Food Blogging is not easy. Content, photographs, cooking, promotions, monetization! That’s a lot of things to take on. So it’s great when you get a helping hand, right? So here are some awesome tools to help a food blogger manage time, reduce effort and generally make food blogging a little easier!
Lightroom:
For most food bloggers their pictures are their messiahs. It is the one thing through which someone can judge the quality of a recipe. So the more evocative and effective your images are, the better your blog will fare. And Lightroom is a great tool for editing your images. It is less intimidating than Photoshop and is extremely effective in fixing things like white balance, exposure and so on.
Buffer:
One of the things that takes up a lot of time for food bloggers is promoting on social media. Posting stuff across all the various platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Google Plus alone is a tedious process. Buffer is a great scheduling app where you can take care of all your social media posting needs. It comes with both a paid and a free version.
Canva:
It’s no longer about just taking great photographs. Most food bloggers view Pinterest as a huge traffic source and hence want to create collages with images and text, which are found to be far more effective on Pinterest. Canva is a great tool for developing all sorts of images, with inbuilt templates for everything from Facebook posts and Pinterest graphics to infographics. It can save you a lot of time and is not as intimidating as Photoshop. Be careful about the images though, make sure you download the high quality images.
Keyword Planner:
SEO is obviously the name of the game for food bloggers. And even though it’s relevance is being contested, keywords are still a pretty important factor for love from Google. So this is a great tool to use while deciding on what content to create for your food blog. You can choose keywords with lesser competition which are still searched a lot by your audience. Something like the difference between writing about Pasta, which has a gazillion search results and a Chicken Farfalle which would have considerably lesser search results but is also searched frequently. Another great alternative is Long Tail Pro.
Grammarly:
It is becoming increasingly important to create high quality content, because it is one of the parameters that Google judges you on. And one area that people routinely get wrong is that of spelling and grammar. While there is no real quick fix to this besides being careful and editing your work multiple times, one thing that you can do is install the grammarly app. It will tell you when your spellings are wrong, it will prompt you when your sentence structure is wrong and so on.
Trello:
One of the biggest problems food bloggers face is, to organise their blogging activity. A content calendar is becoming more and more essential for a food blogger,not just in terms of organising their thoughts, but also to make the best use of SEO, promotional activity, events and so on. Trello is the perfect organising tool which can seriously reduce time for you.
Freedom:
One of the biggest reasons we don’t seem to get as much done as we would want to is distraction. Checking that FB message, tweeting about your favourite flour, checking out amazon for that cast iron skillet you have been checking out for the past 50 days, these are the things that keep you from getting anything done on time. So when you are writing your post, editing your images etc, the app will shut off access to all distracting websites. You can time it, so it’s not like when it comes to promo time, you have no access to FB or Twitter! If you don’t want a full browsing blocker and want to target just social media channels try Anti-Social.
Dropbox:
If you have to consult with a food blogger friend, or team up for a guest post, the best way to share all those beautiful images is through drop box. Even videos, illustrations and a host of other files can be conviniently shared with Dropbox. And you can access it on your phone, tab and PC. So everything from blog updates to Instagram shares can be taken care of.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Do you have a lot of links on your blogs? Recipe attributions from other blogs, perhaps? What if that website has now shut shop and your link is now a broken link? This is SEO harakiri. Screaming Frog basically crawls your blog to find broken links, duplicate pages, redirections and so on. It’s a great tool to keep your blog SEO friendly, and when you have anything over 50–100 posts on your blog, doing this manually can be an absolute nightmare.
Google Analytics
Last, and certainly not the least, Google analytics. Because there is no better way to track and analyse what content is working, where your views are coming, which social outlets are getting you the most traction and so on. This helps you to prioritize, strategize and maximize output. For Cucumbertown food bloggers there is also the Analytics Dashboard which shows similar data. This is a great way to look at traffic building, which will eventually be what gets you to monetization.
