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Say hello to Donalyn, whose food, gardening, photography, family and humor provide a daily dose of delight.
THE BLOGGER
Name – Donalyn Ketchum
Hometown – Upstate NY
Day Job – "I work from home for a few different companies, as a writer, editor and performance coach."
THE BLOG: dlyn (pronounced dee-lyn)
About the Name – "It began as an anonymous version of my real name – I kept it even after going public with my name because people were used to it."
About the Rotating Headers – "The rotating headers on my blog are actually a feature of the template that I use. I create them in Paint Shop Pro X2Ultimate, which is the same program I use for most of my photo editing. And people actually sit on my blog and hit refresh over and over so that they can see all of the different ones. Readers notice when I add a new group of them too."
First Post - 2004
How Your Blogging Has Changed, Then vs Now – "My first blog was anonymous – kind of a personal journal and place to rant. I decided that is not what I wanted in to be though, so in 2006, I switched to a new blog, deleted a lot of junk and began again. Since then, a lot of my focus has changed to food blogging. I didn’t start that way because I didn’t really think that there was room for more food blogs – I was wrong about that though."
How You Define Your Site – "It is really a compilation of my varied interests. Food makes up right around half of my content, but there are other subjects I post about as well."
'Elevator Description' – "My blog covers a variety of subjects that interest me and bring me delight. Food, gardening, photography, family and humor all combine to bring a daily dose of something I hope will turn out interesting."
Standing Out from the Crowd – "Most of my recipes are original, and I try to tie each one to something from my life. My grandmothers and my mom all had a hand in helping me learn how to cook, so many recipes bring up memories of them. I had originally thought that the world didn’t need another blog that had step by step photos, but people eat them up [you should pardon the expression], so I do those when I have the time. It takes 3 times as long to cook a dish if you are photographing every step. Another thing that really inspires me is how many people there are who don’t cook very much or at all. They are often completely intimidated by the idea, so one of the things I try to do is to encourage them to take some small steps to get started, because anyone can cook if they want to. "
Reader Profile – "There are a few different groups of readers. I actually have a lot of friends and family who read and lots of their friends as well. Some of these people don’t really read a lot of other blogs, so they are not typical of your average reader, most of whom probably read dozens of blogs every day. There some people who visit for my photographs, many who come for recipes, but really I think most of my regular readers come back day after day for all of it."
TECHNICAL STUFF
Blogging Platform – Wordpress
Hosted By – "My host company is called Internet Planners and I would recommend 100% - great prices and excellent support."
Ad Networks – "I have three ad programs, Blogher, GoogleAds and Adbrite. In addition, I have links to Amazon.com that pay me when people make purchases. I also sell my photographs and am working to get an actual store set up for that. Blogher seems like a natural and it is my biggest source of revenue, other than selling photographs. I would replace the other two in a second if I found something that made more money."
STATS
Pageviews per month – 35,000
Page Rank – 4
Reader Count – "I don't really track this."
Statistics Package – Google Analytics and Stat CounterPro
Success Measurements – "There two kinds of success really. I like getting a lot of hits cause that pays the bills, but I think returning readers and commenters are a good measure
