I Started a Blog in 2024 – Here’s What Happened

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I haven’t spent a lot of time getting personal on this blog, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about my “why”, my goals, and give some tips and encouragement for new bloggers. I hope you’ll keep reading!

My love for baking goes way back

Some of my earliest memories of baking are helping my Granny with birthday cakes (she made me and my siblings elaborate homemade birthday cakes throughout our childhood) and licking cream cheese frosting off of beaters as my dad made cinnamon rolls for the next morning (it was usually a Saturday night, making a pre-church treat for the following morning). My mom made our family so many chocolate chip cookies she had the Nestle Tollhouse recipe memorized! (She also had a thing for Ghirardelli boxed brownie mix, and she’s not wrong there). And Christmas wasn’t Christmas until I had my Nana’s spritz cookies. So many of my core childhood memories were framed around a dessert or time in the kitchen with loved ones.

But I really started baking in my early 20s after getting married

I remember thinking specifically about all those delicious cakes my Granny made and wanting to have the skills to one day make my own kids their birthday cakes. I even took a cake decorating class at Michael’s in 2011 when I was in graduate school! Over the years I made birthday cakes for friends and family, treats for neighbors, and various desserts for co-workers.

I didn’t start selling any desserts until December 2020
It took me several years to finally bite the bullet and try selling baked goods (hello, imposter syndrome – but more about that in a different post). Christmas of 2020 was such a weird holiday season. The world was overwhelmed with the COVID-19 pandemic, and I wanted to do something small to bring joy to an otherwise stressful and sad season in our lives. I decided to make and sell cookie decorating kits and told my husband I would be so excited if I sold 10 kits. I sold 117!

I received such positive feedback about my sugar cookie cutouts that I ended up making Valentine’s & Easter cookie kits too! I sold cookie kids for the next three years. But in 2023 things changed.

In 2023 I started a new job that was five days a week (this may sound totally normal for most of America but this 3 shifts per week nurse was struggling a bit!) Christmas of 2023 I was working Monday – Friday, with three school-aged kids, in the midst of a very busy holiday season, looking at a list of about 80 cookie orders. I knew this wasn’t sustainable and I had to do something different.

Here’s what I knew to be absolutely true:

1. I love baking. I love getting creative in the kitchen. I love creating new treats.
2. I love sharing baked goods with other people. Feeding people is a love language! And I love being able to share my creative work with the world.
3. It was SUCH a joy seeing pictures of everyone’s families decorating Christmas cookies and making memories in the kitchen together. It was truly the “why” behind the original cookie kits.
4. I wanted to keep doing all these things, but not on anyone else’s timeline or because I was obligated to because I received an order.
5. Rising grocery prices made it harder than ever to make a profit off of sold baked goods – I knew I needed to go digital.

So, in May 2024, MaeganKayBakes was created!

In May 2024 I started making some of my favorite recipes and writing them all up to share with the world. I wasn’t sure if anyone would actually read this little blog of mine or trust my recipes, but I knew I had to give it a try. I also knew that going digital would be the most efficient way to log all of these recipes I created so my children could use and enjoy them one day!

But you guys! I soon found out this wasn’t as easy as it sounded. I loved the baking part of all of this, but the blogging part was very difficult for me. I am not tech savvy! I ended up starting a blog on the completely wrong platform and having to transition it over to WordPress 2 months in. This was a huge hurdle. I was such a novice, and I quickly realized I was going to have to invest a LOT of time into the digital side of things.

I spend more time on the digital work than I do baking.

Digital work meaning: taking and editing photos, writing blog posts, editing for maximum SEO (search engine optimization), creating pins for Pinterest, and creating posts for social media. I eventually found a balance and I got the hang of this blogging thing. I stayed consisted, my content slowly improved, and my traffic is increasing every week!

To monetize or not to monetize…

One thing I had to decide as a blogger was whether or not to monetize my blog with ads. On one hand, ads can be super annoying, disrupt the reader experience, and make your blog seem a little scammy. On the other hand, ads are one of the few ways bloggers are compensated for their creative work. For me – my main goals were to keep all my recipes in one place and share those with the world, not necessarily create and additional stream of income. BUT the idea of having a small passive stream of income was definitely enticing. I decided to monetize my blog with ads.

At first, this meant using Google Adsense to place ads on my blog. Unfortunately this meant that the ads were miscellaneous ads, often paired with unappealing images or companies. It wasn’t ideal, but it was what I did until I had enough consistent traffic to apply for Journey by Mediavine. Everyone in the blogging world knows about Mediavine- a premier ad management company – but it requires that you have 60k+ page views per month. I was nowhere near this! However, their Journey program for smaller bloggers has a lower page view requirement (around 10K). It took 6 months, but I was finally accepted to the Journey program!

This was exciting because not only does Mediavine use ads from higher-paying companies (increasing the blogger’s RPM!), but the ads are strategically placed as to not disrupt the reader’s experience. They are also targeted based on reader demographics (Thank goodness – instead of getting ads for at-home use catheters [!!] my audience is now getting ads from Sol de Janeiro, Tecovas, and VRBO). This is a win-win for the blogger and the reader!

My top tips for new bloggers:

1. Go ahead and monetize that blog, sister. You deserve to be compensated for your creative work! And while at first it may seem small, it slowly ads up. Try your best to keep the ad load low, this helps keep the reader experience a priority and builds trust with your reader.
2. Stay consistent. Growth only comes with consistency. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. Stay consistent with your output, and you’ll be rewarded with more blog views and increased traffic. This has served true for my blog. I’ve seen steady growth over the past 8 months and that is only a result of being consistent with creating new recipes, marketing these recipes on social media and Pinterest, and sharing my favorite treats with friends and family.
3. Increase your traffic using social media. I try to create 1-3 new pins on Pinterest every day. I am able to batch create these on the weekend and schedule them to publish daily. I also regularly post in Facebook baking groups I am a part of. Sometimes I get zero interaction. Other times I have a link or recipe gain traction which brings a lot of new traffic to my blog. Ultimately, my highest volume of traffic comes from Facebook and Pinterest.
4. Ditch the imposter syndrome. This is one of the biggest things I struggled with at first. I had no idea why anyone would use one of my recipes when there were baking icons out there who had been established since the dawn of Pinterest. It took me a while to realize that I had a seat at the dessert blog table – and I am so excited to be here. I am proud of my work and my recipes! And I love sharing them.
5. Work at your own pace. It is really easy to see amazing baking blogs and try to mimic their output. You should remember that these bloggers have been around for years (some of them a decade +!) and you are just beginning. It is okay, and ideal, to work at a pace that is optimal for you and works with your life. I am a busy mom of three kids who works full time and still cooks dinner for my family most nights. All this to say- I do not have time to invest 20+ hours per week into this blog. But I work on it when I can, and have worked it into a pretty good balance with my other obligations.

My goals moving forward

1. Continue working at a manageable pace– I have zero intention of making blogging my full-time work. I love working full-time as a nurse and have no intentions of leaving my role at my institution any time soon. I truly feel like I am right where God wants me! I love living out my purpose every day at work. All that said – this will continue to be a “side hustle” and a hobby 😉 I plan to continue to working on this blog at a pace I can manage. For me, this means publishing 6-10 recipes each month.
2. Work towards getting approved for Mediavine– Mediavine is a premier ad management company that accepts bloggers who have 60k+ views each month. Right now I’m at about 10k. I currently am accepted into their Journey program, which is made for beginner bloggers who have approximately 10k+ views per month. I plan to continue to build my blog and work towards increasing traffic.
3. Take my family on a vacation – here’s where I throw out my big goal! One day I want this little blog of mine to pay for our annual family vacation! We take one big vacation each year, and what a blessing it would be to bring in enough income from this blog to completely cover that trip! That is my longterm, big goal. And I believe it is one hundred percent attainable.

So, can you successfully start a new blog in 2025?

Yes! Yes, you can. You can get just as much out as you’re willing to put in. Stay consistent, and you will reap the rewards. I haven’t worked on this blog every day since I’ve started, but I’ve worked on it most days. I want to continue doing that in 2025! While I’m by no means an expert in blogging or digital marketing, I hope hearing my story comes as an encouragement if you’re just getting started. You won’t go anywhere until you take the first step – if this encourages just one person to take that first step then I will count this post as a win!

And from the bottom of my heart – thank you, thank you, thank you for being here. I think there are a lot of bright days ahead for MaeganKayBakes.