Engineer Beats Wildest Eggspectations With Recipe Blog

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Oh, hey there, welcome back. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. I'm really excited about sharing today's story with you. It's someone who builds a recipe blog into a very healthy online business. She has more than 100,000 website visitors a month while working a full-time job, raising a family.

This blog is helping a lot of people and it's also bringing in a substantial second income. All of that is the very definition of a side hustle as I see it. The kind of projects I talk to you about every day. This woman in Minnesota has created an asset that can earn money for her while she sleeps. It might even help her and her husband have an early retirement.

But we'll come to all of that in a moment. First, speaking of definitions, I just defined a side hustle. I realized that I use this word content a lot, or at least a lot of our stories, they have the word content in them. Like so-and-so is creating content for a blog or for whatever. I mentioned recently I don't wanna just throw out terms without defining them.

I try to avoid a lot of jargon and a lot of buzzwords. So I realized content is something that people talk about all the time, at least in certain worlds, but without defining it. So I was like, huh, what does it actually mean? So I went to look online and I found this definition, which I didn't really like because after I read it, I still wasn't sure what content was. So the definition was web content refers to the textual, oral, or visual content published on a website.

I was like, okay, all right. And then another definition was something that is to be expressed through some medium as speech, writing, or any of various arts. So wow, if somebody reads that, no wonder they're confused. There's gotta be a better way to say that. And if we deconstruct that a bit, I think what that definition means, or I think what the real definition is of content is if you go to a website and you look at that website, basically what you see there, that's content.

All right, so probably there's going to be some words. There might also be some photos. There might be some video. There might be something else. Like if you're listening to podcasts, like in the podcast feed, these episodes are content, essentially.

So content is information, essentially. And when we talk about a story like today's, in particular, it is essentially a content-based business because this is a recipe blog. If you go and look at the blog, which I'll tell you about, you'll see a lot of recipes, you'll see meal plans, you'll see guidance and stories, lots of photos. All of that is content. Okay, so stay tuned.

Let me say thank you to today's sponsor. They allow me to bring this content to you. And I'm gonna tell you all about this Minnesotan engineer who turns healthy recipes into an online business that beats her wildest expectations. It's coming out of the oven in just a moment. [Music]

Side hustles can be a lot like recipes.

When you have the right ingredients and the right measurements, and you mix them in the right order, you can make magic. Or you can also make cupcakes, which are good too. Maya Kramf, a Minnesota native by way of Russia, has learned that creating a side hustle is more similar to baking a paleo-friendly Nutella molten lava cake than you might think. Maya, a full-time software engineer, always had a lot on her plate. Keeping up with her husband and two little girls running around the house was a fun challenge, but work and family, two of her biggest priorities in life, didn't always blend well.

Long days at the office left her with little time to cook healthy meals for her family if she also wanted to enjoy quality time with them at night. But a few years ago, Maya noticed her energy dropping, which she initially chalked up to her busy schedule. It was only when a friend recommended she try switching to unprocessed food did she see an improvement to her mood, energy level, and general wellbeing. A fog she hadn't even noticed before was now lifting. Still, making two sets of meals every day was entirely out of the question, so Maya transitioned her family to this new, unprocessed, and healthier way of eating.

As she began to experiment with recipes and food combinations, she noticed a pattern. Her family's most loved meals were all under 10 ingredients. And as she felt more and more comfortable crafting recipes on her own, she started to appreciate the challenge of putting a healthy spin on classic dishes. After seeing the impact of how food played a role in her family's wellbeing, Maya decided to keep track of her recipes online. If she could help her family, perhaps she could help others too.

She called it wholesome yum. It became Maya's passion as she mixed one half science and one half creativity to create meals that were packed with simple, natural ingredients. They're also ketogenic-friendly, paleo-inspired, low-carb, and free from gluten and preservatives. You could say she's really going against the grain. So in 2015, Maya bought her domain name, set up web hosting, and began working on that blog.

She had lots of content already after years of testing, and so she began to create a name for herself by posting recipes for things like low-carb bagels, keto cheesecake, pancakes, and taco salad. Are you hungry yet? Traffic to wholesome yum was slow at first, which is almost always how it goes. It took Maya a few months of trial and error to begin building that following. She started posting her images and recipes to Pinterest, which became the first platform to really drive traffic to her site.

Search engine traffic, Facebook, and direct traffic began to grow further as she went along. And these days, wholesome yum is known well enough that most of her traffic is organic, meaning that she doesn't have to do paid advertising. In this content-based side hustle, website visitor count is important. In fact, it's critical. Maya needs to ensure that she stays visible with regular and fresh content.

New stories, new recipes, new answers to listener questions. She says amazing content is first and foremost. When it serves your readers, they'll stick around, and it keeps them coming back. So what kind of content? What are we talking about?

Well, Maya takes recipe requests so she can focus on creating the right recipes to help the most people. Most of her readers are looking to make their low-carb lifestyle easier by having the option to reintroduce foods they had given up on, like comfort foods and desserts. Her recipes show that they can make healthy, low-carb versions of these foods with simple ingredients. She really does cast her bread upon the waters. Once Maya saw decent traffic coming in, she knew it was time to start monetizing her blog.

So how does that work? Well, to get started, she reached out to an ad network. She also began to cultivate relationships with sponsors and affiliate partners so that as her traffic increased, she would already have that relationship. Startup costs were almost zero, but her side hustle now includes a full-time employee and a number of contractors. 80% of income comes from ad revenue, with the rest arriving from affiliate revenue, sponsored poster items, and selling wholesome, yum, cookbooks, and meal plans.

We're now three years in. She's put in a lot of work to be able to enjoy her success, and the freedom of substantial additional income from her wholesome side hustle isn't something that she takes for granted. Adding this business on top of her day job and family responsibilities meant that balance was crucial. That's why as she went along, she learned to delegate more, bringing in that additional person and those contractors. Has it been worth it?

What kind of difference has it made in her life? Well, she says her family has been able to take more trips together and enjoy extra quality time. Her biggest goal is for her and her husband to retire earlier than they'd planned, all because of the wholesome, yum side hustle. It hasn't always been a cakewalk. She hasn't had time to loaf around, but success is now ingrained and she's on a roll.

[Music]

Well, this story really takes the cake, I think. And I want to read you a quote from her, just something we got from our notes on our conversation. Maya said, "Nothing happened the first time "I got a site visitor. "Somebody came to the site, they went away, that was it. "Next day, maybe two people came, "but she says I did celebrate the first time "I reached 100,000 visitors in a month.

"It's such an amazing feeling to see so many people visiting "and being able to resonate with them." Now, the point I want to make here is that it really does take time. I get emails all the time from people that say, "Oh, come and check out my blog. "I just started this project, what do you think?" And I don't really do consulting, but if I have a moment, I'll go and take a quick look. And most of the time, not always, but most of the time, I'll go and I'll look and the blog has been up for like eight days and there are two posts there. And often when I get these emails, the person writing them is kind of frustrated.

They're simultaneously excited and frustrated because they're like, "I made this thing, "but it's not really taken off." And the thing is with this kind of project, it's not going to take off like that. I would say if you get six months in and you have 100 articles and you still are just seeing one or two visitors a day, okay, that's when there's a problem. That's when we might be able to look and say, "You know what, here's something that you're doing wrong," or, "You're on the right track here." But if you make these three small changes, you're probably gonna see a lot of improvements. But in the early days, when it's just the eight days old and the two posts or whatever, my advice is always gonna be, "Okay, great, keep writing. "Keep going." Or keep making whatever the form of content, the form of medium is.

So it really does take time, but with the right topic, with the right focus, building the right connection with people, which is exactly what Maya did in this project, the wholesome young blog, it can work. That's why I'm telling you different stories every day of people who are doing this in their own way. So yes, it can work and I want it to work for you. Don't let your paleo cookie crumble. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

Today's show notes, including links to wholesome young and anything else I talked about will be online at sidehustleschool.com/468. That is episode 468. Thank you for listening to it. I'll be back tomorrow. So much more is on the way.

My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]