Food blogger are in high demand these days. They can make a living by writing about food, cooking, and gardening.
But what is the meaning of a food blogger?
Food bloggers are often misunderstood, but the meaning behind their blogs is often very meaningful. Food bloggers are a diverse group of people with different backgrounds and interests who use their platforms to share their personal stories and connect with their fans.
What is a food blogger?
A Food blogger creates a platform for people to explore new recipes and cooking styles. These food bloggers have also helped foodies find new restaurants, dishes, and ingredients. They also use their blogs to advocate for healthy eating and teach others how to cook delicious meals.
Food blogging is an emerging form of social media that has gained traction in recent years. It's a way for people to share their love for cooking or access high-quality ingredients.
Food bloggers can write about anything from cooking to dining out to healthy living. They provide valuable information for anyone who is looking for recipes or tips on how to live a healthier lifestyle.
Bloggers can also use it as a platform to promote themselves, their business, or even the restaurant they work at. There are various types of Food Blogs that you can create.
How to become a successful food blogger?
Are you someone who always feels :
- I love cooking and sharing my recipes with others
- I look forward to promoting my traditional and native cuisine
- I want to transform my passion for food into my career
- I take a keen interest in food innovation and culinary
Then food blogging is your thing!
And if you have not started yet, then chances are that one of the following situations is holding you back:
Even famous food bloggers face such challenges in the beginner stage. But, now you can stop worrying! This article has got your questions and concerns covered!
Before you start with the process, here are a few points to take into consideration.
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Identify your target audience - Who would love reading what you write?
As a food blogger, choosing your target audience is one of the most important decisions you can make for your blog. It’s not just about who will read your posts, but who you want to reach with your blog.
Ask yourself these questions-
I know this may seem like a lot of effort, but having this list will be of utmost importance as you develop a plan to drive your audience back to your opt-in forms and pages!
It is important to know what kind of food you want to cook and share on your blog.
For example, if you are a vegan blogger and want to share vegan recipes with others, then choosing a target audience of vegans would be appropriate.
Identify the type of food blogger within you
Broadly, there are three types of food bloggers on the web-
The Cooking and posting bloggers
These bloggers post their cooking stories along with tempting pictures. They are emotionally attached to their recipes and do not fail to mention any stories or experiences that associate them with the recipe.
Their posts could be about all sorts of recipes ranging from authentic food to innovative variants.
The restaurant reviewers
We can rely on these bloggers to review restaurants for ambiance, service, price range, quality of food, etc. Their reviews provide us with an unbiased opinion on various restaurants ranging from that eatery down the road to some of the finest 5-star hotels!
They always include their experiences, which makes their posts even more informative and engaging.
The Super Niche Blogs
Gluten-free blogs, Bake-only blogs, Vegan blogs, etc. would come under this. These bloggers focus on a very niche subject within the food itself. They also give glimpses of their lifestyle choices and promote healthy eating and fitness goals through innovative and specific recipes for weight watchers.
Mostly a food blog has elements from these three things, but there is no rigid rule. You can go freestyle, explore, experiment, and come up with your very own blogging style!
Choose your Niche - What type of food you would like to write about?
Your niche is simply the type of cuisine or method your food blog revolves around. You might have come across terms like keyword analysis, market saturation, and other analytical stuff while trying to choose your niche. But, I believe that the most important thing to look out for is the type of food you love eating.
Once you identify your niche, ask the following questions:
It is essential to find a niche that you can call your own and be an authority in. Try to resist the temptation to dive into large markets as soon as you start. Instead, find your niche and attack it!
Focus on creating awesome content for the readers in your niche. This may seem like a smaller market, but if you influence it, you will gain a lot of credibility. This would help you to expand gradually and make your way up.
Always remember, slow and steady wins the race!
Research Before you start writing
Research is an integral part of any project we undertake in our life. You cannot overstate its significance. Before you start writing, Read.
Why Reading is important
You may be reading a recipe that you already know how to make, but there are high chances that you find some interesting hack in the recipe that adds to your knowledge. Reading also helps you stay updated with the latest current and help you keep an eye on your competition.
There are many things that you can learn from reading blog posts of successful food bloggers or browsing through related videos on YouTube.
Keep your mind open to suggestions and opinions. Learn from others’ experiences.
Spend a really big amount of time developing yourself as a reader before becoming a writer.
What you need to start a food blog
Food blogging is quite different from other blogging styles. Many people talk about the same recipes, but only a few rank high and others do not. The ranking depends on the content quality, page speed, mobile-friendliness, internal and external linking of the posts, and some other SEO factors.
Once you learn how to write quality content, and you have optimized it well, you become unstoppable!
I am now going to talk about a few tools that will help you run and maintain your food blog. You can absolutely run your blog without the following tools, but, it will almost be impossible for you to get the attention of search engines and your audience.
Platform for blogging
Choosing the wrong blogging platform can mess up your blogging journey even before it starts!
As a beginner, you might want to look out for user-friendly platforms which do not require coding and have a low learning curve.
There are various other platforms like TypePad Micro, Tumblr, Wix, Weebly, LiveJournal, Joomla, Blogspot, Ghost, Squarespace, and many more. But to keep this article precise, I will limit detailing to the following three:
WordPress.com: This is one of the best platforms, to begin with. You could start for free using wordpress.com. You will save on yearly charges of hosting service and/or theme or any other type of security plugins you may need. But, you will not be able to monetize your blog on this platform.
WordPress.org: Again the core remains the same, one of the best platforms. With wordpress.org, you will need to host your site yourself and will need a hosting service provider, your domain name, security plugins, theme, or anything else that you may need. But you are able to monetize it as you start getting an audience coming to your website.
The best part of the WordPress platform is its SEO friendliness. You are able to rank on Google faster than other platforms provided you have to take care of off-page, on-page, and technical SEO.
Blogger: Blogger is a platform that offers many benefits to its users. These benefits include the ability to create a blog for free, the ability to easily share posts on social media, and the ability to connect with other bloggers.
Also, Blogger offers users a wide variety of templates to choose from and provides users with tools to help them improve their blogging skills. Personally, I like the themes on WordPress much better than on blogger, but that's just my individual preference.
Domain Name
Once you have selected your platform, you can move on to the step of naming your blog and get started with a domain. You can create an identity for your blog by getting your own domain name.
I prefer using Dynadot.com to buy domains. And if you like to save $5 when you register your domain name, you can use the 9X716Gv749G8E6q in the referrer name while creating your account. This will help you earn ₹5 while you make your first purchase of $9.99 or more.
The reason I like to buy from Dynadot is that:
And when it comes to choosing the name for your blog, I know people spend ages finding one. The concept of a unique name has never got into my mind as it is too vague to follow.
So here is what I do, when I have to pick a name for my blog.
I write down the purpose of the blog, the niche, and a phrase or a term that my audience strongly relates to. If anything that I can make meaningful that is small and has no jumbled-up spellings, great I am done.
If not, I will move to my next set of research. Now this includes adding some humor and creating a name or maybe adding some puns and creating a name.
You should keep these things in mind while naming your blog:-
Let me explain with the help of an example. We started with the name Sonlicious. We made up this name using the first name of Sonia and adding the word Delicious with it and making it Sonlicious.
Sonlicious was our brand name for quite some time and then we realized that people often are not sure about the correct spellings and misspell our name and we lose out on traffic.
We also felt that it was a little difficult for people to understand the name when we said it over the phone to them. And since it was a little difficult to understand, it was difficult to remember it for later use. Most people called us "Sonilicious".
And then we rebranded ourselves as AnyBodyCanBake.
It is easy to remember, it has our niche in it, it also tells our vision that we will help people to bake, and it has a brand recall value.
Theme
Theme plays a vital role in the way your blog appears to your users. You can pick up the free themes available on WordPress. They are good to start with if your objective from your blog is just testing the market or maybe just your passion but no monetary goals associated with it.
Otherwise, I never recommend a free theme. They are not coded with coding standards that will keep your website lightweight and also SEO friendly.
In fact, most of the paid themes also fail in those parameters. A theme that offers too much customization means has a lot of scripts in it and they will work while you browse your site. You may not use a feature of the theme, but still, that adds to the web page size and its speed.
I had used a Newspaper theme, a Food blog theme, and a few others but I was always dissatisfied until I used Thrive Suite. The flexibility and convenience I have got from Thrive Suite are incomparable.
It helps me to get rid of many plugins. The page builder lets me design every single element the way I want them to be. Investing in Thrive themes from the beginning would be one of the best investments that you can do for your blogging business.
And if you still like to go with a theme, sure. Here are some of the basic things which you might want to keep in mind while finalizing your theme are:
Make sure that your theme or template doesn’t make your blog slow or unresponsive. This would be a huge turnoff for your readers!
Plugins
After all, it’s your content that’s going to make the difference, isn’t it?
It’s important to be original and creative, as well as well-informed about Google’s SEO tactics for creating a successful food blog.
You must always write about your ideas, recipes, and innovations. Posting plagiarised posts will not get you anywhere, and I think, is a total waste of time and webspace.
Here are some tips which would help you create SEO friendly content for your food blog-
● Carry out keyword research-
You can easily dominate search results and grab the attention of your target audience by using appropriate keywords in your food blog.
Using LSI(Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords would boost your content as Google’s algorithm would then be more likely to rank your blog among the best.
● Structure your content-
Your content should have a proper flow with topics and subtopics clearly mentioned.
This would help your reader to easily navigate through your blog.
Do not forget to end your content with a strong call to action! It could be making them subscribe to your blog, comment on your posts, join any online courses that you run, purchase your merchandise, etc.
● Write catchy titles-
Mention your target keyword in your title. Restrict your SEO title to 60 characters as Google displays only these many characters in its search results.
● Heading Tags-
Use appropriate heading levels to improve readability.
● The title should contain the H1 tag
● The main headings should contain an H2 tag
● The subheadings should contain an H3 tag
● Use small paragraphs
Keeping your paragraphs short would make your readers feel comfortable reading longer posts. This is related to the human psychology of refraining from working hard.
Whenever a person sees well spread out, short paragraphs with lots of space between them, he or she is more likely to keep reading and pay attention to your content.
Use bullet points, and different fonts and highlight your text to make it attractive.
● Write an effective meta description
Your meta description summarizes your content in a few lines and should be an appealing one. This would encourage readers to click on your blog post. It should include your target keyword.
Food Photography
It is well known that a picture speaks a thousand words.
Appetizing images of your cooked food would add a cherry on top of your perfectly created content. People are more willing to read your posts if they include lots of images.
Clicking perfect pictures is not as easy as it sounds!
Here are some tips which would help you out-
● Try photographing your food in natural light
● Take photos from multiple angles
● Make sure that your background complements your dish and is free from clutter.
● Use DSLR cameras
● Use a quality tripod
● Focus on crumbs and garnishes to strengthen your composition
You might not be able to click the best pictures just now, but with practice, you can improve your skills and click the most mouth-watering pictures of all time!
Doing so would definitely work wonders for your food blog!
Last but most important-
Do what your mama told you!
Being a successful food blogger is not an overnight task!
You need to work with full dedication to realize your dream of creating a top-notch and popular blog. Stay honest with yourself and listen to your calling.
Be disciplined and work regularly.
You can create an Editorial Calendar for managing your blog posts. I believe that this is absolutely necessary to track your content and organize your workspace.
There would be times when you might face what people call a “writer’s block”. But do not let such situations get the better of you! Stay motivated and keep persevering.
You can and you will!
I’m sure that now you must be feeling a lot more confident and passionate about starting your journey as a food blogger!
After all,
Nothing brings people together like Good Food!
There are certainly a lot of other things to pay attention to such as monetization, hosting, licensing, content marketing, etc. Click on the links below to read detailed articles about these aspects of food blogging.
In a nutshell, these are the things you need to know before you get blogging! articles about these aspects of food blogging.
Stop holding yourself back!
There’s never a better time than NOW to start your journey as a food blogger.
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