*We’re grateful to TheYumList.Net for the inspiration to create this page. Please visit her fabulous web site, and/or follow her on Instagram – theyumlist – for beautiful content and insights into luxury food and travel.
A Few Words About the Cost of our Food and Travel Blog
Humble Beginnings
First of all, we acknowledge that we are very fortunate to be able to pursue this labour of love we call Culinary Slut. Since we started this as a hobby (and, truth be told as a bit of a lark) in 2011 we’ve enjoyed many wonderful culinary and travel adventures. We’ve met many amazing people, many of whom we are thrilled to now call friends.
While we were working full-time it was easy to carry the relatively modest costs of maintaining our presence online ourselves, and we were happy to do so. We had a simple Wix-based website, which many of you may remember, and focused our online presence on Instagram (with a sideline on Facebook).
As our little labour of love grew we started to get more and more feedback from followers, and from restaurants, that told us we were on to something special. The concept of building a community of like-minded people through shared food experiences – both virtually and ultimately “in the real” as we like to say – was very well received.
Going Full Time
So, we decided to turn the sideline into a full-time gig. We successfully tested a community-gathering event that we called Off the Menu and developed plans for personalised, neighbourhood food tours in our beloved Toronto.
However, it soon became obvious that this was going to be much more challenging – and much more costly – than we had anticipated.
The Cost
We refuse to play the “influencer card” and ask for free meals from restaurants or accommodations during out travels. Instead, we believe people deserve to be treated with respect and paid a fair amount for their labours of love and skill. In order to be sure that we’re confident giving good advice, we always eat at a restaurant (on our dime) several times before making a recommendation. The same holds true for building a relationship with an Off the Menu partner.
We also believe that our community needs up-to-date tools to access the insights, advice and recommendations that they’ve come to expect from us. That’s why we’ve invested a few thousand dollars over the past two years working with Iva Kezic to design and build a new website. We also use a number of online tools that help get information to you through the clutter of our very busy virtual world. These all cost money and those costs continue to grow. There are website hosting fees and ongoing website maintenance, and lots (too many to list) of licensing fees and software subscriptions. Put simply, having a robust and useful online presence is costly.
The Time
Finally, there is the time and personal effort required to bring you quality content. The fun part of our job takes up only about 20% of our time – the rest is spent at our digital devices.
While we do minimal editing, we always make sure to touch up our photos so they bring out the best, while staying true to life. Since we are paying for our meals in order to stay objective, we only shoot with our phones and with the lighting available to us at the venue. This is true for accommodations and tours as well.
Writing is a time consuming process. Sometimes it involves asking a lot of questions of our gracious hosts, while almost always it means doing at least a little research. It always requires thought, careful attention and a couple of drafts. We don’t just slap our content together and put it online, we want it to be enjoyable as well as useful and accurate.
Content creation for various social media profiles is surprisingly time consuming. This also involves another step of photo editing and rewording to fit each platform appropriately. And of course, we have to make a reasonable effort to appease algorithms.
The website itself was over a year of constant work before it was ready to go live. The content on the website takes up a great deal of time. We spend many hours, sometimes several days, putting together an article. And unless you’re a website developer, it can be hard to appreciate how even simple content updates require quite a bit of time.
Don’t even get us started on all the work creating even short and simple video content requires!
Life’s Labours
Yes, this is a labour of love – and we really do love what we do – but like all of life’s labours it comes as a price.
That’s why we’re looking at ways to derive some income to support this passion project, everything from launching our neighbourhood food tours and re-launching our Off the Menu series, as well as exploring the possibility of affiliate links and (gasp) sponsored banner advertisements (not at all our preference).
And that’s also why we ask you, the members of our community, to consider making a small contribution to help support our efforts. If you’ve enjoyed our content and found it useful, please consider giving us a donation.
So much more to explore!
About Us
If you’re curious about why building a foodie community is so important to us drop by our About Us page. You’ll get to know us a wee bit better, especially why we’re so passionate about the connection between food, travel and culture.
Reach Out
We want to hear from you – our foodie community! Got a place you’d like us to get to know? Found some hidden travel gem we just HAVE to visit? Read something you love on our website? Found a mistake we should fix?
Business
We love helping restaurants and other food businesses connect with customers. We have have some tried-and-true approaches to help your business grow.