Blogger Spotlight: Becca Pusey, Amuse Your Bouche

Amuse Your Bouche is a destination for simple but tasty vegetarian, gluten-free, and vegan recipes. Created by Becca Pusey in 2011 to document easy to make veggie dishes, Amuse Your Bouche houses a vast amount of interesting recipes for every course (while providing tons of amusement). As well as being a blogger, Becca is also a freelance recipe developer who is featured on different websites. In this spotlight Becca, who features on our top 10 food ranking chats to us about what makes her what makes her blog different, how she measures the success of her blog, and how she likes to work with PRs.

Why should people read your blog? What makes it different? As my blog’s tagline (‘simple vegetarian recipes’) suggests, my recipes are really straightforward. Although everything’s cooked from scratch, I don’t use fancy ingredients that you’ve never heard of, or that you’ll have trouble finding in the shops – everything is really easy and usually pretty quick to make too. I would rather share a really tasty recipe that only uses five or six ingredients than a recipe that’s needlessly complicated just for the sake of it.

How do you measure the success of your website? There are loads of metrics that I like to keep an eye on, but the most important for me is feedback from my readers. When people tell me that they’ve made and enjoyed one of my recipes, that shows me that I’m doing something right. It makes my day when people send me photos of their creations!

What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a blog? You could drive yourself crazy with researching the ‘best’ ways to blog, but really I think you just need to truly love what you do. If you’re passionate about your content and sharing things that you really want to share (rather than just things that you feel will bring in traffic), people will find your blog so much more enjoyable, and you’re much more likely to stick with it.

How do you work with marketers and PRs? I usually work with brands on recipe development, often via PR companies; they’ll send me a product to use in a recipe. I love working with brands, as it often challenges me to try something new. However, I do always try to ensure my branded recipes are consistent with my blog’s niche – simple vegetarian recipes. I think that’s so important, and I often turn down work that I don’t think will be a good fit.

How do you use social media to promote and share content? What are the challenges? I promote each blog post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Each social media has its own little community, which is really lovely. I especially love using Facebook, as my followers there are so receptive and engaged. The main challenge is definitely that each social network seems to be moving towards paid promotions – bloggers and businesses are now expected to pay to promote their posts to their followers. It seems ludicrous to me, and so far I’ve avoided ever paying out of pocket to promote my posts, but it seems that that’s the way things are heading.

What can PRs do in working better with you? To be fair, most of the PRs I work with do a really great job – they’re communicative and friendly, and usually have a good knowledge of the way the blogging industry is evolving. I suppose some PRs could do a better job of keeping in contact – it’s not unusual to send an email, and hear nothing back for several weeks.

What has been your blogging highlight? Meeting other bloggers at conferences and trips. The food blogging community is so close and friendly, and it’s absolutely lovely to meet up a few times each year. All the bloggers I’ve met are so supportive, and we all learn from each other – there’s no feeling of competition at all, which is wonderful.

What will be big in your blogosphere in the coming months? Comfort food! I try to keep most of my recipes relatively seasonal, so I’ll be focusing on winter warmers in the next few months. It’s one of the only good things about winter!