The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 75. Ultimate Blog Bootcamp Success Story: Cynthia Christensen

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

Today, we are excited to chat with one of our old Ultimate Blog Bootcamp students, Cynthia Christensen, about where she is now in her blogging journey.  The Ultimate Blog Bootcamp is a course that we have designed to help those who are wanting to start a blog or who have started but need extra help. Join us to hear more from Cynthia! Thanks for listening! Connect with us on Instagram: @sparkmediaconceptsCheck out The Blog Depot. This is a community and course that we have set up for you if you need questions answered before you start your blog. Join The Ultimate Blog Bootcamp, our online course and coaching that helps you build the blog that you have always dreamed of.Check out the show notes (link below) for more information including links and resources mentioned in today's episode! SHOW NOTES: www.sparkmediaconcepts.com/episode75

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast with Amy Reinecke and Jennifer Draper. We're on a mission to empower women who want to start or grow their own blog. This podcast is for women who want to learn blogging basics and who crave inspiration and encouragement. Whether you're just getting started or have been a blogger for years, we're excited to welcome you into this space where we are passionate about creating community over competition. We are bloggers who want to encourage you to believe in your potential, step outside the norm and step into a life where you create your own schedule, your own success and your own story. Join us for weekly episodes as we navigate blogging

and work from home life all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. Welcome back to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. And we are really excited today because we get to bring one of our old bootcamp students here to the podcast today to share where she is now. And these are some of our very favorite podcast episodes to share. Because one, we love to connect with our students after the fact that they've been in and hear where they're at. And so Cynthia Christensen is going to do that today. She has worked as a professional cook and baker and now works as a freelance recipe developer and food photographer, as well as writing for her own blog, which is But First We Brunch.

Cynthia was in our bootcamp. It's been a little while. It's been over a year now. It's been almost two years. Has it been almost two years? Okay. So it's been almost two years. And we actually connected with her at Tastemaker in Chicago just a couple months ago. And we're like, Cynthia, we need to bring on the podcast so we can share where you are. It was really, really exciting to us at Tastemaker to walk in and see her there, to be honest. Knowing that two years ago, we were having these Zoom calls and talks. And then now here she is. So Cynthia, welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast.

Hi, thanks for having me. Yes. This is going to be a great conversation. And we have always enjoyed connecting with you. We loved when you were on the calls. And let's start with what got you started with blogging? When did that all come to fruition for you? My daughters like to joke, I've had five lives. I've done so minimum, minimum five lives. If I were to tell you all the different careers and jobs I've had throughout my life, you would never believe me,

first of all, but I have receipts. But I was at this time, I was the manager of a large bookstore chain. Prior to that, I owned my own bookstore. Prior to that, I was a registered nurse. That's only a few things. Anyway, so I worked for this large chain and I always loved cooking, but baking scared me. I was always afraid to bake. The only thing I'd ever tried was my grandmother's biscuits, which we won't name, but you all know, I got called into the office by the district manager and said, my manager was on sick leave and said, the company is going to be firing all full time people below the level of merchandise manager and you need to tell them. And I just sat there dumbfounded. I said, what do you mean? You're just going to how much notice they are not allowed to work that day. You have to tell them and they have to take their things and they have to be escorted from the building. And I just sat there and he said, oh, there'll be some kind of severance if they agree to certain conditions. And anyway, I just looked at him. I said, oh my God. And he said, what? I

said, oh, I quit. He said, what? I said, quit. I said, I'm going to do it because I'm not gonna let you do it. But then, yeah, I quit. So yeah, let's do it. So I did it. And then I gave them two weeks notice because I'm not a monster. And I interviewed, I applied for an interview at five different bakeries, just like, hey, I'm going to fake it till I make it. One of them actually made me do a cooking test. She made me make a pastry cream and I'd only seen it made on Food Network. So I'm like, absolutely, I can make a pastry cream. And I made a pastry cream. I have no clue what I'm doing. But I'm like, this is what I saw. And oh, where's the strainer? And you know, And I made a pastry cream.

Like, she just looked at me and said, hmm. I ended up working for her. It was this old Russian pastry chef. So that's how I got into cooking. And I left her because she was a monster. And I went to work at a James Beard-nominated bakery on the Jersey Shore. And worked there for a couple years. Had a hip replacement,

whatever, came back to work in three weeks, no biggie. And I decided I really wanted to learn savory. I wanted to become, I wanted to become a chef, which is like ridiculous. At the time I was what, 55 and I'm restarting my life. So I am manager of heirloom kitchen here in New Jersey, which is run by a top chef contestant, chef Daviana. And I said, I'd love to stage, which is restaurant speak for intern. And she said, sure, come on in and meet the chef and see what he says. And he took me on very suspiciously, like maybe I was a fangirl. And I got offered a job within a week. And I worked with them, worked with them, learned so much from both the savory chef and the pastry chef, just did all their prep work did sometimes

I got to expedite, sometimes I got to plate, I got to do a little of everything. Through them, I met a lot of very famous chefs. Because of his connections, I worked at the New York City Wine and Food Festival, a couple of chefs, started doing food photography for some for Pat LaFrieda, which is a nation's largest butcher. Yeah. And what happened was, and I had to have a second hip surgery. And I was like, exhausted. It was too hard to stand on the line for I mean, I did it. But it was really hard to stand on the line for 10 hours a day, you know, including prep time. So I had already been putting a few recipes on the blog here and there, like just for my kids to see my recipes. And I started

thinking about doing it seriously. And that's when I caught up with you guys. And I was all over the place when I met you when I signed up for the I saw it on was all over the place when I met you, when I signed up for the, I saw it on one of my friends stories. I was like, I wonder if this could be a thing. And at that time, I naively thought that if you wrote a blog post and wrote a recipe, you just wrote a cute little paragraph ahead of time. I'm so clever. And then everybody would just come running. And you know what? They didn't. I had ugly pictures, good recipes, a little haha anecdote before nothing else, and maybe 20 visits. And I think half were mine, the other half were my kids. So I came to you with this blog with recipes that ran the gamut, everything. And you were the

ones that told me I needed to niche down. And I was like, crap, what's my niche? And you really made me think about it. That was like the first big hurdle, making the website, getting the new framework and theme and all of that stuff. That was all new for me. But actually honing in and trying to figure out what I was trying to say, was like, very difficult. And two things made me have it like that aha moment, which not everyone had. You know, some people still struggle with niching down. One was my grandmother's biscuits. I had always wanted to make them. It took me years of a lot of hockey pucks to finally be able to make what I thought

were good enough that were as good as my grandmother's biscuits. I think they're better now. Sorry, grandma. And the other thing was, you know, the pandemic hit. And my husband was back in the emergency room. And he was working, he had just transferred like the month before, and then COVID hit. And he was in the hospital from he left the house at like 930 10 in the morning, and wouldn't get home till one or two in the morning from, he left the house at like 9.30, 10 in the morning and wouldn't get home till one or two in the morning. And sometimes at the beginning, it was five or six days a week because by some miracle,

he didn't get sick and everyone was falling around him. And so they didn't have enough people. So he just kept going in. And the only meal that we had together as a family was breakfast. So I became the breakfast and brunch blogger. I was like, it was the only thing I was really cooking anymore. And let's face it, morning light is beautiful when you're taking pictures. So that's how I came to, that's the long story, to make a short story long.

That's how I became a food blogger. And that's how I niched into what is just like my favorite thing. I love it. you didn't try to force it into a box and be like, I have to figure this out. But you were kind of open to it and said, okay, where do I need to shift and grow? And you probably had that uncomfortable feeling. I'm sure you were wanting it to be in red letters like, choose this, choose this niche. But then it just kind of organically happened. And now, where are you now? How are you doing? How's it going? So my blog used to be Cook Sleep Read, which to a lot of people made no sense. As a matter of fact, I met someone at the conference. Her name is Rachel. Is it Rachel Farnsworth? Yes.

Yeah. I remember I posted on the Food Blogger Central Facebook page. I said, Hey, guys, I have this blog. This is after I changed my theme, done things. And what do you think? And boy, did she tell me what she thought. And I was so mad. Your name makes no sense. Nobody knows what that means. You need to do this. You need to get such a long list. I was so mad. I was like, how rude. such a long list. I was so mad. I was like, how rude. And I, when I met her, I said, thank you for saying that because I did all the things that you said, because setting up the theme with you guys was great. Nitching down was fantastic, but there were still so many pieces I was missing. And that comes with time that comes with experience. So I set up an audit. I had my blog audited where I got lots of more bad news instead of what I wasn't doing correctly. And you have to check your ego at the door when you're doing this. You have to be open to people telling you,

because they don't say, you know, this is great. But like their parents, they say, this is awful and you need to stop it. And I paid someone a lot of money to do that. And so I took that on, I took what you guys gave me, I took what the auditor gave me. And I took a keywords course, which you guys have gone over, but I never, I didn't really take that part in, I focused everywhere else. So I went from a year ago, having about, I would be really happy if I got 150 to 200 visits a day, to last week, I had 11,000 visits a day. And that's not sustainable. But that was because I had a particularly good biscuit recipe that came out. But I'm just about to reach Mediavine.

I'm there. I mean, like I'm so close. I could probably apply now and my numbers will hit by the time they get in there, but I'm going to wait until I actually see the number because I want to make sure I don't want to do it twice. Yeah. Yeah. It's going, it's going phenomenally well. I mean, I, I don't even know the numbers to go from 200 visits max a day to I average three to the 3000 a day. Yeah, that's a lot. Like sessions, not just views or because that's where we get we get caught up in numbers, but it's actual sessions, meaning like how like a person comes on and they, they look at this post and then maybe they they switch over to that recipe how long they're in there that time so sessions itself i'm really i'm up there i think i looked yesterday i was like at 39 000 sessions for the month and i maybe had i think in january when i was i was already doing the work, I had about 5,000. So just in that time, web stories.

Guys, if you're not doing web stories, please do web stories. They really are. Yeah. Yeah. Fair. My daughters know how to find them. I don't know how to find them. I vaguely know, but they're finding them.

I did a French toast casserole that was getting like 8,000 views a day just on the web story. And then of that 8,000, 6,000 were going to the recipe. Yeah, they are an incredible tool for sure. I don't know where they live. I'm not cool enough to get invited to that party. But apparently all the cool kids are looking at them they are and it's benefiting you yeah i just have like chills with you telling your story and how close you are to adding that level of monetization to your blog because i think so many people start out with that goal and here you

are less than two years later, and you're there. And you've talked about all the things that you've done between the time that you started and today. And I think that's what people forget about. They're like, okay, I launched my blog. I am good to go. But you have continued to ask for help, take feedback, look for professional feedback and the way of getting an audit, just really putting yourself out there and being open to continuing to learn. And I think that is such an important skill and just personality trait that bloggers have to have. You have to be willing to constantly learn new things, be willing to take feedback and

be willing to shift and adjust. And that is what is going to help you grow. Imagine if you had just stuck with your original plan, and instead of listening and getting the feedback and seeing what was making you successful, it would be a much different story, I think. what was making you successful? It would be a much different story, I think. You know, when we went to Tastemakers, and I met Rachel Farnsworth in person, I said to her, I said, what had happened on Facebook? And I said, God, you pissed me off. And she started laughing. She thought I was there. She thought I was like there to like yell at her for being so mean. I said, you are so mean. And you made me so mad. I was so mad at you. And I said, and I credit you for everything that's happened since then.

And she just hugged me. She just like, because that's, that's what I want to hear. Because I want to hear that I actually did something because I know I can pull my punches. I can maybe talk a little nicer. But I said, No, I needed that. I needed to get mad and prove you wrong. Yeah, like proving you right. But I needed to prove you wrong that you know, but I think the important thing to note here, Cynthia, is that you took yourself seriously from the start. So whether or not you knew what your niche was, whether or not you knew what was coming next on the pipeline after you took the bootcamp, you took yourself seriously. You decided to start a blog and you're like, I want this to be successful.

And I think it can be. And so hiring someone to do an audit, for instance, is a lot of money. But it is something that can very much help your blog. It very much can. And the bootcamp isn't... The goal of the bootcamp isn't some of the other things that you've done since then, like the audit or things like that. You are always going to learn. Jennifer and I have a combined 14 years of blogging, and we're still learning. I think

when we get to the place that we're like, Oh, yeah, I know everything I know about blogging. I think that's when you'll stop growing. Because the industry, this career changes every single day. We can learn something new every single day. And we can't chase all the lights. You have to focus on the main things. But you took yourself seriously from the start. You said, I want to do this. And you have shifted where you need to shift. You've listened to other people's opinions. Because I think something to note too is Jennifer and I aren't the only ones in this industry. There's a ton of other people who are a lot more successful than we are. Rachel Farnsworth being one of them, for instance.

Yeah. For anybody who doesn't know who she is, she's a very popular and successful food blogger at the Stay At Home Chef. So if you don't know who we're talking about, that's who that is. She's a very popular and successful food blogger at the Stay at Home Chef. So if you don't know who we're talking about, that's who that is. Yeah. Incredibly successful. And what I hope that our listeners are hearing too, is that this is how the blogging community is. Sometimes it is saying, Hey, have you thought about this? Like Rachel did with you, like Jennifer and I do in the bootcamp, like we still do with our students. We have to be willing to come together as a community and say, hey, this is where I think that this could improve. Or I've thought about this. Have you thought about that?

And being open, not having our defenses up, but being willing to say, you know what? I think I could look into that. If growth is the goal, if success is the goal, then you have to be an avid learner because you're going to be learning forever. So another thing for me is I am, in general, a positive person. I think it's something that my husband has always actually made fun of me for. You see people hanging out in front of the gas station all day. And my husband says, one day we were walking to school and he's like, you know, they should go to school too. And I said, maybe they work nights. And he just looked at me. And that's, it's still,

we've been married 30 years. That's still a joke. It's like, you know, I'll say something, he'll go, maybe they work nights. But I am a positive person. But you know, I'll say something and they'll go, maybe they're worth nights. And I'm like, but I am a positive person. But, you know, when you're doing something like this, that's so new and there's so much competition, you know, it can be hard. Or changing careers like I did. It can be difficult. And I just decided, I don't know if it was like one day, but I just started assuming, acting as though the answer was going to be yes. Yeah, for whatever it was. I think it might have been the minute I quit that job. I just assumed because I said, Yeah, I have another job lined up. And I've lied to my teeth.

Yeah. And I got offered three of the five jobs I interviewed for. And I'm like, are you people crazy? I burned I burned box cake. What the hell? Just started coming from a place where I would assume the answer is yes. Who applies to a James Beard nominated bakery? Who does that? Someone who just is crazy or who just is going to ask this, go through life, acting as though the answer is yes. And if the answer is no, or if you get no answer, so what? I'm never going to see them again. Who cares? Ask, you know, send, send that email, make that phone call, send that DM. They might not answer you. Okay. It's not like you're going to have to see them at lunch tomorrow. So, I mean, I asked if I could go work for a top chef.

I mean, I asked if I could go work for a top chef. I'd never. Okay. Yes. So the answer can be yes. If it's no, then you ask another question. Maybe you didn't ask the right question. Blogging. I just went in there saying, I'm going to be able to do this. It doesn't mean there aren't a lot of other factors that I have to pull in there, but I went in there with just the assumption. I can do this. I'm, you know, almost cocky. I can do this. I hit a lot of roadblocks. And realized I had to gain some more knowledge, I had to ask more questions, I had to take some more classes. But I'm still going in with the assumption, the answer is going to be yes. So media is going to say yes, probably next month. And I started writing, doing recipe development for some online and print magazines, because I just submitted a pitch. And guess what? They said yes. A couple said no. I assume. I never heard back. But I just started assuming the answer is going to be yes and acting accordingly. And I think that's huge. I think that that's why you're going to be successful. I think that's why you are successful right now is because of your

confidence. And you know what you have to offer or you know what you're willing to learn, I think, is almost the bigger takeaway there. Because there are a lot of different things that we can do with blogging that can take you out of your comfort zone. Like if you've never developed a recipe for somebody else, or if you've never done food photography, or if you're a ghostwriter for a blog, or maybe you're doing some virtual assistant work. Sometimes the people who are doing the hiring, they just want to see somebody who's willing to go out on a limb and say, I can do it. Just watch me. Watch me do it. I'm going to do it. And be confident instead of coming in like, well, I don't know if I'm good enough or if I can. You're not going to ever get hired or be

successful if you come in with this I can't attitude or I don't know if I can make it work or not. But when you make the shift inside your own head, I think that the world can kind of align in that way because it honors the confidence and it honors where you see yourself going. And I think that as you've continued to go and grow with this, I think that's just continued to shine. And I am really darn excited to watch you continue to do this because just hearing you now, it was different than hearing you two years ago. And that's pretty awesome. I still have that little niggling doubt in the back of my head that

this is hard. We all have days where we're like, I just don't want to. But the fake it till you make it thing is a real thing. Just believe you can do it. In the back of your head, you might hear a little voice saying, yeah, but maybe you can't, but you just put yourself out there and just do it. And, you know, sometimes you fall. I have reels going crazy, four and a half million on a biscuit. I think altogether, all my biscuit reels have well over 7 million views. But then I have some that, put out and they maybe have 2,000 views. But that doesn't mean I'm going to give up. I'm still going to do it.

It's almost like I don't have another choice. Now I'm in there. Well, yeah, because now if you didn't do it, you'd wonder what if. If you were to give up now, there would always be a question, what could it have become? Now Instagram did a rude thing and I had to prove it wrong.

What'd they do? Which is kind of my personality. Oh, yeah. That's my personality. So what happened? What, with Instagram? Yeah. I don't know. I just posted another one today. You know, they go up and down. Sometimes I'll get a couple hundred thousand views, a million views, 4 million views. One day I, I posted one and all day it got 400 views and I was just insulted. But then I just kind of keep plugging along and there's no, but that's what you guys taught me was not to put all my eggs in the social media basket. Because I have no control over that whatsoever. Right? I have some control over the blog, I have control over its content, I have control over my, my push on it, my, you know, what I do. And I can do things that can have real change, like the web

stories, or like making sure that I'm SEO optimized, things like that. And with social media, you really have no control over what happens. And how many people have I seen friends just recently who have lost 10s, if not hundreds of 1000s of followers, because they just got locked out of their account for no reason, they can get hold of no one and all the work that they've done. Think of all the work we do. It's gone. Yeah. We just interviewed somebody yesterday on the podcast who happened to we were like, thank you for saying that because we, we say it all the time. And we're, I don't know. I'm like, I wonder if people actually believe us that people like lose their account. But they do. And it is totally true. do this. You look at someone who has all these followers and you think, wow, they've got it made.

Right. And then you see someone else who's really pushing, you see their social media, you see their Instagram, but they only have like 1900 or 2000 or 5000 followers, which by the way, I didn't have that many for a long time. And I looked up to them. But you look at them and you're like, well, that's not that many, but then I'll click on their link. Are they monetizing? Are they doing these things? And yeah, to me, that's the measure of success. Yes. Not how many followers they have.

I don't care. Are they making delicious food? Yeah. Are they getting people that are coming to their blog in such numbers that they can now make money off of what they're doing? Yes. That's the measure of success.

So social media is great. I do it because I enjoy it. But now when I don't get the big numbers, I just kind of laugh about it. Because at the end of the day, that's not the most important thing. I set up like a workflow for myself because also either we work too hard

or because we work for ourselves there are days where we just procrastinate and we don't do anything right yeah so I had to set up for myself a weekly goal of what I was going to accomplish I put social media down it used to be I try to post a reel every single day. And I've tried to just every day do something. And now I do three web stories a week. I do two reels if I'm in the mood. Sometimes it's one. And I do one blog post or one updated post per week. For me, that's a manageable schedule. And then I try and put in some time for continuing education, for back-end stuff, and for days when I just don't want to. I schedule that in. It's okay.

The only thing that I do that I do almost every single day, and because people really enjoy it, is I make breakfast every morning because my husband's going to work. And so every day I cook breakfast on the blog, I mean, on Instagram, on my stories, pretty much every single day. And I have people from all over the world that message me and say, like, there's one lady in Poland, she's a pediatrician, she gets home from work at night, and her and her husband sit together and watch me make breakfast from the morning. And then a lot of times he's the big cook. So then he'll make for breakfast what I made the day before. Oh, that's cool. What a compliment. Yeah. I have one gentleman from Dubai, who has never seen a biscuit in his life, but it's becoming the best biscuit maker in Dubai right now. I'm telling you. So I have someone else who was on the great, the Italian Bake Off.

She watches me every day, watches, but they just watch my, they say they like to hear my voice. They see my hands, you know, rolling out the biscuit dough or making the hash or whatever. So I have people, that's the only thing that I hope that my social media stays okay, because I have so many people who their day is part of their daily routine is just to make breakfast with me. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that you've made that connection with such a simple thing. It's just breakfast. But I started doing that for my daughters because one of my daughters lives 3000 miles away.

And so when she gets up at her six in the morning, you know, I've already made breakfast. And so she gets to watch her. She watches her mom make breakfast before she even gets out of bed. And then she goes to work. That's fantastic. I just love how you've embraced, you know embraced what people enjoy about what you're doing. And you've made it about the enjoyment for yourself too. Yes, it's about building a business. Yes, it's about monetizing. But at the end of the day, you're doing something that you're passionate

about and that is allowing you to connect with people. And I would assume that is also giving you that momentum to propel yourself forward, to get out of bed every day and to keep doing this because you can see the impact that you're making on people's lives. And it does not have to be earth shattering. People love to learn how to make a homemade breakfast for their family. It is such a great connection that they can have with their family. So what an incredible thing you're doing. Thank you. Yeah, I really, I didn't used to eat breakfast every day. It was, you know, I don't know, Pop-Tarts. But now I make my own Pop-Tarts.

Now I make my own Pop-Tarts. Yeah. I mean, who doesn't love breakfast? Yeah, I know. I love breakfast. It is my favorite meal of the day. I really, yeah, I really enjoy having breakfast. And my husband, he really enjoys like,

and he can, you know, find out what there is, you know, because it's something different every day. And that's joy for me. Although I do get some of those people online who are like, why are you subserving at their husband's? Why do you feel like you have to serve him breakfast every day? I'm like, girl, that's my job. And also, I enjoy it. What's the problem?

But that's another story. Yeah, that could be another podcast episode. That's a whole conversation. I think that the beautiful thing about food is that I think that you think of it like a gift. Like this is a gift. This is a way that I get to give a gift to myself and my husband each morning. And that gift now is just so many more people.

It's to the people who come to your blog, who are then able to bless their families with that as well. And so what I hope that you know and understand is that the impacts of just a simple biscuit or the other things that you create go far more than just a recipe. It's far more than that. Food can come with that. And no matter what somebody wants to blog about, know that your impact is far greater than you could ever imagine. Because I'm sure when you left the bookstore and moved to the bakeries, and I doubt at that point you ever considered yourself the person who is going to be teaching people how to do this stuff. No.

You know, if you were burning boxed cake bags. But I think this just goes to show you are never, it's never too late. No. You are never too old. You can always start and try again. If it's something that maybe you've never even considered, why not? Why not you? And Cynthia, you've done that. You've asked that question, like, why not me? Why can't I do this? And you're doing it. And I think it's amazing. I think a lot of people who have had, like you've mentioned, a couple of hip surgeries and things like that could easily just be like, I don't want

to do it. I don't want to do anything. But I see the joy that it brings to your life and that's contagious. And that just spreads joy to so many people. Yeah. Thank you. I want everyone to make breakfast with me. So who can get mad at pancakes when they have a crispy waffle in front of them? I mean, come on. That's a joyful thing. Pancakes are my son Brett's very favorite food. Like anything at school, like what's my favorite food? It's always pancakes. Like, what do you want? I want pancakes. The kid loves pancakes. Like he loves himself some pancakes. One of my first questions to people when we talk at the blog is, are you team pancakes or team waffles? Because I think that they're so similar. Their batters are very similar, but they're so completely different. And I got to say, I'm team waffle. I'm team texture.

My husband, I was shocked. I can't even believe we're still married after this revelation. It's team pancake. Who are you? That is so funny. So Cynthia, what would you tell either a new blogger or somebody who's just starting out? What is some advice that you would give them? You know, believe in yourself, first of all, to take a chance on yourself. Because like you said, you're never too old. I know people who, I hear people who are in their 30s, 40s, who are just like, oh, it's too late. And it's not. I mean, I started this, I'm 60 years old this year

and I'm just hitting my stride. So, I mean, and it doesn't have to be overnight. I have a favorite quote actually that I'm gonna share with you. And for me, it was because of my physical difficulties, you know, because of all the surgeries and everything. And it is, I will not use moving slowly as a way of avoiding moving toward what I actually want. I can move slowly and still take action. So that's my, that's something that I keep in my mind. I love that.

So it's not going to, you're not going to be an overnight sensation and you don't learn the lessons you need to learn to do the things you want to do well by being an overnight sensation. Yeah. Take your time, be patient and it will come. Yeah. That's it. I'm like teary. It's kind of ridiculous, but I think that is such beautiful advice. Yes. Because I think that we live in an instant gratification society that tells us that we can be an overnight success. And I think that when we have that idea that that's the way it has to look, then people give up before it's ever their time. And so you just gave, I think just beautiful encouragement there too.

It's okay if you're going slowly, you're still going and believing in yourself. I love that. Thank you. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today and for sharing like where your journey has taken you. And please let us know when you get to apply on Mediavine so we can celebrate with you. I'm really excited.

I will, definitely. Thank you very much for having me. I'm going to predict that this episode comes out, I believe in May, and I'm going to predict that by the start, by the air date of this episode that you will have applied. So we're going to, we're just going to put that out there, Cynthia. We're going to believe in that. We are. We are going to believe in that. So that means I got to get to work. I better get another web story. I have a new biscuit out. I got to get a web story going. All right, Cynthia, can you please let our listeners know where they can connect and find you and make your biscuit recipes? My blog is butfirstweedbrunch.com

and you can find me on Instagram and make breakfast with me at butfirst underscore weedbrunch. Awesome. Thanks so much, Cynthia. All right. Thank you. Thank you.

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