How a Lawyer's Home Cooking Blog is Helping Her Replace Her Law Income
Libby Hakim features in the fourth episode of our Blogging Breakthroughs series, where listeners share stories about traffic, income, mindset, and other blogging areas.

Libby has a new blog, Cooking with Nana Ling, which focuses on home cooking based on her great-grandmother’s recipes.



Before her blog, Libby was working a part-time legal job and had two small children.

But with her blog, Libby has experienced four mini breakthroughs:

Mindshift: Presumed she would never make more than she would as a lawyer, but started to believe she could make a living by blogging.
What to Blog About: Had heaps of ideas, but got tired of them. Her cooking blog gives her and others joy and happiness, so she has been able to sustain it.
Overcoming Perfection: Launch deadline makes you commit to moving forward with your blog, even if you don’t think it's good enough yet.
Like-New Blogs: Don’t compare yourself to bloggers who’ve been around awhile. You’ll evolve your writing and the way your blog looks.

With blogging, you’ve got to start somewhere to develop a sense of purpose and enjoy what you do. Don’t give up. Keep going. Breakthroughs lead to something special.
Links and Resources for How This Home Cooking Blogger is Replacing Her Lawyer Income with Her Blogging Income:

Cooking with Nana Ling
Zoe Bingley-Pullin

Courses

Starting a Blog
ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog

Join our Facebook group





Full Transcript
Expand to view full transcript
Compress to smaller transcript view







Darren: Hey, there and welcome to episode 259 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the founder of ProBlogger. You can find out more about what we do in helping the bloggers start blogs and monetize their blogs at problogger.com.

Today is the fourth installment in our blogger breakthrough series where we’re sharing stories from listeners of the podcast in how they had different kinds of breakthroughs in their blogging. Today’s story comes from a blogger who’s relatively new to blogging. She started blogging six months ago using our Start A Blog course, which you can find the link to in today’s show notes.

The blogger that I want to introduce you to today, her name is Libby Hakim. She’s got a fascinating blog. I love the topic of this blog. The title is Cooking With Nana Ling. I’ll let her introduce where the blog idea came from because that is part of the breakthrough that she wants to share today. But I just love this story because it is from a new blogger who’s already got to a point where she’s reaching some of her dreams in being able to give up other work and focus on her blogging. She’s still got a way to go, but she’s well on the way. The blog itself is a beautifully designed blog and just has a great concept.

You’re going to hear four blogging breakthroughs today–just four short ones. At the end of Libby’s story, I’m going to come back and pull out a few of the things that I noticed about it. Libby’s another Aussie, so you’re going to hear a bit of an Aussie accent. You might hear a few words that I use from time to time as well, which is fun and at the end, I’ll come back and share some thoughts. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/259. You’ll find a full transcript there as well. Thanks, Libby. I’ll hand it over to you.

Libby: Hi, there. My name’s Libby Hakim, and I’m from Sydney, Australia. My blog is called Cooking With Nana Ling. You can find it at www.cookingwithnanaling.com. My blog is only six months old, and as you probably guessed, it’s about cooking, more specifically, it’s about home cooking. It’s based around the recipes my Nana Ling—who is my great-grandmother—wrote down in the late 1930s, and early 1940s. I inherited her vast collection of handwritten recipes.