We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Karen Alpert a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Karen thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Are you happier as a business owner? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job?
Being an influencer and business owner is a constant job. Sometimes I dream about clocking into an 10-hour job and leaving it both physically and mentally at the end of the day. But then I’m on vacation posting pictures from the top of a mountain, and I realize how lucky I am. My mind is always on my job, but I get to do it from amazing places—sometimes that’s from a canyon, or a sandy beach, or the middle school gymnasium where I’m watching my daughter’s choir perform. Overall, it’s a huge blessing that I’m my own boss, and there may be disadvantages, but mostly it’s pretty darn awesome.
Karen, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
About 12 years ago, I started a mommy blog called Baby Sideburns. It was literally just that, a mommy blog that let me tell stories about the long, challenging days as a parent. But I was honest, and it ended up being funny and real. There was so much ‘unreal’ on social media. Moms were busy poising their families and cleaning up their shots, while I was telling it like it is. Messy, hard, annoying, sleepless, and full of tears sometimes. Moms appreciated my honesty, and the blog took off. When one post went viral, I knew I needed to keep feeding the beast, and I grew my Facebook audience from 170 to 20,000 in just two weeks. Up until this day, I have never paid a dime to social media. My growth has been 100% organic.
In 2012, I ran a kickstarter project to see if people would be interested in a book. I really had no idea if it would be worth writing, and I needed to find out before I put the effort in. I ended up raising $20,000 in a week or two, so I sat down to write a book I called “I Heart My Little A-Holes.” I ended up self-publishing it, and the first week it came out, it hit the New York Times Best Seller list as well as the Top 100 on Amazon.
At the risk of sounding hokey, the thing I’m most proud of is the honest community I’ve built online. My Facebook page has become a place that moms can be honest and talk about the realities of parenthood. It’s also a place I can be honest. When I’m doing something sponsored, I tell my audience, this is how I put food on the table, but I will only advertise products I genuinely like. And it’s true. I turn down work that I don’t think we’ll like. I think my audience knows and respects this.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Recently, I’ve had to make a pretty big pivot, and it bums me out. When the kids were little, I could talk about their sleep habits and poopie diapers and tantrums because they were little. All babies and parents go through that stuff, As the kids have gotten older, though, I’ve stopped sharing a lot of the bad stuff because I feel like it’s their business and not mine to share. I’m very cautious about what I share, a hard transition after being so transparent all these years.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
As an influencer, you get bombarded with mean comments and emails. I have an extremely thick skin. With that said, there have been times someone has said just the right thing to make me feel like crap. Sometimes I can read 200 awesome comments, but end up dwelling on the one single comment that says I’m a bad mom. And then I remind myself what I always tell my kids. If someone is being mean to you, it’s because THEY’RE hurting on the inside. Does it make it all better? No. But it helps.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.BabySideburns.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/babysideburns/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BabySideburns/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenalpert/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/babysideburns