Milestone 1: Getting into Mediavine

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Jump to:

• Starting My Blog
• My First Year- The Foundation
• My Second Year- Growth
• My Third Year- Monetization and MEDIAVINE!
• Comments

Starting a food blog is definitely not a get rich quick scheme.

Whether it begins as a hobby or with an intent to make money, there is a lot of learning and a lot of work involved before you start to see any returns.

Starting My Blog

I started my blog, The Nessy Kitchen, in December 2020.

I loved reading food blogs and had talked about having my own for years. But I really had no clue how to actually start one and what was involved with running it. Or that I would need to be strategic if I ever wanted it to make money.

I googled a tutorial, signed up with Bluehost, bought a theme and decided I would just figure it out as I went along. Thank goodness for youtube tutorials!

My First Year- The Foundation

To describe my blogging in my first year, I can do it in 2 words- clueless but also important.

Clueless because…

I honestly had absolutely no idea what I was doing. 

I had never heard of SEO. Shooting photos in manual mode was brand new.

I thought traffic would just eventually find my way to my site. 

And I didn’t have a clue how to actually monetize a blog (or what Mediavine was at that point!).

But honestly, I don’t regret that at all. I truly believe that information finds you when you are ready for it, and I think if I knew how much I didn’t know, I would have felt way in over my head.

So instead of growing traffic, that first year built an important foundation. 

Consistency.

Even though no one was reading it, it was important to me to be consistent and I published 1 recipe every week for that first year.

Reader-First Mentality.

My sister was pretty much the only person reading and making my recipes. And so when I was writing a post, I had her in mind.

I wanted her to be able to make the recipe easily and I wanted to be able to answer any questions that she might have. So I didn’t start out with a mindset of writing for search engines. I was writing for people. 

Passion.

Despite not growing and building traffic, I fell in love with food blogging.

I loved the personal growth that I felt with it.

I was excited about the recipes I shared. I was excited to see the improvements in my photography.

And I loved the fact that my blog was something I had built on my own.

My Second Year- Growth

Towards the end of my first year, I started to get to a point where I felt like my blog had enough to share and I wanted to gain traffic to it.

I naively thought that the way to do this was Pinterest. I figured I would create a few pins and watch the traffic come to my site!

In December 2021, I created pins and started pinning. And nothing..

So I searched on google “beginners guide to Pinterest for bloggers” and ended up stumbling on the blog “Productive Blogging”.

I basically went down a rabbit hole on her site, spending most of the weekend reading her articles and discovering how clueless I had been to the whole business of blogging and the importance of SEO.

SEO

I ended up purchasing the SEO Jumpstart course and I can’t say enough good things about it for me. For someone who had no clue about SEO, it took it from being this gigantic overwhelming concept into something actionable and digestible.

I worked through the course in a couple of weeks, implementing the steps as much as I could.

I upgraded my hosting to Bigscoots and purchased the Feast Plug-In.

And within a couple of months, my traffic had gone from 297 sessions in January 2022 to 600 sessions in March 2022.

I know that doesn't sound like much, but since I had been getting NO traffic in my first year, I felt encouraged that I was on the right track.

Focus and Planning

I then took the Cooking with Keywords course which really helped to clear up keyword research for the recipe niche specifically and helped me to give a critical eye to my existing posts.

I researched and planned out recipes for the rest of the year as well as prioritized 22 existing posts for updating.

I tried to stay hyper focused on testing and writing quality recipes for these posts.

And by August 2022, my traffic was up to 6793 sessions!

Again, when the goal for Mediavine is 50 000 sessions, I clearly still had a long way to go, but I was encouraged that I was on the right path.

In September, I invested in RankIQ after hearing a lot of bloggers talking about it. I mainly used it for writing a few informational type posts, but 5 of these posts are in my top 10 posts for traffic, so I think it was well worth it.

By December 2022, I was up to 14 372 monthly sessions (48 times my January traffic!).

My Third Year- Monetization and MEDIAVINE!

After starting to see growth in my second year, my focus for year 3 was much of the same. Creating quality content! 

By May 2023, I was over 50 000 sessions and accepted into Mediavine!

I am excited to see the hours of work start to pay off and am looking forward to continuing to work on, learn from and grow with my blog.

If you are a food blogger on your journey to Mediavine, I hope this post will give you some encouragement! Reading other blogger's stories definitely motivated me as I worked towards Mediavine.

And if you are a TNK reader, thank you for your support! I look forward to continuing to provide more recipes and kitchen tips for years to come. 

Interested in More? See this collection of My Favorite Resources for Food Bloggers!