Why the Cucumbertown Food Bloggers are addicted to the RecipeWriter V2.0
I think we can all safely agree after reading income reports from Pinch of Yum and listening to podcasts and interviews with every food blogger from Simply Recipes to Serious Eats, that food blogging is a serious business.
And in the whole obsession with droolicious images and snappy videos, one thing people seem to forget is, the most important part of food blogging still remains the content. Systematic, high quality, engaging content coupled with smart promotional activities seem to the simple rule with food blogging. And it is exactly with this thought that the Cucumbertown team came up with the RecipeWriter V2.0. How can we give food bloggers a great experience while creating content?
While we knew that capturing structured data was paramount in making our editing interface as SEO friendly as possible, we also knew this was not it. Wordpress already had a bunch of SEO plugins to take care of that. We knew the editor had to be a combination of ease, professionalism and the ultimate canvas to creating stellar content. So we had to keep some things very basic and allow for a high level of customisation too, and make sure that the time spent on creating this content and making it look great was a fraction of what they would need elsewhere.
If I were to go into the details of all the things that this editor provides, the scroll bar would look scarily unsurmountable. So I’m going to cherry pick a few top favorites.
A Clean Slate
At first glance, the editor looks rather stark. While this can overwhelm you initially a lot of the Cucumbertown bloggers have reported that ultimately it gives them a feeling of great control over how the content looks. Recipes can go right at the top, right at the bottom or anywhere in between. Similarly with text, images, gifs, embeds, recommendations and so on and so forth. In short, it’s entirely up to the food blogger as to how they want to craft their stories, and no matter how you choose to lay out your content, the RecipeWriter makes sure the end product is captivating and professional looking.
Customised Images for Social Media, Google and the Homepage
One of the features that the RecipeWriter comes with, which has cut down time that food bloggers may have spent on backend coding, is that you can choose which image will appear where at the click of a single button. You can decide which image will be picked up when your content is shared on Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook. You can also choose which images should go on your blogs homepage, and which should be picked up by Google. This enables you to have the portrait images on your actual post popular on Pinterest and Buzzfeed, while choosing landscape images which may suit your blogs homepage layout more.
While this may seem superficial, it is one of the most important aspects that will aid in your blogs’ discoverability. And that is the end goal, right? To get more people to consume your content. So this one definitely goes into the list of winning features on the editor.
The Amount of Data That is Captured
The Add Recipe section of the RecipeWriter gives you the ability to record a lot of valuable information, which can help your blog in a lot of ways. One thing it does, is give your reader a scan of the more important aspects of the actual cooking involved, including time taken, method of cooking and so on. But beyond that all of these details will eventually help you to evolve your RecipeIndex into a highly professional, data heavy, wealth of information for your audience.
A High Level of Automation
With this editor, backend coding becomes an area where a food blogger will never have to worry about. From adding custom images, to including affiliates, to incorporating giveaways to embedding links, everything is already taken care of. This means the blogger simply has to create content which means that their content creation rate is bound to increase.
And this is exactly what we have noticed, nearly a month into the launch of the new editor. The Cucumbertown food bloggers are creating more content than ever before and they are amazed at the fact that they now only really need to focus on content and promotion. All of the back end drama that they had to deal with are no longer an issue. Wouldn’t you be addicted to writing on an interface such as this?
