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While Janel worked on the blog and website designing, she was in need of a helping hand, her little sister, Lanet, (from a large family of ten) was more than willing to lend a hand, "My sister, Lanet, she was kinda in this position where she was looking for something else to do and I was right smack in the middle of starting website design and I am not a business person, I’m horrible with staying organized enough and she’s super super analytical, she’s type a to the T, everything is laminated. She worked for me for about a year and she did all the backing stuff for me, so she took care of all my calendars, scheduling, emailing all the brands, sending the numbers after things have been finished, you have to send them invoices. About six months ago she went out to go for her masters degree and she got another job, so she left, now I have to do it all myself. She is still nearby and comes over occasionally with cocktails because she feels bad,” says Janel.

When people envision a job, it usually consists of getting dressed in work clothes, driving out to the office and sitting in a cubicle all day or having meetings. For a blogger like Janel Hutton, this is not the case.

Janel is a local blogger whose posts consist of things one might find (and very easily will find) on Pinterest. Things like recipes and cheap DIY ideas and more, engulf the self-made site.

Formation of a Blog

Janel’s blogging was not her original career goal, and furthermore making a career from it was not her plans even after the blog had started. Janel was an extremely involved mother who enjoyed creating for the people around her and for the sake of doing it. The blog was created as a way to share her recipes and crafts with mothers within her communities that asked her constantly for recipes.

“Nellie Bellie is a childhood nickname, my brothers and sisters would call me Nellie and my aunt would call me Nellie Bellie. It was completely accidental, I was a youth leader for 8 years, and then I worked at a public library, so I put on events and games, and a lot of recipes and things like that, and because I’m the oldest of ten, my husband is one of six and I was part of the community I had people asking me all the time for recipes and ideas and games and so I just put it online so that they would quit asking me and so I did not have to repeat myself over and over again, and they could just find that. And after three or four months of that other people found it besides my friends and so that is how it all started,” Janel said.

While Janel now makes an income for baking and creating, she did not start it for the profit. The love for creating and sharing, was something Janel had long before the blog. The blog was merely a result of creativity.

“Before she started the blog she was doing crafts and basically everything that was on her blog for years and years and years and was doing them for family members and such,” senior, Katie Hutton said on her mother and the birth of Nellie Bellie.

To run a blog it requires constant creativity and inspiration, Hutton must create multiple posts a week and add something to it that makes her website stand out so people visit the site. This kind of creativity and inspiration can spur from Janel’s childhood as she used her natural creativity to get by.

“I think it is because I am the oldest of ten and we were very poor, so I think we just got really clever on how to get stuff to not look like crap and how to have a cute room, the recipes and food was because my mom was a terrible cook, she still is to this day, she acknowledges it. It is a joke and when I grew up I wanted to conquer and do that, so I cooked all the meals,” said Janel.

Along with creativity, there is a technical aspect to running a blog, a lot of scheduling and numbers and editing is involved in running a successful blog, all of which Hutton had to become familiar on.

“I also did website design, that was an accidental thing as well, but I did that for a year. That came along because of what I do, there is so much technical stuff that you have to do with the website. You have to know how to run a website,” Janel said.

To create a simplistic, chic image to her website that intrigues viewers, Janel was inspired by something that viewers could look at easily and understand, and something that could remind viewers of Pinterest since that is where her traffic is largely from.
“It takes time, but there are themes out there, sometimes you have to purchase stuff that is already kind of created, but I have a background in website design and I know how to do that. It does not take me a whole lot of time, I created it that was because I wanted it to be simple,” Janel said.

Nellie Bellie gains attention

Many of Janel’s posts have gained attention on social media sights, from Pinterest to Facebook some posts have picked up tremendous popularity and speed.

“Just recently the most popular thing is called ‘Sex on a Snowbank Cocktail’ I just checked the numbers and I had a fifteen million reach on Facebook and 160,000 shares. I do not know how far it can go, I paid for it to go again, we will see how far, but so far that has been the most popular on Facebook. That does not always travel, I get a lot of popularity on Buzzfeed and I have been in a lot of magazines, and they are all very different. Chocolate cake is by far one of my most popular things,” Janel said. The Cocktail’s popularity, comes from Janel’s creativity to create a winter cocktail, since the only ones seem to be summer themed, and the appreciation for her ability to think out of the box shows through in the thunderous comments of contentment with the concoction. 

Besides internet success, Janel’s work has been recognized locally. Along with her blog gaining followers, her local contributions to the Stillwater Gazette have gained attention as well.

“One of my friends came up to me one day and she said, ‘ so we saw your mom in the paper,’ and she had a hot chocolate recipe and they apparently cut out the recipe and tried the recipe and they did not know it was my mom right away until after [my friend’s] mom had met me because my picture was in the paper and so they came up to me and said they saw my mom in the paper. Now they cut out all of my mom’s recipes every single week,” Katie said.

“A lot of what I do is working with brands, and so if a brand comes to me and wants me to make something with a specific product, often I will create a recipe for that product. Usually I try to create something that is similar to something I have already made before so maybe a cupcake or something and I just twist it to add their product in, and that is the only time I will make something that’s not from my own home. When I talk about a product it’s very natural instead of putting an add up it’s in my site,” Janel said.

Family Business

Janel’s blog is more than a one-woman show. Although it looks like an easy job, it requires a tremendous amount of advertising and emailing and tedious work, which is not something Janel can always handle alone, so many times when she needs assistance to run the blog she gets her family involved.

“I started working with Janel about two years ago, mostly helping with copy editing, social media, and behind the scenes work.  Occasionally Janel would send me on trips she was unable to make for the site.  My favorite trip was one to Alaska for a hotel company. These trips varied greatly, but I generally met up with a few people, did social media work, and took photos,” Lanet Delphine said. Delphine is Janel’s younger sister in the family of ten.

Besides involving her sisters, Janel has also gotten her family in on the blog, from enjoying the food to helping with pictures, Janel’s son Levi and daughter Katie are involved.

“They eat everything. When I am making a recipe I try very hard, it is harder in the winter when it gets dark around four, but I try very hard to cook everything in the afternoon. So they will literally eat supper when they get home from school because I have made whatever it is I wanted to make, I will photograph it and everything and then say, ‘Here, eat it,’. I use them to take photos, people like to see my family and they have been on that site since day one,” Janel said.

Along with helping behind the scenes, both of Janel’s children have contributed to the site in their own creative ways.

“How to hypnotize a chicken was by Levi, it is by far my favorite of Levi’s. Back in the day both of them would create materials to put on my site and I would pay them and it was cute. He wanted to teach people how to hypnotize chickens. My kids have definitely used it as a way to learn, and they will learn what I do, and how to use words and social media and to be creative and make money,” said Janel. Janel’s daughter, Katie, quickly added, “He also used to make videos where he would just sit and tell you jokes, they were not good but he did that.”

Along with involving her family, Janel has inspired her daughter both as a person and her ability to have a career like this.

“She is really self-motivated, she is always around to hound me about things. To some extent she does public relations basically and I am currently planning on going into a career in public relations so I wouldn’t be doing the same thing, I would be doing advertising for giant brands, so that is helped me understand how advertising works,” Katie said.

Running a blog has provided Janel with many opportunities and the growth of her business has been exciting, leaving Janel in a satisfying place in her field with a wielding down bucket list.

“I want to write more books, I want to take a trip to wherever they will pay me to go, but if I pick, I would choose probably Iceland or Sweden or something like that,” Janel said, “Other than that I really like where I am and I like what I am doing, I have done about all there is to do in my field.”