Today we’d like to introduce you to Mika Kinney
Hi Mika, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m a civil engineer by trade from California, and I used to work very long construction hours. My husband and I often drive from Minnesota to California, and during one of those trips, we were daydreaming and brainstorming how we could have a flexible enough job that we could take off and drive to California anytime. We had each started a blog at one time or another, and so my husband says, “You should start a food blog!” being that I love to cook. Well, a few years later, after my husband built the site, we’ve gone through many iterations of niches and styles, and in September of 2023 I left my engineering job to take the blog full time. While we started out as a just generally healthy site, we are now firmly a high protein recipes site. This niching down has taken me on Twin Cities Live, helped expand my Instagram exponentially and opened the door for many other partnerships.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
No, ha! When you start something totally foreign you don’t know what you don’t know. So, we had our URL set up with the wrong host, our site was not designed effectively, and so much more. After some major technical things, we started to see real growth from SEO efforts in 2023. This meant Google was rewarding our well-written content by showing it to people. However, just after quitting my engineering job, Google changed its algorithms, so we lost about 50% of our traffic (and still declining) from Google. But, it’s made us reevaluate the business as a whole, and we’ve now built something far more diverse and stable. This is helping us to grow without Google.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am a food blogger and content creator, which means I wear many hats. I develop high-protein recipes, do the photography, videography, and the writing for the site and social media. I’m best known for recipes that are simple and quick to make and don’t usually use protein powder but rather natural sources of protein. This means using hemp seeds, almond flour, egg whites, or similar to have high protein desserts or bone broth and chickpeas for high protein savory recipes.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
With the rise of AI generated content, the online food space is going to change drastically. There are a couple of other things at play, too, such as the loss of cookies. Cookies are basically little tags that get recorded when you visit a site. This allows advertisers to target users with relevant ads but also gives them some data to track users with. Without cookies, though (which are set to go away in 2025), advertisers will likely not want to spend as much on website ads. With AI, users want to know content is authentic and made by humans (usually), and the way to do that is short-form video. Sure, it’s nice to have AI write you a meal plan, but the issue is none of it’s been actually verified, and the recipes are complete guesses based on compiling the top results for a recipe. In one instance, Google AI overview suggested users use glue to keep cheese on pizza – you can see why people want to make sure the content is human-made and written. Because of the these two things, I thing income for the industry is going to shift to subscription models where readers can essentially pay to store their favorite creators recipes and ensure they are not AI and there are no ads.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://joytothefood.com/
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/_joytothefood_/
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/joytothefoodcontact
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX1joID25nSKw7ZYgFHHgLw
- Other: http://pintrest.com/joytothefood
