How Vidar Bergum Publishes Two Newsletters in Two Languages

If you think regularly publishing just one newsletter is hard, try two in different languages. That’s what Istanbul-based Norwegian food writer Vidar Bergum does — he writes Meze, in English, and Et kjøkken i Istanbul (A Kitchen in Istanbul) in Norwegian — while further diversifying his food expertise into other revenue streams.

Vidar got into newsletters in 2015, when he left a career in finance and moved to Istanbul from London. Born and raised in Norway, Vidar began collecting cookbooks in earnest in 2007, kicking off a passion for home cooking and the restaurant scene. After relocating, he promptly started a food blog about his new life. He leveraged the blog to publish several cookbooks, which led him to transition into newsletter writing to promote interest in the books. “I wanted to make that a little bit interesting for people, not just send them a blast of recipes,” he said. He repurposed some stories and recipes he’d posted to his blog to the Kitchen in Istanbul newsletter, now the focal point of his Norwegian-focused areas of business, which includes books and culinary tourism as well. “The newsletter has been incredible in terms of selling these trips to Istanbul,” he says. Subscribers receive a weekly email with six recipes along with occasional “Postcards from Istanbul” about his life in Turkey.

Due to popular demand from non-Norweigian fans, Vidar also launched an English newsletter in 2022, which is also food-centric and borrows from the Norwegian blog but with much more reporting and first-person writing. The two newsletters, he said, are “at different stages of their journey.” For the Norwegian one, he’s got about 11,500 free subscribers and about 300 paying ones. For the English one, he’s got about 5,000 free subscribers and just over 50 paying subscribers. (The paid products are priced differently — the Norwegian newsletter costs about $82 U.S. per year, while the English newsletter costs $50 per year.) 

Vidar sends out two newsletters a week in each language. “For my Norwegian one, the membership has been going for the last year and a half,” he said. “I’ve been sending out to members every Friday, and then there’s a free newsletter on Sunday, which is just like a quick update from Istanbul with a few links to my blog.” He uses these newsletters “extensively” to market his products, like his books and tours. Some recent issues include recipes for spiced Turkish lentil soup, beetroot salad, and roasted sumac potatoes, along with deep dives into a wine-making monastery and visiting the ancient Mesopotamian city of Mardin.

Vidar does admit that staying on top of all of these newsletter sends isn’t easy. “It does sometimes slip if it’s just very busy, but I make sure that paid subscribers get everything that they should be getting.” 

We chatted with Vidar about the challenges of speaking to two different audiences, how Norwegian vs. English-speaking markets compare, and what it’s like to take a bunch of your out-of-town readers out to dinner. 

(This interview has been condensed and edited.)

What goes out in your Norwegian newsletter versus the English one?

Because the Norwegian one is an established audience and there are already a lot of things [on my site], I have to give them brand-new stuff. I’m in the middle of making a big change. I did a survey of my readers, and to my surprise, [after receiving] one recipe a week, there were a lot more people saying, “You’re sending me too much, I can’t read everything,” than saying, “I’m not getting enough.”

From February onwards, I’m doing more of a monthly cycle rather than a weekly one. The first week is a recipe release, and you get all of the recipes for this month. Then I’ll have a simpler newsletter every week from now on that is a bit easier for me to prepare. The whole month goes around one theme, so I don’t need to come up with something new every week.

I’m also planning to diversify the content a bit. I want to start a monthly live broadcast, like a cook-along. I’m involving a friend of mine who’s a sommelier. One of the common questions I get is, “What do I drink with all this food?” She’s going to help me with a newsletter with some drink recommendations. That’s what they get as paying subscribers.

Then for the free one, it’s just a recipe roundup, “Here are six things you can try next week.” It’s all from the archives, a mixture of free and paid. As part of that, I do my marketing as well. Most weeks, the last recipe will be something that is only in one of the books. I’ll say, “This one is great for this week. The recipe is on this page of this book, and if you don’t have it, here’s where to buy it.” We just finalized a new culinary trip to Istanbul, which is going to be in September. I usually tell everyone, “We’re now open for bookings for this one, here are the dates, here’s where to read more.” This has been incredibly effective for the free newsletter.

The rest of the roundup is to keep people interested from week to week; then I give them a couple of paragraphs on what I’m up to so they feel like they know me.

For the English one, I feel like I need to provide a lot more value for the free subscribers than I do for my Norwegian ones. The weekly news there is usually more storytelling or essay-based. I did a series, for example, about some travels I’ve done in Turkey. Sometimes, I write some background about an ingredient, or I can write some from my experience here, a taste of the food culture or something about the history or something I’ve experienced. There are occasional recipe roundups as well. Once or twice a month, paying subscribers get a new recipe that isn’t on the blog. 

I’ve got 500 or 600 recipes. Of those, maybe 100 or 125 are published in English. I’ve got a huge archive to just pull from. I use help from ChatGPT to get that translated and get the U.S. measurements in for those American readers. Of course, you still need to go through it quite deeply, but I find it’s still very helpful in terms of providing a first draft of the recipe itself.

We always keep being told that we should be repurposing all our content. This is essentially one way of repurposing content, right? It’s not as easy as you think. Definitely not. But this is where, perhaps in the future, AI might become even more interesting as those models develop. One of the challenges of using AI for content is that it’s very difficult to get something unique. But if you already have something unique in one language, with time, as AI develops, it might be easy to cross that over into another language as well.

Your English newsletter’s on Substack. What platform is the Norwegian one on?

I wanted to do that one on Substack as well, but [with Substack], you have to set your price in one of the anchor currencies, which are from the English-language countries. For a Norwegian audience, this makes no sense. They want to pay in Krone. I use Ghost, which is a smaller platform. It was super easy to set up, and it’s brilliant to use their dashboard and editor. But it’s got some limitations as well. In the last month, I moved everything over to the website, so I’m using Memberful to do a membership there. Then it’s connected to ConvertKit, so now everything goes on ConvertKit.

What percentage of your income is the newsletter compared to these other writing and culinary travel projects you have?

Things like books vary a lot from year to year. I’ve been lucky because my first few books were really long stayers. My first book that came out in 2018 is still selling well, and we had another print last year.

I would say there are four legs to my business. It’s the memberships or paid newsletters, there’s the culinary tours, there’s the books, and then there’s advertising on my websites. Culinary tourism is the smallest. The membership, as it continues to grow, is becoming more and more important, so this year it’ll probably be the biggest revenue source for me.

Is there a big voice difference between the Norwegian and the English newsletter? I presume you can’t just run the Norwegian newsletter through a translator and just send it out exactly the same. 

Translation is really, really difficult because you have a different voice in each language. I grew up with Norwegian, and that’s my first language, but I lived in London for 10 years, and my partner and I speak English at home. English has been my first language in my daily life for almost 20 years. I’ve got a different voice in each of them. When you finish writing something and when you hit publish, and then start over again in a different language, it’s hard to motivate yourself to do it, because you’re already done with that piece.

The Norwegian audience is very recipe-focused. The English one is a lot more focused on my experience in Turkey and the things that I really know most deeply. It’s a space where I can put pen to paper on the things that I find most interesting about the things that I’ve experienced and learned through research, traveling, and talking to people over the last 10 years.

This is why the newsletter comes in very handy. It is a very good way of separating that from the more evergreen recipe content. That can live on its own as just the recipe and whatever is relevant to that recipe. But then you have this other space where you can tell all the stories that are a lot more interesting and probably can bring someone closer to you.

How does the Norwegian newsletter market compare to the American one? 

There is a very different mentality in Norway compared to what you see in the U.S., where people are a lot more used to [the idea that] you should be paying for stuff. There is an understanding that you need to make money to make this go around and we want to support your thing.

In Norway, people want to support you, but they also get very annoyed: “Why are you putting in these ads? I don’t like it.” There isn’t the same understanding. You can see that in the conversion numbers. Compared to many other people in my space, I have a very close following, and the conversion numbers are much lower than what you see in the U.S. [Editor’s note: Many newsletters can convert anywhere from 3 to 10% of their audience to paying supporters. With his Norwegian-language newsletter, Vidar converts about 2.6% of readers to supporters.]

First, I had to educate [my Norwegian readers] why I’m putting advertising. Now everyone is fine with it; everyone’s understood it, and other blogs are doing it as well. Then it’s the same with the membership, “Why are you charging for recipes? Everyone else is putting them out there for free.” I’m like, “Well, do you work for free? You’re a lawyer — do you do all pro bono work?”

Anyone coming in new will be met with a paywall from Day 1. They will understand, “This is how this site operates. It’s not a traditional hobby blog; this is a proper website.” That’s why, for example, it’s important to have a good-looking website that looks professional because that’s part of the package when you’re charging people.

Norway is a smaller market in general, so there aren’t that many people who can make a living doing it in the space in such a small country. It’s five million people; it’s like a small U.S. state.

What metrics do you tend to keep a close eye on?

I have had, since almost the beginning, a spreadsheet where I used to just gather data from Google Analytics monthly. Over time, it’s expanded. Now, it’s my all-encompassing spreadsheet: It’s got my publishing plans, newsletters, stats, everything. I do look at the metrics that most people look at in terms of sessions on the blog. Now that I’ve crossed quite a bit more than a year, I’m keeping an eye on the retention rate. 

The most important things for me to track are how I’m doing in terms of subscribers and membership. I look more at developments than the actual number to try to correlate what I’m doing. What is resonating? What isn’t?

I focus more on those things I keep track of. For example, if there’s one newsletter that sees a particularly high number of clicks or unsubscribes, I try to understand what is happening here. After I launched my membership, I reduced the number of free recipe links in my free newsletter. I went from four or five to two links per week, and I suddenly saw my unsubscribes double, even triple, in some weeks. I was like, “Maybe I’m not giving enough value now to the people who are not paying.” They’re thinking, like, “This is just for paying subscribers now.” Keeping an eye on those rates has been helpful.

Do you hire anyone to help with images or editing?

I’ve been doing everything myself. For my English-language newsletter, I sometimes pull recipes from my books. For that, there’s a separate photographer. I didn’t do the photography for my books. For the books, that’s a whole team operation.

That’s one of the things I wanted to achieve with my newsletter membership: to get to a financial position where I can hire someone. I’ve really neglected social media because just from a personal perspective, if I weren’t doing what I’m doing, I would’ve deleted Instagram and everything a long time ago, but it is part of our business. I’m considering hiring someone to help me do that, maybe some of this minute publishing stuff like, “I write my stuff, I got my recipe, I got my photos, you take it and turn it into something pretty on the website.” That’s something I want to explore now that I have the financial standing to be able to do that.

Tell me about the culinary tours. Do you plan them yourself?

I do those together with a travel agent based in Norway that does off-the-beaten-track travels. They had had some success with a wine expert doing wine trips to France and Italy and Spain and such, and then they contacted me. We are working here together with a local guide in Turkey, and it’s a full six days, including two travel days. It’s partly sightseeing to make sure that they see all the important bits of Istanbul. There’s a culinary day where we go to the spice market, we eat some interesting food, and we visit a food market. I do a cooking class as part of this as well, because this is the only place I do cooking class, so this is quite attractive to people.

Then we eat at the restaurants that I’ve chosen. The Norwegian tour agents pay me for my participation and then they pay this Turkish guide who organizes everything because I can’t organize all this stuff. I’m the curator of the program, and I participate in the food parts of the program. [The September trip, which runs six days and includes flights from Oslo and hotels in Turkey, costs about $2,585 U.S.]

How large are these groups, typically?

There are about 20 people per group.

That sounds exhausting, honestly.

It is. After the first one, I spent a week just recovering.

What’s that like to meet your newsletter readers in person, and has that informed the way you write your newsletter? 

It’s a little overwhelming because I’m quite an introverted person. I like being around people, but it takes a lot of my energy to be there in the beginning. It’s a little awkward because people know you, and you have no idea who they are, and there are like 20 people. I don’t know any of their names, and it takes forever for the names to stick for me.

But it’s nice. They’re very easy to get along with. You’ll have some that are a bit more shy, and then you have some that are very easygoing, and they help open me up a bit. That’s been a plus for me because we were together quite a lot.

I do a walking tour in my neighborhood as well around here. Sometimes, I can ask them questions, especially with people who are here who follow me: “What do you think of this?” I discussed the ideas for my next book project, for example, with the group last time. Not something I would be prepared for in public, but with a small group like this, by all means.

My experience is positive; it brings a different level to the relationship that they have with you. For every group, at least one or two, maybe even three people signed up for the paid membership afterwards.

Six things other newsletters can learn from Vidar

1.) Use AI for productivity… — When you’re an independent operator, you need all the help you can get. Vidar uses tools like ChatGPT to produce a first version of a translated story, and then edits it and adds voice to make sure it matches what his audience expects.

2.) …But don’t lean too heavily on AI — Vidar notes that even cutting-edge translation tools miss things. If you rely on AI’s help with writing, editing, or proofreading, don’t forget to read things all the way through with your human eyes to make sure it actually makes sense. 

3.) Revenue diversification matters for any successful newsletter — Few newsletter operators are able to make a newsletter a full-time job off just one revenue stream. Vidar leans into four different opportunities — ads, book sales, events, and memberships — to build his business.

4.) Revenue starts with relationships — Once a reader knows you and trusts you, they may take the next step to support your work. Vidar estimated that 10-15% of people who go on one of his tours become a paying member. That makes sense — the readers who have that relationship with him are far more likely to be interested in both getting access to more content from him and supporting an independent operator they already like.

5.) Set goals beyond revenue and growth — It’s great set goals around those two points, but you may have things you want to accomplish beyond those. For Vidar, one key goal is to get to a place where he can hire help with production and social media. Success would mean reaching a level of revenue where he can reinvest back into the business.

6.) Write once, repackage as needed  — Vidar has found another market for recipes he’s already written and published on his blog. Do you have existing content that you can make money off a second time by refreshing it for your subscribers or repackaging and selling to a new audience? You may be able to get more out of the content you’ve already created.