Jane Ko may have one of the most exciting jobs in the world. She gets to go to Austin’s best restaurants, order whatever she wants, and take incredible pictures! Ko has even served as a SXSW 2016 mentor. What first started as a recipe blog while she was a student at the University of Texas has grown into a full time restaurant coverage and travel blog called A Taste of Koko.
The focus of Ko’s blog has always been on food. “I was at UT Austin getting my bachelors in nutrition to become a dietitian just after I switched my degree already from being pre med. I then realized that I didn’t want to be a dietitian either and was like, ‘Well, what do I do now?’ That was six years ago and no one was blogging in Austin. It was not the industry that it is today, so I built a web site and decided that it would be a passion project centered on food.” Two years later, Ko transitioned her blog to restaurant coverage where restaurants approach her for tasting’s.
Ko has worked with some large brands like Nike and KitchenAid to name a few. “I’ve been really lucky that in the past two years the blogging industry hasn’t really changed. I never envisioned that I could do my blog full time, which I have been doing now for almost a year and a half after I quit my job.”
Ko says she got lucky to have such a strong voice in Austin as the restaurant and travel blogger. “So I have a lot of brands that have reached out to me to do collaborations. I just went to New Orleans with Hilton, and then I represented Carnival Cruise Line and booking.com last summer. I’m working on a couple more exciting collaborations this summer. When every blogger starts, you have to build your niche, you have to build your audience and really define yourself. Then you’ll really start working with brands and some of them you might not necessarily want to work with, but just to monetize. I’m so lucky right now that brands will reach out to me and ask me, ‘What is your editorial calendar? We want to work with you on content that you’re going to write anyways.’ I’m really excited about the ones for this summer because these brands are helping me feel my content and put a boost behind it. Then it will be shared with my audience and their own audience as well.”
One of the many factors that makes A Taste of Koko stand out is Ko’s beautiful food pictures. “It’s all about the ambience. If a restaurant has a ton of natural lighting (an outdoor patio with a shaded area or indoors full of white) then I’m a sucker it. You’ll see that pattern through all of my photography. There’s a lot of white: white tables and white dishes. The next thing is if the food is instagramable? When I sit down I always ask the waitress, ‘What are your most photogenic dishes? What are the ones that photograph the best?’ Then when I talk to the bartender I say, ‘Give me your most garnished drinks.’ Anything pink or yellow that will photograph well.” One might wonder how she stays so petite with all the food pictures Ko posts.
“My diet is basically all carbs. My boyfriend is completely opposite and all protein. I don’t eat a lot of the food when we’re at tasting’s. Most of the time the restaurants will let me order the entire menu and then I’ll just take a couple of bites here and there and be done. When my boyfriend went with me to all the restaurant tastings he would then finish the rest of the table, so after the first year of restaurant tastings he gained 30 pounds, that’s where all of the food went. He was like, ‘There’s food, I have to eat it!’”
Something that has always been on Ko’s bucket list was to be a SXSW mentor. “SXSW reached out to me to share my expertise with the attendees. It’s always interesting because I’ve talked with SXSW, I’ve talked to Whole Foods global where they streamed me to all of their teams in the nation and I’ve talked at T3. A lot of these companies reach out to me because it’s interesting to have someone who has done social media from a professional standpoint and worked with bloggers and influencers; but to also be a blogger and influencer myself and be able to give that perspective from both sides. These companies want to know what your thought process is when a brand reaches out to you and how you decide who you want to work with. For me, I just know what my audience wants and I write content that I want to read.” A Taste of Koko is Ko’s catchy blog title.
“Growing up I had some friends who would call me Koko. I struggled with the name of my blog for so long. It took about three months trying to figure out what I should call my blog. One day, I came up with the name on a whim, A Taste of Koko, and decided to just run with it, realizing that I could always change it later. My advice is to find the name, then go online and make sure it’s available on Facebook, Twitter and most importantly Instagram. If the name of your blog does not fit who you are, then you need to come up with something else that you like because you are going to brand yourself with that!” When Jane Ko isn’t busy working on A Taste of Koko her blog, she has found time to give back to the Austin Animal Center. “So I had been working for five years in social media with different agencies, consulting firms, and big companies. I was burnt out and decided, ‘I’m going to quit and go volunteer.’ The company I was with at the time said, ‘You’re going to go volunteer for free?’ and I said, ‘Yes, because that’s just what I really need right now.’ So I quit and then the next day I went to the Austin Animal shelter and asked how I could get involved. They needed photographers to help photograph big dogs, which I struggled with since I’m so tiny, but did that for about a year and a half. It was also kitten season and the shelter had 800 kittens dropped off so they were actively asking people to help foster. I had never fostered before, and I honestly didn’t like cats and I’ve never been a cat person. It’s always been Basil (Ko’s dog) and I and we’ve pretty happy the two of us. Because I didn’t want them to be euthanized, I ended up taking four kittens home. Their names were Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Chopin. I had them for two months and wanted to get them fostered and not send them back to the shelter.”
Ko met with each of the families that were interested in adopting. “I ended up keeping Beethoven and so now I have Basil and Beethoven. He acts like half a dog, plays fetch and loves attention.”
If you’re interested in starting your own blog, Ko has some great advice. “I think the first question I would ask is have you defined your niche? Are you food, fashion or travel? If you are those categories, what kind of travel are you? Domestic? International? Are you doing luxury or are you doing more affordable travel? Then if you’re like me, are you restaurant coverage? Are you doing recipes, because recipe blogging is so big in itself and there’s so many bloggers that are making a lot of money in that category. Once you’ve defined your niche my suggestion for someone to build their audience is to understand that once you define yourself to be able to evolve and grow over time. For me, I started with recipes and I didn’t like cooking and honestly hated doing the dishes. That’s about the same time when restaurants started reaching out to me. I don’t even have to make the food, I just have to take pictures of it and realized that this is what my audience wanted. Because everyone in Austin wanted to know about all these new places to eat, all of these new readers turned to me. So know that you will evolve and grow over time and that you might lose some audience on the way, but that you’ll gain a new audience as you grow!”
To learn more about A Taste of Koko, you can follow Jane Ko on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
