tl;dr food blogging sucks
I’ve been sharing recipes under the moniker “Shared Gooods” for about four years now. What started as a cookie recipe I wanted to share with friends on Instagram turned into a full-on recipe blog, and eventually now an in-person popup. I’ve loved most of it, and I love sharing my food adventures, but as I’ve dug myself deeper, I’ve realized a few things:
I want to write about food, not write about why my food is the best and why you should please please please pretty please try it
Recipe blogging (at least when you’re small with limited resources) means spending 20% of your time on the food and 80% of your time on publishing it. It means writing for SEO. It means embellishing recipe titles so that they entice. This sucks & I hate it. I’d much rather spend my time making food, or writing about the adventures I have with it, rather than focusing on how to get it to appear in search results.
Maintaining a .com is time consuming & expensive
…and it’ll take years before I could potentially be reciprocated for any of that time or money spent.
I think this is the future of food writing
& I don’t mean Substack specifically. I listened to a podcast recently with the Editor In Chief at NYT Food, Emily Weinstein, where she talked about how NYT is a trusted recipe developer for a lot of people; how subscribers looking for a particular recipe don’t go to google anymore; they go straight to NYT. This is because Google search results are unreliable. The results that appear are not necessarily the best recipes, but the ones with the best search engine optimization. This made me realize: I don’t want to be a popular recipe developer, I want to be a good one!
So everything is migrating everything here. Recipes, tips, techniques, & more about food in general. Excited to write more and do admin less. As usual, everything will be plant-based.
P.S. I’m still figuring out how it works so give me some grace