262: A Food Blogging Journey - Freelancing, Ads, Working with Brands, Catering, and Writing a Cookbook with Mary Cressler and Sean Martin

How to understand your blog data, why blogging was more profitable than freelancing, and how to write a cookbook with Mary Cressler and Sean Martin. ----- Welcome to episode 262 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Mary Cressler and Sean Martin from Vindulge about the journey to how they run their food blog today. The Journey of Food Bloggers  Mary Cressler and Sean Martin have done it all: they freelanced, they worked with ad companies, they worked with influencer marketing companies, they catered, they wrote a cookbook –– all in the pursuit of finding what it is that they like to do. This conversation with the Vindulge team will inspire you to think about your own journey and dig deep to figure out the way you want to run your blog. There's not a "right" way or a "wrong" way to run your blog; this episode will give you some ideas to help make your blogging journey the best it can be for you. In this episode, you'll learn: How Mary and Sean started to work together How they transitioned to working on their own thing What it was like to establish their niche How Mary decided to focus on her own blog over freelancing How they started working on sponsored content How they monetize their blog Why it's important to understand your data (and how to gather it) Why their email community is so important to them How they decide to spend their time How all of their content works together What connectional intelligence means How they wrote a book proposal and pitched their book Resources: Vindulge Mediavine AdThrive Sortable CLEVER SurveyMonkey Billy Parisi –– @chefbillyparisi Will Write for Food Dianne Jacob –– @diannemjacob Fire + Wine Cookbook If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to [email protected].