Serial restaurant patrons Adrian and Saffron Brown decided to share their passion for food with their blog We Love Food It's All We Eat. We find out how it all began and how far they've come since the blog's inception.
Tell us about your blog, how did you get started? Why did you choose your subject?
We only decided to start our blog after suffering from the effects of a night out and realised that, after we had cooked a lovely breakfast, food was more than a necessity – it was our passion. And so on 20 November 2010 We Love Food It’s All We Eat was born. We had always enjoyed eating out, spending our evenings trying to find that perfect restaurant and decided to channel this enthusiasm and enjoyment into a blog. During the day we both work in the magazine industry and between us we have over 30 years of design and publishing experience. We think that this level of professionalism, our honesty, and attention to detail has made We Love Food as popular, trusted, and respected as it is.
How do you source content for your blog?
A majority of our content comes from review bookings and blogger/PR events. Saffron is now a contributor to thehotelculture.com and this content is shared on We Love Food. We are also regularly asked for our advice and opinions for other websites (most recently, features on Foodie Apps and Food trends for 2014).
Do you have a favourite post or one that best sums up your blog?
The posts that we enjoyed most were from our recent weekend trip to Edinburgh. We visited four restaurants and wrote two reviews each. Writing as a couple allows us to split our workload and get our posts online a lot quicker. We both have different writing styles which keeps our blog fresh and interesting. We also love our 'Grilled' series of posts where we interview some famous names from the hospitality industry.
Do you write reviews? How many people read your reviews?
We write all our reviews the way you want to read them, no fancy expressions, just an honest description of our experiences. Add to this a touch of humour and the view of a married couple – we feel that we’ve created a fun yet informative blog. Plus, we run great giveaways and competitions and our ‘Checkout’ tab, where we give our opinion on the latest seasonal foodie offerings. Our website gets around 10,000 unique views per month, growing quarter on quarter. This goes hand in hand with our large following on Facebook and Twitter.
How did you build a following for your blog?
We've grown our following organically, starting small and slowly building our popularity. Every review post is promoted on our Facebook and Twitter pages. We also always inform the PRs when our post is live so they have the option to plug it on their clients' social media sites.
Are you PR friendly? Do you accept contributions and content for your blog?
Extremely PR friendly. Over the past three years we have built up a strong relationship with many of the UK's top PR companies. As for our content, we don't tend to have third party contributions. We feel that being a husband and wife team makes our reviews a little different from the norm. That said, using contributors is something that we are looking into, possibly under a 'guest writers' or 'sponsored' tab so as not to confuse our readers.
How best do you like to be approached by PRs?
PRs can approach us any way they want, as long as they approach us! The best way to contact us is via our email, or direct message us on Twitter @WeLoveFoodTweet.
What’s in store for your blogging career in 2014?
Last year we were voted one of Square Meal's top food bloggers, which was a great honour. This year we are going to continue writing in our usual passionate way and aim to grow our readership, basically through good old fashioned hard work! We are planning to do more food related hotel/travel posts, especially as Saffron is now also writing for thehotelculture.com, and we have appeared on travelmindset.com. We’ve loved reviewing all the restaurants we’ve visited, and meeting the amazing chefs, inspirational owners and dedicated PRs, some of whom have become our friends. So if this year brings more of the same, then we will be very happy bunnies indeed.
You can find Saffron and Adrian tweeting @WeLoveFoodTweet.