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That’s right. Season 2 of the “Law & Business” Podcast is back. We start with Episode 21, in which we have a discussion with Chrystina Cappello, the founder of the Chrystina Noel blog and of PHL Bloggers. The Chrystina Noel blog is all about party hosting and various tips and tricks to experiment with parties. PHL Bloggers is an organization based in the Philadelphia metropolitan area that helps bloggers with networking and ideas by hosting meetings and conventions all about blogging as a business.
Chrystina’s blog can be found at https://chrystinanoel.com/
Chrystina’s Twitter can be found at https://twitter.com/chrystinanoel
Chrystina’s Instagram can be found at https://www.instagram.com/chrystinanoel/
This is a part of our special Philadelphia Bloggers series and there is more to come.
Here is a lightly-edited transcript of the episode:
Intro:
You are Listening to the Law and Business podcast hosted by Anthony Verna. We tackle the difficult questions where business and the law intersect to help you run a smarter business and avoid costly mistakes. Brought to you by Verna Law, PC, a full-service law firm focusing on patents, trademarks, copyrights, domain names, and advertising law. For more information, call (914) 908-6757 or send an email to Anthony@vernalaw.com.
Anthony Verna:
All right, welcome to the Law and Business podcast. We’re here doing our Philadelphia bloggers series. We’re here with Chrystina Cappello. How are you doing, Chrystina?
Chrystina Cappello:
Doing pretty well today.
Anthony Verna:
All right. You are the founder of PHL Bloggers and you have a blog of your own.
Chrystina Cappello:
I do.
Anthony Verna:
And you have a full-time job.
Chrystina Cappello:
That as well.
Anthony Verna:
So the first question is, is do you sleep?
Chrystina Cappello:
Sometimes. Less than usual this week. I try. It’s definitely always a balance trying to figure out what means the most, what’s the most important to get done, and which things inevitably get shoved to the wayside along the way.
Anthony Verna:
I understand very well with having the practice, doing this podcast, having the blog guests. No, there are things that you certainly have to prioritize as you’re putting all of this together. So, let’s start here. Let’s talk about the blog first. So, tell everybody about your blog.
Chrystina Cappello:
Sure. So, I blog at Chrystina Noel and that’s just Chrystinanoel.com. It’s about hosting parties, handmade greeting cards, and how to stay in touch with people you love. So, I’ve been blogging for six years now and I started the blog at the same time that I started my full-time job. So, essentially, I started it because my day job is a construction consultant and my background is in architectural engineering. So, I’ve a very left brained day job and that is the space that I live in during the day. And I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to go crazy having only that to do after graduating college with having so many activities going on at the same time. And so, I decided to start the blog at the same time. so I had a place to record my, my more right brained antics while living the left brain day job.
Anthony Verna:
It is a very artistic, lifestyle kind of blog. Would you agree with that?
Chrystina Cappello:
Yes, that definitely. For years it actually was very specifically by very specifically, I mean vaguely lifestyle and I realized recently that it actually for the first four or five years of it, it became sort of like a journal, a place for me to record all of my thoughts and sort of in more recent years I’ve been really making the pushover to talking just mostly about parties and greeting cards and staying in touch, which was always there along the way. But now it’s just more of the focus as opposed to telling people about 10 things that I did this week or something along those lines.
Anthony Verna:
Right. Like your most recent post is about Thai inspired food for the dinner party, but you don’t just talk about the food.
Chrystina Cappello:
No, no. That’s where the engineering side of my brain comes in. I talk a lot about the logistics of planning. One thing that I always hear from people when I’m like, so what’s stopping you from hosting parties? Because this is a normal conversation that I start with people I meet on the street.
Anthony Verna:
Well I happen to live above a funeral home, therefore a lot of people don’t want to come and visit me.
Chrystina Cappello:
I haven’t heard that one yet. But everybody is like, thoughts are always like logistical questions. It’s like, well how many people do I invite and what do I serve and how long does it take to prepare and what happens if these people don’t know each other? So, I really like to sort of provide some insight around how to make it happen, what to be thinking about before you host the event, what to be thinking about during the event and just sort of making it more accessible to people. And I was actually really excited because I got a comment on that post from somebody who is like, I never thought that I could make Thai food before, but after reading this post, I totally think it’s doable now. So that was really great. That’s the whole purpose, right? It’s kind of trying to say, no, you can do this too and you don’t need all the time in the world, and you don’t need to worry about all of the details to make it perfect. It just needs to be about the people.
Anthony Verna:
Understood completely. And I’ve actually never tried to make Thai food myself.
Chrystina Cappello:
Right. Because it seems impossible. All right. Not impossible.
Anthony Verna:
Your name ends in a vowel and my name and ends in a vowel so I think we can agree that we, we grew up with um, pasta and red.
Chrystina Cappello:
And pasta and pasta and pasta…
Anthony Verna:
Right, exactly, exactly. Correct. When I hit college was when, oh, there’s other stuff out there finally hit me and that experimenting hit me and, all right, so Thai food I haven’t tried to make yet, but certainly Vietnamese.
Chrystina Cappello:
Yeah. I didn’t even know that avocados or buffalo sauce existed until I got to college. I had no idea.
Anthony Verna:
Yeah, I, I understand exactly where you’re coming from. What would be your goal with the blog? Are you looking to make money with it in the long run? Are you looking for people just to kind of see it as a funnel to something else? What focuses you on that?
Chrystina Cappello:
Sure. So, I think the two biggest reasons that I blog are: I’m looking for my community in the world. I like meeting like-minded people who like talking about parties and bringing people together. And so, sort of building a community of people that I’ve met along the way has been really, really cool. And that’s exactly what I was looking for, right. And escape from my day job to find a place where there were people who thought more like me so that I wouldn’t feel crazy when I was having all of these right brained thoughts while I’m supposed to be auditing construction projects. So that’s definitely one of the things. And then sort of tied to that is just inspiring other people. So, while getting paid for posts would be lovely, right now it’s just more of a space on the Internet for me to keep a record of all of the things that I’ve done in the past and be able to Google myself. Maybe use as a portfolio one day going forward and to prove that I have any experience in event planning. And bringing people together and community building,
Anthony Verna:
You know, you hit a thought in my head and that thought is that a lot of times we are defined by our careers.
Chrystina Cappello:
Yes.
Anthony Verna:
Rather than anything else. And there is other stuff that we do and yeah, we kind of document that on Facebook but even that can be a little bit of a sloppy way of documenting it because you might not be able to go find that ever again. So here you have the documentation and it is chronologically done.
Chrystina Cappello:
Yes, the amount of times that my mother will text me from the grocery store and be like how many eggs were in that recipe? And I’ll just send her the URL to the recipe and be like, it’s already there, Mom. Just look on the Internet.
Anthony Verna:
So wait. So, does your mom like the fact that she just gets the URL instead of six eggs?
Chrystina Cappello:
She does. At least I think she does. It’s definitely, yeah, pros and cons. I remember I once heard from my aunt that she like googled something about Christmas table settings and her table came up. She was just like, “Oh, what am I supposed to do with this?”
Anthony Verna:
Nothing. Look at it and be happy.
Chrystina Cappello:
That’s true.
Anthony Verna:
So, your blog is ranking pretty well then in Christmas table settings?
Chrystina Cappello:
Maybe. At one point in time it did. I haven’t checked recently though.
Anthony Verna:
Alright, well I won’t check now. I have to admit that’s very impressive.
Chrystina Cappello:
Thank you. I try very hard.
Anthony Verna:
What are some of the favorite posts that you have written over the six years?
Chrystina Cappello:
Oh, there’s a lot. I think some of my favorite ones that I’ve written are the more sort of confessional ones. I love talking about hosting parties and those posts are really fun to write and I think that those are the ones that people can definitely get the most value from, if they’re coming to my blog.
Anthony Verna: Well, they’re paying zero, so everything gets value.
Chrystina Cappello:
But that’s true. That’s true. But I’ve written some over the years. I just actually, one of our coworkers is retiring and I asked, what are you excited about now that you’re moving on to the next step of your life? And he’s really excited to golf. And I was like, oh, I did that once, only once. And so, it’s called my first-time golfing and it’s like an entire post about how I had one week to try and learn how to golf before going on a corporate golf outing. So, that’s one of my favorite posts.
There’s one about me getting my wisdom teeth taken out. There’s one about, I’m not really a nature person, but I went on a like two-day hike camping in the woods trip where there were some things about going to the bathroom in the woods that I decided I needed to blog about. So, there’s things about that on the Internet. Yeah. So, all of those. But then from a party perspective, I’m going to completely 180 this. So, I posted like a chai tasting party. So, I just go to the store and buy all of the Chai concentrates and then we make all of them and taste test them at the same time. So that’s one of the favorite parties I’ve ever had. And then also any beer and cheese party or wine and cheese party that I’ve ever had has been pretty good. And I’m always learning something. I always get to the end of the party and I’m like, oh I would do this differently or I would do that differently. And those posts are definitely the ones that people should be looking at if they’re like, where do I even begin? Cause I’m like I made all the mistakes for you. I did it. Read the post and it’ll tell you what to do correctly instead of what I did the first time.
Anthony Verna:
Yeah. At my first law firm out of law school, somebody always did the Starbucks run after lunch and I got nothing or iced tea cause I don’t drink coffee. So, my wife’s not going to like you. I’m kidding. She’s met you. She likes you. I would rarely get anything. But one person always got a chai tea latte and my boss always just got coffee . Cause, he usually just wanted coffee. So, coffee. And one day they switch the Chai Tea Latte and the coffee and all I hear was … and I’m going to put the microphone over here. “What is hell is this?”
Chrystina Cappello:
They are very different.
Anthony Verna:
All right. So, from that particular post, did you learn about Chai or was that something you already had down?
Chrystina Cappello:
Sure. So, I think what I’ve learned over time about any food or beverage is that you can learn in general about things, but every person’s going to have their own preferences, right? So the things that I learned from these parties are definitely more logistical, more along the lines of, well did you know that if you drink that many cups of Chai in one day, you’re over-caffeinated for the rest of your day and then can’t sleep that night. Or the best way to heat up that many cups of Chai at the same time cause you’re, you’re kind of making them as you go, you one concentrate to the next is using the microwave and you get kind of give everybody a microwave access and that’s kind of where you’re standing around. And then just sort of learning over time for parties what the best and easiest foods to make are. I have some friends that focus a lot on food and that that’s their forte and that’s what they love doing. But my approach is always like, what is the most efficient way that I can feed these people in the least complicated way.
Anthony Verna:
Understood, understood completely. No, and that’s what I like about, that’s really what I like about these posts is that they tackle the subject and then how to get there.
Chrystina Cappello:
Yes.
Anthony Verna:
Because I do think a lot of people have those brain cramps over how to get there and they get nervous. I think reading
it in a format like this helps.
Chrystina Cappello:
True and Pinterest doesn’t help. It just makes you believe that the whole world can look like that all the time. And all of those posts with white backgrounds right now on white tables with all of this natural lighting. I live in a four-story tiny house in Philadelphia that everything is wooden and I was like, sure, I could go buy all of like the table coverings that I need to make everything white and look fantastic and buy all the props. But like that’s just not what life looks like for me. And I’ve got to admit I don’t have the time to set it up. So, it’s a very real look at what party hosting looks like from an engineer’s perspective.
Anthony Verna:
So let’s move on to PHL Bloggers, which you are a founder? The founder?
Chrystina Cappello:
The founder.
Anthony Verna:
The founder, very good.
Chrystina Cappello:
I’m the only crazy one. That’s what it is.
Anthony Verna:
I want to give you the proper crazy credit.
Chrystina Cappello:
Thank you.
Anthony Verna:
I look at PHL bloggers as a support group for bloggers in the Philadelphia area.
Chrystina Cappello:
That’s actually not a bad term for it.
Anthony Verna:
You’re allowed to steal that.
Chrystina Cappello:
I might use that. I might use that. I’ll credit you right at the bottom. So I started the blog in August 2011 and one or two years in, I went to my first conference and I was so excited and I went to one in Philadelphia and I met a bunch of bloggers who were just all at different stages in life. They were a little bit older than me. Most of them had kids. And I was like, this is great. These people are wonderful. I’m really enjoying being around them, but I just can’t connect with them on like day to day levels.
And then I, on a whim, booked tickets to a blog conference in Texas and I went to Texas style council and I met, well not personally, but I met 200 style and lifestyle bloggers in the Texas area and I looked around and I was like, I can’t have to fly all the way to Texas for this. This is a long haul to get to these people. They must be in Philadelphia. So, in September 2014, so three years later, after I stopped traveling from my day job quite as much as I was doing before, I sent out an email to 13 bloggers in the area that I had found on Twitter. That’s just like how I found them. I was like, I know they’re here somewhere and I emailed 13 people and I said, ”Hi, I’m Christina. You may not know me.
I have this blog. I would love to meet up with all of you in person. If you guys want to talk about the challenges of blogging, let me know if you’re interested. We’ll go to a coffee shop and yeah, tell me, tell me if you’re interested. Okay, thanks. Bye.” Like just a really nervous email, right? You’re like, I don’t know these people, they don’t know me and so all 13 people said they were interested, which was crazy to me that I’d never met these people and we had our first meetup that month and we had seven of us at a coffee shop and we did like an activity about brainstorming post ideas and we started talking more about blogging and from September 2014 until now we have grown from like just me sending emails on my Gmail account to making a PHL Bloggers specific email account, to getting a MailChimp list, to hosting two blog conferences, to now up to having a mailing list of 300 members and an awesome team that’s helping me out behind the scenes on everything along the way.
Anthony Verna:
Excellent. Congratulations on that growth.
Chrystina Cappello:
Thanks.
Anthony Verna:
That really is fantastic growth. So, what are some of the goals of PHL Bloggers? Like how often then does everybody meet to talk about those things now and what are you looking to do then?
Chrystina Cappello:
Sure. So, we currently have quarterly meetups that have a social and educational component where people can learn about things like search engine optimization or Google analytics or we had one more recently about how to pitch brands. So, some kind of educational component and then some kind of just meet the other bloggers in the area component and time to network and talk. And at our last one, what we did was we all sort of went around the room and everybody said one thing that they’re really good at doing and one thing that they could use help with. And then we had sort of networking time afterwards where people already knew what they wanted to talk to each other about because you knew who was good at what and could help you and you knew where you could offer advice to somebody else that was looking for something. So that was really great. And really the entire purpose is sort of to meet up in real life. And I’m a firm believer in that building. Like personal relationships with people can get you really far. There is, there’s just so much you can learn from people’s stories and experiences and sometimes you just feel less crazy having somebody to talk to you about this really important thing in your life that nobody else seems to understand it.
Anthony:
And with a lot of these bloggers who have taken this path as their career and are trying to build this as their business. A lot of them do feel as if they don’t have that support because really they’re on their own and then with blogging, it’s you and a computer.
Chrystina Cappello:
That’s it. That’s all it is. That’s you behind a computer screen and you’re like making these connections on Twitter, which is great, or you’re making these connections on Instagram and you’re always commenting on each other’s posts, but for me, who’s such a people person and an extrovert, it’s not necessarily enough. That said, I have found over the years that most of the bloggers that I know and love are introverts, but they’re all coming out and everybody just, it’s sort of looking for more of a community of people to be able to share the experience along the way with.
Anthony Verna:
I do agree with you wholeheartedly on that. And what other events then? Cause you have
an annual conference , as well, for the PHL Bloggers.
Chrystina Cappello:
Yes, I do. So it’s called the Blog Connect Conference. Our second annual conference was in April and the one for 2018 is almost on the books for April 2018. I just need to pick a date, confirm it, and put down a deposit, which is on my to do list for sooner than later. Believe it or not, it’s only July. But we’re uh, we’re getting started earlier this year.
Anthony Verna:
And when you have a bigger event, you have to do that earlier then.
Chrystina Cappello:
It’s true. So essentially, it’s sort of a one-and-a-half-day event that involves a party of networking and getting to know people and learning about styling photos. And we still need to pick the theme for this year. But essentially the overall purpose is to get bloggers together to network and educate them on upcoming things in the industry and just making sure that people feel like they have a place to go to ask questions and just to sort of bring in some experts who have been there along the way and to be able to share their stories, to inspire the bloggers to keep going. Cause sometimes you need that motivation. You need to be in a room full of people who understand and just kind of, I feel like what I’ve, my favorite comment that I hear from people when they leave is that they feel inspired to keep going again because it’s hard, as we said, it’s behind a computer screen. So, trying to get on board with posting once a week or twice a week is and fitting it into everyday life can be a little bit draining until you realize that there’s all of these other people doing it too.
Anthony Verna:
And I think that’s an important point right there. When I have gone to conferences, one of the things that I’ve noticed, I don’t mean a blog industry conferences, but other industry conferences. What I have noticed is that a lot of people who are bloggers and influencers themselves are beginning to go to these conferences and say, here’s what I blog about, here’s what I do videos about , you know, and here’s who’s following me. Can we talk offline out of here about how to get your product into my blogs? I won’t call it a revolution yet because it’s only like two or three people a conference as I go to those. But it’s beginning to happen. It’s beginning to seep through. And so, you know, there are people out there, they’re focused on this as a business, number one, but also personality matters. And I think for a lot of the people who are blogging but might be naturally introverted, this is a way to get them to see what the different paths are in creating this. And then hopefully they can go from, from a blog industry conference to a regular industry conference. And just start saying, “Hey, I’m blogging about this. “
Chrystina Cappello:
Yeah. And I think it’s weird cause this is the place that my worlds collide, right. My Day job of like Super Corporate America and my side hustle of the blog. At my day job, I feel like there’s a lot of talk on like making yourself an expert in the industry and sort of making sure that you know what’s happening and reading about things as they’re happening and getting to know the right people and you’re right, taking bloggers who usually live in that world and taking them to the industry driven conference, it sounds like a great way to move forward from here. It’s making me want to find an event planning conference and head out and check out what that’s about.
Anthony Verna:
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of an event planning conference. There’s gotta be one.
Chrystina Cappello:
I’ve heard of a few. I might need to save up for them, but I know they’re out there.
Anthony Verna:
No, I understand. It’s like me going into the International Bar Association annual convention. You got to save up for that one.
Chrystina Cappello:
Yeah. I believe that.
Anthony Verna:
This year’s in Sydney, so yeah. You have to save up for that one. So, is PHL Bloggers meeting its ultimate goals for what you’ve set?
Chrystina Cappello:
Yes and no. I definitely love what it has become right now. I am so amazed at the 300 members. People are coming out of the woodworks that are bloggers and I’m always like, we must’ve found them all by now, but like not true at all. Not remotely true. The market is not yet saturated. There’s a space for everybody, which is cool. Everybody’s got their own story to share and has their own unique spin on it. One thing that’s sort of happened as the growth has happened is that we initially started off with this really core group of probably 20 to 30 people who kept showing up to the same events and there’s really strong bonds between those original 20 to 30 people and as we’ve grown, we’ve tried really hard to sort of keep that same bond there, but it’s gotten a little bit more difficult with all of the people and sort of less face to face time.
Which it’s been a balance of finding the right amount of face to face time to get people to actually show up. We were having so many events that I think people were saying, “Hey, like I can just go to the next one.” and so now we’re sort of cutting back to sort of make it more of a special event and then hosting informal sessions in between. And really the goal right now for me to figure out is about how to bring those stronger connections back together and whether that’s bringing people together who are at the same level. So, bringing in mastermind groups for the experienced level folks, bringing in intro sessions for the introductory bloggers and sort of making them feel like they have their own individual community within this community of 300 people. So typical Chrystina. It’s going great. It’s like it’s accomplishing all of these things. It’s giving people educational opportunities, but I’m always looking onto the next thing and where I want ahead and making sure that it’s really providing a good opportunity for people to feel more connected.
Anthony Verna:
Understood completely. What events do you have coming up here in 2017 and we’ll end it right there. Yeah,
Chrystina Cappello:
We have an event coming up in either October, November or December cause that’s our next quarter about vulnerability. So we’re going to talk a little bit about the softer side of blogging and what it means to put your life out there for the world and to sort of talk about what some of those more intimate sharing detail things look like and what it means and what you’re comfortable sharing and sort of breaking away from the digital world and focusing on real life and what that balance looks like. And that’s going to be sort of a work session that’s done towards the end of the year coming up.
Anthony Verna:
Fantastic. And then of course April 2018 the big conference.
Chrystina Cappello:
Yes, April 2018 will be the Blog Connect Conference number three.
Anthony Verna:
Chrystina, thank you so much for coming.
Chrystina Cappello:
No problem. This was really fun.
Anthony Verna:
And once again, how can everybody find you?
Chrystina Cappello:
Sure. So you can find my blog online at chrystinanoel.com and that is c h r y s t i n a n o e l.com and you can find more about PHL bloggers out at PHL bloggers.com and the Blog Connect Conference has its own website attheblogconnect.com.
Anthony Verna:
Thanks very much.
Chrystina Cappello:
Thank you.
Outro:
This has been the Law and Business podcast. Visit VernaLaw.com for more episodes. To contact Verna Law PC, send an email to Anthony@vernalaw.com or call (914) 908-6757.
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