Katie Higgins is the founder of the popular blog Chocolatecoveredkatie.com, a number one source for healthy dessert and comfort food recipes.
What first inspired you to start blogging? Describe your career/lifestyle beforehand? I started the blog in college; my friends and I all created blogs to keep up with each other and record our adventures, and my blog was not meant to be a food blog at all! Chocolate-Covered Katie was actually my email account name when I was in middle school; chocolate has always been my favorite food. What is the premis behind your blog and how does it differ from other popular blogs/vlogs? The idea of my blog is to offer healthy desserts and recipes for everyone – recipes that DON’T rely on expensive or hard-to-find ingredients and that even people who aren’t necessarily into eating healthy or vegan will still love. I don’t want my recipes to be good just for a healthy dessert. I want them to be good, period! But at the same time, I want the desserts to be healthy enough that you can eat them every single day without worrying about derailing a diet or feeling weighed down and lethargic from the sugar. Basically, my blog aims to offer recipes that both taste good and are secretly good for you—without tasting like it—at the same time. What is your current following? Depending on the month, the blog gets anywhere from 3 to 5 million pageviews per day, from people all over the world. Then there is social media, and my favorite social media platforms are Pinterest and Instagram. How do you work running the blog alongside your other commitments? I’m lucky in that I get to do this as a full-time job. The hours are crazy, but although I’m basically working nonstop it doesn’t feel like work because so much of my job is made up of activities I enjoy and would do anyway, such as photography, baking, and writing. I never feel like writing my blog posts is “work” because I get to write about dessert, which is one of my favorite things in the world. What do you enjoy most about what you do? Are there any perks/downsides? Knowing people are trying the recipes I post, and seeing their pictures of my recipes on Instagram… it makes my day more than I can ever express. The best feeling is receiving a comment from someone who says the blog touched his or her life. Plus, being paid to bake and eat chocolate chip cookies all day is definitely a perk! The downside: the idea of blogging for a living is so new that, when something goes wrong, you’re not always sure how to fix it (especially if it’s computer-related, which happens A LOT!). I’ve had many sleepless nights spent trying to fix a crashed website, spam attack, or broken email service. But there’s a silver lining – When you’re successfully able to fix a problem, it’s such a rush of pride, relief, and happiness. What would be your one piece of advice to budding health and fitness bloggers? Choose a subject where you have true passion, and create your own style of blogging that feels most comfortable to you. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing or if you “should” be posting more workouts, more food diaries, or more of what another popular blogger is posting. If you’re passionate about something and write from the heart, it will show through in your posts and readers will feel that passion as well.