Elise Bauer
Elise Bauer is the author of Publisher of Simply Recipes, an award winning food blog that reaches tens of thousands of readers every day.
1. Tell us a little about yourself and your blog?
A jack of all trades, master of none, I’ve always been interested in more things than I could possibly pursue. I’m in my 40s, worked for almost 20 years in high tech in the Bay Area, including several years with Apple. After the dot-com crash of 2001 I moved back to my hometown of Sacramento. My parents live here and I spend many of my days hanging out with them, cooking and learning from them. Simply Recipes grew out of a desire to preserve my family’s recipes and especially my mother’s wisdom in the kitchen. Simply Recipes has grown substantially since I started it almost 5 years ago, it now reaches tens of thousands of people every day (60-80K at the moment). The focus is on showing people how to cook delicious dishes from scratch with whole food ingredients.
2. How did you get your start in blogging?
I had had a website for 7 years already, a website in which I hand coded every single page. It was 2003. I had a flu that dragged on for months. A friend of mine sent me a one word email, the word was “blog”. I looked into it, downloaded Movable Type, saw that it would be a much easier way to put content on to my website, and since I had nothing better to do, taught myself the software and started blogging.
3. Your blog has a very high RSS reader base. How did you get so many RSS feed readers?
Google picked my feed early on to showcase with their iGoogle or Personalized Google service, when it was in beta. This was way before any of the big recipe sites had RSS feeds, so mine was the only recipe focused site with a feed they could use. Simply Recipes was promoted right next to People magazine. Sometimes it really helps to get in to something early. I also promote the heck out of my feed. Especially the feed through email subscription service. I try to make signing up for my feed as easy and painless as possible.
4. Why do you host your popular recipes blog at Elise.com/recipes instead of on its own domain?
I wasn’t able to purchase the domain name simplyrecipes.com until elise.com/recipes was already well established. At this point my traffic is so reliant on traffic coming in from searches resulting from having a high Google rank I am afraid to move it to simplyrecipes.com. Could potentially lose the benefit of thousands of inbound links. I have a friend at Google who tells me not to move the domain unless it is absolutely necessary, because they can’t guarantee what would happen to my placement in the search results.
5. How do you monetize your traffic?
Though ads primarily (BlogHer, Adsense), and some affiliate revenue from Amazon.com.
6. Where do you get your content from? How do you find so many recipes?
We grow a lot of our own food, and are always experimenting, so some of the recipes we just make up. Others are old family recipes. Some are adapted from magazines, newspapers and cookbooks.
7. What were the major advantages of being named one of TIME Magazine’s 50 Coolest Websites of 2006 and how did it change the amount of traffic your blog received?
The affect on traffic was miniscule. It did however give the site more credibility, leading to other press like the Boston Globe and the Wall St. Journal. Actually, I think Simply Recipes was more like an honorable mention in the category. Delicious Days was the Cool food website, and it truly is very cool.
8. Why do you use the MovableType blogging platform? How is it better than the competition (Wordpress, blogger, etc.)?
I use Movable Type because that is what I started with, it has served me well and I have seen no need to move. There is a huge learning curve associated with these sophisticated platforms (MT, WP, EE); moving from one to another is non-trivial. Everything I want to do with my site I can do with Movable Type. As far as how it is better, well I think MT is much more powerful than Blogger; there are so many more possibilities when you are hosting the software yourself and can edit the code. As far as Wordpress, I don’t really know because I don’t use WP. I have heard that MT is better for high traffic sites because it produces mostly static html pages which are less of a load on your server than the dynamic PHP pages that WP serves up.
9. What is the number one piece of advice you have for a blogger starting out?
Write about something you love, something you truly care about, something that you can see staying interested in every day. If you do this, blogging will be a lot of work, but also a ton of fun, and you’ll meet wonderful people who care about the same things you care about. The enthusiasm you have for your subject will carry through to your writing and your blog will be alive and interesting. If you aren’t truly into what you are writing about, well, it will soon feel like a job, a demanding job with practically no pay, you’ll lose interest and your blog will suffer a slow demise into obscurity. I’ve done both. Second piece of advice: invest in a DSLR camera and learn how to use it.
