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Our food blog is turning one year old today!
We can’t believe it’s already been one whole year of food blogging as The Candid Cooks. When we began this adventure, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. We were excited, a little nervous, and anxious to develop our cooking skills as quickly as possible. As we dove into the actual food blogging part of our journey, we realized just how much there was to learn about writing, food photography, putting together recipes that other people could easily follow, and maintaining a website. But we also quickly fell in love with the new challenges we faced, and every hurdle we jumped over gave us more and more confidence to keep going.
Today, we wanted to take a moment to thank you – our readers – for supporting us this year. We couldn’t have done this without you!
In our first month, January 2021, we had 73 users – a promising number to us as new food bloggers. Then our web traffic actually went down and by April, we only had an average of 54 users a month. Although disheartening, we kept on going because (1) we were still learning so much and becoming better home chefs, and (2) we wanted to share our recipes with the world!
We realized at this point that we needed additional ways to get our recipes in front of more people. So we started using tools like Pinterest and foodgawker to share our content. This grew our monthly user count to 193 by the end of May, which turned into 653 monthly users by the end of the summer, and eventually brought us to where we are today: 1,150 users over the last 30 days.
Reaching this incredible milestone of 1,000+ monthly users as our blog turns a year old couldn’t be more perfect. Thank you for letting us share our recipes and stories with you. We can’t wait for another exciting year!
To celebrate, we’ve compiled a list of your top 10 favorite recipes from 2021:
- Buffalo Chicken Mac n Cheese
- Homemade Ranchero Sauce
- Spaghetti Carbonara
- Chicken Burritos Ranchero
- General Tso’s Chicken
- Slow Cooker Pulled Pork
- Buffalo Chicken Sliders
- Chicken Parm Sliders
- Cinnamon Avocado Muffins
- Pork Dumplings
Which of these recipes is your favorite? Or do you have another favorite Candid Cooks meal not listed here? Let us know in the comments below!