How to Make a Professionally Popular Food Blog in Your Spare Time – Anniversary Edition

This week marks a year of writing blog posts every week.

It’s funny, I never even thought I would be writing 50 articles. What’s even more funny, I never thought people would read them.

When I interviewed Jessica Gavin, she gave me a lot of tips for food blogging and I decided to distill this information into a post. I kept on doing this for each episode of My Food Job Rocks because I thought it would be a better way of retaining information.

Over time, I decided to just write what I either feel like, or needed to be answered. Some were as simple as explaining what food science is, but I’ve had the Creative Book List become very popular as well.

I had thanksgiving with my extended family last week, I’ve noticed I talk a bit better and land jokes better. I don’t know if that was because of this excercise, but I’d like to think so.

I’ll be revisiting my first blog post “How to Make a Professionally Popular Blog in Your Spare Time”

Make it Look Good – Revisited

“Again here’s the link: jessicagavin.com. Her site is so clean, her tabs have just the right amount of information, there’s videos, opt-ins, those social media buttons, and amazing pictures and videos.”

Apparently, people say my website looks pretty good. Not as clean and beautiful as Jessica Gavin’s, but good enough where it’s navigable.

By the way, we just uploaded a new banner. neat, huh?

I try to make the website as easy as navigable as possible. I have the URL myfoodjobrocks.com, I tag my episodes with an episode number and the name of the person, and they are easily searchable.

The biggest focus I want visitors in my site to take away from it is that all of the content is evergreen (will never age). This is why I developed the career playlist to give people a marketplace for people to listen to the job they want!

I haven’t had much success with this in the blogging realm, though a lot of people do sift through the forest of blogs according to my stats.

Next year, we will be revamping the blogging platform to introduce easier ways to get information. I’ve noticed that the blogs really split into multiple parts. Some being college oriented, or articles to help you find your career.

Other articles focus more on the self-improvement side of things, which targets my journey as a Product Developer in Isagenix.

Be Consistent – Revisited

“Don’t expect to be an instant hit. You need to think in the long run and keep on hustling. As long as you are consistently posting good quality content, consistently, and you continue to experiment to see what makes your audience tick, you will be on the pathway to success.”

There’s an episode of Bojack Horseman, where the main character complains running up a hill and lies on the ground. Another dude comes to him and says “It gets easier, every day it gets easier. But you gotta do it every day, that’s the hard part. But it does get easier”

Think of writing like a couch to 5 k.

You write just a little bit, maybe 500 words a week.

Soon, maybe after 30 articles, you realize you have so much more to say!

Then you write and write and write, and you end up churning 1000 word articles a week. Some even break 1500!

In my opinion, your opinion only actually has authoritative value when you hit over 1000 words. More is better, that’s why we have books.

Screw what people say about SEO and word length. The point is to have content so good, people can’t ignore it. You need to practice how your content interacts with people! Once you’ve figured out that people actually like what you write, then the incentive for writing grows.

And that’s hard for people to grasp because writing content and just posting a link on social media is the worst thing you can do.

After studying different posts, the best thing to do is to turn your article into a great hook, and place the link below. My engagement went from like 5 likes to 50 likes. It’s really powerful stuff!

But maybe that engagement jump comes from practice.

I write weekly because if I miss a week, someone will be sad. I can’t ruin their day because I didn’t write, so I need to keep on writing.

Whether that’s true or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s a excellent motivator.

The moral of the story is, if you’re planning to be a writer whether it’s blogging, book writing, or copy writing, you have to write. Start writing, start posting. Start having people tell you you’re wrong, and then ignore them. It’s what makes good writers great.

Love What You Do – Revisited

There has been points in my writing challenge where it was Thursday night and I needed an article for Friday and I had nothing.

I struggled to write, but when you start to write sentences, an hour later you end up with 1000 words.

I really enjoy writing and there is a special feeling when you get into this amazing mindset and the words just flow from your fingertips.

But it’s not like I’m being paid to write about robots. I have complete freedom on what I write and I love it!

What I’m doing isn’t fueled by money or fame, it’s filled by either destressing, organizing my thoughts, or answering a question that the people I’m helping have.

When people are engaged and are actually reading something I wrote, it makes me smile for hours.

Even when people are arguing or not even reading the full article, I’m just happy I’m getting criticism!

To finish off this article, I iterate this piece:

Blogging is a learning experience, and it is such a great learning experience because it’s your playground. When you learn how to make and use a website, it is literally your creative sandbox. It also allows you to share your voice and your value. No matter how young you are, you should learn to blog.

It takes about $100 dollars to make a good blog (hosting, buying a theme), but the value of your time keeping it consistent is something you yourself has to value.

But you should do it. There needs to be more stories in the world.