Are you looking forward to starting a food blog and making money from your delicious recipes?
If that’s the case, then you have come to the right place!
Starting a food blog can be a fun, rewarding, and even a profitable experience. But first, you need to have a passion for creating content about food and put in the time and effort to set up a blog for maximum growth potential.
Food blogging is holding its ground as one of the most profitable blog niches right now. So, the chances of your blog becoming popular get higher.
This article on how to start a food blog promises you to take through every technical step until you have a live food blog of your own.
We will teach you every step needed to start a food blog, including:
- Selecting a domain name for your food blog
- Setting up web hosting
- Installing WordPress
- Customizing the design of your food blog
- Writing blog posts
- Promoting and monetizing your food blog
We are sure that you will have a simple yet powerful food blog that is both attractive and profitable by the end of this article.
Before breaking out all the technical details, check out why you need a food blog with a successful example on this niche.
Why Do You Need a Food Blog?
Who doesn’t love food, right? And writing food reviews and recipes are undoubtedly the best way of engaging people in your blog.
You can drive a fair amount of organic traffic through the food recipe posts, and you also can branch out into cookbook tutorials.
Generally speaking, this is how this niche works:
- Cook food
- Click attractive pictures of your food.
- Post the entire recipe with pictures and critical sections.
Here is an example of a successful blog in this niche:
Pinch of Yum is one of the most successful blogs in this niche. It gets millions of visitors per month. As a result, the blog owner makes well over USD60,000 per month in profit.
Lindsay and her husband, Bjork, both run this blog. They share healthy, delicious, and easy recipes along with captivating photos of their food. Besides, they share some valuable tips for food photography, which lures visitors. The website is the perfect combination of delicious recipes with eye-catching photography.
Another Example:
Food Blogger Pro: Food Blogger Pro is another successful blog in this niche that teaches you how to optimize your food blog and earn a substantial income. Lindsay Ostrom and Bjork Ostrom are behind this amazing blog where they teach people the secrets of making money through food blogging.
The Ostrom couple has included over 350 easy-to-understand videos on Food Blogger Pro specifically to help food bloggers. Besides, they have included an active community forum, a panel of industry experts, as well as monthly live events, where you can submit your blogging questions and get help. They also offer discounts on tools and services made for food bloggers.
You need to pay some amount to become a Food Blogger Pro member to learn more about food blogging.
The Basic Steps to Start a Food Blog
Now, let’s discuss the six necessary steps of starting a food blog from scratch.
1. Select a Domain Name (Name of Your Food Blog).
This is the most crucial and trickiest part. You need to choose your domain name.
The domain name of your blog plays a key role because it creates the first impression. Also termed as URL, your domain is your address on the web.
Now, what do you want to call your food blog? Before you decide on a domain name for your blog, you need to conduct thorough research on your topic and look for exciting ideas.
Brainstorm some ideas about what creative things that you can write and include in your food blog. With a little bit of research, you will be able to generate fascinating content that can attract plenty of visitors within no time. Once you are sure about your blog’s overall content, choose a domain name that fits your blog’s description.
You need to keep the following three things in mind when choosing the name of your food blog:
- It should be short and appealing.
- It should be effortless to remember.
- It should contain the gist of your niche.
Note: If you are still finding it difficult to think of a good domain name, you can try Wordoid. It is a naming tool that offers you plenty of great options.
When choosing a domain name for your food blog, you can look for different domain extensions. The price for your domain name differs between different domain extensions. Some of the commonly used domain extensions are:
- .com
- .org
- .net
- .co
- .us
Once you have picked up your domain name, you can register it using any web host. Here, we will show you how to use Bluehost, one of the 20 largest web hosts, and WordPress also recommends it.
In the next step, you will learn about registering your domain name and setting up your hosting using Bluehost.
2. Set up Blog Hosting.
It’s time to set up blog hosting and make your blog live.
Web hosting is what keeps your blog online and stores all of your files, images, and content.
There are a handful of options to explore when it comes to web hosting. In this article, you will learn the steps of hosting your food blog using one of the most reliable and popular hosting services — Bluehost.
Most of the bloggers (especially beginners) prefer Bluehost because:
- It allows free registration of your domain name for 1st year starting at $3.75 per month and makes sure that no one uses it.
- It provides free and easy installation of the WordPress software.
- Includes a free SSL certificate, which helps keep sensitive information sent across the internet encrypted so that only the intended recipient can access it.
- It is reliable and has been hosting more than 2 million websites and blogs on today’s date.
- It includes customer support via chat or phone, which is available 24/7.
- If you are unsatisfied with Bluehost for any reason, you can get a refund within 30 days.
The process of registering on Bluehost and setting up web hosting is relatively straightforward. You just need to follow these instructions:
First, go to bluehost.com and click the Get Started button.
Now, select the hosting plan of your preference.
(Note: For the first-ever blog, we recommend to select the Basic plan that costs you $3.95 a month if you are opting for a 36-month package. You can modify your plan to Plus or Choice Plus as you succeed in blogging.)
After you complete selecting your hosting plan, you will be asked to enter your food blog’s domain name. When you enter the name, click the Next button.
Next up, add your account information, and finalize your package info to complete the hosting and registration process. We recommend you choose the 36-month plan as it is the best value.
At last, add your billing address for payment, check the box that you agree to Bluehost’s Terms and Services, and then click the Submit button.
There you go! You have successfully set up blog hosting. Now, you need to install WordPress on your food blog.
3. Install WordPress on Your Food Blog.
Installing WordPress is the easiest process of all. Once you register with Bluehost, you can install WordPress on your food blog within a few clicks.
First, log in to your Bluehost account and find the Website Builders section. Now, click on the WordPress logo.
On the next page, click on the Install button from the Do It Yourself (FREE) section.
Next up, click the Check Domain button to continue.
On the next screen, check the terms and conditions box and then click the Install Now button to install WordPress on your food blog.
Once the installation process gets completed, redirect to http://yourblogname.com/wp-admin, and provide your admin username and password to log in to your WordPress admin dashboard.
After you log in to your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings > Permalink and change your permalink structure to Post name. Now, hit the Save Changes button to complete the entire process.
4. Choose a WordPress Theme.
Now that you are ready to customize your food blog, it’s time to select a perfect WordPress theme.
Themes control the visual appearance of your blog. Customizing your blog’s look and texture is one of the most exciting and rewarding parts of creating your blog.
You can easily select the one from thousands of premade WordPress themes available. You have the choice to either install free themes or the paid ones.
How to Install a WordPress Theme?
Installing a WordPress theme and applying it to your website is very simple. You just need to follow these instructions:
At first, log in to your WordPress admin dashboard and navigate to Appearance > Themes from the left side panel.
After that, click the Add New button at the top.
Here, you get two options. The first option is to search for the free theme from the search bar located on the right side of the page. Here’s the demo:
From the search results, click on the Install button to install your desired theme and then activate it.
The second option is to click on the Upload Theme button located at the top when you navigate Appearance > Themes > Add New.
Now, click the Choose File button to select your desired theme’s zip file that you have downloaded on your computer.
Once you select your theme file, click the Install Now button to install it.
After the theme installation completes, click the Activate button to activate your theme and track your website changes.
There you go! You have successfully added a WordPress theme to your food blog.
You can find a wide range of WordPress themes that go perfectly with your food blog. However, before you select the one among them, you should consider the following important factors:
Design and Simplicity:
First things first, the appearance of your theme should look like a food blog. The color and design of your WordPress theme should complement your food recipes.
To make sure that your blog performs well, you need to select the best WordPress theme that has a visually appealing design and layout. Moreover, the theme needs to be elegant and straightforward to use so that your users would find it easy to interact on your website.
SEO-Friendly:
You should make sure to choose an SEO-optimized WordPress theme for your food blog. SEO helps you rank your blog higher on search engine results and offers you greater visibility.
Mobile-Friendly / Responsive:
Most of the internet traffic originates from mobile devices. As a result, you should make sure that your theme is compatible with mobile phones to keep yourself in the growing competition. The theme you choose for your food blog should be optimized for every type of electronic device, including mobile phones, tablets, and computers.
The responsive design of your WordPress themes adjusts the resolution of your website to match different sizes of different devices. It also helps your users to experience the same interface across all platforms.
Customization Features:
When you look for a WordPress theme for your food blog, you should always put customizable features as the top priority. The customization options help you to adjust the content on your blog as you need and prefer.
Support:
Using a WordPress theme for your website can be tricky sometimes. You may have to encounter some major technical issues that can make it hard for you to solve. Hence, it is recommended to select a WordPress theme equipped with a dedicated technical support team.
The best thing about having a technical support team for your theme is that they will be there to help you 24/7. You can connect with them through call, email, or built-in chatbots to solve any issues related to theme installation or theme performance.
Best WordPress Themes for Food Blog
1. Cookery
Cookery is the perfect theme to jumpstart your food blog. This free theme has a high-end aesthetic that will immediately engage your visitors. Cookery is also a highly specialized theme for food blogs with powerful features.
This is an SEO-optimized theme, which gives you an edge in search engine visibility. Cookery is also speed-optimized and fully responsive, which gives your visitors a great user experience.
There are also numerous layout options, including 9 homepage layouts, 5 Single Recipe page layouts, 6 header layouts, and much more.
This theme works together with the WP Delicious plugin, allowing you to build recipes with step-by-step instructions easily. Using this theme, you can offer an excellent user experience with features like easy print button, serving-based ingredient measurements, and advanced recipe search filters.
Cookery is also a lead generation theme — it supports your various projects with custom landing page templates. You get a Coaching page template to attract clients to your coaching service, a Newsletter template, a Book page template, a Press page template to list your future media appearances, and also a Meal Planning template to sell your meal planning guides.
Cookery comes with numerous customization features too, including 900+ Google fonts and custom color schemes to set a unique look and feel for your website.
You can also set this theme up in multiple languages by using the WPML and Polylang plugins, including languages with RTL scripts like Arabic.
2. Blossom Recipe Pro
Blossom Recipe Pro is a responsive and feature-rich premium WordPress theme that lets you create a recipes blog. With a one-click demo content import feature, you can kickstart your website with ready-made content and settings so that you don’t need to spend hours designing your blog from scratch.
The theme features 4 header layouts, 9 homepage layouts, and 4 slider layouts. Also, you get easy customization options with 600+ Google fonts, unlimited backgrounds, and theme colors.
This SEO and speed-optimized theme allows you to display the step-by-step cooking instruction and cooking details and allows your users to check the number of ingredients required to prepare a dish. Blossom Recipe Pro is fully compatible with the Blossom Recipe Maker plugin.
Moreover, the theme includes advertisements areas to display Google ads and earn income. It features social media integration and is WPML compatible.
3. Bakes and Cakes Pro
Bakes and Cakes Pro is an elegant, professional, and easy-to-use WordPress theme for the bakery business. This theme includes a one-click demo import feature that allows you to import the entire demo content in a click and create your food blog faster than ever.
The premium theme features 16 home page sections, 7 unique header designs, and 7 unique custom pages to grant you diverse choice options for your food blog. It includes a custom food menu page to show your Bakery’s menu. You also get full typography control and customization options with 600+ Google fonts and unlimited color.
Bakes and Cakes Pro is compatible with the WooCommerce plugin that allows you to sell your products online and earn income. Besides, the social media integration feature allows your blog to display and link to your various social media pages.
This theme is optimized for both SEO and speed. It is fully responsive and supports RTL.
4. Restaurant and Cafe Pro
Restaurant and Cafe Pro is another feature-rich WordPress theme for a food blog. This premium theme helps you create your restaurant, cafe, bakery, and cafeteria service website without having to write a single line of code.
This theme includes a one-click demo import feature that lets you import all the images, text, and settings from the theme’s live demo with a click. You can present your recipes the way you want with 3 banner layouts, 21 home page sections, 7 predefined header layouts, and 8 custom page templates.
Restaurant and Cafe Pro presents you with an advanced typography option with 600+ Google fonts to choose from. Besides, you can entirely customize your blog’s look and feel as you prefer with unlimited colors.
This theme supports the WooCommerce plugin and features an advertisement widget to help you place ads and make money. It is WPML compatible and supports RTL as well.
5. Vilva Pro
Vilva Pro is a multipurpose blog theme designed to create beautiful and professional websites. This SEO-friendly, speed-optimized, and mobile-friendly theme lets you build an excellent food blog. Vilva Pro includes a one-click demo import feature that allows you to import the entire demo content in a click and create your food blog faster than ever.
You get the best user experience with this theme, thanks to the pre-made multiple unique layouts. You can select from 19 header layouts, 48 homepage layouts, 11 slider layouts, and 7 single post layouts to meet your expectations.
With Vilva Pro, you don’t need to settle for the default theme color. You can easily reflect your brand with the best color combination. Plus, you get the best typography option with 900+ Google fonts to fully choose from and customize your food blog.
This WooCommerce-compatible theme also provides Google Adsense optimized advertisement areas to help you monetize your blog easily. It also allows you to add a static image or video in the banner section with the CTA button to redirect your readers to the desired page or post.
Vilva Pro has room for social media integration that allows you to share your delicious recipes on social channels. The theme offers ample space for widgets so that you can add tons of features without compromising its design.
5. Choose a WordPress Plugin.
WordPress plugins are the tools that you can add to your food blog to increase its functionality. These tools assist in making some additional customizations that are outside the reach of your theme.
Many plugins let you optimize your food blog and help you to organize your content.
Before we explore the list of the best plugins for a food blog, here’s a thorough guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
How to Install a WordPress Plugin?
Installing a WordPress plugin and applying it to your website is very simple. You just need to follow these instructions:
At first, log in to your WordPress admin dashboard and navigate to Plugins > Add New from the left side panel.
Here, you get two options. The first option is to search for the free plugin from the search bar located on the right side of the page. Here’s the demo:
From the search results, click on the Install button to install your desired plugin and then activate it.
The second option is to click on the Upload Plugin button located at the top when you navigate to Plugins > Add New.
Now, click the Choose File button to select your desired plugin’s zip file that you have downloaded on your computer.
Once you select your plugin file, click the Install Now button to install it.
After the plugin installation completes, click the Activate Plugin button to activate your plugin and track your website’s changes.
There you go! You have successfully added a WordPress plugin to your food blog.
You can find a wide range of WordPress plugins that provide extra functionality to your food blog. However, before you select the one among them, you should consider the following important factors:
Ratings and Reviews:
More than thousands of users use WordPress food plugins on their websites. As a result, they are busy passing reviews and ratings on the plugins that they use.
When you look for the WordPress plugin for your food blog, you should first analyze their ratings and reviews. If a plugin doesn’t have good ratings and positive reviews, you shouldn’t install it on your blog. It is recommended to look for plugins with at least a 4-star rating and good reviews.
You can likewise search for the desired plugin on Google or any other search engines and analyze third-party websites’ reviews. You will then have a clear idea of the functionality and performance of your desired food plugin.
Functionality:
The functionality of your plugin is essential for your blog. You should always check your plugin’s features before deciding to use it for your website. When it comes to WordPress plugins for a food blog, you should look for:
- Simple user interface
- Ability to create the image and video recipes
- Responsive design to run smoothly across all devices
- Layout and color settings
- SEO and speed-optimized
- Social media integration
Support and Maintenance:
Before installing a plugin, you should always ensure that the plugin author shows engagement in the support forums if you have queries related to the plugin. You should look for a plugin that gets frequently updated so that there is no compromise in its performance.
If you download a plugin for your food blog from a third-party website, always check the official site for the plugin’s support policy. You can reach out to the author and directly ask them about the policy to ensure that you receive proper customer support when needed.
Best WordPress Plugin for Food Blog
1. WP Delicious
WP Delicious plugin is a feature-rich WordPress recipe plugin that is easy to use and flexible. It should be your initial pick for your food blog.
This SEO-optimized plugin comes with tons of features like recipe image and video galleries, unlimited recipe creation, printable recipe options, nutrition charts, detailed, rich text instructions, and advanced search.
WP Delicious uses the powerful WordPress REST API to create and manage recipes. With a mobile-friendly and responsive design, WP Delicious makes it easy for you to create and share your recipes online. It features an interactive user interface with handy color and layout settings for customization.
Additionally, this plugin lets you share your recipe on social media platforms using Instagram and Pinterest. The rich pins for Pinterest automatically get updated and give the best available information about your recipe to your users.
Key Features of WP Delicious Plugin:
- Clean and user-friendly interface
- Six customizable widgets
- Image and video recipes
- Image gallery and lightbox
- Attractive print template
- Mobile-friendly and responsive design
- Adjustable servings
- Nutrition charts
- Advanced and powerful search page
- Schema friendly and SEO-optimized
- Pinterest rich pins support
- Instagram and Pinterest share
- Layout and color settings
- Author profile
- Star rating
2. Blossom Recipe Maker
Blossom Recipe Maker is another WordPress recipe plugin that is perfect for a food blog. It helps you create incredible recipes in less than 5 minutes and post it on your blog. Besides, you can easily add food recipes to any of your posts or pages using the shortcode.
This recipe plugin allows your website visitors to interact with your food recipes. It lets them adjust the serving size as per their requirements and mark the given ingredients and instructions as they move along the recipe.
Blossom Recipe Maker includes an advanced search feature that helps the visitors to find their favorite recipe instantly. You can also add pictures to your instructions to demonstrate the recipes’ step-by-step procedure with this plugin.
Blossom Recipe Maker plugin also enables you to embed a YouTube or Vimeo video to understand the recipe better.
Key Features of Blossom Recipe Maker:
- Includes Heading Sections to group ingredients and instructions
- Add photos and recipe gallery
- Embed YouTube or Vimeo videos
- Demo recipe post
- Adjustable servings size
- Check the ingredients and instructions
- Author template
- Option to search recipe by category, cuisine, and cooking methods
- Several Templates to list recipes
- Translation Ready
3. WP Recipe Maker
WP Recipe Maker is a popular WordPress recipe plugin with over 40,000+ active downloads. This plugin allows you to add recipes to your food blog post or page with automatic JSON-LD metadata for your recipes.
This plugin is optimized for SEO, ensuring that you can rank your recipes higher on search engines. It also comes with a social media integration feature to let you share your delicious recipes on your social media platforms and attract more visitors.
Furthermore, you can enable the optional Pinterest sharing button so that your users can promote their favorite recipes on this visual social platform. The plugin allows you to add images and videos directly to your recipe pages for better understanding.
WP Recipe Maker plugin is fully responsive, and it is also compatible with RTL languages. You can subscribe to its pro version for added functionality at a minimum of $49.
Key Features of WP Recipe Maker:
- Mobile-friendly and developer-friendly design
- Template Editor
- SEO and speed optimized
- Compatible with Gutenberg editor and Classic Editor
- Unit conversion feature
- Nutrition API integration
- Recipes snippets
- Adjustable servings
- Google Rich snippets and cards
- Full-text search for your recipes
- Recipe metadata checker
- Compatible with RTL languages
- Excellent customer support
4. Tasty Recipes
Tasty Recipe is a powerful WordPress recipe plugin for food bloggers. This plugin comes integrated with tons of premium features. In general, it helps to upgrade your food blog and its recipe publishing functionality.
Using Tasty Recipes, you can import all your recipes directly from different platforms, including Cookbook, WP Recipe Maker, WP Ultimate Recipe, Meal Planner Pro, EasyRecipe, and Ziplist. It means if you are already using another WordPress recipe plugin for your blog, upgrading to this plugin does not mean starting from scratch.
Tasty Recipes plugin uses JSON-LD structured data to support a comprehensive view of your recipe to search engines. It supports video integration that lets you add step-by-step video instructions to your recipe for better presentation.
Similarly, this recipe plugin includes fields for all the macronutrients. So, from fiber to calories to saturated fat. As a result, you can add complete nutrition information to your recipe that ranges from fiber and calories to saturated fat. You can get this recipe plugin at $79.
Key Features of Tasty Recipe:
- Excellent SEO
- Effortless recipe scaling
- Supports video integration
- Complete nutrition information
- Flexible formatting
- Easy recipe converter
- Effortless import
- Star ratings
- Up-to-date with new trends and features
- Excellent customer support
- 15-days money-back guarantee
5. Cookbook
Cookbook is another elegant WordPress recipe plugin that you can use for your food blog. Optimized for SEO and speed, this plugin allows you to publish your delicious recipes online with ease.
This plugin features nutrition data to help you feed your nutrition-conscious audience. Besides nutrition information, Cookbook also enables your recipes to get enhanced with Google Rich Cards.
Cookbook includes a rich formatting feature. This feature lets you treat your visitors with visually stunning food recipes that are effortless to format. Using this feature, you can also add images, bold and italics texts, hyperlinks, and formatted lists directly in your recipe content.
This premium plugin also comes with printable recipes. Your users can print out their favorite recipes and take them wherever they go. Also, the plugin is fully responsive and mobile-friendly.
Cookbook also provides an option of using a rating system to make your recipes more interactive. It also comes translation-ready. You can get this plugin at $59.99.
Key Features of Cookbook:
- Responsive and mobile-friendly design
- SEO optimized and Schema-friendly
- Easy to create and share recipes
- Nutrition data feature
- Rich formatting
- Integrated shortcode button
- Recipe rating system
- Developer-friendly
- Translation-ready
6. Write Your First Blog Post
Congratulations! You have done all you had to do to set up a food blog. You chose a domain name, set up hosting, installed WordPress, and then added themes and plugins to your blog. Now, you can start writing!
Follow the given instructions to write your first blog post:
At first, log in to your WordPress admin dashboard and navigate to Posts > Add New from the left side panel.
Once you click on the Add New button, you can see blank documents with different sections to create your first blog post.
Here are these sections explained:
1. Title Area: This is where you can write the title of your blog post.
2. Add Block: This is where you can add images/videos/gifs to your post and embed files on your posts.
3. Content Area: This is where you can write the main content of your blog post. You can select a paragraph or header, add some external links to your post, and even make a few sections of your post bold and italics.
4. Publishing: This is the section you control if your post is published and live to the audience. You have the option to schedule your post at your favorable time.
5. Others: You can select a relevant category, upload a featured image, and add tags to your post.
After you finish up creating your first blog post, hit the Publish button to make it live.
Tips for Writing High-Quality Content:
Your food blog posts should be engaging and informative to readers. The contents of your blog must be appealing and lively. The few elements that your blog must include are:
- Your blog post title must be pleasing for readers, and the first paragraph of your content must genuinely define the topic.
- Longer blog posts are favored over the shorter ones as the lengthy posts are more informative. In the meantime, you should not include irrelevant content to make your post longer.
- Adding questions in between content and asking for your user’s opinion keeps them engaged in your blogs.
- The text, images, videos, external and internal links, and content in your blog should be original. You can take ideas from relevant articles, but the final contents must be completely original.
- Your post must be free from grammatical and spelling errors as these address highly unprofessional behavior.
Some Do’s and Don’ts
- Always create composed and comprehensive posts. Users don’t prefer cluttered blogs, which can make you lose your audience and possible income.
- Your content must be very specific and should offer some value to your readers. It should never, in any way, harm your readers or their values.
- You should always make your content look appealing and qualitative. It must also be made easily available without any unnecessary links.
- Pop-up and giant banner ads are the greatest turn-offs for readers. So, make sure your blog post doesn’t include them. Otherwise, you might lose your visitors.
How to Drive Traffic and Earn Income From Your Food Blog?
After you add a few of the best recipes to your food blog, it is time to start driving traffic and making money from your blog. There are plenty of ways to increase the traffic of your blog and monetize it for income.
First, let’s learn how to promote your blog online and attract more visitors.
Promote Your Food Blog
All of your hard work and delicious recipes go in vain if no one visits your food blog. As a result, promotion is an essential part of blogging. Here are the tactics for the straightforward promotion of your food blog:
1. Notify Your Friends.
Share the links of your blog posts among your friends and close circle. This is one of the most effective ways of promoting your blog. Also, notify them of your new content through messages and social media platforms. You can also urge them to share your posts within their circle so that you will be able to grow a large number of audience.
2. Design Social Media for Your Blog.
You can promote your food blog by creating various social media accounts, like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest for your blog. You can then share the clickable links of your blog posts on these social channels so that your followers can redirect to your blog and see all of your content.
3. Use Search Engines.
You can sign up for Google Search Console or Bing and add your food blog to promote it. This process helps to get your blog indexed. The sooner your blog gets indexed on search engines, the quicker it can attract more visitors in no time.
4. Optimize Your Blog for SEO.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in reforming your blog content to attract more traffic from search engines. It is a known fact that search engine results become better with time and more content on your blog. More traffic means more visitors to your food blog.
5. Create an Email List.
Last but not least, creating an email list is another best way to promote your food blog. You can easily gather your visitors’ email addresses and notify them about your new posts every time with a simple email.
Monetize Your Food Blog
Once you attract enough traffic to your blog, it’s time to monetize it and make money from it. There are different ways to monetize your food blog. Some of them include:
1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is considered one of the most profitable ways to generate an income stream from your food blog. You need to add links to affiliate products from your blog posts and recipes. Every time a customer purchases those products using your link, you will earn a certain commission percentage.
You should first find food-related affiliate products. Many high-profile websites in the food industry offer affiliate programs. You can join Amazon’s affiliate program and start recommending products from the world’s largest eCommerce store.
2. Google AdSense
Google AdSense is one of the easiest ways to start earning from your flood blog instantly. It lets you display advertisements on your food blog and earn income when someone clicks on those ads.
Integrating Google AdSense into your website is super easy as you don’t need any coding skills.
3. Selling Your Products and Services
Another effective strategy to make money from your food blog is to sell your products and services. You can use this advantage, especially when your blog increases in readership, authority, and popularity. There is a wide range of plugins to integrate into your food blog and start selling your recipes.
You can create eBooks, including the recipes of some of the best dishes. Once you create your eBook, format it, design the cover that sells it, and add the eBook to your blog and promote it.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Here are some of our most frequently asked questions.
What do I need to start a food blog?
Dedication is key. You can only run a food blog properly if you are passionate about food and are determined to write about it.
As you move forward, you need three key things to start a food blog using WordPress. First, a domain name, which is your blog’s name, that people will type to find your blog.
Second, a web hosting account is where your blog’s files are stored on the internet.
Lastly, you should allocate some time to complete the domain registration and hosting process and customize your blog using WordPress themes and plugins.
Should I start a food blog?
Of course, you should! Food blogging is considered an excellent blog niche.
For instance, you can teach people how to cook a specific cuisine with an instructional blog filled with a lot of information. You can include how-to articles, recipe reviews, and technique demos. Similarly, you can also write a travel food blog that explores a part of the world through food. This can be both informative and engaging for your readers.
How can I become the best food blogger?
Food blogging is hard work than it sounds. To excel in this niche, you need to follow some general rules alongside your complete dedication. Follow these handy tips to become the best food blogger:
• Write about what you love and be authentic.
• Don’t give up easily.
• Always post original content.
• Show your enthusiasm in your posts.
• Make friends and help each other.
• Be responsive to social media and make yourself accessible.
• Keep your blog design clean and easy to navigate.
• Make your blog easy for your visitors to access and follow.
• Make it easy to share your content from the blog.
• Publish regularly.
• Follow SEO guidelines.
• Learn how to take appetizing pictures.
• Submit your delicious recipes to recipe submission websites.
How to find a food blog niche?
There are different food blog types and niches that you can start with. Vegan blogs are getting popular these days, like the paleo diet, keto diet, and low-carb diet blogs. You can always go for what is trending as it will be easier for you to attract more visitors to your blog.
Likewise, it will be easier for you to find your perfect food blog niche if you know what you are most passionate about. For instance, you may be into pastries, and you may enjoy making delicious cakes. Similarly, if you follow a specific diet, you will be closely connected with the topic, making it easier to find a like-minded audience.
Can I create a food blog without coding skills?
Yes, you can! You don’t require any programming, coding, or design skills to build a professional-looking WordPress food blog. WordPress themes are very easy to customize, and you can just point and click to set up your theme.
Which is the best web hosting I can choose?
We recommend Bluehost because:
• It allows free registration of your domain name for 1st year and makes sure that no one uses it.
• It provides free and easy installation of the WordPress software.
• It includes a free SSL certificate.
• It is reliable and has been hosting more than 2 million websites and blogs on today’s date.
• It includes customer support via chat or phone, which is available 24/7.
• If you are unsatisfied with Bluehost for any reason, you can get a refund within 30 days.
Can I make my food blog load faster?
You can! Making your blog load faster takes a few simple steps. First, you need to visit GTMetrix and run a quick baseline test of your blog and note the results.
After that, install a premium WordPress caching plugin like WP Rocket, the most effective cache plugin. It makes your WordPress website load faster in a few clicks. You can also try other caching plugins like:
• WP Super Cache
• W3 Total Cache
• Sucuri
• Hummingbird
• Breeze
How can I get paid as a food blogger?
Monetizing your food blog and earning income from it gets easier once you create quality content and attract a significant number of visitors. There are different ways to monetize your food blog and get paid as a food blogger. These include:
• Selling eBooks with your delicious recipes
• Displaying Ads using Google Adsense, Media.net, Taboola, and so on
• Affiliate marketing
How can I see how many visitors are going through my food blog?
The most convenient way to monitor visitors to your food blog is by signing up for a free Google Analytics account.
After you set up the analytics for your blog, you can use a free WordPress plugin like Google Analytics Dashboard for WP by ExactMetrics to easily add the tracking code to your blog. Within a few moments, you will be able to track every single visitor to your blog in real-time.
ExactMetrics provides you insights on total sessions, total page views, average session duration, and bounce rate percentage of your blog.
How can I back up my food blog?
Whether you run a food blog or any other blog, backing up your blog is very important. You must generate a backup of your food blog to recover your blog if something goes wrong.
You can select from the backup plugin provided by WordPress to create a backup of your blog and save it from malware attacks and issues. Some of them are:
How can I make my food blog available to a broader audience?
When you start your food blog, traffic is the most crucial aspect that you should consider. The major way of attracting more traffic to your blog is by implementing the fundamental SEO principles.
Well, you can learn more about the SEO techniques that will double your blog traffic through this comprehensive guide on the 7 On-Page SEO Techniques.
Also, you can implement these three handy strategies that can flood your food blog with traffic:
• Find the area of interest of your audiences.
• Find out the best possible way to connect with them.
• Create a blog post that answers all questions.
In which language should I create my blog posts?
This entirely depends on who you are trying to reach out with your blog posts. It is evident that English has the biggest market on the internet, and the majority of people understand it. If your English is good and the people you are seeking to reach are reading in English, you should write your blog posts in English. However, that’s not all!
There are millions of success stories of people blogging in their native language and engaging many audiences. As a result, you can still profit in Chinese, or Spanish, or French, or German, or Hindi, if your target audience speaks the same language.
Our Say
There you go! Now you have a step-by-step instruction on how to start a food blog. With this detailed guide, now you have selected a domain name, set up web hosting, chosen a WordPress theme, learned about different recipe plugins, and started writing your blog posts.
Moreover, we hope you are familiar with the techniques to promote your food blog and monetize it to earn a substantial income.
Now that you have everything in your hands take forward your food blog with hard work, creativity, and the willingness to experiment. You will see results quickly!
Feel free to share your expertise in the comments section below if you have started a food blog of your own. We would be thrilled to see what you are writing about and hearing more about your experience in this niche.
