You might think there wouldn’t be much money in being a berry blogger, and you’d be… well, not entirely wrong. But there is some money in it, enough to keep me going, and the experience itself is so rewarding that it somehow pans out.
What is a berry blogger, you ask? I settled on that moniker because I like the alliteration, and it’s also a fairly accurate capture of what the job is. I’m essentially a travel blogger, mostly on social media, with a focus on berry foraging. Sounds niche, right? That’s correct, and it’s also the reason I’ve somehow managed to make paid work out of this. Turns out there’s a fairly large foraging community on the internet, and they’re hungry for content… and berries, it seems.
As an example, I just got back from Lapland, where I did a story on berry season. I also squeezed in a course on time management for managers, training opportunities being hard to seize when you’re constantly on the move. I wanted to do the course because I’m thinking of hiring a couple of staff members – an itinerary administrator and someone to answer my emails – and I’m keen to become better at understanding time management before I do that.
As it turned out, the course was in Finnish, which is a language completely unlike any other and impossible for me to make head or tail of. That was my own bad, so I couldn’t get a refund. Still, I think I learned a valuable lesson about leadership and management. Courses for Melbourne professionals often overlook this insight: that verbal communications can make all the difference. Just because the website was in English didn’t mean the seminar would be, and that was something I’d have found out if I’d called the company instead of just ticking all those online form boxes.
Long story short, it’s all about the berry foraging, not the blogging. The whole ‘social media blogger/influencer’ thing means nothing if people don’t personally connect with it offline.