Food blogging is an amazing niche with a supportive audience and numerous traditional cuisines and recipes to explore. It is quite hard to run out of content in a food blog since the possibilities are endless.
In fact, food bloggers make the most out, with a median monthly income of $9,169. So it is a lucrative business.
If you want to share your best recipes with the world and try something new, here is an easy-to-follow guide on how to start a food blog. There are just 6 steps between you and your successful blogging career.
Decide on the Name and Buy Domain
Before you purchase the domain, you will need to decide on the name of your food blog and include it in the domain. You may look at other content creators for inspiration, brainstorm food blog ideas, and ask your friends what name is the most memorable for them.
While buying a domain, you will also have to choose top-level domains like .com, .org, .net, etc. Most food blogs use .com which stands for commercial. This is a standard domain. You will also get recommendations to get country-specific domains like .us or .co.uk. If you opt for it, search engines will display your blog to users from your country only. It is not the best idea if you want to have a big audience.
Choose a Hosting Provider and Type of Your Plan
Your website will “live” on your hosting provider so make sure that you have chosen safe and speedy hosting. There is no need to buy premium plans or VPS, or dedicated hostings. You can stick to a starter or standard plan and shared hosting.
Build a Website
There are two ways to do it. If your budget allows, you can hire a developer and designer to create and design your blog for you. You will be less involved and have more opportunities to think about the content and marketing rather than the tech side.
However, WordPress is more than enough for simple food blogs. It is a content management system that allows you to build a website with no tech skills. You just have to install the system, choose a theme (the general look of your website), and customize it. You are ready to go! If you want to add more functionality to the website, like making contact forms, filtering comments to avoid spam, optimizing the blog for search engines, or letting guests share your content on their social media, you can purchase plugins. They will do everything for you.
Create Content
This is where the fun part comes in. You can finally share your well-tested recipes of delicious desserts, comforting soups, and exciting main dishes and connect with other like-minded users. Here are some quick tips on the content creation for a food blog:
- Let users choose between international and American measurement systems.
- Include pictures or videos. Learn more about food photography and invest in good lights and photo editing software.
- Do not write a 6-page story before the recipe. Keep it short but do not forget to add some personality to your texts.
- Post on certain days and times consistently.
- Post only tested recipes.
- Share interesting tips, for example, on how to cook with CBD oil.
- Choose your niche: recipes from accessible or unique ingredients, mostly simple or most difficult recipes, specific cuisine or international, healthy food or comfort ones.
- Include realistic cooking times. If there are ingredients that need defrosting, prior cooking and cooling, setting aside, etc., put a warning about it.
Grow Your Audience
Marketing your food blog is as important as creating content. You may have the most delicious recipes, but what does it matter if no one sees them.
There are numerous ways to do it. One of the easiest ways is to use social media. Post pictures of meals, test different cooking equipment, and share quick tips and a glimpse into your life on the Instagram food blog. TikTok has become a number one platform for promotion: you can easily create short video content of recipes by using paid or free video editors and add your personality by posting funny TikTok about cooking.
You can also invest in advertisements. They can be placed either higher in Google search results, as banners on other websites, or on social media. Before you start the ad campaign, you will need to create beautiful visuals and learn more about your target audience.
Lastly, you can use the power of the network for marketing purposes: encourage your friends and family to share your posts, connect and collaborate with other bloggers, and leave nice comments on other blogs.
Analyze
There is always room for growth. If you are very serious about your blog, you should set KPIs (for example, how many views or new followers you want to get), track your website’s performance through Google Analytics, and gather feedback either from your friends or through feedback forms and comments.
Obviously, if there is one mean comment, you do not need to change everything to fit into the expectations of this person. Users are quite mean sometimes, and you have to deal with it, unfortunately. However, if the complaint is repeated several times by different users, maybe you should look deeper into it.
Remember that your food blog should bring joy to you and excite you. If you ever feel like you are burning out or are overwhelmed by haters, it is okay to seek out help or take breaks sometimes. You will come back more productive and motivated than ever.
Conclusion
Food blogging is an exciting idea that will help you pass on your skills to others and connect with people. In order to start, you will need a domain, hosting, and a website. It gets more interesting afterward: you can use your creativity to share recipes and cooking tips, engage with readers and followers on social media, and explore and test new content forms.
As long as you are passionate about food blogging, we are sure you will be fine. We hope these tips for bloggers help!
Leave a Reply