Today we’d like to introduce you to Dennis Hornsby.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Dennis. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
A year ago, I was working at an architectural and engineering firm in Orlando. Being fresh out of university, my job mainly consisted of obtaining building and site permits so companies could proceed with construction. I’ve never been a fan of paperwork. I always had trouble focusing on tasks like that. I was great at math and problem solving, but I felt like I wasn’t using either of them.
Some of my peers were changing jobs around this time, so I asked what their experiences were like. The consensus I got was that most new grads did the paperwork, and then five years down the line, maybe you’ll get to do some of the cool work. Maybe? I didn’t want to keep working in the same career for years, on the off chance that I eventually get to enjoy it.
Luckily, I had no student loans, and I had saved up most of my salary. I’m a thrifty person, so I calculated it out and figured I could survive without working a traditional job for 2 – 3 years. What could I achieve with all this extra time? Should I travel the world like so many other young 20 somethings?
While that was very appealing, I decided against it. I felt like I would end up with no funds and back in an engineering career. Instead, I found some random roommates on Facebook and moved to Atlanta. I heard that it was becoming the Hollywood of the South. I was president of my drama club in high school, why not try acting? I was sure all my extra free time would lead to me auditioning non-stop.
Fast forward to Atlanta, and it felt like I hit a brick wall. I was acting in student films, taking acting classes, and submitting to casting calls, but I only got to audition like once every two months. It seemed I had quit too early. I needed to forge connections with casting directors, build my acting resume, get an agent, all things I could easily do just on the weekends. Should I go back to working?
My brother Travis suggested I start a food blog. I had experimented with cooking based content before. My first attempt was a live-streamed cooking show on Twitch while in college. It was called Vintage Vittles, and my roommate Brenton and I cooked old family recipes. We each hounded our relatives to get the oldest recipes possible (I think the oldest was my grandma’s hushpuppy recipe from the 1940s). I still remember making a Jell-O salad, live, putting it in the fridge and saying, “Now we wait 2 hours for it to congeal.” I never thought about making a second one ahead of time. That wasn’t an attractive option to broke college guys anyway.
We changed to a YouTube channel shortly after that. We put out a new recipe every week, but the pressures of real-world jobs and social lives eventually made us burn out.
Finally, this was my chance to resurrect it. I had plenty of free time. Only one problem, the domain name was taken. Oh well, most of my viewers never knew what a vittle was anyway (an archaic Southern term for food). I wanted something catchy. You can’t change a domain name like you can an Instagram username. After marinating for a couple of weeks, I settled on Dinner By Dennis.
It’s been about six months since I started the blog. I’ve learned a ton in that time. First, this is a tough business. If you don’t implement the correct practices for search engine optimization, people might never see your content at all. If content already exists on your topic, you have to publish something ten times as good to try and get ranked above it. I made some huge posts to try and achieve this, such as a guide to dumplings with 109 dumpling recipes (this one went viral on Reddit with 7000 page views in 1 day)!
Just two months ago, I was lucky to get one search visit a day from Google. Yesterday, I had over 100! It took a while, but I’m finally appearing on the first page of Google for some search results. This was a huge deal to me. Remember the last time you went to page 2 or 3 of Google results and clicked a link? Yeah, only 5% of searches will look at results on page number 2. Imagine how much lower each page past that gets.
Currently, I’m working on a couple of big projects. First is a guide to making famous theme park foods like butterbeer while the parks are closed. My other older brother Roy has a theme park vlog on YouTube, so he was my inspiration for that. Concurrently, I’m working on making every type of ramen possible. Not instant ramen. More like Sapporo style miso with squid and scallops, I have a feeling these are going to be popular!
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Not smooth at all. There’s so much you need to know to start a blog. The biggest bump in the road has been more of a ski jump. For a while, I would make recipes on really common, popular things. Take orange chicken for example. “Orange chicken recipe” gets searched 37,000 times a month, on average. Great way to get traffic, right? Only if you’re incredibly established. According to my research, I would need about 40 links from different websites linking to my recipe to get to the top 10 results of Google for that search. And like I said already if you aren’t on that first page, it’s almost like your content doesn’t exist at all.
Besides that, more minor stuff like compressing image file size, speeding up the page loading time, optimizing for mobile (about 70% of Google searches for recipes are done on mobile devices), and almost starting a grease fire.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
I know a lot of food blogs like to specialize in a particular niche, like only vegan recipes, or only baking, but I like making stuff I’ve never cooked before. Most of the time, the recipe I post on my site is my first attempt at cooking it. I only post it if the recipe is a success. I figure by doing it this way, it’s more likely people will achieve the same result as me, rather than refine the recipe heavily and decrease the room for error.
One thing that sets me apart is that I have no ad banners on my site. No annoying popups either. I want to keep a clean user experience. Another thing that’s kind of cool is being a guy in what seems to be a female-dominated field.
As for what I’m most proud of, it has to my guides. The most recent one, my dumpling guide, took probably 80 hours of work to make. I’m working on two more for theme park food and ramen, which will eclipse that time investment by far.
What were you like growing up?
I was a crazy kid haha. Nerdy, full of energy, with a short attention span. I really wanted to be liked by my peers, so I tried to be funny. I had horrible comedic timing until high school. History and science were my favorite subjects.
I loved the outdoors, camping, fishing, canoeing, and became an Eagle Scout along the way. I was in the Pensacola Childrens’ Chorus for ten years. We performed Broadway numbers with singing and dancing. I did a lot of church music activities too, another choir, an ensemble singing group, and a handbell group.
I loved watching football but never played in high school, opting to join drama club instead. I wear my New Orleans Saints and Florida Gator gear around the ATL a lot, and no one seems to mind. It makes me think the people of Atlanta are pretty nice!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://dinnerbydennis.com
- Email: dennis@dinnerbydennis.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dinnerbydennis/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DinnerByDennis/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/DinnerByDennis
Image Credit:
Ashley Ames Washburn
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