Blog tour – about writing blog posts

While in Amsterdam -a few weeks back- I met up with Simone from Simone’s Kitchen, Maura from Yellow Lemon Tree and a few others. It was great meeting them in real live after knowing each other on social media for so long. Well, in case of Maura that is because I already followed one of Simone’s photography workshops.

Maura is a super nice girl who just started writing a second blog with Suus from Food Bandits. They called it The (healthy) Breakfast Club and the name says it all,they have created a beautiful corner on the world wide web to serve you some delicious and amazingly good looking breakfast recipes!

Last week my new friend Maura emailed me to tell me that they were part of a ‘blog tour‘ and that thay wanted to pass it on to me. How nice of them!
For this blog tour I have to answer four questions, all about writing.

How fun! Because to be honest that’s the hardest part for me, working on photography is way easier for me.

Here they are:

What am I working on?
For a long time now I’m working on rebranding my blog. I designed a new logo and I just started working on sketches for a new website. I’m not giving it enough attention as I should and that bothers me. We moved to LA a little over a year ago and this first half of 2014 we have a lot of people (family and friends) coming over so that’s a small disturbance of our daily life. To be honest I use that as an excuse to not work on the rebranding, because if I really wanted to,  I can work harder; like spending my evenings behind the computer instead of sitting on the couch to watch tv.

And I still spend a lot of time working on recipes, even though I don’t get paid for it, I still see it as my ‘job’. I try to post two recipes a week on this blog and one recipe a week on my Dutch blog www.inmyredkitchen.nl
I initially wanted them to be both different websites but lately I’m experimenting with translating my recipes so I post them on both websites.
Running a blog is always a work in progress 😉

Besides all this I’m thinking (and talking) about setting up a website to taking the Dutch ‘Foodblogswap’ a level higher and more professional. A little over a year ago some Dutch food bloggers started a monthly creative exchange between Dutch food blogs and I feel now is the time to develop that further.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I’m still finding that out 😉 What’s my niche, what makes my blog special?
What gives my store a little extra is that I’m from the Netherlands and now live in LA. My Dutch readers like my stories about living in LA and they like my ‘Food Truck Tuesday’ series. I get good comments on my blogposts were I talk about American supermarkets or driving skills for example. That gives me confidence to keep on writing about that.
I’m still finding out how to brand my English blog, what recipes work best and what stories do my English followers want to read? It’s still a small blog so that’s why I am also working on rebranding it, I want to give it a more professional look!
Also English isn’t my mother language so I hope that it isn’t bothering to others and I definitely hope that’s not the reason to stop reading my blog posts.

Why do I write what I do?
I just want to share my recipes. Of course it would be easier to just post a photo and the recipe but somewhere deep inside I want to share my life and my stories with other. But writing itself and writing about food is also the hardest part for me, I really like writing recipes, cooking, taking photo’s and edit them but writing a blog post is a way different thing.
I like to challenge myself so I try to write a nice and easy-to-read blog post with every recipe.
I just hope to motive others to cook real food and to inspire them.

How does your writing process work?
During my weekly hike, or driving the car around town or in the shower most of the time I ‘write’ the blog post in my head. A few days before I publish the blog post I have the recipe and photos ready, all well organized in folders on my computer.
If I’m ready to write the story down than I sit behind the computer and just start. I don’t make notes and I certainly don’t have an order in which I will write it down. I just do it. But sometimes I don’t have an accompaning story ready in my head so then I read some other blogs to get my into the mood of storytelling 🙂
It definitely helps that I decided to translate my posts from now on so that I don’t need to come up with another story. More time do develop new recipes! (or work on rebranding 😉 )

Pass it on!!

Since this blog tour focus on the writing part I want to pass it on to Gina from So… Let’s Hang Out. How fun is that name?! I ‘met’ Gina on Instagram, a while ago. I’d just moved to LA and I don’t know how but somehow she responded on my pic of a Dutch breakfast: an open faced sandwich with ‘hagelslag’ (chocolate sprinkles). Her husband is Dutch, how nice! I started following her blog and her Facebook page. She is só funny, you should definitely follow her on FB because she posts the cutest pictures and illustrations accompanied by the most amusing texts. Her blog posts always crack me up!

I also want to pass it on to my friend Maryanne from The Little Epicurean because I know, like me, she also has a hard time to write blog posts, so this is a heads up. I love Maryanne’s recipes and photography and this past year she also became a good ‘irl’ friend of me 🙂 And even though she has a hard time writing I always like to read her blog posts!
ps: Maryanne already let me know that she wanted to participate in this blog tour but that she already had her blog posts lined up for this month because of a vacation but I still wanted to mention her 🙂