How One Blogger Took Action, Left Her Job, and Began a Lifestyle Blog

Today marks the end of our series featuring stories from new bloggers. We really hope you’ve enjoyed them.

Jackie Baker recently started a lifestyle blog that celebrates the beauty in everyday life. She considered blogging as a business because she needed a career change that would both challenge her and leave time for a vacation once in a while.

How one blogger quit her job and started a lifestyle blog

But what would she write about? Jackie narrowed her blog’s focus to a few topics that bring joy, peace, and happiness to both her readers and herself. Hence the title of her blog: Pretty Things, Yummy Food.

What Jackie has learned from blogging:

Take action and keep pushing forward when you feel stuck or scared
Create a plan to prioritize tasks you need to get done
Sign up for courses that show you how to start/launch a blog
Connect with other bloggers who understand your excitement and frustration
Embrace social media to find readers and build a community
Use Canva to design graphics
Don’t stress about what others think about you or your blog

Want to start a blog? Do it and don’t doubt yourself. Follow your gut, get into a blogging mindset, and find your message to discover you have plenty to offer the world.

Links and Resources for How One Blogger Quit Her Job and Started a Lifestyle Blog:

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Darren: Hey there and welcome to episode 275 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, which is a site for you as a blogger or someone about to start a blog, that will help you grow that blog, create great content, and monetize it as well. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger and check out our two courses at problogger.com.

Speaking of our courses, today we’re finishing up our series of podcasts from stories who did our free Start A Blog course. We’re going to hear today from Jackie Baker from Pretty Things, Yummy Food, which sounds like the kind of blog I need to check out, particularly the yummy food part of it.

This series really is all about hearing from new bloggers, bloggers who haven’t been going for too long yet, to find out what they’ve learnt in their first year of blogging. I have loved the feedback we’ve had on this series. It seems that a lot of you have enjoyed hearing from new voices, people that they’ve never heard of before, rather than just hearing from experts or gurus or people who have been blogging for 10 years. The new bloggers have been sharing some of their journey as well.

We’re doing this really to highlight that people are continuing to start blogs these days and that there is a simple way to do it. That’s through our Start A Blog course, which you can find over at problogger.com/startablog. It’s completely free and it’s set out in seven simple steps that will walk you through the process.

Today, we’ve got Jackie Baker from Pretty Things, Yummy Food. It’s a lifestyle blog and it’s only been going for six months. Jackie started her blog as a result of going through our course and you’re going to hear her talk a little bit about that in today’s story. She recommends a great tool for those of you who are starting out and want to create some cool social graphics and gives you a few good tips as well. I’ll come back at the end of Jackie’s story to wrap things up and to pull out a few of the things that I love about her story.

Jackie: Hi everyone. I’m Jackie, the creator of Pretty Things, Yummy Food. Pretty Things, Yummy Food is a lifestyle blog designed to celebrate the beauty in everyday life and was officially launched on July 6, 2018. You can find the blog at prettythingsyummyfood.com.

I began thinking of blogging as a business back in January of 2018 and at the time when I felt like I needed a career change. The job I had at the time was a good job but I wanted something that would challenge me. I also hadn’t been on vacation in a while so I was also hoping to find something that might make it a little easier to make it to the beach. But more seriously, I’ve always wanted to own my own business and I felt this year could be a good year to strike out on my own. But doing what? I wanted to use my skills as a photographer and writer but I also knew that I wanted to get away from doing the freelance work that I had been doing.

While I was trying to think through my options, I received an email completely out of the blue from someone who just knew that I was looking to make a change but not what I was looking for specifically. Quite honestly, I didn’t even know what I was looking for, specifically. The email just had a link to a podcast episode about blogging full time. After listening to the episode, I started researching blogging and felt like it could actually be something I might enjoy and maybe a viable business option. So I decided to just go for it.

I left my job which was a really tough decision to make. But I decided to dive in and have the attitude that if this experiment failed, it failed. At least I would have tried it and wouldn’t be wondering ‘what if’ all my life. The only problem was that I had no idea what I would write about. I’m somebody who loves learning about everything and doesn’t really specialize in one specific thing. The thought of choosing one topic and sticking with it was a little terrifying to me.

I decided that I should probably choose a theme or ...