Best of friends and both living in Taupo. Anna Cameron and Vanya Insull are two of New Zealand's top recipe bloggers. Photo / Rachel Canning
Best of friends and both living in Taupo. Anna Cameron and Vanya Insull are two of New Zealand's top recipe bloggers. Photo / Rachel Canning
They may not "crack the internet", but each week two Taupō women give it a good shake.
On Facebook, recipe blogger Anna Cameron has 106,000 followers and Vanya Insull has 67,500. They are also on Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and post blogs from their own websites.
They both say they arefollowing their passion, but enough people engage online when they post a recipe to generate an income that is edging closer to what they used to earn pre-kids.
A banker in another life, Anna Cameron has paired her passion of baking with her enjoyment from making people happy at her website justamumnz.com. She puts her success down to authenticity.
Chatting with people online is a big part of Anna and Vanya's individual success, because meaningful engagement is huge to their audience. When a post goes viral, Anna passes her phone to her kids and get them to press the like button while she cooks dinner, because so many people have reacted to a comment she has made.
She says it's important to respond with a like emoji because it makes her audience feel they are part of the tribe.
Their opinions are sought after by well-known New Zealand brands, they are both Countdown ambassadors, and they have the pleasure of trying out new products in advance of the public. Anna was recently sent a lock box from Cadbury, with strict embargo instructions.
The next day the key arrived and Anna set about creating Caramilk No Bake Slice, a recipe that has gone viral.
Currently 1.9 million people had been reached, and it's still rising. The recipe generated 10,000 reactions, 53,000 comments and was shared more than 7000 times. And this is not the first time it's happened - her butterscotch pudding has 1.8 million views.
Anna Cameron's Caramilk No Bake Slice was content that went viral, reaching 1.9 million people. Photo / Anna Cameron
A strategy of driving social media traffic to her website resulted in 198,000 views from that one post on September 24. Anna says in the background to her success is a lot of learning and doing online courses. She says Instagram is for engagement and brand building, but Facebook is where she gets all the clicks.
"To be good on social media, you need to be very anti-social."
With an artistic edge as former art director at magazines Taste, Good Health, and Cleo, Vanya set up her Facebook page @VJCooks in 2016 to share her recipe videos with friends and family. Within two months she knew she was onto something.
Sharing up to four videos a week on Instagram Story Maker, she gets huge satisfaction out of improving people's confidence in their own ability to cook dinner and make delicious baking. Vanya says people assume she works for a big company.
"But it's just me and my lounge."
With five scheduled posts a day, Vanya refers to Facebook as "the beast" and has educated herself on the nuances of social media.
"You have to really understand Facebook. Most Kiwi influencers don't understand it properly."
She built a big audience with Facebook but wanted to build her own brand. Within six months of launching vjcooks.com she was up to 25,000 impressions a month and was picked up by advertising agency Media Vine and then approached by Countdown to be an ambassador.
Vanya's main source of revenue is sponsored posts, while Anna's main revenue is from ads. They both say how crazy it is to make money from putting stuff on the internet.
The friends met on Facebook, not believing their luck that two of the best food bloggers in New Zealand live in Taupō. They help each other out, talk all the time, text at all hours of the night, admit to spending far too much time at the supermarket and joke they are on a never-ending mission to find the best egg bennies in town.
