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This episode is sponsored by Clariti and CultivateWP.
Welcome to episode 453 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Vincent DelGiudice from Always From Scratch.
Last week on the podcast, Bjork chatted with Nisha Vora. To go back and listen to that episode, click here.
Balancing a Full-time Job and Your Food Blog
We first met Vinny when he joined Bjork for a Coaching Call in 2023. He is on the podcast this week to chat more about his career journey — including how he made the leap from working as a full-time speech-language pathologist to where he is now.
Vinny started his blog, Always From Scratch, in 2019 and has had lots of success in that short amount of time — including qualifying for Mediavine and reaching over 100,000 followers on Instagram. While he contemplated taking his site full-time last year, he has since decided to hold off and shares more about his decision-making process in this interview.
Vinny and Bjork chat about balancing a full-time job with your blog, how you can use your blog as a “business card” for other job opportunities, and how to create a work-life that fills your cup.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- What’s changed since Vinny’s Coaching Call with Bjork in the last 6 months.
- Why Vinny decided not to take his blog full-time (yet!).
- How he used his blog and Instagram account to get himself a full-time job in this industry.
- How he balances his full-time job, his blog, and his family.
- How to mentally justify the early days of blogging, when you’re spending lots of time on something without yet making an income.
- How qualifying for Mediavine and reaching 100,000+ followers on Instagram changed his mindset.
- What advice he has for someone looking to make the transition into running their blog full-time.
- How to approach your work tasks to make help you be “gas tank full.”
Resources:
- Always From Scratch
- Food Blogger Pro Coaching Calls
- Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One
- Designing Your New Work Life
- Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life
- The War of Art
- Follow Vinny on Instagram
- Join the Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook Group
Thank you to our sponsors!
This episode is sponsored by Clariti and CultivateWP.
Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode!
Sign up for Clariti today to easily organize your blog content for maximum growth and receive access to their limited-time $45 Forever pricing, 50% off your first month, optimization ideas for your site content, and more!
Interested in working with us too? Learn more about our sponsorship opportunities and how to get started here.
If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to [email protected].
Transcript (click to expand):
Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. If you’ve been frustrated trying to discover actionable insights from different analytics and keyword platforms, clarity is your solution. Clarity helps you manage your blog content all in one place so you can find actionable insights that improve the quality of your content.
Not only does it automatically sync your WordPress post data so you can find insights about broken images, broken links, and more, it can also sync with your Google Analytics and Google search Console data so you can see keyword session, page you and user data for each and every post.
One of our favorite ways to use it, we can easily filter and see which of our posts have had a decrease in sessions or page views over a set period of time and give a little extra attention to those recipes. This is especially helpful when there are Google updates or changes and search algorithms so that we can easily tell which of our recipes have been impacted the most.
Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro podcast get 50% off of their first month of Clariti after signing up To sign up, simply go to clariti.com/food. That’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.
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, Bjork is chatting with Vinny from Always From Scratch, and we first met Vinny when he joined Bjork for a coaching call in 2023, and Bjork enjoyed the coaching call so much that he thought he would interview Vinny for the podcast and bring this conversation to the masses.
In this podcast episode, Vinny shares more about his career journey, how he started off as a speech language pathologist. Then started his food blog in 2019. In the middle of last year when he first started with Bjork, he was thinking about taking his food blog full time. He’d qualified for Mediavine and had over a hundred thousand followers on Instagram and thought it might be the right time to take the blog full-time.
Since then, he’s decided that he’s not quite ready to do that, and he was able to use his blog and social media accounts to get himself a job that is more in the content creation industry. Bjork and Vinny chat about balancing a full-time job with running a food blog and also a family, and how to know when it’s the right time to take your blog full-time.
I think it’s a really great interview for anybody, but especially those who have kind of just started their food blog and are thinking about what their future might hold, I think it’ll be a really valuable listen. I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.
Bjork Ostrom: Vinny, welcome to the podcast.
Vinny DelGiudice: Thank you. Excited to be here.
Bjork Ostrom: We had a conversation. We do these thing called coaching calls with Food Blogger Pro, where it’s one of my favorite things that we get to do is sit down and hear a little bit about somebody’s story. It’s like what you’d imagine if you connect with a friend who’s mutually interested in a similar thing.
You jam on ideas and brainstorm and think about what’s to come. We had that conversation. I’m trying to think of when it is, would you be able to pinpoint the date of when it was, or even the month?
Vinny DelGiudice: I want to say July. It was definitely warm out.
Bjork Ostrom: It was in a warm season of the year and we’re recording this now in February. What’s great about that amount of time, let’s say it was July, it’s like a half a year, half a year plus a lot can happen if you take action and you move on things. You’ve had some significant changes in between that timeframe.
I would love to hear about those because one of the things that we talk a lot about on this podcast is essentially how do we have conversations around evolving our careers, whether that be working on our own thing full-time or just working on work that is more aligned with what we want to be doing.
You’ve made some of those transitions in a pretty significant way. Take us back to where your headspace was at in July and some of the questions that you were working through.
Vinny DelGiudice: I think in July, whenever it was, I was really focusing on this idea of I was, at the time, I was laid off for my job. I was in this moment in my life where I was like, “I need to make this food blog work or else I’m failing at it.” It really felt like it’s all or nothing. It felt like that.
Then, as I started realizing this is just not the time, I’m not ready to do this full time in terms of financially supporting a family. I tried to figure out ways where I can use the skills that I was learning, whether it was an SEO, video editing, photography, and bring that into a career or at least something that was different than what I had been doing, which was speech pathology. That’s what I did, I was able to apply for a bunch of jobs, a ton of jobs, so many jobs.
Bjork Ostrom: Where were you applying? Was it on job boards?
Vinny DelGiudice: Yeah, I did a lot of Indeed and all that stuff. Then one day, I just thought to myself, I’m going to go on LinkedIn, and I saw this guy post this job in my area for a photographer. I just messaged him and was like, “Hey, I think I’d be a great fit.” The next day I was like, I think it was two or three days later I was hired.
It worked out well because it was just in the moment, the perfect thing where I saw a photographer and I was like, “This is one I want to get better at or one of the things I want to get better at.” That’s where I was able to transition to a different job, which was cool.
Bjork Ostrom: One of the things that we can do to some degree, there’s always, some people have less flexibility than others, but for the most part, we can be pursuing the continual rewriting of our job description. I’m not talking about job description, you are hired into something and they have a job description and they give it to you.
That’s one of the things ways you could look at job description. I’m talking about if we are a CEO of You Inc. and your job is what you get paid to do, that can evolve over time and you can have this mix of W–2, contract, freelance passive income or business entrepreneurial income, and we can figure out what are the ways that we can shift and change.
Adjust all of the different components of those different areas to get us closer to, it’s probably never going to be a perfect match, but closer to where we want to be. When you looked at what you were doing, what was it that you knew you didn’t want to do more of in speech pathology?
It’s like you had a successful career, you had a master’s degree in speech pathology. You were really established in that career. What did it look like to let that go and how did you know that wasn’t what you wanted to do moving forward?
Vinny DelGiudice: I worked in a really specific niche. I only worked with singing voice people and people with throat cancer. I did it all virtually because I was working for a company in Nevada. When I was laid off, I was trying to find something very, very similar. I had worked in nursing homes before and I just knew I couldn’t go back to that.
I even went and interviewed at one and I walked in the building and I was just in that moment I knew, I was like, “I can no longer do this. I will not be happy.” Even I think the biggest thing was how scary switching or starting over really felt because the whole thing was really just how do you decide if that’s the right move? You just really don’t know until you switch and try something.
Bjork Ostrom: I had a friend who reached out recently and they were talking about her husband’s trying to figure out what does he want to do as a next step, potentially career change, so thinking about some of those things. There’s an acquaintance, I wouldn’t say friend, we just had a short conversation at a conference.
Her name is Jenny Blake and she has this book called Pivot Method. It talks about these career transitions that we’re in. There’s also this great book called Designing Your Life, and they have one also called Designing Your Work Life, which is for people in these transitionary periods. The reason I say that the reason these books can exist and courses can exist is because it’s common.
There’s a lot of us who are in this stage of life or stage of our career where we’re like, “We want to do something different.” We feel like there’s something out there that’s more exciting or better fit. For anybody listening, I just want to validate that that’s okay and that’s good, but it’s also hard.
For you, Vinny, as you moved into that, you knew when you walked through the door, “This isn’t going to be a fit.” People say this and it’s true, “When you know, you know.” For you in that moment you knew. The hard thing sometimes is then knowing what is the fit. Talk to me a little bit about the world of digital media.
Even creating food content because a piece of you ink right now, you are creating income from your site, which is this additional income that you get from this W–2 job that you found. How did you know that’s where you wanted to go?
Vinny DelGiudice: I knew I needed to do something that was in the same field as food blogging. I know that I enjoy creating, I enjoy content creation in general. I love doing food creation, but it wasn’t the right time for me to be full-time food blogger. What it felt like at the time was like, “I need an income and if the food blog is making X amount of money and I have to take all of that money and put it towards my family, then I can’t grow the blog and I can’t grow the company.”
That’s what, it’s a company at this point where it needs money invested every month to try to scale it and create more do audits and everything just gets more expensive the more it grows. For me, I was like, “I need to figure out something that I can do that I’m going to continue to learn and continue to grow in a way where I’m still writing, still creating.” I just started searching for digital media.
I basically used my food blog and my Instagram as my resume. I had a resume, but it all was speech stuff. Then, at the top it just said food blog and had how many followers and the site stats and stuff like that. My food blog isn’t making enough money for me to survive on, but the idea that it has got me a career where I’m getting paid each week says enough to me where I’m like, “It was successful enough where somebody is willing to pay me money now because of the food blog.”
Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of the things that I think is often that we don’t give enough credit to in the process when we are looking at metrics or numbers or money or whatever it might be is skills and skill development. What we’ve found is a lot of times what can happen when you get into the world of content creation is you find something that you’re really passionate about that you’re interested in and that you are good at or know that you can be good at.
Photography as an example, in your case or video, like the digital media side of things. For other people they’ve realized that they are really good at writing and they get into that or recipe development or even HTML CSS design. All of these are different skills. I think it’s important for us to remember as we’re getting into this, like you said, it’s not just the outcome, it’s also the journey.
What you’re learning on the journey can be applied in other ways. I think it’s one of the greatest ways to grow and to build a thing is to have something adjacent to it, which is within the realm of what you want to be learning and getting better at, and then allowing your business to just reinvest those profits back into the business.
I think like you said, it’s a business and businesses are inherently valuable. The more you grow this business, the more you have a valuable thing. It’s actually for, I’m a personal finance geek, and one of the things I’ve started doing is like, Hey, roughly speaking, what is the value of this website that we have or this online business in a similar way that you would track the value of your home because these are valuable things.
To pair something like a W-two job where you’re learning with a valuable business that you’re able to reinvest back into and grow feels like a really valuable thing. What does that look like in terms of your time? You also have family, you have time that you want to spend with them. How do you balance that and make sure that you’re having the time that you need in each category of life?
Vinny DelGiudice: I think it’s hard to balance that, and then you have to be very intentional about how you spend your time because even if I have, so I don’t really drink anymore, and if I were to have three beers on a Friday, I can’t work on a Saturday morning. Now, I lose Friday night and Saturday morning, and I really focus on it like that. Where can I get an hour? Can I get an hour on Friday?
Can I get two on Saturday? I try to be intentional about making those small units of time add up. If it’s two hours, I know I’m going to get every weekday morning and 45 minutes every night. Over a week, it starts to really add up how much time you can really put into a blog. Obviously, creating the content is very time-consuming. My wife is super awesome with making sure I have some time on Saturdays and Sundays to shoot, which is great. That’s how I separate my time.
Bjork Ostrom: It gets easier to justify when you’re at the point where you are once you get to, and you don’t have to share specifics, but the site’s getting enough traffic now to say, “Okay, this is substantial in a way where it justifies the time that you’re putting into it. It’s money that could maybe cover a mortgage. It’s getting to that amount where it’s you feel it and it makes a difference.
What was it like in the stage before that? I think some people are like, “Hey, I can justify it once I get to that point,” but you only get to that point once you’ve spent enough time getting it there. What did it look like knowing that you started in 2019? Is that right?
Vinny DelGiudice: Yeah.
Bjork Ostrom: What did it look like in those earlier stages when it was maybe more of a grind and you weren’t getting that initial positive feedback loop of ad income or maybe sponsor content or whatever it might be?
Vinny DelGiudice: I personally felt silly sometimes where I was like, “I’m wasting my time.” It can feel very heavy where you’re not creating an income, but you’re spending hours and hours and hours of time, especially in the beginning when you’re really trying to build up your content. One of the things I always bring up to my wife and I steal this from you guys, is the 1% thing. She comes to me with all these ideas and I always say, “I got to do one thing at a time and we’ll build it up.”
Bjork Ostrom: I’ve got one hour today, what’s the thing that’s going to make a difference?
Vinny DelGiudice: I think you have to just get past that idea of, “What I’m doing doesn’t mean anything.” In the beginning it can really feel like you’re three blogs or you’re 10 blogs or you’re 15, and it can feel very insignificant in the grand scheme when you compare to other people. I think it’s important to look at what you want to do and how you’re going to get there.
Just knowing how long it can take because it does take a long time to get comfortable creating, get comfortable in your process, and you get 50 blogs in and you look at your first five and you’re like, “What was I thinking when I wrote this? What was I thinking when I shot these pictures?” You can’t get better unless you just go for it.
As tough as it can be in the beginning, it’s really nice to be able to look back at it and say like, “Wow, look how far this has come.”
Bjork Ostrom: Part of it too is to talk about that skill development piece. It’s like what do you want to be good at? I think sometimes we can get lost in wanting to hit these certain goals, which is still important. Whether it be like, “I want to get to 50,000 page views and apply to an ad network.” It’s like, “That’s great.” I think it’s good to have those goals, but also what do you want to be excellent at?
Think about that because you will become better the more that you work at a thing, even if some of the things that are harder to control followers, page views, whatever it might be, those aren’t always the best indicators of how good you are at a thing. If you stick with it long enough, eventually once you get to a point you will get noticed, but sometimes it takes a long time, years before that happens.
For you, what was the point where you felt, can you pinpoint made it or this feels like unlock or my guess is you apply to an ad network and then suddenly you’re earning money in a way that you weren’t before. You get to a hundred thousand followers on Instagram and it’s like, “Wow, that’s a really big number.”
For some people they aren’t as aware of some of those things as others, but were there steps along the way where you felt like, “Hey, this is really cool.” It was validating for the work that you had done or even getting a job in digital media?
Vinny DelGiudice: Honestly, that was a huge one for me because I was really able to equate something to a large sum, a yearly salary as a large sum of money and something to do. I think in terms of the blog though, getting on Mediavine was really awesome. Consistent income for a small business is so important to be able to scale because when you’re relying on products and sponsored shoots.
Maybe you don’t get a lot like me, I don’t get a lot of sponsored shoots from my Instagram. It’s not enough, you have to hope for the next one to come in and you have to do a lot of reach out. I’m not good at reaching out to companies and trying to sell myself, but writing the blogs and getting that income from the ads was a big one. It was to me, I think that’s when I realized this is step one.
I just got to step one and this is only the beginning. It really felt that way when I first, because you get there and you’re like, “Wow, now I really want to grow this thing because it’s exciting.” Then with Instagram followers, you think it matters, but it’s just like you get to a number and you think you feel like it’s going to feel some sort of way, but it never does for me.
I don’t get a ton from my Instagram besides maybe views on my website is really the only way. I think the main reason I got to a hundred thousand followers was I posted a recipe that people hate it, hate it. It was an Italian wedding soup and every comment was negative, but it got me so many followers and I was like-
Bjork Ostrom: Interesting.
Vinny DelGiudice: It really validated for me how much I should just, what I should be-
Bjork Ostrom: Focusing on.
Vinny DelGiudice: … focusing on. And for me it was like, “Wow, okay, so this doesn’t make sense. I’m creating something that people seem to not like, but it’s garnering more engagement. It’s funny the way Instagram can sometimes mess with your mind a little bit.
Bjork Ostrom: Totally, and what’s interesting about that is sometimes you see that in really big accounts, not even necessarily in the food space, but can also be the most controversial. The reason that it works is because it’s engagement and it’s attention. Sometimes that controversial type of content can be really engaging. There’s other ways that obviously on social that you can grow and that you have engaging content, but you see that potentially sometimes as an outcome.
Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by CultivateWP, specifically a new offering they have called Cultivate Go. As business owners, I’m talking to you, one of the things we need to get good at is thinking about how we invest in our business.
As someone who publishes content online, one of your most important business assets is your website. There’s a problem that a lot of us run into when we think about investing into our website, and it’s that it seems like there’s really two options. You have the like DIY, figure it out on your own, get really frustrated, spend a bunch of time, or pay tens of thousands of dollars to have a fully customized design and theme developed.
What if you find yourself in between those two options, you’re a successful and established blogger or even a new blogger who wants to invest in the best options, but you don’t have a budget of tens of thousands of dollars. That’s where Cultivate Go comes in. Cultivate Go is an offering from a company called CultivateWP, co-founded by Bill Erickson, an incredible developer that we’ve worked with in the past before we had our own internal team and Duane Smith, an incredible designer.
For years they’ve had their calendar field doing these fully customized sites, but they realize that there’s hundreds of bloggers who want that same level of technology but didn’t have that budget. That’s where Cultivate Go comes in. It’s a semi-custom theme design and white-glove site setup.
That means that your Cultivate Go site can compete on an even technological playing field with the biggest food blogs in the world. You choose one of the core themes, you customize it with your logo, your brand colors, your typography, and then the CultivateWP team sets it up on a stage environment and they can launch your site within one week and the cost is $5,000.
It’s that perfect sweet spot for anybody who finds themselves in that in-between stage where you want the best of the best, but you don’t want to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get it. If you’re interested in checking that out, go to foodbloggerpro.com/go or just search Cultivate, go in Google.
For you, when you think of the evolution, you had this job in speech pathology and it’s like that’s what you’re doing, that’s what you’re focusing on. You were let go from this position and then there’s this moment of what do I do next? Initially the thought was, “Hey, let’s figure out if I can scale this blog and the income from it, this business as quickly possible.”
It sounds like in that season, and it was around where we talked where it was like, “This probably doesn’t make sense to try and scale this as quickly as possible to become a full-time income.” The next pivot was into what does it look like to have my day job be closely aligned with what I want to be doing, which was photography and video? Is that right?
Vinny DelGiudice: I mean my main thing is I like doing video. I do a lot of product photography right now and some content video, but yeah.
Bjork Ostrom: At this point what you’re doing is saying, “Okay, I’m going to have that be my main gig.” You love video and you love photography. That in and of itself, correct me if I’m wrong, feels like a win. That’s a career change that you’ve had in doing something radically different than what you were doing before as a full-time gig and getting paid to do this thing that five years ago you probably couldn’t have gotten paid to. Does that feel accurate?
Vinny DelGiudice: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really exciting because, and this it sounds cliche, every day I go to work, I am like, I’m happy. I’m like, “This is awesome. I get to read about email marketing.” I am reading in the sense that I’m trying to grow that company, the brand. I really try to stay focused on that company when I’m there.
It is a cool thing because as I’m learning about them, I’m learning about what I can do with my blog, and as I’m learning more about my blog and SEO or whatever, I’m able to influence the W–2 job. I think sometimes-
Bjork Ostrom: It’s a win-win it’s like the best win-win.
Vinny DelGiudice: I really feel that way. I never feel like now I’m doing both things all the time so I’m burnt out. They’re different enough where I get to do a lot of the things that I like throughout the day and I feel very fulfilled in how it all came to fruition.
Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. One of the things that I love about that too is you talked about essentially what you were doing was building an incredible portfolio and then you were able to use that and say, “Here’s the case study for why I know video and why I know photography and why I know digital media because I’ve been doing it for five years.”
Can you talk about in that conversation, if you can identify it, what the variables were with your online content that were perceived as most valuable? What was it?
Vinny DelGiudice: I think it was just the fact that I was somebody who took nothing and made it something. I think that’s when you’re a content creator, we base a lot of our value on what people will pay us or what people will give us for what we’re doing. We create a lot of stuff. When you look back at a portfolio like that, you are able to say something you really built from the ground up.
How you knew nothing and then you learned it all and were able to create something. I think that was the most valuable thing that when I was interviewing that I heard was that all the questions were leading to the point where I was able to do this from zero to go to here. Creating that I think was important.
Bjork Ostrom: I think people underestimate how valuable it is in the marketplace to take something abstract and from there, build it into a thing that people can interact with. I think for somebody, my guess is when you’re hired into a role, the one that you were hired into, for somebody to look at that and say, “Hey, that means that we could give you something abstract like, Hey, we’re interested in growing search traffic.”
You are somebody who can take that and say, “Okay, I’m going to get after it and I’m going to figure it out.” That’s a relatively uncommon thing in the world for somebody to be able to take a general direction, general thought, “Here’s where we want to go,” and work to make it exist within the world.
That’s so much of what we’re doing as creators is we’re coming up with an abstract vision of here’s what we want our site to focus on and the audience to be like and the focus for the niche. Now, we’re going to learn WordPress. We’re going to learn Instagram. We’re going to learn YouTube to build something around this and make it a successful thing in the world.
When you think of these parallel tracks, do you have a vision of what your, and if this is a chapter, do you have an ideal vision of how that evolves and what the next chapter looks like? Do you feel like, “Hey, this feels pretty good to be where I am right now. I can grow my site, I can reinvest back into it. I can create a following while also doing work that I love.”
Vinny DelGiudice: I am trying to look at it more that way where I’m very much present in what I’m doing day to day, where I felt like with speech, I was just trying to get done. I felt like every day was the same. Where now I’m chipping away and growing things. It’s just a different perspective that I have with this job and with the blog now.
I feel like the differences is that I’m able to look at it, I can grow my blog now. I can put the time in and let it grow instead of being like, “This needs to happen now and I need this to be here.” I’m just excited to see where it will go. I think there’s so many things I want to learn. When I start getting into SEO now I’m like, “I need to learn more.”
All I can do is read about it and learn about it. Sometimes I want to just be in video editing mode and I want to learn more about transitions and this and that, and I let myself go into those funnels where I just try to learn as much about one thing at a time as I can. Sometimes I get burnt out from that thing and I keep doing it, but I move on to the next thing that I want to learn. I feel like these two jobs are letting me deep dive more.
Bjork Ostrom: I’ve referenced this a couple of times on the podcast, but there’s this composer, Charles Ives, and he was this experimental composer, and so he’d have these weird songs or symphonies or whatever they would be that he would do. One of them, if I’m remembering would be like the person would come out and smash the piano with a sledgehammer, that was it.
I think he was also the one who had somebody come out and the composer would just sit at the piano but not actually play anything or a certain period of time. That was one of the songs, but he was an insurance salesman and what it allowed him to do was to release the pressures of income from the thing that he was most excited about.
I think for a lot of us, there’s a benefit to crafting our life in a way where the thing that we’re most excited about and interested in doesn’t have to be the thing that we have to fully serve. It feels like what you have is a really good balance, which is like you have this client, it’s a W–2 job that is the primary thing that you’re focusing on, which is also in the realm of what you’re interested in, which is great.
Then, you also have this kind of playground that you can create content, build a following, but it’s also revenue generating. That’s a really fun game to play when you put time into it and you see a little bit of a boost of traffic or you see more email signups, but you don’t have the pressure of, “I need this thing to perform at this level.”
If it drops, there’s because of a Google algorithm update that suddenly you’re going to lose a bunch of sleep. Does that feel accurate when you think of the balance that you have right now between those two things?
Vinny DelGiudice: Yeah, it feels like I’m just not letting everything ride on this one thing, which I think is important in anything. You never want to have everything on something like Instagram where it can all fall apart so quickly. You just never know with some of these things. I always hear your email list is the most important thing.
Lately, that’s the thing that I’ve been like, I need to grow this and that’s what I focus on or whatever. I think it’s a cool experience to be able to have something that’s growing, be able to have this competitive finance piece to it where I get to say, “Okay, here’s what I did this month. Here’s the way it created income.”
It definitely makes it a little bit more fun when you’re able to switch from your focus of followers or engagement or this when you can really pinpoint this is how much income it generated, and now we’re talking about numbers that can matter to you and your family.
Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. Let’s say there’s somebody out there and they’re in between. They’re trying to figure out what does my next chapter look like? They don’t know what the next steps are. After you having gone through it relatively recently within the last year, half year, what would your advice be to them as they’re out there trying to figure things out?
Vinny DelGiudice: Identifying what you’re good at is so important and being able to show somebody how that will help them. I think that’s how I was able to explain why they should hire a digital media assistant or a photographer who has no history of being a digital media person or a photographer.
I think knowing what you’re good at and being able to really tell people about it and explain why that works for you. I think you said before, trying to know or work on what skill you want to develop. That’s so important when we’re thinking about content creation because there’s so many skills that you can have and so many different ways to create.
I think identifying what you like and just putting in the hours into that can help you make those decisions when it comes to where am I going to go next? When you know, you know you said that before, you do know what you want to do or when you see what you want to do, you’ll be able to fall into place with it.
Bjork Ostrom: Identifying where you feel the pull. I think even when you sit down during the day, what are the things that you’re most excited to get to? Are you excited to get to video editing or do you dread it? Are you excited when you get to tinker with your website’s HTML and CSS, or do you dread it?
Are you excited when you get to do comments and interact with people? Using those as little indicators for where there is a draw for you I think is really great. I’m pointing up on my bookshelf, but there’s that book Designing Your Life that I mentioned before. They also have one that I haven’t read after called Designing Your Work Life.
One of the exercises they have is with each thing that you have in your day, whether it be a meeting about a certain subject or a task that you’re working on or a project writing it down and then they have a little fuel gauge empty to full, and what does it look like? What did that activity look like for you?
Was it like gas tank full or this was really great or gas tank empty? My guess is for you when you’re in the season of doing speech pathology, towards the end, it was probably a lot of gas tank empty like, “I’m getting through it, I’m doing it.” You’re probably good at it, but for whatever reason, it was draining.
Now, it sounds like a lot of the things that you’re doing throughout the day are gas tank full. I feel like in the conversations that we have, this podcast can be a success if we can help facilitate the transition that people have from less gas tank empty more gas tank full days. It sounds like you’ve pulled that off in a really cool way.
Vinny DelGiudice: I think what’s really important to realize too is that every time I edit a video, I’m not gas tank full. Sometimes I’m like, “Oh god, I would rather be in my bed than be sitting here dredging this chicken Parmesan video at 5:45. I think it’s important to recognize sometimes you don’t want to work, and this is work.
Everything that you do with your blog, yeah, you can say you love it and it’s what you’re meant to do and all this, but it’s still work and work sucks at the end of the day. Everybody wants to be relaxing. I want to sleep. I look forward to a life where I can sleep eight hours, and that’s not realistic in content creation right now where I have a full-time job.
I want to grow it and sometimes I’m psyched in about doing certain things and sometimes I’m not. I think managing that “gas tank” quote unquote to being like, today I am really writing well, so that’s where I’m going to put my energy because that’s where I’m feeling fulfilled, and maybe tomorrow I’ll get more editing done if that’s where my brain’s at.
Being able to switch it up and not let yourself be a one trick pony, I guess, where you have to be doing this thing to make yourself happy.
Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.
Vinny DelGiudice: Anything can eventually feel tough to get through or gas tank empty.
Bjork Ostrom: I think it’s a really good point. Steven Pressfield wrote this book called The War of Art. In it he talks about this idea of the resistance and he talks about it specifically for writers. I think it’s an important concept in that even if it’s something that we know we want to be doing, let’s say we know we want to be a writer or photographer or we want to do video, we can still in pursuit of that have resistance, which is like, “I really want to do this, but I’m going to do the laundry first.”
There’s this part of us that just resists the thing that we actually really want to do, and it is because sometimes it’s really hard to do. Especially, if you’re doing it in the margins and you’re trying to make it work and you have a busy schedule, I think it’s important that you called that out and totally agree that it’s not always hunky-dory, feels really good.
Vinny DelGiudice: For sure.
Bjork Ostrom: … gas tank full. That’s great. Super inspiring, Vinny, to talk to you to see your transition in a relatively short amount of time when we had that conversation whenever it was like June, July, August when it was warm out. It’s inspiring for me to see you evolve your career. If people want to connect with you, where’s the best place for them to do that and reach out, connect, whether it’s shoot a quick message or follow along with what you’re up to?
Vinny DelGiudice: Yeah, for sure. You can find me on Instagram @vindelgiudice. Then my website is alwaysfromscratch.com. You can always email me at [email protected] that’s where you’ll find me.
Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Vinny, thanks so much for coming on, sharing your story. Super great to connect.
Vinny DelGiudice: Awesome.
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