326: Content Batching – Planning, Scheduling, and Creating Blog Posts Months Ahead of Time with Karli Bitner

This episode is sponsored by our sister site, Clarity. Clarity is tool that we built for Pinch of Yam. And we said, you know what? As long as we're building this, we've done this before with wptasty. As long as we're building this, let's make it a tool that other people can use as well. It came out of us maintaining this giant spreadsheet that we had and saying, you know what, there's probably a better way for us to manage these projects that we're doing, these improvements that we're doing. And also there's probably a way for us to make it easier to understand the impact that these changes are having. And we're in the early stages of kind of exploring this and implementing this with Clarity. And the way that we're doing that right now is we have an integration with Google Analytics. So when you sign up for Clarity, you can connect your Google Analytics account. And there's. There's two things that happen here that are really cool. Number one, you can look at the analytics for a page. So I'm looking at the incredible vegan Mac and cheese for a Pinch of Yum. And I can see on the 9th and 10th of September, there was a bump, there was an increase in traffic. And what. What you can do with Clarity is you can see not only when that increase in traffic happened, but as you're making improvements and as you're making updates, you can add what we call notes. Now, this is a really important thing and. And something that we're really trying to get good at with Pinch of Yum and any of the content improvements that we're doing, which is adding notes whenever we make a change or whenever we make an improvement. Now, here's a quick tip, and it's. And it's a little bit specific, but it's an example of how we did this and then how we're tracking that in Clarity. So recently for Pinch of Yum, we made this discovery. We're using Yoast SEO, and Yoast is prioritizing for the. The search image. It's prioritizing the social image that you've put into search. Or for Pinch of Yum, we realized it was doing that. And one of the things that was happening was we. For Facebook, we had created these images that we dropped into Yoast Social section for Facebook, and those images had a text on them. And what we discovered actually a shout out to Kingston, the founder of slickstream. He actually helped us discover this. What we discovered is when you have text on images and Google is Using that image for the search result, you're going to get pinged. Google doesn't like when you are using a image that has text on it for the image that's going to show in search results. And that wasn't an issue before.

But.

But my understanding is that there's an update with Yoast that started to prioritize or started to use the social image, the Facebook image in our case, as the suggested image for the search results. So what we did is we went out and we changed those images that had text on them to just regular images with no text on them. And again, this was in the Yoast SEO area for the social image for Facebook. And what happened was with one specific post for Pinch of Yam, when we tested this the next day, it immediately had a jump. It was like position 6 to or like position 4, 5, 6. I don't remember what it was to position 1 just by changing out this image. So then what we did is we went into clarity and we added an annotation or a note. It's kind of like an annotation in Google Analytics, but you can do it on the page level. You can do it with a specific post. And we made a note with this chocolate chip cookies recipe and we said we switched the image out on this date. So we can, we have record that we can go back and we can look at that and say, great, here's when we made this change. And over time, the more notes you have, the more analysis you can do to see the impact that the changes are having. So you can see how this all ties in. Right now we're tying into Google Analytics. Eventually it'll be Google Search console. You have notes, you have the information with WordPress that's being brought in. You're making improvements, you're making enhancements. That's kind of the premise of what clarity is and what will continue to build it to be. So all of that, this is longer than a typical ad read would be because I included that little piece of information there as an actionable item for you to check out and to look at. And if you have questions about it, we'd love to help you kind of navigate that if you think that might be happening with your social images. So, and something to look into, but all that to say, that's the hope for clarity. That's why we're building it, and that's what we're using it for personally and also how you can use it. So if you're interested in checking it out right now, we're doing what we call 25 forever. And for the first 500 people, you get an account for $25 a month forever. We won't increase that even down the line. When we switch how we are billing, we'll most likely go to some type of scaled billing where, uh, you know, it's, it's either just more expensive or it's based on how many posts you have or page views or something like that. But for these early user, the first 500 people, we're, we're locking it in at this kind of early price point because we're building Clarity. It's not as full featured. It will never be as full featured as we want it to be because we're always going to be working on it and improving and enhancing it. But in these early stages, we want to get people in using it and in exchange for doing that, we wanted to give you a kind of an a forever discounted price on that. So it's 25 forever. And you can get that by going to clarity.comfood c l a r I t I.comfood and you can sign up for the list there and then we'll follow up and go through the onboarding process with you. It's pretty high touch here in the beginning stages. It's not this automated thing where you'll sign up and you won't talk to anybody. We want to make sure that we walk people through the process of getting signed up and understanding it and would love for you to join us there. So again, it's clarity C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com food and you can just drop in your email address and first name and we'll follow up. Thanks to Clarity and the Clarity team for sponsoring the podcast. Hello, hello, hello, this is Picture Bjorko Muir listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Excited to be sharing this interview with you, Karlie from Cooking with Karli. And the reason I'm excited is because we're gonna be talking about some of the things that I often hear people ask about, talk about a lot of the things that come up in the conversations that I have with creators, which is all around sustainable content creation. How do you do it in a way where you don't feel completely burnt out or you don't look at the week ahead and think, ah, it's just another week of kind of the daily grind. Carly's going to be talking about not only how she works with the team, but also some of the strategies and rhythms she's implemented around content creation that allows her to do things like take the summer off or take long times or a long stretch of time off during the holidays. And personally, I love the idea of batching content and having that available to work through during seasons when you want to be potentially more present at home or you want to go on a vacation, whatever that might be. So Carla's going to be talking about how she did that, her strategy for doing it, and also how she works with a team member and what it's like for those team members when she does have these periods of time where she steps back a little bit. It's going to be a great conversation, and I know you'll get a lot out of it. Let's go ahead and jump in. Carly, welcome to the podcast.

Hello. Thank you.

Yeah, be fun to chat. One of the things that I love about this interview, to tease it a little bit before we get in, is that we're going to be focusing on something really specific, talking about how you bash content and really why and what that looks like logistically. But what's exciting for me is I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of creators, and one of the most stressful things is the process of creating. And it's just this never ending need to feed the beast. And what it. What it feels like you've been able to do is like, to use an equivalent. It's like figuring out how to, like, make a bunch of food. It's like, literally and figuratively make a bunch of food that then feeds the beast for a long period of time, as opposed to, like, waking up every morning and being like, oh, the beast needs to be fed again.

Yeah, exactly.

We're going to be talking about that, but before we do, I want to hear a little bit about your story before we jump in and talk about some of the specifics of how you approach content. So rewind the table bit. When did you launch your site and what was your mindset like at the, at the stage when you. When you first launched?

Okay, so I launched back in February of 2018, so not all that long ago.

Great.

And so I guess rewinding, like, way way back. I was in college. My husband was in college. We got married. I started having babies. He still needed to go to school. It doesn't make sense to put kids in daycare to pay to go to school. So we decided we're gonna do it separate. He's gonna go to school, and then it'll be my. My turn.

Sure.

He did his school stuff he was done. And then it was like my little identity crisis of what am I gonna do with my life? Right.

Yeah. How long was that phase where you. Cause it sounds like you kind of pressed pause. You said, great, we have kids. I'm just gonna focus on raising kids, which takes a lot of time, energy. We're in the middle of that right. Right now. In some extent, when you have kids, you always are in that stage, but maybe even how long was that period where he was in school? And you're like, hey, I'm just gonna press pause and focus on.

Right. So when he got out of school, my oldest was almost five.

Okay.

He was four, almost five. So I have four kids now. My oldest is now eight. My youngest is napping in the other room. She's seven months.

Okay, so it's like a five. Is that you saying it's like a five year period?

Mm, yeah.

Yeah.

Was that hard for you? It was that hard for you to be in that season? Or is it like, hey, this is, you know, hard in one sense, but also really awesome in another sense?

It was both. So it was hard. And we. My husband went to grad school, so we moved across the country, like, 3,000 miles away from family. He was at school all the time. I was like, really full time mom. Single parent. Because he was studying from morning to night.

What was he going to school for?

He's a pa, so. Physician assistant.

Sure. Superintendent. My cousin just went through that.

Yep. Yeah, it is super intense. But, you know, it's all worth it now. He loves his job and stuff, but so when he got a job and he started working and we moved again. So all of the family that I created with friends were, you know, back east. They were gone. And I was like, what am I supposed to do with my life? I've just been wiping noses and changing diapers and making food forever. And when kids are so little, they are just so demanding and so hard to. To, like, see any success. I was just. I needed something for me, and so I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life.

Yeah. And can you talk about that piece of, like, the success piece? Like, was it almost like you needed something that you could, like, control and track, that you could see tangible progress with as opposed to parenting with. And maybe I would guess a lot of parents can relate to this where it feels like, what, like, am I. It's seasons. Like, some are great. And then you have this season where, like, everything's falling apart and it's like, oh, no, yeah. As opposed to a blog or a business where you can start it and, like, hey, great, I publish a post. I got a little traffic. I'm making some progress here. So the general sense of kind of what you're feeling.

Right, Exactly. So something where I could have, like, an actual, like, checklist of I need to create this content. I'm going to publish it. I'm going to share it here and there and, like, see, you know, quote unquote success, but see something happening because, like, I'm trying to teach my kids to be nice every day, but they still hit every day. And it's just, you know, frustrating. It's like, are they even listening to me? And when they're. No. But, yeah, you know, so just. It was. I needed something for that and going. I thought about going back to school and I'm like, I don't know that there's anything like that. I could get a degree for sure. That would be worth me, like, leaving my kids. What would I even want to do? Right?

Yeah.

And so I happened to be watching a Facebook live from another food blogger where she was talking about how she made food. Blogging her. Yeah, you know, her career.

It was just out of curiosity, who was it?

Lauren's latest.

Okay.

Yeah, it's just her food blog. And she talked about how her husband went to grad school, and she was like, hey, I've gotta, you know, really make this blog thing work. So he went to grad school. They were living in separate states. She had small kids. And then she said that he graduated and they were debt free. And let me tell you, we were just $100,000 in debt, freshly out of grad school. And I was like, what? I realized that you could make money doing this. And I love to cook, I love to bake. I was the digital photography club president in high school.

Nice. The what?

Photography president, you said I was the digital photography club.

Oh, digital photography president. Yeah. Was there an analog photography club as well? Okay.

I'm kind of young. I am on the younger end of things, but sure, sure. So I was just like, My mind was blown. I could not believe that you could make money doing this because that was not ever anything that crossed my mind. And so I showed my husband alive, and he had a lot more faith in me than I did. And it took him, like, a solid month of him saying, carly, you should try it. You should try it. What are we gonna lose? Like, it's just $1,000, $2,000 investing, like, into it. There's nothing to Lose. You should try it. And it took a long time for him to talk me into it because I just felt like I'm not cool. All of these bloggers I like, sure put on a pedestal and was like, you are all cool. I wish I could be your friend, but I'm not cool enough that you don't have to be cool. Like, I'm not cool. But I just decided I'm going to dive in head first. I'm not going to take no for an answer, and I'm going to work for free for as little as possible. Like, small amount of time as possible. Because nobody wants to work for free. That's kind of the name of the game when it comes to blogging. You have to work for free for a time, but then it really starts to pay off.

Yeah. And if there is something to lose, I suppose that would be more than income. It would. It would almost be time, energy, like focus on something like, which for different people feels different, but definitely is something. Especially when you have kids or if you're doing, you know, have another focus. It's like almost like opportunity cost.

Right.

So apart from just like, yeah, at.

The time it was during nap time, I could either be shooting a recipe and then writing up a blog post, or I could be like watching the Bachelor or something like that.

Sure.

Like, my time was not also time.

Well spent a lot. Yeah, right.

You know, so it kind of just depends. But I went into it with a very specific strategy. I kind of hopped on the instant pot train right as it started and was one of the first instant pot bloggers. So I was able to hit my 25,000 sessions with Mediavine within the first 30 days of me launching and just got ads on my site as soon as I could and just kind of gone from there.

I think that piece is really important. It's one that we talk about a little bit on the podcast, but the idea of focusing on a niche, and I think the other piece that's important to point out is focusing on a niche that has some sense of, like, you're able to catch the wave. And you kind of alluded to that with the instant pot, where, hey, it's this thing that a lot of people are talking about, a lot of people are using. A lot of people have a need to figure out how to use it. And when you're first starting out, you can't be too broad, so you have to focus on something. It sounds like you in the early stages did a really good job of figuring that out. Hey, there's a wave. I want to catch that wave. And I'm going to try not ride all the waves or do all the sports or whatever the analogy is. I'm just going to focus really specifically on this thing. Was that an intentional decision and how did you go about deciding that? Was it like, gut, hey, I see this trending and should do that? Was it you being like, actually, I use this a lot. I see a lot of people asking questions about it. How did you make decisions around it?

So my mom gave me an instant pot. So I was trying to figure out how it worked. And so in me trying to figure out how it worked. This was before, like a year before I started the blog. I joined some Facebook groups, instant pot Facebook groups, just to like, yeah, kind of stalk because I didn't want people to make fun of me because I didn't know what I was doing. So I was just like learning and trying to read all these things. And I one day just was like, I bet I could make homemade gogurts because you could do the yogurt in the instant pot. So I bought these little things from Amazon and I. And I did it and I just posted in the group. It was like one of my first times posting in there. They're just like, hey, I did this, thought people would think it was cool. And it was shared like almost 2000 times. And I was like, what is happening? So when the blog thing, kind of, we were talking about it, you know, it was very intentional of like, I bet I could use these groups to bounce traffic to my website, which is exactly what I did. You know, there's a couple of them. They'll have different rules you have to follow. Some is one a day, some, you know, whatever. And so I just followed the rules. And one a day, meaning post.

You can't post more than once a day.

Yeah, right. You know, and some of them are like, you can't post the same recipe more than once a month. And there's lots of different rules in there that you've got to follow. But I was always very apparent, like very not apparent, transparent and saying like, there you go, this is my recipe. Like, I'm not. Yeah, I'm not linking to my own recipe and saying, oh my goodness, this is so good. Has anybody tried it?

Yeah, yeah.

You know, like, I always said that it was mine. And people started getting to know me as a person in those groups. So it was kind of like a behind the scenes to the blog because they thought that they kind of knew. Knew the person Trained it a little bit.

Yeah.

I was able to gain.

Oh, finish that thought and then. Yeah, yeah. Did you finish that? Was there more?

Oh, I was gonna say I was able to create, like, relationships or more like fans kind of that way because I was just more personal with my posting than I am on the blog.

The thing that I was gonna point out and wanted to mention before we got too far away from it was. So I think one of the most defensible things within a business, within a blog, whatever it might be, is community. It's like people who know you, who trust you, who like you, but it's really hard to build in the early stages. And what I think is interesting about what you're saying is you found communities that you could be a part of and became a significant contributor in those communities in a way that was respectful of whatever kind of guidelines they had outlined. And it's that fine line between self promotion, which is like, this is helping me, and helpful content that people actually want to see. And it feels evident that it was actually helpful content if people share it 2,000 times. Great. That landed really well. If you went into an instant pot community and shared some random cookie recipe, it would be like, wait a minute, this is just somebody trying to help themselves. But I think the piece about finding communities and finding ways to help those communities is a great way to build your own community. And my guess is now some of those people just follow along with you whether you post or not. Like, they just are aware of you. Maybe it's social followers. Whatever it is, I'm curious to know, was there some point where you shifted away from kind of the niche of instant pots and said, you know what, I'm going to kind of open this up a little bit. Maybe it'll still be a focus area. But, you know, you can't. Maybe you could. I mean, you probably could produce instant pot recipes forever. But what does that look like for you in terms of. Yeah, like, strategy around focusing on a niche, but kind of land and expand beyond that niche.

So I've actually done that. My passion is desserts, like, through and through. I love them so much. And so it was just kind of slowly introducing it. And honestly, I post a new instant pot recipe once every few months now. Not a major part of my blog at all anymore. And in fact, I've kind of, over the past six months, I'm kind of starting to ride a new wave, which is kind of fun. I enjoy finding, like, the little trends or the little things and kind of jumping on that and so I've been doing a lot of copycat recipes.

Sure.

And kind of jumping there for those who aren't familiar.

Can you explain what that is?

Yeah. So it's a recipe or I can. I'll tell you exactly what it is. They're crumble cookies. So they, they're. It's just a cookie chain. It's actually started.

They just put one like a mile from here. It's a Utah based company, right?

Yeah. So it's like the original one is like 20 minutes from where I live. And it started in a college town. You can get them delivered hot to your door dorm until like midnight. So warm, fresh cookies. Right. And so they have rotating flavors every. Every week. And I just take those rotating flavors and make a copycat version. So I'm inspired by, by their recipes, by their flavors and credit them and just, just do a quote unquote copycat.

So this is you, to your best of your ability, creating a recipe that's similar to this seasonal recipe that they're doing. For somebody who's like, this cookie is really good. What if I tried to make this as opposed to bought it? And then they search for that term of whatever. It would be exactly like, oh, yeah.

And the catch there too is that their rotating menu only comes in once every.

Oh, sure. So if it goes away and somebody's like, gosh, I love that cookie.

So.

Yeah, interesting.

So it's, it's been like, I don't know why I get so much joy out of like tasting theirs and then like trying to figure out exactly what's in it and working it and recreating it. Like, I love it. It's like a science experiment for me.

So it's a puzzle for sure.

I. Yeah. And so I've kind of been doing that lately. But there's all the other recipes still going on too.

How do you let go of the focus on an idea that you're getting where you're getting a lot of traction, like the instant pot recipes and to go somewhere else, like, how do you know when to double down versus expand out into other areas?

So I kind of let go of instant pot. Well, I shouldn't say let go of it, but kind of backed off on it when I was feeling so burnt out.

Sure.

Because I like, I don't want anything else in the instant pot. I want something else. And my traffic was still strong and I didn't feel like, you know, and watching my analytics, I didn't feel like my new instant pot content was getting as much Traction as my older stuff because the market started getting saturated. There are a lot of bloggers now doing instant pot recipes and it just wasn't making the impact that I would have hoped or wanted. And so I kind of shifted to more SEO based recipes. So looking at what content I'm missing and kind of trying to fill in those gaps on my website to make it, you know, full of everything that you'd on a food blog, how do.

You go about doing that? Are you using a tool for that? Doing kind of analysis? What does that look like?

So I'm using Semrush, but I have to admit that I hate spending money. So I've only used that for maybe a year, maybe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Before that I was using the HOTH.com. it's hot H.com and that's free.

Okay, nice.

If anybody ever needs free things, just ask me.

Okay. What are some of the other tools that you use that are helpful for you with your site?

Just really? SEMrush, I use answer the Public a lot.

Can you explain how you use that?

Yeah. So when I'm writing my posts. Well, we can get into this later too, but I have a writer now, so. Yep, that's great. So I just put in like my keyword or variations of my keyword and it'll spit out just commonly asked questions and I'll just look through those to see if there's it just to kind of trigger in my mind like, oh yeah, that'd be a really great question to answer within my blog post. And so I'll jot that down for my writer so that she can answer that when she's just writing the blog post.

So you're. The way that you work with Writer is you will kind of come up with a recipe, develop it, we photograph it as well, and then kind of build the outline almost. And then they'll go in and kind of fill in the rest of the post with.

Yep.

Yeah, for writing. Yeah.

So what I do is I don't know if you're familiar with Trello. Yep, that's another one that I should have mentioned that I use all the time. I have a shared trello board with her and so I just have a card for each recipe. There's a photo in there, the full recipe, so she's got that context. And then I'll put little helpful tips for her as I'm creating the recipe and just give her any information that she needs just to write the body of the post and then she'll just take that Information and put it in for me.

That's awesome. Any other tools that you. That would be worth calling out or mentioning?

I think that's pretty much what I use. I use Google Calendar a lot, so Google Calendar and Trello probably the most, hand in hand.

That's great.

Yeah.

So it seems like you're somebody who likes systems, likes processes, has kind of developed those. As an example of that is the way that you approach content, which kind of hinted at that at the beginning. But can you talk about your content creation process? It sounds like you have really leaned into batch producing content. You're really strategic about your time, how you use your time, and have optimized around producing a lot of content in a relatively short period of time compared to how most people produce content, I would assume. What does that look like? I'm so curious.

So this is actually a perfect time to talk about this because I. Like I mentioned, I just had a baby seven months ago.

Yeah.

I found out I was pregnant. I. And I know this is my last baby, so I was like, I really want to enjoy babyhood.

Totally.

So I. From last July to last December, like a year ago. Ish. I shot all of the content for this full year, so I am not having to shoot a ton. I do like once a week just because, like, sure, I love it and I miss it.

Yeah. Yeah.

But I shot everything, so I didn't have to focus on creating content at all this year. I have all my recipes done, the photos are done. I've got all of the recipes written. And my writer is just, you know, she's going through and writing every week because she's just going through and writing them.

Yeah.

But that is really important to me to be able to take time off. Because when I very first started vlogging, we go way back to the beginning. I. I felt this need to have all the content on my site, like, right now. And so I was publishing one post a day for like six or seven months.

Because a lot.

It is a ton of content. And it's exactly like you were saying. You wake up and you're just like, okay, something's got to go up today. I don't know what it is, but something's got to go up today. And I'm guilty, you know, back then of walking through the aisles of the grocery store, like, hoping that an ingredient would just, like, jump out at me.

Just inspire you. Yeah, inspire.

Inspiration. And that is stressful.

Yeah.

I did not want to do that anymore. And it was. My kids were going back to school or yeah, my kids were going back to school and I decided I did not want to work at all when they were off on Thanksgiving break or Christmas break.

Sure.

I just wanted to be able to take that time, be with my family, not have to stress about posting things. And so I just scheduled it out and made it so that I wouldn't have to. So what I did was I first scheduled what I wanted to post onto my Google calendar. So ahead of time, just post.

Where are you pulling, where are you pulling that from? Like, do you have a bank? Was there a pre step to that step where you're brainstorming ideas, you're thinking about things that you could create or how solidified are the recipes, like when you're dropping those in or the content if it's not recipes where you're saying like great, December 1st, here's what I'm going to post this specific recipe or is it like this general thing?

So it's a specific recipe and I have a list on trello that's just recipe ideas that is like 5 million miles long.

And it's always you saying like, hey, this could be cool. I'm going to add this year day to day. It's kind of a catch all.

Like for example, I have a donut recipe, but I don't have a separate like donut glaze recipe which would go really well hand in hand to link together. I have cinnamon roll icing recipe that does really well. So I could link that with the glaze because they're similar. And so like that's just something that I was like, I should put that on my website. So I just go and jot it down. And so I have a list really long of that. And then I'll also go into Semrush and kind of look to see what I'm ranking for or what I'm almost ranking for to see if I can make some like supporting content for it to try and kind of boost it up a little bit and then I just make that list and so that's where I will kind of schedule those recipes from.

So the beginning, the beginning part is scheduling and I suppose it depends on the season, you could do it for the entire year as you did in this case. But for other people who want to take a different kind of approach to this, maybe it's quarter based so you have a couple weeks and you kind of are setting that time aside to batch. And first step in your case would be scheduling that out. How many posts a week did you land on for that season.

So the first time I did it, I was doing. I was publishing three new posts a week. So Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And then this last year when I did it, I just, I went down to two. And then I've been updating content, so.

Yep. And how often will you update old content?

I'm.

Is that like once a week where you're doing that?

Yeah, once a week. Yeah. And so it's kind of shifting now to where I need to update a little bit more and, you know, everything is kind of balancing out. But so that was the first step is just kind of getting it on the calendar. And then from there I would organize my shoot days. And my shoot days were always Tuesdays and Thursdays because that's when my daughter was at preschool and my daughter was napping. So I'd have, like, time by myself. So obviously this can work for whatever schedule you have. This is just like, that was my schedule. And then once you have a lot of content planned out and scheduled on the calendar, I would go and look for similarities in recipes so I could schedule my shoot days to be smart. So, like, for example, if I was publishing a chocolate chip muffin recipe and a blueberry muffin recipe, even though they're being published three weeks apart, I'm gonna make those on the same day because they are pretty much the exact same thing. Yeah, you can, you know, and so it just takes a lot of the extra work out. And I mentioned this on in the tastemakers conference and somebody was not very happy with me, but I'll mention it again. Also use shortcuts if you can.

Sure, sure.

So like chicken pot pie. Right. I have a pie crust recipe on my site. Awesome. Yeah, Just use the store bought pie crust. Sure. Make your life a little bit easier. And.

Yeah, yeah.

With my, my, my readers, they prefer the shortcuts. So obviously your thing is all homemade, then don't do it.

But. Right, right.

And I'm very, you know, apparent and transparent with my readers of saying, like, you can use a store bought pie crust. I use a store bought pie crust. But if you want, here's one that.

You could do home.

Here's the link to my homemade one.

The point being, if it takes an additional two hours to make a crust, you need to be strategic about how you're thinking about your content and saying, like.

Exactly.

Technically, I only have two hours to do this for the photograph. Is that kind of what you're getting at? Like, for the photograph? Just for the pictures difference? Yeah, totally.

Yeah, just for the pictures. So, and then another thing that I'll do too, is look at the timing of recipes. So if I know something is going to need to be in the oven for 45 minutes, then I'm going to intentionally, like, schedule a recipe that's super short, like Rice Krispies or something similar to that, that I can do the entire thing while the one recipe is in the oven. So that I'm just scheduling my shoot days. And I, like, physically put in my calendar the exact recipe titles on my shoot day, so I know exactly what will be going. And I organize those shoot days in. And then I'm able to. As long as you're shooting more than you're publishing, you're going to get ahead. So I would try and do like three recipes on every shoot day. And it's. It's pretty easy once you're able to, you know, schedule out your time and what recipes you're doing and just kind of get it figured out in your brain. Yeah, it's easy to get them done in a couple of hours, depending on the recipe, obviously.

And so if you have two shoot days and you're doing six recipes, then, you know, that's two recipes a week. So you're essentially in a week getting three weeks of content. More or less content. Yeah. And how much of that is how much of your time? This is maybe hard to do on a percentage basis, but one of the things that I think a lot about as a creator is, you know, they talk about if you have eight hours to chop a tree down, spend six hours sharpening the ax. And I think if you have eight hours to produce content, spend at least three planning. Like, it's not. The analogy is not exactly the same, but that's one of the takeaways that I hear when I hear you talking is like, part of the work isn't the actual doing, like the actual work itself. It's planning for the work. Would you have an idea of how much time you spend thinking about planning about scheduling versus, hey, I'm in. In the kitchen producing content and taking pictures and developing recipes.

So it is a fraction, just like a teeny bit of the plan.

Yeah.

And it makes your life so much easier, honestly, that the one day that I scheduled out for the entire year basically was I sat at the computer. It was a long day. I sat at the computer for like, maybe six hours, but it's six hours for an entire year. That's like, yeah, that's nothing. And so worth just the peace of mind and not having to have, like, all of that stuff in your brain all the time.

Totally. So in that day, freeing your brain, you said, great, I'm going to sit down, I'm going to get my drink of choice, my favorite drink, going to set it next to me, put headphones in, and I'm going to plan out all of. In that case, was it 2021? Is it essentially planning out the entire year? And so you're going and you're saying, great, January. Let's look at that. What's going to be seasonal content in January? Two posts a week. Here's what I'm going to post them, here's what they're going to be. Were you also picking the content that you were going to update, bring to the front of your blog? So it's essentially like two to three pieces of content, two new content pieces of content, one old one that you're picking and saying, here's the one that I'm going to update. And so, you know, it takes, in that case, let's say half an hour per month to say, here's what January looks like, here's what February looks like. And so you get to that point, then what? It's all on the calendar. You're able to step back at the end of the day and being awesome. I've planned out the entire year. Where do you take it from there?

So then you just start your shoot days. And the thing that is really important is just to stay on top of your content. So you like, I would be shooting three a day. I don't want those pictures to get piled up on my cart.

Yeah.

You know, so that when you say.

You mean like editing, organizing, importing, things like that?

Yeah, I just have to stay on top of that or else you will just get buried really, really fast. So every night it was either I tried to do it that night, but if it didn't happen the night of my shoot, it was the next day during the day, to make sure I got all of the pictures edited and then all of those trello cards updated and over to my writer's board. So all of that was done. And I'm very organized with my folders on my hard drive, so I know exactly where everything is. You know, each, each recipe has its own folder. It's titled what the recipe is. You know, all of the images are in there. I make the PIN images and I just have all of that content ready. So when my writer is done with it, I know exactly where to find the photos. All I have to do is go in, add the photos add the recipe card.

Yep. So that's awesome. The. Can you talk about this? Is getting into, like, kind of nerdy details of folder organization. But I think it's helpful for people who maybe aren't people who are naturally organized or like, you know, these would be the people where I used to work at a nonprofit and would do kind of IT stuff as a part of the job. And whenever I would sit down at a computer, I would say 50% of the time, people would say, like, don't judge. Like before you get in, just don't judge my computer. And inevitably it would be like the smallest possible icon size on their desktop. And it would just be like the icon desktop equivalent of somebody shooting a shotgun like 17 times, just everywhere. Random, not organized. So there are some people who are super organizational, organizationally minded. Everything is structured really well. And then there's the people who are that version of organization. For the people who would maybe skew towards not being naturally organized. Can you talk about your process for how you structure your folders?

Sure.

And maybe why you do it that way.

So I have just. So my blog's Cooking with Carly. I just have a Cooking with Carly folder. And inside of that folder I have a few different ones. I have recipe photos. That's obviously where all my recipe photos go. I have logos. I've got headshots, got sponsored work where I keep all of like sponsored work contracts. And inside that sponsored work one has different folders for each sponsored work.

Sure.

Like project. I've got like employee information and contracts and things like that. I think those are pretty much my top ones. Top folders inside of my main folder. But inside of my recipe folder, I have a folder per year. And then inside that I just have all of the rest.

The recipe names.

Recipe names. So there's a folder for each recipe name. And I'm crazy. And I keep all of the raws. The raw images inside of. I just.

Yeah.

For some reason I can't. I can't delete them. So I keep all of that in that folder as well as edited JPEGs and my PIN. Anything that goes with that post is in there. And I always make sure when I export, export from Lightroom to rename. So this is good for SEO too. You know that. To rename the pictures.

Sure.

Images. You know what the image actually is.

So as opposed to like image_5,4,8, you'll rename it like Mac and Cheese, right? Yeah. Whatever the image is, you use that as a file name.

Right. And so Then that way, too. If for some reason it ever does get lost, like, it doesn't export into the right folder and you're like, ah, where'd that go? It. It's really easily searchable. You know, you can just search it.

Totally. Do you use a PC or Mac or.

I use a Mac, yeah.

Okay. So yeah, you do Spotlight, which is like the search tool, and you just type in the name. You'd be able to find it really easily. Same with folder. I use a search tool. That's awesome. It's like a. It's like a launch. Launch app. I think it's technically called. And this would be a note for anybody listening. If you want to geek out and stuff, it's called Alfred, which is just like the best thing ever. It's like Spotlight on steroids, which would be a good thing to check out. And then the question that I would have for you that maybe a lot of people are thinking is like, wait, what about space? Like, do you just have a huge hard drive? If you're keeping all your raw files? What does that look like? Any comments on that? For people to be like, how do you do that from a space consideration?

My husband is, like the tech.

Tech guy guy. Yeah.

In fact, he's, like, so stoked today because it's the Apple event and he like, yeah, totally.

It's like the super bowl for tech people.

Yeah, he's been, like, counting down the days.

Will he watch it live or go kind of radio silent and then watch it at the end of the day?

He'll watch it tonight just because he's in surgery and stuff. But, like, back in the day, I made an Apple shirt for him that he'd wear on these event days.

That's awesome.

Not even kidding. And we were the crazies that would sleep out of the AT&T store overnight.

To get a new iPhone. All right, good for you guys.

So we're big into the tech watch, and my husband is. I just go along with it, but totally. So whenever my hard drive says, you're running out of storage, I say, hey, I'm running out of storage. He's like, yeah, okay, I'll take care of it. But we have. We have big, big hard drives.

External hard drives.

Yeah, external hard drives that transfer stuff over and.

Yeah, you know, one of the things that. That we've two things that, for anybody listening who would maybe be interested in it, if you have Apple, PC might have a comparable thing, but you have the ability to, like, intelligently offload to the cloud and with icloud storage. Maybe you're doing that, maybe not. But that would be worth noting for anybody who does macOS where like, yeah, maybe, maybe not. But it's like if you get. If you get too much space that's being taken up on your computer, you can store and it's relatively affordable. It's like three bucks for 200 terabytes. So that would be worth noting for anybody. And then another thing worth noting for anybody who's listening is we actually use Google Drive. We have shared drives because we have a team we're working with. So we store actually all of our video footage and our photos for all the different sites on Google Drive and then we back it up with backupify. But what's nice about that is like, you know, we have. Gosh, I forget what it is. It's like 30 terabytes, which is pretty significant between videos and photos and Food Blogger Pro content. But it's all stored in the cloud and accessible and relatively affordable to share that there. So I know not your not the thing that you get most excited about would be all the nitty gritty details on the tech side. But it's one of the things that I love and worth noting, especially as you start getting more and more of the storage consideration, as you get more content, like, it just. It never will become less content. It only becomes more. So these are the problems that you have to solve. Yeah, eventually. So one of the questions that I have about the batching of content is. And Lindsey talks about this. So Lindsey does most of the content production for Pinch of Yam, kind of the sister site to Food Blogger Pro. And she talks about it in regards to inspiration and like, if something sits too long, feeling the potential, feeling that it could be uninspired if she comes back to it at a certain point. And I'm curious to know. And I don't think that exists for everybody. It just is. I think there's personal preferences around content creation. Do you have any thoughts around content as it relates to the season you're in and feeling like separated from that season if you're producing it too early. For instance, writing about Christmas in September, you know, or August, whatever, it might be June. And I know for you, you have a writer that you work with, so it's a little bit different, but even creating the recipe could potentially feel different. Has that been something where you've felt like any friction there or is it just is what it is?

No, it kind of is what it is. Name of the game, kind of my neighbors all understand that they're going to get Christmas recipes, Christmas cookies in July, y cookies in July. They're going to get my leftovers. But it just kind of is what it is. And I will say, too, that I definitely have, and I always will. All of a sudden, just, like, pull a recipe out, like, nope, I want this one. I'm sticking it in there, and I'm shooting it today and I'm posting it tomorrow just because I want to, you know?

Yeah.

So it's more of just like having.

It's not rigid. You have.

Yeah, it's done. And if. If it is what it is and I don't do anything else with it, it's great. But I, you know, constantly. I can shift stuff around whenever I.

Want, you know, and if you're feeling inspired, you can follow that and produce that content. And if not, you don't have to force it because you have this thing that you've done the work on, it's available and you can publish it.

And, you know, there's sometimes too, where I get to shooting a recipe and I'm just like, I do not feel like that anymore. I don't. I'm not vibing with that at all. And so think of something else and say, I'd rather do this instead. And, yeah, yeah, do that.

And then do it.

That's, you know, the glory of being your own boss. Nobody tells you what to do. You get to call the shots, and you can change things when you want and pivot when you need to.

And I think what's great about that combination is it allows you. For me, it seems like you'd have a more healthy relationship with your work in that you don't feel as you own the work as opposed to the work owning you, meaning you have control over it. You've crafted it in a way where you don't feel like at the beginning of the week, shoot, I need to show up and do this. You've already done it. But if you feel inspired, you have something you're excited about, you can go ahead and create that content.

Yeah, it's really freeing.

Yes, Totally.

Be able to be in control of it instead of letting it run your life, because it can. And that's how I was feeling, you know, that first year before I started really scheduling things out. It was just my life was dictated by creating content, and I was being pulled in between. Like, yeah, I want to go to the pool with my kids, but also, I really need to get this shot right.

And that's not. That doesn't feel great to be. And one of the things that's hard, it's two sides of the coin. It's like. Or it's the sun and the darkness of what we do is you have autonomy. So you could do that, which is like this great gift. To be able to go to the pool with your kids in the. In the middle of the day because you're not having to work, you know, traditional nine to five, but you are your own boss. And so if you are deciding to work, it's you saying, I'm not going to go to the pool because I'm deciding to work. And that feels different than if you just have a schedule because you're not having to make that decision in the same way. And what this does is it maybe allows for some flexibility in those moments where you are feeling that the strongest or if it's not kids for anybody who's, you know, doesn't have kids or is maybe single, like, it's your friend calls and they want to go for lunch, it's your parents and you want to go back and visit them, whatever it might be. To have the ability to kind of shift in a way where you don't feel like you are sacrificing the growth of your business because you've done the work in a different period of time to allow you to have that kind of fallback just seems super wise.

Yeah, right.

I'm curious to know. You had mentioned working with the writer and kind of mentioned a few different times that just what it looks like to work with the team when you go through the process and you get it to the point everything's scheduled out, you have it on the calendar, you are doing the recipe development, the photography, you're putting that in. The writer is writing. What does it look like at that point? Is the writer you're working with going into WordPress and writing that out? And then you take the photos and drop those in and then you schedule it and then are there other people that you're working with on your team that help push that to social? Because that's another piece. It's not just pre content, it's also post content. There's work that needs to be done.

Right. So my bread and butter is the photography and recipe development, like that is what I love so much. And I did all of it all by myself for way too long. And I remember the first VA that I hired when I handed over Facebook and. And Pinterest.

Sweet relief.

I can breathe again. You know, it's just there is a lot that is required and a lot that you need to do all the time.

Sure.

So I have three employees. So I have the writer and what I do after she's done is I go in, I read through everything, add stuff that I need, you know, rephrase stuff that I want. So I really go through and read it all, add in the photos, video, recipe, card, whatever I need to do and then I'll schedule it. And then I have a social media assistant and she's the one that puts it out onto Instagram to Pinterest and Facebook and she does the push notifications too. And then my other employee is my. I call her my marketing manager.

Sure.

Because I stink at marketing. Yeah, I will.

You can't do it.

All right. And that's like an important piece of it.

But yeah, I. I don't know why, but I would never. It took me two years, two and a half years to hire somebody to like organize all of my existing content and create a calendar and a plan of promoting all of this content. I was just promoting the current stuff and I'm like, I have Halloween recipes from two years ago and I didn't even mention it this Halloween.

Yeah. Yeah. Right.

So.

So it's somebody whose brain is dedicated to thinking about what's the content lay of the land, what is what's available. Yeah.

And what needs to go out and be promoted seasonally. You know, so though. And she works alongside with my social media gal and they work together and she publishing and creating the schedule for it.

So I think that's an area a lot of people are interested in. They know that they feel overwhelmed. And for a period of time you have to. Right. As you're building up your business, you don't have revenue. It's sweat equity. You're putting the time in to build it to a point where you can potentially hire somebody. And then you get to that point and you hear a lot of people talk about that. I wish I would have done this earlier. You don't know that until you do it. What that feels like. That moment of like, great. And then somebody doing Facebook, Pinterest, whatever. It might be curious are those full time people part time contractor W2 and then where did you find those people?

So their contract W2, you know, so they. I found them actually on a face in a Facebook group for photographers. This is very random, but I. It's a local group for photographers that are just kind of starting. They want to get their foot in the door with it. Most of them are stay at home moms that want to make a little extra money. That's really what it is. And so I would, I just posted in there, say, hey, I run this blog, I'm looking for, you know, X, Y, Z. And I went there because I figure people that are starting up with photography, they have a website, they know how to work that they already have social media, they post about their photography stuff and their social media. So they know how Instagram works. They kind of have all of the basis for what I needed to be able to train someone. And so the three gals that I hire, they're all stay at home moms that have, you know, one of them has four kids, has two, the other one just has two now too. And they just could use some extra money. So I pay them hourly and.

Yep. And they work when they can. And if a nap is short, which is like, it's like, then you don't have to worry about.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So they just can do it whenever they need to. My social media gal, she works probably like 15 hours a month. So not like a ton. But it's a great little bonus, you know, flexible, what she needs. I will say though, that this, somebody told me this once and this was great advice for me for hiring and I wish I would have heard this before. They said if you do the math and somebody works 10 hours a week, so total in a month of 40 hours in a month and you pay them $10 an hour, we'll just say $10 easy math, that's $400 a month you're going to be paying this person. And 40 hours is a full week.

Yeah.

So it's like you're giving a full week.

Yeah.

You know, giving away a week's worth of work to somebody for $400. So if you could be making $400 extra with an extra week in your life, it's worth it.

Yeah. Or if, you know, having that extra time to you is worth, even if you're not doing more, producing more is worth it. Yeah. Which is where it gets really interesting when you kind of start to crunch the numbers and you know, there's no perfect math on it because part of it is just lifestyle design as well. Like, how much do you want to be working? How much can you afford to bring in and to hire? And I think finding, you know, to your point, people who are looking for something that complements what they're doing in a way that's flexible, that allows that slots into like the life that they have and how they want to be living great. Then it's. You get help with the work that you need and somebody else gets to be working on something, hopefully that they're excited about that's a good match for them and is able to produce extra income from that. There's somebody mentioned this to me the other day, kind of in that world. It's called the mom project. You've heard about this? I think it's basically that same idea. It probably should be like the parent project. I don't know enough about it, like stay at home mom or mom who is working. You know, what would be the way to say that's working on building their family or focusing on their family, but want to slot in kind of some variable work? I think there's a couple different projects that do that. But essentially it's like if you're a stay at home parent, you're not going to be doing that, you know, 24 hours a day. You might have little pockets where you'd be able to focus on some work. For people who aren't wanting to build a business, what does it look like for them to get a job that's flexible enough? This type of work is perfect for that.

So it really is.

That's awesome and cool to hear you talking about how you're finding not only how you launched your site but also how you found people to work with. Because I think hiring from a community is another great way to leverage a community. So you say like great. I know there's these people who have, who operate in this certain way that will be a fit for the role that I need them to be in. And I'm going to post this there to see if anybody's interested in it. I think that's awesome. Did you ever think about emailing and like posting on your blog about it? That's something we've done before. We know that, hey, there's readers, we have followers. Or were you able to find who you needed to find through this group?

Yeah, I was able to find who I needed to find pretty, pretty fast. I thought about, you know, posting for my followers, but I don't know, I just am always scared it's going to go south and then, and then I don't want people bad talking, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just. The word of mouth just, it is so huge and people talking good or bad, just so much impact. And so that's something that I'm like scared of. And so yeah, that makes sense.

Like you wouldn't want to post something and then somebody would Have a bad experience associating that with your site or blog and then saying something about it.

Saying something about it. Telling, you know, because I. And I have gone through some vas. I have gone through a rider that wasn't great that I've had to let go. So all of, they weren't all successes right from the get go.

Yeah.

And I.

If that's somebody who's like a huge fan, then that's gonna feel different than if it's somebody who's not connected. I know.

I already feel awkward, like, yeah, but letting people go or it's not a great fit, whatever. And I feel like that would just be too much.

Yeah, that makes sense. And it was almost like a. It's nice to have. It's, it's, it's a version. There's maybe concentric circles around this idea. You should never hire your friends. Like there's maybe the next circle which is like never hire your fans. Which I think one of the advantages that we found. It's not, it's not fans for us. I viewed it as like people who are super familiar with what we do and aware of it. Like, there's something I think in terms of like value alignment and you know, that like if I know if somebody's listened to all the Food Blogger Pro podcasts, that they are probably okay, you know, with who I am, as opposed to somebody who hears me the first time, they're like, ah, I don't like the way he talks. And then they don't ever listen to it again. Like they kind of self select out. So I think there is something to be said about it. But I also hear what you're saying about wanting to be careful around getting too close in that kind of concentric circles around who you're hiring and how close they are.

Well, and I, and I would. And I know a ton of people have great success hiring people, you know, that follow them. And maybe it's just the fact that I don't have a ginormous following yet. And I feel like, I feel like maybe like one opinion could really affect me and my socials and everything. But then maybe some, at some point you get to a point where it's like people are talking bad all the time.

Yeah, whatever.

It's.

Whatever that makes sense. I'm curious to know kind of as we, as we close out here, as you think, it sounds like this season was kind of unique in that you are saying, you know what, this is the last time I'll be holding a three month old Baby, a four month old baby, five month old baby, you know, like up the line, I want to be present for that. As you look at a schedule that isn't as seasonal in regards to the uniqueness of that period of time, like 2021 being the last time that you'll have an infant and saying, okay, I'm going to move into something that will like year to year, it'll maybe look similar. Do you have thoughts on how you'll approach content in those seasons? Do you think you'll still, for a few months, batch content for the year? Do you think you'll switch to a few weeks and batch for the quarter? I'm curious to know, in going through this a few times, what have you learned and how will that inform how you make content in the future?

So what I will do is I will shoot my two main times of year that I want completely off is all summer long so I can play with my kids, which I did this summer for the first time in like a long time. And it was the best.

Like, that's awesome.

Like seriously play and not have to worry about things. Right. And then all of a sudden, just November and December, I want off. Just the holidays get crazy. Yeah, I just want to be able to just enjoy my family.

So real quick with that, a psychiatric question, what does your team do during those times? Like if you're off in the summer, is your team still working in the summer? And then you're kind of checking in and making sure things are going okay.

Yeah. And they have the option they can work ahead if they want. You don't, you know, they've got all of their stuff. And honestly, I think my social media manager, she does it all pretty much in like one or two days and just schedules it all out and then she, she's done. Or you know, she could be doing it every day if she needed to.

And it's just like, here's what needs to get done, here's what done for the summer to be successful? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's what they're doing.

Okay.

But so how I will do it is starting in January, I will shoot for probably, I don't know, it's usually like a month, month and a half of shooting and that will get me through August. And then in August when school starts again, I'll do a month or so shooting to get me through December and into January. And so I just do two batch shooting sections of the year, I guess to get me through those months.

Cool.

So I'll shoot and Then take a break and then shoot.

Yep, that's awesome. My guess is people will hear this and they'll think, wow, that's awesome. They'll fold that into how they produce content. And I think this is my prediction, Charlie. I think it'll have a substantial impact on somebody's life. I don't know who it is, but I think there's enough people who listen to the podcast who will take some of the things that they've learned today and be able to implement those in a really significant way. So I appreciate you sharing this and being so open about it because I think it's life impacting in a real way. Because if not this, I think sometimes we can feel like we are, you know, feeding, feeding the bees forever. Like that's just what our, our, our job is. And every day we get up and feed the bees. And for people to know, wait, you don't actually need to do that. There's a different way I think can have. Have a really big impact. Let's say folks want to follow along with what you're up to and what you do. Where can people do that and follow along? Carly?

So they can find me on all the social medias at Cooking with Karli. It's K A r l I. YouTube's also the same thing. Doing lots over there these days. And yeah, you can just follow me along on socials.

Cool.

That's awesome, Carly. Thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Yep, thanks for having me.

That's a wrap for this interview with Carly. Big thank you to her for coming on and sharing her insights. As a reminder, if you haven't, feel free to check out foodbloggerpro.com that's where a lot of the time and energy we spend goes. We do this podcast. You might know us from this podcast, but it's really the tip of the iceberg and the vast majority of the content, similar to an iceberg that we produce, you can't see because it is all happening within Food Blogger Pro. There's courses, there's live Q and A's, there's a community forum. And the best way to go and learn more about that is to go to foodbloggerpro.com and if you haven't yet, follow or subscribe to the podcast. Super easy to do. All you need to do is search Food Blogger Pro, find that subscribe or follow button completely free. And every week we'll come out with content and deliver it to your phone, your computer, wherever it is that you listen to this so thank you for listening. We hope you enjoy the episode. We'll be back here with another episode next week. Until then, make it a great week. And as always, my hope is that these episodes help you get a tiny bit better every day. Forever. That's why we exist. Until then, we'll see you later. Thanks.

Sam.