July Income Report- $530.32

August 9, 2014 by Christine Skari

Hello all! I’m back with my second blogging income report to share numbers and what I’ve learned this past month. If you want to read my first one, feel free to check it out here!

Let’s jump right to it! Here are the numbers for July.

Blogher– $61.09
Google Adsense– $10.71
Lijit– $21.57
Swoop– $39.50
Tout– $50
Contributor Work– $200
Bluehost– $130
Tasty Food Photography– $9.95
How to Monetize Your Food Blog eBook– $7.50

Total: $530.32

Ad Networks:

If you look on my sidebar and header, you’ll see a few ads running. These are great because I can just fix em’ and forget em’. They bring in a passive income without me having to do much at all.

Adsense: $10.71

Overall, this was a pretty disappointing month for for ad-related income for me. Halfway through the month, I realized that Adsense was just not cutting it and I installed Liijit and used Adsense as a backfill for it if the CPM of Lijiit ads went lower than $0.50. Lijiit pays based on the number of views an ad gets rather than the number of people who actually click them, so it works better and is more reliable for AOME because most people who come to my site are here for the recipes and not to purchase anything.

Lijit: $21.47

Lijit is another ad network I’m trying out. I found the ad network through a list of possible options that Kiersten lists in her How to Monetize Your Food Blog eBook. They’re relatively easy to get into and gave me twice as much income in half the time as Adsense.

Blogher: $44.47

Blogher was also a little disappointing, since I’ve heard that their usual CPM is around $2-5. If that had held true for July, I would have made $120-310. I’m going to shoot an email to the Blogher team sometime this week to see what’s going on. I just checked my account for the month of August so far, though, and things look much more promising in terms of the CPM I’ve been getting! *Edit: this month is looking good! Woo!

Swoop: $39.50

Swoop also gave me significantly less than July’s income, partly because my traffic was much lower since I had recipes featured on The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed last month, which sent over a good amount of pageviews. Less people saw my Swoop ads, thus the lower income received.

Affiliate Links:

Bluehost: $130

A big chunk of this month’s income comes from people signing up to self-host their site on Bluehost and following my affiliate link to do so. You guys, thank you so much if you did! It helps me pay for my grocery bill (food blogging gets expensive with all the vanilla extract and chocolate chips I buy) and I truly appreciate it . The way it works is that, if you go through my link to become self-hosted at Bluehost, I receive a commission from the sale (at no extra expense to you, of course). The fancy internet machine is able to track where a link comes from through cookies (and no, not the kind you eat. I wish) and gives me credit for the referral. You can read more about The Benefits of Self-Hosting Your Site here, along with me mentioning it on my first income report!

Tasty Food Photography: $9.95

Still my #1 must have if you have/are in the process of making a food blog. I seriously want Lindsay to be my bffl and I adore her and Bjork’s blog, Pinch of Yum. I learned everything I know about food photography from her eBook and she does a wonderful job at explaining everything in basic, easy-to-understand terms so that you’re not feeling lost and hopeless and drown yourself in a jar of nut butter to dull the pain of learning how to use a camera and editing photos. Am I being dramatic? Nah.

Other:

Blogher Tout: $50

No, not that kind of tout. I don’t get paid to fart, sadly . Touts are Blogher’s name for advertisements on social media. One of the benefits of being in the Blogher network is that occasionally I’ll be hired to sponsor ads. In July I got a job to post a few ads on my Facebook page.

Contributor Work: $200

One awesome thing about having a food blog is that it lends itself to be a pretty kick-butt resume to getting other food-related jobs. I really enjoy working as a food blogger and must admit, getting paid to do work in my pajamas and practice my photography/eat is preeeeeettty fabulous. I did a post about Tips on Getting Freelance Jobs and I’ve heard that many of you have had success with it! Awesome!

As far as the sheer number of recipes go, I only posted 6 recipes total. It’s weird, but for some reason the extra time I have now that my college is out for the summer doesn’t really correlate to me spending more time on the blog. That’s totally okay, though! I blog because I genuinely enjoy cooking, photographing, and writing as a creative process and don’t want to push it if the blogging mojo isn’t flowing. I think once you start forcing yourself to do something, it becomes less of a hobby and more of a chore. Interestingly, even though I had significantly less traffic than I had in June (a whopping 36% less), I made more income thanks to you guys going through my Bluehost affiliate links. Seeing an increase in the diversity of my income streams makes this girl reaaal happy since I’m not depending on just one main source. That way, when one stream runs dry, I’m not left like a fish out of water (omg the puns here… I die).

My tip for this month is to concentrate on your staging for your food photography. July was a month for working on my photos (quality over quantity) and I discovered that little things can make a big difference. I spent a few bucks at my local craft store ($21.37 to be exact) and was able to pick up a few garnishes to make my photos more fun and stylish.

Things I’ve discovered:

Use small plates. I don’t know about you, but when I see pictures of food, the ones that really draw me in and start to make me drool involve big, in-your-face, glutinous-looking, recipes. When you use a big plate, you have to use massive piles of food to get the same effect and they don’t fit nicely into the frame of the photos.
Elevate your food. When I take pictures of baked goods/sweet treats especially, I like to elevate them to give them more depth. This month, I found a piece of broken wood at TJ Maxx on clearence for 25 cents that I’ve used to get that effect.

Swirl, take bites, make it messy! I usually start off snapping a few pictures as soon as I plate the food without much movement. Those photos are necessary to give me an idea on how to angle my camera, but in the end they always turn out a little stiff and cold. Bring life to your photos by creating movement!

Use small props to bring color to your photos. I like using linen towels, paper straws (my new obsession), some twine, and small bowls to hold a glimpse of what ingredients are in the recipe I made. I picked up the mini bowls in the photo below from the clearance section from my craft store for just $1.25 for the whole set. SCORE.

LIGHTING. Lightning is EVERYTHING. I learned how to position my recipes and use light to make my photos pop with Lindsay’s Tasty Food Photography eBook. Honestly, if you don’t use good lighting, your photos will turn out crappy. Simple as that.

I got a small amount of feedback from fellow bloggers with a few requests on topics to cover.

1. “How did you start building traffic to your blog?”
Honestly, the biggest thing I can think of is simply improving my food photography. I’m really bad at promoting my recipes via social media (I only just got an Instagram), so the only thing I really do is submit to FoodGawker and TasteSpotting. I know you must think I’m hiding some sort of secret, but I promise I’m not. When you get exposure on those food sharing sites, people notice and oftentimes, pin them to Pinterest or link to your recipes on their own sites. Not every recipe I create is a success in terms of generating traffic to AOME, but occasionally one will get shared by BuzzFeed/The Huffington Post/etc and brings in a buttload of page views. Success isn’t gained overnight, but eventually those page views from various sources build up. I promise, it’ll happen. Maybe not quite as fast as you’d like, but it will!

2. “How much traffic did you have when you started monetizing?”

Hmm, it’s hard to remember exactly, but probably around 8,000-10,000 pageviews a month. If I were to start blogging all over again, I would start monetizing and placing ads on my site as soon as possible. There really isn’t a downside to it, and even with 8k page views a month, I easily made enough to cover the cost of self-hosting my site, which also lets me have much more control of my blog, host giveaways, etc. Totally worth it. If you’re on the fence about it, I’d say go for it!

3. “I think it’d be interesting to learn more about the expenses portion of monetizing a blog, for example, how much time do you spend on the blog, how much do you spend on hosting the site, buying groceries, food photography props, etc.”

Gosh, I have a hard enough time even keeping track of my income, let alone my expenses. It’s hard to really get an exact number because my expenses for the food for recipes for the blog overlap with my actual grocery bill since I eat what I make. I’ll do the best I can to give an accurate estimate!

Time spent on the blog: Gah, it varies SO much. Each recipe takes me 2-5 hours to create, photograph, edit, and type up the post for it. So total hands on time for July with my six recipes was probably around 12-30 hours. I would estimate 20 hours. I also spend time interacting with other bloggers, responding to comments, etc which make an exact amount of time impossible to calculate. All of this time is well-spent, though, since I LOVE blogging. I love everything about it.
How much I spend on hosting: I got the one year package since, at the time, I was iffy about commiting to a longer term plan. I pay $9.99 a month, which my ads can easily cover. I wish I would have gone with the longer plan, since I think they go for as little as $4.99 a month!
Groceries: I honestly have no idea. Too much haha.
Food photography props: Probably around $5-$20 a month max. Some months I don’t buy any new props, and others I can’t seem to stop 😯 .

4. “What camera do you use?”

I use a Nikon D5200 with a Sigma 50mm f/1.4 lens. I LOVE my camera and lens (the lens gives my photos that coveted dreamy blur in the background), You can read more about them on my Resources for Food Bloggers page!

5. “What ad networks do you use?”

I currently am using Blogher, Adsense, Lijit, and Swoop. Kiersten does a really great job of breaking down different ad companies and explain their pros and cons and ranks them based on her experiences with them. She has a ton more that I haven’t explored yet, but I’m planning on spending a day at Starbucks with her eBook and figuring out the best combination of ad networks to use for AOME.

Whewww. Did you get through all of that? I think my fingers are going to fall off from all of that typing 😯 . I hope you guys found this report to be useful! I want to reiterate that I do not blog with the sole purpose of making money. It just is a fabulous perk that comes with what I love to do and I am happy to share my experiences with monetizing with the rest of ya’ll so that we can all grow together. Who know, maybe one day I’ll be doing this for a living and I can flush that biology degree down the drain 😉 (just kidding, mom and dad).

Questions, comments, concerns? I’d love to hear them!

*Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links to products I love!

June Income Report- $455.29

July 8, 2014 by Christine Skari

Hi guys! Today is a pretty big day for Apple of My Eye because I’m posting my first official income report! When I started the site a little over a year ago, I had zero idea what I was doing. In fact, I didn’t even mean for AoME to turn into a food blog. I had been reading a ton of healthy living blogs and wanted to keep an online photo diary to chronicle my life in college and connect with other bloggers and talk about the important things in life. Like different nut butters and how I had eaten froyo seven times in the last five days.

Best. Decision. EVER.

For about half a year, I would only post a daily recap that usually revolved around school, a workout, and gross dining common food. I lived in a dorm room and didn’t have kitchen access. Then, I moved into my first apartment and was able to get more of a foothold in the food blogging world. I got a taste (hehehe) of how fun it was to share my recipes and what I was stuffing in my face. I took the plunge and became self-hosted on BlueHost, gradually started to teach myself how to use a DSLR camera and was posting probably around 3-4 recipes a month. It’s only in the last couple of months where I’ve really felt like I’ve been blogging regularly.

Basically what I’m trying to say here is that I’m no expert at food blogging at all and don’t want to come off as a know-it-all because, truth be told, I haven’t been at this long and have posted probably less than 30-40 recipes for the entirety I’ve been blogging. I really want to emphasize that I started off not knowing anything and, a few months later, I’m realizing that Apple of My Eye isn’t only just a creative outlet, but quite possibly something that could make me a part-time living someday. How cool is that?!

My goal with these income reports and monetizing my blog are to:

So without further ado, here are my numbers for June!

Income:

Adsense– $50.06
BlogHer– $78.86
Swoop– $126.37
Sponsored Post- $60
Freelance Work- $100
Misc- $40

Grand Total: $455.29

Breakdown:

Ad Networks: If you look on my sidebar and header, you’ll see a few ads running. These are great because I can just fix em’ and forget em’. They bring in a passive income without me having to do much at all. Here are the ones I use:

Google Adsense: $50.06

Adsense is the ad network that is easy to get into and install and is pay-per-click, which means that the site/blog owner gets paid when a visitor is interested in the ad and clicks on it. One minus to this is that my readers aren’t too click-y. Despite this, Adsense has brought me in over $500 since I started running their ads when I decided one day, “What the heck! I’ll try them out” and installed them.

BlogHer: $58.32

Blogher is also an ad network that you need to apply to get into, but it’s more selective on which blogs it adds to its network. It differs from Adsense in that is it pay-per-thousand based, which means that I get paid a certain amount for each 1,000 pageviews an ad gets. While the numbers may seem close to how much Adsense earns, you can usually expect a $2-5 CPM. This means that you get paid around that amount for each 1,000 views an ad gets. Since I had just joined their ad program, it took a while for their ads to fully settle into place and my earning were low for most of the month while my site was integrated. If I calculate out my earnings using the payout that’s usual, my income from them would be closer to $200-500. Darn!

Swoop: $126.37

First off, Swoop is awesome! If you go to one of my recipes, you might have seen a small ad in the ingredient section. This ad only shows in that one tiny place for relevant ads and brought me more than both BlogHer and Adsense together.

Sponsored Posts: $60

After I started posting more frequently (3-6 recipes a month) I started getting a few emails each month about other companies or sites wanting me to sponsor a post on Apple of My Eye. The benefit of this is that I’m able to name my price and be selective on which products/posts that I choose to share with you guys. I want them to be at least somewhat relevant to either healthy living or food, since that’s where my blog’s niche is.

Freelance Work: $100

I did a whole post on Tips on Getting Freelance Jobs and was ecstatic to hear back that a couple of you guys have gotten some work offers/your first jobs! WOO! June was filled with stress and finals for me, so I didn’t have much time at all to do too many recipes for my freelance jobs, but they’re always a steady source of income. And the fact that I’m getting paid to make recipes and photograph them. It’s a pretty sweeeeeet gig!

Traffic!

So there you have it! Moving on:

Along with posting the actual numbers that the blog is bringing in, I also want to share what tools I use and the basics that allow me to monetize AOME in case you’re looking to start monetizing your current blog or even start a brand new one! Some of them are essential (like being self-hosted), while others play a big role in growing my photography or providing me helpful information/tutorials. Here they are!

BlueHost: Being self-hosted is 100% essential if you want to make money by blogging and I use BlueHost to “host” my site. When I first started blogging, I signed up for a free WordPress.com blog that I customized with a cute little apple-themed layout . After a few months, I realized that my passion for blogging wasn’t going anywhere and I was ready to make the small plunge to become self-hosted and start monetizing my site.

If you’re not self-hosted, you’re extremely limited and can’t:

Run any ads (like Adsense or BlogHer)
Have sponsored/paid posts
Use affiliate links
Host giveaways

Bummer, right?

For me, the cost of self-hosting (only $3.95 a month) is nothing since my blog makes more than enough to cover a full year of hosting service in a single month. Even when I first started out with Adsense when I started blogging, I could easily cover my cost. Along with being able to actually start making money off of my blog, BlueHost let’s me have full freedom in customizing my blog’s theme, installing countless plugins (like the one that displays my recipes, Pinterest feed, and popular posts on my sidebar), and let’s me have control of my site. That means that no one can decide to terminate my site on a whim. It belongs to me and only me!

I won’t lie, it’s a pain in the butt to install and took me a half of a day of cursing at my laptop (a squirrel is probably more tech savvy than me), but it’s completely necessary and worth it when it comes to monetizing a blog. And after that first day of instillation, I haven’t had any problems whatsoever with self-hosting. Win!

Tasty Food Photography: If you’ve been following my site for a while, you probably know that I FREAKIN’ LOVE this eBook. I still use it to this day and learned 90% of my food photography skills from it. The author, Lindsay, is a sweetheart and explains everything in everyday language so you don’t feel like throwing your camera at the ground in frustration.

Click here to visit Pinch of Yum.

While having pretty food photos isn’t all there is to food blogging, it plays a big role in giving your blog exposure. To be honest, in terms of generating traffic to my site the only thing I really do it submit my pictures to sites like FoodGawker and Tastepotting, which drive tons of traffic to the blog and have directly lead to my recipes being discovered by The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed.

How to Monetize Your Food Blog eBook: This is a great resource that explains things nice and sloowww (which, if you’re like me, is fabulous) about all things monetizing your blog. From passbacks to writing your own eBook (a dream for me!), Kiersten’s book has it all!

I’ve added a page for Resources for Food Bloggers with a few of my favorites on my header if you’re ever looking for a quick guide!

Woohoo!

So there you have it! My first income report! In case you’re curious, three months ago I was making around $20-30 a month, so it’s pretty crazy for me to look at my numbers now and see how things have grown! I must say, food blogging is the best part-time job a college student like me could have .

I hope it’s been helpful to you guys and I can’t stress enough how much I value your support and friendship. I have been going back and forth on whether or not to post income reports for fear of sounding insincere, but your reassurance and the hope that my trial and error can help all of us grow our blogs together gave me that last little push.

If you’re a reader or passerby of the site and have been on the fence about creating a food blog, I say GO FOR IT! I can’t even express how much joy blogging has brought me and what a great friends I’ve made in the blogging community. Not to mention it’s brought me fun and exciting job opportunities that I never would have possibly imagined. Who knows what the future will hold?!

If you have any questions on how to start a food blog or on anything else, feel free to shoot me an email at christineskari@gmail.com .

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links for products I love!

DIY Food Photography Table Board

April 11, 2014 by Christine Skari

Hi there everyone! Kyle here and it feels great to be back with another post on this wonderful blog! This one is about something I can actually boast some experience with: building stuff. More specifically, putting together a photography backboard (the one you’ve seen lately in Christine’s photos).

This project was really fun, and I it turned out better than I had hoped, which is always a rare (and really nice) occurrence! Just as a disclaimer, I used power tools but if you haven’t before, you should avoid using them unless you have experience working with the machines. They’re extremely dangerous and you can do all the things in this project without them with no problem. So, that being said, let’s begin!

First thing, which may seem obvious, is that you have to do is get an idea of what you want to make. Otherwise you will likely make mistakes and take way more time getting to your finished product than you would prefer. For Christine’s boards, we referenced a few boards from other sites, primarily Pinch of Yum (Christine has a girl-crush on Lindsay) and Bree Franklin. Christine showed me those boards, told me what size she wanted, and were able to work together to put together a plan for building it.

Here’s what Lindsay’s board looks like:

Once you have decided on the basics of your design, you need to get materials. Home Depot is always a great place to find anything and everything you need. It’s basically my version of going shopping at the mall. Along with that, the employees are always really helpful, so feel free to ask for their advice/help. For these types of backboards I would recommend getting thin pine planks, around 1 inch thick, since they absorb stains well and tend to have really unique abnormalities. Christine hand picked the ones she wanted, which were the most beat up and rough looking ones available. We were trying to go for a more rustic feel, so the more blemishes we could find, the more we like the piece of wood!

For the stain there will be a catalog of types and colors that you can peruse (peruse is such a great word isn’t it?). Christine and I decided on “Cordovan Brown” as our transparent stain. Transparent stains are great for this because they do not conceal the natural knots and marking of the wood in addition to giving it a richer color.

Now that you have your materials it’s time to start building!

1. Set yourself up. When I begin a project I start by getting out all of the tools I will need and set up a sort of workstation for myself. I prefer to use two sawhorses and an old piece of plywood in our backyard. Tools you will need are a saw, a tape measure, a pencil, painting materials, sandpaper, hammer, nails, and wood glue.

2. Measure, mark, and cut. I am sure you all have heard the saying “measure twice, cut once.” (Christine: “nope”).Well, do it. It really slows you down and is just a bummer when you measure incorrectly and your parts don’t fit. We made our boards about three feet long and alternated different width sizes to give the boards more uniqueness. After measuring, feel free to cut away!

***IMPORTANT: If you don’t have the proper tools, or just don’t want to cut wood yourself, you can just ask the workers at Home Depot to cut your wood for you! I enjoy working on projects and didn’t have any other work (WOO spring break!) so I gladly did it all myself =) , but it’s always easier and faster to just have the Home Depot peeps cut the wood for you!***

3. Paint paint paint. I found it best to paint each individual board before connecting them, to give the whole fake table a less uniform look. We used two coats of paint for the table this time. Once dried, try sanding down the wood a bit to give it a nice, roughed-up appearance. If you’re feeling particularly angry or are just in a thrashin’ sort of mood feel free to throw the boards around a bit or hit them with a hammer. They can take it! And it might just make them look better while working double-duty as cheap therapy, win-win right?

4. Put it all together. For the next part, connecting your planks, there are two options I would suggest. First option is to just set all your planks onto another surface and glue and nail them down. We used masonite but scrap wood, plywood, or even thick cardboard will likely work just fine. The other option would be to just not connect the boards. Instead, you can just line them up on a table and put whatever you’re going to take a picture of on top. This is a bit easier, although you will have a bundle instead of a board as your final project. The choice is yours!

The lighting here makes the board not have as rich colors, but look at all that character!

Here’s a closeup ofwhat are finished product turned out like:

Also, if you’re wondering where my helpful girlfriend was this whole time, she was off playing with our family’s chickens. As in, she was taking pictures of their butts so she could come ask me, “Guess what?!? CHICKEN BUTT”. We’re very mature.

So there you have it! A somewhat lengthy outline on how to put together a photo-board for all your photographic endeavors! Hopefully you find this post helpful and you all can soon get your own unique, nifty backgrounds!

-Kyle

Tips on Getting Freelance Jobs

April 7, 2014 by Christine Skari

Hi, friends!

Today’s post is going to be a little different than the normal life recap/recipe blogs that are the usual main characters on Apple of My Eye. Instead, I’m going to be focusing a bit on my freelance work, including how I get hired from them, what I do, and some general tips about working for sites or companies.

When I first started Apple of My Eye, I had NO idea it would get anywhere near the point it is today. It honestly astounds me at how much it has grown and I don’t know where I would be without all the wonderful people I’ve “met” and the relationships I’ve made. If you haven’t gotten my drift, I love you guys!

Anyways, when AoME was just a wee babe, I didn’t even include any recipes in my posts. I used my site as just an outlet and open diary to record my college time and to blabber about anything and everything that came to mind. Looking back, I get embarrassed reading my old posts! Even though I’ve always had a huge passion for cooking and the general act of stuffing food into my mouth, I didn’t really start getting into posting recipes until about a half year into the lifespan of the blog. It took me a few months to really start learning how to take half-decent pictures of my creations and get my first photo accepted on to Foodgawker and Tastespotting. Once that happened, I was absolutely hooked. It was both thrilling and bizarre to see people pouring on to my site and the excitement of knowing that people were actually coming to my own little corner of the web to read my writing and try out my recipes.

Anyways, flash forward to now and I’m actually being hired and paid to create and write about recipes! To be honest, it almost seems like cheating to me. I get to work from my kitchen in yoga pants and a messy bun, stealing sample bites, and practicing my food photography. Yes, it does take a lot of time and effort, and I’m probably working upwards of 60 hours a week in combination to school and studying, but I love it.

Many of you have expressed interest on freelance recipe creation/writing, so I decided to put together a few tips that I’ve picked up!

1. Improve your photography.

I cannot stress this point, hence it’s position as my #1 tip. If you’re looking to be hired for recipe creation, the main way to get noticed is to have something that sets you apart from others when it comes to food. A ton of people are capable of cooking and baking, but how many of them can take mouthwatering pictures to offer along with it? In today’s day and age, everything is image-based and, after all, we eat with out eyes first. I can’t even remember the last time I tried a recipe from a cookbook that didn’t have a delicious looking picture to go along with it!

Take these photos, for example. The one on the left is from before I started working on my photography, and the one on the right it my latest picture (taken today as a matter of fact). Isn’t there a HUGE difference? Which one would you rather choose to make if you saw them on a website or magazine?

Trust me, it makes an enormous impact on how those looking to hire view you. You become a much more competitive applicant and great photos give you more power when it comes to settling on wages. While I don’t feel comfortable disclosing the rates I’m being paid, I will say that I’ve able to name my own price and that the companies were happy to pay what I asked. That sounds completely CRAZY to a college kid like me who has not had any prior work experience other than tutoring and baby sitting! Not only am I building up a resume and titling is with the fancy label of “Freelance Recipe Creation”, but I’m getting paid much more than I would if I were just flipping burgers. The other day, I did the math and discovered that I could make a pretty decent living if I worked full-time as a freelancer. Say what?!

What I’m trying to get at, is that I owe my freelance jobs to my improved photography.

And really, it isn’t that hard. I know it seems impossible at first, but there are some amazing tools out there that can literally help you improve you camera abilities 300% in a week. My all-time favorite source on learning about food blogging comes from Lindsay at Pinch of Yum. She’s absolutely incredible and her eBook “Tasty Food Photography” (<— affiliate link!) helped me learn just about everything I know about taking pictures of my recipes and building traffic to my site. Seriously, guys, that book is a goldmine of information and takes you step-by-step through what it takes to get gorgeous pictures. It’s been a crucial tool for me and I could not recommend it more!

It seriously comes with everything you need to know:

In case you didn’t get the point, here’s another before and after picture of my food. On the left is what my photography looked like pre-Tasty Food Photography, and the right is where is was last week.

2. Join a community that connects freelancers to those looking to hire.

I think one of the most daunting parts of those looking to start freelance work lies in, well, just where to start. I got my start by creating a profile at oDesk.com, which is a site that connects a pool of freelancers that can apply to jobs posted by companies. To be honest, I got as far as creating a super short profile about myself and listing my blog as my work experience, and forgot about it. A few weeks later, though, I got an email from the site saying I had been invited by a company for an interview. Usually the freelancer applies to jobs, so I think this just emphasizes the importance of great food photography even more. They wanted me just based on the pictures they saw alone! It goes without saying that I was over-the-moon excited and I’m still working with the site now. Here’s an example of some of the content I’ve contributed to that site:

Healthy Berry Fruit Bars

As you can see, I’m basically just translating what I normally do in my blog to them! There’s a huge demand right now for healthy recipes, which is perfect for us bloggers in the “healthy living community” because we just get to build on what we’re passionate about. Not to mention that you can use your blog as part of your resume!

3. Don’t sell yourself short.

One of the few things I don’t like about oDesk is that many of the people who are signed up as freelancers work for ridiculously low rates. Don’t sell yourself short because you think you need to match their prices! Once you have your photography down, you’re a hot item and it’s best to look for a publisher who is looking for high quality work and experience rather than the cheapest rate.

4. Spiff up your blog.

A few months back, Apple of My Eye got a huge facelift that, in my opinion, makes it look much more professional while still incorporating in my style and personality. Since I use my blog as part of my resume, I need it to look the part and am so glad I hired a professional to design it. If you’re looking to give your blog a facelift, I used Tasha from My Cute Lobster and had such a great experience with her. She’s incredibly hard working and will tweak every little thing until you’re completely happy with your new look! Not to mention she’s affordable and just a lovely lady in general.

Whew, there you have it! I hope this helps you guys out a little, and please let me know if you have any questions or shoot me an email :).