Lindsay Ostrom — From After-Work Recipes to the Pinch of Yum Business

The first publicly disclosed month of ad revenue for Lindsay Ostrom's cooking blog Pinch of Yum was $21.97. Five years later, in November 2016, the site's AdThrive ad revenue alone was $52,313.13. In the meantime, the recipes an elementary school teacher posted as a hobby grew into a business run with her husband and staff.

Posting Recipes and Photos After Work

It began on a night in 2010. Lindsay, who was teaching fourth grade, put on comfortable clothes, sat down on a hand-me-down couch, and created the blog. After that, after work and on weekends, she cooked, took photos, and wrote posts. Even later, when she wrote about leaving teaching, she recalled the day she started on the couch.

The food Lindsay wanted to share was the food she made and ate in everyday life. She wanted to include dishes that people coming home from work could follow, while the photos made them look forward to dinnertime. Between recipes, there were also stories about travel, home, family, and the dog. Readers came looking for recipes and ended up encountering the life of the person who made that food.

Her husband, Bjork Ostrom, added his interest in technology and business to the hobby. While Lindsay made recipes, photos, and posts, he kept an eye on site operations, visitors, and revenue. In the first income report, he introduced himself as 'mostly the guy in charge of eating' and also took on the role of telling readers what was happening behind the blog.

The first time the couple ran ads for a full month was in August 2011. Even though the ads received about 50,000 impressions, revenue was just over $20, so Bjork was disappointed by a lower-than-expected ad rate. He promised to disclose that result first and from then on write each month about how much they earned and what they learned. And so a small business experiment began on the side of a recipe blog.

How Readers’ Saves and Shares Spread Recipes

A single photo of a sweet potato dish helped put the blog on the map. In March 2012, Jane Wang, who then had a large following on Pinterest, pinned a photo of Lindsay’s Healthy Sweet Potato Skins. In a report the following year, Bjork recalled that the share played a major role in helping the post spread to nearly 200,000 pins in total. A food photo that entered one person’s saved list moved to another person’s list and kept introducing the recipe.

The early spread on Pinterest was driven by readers who discovered the recipes. People saved and shared food photos they liked themselves. In July 2013, the blog surpassed 1 million monthly pageviews for the first time, helped by several posts that were widely shared on Pinterest. The food the couple made was traveling far beyond the reach they could have on their own.

The skills Lindsay learned while running the blog led to new products. In March 2012, she released Tasty Food Photography, an ebook about food photography, and in 2013 the couple created Food Blogger Pro, a paid learning community, to answer readers’ blogging questions. People who read their income reports had said they wanted to run food blogs too. Now the couple was hearing from two kinds of readers at once: those looking for dinner ideas and those who wanted to grow their own blogs.

Leaving a Beloved Teaching Career to Make the Blog a Full-Time Job

Yet Lindsay stayed at school even after the blog’s income surpassed her teaching income. A post she wrote in June 2013 tells of children who handed her a paper-clip bracelet with the word ‘love’ when she returned. She loved teaching, and that year she chose a part-time reading intervention teaching position in the mornings. In the afternoons, she spent time on the blog, deciding to continue both jobs together.

A year later, it became harder to put off. Lindsay wanted to end a life of working 15 hours a day, seven days a week, while juggling teaching and the blog. In May 2014, even as she wrote a post announcing her move to full time, tears welled up at the thought of leaving the school she loved, but after the school year ended in June of that year, she left full-time teaching and made the blog her main job. The changes she wanted included resting on weekends and eating dinner before 9 p.m.

Bjork also decided to cut back on his technology work at a nonprofit and devote most of his time to Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro. The couple was excited that working together would let them set their own schedules. Lindsay cited staying at a cabin with family for two weeks instead of returning after a few days because of work, and having a leisurely lunch with her mom, as changes she looked forward to after going full time.

In 2015 and 2016, Lindsay and Bjork built a team and a separate studio. At the studio, they shot photos and videos and held workshops, and they gained people to share responsibilities for reader replies, brand partnerships, and assisting with shoots. The blog Lindsay and Bjork started became a workplace where several people worked together to prepare the next recipe.

Turning Archived Recipes Into Advertising and Sponsorship Income

As content accumulated, they found new opportunities in older posts too. In the fall of 2016, Lindsay re-shot the photos for an existing sweet potato casserole recipe, added video and explanations, and republished it. A new brand sponsorship was attached to a post readers were already finding. A dish she had introduced once before was revised to look better and be easier to follow, then presented to readers again.

In November 2016, the site reached about 4.25 million monthly pageviews. Separate from the ads attached to recipes, sponsored content brought in $22,400 and Amazon affiliate income brought in $4,753.49. With Thanksgiving and the year-end approaching, more people were looking for recipes and advertisers were spending more. The recipes the couple had built up over several years were being used by many people to prepare meals, and the business's income grew.

On Instagram, they expanded how they collaborated with brands. In a 2019 interview, Lindsay explained that she proposed sponsorships using the blog and Instagram together, and offered Instagram-only sponsorships to advertisers who wanted to promote a product over a short period. Brands introduced products within Lindsay's recipes, and readers learned how a product could be used while watching the cooking process.

Posts with strong responses also helped guide the next recipe. Each month, the team selected and reviewed the top five photo posts and the top five video posts. They discussed whether fewer ingredients made a recipe easy, whether a dessert drew interest, or whether including the full recipe in the caption helped. It was work to identify why readers liked something and apply that to the next post.

Doing the Cooking Herself While Dividing Time Between Work and Life

Even as the business grew, Lindsay still did the cooking herself. In a 2019 interview, she explained that she usually made a recipe two or three times before finalizing it, and if needed, adjusted the temperature or ingredients, or checked how it turned out after freezing. In the kitchen, she wrote quantities and steps in a paper notebook instead of on a computer. Opening the computer made it easy to lose cooking time while looking at emails, comments, and messages.

During shoots, an assistant helped prep ingredients and with cooking and dishes. Instead of worrying about the food in the oven or repeatedly washing her hands and picking up the camera, Lindsay could focus on the food and photos in front of her. She also planned the necessary shots in advance. By cutting down on taking endless photos and selecting them later, she prepared the next week's recipes in the limited time available.

After her daughter was born, the shape of the week changed as well. At the time in 2019, Lindsay developed recipes on Monday, shot with her team on Wednesday, and edited photos and wrote on Friday. She also grouped calls and emails on Friday, and spent Tuesdays and Thursdays mostly at home with her daughter. Whereas she had once fit the cooking blog into the gaps after work and on weekends, at that stage she set aside days to spend with her child and arranged work around them.