In this bonus episode of Ask the Expert, Annie & Leah interview Rachel O’Brien, IBCLC about blogging, and how she uses it to complement her private practice. Rachel shares her process of creating blog posts and how that has changed over the years. We learn how we can make blogging work for us and our businesses, and why it’s not as intimidating as we might think. Rachel O’Brien is an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC) who earned her Master of Arts degree in human lactation in 2015. Rachel prides herself on providing real-life, guilt-free breastfeeding help and specializes in low milk supply, latch difficulty, tongue tie and lip tie, and LGBTQIA+ lactation. When she isn’t doing in-home visits for breastfeeding help or working as a lactation consultant at UMASS Memorial Hospital in Worcester, Rachel is often blogging about lactation or contributing as a breastfeeding expert on multiple websites. She uses her expertise, warmth, and sense of humor to help families to meet their breastfeeding and chestfeeding goals. One thing that might surprise you is that Rachel explains to us that it’s not usually what you write about, just that it's YOU who’s writing it. "I didn't need to prove to anyone that I knew every single thing that there could be about that particular subject. I just had to know enough to make it make sense to somebody else.” In this episode, we will cover: -Blogging for depth rather than quantity (04:28) -Rachel’s blog post creation process (05:25) -Creating posts that are easy to understand (07:49) -Using your unique voice to share information (11:12) -Leading readers further into your business (13:31) If you like what you heard today, please check out our Lactation Business Coaching Deeper Dive Memberships: https://learn.anniefrisbie.com/lactationbusinesscoaching You can email us questions and comments at hello@lactationbusinesscoaching.com.
In this bonus episode of Ask the Expert, Annie & Leah interview Rachel O’Brien, IBCLC about blogging, and how she uses it to complement her private practice. Rachel shares her process of creating blog posts and how that has changed over the years. We learn how we can make blogging work for us and our businesses, and why it’s not as intimidating as we might think.
Rachel O’Brien is an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC) who earned her Master of Arts degree in human lactation in 2015. Rachel prides herself on providing real-life, guilt-free breastfeeding help and specializes in low milk supply, latch difficulty, tongue tie and lip tie, and LGBTQIA+ lactation.
When she isn’t doing in-home visits for breastfeeding help or working as a lactation consultant at UMASS Memorial Hospital in Worcester, Rachel is often blogging about lactation or contributing as a breastfeeding expert on multiple websites. She uses her expertise, warmth, and sense of humor to help families to meet their breastfeeding and chestfeeding goals.
One thing that might surprise you is that Rachel explains to us that it’s not usually what you write about, just that it's YOU who’s writing it.
"I didn't need to prove to anyone that I knew every single thing that there could be about that particular subject. I just had to know enough to make it make sense to somebody else.”
In this episode, we will cover:
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About Us
Leah Jolly is a private practice IBCLC with Bay Area Breastfeeding in Houston, Texas.
Annie Frisbie is a private practice IBCLC serving Queens and Brooklyn in New York City and the creator of the Lactation Consultant Private Practice Toolkit.
Many thanks to Stephanie Granade for her production assistance, and to Silas Wade for creating our theme music
Annie: I'm Annie.
Leah: And I'm Leah.
Annie: And this is like Lactation Business Coaching with Annie and Leah, where we talk about the smart way to create a compassionate and professional private practice.
Leah: Let's dive in.
Annie: Well, Hey there, Leah.
Leah: Hey Annie, how are you doing?
Annie: I'm great. Cause we have another ask the expert session today and we just get to talk to the coolest people.
Leah: This is so much fun. I mean, I really enjoy talking to you, Annie, but there's a lot of cool people in the world that I also enjoy talking to. And we've got another one today. Rachel, O'Brien all about blogging. I'm so excited to hear what she has to tell us.
Annie: I think most of us have been like slightly obsessed with Rachel because you can't help it when you've come across her blog because it's fabulous. And she's also got amazing resources and blog posts that I share with families all the time and get really good feedback from them. So, and then we heard her speak a couple of months ago at LC MPP about blogging and just wanted more. So she is on our podcast today to talk about how to use blogging for your lactation practice. And just a little bit about Rachel. She is an IBCLC in Sudbury, Massachusetts. She also has a master's degree in human lactation and she's doing virtual consults. Like most of us are, and she's typically does in-home consults when that's possible. So she is just full on private practice, helping the moms, helping the babies, helping the families that the breastfeeding, the chest feeding the all kinds of feeding, whatever it is, she does it. And we are thrilled that she is on our podcast today. Welcome Rachel.
Rachel: Hey guys, thank you so much for having me.
Leah: We're so excited to have you here. And just like Annie said, I have shared so many of your blog posts and just love the, I don't know, the just fun and humor that you just like innately feel when you're reading them. They're just, they're so uplifting. I always enjoy reading your blogs. So I want to know though, like when you started out blogging with your business, what was your like purpose, what were you thinking? Was this a business strategy or did you just like love writing so much you decided to start writing all these amazing blogs?
Rachel: Before I started in lactation, my previous life I had, it was an English major in college. And so I always done a lot of writing. And when I started doing lactation, if you go back to the beginning of my blog, there's a couple posts on there that are not great in the very beginning. What happened was that I didn't have a lot of clients and I was feeling really like I was sitting there twiddling my thumbs all day. I really wanted to learn. I wanted to be part of things, but I just didn't have that much in person experience. So what I started doing was writing blog posts to help myself learn about different situations, but also to see if I could explain things in a way that would make sense to other people. So in the beginning, my blog posts weren't that great. But then as I got used to doing them, I started to really enjoy the explaining aspect of a blog.
Leah: We do amazing job at that. I think that's why the blog has resonated so much with so many people like other lactation professionals that we want to share it with our parents because everybody hears things differently. And I think that you really, the way you present ideas and concepts is taken in by the most amount of people, if that makes sense, you know, it's like, I think that it resonates with a lot of people. So that's awesome. Do you feel like now it's in some way helping your business or has become like kind of a business strategy for you?
Rachel: It absolutely does help my business and it's not the way that I thought it would in the beginning. I feel like a lot of times folks in lactation or folks who do different stuff around maternal health and child health are told that they're supposed to be blogging every week to get content on their site. And the more that you blog, the more you're visible, that's all true. But I find it more that if you're spending a lot of time working on a piece and really making it as robust as you can, that's going to do you much more good than a bunch of little tiny blogs about how your day is going, which that's a lot of fun too. But like I said, I really enjoy explaining things and trying to teach things in a different way. And so I do a lot of longer form blog posts now, and I don't do that many of them, but I put a lot of work into the ones that I do.
Annie: I like that quality over quantity approach because especially for what the purpose that's going to serve, which is, I don't really need to know how you're doing in your day. What I need is a three part series on how to introduce a bottle to your baby and use it to support whatever kind of feeding you're doing. Like that's super helpful to me. And I'm going to come back to that a hundred million times, which I do because it helps me with my practice to be able to have good resources to share with my clients. So I don't really need to be the one explaining how to use bottles if I've got a great resource that does that. So you're talking about you create these long form blog posts that have a lot that goes into them. Can you kind of walk us through your blog post creation process?
Rachel: Sure. Yeah. It's always quite a process for me. And usually the thing that gets me really involved in something is if I feel myself explaining it to families over and over again, so that I've almost got a spiel down and I don't have anywhere to send them that will have things written down. When there is a situation that I keep running up against. And I feel like I know it because it's part of my job, but I just have no resources for it. That's when I decided, okay, fine. I'm going to be the one who makes this. So what tends to happen is I get frustrated enough with a situation that I decide, okay, listen, I'm going to go do the research and I'm going to figure this out for myself. And as I'm figuring it out for myself, I'm going to try to explain it in a way that other people can understand it too. So what I'll tend to do is I tend to do my research and then write out a very, very long thing. You know, I try to write it all out and then I go back in, I edited, I break it into smaller chunks. I take pictures if I need to, or I buy stock photos, if I need to. I put them in and then I do the graphics and then I try really hard to make it look pretty. And then it goes out into the world. So it's, for me, the process is a lot of work. There's probably a lot of ways that we could make it simpler, but I'm just so used to doing it that way. That that's how I do it. I write it out one giant long block, and then I break it into chunks and throw it up on the webpage.
Annie: I mean, everybody has to have their own process and voice with the way they are writing. And writing is such a process of working out your own ideas in your own head. And so you'll start thinking that I'm gonna do it this way, but then by the time you get to the end, you realize, Oh, I actually now need to go back to the beginning and change what I had in the beginning, because that's not actually what I'm talking about anymore.
Rachel: Yeah. I didn't end up where I thought I was going to, so I need to change what the beginning says. Cause you have to make sure you kind of loop back around. And if you ended up in a completely different place, you got to go back and change the beginning. So it all feels like it's a cohesive story.
Annie: And so when you're doing that, are you outlining in advance and how much are you going on like clinical rabbit holes into lactation literature? How's that all work?
Rachel: Great question. And I will say that as I have gotten used to writing the blog posts, I try to not go down too many clinical rabbit holes. I find that while I find that stuff completely fascinating and I love the research and I know love to know every little bit. It doesn't translate well to people who just want to know a pretty easy answer. They don't need to know all the clinical stuff. And it took me a long time to figure out that if I was writing a blog post about something, I didn't need to be the worldwide expert on that topic. I didn't need to prove to anyone that I knew every single thing that there could be about that particular subject. I just had to know enough to make it make sense to somebody else. Once that pressure got off, things got a lot easier because then it didn't feel like, well, I can't finish this blog post because I didn't find the one piece that proves that what the thing was right. I just let it go. And it definitely made it easier to do, but I do tend to, most of the time I will write out an outline like I'll do three points. Three is a good number for blog posts. You just do three. I'm going to focus on three different things about this specific issue. So I'll write out the three, I'll write an intro paragraph or write out the middle. I'll do the end paragraph. And then I'll go back and make sure that the intro paragraph actually works with the end of the paragraph.
Leah: That's really awesome. Just you saying that like, Whoa, we don't have to be the worldwide expert on this. Like that relieves so much pressure cause I'm thinking of things I could say. I know somebody who I'd spoken to before about YouTube videos. I had said, Oh, you know, I'd love to do YouTube videos, but you know, I feel like they're all already out there. And they were like, no, no, no, no. Because everybody takes in information differently. I mean, the way you explain it or how you connect over the camera over a piece of paper over the writing might just be the thing that flips the switch in their brain. And I was like, Oh my gosh, that's so relieving. Cause you do kind of feel like everything's out there somewhere. I mean, there is something out there kind of on everything. But I find often it's like, not just what I would want, you know? And that's where I'm sure that you've been led to like make these posts. And I'm like, well, there is something about, you know, this topic or that topic, but it's like, I want to say these three other things and it's not in that blog post. So then I feel like I'm sending people links and then adding like, but don't listen to this and then also do this.
Rachel: Yeah, I did the same thing.
Leah: I think that really is so, so just such a relief when you think about it like that. So if you were talking to and you are other lactation consultants who maybe have thought about doing a blog or really enjoy writing, but they're like a little unsure about the process and what to do, what would you say is your number one piece of advice to them if they wanted to get started or do some kind of blogging?
Rachel: The biggest piece of advice that I tell people when they ask me this question is, it's not about writing about a particular topic. It's about you talking about that topic. And so it's super, super important with the blog that they hear your voice, that when they're reading the words, they can hear your voice, even if they don't know what you sound like, but they get an idea of just from the style that you use. When you write, I know that we all want to seem professional all the time and we all want to look perfect all the time. But if you're just using professional language and there's no personality in there, it's like reading a textbook. And if they wanted to read a textbook, they would read a textbook. So I always tell people the whole goal of this is that somebody wants to hear what you say about this topic. And it doesn't matter if 75 other people have already written about this topic. You haven't. So don't get caught up in trying to prove that everything is exactly the way that you say it is. I tell people a lot of times, write it all down and then read it out loud. Read it out loud and see if it sounds like you. Read it to somebody else who knows you and see if they would have known that it was you. If not, you need to go back and you to change things. You need to use terms that you would use and sentence lengths that you would use and you need to make it sound like you. The more, it sounds like you, the more it's going to resonate to your people because your people are out there and they like you because of who you are. Not necessarily that you know everything.
Annie: That is such a good point. And it's so different than how if you've done like any kind of like clinical writing, you know, where you're like, okay, first I have to explain what lactation is. And secondly, I have to make sure I mentioned the world health organization. And then I have to say like what an IBCLC is before then I can actually talk about what I'm talking about. And this is really you're speaking directly to somebody who is, needs to get information fast, that they need to apply to their situation. And you've got the credential to back up the fact that you are the expert on breastfeeding, so you can write about it and you don't need to prove to the parents. They just need to feel like somebody's got them.
Rachel: Right. And one thing that I've found that it's helpful for my business is to write my piece with the general information that I feel like would apply to pretty much everybody. And then I get to the end and I say, if you need specific information about this specific things, just for you, you can contact me and we can do a video consult. That's the way that it tends to help my business as a whole. I do have a lot of people who will come to me because they'll say, Oh, I read your blog posts on nipple shields, or I read your blog post on bottles or whatever. And they'll say, you know, I'm having this problem and I'll say, Oh great. You know how we can fix that is you can book a visit with me. Now that everyone's doing virtual all the time, I was doing virtual before for this exact circumstance. But now I'm obviously doing way more of them. But I think it's an easier thing now for the parents to get to the end of the blog post and say like, Oh yeah, I could just see her tomorrow. Cool. Let's do that.
Leah: I think the virtual visits are so much more accepted now. Like everybody's opened their mind to like, this could be a thing, you know, which is really great for all of us cause I think it can be a thing. And I love the way that that's one of the ways that can really boost your business is if you put out good content, people connect with you, then they want to work with you. And now in the virtual space that can happen, you know, basically around the world, I guess.
Rachel: Yeah. I mean anybody who wants to work virtually with you come on in, let's do it as long as there's a time that works for both of us, we can make this happen.
Annie: And I think that's really helpful too, for people who have specialties where you're like, I am just so good at this one thing, make sure that you've got something on your website that tells parents that you are really good at this one thing, because now you might get that person from the other, another part of the country or another part of the world who was like, I don't need help. I need help from you.
Rachel: Exactly. Yeah. If you, if you end up being the expert on that one thing, and you're not saying you're the expert in the whole world, but someone would like to find someone who was an expert on whatever that is. We all specialize in different things. And thank goodness for that because the things I specialize in and the things you guys specialize in are different. You know, I'll say to people, if they have triplets, I am not your girl. Like I'm voting for you, but I'm going to send you to somebody who specializes in triplets. If you're having certain problems that I specialize in, then you come to me. Cause we've all got our little niches. So if you have a blog post that proves, Hey, this is my jam. And you can see that I really care about this. Cause you can read how I talk about this. It really helps to bolster the fact that you are an expert in whatever that situation is.
Annie: Yeah. And having that confidence to just say, yeah, I know what I'm talking about.
Rachel: Yeah. Cause we can't all know everything about everything as much as we would like to, which makes it a lot easier to say, you know what? I don't know everything about everything, but I know a lot about this one thing.
Leah: Definitely. And then calling, like you said, really calling in those people that you're going to resonate a lot with because either they need that help or they really like the way you explained it or something like that through the blog. So I think that's really good point to remember for all of us that like your voice needs to come through your blog so that the right people will connect with you. And that's how it's really going to end up being a business strategy for you.
Rachel: I always think that we in lactation and in a lot of jobs, we're not selling our services so much as we're selling ourselves. So for example, my logo is me. It's not a logo of a breast or somebody breastfeeding or anything like that. It is me. And it's because if you like me and you want to hear my voice, then I am the girl for you. And if not, that's totally cool too. But if people don't connect with me, then I'm never going to have any clients. Cause it's a big part of what we do is that emotional connection. So Hey, write a blog post and let them hear what your voice sounds like before they ever actually see your face. It works out great.
Annie: Yeah. It's so true. It's, you know, I've said this before or just really believe it is that, you know, there really should be a lactation consultant for every single different kind of person that there is. Like, you really should feel like you can find somebody who looks like you, sounds like you, fits your vibe and either, I mean, certainly we're very far from being there, but by recognizing that you don't have to aim your content or your website or your branding at, you know, somebody general that you can just be yourself and actually just put out who you are into the world. And that's going to attract people that resonate with you and you don't have to try to fit somebody else's mold.
Rachel: Right, and you don't have to appeal to everybody, you just have to appeal to the people who you appeal to. That's it, you don't have to be everybody's cup of tea, but the people who like you are going to be so glad that you're out there.
Annie: That's great. I love that. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. I mean, we could keep talking for hours, but you could also write a blog post about how to be a blogger because you also have content on your website. That's aimed at IBCLC's and aspiring IBCLC's and we're going to make sure to link to some of those articles in the show notes, because she's got some really good stuff there about business, private practice. She's got a post that I love about what's in her consult bag. I love that one. And she's got another great one about insurance. So you'll definitely want to go down a rabbit hole on Rachel's website. Cause there's tons of good stuff on there for professionals. And we'll make sure to link that in the show notes. And you can follow Rachel on Instagram at Rachel O'Brien IBCLC. And she's super fun on Instagram too. So just, you know, get Rachel in your world if she isn't in there already. And we just want to thank you so much for giving your time today to us. It's been so fun.
Rachel: It's been super fun. It's been really fun being with you guys. It's really nice to hear your voices all the time and now to get to do this with you. It's really been a big honor. So thank you so much.
Leah: Oh, it's been great to have you and thank you so much for sharing all your wisdom. I think I'm going to go write a book.
Annie: All right, until next time. Thanks again for listening. Bye.
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