly love to do, even if it doesn’t look like what everyone else is doing. Be you if you want to be successful in following your dream.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
When I first started blogging, I looked at pivoting negatively. I saw it as something that was a result of me doing something wrong.
Along the way my mindset shifted and I realized changing course isn’t a failure at all, being adaptive is what secures success!
I’ve had to pivot many, many times. I have excepted it and face it head on now instead of dreading it! Here are a few examples:
- I originally named my blog ‘keep rolling with jamie.’ It kills me to even say that out loud because I hate it so much, ha! Early into blogging I was doing research that convinced me to change the name of my blog to something shorter and something more relevant. I wanted ‘baking you happy,’ but some guy owned the domain name and wanted to charge me $1,000 so I outsmarted him and for $8 I bought the domain ‘baking you happier!’
- For the first few years I shared a lot of vegan recipes. I accepted I wasn’t getting a ton of traffic to those recipes so I changed my focus to more vegetarian recipes and less vegan. I’ve seen a significant hike in traffic from doing that! Vegan recipes get more traffic when the blog is entirely about veganism. Otherwise they are considered to be pretty buried in a website that has both vegetarian and vegan recipes.
- When I started blogging I took pictures with my phone. Those pictures were terrible. Oh man, so, so, so terrible. I was finally ready to upgrade to a nice camera and held out hope that Black Friday would offer me a deal I couldn’t refuse. Sure enough, I was able to get the camera I so badly needed! I then had to learn how to use the thing. I started re-taking old pictures and wasn’t feeling so embarrassed by the pictures anymore!
I continued to learn as much as I could about photography and moved my studio upstairs to the natural light and the pictures were so much better! Sigh, more pivoting. I am STILL retaking pictures I have already retaken… but with every photoshoot I do I learn something new!
- As I researched SEO (Search Engine Optimization) I learned that Google appreciates new, fresh, and updated content. For the longest time I thought once I was done with a post I was done for life. Pivoting – again! Now part of my routine is to update that old content and make it fresh again with new pictures, creating new pins for Pinterest, updating recipe notes/instructions, proofing for typos, etc.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
It’s never been about the number of followers or likes for me, it’s been about connection. Baking is such a big part of my life, I have such a deep passion for it that I can almost always associate an event in my life with the recipe I am sharing – whether past or present. People like personal stories!
My Grandma also bakes for the blog and a lot of times I am able to share stories with my readers that she has shared with me. I think it’s so important for Grandparents to be part of our lives. We can learn so much from their stories and experiences. They don’t squawk about making dinner, they just do it and they know how to do it well and inexpensively. They live simple lives, a lifestyle my generation is seeking. We have so much to learn from their homesteading!
One of the funny stories my readers recently liked was one my Grandma shared about my Uncle George. When he would pick strawberries he’d take the stems off in the patch and leave them there so he’d save money on the weight of the strawberries!
I used to just copy and paste the description of the recipe from my blog post and slap it on social media and consider it checked off my list. As soon as I pivoted and took the time to post meaningful, relevant, and relatable material I saw my social media accounts grow! I still don’t have a ton of followers on Instagram or Facebook, but I do have a lot more interaction than I used to, so I consider that growth!
And I try to spread what I call ‘local love.’ If I’ve had a great experience with a locally owned business, I promote them in my Instagram stories to help support them!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.bakingyouhappier.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bakingyouhappier/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bakingyouhappier
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@bakingyouhappier
Image Credits
Dave Kramer – picture of me Jamie Fisher – pictures of food