Episode #065: Common Food Blogging Mistakes And How To Avoid Them With Anushree Shetty

Blog Title: Simmer To Slimmer

Social Media:

IG: https://www.instagram.com/simmertoslimmer/

FB: https://www.facebook.com/simmertoslimmer/

About: I am Anushree, curator of the website Simmer to Slimmer.com, a site focused on Asian-Indian cuisine. A self-proclaimed foodie, I combine my passion for food and photography to create easy, delicious and visually appealing recipes to inspire busy moms to cook more often at home.

Notes from Episode #065: Common Food Blogging Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

• Fun fact: Anushree moved to the US to work on her Masters in 2001. She’s moved 14 times but in only 4 states.

• She took a sabbatical from her engineering work and started her food blog in 2010. Her first mistake was to spend 4 months perfecting her logo and theme and but posting only a few recipes. 

• Late 2013 she saw Pinch of Yum’s income reports and realized you can pursue your dreams and make money. But work was busy and she still didn’t do much with her blog. Then her 3 year old child was having trouble at daycare so she decided to stay home and she picked back up with her food blogging journey and thought she would return back to work when her daughter started kindergarten. 

• Anushree was reading and learning a lot but wasn’t posting regularly still. She focused on “learning” and didn’t apply it right away. Then she was wondering why there wasn’t any traffic on her blogging page.  

• Find a blogger friend or SEO expert to take a look at your website, the data and your habits and then begin to apply the principles of what is shared. 

• Anushree received a piece of advice from another blogger at a conference she attended that still helps her: Don’t just post randomly, there has to be a theme. Start looking at recipes in different “categories” like Main Dish|Drinks|Desserts so when people visit the site, there’s variety of food and recipes that go with one another. 

• Posting regularly and focusing on SEO were other main points she needed to attend to. Keep the seasonal items in the right part of your editorial calendar. 

• Her organic traffic was not growing and so Anushree started following Casey Markee online and set up an audit with him. 

• Anushree recommends finding someone online that has a teaching style you like in different areas – like photography, SEO, social media, etc – and then just learn from these professionals all they have to share. Make sure to apply what is being taught. It’s better to find a few people you can learn from then follow all the people in those fields. 

• Attend a food blogging conference and you can find good trusted resources as well. If what the “experts” say at the conference resonates with you, then check them out online. Do they have a good IG account? Do they have a good following? Do they have a lot of traffic? Is their website attractive to you? Do they offer a course? Then this would be someone you can follow and get help from. 

• How to identify where a problem is if you don’t see a lot of traffic

  • Ask yourself a few questions: is your organic traffic growing? Where is your audience from? 

  • Dissect the information you have available to you (analytics), and then try new things.

  • Seek out feedback from others; your audience or other bloggers and than address it.

  • Sometimes Pinterest isn’t your traffic builder. Try another avenue then!

• Anushree doesn’t like to multi-task, it’s not effective for her; she finds a project and works on it after her content for the month is ready. She loses her focus if she starts a job, stops and then has to go back to it. She picks up something else that needs to be done and completes that before starting another task. Otherwise she finds things don’t get done well.

• Anushree finds little rewards to help her stay on track with getting her to-do list done. It’s a tool to encourage yourself. 

• In real life and in blogging life, Anushree tries really hard not to compare herself to others. Do the best with what we have. 

• Anushree sees the past as an opportunity to learn from what she did and didn’t do. If she’d committed to blogging back in 2010, maybe she’d be further ahead. But the circumstances at that time didn’t work so she had to give herself some grace. 

• Sometimes you get a setback that’s out of your control. Sometimes you need to stop, take a moment to grieve or let it sit on your mind but then jump back on the wagon.

• Know who you are. Be aware of your abilities and strengths. Are you a morning person? Are you good at X? When are you productive? What’s easy for you and what’s hard? Can you outsource something you struggle with? How much time in any given day do you have for blogging?  Give yourself clarity on what you can accomplish.

  • Then it helps you make a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly plan and set your goals. Know your limitations and strengths before you plan your strategy. 

• Get rid of negative self talk!

• If you’re lonely, get to a food blogging conference and meet other people doing the same work so you can talk shop and encourage one another!

• Favorite quote: “Knowing is not enough. We must apply. Wishing is not enough. We must do.”

Helpful references from the episode:

Webinars by Casey Markee

Joanie Simon’s course on Artificial Food Photography

Food Blogger Pro community and Podcast