After 10 Years of Food Blogging I Called it Quits - Here's Why

And why I chose to leave thousands of dollars behind

This is a long post, so it may be a better experience to read it in the Substack app, or you can listen to the embeded voiceover.

This is a story about self sabotage, of failure, of giving up, and of living a life tainted with regret.

It’s also a story about burn out, self doubt and imposter syndrome. It’s definitely not a story about success and happy endings.

But it’s also a story about forgiving oneself, of letting go, of finding faith, of finally accepting your true calling. It’s also a story of new beginnings, and a story of not giving up after you did give up. It’s a story about finding hope, and trusting yourself to begin again.

Let me be clear here, I’m not going to come out as a hero in this piece. In fact, I’m not even sure why I’m writing this piece. It may backfire big time, or it may simply paint me as the fool that I’ve been for so long.

But it may also resonate with regular people like me who went through similar circumstances, and perhaps give them a little bit of peace knowing that they aren’t alone in feeling this way. And perhaps that there is indeed light at the end of the tunnel.

Why would I talk about my failures on the internet? If I’m being honest, it’s mostly for selfish reasons such as finding closure and forgiving myself. Maybe I will complete this piece of writing, and keep it tucked in some folder on my laptop. Or maybe I’ll muster up the courage to put it out there, and perhaps shine light on a dark part of the internet that isn’t talked about often.

For years now, the internet has been selling us the possibility of having a certain lifestyle, of a freedom to live the way we want to. Using our passions to make money. However, that’s where things start to get murky. Are we really living the way we want, or are we at the mercy of the algorithm gods? Are we just mere puppets with our strings being pulled by the social media giants? Have we just become content creating machines?

Millions of people around the globe have achieved it. People stuck in 9 to 5 day jobs dream of moving to this type of career. It’s like the shiny object that everyone wants to possess.

But I’m here to tell you about the dark part of this internet that we scroll past, google, and stream every single day. It seems innocent enough, watching people cook, entertain, and inform us. It’s all so inspiring right? But no one knows what goes on behind the scenes. No one really understands the pressure that comes with having an online career.

You see, I’m somebody who has seen both sides of the coin, and I want to talk about the struggles that online creators go through. I need to talk about it, so perhaps I can also find some peace.

But as with all stories, we must start at the beginning.

The Bright Beginning

I founded my food blog in the year 2015, after having spent months researching on how to run a food blog. I chose a catchy little name (I Knead to Eat), made a logo in Canva, and set up a wordpress site with Bluehost.

It was all very exciting. I didn’t think I could make actual money, I was just doing this for fun. If I made money it would be good, but if I didn’t I’d just keep my blog as a passion project.

Thanks to big platforms like Buzzfeed and Pinterest, I was able to gain a decent amount of traffic to my blog and get my blog monetized within a few months. This was a big deal, because you had to have a certain threshold for traffic to be accepted with the big ad agencies.

It wasn’t a lot of money at first, but it felt like a big achievement. I was making money by doing what I liked, writing and cooking. That was the dream right? Doing something I loved, and earning money? The blog was something I had made out of scratch, and countless people were visiting it. People wanted to read my blog posts, people were trying my recipes. People were reaching out to me saying amazing things about my blog.

But food blogging wasn’t just about cooking and posting recipes on the internet. It was also about the countless other jobs that go with running a food blog. Marketing, taking aesthetic photos of the recipes, the backend technology, using recipe cards, having the right plugins and hosting plan to run your blog smoothly. On the surface, it seemed very simple but if you looked at the backend of it all, you’d see how much more effort went into it.

Even now when I tell people it was hard work, they just smile and nod but I know they don’t believe me. That hurts, if I’m being honest.

After all how hard could it be to make a recipe, and snapping a few pictures right? Right. Cooking on the internet. That’s not a real career. That’s something you just do for fun, and also earn money on the side. Easy money. But I want to tell you that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

When I started blogging, the food blogging industry was already comprised of millions of food blogs competing for readers. However, not many people knew that blogs could be monetized (at least in my circle). Then the news started spreading like wildfire and everyone wanted to be a food blogger. It didn’t help that it was also one of the most lucrative niche in the blogging industry.

There were also the constant changes taking place in the industry, with you being required to pivot every time a change was being made. A couple of years into my blog, I could see that Pinterest was not bringing as much traffic as it used to, so it was time to pivot and find other avenues of traffic. And so began the trap of pivoting every time something changed.

The Honey Trap of Numbers

Numbers, numbers, numbers. The obsession with seeing high numbers on my Google Analytics was addictive. As readers from Pinterest were reducing, I started looking for other sources of traffic.

I needed that hit of dopamine from elsewehere.

Enter Google search. In retrospect, I think this is where things started going downhill for me. I was already struggling with the mental load of being a stay at home mom to two kids, and then I fell into the honey trap of organic traffic.

All you had to do was optimize (aka SEO) your website in a number of ways, make it user friendly, don’t use too many ads, have a recipe card to get your recipes indexed, make sure the website loaded in the blink of an eye, use the right keywords but not too many, optimize your posts to how the algorithm demanded etc. The list was never-ending, and the conditions of showing up on Google were always changing with the light of speed.

Other food blogs were getting millions of readers through showing up on Google search results. Millions of readers meant lots and lots of fame, and money of course. It all looked so glittery. And it was almost in my reach. Almost. I just had to work a little more, and I’d get there. After all, my food blog was already gaining over a 100,000 views per month and I was making plenty of money.

The algorithm was god, and you had to constantly make offerings in the form of adapting the changes they threw at you. It was like having a narcissistic partner who was pleased with you one day, and the next day would rip away the ground from beneath your feet in a split second because you weren’t bringing in the numbers.

Oh how many bloggers did I witness from having sky high numbers one day, and the next they had crashed to the ground, left to pick up what remained. I watched them, and feared that any moment it would be me and my blog next.

Hustle Culture

Hustle was the new word in town, but hustle meant I had to give up any semblance of work life balance. I was trying to have it all, but we all know that you truly can never have it all.

I wasn’t sleeping because I had a baby, I was waking up super early to get my older daughter ready for school. I didn’t even have time to brush my hair, let alone run a website all on my own.

I had to cook, take pictures, write recipes in little pockets of time, and also keep up with changing trends. Video was now taking over and in order to keep up you had to make videos too, but that was another learning curve that I didn’t want to climb. I was living in a tiny apartment, and setting up a studio and then taking it down everytime I had to shoot was so overwhelming along with raising two kids.

I was drowning, suffocating and suffering trying to do it all. I tried to outsource some of the work, but perhaps I was only a good writer and not a good business person at all.

Now that I look back, I could have taken different steps, but looking back turns one into stone. And I did turn to stone for awhile, until I was ready to process what I had done and move forward.

Are you judging me? It’s okay, you can judge me. I also judged myself for a long time.

Gaining organic traffic was difficult because there were millions of people fighting for the coveted first position on a google search results page. If you were the ruling queen of Mac n Cheese on google, for example, you were basically getting millions of hits to that one page. But a few positions down and no one would even know you.

The dream was to get a lot of blog posts on the first three positions on Google search results. But the thing is, even if you did manage to achieve that by using all the best practices required by google, there were countless other bloggers trying to topple you over for these positions. It was the culinary version of the Games of Thrones.

And don’t get me started on the whole business of keywords. You see one of the things you needed to do to appear on google search results was to use the right keywords. There were online tools to find keywords that could get you to the top of google search results. It was a literal battle of words, and if you used the right ones you could topple off the reigning results and take your own place.

Best practices dictated that you posted new recipes at least 3-4 times every week. Now these weren’t recipes that you simply posted. They had to be well researched recipes, with step by step photos, instructions, and lots of details. Video was a bonus, and getting more and more important each day. Each post took 10-12 hours to get ready. Maybe even more.

All of this work required you to have a million hours in a day, and if you have kids that’s not possible. You had to absolutely let go of the concept of work life balance to make it to the top.

But I was a stay at home mom. I already had a full time job, looking after my children. I was also struggling with mom guilt in a big way. I was also really bad at multitasking.

In between work and life, I made the choice of choosing life most of the time. And so my blog suffered. I didn’t want to be a bad mom, and the stress of the blog was making me into one.

Successful food bloggers were publishing several new recipes a week, while I could barely post two recipes in a week. But they also had large teams helping them push out so much content. I was unable to be consistent, due to a number of reasons. I couldn’t turn myself into a content churning machine, and still live a normal life.

I was drowning, being pulled in all kinds of directions. And I’m ashamed to admit that I succumbed to the pressure. But if I’m being honest, I did have the privilege to be able to let things go because my blog wasn’t our primary household income. Would I have worked harder if it meant that we wouldn’t be able to put food on the table? Certainly. Would I have lost my sanity in the process? Probably.

I just wanted it all to end. I didn’t want to make recipes anymore to post on the internet. I wanted to cook for myself, for my family without worrying about whether Google would like these recipes or not.

I wanted to make meals where I could sit down after cooking and eat, instead of setting up a makeshift studio to take aesthetically pleasing pictures of food so people on the internet would want to make these recipes. I certainly didn’t want to do a million dishes a day.

Letting Go

Eventually there came a time when I stopped blogging. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but I took a break and then never went back.

People would ask me about my blog, and I would smile and nod, saying it was going fine but inside my chest my heart would be pounding and I’d be filled with guilt and shame. Could they see through my lies?

To be fair my blog was still doing pretty okay because of the years of hard work I’d put in. It was still bringing in passive income. But who knew for how long that would last? I was so disappointed with myself for quitting when my blog had so much potential.

I was so ashamed to admit that I had given up. It took me a long time to admit this to myself too. Because in my eyes I could have done so much more to keep my blog growing, but it would have been at a great cost.

So I paid the price of giving up. For two years, I blamed myself, tried to force myself to go back to posting. But I was tired. I was so, so tired. The blog was no longer fulfilling, it was all about pleasing the algorithm gods, and I didn’t want to worship them anymore in return for traffic.

New Beginnings

In all honesty, for me food blogging was an outlet for writing creatively. And in the beginning it was, but then it became a lot about meeting the algorithm requirements, and all of a sudden all the blog posts began to look the same to me.

The internet was now full of cookie cutter recipes. Everyone was making the cheesiest mac ‘n’ cheese, outrageous chocolate desserts, and recreations of famous foods. All the recipes, the posts, even the formattting was the same. The keywords were also all the same. Everyone was just copying each other, and there was no space for uniqueness left. Nothing was authentic anymore.

It was just a numbers game, and climbing the rope until you reached the top. It was a race of who could do it faster, and better. But even if you did reach the top, the algorithm could push you off the cliff in a moments notice. If not the algorithm, it could be another blogger cutting the rope, so you would plunge to your analytics death in an instant.

So I quit. And then for the next two years, I didn’t do anything. Except blame myself.

I was so immersed in self hatred and regret. I had had a real chance to make it big. I was already earning thousands of dollars, I just needed to put my head down and keep playing the algorithm game, and produce quality content. In a couple of years or so, I would have made it to a six figure income. But I just couldn’t do it. It was like I was frozen in time, and couldn’t make the right moves anymore. I was burnt out to the max. Blackened, charred, beyond saving. I was a recipe blogger, but I had messed up the recipe for success big time.

I remember sitting in my living room, and crying my eyes out. What had I done? How could I have been so stupid? But after months of crying, I was eventually all cried out.

Then I began healing myself, and I learned to give myself grace. I’m still raw from my experience, but this time I’m armed with a lot of learning from my past mistakes.

I’m back on the Internet, but with a different mindset this time around. I want to write from the heart, and see where it takes me. I want to write books. I want to write down all the stories that live inside me.

If this takes me to success, that would be the dream. But if this leads me to nowhere, I’ll accept it as my destiny. One thing I won’t do this time around is to sit on the roller coaster of numbers, or try to make it big. This time around, it will be for me first and foremost, and not for the algorithm gods.

So here’s to new beginnings, and starting over after failure.

Wishing you a wonderful day.

Wajeeha 🖤