In episode 439, Tammy Spencer teaches us about being open to learning about all the different aspects that go into successful food blogging.

We cover information on why it’s important to select a blog theme wisely, get comfortable playing with your recipes as well as thinking outside the box, be sure to learn to take photographs that attract readers, know SEO is essential, place priority on getting a site audit and come to terms with you’ll always be learning as a blogger.

Listen on the player below or on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast player. Or scroll down to read a full transcript.

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Guest Details

Connect with Scotch and Scones

Website | Facebook | Instagram

Bio Tammy started Scotch & Scones in 2017 as a way to keep track of her whisky-tasting notes and share her experiences of having fun baking. In 2019, she devoted herself full-time to developing her site for commercial success, learning about the business of growing a blog from the ground up. Since then, she’s applied her culinary school training by sharing recipes and tips for desserts, bread, and other goodies that home cooks will feel confident creating.

Takeaways

  • Get the theme right.
  • Pick a good host.
  • Tech support is a must.
  • Perfect your photography and lighting.
  • Think outside the box on content creation – not all recipes have to be created from scratch.
  • SEO is everything about blogging.
  • Get a site audit.
  • Expand your revenue streams.

Resources Mentioned

  • To receive a copy of the ebook Maintaining Sourdough Starter with Less Waste, send a note with the subject EBT Listener and Tammy will send it to you.

Transcript

Click for full script.

EBT439 – Tammy Spencer

Intro: Food bloggers, hi, how are you today? Thank you so much for tuning in to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. This is the place for food bloggers to get information and inspiration to accelerate your blog’s growth and ultimately help you to achieve your freedom, whether that’s financial, personal, or professional.

I’m Megan Porta and I’ve been a food blogger for over 12 years. I understand how isolating food blogging can be at times. I’m on a mission to motivate, inspire, and most importantly, let each and every food blogger, including you, know that you are heard and supported. 

If you are anything like me, you started blogging and just did your own thing in many different areas and then realized that you maybe did a few things wrong, so you had to go back and redo some things. I had to redo a lot of things, and I’m still redoing some of those things 13 years later. So Tammy from Scotch and Scones joins me inside this episode to talk about just this. She started her food blog in 2019. Really buckled down at that time to make it a successful business. There were a handful of things that popped up that she had been doing wrong and that she changed and immediately made her blog improve in various ways. So she talks through these things inside the episode, things like choosing the right theme for your WordPress site, taking pictures the right way, even if it’s just pictures on your iPhone or your Google pixel, learning about SEO and keyword research and so much more inside the episode. Whether you are a new blogger or a more advanced blogger, you will find value here. This is episode number 439, sponsored by RankIQ.

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Megan Porta: Tammy Spencer started Scotch Scones in 2017 as a way to keep track of her whiskey tasting notes and to share her experiences of having fun baking. In 2019, she devoted herself full time to developing her site for commercial success, learning about the business of growing a blog from the ground up, and since then she has applied her culinary school training by sharing recipes and tips for desserts, bread, and other goodies that home cooks will feel confident creating. Hello, Tammy. Thanks for joining me on the podcast. How are you today?

Tammy Spencer: Hi, Megan. It’s so good to talk to you. 

Megan Porta: Yay. I know I’m excited to hear more about your blogging journey and all that you’ve learned, but first, do you have a fun fact to share?

Tammy Spencer: I’ve actually had a very wide ranging career. I started out life as an aerospace engineer and I worked on the space shuttle. I’ve been a math tutor, a mural artist, a website designer, and a preschool teacher. But then I decided to go to culinary school and focus on food and talking about food. 

Megan Porta: I don’t even know what to ask you. There’s so much there. My brain went a million different places. That’s so cool. So I don’t know, are you just an adventurous soul?

Tammy Spencer: I am a curious soul. So what will happen is I go one way and I get interested in it, and then I start to veer off and, oh, let’s see about this one. Then I’ll go into that. I’m just curious about life in general. 

Megan Porta: Which I think is the greatest thing that you can be given because curiosity leads you to experiences and different people and so many things that you can go through without having that curiosity. So I love that. Oh my goodness. 

Tammy Spencer: Thank you. 

Megan Porta: What do you think will be next? What’s next on your curiosity agenda? 

Tammy Spencer: From blogging, I’m looking to go into more writing. So many food bloggers go into books and cookbooks and things like that. So for me, I think that might be the next challenge because I’ve never actually written out lots and lots of recipes to take it within one theme and just see how that works. I’d love to just experiment with that. 

Megan Porta: I love it. I love it. You had an answer for that, too. That’s amazing. All right. Let’s talk about your blogging journey. So a little snippet of your life, one of your curiosities. Tell us when you started and how your journey has evolved to today. 

Tammy Spencer: I originally started the blog back in 2017. I wanted a place to write about my whiskey tasting notes because at that time I got curious about tasting whiskey, tasting bourbons and I needed to write things down so that I would remember them so that if I went into a restaurant, I would know what to order. I would look up and say, Oh yeah, I like that one. I can go taste that one. But so what happened was the place where I was keeping my notes crashed. I thought having an online presence would be a better place to keep my notes. So I started writing about my whiskey tasting notes. I also love baking. I love the science and the magic of food about how disparate ingredients come together to make something yummy. I’m a mom, I have two daughters, and food is love. So taking care of them, taking care of my family, and giving them wonderful nutritious foods led me to want to share with others what I did, how I did, the experiences that I had as first a home chef and then going into culinary school and then coming out with a little more technique, but still making mistakes like everyone else. I wanted to share my mistakes and my experiences with folks. So that’s how I started just writing things down. I originally wanted to write a diary, so to speak. Back then, blogs were that, just blogs. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So I didn’t know that when you just start writing something, it’s not going to become instantaneously popular and lots of people will see it and find it. So it started the journey there. Then as I learned more and more of what a blog really is, and how it’s run, in 2019, just before the shutdown, I really started focusing on making that a goal to become a professional successful website.

Megan Porta: Oh, that’s amazing. Okay. So you started in ’17, just blogging, and then in 2019, you really dedicated yourself to making this work as a business. Yeah. Okay, cool. So you have learned some things along the way, what’s important, some things that we need to keep top of mind in order to turn our blogs into successful food blogs. So what are some of those things that you’ve learned along the way? 

Tammy Spencer: One of the very first things I learned back then I was on wordpress.com, before it was just the free way of getting onto the internet. WordPress.com has specific themes that are available to allow you to have the layout for your blog. So I chose one and just started going from there. Then when I decided to get my own URL, my dedicated URL and I had to migrate from wordpress.com to wordpress.org, I found out that the themes that I was using weren’t necessarily the best or most efficient ways to go about presenting the blog on the internet. Getting the right theme is so important nowadays for page speed for SEO benefits. Everybody talks about core web vitals and how fast your site has to be. The theme plays a big part of that. If you want something that not only is going to make your site look good and come up fast, but also a theme that has support so that as things change, you will have somebody behind the scenes working to update the theme so that you don’t have to do it. You don’t need to know the nuts and bolts of it. You can continue on building your blog without worrying about your theme bogging you down. So that’s one of the very first things I think is important. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, an important lesson, a hard lesson when you choose the wrong theme, right? Then you have to redo it. 

Tammy Spencer: You have to redo it. I had to redo it probably three or four times before I finally settled on the best. The best thing and I actually found this theme through word of mouth. I was chatting with somebody on Facebook on one of the food blogging groups that are out there. This gentleman said, Hey, you should use this theme. I’ll help you put it together, which I thought, Oh my God, what a nice thing to do. To have that support, having somebody, like a big brother to pull you along and give you a little bit of a steering mechanism, so to speak, made a big difference for me. 

Megan Porta: So what theme did you land on? What theme has been really good for you? 

Tammy Spencer: I use themes from Feast. So Feast Design Co. I’m using brunch. What is it called? Brunch Pro, I think it’s called. They have five or six different overall themes, and then within that, of course, you can customize it to your advantage. But the beauty of using a Feast theme is they have a plugin that they’re constantly updating that allows you to have the theme updated. The folks over there are super responsive and if you have a question, if you have a problem, you submit a ticket. So I really like the fact that not only do I get this one time theme, but I get the support along with it. Having support is just indispensable in so many of these different aspects. That we can talk about because I don’t know what you don’t know.

Megan Porta: Oh, my gosh. That’s so true. Support is huge these days. If you can find a service or a tool that has great support, it’s so meaningful. I’m a huge fan of the Feast theme as well. I use it on my own site and it’s so nice. There’s so many things that you can customize inside of there and it’s peace of mind, right? You don’t have to worry about the back end stuff that a lot of food bloggers really don’t want to think about. So yeah, huge fans here too. What else have you learned along the way that you want to share? 

Tammy Spencer: Another important piece, it’s not just the theme you use, but where do you host your website? Again, originally, WordPress.com, you just host it on their servers and you’re done. But when it comes time to have my own URL and now I have to choose where I want those files to be, choosing the right host is also paramount. I started with one, I went to another and then I landed with BigScoots. BigScoots is probably the best one out there. Again, they have fabulous technical support. They help if you need to migrate your site over, they’re very good about doing it. Again, they’re also on top of things. If something changes, they will let you know. Having the host, the thing about that is not only do you want the peace of mind that your files are safe, so that they’ll be backed up, but that the servers that you’re posting your site on aren’t going to go down every, however often, God forbid they go down at all. But to be able to know that your files are there, when you need them and they’re run by professionals who know what they’re doing and can help you when you need it, it’s a big part of it. 

Megan Porta: It’s invaluable. They’re top notch. Their posting is top notch as far as support, quality, everything. Again, like I’m echoing what you are saying here too. I use Big Scoots as well. I know a lot of food bloggers do. I will say it’s on the higher end of the investment scale. If you ever have been in a situation where you’ve had really low quality hosting, I’ve gotten to the point where I’m like, I will pay anything to not have to deal because like you said, your site’s going down and you’re not told about it. Then the support. Oh my gosh. I had a nightmare situation a few years ago where I was on hold endlessly and then got transferred to I think I counted like 20 different people tried to help me. Nobody could help me and I was like, my sight is down and no, and I was in tears. I didn’t sleep. So after experiencing that, I’m like, you know what? I’ll pay whatever you want me to pay to have peace of mind hosting. It’s so worthwhile. If you are like, Oh, I don’t know if I can afford that. Yes, you can. If you want to make this a business, yes, you should definitely invest in that. 

Tammy Spencer: Absolutely. A lot of people want to start out with either very low cost plans or free plans, but there’s so many trade offs when you go that route. When I finally made the decision where I wasn’t monetizing yet, but I’m like, this is worth it to me. That’s when I decided to go to them. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. Unfortunately, some people have to get to the point of pain like I did in order to get there. So if you’re listening and you haven’t been to the point of pain, don’t go there. Avoid that because it’s so horrible. I don’t wish that on anyone. All right, Tammy, what else do you have for us? 

Tammy Spencer: Okay, since we’re still talking about the tech side of things, I went a long time before I had tech help in terms of the front end, in terms of how to set things up, what’s the best way. Site tech support is again, one of those things that when you can afford it, or even if you’re not monetizing yet, and you’re willing to just spend a little bit of money to be able to, at any time, type a question into your tech support and have them respond quickly, again, is so invaluable.

To be able to have someone who can help you with setting up plugins, telling you when to update plugins, telling you when to not update plugins, because they might crash your site. Helping you with, oh my god, there’s a new recommendation out there, how am I supposed to do that? They’re like, nah, you don’t have to worry about it, or here, let me help you do it. There are site tech support out there. Some are more expensive than others. Personally, I use Grayson at iMark Interactive, who has a very good service record, and his costs are low, comparatively to some of the other site support companies that are out there. I would so recommend them, because, again, it’s one of those things that you want to focus on writing. You want to focus on photography. You want to focus on the recipes. You don’t want to have to focus on the HTML codes or the JPEGs or this or that or something else. You want to do what you came to do, which is to write a beautiful food blog. So that’s why these backend things, they’re not glamorous, they’re not fun. They may cost a little bit, but they’re so worth it. 

Megan Porta: Oh, worth the investment. Another investment worth making. I’ve never worked with Grayson. and iMark, but I talked to many food bloggers who do, and I’ve heard all good things, exactly what you’re saying. Just really responsive, low cost, really high quality. Also, I will put out there, I work with Nerd Press. They’re great. I love their team. They’re so responsive. They’re so kind, which matters to me. That’s a factor for me that personally matters. Just high quality, you’re being covered. I just got an email actually right before we started this chat from Nerdpress telling us about what it is, INP, it’s a new ranking factor coming up. I’m like, oh, great. Here we go. But I love that they give me the heads up for that so I know what to look out for, and I know what it is, briefly. 

Tammy Spencer: And not to panic about it. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, not to panic, and that’s their bottom line, if it’s okay, it’s going to be okay, we’ll keep you posted, but it’s so worthwhile. Otherwise, I don’t know when I would have learned this, right? It’s not going to be a ranking factor until March 2024, it looks like. I wouldn’t have known that, who knows when. So it is worthwhile. 

Tammy Spencer: Yeah. I got that same email about INPs coming out and I’m like, Oh, now I know I don’t have to deal with this right now.

Megan Porta: Something to have on your radar, but in the back of your mind. Don’t fret about it now because there’s a lot of other things to worry about right now. Okay. Outside of tech support, what else? 

Tammy Spencer: What I was going to say is that, yeah, all that stuff is the unglamorous backend, but again, when I first started, I knew about writing recipes in terms of making sure that it’s formatted properly, but how do you present this to others so that it’s compelling to them? Learning how to take good food photography pictures was a huge learning curve for me. I’m not a professional photographer and in no way, I still have trouble wrapping my mind around F stops and ISOs. I don’t know why, but there are so many resources out there that you can use to learn about taking good food photography, to learn about lighting your scene. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on high end cameras. That’s something that a lot of people have wonderful cameras and they know exactly how to use them. I use my iPhone and I’ve used my iPhone since the beginning. The difference is that now I have different apps that I use for my iPhone. I’ve learned what kind of lighting works best for my kitchen. Having the ability to, again, ask people for help. I took a class called Beyond Baking Bootcamp. They had a food photography course that was super interactive and really helpful and you can use your phone to do it. You can use a camera to do it. She has both sides in her class. So being able to take compelling pictures and learning how to set them up and learn how to light them made a huge difference from the beginning of my blogging journey to now. I think my food photography has gotten much better and I actually have gotten compliments on that. So it’s yeah, okay, nice. 

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Megan Porta: I love that you use your phone. I love it so much. I love it when people are going out there and proving that you don’t need the expensive equipment, that you don’t need all the knowledge or skills that you can make this work with bare minimum and starting with a phone. I think that’s so cool. I love that so much. Okay, so pictures are important though. Through editing, you can tweak anything that goes wrong through your photography. You can learn more about photo editing, but they are really important. What else do you have for us, Tammy? 

Tammy Spencer: I will talk about playing with recipes and having the confidence of not just, you don’t have to write your own recipes from scratch all the time. A lot of people think, Oh, I have to be a high end chef in a fine dining restaurant for 10 years before I reach the culinary level of knowledge that these people online seem to have. I would say that’s not necessarily true. You can be a home chef and you can take recipes, tweak them in some way, and make them your own that way. You don’t have to start from scratch, in other words. Getting comfortable with adapting existing recipes to make them your own gives you the skills, gives you the confidence and going, wait a minute, I am a chef. Because I took a recipe, I changed it, I made it better as far as what works for me. Yeah, I’m a chef. Yay. Then I can go ahead and write about it. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. Do you feel like this is something like if somebody starts out, this is my journey, not really being like an adept cook or anything like that, but you learn as you go that along the way, somewhere along the way, you’re like, What you just said, Oh my gosh, I think I might be a chef. I think I might actually be a really good recipe developer and a cook. It’s something that can be learned.

Tammy Spencer: Exactly. It’s something that you don’t have to have a culinary school education. You don’t have to have, like I said, 10 years in fine dining and you can do it just from your own experiences. Those experiences may or may not work. Sometimes things fail and you learn from that as well. So it’s okay to just take your experiences and the things that you’re comfortable with and go forward from there. 

Megan Porta: Yes. I love this one. Okay. What else do you have, Tammy? 

Tammy Spencer: So we’ve talked about the backend stuff. We’ve talked about being comfortable with the content that you’re creating, the recipes you’re creating. We’ve talked about taking the pictures so that people want to come to your site? They want to see and learn from you, but how do they come to find you? SEO is a huge portion of writing a blog. It’s not just writing the recipe and a few notes and taking a picture and putting it out there and hoping people will find you. Because unfortunately, that’s not the way it works. I remember the movie, Julie and Julia, where she started just writing her experiences with Julia Childs cookbook. All of a sudden she has 10, 000 followers. It’s not like that. So you need to understand SEO, search engine optimization, from the bottom up. The best way to do that, there are webinars out there, there are conferences, both virtual and in person, and there are people who are experts, who you constantly will see answering questions online on Facebook. Casey Markee is a good example. Arsene Rabinovich, Andrew Wilder, who you mentioned from NerdPress, those three are the big three that help to usually answer the questions from the Top Hat Rank SEO webinar, which are free webinars that are incredibly valuable. You learn so much of what to do and what not to do.

Megan Porta: Yeah, I highly recommend those two. Those are amazing. I love that they’re free. Anyone can watch them. 

Tammy Spencer: Absolutely. The big word beyond SEO is of course, keyword research. I know you had on your show recently Aleka from Cooking With Keywords and her class is amazing. Her support is amazing. It’s not just picking your favorite recipe and just starting to write about it, but you have to do it in such a manner that matches what people are actually looking for on the web. That’s how you get found. I didn’t know how to do that in the beginning. 

Megan Porta: None of us did. We were all like, Ooh, let’s make this random thing. Throw it up. 

Tammy Spencer: Exactly. Just writing a blog and hoping people will find it. The important thing to realize is that when you’re writing, you don’t just write for yourself. You’re writing for an audience. You’re writing for people who may or may not have a culinary background. So you have to remember to keep it in the level that most people understand. Here’s the example I use. I write my blog posts and then my husband, who has no communicative experience whatsoever, goes through and he reads it to me and he’ll say, what does this mean? I don’t understand this term.

Megan Porta: It’s so smart. I love that. 

Tammy Spencer: Yeah. It’s good to have someone who’s not in the sphere all the time, to take you back a couple of steps and maybe to find things a little bit better or present them in a different way. 

Megan Porta: Because we forget that we’re not the only ones reading this, that there are other perspectives, other ways to look at our content, what we write, what we put together. I think that is so smart. That makes me want to send it to my father in law or something and have him look through it. He’d be like, I don’t know what any of this means. But that might be good, right? Good feedback. 

Tammy Spencer: Exactly. One other important resource to look at when you get to the point that you do want to spend the money is to have your site audited by one of the experts, Casey Markee, Arson. I know there’s other site auditors out there and they will go through basically and tell you all the things you didn’t know, you didn’t know and tell you how to change things. I will tell you this: I had an audit with Casey two years ago. He told me, this is what a post should look like and this is what it needs to do. I have taken the last two years and gone back to my old posts and have updated them. I’ve updated them for keyword research, I’ve updated them for SEO, food photography, layout, all these different factors that we’ve been talking about. It’s okay to do that. It’s okay to go back to your old posts and make them better. I know that people will say, Oh, don’t touch your top posts if they’re in the top three spots of the search engine results. That’s a good point. I’m a big believer in making things uniform, and I want to make things right. I don’t feel that it’s a bad habit to go back to your old posts, to make them better. You don’t have to necessarily put out new content every week. If you focus on your old content, that will help you and I will say for me it’s taken me two years to do it, but I went through all my old posts and my traffic has been up for the last two years as I’ve slowly gone through it. So it makes a huge difference. It really does.

Megan Porta: I’m so glad that made a difference for you. I’ve found the same Tammy. I’ve been spending the last couple of years, not at all focusing on new recipes. I’ve done some new content but non recipe content. But as far as recipes go, I’ve just been going through a lot of my old content and it makes a huge difference. Even doing just a couple a month is huge for my traffic and overall website health, I think. 

Tammy Spencer: Absolutely. What’s happened several times over the course of this site audit that I’ve been doing on my own site, is that I’ll be doing something one way and then something will change. It’s Oh, great. I get to go back and do it all over again. Sometimes it’ll be okay. I have to do this one thing for everything now because it’s important and something it’s going to be the next time I get back to that post, I will change it and bring it up to speed if it’s not huge or if it’s more of a cosmetic change, whatever. It’s gonna be an ongoing thing. Site auditing is not something that’s one and done. It’s something that you’re going to be constantly going back and tweaking and making things better as the environment changes. 

Megan Porta: Not to be frustrated with that, right? To expect that going in, that things are never going to be at a static point where you’re like, okay, good. We’re all set here. 

Tammy Spencer: Yeah, you’re never done. 

Megan Porta: No. It’s never done. I’ve been doing this for 13 years, and it’s never, ever been like that, where I’m like, oh, phew, I can kick my feet up. Never. That’s just the name of the game, so expect that and you’ll be just fine. Okay, so beyond tech stuff, photos, themes, SEO, keyword research, is there anything else that should be at the top of our minds? 

Tammy Spencer: When we talked about at the very beginning that I’m a curious person, I’m still learning. Everything that we’ve done so far, I’ve learned along the way. There’s so much more coming out on the horizon. Of course, the big news is the AI and the chat GPT and how that’s going to affect not only how we write, but how our sites get displayed and found. So learning about that, being open to learning is going to be, it’s a challenge. It’s frustrating because you think, Oh, I know how this goes. The next thing you know, something is tweaked and it’s like, Oh man, that’s not the way it is anymore. Social media is changing. It used to be that you could post a little static pin on Pinterest and have things go wild. Or there was a time when web stories were the name of the game. Now, for me, at least, not so much. I know other people have really good luck with that. Just being open to what’s coming on, and being nimble enough to switch how you do things as things change, I think is just one of the harder parts of vlogging, but it’s also something that keeps things a little bit fresh too, so it doesn’t get stale.

Megan Porta: Oh, that’s so true. It keeps it exciting, that’s for sure. As you were talking through that, I just had the vision of like water, be water. Just be the element that kind of goes with the flow and doesn’t try to resist, doesn’t try to fight back. It’s just, like we were saying a little bit earlier, it’s the name of the game. This is how it’s going to be. So you might as well let the water take you, right? 

Tammy Spencer: Exactly. Exactly. 

Megan Porta: Any key points that we’re missing, Tammy? 

Tammy Spencer: The only other thing that I am looking into personally right now is looking to expand my revenue stream. So instead of just relying on advertising, I know people are now starting to offer those services either with coaching calls or with photography classes. Writing my first ebook is something that I am looking at right now. Just at the beginning, we talked about what the next step was and for me, that’s what it is. I want to see about writing an ebook and seeing what’s involved in that and going slowly. It doesn’t have to be war and peace. It can be a little pamphlet at the beginning, but just something so that you get your toes wet and get confidence in it. When you’re first doing recipes, learning to tweak it and get yourself to the point where, yeah, I can do that. I am going to write a larger cookbook and see where that goes. 

Megan Porta: I love that recommendation. There are so many ways that food bloggers can monetize outside of display ads. I just want to say that too. We often get so locked into just wanting those ads and focusing on the traffic so much that we forget that there are other ways to go about making money, but there really are great options. I’ll throw in a little plug for my free monetization quiz here. If you want directions as to which way to go, I have this quiz that takes three minutes. It’s totally for you. Just answer a few questions about what you like and what your skills are. Then at the end it gives you like I think top 10, there’s 10 or more recommendations, in order, what to pursue. So it’s those, but you can go to eatblogtalk.com/quiz and take that. It’s fun. It’s Oh, I didn’t realize I’d be good at that, but then it makes you rethink what your skills are and all of that. So just something to throw out there.

Tammy Spencer: I think that’s fabulous. Because again we’re working as lonely people wherever we work. In our rooms and we’re only on the computer and we don’t have other people to bounce things off of, to have something like that where you can get some ideas is invaluable. I think that’s great. I’m going to be taking your quiz. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, I’ve had people take it who respond and they’re like, this is perfect, but I wasn’t thinking of it. We can get in our own heads about what we’re good at or what we should be focusing on, but sometimes we just need an outside force telling us, wait, you might be really good at this. Why don’t you think about this avenue, whatever. Okay. Yeah. Thanks, Tammy. This has all been so great. Then I was going to ask you one last question. If you could go back to 2019, when you decided to make this a full time business and you could change one thing, only one thing, what would you change? 

Tammy Spencer: There’s so much I didn’t do then that I know to do now, and I’m the type of person that I want to know things, I want to learn, and I want to be able to master it. If I were to say, oh, I want to be better at food photography, that would leave out all this other stuff that I got good at. So I would say for me, there’s no one thing I could point to. I know that’s a wishy washy answer, but… 

Megan Porta: No, I like it because I think it implies that you are embracing your journey just as it is and just allowing it to take shape in the way that it was supposed to, maybe.

Tammy Spencer: Yeah. Thank you. 

Megan Porta: Awesome. It’s been such a pleasure to connect with you and talk to you and I know this episode is going to just help people, give them confidence and information about what they need to have on their minds as they dig into blogging as a successful business journey. So thank you for your time today.

Tammy Spencer: Oh, thank you for having me. It was lovely talking with you. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, of course. Do you have either a favorite quote or words of inspiration to leave us with today? 

Tammy Spencer: One of my favorite things, it was on a poster in my bedroom when I was a girl. It says, only those who risk going too far can possibly find how far they can go. I’ve always lived by those words. 

Megan Porta: I know this about you just from our little chat here and all of your curiosity and achievements. I love the message behind that. So thanks for sharing that. We’ll put together a show notes page for you, Tammy. If you want to go look at those, you can go to eatblogtalk.com/scotchandscones. Tell everyone where they can find you, Tammy. 

Tammy Spencer: The blog is scotchandscones.com. If you want to find me on Instagram, I am at Scotch_ Scones, same with Pinterest. On Facebook, I am on Scotch and Scones blog. 

Megan Porta: Okay, everyone go check out Tammy’s website and socials. Thank you so much again, Tammy, for being here and thank you for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you in the next episode.

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat Blog Talk. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you posted it to your social media feed and stories. I will see you next time.


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