178: Life, Podcasting, Blogging, and Cookbook Writing with Sonja and Alex Overhiser

In this episode, I chat about planning for the new year and then Bjork interviews Alex and Sonja from a couple cooks about producing quality content in a ton of different ways. Hey, hey, hey. Wonderful listener. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I'm Alexa and we are just so excited, so thrilled, so honored that you decided to tune in this week. Before we hop into the episode, I'd like to take a second to thank our sponsors, wptasty WP Tasty is our sister site and the site where we sell plugins for bloggers. We have a recipe plugin called Tasty Recipes, a Pinterest plugin called Tasty Pins, and a super slick auto linking plugin called Tasty Links. We use all three on Pinch of Yum and they actually become essential to the way we we run Pinch of Yum. So you can learn more about all of those plugins@wptasty.com and if you've been around the FPP podcast for a while, you'll know that we like to offer you a little Tasty Tip along with the information about our sponsor. And today's Tasty Tip is all about planning for the new year. And I know, I know you're probably saying, alexa, it's not even December yet. Don't make me start thinking about 2019. It's too early. But friend, there's really no time like the present to start thinking about the processes and tools you'll use to stay on top of your work in the upcoming year. And an easy way to do that is actually to look backwards, look at this past year and really think about the things that have been working, the things that have brought you joy, and the things that, well, haven't. Do you remember the solo podcast episode that Bjork did a few months ago? And it was about keeping it fresh and avoiding burnout. I think it was number 155. And you can go and check that out by going to foodbloggerpro.com 155. But in it he talks about making Things I do lists and Things I Don't do lists. This time of year is the perfect time of year to reevaluate those lists and move things from one to the other. So I invite you to look back on your year and ask yourself those questions. What are your pain points? What have you been struggling with? And what can make next year even better? And now the episode. I had the honor and privilege to meet Sonia and Alex Oberheiser a few weeks ago when they were in Pittsburgh. My Hometown for a blogging event. And they were just so inspirational. I knew we had to have them on the podcast to chat about what they're up to. They balance a lot for their blog. A couple cooks, they run a podcast. They consistently publish quality content on their blog. They recently published a cookbook. They appear on television shows like the Today Show. And that's all on top of raising a toddler. If it seems like a lot, it probably is. But Sonja and Alex have learned ways to balance and exceed in it all, and that's exactly what they're here to talk about today. So without any further ado, Bjork, take it away.

Alex and Sonja, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having us.

So glad to be here.

Yeah. So this is officially my first podcast back. We kind of loaded up the queue, took some time away, and with our daughter Solvi, and this is the first one back, but it's an easy podcast to get back into because we are old friends. You are actually what I would consider to be our first Internet friends. And I was trying to remember the year that we first connected. Do you remember when it was? 2010? 2011.

2011.

Okay. Roughly around there. Ish.

Yeah.

Yeah. About July 5th, 6pm so thinking back to that time, I remember for Lindsay and I, we were going to visit a friend in Indianapolis. And I think that you guys had connected Lindsay before previously, and had maybe heard that we were coming out there, and you're like, hey, you should swing over. For us, it was this first time of, like, oh, these are Internet friends. Which is so common now. Like, you get to know people, and then maybe if they're in the city, then you connect. But I remember for us, that was such a big deal. Uh, but you guys go back. You started your blog in 2010, so you'd been doing it for about a year. And same for us. Take us back to that time when you started your blog. What was the reason for starting it? And you kind of have an interesting story as well, with your interest in food in general and together working to kind of fall in love with food and. And everything around it. So. So rewind the tape a little bit and take us back there.

Yeah. So Alex and I are college sweethearts. We met here in Indiana. I'm actually from Minnesota originally. I came to Indiana for school. We met first day of freshman year, didn't date till sophomore year, and then ended up getting married, moving to Indianapolis, and buying a house. And we bought this house, and we said, oh, like, what's what's the adult thing to do next? Have people over for dinner. Right. So we realized at the time we had no cooking skills whatsoever. I ate a lot of Hot Pockets and breakfast cereal. Alex ate a lot of Taco Bell. And so we really didn't have anywhere to start in the kitchen. So we said, okay, let's learn how to cook something. And so we started looking for cookbooks. And at the time, my boss at work had a cookbook. I asked her, what's a fancy, like, French cookbook? And she said, julia Child. And I said, who the heck is Julia Child? And she gave me the cookbook. And so we started paging through it, and I just kind of fell in love with her personality. She was so just warm and genuine and said, if you've never learned to cook before, you can do it. And I was like, oh, man, that's so great. I don't know anything. And that's kind of where we started. So we tried a couple recipes from her, and they actually turned out. I think it was beginner's luck, because then after that, we had a lot.

Of failures, some that didn't turn out.

Yeah, we kind of started just to fall in love with the process of cooking together and having people over and enjoying this food.

Hmm. It's interesting because to hear. For me to, like, envision. And again, we know you guys, so I can kind of fill this picture out a little bit. I have this idea of who you are individually and as a couple, and for me to, like, think back and imagine Alex eating a Taco Bell taco. Like, it is such a. Like, strong contrast. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, Right, Right. It could be anything from the Taco Bell menu, but, like, it, like, doesn't compute in my mind. But it's fun to hear that. That. That origin story of how you guys said, okay, let's. And it sounds like part of it was, we want to host people. We want to be a people about people, and part of that is food. And how do we start to learn how to do that? And my question for you, as long as we're talking about, you know, specifically food. Food and the. In the skills around that, which is such an important piece of this. And sometimes we talk about the more technical things on the podcast, but for each of you, it feels like you're continually trying to evolve that. Like, you're trying to get better at your. At the craft of creating meals. And I would assume it involves a lot of testing, a lot of learning. But, Alex, are there places that you go to say, hey, how do we continually become better at our craft of creators around food and recipes?

Absolutely. We've really become really passionate about making recipes that other people can follow. I think early on in the blog we were passionate about just creating new things and hope somebody else could create it as well. But we've realized that it's really, really fun when somebody can make your recipe, follow it to a T and have it turn out. So we've really kind of dedicated ourselves to creating recipes that are simple to follow and will turn out if you make them. And that was a bit of a change for us.

Yeah. And can you talk about that? Number one, why did you make that change? And then we'll talk about some advice that you have around for people who want to create kind of these clear, easy to understand kind of doable recipes. So first of all, at what point did you realize, hey, this is something maybe we need to shift in terms of how we're approaching the content on our blog?

I think early on the blog wasn't. Well, it wasn't a professional blog. It was just purely a hobby. And so we were just doing things out of passion. We were so excited about these new recipes, so excited about these healthy, nutritious foods that we just wanted to put them on the Internet as soon as possible.

I would just say, hey, have you heard of quinoa? It's so good.

Yeah, right.

We didn't really put that professional spin on it. And the funny part is in our day jobs, we actually worked together previously at a technical writing company. And so writing instructions was our actual job.

Yeah, so our job was to take really complex things like products. We worked a lot in medical devices and take our software and take these really complex things and then translate them to make them easy to understand for the everyday reader. And so that's actually we realized what we do on the blog every day is to take a process and to really distill it down and to think about who is on the other side, who is the user of these instructions, how can we make it fail proof? How can we make it something that anyone of any level of cooking can understand and follow? And that has kind of really become our passion of what we do is to make these recipes that are easy to follow for people of all kinds.

So do you feel like there are recipes then that you are super excited about, you really personally love and you would love to share with your audience, but they don't pass the filter of accessible or whatever you'd want to call it in terms of a recipe that you can publish on your blog. And is that, is that a hard thing to. To have that filter?

Oh yes. Blog worthy is such a difficult. Yeah, difficult subject. We had it even more so when we wrote our cookbook because there were some recipes that we just really loved and wanted to put in that cookbook. But our title for our book was Pretty Simple Cooking and we really wanted to kind of distill recipes that were simple. But we are tackling some newer, more complicated things. Like we just did a sourdough bread recipe on our blog and that took like a year and a half to develop to try to like figure out what is this super complex thing and what's the way that we can spin it so that other people can do it too.

So it's super complicated. It takes three days. The one, the most labor intensive day, it takes three, five hours. Put this together. So what we decided to do was number one, write super, super clear instructions. Number two, do a very in depth video to show people how the dough should look. And then number three, what we feel like was our really innovative piece was to create a checklist because Alex found that he was always forgetting what step he was on of our sourdough bread. So we created a really simple checklist for people so they could check off after they do each step. We made it a printable on our blog. So we, we feel like we something that was really complicated and we made it simpler to follow and we're seeing results. We're seeing people making our sourdough bread and tagging us on social media and it's just really, really fun to see that all this time and energy and years that we've put into making simple recipes is actually paying off.

Yeah. And I think this is a missing. It's not a missing piece. I think it's something that's important to point out. How long do you feel like if. I know, it's hard to know for sure. But between the two of you to create that one piece of content, how long would you guess total that it took?

That one was on the extreme side, but it had to be.

I don't know.

I don't even want to know.

50 hours maybe. That was pretty insane.

Okay. That's the thing that I feel like is so important to point out. It's like when you stop and think about it, it's an insane amount of time. But I think it's so important to point out that if you're going to produce a piece of content and you want that piece of content to do really well. It's not true all the time. Like, it doesn't have to. You don't have to spend 50 hours for every single piece of content. But I think that there are these kind of pillar pieces of content that creators need to think about that will take 40, 50 hours by the time that you factor in, in this case, recipe testing, you created a guide. All of the photographing, developing, you know, and tweaking the recipe, doing the photography, the video. But then what happens is like, and this is the beautiful thing about the recipe content is that it just lives forever. And it's not like someday that recipe is going to not work anymore. Like, it is forever going to be a really valuable piece of content. But it's hard to put that much time and energy into it. We did that recently with Pinch of Yum. And by we, I actually didn't have anything to do with it, but Lindsay and some of our team members put together a freezer meal piece of content. And it was kind of the same strategy where, hey, we're going to put together printables, we're going to, you know, test these recipes. We're going to have, you know, really specific instructions on it, and it takes a ton, a ton, a ton, a ton of time. And the good thing is, though, often, not always, but that that is rewarded by, like you said, people interacting with it and making the recipe and having success with it. But it's not easy. So let's talk about. You talked about the different components that were part of it, a printable, like something above and beyond just the written content, the video, which I think people understand. But one of the things that I think isn't as easy to understand or as easy to immediately develop as a skill, but that you guys have is this ability to clearly communicate in writing. So for those that are looking to help, the people that come to their blog have success with a recipe specifically or just instructions in general, what would your advice be to those people as they approach writing?

That's a great question. And it's something that takes a lot of practice, I would say, to read a lot of cookbooks, to kind of understand the style of recipe writing. I think that's something in the early days that we kind of said, oh, well, we can just write these in our own words and it can be pretty loose, and it doesn't really matter if the ingredients are in the same order. But there's, there's this very standard practice of how to write a recipe. So I would say get familiar with some Style guides and cookbooks, just read recipes to understand the basic structure of them. And then another thing that I do is in what we learned in our technical writing jobs is always start with an action verb. So say stir the pot or that type of thing. Like, always start with that, and then just really think about your recipe and break it into logical steps. One thing that we've also learned from our technical writing careers is that people's brains can't understand more than 10 steps at once. So trying to break things down into logical groups can help. And doing sub steps. So, for example, with our sourdough bread, there were so many steps that we really had to start to kind of put those into groupings of smaller steps to make it a little more modular and easier for our brains to understand.

Yeah, I think that's great. And you think about writing some of the most, especially content online. Some of the easiest content to read is. Is there's a flow to it where there's a heading, maybe there's some bullet points, there's numbers. And for the. I pulled up the sourdough bread recipe, and that's true for this recipe. You can see day one, there's a little walkthrough, there's an area where it's bold. Feed the starter, and then it goes. Day two, there's italics. Like, there's. There's a flow and almost a design to how the information is communicated. And I would assume some of this even just comes without you guys thinking of it, because you have crafted this skill from your job as well as from reading. It's. It's interesting to hear you talk about how the importance of reading. I remember when Lindsay was. And she still is super interested in developing the craft of writing and writing in a way where people feel like they are connected with you. And she said what she learned from other writers that she really appreciate, appreciated, was exactly like you said. The most important thing to do is read other people and then write as much as you can. And it sounds so obvious, but it's like any other skill where you need to observe people that you appreciate and. And. And want to pursue in terms of their level of skill. You want to get to that place and then also practice on your own. So I think that's. It's. It's great advice and something to consider because writing is so important, both accessible writing and then also technical writing is so important. So you've talked a little bit about the. The career, your previous career, and you kind of have an interesting story where, like, even before Working together. Now you guys were working together before, so it's kind of this or at least at the same. At the same company. So, Alex, can you talk a little bit about your story of your career before you were doing a couple cooks full time?

Yes. So Sonia got her first job out of college at this small technical writing company and I was finishing school and so she was there for a year or two and then they needed a graphic designer at the company and I jumped on board. So we worked together for this small company for Sonia 13 or 14 years and me for 12 years.

He actually got the job by Photoshopping our boss's cats into like funny scenarios. And she was like, oh, you're good at Photoshop. Okay, do you want to be a designer?

Little did you know that cat pictures would be. Would trump a fine tuned resume. Absolutely.

Every time, a little bit of humor, we'll get you the job.

So you were at this company before, and the interesting thing is, as I understand it, there was kind of potential for this to become a company that you were really involved with or even kind of had, like you're a partner in and Sony, because you had kind of come in early, that was a potential path. So it kind of seems like for some people it's like, hey, this would be something really, really cool. This could be kind of something that I could develop, I could become a part of. Um, and. And you guys made the hard decision, like, okay, this is for some people. They would really have this strong desire to become entrepreneurs kind of in this different setting. But it maybe wasn't the best fit for you. Or you said, hey, we, we are just so passionate about what we're doing with food and a couple cooks that you can, that you made the hard decision and said, hey, we're going to walk away from some really cool potential here in order to focus on a couple cooks. So can you talk about how you came to that decision and then what that was like to make the transition from where both of you, which is an interesting complexity to the story, make this transition into then working on a couple cooks full time?

Yes. It was a very long and hard process. I worked there for 13 years and in the past, the last six years I was there, I came on board as a partner of the business with my former boss. She became my business partner and she had started the business herself. It was kind of her business baby. And she was asking me to be her partner and then eventually run the business in the long term. And so it was a great career path and A really exciting field to be in. But at the same time, it was just. It was a lot. A lot of hours as, you know, just, you know, being in a small business setting there, the clients are always there, there's always more work to do, especially being a manager and a part partner. And so just started to become pretty overwhelming in terms of the work life balance aspect. And at the same time, we had a couple cooks. It was always our just kind of passion project, our hobby over the years, but it started to make just a little bit of money. And so it was kind of becoming a little bit of a side hustle for us and eventually just started growing. And it was hard because I had a very set career path and being. I call myself kind of an older millennial Xennial, if you've seen that term.

I haven't, but I love that.

Yeah. So it's like people who are born.

Gen Z millennial hybrid.

Right, right. They're kind of right in between the generations. And so for me, I never would have conceived of, you know, running a business online. I thought, you know, you have to go into these professions where you stay and you work for a corporation. And so in my mind, this was, you know, the secure career path and the salary and the benefits and everything. And so.

And it's. And it's also, like, a little bit entrepreneurial, like you're. You're able to come in as a partner of this company. Yep.

Yeah. So it was. It was hard for me to think of this hobby that we had on the side as something that could really sustain our lifestyle. But we. We continue to grow it. And we decided actually that we were going to go into the adoption process. And so when we decided on that, we decided, okay, we need to have a change here. There is no work life balance right now. And so we decided that once a child appeared in our lives, that I could step down and start running a couple of cooks.

And I feel like, oh, sorry, yeah, no, go ahead. And I feel like one thing that's kind of different from us, from a lot of other bloggers that we've talked to, is that a lot of people started their blog at a time in their life where there was a lot of free time. Maybe they were between jobs or right at the end of college or something like that, and they were able to.

Or had a job where they could work on it while they're at their job.

Right, exactly.

But for us, we had very successful careers. And so it was really hard to build into the blog as a business because we just didn't have time for it. And so it was still a leap to set aside two full time salaries and say, we're going to try this even after seven years of blogging.

Yeah. And what, in, in the, in that process, what are some of the things that you've learned?

I think one of the big things is that being strategic about where you're investing your time. There's a lot of different aspects when you're running a blog and you're kind of doing it all by yourself or between the two of us. And we've realized that we can be strategic, like work on SEO, work on new content. Don't spend too much time worrying about social media. Just get your stuff out there and keep creating. Creating great content, huh?

So the one of the things that's interesting to hear you talk about, and I think it's hard for people to understand this, but like the balance of social media and you talk about, hey, this isn't necessarily where you should be spending all your time, but sometimes it feels like that's where everybody else is spending all their time is with social media. So how do you balance that as creators and say, okay, we know that we want to create like at the core of what we do is really solid, reliable, good recipes. So that has to be the core of what it is. But also we know that in order for this to be a sustainable thing, people have to see those and get to that in some way, whether that be through your podcast, which we'll talk about a little bit through the blog, through social media. So what does that balance look like for you? And each of you can talk a little bit about what your role would be, but what does that balance look like for you in terms of content creation versus content promotion versus graphic design? You have such a beautiful site. What does that look like? How much time do you spend on that? If you were to break down a typical day or a week, what would it look like for each one of you? And Alex, you can start.

So we both develop recipes, so that's the one thing that we share fully. We bounce ideas off each other and kind of split up recipes to take on and we develop them and test them together, which is really fun and really the best part about this job for us. But then I do a lot of the more technical things. So I do all the website design, I manage all the backend, I do SEO research and keyword research, I edit the photos. So all that kind of technical stuff I take on. So throughout the day, when we have Larson at childcare or we're splitting up our time. I'm working on those things.

Got it. And before we get too far away from it, I know people will hear this. SEO keyword research, and that's kind of this black box for a lot of people. For anyone that's interested in doing that, do you have any advice for them how to go about doing it and kind of of even just like a 101. Hey, how do you get a little bit better at understanding keyword research? It's kind of this complicated thing or seemingly complicated thing.

It is complicated.

We've been kind of mystified by SEO for the last seven, eight years. And then just this year, I've really started to learn. And the big thing for us is to understand that the way Google works is kind of like a human. If you're giving it good information, then it's going to take that information and give it to other people. If you're giving them a blog post with a recipe and you don't talk about the recipe at all, they're not going to think you really care about that recipe.

So we have years and years of content of me just saying quinoa is yummy and not talking about the recipe itself or any of the components within the recipe.

And what does that look like to talk about the recipe when you say that?

Yeah. So maybe explaining some different components inside the recipe. For example, I was just re. Optimizing a curry recipe, so maybe talking a little bit about what is curry powder. Um, and if, if you don't know, go research it. I had to go research it a little bit and I learned some interesting things about curry powder and then kind of explaining a little more about the process around the recipe instead of just relying on the recipe card to tell people that, maybe kind of walking them through some of the. The different techniques that are used and then maybe some things that you might want to pay attention to or tips, all those things that I just thought, oh, well, it's in the recipe card, so people are going to read it there and understand it. Putting some of that up in the body so that Google can kind of grab that content and see that you are really an expert in what you're talking about.

And is there a tool that you use for doing any of the keyword research or is that kind of. Some people will be organic and just, you know, search a keyword term to see maybe how competitive is or what other sites are ranking for it. But is there one that you really like as far As a tool.

We did the E course from Hashtag Jeff, I think. Has he been on your podcast?

He hasn't, no. But yep, yep.

I'm familiar with Jeff, SEO expert. We did his E course and he recommends Semrush. And so we've been using that the last few months, which is a big investment, but we do feel like it's really useful as far as organizing all the keyword research.

Awesome. Cool.

And it's absolutely a paying off.

So that's great. And that's inspiring, I think, for people to hear that are maybe that have been creating content for a long time and maybe haven't considered that to say, hey, it doesn't. You can get into it at any time, even if you've been, you know, blogging for a substantial amount of time, to say, hey, we're going to start thinking strategically about some of the content. And it doesn't mean that you have to then produce content that you don't enjoy or that you're not passionate about. You're just maybe a little bit more strategic about what that looks like and how to create that.

Exactly. It's kind of finding that great kind of sweet spot of what are people looking for, what do they want? And then what am I passionate about? So, yeah, that's what. That's what we've kind of been focusing on. And it is inspiring to. You know, when we started and for so long, we were just kind of doing this as a fun passion thing and not being strategic about it. And so it is encouraging that you can decide to be strategic late in the game and it can still pay off.

That's awesome. And then, Sonia, what does, in terms of the typical day for you or typical week, what are the things that you're focusing on in the areas that you spend most of your time with?

Yeah. So I am the main writer for a couple cooks. I write all the posts and I do all the communication. So any of our work with sponsors, we do a lot of work, sponsored content, and we actually really, really love it. I love working with different brands that kind of fit our values and figuring out ways to work with their product. And so I do a lot of that communication. And then I do Instagram, which is our main social media outlet. And what else do I do, Alex?

I don't know. But you're very busy, but you do.

A lot of it. Yeah. So this is actually as we're talking about time and what you spend time on, this is a completely selfish question. So as I mentioned at the beginning, this is my first podcast back. And we have our daughter Solvi. Yeah, thank you. Really appreciate it. And you have Larson at home. And I want to know what advice you have for me as I'm kind of figuring out what this looks like and how it works. What was that like for you guys, knowing that it was an insanely busy time for you, knowing your story with that in your cookbook and how all those things kind of happened at the same time? But can you. Can you talk about things that you've learned as a family and. And working together as a couple and being entrepreneurs, building. Building your blog and your following online, publishing a cookbook? All of those things. What are some of the things that you've learned in terms of what it takes to find that balance that you talked about? Maybe there are times when there isn't any balance, and you just have to accept that. But what would your. What would your advice be to me or to people that are listening, who are trying to kind of figure out what that looks like to both have a family and run a business and maybe even, you know, continue with their. Their normal job, too, if that's a part of the puzzle as well. And, Sonia, I'll. I'll start with you. The pressure's on for you. You're in the hot seat. And then, Alex, you can have some time to think.

Sure. So we, as I mentioned, we were part of the adoption process. And so when you're waiting for a baby, you don't really know when they're going to show up. And part of our story, actually, we had a few fall through in the process. So it was a long period of not knowing when our family was going to start. In the same time, we were working on this cookbook, Pretty Simple Cooking, and we had a year to do all the content development, and our draft deadline was in February. And so we ended up having a call about a baby who ended up being our baby, Larry, two weeks before our manuscript was due. So we were super scrambling. Actually, when we were driving to the hospital, I was. I had my laptop out and was working on our manuscript because I was so nervous. I was like, I just need something to channel this.

Yes, for sure. It was almost an escape.

Yes. So. So, yeah, so we drove a few hours and ended up having the most beautiful baby boy and brought him. And then we had this deadline. So there was a lot of him sleeping on our laps while we were working. And actually, when I look back, having a newborn is, you know, they sleep so much. It was actually a great time to be productive right now, having a toddler there, it's not the case you're getting done. But what I think the main thing for us is being an entrepreneur, being your own boss is an incredible privilege when you have a family, because you can be so much more flexible than you could be working kind of a normal desk job and reporting to a boss. So the fact that we both are home, that we're working for ourselves, that we can be flexible with our hours, we are just so grateful for that every day. And that is what helps us to have a good balance with our family. We don't mind working in the evenings. We don't mind doing that if it means that we can go to the zoo with Larson during the day. That's a trade off I would make in every second. So we just kind of shift our hours around Larson's schedule. We do a little bit. We usually work kind of after he goes to bed. He goes down around 7. So we'll usually work in the evening a little bit. But the cool thing is we love what we do, so it doesn't, it doesn't feel bad to work in the evenings. And then now that he's a toddler, we've put him into an early childhood program. So he goes three a week for six hours. And like today we can do podcast interviews and really catch up on work. So that's been a nice new element of balance. He can go, he can learn from his teachers and have fun with all the kids and then we can get some good time to get some stuff done.

Yeah, it's the, what I've learned in our, it's, it'll be seven weeks tomorrow is this. It's just a continual process of rediscovering what works. And like one a week week, this week will be different than next week. And it's, it's staying flexible and figuring out, okay, like, what's going to work this week and how do you win in those gaps that you have, in those margins that you have, how do you go heads down and get stuff done? Alex, how about you? When you think of, of what, what it's been like to kind of juggle the blog, cookbook, family, maybe even fitting in kind of some personal time in there as well, in the, in the tiny margins, what advice would you have for people that are, that are looking to be successful in all of those different areas? It's not easy to do. But what would your advice be to those people?

I think one of the things that we've done that's been really useful is to create an ongoing task list. So we use Asana. It's an online test management system where you can.

Is that how you say it?

Yes, I know that's one of those. That's one of those where you, like, you use. You probably go there 14 times a day, but you say it out loud three times a year.

We always said asana, but then weren't sure if that's asana.

That's how I say it as well. We had this thing with our team where we. It developed into two words, asana. So, like, we would have. It would be this joke of like, hey, we're gonna go. Let's go meet about that in asana. As if we were like, have this, like, virtual place to relax and hang out. But yeah, that's what we say as well.

So it's great for teams. But even by yourself, I think it'd be really useful able to know what your priorities are put on. For me, it's important to say today I have to get these four things done. Everything else. Else move till tomorrow. And then I feel like I'm being successful. Because otherwise I feel like you can feel not successful when you have 40, 40 different jobs to do.

For sure. Um, the. And they just recently, I don't know if this was across the board, but they just pushed out an update. Did you get. Did you. Have you seen that update in Asana yet?

I haven't really dug into the difference.

Yeah, but super clean and really fast. And. And so it's. It's a great tool. I think it was actually some of the. The Facebook early employees or co founders that then split off and started this. And it's a great tool. So we use it.

Yeah, we actually also used it for our adoption paperwork, timeline.

You can use it for all of that stuff.

Last time we used it actually, you're like, oh, my gosh.

They're like so much paperwork, for sure. So one of the last subjects that I wanted to talk to you about was the podcast. That's something that you guys started. You have. In your first season, you had. Was it over 60 episodes? Is that right? Yes, I'm trying to think so. A substantial amount more than almost all podcasts. And then now you have a second season that you've come out with. Curious to know kind of what the intention was behind the podcast and why you started that, what you learned in the first season and then in starting the second season, some of the things that you are changing and tweaking as you think about kind of evolving that part of your brand. So, Alex, you can talk a little bit about that.

Sure. We started the podcast in 2015, which seems like forever ago now in Blogger, and we wanted to do something where we could really engage with our audience in a way that you can't through writing. I feel like there's something about talking, about hearing somebody's voice that allows you to dig into deeper subjects than just recipes. So that's what we were excited about and why we wanted to start the podcast. And so we did it every other week for about two years, which ended up with 62 episodes. And it was just a really great opportunity for us to talk to interesting people, inspiring people. And we found that we didn't have a huge audience on the podcast, but the people who listened were really paying attention and really seem to be engaged with our brand.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's the. You know, when you're used to page view numbers, to have podcast numbers to contrast it against, it's like sad trombone. You know, it's like. But then when you think of the fact that, okay, what is the level on which you are connecting with those people? And it's so substantially deeper. And so, like, the plot might not be as big as it would be with a blog, but in terms of, like, the depth of the roots of the connection that you have with those people that listen, it's so much more. And I know that's true for people that listen to this podcast. You know, it's the conversations that we have. When I meet somebody who listened to the podcast, it's like, oh, we are able to pick up so quickly because we have this established relationship. Although maybe we've never even had a conversation before, we. We kind of understand, like, okay, these are some things that we can. That we can start with right away. And. And if somebody I've never met, they can say, hey, this is something that I really connected with and we have that starting point. So in terms of relationally for people, it is. It's absolutely something that. That's worthwhile to have those connections. Um, Sony, do you. Do you have thoughts on when it comes to the podcast, you know, talking about the amount of time that it takes for something, It's a lot of time. It's a lot of energy. Uh, when you think about dividing the work that you have in a normal day, is. Is the podcast 10% of what it looks like for you guys in a normal week or month? Is it. Is it 25%? How do you kind of section off that amount of time, and then in terms of actually producing an episode, do you have thoughts on how long that might take, start to finish, by the time it's all said and done?

Yeah, that's a good question, and I'll back up just a little bit. So we had our. Our podcast. Um, and, you know, podcasting, it's really fun. It's exciting. You get to talk to a lot of really amazing people and learn a lot, but it's also a ton of work. As you said, there are a lot of technical issues. And also marketing podcasts is really a different beast. I don't know if you've run into that too, but we thought, oh, we have all these, you know, blog followers. They'll just go over and listen to a podcast. But it's a lot harder than that. We. When we started, people didn't even really know how to listen to podcast podcast. So it was a lot of education around, okay, you go get a podcast app and you subscribe. And so there were just. It was so, so different from blogging that there was a big learning curve. So when we launched our book Pretty Simple Cooking, we decided to take off a season from the podcast. So we stopped podcasting for about a little over six months. And honestly, I wasn't sure if we wanted to come back to it because it was so much work. We, um, we had some ads on the first season, a little on some of the episodes, but we weren't really. It wasn't really a big revenue stream for us, and so we were just spending a lot of time on it without a monetary return. So we just wanted to make sure that it was worth our time, because now that we have Larson and I'm sure you feel the same now that you have a sweet baby, every. Every passion project is time away from him. And so trying to figure out, okay, like, what. What are the things that I really want to be focusing on with our business? So we took some time away and we thought about, okay, how can we make this less time to produce? How can we make it easier, and how can we make it better, better content for our listeners? And so we came up with this concept. Have you. Do you. Have you ever watched Comedians in Cars getting coffee?

For sure.

So it's a Seinfeld show, and he just, like, takes out really cool, funny comedians and pairs them with a car because he's obsessed with cool cars. So he pairs them with a car and they just talk. And it's fun and it's cute, and it's only like, seven to ten minutes long. And so we were kind of inspired by that style of, like, just really short, short and sweet. And because we're not funny, we thought we could bring it kind of deep, have, like, a little more deep takeaway instead of a funny takeaway. So we thought of the concept called Small Bites. So we decided, let's make our podcast shorter. Let's make it 15 minutes. Let's make it cut out all the small talk and just get right to the point on just an inspirational idea. For example, we just released one today about eating and how what we eat affects climate change, which is actually kind of a very big subject. But we packaged it down into less than 20 minutes, about 15 to 20 minute conversation. And that made it a little bit easier to schedule interviews. So our interview slots are only 30 minutes with people. And then our intro and our outro that we record are shorter too. So we. We hope that it's better content and it's also taking less time. So in response to your question, how much time is it taking? This is kind of a new normal for us. So now I would say. What would you say, Alex?

Maybe two hours for each of us instead of double that or an episode?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that. Yeah, I think that. Well, finish that thought and then I have some thoughts.

Oh, I was just gonna say, I think it's hard to quantify. Some of. A lot of the time was just put into researching guests. You know, how can we curate these topics? These people from different aspects of the food industry, people from diverse backgrounds. Like, how do we. How do we find all these people? So that has been that. That is a hard, kind of a longer process of figuring out who are going to be guests. But I would say we have drastically cut down the amount of time it takes to produce an episode.

Yeah, that's. I. There's. So I was thinking about doing a podcast episode where it was just me, unrelated to comedians in the cars getting coffee. This would be me probably with a coffee in a car, but I'm not a comedian, and I would be by myself. But. So there's actually no connection to that. But the connection is to thinking strategically about what you have done and what's working and what's not working, and then evolving that. So what I love about it is saying, okay, this is something we want to do. It doesn't have to look exactly the same, and there's a really good chance that we could produce something better that also doesn't have as many of the negatives in this Case time that it took to create it. And I feel like what you guys are doing with the podcast is a great example of that, where it's strategically thinking about evolving something, and so it's still a good fit for what you're doing and just trying something new. And there's this fine balance between sticking with something for a really long period of time, sometimes winding that thing down, but oftentimes it's not either one where you just put your head down and do the same thing over and over or wind it down, but you say, how do we create a better version of this? And it could look drastically different. And so. So the point with the podcast episode in the car, it was going to be an exercise for myself to say, hey, there could be something still valuable in a very different format. Maybe the audio is not as good. I'm by myself. You know, I'm not reading off an outline or something like that. And so I love the example that you guys have in evolving the podcast. If people want to check that podcast out, what's the best way for them to see that and to listen?

It's called A Couple Cooks Small Bites, and it should be in any of your favorite podcasts.

App.

Go get a podcast app.

Just start with that.

Knows how to listen to podcasts.

That's the nice thing about being on another podcast is, you know, that you can talk about a podcast and people know exactly how to find it, which is just this. This huge advantage. Uh, so last thing.

Look. Look for Small Bites. And we're really excited about this season. We have some kind of big names coming on, actually the person who inspired our whole cooking journey, or one of the people, Mark Bittman, who wrote the book Matters. Yeah, we're gonna have him on the podcast.

Awesome. What?

Excited. I'm going to try not to fangirl too.

Right, right, right.

And then some other really exciting people, including Tiffany Amber Thiessen, who was on Saved by the Bell. She has a new cookbook coming out. Yeah. So that's another reason that we love podcasting is just the ability to talk to some really interesting and great people in the world of food.

Awesome. So last. This will be my last question for you guys. We've talked about your cookbook a little bit. Bit. And we'll be sure to link to that in the show notes so people can check that out. But you guys are on the Today show for the cookbook, and I'm always curious to know what that experience is like. When somebody has an experience like that. Obviously a huge influential Media outlet. And what was that like for you guys to be a part of that?

Yeah, it was so much fun. We had a blast. I mean, it was pretty terrifying too, to be on end, but yeah, I mean, like, like going in and getting my makeup done next to Carson Daly, it was just so crazy. And then, you know, Al Roker just popping in, saying hi. It was so crazy. And then just being able to have Hoda on our segment was very cool because she's also an adoptive parent. And so it was just really amazing to connect with these people. And then, yeah, they're very. The show is very, very well produced. So a lot of the kind of local show that we've done cooking segments on, you have to do everything yourself. You have to bring all this for sure. You know, you guys did it and on a national level, they do it all for you. So they had a. All prepared by food stylists. They block it all out for you and have it in little stations. You get to do a dress rehearsal where you walk through each one. And so that was amazing. We just had to show up. We just kind of rolled out of bed and we're like, hey, we're here.

Yeah, it was. It was kind of a 15 minute, you roll out of bed, walk over to Today show, do the shoot. Yep.

Then. Then you're done.

We're drinking coffee at like 7:30. We're like, wait, what's going on?

Yeah, that's awesome. And for those that want to check out the book, can you talk a little bit about what that is? We've kind of mentioned it here and there, but just want to make sure that you get a little chance to promo that.

Yeah, this is our first cookbook. It's called Pretty Simple Cooking, and it's a hundred Vegetarian recipes for non vegetarians. As we like to say. Say it's really accessible, delicious kind of everyday type of food. And there are recipes that will actually work if you try them.

Yes. Awesome. Well, that's great. Alex and Sonia, so fun to have you on the podcast. Appreciate your friendship and also your insights as fellow creators and business owners. And just really appreciate you guys. So thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having us on.

And another successful episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast is in the books. But before we sign off, I'd like to feature one of our reviewers from itunes. And this one comes from Lane Oliver. And it says, as I'm working towards launching a food blog of my own, my husband and I have both enjoyed listening to this podcast. BJORK is a fantastic interviewer. He asks all the right questions and I leave each episode inspired and informed. Thanks for all you do. Thank you so much, Lane. We appreciate your review so much. And if you, dear listener, would like to be featured in another episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, all you have to do is head over to itunes, find the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, and leave us a review. We'll give you and your blog name if you you include it in the review. A shout out in an upcoming episode of the podcast. And that does it for us this week and from all of us here at FPP hq. Make it a great week.

Sat.