It’s finally here! The very first Annual Report for Served With Rice, with hopefully many more to come. Here is my experience of starting a food blog, the challenges I encountered, the revenue and costs, and some lessons learned and words of advice for those of you who may be looking to do the same. If you want to read more about the nuts and bolts of how I run this blog, don’t forget to check out the behind the scenes tour as well!

The Origin story

November of 2023 marks the first anniversary of Served With Rice. Hopefully, there are many more anniversaries to come. I’d like to take a moment to reflect on my journey so far, and hopefully provide some insights for those of you who are also interested in starting your own blog.

The idea to start Served With Rice began in 2021, as I started to get more and more questions about my meal prepped lunches at work. I wondered if it would be easier to just write my recipes up and give everyone a copy instead of having to repeat myself a dozen times every week. It’s funny how now when SWR went public, I chose to keep it a secret from most of the people I know. It’s kind of exciting to have a secret identity.

I struggled a bit at first to find a good name for the blog. I wanted anonymity, so it was definitely not going to be [my name]’s kitchen or something revealing like that. I finally settled on Served With Rice since I have rice 80+% of the time, so it only made sense. A quick check on a domain registry showed that it was still available, so I decided to go ahead with the name.

But I dared not pull the trigger yet. I was working 70-80 hour weeks with all-nighters at the time, and it was the best I could do to cook once a week. There was simply no way I could keep up a regular publishing schedule. But I took photos, kept them in a hard drive, made a Gmail account and bided my time.

Things started to slow down by the start of 2022, and I spent my spare time writing up blog posts to go with the photos, all while cataloging the new meal preps I made. I had an idea at the time that I needed to bank up enough posts for a year of weekly updates in order to provide a runway to launch the blog with.

Some of these ended up being published (such as the couple ones above) but truth be told, most of them ended up being unusable because I had no idea how to take a proper food photo. Most of the shots were atrocious – out of focus, poorly lit, or badly composed. But it did get me into the habit of writing, and the general structure of the posts were developed during this period.

Taking the plunge

Just as life was starting to get easy, I broke my ankle in mid-2022. Being stuck in bed for more than a month, I spent a lot of time going through the excellent articles on personal finance over at Financial Samurai (Hi Sam, love your work). I was already a big fan of the blog for more than a year, but his guide to starting your own website really caught my eye. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, as the idea has already been in my mind for so long.

It had been months since I last checked to see if the domain name I wanted was still available. I let out a sigh of relief when I found out it was still there for the taking! If I had been less lucky, someone else might have gotten the drop on me and yanked this great blog name from under my nose.

So, with a few days left before I returned to work, I registered for the domain name and got started. I waded through the WordPress interface to set up a homepage, an About page, and a Contact form. One of my earliest struggles was getting rid of this generic default placeholder profile that my WordPress theme inserted everywhere.

This is not me. This is about as far as you can get from a representation of me.

It took me weeks of fiddling around to get rid of her. I suspect Jennifer still lurks in some dark, neglected corner of this website. Let me know where she’s hiding, so I can purge her from existence once and for all.

Going Live, and Growing the Site

Now, just having a website up and running wasn’t enough for me. It would be weird if people came and found nothing but the homepage, right? So I got to work putting up a couple recipes from the stockpile.

The website finally went live on my birthday. A little gift to myself. A Reddit account, Facebook page, Instagram profile and Pinterest soon followed. I gradually settled into a rhythm of writing posts while on the train. Thursday became publishing night, as it fit my work week best. As I published recipes on the site, I would promote the post on social media.

Say hi if you bump into me!

The Facebook page broke through 1000 followers pretty soon, it must have only taken a month or two. It took much longer for my instagram account to break 1000, and it took until early 2023 to get there. What made a big difference was hashtags – once I started adding them, I got noticeably more traffic and engagement on my social media posts. It didn’t translate very well into website views however, and I’m still struggling to find out the formula for success on Pinterest.

Since mid-2023 I’ve been leaving Instagram and Facebook on the back burner while I focused on Reddit and Foodyub, and the follower count has stagnated as a result (which is the best I can do, I only have so much spare time). From my impression, it seems like it’s easier to get a lot of viewers come in through Facebook without any effort beyond publishing a post, but once you convince a viewer to come in with a well-written comment or post on Reddit they stick around for longer.

Contact forms and Comments spam

I’ve also been sending newsletters and collecting emails since mid-2023, and it surprised me how responsive my newsletter friends are! I might announce a new post in the morning, and get a steady trickle of views by noon. Newsletter friends may be a small cadre, but they’re your biggest fans. I highly recommend starting a newsletter if you have a blog. If you’re one of my newsletter friends, thanks for coming, love you loads! If not, consider becoming one:

There’s a surprising number of spam coming through my Contacts page and comments. Most of them are probably legitimate businesses using bots to sell services like making instructional videos or text-to-voice conversions for my posts. Sometimes it’s malicious, like non-specific but flattering comments with suspicious backlinks hidden in the text.

I mean, it’s flattering to be called a “webmaster” but c’mon.

And then there’s this magnificent example:

Whether this is or isn’t your thing, I make no judgments. You do you. This is a humble food blog and nothing else.

Crunching the numbers

I paid Bluehost about USD$122 to put up a website for a year, on 20 September 2023. That cost included a couple of add-on services that seemed like a good idea at the time (you’ll hear more about this later – ominous foreshadowing).

It took me a month or two of intermittent effort to finally set up Google Adsense. First they ask you for your personal information and bank account, then they give you some code to paste into the back end of your website (there are WordPress plugins to help you with this). Next they sent me a letter with a verification code two I can prove that I really live where I say I live. Finally they wired me a trivial bit of money into my bank account, and I had to tell them how much I received to prove that the bank account is really mine.

The site was officially monetised on 10 February 2023. Google Adsense pays you every month, or for every USD$100 of ad revenue if you make less than that per month. As for myself, as of 13 September 2023, my earnings totalled …

About USD$22.70, for a grand loss of about USD$99.50. Rats. Now, given that I started paying for the blog 7 months before I started running ads, I could extrapolate the revenue and say that I should be generating USD$38.90 a year and only losing USD$83.30 per annum. But that is a small consolation.

Oh well. I don’t expect to profit from this blog, and I can afford to pay to keep it up and running. All I hope for is that SWR grows enough to pay its own rent, and even that seems very difficult now with the limited time I can afford to give this website. But one can hope, and one can dream. Time will tell.

Lessons learned from a year of blogging 

They say hindsight is 20/20, and I can’t agree more. Some things you just have to learn the hard way. Here’s what I wish I knew when I first started out.

Start early, and learn as you go.

I’ve read this piece of advice so many times on other guides to starting a blog, and I didn’t believe it until I was in the same situation myself. There are so many little things you will find out when actually running a blog that will render your earlier plans moot.

As I wrote more and more posts, my voice and my writing style evolved. The format of my posts also changed quite significantly from my original conceptions, and I ended up having to go back and re-format dozens of pages. Which is a very unpleasant experience on slow Wi-Fi.

You’re just gonna have to struggle through the teething problems in the first 10 or 20 posts. Save the grind for once you work out what you want your content to look like, to save yourself a lot of retrofitting. For example, it took me about 30 posts to come up with the time-to-effort heat map rating system for recipes. It has since become a feature of every post – like to think is somewhat of a signature for this site. But boy was it tedious going back to add it back to each page.

My style has shifted a bit since I started blogging. Let’s compare my first ever post, my miso glazed salmon (still one of my favourites) with my more recent barbecue sauce marinated chicken thighs. They’re very similar recipes in that they both involve roasting a marinated protein in the oven while you cook your vegetables, all while the rice cooker is working in the background.

If you skip to the recipe using the little menu under the tagline (another new feature, by the way), you’ll see the difference. In the old blog, I tried to write a recipe that you can scale to your own needs. I told you how much salmon you need per portion, and left the rest as an exercise for the reader. In the newer post, I’ve switched to simply documenting the meal prep process I went through and let you decide how to make your own adjustments.

I still try to present the food in a way that gives you choice and flexibility in how you want to approach the prep. But with the newer way of doing things, it’s both less work for me and easier for you to replicate exactly what I did in your own kitchen. But why would you want to do that? Take inspiration here, and go create your own masterpieces.

Views (and therefore ad revenue) is very unpredictable

There’s a very noticeable trend in the view count on my page. I used to only get views after some activity on social media. In the past couple of months I haven’t been as proactive as I had been, but I am still getting a comparable number of views. With time, more and more traffic trickles in as you leave links here and there for people to find me.

But then there are sudden spikes and surges that surprise me, like the Onsen Tamago saga. Let’s look at this graph showing the number of views I got per month, in the past year.

Look at that spike in February! What’s going on? Enhance.

Woah. That one spike in traffic really dwarfs everything else by comparison. Fortunately, WordPress gives you some information on where your views are coming from. Let’s look at the breakdown of the activity that day.

The number of referrers don’t add up to the total amount of views, because somehow WordPress can’t capture a lot of the referrer data. But if we assume the data presented is roughly representative of what is actually going on, then I can make a guess about where the traffic is coming from.

And here’s where it all started. I replied to a Reddit post with a link to the page. I arrived to the thread early before the original post exploded, and my comment got a lot of attention because of that.

It was unfortunate timing that the recipe exploded when it did, because the post still needed a lot of polishing. My grammar was off, the layout wasn’t very good, I didn’t have any links to any of my other posts, and my newsletter sign up box wasn’t up yet. I’m still kicking myself over all the missed opportunities, but I’m glad for the attention and exposure. Hopefully some of the folks from the Onsen Tamago episode will keep coming back (if you’re one of them, hi! And thank you.)

I’m sure you have heard other full time influencers describe something similar. Success in social media is incidental, and you never know when you’ll be picked up. But if you keep doing what you do and do that thing well, you’ll increase your chances of success when the time comes.

Check, check and check what you’re paying for

After enjoying a year of relatively affordable hosting, my credit card was hit with an auto-debit for the following year’s subscriptions … for a grand total of USD$421, or more than triple the cost for the first year.

Turns out, I mindlessly subscribed to a couple of add-on services when I signed up to host on Bluehost. While it didn’t cost that much for the first year, the prices got jacked up on renewal. Oh well, I have nobody to blame but my own complacency for falling for the old bait and switch. I would have done the same if I was on the other side of the table. Don’t hate the player, and all that.

All this, plus an SSL which does seems like an actual good idea

Does a young blog that barely gets any traffic really need all that? Probably not. What’s done is done, but you can be bloody sure I am going to think very hard about whether or not to continue each subscription, well before the auto-renewal next year.

Their house, their rules

A word of caution when you self-promote on forums and groups: make absolutely sure that you only do so in places that allow you to, and do it in ways that comply with their rules. Remember that you are a guest in someone else’s house, and you should be respectful.

I’ve gotten myself banned from some places that would have been very fertile ground for self-advertising by pushing boundaries too far, and I still regret both my moral failing and the loss of viewership from that to this day.

Going forward

After a year of blogging, here are some things I want to do in the second year. I’m afraid I can’t make any promises, but these are the directions I hope to take SWR in the future.

Turning off autoads

Google lets you decide if you want to choose where the ads appear, or if Google chooses for you to maximise revenue. Low effort and max revenue sounds good, so I went with auto-ads. I’m regretting that now, because the ads are sometimes so intrusive that it really interferes with the user experience.

I’m too ashamed of the ad placement to show my website to my grandma, and that’s a real shame. One of these days, when I have a few vacation days, I really want to really get a handle on the ad situation. Here’s to hoping that I get SWR to pass the Grandma test in 2023/24.

Advertising

I used to think that I shouldn’t spend money on the site until it can pay for itself. But I’m increasingly wondering if one has to spend money to make money. In particular, I’ve heard good things about low-budget advertising on Facebook. 

Based on my experience with self-promotion on that platform, it does seem that the audience in that crowd is easier to attract (but harder to keep). So maybe I will plan a small ad campaign with a small amount of money and see how it goes.

Part of my change of heart is because SWR is really shaping up to become something I’m proud to show off. I think I have something to add to the discussion on macro-friendly meal prepping, and I’ve built up enough content to provide a proper viewing experience.

Countering the spam

It might be funny to read the occasional misspelled spam while I clear out the trash now, but if the viewership on SWR grows by any amount it is bound to attract the attention of even more bots. 

Also, as I get more traffic hopefully I will get more real comments from real people. It’d be even more of a chore if I had to sort out the spam from the real discussions if the bots keep botting.

Maybe I need to be more restrictive about who gets to comment. I might have to look up ways to set up captchas or some other method. Like with my other ideas here, a lot of the site development will have to await vacation weeks when I can finally get more breathing room than just catching up on chores on weekends.

E-Books

The more recipe posts I write, the more I realise there are many patterns to my cooking. These patterns are habits that I accumulated over a decade of trial and error, and they all help my cooking one way or another.

I’ve been thinking of a higher-order form of content than the usual recipe posts to organise these ideas. There are plans for a Chicken and Rice Mega Page (since like, half of all my recipes are some form of chicken and rice), a Rice Bowl Choose Your Own Adventure, and tier lists for things like effort-saving kitchen appliances or most meal-prep friendly vegetables.

Part of that daydreaming is the possibility of SWR E-books appearing somewhere down the line. The E-books could be for pragmatic tips like the ones I just mentioned. Or, I might write E-books on some of the recurring concepts you might have seen me touch upon in my recipe posts like Last Things First, managing parallel heat sources and other more theoretical approaches to the spirit of meal prep.

Of course, with the topic of E-books comes the discussion on how much money to charge for them. Like I’ve said before, Served With Rice is about the food first and the money third (after the fun I have running the website). It doesn’t seem fair to charge a very high price for a digital thing that costs nothing for me to replicate, and to be honest I’m not sure how valuable of an E-book I can write. What I think I’ll end up doing is to let the buyer decide the price, but let’s cross that bridge when we get there.

A Message to Future SWR

If you stuck around until the very end, thanks a lot! This turned out to be much more long and rambling than I intended it to be. Join the newsletter and keep in touch. I’d love to see you around here again. And if you want to read more about the nuts and bolts of how I run this blog, go check out the behind the scenes tour.

This concludes the first ever annual report for www.servedwithrice.com. May it serve as a snapshot of my thoughts in the present moment, be a point of reference for me to see my growth, and act as a reminder for me to stop and reflect on what I’m doing at least once a year.

Cheers!

SWR

19/11/2023

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