Ramya Menon
Cucumbertown Magazine Archive
5 min readJul 14, 2016

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How Do Food Bloggers Decide What to Blog About : Content Planning and Food Blogging

I have often wondered when I browse through page after page of yummy recipes that my food blogger friends come out with, how do they decide what to blog about? Is there a process to it or is it completely random, with whatever catching your fancy turning up on the blog?

While I was pondering these things, good friend Nandita Iyer in a sort of telepathic fashion, asked the exact same question in one of the popular food blogging groups on Facebook. And the answers, were varied enough for me to initially conclude that it is a highly individual thing, but I soon spotted a pattern.

This is by no means a comprehensive understanding of the various ways food bloggers approach how to create content, but I believe these are the three broad ways in which one decides what goes on the blog.

The Post-What-I-Cook Food Blogger

One of the common responses to “how do you decide what to put on the blog” is “ I post what I cook.” The premise here is obviously fairly simple, what one cooks daily appears on the blog. While a majority of bloggers may start off this way, personally I have found this method sort of saturates after a point. Because we tend to usually repeat a lot of the dishes that we make on a daily basis and so after about 50–60 posts, you find that you really need to think deeply about what to cook so that content creation on the blog is not saturated. Then it stops being about posting what you cook doesn’t it?

The Seasonal Produce Blogger

Quite a few of the bloggers who responded to Nandita’s post fell into this category. Fresh, seasonal produce was the element around which their content creation was focussed. I can imagine this being a pretty good strategy as the content would then be relevant and hence optimum for consumption. But perhaps the incentive for the bloggers to do things this way is to also ensure ingredient quality in the foods they are making. A large number of bloggers adopt this strategy to great advantage.

The Minimal Planner

I have a strong feeling that I fall under this category. These are bloggers who chart out a rough strategy in their head, but for short intervals of say, a week or two, but don’t really follow a meticulous process. This is especially so when people want to experiment with some specific ingredients, which would need some level of pre planning. It’s rather vague and has room for change according to what suits their schedule. I believe a lot of the bloggers who start off as post-what-you-cook bloggers, transition into this kind of a content planning methodology.

The Super Planner

Then comes the highly planned blogger. In this scenario, there are excel sheets, white boards, shopping lists and a whole paraphernalia of organisation activities to deal with content planning. There is a definite goal around the content planning. It could either be to create recipes around an event, or to develop recipes using a device or simply to have the right balance in the kind of content that is put out. Although it is unfair to generalise, a lot of the more successful bloggers seem to be adopting this strategy. Pinch of Yum, Steamy Kitchen and Minimalist Baker all talk about the advantages of having at least a content scheduling strategy.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, this is by no means comprehensive a list of all the kinds of decisions that go into planning the content of a food blog, these are definitely some popular methods.

Now, is there a right or wrong way to do this?

Absolutely not.

What you decide to put on your food blog is entirely your decision and it also depends heavily on what your motivations behind blogging are.

Having said that, we have found that the more serious bloggers who blog for a career do eventually tend to become the highly planned blogger. One of the main reasons for this is that, your blog is then your business. And this kind of planning will become necessary if you want to focus on SEO, virality, and the right balance of sponsored content and general content. If you have three posts in a row which are all sponsored content, you could potentially alienate your audience.

But this is simply a reflection of the majority. There are exceptions to all things, and content planning for food blogs is no exception.

We would love to know what goes on in your mind while you are planning your next post. So don’t forget to leave us a comment, and maybe this list will get longer :).

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Ramya Menon
Cucumbertown Magazine Archive

Journalist, writer and dreamer. Now combining all three with a dream team @Cucumbertown