Kelly from Perfect for Supper started her blog from a selfish yet beautiful reason: to talk about her food struggles and help people who relate to find trustworthy solutions.
In this interview, you will get a different perspective on blogging, one that is often undermined: how your personal stories can change the world for the better. Because guess what? Each of us has a unique way of impacting the society we live in. Let’s read Kelly’s!
Q: What should we know about you?
Kelly: I’ve been a blogger since 2011 and my newest blog, Perfect for Supper, is dedicated to my struggles with finding delicious food since I was diagnosed with multiple onset food allergies three years ago.
Q: What was the drive to start a food blog?
Kelly: I started Perfect for Supper because I remembered having a hard time finding delicious food to cook when my diet was restricted. There weren’t nearly as many resources available three years ago as there are now, and I wanted to start a food blog to share my food struggles with anyone else out there who was in the same place as I was.
“I don’t view my blog as a vulnerability or putting myself out there at all – I’m simply sharing a little bit of myself and what I’ve struggled with, with the world! If just one person stops by, tries a recipe and likes it, that’s the kind of impact I’d like to have!”
Q: What do you aim to achieve with your blog?
Kelly: My goal is to help someone who battles with food allergies. I don’t care about “making it big” or gaining a bunch of followers, I just want to provide a few recipes to someone with the same dietary restrictions as me so they can easily find a tasty recipe!
Q: What’s the biggest challenge as a food blogger?
Kelly: Finding the time — food blogging isn’t like fashion or beauty blogging because recipe development takes a long time. If one recipe isn’t delicious and picture perfect, I have to make it again. It’s one of the most frustrating aspects of being a food blogger, that’s for sure.
I’m also a lifestyle blogger and post-development is very different because there are fewer variables. But what I’ve come to understand is that food blogging depends heavily on the quality, and if a recipe isn’t right, I have to accept it and try again!
Q: Do you feel like belonging to a tribe?
Kelly: Not necessarily. Food blogging has become so big over the past five years that it’s tough to find a tribe out of the fact that there are just so many other food bloggers out there.
Being part of a community implies building relationships that have to be developed, and for a food blog that’s only a few months old, I don’t expect to be a part of any tribes at this time. I’m doing my best to interact with other bloggers through social media and commenting, but developing relationships virtually just takes time.
Q: How do you know that what you write is valuable to your readers?
Kelly: The key is to write content that I, myself, would like to read if I came to my blog. I can think of tons of recipes, but if I don’t put myself in the eyes of the reader, a lot of those recipes just aren’t going to make the cut. It’s very simple, and this is a trait that carries over into my day-to-day job: it doesn’t matter what I, as the blogger, think is right.
My entire blog and its success are dependent upon attracting readers and viewers so I have to think how they want to read a post and what recipes I would like to see if I was a stranger visiting my blog.
“I would like to say “write it from the heart” — if your heart and soul isn’t in your content, it shows.”
Q: How do you express your personality on the blog?
Kelly:For me, it’s all about the visual around my logo. I chose a light grey-blue and soft pink color scheme because it was something different and it wasn’t too harsh for a food blog. I love the logo I designed as well, I was struggling for a while to come up with a good one but I think the cast iron skillet works well.
Q: What made you choose our blogging theme, Julia?
Kelly: I chose Julia the moment I saw it. I loved that in some way, the homepage reminded me of a cookbook my mother had when I was younger.
I knew that the way it was designed was going to be perfect for how I wanted to present my food blog. I wanted something that was different.
I’m a graphic designer during the day, so I understand from a reader’s perspective on how easy it is to get bored with designs when they all look the same. I was looking for something that was a little whimsical and out of the box and didn’t look like every other food blog out there.
Q: What do you appreciate about the design of your blog?
Kelly: What I appreciate most is the simplicity. So many food blogs out in the market are bogged down with ads and pop-ups, and I’m really trying to make an effort to keep things simple.
Simplicity for me is critical. With attention spans being so low these days, you have to make it very easy and apparent what it is you’re trying to convey to the reader, all in under three seconds. You’ll never see more than one ad on my site for this purpose, and it’s also why I don’t use pop-ups. It’s because I want to keep things as simple as possible and don’t want anything to keep my readers from absorbing my content.
Q: When you write out of passion does the theme matter anymore?
Kelly: Yes, I’m a graphic designer to design, and content always compliments each other, no matter how much passion you may have for one over the other. I have to be just as passionate about both.
At the end of our interview, I kindly asked Kelly to send a message for the fellow bloggers out there. Here it is:
“To any fellow bloggers, I would like to say “write it from the heart” — if your heart and soul isn’t in your content, it shows. Passion and love for your niche and sharing it with the world is what blogging is all about!”
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