If I had a dollar for every time I was asked in the middle of a random conversation about how to start a food blog, well, I would have way more money than I do at the moment.
It got me thinking if one can really define the various steps to setting up your food blog, because when you think about blogging, you always associate it with individual choices overriding steps and rules. But surprisingly, when it simply comes to setting up your food blog, there are a few steps common to pretty much everyone.
Here are Cucumbertown’s tips on what to consider when starting your food blog and what to do to make it successful:
Decide Where to Start Your Food Blog
One of the most important things to consider when you decide to get started with your food blog, is where you will be blogging. Now that there are quite a few choices when it comes to blogging platform, things are not as black and white as it was before. Since Cucumbertown is a blogging platform dedicated to food blogging, we are going to explain why it is the ideal choice to start your food blog.
When we decided to build Cucumbertown into a food blogging platform, we knew we had to give bloggers the easiest place to create their content. One thing that can go a long way into making yours a successful food blog will be the platform you choose. It has to be easy and addictive enough for you to keep coming back and creating more and more content. With Cucumbertown, this is exactly what you get. And unlike other platforms, there are no hosting charges or renewals, so it’s fairly easy to start a great looking food blog for free.
All the tech details including SEO, security, and hosting are taken care of by Cucumbertown. Along with that there is also a team that helps you to monetise your food blog. This could really make the difference if you are looking to make money with your food blog. I will go into more details on monetising a food blog, but this literally takes care of two of the biggest questions in starting your food blog.
Decide What to Blog about
While most of us are aware of the what we want to write about, it’s always good to think this through. While it may seem like a good idea to simply post as and when things come to you, taking a more planned approach to food blogging will go a long way in helping your blog become a success in the long run. So identify what you would like to blog about. Do you have a particular cooking niche that you are passionate about? Or do you have a lifestyle based cooking routine that may appeal to a lot of people?
Once you identify what kind of content you want to write about, you can then plan your posts on the food blog. While doing this, it is especially recommended to pay a little attention to SEO right from the beginning. I also recommend choosing the name and look of your blog based on what you are going to be writing about. All of this will go into giving your blog the personality it will need to have. For instance, within the Cucumbertown universe of bloggers we have found that bloggers with a personality, right from their domain name, to what they write about, seem to create more buzz. Here are a few interesting ones:
My Food Story: It’s as much about the story as it is about the food.
War and Cheese: War and crime reporter turned food blogger.
No Recipes: Because most recipes really have no recipes.
Choose Your Name, Buy your Domain, and Decide on a Theme
Once you know what your food blog is going to be about, choose a relevant name. While a lot of things about your food blog can be changed, if you so desire, the name is something that endures. So make sure you choose the right one.
Although this is a highly individual choice, a few things to remember is that it resonates with you, is easy to spell, is memorable and ideally ending in .com. Also avoid hyphens and special characters as much as possible. There are a lot of domain marketplaces you can use to then check availability and buy your domain, including Go Daddy and Namecheap. Once you do this, you can then choose the theme for your food blog.
This is a pretty important choice because it will reflect how your thoughts, recipes etc will be reflected to your reader. A few things to highlight here:
- Think of functionality while choosing the theme, because if you want to do things like include ads on your blog to make money, then you will need to make sure your theme can accommodate them without compromising the look and feel of the blog too much.
- Try to keep the clutter minimal, as more boxes, widgets and plugins, will lower the speed of your website, which is not a good idea.
- Make sure that navigation is easy and calls to action (like Follow Me, Share buttons etc) are prominent
All Cucumbertown themes are designed with these things in mind and they are also responsive, optimised for mobile and minimalistic in nature. These are a few themes available on Cucumbertown.
Start Creating Content
Once you have these things sorted , it’s simply a matter of creating content. It is ideal to start by creating as much content as possible in the beginning. You can bring this down to a regular number of posts per week, but it’s best to build a pipeline of content in the beginning so that Google will take note of your blog.
One important advice for all food bloggers who want to do this as a business, and make money, would be to make sure that you focus on good photography right from the beginning. Because, at the end of the day, your pictures really go a long way in making your food blog successful. So, even if you can’t invest in photography equipment right from the beginning, try to take well lit, clean images of your food.
Market Your Content
They say that for your food blog to be successful you need to put in more time marketing your content than creating it. This is very true, because only if more people know about your blog, will your readership grow and so will your blog. So from the very beginning try to get your content across to as many people as possible. Start small with this. Here are a few tips on what to do after creating content, to make your food blog successful:
- Create a Facebook Page
Here’s an example from Saffron Trail.
- Join relevant Facebook groups and post your content there. Here are a few examples.
- Start a Twitter account and post your recipes using relevant hashtags. Slowly interact with other people on Twitter and build your following.
- Create an account on Pinterest and start pinning your recipes. Check out the Cucumbertown account on Pinterest.
- Join Instagram and share your food photographs
Here is a detailed explanation on ways to build your traffic, so explore them according to your preferences.
Monetizing your Food blog
A lot of people make a lot of money through food blogging. But it is by no means an easy task, so it’s certainly not one of the things you should be thinking about while starting a food blog. It will take at least a few months or in some cases a few years to build your blog to a point where you start making a living or even some money out of it. At Cucumbertown, we have a team that manages ads on your food blog and add affiliates to it once you cross a certain traffic threshold. So it’s slightly easier than if you were to do it on your own. We are also building partnerships with brands to facilitate sponsored content, but these are things that you should ideally be looking at after having built your blog to a certain level.
But if you are consistent with content creation and promotion, and having the backing of Cucumbertown’s tech team that keeps things up to speed, there is no reason why you can’t build a successful food blog over time.
