“A major reason why I do what I do is to prove that we women are capable of more than we convince ourselves to be! -Shumaila”

Who am I? 

My name is Shumaila (Mila), I’m mainly a food and lifestyle influencer. I specialize in creating different types of presentations, cuisines, cultures, and unprecedented innovations in the world of food. Currently, I’m doing restaurant & cafe reviews while highlighting the best parts of Jeddah’s beauty. Apart from this, I’m also a corporate event registration manager, I have years worth of knowledge and experience in the fields of business administration, E-commerce, computer science, health science, skincare, haircare, nutrition, photography, and design.

How I created this brand/my current mindset behind it:

I started this page eight years ago, solely because I wanted to learn and master the art of food styling and presentation. Now, fast forward today, I am working with some good organizations.

How my page works:

A few years ago my page was all about food styling but slowly as my work got noticed, I have dedicated it to exploring and reviewing the best parts of Jeddah and bringing forth the beauty of this remarkable city. I help people virtually explore along with me as I reveal the most extravagant features of the city; cafés, restaurants, beaches, shops, and what not! 

The idea I want to highlight:

I wanted to take this opportunity to not only introduce myself in this space but to also share out here the idea that no one is born already having the skills and experience. Talent is not born, it’s created, and the process of creating it is NOT easy. Success doesn’t come knocking at your door overnight. It takes years of grinding and hard work to make it happen. I’m a true advocate of the belief that a woman should never stay idle, she should always have something going on in her day to day because life is too short to wait around for something to change, you gotta BE the change you want to see!

The challenges I went through creating my brand:

Before my page took off, people didn’t believe in my capabilities and dreams. They always thought that if I was successful in something, it’s only because of somebody else. Even in the beginning, perfection in food styling wasn’t easy to achieve. I would run back and forth in my kitchen, scraping together random pieces of paper, objects, or backgrounds that could work for my scene. A lot of things weren’t available to me at the time. I was constantly told to take my page down and to “Stop this madness”, but I kept going and here I am today, the people who doubted me, now stand with me and refuse to admit who they used to be. Yet now, People think I gained overnight success but I’m here to tell you that I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs, failure, slumps, criticism, and self-doubt in this process. Anyone who thinks they can just wake up one day and have all these wins without putting in the effort or that it’s easy and requires no mental energy has not yet seen what it takes to build such a community. 

How I manage my finances:

Almost all of what I earn from this, I re-invest back into content creation. I’m a true believer in investing in areas that can help me grow both in my career as well as a person.

My vision:

My vision about my page is for it to become the go-to destination for people to explore Jeddah inside out in terms of both food and entertainment. I’m planning on working with even more famous organizations and brands whilst adding live reviews and collaborations so that I can dig deeper and people can engage more with my content. 

My message to people reading this article:

In the end, I just want to say that it’s easy to assume that you can do it all or better than someone when you’re not actually in their shoes. It wasn’t easy building this landmark of my life. Everyone starts at zero and only the people who are willing to BE the change can make a difference!

Brand name: Diet-a-might

•Website : www.facebook.com/dietamight

•Instagram : www.instagram.com/diet_a_might

The post Mila: Be the Change You Want to See in The World! appeared first on CEO Medium.

She belongs to Karachi, Pakistan where she spent her entire childhood and teenage. She opted for Computational Finance as her professional field, but couldn’t practice it as a career.

Got married 4 years back and moved to Khobar, Saudi Arabia.

Living as an expatriate, she never applied for any job since her priority was her home and family yet at the same time she was passionate to do something on her own.

Food had always been her weakness. She loved creating new recipes, experimenting with flavors, discovering new cuisines, and trying out different eateries in town.

Hence it was a perfect idea to turn her passion into a career. 

Her food blog was started in August 2020, which caters to creative and easy recipes, kitchen hacks, food science, and eateries reviews. 

When she stepped into the kitchen in her initial days, she faced a lot of hurdles in cooking. Since marrying at a young age then moving abroad doesn’t seem fascinating when you don’t know how to cook. Hence this idea clicked her and she felt the urge to share her experiences with the audience. 

According to her, cooking is not a chore, but an art, in which every day you learn something new,  you fail but u try again and succeed. This process goes on until you feel accomplished even with one compliment that comes from the dining table. 

Talking particularly about Aamna Saad’s food blog, it has her heart and soul in it. Whatever her audience finds there, it is something related to her. The problems that she faced as an amateur cook before, she doesn’t want others to go through. Hence her basic target is to create easy hassle-free recipes with minimum ingredients yet with a promising taste. Be it the main course, appetizer, beverage, or dessert, her blog has everything for you to try out. 

Her contentment is when her audience shares their recreations with her, she feels honored to have put a smile on someone’s face who had been struggling in something and she made it easy for them. 

Not just home-cooked food, she also posts food reviews to help people in her town in selecting the best restaurant for them. She photographs the food and ambiance and uploads with all the necessary details like the menu, prices just to make it easy for her followers to explore it through her feed. 

Blogging never is an easy job. It’s not just a person behind a laptop creating content. It is a tiring process.

You never know that one food picture that you see on your Instagram feed takes the whole day of the blogger. At first creating the recipe after multiple trials to make it perfect, shooting it nicely, photographing it to make it look out of the world, editing it to look more appealing, typing in the whole recipe procedure in the caption, and then finally uploading it with suitable hashtags! 

Hence it requires a lot of patience and hard work

Making your blogging a career requires double the hard work mentioned above. You need to build good connections, network with different people to make your blog famous, and expand its audience. The more exposure the blog gets, the more chances there are to have brands approaching you. This certainly means giving more and more time to your workspace to reach thousands of people and get acknowledgment from related brands. Consistency, hard work, creative content, and networking surely leads to the positive growth of a blog through which you can earn as well. 

As a blogger, after all the hard work that is involved in the process, she craves some appreciation from her followers. One like comment, save, or share simply makes her day. This in turn also contributes to increase her reach. Hence, as an audience, we all should uplift and support everyone who is putting in a lot of effort in creating valuable content. 

At the moment, she isn’t earning through her blog, in fact inputting all that she has got and would certainly be doing that until she achieves something more from this. 

She wishes to see this space as a huge recipe sharing and food review platform where people would be trying out her recommendations and execute all the recipes without having the fear of wasting their ingredients. 

Anyone who is at the same stage as her, her guidance for you is to stay consistent, be genuine, and never give up. At times it seems so depressing when you are putting in so much effort but still not reaping the reward, but remember everyone gets what they deserve someday or the other. 

She would like to wrap it up with the basic motive behind this journey: 

Food is a basic necessity, hence try to ‘love’ it and not just ‘make it.

For more information contact: amytamy19@gmail.com

Instagram: www.instagram.com/appetizing.aromas

The post A Student who Started Studying Finance but Ended up Being a Food Blogger appeared first on CEO Medium.