We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Bert Anderson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Bert, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

From the moment I learned to read and write I wanted to be an author. I was 8-years-old and it suddenly dawned on me that Little House in the Big Woods was written by a real person; she had not one, but many books she’d written about her life. Maybe it’s because I thought of Laura Ingalls Wilder as Melissa Gilbert but seeing Gilbert play the author on my television screen made the reality of becoming an author seem feasible.

Life gets in the way though, doesn’t it? During the spring of my junior year I took my first journalism writing course, News and Feature Writing, and I fell in love. I loved the challenge of communicating the important parts of a story in the beginning to hook the reader. I reveled in the challenge of writing the lead sentences of an article. Could I get a reader to dive into my words? Could I get them to care enough to stay?

By the time I realized I should’ve gone with my gut and listened to that 8-year-old voice in my heart, I was too late. Changing majors meant two more years of school; I was already in a mountain of debt, staying extra wasn’t an option I wanted to pursue. Another historical event happened in 2004 though and that was the invention of FACEBOOK.

It was first called The Facebook. The spring of my senior year Facebook made its way onto my college campus. Video and audio wasn’t in its heyday so pictures and captions was all you have to do on Facebook. I could do captions.

During the day I worked at a Fortune 500 company, did the corporate America thing for a medical insurance company, by night I updated friends on my life with witty status updates. In the beginning, Facebook was like journaling. It felt like writing a mini diary.

I started blogging after my first was born as a way of documenting his life for myself, my out-of-town family members and him. Then while I was pregnant with my second child, around 2011, a more experienced blogger read one of my blog posts after finding my blog in my email signature. She responded to an email I had written to her and complimented my writing, letting me know that I should consider pursuing blogging as a job. She was the social media manager for a few small cloth diaper retailers. The primary way to build a presence on Google through keyword optimization. She couldn’t keep up with the posts that needed to be written on the blogs so she offered me a job.

I was paid so little, like $12 per article but I did not care. All I wanted was the byline. That’s what started all of this for me.

Writing is like a muscle; the more you use it the better you become. You have to flex it and push yourself to think of different ways to communicate your message to others. It’s a strategic guessing game to see if you know your audience better than they do. If you win, they read your words. If you lose, re-read what you’ve written and see where you went wrong. Your audience is always changing too so I never get bored. It’s really perfect.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

Growing up in the military, I was able to see just how big the world was and that helped me understand that there wasn’t one way to do something. I think I’ve carried that into my work, I respect the different ways there is be a mother. We all make different choices for our children. The one things that remains the same is the sacrificial love a mother has for her child. It’s almost a determent to her health; she will stop doing anything she loves if it interferes with her child’s preceived needs or desires. After watching a friend who through a bad divorce after 20 years, I had a wake up call that life had to be more than putting my children first. If I was going to do this parenthood thing the right way then I had to prepare my children to leave my nest. What happens to me when everyone is out of my nest? Will I know the woman staring back at me?

Those questions are the heart of the work I do at Me Before Mom. I encourage moms to take care of themselves while doing the most important job they’ll ever have. If I can help one woman put herself first and not lose herself in motherhood then everything will have been worth it.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

One of my earlier goals was to be published on Huffington Post. You had to submit pieces to section editors and hope and pray that they would not only find your piece but they woul read it and like it. I think I submitted over ten essays for their parenting section. Every submission went without an answer. I would submit my work, hear nothing, understand that it was a rejection and then internally decide if I was ready to try agian. I would wait about a week and see if there was anything in my life that inspired me to write. Even if there wasn’t, I would write, post on my own blog and go through the submission process again. Submit, click, reject, repeat.

It went on like that for months. I had to take breaks from submitting pieces to Huffington Post so I would submit to other publications. The same story happened even with different publications. In any other situation in my life I would’ve given up. There was something inside of me that just would not take no as an answer.

After six months of this cycle, I wrote an essay titled “To the Exclusively Pumping Mama: A Standing Ovation” (https://bertmanderson.com/exclusively-pumping/) on my blog. An acquaintance shared it in an exclusively pumping Facebook group she was in and it exploded. I had a sneaking suspicion that maybe this piece would do well on Huffington. I hadn’t submitted anything in a while so I didn’t have anything to lose. I was used to the silent treatment and you can’t have any rewards if you aren’t willing to take a risk.

I submitted the piece, waiting seven days, and then found the email of the section editor. I emailed her to follow up and showed her how well the piece was doing on its own. I had heard her speak on a writer’s podcast and she talked about submitting pieces to publications. Within a few hours I received this email from the parenting editor telling me that she loved my piece and they would be featuring it on Huffington Post in the following week.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I’ve been doing this for such a long time that building an audience and how I’ve done it has changed dramatically. When I first started, I was very active in the cloth diaper blogging community where Facebook pages were king and everyone did product reviews accompanied with giveaways. A mandatory entry was always whatever social media platform you were trying to build at the time. Then the FTC wised up and changed their rules; mandatory entries weren’t allowed anymore for any giveaway.

There were also groups of bloggers who would work together and follow each other’s work, generating engagement, thus getting interest and that gained followers because new eyes were always on your content.

Algorithms are complicated now and even though social media platforms want to present an organic engagement experience for their users it’s still a numbers game. Can you buy followers? Yes, you absolutely can. Will it hurt you? If you have huge numbers to work with I don’t think so but I wouldn’t feel like I was successful.

I have three pillars that I stick to when I publish anything: how does it make me feel, how does it make my audience feel and will I feel like I need to delete it later. Those three questions keep me honest and at the end of the days that all the public wants – authenticity. If I can relate to other moms and they don’t see me as this perfect woman then I think I’ve done well.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bertmanderson.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/bertmanderson
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bertmanderson
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/bert-anderson
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/MeBeforeMomBert

Image Credits
Daphne Christenson