“Food Blogger/online content creator, Independent self-published author, name brand sponsorship 'collector', photographer, and designer.”
Things Emily would love to chat about:
New Mexico-grown, now Idaho-based Emily Sego has been creating outstanding recipes and featuring them on TV, on the web, for name-brand sponsors, and in her cookbooks for the last 10 years. When not absorbed with recipe testing, Emily loves being a wife and mother, spending far too much time watching sci-fi, gardening very badly, and trying to keep her head out of the clouds when she is hot-air ballooning.
Finding inspiration from income reports published by the Ostroms at Pinch of Yum, (and other burgeoning food blogs in 2013) Emily started her blog The Goldilocks Kitchen in the hopes that she could combine her love of cooking, photography, and design into an online business to make some extra money while still being able to stay home and be a mom for her young children.
In the first few months of blogging, most of her posts were shared like crazy across Pinterest with notifications for repins pinging her phone constantly, which was so encouraging! Her blog then became a giant success rivaling the likes of The Pioneer Woman. Hahaha! Nope. Just kidding. As Pinterest continued to manipulate its algorithm (and platform) the notifications disappeared over a matter of weeks and The Goldilocks Kitchen was left on the sidelines while other food blogs exploded in popularity.
Instead of quitting, seeing the success of others gave Emily the determination to keep going and figure out the 'recipe for success'. To Emily, knowing there were bloggers out there making thousands of dollars a month proved it could be done! So for the next 7 years, Emily continued posting content online, even landing lots of name-brand sponsorships (thanks to her photography skills), but never ranking very well on Google. She went to food blogging conventions, purchased expensive courses, booked local TV food segments, joined paid memberships like Food Blogger Pro, and even self-published a full-color cookbook (TWICE because the first one was garbage) all in an effort to have a more profitable business and learn blogging SKILLS.
However, business growth remained elusive (average pageviews stagnated around 10-15K page views a month for years) until Emily discovered and joined Project 24 by Income School in 2019. She went through their courses on how to start and grow a profitable blog and since then she has seen tremendous improvements in her business by following their methods and advice. Turns out that for Emily, success came from figuring out what people were actually searching for and creating content that filled the need or answered the question, instead of simply publishing the latest 'fun seasonal recipes'.
Average page views for The Goldilocks Kitchen have tripled in the last 3 years, going from 13-15K a month to 50-60K a month, bounce rates are on average around 50% (down from around 85%). Eight of her ten top blog posts are written following Project 24 methods, and her most popular post averages 6K views a month. Her blog hasn't seen any significant 'hits' from Google's algorithm changes, weathering the storm where others sadly have been decimated. She currently aims to join MediaVine, sell digital products (budget family meal plans), and publish another cookbook in hopes of earning $4000 a month.
