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Hey Reader,

Welcome to August's monthly newsletter! 🎉 We're excited to share the latest news in the food creator space with you, but before we do, we wanted to make sure you've tuned into our August podcast episodes:

• ​Building Brand Authority Through PR with Lydia Bagarozza​​
• ​Why Jeanelle Castro Thinks YouTube Is the Most Powerful Social Platform for Food Creators​
• A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Claude as a Food Blogger with Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju​
• ​Why Trust Matters More Than Detection in the Age of AI with Jeremy Carrasco​

Now, let's jump into the latest articles! ⬇️

1. Does topical focus make your brand more visible? 🔍

Is it better to niche down or expand your horizons? New research from Kevin Indig (analyzing Semrush data) has an answer for anyone wondering whether AI search rewards focus or breadth.

It turns out that AI tools will happily cite your content as a source on almost any topic, even ones outside your wheelhouse, but they only recommend your brand by name in the categories where you've actually built real authority. In topics closely tied to a brand's core expertise, name-mentions jumped to 44%, compared to just 25% in unrelated categories.

The main takeaway for food bloggers is that sharing content in twenty different niches doesn't make you an authority in any of them. Depth beats sprawl, so if AI visibility is a part of your strategy, you'll want to double down on a narrower niche rather than spreading thin across every recipe category under the sun.

​Read her full article on Search Engine Land here.​

2. The Substack strategy that grew her podcast 999% with Chef Carla Contreras ✉️

On the latest episode of Happy Subscribers, our Email Marketing Expert, Allea Grummert, sat down with content strategist and food creative Chef Carla Contreras to chat about the evolution of Substack. Spoiler alert: it's not "just a newsletter platform" anymore. It has evolved into a media app, with audio, video, and its own social layer called Notes. 🤯

Carla shares her own wild numbers; after moving her podcast over to Substack, it grew 149% in one year and 999% the next (yep, you read that right).

For food bloggers specifically, Carla makes a great case for using Substack to share the behind-the-scenes stories your recipe posts and emails can't, without duplicating content or turning it into a whole second job. Sounds like a win-win to us!

Her advice is to start small with just a profile and one link and to index your recipes with links back to your blog (don't abandon it as your home base!). It's a great listen if you've been curious about Substack but weren't sure where to start!

​Listen to the full episode here.

​3. How to post on social media from Claude 🤖

Breaking news: Buffer just rolled out an MCP (Model Context Protocol) connection that lets you talk to Claude and have it schedule posts straight to your Buffer queue (no more copy-pasting drafts between tabs!!!).

Once connected, you can ask Claude what's already scheduled across your channels, turn a rough idea (screenshots, voice notes, half-formed thoughts) into a polished post, or ask it to tweak something already sitting in your queue. It works across all the big platforms Buffer supports, including Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok.

For food bloggers juggling recipe posts alongside Pinterest pins and Instagram content (aka all of us), this could save you lots of time.

​Read the full tutorial on Buffer.​

4. What creators should focus on this August (embrace the Quiet Month) 🤫

Clariti's latest blog post makes the case that August's quiet pace is a feature, not a problem, since it's the one stretch of the year with enough breathing room to tackle the stuff that always gets pushed around by other tasks. Here are some of the suggestions they shared in the post:

• Finally do that content audit you've been putting off (and decide what to update, promote, or retire)
• Build a real first version of that digital product or newsletter instead of just dreaming about it
• Check in on your affiliate content to make sure links and recommendations are still current

The post also pushes for getting ahead on your Q4 content calendar now, while there's still room to think it through. It's a good nudge for anyone closing out this slower month and wondering whether to just coast. A little intentional effort now tends to pay off once things pick back up this fall!

​Read the full blog post on Clariti here.​

And that's it for us this month! See you back here in September. 📚