How to Grow a Blog with a Full-Time Job with Sara Mohr & Louisa Williams (Blogging with a Partner)

So you have this idea, you come together and say, hey, generally speaking, this is the direction that we want to go. What are 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 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, 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 going to 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.

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.

Yeah.

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. 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 impact based, some it might be personal freedom, some 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, um, what, what have you found to, to work in 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, 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. 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, you know, I'm seeing patients for that period of time. I also have to do my chart review and I have to, you know, 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 thing that I've scheduled? So 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 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, um, 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? Um, 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 happen?

Right.

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. There's a. We were working with a sleep consultant, so another vital type of consultant. And they used Voxer, which is 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 the 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 you? Being early, like, it's. It would be early in the conversation to start thinking about that, but do you have thoughts on, like, hey, this would be great if, 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.

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, 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, 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.

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. 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 and it's not 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, 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's 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 not going to do it. Right. I don't, I'm just that classic, like millennial. Like I don't get paid enough to do this. I don't get paid enough to like 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, like, I need time for me, and I'm going to take that time because my mental health is important. So for me, like, 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 write a recipe for it. So I think Sarah and I have had this conversation, but just kind of giving ourselves this space to. If we have the desire and the time to work on it, then do it. That's great. But if there's no time, then it is what it is. Like, me personally, since pretty much October, I've been checked out, just super busy with work. But as a school slp, 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 potentially want to do them. Um, there's a man. It was one of the 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. Sam.