Transcript
Welcome to the Bloggy Friends show.
What's up, you guys?
Famous Asher Grant here and welcome to the Bloggy Friends show.
I'm so excited to bring you Katrina White today.
We're going to be chatting all about the fact that she is starting her website
from scratch, so I'm very excited to dive right into this.
Katrina, welcome to the show.
Hello. Hello.
So tell us a little bit about what your website is and when it launches.
Now, this this episode should be going live after it's already launched.
But tell us a little bit about it.
So my name is Trisha.
That's the name that I go by for blogging.
And my blog name is purposeful healing.
And it invites you to the journey of me.
So a lot of times we blog about different information,
but this is a personal blog and it's a journey through my healing
journey, actually, personally.
OK, now what what caused you to call it purposeful healing?
Because this year I decided to everything that I did was with purpose
and attention because a lot of times to go through life, just
letting life pass us by.
Well, being a nurse, I'll show in my background and dealing with COVID-19
in the face of it, I felt the need to connect with people in a different way
and to do everything with purpose and attention because you don't know
if it's going to be your last time that you have the opportunity to impact on one.
So that's why it's purposeful healing.
And it's towards a certain
place in your life that you're trying to reach or trying to go.
Wasn't it in each and every.
So walk me through the process of how you chose the name,
how you decided that you were going to blog about this
and exactly what you plan to blog about.
So the journey began actually even before I knew it.
My mom died when I was two months.
So at that time, I did not know that, hey, I was a motherless child,
nor did I know that it will impact my life the way that it would
for many years to come.
So I have a specific purpose for my healing
because I don't want to repeat the cycles that I have repeated
time and time again.
I've gone through
cyclic depression, which was also called my future.
We're also inherited.
And I decided that this healing was with an intent and a purpose
to be a better person and to be the person that we all
we all got a calling or a purpose in life.
So I want to become the woman that I was born to be.
And with that, I have to heal in certain areas.
So it's a healing with the purpose.
So here's the name purposeful healing.
I love that so much.
So now will you be blogging a lot about like mental health
or is it strictly going to be from for your purpose
only or your journey or is it to help others?
It's to help others.
That is why I'm going live with it,
because I've always blogged all my whole entire life.
I just did it personally.
I used to journal my feelings in poems and short stories, music.
However, I could channel in a creative way.
Though those were my outlet.
However, I decided this year, well, last year that, hey,
I want to my niche is kind of to connect with
especially women in a different way.
I found that around my life, I was an inspiration to a lot of people.
However, honestly, they did not know me.
There will be a lot of people to be surprised when I launch my blog.
I grew up motherless because they looked at me from a different lens.
Here I am academically,
professionally adored, adored.
I have a degree that I have the home.
I have the children.
I have the outside exterior view of a woman that she's there.
She's the right. But inside, I was a total wreck.
I kept a lot of things inside and I
I suffered in silence.
And so I decided that, you know, if I inspire these women
the way that they that I appear to be, then I want to reach people to know that
you there's a different person inside of you that's screaming to come out.
So I started on top of a brick ceiling.
It's on a healing out loud
journey, which means we're going to speak out.
We're going to get to the silence.
We're going to talk about it.
So that was my journey of
going out loud, you know, blogging.
I'm glad to hear that, because to me, one of the things that drives me nuts
is when it comes to mental health, it seems like there's still way too much
of a stigma of people like trying to keep it quiet.
And it's so interesting what you said about, you know, that that people are going
to see a different side of you that they haven't.
Personally, myself, mental health is very important to me.
I'm a suicide survivor.
I you know, my father committed suicide two days ago.
You know, my father committed suicide two days after Christmas in 2016.
And, you know, there were so many people that came out of the woodwork
that they were like, oh, he was such a happy guy.
He was such a good guy.
And it's like, y'all had no idea what was going on in the background.
And so I think it's so important that that a website like yours is coming out
because, you know, every person who can actually speak up
and start talking about the important things, the things that really matter.
It's critical, especially in today's day and age,
with so much stuff happening in the world.
I feel like the more that we can speak out and talk about mental health, the better.
So I think it's awesome.
We're breaking over.
Yes, absolutely.
Because I mean, because why do what? Why keep it quiet?
Why keep it quiet?
If we have stuff that we need to get out, that's that's how you heal,
is to speak up about it.
And you know what they say, if you keep things bottled up, eventually it'll explode.
So so like wine, open it up, honey, and drink it.
I like that.
OK, so now obviously it hasn't launched yet.
So you're probably not monetized from the get go.
But do you have plans to actually monetize the blog?
I absolutely do.
My monetizing, I've created a little thread in a plan of what the launch
and of course, collect the data of having a subscriber, how many people.
I want to offer resources from my website.
I want it to kind of be a one stop shop, not as much as I can,
that they can come there and it can be their mental health home.
So I will be opening up a healing collection store that would offer like oils,
candles, happy T-shirts, because who doesn't like a great T-shirt?
And I'll be adding items that when they come, you know, they're meditating
what they need for their meditation, what they need.
I want to reach as many people.
I don't want to have any boundaries.
Let me make sure I put that. I don't have any boundaries.
I don't want someone to say, well, I'm not going to go to, you know,
I don't see anything for me.
I want people to know that this is your plans to be safe
and that you can get the things from different walks.
I'm learning from different people, learn about amethysts, different
everything that deals with mental health and healing and filling, you know,
your best. So I'm learning from different people and I'm going to offer
different things on my side that people can purchase and help them
find a space with not only their mind, but also their life to take the time
to do what they need to do to be the best person that they can be to heal.
I love that. So now you you said something that struck a chord with me
because I love planning sheets and creating, you know, outlook plans.
So walk me through how it worked to create yourself a content plan,
a plan for your for your business, basically.
So I'm an OCD person, kind of type personality.
And it's just like I'm an educator in nursing.
And so we had to learn how to build a curriculum.
You just can't walk into a classroom without a lesson plan.
So that applies to my whole entire life.
I actually listen to my whole entire life.
Oh, it was no different for me to build a curriculum for my blog
and how to launch it from the day everything and everything was actually
chosen with purpose on the day of my blog is actually the
for the first anniversary of my mom's death.
And I wanted to create a better memory of it, even though it changed my life.
Again, I didn't know it at that time, but I wanted to be
turned into something different.
So that's the actual day that that's why I so significant about that day.
That's beautiful. I absolutely love that.
I didn't realize that was why you were launching it the day that you are.
That's God. That's such a great idea because, you know,
we have these these moments in these memories and sometimes they're
they're haunted by something dark.
And so I love the idea of taking it and turning it into rebirthing it,
rebirthing it into something beautiful.
And one of the things you said kind of cracked me up and said, you have OCD.
And my husband and I joke all the time that the actual thing is it's CDO
because that's in the correct order.
You know, because that's alphabetical.
I love it.
So now it sounds like the the niche that you've chosen is kind of broad
in the sense that, you know, you're you're trying to help the mental health
of more than just one particular person.
But would you say that you're defining your website as a mental health blog?
Or what would you call it?
It definitely is a mental health blog.
But I'm taking the name off of it because it's very important
that I love that you pointed out erasing the stigma.
I don't like labels.
I absolutely despise labels.
So I wanted to call it healing because that's what it is.
You're healing the inner soul of yourself.
You're in it. You're coming home.
So I love the word healing versus the mental health.
And I call it a journey because we're ever evolving.
And I love the fact that.
Every day you wake up, it's a different day on your journey.
You don't know what to expect, but it's a journey that I want people to embrace.
I want to make them feel welcome that I'm a representative
or people that may have guest blog as I thought.
Then, you know, having guest blog, because it's a big it's a big tag.
And I actually have honed down to women
because we as women deal with things that are different to me.
And we carry things different.
We operate different.
I remember my grandmother always saying that women are for Venus and that's for Mars.
And I absolutely believe that we don't talk the same language.
And I want women to be able to know themselves
and know that when you get through 10 care of everybody else,
let's not forget about ourselves.
Let's not forget about ourselves. Absolutely.
One of my favorite phrases is you can't give from an empty cup.
You sure can. So you got to fill yours up first.
And it sounds like that's what you're intending to do is you're going to fill up
people's cup with this website.
Well, so what do you see for the first, let's call it just even the first month
of your website, what are you planning for for your rollout?
So I roll out, I have different headline.
So, of course, I want to be the inner child and it's going to walk you through my jury.
So the first blog just create a memory of a snapshot of where I am now.
So it starts the story of where I am right at this moment,
but then it's going to proceed to go backwards to show you how I got here.
So that's one section of it.
And then other sections are being glimpsed of what I've been doing.
Glimpses of what I actually I wouldn't say suffered, but what I my journey
of consequences of not being healed.
So it'll have different topic that that blog would relate to, such as low
sepulchre depression.
I also am a suicide survivor.
My first attempt at suicide was 11 years old.
So that sets up a logging.
So I'm taking every issue that I dealt with and I'm putting certain blogs
so people can go to that particular topic and say, OK, these are the blogs
related to that would actually be categorized.
That makes sense.
So how are you planning on finding your readers?
So, of course, reaching out to initial people within my circle
family and doing things like this.
I signed up for Twitter.
Oh, my God, I'm 41 and I'm just behind here.
I'm just a bit.
So I say I'm definitely going to be hired.
So a virtual assistant helped me, you know, with that.
That delegation, a learning delegation.
But those type of things and I'm learning how to search
using different hashtags.
So I'm doing a lot of homework because it is new to me.
I'm I'm the 80s, baby.
It's a generational gap for me.
So but it's a it's a journey that I'm experiencing that I love,
because the more important thing to me is getting to where I need to be,
you know, and getting people to.
To enter into my journey so they can also start their own journey
and also connecting, reaching out to those people that offer resources
and seeing if they want to partner up and those type of things.
I've been, you know, doing my homework on finding different people that
I can partner up with to spread the word.
They got to get that spreadsheet
going of all the people to contact and all that.
Well, to all.
So now are you going to be doing anything with like SEO
or are you mainly focusing on the content before you think about the SEO?
I definitely will be doing it.
You know, that's why I created the labels, because
it's easier from what I've been reading.
If you have your geo tag with different things that people search for.
So I definitely do an SEO.
Yeah. Well, one thing I recently found out about, and I'm so excited about it
because I really want to dive into it.
Google has released an entire SEO class for free.
Like it's it's everything that you would ever want to know.
And it's all for me.
So I'll have to look for that and put a link in the show notes
and I'll definitely send it to you. But yeah, I've been trying to learn more
about SEO because I've been doing this.
I've been blogging. Goodness gracious.
I started professionally writing in 2007, started blogging in 2009,
went pro blogger 2011 and then Ghostwriter 2014.
And yet even still, even, you know, more than a decade into this,
I'm still learning.
And I think that's I think that's the craziest thing about content creation
is that we're never done.
Just like the mental health journey, you're never done.
The journey, it's an ever evolving journey.
And I wanted to make it beautiful.
That's the thing.
Even when I chose my colors, when you come to win it,
I want you to be invited.
Like I'm not going into some mental, you know, or I just want to create
that thing and say, hey, it's it's OK.
It's it's OK. It's OK.
Yeah, you don't want it to feel like you're very a hospital.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Like we don't want to be sterile here.
We want to like actually show that we're healing.
And then enjoying ourselves.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Absolutely. So now that we've discussed what what you see for the next month,
what do you see for the next year in five years?
Oh, my God, I envision
just what you think like the monetization,
but also linking with other entities and other bloggers
and other people that create services like I actually do.
I actually wrote down there's a guy that I'm following.
He does it for the guy.
And so being able to bounce off of each other
and different things and they're just connecting with those different
organization that may need to increase their reach.
And it's funny, I just said that my
marketing guy hit slogan is increasing your reach.
That's another reason I decided to launch a blog,
because I wanted to increase my reach.
Yes, I I do a lot of uplifting in my community, just just being around.
But I wanted to increase my reach.
I wanted to get those people that are like me.
I love to read. I love to read blogs.
I love to read.
And so I'm just like, I want to connect with those people, too,
and also invite others who may not, you know,
they may be new to reading blogs or whatever.
So I wanted to definitely increase my reach.
So I see myself in the next year doing a lot of connecting
and launching and adding.
Yeah. Addition. Yeah.
I think what we ought to do is in a year, come back and see what what happened.
Yeah, we should definitely do something like that.
And it sounds like everything that you've been describing,
it sounds like you're going to be building more of a community than just an audience.
Yeah, it's like a consortium that's all.
Yeah. Connecting and people from different walks of life,
connecting and creating something special.
And we're doing it, you know, one blog at a time.
One, I'm also going to be out frustrating podcast.
I have an aunt who's an IT guru and she's like,
I hope you think about doing podcasts.
I'm like, OK, take me to.
But yes, it's going to be where people that don't read,
hey, I'm having on a podcast.
If you like to see visual, I'm going to have all that.
Oh, yes, I'm slowly adding and adding.
So you're right.
It's going to be a community where you can just put your pajamas on and say,
hey, I'm a heel today.
This is my journey.
You know, yeah, I can I can totally see virtual slumber parties happening.
Because you said let's get our pajamas on and start healing.
Am I right? Let's go virtual slumber.
Well, you know, you got me started when you said
you was talking about language, they pop the wine.
And I'm like, yes, that's right.
Yes. Yeah, I like to say if you want a little, you'll feel better.
Yeah. OK, well, I think that everything you've described
sounds like it's going to be a really awesome website.
I have to know, though, in your journey, as you've been preparing to launch,
what have been like the most surprising lessons you've learned
as you're preparing to launch?
Oh, my God. Oh, I'm.
Launching this blog and and telling people about it, the
and brains that I had, you know, a lot of times,
number one, getting rid of the inner chatter.
Access and you would know a lot about this
eliminating the distractions and the access
and being able to allow yourself the time.
And you can't be there for everybody. And also.
The opening, the openness, because again, there has been a great stigma,
especially culturally among the African-American, especially women.
And I come from
strong women.
So you just don't talk about different things.
You show up, you just show up.
And it's funny how people say about your father.
And some of the reactions I got, he's like, oh, my God, I admired you.
But I had no idea that, wow, you grew up mother of it.
You know, and that,
you know, that's something I want to make sure that people know that
be up there, be up there, let people know who you are.
And therefore, you know why someone loves you.
And doing this blog journey, I have learned
people have really honestly that I thought
when my family, if I opened up, they were so in-breadth.
They were so in-breadth.
So I would tell anybody, if it's something that is in your heart
and you want to start and you want to do it, because sometimes we have
preconceived notions that are not real.
They're just formulated in our brain and not to let anything stop you.
Especially we can be our own world's great.
And I was I was my own world's great.
I was. Well, and the fascinating thing to me is, you know, if you have a message,
if you have something on your heart that you want to get out there,
it's never been easier to start a blog.
I mean, we have more resources these days.
We're not coding in the corner anymore.
We have templates and and all these things.
We can just push a button and we're blogging.
Yeah. So I think that I think this is going to be an awesome website.
I can't wait to see it launch.
I can't wait to to engage with it.
But I'm going to ask you one thing I haven't asked you yet.
Is there anything I haven't asked you?
You wish I had.
Now, you have absolutely pulled a lot out of me.
Because again, I'm kind of shy.
I'm starting with the blog.
I'm really shy, which is amazing.
People think you're shy.
Yeah, I'm actually a social introvert.
I work well when I'm at work or being an educator.
But when I go behind those closed doors, I'm a totally different person.
So this actually pushed me to another level.
And it feels good. There's no way in years, a year ago,
I would have reached out and did that.
So you said, hey, children, I just wouldn't have.
I just would have.
That's awesome. Yeah, because that's actually how you and I met.
As I put out a basically a cattle call saying, you know,
I needed people to interview for my for my show and you pick me.
So I did.
And that's that's kind of the awesome thing, though, is it's like even further
proof that this is like the best time to get into the content business.
Because it's so easy to connect with people.
I mean, you're able to like one of the girls that responded.
She's from Northern Ireland.
And I'm like, oh, my goodness, like, I'm going to be interviewing someone in Ireland.
But how wild is that that we can connect with people all over the globe?
Like I interviewed someone in India a couple of weeks ago, and it's just like,
it's such a worldwide thing.
And I think that the big thing about content creation is like, like we've been
talking about, we all have a lot of content creation.
Like we've been talking about, we all have a message.
We all have something that's in our hearts.
And I think it's awesome that you have stepped up and you're like, I'm going to
share my I'm going to share my story.
And whoever shows up, that's that's who it's for.
Yes. And I'm going to have to be consistent.
I've been reading a lot and a lot of times, you know, we get discouraged
and because you don't see the results that you want to see.
So I began to focus on what my purpose was.
And that's how I want to always.
Design a couple of purpose, the purpose is this.
So this is why I'm going to continue to show up
because somebody, whether they say anything or not, and this one thing
I've also learned, Ashley.
A lot of people are watching you and they may never say a word.
A lot of people are expecting you to show up so they can show up as well.
But they will never say a word.
So that drives me as well, because I want to show up for those people
who may never say a word, but I want them to know that they matter too,
even though they may not verbally or, you know, because they may be going
through their own and having got to where I am because I used to be that person.
I watched other people and through them, I gained another sense of strength in
myself, even though I may not have the courage because I was shy to say, hey,
you rock, but because they showed up, it gave me some type of strength to say,
yeah, I can do that too.
I love that. I love that.
So I think if anything that we've learned from this episode, it's that if you want
to launch, you need to, if you want to start a blog, you want to show up, just
do it because like you said, you know, even if you're only helping just one
person, that one person needed you and so show up for them.
So, so bloggy friends, if you're listening to this and you have something
that you want to put out there, go for it.
And Katrina, I just want to thank you so much for being with me today and
sharing all of the, all of your story about launching, because I think it's
going to be awesome.
I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity because I'm not a fool.
I'm not, I'm not among the big rock star yet, but yes, you are.
Yes, you are.
I really want to thank you for the opportunity.
Because I said, you never, you know, interviewed anyone that hadn't launched
yet, so yeah, it's pretty exciting.
It's my lunch day.
Yeah.
Yes.
That's pretty exciting.
That's very exciting.
Well, thank you again.
And I will keep in touch with you and I can't wait to see what happens next for you.
Yes.
Thank you.
Well, my bloggy friends, thanks again for being here today and until next time.