From Side Hustle to Full-Time Food Blogger with Amina Al-Saigh

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Emily Walker: Hey there, 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 delighted to welcome Amina from Hungry Paprikas. On her food blog she shares recipes from across the Middle East with an authentic Arab voice and she has so much wisdom about her food blogging journey to share with us today. In this interview, Amina shares her journey from starting out as a food content creator on Instagram while she was still working full-time as an engineer. And then how she got to today where she is a full-time food creator and has just published a brand new cookbook. She explains how she balanced her demanding full-time job with her food blog and how she began monetizing in the early days of her business. She shares the importance that her niche played in attracting brand partnerships and the qualities that she thinks made her a desirable partner for brands even when she had a smaller following.

Bjork and Amina also chat about the strategy of incremental stacking when adding tasks and processes to your workload and how your workflow changes when you take your food blog from a side hustle to a full-time gig. Amina’s background as an engineer is present in almost everything she does with her business, and she has a really interesting approach to making decisions, organizing her tasks, scheduling content, and even communicating with and building her team. They wrap up the interview by talking about how to make progress on your business and on your food blog while letting go of perfection and am and his other tips and tricks for beginner food bloggers. It’s really fun to hear her story. I know you all will enjoy it, so I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Amina, welcome to the podcast.

Amina Al-Saigh: Thank you, Bjork. It’s great to be here. I’m a big fan of this podcast, so it’s an honor.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of my favorite things. Interviewing somebody who knows the podcast is familiar with the podcast, and I think one of the reasons that I love it is because we get to be somebody who I don’t know. I would have it be kind of the equivalent of if you’re building a business and you go to the same coffee shop and you maybe get to know the barista a little bit, they’re kind of along with you for the journey. And I feel like we get to be along on the journey with some creators by being a little touchpoint along the way. It’s not like we’re a major part of it, but we do get to connect with people through the podcast, through Food Blogger Pro membership, whatever it might be along the way. And you have a really fun journey to talk about because you built an Instagram account, you built a following there, you built your blog, you got a cookbook deal.

You made some of these really significant changes in your life all while also having a career, kids, family, all of these things that are really difficult. And I think for a lot of people who listen to the podcast, that’s a journey and that’s a path that they’d be interested in hearing you reflect on how you went about doing it. So let’s go ahead and do that, and let’s talk about the moment where you started this thing at the start of it. When did that happen and did you approach it with the mindset of I want to build a business, I want to be a creator?

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah. Okay. So we’ll go back to around 2018. That’s when I decided to start my Instagram account and I had no idea that you can make money or it could be a business. I purely started it as a hobby at the moment. At the time, in 2018, I was actually living in London UK with my husband and I had just had my first child, my son, and I was on mat leave and I worked as an engineer in the city and I was on mat leave. I had a lot of extra time, I guess. So

Bjork Ostrom: In strange places throughout the day.

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah, little

Bjork Ostrom: 5:00 AM Yeah,

Amina Al-Saigh: Exactly. And weirdly, I’ve spoken to a lot of mothers, A lot of us seek something for ourselves, something fulfilling, something creative. So that’s kind of what

Bjork Ostrom: You mean during that time, you have this time, it’s not like you’re going to do engineering work, it’s your normal W2 job.

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: W2 job in U.S., but your full-time job. And so how are you going to fill that time? You find this creative thing and for you, it sounds like that was posting content to Instagram. Was it food content right away?

Amina Al-Saigh: Yes, it was food content right away, and it was back when Instagram was just photos and weirdly, so it wasn’t even what the niche I’m in now. It was sort of general food, healthy food. I was very into healthier cleaner eating. And so I started it. I actually started it with my sister. It didn’t last very long. She a few months later for sure. But yeah, it was just to just share food and photos and then I continued to do it up until I went back to work very consistently and I found it really fun photos of my food, not just cooking. So that’s how it started and I just kept doing it just for fun.

And it is a lot of work of course, and especially if, I mean a lot of us take pride in the work that we put out. And so if you are putting effort, I remember I told myself, okay, four months into this, if I’m still posting on Instagram, I will buy a D-S-L-R camera. Because back then Instagram was all about photos. And so right now I feel like you can get away with just using your phone, but back then it was like the next step is to just get better at photography. And so I did that and once I got the camera, it was another six months to a year of playing with it and really having fun with the content I was putting out. And I did see growth as well. I did see a community start to build around what I was sharing, which was very encouraging. It wasn’t like skyrocketing or anything, but it was slow growth. That was very motivating for me.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Yeah. So one of the things that I think is important to point out in anybody who’s building anything is what can you, I’m trying to think of, maybe you would have a better word, but what can you grind on? Grind isn’t the best word because I feel like it implies that it’s not good. Maybe a better word is flow. Where can you find flow? And they talk about flow being this state where you are just challenged enough where it’s kind of hard, but you can do it and actually accomplish it. And it’s like that tension point. And I think a lot of times for creative people, they find that in photography or the arts because you’re never, you never perfect it. Sports is another example of maybe where that happens, but are there opportunities in the world of business or creation where you can find flow?

And what’s great about that is you can kind of lose yourself in the pursuit of that thing. And if there’s an upside advantage to that from a business perspective, great. For me, it’s like ping pong might be that there’s maybe not as many opportunities as a 38-year-old to go playing ping pong. I could enjoy it. But let’s say that I found flow in photography or video or development web design. So a point for anybody listening to think about that, where do you find flow? It sounds like for you, one of the things you found was this kind of state of flow where you could work really hard and for long stretches of time doing photography, does that feel accurate? Was that the leading thing in your pursuit of this creative business that you spent most of your time thinking about or doing?

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah, absolutely. It’s actually exactly what you just said because I think for me, that flow or that thing that you are seeking or the thing that gives you joy is what kind of keeps you going.

I sort of thought that once I was going to go back to work, I thought it was going to be just this thing for fun. And then once I go back to work, I was not going to post anymore. I didn’t even know what I was going to do. I was taking it very easy. But it is the flow. It’s the photography that had me itching on weekends to like, Ooh, okay, I have this fun recipe idea. Let me shoot in. And by the way, I was in a small London flat. I was shooting literally on the ledge of a window. It was so funny. I have

Bjork Ostrom: To, yeah, you’ve got to make it work.

Amina Al-Saigh: Click wherever you are. Exactly. And to be honest, looking back, it took extra work at the time, but compared to what we do now, it’s pretty easy. You just have to shoot a final photo of your dish on Instagram. But that is,

Bjork Ostrom: You mean compared to now you do a video and the amount of effort that goes into a singular piece of content, right?

Amina Al-Saigh: So for me, it was just like, oh, I’ll just cook it, style it quickly and snap a photo. And also because it wasn’t this profitable business, there was no pressure. You were just sharing it for fun. But that is exactly what kept me going back. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: At that point you went back to your job as an engineer. What type of engineering were you doing?

Amina Al-Saigh: I studied chemical engineering, but I was actually working in power, more specifically electricity distribution. So we like to say we keep the lights on,

Bjork Ostrom: Literally,

Amina Al-Saigh: Literally

Bjork Ostrom: Not necessarily connected to what you ended up doing with your, and we’re kind of buried the lead here, but full time now working on your site and your creative business. But one of the things we will touch on a little bit later is as an engineer, that process mentality, that systems mentality that comes in handy in a creative business, you have to pair those, the creativity with the framework, the scaffolding in order to allow you to repeatedly do that without getting burnt out. We’ll get to that, but let’s stick here for a little bit. So you have your first boy girl, okay, you have your baby boy, you go back as an engineer. So now you are a parent, you are working and you’re doing your side hustle. Talk about that stage and how long that lasted and how did you continue to grow when your margin for doing that work, I would imagine was pretty thin?

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah, no, that’s a great question. Essentially that period of just doing it for fun I’d say lasted about a year. And then in 2019, mid 2019, my husband and I and my son, we moved back to Canada where I actually grew up in Toronto. And so once we moved back, I was kind of in between, I had a few months off where I was figuring out where I’m going to work next, et cetera. And that’s the time that I started getting approached by brands on Instagram, make money, essentially create content for them. And

Bjork Ostrom: Do you remember about what your following count was at that point?

Amina Al-Saigh: Probably around 10,000 or so. It wasn’t very big, but it was like, whoa, mind blowing for me. And I was like, oh, I’m not even focused on that. And yet, here it is. And I think at the time, 2019, probably up until 20, 22, 23, I feel like the brand partnership industry was booming. There was just a lot. And so a bit of it made its way to me and I started getting approach. I remember in 2019 I worked with maybe three, four brands. It wasn’t a lot, but it was for me, it was like, oh, okay, so if I

Bjork Ostrom: Of concept at least to say this can be done.

Amina Al-Saigh: Exactly. I’m taking a photo for fun, but now it’s even more creatively challenging. I have these parameters and this brand wants this type of recipe. And it was lovely. I ended up, I remember I partnered with a kitchen homeware brand when I first moved back to Canada, and I was like, oh, I need to, we moved to a new house. And so I was very excited taking photos of my new kitchen cupboards full of the new kitchen and all that. So for me, that was the next flow. I was like, oh, okay. It’s not just photography and fun. Because I had gotten to a point, I won’t lie, that the engineering mentality, it’s like I very much value my time. I’m very in efficiency and like, okay, where am I going with this? Yes, I’m enjoying it, but I also have a son and I have a home and I have a career. It’s

Bjork Ostrom: Taken your time is very valuable in general, but especially it becomes more valuable when you have a son who if you’re going to take a Saturday to work on a project, it better be worth it.

Amina Al-Saigh: Exactly, exactly. And I started to question like, oh, how long am I going to keep doing this? And then after that year when I started making money with brands, then I started to think, okay, wait, so if you can make money with brands, how else can you make money? And that’s where my curiosity got the best of me, and that’s when I actually found you guys. I found Food Water Pro Pinch of Yum. And then I started to discover this whole world of online food blogging and having a website and making money. And I was like, whoa, I didn’t know about any of this. This is so exciting. It was really exciting for me. Now, I was so eager to learn how does this work?

Bjork Ostrom: We talk about that idea with the four minute Mile a lot where nobody ran a four minute mile and then somebody ran it, and then I don’t know what it actually was, but it was something like then within the next month, four people ran a four minute mile. It’s almost like, oh, it is possible. They all thought it’s not possible. It’s not that people don’t think it’s possible to do what you’ve done or Lindsay’s done, but you almost don’t really even think about it. And then it’s like, oh, here’s a story of it happening. Wow, that’s really curious. I wonder what that could look like for me. You start to learn a little bit more. You get after it. None of it’s easy, but just to know that it’s possible, then you can get after it in the way that you feel like fits what you’re doing and feels aligned with how you want to work.

So you have these initial brands that reach out. One of the questions that I wanted to ask about that was we talk about this idea of who not how many and 10,000 is a lot of followers. And at the same time you have almost 200,000 now. And for somebody who’s in the early stages, you might say, oh, 10,000 followers, I want to get to 500,000, I want to get to a hundred thousand. But it’s important to think about who those people are, not just how many, because probably in your case, well actually because they reached out, they were brands and they were companies, and what they were looking at wasn’t just followers. My guess is, but also the quality of your work. Do you have any sense for those early brands who reached out, did they give you any sense for why they reached out? If I had to guess, part of it was like you had developed this skill of photography, you could present the thing that you were creating in a really beautiful way. Contrast that to if the photography was terrible and didn’t look good and it wasn’t lit well, they probably wouldn’t have reached out. So was photography a piece of it? Were there other things? What can you point to that was maybe some of the reasons those early brands reached out?

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah, no, I think photography and the quality of work was huge back then, especially when it was just a photo platform. I remember all the brands that did reach out. I did have quite an engaged community, and I was a unique niche at that point. I had pivoted to share Middle Eastern food, which is of course my own food. The food we grew up with. I’m from Iraq; I eat Arabic food, Middle Eastern food. So I decided to just share that because I realized that people that were following me wanted those recipes. And so I think my brand was very unique in the sense that I had a very targeted group of followers that were that niche. And a lot of brands at that time were trying to diversify and work with all kinds of communities. So I think that’s one of them. And then the other one is for sure the quality of the work and also the experience.

Because I worked professionally as an engineer. When a brand approached me, I would go the extra mile. I would write up a document and have, this is my concept, this is what the photo was going to look like, and just kind of make it a really great experience for them. And I think again, at the time, because the industry was very new, that wasn’t the common thing they were getting from other creators possibly. And so they kind of knew. And a lot of them, I worked with them again and again, they kind of knew, okay, we can just trust, do a good job. And yeah, I would just retake some things if I needed to. I really wanted the photo to be excellent and because I valued the fact that they were paying me for it. But I will say also, I did value my time and I wasn’t charging low rates because I worked already. I already had an so that worked to my advantage. I didn’t just say yes to any $200 deal, you know what I mean? But I also knew that, okay, I’m starting out. You start low and you continue to,

I always revisited my rates. I always revisited. I would talk to the brands and say, how was that? Did you enjoy working with me? What would you do differently? Things like that. But I didn’t have too many brand partnerships, but the ones that I did have were worth my time, essentially.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Three things that I heard you say that I think are really important to point out. One is quality of work. Are you creating a product when you are a content creator, your product is the content. And so are you creating a product that is desirable, that is high quality, much if you walk into a store and you buy something off the shelf, whether it be a food product or a consumer goods product, it has to be quality. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re creating content that is our product. So you had quality content. The other piece is niche. You had a unique angle that was novel or not easily accessible for certain brands. And if there is a certain brand that wanted to get in front of your community, it’s an engaged community. It’s people who know you, who interact with you. It’s not generic, it’s not broad.

You have this really specific niche, you can speak to that audience, they trust you. And then the other piece is being professional. You operate as a professional, you get back to people quickly. It’s one of the things that this year I’ve been doing more brand calls and on the calls, similar to what you talked about, I’ll ask a question of, hey, with the companies or the creators, publishers who work with, what are some of the things that you would consider to be the success variables? What are the best clients that you work with? And almost always they say responsiveness, delivering the thing on time. It’s not some weird thing that’s only certain people have this mystical ability to create a viral video. It’s like, are you somebody who shows up to meetings that delivers the content on time, follows up that you’re a professional? And I think to hear you talk about those three things, it’s important for us to all remember those are such important pieces.

If you do want to work with the brand, so you go through this phase a year or two, it’s kind of hobby and then it switches over into like, Hey, actually my time’s pretty valuable. I want to make sure that the time that I am spending on the site is rewarded with some type of return on that other than just it being a hobby and enjoyable. So you start to think about doing this and getting compensated for it. How did you then figure out to make the leap into going full time? How long were you in that and at what point did it transition to saying, I’m going to do this full time?

Amina Al-Saigh: So I only went full time. We’re in 2024. It was March, 2023, so it’s not been too long. So I was working still up until March, 2023. But what had happened is I started to discover that you could have a website. And I said, okay, wait a minute. I’ve been sharing recipes for a year. I have all these recipes just on my Instagram and just knowing good business sense, it doesn’t make sense to have all my eggs in the Instagram basket. And I just thought, there’s no way I’m going to sustainably make an income from just brands. At some point they’re not going to find me, and at some point I’m going to get really annoyed of reaching up or anything. So I said, okay, let me figure out how to do this website thing. I started learning, I was working in downtown Toronto. I was living in the suburbs, so I had an hour and a half commute one way, and I would listen to Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: All right, there we go.

Amina Al-Saigh: Literally everything

Bjork Ostrom: Commute buddy.

Amina Al-Saigh: Literally I started to learn and just through listening on my commutes, I would be like, okay, tonight I’m going to work on just setting up my website. I also joined the Food Blocker Pro membership for a couple months. That was really helpful. I’m pretty tech savvy, so I was like, okay, I can figure this out myself. It was frustrating. It does take time for anybody trying to do it right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Like any skill. Yeah,

Amina Al-Saigh: Like any skill, but you just power through it. And then I started my site, and then I just got busy with work, but in 2020 I had my daughter and I went on mat leave. In Canada, we actually get a year and a half mat leave.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, amazing.

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah, it was amazing. The first, and obviously it was the pandemic at the time, the first three, four months I was, and again, it was a second time mom thing, so I was already used to what it takes to take care of a baby and also do my own thing. So in that year, I actually focused on getting all my content up on my website, and I remember it went live January, 2020. It was actually live before that, but the content went live at that time and one year later I made it into Media Vine

And it was all just really focused on get all of my old content up and then any new recipes I publish on Instagram, they have to have a blog post. And at the time as well, obviously it wasn’t as involved because you just needed to post a photo on Instagram and I wasn’t doing step-by-step photos or anything. So it was just a little bit, I would say my journey is always incrementally adding things to my plate until I can manage it and then going like, okay, what’s the next step? What’s the next step? And so I did that and once I got into Media Vine, that was amazing for me. That was peace of mind that I had

Bjork Ostrom: Somewhat predictable. Yeah,

Amina Al-Saigh: Exactly. Another stable income, and I didn’t actually realize that you can make a good sum as soon as you make it into Media Vine. I thought it was just going to be in the hundreds, but I remember you could start off with a thousand thousand 500, maybe 2000 depending on how many recipes your RPM. And so that was solid. And I remember at the time too, that’s when my family and my husband were like, oh, okay. They just thought,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, they’re

Amina Al-Saigh: Like, oh, OM is doing her thing. I don’t know why she’s doing that, but now they’re like, whoa, you did it.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about that? After you joined and things got set up, the ads got optimized, what day was it that you logged into your account? Do you remember logging in and seeing, oh, yesterday I earned this amount? What was that moment like? I think that’s a pretty powerful moment as a content business owner to see the thing that you’ve created activated in a way that it hasn’t been before.

Amina Al-Saigh: Absolutely. I remember I got in around May perhaps of 2021 around Ramadan because I practice Ramadan and Ramadan. People don’t know it’s 30 days and we are fasting, but we’re also thinking about, Ooh, what am I going to cook when I break my sentence? So my website, contrary to other websites that peak in Q4, my website actually has an even bigger peak in ram. So that was the one thing I needed to just tip me over that 50,000 session line, and I was so excited as soon as it happened and then the ads were running and I opened it up and I was like, whoa, this is how much I’m making. And not just that, just seeing the traffic and seeing people actually leaving reviews just for some reason it felt more empowering than Instagram because I don’t know, it just felt more legitimate if I can say that. It took a lot of more work to kind of get there, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and it’s also, I think one of the great things about Instagram is there’s a really low barrier to entry. And so if you have taste, if you are a creator with taste, you can pretty easily get up and running. It’s really easy to create an account, and if you have those foundational elements of good photography and you are a creator at its core, you can post pretty easily. The barrier to entry to a website is a little bit higher and anything supply and demand looks different. So while there are a lot of food sites, there aren’t as many food sites as there are food Instagram accounts. And so the effort to get to a place where you’re getting 50,000, a hundred thousand, whatever it might be, page views is different than maybe what it feels like to get to whatever number of followers on Instagram.

And also I think one of the things that’s different is to your point, there’s a certain level of predictability. The numbers always change, but with Instagram, you might go three months and you might not have a brand reach out, you might not have a sponsorship. You might be working really hard to get that with a website. It’s like unless there’s some big Google algorithm update or a change happens where a post falls out of a top spot, it’s relatively predictable, especially compared to brand work on social. But to go back to one of the things that you talked about, I think it’s really important to point out, which is the incremental stacking of the work that you did and starting within, and we see this a lot now where people start with social. It used to be people start with a site and then they add social after, but now almost always people are starting with social because of that low barrier to entry that becomes kind of the lab where they figure out how they create content.

Sometimes people just stay there and they do brand partnerships, so they have a product and that becomes their thing. But a lot of times in the food world, you eventually get to a place where you have a site and people go there for the recipes and you monetize with that. But can you talk about the stacking of, Hey, I’m going to do this thing, maybe create some processes around it, create some systems around it, master this, and then I’m going to figure out what the next best thing for me to work on is go through that process again of creating systems, mastering it, because sometimes people will try and do all of it and they spread themselves. They do TikTok and Instagram and a site and email and all these things are important, and they hear me interview seven different experts and they’re like, I got to do all seven of those things. And it’s like I think your approach is the one that’s a wise approach, which is stacking. So was that an intentional thing and talk about the systems and processes you created along the way?

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah, absolutely. It was intentional and it was because I had limited time, so I knew, and it was hard at that time because I finished my mat leave, I got into meet van, I went back to work and I went back to a promotion. So now I was in management, so I had even less time. So I was very just goal focused. So I would sit down and say, okay, so now I’m making this income from the website and brands are approaching me here and there to make money, so what do I do? Do I continue doing Instagram or do I focus all my effort on my website and go faster there? And so I had to make a decision to say, okay, what’s my goal? My goal is to make an income, but also to do it sustainably and to have a solid foundation for my business. And so I felt that I needed to continue to nurture my Instagram as well as building my website. I made the decision. I know a lot of people sometimes just ditch Instagram because it’s true. You could see more momentum on your website that way, and I would have moments where I’m like, oh, why am I so slow?

I’m not publishing as many recipes. Even to this day. I only have 170 recipes on my website, but I kind of stepped back and said, no quality over quantity, and I’m going to continue to straddle both, but I’m not going to add anything else. I remember at that time TikTok was coming on as well, and I just said, I’m not ready for that yet. But at the same time, Instagram reels were starting to come up, and I think I had gotten comfortable with posting a photo on Instagram and then posting a blog post on my blog, and then the next increment was starting reels, and I was quick to adopt reels. I’m very, I love change. I think that’s one of the things that has helped me succeed is that when new things happen, I’m not like, oh no, this is so hard. I just kind of jump on it and try and slowly figure out how do I just insert this into my process?

And so I decided that I was going to just use my phone to take reels. I’m a food photographer at heart and I know so many people that were using their DSLR to get videos as well, and I just knew that was going to be way too much for me. So I decided to just snap a video of my recipe as I’m doing it, get the final shots and continue to do this thing of every recipe has an Instagram post, a blog post and a reel, and sometimes some recipes. I couldn’t get a reel, and that’s fine. Just kind of knowing that, okay, I had a really busy weekend. I was working weekends as well for my job. And so just knowing my situation and understanding that as long as I’m making you talk about this a lot, Bjork is just 1% better or just one step as long as I’m making a little bit of progress. Okay. And I would go weeks sometimes without posting anything on Instagram and people would be like, oh no, you can’t do that. You have to be consistent, but you can’t do that. You just come back, right?

You’re not going to skyrocket in growth, but you’re going to continue to build this sustainable community that’s going to stick with you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I heard this phrase the other day. It was related to health and fitness, but I think it applies to what we do as well. And it had to do with this idea of all or nothing. And I think a lot of times we think all or nothing, oh, I can’t do it. I’m just not going to do it. But the idea was instead of all or nothing, always something, and it doesn’t mean that it has to be eight hours of work. Maybe it’s you go in and you watch a 10 minute explainer on the Instagram algorithm, or you take a picture before you eat and figure out how to share that on a different social platform or point being, I think some of us have this mindset of, oh, we got to do it all. It has to be perfect and to let go of perfection and say, actually, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but I do have to continue showing up in some way and figure out to your point, how do I get just a tiny bit better at this? How do I improve just a little bit? And if you do that in your case over six years, that can compound, and I feel like so much of what we’re doing is figuring out how to compound.

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I think one of the ways is to have a system and a process. One of the ways is to focus, which we talked about, but also to not kind of reinvent the wheel every time. So when you talk about your engineering mindset, when you talk about systems and processes, are you actually going through the process of creating an SOP document? Talk to me about what systems and processes look like within your business with that engineering mindset.

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah, of course. So I did, yes, once I had the website going and I was doing Instagram and the website, I hired my first VA a and because I hired a new person, I was already a manager at work, so I knew that when you bring people on board, you have to be there for them. You have to make sure they have what they need to do their job. And so we would have weekly calls and I would send her Loom videos of here’s how you do this process, and I would have her even help me write the SOP for like, okay, here’s how you update a post, or here’s how to go in and reply to comments, or here’s how to go in and edit this video. I would take my vertical Instagram videos and turn them into horizontal videos on Canva. And so that was a process.

So I use Asana. I started it when I was still working and right now I still continue to use it. I’m just building out the system a bit more. I kind of have this process where on Asana, I use the board and I have levels, so I have L zero all the way to L six, and so my recipes are sort of bucketed into those buckets. So L zero is research concept stage, is it a recipe? I’m thinking about L one is like I’m testing it now. I’ve tested it once and I kind of add notes there. L two is now I am going to film it, I’m going to produce the content. L three is I’m editing, I’m editing the video. The photos IL four is now we are publishing, so we’re writing the blog post and we have the videos ready to go that are edited with a voiceover, and then finally the last bucket is any updates to old posts.

So that’s how my recipes flow through that process and you can kind of visually see where everything is at and who’s taking care of what. Obviously at the time it was mostly me with my VA helping me a little bit with editing and publishing. But right now I do have a few other team members. I have a recipe developer that helps me with the research concept and testing phases. And then I also have a kitchen assistant that comes in once or twice a week that helps me just batch, create content so that I’m not shooting every single day because shooting is really hard. I continue to do both photos and video at the same time for all the recipes. So I use Asana for just the workflow, and then I also have an Airtable of all of my recipes as well as things like newsletter, what newsletter did I send out, what recipes were in it, what season was it?

Things like keyword research for future posts. And then as well, I kind of did this, I’m starting to get better at this. You of course will not be able to do all that when you’re working. So that’s just one caveat. When I was working, I was flying by the seat of my pants. It was just get it out there and that’s it. But now that I’m doing this, it’s easier. So I just want to let people know that, not to think that you can do all this while working, but, and so now I have a plan, so I try to do three months at a time, a quarter at a time where I plan out the recipes and then I’ll kind of go slot them into Asana. So that’s a bit about my system and my process. And also I have a system for editing. Editing is so much easier now for me in terms of Lightroom because I have presets that are exactly how I edit, and so I just apply the preset and then I’m good. Doesn’t take that long. Then I also really worked hard to streamline just my workspace. I wasn’t shooting in an office before. I only started doing that maybe in the last couple of years, but I looked at, okay, what can make my life easier when I’m shooting, for example, a C stand that changed my life because I’m no longer hunched over. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: It’s amazing when you get a tool like that and you’re like, oh gosh, I wish I had this three years ago.

Amina Al-Saigh: Exactly. And then I also recently, because of my cookbook shoot, I learned flash. And so now I no longer have to rely on, I literally have my flash in the same spot on the same settings with my diffuser. So it’s just this same style. And that’s one of the things I decided to do is just because I’m focused on growing my website is to not always be super creative. Before I used to tweak the photos a lot and just spend hours on one photo. Now

Bjork Ostrom: Every photo’s unique. It’s a little bit different. Yeah, it has its own personality. We

Amina Al-Saigh: Did it. Sometimes I had fun with that for my cookbook, but for now when I’m in blog mode, it’s just kind of consistency

Bjork Ostrom: Processing.

Amina Al-Saigh: Exactly. And then using a light for video has really helped as well, because I live in Canada, it’s so gloomy right now in the winter, so that just takes it out of, I used to get so frustrated. I remember when I would plan to shoot that day and I would have time off, maybe I had a day off from work, and then it’s dark and suddenly, I dunno, I am too tired to hold my camera or I don’t have the groceries. And so my day off which I plan to be productive on is completely derailed. And then that mentally affects me because when I go back to work, I’m like, oh no, I didn’t even do anything on my blog. And it’s just not great for your mental health to not be productive. And so setting yourself up for success, both with systems on your computer as well as systems where you’re shooting physical

Bjork Ostrom: Space systems.

Amina Al-Saigh: Exactly, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about, you have your VA have the person who comes in and is kind of a shoot assistant. What were the other team members you said that you work with?

Amina Al-Saigh: It’s three people. So I have a recipe developer, developer, virtual assistant who kind of helps me with blog posts and then a kitchen

Bjork Ostrom: Assistant. Great. And how did you find those people, and what would your advice be for people who are looking to build a team to help augment the work that they’re doing?

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah, actually for my careers, Humira sheet, I found her later on. I went through several VAs. I just mean, I went to Facebook groups, tried to find people that way. There’s a lot of courses for VAs. And I remember there was one person I knew that was running a course and I reached out and said, okay, is there someone suitable? I kept going through people until I found somebody that worked well with me. Humira actually, funny story. I like to experiment. And so at some point I also created a food photography course that I sold and I had students take it. I had maybe 40 students go through it, and she is one of my students. She’s amazing. And that course allowed her to get into food blogging. And because she was in the course, we have a very similar style. And so when she finished the course, I was like, Hey, why don’t you come work with me?

And she’s like, amazing. And we’ve been working together for three years. I can’t live without her. She’s amazing. And then for my kitchen assistant, I try to announce it on my Instagram community. I’ve had a lot of people apply that way, but then I would also suggest for Kitchen Assistant, because you want someone locally to go on your local city Facebook groups, there’s usually a lot of people looking for work, and you could just post an ad there. That’s how I found my current kitchen assistant. And then the recipe developer was through Instagram because obviously you could get someone virtual. So she actually lives in Europe, and at the time, as soon as I put out anything, I actually get tons of people applying. There’s so many people that just want to do this for fun because it’s not like they’re working tons of hours, but it’s fun and they make a bit of money out of it and it works well.

And the one thing I’ll say about building a team is to also just kind of think about them, their perspective. So like I said, over the last year and a half, I started doing weekly calls with my va, and that was a huge game changer because it’s so nice to just have someone to check in. Especially with blogging, you’re kind of lonely. You’re not, sometimes as a VA or as a team member working for someone else, you’re like, oh, should I ask this question? Oh, am I bothering them? Sometimes you try to figure out things yourself. So it’s just about having touchpoints with your team and then slowly through conversation, you start to realize, oh, they’re actually really interested in doing this or that, and you start to evolve their role because you learn more about them when you’re actually talking to them versus just communicating via email. So I think that’s one thing that has really helped with my team. That’s great.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. Yeah, it’s almost like that management mindset of you have this person who has these unique skills and abilities, and much for us, we’re out in the world trying to figure out where’s the need in the market and where’s our greatest interest and how do we find the overlap? Similarly, it’s like, what does that look like to do that with somebody on your team? Where’s the need within your business? Where’s their greatest interest? Can you find that overlap? And I think your point talking about having worked with some VAs, going through the process of trying to find other ones, it’s a good reminder that that is also a skill, the process of working with somebody, hiring, building a team. And so I think sometimes we have unrealistic expectations of how well that should go when you’re first starting out, because it’s a hard thing. It’s hard to work with people, it’s hard to figure out systems to bring people in and company culture, it’s like whether you intentionally do it or not, you will have a company culture, even if it’s only three people.

And so that’s a skill that we all develop along the way, and you get better at it as you get more reps and iterations, much like photography or playing guitar or ping pong. So a good reminder, and it sounds like you’ve settled on what is a pretty good balance, where you’re able to do the things that you enjoy, you have that support. You talk about this idea of like, man, if I didn’t have this va, that would be such a difficult thing. Last thing that I want to point out as it relates to the team, and I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on this, is I’ve been having this thought lately around time is unlimited. And everybody’s like, well, actually no, it’s not because we barely have any time. This is a great, the week that we’re recording this, it’s holidays and there’s a lot going on, and it’s like, oh my gosh, there’s no time.

But my thought with it is time is actually infinite insofar as there’s whatever billions of people in the world and a lot of the people, there’s a lot of people out there interested in doing the things that we need help with. And so the idea is actually time is infinite. What we really need to figure out is, number one, do we have the resources? Usually it’s finances, but you could even get creative with that. Maybe there’s a college internship and you can find somebody who comes and works on your team. And so we have this idea of time is infinite, but we oftentimes need to pair that with finances in that there has to be a return on the time that somebody is getting paid to work within your business, blah, blah, blah. All of that to say, how did you as a business owner make the decision around scaling time? If time is infinite, you’re going to create some more of it by giving up some of the income within your business. It’s maybe a little bit easier to do that when you have a full-time job because you have the guarantee of that. Talk to me about what that was like to make the decision to start to give up some of the revenue in order to gain productivity within your business.

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah, it’s a really important point, and I think I stitch struggle with it at first, just the idea of am I ready to hire somebody? I think what ultimately it comes down to is having a long-term vision for your business. So yes, I mean technically at face value, if you were doing all these jobs, you don’t have as many expenses, but how far are you going to get in terms of income? And so I just knew that as long as I was, whatever income I was getting, I had a portion of it that was just enough for me, for my own family expenses and whatever you need, then the rest of it should be looked at as an investment to continue growing your business. Our business is actually really unique. Most like brick and mortar or product-based businesses or any kind of other business, you don’t actually make money for many years, but we make money right off the bat most of the time, at least within the first year if we’re kind of doing the right things.

And so you sometimes forget about this investment mindset because many other businesses, they know they’re not going to break even for, I don’t know, 2, 3, 4 years, whatever it is. And so I think it’s important for us to go back to that and just say, also what gives me more joy to continue growing the business, you will be burnt out. I did have moments where I was burnt out and I said, listen, my kitchen assistant, my latest hire was basically because I was just so tired trying to shoot two, three recipes, maybe one of them failing, and then not knowing it just I needed

Bjork Ostrom: Somebody bring all the dishes after you done and none of the recipes worked out. And it’s like, and then you’re doing dishes.

Amina Al-Saigh: The first day with my kitchen assistant was groundbreaking for me. I was like, whoa, why didn’t I do this way earlier? And like you said, sometimes you can find people that are just looking for a casual job, hourly wage. It’s not even going to, I think what you end up paying needs to far outweigh what you’re getting out of it in terms of not just financials, but also just comfort and joy and happiness and to keep being creative and keep working. One thing I will also mention about the team that I forgot completely, their huge part of my team is Foodie Digital. I also am part of their membership, and they’ve been amazing in just taking so much off of my plate in terms of worry about backend of my website, Google algorithm changes, plugin updates, all these things. So that’s just another part that I have outsourced to someone who’s very capable that will do a better job than me. And even now, some of my recipe developer, I’m a great recipe developer, but she’s also amazing and she’s got different strengths than me, so she does a lot of my baking because I don’t like to bake. And so you also have to think of your team and the value that they’re giving you in terms of their skills and how they can compliment and do things maybe even better than you would do them.

Bjork Ostrom: I love that. That’s great. I think of it as superhuman and super router and what do you want to be for all of us as creators, what do you want to be superhuman at? What are you going to be top 1% or 1% of the 1% at? And I’d be interested in your reflections on it. For me, it might be, Hey, I want to be really good at doing a podcast interview and extracting helpful information from that interview or part of it for me on the other side, the non forward facing side is I want to create businesses that are really financially healthy. What does that look like? I want to be superhuman at that. Then there’s a lot of things that I don’t want to do that need to get done. How do I become a super router? Something comes in, it has to get done.

Who am I routing that to? And it could be a team member, to your point, it could be foodie digital where you have, I remember talking to a friend who had a food site and they’re like, every time Google Workspace sent out an email around some security thing that had to be done for my personalized branded email, it was just enough for me to say, I’m done. Because you don’t have that ability to be the super router. And so how do you route those, find the people, whether contractors, agencies, individuals, to route to, and then what are the things that you own and you become superhuman at, you become the best in class at, what do you feel like those are for you when you think about the things that you want to be superhuman?

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah, it’s a great one. I think it’s kind of two things. Part of the two people that I feel I am that are different, I am very attached to the traditional recipes that I share because a lot of them are just the flavors and the textures and the techniques I grew up with. So there’s a lot of recipes that I wouldn’t necessarily outsource and I just want to stay close to. But then having said that, the website has so many other categories of food and recipes, and so there’s a portion of the content that I’m very attached to, but not all of it. But then I also, the engineering side of me, I’ve also just been someone who loves growing things. Just the sheer idea that I started this business now fully full business with just an Instagram account, now it’s grown into this. I’m just so excited at the thought of what else can I do?

And I think that also stems from the part of me that feels a little bit sad to have quit my job. It is not the easiest thing, and we didn’t really touch on this of quitting my job, but I don’t know, I feel like I still have something to prove to myself, and I was so attached to being a professional and working in corporate and being an engineer for 10 years, career wise, five, six years of studying that I still want to be like, yeah, I can grow a business and maybe not just a food online, medium business, maybe something else. I really want to, I have big plans in terms of dabbling in maybe physical products and things like that. So I do love the business side of things and growing it, and that’s why I think I’ve been really good at hiring and outsourcing and figuring out, okay, what pieces do I need to continue growing and not just focus on the creative part of the business?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It sounds like you have kind of this engine that’s running and the engine is almost like, Hey, I have something to prove. I’m out there and I want to make this awesome because you want to create something awesome in the world, which is great. It’s one of the things I realized, the more people I talk to and the more conversations I have is we all have our own really unique individual motivations and desires. And that’s why these interviews are so helpful is because sometimes you can learn somebody else’s. You can learn from them the things that they’ve done, but I think it’s also, we all are playing a different game on the same field, which can sometimes get confusing because all have different motivations and desires and are keeping score in a different way, and yet we’re all kind of playing a similar game.

So I think it’s a good reminder for myself oftentimes to just say, what game am I playing and what does that look like? Can you talk a little bit about the business as it is right now? You talked about physical product and things like that. I know you did the cookbook, which is a really big deal. We’ll link to that in the show notes as well. The business right now, if you do a pie chart percentage wise, where does revenue come from and anything that you want to tweak or change with that as you look forward?

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah, definitely. So right now I’ve got, because of my cookbook this year looks a bit different, but I’ve got some revenue for my cookbook. It’s a smaller part of the pie. The two biggest pieces would be my website income as well as brand work, which I would like to just take down a bit more. I did already not do as much as I used to do this year, mainly because of the industry slowing down and also just because I realized that I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to. But I do now also do work for publications. So I used to work for Food Network and did work for them, and now I work with CDC, the CBC creator community. So I have a chunk there just kind of doing recipes for their website as well as posting reels to Instagram. So we’re

Bjork Ostrom: Can CB, C, what is

Amina Al-Saigh: C-B-C-C-B-C? Canadian Broadcasting Company?

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, like PBS the equivalent of PBS. Okay, great.

Amina Al-Saigh: Exactly. It’s like the news channel here, but they have an arm that has the creator community, so they do CB, C Life.

Bjork Ostrom: Alright. So I think CBC is the channel or the network that gave us Schitt’s Creek, the TV show, Schitt’s Creek, which is just all time. Great. So I’m tracking now. So when you talk about the pie chart of what you’re doing, that pie chart is brand work, scale that down, potentially it’s kind of some recurring work with some of these other outlets and then the ad revenue from the site. Is that kind of more or less what the looks like

Amina Al-Saigh: More or less? So in terms of my future plans is I would like to introduce another source that is product based, whether it’s digital or physical. I’m going to take my time with it. I have dabbled before into eBooks and things like that, which I’ve sold relatively, but nothing groundbreaking. And so I am trying to think of what else I can do. But also for my ad revenue, I want to diversify the sources of traffic as well. There I’m focused on that. So really want to just kind of continue working on Pinterest and possibly YouTube just stack more of these social channels as I kind of have more time now to focus on it. Yeah, that’s where I’m at right now.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Love that. Talk to us about the cookbook where people can find that and pick it up. Like we said, we’ll link to that in the show notes. We want to make sure that people can check that out and would love to hear just your brief overview of what that was like to go through that process.

Amina Al-Saigh: Of course, that cookbook inquiry from Corto us, it’s a US publisher. It came into my inbox at the same time that I was feeling very burnt out from my job and I was like, I need to quit. And then this comes into my inbox and I was like, okay, this is like kismet. I need to take this seriously. So yeah, I kind of worked on it for the last few years. I chose to also shoot all of the photos myself because I felt like if I had worked with another photographer, they would absolutely hate me because I’m just such a control freak with my photos. But it turned out lovely. I’m very happy with how it came out. It’s called Silk to table. Silk is an Arabic word, which means market where you can get food and spices and all that. And so it’s a play on farm to table soup to table.

I really wanted to have an Arabic word in the title. And really the concept is it’s Middle Eastern food, but it’s focused on quick and easy dinners. So we have about more than 50 recipes that are either 30 minute or one hour because that’s just true to who I am. I was a working girl all these years and I know my community appreciates just these easy to make, but still Middle Eastern recipes that we are familiar with it. We grew up eating and it’s also a great introduction to the cuisine for people that don’t know much about it because it’s not intimidating. So that came out in October. You can actually find it wherever books are sold. So Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, indigo. Anywhere that books are sold, you can check it out there. And there’s also a page on my website where you can learn more about it.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it. That’s so great. Last question that I love to ask people is, let’s say you’re, to rewind the tape, you’re to go back, you’re sitting across from yourself 2018. What advice would you give to yourself at that moment knowing that you are embarking on this journey of building a business?

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah, that’s a good one. I would say to just trust your gut feel and to believe in yourself and that yes, you can do it if you continue to use learning and strategy and goals and focus and determination. If you use those to, if you have those on your side, you can do it because I remember when I was in the trenches while working, I’d have many days where I’d say, okay, yeah, sure. I just heard this podcast interview of someone who did it, but can I do it? What about me? I’m different. I do Middle Eastern food. I don’t have a lot of time. I don’t know if I can actually get there. And really what kept me going is just trusting my gut and knowing that as long as I’m doing things that way that I think I should be doing, using goals, using strategy, being focused, understanding how businesses work and how to be successful and continuing to learn and learn from other people’s experiences, then you can do it. You can get there and it looks different for everybody, but you’ll get to where you think it works for you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. And I think that’s important to point out. It looks different for everybody. It’s not the timeline, the way that you go about doing it, the breakthrough moment, all of that looks different. But if you continue to show up, if you continue to learn, like you said, if you continue to find ways to get better, you’ll be able to get there. So fun to talk to you. So fun that I was able to join you on some of those long commutes. If people want to reach out to you to connect with you, what’s the best way to do that? Send an Instagram dm, reach out on your website. How can people connect with you and follow along?

Amina Al-Saigh: Yeah. Well first it’s been an honor to chat with you, Bjork, for the first time, two way. It’s been lovely. And yeah, for sure. Send me an Instagram dm. I’m always around there. Or if you want to email me Hunger [email protected], hunger paprika.com, as well as my website. I’m also around on TikTok a little bit more now, but yeah, and Instagram dm. I’d love to connect with other creators.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Amna, thanks so much for coming on.

Amina Al-Saigh: Thank you so much.

Emily Walker: Hey, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Thank you so much for listening and tuning in today. I wanted to chat a little bit more about one of the perks of the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you likely already know about these, but maybe you’re a new member or you’re thinking becoming a member, and I just wanted to let you know about one of my favorite things in the membership. Every month we host a live q and a over Zoom with an industry expert and usually Bjork. They chat about topics ranging from republishing content to Google, algorithm updates, Pinterest or advanced SEO. Sometimes we’ll do an Ask Bjork anything or even questions about creating content plugins, site speed. Really, we cover every topic you might need to know something about As a food creator, as a Food Blogger Pro member, you’re given the option to submit questions in advance or you can submit questions during the live q and a and the guest in Bjork will answer your questions and provide feedback.

It’s always a really awesome opportunity to get advice and feedback from experts in the Food creator community, and it’s just a really fun way to connect as members and get to know each other better these Q and as are hosted live. But we always post replays on our site and for our members only podcast if you can’t make it live. So anyways, it’s just a really great feature of the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you aren’t yet a member, and this sounds like something you would like access to, head to food blogger pro.com/membership to learn more. And that’s it for this week. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Make it a great week.