Blogger Spotlight: David Purdon, BakingBar

BakingBar by recipe developer and food writer David Purdon was created as a space to share recipes passed down within his family and developed by himself. Since 2010 with the help of co-owner Sean Gregory, David provides a variety of easy to follow recipes, baking based reviews of ingredients, products and cooking utensils, and interviews with award-winning chefs. In this spotlight, David chats to us about how he likes to work with PRs, how he uses social media to promote his content, and what being listed on our top ten baking blog ranking means to him.

Why should people read your blog? What makes it different? We pride ourselves in keeping our recipes and their instructions as simple as possible. We want to encourage baking, not put people off.

How do you measure the success of your website? Engagement is the key here. The more people we see engaging, sharing, commenting on and making certain recipes shows us which are more popular. This can also vary depending on the time of year.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a blog? Just start. Don’t procrastinate just because you don’t know how you want it to look yet, the colours you want, your logo. They are all small things at the beginning. Your content will always be there and can be easily migrated onto a new template for a more professional look further down the line. Start Twitter and Facebook pages from day one and ask your friends to get engaging with your content.

How do you work with marketers and PRs? We get hundreds of requests from both big and small companies through PRs. We’re normally asked how we can incorporate ingredients into some of our recipes or whether our readers might be interested in certain products. If we don’t like a product ourselves or it doesn’t meet a high standard we tend to avoid it.

How do you use social media to promote and share content? What are the challenges? Everything we write gets shared on social media. It helps keep people in the loop with what we’re doing. Some people are too busy to read through a days worth of tweets to just find what we posted on a particular day. So we post content multiple times per day. This includes old content too. It’s important not to forget recipes which were written months ago too, they’re just as good as current ones.

What can PRs do in working better with you? Not just with us, but with bloggers in general PRs need to understand that you need to be compensated for your time. It can sometimes take weeks to perfect a recipe which uses a specific product or to write a good honest review of a product. Just offering a bar of chocolate or something of extremely low value and in exchange wanting a huge feature shared out to tens of thousands of people is not a fair exchange. However, when you first start out as a blogger you should try and interact with big brands as much as possible especially if they reach out to you. But don’t be taken advantage of!

What has been your blogging highlight? Seeing people making our recipes and sharing the pictures is our highlight each and every day. Nothing gives us a more valued feeling than seeing this. We get to try lots of amazing food and products, which we may not get the opportunity to otherwise. Our readers are always central to our blog so knowing what we write provides value is just a wonderful feeling.

What will be big in your blogosphere in the coming months? The trend in the coming months is certainly Christmas. We know it’s an obvious one but it happens every year and we don’t think it will ever change. So prepare yourself for a surge in Christmas themed everything.

What does the Vuelio Blog Ranking mean to you and how does it affect your blog? We get listed in Top blog charts all the time, but we really don’t take it for granted. We know we work hard but we appreciate every single mention we get. It’s awesome!