INTRODUCTION: Being able to follow your passion and devote your days to doing things you love is something that many people only dream about. Blogger and food enthusiast Lindsay Ostrom spends her days at Pinch Of Yum, a popular cooking blog that includes recipes, photos, and stories of her life in Minnesota. We asked her about her move to full-time blogging.

7SR: Making the leap to full-time blogging is a difficult decision for many people. You were blogging on a part-time basis while also teaching children in the United States and the Philippines, a job that you enjoyed. What prompted you to “go pro” as a blogger?

At a certain point I realized that I wasn’t able to fully commit to either job because I was stretching myself so thin between both roles. I wasn’t doing the kids any favors by being distracted as a teacher, and I wasn’t doing my readers or my business any favors by being totally stressed out and scrambling in my content creation. It was a really hard decision, but ultimately I felt like this opportunity that I had to be my own boss and attempt to develop a business online was so unique and rare that I couldn’t just let that pass without giving it 110%.

7SR: Some of the e-books that are available in the 7 Speed Reading online library deal with cooking and food, and many people are interested in the topic. Was cooking always something that you enjoyed? What is the first dish you remember cooking?

I always used to love making cookies when I was growing up – baking things on the weekends, with my mom or with my friends. But the first “real” recipes that I made were super easy and basic. I loved making pasta with lots of vegetables and just sauces from a jar. I also loved curry, but I would always use a pre-made sauce base rather than making anything from scratch. My love of cooking and my knowledge about it has been something that has built slowly over several years.

7SR: Now that you are blogging for a living, do you find that you have more time to cook? Or do you spend more time writing about what you’re cooking than actually making those dishes?

The funny thing is that there are so many recipes I LOVE, but so few recipes that I actually get to make more than two or three times. I have a few standby recipes that have been made countless times over the years, but with 700 recipes on the site, there just isn’t time to make old favorites as often as I would like. I’m almost always making something new when I’m cooking.

7SR: Your husband Bjork is part of the business, and in his July post on your business growth he says something very important: “[I]f you’re committed to the long term, if you keep your head down and do the work on a consistent basis, then one day you’ll look up and be amazed at how far you’ve come.” What other advice do you have for people who are thinking about taking the chance on creating a full-time business centered on blogging?

The hard thing, I think, is when you approach blogging as a “get rich quick” type of endeavor. You’d be amazed how many emails we get every single day from people saying they want to start a blog for the sole purpose of earning money while working from home. That’s to be expected, but in my opinion, that’s sort of a backwards approach to blogging or building a following online. You need to really love what you’re doing because inevitably there will be period of time when you are building it and you’re not earning any money from it. And if you hate it, or if you have an expectation that this is all about the money, it’s very likely that you’re going to fizzle out when you realize that it’s not an overnight thing. The best case scenario in my mind is to do something that you really enjoy, whether that be creating content for Instagram, or recording videos, or publishing blog posts, and as it builds, and as you stay committed to improving it, THEN you can think about how to best build it into an income.

7SR: You’ve also written e-books on food photography and nutrition, cauliflower recipes and recipes for eating well every day. How much of your time is spent on reading things that other people have written?

Very little, to be honest. I love to read, but I don’t take in very much content from other bloggers because sometimes I find that it messes with my creative process. I like to draw inspiration from sources that are outside the food blogging realm – whether that be a different medium like a print cookbook or content completely unrelated to food or even just looking at really stunning food photography from around the world on Instagram.

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