We were lucky to catch up with Lilibeth Ramirez recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lilibeth, thanks for joining us today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

I’m a content creator, and I absolutely love sharing my healthy recipes and lifestyle. Before diving into content creation, I was an advertiser with my own successful agency in Caracas, Venezuela. But in 2013, due to the economic and political issues in Venezuela, I had to close the agency because my clients no longer had products to sell. With all my free time and no job, I threw myself into my cooking blog, which I had started as a hobby. I had friends constantly asking for recipes, so I decided to launch the blog.

With all the stress and bad habits, my husband got sick, and my medical tests gave me an ultimatum. We had to change our diet, but since I wasn’t willing to eat boring diet food, I decided to experiment by swapping out ingredients to make healthier versions of our favorite recipes. My friends kept asking for recipes, and my blog kept growing. When social media started to catch on, I thought about sharing my dishes there. It was something new, and my followers started to grow quickly, my blog got more visits, and I was super motivated to post my recipes every day.

In 2014, when we decided to leave Venezuela, a big food brand from there offered me a deal to create recipes using their products. That’s when I realized I could actually make a living from this. It wasn’t easy; after arriving in the U.S., I had to start from scratch, reaching out to agencies and brands. Gradually, people started to know me and hire me. But I didn’t want to rely solely on brands, so I decided to publish my recipe books and start a YouTube channel. They sold immediately, and reaching a global audience opened many doors for me.

Creating a book is a lot of work, and sometimes it took me up to a year to finish one. I thought it would be great to have something I could sell every month, so this year I started a new subscription service where subscribers get a weekly menu with all the prep work and recipes. In just three months, it became a bestseller on Substack, and more people are subscribing every day. If I had known what I know now, I would have started building my own follower database from day one and would have started offering my services with just 100 email addresses.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Since I can remember, cooking has always been my hobby. The idea of sharing something valuable through digital platforms seemed really interesting to me. I offer ideas to make the foods we love healthier through recipes. However, I noticed that many people have some myths about healthy food:

They think they can eat healthy recipes endlessly, especially desserts.
That’s why, in addition to offering recipes, I now also create weekly menus so my followers can enjoy their healthy meals in a balanced way. I realized that many people saved the recipes but rarely made them, either due to lack of time or motivation. These are busy people who often eat out or are used to dieting, and they have the second myth:

They think healthy eating is bland and means eating less.
I focus on organization so that those with little time can prep their ingredients in advance and make their meals in just a few minutes. I always offer simple ideas to prepare, with a high content of vegetables, and help choosing healthy ingredients at the supermarket.

I’m proud to help so many people, especially women over 40 who have never learned to eat vegetables and are now at a stage in their lives where they want to take better care of themselves. My menus are available on my platform https://lilibethramirez.substack.com/. For just $7 a month or $70 a year, you can access 2 monthly menus plus all the published content (there are already 14 menus available, each with 7-9 recipes). This is better than a recipe book and costs less than two coffees.

I’m super proud to have worked with brands like Tropical Cheese, Best buy, Barilla, Dunkin’, Iberia, Polar, Nutribullet, Walmart, LTK, Dux, Total Wine, Got milk, Baptist Health, and more who have trusted my credibility and content.

Additionally, I like to share my lifestyle, exercises, products I use, clothes, makeup, and the places I travel or visit, especially restaurants. People think I’m always on a diet, but my philosophy is that if you take care of yourself 80% of the week, you can use the other 20% to enjoy those moments when you go out.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

3 lessons I had to unlearn on social media were:

You don’t need millions of followers to start selling your service. With just 100 people and a high-quality service that solves their problems, you can start and have a better chance to create a genuine connection.

It doesn’t matter if your post wasn’t seen by many people; if it helps just one person, that’s more than enough.

Whether you have 1 or 1 million followers, what really counts is how many emails from those followers you have in your own database.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

To everyone who asks me how to start on social media to promote what they do, I say: start today. Stop posting photos of your weekends with your family and begin creating content about what you’re passionate about. And by the way, that passion isn’t always related to your job. Most people have both a passion and a job, and a few manage to combine them, but many don’t truly believe that someone would pay them to pursue their passion. “Who would pay me for that?” they wonder. But on social media, with so many people out there, thousands are likely to be inspired by what you have to offer.

No matter your profession or hobby, creating a community on social media gives you the freedom to decide what you want to focus on. So my recommendation is to start today with quality content and be consistent. You’ll reach people who resonate with your message. Don’t focus on the number of followers; focus on your message, connecting with each follower you have, and building your database. Having a million followers won’t help if you don’t have at least one email address to contact directly.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lilibethramirez.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/recetaslily
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RecetasLily/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lilibeth-ramirez/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@recetaslily
• Other: https://lilibethramirez.substack.com/

Image Credits

Bonnie Rodriguez fotografa IG @bonnierzm