News Archives - International Food Blogger Conference

Hiring Digital Marketing Manager for Zephyr United (Our Tour Division)

July 19, 2022 by Sarah Wohlner

Taste Vacations (or, more specifically, our overarching travel company, Zephyr United Travel Collection, which is our sister company) is hiring a new office employee to conduct the marketing for all three of our travel brands.

As you probably know, Zephyr United is a small company. We currently have 4.5 full-time employees (including Allan), and one of those positions is left vacant by our Marketing Lead to pursue a new career path.

We are specifically looking for an individual with marketing experience, preferably in the travel industry. The individual also needs to have an outgoing, caring, fun personality, as all our office staff also guide tours. The pay is not going to make you rich, but the lifestyle benefits are superb. Plus, you can work where you live as we gave up our brick-and-mortar office long ago (way before the pandemic).

Do you know someone who might be interested? Please refer them to the job description and application form. Application deadline is August 10.

Trove – a social sharing platform for creators, storytellers, chefs, adventurers, and explorers

May 16, 2022 by Sarah Wohlner

Guest post from sponsor Trove Collective.

It’s Spring and everything is blooming – especially great ideas! Today we want to share our exciting new platform, Trove Collective, designed for you to collect and build content on all the topics that matter most to you. A place where you can curate your passions with less distractions. Trove is a social sharing platform focused on community-oriented engagement and discovery. We are committed to chartering a future of more authentic peer-to-peer “social blogging”. Trove is a growing community of creators, storytellers, chefs, adventurers, and explorers who showcase their knowledge and pursuits in the spirit of mutual empowerment and inspiration.

Check out the platform, and if you want to give it a try, we are welcoming 200 new users to our iOS app experience using the code TRVE31, completely FREE.

As you explore and navigate (and hopefully love) the Trove app, you may notice the following elements which were at the forefront of our platform design, and how we wanted to set it apart from existing platforms:

Multimedia Content Creation (and Curation): Trove helps you organize your various areas of expertise/interest into separate collections. Within each collection, you can still focus on the written word, but also add user-friendly links to music, books, google maps, youtube (and more) to perfectly customize your story
Evergreen, Ever-evolving: Trove is built to encourage you to come back to your posts (we call them Kernels) and update them as you learn new things or have more to contribute on that topic. It’s a work-in-progress (ya know, like life)
Community at its Core: Trove makes it easy for your communities to subscribe to your specific Collections, save content they love, and discover other content that inspires them. It’s a more structured and focused way for people to discover your content.
[Future state] Monetization on Quality: We are in the process of building out a seamless ‘content marketplace’ to put specific Kernels/posts behind paywalls. Once you build your audience, you won’t have to wait for thousands of site visits, you can use Trove to organize, share, and monetize your most valuable content

Trove – How it works

If you want to know more about the ‘why’ behind our endeavor, we love sharing how we got here:

Currently, there are over 600 million blogs that exist across the web, accounting for a third of all websites.

People have a deep desire to share valuable information on the web in blog form. Lately, it’s getting harder to justify the time, effort, and cost of running a personal blog. It takes, on average, a toilsome 3.5 hours to write a blog post (~1,100 words average), and research tells us that the average reader only consumes it for 37 seconds. Blogging platforms haven’t changed much in the last two decades. They haven’t evolved to account for shifting attention spans, optimal monetization methods, modern storytelling tools, and intelligent discovery engines of the current times.

Conversely, social media has exploded with over 4.5 billion users tapping into rabid content creation with user-friendly tools. The tragedy is in its design principles. Built to bait our attention and exploit our data, these platforms incentivize content creation without context and engagement meant to inflame rather than inform. This strategic commitment to entertain at all costs undermines the basic elements of knowledge sharing – the ability to search, recall, and share for long-term benefits. The worst result of all this has been a mental health epidemic that leaves people in the vicious cycle of want, rather than empowerment. We felt there had to be a better way, so we started to build Trove through the lens of a positive flywheel – without the need for validation of likes and comments that have become the dopamine burst that leaves you needing more.

The Future of the IFBC

April 4, 2022 by Allan

First off, thank you to everyone who sponsored, spoke at, or attended the 2022 International Food Blogger Conference in El Paso. We especially want to thank Destination El Paso, which was a stellar partner over the last years during the pandemic in helping us run the conference. If you have not seen the short summary video, it is worth your time.

So where does the conference go from here?

We have no plans at this point to bring back the International Food Blogger Conference. Obviously, the pandemic has been bad for conferences. Even conferences that have run have tended to have fewer participants and sponsors than in pre-pandemic years. And while we think conferences will return, we at Zephyr Conferences also faced the reality of losing 1/2 our four-person staff due to the pandemic.

In 2021 we experienced a surge in (mostly domestic) travel and this surge has only increased in 2022, as people are hungry to again travel around the world. This means the tour side of our Zephyr United business has been booming and requiring much of our time and attention. Which we are not complaining about!

In the end, we have decided to not plan a 2023 International Food Blogger Conference unless something changes. We are open to any suggestions from key food industry players or influencer groups regarding the future of the IFBC.

Say Heck Yes to Live Streaming

March 10, 2022 by Sarah Wohlner

This guest post is by IFBC22 sponsor Ecamm Live

Kathy Hester is a home chef, cookbook author, blogger, and digital marketing expert. Over the last 14 years in the industry, she has sold over 150,000 cookbooks.

Kathy also teaches live streaming and video production with a focus on finding your authentic self and pushing past feelings of fear and shyness. Five years ago, if you had asked Kathy to go live, she likely would have told you “heck no.”

In fact, she did.

“I remember my business coach, Jenny Melrose, telling me to just go live. And I was like, no. Finally, I agreed to pitch live streaming to a company I was working with and they said yes! Since I had never done live streaming before, I had nothing to show them. But they wanted four live stream broadcasts, so I had to learn how to go live.”

Like starting a blog, or writing a cookbook, Kathy decided to jump in with both feet and just give it a try. And do you want to know a secret? Those first four episodes weren’t perfect, but they were impactful.

“I honestly believe that there’s just X amount of crap that you have to go through and get out of the way to get to that good spot. I’m not sad that I had to do the live streams that way. It forced me to just start and go live. Now my studio is set up in my kitchen and I’ll go live at the drop of a hat. You’ll never really succeed unless you’re willing to fail.”

One of the biggest selling points of getting started with live streaming is that it’s raw and authentic. When you’re live, you’re not able to hide behind fancy video edits or tweaks. It’s what you say is what you get – ums and all. That authenticity is what builds a viewership and community behind you and your content. It’s also what can be scary and uncomfortable when you’re getting started.

“It’s like learning to cook. I can tell you that I’ve messed up some stuff in my life and that’s OK. Your homemade pasta and sauce is always going to be better than box pasta and canned tomato sauce, even if it’s not perfect to you. Video is the same way. You can do a great job even if your lighting isn’t there or you don’t have the best camera… you can still have that connection with your viewers. We all need to get comfortable with uncomfortableness.”

Live streaming helps Kathy welcome her readers and fans into her kitchen to spend time with her, ask questions, and learn something new. Sometimes she’s walking through a recipe, other times she’s testing out a new kitchen gadget, or making a spice blend. Her community shows up to each live stream because, to them, it feels like they’re coming over for a visit with her.

And that’s the goal.

When Kathy became a vegetarian back in 1983, you couldn’t even buy tofu in a grocery store. There was no real support for that diet and lifestyle So she taught herself how to cook. She developed not only recipes, but also the process for how to be successful as a vegetarian. Through her food blog and cookbooks, she’s able to share recipes with everyone. Live streaming allows her to welcome those people into her kitchen and give them the opportunity to know her better and learn her approach to cooking – it’s more than just the recipes.

About five years ago, Kathy attended a plant-based food conference. While she was there, she met some of her cookbook and blog readers. After just a few minutes of hearing their stories, it became apparent that Kathy’s readers weren’t just in it for the one-off recipe – being vegan or vegetarian was a part of who they were.

While her cookbooks and blog were certainly working well for her, there was an opportunity to build a community and connect with her readers and fans in a different way.

Kathy’s Facebook community now has about 7,000 members. They share recipes, tips and tricks, and more. It’s also a safe space where everyone can ask questions, try things out, and make it all their own. Live video is integral to this community.

“If I’m having a rough week or I’m just really busy, my community jumps in and answers questions for me. In many ways, that’s happening because of my live videos – because we’ve had that connection together live. They’ve seen me preparing a meal and watched me as I double checked to make sure I had enough water added or diced an onion in a particular way. They know how I approach cooking and they feel comfortable helping each other. They’ve basically taken it and run with it.”

To plan and produce her live broadcasts, Kathy uses Ecamm Live. With Ecamm, Kathy is able to connect multiple cameras (including an overhead camera so you can see her hands as she preps recipes), improve her audio, present recipes, images, and video clips, and even show viewer comments on screen. And she does it all from her Mac computer right in her kitchen.

The best part? Once the live stream ends, Kathy has a copy of her video automatically saved on her computer so she can share it with those who missed it live, trim it up for social posts, or even grab the transcript to turn the video into a blog post.

In order to make things easier and ensure everything is always ready to go, Kathy keeps her live streaming gear (cameras, microphones, computer, lighting, etc) set up all the time so that she can just walk into her kitchen, turn everything on, and go. This not only saves her time, but also makes it easier for her to be consistent in creating content because she’s not stuck with having to set things up and take them down each and every time she wants to make a video or share a recipe or story with her community.

Kathy may have thought “heck no” when first thinking about live streaming, but now going live is second nature and central to all she does.

If you’ve been saying “heck no” about live video, but Kathy’s story has you thinking differently, get in touch! We’d love to show you how Ecamm Live can make a difference and how you can be up and running with live streaming quickly and easily. Try Ecamm Live today for FREE at www.ecamm.live

Learn more about Kathy, her cookbooks, blog, courses, community, and live streaming tips & tricks at https://www.kathyhester.com

The Taste of El Paso: A Highlight of the Conference

February 7, 2022 by Sarah Wohlner

The Taste of El Paso is for many the highlight of the conference. Taste of El Paso offers conference attendees an opportunity to sample some of El Paso’s best restaurants under one roof. Savor authentic tacos from Tacos Chinampa and Birria Culiacan. Try The Tap Bar’s world-famous nachos. Quench your thirst with craft beer from DeadBeach and Old Sheepdog breweries. If beer is not your style, you can also indulge in regional wines from Wine Attitudes or chamoy-smothered “mangoneadas” from Craze. Indulge in the best vegan Mexican food from Lick It Up and don’t miss Ruli’s International Kitchen’s delectable fusions – plus so much more! Where else can you sit in one outdoor space and have the best restaurants of a city come to you?

Take a look at the pictures below. Can you spot the chamoy-smothered “mangoneadas” (picture 1), the crisp craft beer from DeadBeach (picture 2) or the authentic tacos from Tacos Chinampa (picture 3)? What about the vegan Mexican food from Lick It Up (pictures 4 & 5)?

Experience Mexican food and El Paso like you’ve never before. Check out the full Agenda and Register Now!