The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 7. Jennifer's Blogging Journey

Episode Date: February 1, 2022

Hey there! It’s Jennifer here and I am solo on today’s episode, sharing all about my blogging journey and what led me to where I am today. I hope my story can bring you encouragement. A key takeaway I want you to hear while you are listening is that it doesn’t matter what age you are or where you’re at in your life, it is okay to start something new. It’s never too late to chase your dreams.Listen in as I tell my story from accountant to SAHM to successful blogger. I had this dream inside of me to start my own business and I am so thankful that blogging was the business that I started.Check out the show notes for links and resources mentioned in this episode! Let us know what you thought of this episode on Instagram: @sparkmediaconceptsInterested in starting a blog? Join our waitlist for the Ultimate Blog Bootcamp!SHOW NOTES: www.sparkmediaconcepts.com/episode7

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast with Amy Reinecke and Jennifer Draper. We're on a mission to empower women who want to start or grow their own blog. This podcast is for women who want to learn blogging basics and who crave inspiration and encouragement. Whether you're just getting started or have been a blogger for years, we're excited to welcome you into this space where we are passionate about creating community over competition. We are bloggers who want to encourage you to believe in your potential, step outside the norm, and step into a life where you create your own schedule, your own success, and your own story. Join us for weekly episodes as we navigate blogging

and work from home life, all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. Well, hey there and welcome. This is Jennifer. And today I'm going to be doing something a little bit different. And this episode is going to be solo. Amy and I thought it would be fun to do some episodes where you can get to know each of us just a little bit better. If you listen to episode one, we talked about the history of Spark Media Concepts and how we came to start the Ultimate Blog Bootcamp. But if you are thinking about being a blogger, or maybe you have just started a blog, we thought it might be interesting for you to hear the story of how we each became bloggers. and just to see that each journey and path can look a little bit

different and you might just find something unexpected along the way. So I hope this serves as just a little bit of an encouragement to you or a way to create a connection. And if you listen and have questions about, you know, blogging or what it's like to be a blogger, anything like that, we would love for you to reach out to a blogger, anything like that, we would love for you to reach out to us on Instagram or via email, and we would love to chat even more. So I'm going to dive in and tell you a little bit about my background. And this is making me dig way back and think about things I haven't thought about in a long time, which has been kind of fun. But I hopefully I won't be dating myself too much here, but just know that even

if I sound old, I think the important takeaway here is that it doesn't matter what age you are, where you're at in your life, that it is okay to start something new. It's never too late to chase your dreams and always keep in mind that the unexpected may happen and you may just create a new life for yourself that you never could have imagined, but it turns out to be better than you could have ever hoped for. So I'm going to go way back to when I first went to college. I went to Kansas State University to study accounting, which is obviously a far cry from blogging. And if I had to say now, if I would have chosen a different career, the answer would be no, because I think that the years I spent as

an accountant really gave me a good, solid foundation. And as a matter of fact, I wouldn't have chosen blogging because that didn't even exist when I started college. The internet was just starting to become more widely used in people's homes. We still had dial-up internet service. We did not have internet service available in our dorm rooms at college. And in fact, we never even had it in our apartments, even further on down the road. If we wanted to get online, we had to go to the computer lab. And we were just grateful that during our time at K-State in the College of Business, they redid one of the floors of the building and created a nice new computer lab where you could go and use the dial-up, slow,

clunky internet. Google didn't even exist at that point in time. We used, I believe Yahoo was the search engine of choice most of the time. And it was not something that we spent a significant amount of time doing. It was not the major part of our class assignments or anything like that, because it just wasn't what it is today. So if you would have told me that now my life would revolve around the internet, I would never have been able to imagine how that would be possible because it looked so different back then. In fact, gosh, if one of our classmates even had a laptop computer at that point, it was pretty special. Everybody wanted to be your partner for class projects because you had a laptop and you could go sit anywhere and

work. And that was fairly rare at that point in time. And the point of all of this is that things just change and evolve and grow. So just never close off your mind to new opportunities that might exist. And it's just fun to think about back at that point in time when my dream was to be an accountant. I could have never imagined that someday my life would revolve around blogging and Google and the internet. So right out of college, I got my master's degree in accounting and I went to work as a public accountant for a firm where I did income taxes. And while I did love the work, it was always a struggle because during tax season,

I would work 80 plus hours a week, sometimes 90 hours a week. And while I did, like I said, like that kind of work, those kind of hours and that kind of stress, I just couldn't imagine that being my life forever. I knew that that was not the area where I wanted to put all my effort. I did not want to climb the ladder there. It just was of no interest to me. So after three years in public accounting, I interviewed for and got another job working for a company doing their corporate income tax. So that was like an internal tax department. And I ended up working there for about 10 years. And again, I liked the work. I liked the people that I worked with, but somehow it just always felt a little bit like something was missing. I always had this

dream in my heart that someday I would own my own business. And I just really struggled with the confidence, with wondering if anybody else would believe in me being able to start my own business. It just was not something people around me did often. So it just felt a little crazy and a little out there. But my mind was always working in that direction. And I would think about things like, well, maybe someday, maybe someday I'll start a coffee shop, which sounded like fun. But then, of course, my accountant brain did not let those dreams go too far because I

started working up the numbers in my head and knowing the costs involved and how much money you could likely make, none of the ideas I ever came up with seemed like they would be very profitable. I did think they would be fun, but definitely not super profitable. And that was important to me. While I wanted to do something that I loved, I also wanted to be able to make money and support my family. So during these 10 years, obviously life changed a little bit and the world changed a little bit. The internet was becoming much more available, much more popular, and there was lots more going on. You could start reading chat boards and

connecting with other people. And blogs came about sometime, I believe they started gaining popularity like mid 2000s, 2005 to 2008. And in that time period, my life changed quite a bit too, because we adopted our first child, our son. And again, I was looking for something a little bit different with my life. I continued to work, but worked part time at that same job for the next several years so that I could have a little bit better balance. And that's about the time I started becoming, I don't know if obsessed is the right word, but it might be with reading different food blogs. I was wanting to try and feed my family healthier food. I think

that happens to a lot of us when we have kids. We want to do a better job. We want to cook at home. We want to cook more wholesome meals. So I was always looking at recipes. But instead of like the old fashioned, like clipping recipes from magazines, having my mom scribble down recipes for me, buying cookbooks, which I have a lot of cookbooks. It was becoming more common to go out on the internet and start to search for recipes. And I actually came across a blogger at one point, and I believe this was around 2008. And she was creating slow cooker recipes and she was posting a new recipe on her blog every single day. And I was hooked. I was reading it constantly, trying out her recipes. And I just really loved this idea that somebody was out there sharing a little bit about what was

going on in their life. And they were also helping other people by sharing the recipes that they were creating. And I kept looking for more and more recipes, finding more blogs that I like to follow. And I actually even dabbled a little bit in having my own blogs. They were simply just little journals that I put together on blogspot, and they were actually related to adopting our son and then later adopting our daughter so that we could keep our friends and family informed. But those were definitely my first forays into having a blog myself and just even knowing what a blog was and understanding a little bit about how it worked. At that time, I never really connected the dots

that people were blogging and making money. And I'm not sure exactly how that evolved over time, but I know some of the first bloggers who figured this out were able to be fairly successful because there wasn't a lot of competition at that point in time. But that's not really where my mind was. I was just such a consumer of these food blogs and blogs about parenting and adoption and different things. It was just amazing that you could go out on the internet and find information that you were looking for, like that was created by people who were just like you in your stage of life, who knew what you were feeling and what you were needing and what you were thinking about. And it just felt like a really good way to connect with other people and get help and information that was really valuable and relevant to life. And so

over the next few years, again, life changed a little bit more. By like the 2012-2013 timeframe, I ended up quitting my job as an accountant because I decided to homeschool my son for a little bit. And in that timeframe, we actually ended up adopting our daughter. So during that time, like I said, I was still obsessively reading blogs, printing out and making recipes, changing the recipes because often they didn't have the kinds of ingredients that I wanted to use, or I thought they were too complicated and I wanted to simplify them. I was always on a new journey to either meal plan or test new recipes or try new foods, get my family to eat healthier, all those kinds of things that we like to do. And I just really found that I enjoyed that piece of it and creating my

own recipes or modifying recipes that I was finding to make them my own. And I think by this point in time is when it started coming into my mind that there might be a possibility that I would want to have my own blog to share these recipes that I was creating. Because at this point, Link, I had friends ask me for recipes, family asked me for recipes. I was kind of starting to be known as the girl who loved to cook. And I really did and do love to cook. And so at that point, I started thinking about the blogs that I had on Blogspot and thinking, well, could I just do something like that and start sharing all of my

recipes that way? And I think as I was probably on Google at this point in time, looking at ways to start my blog, trying to figure out how this was going to work, I actually came across a couple different bloggers who had a series of posts about how they made money blogging. And that is pretty much when the light bulb went off. I was like, okay, this is actually something that I could do, something that I could love, and something that I could potentially turn into my own business. Because if other people are making money doing this, then why can't I do it? And the accountant brain in me was like,

this is a really good option because the cost to start a blog in comparison to starting any other kind of business is so low. There was no serious amount of equipment to buy. Like if you're thinking about, like I said, a coffee shop, man, you'd have to have rent. You'd have to have coffee machines. You'd have to have furniture. You'd have to have employees. And if you want to start a blog, you need a laptop computer, which I already had at that point in time and a way to take some pictures. And that's kind of about it. The costs are fairly low. They can get to be more over time, but it's just such a easy way. And from that perspective to start a business,

because there's not a great amount of financial risk involved, which is amazing. I think the trade-off is it takes a lot of time. And depending on how knowledgeable you are about blogging, it can take a significant amount of time to learn and it will also depend on like if you're trying to teach yourself everything or if you have another resource to help you,

like how quickly you can get this up and running. But thankfully for me, my husband was in IT at the time and he didn't know a ton about blogging, but he did know enough to tell me not to start my blog on Blogspot, that that would not be a good fit long term if I truly did want to grow and monetize a blog. And I'm so thankful he said that because I would not be where I am today if I hadn't just taken that leap and dove into figuring out how to have a self-hosted blog on WordPress. And I know that's a lot to talk about. We won't dive into that today, but the whole moral of the story is you got to do it the right way from the start and kind of think about what your goal is with this. And for me, it truly was that I wanted to create a business and make money.

Like I said, I saw the other people were doing it and I knew that I could too. So thankfully, he helped me. And I think we only spent a couple of weeks getting that first version of my blog up and running. I was so excited. I just wanted to get it done. I was taking photos with an old camera that I had, and they were horrible. If I look back at them now, it was terrible. But I was just, I had to harness like that enthusiasm and get this thing going. And I really truly had no idea what I was doing, but it is such a part of the journey. And it did take a little bit of convincing to get him on board with this blog as a job because he had never heard of it before either. But once we really looked into this, it really made sense for us to try to create this business from a blog rather than have me try to go back to work because with our two kids,

they both had some needs. My daughter has a medical condition. There's a lot of appointments and it would just truly make our lives better if I was able to have the flexibility to work from home and handle a lot of these appointments and things like that that have to take place during the day versus having to constantly ask off work, take vacation days, sick days, et cetera. That would have just created a lot more stress in our lives than we really wanted to have at that point. Have you ever wanted to start a blog, but had no idea where to begin, or maybe you have a blog that you'd like to update and want some help to make it the best it can be.

We know that there are many people out there who have big dreams for their own blog that never happened because they simply feel stuck. The Ultimate Blog Bootcamp is an eight-week course designed to help you create a solid blogging foundation by teaching you how to treat your blog as a business, find your audience, design a website that is optimized for SEO, all while providing support via online coaching calls each week of the course. There is a private Slack channel for students as well, so questions will never go unanswered. The Ultimate Blog Bootcamp will give you the tools and support to create a blog that has the potential to turn into a profitable business. We are committed to helping each and every student feel empowered and confident with the foundational principles of blogging and the behind-the-scenes work that goes into it. If you don't want to blog alone, we can help.

We keep each round small in order to provide each student the attention and support we believe you deserve during this process. Since space is limited, get on the waitlist today so we can help you with your blog. The link to join the waitlist is in our show notes or go to sparkmediaconcepts.com and click on the ultimate blog bootcamp. So like I said, within a few weeks of us like looking into this and making this decision, we launched my blog. It was right around Thanksgiving time, I believe, in 2013. And like I said, no real idea what I was doing, but I persevered. And my goal was every day just to learn like one new thing or do something just a little bit better.

And I posted quite a bit of content before I finally had a post that sort of took off, so to speak, and got some traffic. And that was an orange chicken recipe that I think my photos had improved just enough by that point. And it was just a unique enough recipe. It was an orange chicken recipe for the slow cooker. It got pinned by the right person and kind of went a little bit mini viral on Pinterest. And so that was pretty exciting and just the fuel I needed to keep at it and keep working on creating those recipes. And I think that that's such an important aspect of blogging is you have to be willing to keep at it because you're going to post a lot of stuff that just does not gain a lot of traction. But one day you'll figure it out and you'll post something

that does gain traction. And that gives you just a little bit more knowledge going into your next post. Okay. These are the kind of photos that people like, or these are the kind of recipes that people like. You start to figure things out slowly one by one. And every day you get just a little bit better or you make one small improvement that gets you closer to that success that you want. And for me, like I talked about, I didn't want to invest like a ton of money into this. So again, I knew from the start I wanted to make money. So I was always looking at ways to create an income from it. And so I monetized my blog fairly soon with some different ad networks and things. But the biggest thing was I just very

slowly and carefully invested into my business. So at some point in those first few months, I bought myself a different camera where I could take a little bit better pictures after I had read a book about food photography. So again, I just found a used camera. I think I spent 180 bucks total on this DSLR camera and lens so that I could start learning how to take more professional food photos because I knew that was going to be an important piece of this. Whenever I had the opportunity, I went to a conference that was here locally in Kansas City. And I even took some online classes or read books or ebooks whenever I could just to kind of continue that learning process, just to do something a little bit better every day that would help my blog grow. And like I said, I was pretty lucky to have my husband who knew just enough about websites and things to help me get that first one off the ground. But I quickly learned that I needed to figure some of this out for myself. He was very busy with his job. And honestly, it wasn't his

responsibility to be able to make all the changes and things that I wanted to make to my blog. I wanted to be able to jump in there and just do those things myself. So I started just playing around, honestly, just getting in there and looking and Googling. And yeah, I spent a lot of time figuring things out. I joined a lot of different blogging groups on Facebook and just try to connect as much as I possibly could with others through classes and conferences and Facebook groups and things like that, because I think you can just learn so much from other people. And so, you know, I learned about different ad networks that were out there. I learned about like what kind of food photography does well. So for me, it was

kind of a long journey figuring every little piece out for myself. And I think it took me about four to five years to finally replace the income I had been making from the days that I was working full-time as an accountant. So I realized that that timeframe is not something that would work for everyone. We were fortunate that that did work for us. But I think the flip side of that is that there are ways to bring yourself up to speed and to learn about blogging a little bit quicker, especially now that it's become more popular and it wouldn't necessarily take anybody that long. There's no guarantees on how this is all going to work out. But I've learned so much over these years that I know that if I were to start again,

like I would have so much more knowledge to be able to make this happen so much more quickly. But then again, I'm just grateful for the time that I had, for the journey that I had. It allowed me to spend my time at home with my daughter when she was young, before she started school. She was awesome. She would sit with me and we would sit at her little tiny table in our kitchen and she would color or work on her toy computer while I was typing up blog posts. And she would go to the grocery store with me and help me pick out ingredients to test recipes. At that point in time, I was essentially just taking pictures of the recipes that I was making for dinner.

It was just a really neat time. And at that time, I'm sure I was wishing, man, I wish I was further along. I wish I was as good as one of these other bloggers who's already made it. But now that I look back, I'm so grateful for that time to learn and to grow and to just spend that time with my family, to spend that time just getting the, like getting my skills improved, learning the food photography. I just love to learn. And it was such a great, just such a great thing to be able to start doing something that I loved instead of feeling like I was spinning my wheels at a job where I would never really achieve that personal satisfaction

that I wanted to, because it just wasn't going to be possible. So during these few years, I was, like I said, I put some different ads on my blog. I did start working on some sponsored posts. I had some brands reach out to me as a few more of my recipes started to do well. I had a really lucky break at one point, I guess. I don't know. Is it a lucky break or did I just do the right thing at the right time? I had a buffalo chicken chili recipe go completely bonkers on Facebook, I think, which really, truly helped not only get my blog recognized and to get some people linking back to my site, but it helped me realize what kinds of things people were looking for. And it helped me learn to create better content to share. And I don't think even to this day, I've had a recipe that's ever been quite so popular

on social media as that buffalo chicken chili. It's still a recipe that does really well. And honestly, I'm glad I have that background of the blogging piece of it versus the social media piece of it, because that recipe was created so many years ago, as were many of my recipes that do well. And I'm not doing a ton of work on them now for them to still be bringing like traffic and being one of the primary sources of income for my blog. So that's kind of the beauty of blogging to me. I don't love to spend a ton of time on social media. So blogging is perfect because I can create the content, promote it. But then if I lay out the cards right and I do it just right, these recipes will perform well on Google and

Pinterest over time and bring traffic to me for years to come. So like I said, back then things looked a little bit different. I didn't necessarily treat my life or my day as a business. I kind of just fit what I was doing in the nooks and crannies of taking care of my family. And I would stay up late some nights to write blog posts or right after dinner, my husband would clean up the dishes and I would run in the office to upload all the photos I took of our dinner and I would get them edited and everything right away. So it was just a very different way of doing things at that time than what I do now. And I don't think either of them is right or wrong. It's all going to depend on where you're at in your life and what your goals are. There's so many good memories I have about that time, but I also love the way things

are right now. Now that I have two blogs and Amy and I run Spark Media and the Ultimate Blog Boot Camp, I have to be a little bit more structured with my time. So recipe creation doesn't necessarily look like taking pictures of what I'm making for dinner every night. It actually looks more like picking a day and having somebody come and help me and we make six or eight recipes and I do all the photography in one day. And I just batch my work a little bit differently and it's definitely treated more like a business. But I have to say, I still really enjoy it. more like a business, but I have to say, I still really enjoy it. I would take this any day over going back to commuting and working for someone else. As much as I, you know, enjoyed my job and

enjoyed the people, this is just going to beat it out any day of the week for me because I have so much more control over my life. I can't say I don't still work a lot because I do, but it's more by choice and it's driven by the passion that I have for everything that I do. So now it's more about not creating boundaries with other people. It's more about creating boundaries with myself to make sure that I'm not working too much and that I'm spending some downtime and I'm relaxing, spending plenty of time with my family. And yeah, it just, it looks so different now than it did then, but it's been an amazing journey. And I guess the point in all of this is just to say, you know, everybody is going to go about this in a different way, but it's really important to, I think, have an idea in mind of what you're wanting out of this

and think about how you're going to go about it, how it's going to fit into your day and what you want it to look like in the future. It's important to enjoy the whole aspect of the journey to get from point A to point B. So don't ever beat yourself up and compare where you're at with where somebody who's been doing this for years is at. Enjoy every aspect of that, but definitely decide, like, do you want to spend years and figure everything out for yourself? Do you want to get some help? Do you want to make money with your blog? Is this going to be a hobby? But first and foremost, and most importantly, you have to believe in yourself and really have a passion for what you're doing and know that it's something that's going to be

helpful to others as well and something that you're going to want to continue to create and share for years to come. So I hope you found this somewhat helpful, maybe a little bit interesting. Hopefully you don't judge me for being too old here as a blogger, considering that this didn't even exist, like I said, when I first started my career, but I'm so glad it exists now. And I'm so thankful that I get to do something every day that I love. Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you'd like to continue the conversation about blogging with us, please find us on Instagram at spark media concepts. You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter where we share blogging tips and inspiration. You can sign up by finding the

link in the show notes. For those of you who are ready for the next step and want to start your own blog, join the waitlist for the ultimate blog bootcamp. The link to join the waitlist is also in the show notes. Go out and make today a great day.