Cyndi Allison Wittum, a lecturer in Communication Arts at Catawba College, can tell you a lot about grilling. And folks must like what she’s been sharing about grilling through her Barbecue Master Blog (http://barbequemaster.blogspot.com). Visitors to Wittum's blog site just crossed the 2 million mark this month.
Wittum launched her blog as a hobby on January 16, 2006, and has been grilling and making posts to it since that time. Her passion for grilling and her persistence in writing about it has paid dividends in the form of site visitors.
"You hear about web sites going viral and people getting famous overnight, but that really hasn’t been my experience," she shared during an April 2012 interview about her site. "Onliners have found and shared my articles and given me a wonderful platform for sharing things I love to do in the evenings and on weekends to relax – grill and write."
Wittum's online blogging experiences have helped her in the classroom. She teaches an Online Publications class at Catawba that requires students in that class to build their own blogs.
Her blogging experience and her grilling prowess has also helped her land some freelance jobs. In 2012, Wittum was invited by Sears to blog for them as a part of their corporate "Grilling is Happiness" project. This put Wittum in the company of some of the top grilling and barbecue writers across the country. Before that, in 2006 and again in 2011, she was tapped by Consumers Digest to test grills for their “top picks” and to write a feature article about her testing experiences.
In addition to her Barbecue Master blog, Wittum maintains two other websites related to grilling and cooking: www.yesyoucangrill.com and www.yesyoucancook.com.
