The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 2024 in Review: Must-Listen Moments (Part Two)

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

We’re giving you the best moments of 2024 from The Ultimate Blog Podcast. If you haven’t already listened to Part One, make sure you tune in to that episode first! In Part Two, our past guests are sharing wisdom about how to turn your blog content into a “need to have” for your audience, what to do if you’re unsure what topic to start blogging about, why being an entrepreneur comes with a commitment to life-long self-development, and SEO basics every blogger needs. If you want some blogging inspiration for 2025, this is the episode you need to hear!🔗Click here to check out the show notes or Episode 159!

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Our episodes dive deep into how to monetize your blog, sharing unique insights and practical tips. We bring you in-depth interviews with successful bloggers and experts who offer valuable, actionable advice. Our mission is to educate, support, inspire, and empower you in your blogging business. Welcome to The Ultimate Blog Podcast. Hello and welcome back to the podcast.

So Amy had this great idea to round out our year by doing something special with these last couple of episodes. And last week, you hopefully heard part one of this two-part series where Amy highlighted just a few of her favorite moments from the podcast in 2024. And today it's my turn. So we love podcasting so much and we truly learn and are inspired by each and every guest that we have. So it actually makes it really hard to choose just a few favorite moments to share with you all compiled in one episode.

But as I was listening back to a lot of the episodes from the year, I found myself gravitating towards a theme. And so that is what I am choosing to share with you today. So each of the five episode clips I'm gonna share are things that I feel can have an impact for each and every one of you if you just listen to these clips

and you think about how you want to move forward in your blogging journey in 2025. So I hope as you listen, you will feel inspired, you will feel empowered by each person sharing how they were able to make an impact by sharing what they know with others, what they've learned that's kept them on track to building a sustainable business, and how important it is to do things the right way to remove obstacles from building your own business. Okay, let's jump in. So this first clip I want to share is with Gillian Leslie. She is a blogger. She has 15 years of experience blogging at Catch My Party, which is

a very successful party planning website. And she has a product called MiloTree that supports other creators being able to earn an income from their online business. Jillian has a positive yet realistic outlook on the business of blogging, which I appreciate so much. And she has so much experience that she so willingly shares with others. She is just an amazing person. And in this episode, Jillian shares not only like really valuable advice, but one big takeaway for me was that to be successful, you need to solve real problems people have, and that you can and you should think about your blog as a business from day one. So she has just this way of explaining how to get into the business mindset that I think all of us can relate to.

So I hope you'll find this clip helpful. I'd also encourage you to go back and listen to the full episode for so much amazing advice. Solve real specific problems for their audiences and have a personality. I'm not saying even that you have to show your face, but your brand has to have a personality, a point of view. And if you had all of these ingredients, you could become very successful and you could ride out some of these bumps more easily. So just to kind of say what I recommend today where I'm seeing people have success, it is

from the get-go. We talked about this on my podcast. Thinking about your blog as a business, you are an entrepreneur, and you think about money from the get-go. It is not, well, I'm working on my Instagram right now. I'm building my blog traffic. I'm doing all these things, waiting for that moment. Funny, when I turned 40, I had this come to Jesus moment

where I thought to myself, oh no, I'm 40 and I don't feel like an adult. Nobody anointed me an adult. Like, you're now like middle-aged and it was kind of like, I had to do it for myself. I had to say, oh no, I am now an adult and I'm going to act like an adult. Not that I was acting like a child, but you get my point. Like same thing with your blog.

There's no moment where you go, I've now made it into Mediavine. I am now an official blogger who thinks about money. No, think about money from the beginning. What does that mean? That means you start thinking about what you can offer. For example, let's back up. You start thinking about what problem do I solve? What specific problem do I solve? Rather than I like to take pretty photos of something, of my own food. No, I help people live a healthier life. I help people put food on their table in 30 minutes. I help with parenting. I help with any sort of wellness. I'm a craft blogger.

I'm a budget-friendly interior designer. What is it that you do better than a lot of people so that you can say, hey, even if you do not have a degree, you do not need to have a PhD in interior design, you just have to be good at it and a point of view about it. And then you think to yourself, okay, what is the big problem I can solve? And how can I break this up into smaller problems? So here are my, I feel like I'm on like a monologue, so please interrupt me. You're doing great. Okay, but here's what I want to say. When you're thinking about your niche and the problem you solve, see if you can get

it to fit into one of these six buckets. Do you help people make money? Do you help people save money? Do you help people save time? Do you help people move toward happiness? Do you help people move away from pain? And or do you raise somebody's social status? These are the triggers that turn your solution from a nice to have to a must have to, I will

take out my credit card and I will buy that solution. My second clip that I'm choosing to share is from one of our episodes with Dolly DeLong. We were so thrilled to connect with her by chance this year and to have the opportunity to collaborate with her in many ways over this last year. So Dolly is a photographer and she used her experience and skills and realized she could help others. And so she has grown a very successful business in the systems and workflows area.

And it includes having a podcast and online classes, helping other online business owners. So in the episode, Dolly joined us and her goal was to teach our audience about how systems and workflows can help you and help your blogging business grow. But what I really wanted to share with you are some words of wisdom that she shares

about keeping your eyes open to what you're good at and leaning into that for ways you might be able to help others and how that can even help you create more streams of income. And so that can help you create a solid business foundation. So I'd love for you to go back and listen to the full episode for all of the systems and workflow magic advice that she has to offer, but also just enjoy this clip and inspiration that she shares. What am I good at? What do people ask me advice about and help with? And so I kind of like, that's where systems,

I didn't know that it was called systems and workflows. I just knew I'm pretty organized. I really like running my business and being a photographer. How can I merge the two? And so that's kind of like running my business and being a photographer. How can I merge the two? And so that's kind of like where my systems and workflow journey began. Again, just me trying to figure out another avenue of revenue, even though it's stream of income there. That's the word I was looking for stream of income.

And so it's ever since 2020, it's just been me like honing in that strength. And then in late 2021 is when I started my podcast, the Systems and Workflow Magic podcast. And then it's just been like growing more and more since. And then last year, I just like I had hired a bookkeeper for the first time for my business. And we just, she helped me see like, hey, your systems and workflow education business is actually like the same revenue, if not a little bit more than your photography business. So that's why I'm like, oh, really leaning heavily into the power systems and workflows. And I'm having so much fun doing it. It's a wild ride, you all. It's a wild ride. I'm having so much fun doing it. It's a wild ride, you all.

It's a wild ride. It's an amazing story. And what I love about it the most is you said, you went with what people were asking you for. It was such a natural thing. And that's what we tell so many of our new students who are wanting to start a blog. You know, they're like, what do I blog about?

And we're like, well, what do people ask you about? What did the people in your life naturally gravitate towards you, you know, and ask you like, well, what do people ask you about? What are the people in your life naturally gravitate towards you and ask you, or what are you the sort of expert in your community on? And it's such a great testament to the fact that when it's a natural fit like that, then it can really truly become something. Okay, next up is an episode we recorded

with Ainsley Butler of Peach Perfect Financials so that we could talk about bookkeeping as a blogger. Interestingly enough, just like Jillian and Dolly from the previous clips, Ainsley has also started with a creative business and is a blogger at The Fit Peach, which is a food blog, and she did this before starting her bookkeeping business to help other bloggers. So even though this was an episode intended to teach you about bookkeeping for bloggers, and I definitely highly encourage you to go back and listen to the full episode to learn about bookkeeping for your blog, especially heading into the new year and in your end and all of that. But this clip I'm sharing really has

nothing to do with accounting. This clip was meaningful to me because Ansley shares about how she wasn't fulfilled in her accounting career, which actually led to her starting a blog. And that is so similar to my own story. If you ever go back and listen to any of those episodes where we've shared about our stories, you'll know why I feel that way. But not only that, I know there are so many of you listening that may feel like your own career is uninspiring and you want to know how to make a realistic and sustainable move into something that will be more meaningful for the rest of your life. So I hope this clip will help you just feel that encouragement. And then you can also go back and listen to

the full episode for all of the accounting tips. Accounting thing, it's been great for a few years, but I don't want to be doing this for 20, 30 years. I didn't feel like it fit into my, my family goals, my lifestyle that I wanted to build for myself. And so I kind of pivoted and I really went into the food blog and said, I'm gonna, I really want to make this my full-time job. I'm going to focus on photography, focused on just building up the website. This was while I also had the accounting job and took it full time in 2020. It was probably the biggest jump, probably will be the biggest jump of my life. I was pregnant with my first.

We had just bought a house since April 2020. Just bought a house and obviously COVID was going on. But my blog was doing fairly well, like most blogs. My blog was kind of just trickling along there for a while and it got a big boost in 2020. And what also catapulted a lot of this was a food photography retreat that I went on February of 2020. And I met some other bloggers and when you mentioned that you're an accountant, it was just wild. Everyone, can you help me with this? Can you help me with that? Can you do this? I had thought that like, hey, when I take my food blog full time, then maybe I do create a course or do something. That

was the vision, but it was not to create an accounting firm and to have hundreds of clients and to be filing taxes and doing all this stuff. That was definitely not the initial vision. But I just thought May 15, 2020 is when I say that's when I left my corporate job. That's when... It's actually the day that I transferred my food blog also from Squareface to WordPress. And when things started taking off, I got a few clients that just had me do bookkeeping, do some taxes, stuff like that for 2020. And that was the start of it.

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Okay, and this next clip comes from a business duo like Amy and myself, who we've also had on the podcast a couple of times in a couple different ways, and we've been on their podcast. So I'm talking about Corey Frazier and Melissa Pepin from The Business Pre-Boot. Sozier and Melissa Pepin from The Business Reboot. So Corey and Melissa were also business owners who saw the need to support other business owners. And so they created what is now known as The Business Reboot.

And it was created as a way to inspire or to empower small business owners and entrepreneurs to thrive while keeping a healthy balance in life. So first I want to point out that everyone featured so far in this episode in the clips that I have shared has embraced the opportunity to serve when it became clear that they had a talent or skill that would help others. So not only is this in the spirit of blogging in general, but what I really want you to take away from this is that you should keep an open mind as your own business grows and keep looking for those opportunities to pivot and to serve in new ways as well as what you originally started with with blogging. So this can be a great opportunity to grow

and solidify your business and your income streams. In this particular clip, we are going to take that mindset a step further. I'd like you to listen to Corey and Melissa's encouragement that growing a successful business includes being open to a lifetime of self-development and learning that you often need to reverse engineer your goals to figure out how to pay the bills. So they just have some real solid advice. So listen to the full episode when you can. And I hope you feel inspired and supported as you grow your business.

Well, and I think one of the things that Melissa, her go-to is when you sign yourself up for entrepreneurship, you sign yourself up for a lifetime of self development and content creation. Like those are two of the things that are really non-negotiables. Like you've got to be able to market yourself, but you also have to work on yourself. And I don't care if you've been in business for two seconds or two decades, you are constantly going to be challenged in a mindset way, because there's always somebody newer, faster, more experienced, less experienced, but making a whole heck

of a lot more money than you are. There's always going to be a comparison. I know for Melissa and I, where we really try to help our clients is saying, what are your goals? Let's look at reverse engineering. Like you said, this sounds like it's going to be fun, but fun isn't sustainable. Fun isn't real and also fun doesn't pay the bills. If you want this or need, and some people don't, but if you want your, then that's just an expensive hobby. It's actually not a business.

Melissa and I are kind of like your tough love sisters to where we're going to encourage you and we are the biggest cheerleaders that you will ever have. But also we want to shine a light on some of the, you know, the darker corner issues that maybe you need to deal with in order to see success because it actually might not be this new thing you need to implement or this new product or this new thing you need to buy. It actually might be you that might be creating that. I just need to tell you, we are so polished on this beautiful podcast course. There might be things that we need to say. I'm like, if you're in front of us, we're like, girl, ma'am,

why are we doing it like this? We're not doing this. That's so funny. No, and you're totally right. I think that it is the self-development, the personal development. There are so many ways that we will self-sabotage and we will get in our own way. And if there's anything that we know, and I think all four of us know this, is that it must be nice is the most backhanded compliment. It is my zero to 60 rage compliment, which sounds like, oh, it must be nice. And you know what my new response is? It really is. It really is nice to be able to have this happen to me. But in order to get to a place where it must be nice, it takes a lot of work.

Okay. And well, last, I'm sharing an episode that might not seem like it fits with these other episodes, but to me, it really tied everything together. Earlier this year, we were so honored to have Casey Marquis. He is an industry wide known SEO expert for food and lifestyle bloggers. And he owns a company called MediaWise. And he came on to teach our audience about technical SEO, to share some of the most important components of setting up your blog, the importance of having an SEO expert audit of your blog,

and overall just really critical things that will set you up for success. So yes, this is an incredibly important episode for you to go back and listen to. But the reason I wanted to layer this on as one of my most impactful moments of the year was because of a couple of things. Number one, Casey shares how inspired he is with by all the bloggers that he has worked with who have created a really, truly successful business and were able to

make a lot of money by doing something that they love. So I want you to hear that part of what he has to say. And then second, he also shares why it's important to do things right from the start because of wanting to eliminate any barriers we set up for ourselves because that's you know, not only a mindset thing, it can also be a technical thing when we set up barriers to growing our business. So while the first episodes I shared were more like related to that mindset and business aspect, we can't forget this technical piece and we really need to take the time to make sure we get this right from the start so we don't inadvertently keep ourselves from growing.

So I think this is a really important clip to listen to. And I think the episode is just vital baseline episode that you should listen to when it comes to blogging. And overall, I hope all of these snippets have left you feeling really inspired and excited about blogging and building your business. I know they have done that for me. So I hope you will listen to this episode and walk away

feeling ready for whatever the new year has to bring. And I also hope that as soon as you have the opportunity, you will go back and listen to all of the full episodes as well. And of course, keep listening for all the new stuff to come in 2025 from the Ultimate Blog Podcast. You can make a career out of it. And I'm always odd at the incredible amount of money. A lot of these food and lifestyle bloggers make, so I applaud them. It's not an easy job and they do their jobs extremely well. As I know, both you ladies do since I know you're both, you

both have your own sides. Is that correct? Correct. Yes. Both too. We both do. So we've kind of talked about SEO and anybody who's listening to this podcast has heard that term before. If you're a blogger, then you've heard that term. But like Jennifer said, we're diving into like the technical side of SEO.

And that might be the first time that somebody listening to this has kind of heard that specific term. So just to keep things really basic out of the gate here, Casey, can you just kind of give that a definition? Like, what do you mean by technical SEO? So loosely defined technical SEO is about improving your website to make it easier for search engines to find, understand and crawl your content. That's honestly the easiest way that we can explain it. Our goal is to eliminate barriers. So we want Google to come and crawl our site and not keep running into trees, things like broken links or orphaned pages or schema that's applied unevenly or incorrectly, or maybe they're using a template that Google

doesn't necessarily understand. But technical SEO is all about removing obstacles and making it easy for Google to algorithmically understand and rank our content as highly as possible. And I think that that's something that a lot of new bloggers miss out of the gate. They might choose something that is easier, what they consider easier to get started, just to get started,

but it might actually be something that they have to end up turning around and then redoing later. So basically I want you just to give a pep talk to the new blogger right now, who maybe either did that or is considering doing that. What would be a couple of the main things that you would say, Hey, these are the main things that you need to make sure that you're putting into play right at the start of your blogging journey, because you're not going to want to go back and redo them later.

Right. Right. Well, as I tell bloggers all the time, how you eat an elephant, preferably start at the trunk, work your way back one bite at a time, preferably. SEO is that way, especially when you're first starting out. We want to do things the right way. Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about building your blog, visit theultimateblogpodcast.com backslash newsletter to get signed up for our email newsletter. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to share it with a friend, subscribe and leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts. Thanks for tuning in today and we'll see you next time.