We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kristen Wood. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kristen below.

Hi Kristen , thanks for joining us today. We love asking folks what they would do differently if they were starting today – how they would speed up the process, etc. We’d love to hear how you would set everything up if you were to start from step 1 today

I think in the food blogging industry in particular, it is easy to feel like you need to do it all and keep up with all the possible avenues for promoting your content.

If I could do it all over again, I would not give any of my time and attention to social media and give 100% of my time to writing SEO-optimized blog posts that rank well in Google.

There is always time to grow social channels later in the game. Google search traffic is more reliable and more fruitful than social traffic.

And, over time, I’ve discovered that giving my time and energy to master one thing is of greater benefit to my business than doing a mediocre job with many things.

Kristen , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m the creator of MOONandspoonandyum.com, a food blog that has grown into my full-time job and the main income provider for my family.

My website started as a creative outlet for my passions for both photography and cooking. A short while later, I discovered that there were food bloggers actually doing this for a living, making money from the ads served on their sites, through brand partnerships, and many other avenues.

It was a slow climb, but over time, I learned all that I could about increasing traffic, creating content that ranks in Google, optimizing a site for speed and user-friendliness, what it takes to join an ad network, and much, much more.

Eventually, I was able to join an ad network and start making money from my site. The site has since grown to a level that fully supports my family.

It was a lot of hard work, a lot of late nights, and making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. I don’t want to give the impression of an overnight success story or that it’s as simple as posting a recipe and some photos on a site.

As a food blogger, you are the recipe developer, photographer, videographer, editor, writer, social media manager, tech specialist, customer service manager, and much more. Food bloggers wear many hats and it can take 20 hours of work just to get one recipe out into the world. It is also a highly competitive industry and has become increasingly harder to create content that ranks well and holds its position. It requires continual learning, pivoting, and growing and changing with the times.

I believe the single quality that is the driving force behind my success is simply perseverance. You have to keep striving, despite any setbacks, and believe in yourself entirely. Only a small percentage of active food bloggers make a living from their sites and it is easy to give up before you get there. You have to keep going!

I now run several websites and really enjoy the process of starting and growing sites. There’s this whole wide world of building or buying and selling sites, not much unlike real estate, that I hope to dive into eventually. Passion helps!

Does your business have multiple or supplementary revenue streams (like a ATM machine at a barbershop, etc)?

The ads served on my site are my main income stream, but alongside that, I also earn income from affiliate links for products I promote on my site, creating and promoting sponsored content for brands, through paid creators programs some social media channels provide, and I also do occasional photography and videography work for clients.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

The beauty of food blogging is that you can grow a site with very little investment apart from time.

When I started my site, we had very little income and lived in a tiny studio apartment with our newborn. I started out using free tools and the only expense I had was a tiny monthly fee for hosting the website.

Even now, I invest very little. There are so many free resources at our fingertips these days and I learned a lot about the industry through industry experts’ newsletters, blog posts, and YouTube videos.

Eventually, you might want to scale up by getting help with writing, photography, videography, and/or social media management, but even then, it is still possible to scale as one person if you put in the time and work.

If you have the ability to invest from the start, you might just get there faster though!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://moonandspoonandyum.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moon.and.spoon.and.yum/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/moonandspoonandyum/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kwoodphotography/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/moonspoonyum
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHqCkpd-BLqTxIFP0ZM3aeA
• Other: https://schisandraandbergamot.com/ https://thewonderfulworldofsprouts.com/

Image Credits
Kristen Wood