How a Blog Launched a Movement: The Vani Hari Story

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This episode explores how a blogger followed her passion and grew a mega following in a few short years.
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The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

Join me as I interview Vani Hari, who is known online as the Food Babe. Her popular blog, FoodBabe.com, focuses on healthy eating. She's built a large platform through articles and videos that investigate unhealthy ingredients in food. Her new book is called The Food Babe Way.

In this episode Vani will share how she got started with her blog and built her following.

You'll discover how to apply Vani's lessons and journey to your own business blog.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
How a Blog Launched a Movement
Vani's story

Vani's parents were from India, and moved to the United States right after they married. The first thing Vani's father introduced her mother to was a McDonald's hamburger. Since cows are sacred in India, her mother had never eaten a hamburger before and it was a shock to her system. It turned out American food didn't sit well with Vani's mother, so she just made Indian food at home.

However, she let Vani and her brother eat whatever they wanted. Because the siblings wanted to fit in with their neighbors and peers (Indian food looked weird and smelled funny to some of the other kids), they shunned their mother's cooking and asked for fast food and other processed foods.

As a result, Vani had a lot of health issues as a child: eczema, asthma, allergies and stomachaches. She didn't tie them to food; she thought they were largely genetic, because her brother also had health issues. Many years later, her health issues caught up with her. Vani was working in a prestigious job for a big-six consulting firm shortly after she graduated from college. She gained over 30 pounds right away (eating catered meals brought into the office and fancy dinners out), and landed in the hospital with appendicitis. Vani didn't look or feel well. It was a major wake-up call.

After her recovery, when Vani got back to work, she started to research health and nutrition. She wanted to lose the weight and get healthy.

Vani set out to learn about what she was eating; what the ingredients were, why they were in the food and why the food companies were using them. She discovered the chemicals put in food (many of which were invented in the last 50 years or so) were there just to improve the bottom line of the food industry, to figure out how to sell food cheaper by using food-like substances and making them taste like real food. Vani realized the majority of the food she had been eating was processed and had little to no nutrients left in it.

The health incident happened 14 years ago and Vani started the blog 4 years ago. The Food Babe Way is all about adopting healthy eating habits.

Listen to the show to discover what Vani's aunt told her cousin about Vani's new look.

FoodBabe.com

Vani says she created the blog because her co-workers and friends asked her to.

She explains how she came up with the name. After asking her husband to register the name EatHealthlyLiveForever.com, Vani recalls him saying, "Are you crazy? That's a horrible name. No one's going to remember that." She asked him to come up with something better. A few minutes later, he saw FoodBabe.com was available on auction, and suggested that.

At first Vani didn't want to call it Food Babe because for most of her life, she was anything but a food babe. She decided she wouldn't call herself the Food Babe,