This might seem like a silly thing to write about, considering we are the world’s only food blogging platform, but here is why we decided people needed to know about this.
Sometime back when we had published an article in the magazine about what it takes to be a successful food blogger, we had a flurry of emails asking what food blogging is really about. While most food bloggers may know what food blogging is about, does the world know what food blogging is?
Honestly even I am confused at times, is it a journal about the food I’m cooking, the stuff I’m eating, restaurants I’m visiting? Or is it a license to gawk at bowls, plates and cups, thinking of props and stopping at random places to look at discarded pieces of wood that can be used as a rustic background for your images? I say this, because I have done all this and more.
So let’s start with what can be construed as food blogging:
The Cooking and Posting Bloggers: These are the bloggers who cook extensively, and post about their cooking stories along with super appetising pictures. It could be anything from a blog that documents highly authentic recipes, or experiential food or just about anything that one is cooking. There will most often be a story accompanying the blog post. The Pioneer Woman Cooks is a great example of such a blog.
The Restaurant Reviews: These bloggers are the people we can count on to review restaurants for quality of food, ambience, service, price range and so on. This is much more detailed version of a restaurant guide and will almost always include a little story about why they loved or hated the food, what motivated them to go in the first place and so on. A Girl has to Eat blog is one such food blog.
The Super Niche Blogs: These are bloggers who catalogue a very niche subject within food itself. No Bake blogs, Gluten-Free blogs, Vegan blogs etc would come under this. Theirs is a repository of recipes that not only chronicles the food they are eating, but also gives a glimpse of their lifestyle choices. Sous Vide Life, a joint blog by Adam Phillabaum and Trevin Chow will show you what I mean.
Most often a food blog has overlapping elements of these three things. It’s usually a niche that is talked about with great detailing and story telling and occasionally has product and restaurant reviews. But there is no real rule. A blog is a personal journal. And obviously anything you want to say about food through your blog, and as long as your blog is mainly about food, becomes a food blog.
So what do you do if you want to be a Food Blogger?
First things first. You need a blog. You can start one on any blogging platform out there like Wordpress, Tumblr, Blogger or medium. Cucumbertown is the world’s only blogging platform dedicated to just food blogging. So the tools here are obviously tailor made for food bloggers.
Once you have identified the platform, you can begin by naming the blog, getting started on a subdomain, or if you are ready for it, get your own domain and basically create an identity for your blog. Keep these things in mind while naming your blog, besides the obvious: it’s availability:
1.Easy to recall
2. Easy to spell
3. Not too long
If you are hosting the domain yourself, then that also need to be looked into. This will mostly be the case when you have your own domain. Here’s a great post that goes in to the nitty-gritties of setting up your food blog.
Once you have the name sorted, then it comes to things like the theme, the overall design and the look and feel of your blog. This is important, because your blog is a reflection of you, this is what your readers are going to take away when they leave after reading a post. So make this as close you as possible and refrain from going overboard. One of the things that bloggers consistently do, initially, is go a little crazy with the widgets. I did. Not the best idea. Especially because you may be giving away precious traffic and ad space. And of course, loosing out on page speed.
Once you have this sorted, then it’s all about creating content and promoting it. There are two things to take care of primarily for a food blogger. The first is the written content you are creating. The more content you create, the more valuable keywords you are gathering on your blog and eventually this will add up to making your bog SEO friendly. SEO is something bloggers need to be conscious of when they are blogging. You can understand this a little better with the article below:
The second big parameter to keep in mind, is the photographic content on your food blog. Because, in this case, a picture is going to speak well over a thousand words. So get smarter with your photography and try to constantly improve on the photography. This is becoming even more important, now that Pinterest and Instagram have taken over people’s lives.
Now, as important as content creation, is content marketing. In fact, it is possible that this is more, much more, important. Since I wouldn’t be able to do justice to how to promote your content through this article, here is something that covers most of the traffic building mechanisms out there.
There will obviously be a lot of other things to consider, including monetisation, hosting, licensing and so on. But in a nutshell these are the initial few things one needs to think of while setting up their food blog. In Cucumbertown, hosting, themes, SEO and analytics are taken care of from within the platform. It of course varies from one platform to the other. But there is no doubt that food blogging is in. And it is most definitely here to stay! So if you have been confused as to what a food blog is and what food blogging entails, I hope this has cleared it up at least a little bit.
For any doubts and queries, please don’t hesitate to contact me on ramya@cucumbertown.com.
