Since 2010, my brother and I have been maintaining our food blog Certified Foodies. We’ve had an amazing ride so far, even being recognized as one of the top food blogs in the country, which is really just the cherry on top.

My brother and I have had this passion for food since we were kids. We both love cooking, him being the more skilled one. So we feel that we were meant to start our own food blog. We never intended to gain fame or even earn from our blog, but we did and continue to do so, which pushes us more to make our food blog better.

During the past 2 years, I’ve seen new food blogs launching here and there, and I was actually glad to see more people becoming more adventurous with food. We’ve received emails and inquiries from new food bloggers asking us for tips and help, and it seems that the most common question was how they can earn from blogging about food. And I think that’s the wrong way to approach blogging, especially when you’re writing about food. If it was for a different niche, I’d be perfectly okay, but I feel like for someone to start a successful food blog, one must have genuine passion for it.

A really, really, really old photo of me. 😀

When we started our food blog, we only wanted to share our own recipes. Certified Foodies eventually evolved into a personal blog where we also write our own reviews of restaurants and food products we’ve personally tried, and share our own recipes. Even our nanay got involved. 😀 We realized that, after over 3 years of maintaining our food blog, you need to be deeply passionate and dedicated to everything that goes behind all this for you to be successful or to keep your sanity as a food blogger.

Food blogging may seem easy for most people, but it’s REAL hard work. Just imagine the photography skills you need to master so you can take delicious and enticing photos, plus the editing and post-processing that happens before the images go out for the world to see.

Though we do love dining out with our nanay and friends, food blogging can be quite costly since we’ve become more curious and open to trying new restaurants and food products.

And writing about food is not that easy either. You can’t just use simple descriptions of food. You have to let your words make the reader feel something, like they were there with you, taking a spoonful of that ice cream, devouring a slice of cake or chewing onto that juicy steak. We didn’t study or intentionally trained for this, but our love for what we’re doing drove us to reading and learning more about food, which eventually helped us improve in our writing and conveying the flavors and enjoyment we experience in every blog post.

A really, really, really old photo of my bro. 😀

What am I driving at, exactly? I just wish these new food bloggers are starting their blogs not because they want to merely earn money from it, but because they are genuinely passionate about food. Otherwise, they will burn out and lose interest because it takes time to gain authority and credibility as a food blogger. It takes even longer for you to start earning from it. And if you don’t have the sincere intention to become a full-fledged food blogger, eventually, your blog will just be another wasted space on the internet.

I guess we’ve been so lucky and blessed to be where we’re at. Our food blog has led to many paths for us. I discovered my love for marketing since I take care of our blog’s social media presence. Ken also became more passionate about cooking, which eventually led him to taking a culinary course. He is now a chef, but is taking his time now and learning about social media too and what it takes to start his own business.

We have bigger plans than just blogging about food, like opening a small restaurant of our own where Ken will be the executive chef/owner and I’ll take care of marketing, obviously. Our nanay will be in charge of the logistics, buying necessary equipment needed in the kitchen and at the front of the house like POS Systems from Fedelta. We’ve got all the assignments figured out, but we have yet to finalize what we want to do.

You see, our food blog has led to all these plans for the future. We have more ideas and dreams in mind that we can’t share yet. We do hope everything will materialize within the next 5 years.

Where is this journey and our food blogging taking us? We have yet to know and we’re excited to see what the future has in store for us. It seems bright from where we’re at. 🙂