Key Strategies for Taking Your Blog Full-Time with Alexandra Shytsman from The New Baguette

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Emily Walker Hey, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming Alexandra from the Food blog, the New Baguette. In this podcast episode, Alexandra shares the ins and outs of becoming a full-time food creator and her reflections on what she might have done differently to meet her goals more quickly. If she had the chance to start over. Alexandra breaks down the strategies and decisions that have really moved the needle for her business over the years. She talks about projecting expenses and investing in courses and audits and the importance of surrounding herself with a community of fellow food creators. She also speaks more about the importance of understanding your why as an entrepreneur and how clarifying the driving purpose behind your business can really help provide clarity and direction and help to ensure that your time and efforts are aligned with your core goals.

Alexandra also chats more about how she overcame the fear of taking her blog full-time and how she reduced her freelance work and decided to commit to her site. And she has some really great advice for other food creators who are looking to make the leap into taking their site full-time. Alexandra has a really thoughtful approach to growing and building a business as she has taken the slow and steady route to building a full-time business for herself. It’s a really lovely interview. I know you’ll enjoy it, and I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Alex, welcome to the podcast.

Alexandra Shytsman Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here. Probably like everyone else who listens to this podcast, I learned most of what I know about blogging from this podcast, so it’s really fun to be on it. That’s

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome.

Alexandra Shytsman Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: That makes me so happy. One of the things that’s a great joy for me is having done this as long as we’ve done it, you get to connect with people who have use this quote sometimes and you’d maybe know because you listen to the podcast where people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade. We’ve been doing it long enough where we can have some of those conversations with people who have been working on their online business on their site for 7, 8, 9 years, and a lot of times we’ve in the podcast form been a part of that journey in a really small way. So it’s fun for me to hear that fun to interview people who know the podcast and are familiar with it, and it’s an honor to have you on. So we’re going to talk about your story and we’re also going to talk about the things that you’ve learned in making the transition and really successfully working on your site full time.

2023, you won IACP Food Blog of the Year. You’re working on your site full time, you have a lot of success with it, and we’re going to pull out some of the bits and pieces of what you’ve learned along the way that has helped you get to that point. One of the things we often do at the end of the podcast is we ask this question, Hey, if you were to go back and do it again, what would you do different? What would you change? But we’re actually going to lead with that because as we were trading notes back and forth and you’re sharing some ideas, it’s one of the things that you said was, I have some reflections on what I would’ve done differently. And I think the reflections that you have are something that people are interested in hearing about and also constantly trying to balance and figure out. So rewind the tape back to that point and look at or let us know what you would’ve done differently, the things that you would’ve changed at the start of your journey after having been doing it for a while now.

Alexandra Shytsman So I think that the biggest kind of mistake looking back, and I want to use that word sort of lightly, obviously, we didn’t know then what we know now, and we did the best we had with the information we had at the time, but I think one of the sort of things that I would like I could redo is just focusing more on the thing I set out to do, which is building a recipe website. And at the time, the last full-time job I had somewhere else was eight years ago. So

Bjork Ostrom: You’ve been doing this full-time for eight years.

Alexandra Shytsman So I’ve been blogging and freelancing and recipe development, writing and photography for the past eight years. So

At the time, my dream was like, I’m going to quit my job and I’m going to build a recipe site like Pinch of Yum. And at the time, I just felt like my focus was really diluted, and I was also kind of when you’re starting out and also when you have to have a full-time salary again, right? Money is obviously a consideration here. I was kind of like, I’m just going to do everything. I’m just going to say yes to everything that anyone asked me to do. And so at that time, I was getting so many inbound requests for all different kinds of things like teaching and recipe development, whatever. And it was so great that I had contacts in the food industry and people who wanted to work with me, but at the same time, it really set me back with the actual growth of my sight because in the beginning I was like, oh, this maybe it’ll take me six months or 12 months or two years. But it really took me so much longer, and I think it’s because my focus was so diluted.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say it, what do you mean? It took me so much longer. It took you so much longer to get to a point where your site was earning a substantial income. Is that kind of what you’re getting at? Because you had these other things that were maybe a little bit more trading time for money, which isn’t bad, it’s just in your case, it’s not what you were setting out to do. Is that what you’re getting at?

Alexandra Shytsman Exactly. Yeah. So growing site traffic, getting accepted to an ad network, actually paying my bills with ad revenue, those were my goals, and those things took me so long to get to. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and it’s hard because in that early stage it’s enticing because you do work and you get money, and there’s a certain level of comfort in that because there’s not as much risk. But when you do get to the point where your site is earning income, you realize, man, this is a really great type of business where it’s not passive. You’re always having to work on it, you’re having to pay attention to it, you’re having to feed the fire, but it’s different than showing up and working for two hours and then getting paid a set amount. Again, it’s not, neither one is good nor bad. It’s just a question of what is your desire in terms of what your work looks like? And for some people, the desire is it feels really good for me to show up and to know how much I’m going to get paid to have a set schedule. There’s some levels of risk with that, but you also are reducing risk. But in your case, what you’re saying is that was really your desire, your hope, your goal was to build your site up. So what did it take for you to get to the point where you did start to dedicate more time to your site and stop or reduce the amount of freelancing you’re doing? Because I think for some people they might have that desire, but it’s hard when you get paid a certain amount to not get paid that amount and then work on something where you don’t know if you’re going to get paid with the potential outcome of that being something. But there also might be the outcome where it doesn’t actually turn into something. So how did you navigate that and feel confident dedicating some of your precious time to working on something that maybe wasn’t at the time creating income?

Alexandra Shytsman So I think getting accepted to an ad network. So I got accepted to Mediavine, I think in that first couple of months of covid when people were really searching for recipes a lot. So my site did experience some growth in that time. And when I actually started to monetize via ad revenue, and I saw those numbers going up a little bit every month. At first, you’re $300 and then you’re $500. And then I feel like when I got to the thousand dollars in a month, I was like, oh, I can pretty put much pay my rent. And I live in New York City, so everything is very expensive here, so I need probably more money than people in more lived in other states, lived

Bjork Ostrom: Out of state Minnesota.

Alexandra Shytsman And when I first saw that, I was like, okay, if I just continue investing, if I invest a little bit more every time, I will get slightly more outcome every time. And sort of putting the faith into that system, that was really key. And then also just being really honest with myself, looking back at the year or looking at my profit and loss statement, how much if I’m really doing this right and if I’m really giving up all the benefits that come with a full-time job for this. And I’m really looking back at the progress that I’ve made in a year, and I’m really seeing that most of my time is going to these freelance projects and not the actual business I set out to build. I just had to be really honest with myself, do I really need to be doing this? Do I really need to be doing this?

And just cutting things out as much as possible. And also, I do have to say one of the things I think I did well in the beginning of my journey when I still was working a full-time job is I saved money specifically for the purpose that I knew I would not have a full-time income for some time. And I guess I’m okay with money. I’m okay with just planning for the future, and I knew that I needed a certain amount to live on for six months in New York knowing what my fixed expenses are. And that was really helpful too. So I know not everybody’s able to do that, but if you are able to do that to give yourself some cushion for those first few months, that’s a great strategy.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I love that because you said not everybody’s able to do that for sure, but also we have a lot of options. You can work more and earn more. Maybe it’s a side hustle. Maybe you’re doing some of that trading time for money in order to build up that reserve. Or you can also, if it’s not creating more money, it’s like spending less money. How do you cut and doing that in service of building runway, which is what you did. And if you are a startup and you go and raise venture capital, you might get in your angel round that first round of investment, maybe you’ll get a hundred thousand dollars and that buys you a certain amount of runway. Your runway is dependent on, number one, how much are you spending every month? And number two, how much are you making every month? And once you hit that point where you are making as much as your spending, your runway becomes infinite. And

So it’s great to be able to, when you’re trying to bridge that gap when you are in a season where your expenses are more than your revenue, to have runway to help fill that in between, to fill the gap in the in-between until you get that infinite is a really wonderful thing. And I think most people have the ability to move the levers one way or the other. And so a challenge to people who are thinking of that, to have that mindset around, if I do want to do this, either try and get to that point of infinite runway before making the change or be really clearly defined on how much runway you have. So when you need to shift and go back and get a W2 job or do some more freelance or sell something like whatever it might

Alexandra Shytsman Be, work in a coffee shop on the weekend. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And so one of the things that you mentioned that I think is important in pointing out is your p and l, so your profit and loss. And so for those who aren’t in the accounting world, you can look at a p and l for any amount of time. It could be a month. You could say, Hey, what’s the p and l for January? Or you could look at it for a year, Hey, what’s the p and l for 2024? And essentially what it’s showing you is how much revenue did you make, how much expenses did you have within your business? And then the bottom line, we hear that idea of what’s the bottom line? The bottom line is how much profit you made within your business. So tell us a little bit about how you were going about managing that, because it sounds like you had a pretty good handle on managing the books, the bookkeeping for your business, having an understanding of what the p and l was, and that is the dashboard that helps you to confidently make a decision around some of the things that you were contemplating. So what did that look like and how did you manage the process of having a p and l every month? Were you doing that on your own, working with somebody? What did that look like?

Alexandra Shytsman I was doing it on my own, and I still am, actually, my system is very old school. It’s literally just an Excel spreadsheet that I keep updated every month. It has three sheets on it. So one sheet is literally my expenses that I break down by category, so tech support, domains and subscriptions, groceries, things like that. Another sheet is the actual money that’s coming in. So every time I get any kind of paycheck, I log it in there. And then the third sheet is what’s coming up. So if I know I have projects in March and April, I put down the revenue that I’m expecting from them or the ad revenue that I know that’s coming down the pipeline. And yeah, I mean think obviously that’s a very basic thing that any person starting any kind of business or side hustle should do. For very silly example, my sister sells old clothes on Poshmark as a hobby, love it. And she’s like, oh, I made a,

Bjork Ostrom: We’ll, go to a thrift store, find them, buy them, and then resell ’em

Alexandra Shytsman Pretty much. Or yeah, not to get too in the weeds about it, but yeah, something like that. It’s interesting just to know, know basically what are the supplies that I have and what’s the revenue coming in when I sell them? So yeah, that’s very basic and that’s something that I did from the first month. And also, I should mention that I have a marketing background back when I was working in the outside realm, so that’s something that I did for my job too. So managing expenses, and I kind of learned that system from there.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And one of the things that I like about what you’re doing is it requires you to manually or manually digitally touch each one of those expenses and each income category that comes in, and it just gives you a better understanding of what am I actually spending money on? You can stay on top of maybe recurring fees that you don’t need to be spending money on. Totally.

Alexandra Shytsman Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And the other piece that I think a lot of people aren’t doing that’s important is a little bit of projections. Hey, I think this is probably where things are going. Here’s how much I made in December of last year. Traffic is maybe up 10% compared to last year, so here’s maybe how much I think that I’ll get paid in December of this year, or I know that I have this freelance gig and this is how much I’ll pay. So it allows you to do some projections within your business, which also is a skill within building a business that you get better at over time, which is projecting the future of your business and getting an understanding of where that goes. Related to that, did you also then have a good understanding of your personal expenses? Were you keeping track and budgeting of what that looked like so you knew how much you’d have to earn from your business, but that would be kind of a separate spreadsheet where you had personal expenses that you were keeping track of and then you kind of matched those together? Is that how that worked?

Alexandra Shytsman That’s a great question. I actually didn’t do a lot of personal budgeting up until a few years ago, and that’s honestly because I felt like my revenue was not growing, and I was like, what’s going on? Just trying to get a better sense of where is this money going? So yeah, I keep those separate. But yeah, I think when you are looking at those things, it also helps you, like you were saying with projection, if a client comes to me and maybe it’s a project that I would typically say no to, and I’m looking at my p and l and I’m like, I think I’m going to need more money in April, I’m probably going to be more likely to say yes to that, whether it’s for personal or business expenses, whether I’m going to want to take a trip or whatever. So it’s always keeping those balances in my mind. And then if I’m, I feel like, oh, April’s going to be a great month. I don’t need to take any more freelance stuff on, but maybe it’s a great time for me to take on a blog project that I’ve been avoiding

Bjork Ostrom: Non-revenue producing in the near future. But in the long term, it’s going to be something that’s going to set your site up to be more healthy, to be more profitable potentially in the longterm, but it’s not like you’re going to get paid for it in that month.

Alexandra Shytsman Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And so what you’re saying is projecting allows you to have a better idea of saying, great, okay, April’s going to be a good month. It looks like maybe this would be a good time to, instead of doing a brand partnership or freelance work, I’m going to spend some time working on the recipe index on my site or one of these projects that’s not immediately revenue producing, but is holistically a good thing for your site. I love that. I’ll just share it real quick. I think people are always interested. One of the multiple tools that we use, one of ’em is QuickBooks. So we do QuickBooks, we have enough transactions that are coming through with all the different businesses. That’s been a really good tool for us to use. But I do think if you’re just starting out, I would almost encourage people not to go to a tool like that instead to use a spreadsheet because it allows you to get a better pulse on the spending that you have. But QuickBooks is a great resource, QuickBooks online. And then for personally, we use this tool that I really love and I’m in this probably once a day on average, and it’s a software tool called Monarch. We’ve actually been trying to reach out to them if anybody knows anybody from Monarch, because we’d love to have them be a sponsor of the show because they just love the tool so much. But Monarch is a great budgeting tool, and we actually do two different Monarch accounts. One is it has all of our different business accounts in it. And so every single transaction that’s happening within our businesses, whether it be like our operating businesses or we also have some real estate that we do, it’s all coming through there. And so there’s a ton of transactions, but in the same way I’m looking at those probably on average once a day, once every other day to see, to stay on top of it and say, do I have a pulse on do we have enough savings within these businesses? What are the expenses within these businesses?

What does revenue look like? And then we also have on this just personal, and so it’s only our personal accounts. And so what we see there is like, Hey, as a family, how much are we spending every month? And it’s been really great for us to be able to see those two very different buckets, which is one is personal and business with our collective kind of entities, what does that look like? And then the second is just personally, what does that look like for us month to month in terms of spending and that component? So at what point did you know when you were doing that analysis of business spending, business earning and personal expenses, at what point did you look at it and say, Hey, I’m at the point now where I kind of have that infinite runway. Tell us about that moment and what that felt like and how you knew you were there.

Alexandra Shytsman Yeah, I mean, I’ve never heard that term infinite runway before. So just for people listening also, if they never heard that, don’t panic.

Bjork Ostrom: Just the idea of you can go full time. Maybe that’s like it’s a nerd’s way of saying you’ve built up enough to not have to fund your thing in other ways.

Alexandra Shytsman Totally. Yeah. I think it was literally when I first saw that I was making $1,000 in ad revenue, I was like, okay, I know that I can build this because I see the steady growth that I’ve had, so I know that I can build this so I can have enough to actually pay all my bills, et cetera. But honestly, there was no huge moment. It was just little by little every month that I started to notice that those percentages were shifting of where my revenue was coming from, ad revenue versus freelance. And then every month I can kind of taper off things that were no longer necessary on the freelance side. So I knew that I could start dedicating more time to the site. But I think one of the really important things to note here, and it is just knowing your why, that’s something that I always go back to.

And if people listening, if you’ve never heard of Simon Sinek and have never seen his TED Talk, I would really encourage you to check it out. You just search, start with y, I think on YouTube. And it really just gives you the breakdown of how to figure out why you do the things you do and what is important to you. And so once you have that, you can make sure that your time is actually going to that thing and not just staying afloat with projects. And maybe if your why is having freedom and maybe you have small children or something and you want to be able to be flexible with your time, why is your freedom? So maybe those freelance projects are better for you because you can calibrate how much time you need to spend at home, et cetera. But for me, my why was like, I want to help people cook healthy food. And so that is kind of always what I go back to every month. How much time can I really dedicate to that?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s one of the things that I think is so important to point out because if we don’t have that defined, you can get into this loop where you’re like, you show up, you do work, but do you really know why you’re doing the work? Yeah, okay, to make income, make money. For some people, that is the why. They need to get to a point where they are able to provide for their family or they want to feel stable or they have something to prove. Maybe that is the why, but I think for a lot of people, that’s not the why long term, you’ll get to a point where you do that, you have enough, and then it’s like, okay, so why are you showing up now and continuing to do the work every single day? And so I think it’s so important to point out in that idea of the work that we are doing, there’s multiple types of income that is creating, there’s financial income, but there’s also impact income. Totally.

Alexandra Shytsman Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s why income, and sometimes we have to do work that is devoid of why, but it’s purely financial. There’s not a lot of why income, but there’s financial income. But ideally over time, and it sounds like this is what you’ve done is you can continue to work towards that. Why income, the purpose income, the impact income. And it also then is financial income as well. A lot of times, and it feels like the sweet spot is where it can become both of those things. Like you produce content on the internet and people come and consume that content. It helps them understand how to eat healthier, to access good food, and also that produces an income for you. And that feels like a really wonderful thing if you are able to get to that point. So we’ll link to that in the show notes. Simon Sinek, I also have shared a couple times on the podcast, Simon Sinek has this idea of a business really is a vehicle to get you somewhere to get you to your why, to put you in a certain direction. And the income we are creating from those businesses is the fuel for that vehicle, which I think is a great concept and a good reminder for us. It’s kind of like you’re not driving around in circles, where are you going?

Alexandra Shytsman Yeah, totally,

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. That’s the important thing to remember is directionally where you headed. And if you’re able to create income within your business, it helps direct you to where you need to go. So as things look right now for you, what does the pie chart of your business look like? You have advertising income from your site, you do some freelancing, maybe still sponsored work. What does that look like? If you were to break it out, just to give people an idea of what your day-to-day looks like now?

Alexandra Shytsman For sure. So I would say 70% of my revenue is ad revenue from Mediavine, and the rest is freelancing. So I do recipe development and photography for a couple of other bigger food media brands. And then also I teach food photography in person. And then from time to time, I’ll also teach a vegan cooking classes here in New York. So that’s kind of like what makes up the complete pie.

Bjork Ostrom: I love that. And the thing that’s great about that is we’re very similar. I think if people were to know us being me and Lindsay in a certain capacity to be like, oh, what you do is pinch of yum. But it’s like, actually there’s a lot of different things that we’re doing in any given day. We have obviously Food Blogger Pro, a lot of people don’t know about that unless they’re in the food world. We have Pinch of Yum. We have some other software businesses. We have a site called Clarity and Curly. We do some real estate, and if you roll the tape back further for us, there’s a season where we would do classes and we would speak. And so the nice thing about that is it provides a little bit of comfort in knowing that any one of those could go away at any time. And anybody listening to this knows there’s Google updates and there’s social media algorithm updates, or we have Lindsay’s sister worked in U-S-A-I-D, and then with this company adjacent to that, it’s like, oh, you think this is a secure government job

Alexandra Shytsman That

Bjork Ostrom: Can go away? All of us are vulnerable no matter where we are, even if we have the perception of we have a secure stable job, a lot of times those secured stable jobs, things happen and they go away. Totally.

Alexandra Shytsman Or something happens to you and you can no longer do that

Bjork Ostrom: Job.

Alexandra Shytsman Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. And so it’s helpful to have those things that you can fall back on. And I’ve heard that said, even for people who, let’s say you’re somebody who has that full-time W2 job or part-time W2 job, and you are doing a side hustle with that, if that full-time W2 or part-time W2 job goes away, you have this safety net of a side hustle that you can scale up. And so for anybody listening, I think it’s a reminder to them around one of the assets, one of the valuable components of having a side hustle is a certain level of security that you have this safety net that you can scale up if you need to. So just that as a variable within all of the decision making. Do you have advice for Well, yeah, go ahead.

Alexandra Shytsman One thing quickly is that I would caution people slightly against the idea of having something to fall back on. And just speaking from personal experience, obviously that is very sound advice and very parental advice. Like, oh, you want to be a theater performer? Make sure you have a degree. So of course we love that advice, but when you are already on the path of starting your own business or pursuing some sort of passion project or pursuing something else that’s slightly unconventional, if you are focusing too much on this idea of I can always fall back on this, oh, next month if it doesn’t work out, I can always go back to work. It can actually psychologically hold you back because you’re not putting a hundred percent into your project. And I know that this has happened to me, and I think that’s partially why in the first couple of years of me doing this, I was focusing so much on freelance work because there’s also a little bit of fear of just diving in and being the next six months I will dedicate to this one thing I set out to do or the next year or two years or whatever.

So I would really be honest with yourself about your priorities and where your head is at every day.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a little bit of this idea of burn the bridges approach. You go across and you burn the bridge, you’re going to be there, burn the boats is another idea of, I suppose burn the bridges is like relationally burn the boats being like the army shows up, you are at the shore, you burn the boats, you’re not going back. What that means is you can’t retreat then.

Alexandra Shytsman Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: You just are there and you have to figure it out. And I suppose each person being very unique in terms of their life situation, their requirements, but to your point, important to think about the potential of putting enough pressure on yourself that you actually do it, versus if you are consistently in a place where you’re not having that pressure, there’s a really good chance you’re not actually going to do it.

Alexandra Shytsman Totally. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: You just continue to do the thing that is most comfortable.

Alexandra Shytsman Totally. Exactly. There has to be some stakes and a fire under your butt somewhat. But

I think another thing that’s interesting about my story and sort of the idea of reflecting on your mistakes in the beginning is because I was already working in the food industry when I set out to build a recipe site, I was working in marketing in a culinary school, so I already had a lot of contacts in the food industry, and I was already developing the skills that I needed for my site, getting to know how to write a recipe. For example, I got to take a recipe writing course at the school where I used to work. I was doing food photography at my old job. So I already had those skills. And most importantly, I had connections and I was sort of in the food world. So when I left and I basically sent out a batch email to all my contacts, and I was like, I’m freelancing.

Let me know if you need me to do anything. Not verbatim, but that’s kind of what I did. And I had a lot of projects inbound for a couple of years because of that runway. And then because I was already out of sort of that world a little bit, those things sort of started drying up. And then I looked back and I’m like, okay, so it’s been three years and I was supposed to have been building my site, but I’ve just been doing these freelance projects the whole time. And now only then was I sort of really starting to take my site seriously.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s almost like tying back to that idea of things you would’ve done differently. It’s like, man, if you would’ve been working on your site those three years, instead of doing freelance, you probably kind of played the numbers game a little bit and look at the arc of growth and say, it would’ve been nice if I was working on it, which is always one of the hard things. It’s like there’s no perfect formula for it. And knowing what, now you can look back and say like, oh, great, it makes sense that it would’ve made sense for me to focus more on my site because you’ve seen the benefit of growing that and building that. And I think if nothing else, it’s helpful for people to hear from somebody like yourself to say, actually, I probably would’ve done a little bit more site work building my own business as opposed to just doing the freelance work. And I think one of the other things that’s important to point out in a reminder for people, this is actually something going back to that Monarch conversation, Monarch money, which is where we track business and revenue expenses, net worth, one of the things that we do is we track what is the value of the business. And I think sometimes we forget that the thing that we are working on is also inherently valuable. If we are building something that produces income, that income that the thing produces, if it’s not just us trading time for money, if there is a system, if there is a process, if it is scalable, transferable, repeatable, that inherently has value, just like if you bought a rental home and you had a tenant, part of the value of that wouldn’t just be the home, but the income that it can produce. Similarly, if you have a website and it makes $10,000 a year, that might be worth 30,000, $40,000. And so aren’t just producing income, you’re producing an asset. And I think it’s important for us to remember that the work that we are doing, building our businesses, if it is the right type of business, could also potentially be an asset. And so just a reminder for people that’s a component with everything that we are doing. Yeah totally. One of the things that you talked about was so along the lines of burning the boats, taking this unconventional path, moving away from maybe what would be considered kind of a normal career path, making that hard decision, but especially hard within the context of being an immigrant. And it sounds like part of one of the challenges you had was all of us I think, feel this to some degree, but it sounds like especially in your story, convincing family or parents that this is kind of a weird path. It’s maybe unconventional, but it’s a good path for me. Can you talk a little bit about what that was like to navigate some of the social parental relational dynamics around pursuing something that is maybe hard for some people to understand?

Alexandra Shytsman Yeah, I mean, that’s such a big topic, but obviously one I’m happy to talk about and also do want to encourage other people who maybe weren’t born here or maybe have immigrant parents and just give some advice on what that journey is. I mean, we all grow up in different kinds of families learning different things from our environment. So it’s not just immigrants that this is pertinent to, but for me, I am Ukrainian. I was born there. I came to the states when I was nine, so I still have the first chunk of my life and my first memories are still in another country. And so when you do immigrate, obviously the whole point is I want stability and security and safety for my family. And stability, security and safety are not necessarily synonymous with

Bjork Ostrom: Entrepreneurial pursuits,

Alexandra Shytsman Especially

Bjork Ostrom: Online businesses.

Alexandra Shytsman Yeah, exactly. So the idea is a lot, I’m sure immigrants from any part of the world, like immigrant kids in America have probably heard that they should be a doctor, a lawyer, or at least an accountant

If all else fails or a nurse or something. Not that there’s anything wrong with those fields at all. Obviously they’re very admirable careers. It’s just something that never resonated with me. I think I’m a little bit stubborn, and I’ve always just known that this is literally the one thing I want to do. I don’t want to do anything else. And I also, knowing that I’m a creative person, I always knew that this is something that I wanted. And there was always kind of different steps of challenges. First it was like, what are you going to major in college? And then what kind of jobs are you looking for? And then all that. So I think that nobody really understood what I was trying to do. And to a certain extent, nobody still does. Not nobody, but a lot of people still don’t. Many

Bjork Ostrom: People

Alexandra Shytsman Sometimes, I don’t know, even my mom will call me sometimes and be like, oh, hey, what’s up? How was your day? Did you work today? And I’m like, I work every day just like everyone else. And I think it’s just hard to understand what this thing is because for example, for someone, for my mom, she just doesn’t fully understand how this pays the bills. So for her, when she asks, did you work, it’s more like, did you go teach a class today or

Bjork Ostrom: Did you go into work?

Alexandra Shytsman Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: What were your hours, when were you working today? And you were like, I don’t know, kind of the whole day, but also was at a coffee shop and then, yeah,

Alexandra Shytsman Yeah, exactly. So that can be very hard and discouraging when people don’t understand what you want to do or don’t support it or tell you, oh, don’t worry, you can always fall back on something else. Sort of setting you up for failure from the start before you even tried. So that can be really hard. I think that the only thing you can really do in this case is just do the thing despite what other people are saying, it’s your life, right? You’re the one who’s going to have to look back on your life and think about the decisions you made and how you got to where you are. It’s still your life. So you have to make decisions for yourself. And the only thing you can do is just do it. And then hopefully 2, 5, 10 years from now, people will be like, oh, okay, I get it.

I get it. But maybe people won’t get it right from the start. So that can be a little bit challenging. But something that’s been really helpful for me is having a community in this space, whether it’s going to conferences and meeting people who do the same thing and actually having a bigger context around it. Like, oh, I’m not the only one publishing recipes on the internet. There’s a whole community of us and people are having the same challenges as me. So that’s really nice. And then also just having some people in your life who will support you, find those people, maybe not going to be the people in your immediate family, or maybe not your spouse will understand, but finding somebody who knows those challenges and can commiserate with you and congratulate you when things are going well, that’s really, really key because this is a really isolating endeavor. Most of the time, you’re just alone in your kitchen. You’re alone at your computer, you’re talking to a screen on Instagram, it can be very, very isolating, and sometimes you’re just like, what am I doing? And who cares? So it’s nice to have people in your corner. It could be friends, it could be people on the internet that you meet. For example, you had a guest on your show a few years back, and I loved her story, and I reached out to her, and now we meet every month online and we talk,

Bjork Ostrom: Who was it?

Alexandra Shytsman Karama? And her site is Home Cooking Collective.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, cool. That’s awesome. Yeah, a lot of times it takes you taking the initiative to do it. You have to go through the process of connecting with people, reaching out,

Saying, Hey, let’s get a group together. And that was something that, this was years ago pre covid, but found three people in kind of adjacent industries. One was, his name was Rafael, a gentleman’s Gazette who has a home, or not a home, but a fashion site. Mark do started a company called Quiet Light Brokerage, which buys and sells online businesses. And then my friend Bruno, he started a site called Influence Kit in another site called Curly, which we actually eventually acquired, but we would get together for lunch. And it was like, great, they get it. There’s no explanation of how to do a thing. It’s just like you get each other and there’s no work in trying to catch somebody up to speed on what you’re trying to do or the issues you’ve had or a Google update and what that means,

Alexandra Shytsman Or try to prove to them that even your goals are worthwhile. And it doesn’t have to be somebody directly like a blogger or somebody or an influencer. It could be just somebody doing an unconventional thing. It could be a theater actor. So it’s really somebody who just gets it. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. That’s great.

One of the things I know that has been important for you as you’ve built up your site is systems and processes. You talked about the idea of batching as being really important. I think it’s one of the things that we can always learn from other people around what’s working within their business when it comes to systems, processes, things like that. So can you share a little bit about what has worked best for you when it comes to systems and processes, and even how you document some of those things and what that looks like for you?

Alexandra Shytsman For sure. Yeah. I think that having scheduling templates and batching projects on certain days of the week and things like that has been one of the most transformative things I’ve had in my business last couple of years. And I actually had a kind of roundabout way of getting to it because in the beginning when I was first starting out, and I think a lot of people can relate to this, you sort of wake up on Monday and you’re like, I guess I’ll cook something today, and then if it turns out, I’ll take a photo and then I’ll publish it on Tuesday and maybe I’ll send a newsletter. And it’s sort of this kind of wishy-washy thing. So I think it’s really important to think about yourself as the CEO or as the manager of your company, and certain functions needs to take place within your business every week, and it needs to be, like you said, repeatable.

So one of the things that I do is I have a weekly template, and every either Sunday night or Friday afternoon, I look at the next week and I fill in the template. So for example, Mondays are my computer days. So I will draft my new recipe to publish on Tuesday. I always publish that recipe and send the newsletter in the afternoon. I’ll recipe test on Wednesday. I’ll shoot reels on Thursday, I shoot photos, and Friday is kind of like a catchup day, or if I have any freelance work, I’ll do it on Friday. And so that’s the general template. And every week I never have to wonder, what am I going to do on Wednesday? I always know what I’m going to do. And so that really takes the guesswork out of it. And I think it’s one of the really important things is there’s so many moving parts of this business.

There’s admin tasks, there’s writing, there’s mood boarding for your photos, there’s updating old posts going into your analytics and things like that, researching keywords. There’s so many things, and it is not efficient for you to do 10 things in one day because when you’re switching tasks in your brain, it takes your brain a while to catch up and start doing a new function. So as much as possible, I like to batch things. So for example, if I’m testing three recipes that week, then I will test them all in the same afternoon. I’m not going to say, oh, on Monday I’m going to have a couple of hours at night. I’ll just slot it in there because in my experience, I’ll be tired. I’m not going to want to switch to that task. Or if I have a lot of computer work, then I will do it all in one day.

So it’s really important to batch those things together. Or if I’m going through the trouble of setting up my studio and shooting photographs and going grocery shopping, I’m not going to do just one recipe. I’m going to do three. So that’s been really transformative, and that just makes your business so much more efficient. And actually, one of the things that was really also an accidental benefit is that I was working with interns a couple of years ago who were helping me with primarily photo shoots. And it was so exciting to have somebody to come in and work with you. But I quickly realized like, oh, actually, there’s a lot of work that needs to happen in advance before somebody comes in to work with you, because you need to prepare them. You need to make the day for them. So you have to make sure that your recipe is ready to be followed, it’s fully printed, it’s ready to go.

We’re not going to be making any guesses or changes when we’re actually doing a photo shoot. Everything has to be perfect. I have to get groceries. I have to plan exactly how many recipes we can do in eight hours. So when I was working with interns, that really helped me with just planning in advance and making the most of my time. And then also, obviously, I’m sure most people listening are familiar with keyword research and planning your content in advance. So right now it’s February, so we’re probably thinking about spring vegetables right now. Maybe we’re starting to dip our toes into Easter. And so always knowing in advance what those recipes are going to be that you’re working on and doing some preliminary research. So that’s really key.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you talk about, so Friday afternoon, Sunday evening, you said it was like a template that you follow.

Alexandra Shytsman Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Are you putting that into your calendar? Is it something that is a document that you duplicate and then you fill it out, okay, on Monday, here’s what I’m going to be doing?

Alexandra Shytsman Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: I think there’s something really great about doing the work of planning the work, and I think sometimes a lot of people just show up and do the work. They don’t do the work of planning the work. And when you do the work of planning the work, when you actually do the work, you’re going to get more done. So can you talk specifically around what that looks like with the template you use, the process you follow within that? So you’re sitting down, does it take an hour? How long is it much time you’re spending with each day thinking through it, fill that picture out a little bit more?

Alexandra Shytsman Sure. So I’m a little bit of a technology dinosaur. I don’t love trying out new tech and software. I know that a lot of people use things like Notion or even a Google Calendar. For me, the thing that works best is a Google Doc, like you said, it’s a template. And then I just make a copy of it every week, and then I call it week of whatever, February 3rd, and then I fill it out. And then the template has, on Monday it says basically what recipe are we drafting to publish? And then I just fill in that information. But before I get into the template, I actually just start with a blank sheet of paper and a pen. Again, dinosaur. So I like to do everything by hand first, and I just open my notebook to a blank sheet of paper, and I write down literally everything that needs to happen that week.

And these are personal and business things. So for example, the recipes. I’m publishing the newsletters, I’m writing the reels. I’m shooting the photos. I’m shooting any kind of pitch letters or any kind of important emails that I’m writing if I have to get a haircut, if I’m taking my cat to the vet, if I need to buy cat food, literally everything that needs to happen that week, I just make a big list. And that probably takes me 10, 15 minutes. And then I take those tasks and I plug them into that Google Doc and I write, and then I see what I have to do. And I think the whole process probably takes me 30 minutes of upfront work, but then it’s perfect because when I wake up on Monday and I see my week, I know exactly what it’s going to look like. And then it’s also so much easier to batch tasks. So for example, if I’m shooting two recipes for my site and then one recipe that’s for a freelance client, I can batch those into one day, and that really saves a lot of time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. The reason that I think it’s important to talk through these things and talk through ’em specifically is I think back to, this was probably 15 years ago when I was at this nonprofit that I was working at, and there was a lunch and learn that somebody was doing, and she was explaining how she uses Gmail, and she’s like, so usually what I do is I’ll go in, I’ll respond to an email, and then I archive the email, so it’s no longer in my inbox. And I was like, whoa. The idea of archiving an email never existed for me. And obviously it’s such an important part of my process now to keeping inbox zero or whatever, but I think there’s little things like that that we can pick up and implement and our processes as we continually look to refine and improve what we are doing.

Alexandra Shytsman For sure. With that in

Bjork Ostrom: Mind, is there anything as we come to the end that you would point out as we talked about you looking back and saying, Hey, these are some things I would do different. What about things that you would do, again, the things that you did that you were really grateful that you did along the way that had a big impact in you being where you are today?

Alexandra Shytsman For sure. Yeah. Well, a couple of things that I felt like really moved the needle is I think somewhere slightly after Covid happened, I had my first audit with Casey Marquee, who is constant of this podcast. So that was really helpful, just getting that rundown of, here are the things that you need to work on that are really going to make a huge difference. For SEO, I would definitely, that’s a great investment. It doesn’t have to be Casey, it could be someone else.

Bjork Ostrom: Were there anything, if you were to think back to the three things within that process that were most helpful, can you think through what those were?

Alexandra Shytsman Just having somebody look at my site as a neutral party, well, not that neutral I guess, but just and saying These things that you’re writing are not helpful. This information that would be really helpful is missing the photo of the ingredients that is labeled with text overlays. He really wanted me to do that. I was reluctant to do it. Then I started to do it and saw big growth or having step-by-step photos, for example, was really important. Things like internal linking, structure, closing, not indexing your tag pages. Not that we even use tags anymore sites, but just a lot of technical things, some

Bjork Ostrom: Technical and also some user experience things.

Alexandra Shytsman Totally. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: The step-by-step images or labeling a picture labeled with ingredients, not technical, but definitely a user experience consideration, which all of that rolls up into SEO. It’s kind that art and science.

Alexandra Shytsman Yeah, totally. Yeah, so I would definitely invest in that again, a hundred percent. Also, a couple of years ago, I did the cooking with Keywords course with ekka. I know she’s been a guest on here. And yeah, that course was just brilliant. I was doing keyword research obviously before that, but also moving to KeySearch specifically was really helpful. And also just knowing the ins and outs of how to compare a competitor’s page to your own and those kinds of technical things. That was really key. I did that course in one weekend or something, and I was like, this is the best weekend ever. This is the best way I could have spent my weekend transformative. And then another thing that I think has been really important for me is going to a coworking space to work. So on days when I’m not recipe testing or shooting, and my studio is in my house and my apartment, so I’ve been working from home for eight years.

So people, I know that Covid was a big shift for people, but for me it was like, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and there are definitely benefits to working from home. You can do laundry in the middle of the day, and that’s wonderful, but it’s a completely different state of mind. When you put on your big girl pants and you leave the house and you get your coffee out, and you pack your lunch and you’re sitting somewhere else for eight hours, the productivity is just through the roof. I know that coworking spaces can, or just like any office space can be really expensive, but even in New York City, I was able to find one that is really affordable and just a complete game changer front. And also just feeling like you’re a part of the world. Again, blogging can be so isolating that just getting on the subway, going somewhere, seeing other people also working, just reminds you, oh, this is business time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, generally speaking, we’re not meant to be alone for long periods of time.

Alexandra Shytsman Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Absolutely. And I know there’s a broad spectrum of people’s comfort with just being alone. But I think broadly speaking, generally speaking, we are social people. And even if it’s not hanging out and socializing for eight hours, there’s something that is undeniably different when you are with other people. So I think that’s a great point and can feel that myself too. If I have periods for too long of a time where I’m just on my own, it feels really good. Even just to go to a coffee shop.

Alexandra Shytsman Totally. It

Bjork Ostrom: Could be around other people.

Alexandra Shytsman It really affects your mental health. I think when you are, and also especially in the beginning of your business when maybe you’re not getting a ton of traction with your email subscribers or whatever, and you really feel like what you’re putting out is going nowhere, that can really just accumulate in your brain into a lot of negative feelings like, am I wasting my time? Blah, blah, blah. So if you can just get out there, that’s really good.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and I think the other thing worth pointing out is the combination of a lot of us, what we’re doing is on social media and we are alone, and the combination of working in isolation plus increased amounts of time on social media feels like a formula for a lot of people of mental health struggles and

Mental health, obviously very broad, but it’s just like the idea of having a lot of consumption of social media and being alone would be enough for me to encourage people. And it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing to say, Hey, what does it look like? Not only to find a place where you can work with other people, just being in the same place and have those interactions, but also to find groups of people that you can connect with. And the analogy that I think of, and it was somebody who was talking about the impacts of working on our own or without social connection, was she talked about this idea of when we do go into an office, and I think a coworking space would be another example of this. She said, we are kind of tires on a car or a bike, and when we have these little interactions throughout the day at a coworking space or at an office, what’s happening is it’s like a little pump that keeps some air in the tires. And what happens when we don’t have that is our tires just slowly get deflated and they’ll maybe get like then on Friday night, you go out and you have this interaction and you have that tire that gets inflated, but then you have another long stretch where it gets deflated. And so we don’t have these little incremental interactions

When we are going in and being with other people that generally keep our tire inflated all the time. And so the importance of that, and it trickles down into our work. We do better work when we have a full tire. So I think it’s an important piece. It’s a tool in the tool belt

Alexandra Shytsman To

Bjork Ostrom: Be a successful online business owner.

Alexandra Shytsman Totally. That’s great. And it doesn’t have to be not every day, or if you can only afford one time a month, again, these things can be expensive. That’ll even add a lot. Or even if it’s just two hours at a coffee shop. Same thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. That’s great.

Alexandra Shytsman Alex,

Bjork Ostrom: We could talk for another hour about all the things that you’ve learned and all the insights that you have that you could share with podcast listeners, but we’ll wrap it up. If people want to connect with you, follow along with you, what’s the best way to do that?

Alexandra Shytsman Yeah, so my site is the new baguette.com baguette, like the bread. It’s also the new baguette on Instagram. I have a substack newsletter, so it’s just the new baguette.substack.com. You can sign up for my newsletter all over my website, and if somebody wants to email me and chat about anything, it’s just hello at the New Baguette.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. It’s nice of you to offer that. Alex, thanks so much for coming on and for being a podcast listener. Thank you. It’s one of our favorite things is to have folks who listen and understand the podcast on to interview them around what they’ve learned and the successes that you’ve had. So really appreciate you coming on.

Alexandra Shytsman Thank you for having me. It was a blast.

Emily Walker Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team coming at you with something special this week. We are really excited to be planning an upcoming episode featuring questions from our listeners. We always love hearing from Food Blogger Pro members and podcast listeners with any questions they have, problems they’re solving or anything else that’s come up in their blog and business lately. So we are asking you to call in with your questions. You can head to speak pipe.com/food Blogger Pro, or we’ll have the link in our show notes and send us a recording. You can ask a blogging business, social media, or branding question for Bjork. If you have questions about Pinch of Yum’s current strategy or questions about working with an ad network, really the sky is the limit for any questions you might have. Just leave us a message and Bjork will answer your questions in an upcoming podcast episode. Again, head to speakpipe.com/food blogger po to send us a recording. All you need is your phone or a laptop. It’s super easy, but head to the show notes and you’ll see the link to send us a recording. We can’t wait to hear from you.