Katie Olsen talks about launching her food blog in 2016 and learning to handle negative comments. She reframes herself as a publisher like Bon Appétit, treats criticism as part of the job, and addresses the loneliness of creating alone versus working in a team.
Questions this video answers
At the end of 2016.
About seven to eight posts.
Chapters
Let's rewind the tape a little bit and go back to first time that you pressed publish or launch on your site. And we chatted a little bit. I know you've been listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast for a while, but what was that like for you when you actually launched your blog? And what were you thinking about it when you're getting into it?
In a word, it was terrifying. I had followed food blogs for many years before I ever decided to do one of my own. And my first post I published was at the end of 2016. I kept my blog private for a few months before I actually made it public to the world. I know you guys don't advocate for doing that, but I was one of those people who. I didn't want to have just like one post out there and make it public. I wanted to have. I wanted it to look like I was a professional and had a bunch of them. So I probably had, you know, seven or eight posts live before I ever actually made it public. But it was terrifying. It's. There's something really vulnerable about putting yourself out there for other people to see what you've done, what you've created and comment upon it. It's very different from when you, you know, I started by just baking things for my friends and family, bringing stuff into, you know, college, law school, classes, into the office, whatever. And people are always really nice when it's someone they know that made it and they're like, oh, can I have the recipe? Things like that. It's different when you're publishing something to the world, putting yourself out there as a quote unquote expert and having people comment on it. So that was what was really terrifying, I think, to start with, for sure.
And how long was it terrifying? Like, do you still feel that? Or do you feel like exposure therapy of continuing to press publish has made it not quite as scary?
I think it's a little bit less scary because I'm a little bit more confident now, almost five years in, but. But it's still scary because everyone has different tastes and people are not shy in telling you how they feel. And sometimes, you know, you try not to take it personally, but sometimes there are comments that you know are pretty hurtful that people will say. And so there's a lot of that kind of fear that when you hit publish, even if you've done it a million times before, you're like, well, this is something that's really precious to me that I've worked really hard on, and someone else can just like tear it down in a second, but at the same time someone else can come and totally make your day with it in a second and say, hey, I made this and gave it to all my friends and family. And they loved it too. So there's, there's kind of the, there's a risk reward analysis there.
Do you, do you have any type of like, mental framework in how you deal with negative comments or just like, not nice people, which a lot of those people exist on the Internet?
Yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty sad. I. It's, it's. You have to just try to think of yourself as any other online publisher, online place that people would go and comment and not, not take it as you are. Your blog, I know you've discussed that with a number of people on the podcast before of separating like a personal brand from you, which is hard to do because it is me, but, but you have to think of yourself as like, you know, like Bon Appetit or Allrecipes or Food Network or one of those people. And they have tons of negative comments on their websites too. People are savage and that's okay as long as they're being honest. So it's hard not to take it personally, but I try to just think of myself as any other publisher, basically.
Yeah, there's something about. That's one of the things that I think is difficult in this world specifically is that we produce content and we're kind of in our personal silo and people respond to that. But there's this universal reality that we are all getting some type of feedback like that, right? So positive feedback, negative feedback, mean comments, nice comments. But if like we worked at a restaurant and there was like 50 of us, there's kind of this shared experience of, hey, if you're a server, you know that you're going to have a terrible table occasionally with really rude customers and your coworker is going to be able to be like, oh my gosh, that's terrible. I'm so sorry. But for us, we kind of live in these silos and it feels not only very personal, but also potentially kind of lonely sometimes. So I think one of the things that I like to do is think about the fact that it's universal. Everybody's experiencing it. If you are putting yourself out there and the only way not to experience it is if nobody sees your content, which is like the anti goal. You want more people to see your content, but then the more people see it, the more you're opening up to that equation of, like, one out of a thousand people who see it will maybe say something not very nice, and you just kind of have to deal with it. There's a great oatmeal who's a comic I've talked about multiple times.
Yeah.
Have you seen this? You know the one that I'm talking about?
Drawings, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So he does. He does drawings, and one of them is, like, link to it in the show notes. But it's like, as a creator, the impact of just, like, one negative comment, and. And he gets, like. It shows this character getting, like, a thousand positive comments, and there's like, one not nice one, and then it just, like, totally dismantles his life, and it shows him, like, just not being able to get up from the couch because. But it's, like, so relatable. So if nothing else, know that if you are a podcast listener listening and you feel that way, you're not alone. It's a shared experience, but we don't get to share with it in the way that we would if we were working together.
