This episode is sponsored by Yoast and zZest.

Welcome to episode 569 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Liz Wilcox.

Early on in Liz’s career as a content creator, she noticed a pattern: the most successful creators all had one thing in common — a thriving email list. So she started hers from day one, and she never looked back.

In the following years, Liz sold her travel blog, went all in on teaching email marketing, built a membership with 4,000 members, and — plot twist — competed on Survivor while her business kept running, generating $1,000 a day in revenue while she was literally on an island with no phone.

In this episode, Liz and Bjork talk about what it actually takes to build an email list that drives real business results, how she transitioned from one-on-one client work to a scalable membership model, and why she believes the biggest thing holding most creators back from email success isn’t strategy — it’s that they’ve stopped sounding like themselves. She also shares the mindset shifts, boundary-setting practices, and growth tactics that have made her business not just profitable, but genuinely sustainable.

​See the show notes to find relevant links and/or leave a comment!

Three episode takeaways:

• Why email is the most important investment you can make in your business — Liz shares the tactics that have worked for building her list and her membership to 4,000 members, including live events, collaborations, freebie swaps, and affiliate marketing. She also talks about why getting in front of people and showing your face matters more than ever and why giving people a real reason to trust you is the foundation everything else is built on.
• How Liz built a business with real boundaries — From knowing what “enough” looks like financially to the practice of saying no, Liz talks about the discipline and intentionality that have shaped her business.
• The biggest email mistakes food creators make (and how to fix them) — Liz has seen a lot of creator newsletters, and she knows exactly where things go wrong. She shares the most common mistakes she sees and why leaning into your humanity, writing like yourself, and showing that you’re genuinely invested in your readers can make all the difference.

Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Please leave a rating or review if you enjoyed listening. 🎧

Thank you to our sponsors!

Upgrade your blog’s SEO game today with Yoast. If you’re a food blogger, you’ve probably spent years mastering traditional SEO. But here’s the big question: how does your brand show up inside AI answers? Are you being cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini… or completely left out? That’s where Yoast comes in. Included with Yoast SEO AI+, Yoast SEO Brand Insights scans how your brand appears across AI platforms like Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT. You can: See when (and if) you’re mentioned in AI-generated answers Track sentiment around your brand Compare your visibility to competitors It’s a whole new layer of search visibility — beyond traditional rankings. Use code foodblogger10% at checkout for 10% off Yoast SEO Premium, Yoast WooCommerce, and Yoast SEO AI+.

​

Turn recipes into shared, real-time cooking moments with zZest. What if your readers could cook with each other, not just read your recipes? zZest adds a live, interactive kitchen directly to your blog, turning passive traffic into an engaged community and new revenue. It’s completely free to use, and you earn a share of any revenue generated during live sessions. We’re opening a limited group of creators for early access with a higher revenue share. zZest is hosting a live webinar TOMORROW (May 6th) at 1pm CST where you can see exactly how it works. Head to zzest.io to check it out and sign up.

​