How to Start a Food Blog
If you love food and want to share your culinary ideas with the world, it’s worth learning how to start a food blog in order to see if you can shift your career to something you really love. This step-by-step guide for starting a food blog provides guidance to take you through the major elements of success in this arena. Ultimately, though, you’ve got to have the right ingredients to make it work. If you think you can inspire readers and build a following as a culinary wizard along with good food photography don’t hesitate! Get started today and you’ll become a food blogger pro in no time at all.
Step 1. Find Your Niche
The question of how to become a food blogger pro should focus on one important concept: Food itself. You’ve got to have some worthwhile ideas and recipes on deck if you’re going to really shine. The food blogging world isn’t exactly starving for participants. So, if you want to stand out, you’re going to have to find a unique way to present yourself, including your domain name and different themes. There are a few ways to approach this, but one way is to focus on a specific culinary niche. What do you really like to cook? Do you have recipes from family members that have been passed down through the generations? Do you excel at creating healthy meals that make vegetables enticing to kids? Think about what makes you worth following from the audience’s perspective and plan your blog around that.
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Your niche doesn’t necessarily have to be culinary, but it really does help. However, if you have some special skills, like a killer eye for food styling or a particularly deft hand with a knife, you can find ways of using visuals to set your food blog apart. Even a basic stir fry can look amazing if you cube your carrots perfectly and slice flowers out of your peppers with ease. The key is to then share these skills with your readers. Food blogs need to balance the visual aspect with some practical advice to keep readers coming back.
Step 2. Choose A Domain Name
What is a domain name? Well, it's the "address" that you type into your web browser (Chrome, Safari, Explorer) to get to a website. It's also listed in Google for people to find. In choosing a domain name for a food blog, there's two important things to remember:
1. The domain name should be memorable. That means short and contains something about food in it.
2. It should be a .com because these are the most trustworthy addresses. People will take you more seriously if you have a .com
Here are some good examples of food blog domains (that are already taken):
You can check to see if your domain name idea is available using this tool:
[sbo-domain-checker]
Step 3. Find A Place To Host It
What is a host? If your domain name is an address, then your host is the landlord. Hosting companies charge a small fee for your website to exist on the internet on their "server". A server is basically a big computer that can handle A LOT of visitors (after all you wouldn't want thousands of people visiting your personal computer downloading the photos and text of your website, would you?)
I have a really awesome guide that compares the different web hosts.
If you want to save some time and money just get Hostgator. Use my discount code: htsabo
Step 4. Find A Place To Host It
What is a host? If your domain name is an address, then your host is the landlord. Hosting companies charge a small fee for your website to exist on the internet on their "server". A server is basically a big computer that can handle A LOT of visitors (after all you wouldn't want thousnands of people visiting your personal computer downloading the photos and text of your website, would you?)
I have a really awesome guide that compares the different web hosts.
If you want to save some time and money just get Hostgator. Use my discount code: htsabo
Step 5. Install WordPress
After you find your host, you're going to want to install WordPress. Trust me, it's the best because it is:
A. Free blogging software
B. The most popular in the world (75 million websites use it including me)
C. Requires no technical skills (you don't need to learn how to code HTML to use it)
You may have heard about some other free blogging software like Tumblr, Medium, or Blogger but those companies own all of your hard work. They are only free because they slap ads all over your blog to make money (and they don't share it with you)! And, if they increase prices or limit your features... there is nothing you can do about it because they own your blog.
With WordPress, you own 100% of it.
Step 6. Study Your Competition
After you’ve defined your niche, look at how some successful food bloggers operate, even the ones who aren’t in your particular niche. You’ll notice some consistency in how bloggers tend to approach their work. Most provide a blend of personal insight with brass-tacks focus. You shouldn’t set out to copy anyone else’s blog. Aside from potential intellectual property legal issues, it’s just not good form online. Plan to use your own voice, your own experiences and your own recipes; but as you’re getting started, find out what works for other people and adapt it for your own use.
For example, how often do the most popular food bloggers post new recipes? Do they link to similar recipes or provide suggestions for other posts? Do they run a self-hosted blog or a free theme blog? Do they include a step-by-step guide with food photography for more complicated recipes? What domain names do they use? What type of themes do they go for? Take a look to find these answers. In most cases, successful bloggers post new recipes at least once a week and they will often include plenty of photo or even video or GIF support to illustrate what they’re talking about. Some bloggers even have a signature way of describing what they’ve made and you can find a way to adopt this concept for your own. Just remember: Be original and be yourself.
Step 7. Learn the Basics of Ad Sales and Affiliate Marketing
At this point, you may be thinking “But, wait a minute... how do food bloggers make money?” That’s easy. In the beginning, food bloggers make money by selling ad space on their sites and using affiliate links to products they discuss on their blogs. These are the basic points of entry for earning money from a website and food blogging is a particularly good option because there are a lot of relevant ads and products that can buy space on your site or provide enough relevance to inspire readers to click through and purchase. With affiliate links, you’ll get a small percentage of the cost of the item the reader purchased. Therefore, it pays to use these quite often, especially when you’re making a recipe that requires an unusual tool not everyone has in their kitchen.
Both of these revenue-generating options work best when you have a significant audience. Building up a large following can also net you additional opportunities, including product sponsorships and even a publishing deal to get your own hard-copy cookbook printed. The former option, product sponsorships, tends to be more widely available than a book deal so keep your expectations in the realm of possibility for now. Product sponsorships may involve you using a specific type of food or food product in a recipe and specifically including that brand name in your post. You may be required to tag or disclose that the post is sponsored depending on the laws surrounding this practice where you live.
Step 8. Get Comfortable With SEO and Social Media
Clearly, building up a large audience is the key to really unlocking moneymaking potential for your food blog. If you’re starting a food blog with a goal of making money from the endeavor, it’s essential to get smart about how you market yourself. You’ll need to learn the basics of SEO (search engine optimization) so people can find your blog. This usually means researching what keywords people use online when searching for recipes and using those keywords in your posts. This goes back to finding your niche—if you can find food-related keywords that don’t actually have a lot of competition from popular blogs, you can establish yourself more quickly than if you try to shove your way into frequently used keywords.
Social media is also a very important tool for promoting a food blog. Using hashtags and categories can be essential for making sure your content actually gets seen on Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook. Make sure all the content you post on social media is relevant and of the highest-possible quality. Again, studying other food bloggers may be the key to ensuring you actually get the results you want.
Going from 0 to total success may take some time so don’t give up on your food blog if you don’t have a book deal and millions of adoring followers in the first month (or six months... or year, even). Be patient and stay smart about marketing. It takes time to earn some fans so stay consistent and don’t give up!
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