11 Years Blogging!

SweetPhi.com has been my little corner of the internet where I share recipes, fun finds and motherhood content, and today marks 11 years blogging! THANK YOU to you, dear reader, for being here and engaging with my content (I truly appreciate every comment, like, follow, share and email I receive) and am more than honored to find a place in your kitchen when you make one of my recipes. Around this time of year I always share a look at behind the scenes and share reflections. This year, whoa. There’s a lot from the past year.

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Last year I shared more of a ‘behind the business’ in my annual anniversary post when I shared the logo and business timeline/history. I turned something that started as a hobby/passion project and turned it into a business (which became more of a hustle than I wanted). With that came everything that goes along with running and trying to grow a small business. It’s all you. When things go wrong, you have to figure it out by yourself. Then the landscape of the content creation world and blogging world changed a lot, very quickly, and not in a way I was loving as much anymore.

With the new requirements for getting your content seen, you’d have to produce a lot of content, in a certain way, and be on every platform all the time, and each platform has certain rules and algorithms (blog/web, Newsletter, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, Youtube). It felt like more more more needed to be done, like feeding a never satisfied content beast.

Cooking a recipe (now with my kids under foot, oh, not to mention I had a new baby, so 4 kids under 5) on the weekend and sharing it when I had a moment became a content calendar with recipes planned out, tested, seo researched, photographed, video creation for the recipe, and then sharing on all the platforms, and and and, and this was with each new post, and I had a schedule where there’d be a NEW blog post EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. It became exhausting and just wasn’t working or sustainable for me, and I’m sure a big part of it was feelings of burn out and like my creativity was zapped – when you consider it a big win to just get dinner on the table, something, anything – it’s hard to come up with new recipes worthy of being shared, 7 days a week.

All of this was self inflicted pressure that I was putting on myself. That and thinking about my priorities and how they have shifted a lot with family life changes. The realization that it wasn’t working for me the way it was, was a powerful one. I cannot thank my husband and friends and family enough for their unwavering support as I made the decision to go back to work full time (I help run a natural products company called True Botanica) and changed the way I am involved with the blog, turning it back into more of a passion/side thing instead of being a full time content creator.