I started blogging by accident.

I’m that girl that everyone calls for emergency kitchen advice when they’re stuck behind the stove. About a year-and-a-half ago, I started a food blog as a way to share my recipes with friends.

Fast forward to today.

That same blog gets between 60,000 and 70,000 visitors a month—and has a large and loyal following on Twitter and Facebook, an Alexa rank under 100k, and Google page ranks up to 5. I’ve been featured in Bon Appetit and Saveur magazines, and get e-mails every week from foodies around the world asking me for advice in the kitchen.

You probably won’t believe me, but I didn’t do a lot to make that happen.

I’m not a coder, designer, or SEO expert. I’m just a girl with a passion for food—and writing. And I’ll tell you a secret: I do it all mostly myself. The cooking, the writing, the photography, and the site hacks and maintenance.

It’s not as preposterous as it may seem. I know I can cook and write reasonably well. But I didn’t know anything about running a website. In fact, I started out knowing only one thing about code: It’s a language.

Sure, it’s one I didn’t know, but if it’s a language, then it must have its own grammar.

So I started looking for patterns. And after a little hunting, they started to emerge.

I used what I found to hack and hone my site in Wordpress, tweaking design and function to fit my—and my growing audience’s—needs.

Here are 10 things I’ve learned along the way.

1. Blogging is a DIY labor of love. Read everything that you can on blogging—and on your niche. And when in doubt, look it up. When I ask him for advice, my coder friend usually says, “Google it. Someone’s already figured out how to do that.” You know what? He’s almost always right.

2. You gotta have the content. You don’t start blogging to get rich. Trust me. You do it because you have something to say. And, it has to be interesting. As Copyblogger’s Sonya Simone put it, “The first rule of Copyblogger is you do not publish content that sucks.”

3. Less is more. It’s cliché, but it’s true. Resist the urge to stuff your sidebar full of junk that’s not relevant to your readers.

4. Learn to love Twitter. If you’re blogging, you’ve just joined a big community of like-minded folks all connected by 1s and 0s. Creating quality content aside, being a blogger is also about reacting in real time as things happen in your little corner of the interwebs.

5. Be genuine. Your readers will know when you’re not. The internet has a pretty good built-in BS detector. The other day, Adii, co-founder of WooThemes, tweeted, “You can’t buy loyalty and awesomeness.” He’s dead on with that.

6. Have a point of view. It doesn’t necessarily have to be unique, but you should be able to get behind it 110%. Stay focused.

7. Your blog is about you. But it’s also about your readers. If your audience is interested in what you’re saying, your blog will naturally evolve into one big two-way conversation.

8. Give stuff away. Giveaways are fun and engaging. People like treats and a chance to win something just for joining a conversation.

9. Make friends. A lot of them. But you have to be for real. Five-thousand fans on Facebook don’t matter much if you don’t know who any of them are.

10. People click the flat belly ads. No really, they do. At least they do on my blog. Pay attention to which ads get clicked and get rid of the ones that aren’t working. Apply the same principle to your content.