Food, Glorious Food: Strategies for Starting Your Own Cooking Blog

Strategies for Starting Your Own Cooking BlogYou want to start your own food blog. Guess what? About a million other people have the same exact idea you do. How do you set yourself apart from the crowd? Here’s how successful bloggers did it.

Finding Your Audience

First of all, you want to find an audience for your blog. Not all blogs make it, even when they’re in a hot niche. Finding an audience can sometimes be easier said than done. Most bloggers go about it the wrong way, too.

Basically, what you want to do is get published on another, more popular, blog before you put a lot of time and energy into your own blog. In other words, you shouldn’t be spending a lot of time publishing on your own blog if you don’t already have an audience.

Guest blogging is one of the best ways to get published on another platform. If you can’t do that, then you could join forums and Facebook groups filled with your ideal readers. Get to know them. Find out gaps in the niche — information no one is currently sharing or doing particularly well. Then, fill in those gaps with blog posts.

Hire A Web Designer

When you’ve got your audience, it’s time to build your website out. You can hire professional web designers melbourne, they will be able to help you build your website in such a way that ensures your website stands out from other similar businesses. Custom designs cost thousands of dollars (normally), but they are the best way to stand out.

If you can’t afford that, start with a design platform like Genesis, which gives you professional-quality templates you can modify without too much trouble. Stick with a reliable framework that’s supported by the developer.

If you’re not afraid to roll up your sleeves you can spend even less than the professionally-designed template.A startup host, like Siteground, can host your blog very inexpensively. And, free WordPress templates can get you off the ground for next to nothing (or even free).

Pro-tip: try to go with a professionally-designed WordPress theme if you can afford it because there’s less likelihood it will be riddled with bad code or malware.

Practice What You Preach

If you want to be different in the food niche, practice what you preach. It’s so common these days to not be authentic, that authentic bloggers stand out like a sore thumb.

Use Smallwares, for example, in cooking demos to show that you know what you’re doing in the kitchen.

Explain your recipes, and the science behind why they work. Be honest about what you do and do not know. Give credit for recipes that aren’t yours. Disclose any affiliate relationships you have with vendors (not only is this the right thing to do, it’s a legal requirement).

Name Your Blog

Naming your blog is hard. Get the name wrong, and you may not see it go anywhere. Generally, blogs should be named intuitively, based on the purpose of your blog. So, for example, if you run a paleo or gluten-free blog, you might name it something like “Gluten-Free Journey” or “Gluten-Free Friday” or something catchy like that. Keep it short, memorable, and make sure you can get the “.com” domain.

Start Blogging

Once you’ve got a good audience built up, you can start linking to your blog, and directing traffic there. From that point on, it’s up to you to maintain the community and give your readers what they want.

Bio: Abbie Ellis discovered a passion for baking when she was a young teenager, soon making all of the families birthday cakes. Now having graduated she’s ready to pursue her passion and get her baking brand out into the world.

Comments

  1. Jo-Ann Brightman says

    This is all good information,but I think I would try to start catering and/or selling in my neighborhood before starting my own food blog. I realize that it would take a lot of time and money too.

  2. This is all really good information, I have wondered about doing this, but don’t have any funds to put into it. Also, I realize it is harder than it looks to do good posts, but it is “food for thought!”