Being the proud owner of a food blog for a year, I would like to share my thoughts and give some hints to the starting blogger. I won’t cover all of the issues related to (food) blogging but it will get you started.
So, does food blogging hurt? Not so much, much better than going to the dentist!
So, let’s get started!
1) Food blogging is hard!
No, it’s very easy. You go shopping, you make dinner, take some photos, write down the ingredients and directions, post it online and…voila! You are a food blogger.
But are you a good food blogger?
Is your recipe tasty? Are the photos good and appetizing? Do you provide useful information to your readers? Does anybody care about your food and ideas?
There are millions of food blogs but only a few of them are successful. Why? Because food blogging demands patience, motivation, discipline and creativity. Make sure that you don’t lack any of these, if you want to have at least moderate success on food blogging.
2) Food blogging is time-consuming.
Most probably you have a day job or you are retired. You have a passion about food and talent in cooking. Is it enough? No, you also need time.
After cooking and taking photos, you can easily write the recipe, prepare the photos and publish it within an hour. Not bad. However, I find that I spend most of my time on what comes after I post a recipe.
Which means promotion of the post, participating in communities, looking into other blogs for inspiration, involvement in social media etc.
I spend 80% of the time I dedicate to my blog on doing something else that cooking and writing. Simply, if you don’t do that, traffic is not coming to your blog because your recipes are awesome. You need to let the people know that it’s there.
3) Food blogging is expensive.
That depends a lot on where you live and how much a supermarket tour will cost you. If you are lucky, you live in a country where the seasonal vegetables are cheap and abundant and buying some meat will not cost you an arm and leg.
If not, prepare for some sacrifices!
It also depends on what you are cooking and what your blog is about. If you are trying to mimic 3-Michelin star recipes and general up-scale food, that can be a problem.
You need to be well organized not to waste any ingredients. Also, you need to be creative and come up with ideas for recipes simply with what’s in the fridge.
Depending how serious about blogging you are, you may also need a nice camera, some lighting equipment and good-looking plates.
Because, I don’t know if you have noticed, amazing photos are the most important winning factor for food bloggers. That brings me to the next fact.
4) Photography in food blogging is important.
There is nothing wrong starting taking photos with your iPhone or another great smartphone. Actually, my Galaxy Alpha has a great camera with 12MP and that’s what I used for my first recipes.
However, the sooner you move to DSRL cameras, the better. Not only they will allow you to take better pictures but you will have much flexibility later during post-processing.
You don’t have to spend a fortune on a good camera. Any entry-level model will do the job. Maybe you can invest some more money on a good lens, but that can happen later.
For an amateur photographer like me, DSLRs can be really overwhelming! There are so many settings, so many buttons to press, a nightmare. You can find so much information on the internet but still, you need to practice a lot. After a few months and my photographs still suck.
But I will get there.
Bottom line: If you are serious about blogging, buy a good camera, a tripod and some lighting equipment.
5) How to attract traffic to your food blog.
You wrote your first recipe, took some decent photons and it’s online. You text your mum, she visits your blog and she texts you back to tell you that she’s very proud. Congratulations! You have one pageview!
Now you need some more people. You keep pressing “refresh” on your Google Analytics page but no one comes to drool over your beautiful lasagna photo. That’s depressing.
I believe bloggers have a big ego, which can be damaged with a low number of pageviews. Instead of crying over your mum’s shoulders, you need to take some action.
After all, your post is brilliant and the whole world is just ignorant.
That’s why a food blog is time consuming. You need to spend a considerable amount of time online to promote your content. In the beginning, you want to try all the possible ways to attract some traffic. Some of them will work, some of them not and some of them can do small miracles.
I will share with you my experiences during my first year of blogging and how I managed to have ~ 7K pageviews in one month.
6) Is SEO important in food blogging?
Yes it is. But don’t expect to get much traffic from Google during the first months. There are millions of food blogs and hundreds of thousands of recipes on “Creamy Lasagna”. Most probably your post will be on page no. 25 on Google search. Or even worse. Not good.
The more you run your blog, the higher it will rank on Google searches. So, do your SEO, optimise your content for useful keywords and, eventually, Google will do its magic (after several months, or even a year).
If you are using the WordPress platform, do yourself a favour and install the SEO by Yoast plugin. It will help you optimise your posts and be Google-friendly.
But again, don’t expect much organic traffic, especially in the first few months.
7) Attract traffic from social media to your food blog.
Social media are everywhere. One could think that all the hard work of scientists and engineers in the last 50-60 years was done so we can share photos of babies playing with puppies while we commute to work.
Sure, there is more to this and actually social media are a powerful tool for marketing. And your food blog is a product you need to promote in the market.
Facebook is the first and more obvious platform to start sharing your creations and posts. Here are some useful tips to get you started on Facebook:
-
Do not use your personal account but rather create a page dedicated to your food blog.
-
Invite your friends to follow your page.
-
Find other pages where you can share your posts (recipe pages, food bloggers pages etc).
-
Interact with people. Reply to comments and leave comments to other people’s recipes and posts. Be part of the community.
-
Follow other food bloggers and hopefully they will follow you back.
-
Be nice and share genuine content with your followers and readers.
I have to admit that I don’t get much traffic from Facebook. People tend to “like” my posts but not many “click” on them to go to my website. It is a slow process to build up followers there and I have to invest some more time on it.
In the meanwhile, why don’t you join me on Facebook?
Pinterest is another media you need to join. I admit that I hadn’t heard about it before I started blogging. Since it’s a platform based on photos, it’s perfect for food bloggers. There are successful food blogs that have Pinterest as number one source of traffic. We are talking about tens of thousands per day!
You need to make your photos Pinterest-friendly in order to be successful there. Long (not wide) photos seem to work better there. Always change the title of your photo to a sentence reflecting what we see in the photo (name of the recipe). Do the same for the “alternative text”, as this is the one that is picked by Pinterest as a title for your photo.
After one year, I do get some traffic from Pinterest, but not enormous. Need to work harder on it.
Why don’t you join my Pinterest Page?
Twitter, for me, has been a waste of time. After one year I have ~ 800 followers, which is not bad. However, Twitter is chaotic and don’t expect to get many clicks in your tweets. Unless your photo is AWESOME!
You can follow my updates on Twitter.
Yummly
Yummly is a platform I discovered recently. It has several millions of users that upload or search for recipes. Uploading your recipes is very easy, simply by pressing the “Yum” button on your browser (that you need to install once). I strongly recommend to add the “Yum” button together with the other social media buttons at the beginning or end of your posts.
I love Yummly! It’s one of my major sources of traffic and I am very happy I have joined it. I don’t think that you should expect tons of traffic immediately but it’s a great starting point for the beginning of your adventure in food blogging.
Reddit is strange. Its community is strange. They don’t like people trying to promote their content. The idea is that information should be free and everything you share should be advantageous for the community, not you.
However, there are some places where you can post your recipes with a link back to your website. It can be accepted. But remember to be a part of the community, interact and reply to the comments other people make. If not, you can be easily banned!
I had quite some success with Reddit. It is possible to get several hundreds of clicks in your post in a day. It’s a powerful community but needs to be treated with respect. Do it and you will be rewarded (with traffic)!
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is another social media platform where you can share your posts. Just create an account and start “stumbling” your pages.
It’s a bit tricky to make it work for you. It doesn’t like self-promoting much, so, again, you need to show that you are a genuine part of the community. I had some success there, with some posts making a few thousands hits. Not bad!
Conclusion after one year of food blogging.
These are my thoughts one year after I started my food blog. It’s hard work that can be even harder if you want it to be successful. There are still many things to learn but it’s good fun.
I hope this post will be helpful for the starting food blogger. Remember, if you do it from your heart and put your personal touch, who knows, one day you will be one of the most famous food bloggers in the world!
