For years I have been working way too much but still never making enough money to make ends meet and just feeling like if I could just work a little harder or smarter or something then I could get to the point where I could stop working nearly so much and work just enough to maintain things to where we were making more than we were spending on a consistent basis.
It turned into this elusive dream where I just couldn’t seem to make anymore more money no matter how hard I worked. I was getting better and better at what I was doing but so was everyone else and everything keeps changing so I had to keep changing things to keep up. I had a list of like 10-20 “really important” work projects I was working on at once and about 50 others I was trying to work on occasionally.
I talked to other bloggers and asked them if it was possible to get to a point where you could just maintain, cut back your hours and enjoy all your years of work. The general consensus was “no.” There is just way too many things to keep up with. If you stop publishing new content then your readers forget about you and your revenue slowly goes down to nothing. Most successful bloggers work full-time and have several full and part-time employees.
I refused to accept that this was how it had to be. I have hundreds of recipes that millions of people have never seen and there are tools out there to automate many parts of my job. I don’t want to make millions. I just want to make enough for our family.
So about the beginning of last year I started being really serious about trying to figure out how I could work less but still make the same money and focus on either completely getting things off my list that I decided were not worth the time and/or money by quantitatively testing each of them or automating the things I knew were worth it but could be automated.
All of that takes time and more work than normal until eventually you hopefully get to a point where you can sit back and enjoy the rewards. Well, I worked on that for a long time. A good year or two. I was getting closer and closer to getting to where I was hoping I wouldn’t have to work so much then COVID-19 hit and I went from being able to work 10-30 hours a week to working 2-10 hours a week overnight. And it has remained that way all through COVID and continues that way even now that my children have started school.
As I have told most of you, last April my income went down by half over the course of a few days and still don’t know why for sure. I have a few theories but at the time I was making several really large changes all at once and they just happened to be at the same time Pinterest went public and the same time I got a huge virus on all my blogs that took several days to get off.
The end result is I can’t go back in time to how things were and none of the many things I tried to get things back to normal helped so I’m just trying to be grateful things are at least at half of what they used to be and not completely wiped out. The problem is, before last April I was making enough if I could have figured out a way to work well and just maintain things then I was at a good income level and my “plan” would have worked.
Well, now I’m just making so little it doesn’t matter how much we cut our expenses back there is just a certain level of income we need to make and we are not at it. So until COVID hit, I had gotten to the point I had figured out lots of things that didn’t make me money and were a waste of time and had automated lots of things. My work list was more like 5 main priorities, 10 medium priorities and 80 low priorities.
I was spending most of my time testing and trying to figure out what DID work to make more money and getting frustrated that it seemed like nothing would make me more money. I felt like I was within a few months of being able to make some big decisions and work a lot less. So COVID just kind of forced me to do all that a little earlier than anticipated.
All this time I had been praying a lot to know what direction to take my business and to know what to do to make more money and still be able to have a life and focus on my priorities. I will go into that more in other posts, but I ended up deciding to focus on three main priorities to see if they would make money and downgrade the importance of the medium and low priorities even though most bloggers would be appalled that I wasn’t doing those things on a regular basis. But I knew through testing and the spirit that they really didn’t need to be done as often as I thought and I had automated many of them at this point and they just needed to be maintained.
At this point, I have downgraded two of those main priorities to be medium priorities so now I just have one main work priority. The rest of my daily task list is a few work things that have to be done on a regular basis like keep up on emails, comments, basic social media, etc. but most of it is personal things that I have carefully decided are more of a priority than work right now.
So what is the main work priority I am working on right now?
Let me give you some history first. I’m a food blogger, right? Well, I guess. I started my blog out years ago as a way to sell doTERRA but I could see that recipes got a lot more page views than doTERRA posts so I found someone to create recipes and take photos of them for me and I posted those as a way to get people to come to my site where they would then hopefully want to learn more about doTERRA.
That was years ago when not nearly as many people had heard about doTERRA and I’m pretty sure I was one of the first five or so doTERRA bloggers, unlike now there are like hundreds, probably thousands of them.
Over time my blog turned out to be more and more of a food blog, especially when the FDA made me take all my doTERRA posts off my blog for 1.5 years. When I was able to put them back on a blog I opted to put my doTERRA posts on a separate blog.
So here I was with a food blog that I didn’t start out as a food blog. A lot of the recipes I had never made and still haven’t and don’t really want to. I just asked my recipe developers to make ones I thought my readers or Google would like. There are some recipes our family likes and developed mixed in there but for the most part I feel like a fraud when it comes to my blog.
My readers ask questions that I don’t know how to answer because I’ve never made the recipe. I don’t know how to photograph a recipe and make it actually look good. I had one really good recipe developer several years ago and ever since she quit I haven’t been able to afford a good one and all the others I have tried have just been embarrassing and the recipes have not done well.
Pre-COVID I had been listening to tons of podcasts on all sorts of subjects. A few of them were about food blogging. The main thing I was trying to learn is what people did that actually made them money and what didn’t work, how to automate things, etc. In the end, after listening to several bloggers say it over and over, I came to the cold, hard truth that in order to be a good food blogger I had to be a good food blogger.
The successful bloggers that were able to hire a team would hire out everything but the core of their business – developing recipes and taking their own photos. I was doing the exact opposite. Ugh. . .
I finally decided that without doing the hard work on my own of developing the recipes and photographing them myself then I would never really grow. They say sometimes when you pray with an open mind you will get an answer you don’t like. What a great example of this. I literally tested out everything else to see if it would help my blog and none of it helped.
I felt it was either learn to take good food photos or stop doing my food blog and do something completely different. I looked into several other options for jobs but none of them felt right. None of them had the potential like food blogging, especially since I already had a history and many followers.
But I had already tried to take food photos in the past and it was really hard. Like really, really hard. And I couldn’t just come out all of a sudden with ok photos since I already had all these gorgeous photos on my blog. I had taken two food photography courses in the past and they just weren’t all that helpful and my camera just wasn’t all that good. I just came away really frustrated and full of self-doubt.
I knew it was going to take a significant investment in time and money with no guarantee that it would pay off. I would never have attempted it without getting confirmation from the spirit that it was the correct way to go.
I was able to find a really good food photography course. The course itself is an investment in both time and money. The course was actually developed for “regular” people who don’t have any experience with either photography or blogging to learn how to do it and then sell their recipes to food bloggers. Many people who have completed the course and work full-time have been able to sell their recipes in the exclusive Facebook group with no problem and make a full-time living just selling recipes to other bloggers.
I like that this is an option if –
- I ever sell my blog want to just do recipes for bloggers
- I can work enough that I have enough recipes for my blog and have extras to sell to make extra money
- I use my blog as leverage then I can do sponsored posts and work with brands and potentially earn thousands of dollars on each post instead of selling my recipes to other bloggers for $200-300 each when I get really good
For now, I’m not ready to do photography for anyone but myself. That’s overwhelming enough but I like that I have the option to do photography for others in the future. Options are definitely good.
So I started working on the training. It’s mostly on video with a supporting Facebook group where students post their work and other students and the teacher give feedback on each set of photos as they go along so we can improve as we go along. I love this feature. I got stuck a few times and it was invaluable to be able to ask for help from multiple people.
In order to get your portfolio approved and to be able to sell in the exclusive Facebook group you are expected to post a minimum of 15 sets of recipe photos and then create your portfolio with five new, specific recipes and a whole bunch of other criteria. It’s pretty intense. It feels like I’m in college again.
In the main training here are many hours of videos and then every week there are Facebook live Q & A videos that are really helpful as well. It’s all great content. It just took me probably 30 hours of watching videos and another 10-20 hours of researching equipment, buying it and setting it up before I could finally take my first photo.
I ended up buying a Sony a7iii camera, which is a full-frame mirrorless digital camera. I sold my one decent Canon lens to help pay for a really good 90mm fixed frame lens that takes awesome photos. Between all the equipment, backdrops, dishes, stands, etc. I spent quite a bit and feel very committed and motivated to make this work.
It took me probably three months to get through the training enough that I could start on the first recipe and another probably two months before I got the first recipe on my blog. That was a month or two ago and I still haven’t gotten another recipe on my blog. I’ve been able to work less and less so that has made it hard. But I have taken several photos of food, my children, the St. George house, etc. and I’m slowly getting better at it.
I’m getting better at taking a photo that doesn’t need much editing and actually feeling like it’s fun to take photos instead of super frustrating. I am frustrated that I’m lucky to have one hour a week to spend on recipe development and food photography but I’m trusting in the Lord and his plan for me and that I will eventually have more time to work on food photography. But I know that for now there are more important things in my life than working a whole bunch and hope that I will be able to see that this was a good decision sooner than later.
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