344: Blogging with a Full-Time Job (Part Three) – Running a Niche Blog with a Partner with Sara Mohr and Louisa Williams

A big thank you to Clarity, C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com for sponsoring the podcast. Clarity is a Tinybit brand. We kind of operate as sisters, brothers, siblings within the tinybit infrastructure and Clarity and Food Blogger Pro are sibling sites. So we operate them and run them on a day to day basis. But they also pay to have a spot here on the Food Blogger Pro podcast to advertise. So a big thank you to Clarity, the team over there for the incredible work that they've done, and also for partnering with us at Food Blogger Pro. I've talked a lot about Clarity recently for anybody who follows along with the podcast and we thought it would be helpful to feature some other bloggers who are using it. So this is a little clip from Sean from Vindulge. I've had the honor and privilege of connecting with Sean and Mary a couple times over the years. They do really incredible work and he's going to talk for just a minute on how they use Clarity and some things they appreciate about it.

This is Sean from Vindulge, one of the world's largest barbecue and grilling websites. We're here to talk about how much we love using Clariati and if nothing else, we love the ability to easily export all the content on our website or a segment and search and pick apart some of the various things we're trying to work on. It saves me and our team hours of time and segmentation and we're searching over 800 pieces of content. We've also used it to easily identify and clean up missing alt tags so that we can really focus on optimal image search opportunities. We're also cataloging tasks so we can prioritize and work on various things around our team. We can have multiple tasks at a time. The new feature about adding labels helps us also work with our sponsored content. That means that we can put all of our sponsored content or various sponsored content under one label and that we can report back with ease. This has been a great feature for us, saved us a ton of time and we really look forward to future investments.

All right, thank you to Sean for talking through that. One of the things I love about Sean's blurb there is he talks about something that I think not a lot of people are aware of. It's kind of like the secret menu item on Clarity and that's the ability to export to a spreadsheet. So previously for Pinch of Yam we would do a lot of manual labor to build spreadsheets. Maybe it was our top 20 posts from the past year. And we'd create a little spreadsheet and we'd go into Google Analytics and we'd look there and we'd sort there. Or maybe it's the posts without any comments. And we want to create a spreadsheet on any posts without any comments to see if we can get more engagement on that. There's hundred, there's more than a hundred, thousands of different ways people might use spreadsheets. And what Clarity does is it allows you to filter based on the metrics that it's pulling in. So it becomes the hub you can filter and then you can create a spreadsheet on that and do whatever you want with it. So Clarity brings in all sorts of information from WordPress and Google Analytics and you can sort and order that and.

Export to a spreadsheet.

And it sounds like Sean's doing that, which is really cool. The other thing he mentioned is labels. And the specific use case he mentioned is the same one that we used for Pinch of Yum, which was making sure that we understand what is sponsored content and what is editorial. Or for you, it might be lifestyle content and food content. It's different than categories because when you create a category in WordPress that creates a page, a category page which is more externally focused, this is all internally focused. So labels how you want to organize your stuff. And that's really important because there's a lot of different ways as you get more and more content that you want to make sure you're tracking and organizing and lots of different use cases for that.

So two cool things that Sean pointed.

Out and appreciate that little blurb. Be sure to check out their site Vindalj as well and the good work that they are doing. And thank you to Clarity for sponsoring this episode. You can go to clarity.com food C-L-A-R-I-T I.com food if you're interested in signing up. Getting a little demo of how it works, seeing if it's a good fit.

For your account or for your site.

And would love for you to check it out. Let us know if you have any questions. And again, it's clarity.com if you want to learn a little bit more. That's Clarity with an I. All right, that's a wrap for this little ad read. Let's go ahead and jump into today's episode. Hello.

Hello. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast.

This is York Ostrom, and here I am chatting with you and what a.

Wonderful thing it is.

My hope is someday we can connect in person, but until that time we can have this kind of one way conversation all around things that we are interested in, which is growing, building, enjoying the process of creating content online, specifically around food and recipes. That's what we're all about here. So if that applies to you, great. And actually related to conversations. We're starting to have more conversations with the Food Blogger Pro audience over on the Facebook group. So if you go to Facebook and then just search Food Blogger Pro podcast, you'll be able to see the group that we have as a small but powerful audience of people or gathering online. Gathering of people, having conversations around the things that we're talking about here on the podcast. And we wanted to add a little back and forth for any follow up questions that you have for people who come on as guests, or potentially any questions that you'd have for people who are going to be interviewed on the podcast. That's what the Facebook group is all about. You're not going to be overwhelmed with hundreds of posts or random things that will pop up here and there. It's pretty focused on the podcast, on the guests and on the topics that we have. So you'll stay sane when you go there, I promise. And my hope is that you'll get some little tidbits and nuggets out of it and that we can open up the conversation a little bit. Speaking of conversations, we have a great conversation with Sarah and Luisa today and we're going to be talking about picking a really specific niche and focusing in on that and the power that goes into that. And the hope for this series. It's our third podcast interview. The Blogging with a Full Time Job series is all around obviously talking to people who have a full time job and learning from them how they do what they do, the things that they're learning along the way, and talking to people that are on different parts of their journey. So some people might be earlier, some people might be later. We've had some interviews where somebody's been working on what they're doing for years and they fine tune the process and people who don't want to leave their full time job and want to continue to do it and others who are ambitious in the way of this thing becoming their career and there's all sorts of different people in all sorts of different pursuits and sometimes we get locked into this idea of like, here's exactly how you have to do it. And what we wanted for this series was to open that up a little bit, to broaden perspectives and to have conversations with people who are approaching things from all sorts of different ways and all sorts of different angles. And I think you'll find that to be true with a conversation today with Sarah and Luisa. And one of the things that's great about this is they also talk about their partnership. So not only do they have a shared expertise in what they're doing, but they also have a partnership where they're coming together and creating content around that. They talk about how they work as partners, how they've kind of come to focus in on this specific niche, some of the benefits of that. And it's going to be a great interview. And I think that you'll be able to take some tidbits away from it, especially if you're thinking about partnering with people and thinking about that. So let's jump into the interview with Sarah and Luisa.

Really excited to do this interview today. We have two guests with us. So I've learned when I have guests that I have to address each individually when asking questions or whatnot. So first, Sarah, I'll say welcome to the podcast. Hi.

Thank you. Bjork.

Yep. And Luisa, welcome to the podcast. Thank you.

Happy to be here.

Yeah, it's going to be a fun conversation. One of the things that I'm excited to talk to you both about is this idea of focusing on a niche and also the impact that you're having through the work that you're doing. I think anytime that we can think about not only the career around what we're doing, which a lot of us think like, hey, we're going to create a blog to maybe create side income, or we want to build this into our full time career, which is awesome, but also the reality, the impact that it can have because the content that you're producing is in that category. It's impactful for people in a real way and your careers are as well. Before we hit record, I was saying I benefited from people who followed your career. So that will be our foreshadow into it a little bit and I'll explain that story. But Sarah, do you want to talk a little bit about how the two of you first connected and what it is you do for work?

Yeah. So Louise and I met in graduate school for speech therapy. We were in the same cohort and at that time we had talked about potentially creating kind of a cookbook for people with swallowing disorders. And then we went on and started our careers and didn't do that. And then last year we sort of came back together. We've both been in the same town still. And then we decided that we reach more people with a blog than we would with a cookbook. Instead, we came together and started the blog based on that idea that we'd had in graduate school.

Yeah, so you talk about swallowing disorder and speech pathology. The thing that I queued into a little bit there, I saw speech pathologist. When I was in elementary school. I remember walking down the hallway, and I just have this extremely fond memory of feeling really special to be able to go down to this room. And he would work with my R's and W's, which I don't know if that was really common, but my parents tell this story of when I was sitting in the backseat as a little kid having this conversation with another friend of mine who had this same speech impediment. And we were having a conversation, and we saw it was like a cow, except. Or, no, it was a car. And I wanted to say, hey, look at that car. But instead I said, hey, look at that cow. And then he had the same thing, and he said, that's not a cow. That's a cow. And then we had this back and forth for like a minute where we just, that's not a cow. That's a cow. But anyways, so I have this fond memory of working with a speech pathologist. And what was interesting for me in reading about your story is that one of the areas of expertise or one of the areas that you focus on is swallowing disorders. There's an official word for it. But, Louisa, can you talk a little bit about what that is? And was that something that the two of you knew that you wanted to focus on? It sounds like there's always an interest in it. How did that come about, where you're like, hey, you know what? This is something we want to do.

Yeah. So the fancy word for it is dysphasia, just meaning that somewhere along the line in your mouth to your throat, something's not connecting. And for any myriad of reasons, you may have trouble kind of getting that food to where it's supposed to go. Me personally, coming into grad school, I had no idea, really, where, you know, what track I wanted to take. But kind of going into the dysphagia course I was really interested in, and kind of halfway through, I was like, you know, this is something I'm really passionate about cooking. You know, this kind of makes sense to me that, you know, there's nothing out here. Like, it. It just made me sad this whole time about, like, how. How these people are dealing with this and there's no resources for them. So, yeah, kind of Sarah and I got to talking about it and we just kind of figured that we could go into that. But I, you know, like I said, I really didn't know much about dysphagia. And I think it's really uncommon for people to know that speech pathologists work with dysphag. When you think about a speech pathologist, you think about exactly what you just said, that we spend our days kind of working on the R sound. And personally that's what I do. So that really resonated with me. I spend a lot of time doing that. But Sarah probably spends way more time actually hands on with the actual dysphasia.

Sure. So you have this idea, you talk about doing a cookbook and then have this realization, you know what, we might be able to reach more people if we're publishing to a blog. What I love about that is this mindset of like, impact. Right. So how can we help more people with this thing? Especially seeing that there aren't a lot of opportunities or there aren't a lot of resources available for families or individuals who are looking to discover recipes that are modified. My guess is it's modifying them, making them easier to consume and swallow. Is that the basic idea? And Sarah, can you talk more specifically about that? It sounds like there's even like levels where it sounds like I didn't look deep enough to know, but like level 5 would be like more texture, whereas like level 1 would be less. What is that like? And fill us in on, on this world of dysphagia.

So the different levels will. The setup we use is. It's under idzi, the International Dysphagia Diet Standardization Initiative. So every hospital that used to, they had their own levels.

Right.

So one of the places I worked was like mechanical soft ground puree, those sorts of levels, but those aren't standardized between facilities. So like when someone moves from the hospital to their rehab facility, we might know what level they should be on, but that doesn't match with one at our facility or something to that standard.

Sure.

And so IDDSI went out back many years ago now and they set seven levels from zero to seven. And it's a continuum. There are images, it's two triangles that overlap. So the liquids are from level zero to four, from thin, like water, all the way up to extremely thick, which would be like pudding, right?

Sure.

And you can have a liquid, any of those four levels and then the salads go from three to seven, with three being like thinking about like a thicker soup and then seven being something like taffy, something really hard to eat. Right. And so usually when people are put on a diet, they're put on a liquids level and a solids level. And so this is great, right? Because if you go between facilities, right. If we send someone back to the hospital, we say they've been, they've been on level five, the hospital knows what level five is, where they might not have known what advanced solids would be.

Right, sure, right.

But the difficulty being that there's not a lot of information out there yet for the person who goes home. When you go home, what. What do I eat? What is missed and moist, what is.

Totally where you like you can you on your menu when you're ordering at the hospital, it's like you call in, they would probably in some ways filter for you where you'd be like, I want a hamburger. And they'd be like, sorry. Like, you can have pudding, but you can't have a hamburger. You could have flavored pudding, but you can't have a hamburger. So these filters exist for you. And then you go home and you think, I want a hamburger and you can eat it. Right. Like, so how do hospitals help people transition? And it sounds like maybe there's not a lot of resources out there for people who are transitioning back. And is part of the plan for what you're building to be kind of that bridge? Louisa so when you think of the content you're creating, you're building it in a way where somebody could leave and they have that like three page printout and it's like, here's all the things, you know, in order to be successful after this surgery or diagnosis or whatever it might be. And it says like, you can do level three solids and level two liquids. And then you're like, okay, what does that mean? And where do I get these? So you, you're building out a platform, a blog content that allows people to quickly go and say, like, great, I know I need to go here for this thing. Is that generally accurate in terms of what you're building?

Yeah, you know, we have a handout that kind of explains a little bit like about what IDZ is and then, you know, how we can help. I think that, I think we would love to go that route. Honestly, I think there's such an in for it. Just like we've been saying this whole time, just nothing exists at this point in time. And like Sarah working in the medical field, I think, and I have too as well, I think we have a really good idea of what it's like to kind of be sending these people home. Because so frequently, at least for me, when I was working, like, outpatient, you kind of saw a lot of, like, repeat offenders, you know, people who would go home and they would go home on this diet that we recommended, and then they're not. You know, when you think about people not swallowing right, you're like, oh, whatever, no big deal. But when stuff isn't going down the right way, it's going into your lungs, likely, and sitting there, and it's not doing. It's not doing good things. So then, you know, you have those people who come back to the hospital, and again, it's like this cyclical thing, you know, where you're recommending something, you're not providing them with the resources, and then, oh, look who's back, you know, and it's just kind of like, where can we. Where can we help? Where can we stop that, you know, process from happening? Because I don't know about you, but I found that all the time when I was in, we had. People were like, how long have you had this swallowing problem? Oh, maybe ten years or so. And they're just seeking help at this point?

Yeah. Oh, interesting. And probably hard for you hearing that when, you know, hey, there are things that you could do to help move you through this so you wouldn't have to struggle in a lot of ways for 10 years. So you have this idea, you come together and say, hey, generally speaking, this is the direction that we want to go. What did those first steps look like, Sarah? To not only move forward with creating a blog, which. That in and of itself is hard, you have to learn these things, you have to take these things on, but also doing so together, you have to divide responsibilities, you have to talk through things, you have to figure out when you want to meet. What was the. What was that like to navigate the partnership? And also just the actual process of creating the site in the early stages.

I think that's been something that we've definitely, I'd say fine tuned, but probably more like medium tuned as we go along. So we live in the same town, we live in Tucson, but right now we live on different sides of town. And so when we started, I lived a little bit closer, so it was easier to do in person meetings. And we started during COVID so we weren't doing anything else. So that was easier to have more time to work on these things. And we started definitely with a divide and conquer approach. Right. So I Do most of the back end on the blog, getting things set up that way. And then Louisa does a lot more of the photography and those sort of pieces. But then we both develop recipes. And so that's been an issue that we've had is if Louisa's got all of this photography knowledge. And now I'm at my house taking a picture of something that looks terrible because a lot of our food does look.

It's one of the interesting challenges. Like as an example, soups are really hard to document. Right. And to take pictures of. And my guess is a lot of the content that you're creating is in that category of content. Right. It's not like a sandwich, like a one foot sandwich with a bunch of these layers on it. Like it's. You're gonna have to be creative with it.

Yeah, there's nothing, there's nothing like garnishes. Right. Because none of that would be allowed. Everything has to be one level and so everything is just kind of the same. So I take a lot of pictures and I send them to Louisa and Louisa's like, don't do that. Drive to my house and give me.

The bowl of food. We'll go from there.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's been something that I think we're getting better at. I finally got a new phone now so I can take slightly better pictures. So we're working on getting setups in each of the locations. So that way even though like we've still got our specialties, then we're each taking on more of what the other person was doing before.

Yeah, that's great. One of the things that we're doing. So we're doing this little mini series talking about blogging with a full time job. Obviously when you started it was Covid everybody's world look a little bit different, maybe had more time with it. And then slowly for most people it's kind of inching back towards normal or new normal or whatever you want to call it. What does that look like for you now, Louisa and then Sarah, I'd be interested in, to hear your response in regards to figuring out ways to continue the momentum with your site while also acknowledging like you have work that you're doing and full time commitments. That's a hard thing to do to find ways to do both of those things. So what have you found that's worked well for you in regards to keeping your site up, keeping it going, but also acknowledging like, hey, you have a full time gig that you are responsible for?

Yeah, it is a big challenge. I Mean, I don't think either of us are going to sit here and say we do it perfectly because we certainly don't. I do think that having someone that runs the blog with me is super helpful. Like just even having a meeting with Sarah is often like rejuvenating for both of us to find a little bit more motivation. I work full time in a school. I also help with the after school program. So a lot of days I get to work at 7 in the morning. I may be getting home at 5:30. By the time I make dinner, put it on the table, clean up, I'm like exhausted.

Yeah.

And then, you know, at the same time it's also a balance between not only do I want to work on the blog and all my free time, but I also want to have free time because our jobs, you know, we're frequently like understaffed, just SLPs in general. There's often not enough of us. So, you know, it's just a lot of work and a lot of like, I need a lot of time to just kind of sit and reflect on a day. So I will say that at this point, you know, the biggest thing is just meeting with Sarah, talking about those things and then also just having conversations like this. I feel like anytime I tell someone about our blog they're like, oh, you know, I had a friend who had a stroke who then also like wasn't able to eat foods for a while. And just hearing stories like that are often so like motivating. It's like, okay, you know what, there are so many people out here who could benefit from this. Like, I need to really kind of drive forward and start working on it.

Yeah. One of the things I think about occasionally but should think about more is the why behind the work that I'm doing. And I think whenever we can have a really strong why and it's going to be different for everybody. Some it might be, you know, impact based, some it might be personal freedom. Some of it might be for some people might be spending time with their family. But really clearly defining the why and visualizing that is so impactful. And I hear you talking about that. How about you? For Sarah, like as you think about balancing the work that you're doing as a creator publisher, learning this as you're getting up and running, what have you found to work and what are the things that have been super helpful and then maybe on the opposite side of that, what are the things that are just the challenge and have been difficult?

So I work PRN. I don't work full time. I work at least 30 hours a week, but they can cut me down if we've got more staff, so that doesn't happen anymore. And so usually I'm working 30 to 40 hours a week, but I don't know my schedule until the night before. So, like last night they told me I'm coming in at 9am but like, who knows when I'm coming in? Tomorrow I'll be in, but I don't know what time. And so that's definitely been a challenge for me with trying to schedule my day. It's like, I don't know if I'm going to have time to work on something in the morning or if I'm going to have time in the afternoon, because then we also have to think I'm seeing patients for that period of time. I also have to do my chart review and I have to write all my notes and talk to all the doctors. Anything else I need to do. Then if that runs into something I've scheduled, then what happens to the minute I've scheduled? That's something that has been a challenge for me. But I think in the same vein as Louisa, I get a lot of motivation at work because I'm working with the patients that we're going to be sending home. And then just today I talked to a husband and one of the patients and he was like, so what do we do when we get home? I'm like, well, thank goodness you asked because I know what I can tell you to do now because, you know, there used to be, and there still are some cookbooks out there, but unless, you know, to buy them, what are you going to eat for the three days until it arrives?

You know.

And so I get a lot of motivation out of talking to my patients. I talk to them about what do they want to eat, what do they miss? You know, and then we can work on developing those types of recipes. But I think for me, the flexible schedule is nice, but then it also becomes a problem for scheduling even when we're going to meet.

Right? Yeah. Because what an interesting role. It kind of reminds me of. There's a season where very, very different, but from a scheduling perspective, similar where Lindsay was substitute teaching and she would like, call the morning of and it'd be like, okay, what time? What time is it going to happen? What time am I going in? And just this idea of you kind of know your schedule, but not really. And my guess is like, you would be able to take a day off and say, okay, I'm not coming in this day. But if you are technically on, then it's almost like being on call. Like, hey, here's when you'd come in, here's when you wouldn't. Which makes it to your point really hard to schedule. Are there any tools or like software that you've used that have been helpful from a partnership perspective? Do you find that you're texting a lot? Is it email? What does that look like as you partner on things? For communication?

We started, we started out with Asana. We started with that to kind of schedule each of the tiny parts of the task. Because that's something that surprised me when we started blogging was like, oh, I've got this wonderful recipe, I'll just turn it into a blog post. But there's all these tiny little parts that's like, when did this. And so we were using asana to kind of keep track of where we were in each recipe. But then for me, like, I don't get on my computer every day because I work in person. So if I'm not on my computer and I'm not looking at the asana, then I'm not doing anything. So a lot of, a lot of what I'm doing is texting Louisa, telling her what I'm working on, sending her screenshots of texts or screenshots of ideas, things like that. Which maybe isn't the best system, but.

Yeah, it's like, whatever. What was that, Louisa?

I said lots of audio messages, like just constantly talking into our phone, telling.

Each other, yes, totally. We were working with a sleep consultant, so another vital type of consultant. And they used Voxer, which was a great little back and forth voice app. It's essentially like a voice. Like if you iOS I'm thinking of, you know, you can hit it and record a little voice message and shoot it off to somebody. Which is great when you're on the go or driving or whatever. But Voxer is great for just purely for voice, text and voice messages back and forth. So, you know, as you think about the moving forward is your hope. And part of this comes out of some conversations that we've had just in general, but also in this series where.

People are like, you know what?

Like, I love what I'm doing and I don't really have a super strong interest in transitioning this site into my full time gig. Do it being early, like it's, it'd be early in the conversation to start thinking about that. But do you have thoughts on like, hey, this would be great if we could build this into something and then this is what we're doing full time? Or do you like the idea of having it as something that is available, like, for those days, you know, maybe Sarah, where you don't get called in or to have something to be able to work on and focus? But where do you land when you think about the future of it, or is it still too early to know? Louisa, do you have thoughts on that?

I mean, when we talked about it initially, I think the goal was, like, if we can make enough money and this could be our job, that would be amazing. I think, you know, Sarah is immensely creative. She constantly is coming up with, like, ideas for products and things, and we're just like, I have no idea how to make any of that happen. But in reality, like, if we could even come up with, like, half of the things that we have ideas for, I think it could be very successful. I will say, like, for me, I find a lot of reward in being an slp. But at the same time, like, it is a career that is just like, burnout city.

Why is that?

Just. I can talk from the school SLP perspective because I will, like, die on a hill. That school SLPs are super, super overworked.

And SLP stands for speech and Language Pathologist.

Yes.

Okay.

So, yeah, for me personally, you know, I work with currently, like, 64 kids, so I have to see all of those kids either once or twice a week. The amount of paperwork is just immense. Like, for Sarah, I always say, like, I worked medical. The best thing about it is that at the end of the day, you just, you're done, right? You sign off, you don't think about it until the next morning. But for me personally, like, I am at least a week behind on everything that I need to do. So for me, sometimes it's hard to come home and just be like, okay, I'm done until tomorrow. It's like, I'm just constantly worrying about the things that I have going on and just SLPs in general, it's a very small program. Typically, it's very competitive. So, like, for the University of Arizona, where we went to grad school, they get something crazy, like 500 applications. And our class was 27. So it's very competitive. And then it's like, wow, there's not enough SLPs, and it's like, wow, there's just, like, not a ton of spots in grad school for us. So it's just kind of that balance.

Yeah, it's interesting. Just in regards to burnout, one of the things that exists a statistic. I don't know if this, where this came from or how, how true it was even, but I worked for a nonprofit and they talked about teaching and they talked about teachers. And I think the statistic, this is going to be me. Like 80% of statistics are made up on the spot, but it was like 60% of teachers quit by the fifth year. Like, and I don't know what it would be for an slp, but it feels like maybe potentially a similar thing where you're excited about it, you get into it, you want to make an impact and like the weight of the work is just so heavy that it, you, you just get burnt out and it's like you like the work. It's not like you don't like it, but it's just not sustainable. Um, and one of the things I've heard people talk about and I think it's really true, especially in the category of people who are working a full time position but then also have a side hustle that they're doing weekends, maybe it's nights, just whenever they can, is there's some level of a safety net that exists that you can fall back on this thing as not as a full time career always. Right. A lot of times it still is the side hustle, but I know a lot of people who have gotten the ball rolling slowly with their thing behind the scenes and they have some life event. Maybe it's a, their kids get sick or their parents get sick or they get completely burnt out or they have a health diagnosis and that results in them not being able to do their full time career. But they've gotten the ball rolling with this thing far enough where it's like it's not starting from zero, um, and it's not, you know, going a hundred miles an hour, but it's like, hey, there's a little bit of momentum with this thing. And that life event switch allows them to have a little bit more brain space to focus on it. And that's one of the things I heard you saying was like, there really is no brain space a lot of times for you because you could always be doing more. So I'm curious to know, Louisa, like, how do you make time and space for that when you could always be doing more for your job?

That's a good question. You mean like making time and space like for the blog?

Yeah. Like I think a comparable in my world would be it's different, but just for the sake of an analogy, like I always have something that I could do, like there's always an email in my inbox. There's always, you know, some optimization thing that I could do. And so if I'm going to like organize my basement, the storage area, I'm just going to have to say, you know what? I'm not going to do work stuff because I need to get this stuff done. I think that same mindset can exist for people who are working on their blog as a side hustle, which is there's always something that you could be doing for your full time career or gig or just at home. And so what is the mental framework that you use in order to prioritize writing content or working on your blog or building your business while there's always something else you could be doing?

Yeah, so for me, like a lot of school SLPs work outside of school because there's the amount of work where you kind of should and almost need to. But for me, it's like, as much as I think about it, when I'm at home, I really try to step away from my job. When I'm at home, I really hardly ever bring my computer home, even though I need to and probably should. I'm just not gonna do it right. I'm just that classic millennial. Like, I don't get paid enough to do this. I don't get paid enough to bring this stuff home with me and then work on it at home. And I'm also like the classic millennial in the sense that I need time for me and I'm going to take that time because my mental health is important. So for me, I find cooking very therapeutic and I find it really enjoyable. So I think that there are so many times where I'm like making something and I'm like, this would be perfect for the blog. And then I'm just like almost too lazy to take a picture of it or to write a recipe for it. So I think Sarah and I have had this conversation, but just kind of giving ourselves the space to, if we have the desire and like the time to work on it, then do it. That's great. But if there's no time, you know, then it is what it is. Like me personally, since pretty much October, I've been like, checked out, just super busy with work. But as a school sop, I also get loads of breaks. So I'm hoping this summer, like when I'm off for two months that I can really take some time and kind of dive into the blog. Just because I know that during the school year it's like, it is not my first priority. You know, I just. There's not enough time in the day for all of it.

Yeah, I think that there's a really interesting takeaway there in that sometimes we just don't have capacity to do the things at the level we'd potentially want to do them. There's a man. It was one super early podcast interview we did, and I don't remember even who it was with, but she talked about this idea of time blocking and saying, like, what are all the things that you want to do in a day? What are all the things that you consider to be important things that are, like, set. Like, those would be work. You know, maybe it's like getting food ready for dinner or family or whatever. It might be working out, like, all of these things and then just putting those in your calendar and saying, like, how much time do I actually have to do the thing that I want to do? And it might not be a lot of time when it comes down to it. And the reality is what we're doing, creating content takes a lot of time and energy. But to your point, like, sometimes you can figure out ways to slot it in and it's like, hey, maybe you're making a meal and it. And you're like, this is a great. This would be great for the blog, like documenting that and publishing that. Sarah, what have you found in terms of figuring out ways to fit this in with your schedule? Knowing it's a little bit abnormal, Knowing that you can't necessarily schedule something for three the next day when you might be working at three and you don't know. So what's worked well for you in regards to scheduling and moving the site forward, while also making sure that you are prioritizing work and then have time for yourself as well.

I think for me, the biggest change I made recently was doing more of the recipe development just as the meal we're going to eat. I think one of the things that Louisa and I run into more than regular food bloggers is sometimes I'll have an idea for a food and it just is disgusting. Right. And I think other people don't run into that as much because they're not trying to, like, blend a steak, you know?

Yeah, yeah, right.

So I'm sorry.

It was gross.

Everyone in the house. But I've been doing. Doing more of that and then trying to. Trying to pawn food off onto people too. Right. I made six batches of this potato salad here. Everyone gets one instead of me making it six weeks in a row. So that has made that's made a big difference in just getting more content done. And then as well, I've been watching, I've been trying to watch more videos and do more courses that can help me get more just manageable steps. Right. Like I'm thinking about a task and then I, I don't have the knowledge to break it down yet. So I'm thinking I'm going to do this and it's going to take me two hours. I don't have two hours. I'm going to do nothing. Right. But then, now, as I get more knowledgeable, we do more of it. It's like, okay, well inside this two hour task is three 15 minute tasks and then a big task. So I'm going to do one of those three tasks in this 15 minutes. So that's giving me, it's giving me permission to work less at a time.

Sure.

Right. And that's made a big difference.

Do you have an example of something that you've broken down in that way?

So I did. What did I do last night? Oh, last night the only task I did was creating a post template for us. Up until now we've just been completely revamping each post, wasting so much time making the same headings every. Every post. And so like usually I would sit down, I'd say, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make the post template and at the same time I'm gonna make another post that it's gonna be, the template's gonna be based off of. And then I'm gonna write a Google Doc about how to use the post template so I don't have to meet with Louisa. And it's like this whole big task. But instead I was just like, I'm just gonna make the post template. And then I sent Louisa an audio message of how to use it instead of like making a whole additional document. So then that way instead of taking, I booked an hour and a half for this task and it only took me 30 minutes. I was like. So I, because I expected it to take longer, I put off doing it when I could have done it earlier in the week.

Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like there's a lot of tasks that are like that. I think of one time I was going to fix the water faucet outside and I put it off for like three months and it took like seven minutes. It was like, oh, this would have been like, I could have just done this like, you know, in my slippers before I had breakfast in the morning. And I oftentimes it feels like that's true for a lot of those things. And my guess is not only did it take less time, but because it was something process related, it's going to allow you to spend less time moving forward on all the other things.

Definitely.

Here's a system called Eos. And in Eos they talk about the importance of documenting everything and documenting it not in a way where it's like super specific and every little step is, is clearly outlined. But like, hey, we, we, we're going to be working with smart people. We are smart people. Like, let's just, next time that we come up to something, we're like, wait, how do you do that? We can pull up this process, we can look through it real quick and we can be like, oh yeah, that's what we do. But it's kind of hard because it feels like a weird, it doesn't feel like work that's moving something forward. It feels like a different type of work that you're not actually technically getting something done, you're just making it easier to get things done in the future. Um, but do you find that you're starting to think about documenting and like creating light processes and in breaking out tasks into smaller subtasks and things like that? Is that part of, part of the way that you're thinking in regards to the work that you're doing?

I think so. I think one of the things that should have, we should have noticed earlier was a lot of what we did at the beginning in our planning stages, like before we started the blog was we wrote a lot of what I would now call like long term goals. You know, what do we do want to do in a year, what do we want to do in a month when we really should have been focusing on our two week goals. And so now that we've done more with these short term goals, it makes more sense to figure out what each thing I'm doing. How is that working towards that shorter goal where it was sometimes harder to see with the really big view goals. Right. And so that's something I think that has switched in our mindset as we think about like how to keep this long term. Because like some, some of our long term goals we met and some of them we did it. But then each short term goal we can then have more data to revise the next goal. Right. So everything we do in our therapy is goal based, right? Yeah, we have to build for it. It's gotta, it's gotta be towards the goal or I can't do well, I Have to think about, you know, like, what's my time worth? Like, if I was at work and I was doing this, is that worth so many dollars an hour? No. So that's maybe not worth my time right now unless I am taking a break. Right?

Yep. One of the things that's great about that and I'd be interesting, interested to hear if this exists within your practice doing therapy. But so you set a goal. So like we want Bjork to be able to distinguish, to be able to say like, I see a cow in a car and people that like, understand what that means. And so breaking that down into like micro goals in order to achieve that goal. Is that Louisa, like when you're working with a student in school, is that what you're doing?

Yes.

And like, I think in grad school that was one of the things we talked about a lot was like how to write a long term goal and then how to write a short term goal, like how to get there. So like taking your example of the R, the ultimate goal is that these kids are going to say the R sound in conversation in any setting with anyone that they're talking to. First step, can they even produce that sound by itself?

Sure.

Okay, great. We spent three months just trying to get them to say that sound. Can they now say it in a short word? Okay, great. Can they now say it in a sentence? So I think we're kind of trained. Like Sarah was saying, like that is ingrained in us as what our practice is to kind of make tiny steps along the way. And I think just, yeah, like kind of what she was saying just up until recently, I don't know why we were more focused on the long term and not just on like, what do we want to do in the next two weeks? So like last time we met, we talked about like pretty much up until like the end of February. You know, how many things do we want to have done between now and then? Because we'll maybe only meet twice. So yeah, that's great.

And I see that really playing out when I think about, you know, a really easy example would be somebody might set a traffic goal, right? I want to be at whatever it might be a hundred thousand page views by the end of 2023. Okay, cool, we can say that. But like, what does that look like then to break that down on a month by month basis and say in order to do that I'll need to grow 10% a month from where I am right now and then saying each month, like, have you hit that goal and if not, what are you going to do to adjust and change that? And so great. We're a little bit behind. I said that I set this goal. I'm not going to just like, think it into existence, but I actually have to plan in order to achieve that. And part of that planning is starting early and saying, what is it? What do I need to do in order to make that happen? And there's a lot of little steps along the way that have to go into it. I'm curious to hear, knowing that you have had some time doing this and have maybe started to develop some opinions, even being early on, what are the things that you've learned? Like, if you were to go back and sit down with yourself or, you know, the two of you met with the two of you when you first started your site, what would be the conversation that you'd have and the advice that you'd give to your past selves, knowing what you know now? And Sarah, we can start with you.

I think if I could get past Sarah, some advice about this, it would be to try to focus more on one thing. We started that pretty, pretty early, fairly. But when we first started out, we're like, okay, we're each going to take two types of social media and we're each going to do content creation every week, and Louise is going to do more about the photography, and I'm going to learn about how to build a website. And that was just way too much to do at once. And then we never got better at any of it. Right? Because then we're just kind of like, you're just treading water trying to figure all those things out. And so now we're focusing a lot more down on just doing more content creation and trying to optimize posts in one certain way. And then we're just, we have the social medias that we've set up, you know, two months in, but I don't think we've touched them since, like, December 2020. And so our 14 Pinterest followers can enjoy those recipes that we had out at that time, and next year we might have some new ones.

I think there's a lot of wisdom in focus, and I think what can often happen is a very similar thing to what you described, which is people try and do everything and you're just spread too thin. And even, like, when it comes to social platforms, like, hey, once you get good at one, you can introduce another. But don't try and get good at seven. When you're first starting out and working a Full time job. I think that's where that time blocking comes in. And it's like, okay, if it's going to. If we want to be good at TikTok, that'll take like at least 10 hours, like at the very least to do that really well. So where are we going to slot that in? And pretty quickly you're like, well, if I'm also going to create blog content, there probably isn't a place I can slot that in, so I'm just not going to do it. And we've done things with our sites where we say, hey, we can't do that well, so we're just not going to do it. And later on down the line we can start to introduce that when we feel like we can do that a little bit better. So, Luisa, how about you? If you were to sit down with your past self, what would you say?

I think like, organization and consistency. For myself, just like, I'm one of those people where it's kind of like all or nothing. Like I'm either going to work on the blog non stop for my entire Christmas break and do as many recipes as I can, or I'm gonna like, feel dread about like doing anything. So for me, just like allowing myself the space to kind of like work on things little by little and then just being organized with like, you know, what step is done, how is it done, where is it located, how do I put it all together and like manage that time a little bit? Because before, like, if I was doing a recipe, I would cook it, I would take pictures, I would write it and I would post it like all in one day. And now that's just like not maintainable. So I think just for me, like the time management, organization and just, you know, saying, if you only get a recipe like every two weeks, like, that's great. It's better than doing, you know, two in a week and then taking a month off. Um, so for me, like, I think that's. And I'm even still working towards that.

Yeah, that's great. I was doing a peloton run this morning and it was this. The. What was her name? Uh, I forget what the, like, coaches name. Everybody has opinions on their favorite coaches. But she said, what if instead of being occasionally awesome, you were consistently good? And I was like, oh, that's like really solid advice. I love that idea of being consistently good as opposed to being occasionally awesome. Whether it's, you know, fitness or business or whatever, it might be like continually showing up. It's what we're all about. And we talk about that a lot on the podcast. So this has been a really fun conversation. Do you feel like there's anything that we missed in terms of things you've learned, experiences you've had, you know, anything that you'd want to make sure to share with the audience before we hear a little bit more about where folks can follow along with what you're doing and maybe increase. We could increase your Pinterest following from. We could double.

I think one thing that I, that I really learned was how much of a niche we're in. Like, we knew we were a niche food blog, but I needed to stop thinking about us as a food blog as much as a resource. Right. And because I really stressed myself out a lot with like keyword research and stuff like that. When for us, keyword research is not probably going to get us anywhere. We don't really want to rank for minced in moist breakfast hash with cucumbers or something like, no one is ever going to search for minced and moist in that specific recipe. We really wanted to show up. When someone searches minced and moist recipe ideas, we want the whole site to show up and then all of our ideas are there. We are a food blog, but the way that we need to do our optimization is not, I think, the same way that a lot of other food blogs do it. And that's something I think I, I wouldn't, I didn't say I wasted time because I learned a lot, so it was worth it. But I think I was not getting anywhere with a lot of what I was doing in the beginning.

That's great. It's. I think, you know, in the startup world they talk a lot about tam, which is, you know, total, total addressable market. So like Uber, what's the tam? Well, it's like anybody who needs to get somewhere. Right. So it's a huge, it's a billion dollar total addressable market. Billions. Multiple billions. I think one of the things that happens like as your total addressable market or your niche gets smaller is like the mechanics of monetization change and which is also really exciting because potentially you could be a site where you don't have to have any ads and instead you have a premium offering. Or maybe you sell consultations for people to help them build a meal plan. Or maybe it is meal plans that you sell, but like higher dollar amount but for a smaller niche or a smaller group of people, which I think is a really good place to be. And there's less competition potentially. So it's really cool to see and also something for people to think about. Like hey, it's okay to have a small niche. Just know that how your the monetization for that is going to look different as people think about what that might might be for them. So Louisa, where can people connect with you? Follow along with what you're up to. We'll have talked about the site a little bit before in the intro so people will know but just can you give a quick plug? And my guess is somebody will be listening who can also use it as a resource as well.

So they say some like 20% of people have dysphagia. So I'm sure that there's someone out there listening to this. Yes, you can find us on our website obviously realmealsmodified.com we do have a Facebook page. It's also just real meals modified then on Pinterest as well. Hopefully someday we will have an Instagram. I'm like much more comfortable with that content but we just don't have one yet. Probably never on TikTok because that sounds horrible.

You say that and then we'll have a conversation three years from now and you'll be like here I am on TikTok.

I know it could be really cool. Not yet, but yeah, for now. Check us out there.

Cool, that's great. Much like the intro, I'll say goodbye individually. Sarah, thank you for coming on the podcast.

Thank you for having us.

And Louisa, thank you for coming on the podcast.

Yeah, thank you.

It's been a pleasure.

That's a wrap for this interview. Thanks to everybody for coming on and or listening. Thanks to everybody for listening and thanks to Sarah and Luisa for being a part of the interview today. That's a wrap for this short series that we did. Blogging with a full time job. Let us know what you thought about it. Let us know if there's other series that you might be interested in. If there's one thing that you wish that we could deep dive on and do multiple podcasts on, what would that be? If you ever have any thoughts, feedback or ideas, just shoot us an email podcastoodbloggerpro.com and we would love to hear from you because we're always trying to improve and get a tiny bit better every day, forever, as long as we're doing this and we've been doing this a long time and we're going to continue to do it because what we found is that one of the best ways to get better at what you're doing is to show up every day for a long period of time and incrementally get better. And we want to help you do that. And one of the ways that we do that is through the podcast. Another way that we do that is through the Food Blogger Pro membership. So we have a lot of Food Blogger Pro members who are part of the community. And you can check that out by going to foodbloggerpro.com you don't have to sign up right away. Just sign up for the email list and learn a little bit more. That's probably the easiest way to get to know who we are and what we're about. Thanks to you for tuning in, for being a part of this community. We really appreciate it. And we'll see you next week. Bye. Bye.

Sam.