10 Years On WordPress

All that said, my blogging journey did not begin in 2015, but rather in 2006 when I launched my first blog on a now defunct blogging platform. Each platform it seems has its pluses and minuses, but I’m still here.

As a chef at a popular restaurant in my home town of Birmingham England, my then boss (Tony), thought it would be a good publicity for the restaurant if the Sunday Mercury newspaper came and did a feature of the famous people I had cooked for whilst working in the UK, Netherlands, Bermuda and the USA. After publishing a two page story about me the newspaper invited me to write a recipe column for the food section of the newspaper.

I wrote recipes and articles for the newspaper but after 5 years I decided that I wanted to try my hand at blogging. This was prompted after I found my recipes were coming up in Google results because old newspaper copy is sold to online archival services as a way for newspapers to make additional profit.

Some of you that may have visited my Media Wall will have seen the samples of the newspaper stories about me and my career.

So how did I get 17,855,049 hits?

Well a lot of hard work, particularly in the beginning. That is not to say my SEO knowledge is is amazing, just that I am very stubborn. If I want to get any on my recipes and or articles seen on Google at all, I needed to repost my blog posts on all of my social media channels: Facebook (in many pages and groups), Instagram, Reddit(in many groups), Quora, Pinterest, Tumblr, Blue Sky, Threads, LinkedIN, Live Journal and Tiktok. And then there are foreign social media sites like Wykop, Hatena and others. Of course all this sharing on my social media sites takes time away from actually creating recipes, but at least many of my recipes and articles are visible and competing with the BBC and other food outlets.

Youtube Channel

When I decided to launch a Youtube channel as well, I decided the way forward was to tie in more of my recipes on both WordPress and Youtube, rather than try to produce separate content for both, well at least this is the aim. So far I have 3,254 subscribers and am monetised and have hopes to reach 4,000 subscribers by the end of the year. I am finding that blog versions of my recipes bring me views to Youtube and vice versa.

Rewards

All this work has brought some rewards and I’ve met some interesting people. I’ve been invited as a food judge at international competitions like the World Steak Challenge (in London, Dublin and Amsterdam), the Academy of Chocolates Awards in London and others in Spain. I’ve been on press trips to Austria, Canada, Spain, France and Croatia. From time to time I review equipment but always give an honest review. And my Youtube channel also gets me offers to review equipment, but if I don’t like the item I will turn it down.

WordPress

Like others here, I still have a love hate relationship with WordPress and how they seem to keep reinventing the wheel and each time making a little more difficult to use. From time to time I flirt with moving my blogs (yes I have 5). Even trying to create the image for this post was a struggle; editing and re-editing to make sure it showed up the right size on my home page had me spitting feathers! But the truth is that moving my blog would damage my Google rankings, which would take a couple of years to rebuild.

These Days

I’m no longer working in hotels and restaurants so my time is split between blogging, creating youtube videos and teaching via my online cooking classes.

If anyone is interested then you can sign up either via youtube or my patreon page

St George’s Day

For those that don’t know St George is the patron saint of England (and many other countries). It was happenstance that I launched my WordPress blog on April 23rd, but a good one because it’s so easy to remember my blog anniversary, not the mention the beginning of the British Aparagus season, Happy St George’s Day to you all.

45 thoughts on “10 Years On WordPress”

    1. Thanks Teri, juggling my blogs and Youtube channel does make me sometimes feel like a circus performer, but as my wife says……….it keep me out of mischief. 🙂

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