The food blog ‘The Recipe Critic’ is considered among the best recipe websites – it had Alexa rank 2500 as of March 2021. This blog website showcases recipes of every variety – appetizers, breakfast, dinner, desserts, salads, air fryer, instant pot, slow cooker, 30-minute meals, and more. You can easily search for a recipe by ingredients, cooking type, and other filters.
Food and cooking blogs are one of the most popular niches in blogging. If you have a passion for food and want to tell people about your recipes, a food blog is a great way to start. It can also help you establish yourself as a food expert and build authority in the food industry.
Here are some valuable tips on how to become a food blogger.
- Choose a Blog Name
There is no perfect name for a blog. It depends on your niche, audience, and type of recipe. You have to mix and match to come up with a good name. Jot down your thoughts about your blog or create a word bank of food-related words. You can then play around with these thoughts or words to develop the right name. If nothing else comes to your mind, you can even start a blog in your name.
Make sure that the name is short, catchy, and easy to pronounce. Here are a few names of popular recipe blogs to give you an idea:
- Select a Niche
Determine what you want to talk about in your blog. Would it be a blog about baking, healthy eating, gluten-free recipes, beverages, or other cuisines? A niche would make your food blog stand out in the crowd. Another advantage of niche is that you will create content easily because the subject will come naturally to you.
These days, healthy food blogs are in demand. You can consider this your niche if you are a fitness enthusiast and cook healthy recipes at home.
- Set Up the Blog
The next step is to choose a blogging platform such as WordPress, Tumblr, or Medium. You will also need a domain name and a web hosting company. Pick up a theme and design for your blog.
- Post Original Content
Original content is crucial for creating high-quality content. It attracts the audience and enhances your chances to feature in the list of top food bloggers. Original content even helps increase the search engine rank of your food blog.
- Create Engaging and Personalized Content
Food is an emotion. It provides pleasure and comfort. It makes you nostalgic and creates new memories. Food builds social connections. So, when you write a blog on food, it should trigger sentiments in the audience.
You can invoke emotions by creating engaging and personalized content. Don’t just publish a recipe for the sake of it. Tell a personal story or anecdotes behind it. Let the audience know how you came up with that recipe and why you want to share it with them. Your recipe should inspire the readers with ideas for good food to cook at home.
Take for example the case of David Lebovitz, a professional cook, baker, and author. His recipe ‘salty, deep-dark chocolate brownies’ starts with his personal story on his blog. He says that he had received a box of brownies from a fan during a book signing event, and loved it so much that he took painstaking efforts to recreate it with his twist.
- Make it Visually Rich
Visuals are a powerful medium to increase the reach and impact of content. A survey revealed that 48% of content marketers had incorporated visuals in 91-100% of their content in 2020 as they consider it very important for marketing strategy.
When you are looking for how to start a cooking blog, remember that you will need to take several photos to post in the recipe. The audience expects bright, colorful, vivid, and high-quality visuals, especially in a food blog. You should also consider including a video recipe for higher engagement.
The famous food blog ‘Hebbars Kitchen’ by Archana Hebbar is known for its detail-oriented and step-by-step recipe photos. The blog includes at least 4 to 5 pictures in every recipe. She also has a YouTube channel.
- Study the Latest Trends
The food industry evolves continuously. You must adapt your blog to the changing trends to bring a fresh perspective for readers. For instance, organic, plant-based, and environmentally conscious recipes are in vogue. You could experiment with such recipes and post them. Writing about the latest trends is instrumental to getting the tag of the best blog about food.
- Focus on SEO Strategy
When it comes to how to start a food blog, a robust SEO strategy is a key consideration. The right and relevant keywords will make your blog easily searchable on the internet. Moreover, SEO will also enable you to rank your food blog higher in the search engines and attract organic traffic.
How to Grow Your Food Blog with AI?
These days, several AI-enabled tools are available online to make food blog writing easy. One such AI tool is Instoried. It can help you in the following ways:
- Give real-time word and phrase-level recommendations to boost the quality and emotional engagement of your content.
- Set the right tone of your blog to speak to the target audience and help them understand your voice. The tonal analysis feature of Instoried helps you to understand whether the tone of the content of your food blog is positive, negative, or neutral.
- Evoke a sentimental response from your readers to make your food blog more impactful. The emotional analysis feature can help you do that in the right way.
- Generate appealing and engaging headlines based on the body of the text.
- Check your text for plagiarism; hence it is useful for proofreading.
- Analyze the headlines. It checks the performance of headlines, titles, captions, and subject lines in terms of their tone and impact. The impact index helps you understand whether the headline is attractive enough to capture the audience’s attention.
Can You Monetize Your Food Blog?
Are you wondering how to make money as a food blogger? Well, you first need to build a large audience, and grow your reach. You can start publishing your recipes on YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram to drive more traffic. The money will start kicking in gradually. Here are some ways to monetize your food blog:
- Partner with brands that are associated with the food industry. Publish recipes with their name or ingredients on your blog.
- Create an ebook of your recipes and sell them to your audience.
- Collaborate with cafes, restaurants, and hotels to write paid food reviews.
- Display Google AdSense to earn money when someone clicks on it.
Conclusion
There is no magic formula, secret or shortcut to foray into the food blogging journey and make it successful. A food blog takes a lot of love, patience, and hard work just like cooking does. You need to be dedicated and consistent to increase the readership. It also requires initial investment and it might take time for you to earn returns on it. However, be enthusiastic about starting your food blog and things will start falling in place eventually.
