The Reality of Career Pivots and Building an Authentic Brand with Tanya Harris

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: AllSpice is building the next evolution of recipe blogging, an AI-powered experience layer that connects your website, your recipes, and your readers in one seamless flow. By adding AllSpice to your site, your readers also get access to a companion mobile app that can notify them the moment you publish a new recipe, driving repeat traffic straight back to your website. Readers can save recipes directly from your site, generate smart grocery lists, track their pantry, and get personalized cooking insights, all while staying connected to your brand. AllSpice, partnering directly with recipe bloggers to roll out features that increase engagement, retention, and monetization while helping creators turn one-time visitors into loyal readers.

Ann Morrissey: Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I’m Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team, and in this episode, Bjork is sitting down to chat with Tanya Harris from My Forking Life. Tanya is a former attorney turned food blogger who gets real about the guilt identity shifts and mental hurdles of trading in the courtroom for the kitchen. She opens up about the challenges of redefining success on her own terms and why aligning her work with your personal values is a secret to longevity. Tanya also touches on the business side of full-time blogging, from the dynamics of working with her spouse to using AI tools to avoid burnout, she shares practical strategies for building a sustainable brand. We think you’ll find this episode really insightful as you start to think about how you can be your authentic self online and grow your blog. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Tanya, welcome to the podcast.

Tanya Harris:Hey!

Bjork Ostrom: It’s going to be a fun conversation. We’re going to be talking about a lot of different things, authenticity and the content that you create. We’re going to be talking about email. You were featured on kit around your email growth and how that has played out for you and some strategies you’ve implemented for email growth. But before we do that, I want to hear about your story. Your previous life, you were an attorney. It’s a very much so one of those careers that usually people get established in their life as a career as an attorney and the attorney to food creator, attorney to food blogger isn’t necessarily a common path that you see people taking. So talk to me about what that was like and what that transition was like.

Tanya Harris: It feels like forever ago, but before that I was actually a track collegiate athlete, and then I kind of was just like, what’s next? And I went to law school, really liked it, really got passionate about criminal defense, and so I ended up becoming an assistant public defender, and that’s basically the kind of law that I practiced the entire time. I was a practicing attorney and somewhere along the way I started liking to cook. It was just a hobby And I kind of knew that I wanted to do something outside of law. At some point I didn’t know what that would be, but while I was learning to cook, I decided, I was like, I’m just going to start a blog. It seems like something that would be cool where I can document it. And so I just randomly came up with the name my working life and bought the domain name, got all the handles, and I kind of didn’t know what kind of food I was going to blog about, but I just blogged about food. It was my escape from my job. And then eventually somewhere along the lines, I was like, yeah, I think I could totally switch to being a food blogger full time. And so I was able to do that back in 2019 stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: First of all, what events did you run in track and field? Were you running?

Tanya Harris: Yeah, I was. So I started in high school. I was doing the 800 and a 400, and then once to college I exclusively did the 400 of the 200, so I de turned it to pretty much a sprinter in college.

Bjork Ostrom: We recently had a conversation on the podcast about somebody else who’s in track and field, and we were talking about the 800 being such a grueling, it’s such a grueling race. I did track and field in seventh and eighth grade and did 800, and it was like, oh man, you’re kind of right in between a sprint. And yet, yeah, so you have this period of time where you are an attorney and it’s like you need this escape. The escape is food, but also documenting food is kind of a fun, unrelated side hustle. Eventually you come to understand, Hey, this could be a career. I could make something out of this. How did you navigate the transition into doing this? What did that look like?

Tanya Harris: A little bit hard. So even when I started the blog, I was very inconsistent. And then I think there was just a period where I was reading income reports and I was like, oh, okay, I could actually start making some money. I didn’t think it was going to be full-time money. And then along the lines, it was actually after I had my second child, my daughter, I started really getting serious about I definitely need to think about making this shift. So I was, rather than going to lunch with colleagues, I would go and just learn more about blogging and how to build it. And then my goal was to at least match my income once I started making money and then I started making more. And then even when I was making more, it was still very hard to leave this profession because friends and family would be like, are you serious? You’ve got this steady job and you went to school for all those years to be a lawyer. And I would kind of just be like, I don’t know. I’d had that guilt about leaving, but I eventually got to the point where I was just like, it just makes no sense. I really need to bet on myself and go whole time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I feel like that comes with jobs where you have worked really hard to get them. I think we all work hard to get a job, obviously, but some jobs specifically around going to school, you go to undergrad and then you go to graduate school or I think of within the context of an attorney, you have all of these years that you’ve gone through the education system and then you’ve also kind of worked your way up. Maybe you’ve had entry level roles within that, and then you get kind of some seniority. I know people who have gone through the process of becoming doctors and it’s like, and then they discovered that they have this passion or interest maybe in content creation or real estate or whatever it is. How did you navigate psychology of your identity shifting within the role? Because I’m guessing that was a part of it. Was it almost like a question of identity both for yourself and others?

Tanya Harris: Yes, and I think that’s the thing is I think I finally got to the point where that identity mattered to other people more than it mattered to myself. And then I really would always tell my friends, there was a point where I knew that I wasn’t going to be a practicing attorney forever. I still have my license. I’m still a lawyer. I still can go be in a courtroom, but I always admire people laugh when I mention Jerry Springer and I would be like, man, I really like him because he had this talk show, but he was a lawyer. I really always admire people that just were able to do this big thing and be like, that’s cool. Let’s see what else is out there. And so once I realized that that’s what I cared about more than let’s say being a judge, I was like, yeah, then I’m okay with making that transition

Bjork Ostrom: And we’ll talk about that more as well. But this idea of defining your own game I think is so important because it can be so easy for us to get caught up in what other people are doing or how other people are doing what they’re doing, even getting caught up in the priorities of other people and to the degree that we can really look at ourselves and say what matters to me. And it doesn’t always have to be, it sounds inherently selfish, but what matters to me could be it’s really important for me to have 10 hours a week of nonprofit work. I’m not saying I actually do that. That is a component of how I view things is not 10 hours a week. Or for some people it might be, it’s really important for me to have two to three days at home with my kids or to drive my kids to school every day, or it’s really important for me to work 10 hours a day. We’re all so different in what our hopes and dreams and ideal best life looks like, but sometimes I think we can get caught up in looking at somebody else’s and then absorbing that and kind of becoming that. So how did you work through that and unravel other people’s thoughts or expectations or even your own desire to fulfill those other people’s desires or expectations? How did you sort through that? I think we’re always doing that, and I’m guessing people who are listening are thinking about that and processing that as well.

Tanya Harris: Well, it’s just been the story of my life. It’s just always been different transitions. So even when I went to law school, and I chose to be a public defender, I got people that would say, Oh my gosh, you need to go get a high-paying job, or You should be working at a law firm. You should try to be a partner. And it is hard. It is just something that I have to practice where usually I would just shut out all the noise and I would always just try to listen to, whether it’s a podcast or just people that were doing things that were more aligned with what I felt I wanted to do. So there was a part of it that I do have to be, and I think this is probably going to happen to me again where I’m going to be in a certain position, everyone’s going to say, you should do this, you should do that. And I’m just going to have to shut off that noise and just really dig into what are the things that spark joy in me? What are the things that I really am happy with doing? What can I go to bed at night and then think about and say, wow, I had a really good day. So those are just things, it’s a lot of mental work, but it’s not easy. Definitely.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Well, and the reason I bring it up is I think so much of what we do is that mental work, and we have these roles which are knowledge jobs, knowledge-based jobs. And the primary way that we are creating value in the world isn’t through other jobs that I’ve had, which is laying blocks in construction or shoveling snow or working at UPS. Those are all value-add jobs, but it’s pretty obvious how you are adding value when you’re doing something physical, or even I think of people who are. We just did a big kitchen project, and man, we got to work with these people who are just artists when it comes to cabinets. But for us it’s really, it’s our mind and it’s our brain. And then we take that and we create with it a digital thing that communicates something to somebody else’s mind and brain. And so for us to be in a good head space as it relates to the work we’re doing is so critical because the main mechanism, the main output, the main thing that we are doing is creating and creating from our own thoughts. And if that is misaligned, then the output is going to be misaligned. So I think it’s super important to talk through. What does that look like now for you today? So you’ve this transition, you’re doing it full time, you’ve built the business to the point where not only met your previous income but surpassed it. How are you able to show up day to day and be in good relationship with your work? And what are the things that in the day-to-day that you are doing right now that are most valuable?

Tanya Harris: That’s a hard one. I even felt like I’m going through a transition kind of right now, but as far as my day-to-day and what I do work with my spouse and what we’ve done and I talk his ear off about it is just really honing in on whether it’s recipes or topics that really mean something, this, that selfish part, but really means something to me, but that I know that would provide value to other people, which is weird. You think it’s just really general. But I start to realize, wow, if I’m developing a recipe, I’m really, I’m really thinking of, well, why do people need to hear about this from me? What is my personal experience with this? And really honing in on sharing those kinds of things, which also means that I may not be producing as much content as I’d like to because it does take a little bit longer to think through all those types of things. But that’s pretty much my goal is to just really dig deep on not even just the kinds of recipes, but how I’m sharing them, how I’m presenting them to my audience and the new audience and exactly what kind of value they’re getting from that, whether it’s seeing it or whether it’s the way that I’m saying it or whether it’s just an extra fact that I might put in there. So that’s kind of what I’ve been focusing on mostly now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Tanya Harris: I hope I answered your question.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it is. I think it’s like, and as we were shaping what this conversation could look like, it’s one of the things that you pointed out was this kind of in inflection point. It sounds like within your content creation process, which is starting to focus on your unique angle, your voice and that authenticity piece, and it sounds like not only has that resulted in you being more aligned with the content that you’ve created, but maybe has also impacted the growth of your content or your followers or email subscribers. Can you talk about anything that you’ve been able to see that has been kind of a correlation between those two changes for that change?

Tanya Harris: Absolutely. So I’ll say, I’ll even particularly talk about email, and I recall when everybody was, this was probably a while back when everyone was like, okay, let’s do those sequences and stuff like that. And a lot of the sequences that I created were from let’s say, categories that were doing while on my website, but they were categories that I was really passionate about it. So for me to do a sequence, it wouldn’t be so generic. I might be giving you recipes, were just different. Maybe I didn’t write ’em for SEO, but maybe I did it because I’m thinking of an air fryer recipe. I may have done something that I just thought was super cool, super passionate about it, and I put those in that sequence. And what happened is people would go through those sequences, but they would really just be super excited about it because my wording was super excited about it. I

Bjork Ostrom: Also, because you were super excited about it.

Tanya Harris: Yeah. So it came across at that, and then there was these, I started getting into, my mom’s family is Jamaican, and that’s all I knew growing up was Jamaican food. So I’m like, okay. But I started doing those on my website, but then I would do an email funnel about that just like modern Jamaican cooking or modern day Jamaican cooking. And I was passionate. I’m still passionate about that because that’s the food I grew up eating. I talked about ways that I might change it to suit my family, and I believed that people could see that in the content that I was creating, and that’s what helped. And it was also easier for me to keep sharing and keep promoting that stuff. It’s hard for me to promote something that I’m just not passionate about. If it’s just a regular recipe, I’m not going to, you could just tell. It’s just going to be like, you’re just doing this just to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Lindsay talks about that within the context of the recipes that she does. This idea that we are marketers and what we are marketing is a piece of content. And in our world, the content almost always is recipes. And in order to market something, well, you have to be believable, you have to be excited about it. There has to be some kind of genuine, authentic communication around why is great and why you’re excited about it. And I think you might be able to act and pretend, but man, that’s going to be like recipe for burnout. If You are a content creator who needs to constantly be creating and promoting content and the content that you are constantly creating and promoting is not inspired content. It’s content that is a drag and you’re not excited about it. And I think more and more it’s important for creators to understand marketing within the context of social media, within the context of email. All of these are channels for us to promote the content that we’re creating and we need to be excited about it. So can you talk about what the process looks like for you or looked like for you as you were creating a recipe? Where were you talking about that you have your YouTube channel, you have email, all of these are substantial channels for you, what have you found to be most effective for these recipes that you are excited about and inspired by to then go and promote them?

Tanya Harris: So it’s funny, I was just looking through my, we took a break from YouTube, but we started going back into YouTube. And honestly, it would just be by accident. I might just be talking about something and then I might say, oh, yeah, I learned this, I learned that. So for me, it’s just making sure that there’s just some, whether it’s two sentences, a paragraph back in the day on my blog post, it would be a whole Long story. But for me, it’s just thinking of one important fact to put in somewhere. I know short videos are kind of hard to do that, but I was even looking at some of my Instagram reels that did a lot better, and a lot of them were aligned with a small bit of story, not like a ton, but I could say like, oh, wow, I used to make this for my then boyfriend, now he’s my husband. And people would attach to that. So I think it’s just important. So whatever we’re promoting to just think of what we can say that draws on people’s emotions, something that makes them go that they can relate to or they could learn just something. I used to do it by accident, but now I’m starting to think, okay, let me be more intentional with just making sure that every piece of content I put out there has something that could spark some kind of emotion.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s one of those things. I remember Ed Sheeran talking about the reason that he can write good songs today is because he wrote so many songs to get to the point where you start to develop a sixth sense around what’s going to work well. I think the same thing really applies in the world of content creation, where part of it is just reps, you continue to create content and suddenly you start to realize, Hey, this did well. Let me spend a little bit of time thinking about why that might’ve done well. Let me maybe do a version of that again and see if it does well. Oh, it did do well. I wonder if there’s a pattern there. But I think especially in the early stages for people who are creating, it’s an important reminder that part of what you’re doing is just trying to understand what’s going to work well and what doesn’t work well, and you’ll get better with it over time. In the kit conversation, it was really cool to read through that. You talk about this period of growing your email list by 7,000 subscribers in seven months, and they mentioned having almost 70,000 email subscribers. I don’t know when this was published, so it was this last year. My guess is that number’s grown a little bit,

Tanya Harris: And then I cut it.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, yeah. Okay. Getting rid of cold subscribers, which great practice to get into for anybody who has an email list, not only does it save you cost, but also it keeps your list healthy. But tell me about email. How are you using email? You had mentioned sequences. Was that in reference to if somebody signs up, they go through a certain sequence where they’re able to get certain content if they opt into it or whatever? What does that look like for you? How have you been using email as a platform?

Tanya Harris: And so the way I’ve kind of slowed down, so I did the sequences is for my most popular categories, so just went through my analytics. Okay. For example, people loved air fry stuff. So I did a sequence and I did one of those welcome five day sequences where each day they get an email, but within the actual email language, I might name it like day one, air fire baked goods or something like that. And then I would make sure that the language was more conversational, and then I would have the links to those particular blog posts with that. So that actually worked really well to get the people to log on the list. And I think it’s a great way to give people, I would name it something like a guide, so that way people would think of it. It’s an important thinking of it, it’s an important piece of paper, but it’s really just a bunch of emails.

Bjork Ostrom: And this was on your site, to be clear, you’re talking about this on your site.

Tanya Harris: So if you were on the site, so in the reason why you want to do it on your highest category pages, because you’re going to get the most traffic there, and those people are intentionally looking for something. So if you’re intentionally on a, let’s say, air fryer recipe, it makes sense to give them an air fryer guide on that post to let them join.

Bjork Ostrom: And is that within, there’s a super specific question. Is that an in line within the post itself prompt for somebody to sign up, or is it like a popup? What have you found to be most impactful?

Tanya Harris: Popups? Those are popups for those particular ones with the sequences. So I do that. I’ve also done the share it on social media. So if you have A ton of content that might align with, I don’t know, one of those categories, you could just share it with the real comment, whatever for the signup, and then you can have ’em on a landing page. So I actually had some pretty good success with that. But then my whole goal too is not even just to really scale the email list as much, it’s really to get those people that are logged in to start interacting with them more. So I haven’t done too many sequences. It’s mainly because I do want to keep cost level, and I’m trying to get people that are invested to want to hear the emails. So one thing we did recently is just increase the number of emails. We’re sending four emails a week as opposed to two that I was doing before, and they’re just random. It could be like, here’s a new YouTube video, here’s a new recipe. Sometimes they’re roundups, but we haven’t had any complaints and it’s been doing really well as far as open rates and clickthroughs. I’m also being able to see the kind of content by at least my email audience wants to see from me,

Bjork Ostrom: Responds to. Yeah, I think it’s one of the most common things that I’m starting to hear is just people sending more email. What’s the easiest way to get more clicks through email? It’s like send another email to the degree that some people, I think are sending multiple emails a day. We’re at that point, we’re similar to you, I think three or four emails a week. But it’s of those things that one of the great things as a content creator and having a content business is we have a thousand different levers that we can change and adjust, and those can have a positive impact on our business. The hard part is knowing which levers do you shift and adjust. But one of the easier ones is, hey, if you already have a system and a process for sending out emails, think about potentially sending another one. And maybe you send one that doesn’t require quite as much effort or lift, whether that be a roundup, or maybe you sit down one day and you brainstorm 50 different recipes that are the highlight or the shining stars of your site and you schedule it out for the year, a link to one of the recipes. All of that stuff can really add up over a long period of time. I’m curious to know in this season, what are the things that you feel like are the highest leverage? When we talk about those levers, what are the things that you feel like are the highest leverage items for you right now within the business and the way that you’re working?

Tanya Harris: I think it’s hard to say leverage. I do, I think for sure video, but that’s also because that’s something that I actually enjoy doing. So I enjoy getting in front of a camera and speaking, is it the best return on investment? I don’t know, but I like getting in front of a camera. I think it gives people the chance to feel like they know me a little bit better and to trust whatever I’m saying a little bit better if I’m able to do that. So that’s something that we’re focusing on. And the other one isn’t really like a platform, but I’m really working on my systems and just trying to make things easier and more simple. I think when I first started blogging, let’s say for video, one of the ways I would do it is I’d set up my DSLR and get all these big lights, and now I’m just like, Nope. If I’m doing reels, let me figure out how to do it on this phone and just simplify the system as opposed to the way I used to do it. That’s been kind of hard. I was so used to doing everything one way, and now I’m shifting it to saying, what is causing me friction? What steps can I eliminate and how can I be more efficient with my time so that I can either produce more content or just actually make it more sustainable? Something that I could do week after week without feeling like I’m getting burnt out.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Do you feel like you’ve come up against that feeling burnt out?

Tanya Harris: Absolutely. All the time. Whenever I get burnt out, I just stop. I just like, oh, nope, nope.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you talk about that? Other people who are experiencing that, or inevitably, if you do this long enough, you probably will come up against it. What would your advice be for people who are in it or who might come up against it?

Tanya Harris: I also, I think it’s easier for me to say this. Well, no, actually, it took a break even when I initially started. It’s like depending on how you build your business, you can take some time off and you’ll still make money, especially if majority of it’s ads or affiliates. But I think it’s just good to take a step back and then just try to remember why you’re even doing it. So that was what I had to do just recently. I’m like, why am I still showing up? And that may just make you say, for me, it didn’t make me say I wanted to quit, but it did say, okay, I just need to be more intentional with the kind of content that I’m promoting, the kind of content that I’m creating. I really need to love this recipe down before I put hours into filming it and taking video and writing it. So for me, it’s just take that pause, really try to remember. And also, like you said, just remember that it doesn’t have to look like everybody. You don’t need to be publishing a recipe every day if that’s not what you want. Just figuring out what you truly want.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. When you went through that exercise, when you stepped back and reflected, did you come up with the answer why you’re doing what you’re doing? And was that what was motivating to help you continue to go forward?

Tanya Harris: It kind of changed, but I think initially it was just more so don’t, one of the things where it’s just like, there’s only one me, right? There’s plenty of people on the thing, but there’s only one me, and I’m really passionate about learning about food and cooking, so I’m also just really passionate about sharing that information. So that’s just what made me say, okay, that’s a dig deep down. I finding a really random fact about a recipe and being like, Hey guys, I really want to share it. And so for me, that was my why. Outside of money, whatever, all that stuff. For me, it’s just me being myself, Tanya Harris, and being out there to share it, because I know that there is somebody that wants to hear it from me. I don’t know who that person is yet, but that’s just what my why is, it’s just like, I’ve got to be the person that shows up and does it. I dunno.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Well, I think it’s clarifying in that what you come away with is here are the things that I enjoy. I enjoy learning, enjoy. I enjoy sharing those things. And so if I’m doing that, I want to do it around things that I’m passionate and interested in and at the pace that feels like sustainable. It’s kind of like a version of what I heard you say. Maybe it’s a bit

Tanya Harris: No, that’s okay.

Bjork Ostrom: But I think what can sometimes happen is because of the way our brains are wired and how we exist within the world, we can hear on a podcast interview somebody saying, I’m publishing a post a day, or I’m updating 20 pieces of content, or I’m making a hundred thousand dollars a month, or whatever it is. And sometimes, oftentimes for myself at least I can kind of anchor on that and be like, oh, man, this person is scaling their team. This person is two Xing their email list. This person is whatever it is, fill in the blank. And because of, I don’t know, some psychologists would probably know pattern matching or competition or the desire for more, I don’t know what it would be, can often find myself being like, Hey, maybe I need to do that. I need to X, Y, Z, this within my life because I’ve seen somebody else do it. And it feels like one of the really hard things to do is to have this really tight self-awareness around the why and to know that somebody else’s why is going to be different than mine, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from them, but you’re probably going to execute and implement differently. And so with that in mind, are there things that you feel like you’ve intentionally said no to or have decided not to do in service of better alignment with what you actually want from your business and your life?

Tanya Harris: Oh yeah. The biggest one I talk about now is I think at one point I thought I needed to just hire a ton of people, and I did that. I’ve had a full-time employee. And then it got to a point where I was just like, oh, wait, this isn’t aligned with what I wanted just because everyone else did it. But you said something just recently when you were talking about that, and this is something that I have to sometimes remember is go back to track Tanya. And the reality is, I’ve had a really good track career. I mean, my school was Hall of Fame, but I was never always the fastest. So I would get on a track, sometimes I would be the fastest, but sometimes I would go against former Olympians and I would sit in my lane. And my goal was never really to always just win the race. My goal was always just to get faster. It’s like to pr, how can I, and then I would run my race differently compared to some of those girls would run faster through towards the end. When I was trained, I was told to run faster at the beginning. It’s just different things running my own race. And so sometimes when I’m comparing myself to like, oh my gosh, this person is publishing five times a week. Oh my gosh, this person is on TikTok. I have to remember, like you said, and go and be like, okay, I’m in my own lane.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s so applicable for track. You’re literally running your own race and in your own lane.

Tanya Harris: And then only thing that I need to focus on is my pr. So if I set a goal for email, for example, okay, you know what? I’m going to do my own email thing and I just want to add two emails. I don’t need to do two emails a day. I just need to hit my pr. And if I hit it, yay, it’s a success. If I did it, let me figure out how I can tweak things. But I think that’s what I have to sometimes remember is just to go back to that brain and say, I’m not competing with everybody else on the internet, and I can cheer them on. I think it’s great that they’re doing what they’re doing, but I have to remember that this is my forking life. I like saying that, but this,

Bjork Ostrom: It works.

Tanya Harris: This is my race, and I need to make sure that I am just here with it and just focus.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And I think we’ve been in some way, shape or form creating content for 15 years and still every day I need to remind myself of that. What is the race I’m running? Why am I running it? And in some ways, it almost becomes more of that the longer you do it, once you get to the point where you’ve replaced the income that you had from your job and you’ve replaced the income and you’re making a little bit more than you did before, initially, that can be the race. Hey, I want to get to this point financially. And there’s probably always those goals where you want to continue to stretch and grow, but eventually it’s like, do I want to do that in place of picking my girls up from school? Maybe, maybe not. That’s going to be where you have those individual decisions. So one of the things I want to ask you about is you had mentioned working with your husband. Tell me what that is. What has that process been? What have you learned? Because I know that there’s a lot of people who are in this world of building a thing, and eventually it gets to the point where it makes sense for them to do it, and they continue to work on it. And then it also gets to the point where it potentially makes sense to have a partner or a spouse leave their job because it’s more beneficial to grow the thing and work on the thing, whether it be part-time or full-time, but then it’s a really unique relationship that you have working with somebody that you also live with. What has that been like? What have you learned and any advice for other people who are working with a spouse or partner?

Tanya Harris: I would, no, and I think it was one of those things where I saw you and your wife working together. So I will see other people and be like, oh, well, clearly it’ll be just easy. It just depends, right? It’s not bad. It’s never been bad. But it did take us a while to figure out where you should be in the business. And there might be some things where I’m like, okay, you totally should take over this department. And then I’ll come back and be like, maybe not. And it’s not like they’re not capable, but it could just be there are other things that I’m passionate about that I shouldn’t be handing off. So Currently my spouse, he does my editing for my long-form videos in the YouTube, and he is also pretty much the primary caregiver when it comes to our two children as well. So takes him to school, does all the running, but he really loves doing those kind of things. So for us, we just really focused on the things that we were really more passionate about. I’m way more passionate about recipe development, taking the pictures, doing the shorts, where he’s more passionate about editing the videos. And if they call, they need a parent, that’s him. And anytime I’m like, Hey, I need extra hands on this, he’s there to help out.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I did this for a while. I’m trying to think. I could even pull it up now and look, I think I had a note just in the notes app, and it was just as a exercise, I was creating a list of all of the things that I do. And I haven’t done this with Lindsay before, but it would probably be a good exercise. And I think I just called it things I do. Yeah, things I do. And it’s probably 30 or 40 things long right now, and it included everything. Anytime I was doing a thing, I put it down. So it was like put away laundry, clean out the coffee, make coffee, drop items off at Goodwill, text friends, unsubscribe from email, oil change for the cars, book rental cars. Anyways, it was a little bit of an experiment just to see what does a day look like? What does a week look like? What does a month look like? What does a life look like? When I put all of those things together, what does that list look like? And from that, I think one of the things that’s so cool being a business owner is you can start to make decisions around, okay, what do I for surely want to continue to do? For me? It’s like there’s an item here where it was shopping with our daughters looking at dolls and toys. It’s like, well, of course I’m not going to outsource that to somebody that’s going to be me doing that, but oil changes and car maintenance, would I want to do that? Would it make sense for somebody else to do it? Maybe it is me. But then it gets really interesting when you then have the time and availability of a spouse to say, okay, collectively, if we have this list of 200 things that cover 90% of what happens within our life and our business, what does it then look like to say, here’s what I do, here’s what you do. And then potentially, here’s what somebody else does either within our life, like our personal life or our business. So is there anybody within your business on a contractor basis that you have found or within life that you’ve found who’s been able to come in? Or do you feel like for the most part, you and your spouse right now, your husband, are able to have coverage of everything within life and business?

Tanya Harris: No, we have help. And it will be occasional, you’re thinking house cleaners. We have someone that comes over, even doing my daughter’s hair sometimes I’m like, I don’t have time to do it. My husband actually took a class to try to learn.

Bjork Ostrom: Love that

Tanya Harris: It wasn’t working.

Bjork Ostrom: I need to do the same thing. It would be super helpful if you could figure out how to, in my kids, it’s like braid the girl’s hair. This probably something that I, yep.

Tanya Harris: So we found someone else to do that because he tried. And I was like,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

Tanya Harris: So we’ll hire out hope for that. And I guess that’s where delegation is just a little bit easier for me outside of business tasks, but household related tasks or accountants and all that stuff like that, we’ll, easier for me to delegate that than something entirely in my business.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s all the time is no different. An hour is an hour is an hour, but the time is different when you slot it in within the context of your business. Because if you are working an hour on a piece of content that then goes onto your blog, the value of that is pretty amazing potentially. But if it’s like an hour within the context, I use this example recently because it just happened. We have a pet frog. Rice. Rice needs to eat bugs, and we hadn’t been to the pet store to get crickets recently. So I found myself one morning walking around looking for bugs in our house to feed our pet frog rice. That’s not something that’s happening all the time. But there are lots of different things that I think we could start to surface that number one, we don’t actually like to do and that we don’t want to do within the business or within our life. That if we can think strategically around, okay, if I don’t like to do it, if I don’t want to do it, and if I’ve built a business or built through work of W2 job contractor, job plus the business to have some disposable income, then to think really strategically around how you start to trade those hours of things that need to get done for things that maybe don’t need to get done, but are going to be more value add if they do get done. So it feels like one of the kind of games that we get to play as entrepreneurs and business owners, or more broadly just in life as we think about time and money and whatnot. So for anybody who is working with their spouse, I feel like that’s an ongoing exercise. Lindsay and I are always talking about it. It’s always revisiting that conversation. And realistically, that job description that we each have is ever changing and ever evolving as well. One of the things that I wanted to talk to people about on the podcast more often is tools, like tools and processes. So are there tools that you are using right now that have found to be especially helpful? It could be scheduling tools, it could be social media tools, it could be plugins. Really open-ended question around, we talked just recently about delegation within the context of people, but I think another form that that can happen is delegation within the context of tools that help us get things done, software, whatever it might be. Anything that you’d point to that has been especially helpful for you as a creator and business owner?

Tanya Harris: Do you have another hour? No, I’m joking. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, great.

Tanya Harris: No, I love a tool, especially one that can eliminate friction. And I’ve been really into more of AI tools as assistants. So I really like Claude, is it Claude? And yeah, I use that. So I use that a lot to help with learning, not writing content, but if I’m writing a caption, I’ll be like, what could I say to draw on people’s emotions and based off of the facts that I’m giving you. And it does a pretty good job doing that, and I use it for data analysis and all that kind of stuff. It’s just way faster than my brain. So I really like that. I really am obsessed with, it’s called with Whisper Flow.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes. Okay. And this is exactly my world as well. Yeah,

Tanya Harris: I love WisprFlow because the way you’re just talking to it, and it just basically makes everything perfectly. So a lot of times I might use that to maybe to even just talk to everybody, but also in Claude or whatever, or even that also really Gemini for email responses. I realized for a while I wasn’t really responding to emails like I should. Like, oh, I don’t feel like putting the brain power. And then I realized Gemini’s in my emails, so it’s easy to respond to. Usually I’ll get general emails like, oh my gosh, I love your blog so much. It’s easy for me to just click a button to have a really thoughtful response. So I use that. I ClickUp to have all my data in store, all my data. And then I thought there was another,

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about that? Have all your data in store, all your data within ClickUp?

Tanya Harris: Yeah. So I really struggled with organization forever. And so now, rather than using ClickUp as just like a task management, I put everything in ClickUp. So all my blog posts are in there, all the photos are in there, all the videos are in there and organized. So that way, whether it’s me or I tell someone to grab a file, it’s just easy. Because when I was trying to use other tools, let’s say something paired with Google Drive, there was friction. I’d have to go to a Google Drive link to get something. So now I get unlimited storage with everything. I draft blog posts in there, I put my photos, my videos, and then it’s just easy to grab stuff to reshare it.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. So it’s literally your media library That has access to all of blog posts, but then also photos. It has access to videos. We were just having this conversation this week. We’re starting to think more about Facebook. How can we be more strategic on Facebook? And we’re like, where can we easily access all of our videos? And right now the system is that Jenna on our team and Lindsay use iCloud, but it’s like, oh, we actually need to put those into a spot where everybody would be able to more easily access those and organize them. So we’re just starting to have that conversation around what’s our media library look like. Because also, once you get to a certain point where you have hundreds of pieces of content, videos, blog posts, photos, part of the strategy isn’t creating the next new piece of content. Part of the strategy is revisiting old content, including it in an email, publishing it again on Facebook, creating a carousel of content, publishing that to Instagram. It’s like remixing that content or even playlisting that content. And so I think the easier it is to access it, the easier it is to access it, and the better organized it is, The easier it is to put that stuff together. So that’s interesting that you can do that within ClickUp, I thought of it always as task management, but media management is a really cool way to use it.

Tanya Harris: And if I just need something, I just search for it. And I have a setup where it’s like, I’ll use it to plan my content. And you mentioned Facebook. I do use Smarter Queue for Facebook, and I just load that up to continuously share things forever and ever.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about what Smarter Queue is and how that works?

Tanya Harris: Oh, yeah. So Smarter Queue, and it was something that I wasn’t using efficiently until recently, but it’s basically, it’s a scheduler, and you can use it for more than just Facebook. I think they have Facebook, Instagram, a lot of different platforms, but I usually primarily for Facebook, because I’m sharing so much on Facebook. So what it is is you can put your media into the smarter queue. You can write different varying captions. You can also vary the media, and it could run forever, or you could have it run for a specific period of time. So the reason why I like it, it does take a little bit of upfront work, but the more you do it, the more you’ll realize you’ll have a lot of content that’s in there that will just continuously share even when you’re not thinking about it. The beauty of it is that I’m still sharing on Facebook, and I just maybe queued it up like a month ago, and it’s just keep going. Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: And will it take a piece of content and post it every three months as an example, or you load it up, schedule it, it publishes it, and then would you need to schedule it again manually in order for it to publish?

Tanya Harris: Sometimes it depends on what, so I don’t think you can pick it by month, but you could. It’s like a queue. So for my Smarter Queue, I might have different categories where I might say Air Fryer recipes Monday at nine, and then at 12 it might be a different category, and then I fill those categories up with content and then what it will do is it will just put it all in order, and then it will just continuously go through. And some of this stuff can go on forever. I usually don’t like it to go on forever because I always want to kind of just have the habit of going in and check, but it won’t do it. The more I guess things you have in the database, it won’t be back to back that you’re seeing the same kind of content.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. That’s great. And kind of touches on one of the things that we were trying to figure out. Do we post natively within Facebook? Do we use a tool? This kind of touched on something that we had hoped for, which is just putting a bunch of stuff in and then letting the tool kind of run through and publish it, which is great. I want to go back to what you had talked about before, WisprFlow, and just how great that tool is, especially for somebody who would prefer to speak over type, which what I’ve noticed is the more that I’ve used it, if I’m in a quiet library or with a group of people and I can’t use WisprFlow or I’d feel weird using it, I’m like, oh, shoot, I have to type. I get so used to it. And I think the key point that you made is that you can speak, but then it cleans it up. It creates a grammatically tight version of what you said. And it’s also pretty good about understanding contextually where you are. You can change the behavior if it’s in messages versus Slack versus email. And do you use it then if you’re talking to Claude to build your prompt?

Tanya Harris: Yes. And I think it’s, even for blog posts, I use the term word vomit, but it’s easier for me to talk about tell a story versus writing it. So let’s say I’m developing a recipe and I want to talk about my experience, I will just go to WisprFlow and be like, please give this information or whatever. And then I might go to Claude and prompt it and be like, okay, I said a whole bunch of stuff. Just give me the most two important things that I need to really reference. Not the 10 that I just told WisprFlow, but the two that might be the best. And so I use it for those kinds of things just to help tighten things up.

Bjork Ostrom: And the thing that I feel like that gets at, which is great for us to be thinking about, is it’s your original story. It’s your voice. You’re literally talking and it’s shaping it. But the 80% of the work around creating a tight version of it, actually getting it onto the computer, all of that can be to somebody who doesn’t want to do it, can be lifted and tightened up a little bit, but it’s still, you’re shaping the initial part of it. It’s your voice, it’s your story, it’s your reason for creating the recipe, whatever it might be. And then you’re also shaping it on the backend. So once it takes that story, it revises it, it says, here’s maybe the two most important bullet points, or then you put your final touches on it. And so obviously a thousand different ways that people can be using ai, but it’s cool to hear that version, especially paired with voice to text, which is just getting so good. So we’ll add those to the show notes. SmarterQueue, WisprFlow is a great one. Claude, for people who haven’t used it, ChatGPT, I think a lot of people are familiar with some really great tools to use. So how about as you look forward, so we’ve talked a lot about what’s gotten you to this point, the things that you’ve learned, the things that are working well now, when you look forward, what do you hope to be true for your business, for your site, for your social media as you look into the next year, and what’s to come down the line and 2026 and beyond?

Tanya Harris: I think the biggest thing for me is positioning, which sounds weird when people are like, what are your goals? I’m like, I just want to be in a good position. And when I mean by position just altering, that’s why I’m doing more videos and showing my face more on camera, because I always say, or maybe opportunity, if ever a company wanted to put me on TV, they’re not going to do it if I’m not showing my face, if I’m not telling my story. So that’s just where I’m shifting more in my head just to showing up more, being my authentic self just for discoverability, but also for opportunity. That probably sounds very dreamy, but this is just something that I focused on, and

Bjork Ostrom: I think it’s super aligned for how creators should be thinking about their business moving forward, because content, generally speaking, is getting easier to create. It’s showing up differently. Google AI overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, but I think the future is really bright for people who are excited about and interested in showing up, being personable, being relatable, telling stories. You still need to understand all of the technical stuff. That’s still super important. But I think especially over the next five to 10 years, maybe not five to 10 months, but over the next five to 10 years, to be a creator and to have a creator-based business, your own personality, your own brand, your own humanity, is going to become more and more important to be integrated within it. So for those who want to follow along Tanya with what you’re up to, what you’re doing, we’re the best places to do that, obviously the site, but what’s your favorite social platform? And

Tanya Harris: It depends on the day.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Today, as of today, what’s your favorite social platform?

Tanya Harris: I would say Instagram. It’s just I’m on there or Facebook. But yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Link to those in the show notes. Thanks so much for coming on, Tanya, sharing your story. Really appreciate it.

Tanya Harris: Thank you.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from Food Blogger Pro. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. As we kick off a new month, I wanted to let you know what you might expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership for the month of February. If you didn’t already know, in addition to the Food Blogger Pro podcast, we have the Food Blogger Pro membership. Over the last 10 years, the Food Blogger Pro membership has helped thousands of food bloggers start, grow and monetize their food businesses. We have hundreds of course lessons, monthly Live Q&As, and as for our members, monthly Coaching Calls with members, a member forum, and so many other incredible resources. So if you’re not yet a Food Blogger Pro member, we would love for you to join us. You can join as a monthly, quarterly, or yearly member and get access to all these incredible resources. Our membership is always changing because we are always adding new and improved content and updating old content, and the month of February is no exception. Starting on Thursday, February 5th, we’ll be releasing a brand new coaching call with Celeste Meredith from the food blog, The Whole Serving. You can watch the video replay or get a link to the audio replay within the live tab in your Food Blogger Pro membership. Next up on Thursday, February 12th, we’ll be releasing a course update to our Sponsored Content course. You’ll be covering how to find the right brands, how to reach out to brands when you can start reaching out to brands, and how big your food, blog, or social media accounts need to be, how to determine rates, how to maintain good relationships, all of nitty nitty-gritty details to sponsored content. Last up on Thursday, February 9th, we’ll be hosting our rescheduled Live Q&A with Jasmine Lukuku, our designer at Food Blogger Pro all about branding for your food blog. If you’d like to submit a question in advance, you can do so under the Live tab on Food Blogger Pro and you can also add the event to your calendar. We’re really looking forward to all of these new pieces of content and events this month. We can’t wait to see you in the membership, and we’ll see you back here next week for another podcast episode. Make it a great week.