Dannii Martin is a healthy lifestyle blogger and founder of www.hungryhealthyhappy.com
What first inspired you to start blogging? Describe your career/lifestyle beforehand?
I started Hungry Healthy Happy as a way to keep myself on track with my weight loss and improving my health. It was a place to keep my favourite recipes and share them with friends and family who kept asking how I was losing weight and what I was eating. I had finished university with a degree in Criminology and working in a call centre which I hated. I spent all my free time working on the blog and it quickly took off. I decided to quit the job I hated with the savings I had and focused on the blog and building it up. You just have to take that leap. What is the premis behind your blog and how does it differ from other popular health blogs/vlogs?
So many “healthy eating” blogs out there are focused on giving something up and that’s not we are about. Nothing is off limits on our blog, it is just about finding healthier ways to make your favourite meals and enjoying it in moderation. Also, the focus isn’t just on food. Being healthy and losing weight is far more than just about what we eat. Emotional eating was always my biggest problem, so we talk about that a lot, as well as small ways to fit in more activity. What is your current following?
We have a social media following of over 170,000. Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are today, which is having our second book published.
How do you work running the blog alongside your other commitments?
We have a one year old daughter now and that makes keeping the blog running a lot harder, but we just had to get more organised. It is so easy to spend 18 hours a day working on the blog (I used to), but we have found a better work/life balance now. What do you enjoy most about what you do? Are there any perks/downsides?
I love how flexible blogging can be. Hungry Healthy Happy got to a point where my husband was able to quit the job he hated too, and come on board the blog full time - he handles all the technical side so I can do all the creative stuff. Working together and being able to spend so much time with our daughter is amazing. But, it doesn’t come without it’s downsides. Who knows where blogging will be in 5 years time. Self employment can be so unstable, but that just makes us work harder every day. Having a blog allowed me to realise my dream of having a book published (Hungry Healthy Happy was published in January 2016). What would be your one piece of advice to any budding health and fitness bloggers?
Write about what you love. Don’t get sucked in to doing what everyone else is doing, or worry that your blog isn’t where someone else’s is. It takes a lot of time and work to make a success of a blog and there are so many blogs out there now. So, make sure you actually enjoy what you are writing about.