This week, we’re sharing all about our new site design, our goals for the future of A Beautiful Mess, and how we want to evolve.

If you’re interested in the topic of blogging, this episode has quite a few good tips, plus our predictions about the future of blogging. We’re also sharing a book report for The House in the Cerulean Sea, which is a certified banger.

You can find the podcast posts archive here.

A big thank you to our sponsors! Check out the offers from Ritual, BetterHelp, Shopify, and The Burlap Bag. And, if you’re looking for a specific code you heard on the podcast, you can see a full list on this page!

Show Notes:

How blogging has changed over the past 15 years:

• There was no social media
• The only way to monetize was through Google ads
• There are a lot more bloggers now

What we feel inspired to share more of on ABM:

Emma – more family recipes

Elsie – food posts, home posts, and holiday and season posts

We mention the blog posts Build Your Own Curved Fire Pit Bench and Easy Hack to Patch a Drywall Hole

Advice for future influencers and bloggers:

• Own your own audience, and start a website
• Choose your own path
• Have multiple goals
• Have a diverse strategy
• You can grow as long as you stay with your priorities

Advice we would give our younger selves (knowing what we know now):

Elsie – Quality over quantity, your privacy and boundaries matter, learn to work toward long-term goals, and listen to influencers outside of your bubble

Emma – fight for an environment you enjoy working in

How we updated A Beautiful Mess:

• Made it more mobile-friendly
• Condensed categories to make things easier to find
• Made our search bar more robust
• Made holiday content easier to get to

We discuss the book The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

Listener question from Mickaela: 

I love activities (especially during the holiday months) but I find a lot of ideas geared toward children. I was wondering if you have any ideas for holiday activities and crafts for adults/couples?

-Fancy dining experiences
–Make a wreath
-Watch scary or adult holiday movies (here’s a list of our favorite horror movies)

Miss an Episode? Get Caught Up!

• Episode #153: Autumn Bucket List
• Episode #152: Personalizing a New Build
• Episode #151: Cozy Episode + Autumn Book Club

Episode 154 Transcript:

Emma: You’re listening to the A Beautiful Mess podcast. This week we’re sharing all about our new site design and our goals for the future of A Beautiful Mess and how we want to evolve. If you’re interested in the topic of blogging, this episode has quite a few good tips and also our predictions about the future of blogging. We’re also sharing a book report for, The House in the Cerulean Sea, which is a certified banger.  

Elsie: Whoa! It really is. I am so excited to talk about the book. Okay, so I feel like up top we should say disclaimer, Emma is sick this week and she is doing the podcast anyway. So she’s in the hot tea zone and just please don’t leave us a mean review because we did a podcast when we were sick, because we’re doing our best, we’re doing our job and we love you.

Emma: You could just be like, why did you have that guest frog on the show? Good point she sucked.

Elsie: You do kinda sound like a frog!

Emma: I really do. It’s great. 

Elsie: Let’s imagine Emma as a frog for the rest of this episode. 

Emma: Honestly, I would love that. Please do, think of me as a girl Kermit the Frog. I love it!

Elsie: Yes, I’m excited about this episode because we haven’t done a business-focused episode in a while and there is a small but loyal part of our audience who wishes that we would just do business talk all the time. So if that’s you, this episode is special for you and if not, I think it’s still an interesting subject overall. So we’re talking about how blogging has evolved over the 15 years, it’s actually been almost 20 that we’ve been blogging, where we think it’s going next, and tips that we would give our younger selves. So I feel like this episode has any wisdom that we have to share. And also, it is just an interesting case study. I think the early internet first influencers, like us, we’ve evolved three or four or five times by now from what it was, to what it was going to be, to what we never thought it would be, and back again, it just has changed so much. Exciting topic!

Emma: I’m one of those people in our audience, that loves to hear about business, and our business is blogging, so that’s what we’re talking about today. I love hearing about other people’s businesses, honestly, when I meet people, in a group or at a party, and they say, “I work in industrial pipes”. I say, “tell me about your industry and how it’s changed.” It’s kind of interesting, it’s fun. It’s like hearing a news report but from the inside.  I find all that stuff interesting. And I also think blogging is kind of this weird mix of, it used to be more of social media, and now I don’t even really think of it as social media but it sort of is I guess. So I think that’s kind of interesting, too.

Elsie: That’s a great thing to start us off with for our first question.  How has blogging changed over the past 15 years? And for me, I would say that the biggest difference in early blogging versus now is that in early blogging, there was no social media. So your blog was your way for people to get updates about your life, it was your only way. I think we had MySpace and then in the very beginning of when we had our first shop, I remember that’s when Twitter launched.  Social media at that time was never a thing that anyone thought was ever going to be a replacement for a blog and now it has become that for a lot of people. It’s changed so much and that’s probably the biggest thing.  We used to share a lot of, how was my weekend.  Writing two or three or five paragraphs about how our weekend was, or how we’ve been lately.  That was a very normal thing, that now is not normal anymore. Now, I think of our site as building up a library of useful content.  Emma and I, when we work on our blog schedule and talk about our site, a lot of what we’re doing is finding, Okay, we’ve never done this salad, we’ve never done this salad, we’ve never done this salad. It’s not as much, let’s tell everyone how we’re feeling. Actually, the podcast is also something that’s changed.  This is now a space where we probably talk about our personal lives the most.

Emma: Yeah, I definitely think for us, our podcast is our window into the most personal that you’ll see us and I think for us, that makes a lot of sense because it’s long form. I’ve never really been a person who felt like they could share very much in 15 seconds.  I don’t even think I could say anything.  I admire people who can, but I just don’t feel like I can get out anything in that short amount of time. So for me, podcasting feels like the only place I can really share broader thoughts that I haven’t created an outline of, I’m going to teach you how to make this cake or whatever a blog post that I might write would be.  Another side of that is, we didn’t have social media, so basically, our blog was our Instagram account, or it was our TikTok, and now that’s different because we have so many different ways to share.  Things have become more segmented. We all kind of know, if you want to share a short video, you might do that on Instagram or TikTok. If you want to share a long talking through something, you would do that on a podcast.  There’s just all these different options now that really didn’t exist, or were just beginning to exist when we were first starting to blog. So that changed the way we blogged. Additionally, I would say, the ways that you can make money online as a blogger or an influencer have changed dramatically in the last 15 to 20 years. When Elsie and I were first blogging, there were really very few ways for us to make money online, we were creating a lot of content, spending a lot of time making things, content that people would consume. So the job of a blogger is to make content people consume for free, same for podcasts, for Instagram, for whatever.  So you are an entertainer or an educator or whatever you want to say, you make stuff.  Then the job, in my mind is, you figure out how to monetize it. So it’s two-fold.  I think a lot of people don’t see that second part. They know it exists, but they don’t see it.  I think it’s easy to discount, or people don’t realize that you’re kind of always doing at least two jobs. I don’t say that to be like, “we’re amazing”. I just mean if you’re, “oh, you don’t put out enough content,” well, that’s not the only thing I do, I have to also monetize it. There’s a lot of extra work that goes into making money online. You had to figure out how to monetize your content back when blogging was starting, there really wasn’t a lot of ways to do that. You could put Google ads on your site, so CPM based ads. Based on how many views you got on a post or on your page, you could collect some ad revenue from that by having a banner ad on your site. Same as now, there just weren’t companies that you could sign up with, it would basically facilitate that for you. You had to kind of piece-meal it yourself or just only rely on Google ads, and additionally, not as many companies were utilizing those types of advertisements yet. Now, I think a lot of small businesses and even large businesses understand that having a whole marketing campaign for just having ads on the internet or on Instagram, Facebook ads, or I guess meta now

Elsie: Even a lot of emails I get have ads in them, it’s everywhere, for sure.

Emma: I completely understand feeling like, oh there’s so many ads coming at me all the time. But the flip side, the silver lining to it, is that means that content creators are likely getting paid because that is one of the main ways that they can monetize all that content that they’re creating. There’s always a give and take, always a good and bad side of things or whatever you want to look at it. There weren’t as many of those back then, now in blogging there’s a lot more of those, a lot more opportunities. There’s a lot more sophisticated companies and programs that you can join to have those CPM based ads, so banner ads, where you’ll get paid, and they’ll pull from lots of different places, not just Google ads. So that’s pretty amazing, based on your traffic, you’ll get paid. And I think traffic is one indicator of doing a good job at blogging because it indicates that you’re making useful content. It’s something that people are clicking on, for whatever reason. For us, it’s usually they’re wanting to learn something like how to hang curtains or how to make a recipe.  For other sites, it might just be that they’re very interested in the article you’ve written, or something of that nature. But for us, it’s more about education, it usually means that we’re doing a good job being useful. You can get paid based on your traffic, which is really cool.  I think Instagram is kind of trying to move towards a model like that for creators because they’re kind of starting to have more opportunities last year and this year, where you can get paid for the traffic that your reels receive, or different things like that, which I think is long overdue. Ultimately, if they’re able to figure that out, I think it will make their platform much more sustainable. The idea that people are on that platform or any platform, TikTok included, any anywhere else, creating hours and hours of content that millions of people potentially are consuming and loving, but they don’t get paid anything for it. It’s just kind of bananas.  Imagine seeing a TV show and they didn’t make any money from making it. It’s like, they’re not going to have a season two because how could they can’t afford it.

Elsie: Or imagine starting a business where you could get thousands of people to work for you for free, just because they were trying to get noticed or grow. It is kind of a twisted concept when you think of it that way. 

Emma: Being an influencer is now the new unpaid intern, but there’s no real ending to it.  For us, blogging has moved as like one, we have more options and more social media. So now we can focus our blog content on just being useful content. So for us, again, that’s something that we’re teaching in the vein of, home decor, crafts, or cooking. Other sites, it’s other things, but something that you might Google. So if you’ve ever picked up your phone, and Googled, you know how to make mayonnaise, I don’t think our site pops up, but would it be great if it did.  Some other blog probably pops up, but I don’t know if I want that mayonnaise spot. I don’t know who’s in the top spot. She’s earned it or he’s earned it. Whoever is up there, good for them. Mayonnaise is hard to make but anyway, we’re aiming to be that person to answer your question. Whereas on Instagram or any other platform, we’re not necessarily trying to answer questions. I mean, we are if we’ve put up a question box. At least right now, the platforms are more about entertaining or sharing a peek into a personal life or something of that nature.  Unfortunately, they also don’t have as many ways to monetize your content. So for us, those are lesser options. We don’t put as much into social media as we do our blog. I would say blog is number one for us as far as where we put all of our energy. And then after that, it’s probably podcast. And then after that, it’s Instagram, and then some of the other social media options.

Elsie: I wanted to talk about what we feel inspired to share more of on A Beautiful Mess. A lot of times our OG readers, which there’s so many of you, and thank you so much for reading for so long. This weekend, I got a message from someone who said they’d been following me since the Flickr days, which means 15 years ago.  That kind of thing, there’s nothing like it. It’s very special. A lot of times the people who have been following us for a really, really, long time, they’ll miss something that we used to do that isn’t within our goals anymore. We used to do these fashion posts called Sister Style. Pretty frequently people will say, bring back Sister Style. I loved Sister Style.  I think it’s cute and I still think it would be fun to do but it doesn’t really meet our goals or our objectives, or it’s not a meaningful investment for our time anymore.  I think we should take more pictures together for fun. I want to talk more about, what were our intentions for A Beautiful Mess and where we’re putting our energy sort of on purpose.

Emma: We will write in slightly different areas but the main areas of our site are crafts, cooking, and home decor. We also have a little bit of personal style, like you know I want to talk about skincare from time to time, or hairstyles or different things like that. So we have a little bit of that and a little bit of advice too, and holidays. Other things that we want to focus on, in my mind, I really want to build up all of the classics, in the areas that I like to write in. So for me, that’s mostly cooking and baking, but a little bit of crafting, not a ton of home decor. That’s not as much my area. I love home decor but I don’t feel like I write in that area quite as much as Elsie and Laura, but I write a lot in cooking.  Recipes is really my wheelhouse. So I’m really aiming to build up the classics, the things that people are searching for the most, just so that our site can be really useful. And then also, I’ve been really inspired this year and actually one of the books in our book club, the one about the immigrant women and food culture. That’s also been really inspiring me about the roots of cooking that I love and the way that I grew up. You know, I’m not an immigrant, but I think country cooking, Midwest cooking, and things like that were a big part of my childhood and upbringing. So I’ve been wanting to infuse more and more of that into our site. I really want to, this season, I think I’ve mentioned this before, but our great aunt Ida who passed away a couple years ago, she had this really delicious jello salad, and jello salad, if you’re not from the part of the world that I am, might sound really strange, but it’s just a staple. 

Elsie: Can I just describe it?

Emma: Yes, describe it.

Elsie: It’s jello salad, we served it on Thanksgiving Day, and pretty much every Christmas anytime there’s a family dinner. And it has in it cranberries, and fruit like pineapples, I think, and also nuts. So

Emma: It has pretzels in it too. 

Elsie: And I will say, it is a staple food of our families’ gatherings. Saying it out loud makes it sound so weird, but I kind of do hope that someone in another country will try it when you put the recipe out because I think that will be fun. And we can try a recipe from your country because that jello salad is a big part of our childhood. 

Emma: Yeah and I think listening to the book, which we’re not doing this book report yet, but just if anyone’s listening already, a lot of that book with the immigrant women in food culture, the author talks through different dishes that were in the cookbooks that these women were creating. And a lot of times, the ingredients are kind of weird but as I’m listening to them, and I’ve been listening to the audio version, I was like, “oh, I want to try that, oh, I want to check out this lady’s cookbook.” And it wasn’t things that I was familiar with growing up but it just got me inspired. A lot of times I’ll think of sort of country cooking or old family recipes that we have and I’m like, “Oh, nobody would care about that. That’s just something weird that I like because it’s from my family and it’s the way I grew up,” but no one else would care and now I’m kind of feeling more and more inspired of like, No, I think it’s really cool and I want to put those classics on our site. I love when it came from someone in our family, like our Great Aunt Ida, also are great grandmother, Lula was a really great cook. Something about all of that, I feel very inspired by it. It’s the thing that I can contribute culturally as it’s how I was raised and some of the food we grew up with. That’s more kind of some of the things I want to focus on for A Beautiful Mess.  That and holidays! We’re all obsessed with holidays!

Elsie: Yes!  So for me, creating for A Beautiful Mess is my biggest challenge. The biggest investment that I want to do for our five-year plan, the categories that I want to contribute the most to are, I actually am learning to be a food blogger, so I’ve done my first few food posts recently, and someone left me a five-star review on my whipped feta dip. It was the greatest moment for me because it was my first time someone left one of those. So yeah, that’s very joyful for me, because I’m learning something new.  I love that I live for it! And then obviously, I like to write home posts. We’ve been talking a lot about where we want to steer our home posts. Our top home posts of all time are so interesting. They’re really weird. They’re not what you would think.  They’re not a tour of our living room or a tour of our Halloween decorations. It’s more like, we have this one firepit post. It’s actually the bench that they built for the firepit, it will never be beaten by anyone. Laura made this post last year about patching drywall, that was a huge winner, things like that. We want to do posts that are home, that are useful things that aren’t just sharing our interests and what we’re into this season but sharing things that will help people in the future. I have on my list. This is serious. I have on my list to write a post about how to take care of a fruit fly problem, things like that. But it was like a real problem…

Emma: I will be reading that post. I will be using that post. Yes. If you don’t have fruit flies. Good for you. But yeah, it’s an issue.

Elsie: Yeah and learning how to write in a way that is acknowledged by Google. It’s a huge challenge and I think it’s very fun. It’s sort of like learning the algorithm that people don’t talk about as much in our bubble. So I think it’s super fun and interesting. Okay, so let’s talk more about where we see the future for influencers and bloggers. I think you have to choose your own path. And I’m seeing lots of different paths, which is great. I really think influencer work is the land of opportunity. It is like a gold rush of our lifetime. Is that fair to say? I think it is.

Emma: I called it the unpaid intern. I like that you think of it as the Gold Rush that’s much more optimistic. That’s a glass half full vs glass half empty,

Elsie: I am an optimist in my soul. Obviously, influencer work can be unpaid.  It can also be life-changing for so many people, more than you think. But I do think it’s an, is what you make it situation, and for me, I think everyone should think about their five-year plan, if not your 10-year plan, and think, what am I working towards? Because the thing that hurts me the most and gives me the sort of big sister or mom instincts towards my fellow influencers is if I see people who seem to be on this eternal hamster wheel grind, that is so much work, but they’re only working for the result they can get that day or that week, but it’s not building money for their future. So I would just encourage everyone to think about what you’re working towards, and have multiple goals in your future that are big and that are achievable and that, you know, you’re on a path too.

Emma: A Beautiful Mess in our internal meetings and such, we’re always talking about lately, long-term wins versus short-term wins. Thinking through how we can move our energy and our time and our resources and our talents towards the long term wins as much as we can. Sometimes we’ve got to focus a little bit on short-term wins, because they help us pay the bills and we gotta pay our bills. Having that mindset I think helps you prioritize, because I think that’s one of the biggest things. It is difficult when you are in charge of coming up with the content ideas, being the performer in the content, or making it, you know, making the food or making the home decor.  Photographing it, editing it, editing the real, you’re a videographer now, all these things, and you’ve got to monetize. I think that sometimes it’s really hard to prioritize. You just have so many different tasks on your plate, it’s really hard to prioritize. I think a lot of times the hamster wheel comes from people focusing in on what is the thing that people comment to them the most about, which is usually the sexy part of their job. So getting a lot of views on a reel, for example, on Instagram. 

Elsie: Yeah like going viral.

Emma: Yeah, going viral, getting a viral reel, very sexy, very sexy. And so I think then all of a sudden you get kind of fixated on that because that’s the feedback you’ve gotten from all those views is like, this was good, you should do a lot more of this. And I think that’s great and you should try for it but you’ve really got to think, was I able to monetize that reel? Did it help me grow organically with the audience that’s going to stick with me? You know, if not, then it’s something to aim for now and again, but I shouldn’t put too much of my energy and focus there, I need to focus on the things that are going to be the long-term wins for me and it’s hard to know what that is because every business is different. And like Elsie said, I think everyone’s got to choose their own path. I just wouldn’t get too fixated on, what’s the new shiny thing is that we’re supposed to be doing, and just really focus on, what’s making an impact for your business, your brand. And what’s going to help sustain you for the long term, and what’s helping you pay the bills? Because, you know, unless you’re independently wealthy and just doing this for fun, you’re gonna have to do that. So that’s got to be a focus.

Elsie: Yep! That’s very good advice. The next thing I have down is, what’s the advice that we would give our younger selves, knowing what we know now. So the advice I would give to my younger self, the first one is, this is for blogging specifically, quality over quantity. So I wish we would have known this advice because now 15 years into blogging, we’re going back into posts that we wrote in my first house, you know, my historic house when I lived in Missouri. We wrote so many posts, we were posting three times a day during that era. We’re going back into all those posts, correcting all of our mistakes, adding way more information, and filling them out, because we were getting good topics.

Emma: You should tell them how many posts we’ve deleted. 

Elsie: We deleted 2000 posts from our site to help our site run faster, and also to basically declutter it, I would say, it’s kind of like a house that had a lot of junk that you just weren’t using and that was hurting you more than it was helping you. So yeah, we did that recently, which that was hard for me, I’m a hoarder by nature.  I actually really enjoy the idea of going back and improving an old post but I think that if we would have known sooner to spend three times as much time on each post, instead of, you know, writing three posts a day.  To write one post a day, that was three times longer and higher quality, obviously, it would have benefited us more. So that’s a good tip. The second one is your privacy and boundaries matter. So this is something that I learned the hard way and I think is an early internet early influence or flaw, or just a thing that had to evolve is that in the early internet, people treated us like if we put ourselves out there and if we made any money at all from being on the internet, that we owed them, everything. And in some cases, I would give that and I regret it now.  I wish I would have had more boundaries from the beginning and I wish I would have valued my own privacy more from the beginning. Because I mean ultimately there was no permanent damage done but I just think that I had to relearn a lot of attitudes and I will teach my kids differently when they get old enough to have an internet presence. I felt like if people said, you owe us basically every detail that we want to know, that I felt like I really owed that.

Emma: Yeah. Well, I think too, it could also be a product of the time in which we grew up, because yeah, we literally didn’t have internet at our house until I was, maybe a senior in high school. I mostly remember starting to use the internet in college. We just didn’t grow up learning boundaries around it. I mean it wasn’t there, it wasn’t a thing, and social media really wasn’t a thing until I was way out of college. I mean, I guess there was Facebook and MySpace. That was starting while I was in college. So anyway, hopefully, kids are learning a lot more than we did about the internet as they’re growing up understanding some of the things that are true and untrue about it. And you know, ways to treat it and boundaries to have around it. Just things that I don’t think anyone could have taught us because it just was new. Like, we hadn’t done it yet, as a culture, it was a new thing.

Elsie: So yeah, in that respect, it’s not that I regret it. It’s more just, this is the advice I would go back with my time machine and it would have helped a lot. The next one is learn to work towards long-term goals, instead of just a hamster wheel. I think that our three posts a day example is probably, for us, our strongest thing that we could have changed sooner, we felt that people expected it. If we ever didn’t do the three posts a day, people complained. And we were worried that our stats would go down if we didn’t post that much. But ironically, at that point in time, we weren’t actually making that much money from our stats being so high. And we didn’t really need it to be like that.  It kind of served no purpose, except for that our mentality was like, if you’re not growing, you know, you’re not good.

Emma: Yeah, we got focused on the sexy thing.

Elsie: So I think that if we would have learned sooner, then we wouldn’t have to do so much work now going back and filling out our old posts and correcting them and you know, doing everything properly.  Kind of the way it should have been done the first time.  Then the biggest advice I have, that I think we could all learn from, this is probably filed under the Emma was right I was wrong, is to listen to influencers outside of your bubble.  I would even go so far as to say, listen less to influencers inside of your bubble, because the people who are doing just what you do, you already know a lot of what they know, you know, there advice just doesn’t have as much value to you. When you listen to someone who does something completely different from you. A lot of times the space where you can find some perspective and I think the most we ever learned about how to improve our site how to improve our content, how to improve our writing flow, our lightning speed towards burnout problems, like all of that was through listening more to people who did things differently. And honestly, a lot of the people who blogged just like we did back in our early days have now quit, because it was a burnout machine for sure. Yeah…

Emma: Yeah, definitely.  I have a hard time with thinking of advice that I would give my younger self because I am also just happy with where we ended up. I feel like every mistake was a good lesson. I can see what I learned from it. So it’s always hard. But I think if I was going to, what I would include on my list of advice to my younger self would be to fight for an environment that you enjoy working in.  For me, it took a while to see I really need a good amount of time alone, where no ones talking to me or needing things from me so that I can make content.  I’m not very good at, if someone was following me around in the kitchen and asking me questions about our website redesign, while I’m trying to work on a recipe, that recipe is not gonna turn out.  I’m going to forget to write something down. I’m gonna, you know, like, just, it’s not gonna go well. I always felt like I needed to be available. You know, if I wasn’t available to whoever was meeting me, then I was doing it wrong. And now I think…

Elsie: You’re a very hard-working boss and you take that part, managing other people, very seriously, but I can see how it could be, for your own detriment to not have a little bit of space for yourself.

Emma: Yeah, I think it just was I’m not very good at, or especially younger Emma wasn’t very good at, advocating for herself and the things that she needed. I think step one is understanding what you need and I think that took me a while to get.  It is actually kind of weird to be like, I’m not going to do something for you because I need to do this thing for me. That’s a hard thing, at least for me to kind of say to people.  I don’t know if I’d say it quite that harsh, but that’s essentially what I need to do sometimes and I do that a lot more now. It just makes it where I’m able to get my work done and I don’t have to do all of my work on the weekends because I did everything else that everyone else needed from me during the week. And it’s like, I don’t have weekends anymore because now I’m a mom. So yeah, I just, you know, had to learn this lesson. So I don’t know that would probably be one for me is a little more lessons around just valuing my time and asking for what I need.

Elsie: Yeah, I think that’s really great advice. Okay, the next question is, what advice would we give influencers who are starting off now, like you’re already in it, but you’re in the early stages.  You’re still figuring out how to make money, how to turn it into full-time, things like that.

Emma: Yeah and I think this depends. So we have this word of advice to influencers. So is this just general influencers? Because I have different advice for someone who’s like, I want to start a blog, do you think that’s a good idea? Or is it over? Did I miss it? Versus someone who’s like, I think I’m gonna get on TikTok, and really work on that this year. What do you think about that? You know, I have different things to say, well, the TikTok person, I’d be like, good luck, more power to you. I’m not really on there. So I’m not a good person to give you advice.

Elsie: Okay, mine is kind of for both. So yeah, I do think that a lot of people in the influencer space have, they’ve sort of let their blog go, or they haven’t started a blog or a site yet. So my number one piece of advice is that you have to own your own list, so your own audience. So if you are on Instagram, TikTok, anything like that and that’s your main place where you have the most followers, you have to start an email list, at the bare minimum, start an email list, and do cute incentives, or, you know, whatever your audience loves, do some of that, to get them to join your email list.  You have to do that because social media can change in an instant. We all know that. And the huge following that you’ve built up, you might at one point, find that you don’t have a way to get your content to them anymore. Because you know, things change. I’ve seen it happen. I have some friends who have very, very big accounts on kind of all the major like Instagram, Pinterest and there was points with both of those where the engagement just went from like amazing, to nothing. And so I think to get the email list before that happens is your most important move. The other thing I would do is start your own website.  If you don’t want to blog every day, that’s totally fine, but start your own website that has your important content, and, you know, has the basics of what you do, and it’s active. You know, like once a week is fine. But I think if you want to be an influencer, you do need to have your own website, it scares me for people who don’t have anything to show if you know, an algorithm changes.

Emma: Yeah, I pretty much agree. And then I think too, for people starting out, as you get into monetizing, there’s some building.  If you’re brand new, and you are just starting everything, then you’re probably just building for a little bit. So there’s that, there’s time just to do that, to be the unpaid intern. Once you do get into monetizing, I recommend having a diverse strategy for that. So don’t rely on only one way to make an income monetizing your content because for example, let’s say you only rely on sponsorships.  This past year at A Beautiful Mess, we’ve seen a lot less sponsorships.  I think it has to do with two things, mainly one, there’s a lot more competition out there and that’s actually a good thing.  It probably means that the marketing budget that’s available is going to lots of different people instead of just a smaller pool.  Although that is affecting us adversely, I still think that’s a good thing if that’s the case, but two is the economy. We started off the year with the war on Ukraine, also coming off the heels of a global pandemic, which is still somewhat ongoing, but not like it was in 2020.  Then a lot of people here in the US especially have been talking about, is there going to be a recession.  What’s going on with the market? What’s going on with the stock market? What’s going on with the housing market? 

Elsie: Yeah, people are being very cautious right now.

Emma: Very cautious, which a lot of times in large businesses, one of the first places that you can cut budget if you’re looking to be conservative, is the marketing budget.  Especially if you work with an agency because then you don’t even have to fire anyone, you just do less work with your agency, right? But that budget is how sponsorships trickle down to people on the internet like us. So we’ve just seen a lot less of that this year. I think, basically, because of those two reasons, the economy and then more competition. So if we relied solely on sponsorships, we probably would have closed our doors this year. It’s just been that bad.  Elsie and I wouldn’t be doing this anymore but we have other ways over the years that we’ve been building up and those things this year saved us. So that’s why it’s really important to have a few different ways, and it’s okay if one way is your main income, but then you’re working on the side things to just try to build them up. That’s normal. That’s basically what we’re doing all the time.  The reason you want to have three legs to your table instead of one is because if that one leg gets kicked out, now you don’t have a table, whereas you have three eggs, at least you still have two legs, you know, you can kind of make it through, which is what we’ve done this year. And I’m really grateful.

Elsie: Yes, yes, I completely agree. Yeah, if you have a choice between taking a class about how to grow your social media following verses how to grow your email list, pick the email list one, every time, I just promise you, it’s the most valuable thing you can have.

Emma: Well, let’s talk about, we’ve talked about blogging generally, let’s talk about our blog redesign because it has been six or seven years since we had a redesign for abeautifulmess.com and we’ve been working on this since late last year. So since before the holidays 2021. We’ve been working on this redesign that just launched last month. Yeah, it’s been really exciting. And I love the new site, we’re still learning how to use it like back endwise. It’s very different, we’re on WordPress, and you know, over the last couple years, we’ve been moving to the Gutenberg blocks. If you are a blogger, you know what that is and if you don’t, you probably don’t care so I’m not going to elaborate but essentially, it’s like a different way to enter in your information, your data, your content into the backside of your blog before your audience sees it, the front end. So for us, there’s been a lot of changes that you haven’t seen as far as what our audience sees on the front end on abeautifulmess.com. So one, we’ve noticed over the last few years that our mobile traffic has significantly increased. I am always looking at our blog on desktop because that’s how I work on the blog. That’s how I upload photos and write my text. I don’t do that on my phone almost ever, because it’s just too difficult. I almost always do it on my desktop. So I’m always looking at the blog on desktop. So it’s just easy for me to think of everybody is reading our blog on desktop, but that’s not true.

Elsie: I prefer to read blogs on desktop too. But when you look at the stats, was it like 70% of our traffic is looking through their phone?

Emma: Exactly. Yeah, so this website redesign was very much focused on mobile. So if you haven’t checked out our site on mobile, even if that’s not normally how you read blogs, do it because it’s actually really interesting. I think it’s so much better, like a way better experience than it was before. It’s easier to navigate. Categories are slightly different. There’s somewhat condensed, and I think that makes it easier to find things. Also, our search bar is different. It’s much more robust. So it’s just better. So if you’re searching something with the search bar, it’s much more likely you’re going to find it now than if you had done that a year ago, because it wasn’t as good a year ago.

Elsie: Yeah, it’s intensely easier to navigate through mobile. And yeah, the mobile experience and the speed are the main things that we wanted to improve and I’m really glad we got a chance to do that.

Emma: Yep. And then it also just has lots of little areas on the homepage and then throughout the category pages where we can add different things. Right now we have a shirt that’s inspired by Weegee board, and it says cookie season. And it’s for our charity shop, which we do through Bonfire.  So if you go on our homepage, you can see that right now.  We’re not necessarily going to do a blog post about it, but now we have a place where we can kind of put that on the homepage for these next couple months because it’s you know, geared towards Halloween and spooky season, we don’t necessary have to do a blog post that then gets buried after a couple days. So I really love that about the site. Probably my number one favorite thing is actually a really small detail but I think it’s so fun. So as you’ve heard, Elsie and I are obsessed with holidays.  If you listen to this podcast, then you know, we love holidays. So we moved how you navigate to our holiday content.  It’s more prominent on the homepage and we change it out with each season.  Right now it says Halloween, and it’s in Elsie’s handwriting, and it has these little bats and it’ll switch over to Thanksgiving, it’ll switch over to Christmas.  We change it up for each of the holiday seasons. I just think it’s really fun. It’s just like a fun little detail that makes the website feel like it’s more seasonal. You know, we’re not changing all of the colors of the whole website for every season but what’s on the homepage kind of changes and then that little button does.  I feel like it kind of gives it a fall vibe now currently and then in the winter there’ll be more winter and yeah, so I don’t know those are some of my favorite things and hopefully makes the site just way easier for people to use because we do still have, even though we deleted all those posts, we still have well over 4000 posts on our website, so we just want people to be able to find the good stuff because there’s honestly lots of good stuff in there. 

Elsie: Awesome. Okay, so should we jump into the book report? 

Emma: Yeah, let’s do it. 

Elsie: So our book report this week is for, The House in the Cerulean Sea. 

Emma: Yes, so this book is about a caseworker, Linus Baker, who is sent to an orphanage that he is doing an investigation of.  That’s what his job is, he investigates orphanages to make sure that they’re up to code, and they’re safe for the children, they’re probably given more funding or closed based on his reports. So that’s his job and he’s sent to a very special one on an island that’s very secretive. And that’s sort of the story. Another thing to note is that it’s a fantasy book. So he’s always going to places where there’s magical children. So the children are unique in that there have different magical abilities or just different aspects to them that are fantastical. So that’s a part of the book too, which is really fun and interesting. Some of the major themes of the book, I would say are about prejudice, or kind of racism but it’s, I guess, a special kind cuz it’s kind of about magical humans, which is not an actual race. But you know, we’re learning about racism through the lens of magic.

Elsie: I think general prejudice, for sure. 

Emma: Yeah, prejudice, a massive theme in the book. And then also, some of the characters are gay or bisexual. I’m not really sure but there’s a love story of gay individuals, which I think that was really fun and sweet in the book, too. Yeah, it’s definitely a feel good. You have little moments where you cry. And it’s just an adorable fun read.

Elsie: I loved it. 10 out of 10. It was one of my favorite books of the year.  Best main character, I loved the main character.  The romance in the book, it’s very subtle. I like a subtle romance actually, I also just read too many sex scenes this year, I think, like, you know, they blend together. Yeah, I’ve had enough for the moment. I just wanted something very different and this book really delivered that. I will say my favorite thing about it, sensory-wise, that stuck with me, is that they use the song Beyond The Sea throughout the book. And it’s like, I can hear it. It’s so sensory. I love that song anyway, but now I’ll never hear it for the rest of my life without thinking of this novel, which I think is really special.

Emma: Yeah, no, I loved it too, it’s a lovely read.  I also love exotic places. I felt like I got to go to somewhere special. I wish there was more detail about the orphanage, the house that they’re in. I would have loved more description about the rooms but that’s just because I want to picture the movie house version. I want more details about the drapery and the carpet and what do the mantle’s look like. And you know, that’s just where my mind goes is picturing the house. So I guess I wanted a little more of that. But yeah, it’s very, very sweet. Really pretty simple but I think speaking to some very complicated things that we’ve all seen before, you know, like I said, theme is prejudice. So, yeah, I think it’s speaking to some larger things that do take place in our real world and not just this fantastical world of the book, the author is making his points through magic, and I could not love that more. 

Elsie: No, I agree. 

Emma: Do you have a favorite character? Like there’s a bunch of kids in the books, and they all have different magical powers and different species in a way. One of them’s like kind of an animal in a way, I guess. 

Elsie: I thought that the way that the children were magical was very unique and a fresh take. My favorite character was definitely Lucy. I do think that E is a heart stealer for probably everyone.

Emma: For sure. 

Elsie: Yeah. I mean, that was one of the most magical unique characters I’ve ever heard. But I don’t want to give spoilers around that because I do think that that part of it is, just I want everyone to read this book.  I would say one of the strongest recommendations of our year, you have to read it.  

Emma: One of my favorite characters is the little boy, I read the book, like paper version, so I probably am not gonna say his name right but it’s like Chauncey. And I won’t say like, what his deal is so you can find out in the book, but he has a very unique dream of something that he wants to be when he grows up. And it’s not just like a doctor or a lawyer. I feel like the things that lots of little kids say which it’s, doctors and lawyers are awesome, have used both their services before, love them. But you know, he has a really unique, strange little dream. I love that depiction. I loved seeing a kid that’s just excited about something and he’s reading books on the subject. He’s practicing in his own way to do this job, and he has some barriers for why he might not be able to because of the way that he looks because of his magical abilities or his magicalness, I guess.  I think that’s a really interesting part of the book.

Elsie: Yeah so leave us a comment on our show notes today at abeautifulmess.com/podcast. If you want to tell us what you thought about the book, your favorite characters, or any kind of conversation, we will jump in there and chat with you on the show notes. Okay, so before we go, we have a listener question from Makayla, this one came through email, you can email us anytime at podcast@abeautifulmess.com It is one of the best ways to send a question because we never miss anything there. You know, social media, it can be very messy.  The question is, I love activities, especially during the holiday months, but I find a lot of ideas geared towards children. I was wondering if you have any ideas for holiday activities and crafts for adults and/or couples. I love this question. So I basically am just going to talk about, what I miss, my life before kids, and that’s my list. And you know, looking forward to again someday, because yeah, the Kid Zone in life, it’s the greatest but it’s not the only magical great zone in life. I hope to never make it seem that way. Because that’s not what I think. 

Emma: No, that’s not what I think either. 

Elsie: Okay, so one of the big things I miss is just fancy or special dining experiences. So in Nashville, the hotel restaurants during the holiday season go like, amazing. There’s one of them that does little igloos that you can sit in on the rooftop. And you know, you can have your drinks out there and there’s no kids allowed, believe me I asked, things like that. And then there was another hotel last year that did a Home Alone experience where you get Home Alone themed cocktails and a cheese pizza and I just died for that. And we weren’t able to go do these things because of our babysitter situation. So I think if you don’t have that barrier in your life, go out all the time. Like it’s so special.

Emma: I agree. Some things on my list are before we had our son Oscar we went to, it’s called Silver Dollar City, where I’m from, and it’s kind of like a Cracker Barrel turned into a theme park. I don’t know. So it’s really fun. But at Christmas time, 

Elsie: That’s the most accurate way to describe it. 

Emma: Anyway, at Christmas time they put up tons and tons of lights. And so just walking around in the park with a hot beverage and I think they even sell like Wassell, which is like a wine. It’s an alcoholic beverage and they have other things. I think they have hot chocolate other things too. I think that’s really fun because at the age that Oscar is at right now his bedtime is seven. So it’s kind of hard to do anything at night unless we get a sitter and then it’s an adult thing. So I would just say anything at night is a fun holiday thing to do for adults. Because you know, 

Elsie: Yeah

Emma: But I love Christmas lights

Elsie: Tired mom era, kids cannot chill. Kids cannot linger. 

Emma: They sure can’t. 

Elsie: Kids walking around slowly and having a nice conversation with a hot beverage and looking at lights, is just for me in my life right now, just not something that I can do. Yeah, I think of it as a lot of the same types of things, like you can make crafts, Emma and I love making wreaths.  That’s what we would make. 

Emma: That was the next thing I was gonna say.

Elsie: Like a wine mom night, like it would probably be a wreath right? Or like a garland? We like that kind of craft.

Emma: Yes, just have your friends over or do it by yourself.  Watch a seasonal movie and make yourself a Halloween wreath or a Christmas wreath. Yeah, there’s so many things you can make and do.  Holidays definitely should not be thought of as just kids’ crafts and just things for children. I love doing the kid stuff but I think doing things for yourself or just you and your partner or you and your friends. So fun. I’m definitely wanting to do a Hocus Pocus 2 viewing party at home with some friends and do the elaborate sugar cookies that are witch hats and all that stuff. And Oscar will be asleep. So that’s just like me and my adult friends doing it because it’s fun and it’s holiday. 

Elsie: I love that. I think just make your list work for your season in life and whatever that is, own it, and make the most of it.

Emma: Yeah, enjoy the season because there’s beautiful, wonderful things in each of them. It’s not all for kids. That’s a fun season, but it’s not the only thing.

Elsie: Yeah. Okay, thank you so much for listening. Email us anytime at podcast@abeautifulmess.com If you are loving our podcast please leave us a review.  That means so much to us and don’t forget to hit subscribe so that you always get updated with our new episodes

I’m excited to tell you why—I’m really passionate about this subject!

The internet isn’t dead. In fact, more than ever, the internet is where people turn for both information and inspiration. It’s estimated that Google processes over 8.5 billion searches a day (!!!!!!!). It could be your blog that shows up in those searches, answering someone’s question.

As long as people are using the internet, searching websites for answers to common questions, everyday dilemmas, or needing inspiration for their lives.

They could be looking for inspiration about a home renovation, what winter coat to buy, or maybe they want to change up their hairstyle, etc.) Blogging continues to have a place in the world.

People (now more than ever) actually know what blogs are. There’s less of a barrier to get people to read your blog. Back when we first started blogging, people did not always recognize this type of site as a source of information they felt was legitimate.

I think this sentiment has changed. People would rather get information (like home decor advice) from an individual they like more than a corporate website. There’s more trust for bloggers than there used to be because it’s become more common and accepted over time.

There are SO MANY user friendly tools to start and maintain a blog. There are tools we only dreamed of when we started! This is, to me, the number one reason why it’s easier to start a blog now than it was before.

There are different website platforms, plugins, and whole companies of developers who are familiar with (and ready to meet) the needs of bloggers. It’s awesome! You don’t have to cobble together website features. It’s like if your first car was a Porsche instead of a go-kart.

And along with more tech-savvy tools, there’s also just more of a community and more readily available information on how to get into blogging and how to make it work for you.

Is blogging worth it?

Monetizing strategies exist for the community, so you don’t have to build your own model. You can monetize a blog many different ways, but there are so many more readily available options than when blogging first started.

At A Beautiful Mess we monetize mainly through four ways:

• CPM-based ads (the ads you see in our sidebar and throughout our site in between the content)
• Sponsorships
• Affiliate marketing (like the LTK network, formerly called RewardStyle)
• Selling our own products (we’ve tried several, from T-shirts to iPhone apps)

And for each of these four ways we monetize our blog, there are SO many more tools and options available than when we started!

Is blogging still profitable?

For us, yes. Think about this: Sponsors are aware of blogging and social media. Most big companies now have an annual budget to work with influencers. That could be you!

It’s there for the taking to anyone who is consistently showing up, publishing quality work, and building their audience.

Is blogging hard?

Yes. While it’s maybe a little easier to accomplish (with the rise of so many blogger-friendly tools), it’s more competitive than ever. You have to stand out.

You can’t just post whatever little thing is on your mind with a semi-blurry photo … like some of us were guilty of doing in 2008 (raises hand sheepishly).

I think this is the big mistake that people make. It’s not that blogging is dead (it’s not), but rather it’s that blogging is more competitive and takes a lot of hard work over a long period of time.

It’s not something you can start and expect to be making an income from in the first few months. It takes time to not only get good at blogging, but also to grow your audience.

Is blogging still relevant in 2022?

Yes! It’s probably the most relevant/worth it that it’s ever been, but it’s also more competitive.

Your blog will likely not blow up overnight like it could have in the old days, but that doesn’t mean you can’t create something worth value to both yourself and your readers. xo, Emma

You can stream the episode here on the blog or on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, and Stitcher. You can find the podcast posts archive here.

Thank you to our sponsors for this week! We are so excited to bring you offers from Grove, Issuu, JuneShine, and Curtsy! You can see our full list of podcast sponsors on this page.

Show Notes:
-In this episode, we share secrets on how to start an influencer career. We focus specifically on blogging, Instagram and podcasting (since those are the areas we have the most experience in).

-We talk about whether you can still start a successful blog in 2021.

-Linking the book: The Twelve Week Year

-Linking Emma’s viral oatmeal post that we mention.

-Do you all love it when Emma says “life is long”?

– Have you read Emma’s Career Advice I’d Give My 20-Year-Old Self?

-Check out Claire’s 3 Tips for Working with Sponsors!

Hope you all have a wonderful week! If you have topic requests for upcoming podcast episodes, we’d love to hear them here! XX

Miss an episode? Get caught up!

• Episode #80: Our Secret Weapon—Batch Working!
• Episode #79: Emma’s Evangelical Upbringing Story
• Episode #78: Elsie + Emma React To 2021 Trend Predictions

Episode 81 Transcript

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Emma: You’re listening to A Beautiful Mess podcast, we’re always giving our friends advice about how to start a blog or make side income from influencer work, and they never do it! So in today’s episode, we’re compiling all our advice for you. If you’ve ever wanted to make full or part-time income from blogging or social media, this episode is for you.

Elsie: Yes, this episode is for all of our listeners who are like, I like it when you talk about money, because that’s a very certain part of our audience is like the money people. And this one’s for you because we like to talk about money, too. OK, so I thought you could start off by giving us the most important advice, Emma. Like if they’re going to, like, click off after five minutes, the number one key to success, the number one.

Emma: The number one.

Elsie: This is the number one. All right, Emma.

Emma: Yeah. And it’s not even the key to success for just blogging or social media. It’s the key to success…

Elsie: For business.

Emma: …period,

Elsie: …that’s true, for anything, I guess.

Emma: Finish. That’s it. I don’t even know who gave me this advice early on, but I feel like I say it so often that I have like, lost track of that. But finishing is the most important thing. So often people start and then they lose momentum or they lose interest. Or the one I see a lot is people derail themselves because they want it to be perfect. So they keep tweaking, tweaking, tweaking for like five years and they never actually finish anything. And an idea that’s like, OK, but it got finished and an idea that’s amazing, but never gets finished? Like the success of those two is starkly different and it has nothing to do with how good the idea was, which is crazy sad in a way. But it’s like finishing is, is it. It’s where it’s at.

Elsie: Yes.

Emma: So if you have an idea, the most important thing you can do is finish the idea, which might include like years of work. It might not be like one time finish line thing, like running a race. But as you finish things, you grow, you learn, you get better. For us, it has to do with, like, growing a following over many, many years, because a lot of times people will ask us, like, basically, how do you make money or what was the one thing that changed? Made it where you’re rich now, or whatever they think of us. I don’t even know. And I always want to say, like, well, we’ve just been working for a decade, so I’ve done a lot of finishing for many, many years. And I, I plan to keep doing that over and over and over again. And that’s really the secret, which is a very boring secret. So…(laughs)

Elsie: Most entrepreneurs and especially influencers don’t have like one overnight success moment, you have a series of lots of little things that happened, kind of as a result of already getting yourself out there and creating a brand like if you want to get your first sponsor, you have to already have like a running brand with an appealing, you know, point of view. And, you know, like you kind of already have to do all the groundwork before you can make a penny, which I think is the hard part about influencer work. Yeah, but there are a lot of advantages if you can get past that. So this episode is kind of a pep talk. We love to give a pep talk. I’m like one for asking for pep talks. Pretty often. (laughs)

Emma: I give myself a pep talk like every day. (laughs)

Elsie: Mhmm! So here’s my pep talk. OK, a lot of people blog for like two weeks or two months. And this is — this is heartbreaking to me because you cannot judge your success or your work, your creative work, your potential. You can’t judge anything in two weeks or two months of doing influencer work. I think that a lot of people just start and they have an expectation that they want to gain some kind of traction, whether it’s making money or whether it’s getting more followers really quickly. And then when that doesn’t happen immediately, they give up or they say, I’m going to take a break and make my brand way better, like Emma said, getting in a perfectionist mindset. And then, you know, they talk about doing it for a while and then they eventually realize they’re not going to do it and they don’t. And I want you to just not be that story because that that’s really like the most common thing that we see in people quitting blogging. There are people who blog for five years and they have success and then they quit, but really not very many compared to people who quit after two weeks or two months. So you have to commit you have to tell yourself, I’m going to do this all year. I’m going to lay the groundwork and we still have to do it all the time. So I think I’ll get to it later on. But like recently, you know, we started this podcast and we didn’t make any money or feel like we were really gaining traction for a while.

Emma: Elsie kept trying to quit and I was like, no!

Elsie: I did not try to quit, but I was a little bit like, if this doesn’t make some money soon…yeah…(laughs)

Emma: It’s not worth my time. I was just like, hold on. We got to do it for at least a year.

Elsie: Yes.

Emma: We’re going to get there.

Elsie: This is a thing that we really want you to hear from the beginning. You have to commit to doing influencer work for a long time if you want to make it. You can’t do it for two months or six months, you have to do it for years.

Emma: It’s not a weekend boot camp and then, boom, you’re there.

Elsie: Right.

Emma: That’s just not how it works.

Elsie: And also, I understand how it looks like when you see someone with 500,000 followers or a million followers or, you know, they have a sponsorship with a company that you want a sponsorship with, you look at them and you think like it came so easily to them, but you don’t know. You don’t know the back story that they went through. I promise you, it wasn’t as easy as it looks.

Emma: That’s why I like reading memoirs or seeing documentaries about famous people, because so often it does give you that look where basically you’ll see them working for years and years and years.

Elsie: Yes. And failing!

Emma: And doing well, and failing and having moments where they’re, you know, doing something that kind of looks silly. And then they finally start getting traction and then you’ll see them start doing interviews where they’re like, “oh, how did you get your overnight success?” And you want to scream at the TV or the book, like it wasn’t. Haven’t you seen that they were just working for years? Because now, you know, because you got to see the behind the scenes part, which usually like we don’t get to see that because we only know of people once they’ve already become famous or they’ve already made it or whatever it, whatever our, you know, perception of them is or whatever. But it’s like pretty much always there is a lot of years of work behind that where they didn’t feel like they were — they just felt like they’re kind of treading water. So you have to be willing to do that part if you want to make something, build something or whatever. So that. And then the other little thing I wanted to say before we get started into, like, the tips and like how-to is, so often I have people ask me this and I know people ask you too, they’re like, but can you start blogging now in 2021 and make money?

Elsie: A lot of people think that, like have the perception that blogging is dead. And here’s the thing. Like there was a boom like ten years ago and it’s not like booming in that way anymore, but now it’s like very, very steady water. It’s actually better to start now. I think there’s more opportunity. There’s more sponsors. Like when we first started, you couldn’t get a brand to want to sponsor a blog. Now, it’s very easy to find brands who have a budget for blogging. Sorry I interrupted you. Go on.

Emma: No, I was pretty much going to say the same thing.

Elsie: It’s easy, guys! It’s a great time to start!

Emma: It’s a great time to start. I think if you want to be an early adopter. Yeah, you missed it. Like that’s over. Yeah. And we all know that being an early adopter is kind of a way to have success. But it’s not the only way.

Elsie: But, and it’s also like just doesn’t happen sometimes. Like I started a vine, I started a lot of things that didn’t take off, you know what I mean? Like…

Emma: Yeah, it’s a little more risky.

Elsie: I used to be like hopelessly devoted to my MySpace, you know what I mean? So there’s a lot of things you do, like blogging was just another thing like that that we did. It wasn’t important to us at the time when we started. I wasn’t starting it as a way to start a career at all. I just started my blog because I saw my friends had one and I was like, I guess I should start one. That looks fun.

Emma: Yeah. And there is more competition now than like at the very, very beginning. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing either, because it also means there’s more opportunities to network, there’s more opportunities to learn and to see what works and what doesn’t work and to build off, you know, lessons that you can learn from others. You don’t have to learn every single lesson yourself, which is nice because as OG bloggers, we kind of did have to learn every lesson ourselves, which can be kind of frustrating and take up a lot of time. So…

Elsie: It’s true. There’s so many things that we navigated in the early years where we were working to make like a fraction of the money that we can make now on a much more established, streamlined system.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: So I definitely think it’s a great time to start a blog. Don’t get hung up about that, honestly, like some people who started in the very beginning had a disadvantage because they started in the beginning.

Emma: Yeah. It changed.

Elsie: Because they didn’t know what — right.

Emma: Yeah. And we’re really…we’ve been saying blogging, but there’s really three areas that we feel like we can teach in, which is blogging, Instagram and podcasting.

Elsie: Yes.

Emma: There’s lots of other areas, by the way, like YouTube and TikTok. We can’t teach you that because we don’t feel like we necessarily have anything helpful to really share.

Elsie: Yeah, it’s just not a thing we’ve done as a business. So we have courses on blogging, Instagram and podcasting. You can go to courses.abeautifulmess.com and check out all our courses. We have more than that. But definitely like, from this episode, you’re going to hear us talk about blogging, Instagram and podcasting a bunch. And you can use the code PODCAST for twenty five percent off any of our courses, which is kind of a banger deal.

Emma: Yeah, it’s pretty good. So, and this will work. We’re not putting expiration date on it. So, you know, if you’re listening to this five years from now, maybe it will expire, but probably not. So you can use this any time. PODCAST, 25% off.

Elsie: The Year was 2026…

Emma: And the code still worked and I was like, “wow!”. Okay…

Elsie: Cool!

Emma: And now we’ll take a quick break and hear a word from this week’s sponsor:

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So we divided this into three sections. The first one is make your plan. The second one is execute your plan. The third one is keep going! And we’re going to teach you how to start an influencer business in this 40ish-minute podcast episode. Ready, set, go.

Emma: Yeah. So first, make your plan. So this has to do with the first three to six months or so. And just like as you’re launching, which is going to be your most exciting time, like you’re going to feel really jazzed. So take advantage of that energy to make a plan. But as you are. Make sure it’s something that you can truly execute with however much time you have. So let’s explain how we used to blog versus how we blog now. And this also applies to Instagram or podcasting.

Elsie: Right. So when I first started blogging, I felt that the most genuine way to blog was to write a post that day and publish it that day. And that was what I often did. And I would blog several times a week in my very first year or so. And it would just be like what I was doing that day, what I was doing that week, what I just bought, what show I just watched, you know, things like that. And it was very much just like a diary of my life. And then over time I had to adjust my thinking because I realized that it really wasn’t sustainable. I wasn’t going to wake up every day with a new idea. I needed to plan ahead. And when we started doing shareable content, that was when…which shareable content to us is like something kind of like teaching content, like a recipe, a DIY, something that you would send to a friend or you would save for six months and then do it or something you would pin to Pinterest.

Emma: Right, or so something someone would Google, you know, like a question they would have and they would type in how to make royal icing sugar cookies or whatever, you know, something like that.

Elsie: So when we started doing those types of posts, I started making long lists of ideas. And like I have this picture from our early days where I was like putting this like huge calendar of post its on my wall. And I think that type of method is really, really helpful in the beginning, like writing down your ideas to where — like and if you take Emma’s course, she’ll help you do this. But where you have months of ideas already just sitting there waiting for you and then you go ahead and schedule them and then you execute them and then you can do it in batches where you can get like a whole week of work done in one day. And I will tell you this, it’s not less genuine. I know that people…like it bothers people like after the last time…

Emma: People think it is. But they’re wrong. (laughs).

Elsie: Right after the last time I mentioned that we batched our podcast episodes, I got a couple of, like, strongly worded messages that were like that kind of ruins it for me and which like…

Emma: You’re like, OK, see you later.

Elsie: Yeah. To that I would respond like OK, like if we were doing like a Daily News podcast then…

Emma: Right.

Elsie: I get it that you have to wake up every morning and respond to that day’s events. But for what we’re trying to do, if we didn’t batch, we wouldn’t have an episode every week. And so I think that in the big picture, when you zoom out and look at it, it’s better to work ahead because then we’re doing something that’s sustainable that we can maintain instead of just like busting our ass so that it can, so that we can, like, talk about, you know, something that was in the news this week. That’s not what our podcast is.

Emma: Well and another way to say, busting your ass is to say burning yourself out.

Elsie: Right. Yeah.

Emma: Which is not what you want to do because you’re not, like Elsie said, be able to sustain that.

Elsie: Yeah, because for what we’re doing right now, you know, we…a lot of people know we have two separate businesses and we’re very involved in both of them. And we run our podcast. And Emma’s preparing for maternity leave. There is no…

Emma: And Elsie has two young kids.

Elsie: Yeah. And I have two little kids. There’s no possible way that we would have an episode for you every week if we didn’t batch at least a good amount of them. And I really, I won’t apologize for that. And I don’t think you should either.

Emma: The moral of the story is if you have a friend who tells you that planning is bad, that’s not your friend. (laughs)

Elsie: (laughs) Right. Like so. And the thing that’s really cool that I wish someone would have explained to me in my first year of blogging. And what I’m explaining to you now is that you really can write a whole month of blog posts in one or two days, maybe three. You know, I don’t know how what kind of blog you have and how complicated your posts are, but you definitely can do all your content, set it on a timer and, you know, check in every day and like respond to the comments and stuff where it’s like very easy to maintain. And for some people, not us, blogging can even become like almost like a passive income where it’s like a very, very small, like side project thing that they do right now or podcasting. But I feel like our podcasting is like, it’s a small amount of our time compared to the other stuff we have to do in our business.

Emma: Compared to the other stuff, I would agree.

Elsie: Yesterday I spent the whole day writing outlines, though, so…

Emma: And today we’re going to spend at least half the day recording. But we don’t do that all the time. We do that once or twice a month.

Elsie: Anyway, planning is absolutely the way to get your work done and then still have capacity where you can, like, add on something fun or try something different, you know, or experiment in your business. If you don’t want to be stressed and behind every day, you have to plan ahead.

Emma: Yeah. And if you’re even needing a step right before this, before the planning, which is just like I need help defining my blog, defining what my Instagram is, defining what my podcast is, we do have lessons about that, too, because, yes, you’re not going to be able to plan content months and months in advance if you don’t know what you’re writing about or what you’re talking about. So if you’re needing to define that and take that step back, then I definitely recommend doing that on your own. But also, if you want to go to courses.abeautifulmess.com, we have some resources available there, too.

Elsie: Yes. All right. Let’s move on to executing your plan. This is the most important part. This is the part where a lot of people stop or don’t complete it or they’re like, I need to wait till I can be more perfect. And then that day never comes.

Emma: This is called finishing.

Elsie: Yes.

Emma: Over and over and over again.

Elsie: So I want to first recommend the book The 12 Week Year, Emma and I both read it right before the New Year, and it’s life changing. It’s very good. It has a lot of things in it that are going to help you keep going. One of the things I learned from it that I thought was the most helpful is that if you execute at 80 percent of your plan, most people will still achieve their goals. So that really helped me just to feel like not every day has to be perfect. Like I can have days where, like, my kid was sick and they were home from school and it didn’t go as planned or like, you know, other, you know, medical things or whatever, like life happens. And your plan doesn’t have to be perfect every day for you to achieve your goals.

Emma: Yeah. And I especially give this to all the Enneagram ones out there because. Eighty percent…so here in the U.S. with grades. I grew up in the U.S. that’s a B it’s a lobby. Like you’re hanging on by a thread. You’re almost to get a C plus. Right. So and to me, as I was in school a B was like that’s the lowest grade that I would really accept for myself. And an A was like, oh, wow, I did a really good job, you know, because. I’m not much of a perfectionist personally, but that’s kind of the idea is you don’t have to get an A. You just have to hang on by a thread and get that B, get the solid B, and you’re going to be able to achieve things. So, yeah, if your nanny doesn’t show up one day or your kid’s sick or you just have an off day and your content wasn’t what you wanted it to be, as long as you’re executing at 80 percent, you’re still going to get where you need to go, which I think is really inspiring because none of us are operating at 100 percent all the time. That’s just like a really special good day when you feel like you’re achieving that. So — it’s true. OK, so another thing I really like about the 12 week year that I think might help is you’re starting to execute your plan is you do need to blog or podcast or Instagram for a solid year at least to kind of get traction. But if you think about doing hard, hard work for a year, sometimes that’s really hard to wrap our minds around. So thinking about it in a 12 week cycle, I think helps a lot where you kind of have a mini finish line every 12 weeks. Yeah, it’s like what content?

Elsie: 12 weeks is like a quarter. Yeah. So there’s four of them in a year. Yep. So it’s really it’s yeah. That’s kind of the point of the book is that when people make a year long goal they might like take a month before they start or always feel like they have enough time. And when you have the shorter number of weeks, every week matters. And I really like that.

Emma: I really like it too. And yeah, you can’t procrastinate. And you also don’t feel like the finish line is so far away that like because if you’ve ever ran — I’ve never ran a marathon, I ran a half marathon and that was enough for me.

Elsie: Counts for me. (laughs)

Emma: And it felt too long. I wanted to quit. (laughs) I much prefer something where I can kind of see the finish line from where I start and then…so I can get there. And then if there’s another finish line after that, OK, like I’d rather you trick me and just do a series of 5Ks as a half marathon like that would work better for my mind than doing like a long, long, long race. That’s another thing I like. About 12 week cycles of planning is like, OK, this isn’t like such a long finish line that it’s so far away. So what I’m in the thick of it and things aren’t going as planned. I don’t feel like quitting. So I’m like, you know what, I can see the finish line. I’m going to just finish this up and then start my next one.

Elsie: Absolutely. Yeah. And for people who love to set goals like me, you get to set them more often. Yup. Which feel like you have that fresh start feeling more often.

Emma: Yeah which is good.

Elsie: I think that’s really good too. Yeah. I was just going to share that when we first started the podcast, we — and we started with like, you know, a big audience, like we have a blog, we have an Instagram, like we have an established audience for more than ten years. But it still took us a while to gain traction on our podcast and be able to both feel like we were growing and feel like we were reaching outside of our initial core audience and then also to feel like we were, well, to literally make money to make any money. It took a while and then, you know, all of a sudden it clicked into place and it was like cooking all of a sudden. And it really felt like, you know, it felt like it happened quickly by the time we got there. But there were like long stretches of months where it felt like, are we really, like, doing the best use of our time? So in the 12 week year, I feel like we’re talking about that a lot, but it’s so good. He calls it the Valley of Despair. And I think it’s good to, like, anticipate it next time that you start a new goal. Recently, I started a new like trying to become a runner again. And when I knew it was coming, the valley of despair, of like I don’t like working out, it helped me get through it.

Emma: Yeah. Because you know you’re in it and it just makes it less…not that it’s less real because your feelings of despair when you’re in it are still valid and they’re still real.

Elsie: You know, that it’s an obstacle that everyone has to go through and that a lot of people quit at that point. And so I think that if you start your influencer goal, knowing that you’re going to go through this spell of feeling like you’re working for nothing, it’ll be easier for you to get through it because you’re not surprised by that feeling.

Emma: Yeah, you won’t be surprised. You’ll know that it’s part of it. It’s part of the journey. You know, it’s the part of the movie where, you know, things are going bad, but they’re about to go good.

Elsie: Yes.

Emma: If it’s a happy movie. (laughs).

Elsie: So, yeah, when you have a boring day, you feel like you’re wasting your time. You feel like, oh, maybe I should just start a new plan and start over. Don’t start over. Just keep going. It’s such an essential part. All right. Let’s just take a quick sponsor break.

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Elsie: And then for the third point. So this point is just keep going, learn from your mistakes and build off your successes.

Emma: Yes.

Elsie: So you know that it’s working. You’re starting to gain traction. You’re like, I can see a real business forming here.

Emma: Yeah. And this is the time. So as you finish, as you execute. So whether it’s you’re doing our thing with the 12 week, you know, cycles or however you’re doing it, this is the time where you’re like, OK, I completed some things and now I’m going to collect some data. I’m going to evaluate. And, you know, I feel like the number one…

Elsie: I love looking at stats!

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: It’s such a fun part.

Emma: Because the number one thing I think you’ll already know is how you felt like how did I feel going through that goal? You’ll already know that. And that’s good. That’s something you should take into consideration. But you also should take some time to go through the stats, whatever that might be. You know, if it’s a blog, you probably have installed Google Analytics and you can check out your traffic, check out how people discovered you. What were your top posts? You know, whatever it is, whatever kind of metrics you have, Instagram has its own insights. So you can look through those like this is the time to kind of see what worked, what didn’t work and evaluate it not just from an emotional how I felt doing it perspective, but how did people respond? What gave me the biggest boost? What things could I try to replicate, but in a different way? And what things like, oh, that was a ton of work and it actually didn’t move the needle. Good to know, I won’t spend my time on that again, you know, like those things. So this is like evaluation lesson learning time.

Elsie: If you didn’t like doing it and it didn’t work, then you kind of get this permission to be like, all right, less of that and more of what’s working. Building off what’s working is like a huge point that — it cannot be emphasized enough.

Elsie: So tell us a little bit about it. Tell us a little bit about learning from our mistakes. Yes, we have a good story.

Elsie: Yeah. Favorite lesson to share. And I believe I share this in my blog essentials course, a little bit in a little bit longer form. But the gist of it is we used to blog so… We’ve been blogging a decade. If you don’t know, we used to blog three times a day, and that’s a lot of work. You could probably just guess that just by me saying it, but that takes a lot of work. We had a bigger staff and it took up a huge portion of our time. Is just creating the blog posts that you see on our blog. So we would blog three times a day and over time it just started to feel not as sustainable, we felt very burnt out with it. And so we went down to two times a day and then eventually we went down to one time a day. And the reason we didn’t even try this for years is mostly fear. We were afraid that if we didn’t create all the free content that people were used to seeing from us that they would leave, they wouldn’t return to our site, which would be terrible.

Elsie: Yeah, and sometimes we would have a day like back when we did three a day, we would have a day when we did two. And people would like call it out and complain. And I think that’s another important point, is that if you react to criticism too quickly, you can kind of like make a lot of mistakes because a lot of people will give you kind of bad advice in their criticism. And it’s not that they’re trying to it’s just that they feel like they’re speaking for everyone and they’re really only speaking from their own opinion and they’re not speaking based on your stats and what is, you know, furthering your business.

Emma: Yeah. So for us, we should have tried more experiments with how many times we were posting a day, but we didn’t for years. And finally, we did.

Elsie: It was very scary, to be honest, because…yeah.

Emma: We mainly changed it up out of necessity, like our lives were just changing. And we also, you know, the landscape changed. So where we needed to keep up with Instagram and we had other goals and things that we were working on. So we just, we just had to change it up. So we did. And guess what? Our stats barely changed and we didn’t even make less money. So we were working three times as hard as we needed to for years just because we didn’t really try experiments. We didn’t really look at our stats. We listened to a very small sampling of voices that were mostly negative and fear-based and that held us back for a long time. We could have been doing lots of other things. We could have been putting more time into the content we were making…

Elsie: The hard thing about having super fans is that they will always tell you not to change.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: And that isn’t good advice. (laughs)

Emma: No.

Elsie: It’s coming from a good place, you know, and a place of like, genuine fandom. But it’s…but it’s not advice that is going to help you move to the next phase, whatever that is for you. And that’s something that took us a really long time to learn. OK, let’s talk about that unsexy money.

Emma: Oh, OK.

Elsie: OK, we’re going to talk about Emma’s oatmeal money. So Emma just showed me this chart yesterday.

Emma: Yes. Let’s call it oatmeal money. Oh, my God. Yes.

Elsie: Yeah. So, you know, we have blog posts every day and we do a lot of like really expensive, really fancy blog posts. Like we do room tours. We do, you know, big DIYs…

Emma: Some of our blog posts cost thousands and thousands of dollars.

Elsie: Right. But Emma just showed me a chart of last month of our ad thrive money, which is like the…

Emma: CPM based ads.

Elsie: Yeah. The CPM based ads that you see like popping up kind of in-between our content on our sidebar. And there was like this one huge spike one day in the month. And it was because she did this oatmeal post and it got re-shared so much. So we got a lot of traffic that, you know, was outside of our normal traffic. And so, yeah, there was this huge, huge, huge spike that we — I would have never known was there if we didn’t look at our stats from the inside because like, it’s great oatmeal, but I never would have thought it was like five times better than any other post from a month. (laughs)

Emma: Right? Yeah. It’s it’s truly a delicious recipe. I made it. I eat it. It’s delicious. But I don’t think from the outside looking in, you would — like if someone was just looking at our blog and I was like, hey, what do you think our biggest posts of last month was? There’s no way anyone would say…like maybe someone would guess this, but I don’t think so. They wouldn’t guess that, like, this baked oatmeal recipe was the banger for the month. But it was, you know, and I, I don’t like…I didn’t know for sure that it would be. But that being said, in our monthly meeting, which is where we kind of talk through our a lot of things, but including our editorial calendar, it’s basically so the three writers for our site don’t overlap each other too much.

Elsie: Yeah.

Emma: And other reasons too, so we can support one another, so on and so forth.

Elsie: Some of us like doing the same ideas all the time. Right. And so we want to make sure we’re not doing like I’m not doing the same idea as Laura or very, very similar in the same month because that would be not helpful. So anyway, so the month before I did this oatmeal recipe I mentioned, I don’t even know if you remember from the meeting, but I was like, I’m going to do one of my baked oatmeal recipes. It’s always a big one every year. And then sure enough, it was. And it’s like I think you could kind of look at that and be like a baked oatmeal. That’s not like the cool blogger thing to do. Cool blogger, things like room tours and like, you know, there’s just a lot more sexy content.

Elsie: Right. Emma announced she was pregnant last month on the blog and the oatmeal got more, more money. (laughs)

Emma: People cared a lot more about the oatmeal. (laughs) And I kind of knew they would like. That’s just, you know, the stats of it. And it’s not in any way offensive. I hope that doesn’t come off. Like people didn’t care about me being pregnant.

Elsie: It’s just what can get shared. I think that this is a great lesson because first of all, it shows you that you never know what’s behind someone else’s stats or someone else’s brand or how they’re really making money, because, you know, people look at what we do. And I think that they make assumptions. Right. And we make assumptions about other people.

Emma: Definitely.

Elsie: And what does like, what makes the most what you know is their big thing. And sometimes you can tell and sometimes you really can’t.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: So I think, first of all, knowing to examine your stats, because, like I said, if I wouldn’t have looked and she wouldn’t have looked and we didn’t know? How sad because now I’m like going to be bringing up baked oatmeal every month. Like, let’s do more of that. Let’s do like baked mac and cheese, let’s do like…

Emma: Just so you know, it’s not only a baked oatmeal blog now that’s all A Beautiful Mess is. We’re only doing baked oatmeal from now on. (laughs) I’m just kidding.

Elsie: People like delicious comfort food, though, like I get it.

Emma: Well, there are some lessons to draw from it. Like it’s an easy recipe to make. It’s something that I saw a lot of people saying they’re making for themselves, but also for their families. For kids, it’s ingredients that are very easy to find. So there are some things that I can kind of take from that and incorporate into other recipe posts, like people don’t necessarily want super complicated recipes from me. They might want it from a different blog, but they don’t particularly want it for me. They want something simple that they can make for themselves and their kids. So it’s like, great, OK, good news. That’s the only thing I know how to cook anyway. So great. You know, I can move forward with that information, but sometimes, you know, you can get really excited, like when I see the people on other blogs or Instagram and they do like a beautiful giant wedding cake or this like super complicated, you know, I don’t know even know like, I get really excited about that stuff. I like food. I like cooking. But I think I kind of always come back to that’s really not my lane. That’s something for me to be a fan of and to love and to comment on their site. But on my site, I’m going to stick a little more in my lane, which is like baked oatmeal and other things like that. (laughs)

Elsie: Yes, finding the thing that you’re good at and that people respond to is super important. It doesn’t mean you still can’t try any idea that’s exciting to you, but you’re like creating your base around things that, you know, work.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: So before we do our listener question, I just want to repeat again that we have 25 percent off any of our e-courses. We have one for podcasting, one for blogging, one for Instagram and more at courses.abeautifulmess.com and you just have to use the code PODCAST for twenty five percent off.

Emma: Yeah. Courses are a little more packed with information and a little more linear in their teaching than this episode. We are trying to give good tips here, but also…

Elsie: Yeah, it’s much more of more of this. So if you felt like you learned a lot from this, you’ll enjoy the courses. All right. So we have a listener question.

Emma: Jillian asks: “you are very generous with your time on Instagram. Do you ever want to hide?” It’s nice that she thinks we’re generous. It’s really sweet of her to say.

Elsie: Yeah, OK. So I, I love this question because it’s like she’s feeling like we’re being generous. I, like, don’t always feel that way. I, I feel like I’m hiding like a good amount. Last year I had weeks at a time where I didn’t go on there at all and or I wouldn’t post anything at all. You know, I would go on there and just like look at my friends posts and get off, you know, and that was what felt good to me at the time. And I guess the lesson there is that no one really notices when you need to take time away. You don’t need to, like, announce it or anything. Just take time away. And then when you’re in the mood to come back, come back and then people will think you’re generous. (laughs) I don’t know, like I feel like we take a good amount of time away. I don’t think that unplugging is something that’s difficult for us. We’re not workaholics anymore at this phase. I think when you’re in those early building years, it’s really easy to be a workaholic because you need to be/want to be. And then over time you develop boundaries and you realize that like, OK, I need to be a healthy person now that I’m a mom. You know, I have all new boundaries for that. Emma will be, you know, coming into that season this year. So, yeah, I think that I guess what my point is, is that we have boundaries that you don’t even notice are there. And so it’s OK for you to have boundaries that other people don’t even notice are there? You know, you don’t have to announce that. You don’t talk about it. You can just, like, have them.

Emma: Yeah, it doesn’t have to be a big mic drop moment. I also think, like, it’s really sweet that she said this, and I I’m sure she is noticing something and I really do appreciate that. But I also feel like for me, there are a lot of ways that I make myself accessible to others that I don’t think people really see, or at least a very small portion of our audience will see it. Like I just spoke at an event last month. It was through Zoom because, you know, we’re all not meeting in person, but and they just asked me to do it and I did it. And also there’s a lot of times people email me because I’ve given out my email a number of times and people email me and just ask me for any kind of advice. Or a younger gal, she interviewed me for her college paper that she was writing about food bloggers. And I did like a 45-minute interview with her and it was really fun. And then she sent me her paper at the end and it was really good. And she got a good grade for it. Yeah. And it wasn’t just about me. It was about a lot of things. She did a great job. But it’s like there’s a lot of ways to give of your time and to be a generous person with advice and just with encouragement. And it’s also OK to have boundaries and be like, I don’t write back to every single DM. I don’t write back to every single comment, and I especially don’t if I feel like it’s a personal attack, but if there’s someone who, like I, I just perceive they genuinely want a little bit of time for me for advice or for encouragement or whatever, then I’m personally really happy to give of it. And there might also be a season of my life where I can’t. I’ve got to conserve that energy for my son.

Elsie: It’s a good balance.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: It’s like you have like a pay-it-forward side and then you have like a guilt-free side.

Emma: Yeah. Or like I can’t pay it forward at the moment, but I’ll come back to that. Right now. I need to take, (laughs) because I need to, you know, get my work done or raise my kid or, you know, whatever. And there’s just different seasons. Yeah. So life is long. Have I said that yet? (laughs)

Elsie: Right. I mean, I think the lesson…(laughs) Yeah. That’s your favorite phrase. I like it. I think the lesson is just that there’s always so much more behind everyone’s life that you’re not seeing. So always just remember that. I think most people do. I think for some reason some people don’t.

Emma: A few very vocal people don’t. (laughs)

Elsie: It’s good to remember that most of our life is offline and it always will be. And it always has been, honestly.

Emma: Yep.

Elsie: Thanks so much for supporting the podcast. If you haven’t yet, we would love it if you would take a minute to leave us a review like this review from PTschoolgirl on Apple podcasts, the title says “you need this podcast in your life” and the review says “literally, I’ve never written a podcast review before. I feel like we’re having a wine and pizza night with a close group of friends when I’m listening. Thank you so much for your vulnerability.” Oh, we love that. Thank you so much for everyone who leaves this review. We noticed how many there are and there’s like way more than the last time I checked. Sometimes I, like, don’t look at them because I’m scared. But then when I do, they’re all like, really nice. So thank you!

Emma: Thank you!

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You can stream the episode here on the blog or on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, and Stitcher. You can find the podcast posts archive here.

As always, a big thanks to this week’s sponsors! Be sure to check out the offers from Bev, Function of Beauty, Pharmaca and BetterHelp exclusively for our podcast. If you’re looking for any past codes, check out this page, and thank you for supporting our sponsors!

Show notes:

-Linking Jenna Kutcher’s batch working podcast episode. I listened to it years ago and it inspired me to write 20 blog posts for my maternity leave. After that, I never went back!

-I’m so upset I used the word “mind-blowned” hahahaha WOW.

-Linking the book The 12 Week Year.

-A personal note:
I recently saw a couple comments saying that knowing our podcast is batched “ruins the magic.” To be honest, it made me feel really insecure. I hope that after listening to this you can see that batch working makes this podcast possible!

Guilty pleasure treasure:

Elsie- Headband organizer 

Emma- Heated massage pillow

Thanks so much for listening! We’re so grateful for your support!

Miss an episode? Get caught up!

• Episode #79: Emma’s Evangelical Upbringing Story
• Episode #78: Elsie + Emma React To 2021 Trend Predictions
• Episode #77: Elsie Teaches Emma To Be An Internet Mom

Episode 80 Transcript

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Emma: You’re listening to the A Beautiful Mess podcast. This week, we’re chatting about our secret weapon — batch working. This is going to be a great episode because batch working is the number one productivity habit that changed my life. I get more done in less working hours now, and it’s truly amazing. So we’re going to share all the details of how we batch work as well as our current guilty pleasures.

Elsie: Woo! So we’ve been blogging for 14 years and for the first maybe 10 years we were blogging, I didn’t batch work. So I have a very good before and after story of like how much it changed my life. Can I tell that?

Emma: Yeah, yes!

Elsie: Story time. So when I very, very first started blogging, I would only…this is just this is so green, and you guys are going to laugh. But I thought that it wasn’t very authentic unless I shared…like I had to write it that day and publish it that day. So at first I didn’t even do drafts. I would just, you know, write something out that day. And if I had more time, it would be a better post. And if I had less time, it would be a really bad post. Some of our very early blog posts are surprisingly very short, very random, just pictures, just talking. It was all over the place, kind of like live journal-y type of vibes, sometimes ranting, unprofessional. Should I go on? (laughs) And then through the years, we learned the beauty of working on drafts and having, like, more, you know, always having our work done ahead. And we didn’t always have our blog posts done ahead before that day. But for the most part, we would have you know, we would be working ahead on things. And I think we started a little bit to lightly batch work and it did help significantly. But… where it really got good is when I was preparing actually to have my second maternity leave. So my first maternity leave, I don’t necessarily think I did that great. I think I did the bare minimum and then everyone covered for me. And on my second maternity leave, I think I felt a little guilty because I had adopted two kids in two years and I was having two maternity leaves in a row. And I think I was like a little self-conscious. And also I think I just had listened to…I’m going to link to it. Jenna Kutcher’s podcast on batch working where she talked about her maternity leave and she talked about batching her like writing…or doing like 40 podcasts or something like that so that she could take a long time off. And that inspiration did a lot for me. And I think I ended up writing…it was something like 20 blog posts for my maternity leave. It was like way more than we needed! (laughs) And we ended up using them for, like, the whole year.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: But the thing that was cool is that I learned from it…

Emma: Yeah you came back from your maternity leave and we still had like half and…

Elsie: Yes!

Emma: And I think you were like, wait a second…(laughs)

Elsie: Yeah, I think I thought I was like saving the world. But actually it wasn’t even — we didn’t even need that many blog posts. But the thing that was cool is I learned how to do it. So…and I did all these extra 20 blog posts in my regular shoots, and I think it was over about two months. So that would be about three or four shoots where I just added extra things into each shoot. So like five extra posts in each one. And then I suddenly had like basically like half a year of extra blog posts completed. And it was kind of mind-blowing to me because I didn’t know I could get that much done that fast. And I also learned from it that the posts were standalone interesting, good posts, like high-quality posts. And the reason why was because I was batching the planning and I was putting — I put a lot into the planning of the topics and put like a ton of really different, really interesting topics, because normally if I was just batching what I was working on, I would do like three post about one room or something, which isn’t like a good variety. But this was like a very big variety of different things. And so I learned that batching my planning was essential too, and I think for anyone who’s a blogger or any kind of content creator batching you’re planning and batching your execution is the number one thing that can change your life. And since I had that experience over the last few years, I started having Fridays be a catch up day or sort of like an empty day with nothing scheduled. I usually do therapy on Fridays every other week and I’ll do things like run errands for the things I need to do the next week or things like that, like getting ahead. Like I feel like my schedule is much more airy and much more freed up, even though our kids were home from covid almost the whole year, and we had significant challenges so batch working is literally the glue holding our business together. And any time that someone wants to talk to us about how do you get so much done, this is like the main advice that I want to give them. So I’m really excited about this episode today.

Emma: Yes, I agree. Yeah. So I feel like you kind of defined batch working. It’s just basically like doing a whole bunch of the same thing at one time. So instead of writing, you know, because like, let’s just take a blog post since we’re bloggers and I think people can see blog posts pretty easily so they know what it is. So there’s the idea…buying of supplies or prepping of whatever it is you’re going to be doing, whether it’s a recipe or a room tour or whatever. So, you know, planning it, buying the supplies, actually making it, photographing it and then writing, you know, editing the photos and then writing the blog post. All of these things have to take place before the blog post can go live. So there’s actually a lot of, you know, steps. And you can do each of those steps that I just listed, you could do that for a whole bunch of blog posts at one time. So when I’m planning a blog post, it would be better if I plan five to ten. And when I’m buying my supplies, I should buy all the supplies for five to ten. All of that I have planned. And when I prep…so for me, like if I’m working on food, if I’m doing recipe testing, it’s like a recipe testing day where I’m usually testing at least two to three things and sometimes more depending, but basically like how much room I have in my oven and like what types of recipes I’m doing (laughs) because I can’t put an endless amount of things with different temperatures, but, you know, things like that. And photography, same thing. I like to photograph at least two or three things in one day, at least, and more is better if I can. I like to edit everything at once. And that’s the time when I listen to all my podcasts because I’m editing photos and it’s kind of visual only. And then I’ll often write two or three blog posts in a day, like the actual text of it. So that’s sort of, you know, and you can do batch working. You can think about it in all sorts of different ways. You could do it with housework, you could do it with different types of careers. You could do it, you know, with personal things, with job things, with parenting things. There’s lots of different ways to batch work. And currently this year we are trying more batch working in our podcast schedule. So we’re trying to plan better. So we plan a whole bunch at once. We work on all the outlines at once and then we’ll do a number of them in one day. We’re trying to find our balance with that, though, because everybody, you know, as you get into batch working, you’ll see that you…you know, especially if you’re working on something creative, there are times you kind of get exhausted or you kind of you know, you’re out of creativity for the day. So you don’t want to overwhelm yourself so that your work suffers. But you kind of have to find that balance for yourself.

Elsie: It’s interesting because, yeah, there’s certain things where, like taking a bubble bath, you wouldn’t want to batch work that it would ruin it for you. You just yeah, one is enough and you know, going to get a massage. There’s certain things where one is enough and then there’s certain things, and for us, a lot of it is work-related things, where you can do five of them in the time that it would take you to maybe do two and you realize that you can just get so much more done. And then with that comes more time later on in your schedule, like more freedom, more flexibility. And that is especially for us, you know, I have two young kids, Emma’s about to have a baby. This is a time in our lives when we need that freedom and flexibility because little kids go to the doctor and things like that all the time. They have sick days from school, things like that all the time. So flexibility is very important to us right now. And yeah, this is how we achieve it. And we’ve continued growing. Like, I think it’s really cool. We were able to grow our podcast during the time of covid. We were able to grow A Beautiful Mess last year during the time of covid — not like the biggest growth year we’ve ever had, but we were up against serious obstacles. So anyway, I think batch working is…it’s so essential and I hope everyone tries that we’re going to try to teach you as many of our little strategies as we can in this episode. And then please try and please report back on how it changed your life, because I really think it will. All right. Let’s take a quick sponsor break.

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Emma: Well, first tip for me. So there’s to me kind of two main mindsets that I had to get myself out of before I could really take advantage of all the benefits of batch working. And this could be different for everyone. These were just the two things that I had to get over. And one of them you kind of already touched on, Elsie, is I think sometimes we have this idea that it’s less authentic or it’s not as real to batch work something. And this happens with content creation. So blogging, posting to your Instagram, whatever, if that happens to be a part of your career like it is for us. But it can also happen with other things, like I know some people who are very…they don’t want to do meal planning. They don’t want to like do like prepping all meal stuff on Sundays because they feel like what if I feel like eating something different on Thursday? And I’m like, well, I understand what you’re saying. But I also think if this is a problem that you keep running into over and over again, this still might be an area you might try the back working and you can always adjust a little bit as you go, you know, so kind of changing your mindset on it instead of viewing it as a trap, viewing it as an opportunity for more freedom because that’s really what it is. So there’s that.

Elsie: Yeah.

Emma: And then the other mindset thing that I had to get out of is, Elsie and I are small business owners, as we’ve mentioned. And it’s not just our blog. We also used to own a store and we’ve done lots of other things in our career and we’re small business owners and so anyone else who owns their own business knows you end up doing a lot of different things, and especially when you’re starting out, because usually you can’t afford a lot of help at first. So you’re just doing a lot of different things as best you can. And so what it feels like is just putting out fires all the time. So for me, I had a big mental block about spending a lot of time planning and also spending a lot of time reflecting on what was working so that I could do better planning. I just didn’t want to take the time to do that. I felt like that was a waste of my time or that that would be me, like not doing work. That’s me just sitting around and not even doing work or like I just had so many fires to put out all the time. I just was like, that’s all I can do. I can’t I can’t get ahead. I can only maintain. And that was a mental block that I needed to get past. Because if you really want to do batch working and you want the freedom and the benefits that it brings, you have to make space for a lot of planning and also for reflecting on the past work that you did and seeing how it could improve, seeing what worked best, seeing what isn’t working, and so taking the time to do all that forecasting and planning and analyzing can sometimes feel like not real work, but it’s actually really important and the foundation of all of it.

Elsie: Yeah, I think that the thing that’s different is that if you’re used to having in a given workday, the feeling of starting and then finishing something in that day, you might not be able to have that feeling anymore. It’s kind of the opposite of a balanced schedule. It’s a very unbalanced schedule to spend your whole…like recently, you know, to prep for this day. We spent a whole day just writing podcast outlines, which I will tell you is not my favorite kind of day. It’s just not. But we wouldn’t be able to work ahead and then have, you know, eventually weeks where we don’t need to record if we didn’t do that. And planning for blog posts is like that as well. It can feel like you’re spending so much time just thinking about working before you actually start working, but I’ve learned that if you don’t put the time into like a really quality plan, the rest of it will all fall apart. So I think having a great plan in the beginning is actually the most important part of doing quality work, no matter what type of work we’re talking about, photography, writing, anything.

Emma: I agree.

Elsie: Yes. So you’ll have…when you start batch working, it’s a very focused schedule. You need to learn to focus. Like so many times I try to Face Time Emma and we’re big Face-Timers. We Face Time pretty much every day and she’ll be like, I’m doing recipes today. I have really good lighting. So basically I just can’t talk to you today. And that’s fine.

Emma: Yeah. (laughs)

Elsie: Like everyone in your life will understand, I think it’s important to learn for your employees to learn how, like, you know, that they don’t need you right then every single time. You know? I think it’s really, really important. So I’ve shared some examples about how I batch work in A Beautiful Mess like planning. I usually plan about two or three months of content at a time. Recently I planned my whole year of remodeling and it’s down to like when we’re going to do the post, when I’m going to complete the rooms, when I’m in a photograph `the rooms, what the budget is for the rooms, everything is planned, which feels really good. But it took a lot of time to do that and it felt like I was working on things that I didn’t need to work on yet. But it’ll free me up later. And it’ll also allow me to work ahead, because sometimes when you get ahead, you can get bottlenecked when you don’t know what’s the next priority. But when you’ve done all that planning in advance, you always know the next priority. So it can like…

Emma: Yep.

Elsie: …keep you moving faster. And in my personal life, I batch work basically everything I can. I’m definitely a grocery shop once a week person and like a big haul once a month, like if I go to Trader Joe’s it’s like a carful because I want it to last for a while. You know, with the freezer stuff, I buy all my Christmas presents usually in about one day every year, which I know is like very quick. But I feel like if I don’t — if I spread it out, like I spread it out with my kids and then I buy the whole rest of the family in one day and with my kids, guess what? I forget things that I bought them because it’s like it’s easier like when you buy something in August and something in September and two things in October, then it’s easy to have like a bunch of gifts everywhere and you don’t remember what they all are. So I think batch working can create a lot of efficiency for you too, and reduce waste. Like I remember when I was in high school and I was like staying over at one of my friend’s house and I learned that their mom went grocery shopping every day on their way home from work. And I was just like mind blown by that, you know, and it was just like how she did it and how she liked it. And maybe in some way it was like a comfort to her or a way to, like, reset herself at the end of her workday. But for me, it would be a nightmare to do it that way. I wanted to share a couple of reasons why having a batch working schedule can actually be way more productive than a balanced schedule where you do a lot of different things in one day. So especially when creating content, I think that seeing…being zoomed out and having that big view of what you’re covering is really helpful. Like if I write five weeks of blog posts and I do each of them in that week, I might kind of cover the same topic several times and not even notice it, if that makes sense. But if I’m doing all five weeks at once, I will be more careful to do a variety of different topics. And I’ll probably be covering off on more than one of our goals, which is really important and really helpful. Another thing is just that focused energy. So I learned recently in that The Twelve Week Year book that we loved that multitasking decreases productivity, which I had never heard that before. I was always very proud of being a multitasker and I can multitask a lot. Some people just naturally can, but it definitely decreases my productivity. And once someone put a label on that for me, like a stat, (laughs) I felt like I really got it. You know, that it’s not the kind of thing I want to do unless I’m doing something that’s just for fun, like just a hobby. It’s not something I want to do to be efficient in my work. Let’s take a quick break for our sponsors.

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Elsie: Making therapy a regular part of my life has been meaningful and helpful to me. We’re advocates for therapy and this week sponsor Better Help provides a great service providing access to professional counselors. It’s not a crisis line. It’s not self-help. It’s professional counseling done securely online. Better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist. And you can start communicating in under 48 hours, visit their website and read their testimonials that are posted there daily. Financial aid is also available. Visit betterhelp.com/abeautifulmess. That’s better h-e-l-p and join the over one million people who have taken charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional ABM listeners will get ten percent off your first month at betterhelp.com/abeautifulmess.

Another thing that’s this one’s kind of a funny side effect. But OK, so when I started batch working, which was about two years ago now for our blog posts, at very first people were sort of like noticing the batching and calling it out. Like one time someone was like, it looks here like you photographed a recipe and a post about a shelf and a post about your garden boxes all in one day, (laughs) which is true. So I like basically, I learned to hide it. And I think that learning to hide it actually like created more variety too, because when I do my shoots, I’ll change clothes like four to ten times in a day and where I wouldn’t have done that before. And if I were shooting in real time, I often wear the same clothes over and over, you know, like I definitely probably would have accidentally worn, you know, the same thing on two different weeks. But I don’t know…when you do batch working and you’re trying to, like, compensate for it, then you end up with this like natural like big variety of different things because everything’s planned and everything’s intentional. So anyway, that was just a few of the things that I learned that have been really helpful. I would never go back. And my advice, if you want to try it for the first time, is just take one of your tasks, whatever is your main work task, and divide it into three different focus days and just try it like see how much more you can get done dividing up the planning and the execution and then the finishing work.

Emma: Let’s do our guilty pleasure treasure segment. OK, I’m always ready for this one because, you know, I just want to talk about shopping. So my guilty pleasure. This is actually not I’m not guilty about this at all. I’m feeling very high on it. So, you know, I’m like obsessed about my dream closet and probably going to be the best part of my 2021 every day I’m thankful in my heart for this closet. So one of the things I did was a shelf of headbands and so I got these headband organizers actually started using them in my last house and I will link to them in the show notes. They’re kind of like a plastic cylinder. And then you can open up the tops. You can store things inside of it, too, if you want to. But I don’t like to do that because I don’t like any kind of hidden stuff. Like I want everything to be, like, easy to see unless I’m trying to hide it. But that’s what cabinets are for, right. So anyway, I think I have four or five of them, which is a lot of headbands. I know, but it was one of my shopping therapies of 2020 like, how I made it through was buying stuff on Etsy and you know, just like collecting little cute things. So anyway — loving the headband trend and I got these organizers and now they’re all like in a row I can see them all at the same time and it’s right by my clothes. So that’s my guilty pleasure. But I’m not guilty because I love it. Woo! What’s yours?

Emma: Yeah, (laughs) mine is kind of dorky, I feel like all my guilty pleasure treasures are just like bordering into the dorky, but that’s OK. I got this heated massage pillow for Christmas it was actually a present from Trey and it’s you can put it in your car, which I have not done because I don’t know about that, but I use it in my office chair and when I’m watching TV at night and it’s very similar to if you go get your nails done and they have a massage chair, it feels like that where it’s kind of like metal balls that are inside fabric and they press on your back and then it heats up. And so, yeah, it’s it looks like a little alien face and I use it all the time. I love it. It makes kind of a like buzzing sound though. So I try to remember to turn it off if I have a Zoom meeting or something because I don’t want anyone to know that I’m just giving myself a little back massage at the same time!

Elsie: Oh my gosh, please wear that in our Monday meeting.

Emma: It’s been great because my back has been real sore. So yeah.

Elsie: Yeah that is an awesome gift. OK, we’ll link to it. So do you just use it on the couch mainly? Like where do you usually use it when you’re sitting and how do you position yourself?

Emma: Yeah, I mainly use it on the couch or my office chair and it kind of can do like your lower back or your middle back or your like shoulder blades. It can’t do all those areas at once. It’s, you know, so I’ll kind of put a pillow in the area where it’s not so that I don’t feel like I’m like leaning back or leaning forwards. So, yeah, it takes a little finagling. But…it’s really nice!

Elsie: I miss the pedicure massage chair. I miss it so much. It’s one of my things from the before times that I can’t wait — mark my words. As soon as I have my second vaccine dose I am going back to the nail salon and I’m going to get some claws. It’s going to be amazing.

Emma: I like it. Do it.

Elsie: Thank you so much for listening to our podcast and supporting us. If you haven’t left us a review, we would really appreciate it, especially if it’s a nice one. We also love getting your questions and topic requests. Our email is podcast@abeautifulmess.com. We love receiving those every week. And if you try out batch working after listening to this, we would love to hear if it helps your life. It’s a subject we’re so passionate about and we hope that it’ll help you out too. So have a good week, Bye

Emma: Bye!

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What’s in the course?

Lesson 1: What is my blog? Defining and refining your purpose.

Lesson 2: Creating Blog Posts – Never get stuck again.

Lesson 3: Content is Queen – Amplify your blog content.

Lesson 4: Design & User Experience – Think like a blog reader and plan like a pro.

Lesson 5: Monetizing Your Content

Lesson 6: Sponsorships & Collaborations

Bonus: How to Start a WordPress Blog

Bonus: How I Shoot Flat Lays

Bonus: Our Affiliate Marketing Guide

Bonus: The A Beautiful Mess Media Kit & How to Make Your Own

Sounds great. What does the course cost?

Blog Essentials = $294 or four payments of $73.50 — but for a very limited time (this week!), the course will be 50% off to celebrate its launch, making it $147, or 4 payments of $36.75 with AfterPay.

Feedback from students:

“Emma speaks from years of blog experience […] if you’re thinking of starting a blog or feeling a little blog jaded then Emma’s course may just give you the boost you need.” — Jo S.

“This course was more of a how-to guide on “so, you started a blog, here is how you actually can make a living off it,” which I really love and have been looking for.” — Jennifer H.

If you have ever wanted to start a blog, or started but didn’t see the success you wanted, I hope you will check out Blog Essentials. And if you know someone who might be needing a little boost in their blogging career, it truly would mean a lot to me if you shared the course with them. Thank you in advance! -Emma

We hear these questions all the time. But what’s CRAZY to me is that we’ve been hearing these exact same questions for more than five years! In this post, I’ll share the pros and cons of starting a blog (or new social media account—they are quite similar) in 2020.

Let’s start with the downsides. First, I want to tackle some commonly said “Cons”:

CONS:
-It’s too late to start a blog.
Sure, it would have been BETTER to start sooner. Unfortunately, this is true with any business venture and really any large goal in life. There are no time machines. If you want something, your only option is to start today.

But even more than that, I think people assume that blogging was a trend that’s now over, or there are no ways to monetize a blog anymore and these are both so untrue.

-It’s more competitive.
Eh … I disagree. I would argue that there are actually less people trying to make a career (or side gig) from blogging than there were five years ago.

Lots of people have dropped out. And many more have opted to solely work on their social media channels (which I’m not saying there is anything wrong with, but my point is that they aren’t blogging).

-If you’re not a top blogger, you can’t make money.
I disagree with this 100%. In fact, I have seen firsthand that there are many jobs we can’t get because our blog is “too big.”

Plus many opportunities are not just about size, they are about what you bring the project, or what your audience values from hearing from you specifically.

-It’s too much work.
Ding-ding-ding! This one is mostly true. Let me say it louder for our friends in the back … blogging is probably WAY more work than you think it will be.

It’s also more involved and generally more expensive to produce than social media. So if you want to take the easiest possible path, blogging probably is not it. I’ll go more into this below!

-Blogging has been replaced by social media.
Not true. Although, sure, there are some brands who allocate more budget for social campaigns, there are also lot of brands who know that the lifespan of a blog post is much longer than social media, thanks to Google searches and Pinterest.

A high quality blog post can continue earning views for years to come. Also blogging often offers more real estate, meaning there is more room for multiple photos, videos, text, and links all in one place that isn’t going to disappear quickly.

A blog post is simply less disposable than social media. (Again, not a dis to social media. It’s just different!)

Next, here are some “Pros” that a lot of people don’t think about.

PROS:
-It’s easier to get sponsors than ever before. This is true! When we first started blogging and our stats were skyrocketing, it was still so difficult for us to make a basic income on our work.

Ten years later, things have REALLY changed. Major brands have good sized budgets set aside specifically for bloggers.

-Blogging income is more steady than social media.
I touched on this above, but it’s true that the time and effort you put into blogging can pay off more and for much longer. This is in part because, again, a blog post is less disposable than social media, so you can often monetize your content in different ways.

For bloggers who do rank high in Google searches, they have essentially created passive income for themselves in that those posts they may have written years ago will still earn them money today.

-Your blog is truly yours. Unlike social media platforms, which could be sold, deleted or changed without your consent, your website it truly your online real estate where you have much more control and choice.

This a huge pro and why I recommend every online presence have a website (and email list!!!!!!) even if you don’t choose to update it as frequently as a blogger would.

When friends ask me for advice on whether they should start a blog, here’s what I tell them.

If you are someone who loves to take photos, write, and share like you may already be doing on a social media platform, a blog can be a great way for you to expand on that and make more money, or more steady money.

The downside is that it can take several years to establish a blog.

I’m sure there are case studies of a few people who have done it faster, but my professional opinion is that it’s not worth it to start a blog unless you are committed to posting on it 2-3 times per week for at least two years before you start making consistent money (from CPM ads or sponsor offers).

I realize how deflating that time commitment can sound, but it’s realistic.

In two to three years, you can gain a lot of skill both in photography and writing, you can carve yourself a unique place in your industry and you can learn through using affiliate links what your audience will buy from you. I’m not saying you can’t get sponsors sooner—great for you if you can!

But if that time commitment doesn’t sound worth it to you, you probably will end up quitting anyway. So ask yourself: Am I willing to write 200+ blog posts before seeing a return on my investment? I would hate to overpromise, as I’ve sometimes seen others do.

Blogging as a career path is not an overnight make-money-quick option, but it is an AMAZING opportunity if you’re willing to put some foundational work in.

If you’re willing to make the commitment, there are so many ways to earn money as a blogger. And most of these revenue streams will grow with you.

You can have CPM-based ads (like we have in our sidebars and throughout our posts), you can use affiliate links, and you can work with sponsors. You can also create a signature product (physical or digital in nature) or collaborate on a licensed product line. Through the years we’ve done all these things!

Starting a blog and doing it for fun for several years was one of the best choices of my life. I didn’t set out to become “a blogger” because I didn’t even know that was possible.

But I found my dream job through writing daily on the internet about the things I loved, and I am forever grateful for that.

In this post, I’m definitely simplifying what it means to be a blogger, but if I write a 4000+ word post, no one will read it. If you’ve been considering starting a blog, this will help you decide whether or not it’s worth it for YOU—only you can decide that.

But if your question is, “Is blogging dead in 2020?” the answer is most definitely a NO.  

I’m happy to answer your questions in the comments! xx- Elsie

Hi there! I work with Elsie, Emma and the team to manage our sponsorship program at A Beautiful Mess—which also means I get to work with our great brand partners, which I love.

Before joining the ABM team, I worked at an advertising agency in Springfield, Missouri that gave me some great insights into how agencies work, which helps in my current role quite a bit. Sponsorships can be a scary word to use when talking about creating content, a lot of people are either scared of it or apprehensive of how people will respond to hearing something’s sponsored.

This might make me sound crazy, but when I see sponsored content, one of the first things I think of is how cool is it that this brand has made a decision to support small businesses and a lot of small media companies (that’s us, bloggers!!).

Julie Blanner gave an amazing session at Haven last year about that mental shift and how companies are not only ran by amazing girl bosses, but they rely on sponsored content as a primary revenue source.

Part of why I wanted to share tips on how to work with brands is to be transparent so readers know how and why we do it, and why we appreciate it SO much when you are excited about it too.

The overwhelming majority of the content we create at ABM is done at our own expense so that we can share it freely, which the team loves to do. It’s because of our amazing brand partners that we’re able to support our business and continue to create that free content.

So, although it’s important to pick authentic fits (spoiler alert: that’s one of the tips below), sponsored content is something to be proud of and excited about. Below are three tips I wanted to share about finding, working with, and growing sponsorships.

1. Know your worth
Your content is worth something. It’s one of a kind and unique. Knowing your worth is the first step to a positive relationship with brands. All brands have marketing budgets and are looking for ways to expand their reach. You can take a look at this post as an example on how ABM structured their first sponsorship program.

We’ve grown and adjusted since then as channels have grown, platforms diversified, and to respond overall to the growth of influencer marketing, but as a baseline or starting point, this formula is fantastic.

Trey actually had my position before me and I will forever be grateful to him for how he started our sponsorship program! Regardless of your pageviews, followers, or impressions (although those are important), your content is worth something.

Your engagement may be through the roof, you might have an audience that will buy anything you recommend … no matter what it is, know what unique value you can bring to a brand and don’t be afraid to tell them! You could be exactly what they’re looking for.

2. Pick authentic fits
Sometimes we get offers from brands that we can’t take. I’m not saying “Oh, look at the offers we get,” by any means. What I mean by that is we’ve established guidelines around what types of brands we will and won’t work with. One example is around our clean beauty guidelines.

As a company, we’ve decided to make our best effort to only buy, support or promote clean beauty brands. Are we perfect? Of course not. We’re always learning and growing. But, with that in mind, we won’t accept a partnership from a beauty brand that has artificial fragrance in its ingredient list. Two rules of thumb we have for picking sponsors are: Is it a brand we already use in our homes?

Or are we interested in this product/brand even if we haven’t tried them yet? Using those two as guidelines allows us to explore new and cool things that we may share with our readers (usually we’ll ask for a sample or trial period before kicking off the campaign or fully executing a contract) or that we know we actually use or would or have bought on a regular basis.

It’s also important from a brand standpoint (and this ties into my third tip) that brands love it when you’re excited about their products. If you are genuinely a fan and think it would resonate with your audience, it’s a win-win-win.

If it’s not something you would normally promote, the brand might get beautiful content out of it, but you could lose your reputation with your audience and the brand could see the disappointing engagement and feel taken advantage of, too.

3. It’s all about relationships
One of the biggest things (that I think is easy to forget when working with brands) is that behind the other computer you’re emailing a person. Maybe someone whose followed your blog for a long time, or just really thinks your content resonates with their campaign.

They’re typically excited about the partnership and to see what ideas you have to share their product! By remembering we’re all people working together for a common goal, sharing great content is not as intimidating. My biggest advice on this piece is to get everyone on the same page upfront.

Have a kickoff call where you talk about the content idea and the expectations around how the brand will be integrated. That way, there are hopefully no surprises when it comes to execution and everyone stays excited and proud of the end result.

If expectations are managed from the beginning, it goes a long way in building and maintaining great relationships and even friendships with the brands for which you’re working on content.

Hope this helps you either in working with your sponsor partners or to understand a bit of what goes on behind the scenes for bloggers who do!

We also recognize more people are looking for ways to earn a living or side income online through blogging or other social media platforms, so we wanted to offer up some tips that could hopefully be helpful.

Thanks for reading! -Claire

I’m here today to talk about how we still LOVE blogging after 12 years. In that span of time we’ve seen the blogging world change and grow and then change some more. Many of my favorite blogs for years past made the decision to stop blogging or move on. It’s definitely been a topic of conversation in our close circle of blog friends—”What is your end goal? What is your exit strategy?” Emma and I even talked about this as recently as two days ago.

What’s crazy to me is that I through all the highs and lows, I truly still love blogging just for fun. I even have a family blog on the side that I do just for fun. Emma and I have had hundreds of conversations over the years about which types of posts we enjoy, which type we dread, what’s easier or more difficult, expensive, or hard on our marriages (lol, anything where you have to receive a ton of boxes). Those factors change over time. We’ve also changed the type of posts we write. Where I used to feel happiest sharing a craft tutorial or a wishlist type of roundup, I am currently most inspired by posts like this where I just get to talk—and also big room tours because they keep me challenged and growing. Emma has her own list!

We’ve said over and over that even if we decide at some point to stop blogging professionally, we would still enjoy blogging for fun. I guess that’s the best you can hope for in a career really. Right?

Here are a few keys to how and why I still enjoy blogging after 12 years:

1. I allow myself room to change. 
I am an enneagram 7 and I have often lost interest in things I was once obsessed with. That’s part of why I’m so surprised I never get tired of blogging, and I’m starting to think I never will. I’m probably about 70% a different person than I was at age 24 when I started this blog. I’ve changed, my life has changed, my hobbies have changed. Almost everything is different.

Leaving room to change and grow, and having a diverse lineup of content is the reason I’ve been able to stay interested all this time! I will admit I get envious of bloggers who do just one thing really well— interiors, food … whatever it may be. But for me, having the option to jump around and try different categories has been so helpful!

2. I am not afraid to fail and move on. 

We fail all the time, people just don’t notice. People see the successes but they don’t see the failures. We’re currently winding things up with our beauty brand Oui Fresh—we’re going to transition it to be JUST the beauty box this fall. We kind of failed. It wasn’t horrible, but it certainly wasn’t growing and thriving like a lot of other parts of our business, so we’re moving on.

Early on in the blog we had a vintage store—I actually had two storefronts if you dig through our archives long enough. They were so cute and fun, but they failed financially. I still miss decorating those store windows, but we moved on.

When I was 27, I spent all my money making demos for a toy line. I got pretty far along and even presented it in person to one of the biggest toy companies in the world, but it didn’t work out. It could have changed my life, but it didn’t happen. Just a few years later, we made our first app and it did change my life and our business path forever. You remember the successes, you don’t remember the heartbreaks.

Failure is not a big deal to me. If we let our fear of failure control us, we wouldn’t be nearly as successful as we are today. You win some, you lose some!

3. I blog about my changing interests. 

To be fair, I don’t blog about all my interests. I do keep some things just for fun, but in the early days of this blog I pretty much shared everything I was interested in, working on, watching, listening to or trying out.

I like that I CAN blog about whatever I am interested in—I mean, through the years I’ve blogged about so many random things. Whole 30, wallpaper, essential oils, our adoptions, KonMari … haha. At face value it doesn’t make sense to combine all those topics on one blog. But it works because they’re all things I was passionate about at some point.

In other words, keeping it fresh!

4. We found our boundaries. 

There are so many things we never talk about on the blog—90% of it you probably don’t even notice. Setting up healthy boundaries is key, but each person has to do the work fo figure out their own boundaries. Early on I used to think that if someone else didn’t do this or that (or did), it meant that was right or wrong. Definitely not. My sister and I even have different tolerances for what we feel comfortable sharing and how often. Each person has to figure out their own healthy space and guard it.

Now that I’m older (and wiser!), I almost never judge another blogger’s choices or boundaries because I recognize that THEY are the only ones who have to live with their choices, and I live with mine. There’s no rule book for this.

5. I consider my blog readers my friends.

Although it may sound cheesy, I do have the occasion fairly often to meet one of you, whether in the airport or the aisle of Target or at a blogger event. Without fail, these experiences inspire me and remind me that I’m writing this blog for real people—people who I have a LOT in common with. It’s the family you choose, as they say.

Whether you’re a brand new reader or someone who has been here all 12 years, thank you for reading!!!! We appreciate it and love doing this! I can honestly see myself blogging when I am my mom’s age, which makes me so happy.

Cheers to 20 more years! For real. xx- Elsie

Want more tips on blogging? Check out Emma’s post Is Blogging Dead?

I’m SO excited to share today’s post with you! Last year, I implemented some new batch working habits and it changed my work days dramatically. The results were immediate and shocking and in my 14+ years of blogging, I have felt my most productive ever!

I listened to Jenna Kutcher’s podcast on batch working (which is great, but this episode is especially helpful!). I have heard about batch working for years, but never fully committed to trying it. One of the things Jenna talked about in her episode was how she prepared ahead for her maternity leave, which was something I really wanted to do.

The last time I took maternity leave, I only left a couple blog posts in the drafts, but I got lucky because it was over the holidays when we typically take a little time off anyway. But this time I wanted to stay present in the blog content and leave a bigger buffer so my co-workers didn’t feel my absence as much.

So I tried it, and I LOVED it. Here’s a bit about my experience!

First of all, I had a goal to write 20 blog posts ahead of time that would go up during my maternity leave. I figured it would take me several months of adding an extra post or two per week to get this done.

But I decided to plan all the posts ahead of time. It took a lot of time (a whole eight-hour workday) to get 20 ideas I was excited to write about, and that I was already prepared (or mostly prepared) to shoot.

So, the first phase of the batch work was the planning.

Then in my next shoot (I typically do two shoots a month with my photographer and we shoot 80-90% of my blog posts in these two days), I was in TOTAL shock when we were able to shoot an extra 10 blog posts in one day (in addition to what I already needed for the coming month).

We did it again in my next shoot the following week. And just like that, all my maternity leave posts were shot.

It actually took more time to plan all the posts than it did to shoot them.

Then I spent about two days writing the posts (which I already had outlines for from my planning day). It’s hard to say exactly how much time since I was also working on my regular posts, but I wrote around 20 posts in two days, which has NEVER happened before in all our years of blogging.

This experience made me realize A. How much I still LOVE blogging and B. How much I can accomplish in just a few days if I spend more time upfront planning. The only really big difference was the planning time—I would normally never spend a whole workday planning, but now I will forever schedule at least one FULL planning day per month since I see what a huge productivity boost it created.

I think in the past I had an unfair bias that if I worked in bulk the quality would be lower, but as I did this I realized that the quality was just as good, if not better. I had been getting in my own way for so long by only working on one or a few blog posts at a time.

After this experience I felt so powerful—like, unstoppable!

I went through my schedule and started to find everything I could batch together. I quickly felt like I had more time in my workdays and that I was consistently finishing my work on time or early, which has always been a struggle for me.

If you’re someone who struggles with feeling overwhelmed or is easily distracted, I cannot recommend this method enough. It may not work for everyone’s job, but there are still probably lots of parts of your life where you can try it.

Batch working totally changed my life! I feel so much more confident in what I can accomplish. My only regret is that I didn’t start doing this 10 years ago!!! But I’ll definitely be doing it for the next 10.

xx – Elsie

In many ways, I feel like I grew up on this blog. I was 24 years old when I started A Beautiful Mess and Emma was still in college. I fell in love, got married, talked my sister into joining my sinking business (which she then rescued). I made mistakes—I had seasons of being an oversharer and seasons where I only showed an overpolished side of my life. I learned, I grew.

And btw, if you want to see a TON of old photos and links, we put together a huge post celebrating 10 years of blogging last year. So check that out!

It’s weird to me now that we became bloggers in that perfect intersection of time just after people really started to use the internet every day and just before social media became a thing.

I started this blog when I didn’t know it could become a career. I did it for fun. And I’m often thankful I had a chance to jump into it with zero expectations. My sister and I used this space to start a business (ultimately three businesses, which now stemmed from our small team). We spent all our savings to make an app, we became adults with health insurance and retirement funds. We really have grown up here.

But the craziest part of all of it is that my favorite parts of blogging are still the same as they were 11 years ago. I like sharing what I’m most excited about in life. I like hearing your television show suggestions in the comments—lol. I love making friends with readers all over the world. I still get so happy when someone comes to say hello to us in Target or at a restaurant. It still surprises me every time.

Here are some funny photos (some are embarrassing) to celebrate 11 years! Because you don’t deserve to make a career out of blogging if you can’t make fun of yourself, right?

Elsie in 2007. Ugh, so embarrassing, but also too funny not to post.

Emma in 2007. Visionary.

Falling in love with Jeremy in 2008.

One of my first e-courses with Rachel in 2009.

My studio in 2009. I used to stay up all night trying to make paintings to pay my bills. I’m forever grateful for that season of life.

One of my first outfit photos in 2010. Also note three vintage collections in one photo!

Can you believe I’ve been writing “10 Things I Love Sunday” for 10 years?!

(also, holy Photoshop—haha)

My wedding in 2011.

Emma’s wedding in 2013.

If you’ve been reading for 11 years or two years or two months … thank you. We love what we do and in the past one or two years I have started to feel some of that old-school nostalgia coming back. I am really excited about where the blog world is going lately. It feels really good to me and I still read blogs every morning with a cup of coffee.

I can’t help but wonder what the next 11 years will bring. I never imagined I would still be writing this blog after all these years, but now I can’t imagine ever stopping. Emma and I are pretty sure we’re destined to become old lady bloggers. Honestly, that sounds pretty fun.

Love you! Elsie