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How to create a food blog in 10 steps
If you just need someone to help you set up your blog quickly and easily in a few steps, check out step 5.
As someone who loves food and cooking, you might be considering starting a food blog to express your creativity and have an easy way to share as many ideas as possible with the world.
But there are plenty of other reasons why you might want to start a food blog.
- Get free products : As a food blogger, you're likely to receive Tons of free products from brands that want to try them out and recommend them to your audience.
- Earn money : As your blog grows, you'll be able to monetize it in a variety of ways and start receiving passive income from all of your efforts.
- Create an audience : You can use your own food blog as a way to create a community around your passion. The more interesting content you post, the more your audience will grow.
- Share your experiences : Some amateur chefs simply want to post photos of dishes and recipes to share their passion for cooking with the world.
- Develop a community : A blog is a great way to develop a community of like-minded people about food topics you love.
1. Decide the purpose of your food blog
The food industry has become saturated over the past decade, which means that if you want to start a profitable business, you need to start your food blog with a goal.
That's why the first step in learning how to start a food blog is figuring out the purpose or direction of your new blog.
If you neglect this important step, you may fail. So take the time to think of a few ways to position your new blog to give you the best chance of success.
For example, you might focus on creating a community for aspiring chefs, collaborating, or generating revenue, etc.
Here are a few examples of possible directions for your food blog to help you get started:
- Food news : A way to share the latest news about the food industry.
- Avis : You can give feedback on kitchenware, tableware, bars, cafes, restaurants, etc.
- Chef careers : You can choose to follow the careers of chefs in your niche.
- Restoration recommendations and criticisms : You can also use your blog to recommend places to eat (and avoid) in your area.
- Sharing recipes : You can use your blog as a platform to share all of your favorite recipes, ingredients, etc.
- Cooking on a budget : You could focus on teaching people how to prepare delicious meals without spending a lot of money.
2. Choose your niche
Once you've decided on the purpose of your blog, the next step is choosing your food niche.
As mentioned before, the food sector is saturated and if you want to stand out and ensure the success of your blog, you should choose a niche in which you will specialize.
A niche is simply a specific topic around which you will create content. These include blog posts, YouTube videos, social media posts, email series, and various other types of content.
The niche you choose will likely depend on the type of food you like to cook, and it's a very important step when trying to learn how to start a food blog and make money while doing what you love.
Below are a few examples of different types of niches that you can focus on with your new food blog:
- Family Meals/Meal Planning
- Career path for a professional chef
- How do I sell food to make money as a side business?
- Exotic cuisine
- Budget/Casual dinners
- Veganism
- Meals in 5 minutes for busy professionals
- Delicious snacks for toddlers
- Pet food
- Recipe ingredients with food photos
- Food Preparation/Quick Baking Recipes for Kids
- Kitchen Item Review/Tableware/Restaurants
- Cooking blog for one person
- Paleo Diet Recipe Blog
- Cocktail recipes
- Low Carb Meals/Workout Snacks
- Batch Cooking Blog/Cooking/Freezing
- Gluten free recipes
- Salads/Desserts
- Fun/Party Food
As you can see, there are a lot of different niches that you can choose from. You can even combine two or more niches to create your own unique niche.
3. Choose your blogging platform
Once you've decided on your niche, it's time to choose your blogging platform. Again, you have the choice between hundreds of platforms, free or paid.
You have the option of choosing between self-hosted software or hosted options like Wix, Blogger, Squarespace, and more.
I recommend that you choose the self-hosting option, as it has a number of advantages.
When choosing and installing WordPress, in particular, it offers a great option for a self-hosted blogging platform. It is free and open source software (FOSS), easy to install and use, and the platform is among the most popular ways to create a website, including food blogs.
Why choose a self-hosted WordPress?
- It is very easy to get started. You can install the WordPress blog software with a single click.
- You have total control of your web domain when you are your own web host.
- You can monetize your blog in any way you want.
- Self-hosted WordPress blogs are extremely fast, and Google loves them.
- You have full customization capabilities to make your blog unique.
- Thousands of plugins offered by a web hosting provider allow you to extend the functionality of your website, such as a recipe plugin and more.
- When you install WordPress, you immediately have access to the user-friendly WordPress dashboard, a few options, and free themes — a great help for a good food blog.
- When you have your own web hosting account with a reliable web host, you get significant support from developers and a large user community.
On the other hand, the free blogging platforms or hosted have numerous disadvantages. For example, most free platforms have a slow loading speed, and Google doesn't rank them, unlike premium platforms.
Also, free web hosting does not allow you to monetize your blog effectively. You can't add supported features to your web hosting to extend the functionality of your site, and if something happens to the web hosting platform, you'll lose all of your content. That's why you need a reliable web host.
Plus, it's hard to get people to trust your WordPress website or blog when you're using a free blogging platform. So your domain will be something like”Myawesomefoodblog.squarespace.com“, instead of just”Myawesomefoodblog.com”.
4. Choose your domain name
Before officially launching your food blog, you should first decide what you are going to call it.
While this step may seem simple, it's important to take your time because the name you choose will define your brand and set your food blog apart from everyone else.
So you need to make a wise choice. And to help you do that, I've written a detailed guide on How to choose a domain name.
Here's a quick overview of what you need to consider when choosing a name for a new food blog:
1. Choose a domain name.” Com”. Domain name.
You can choose from a variety of domain extensions, including.com, .org, .net, .us, .co, and more.
Some creative domain name extensions are designed specifically for food blogs, like.food, .chef, .cooking, .organic, and various other domain name extensions that fall under the food/drink categories.
But it's important to choose the.com for your own domain name, because it's the one the web is built on, and it's what your audience will most easily remember.
2. Purchase the domain name separately from the hosting provider.
If someone broke into your hosting account, they could potentially transfer your domain name to their own hosting.
If that were to happen, it would be very difficult to back up and it could be a huge safety issue for you.
So it's best to buy your domain name separately from web hosting provider. But, of course, if you're just getting started with your very first site, you can skip that step for now and move on to the next one.
3. Choose an extended domain name.
Stay broad with the name you choose. If it's too narrow, you'll run out of topics to talk about on your blog. On the other hand, if you choose a name that is too broad, it will be more difficult for you to create an engaged audience for your food blog.
So, for example, instead of calling your blog”Glutenfreecookies.com”, you could consider something like”Glutenfreeparadise.com”, This would allow you to focus on more topics and treats other than cookies alone.
4. Keep it short and kind.
Your website domain name should be between two and four words long. Don't use words that are long and difficult to spell, and avoid using special characters or foreign words.
5. Use alliteration.
Alliteration is the use of two or more words that start with the same letter or sound the same.
For example, you might have a website name like”Damn Delicious”, “Smitten Kitchen” or”Freezer Fiend” . “
6. Add additional words
If all else fails, and you still can't get the name you want, add additional words like “the,” with “,” club, “hub,” etc. For example, if you want a name like “Dessert Dome,” you might consider”The Dessert Dome” instead.
7. Think about the concept
To help you come up with ideas for the name of your food blog, try to think of the concept for your food blog. Ask yourself what name it might come under and how it might develop in the future.
You can have a personal, meaningful conversation with friends and family before writing your own blog, and you can also learn helpful tips and video tutorials, like what you can see in this blog. This will help you come up with good name ideas when you open yourself up to the possibilities of evolving your food blog.
8. Use name generation tools
If you're still stuck, there are plenty of free online tools that can help you find a great domain name. Some of the tools I like to use include Lean Domain Search and Instant Domain Search.
9. Don't buy a domain name
You could come up with a name for your food blog that you've fallen in love with, but it costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Don't be tempted to buy it. It's not worth it at this point. Instead, look for another name or a variation of that name that is available for purchase at the normal price and use that money to create content to develop your new blog.
10. Don't get stuck here
Most people are so obsessed with getting the perfect domain name that they never get past that stage. Avoid falling into this trap. The decision should be made fairly quickly and there is no need to devote more than two hours to this task. Instead, choose a name that works for you and move on to the next step.
11. Examples of popular food blog names
To help jump-start your thought process, here are a few examples of existing food blogs, along with a brief explanation of the Reason why their domain names make sense.
1. Love and lemons
The name of this blog comes from the fact that its creator, Jeanie Donofrio, loves to prepare seasonal vegan dishes, often finished with a squeeze of lemon.
2. Closet kitchen
The name of this website uses alliteration to make it more memorable and make it easier for the food blog to stand out.
3. Green food stories
This domain name was chosen to express that this food blog focuses on healthy vegetarian recipes.
4. Minimalist baker
This name explains the type of blog it is. Here you'll learn how to create savory and sweet dishes that require ten ingredients or fewer and 30 minutes or less to prepare.
5. Budget bytes
This name clarifies the value this website offers for planning meals on a budget by making smart purchases to keep the grocery budget low.
5. Buy your accommodation
Now that you've chosen a name for your blog, you need to register your domain name and get hosting for your blog.
Hosting is simply the space on the Internet where your video game blog will live.
Blog hosting providers are companies that offer services to keep your blog files on their servers and ensure that your website is always available for your readers to find online.
6. Choosing and installing a theme for your food blog
Once you've set up your basic website, it's time to choose a theme for your new blog. There are thousands of WordPress themes to choose from, but you should choose one that is designed specifically for food blogging.
Instead of choosing WordPress themes, you can use WordPress recipe plugins (WP recipe maker) that add recipe creation functionality to any theme, turning it into a food blog.
However, while using WordPress plugins for food with a generic theme can offer more flexibility, it also makes configuration a bit more complicated. For that reason, I wouldn't recommend it to newbie food bloggers. In this case, a WordPress theme specially designed for food blogging is the way to go.
It will have a wide range of built-in functions and features specific to food blogging, including:
- Recipe creator : This feature allows you to display your recipes and ingredients in a layout that is easy for your visitors to view.
- Gallery and video support : So you can download stunning images and instructional videos to engage your audience.
- Advanced search function : Allow visitors to search for recipes and ingredients so they can quickly find what they need on your blog.
- User registration/login functionality : This user-friendly feature will allow you to create a members-only section to create a community around your food blog.
It would be helpful if you considered the following factors before choosing the best theme for your blog:
What to look for in a good theme:
- Vitesse : You want a WordPress theme designed for speed in order to maintain a fast-loading website.
- Gorgeous design : Choose a WordPress theme with beautiful templates and layouts that will allow you to present engaging videos and images of your food.
- Mobile responsiveness : The WordPress theme you choose should be mobile-friendly and appear on all devices.
- Complete customization: Make sure that you can customize your WordPress theme to look and feel the way you want thanks to numerous WordPress plugins.
- Well established brand : Choose a theme from a well-known brand like Themeforest, Thrive Themes, StudioPress, Envato, etc. and get it across with a WordPress plugin.
- Online reviews : Opt for a WordPress theme with lots of positive ratings and online user reviews that can be used with your recipe plugin.
- Reliable support : Check the theme's support options to make sure you can get help at any time and even help using the WordPress plugins you've chosen.
Food Blog WordPress Theme Options
Now that you know what to look for in a good theme, here are a few WordPress food blog themes to choose from.
1. Braiser
This theme is designed with all the features you need to highlight your culinary creations in a captivating way.
There are pre-designed templates for cooking, baking, cookbooks, recipe cards, and more.
That means you can create your blog in no time by simply using one of the templates and putting in your own content and images. You can also use all the images in the theme for free.
2. Dolcino
This theme is highly customizable and comes with an extensive administration interface. It also offers quick one-click import of demo content and requires no coding knowledge to build beautiful, responsive, and retina-ready pages.
3. TinySalt
Creating a food blog is a breeze with the top-selling TinySalt theme.
It comes with 12 pre-designed demos, and all you need to do is select a demo, import it to your site with a single click, and you're ready to go.
The various demo layouts can be combined to create your own unique layout, and you can choose from 32 blog variants, including page layouts
Grid, Classic, Masonry, and List.
4. Gourmand
With this easy to use theme, you'll be able to create a mouthwatering food blog with spectacular pages and remarkable features designed especially for chefs, bistros, restaurants, and anyone looking to start a food blog.
5. EasyMeals
It's the perfect theme for personal or community food blog WordPress websites. It has all the features you need in one convenient location, including a powerful admin interface, a large collection of templates, and a range of useful shortcodes, including Social Share, Price Table, Product List, and Highlight shortcodes.
You can also customize each page to your liking by changing color fonts or by dragging and dropping different elements onto the page, including videos, text, images, and more.
7. Create essential pages and a logo
Every website needs essential pages, and so does a new food blog. Below is a list of the pages that you absolutely need to have on your site, but you can add more to suit your needs.
Home
This page provides your readers with information about you, such as who you are, why you created your blog, and what value they can derive from it. Additionally, you can include an image of yourself on this page. And be sure to use a style and tone that lets your foodie personality shine through.
Contact
You should include on this page any information that your readers may need to get in touch with you. This includes your email address, phone number, social media profiles, Skype (avoid giving out your home address and responding to spam comments), etc. Choose what makes sense for your audience. You can also include an FAQ section on your Contact page with all of the most frequently asked questions.
Confidentiality policy
A privacy policy is essential for any website. You should include text that explains exactly what type of information you are collecting from your users and the The way in which you are using this data. There are numerous online services to help you create a foolproof privacy policy, such as Termly, which can also help you create a cookie policy.
Create a logo
At this point, it's also a good idea to create a logo for your food blog. There are lots of ways to do this, especially if you have graphic design skills. But I am a big fan of using logo creator.
Create a logo has become easy today thanks to intuitive platforms will guide you through the process of creating a unique and high-quality logo for your blog, even if you have no experience in graphic design.
note : If you need high-resolution logo files, you can pay a minimal amount to access the files and a few other items that will help with your branding efforts.
8. Start blogging
Once you've got your essential pages in place, it's time to start blogging. As a food blogger, you can blog about tons of things. Inspiration is everywhere, but just take your main topic and break it up into subcategories to make it easier for you.
So, for example, if your niche is exotic food, you can divide it up according to the different countries or regions you intend to cover. You can also do it by type of meal, for example, lunch, dinner, snack, party meal, etc.
Here are a few ideas and writing categories you can consider:
- Welcome article or series : You can write articles about why and how of creating your food blog.
- Item lists : Create lists of resources that your readers will find useful, such as “The 10 most popular food blogs,” “The 25 food bloggers you should follow this year,” and more.
- Practical guides : Create detailed how-to articles that answer a lot of frequently asked questions in your space. For example, you can create guides on “How to plan your family's meals for the whole month,” or “How to batch cook and freeze meals in advance,” etc.
These are just a few ideas of the types of messages you can create. You may also have the following items:
- Item checklist
- Holiday treats/seasonal food items
- Problem and solution areas (e.g.
- Personal stories
- Chef interviews
- Latest news from the sector
- Tell me about your favorite places to eat
... and so on.
It's always best to stick to your chosen niche and write cooking/food articles around this topic and informative content that will help you attract a larger audience and keep them engaged on your blog.
Important note: Make sure you've written at least ten blog posts before promoting anything on your new blog. Indeed, your new blog will look more populated. It will also help give new visitors to your blog enough variety to cater to different tastes and make them want to come back to read more.
9. Promote your food blog
Now it's time to get the word out about your new blog. Here are a few methods that have proven to be extremely effective in promoting food blogs.
Talk to friends and family about your food blogs
Start with friends and family. Let everyone know about your blog and ask them to visit it and read your articles. Then, ask them to share your blog with others in their own network and encourage them to make suggestions for improvements to help you create better content and attract even more people to your site.
Social media
Social media plays an important role in starting a food blog. It's a great traffic generator for the blog. Whether you choose to use Facebook, Twitter, the YouTube channel, Pinterest, Instagram, or one of the many other social media platforms, there are a few tips to help you effectively grow your audience.
- Add social media sharing buttons: This will encourage your visitors to share your cooking recipes, photos, videos, paid and free ebook recipes, etc. on their social channels.
- Activate Pinterest's rich pins: This feature allows you to show your recipe details directly on your pins, increasing the number of repins you get.
- Integrate your Instagram feed: Integrating interactive social media channels and feeds into your food blog will help you gain attention and increase your followers.
Paid ads
Depending on your budget, paid ads can be a great way to generate a steady flow of visitors to your new food blog.
You can start with social media ads, like Facebook or Instagram ads, to bring targeted visitors to your blog, where you can then convince them to join your mailing list or read more of your posts.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) allows you to attract targeted visitors to your blog for free. All you need to do is focus on important keywords in your niche or industry, incorporate them into your content using search engine optimization (SEO) best practices, and Google will rank your content by making it accessible to people who search for it in search engines, giving you customers and readers through Google traffic.
Use Rich Snippets
When it comes to SEO, you should also use rich snippets on your food blog. Rich snippets are those additional pieces of information that you see with the meta description of a listing on Google and other search engines.
They're a great way to increase your click-through rate, and once you've built your food blog, you can add rich snippets to improve your search engine results. By doing this, you can also have your website featured on rich maps that only appear on mobile devices.
Guest blogging
Also known as”Guest posting”, this method of blog promotion involves finding other popular websites in your food blog niche, with an audience similar to yours, and then offering them to write articles for their blog.
You can then link to your own website, either in the body of your content or in your bio at the end of the article, which will take people back to your new food blog.
10. Start earning money
After all the effort you've put into creating and developing your food blog, it's finally time to start reaping the rewards. But to do that, you need to find effective ways to monetize your food blog.
Here are some of the most commonly used (and most profitable) ways to make money from your blog audience. Don't forget that I also wrote a comprehensive article on the way to make money blogging.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process of recommending other people's products or services and receiving a commission for each sale you generate.
You can sign up for affiliate programs like WP Tasty, Home Chef, Vital Choice, and Food Blogger Pro.
Then search their products to find cookbooks, cooking products, and other items to recommend to your blog visitors and instantly find your suggested recipes or your own recipes in the search results.
Create your own cookbook
Another great way to make money with your food blog is to create your own cookbook, digital or physical.
You can sell it on your website or on larger marketplaces like eBay and Amazon. 101Cookbooks.com is an example of a website that makes effective use of this monetization method.
This site offers various cookbooks in a wide range of categories that you can also filter by ingredients, season, etc. in order to find the cookbook that suits your needs.
Accept sponsored posts
You can charge people to post on your blog (although I don't recommend this monetization method very much).
Nowadays, a lot of people have started to ignore traditional banners and ads, which is why sponsored content is becoming increasingly popular for brands to establish trust and credibility with their target market.
As your audience grows, you can help businesses increase brand awareness by publishing creative and engaging content on your site. Just make sure that this content is in line with the interests or needs of your target audience, otherwise you risk alienating it.
Selling advertising space on your own food blog
You can also earn money by selling advertising space on your site. Get brands to pay to advertise their products or services to your audience.
Selling advertising space directly to brands has numerous advantages. For example, you can keep 100% of the revenue you make, while ad networks keep a portion of your earnings for themselves.
Additionally, food bloggers can generally ask for a higher rate by negotiating directly with advertisers. At the same time, you can also establish working relationships with advertisers, which usually leads to future lucrative advertising campaigns with them.
Sign up for Google Adsense
Another easy way to monetize your food blog is to sign up for Google AdSense. Signing up is quick and easy from this Google tool, and once your new Google account is approved, Google will start showing relevant ads to your blog visitors. In return, you will be paid for each view of the ad.
Over time, this can create a steady stream of passive income that grows as your blog audience grows. Additionally, you can also access Google tools like Google Analytics to analyze your website statistics in search results in order to reach your target audience much more effectively.
Of course, there are plenty of other ways to make money with your blog, but the recommendations above are especially beneficial for food blogs.
Hope you enjoyed this step-by-step guide on how to start a food blog and make money doing it. If you follow this simple strategy, you will have a fully functional blog and profitable in no time.
