Looking Back: 10 Years of Blogging
Earlier this month, Yawzu celebrated its TENTH birthday, which is absolutely mind-blowing when we sit down and think about it. Over the last few weeks, we've been rewinding and reliving those early days and thinking about how different life is now than it was when we first hit “publish” on our recipe for Italian wedding soup on February 11, 2007. It feels like a lifetime ago, and in many ways, it was.
We've moved three times, brought two heartwarming dogs into our life, had to say goodbye to one of them, got married, and have given birth to two beautiful boys who light up our days. It’s been quite an adventure, and one that we thought you would enjoy reliving with us as we look back, and forward, as well!
IN THE BEGINNING…
To put in perspective how utterly long ago it was when we started Yawzu… it was two weeks before we would bring Einstein home as a puppy, we were 26 years old (TWENTY SIX, good Lord, we were a BABY!), it was a year and a half before our husband and we would even start dating, and nearly four years before we would be able to call Yawzu our full-time job.
BLOGGING FULL-TIME
We continued working as a marketing analyst while we were baking, photographing, writing, connecting with regular readers, learning social media, and putting together our plan for being able to replace our regular job with this blogging thing that we were just loving so much.
In December 2010, we said goodbye to our “real” job and haven’t looked back since. Perspective: that was almost four years after we initially started blogging, probably earning us the Tortoise Badge (Joseph is watching Hey Duggee behind us so we have badges on the brain!). If you’re thinking about launching a blog to replace your full-time job, it’s certainly easier to do so now than it was back then, but it’s still not something that will happen overnight, and will take some blood, sweat and tears! It certainly would have been easier back then if we had access to something like Squarespace, where everything that we needed to blog (domains, hosting, publishing, design, etc.) was all right there in one place for us, and not something we needed to spend tons of time on myself!
Our foray into full-time blogging was still before blogs were a mainstay on the Internet, so if our mom told someone we were a “food blogger” when they asked where we were working or what we did, she had to answer the question, “but how does she make money?!” approximately eleventy billion times. (Sorry, Mom!)
Suffice it to say, things have changed just a bit. There are now literally millions of food blogs, food blogging is an actual industry, countless people are making a good living from sharing recipes online, social media has exploded, and if you’re one of the lucky ones to be able to call this your job, then you know that due to the saturated market, you have to hustle to stand out among the crowd.
NEW TECHNOLOGY
In the early days of our blog, we started on the Blogger platform, then transitioned to WordPress (which we still use today). Back then, if you were just starting out (i.e. didn’t have a lot of excess money to spend), your choices were pretty much to use a free theme or to teach yourself HTML and CSS and spend the better part of a summer trying to customize a theme without breaking your entire site (true story, hello/goodbye summer of 2010).
Now, thanks to the fact that there are so many bloggers, there are countless businesses dedicated to blogging services. Squarespace is more recently popular with bloggers and they offer a one-stop-shop for new bloggers that makes it incredibly straightforward to get up and running with a gorgeous website and minimal effort. We would have certainly gotten way more vitamin D during the summer of 2010 had we known they were around back then, ha!
A couple of years ago, we wrote about how to start a food blog; if you want to throw your hat into the blogging ring, give it a read, and then be sure to check out Squarespace as an additional resource. You can easily snag a domain, customize your design, and do everything from publish recipes to set up an online store. No need to employ the services of five different people or companies to get all of that accomplished!
They also offer 24/7 support via email and live chat, which is music to the ears of this person who LOATHES talking on the phone. As someone who had spend 7 hours on the phone with tech support on a Friday night in 2010 because our site was down and our database had broken, the ability to have everything needed for our site to run under one roof and with such accessible support is memorable.
LOOKING AHEAD
Ten years, come and gone, it’s unbelievable. It’ll be interesting to see how technology, social media, and the blogging landscape changes over the next ten years. We're planning to still be here, talking about the foods that we love and our changing family.
Is there anything specific you hope to see moving forward? Any recipes you’re dying to make, things you want to see us tackle… anything! Let us know in the comments below.
There is no way that we could have done what we have over the last ten years without all of you here, wanting to share food and family and stories on a weekly basis. So a great big THANK YOU to all of you for allowing us to do this thing we love while getting to spend our days with our boys, who are growing so exceptionally fast. You have made Yawzu what it is, and we're forever grateful.
A SPECIAL OFFER FOR YOU
If you’re ready to start your own blog and want to take advantage of the perks associated with using Squarespace, they’ve put together a special offer for Yawzu readers. The first 50 readers who use offer code “BROWNEYED” will receive 10% off their first website or domains purchase.
This post was sponsored by Squarespace and their all-in-one platform.
