Interested in cooking? Then you should start a food blog today.
Do you know starting a food blog is easier than you think?
Although it might sound overwhelming with all the details and technical jargons you see online. It is not rocket science to figure it out.
“Before we jump in, I want to tell you that this is a detailed guide that shows the exact steps with pictures to start a blog. Furthermore, it is also going to point out many other important factors to make you blog successful. I have also included many pro tips to put your blog on fast track to reach your goals faster.”
Disclaimer: Please note that this page contains affiliate links and I will earn a commission if you purchase through the links. I only link to products I tried and trust.
There could be many reasons you want to start a food blog.
- Maybe you want to share your killer recipes with your friends.
- It could be you want to learn more about cooking and save it for your family.
- You want to pick a hobby and keep track of your cooking on the blog.
- You want to start an online business through your blog.
- Or just looking to move from the free blog providers who have limitations to better hosting for more control.
Whatever reason it may be. It is the right choice to start a blog online with your brand name on it.
We all know that internet users are growing exponentially. Almost everyone is looking to get online, to shop, communicate, entertainment and so on.
Many are spending a lot of time online on either social media, blogs or on some shopping websites. If you put your share of content in the growing internet today, it could worth a lot in the future. Basically, it is a new way of asset building in this technology-driven modern world.
Do food bloggers get paid?
Everybody works for rewards and money. Before spending, money, and time on food blogging, getting to know what should I get back from blogging? Is it worth starting a food blog and spending lots of time? are necessary. Food blogging takes lots of effort and patience, from cooking to marketing, it requires lots of effort like photography, editing, writing, and marketing. My simple and honest answer to this question, Do food bloggers get paid? is, YES.
How do food bloggers make money?
I am getting by paid by these ways, from ads, sponsor posts, selling physical products, selling cookbooks in Amazon and affiliate marketing. You can make a good amount of money from a food blog. And there are few of my blogging friends who earn money from cooking classes, being a VA to other bloggers, and Youtube videos too.
How do I get sponsors for my blog?
Getting paid from sponsors to promoting their product is one way of making money from food blogging. I shared a detailed way of how I get opportunities to work with the companies to promote their products and getting paid, here.
What do I gain from starting a blog?
You probably might not have thought about the benefits of blogging yet. There are so many benefits to blogging, especially with food blogging.
You could learn more skills than just developing recipes.
Some of them are
- Photography – Food blog is all about pictures, whether you take pictures with your phone or professional camera. You will learn a lot about photography, editing making it better.
- Copywriting – Writing gets better with practice, blogging helps you to write more and become a better writer.
- Meeting new people – As soon as you start blogging you would meet similar bloggers and your audience. Even if you are not an extrovert, many nice people will approach you and become friends for life.
- Grow your confidence – Sometimes we underestimate ourselves and the skill we already have. When you put out something that you created, it builds confidence. People give feedback immediately and you will know that you are better than what you thought.
- Learn some technical skills – It is not important to have technical skills to be a successful blogger. However, if you are interested you can learn some of the technical aspects of creating and optimizing your blog.
- Make more money – You can use the blog to keep it as a passion or make some passive income or even make it a full-time income stream. Blogging provides so many options, it is one of the least expensive ways to start an online business.
and much more.
You could start a food blog in two ways.
1. Get a professional to do it for you.
I know many people who are serious about making money with their blog do this. It definitely helps to have a custom build blog. It depends on how much resources you are willing to spend. If you are a beginner you can pursue this option at a later point
2. Do it yourself
Like I said earlier, starting your blog is not difficult. It is just about finding the right information and putting all those pieces together.
We are going to do that together today.
This option is also much cheaper, you could do that for as little as$3.95 per month
In this detailed guide, I have split the post into 2 Basic and Advanced step. I recommend you to going through each step to get your blog. It will help to jumpstart your growth.
Basic Steps to Start your blog
1) Figure out your goal with your blog.
Most Important step in your blog. You need to know the destination and the directions to get there, otherwise, you will be wasting all your effort and time.
2) Name your blog.
Find a good name for your blog. Not just a random name but something that connects with your audience well.
3) Buy a domain for that name
Find an SEO friendly domain that is unique and reflects your brand.
4) Buy Reliable hosting
Not all hostings are the same. Don’t get lost with the multiple choices and end up buying a non-reliable hosting.
5) Install WordPress
It is just a one click installation.
6) Install a Theme
The default theme in WordPress won’t get you too far. You need a theme to make an impression.
7) Install WordPress plugins
SEO tools, recipe plugins, social share buttons, and other vital plugins to run your blog.
8) Setup Basic Tools
Google tools, other search engines setup.
9) Advanced Steps
These are the steps that make your blog different from others.
Step 1 Figure out your goal for the blog
Most Important step in your blog. You need to know where you are heading otherwise you will remain in the same place after all the effort.
Setting a Goal for your blog.
According to me, this is the most important step, you need to know your long term and short term goals. These goals will help set your expectations and allow you to estimate the cost of your valuable time and resources.
However, many would like to just start and see how it goes. If they like it then they would take it seriously. In reality, this never works but the opposite.
Only when you are serious enough, significant results would show up.
I understand we cannot plan the future completely, still, we should have some level of planning to do anything. Then alter that plan as you progress and change the course as it turns out.
Imagine even when you are planning your vacation or any leisure trips, you still plan the destination. You just don’t get up and drive to any place. Even if you did that, rarely you would go anywhere interesting.
That is the reason to have a short term plan.
In blogging, you should set some simple goals like these to get started
- Share all my recipes with 5 friends.
- Make 3 new friends in 2 weeks.
- Learn the technical stuff on how to set up a new page in 15 days.
- Make 10$ from ads in 4 weeks.
- Get 100 visitors in 3 months.
Trust me. Once you hit the goal even if it is small, you will feel accomplished and happy.
As you start hitting small goals then you should set larger goals. Then plan to achieve those goals. These are the goals that would make your blog take off and help you achieve whatever you want with it.
At this point, you will set up goals like these
- Make 10k per month.
- Have 100k visitors each month.
- Write a book and sell 1000 copies in 6 months.
Or whatever you big goal is.
Step 2 Name your blog
Find the perfect name for your blog. Not just a random name but something that connects with your audience well.
Name your blog.
Before you think of coming up with a random fancy name, let me stop you there.
Naming your blog is not just coming up with a cool name. If done correctly, it could be a great value add in the long-term. Name of your blog is your brand name.
The name of your blog is your brand name, so craft it carefully.
Just think of the popular brand names. Like Wal-Mart, it is short, easily memorable and clear, says the type of blog. Your brand name should also be similar to that.
The Ideal name should be
- Short.
- Memorable.
- Tells about your business.
Step 3 Buy a domain for that name
Find an SEO friendly domain that also unique and reflects your brand.
Buy a domain for that name.
Once you know your blog name, it’s easier to find the domain name. However, sometimes most of the popular names are already taken by someone else.
Fortunately, there are services like domainr.com where you can easily find domain names based on the keywords.
Make sure you get a .com domain. .com domains are easy to remember and gives a global identity. Even though it might be tempting to get other extensions because the name you are looking for is available. Skip that.
If the domain is not available in .com, then someone else already has a website in that name. You don’t want to look like you are part of that website. You need something unique to stand out of the crowd.
Also make sure you get the .com extension, because it is easier to remember than other extensions.
Step 4 Buy Reliable hosting
Not all hostings are the same. Don’t get lost with the multiple choices and end up buying a non-reliable hosting.
Buy Reliable hosting
Hosting is fundamental for a successful blog. A better hosting should be fast and has maximum uptime.
Users don’t like sites that are either slow or down in maintenance mode often. So is Google, it uses a lot of other signals from the hosting servers to determine the rank of your blog.
Consider the following while choosing the right hosting provider.
- Reliability – You need your site to be up and running all the time and the speed shouldn’t go down when one of your posts go viral and have many visitors are in your blog.
- Scalability – As you grow, the hosting should let you grow instead of shutting you down. When you start getting a steady flow of high traffic. The WordPress hosting should be able to allow you to upgrade to the next level without disrupting your blog.
- Customer Service – You will need this more than you think. There will be a situation when your blog is having issues because of some plugins you installed. The hosting company should be able to address these issues quickly and fix it.
I recommend Bluehost from my experience for starters.
- They are affordable (starts at $3.95 a month (only through this link))
- Reliable – I have my blogs running for more than 4 years without any issues
- 24/7 support – Couple of times I had issues with some free plugins I had installed, they reached out to me about the issue instead of me trying to figure out.
Select Plan
Let’s start a food blog for you now.
Follow these steps.
- Click this link and go to bluhost.com.
- Select the Basic plan which says 3.95/ month – You can upgrade to a higher plan later.
The next screen will ask you to enter the domain name. Enter the domain you want to purchase. Your plan comes with 1 free domain, so go ahead and type that name here.
Set up domain
Enter your details
You can choose any of the plans but when you buy more months in advance the price drops significantly. Choose the one you are comfortable with.
Remember they have a 30-day money back guarantee and if you change your mind for any reason you can request a full refund
Once you fill in the information, click submit.
Step 5 Install WordPress
It is just a one click installation.
Install WordPress
Bluehost makes it super easy to install WordPress for you.
Follow this video
or follow the step by step instruction below.
Bluehost has WordPress pre-configured in their c-panel.
As soon you log into the account. Select the hosting from the menu.
There will be many sections, go to website section and click Install WordPress.
It will take you to the next screen. Click install.
Next page you will be asked to select the domain name. Since we bought the domain through Bluehost, it will show up in the drop-down.
Adding Domain to your account
You could skip this section if you were able to select your domain in the previous step.
The next step is to fill out your account and billing information.
In case if you have already purchased the domain with some other registrar you need to add that domain to your account.
Select the domains from the menu and click Assign a domain to your cPanel account link.
Now you will be taken to the next screen where you will be asked to fill all the details and finally submit the page.
Once completed, go back to installing WordPress. The last step is to agree to the terms and conditions and click install now.
The installation will start and progress will be shown on the top.
Thanks to Bluehost, after your hosting account, has been created WordPress will automatically install. Start off by picking a theme, these are all free themes from WordPress.org. You can always update your theme later.
Now that you’ve picked your theme, let’s jump into WordPress and get you even closer to constructing that first blog post.
Decide whether this will be for business or personal use.
On this step, you’ll see an overview of Bluehost+WordPress integration. You can manage WordPress plugins and blog posts or pages here.
Decide on a site title and description here.
Here’s a revamped dashboard of the Bluehost control panel.
Now you can make your site look how you want! Since you are using WordPress the sky’s the limit!
The installation is complete.
Congratulations on your new blog.
Enter the username and password.
Your blog is ready. Try to hit the URL that you selected and your blog would show up.
Step 6 Install a Theme
The default theme in WordPress won’t get you too far.
Install a Theme
You probably would have noticed that the blog is not pretty enough to brag about it yet. Right.
Don’t worry, now it’s the time to install a theme to make it look gorgeous.
Finding a right theme is an overwhelming task. With so many free themes and many options for paid ones.
You have to trust me on this one. Premium themes are better than free ones for a variety of reasons.
- Features – Premium themes provide more features compared to the free ones. More importantly, those features would work properly. As you grow your blog you will need these additional features to support new ideas and audience requests.
- Support – You will need support in setting up something or fixing an issue. The customer support team should be able to resolve these issues much quickly for you.
- Well structured – It’s the foundation of the theme, a good theme should be able to work with good plugins properly. It also determines the speed of your blog. The structure is not visible from outside but it decides how the theme works for you.
- SEO – All the tags inside the code, visibility of your blog to search engines and user experience from your blog is all determined by your theme. If your theme is not good then Google will have trouble showing your blog in search requests.
- Links – Many free themes have embedded links in them. They are dangerous for your SEO effort as they are pointing to a different website.
- Look and feel – This is obvious when you look at a premium theme, there is a good chance you will like a well-designed theme as soon as you see it.
Now let’s select a premium theme for your blog.
Here are some of the popular themes that are used by many bloggers.
- The Thesis Theme for WordPress – A popular theme used by many top bloggers. They have pretty much all the features and have great reviews about it. It offers a ton of customization and skins, so you can literally create your own theme out this theme.
- The Genesis Framework Another popular theme among bloggers, it offers a powerful framework for every theme. The framework helps you to customize your theme to any level, however, the default themes are gorgeous themselves. Browse through their collection to find the right theme that suits you and you can use it readily.
- StudioPress Themes for WordPress – These the makers of the Genesis theme and they do have a theme for food bloggers called Foodie Theme. This theme offers many features tailored to food bloggers.
- Elegant Themes They provide a collection of themes with every purchase, so you can have options even after purchasing the themes.
- Avada – They claim to be the number 1 selling theme in ThemeForest, and they have a gorgeous looking theme with many features and integration with many popular plugins.
Once selected now let’s install the theme in WordPress.
Click on themes from the side panel
Add new in the top of the page
That upload the theme you purchased earlier.
Yay!!! the theme is installed and if you look your blog it looks gorgeous and ready for blogging.
But wait a minute. Just a few more steps to finish it 🙂
Btw I have written and extensive post about the themes and blog design
Step 7 Install WordPress plugins
SEO tools, recipe plugins, social share buttons, and other vital plugins to run your blog.
- Akismet – It is to protect your blog comments from spam without requiring
CAPTCHA . It’s a required tool to prevent unwanted spam in your blog. - Easy Recipe – Required for food blogs. These plugin helps to format the recipe for the search robots and crawlers to understand the content. This plugin will help the search engine to show in search results with accurate details.
- Recipe Card – This is another alternative to Easy recipes plugin. Both
do a similar job in formatting your recipes. Just play around with both of them and choose either one. - Sumome – There are many useful features in this plugin. I use almost all of the apps within this plugin; they have a generous free tier to starters.
- WordPress Related Posts – This plugin is to display related recipes at the end of each post. This plugin is good to use as this will not only help to link your post within the blog but also show up on suggestions in others blog who have this plugin installed.
- WordPress SEO by Yoast – SEO is important to your blog. SEO is complicated and takes a lot of time. However, SEO can bring a lot of free traffic to your blog in a long term. You don’t want to be working every day for
rest of your life to bring visitors to your site, right. At one point they should automatically discover and come to you. We talk more about that later, for now, let’s install this plugin. - Google Analytics by Yoast – This one is a mandatory plugin to install google analytics on your blog.
- W3 Total Cache – This plugin will help to cache the data in the memory. Which means your site will load faster and contents show up quickly.
- Google XML Sitemaps Another plugin for SEO – This plugin will consolidate all your content in an XML format and give complete information to Google about your blog.
- Constant Contact – Constant Contact is the email marketing software to send an email to your subscribers. It provides an effective way to start the communication channel with your audience. This plugin helps you to capture your visitor’s email address.
- VaultPress – This plugin will help you to back up your blog and its content. In the worst case, if something happens to your blog, you can recover all the content from this service.
- JetPack for WordPress This plugin simplifies managing WordPress sites by giving you visitor stats, security services, speeding up images, and helping you get more traffic.
Jetpack is a free plugin. Click on plugins from the side panel
Click upload plugin and upload the plugin you downloaded earlier.
Step 8 Setup Basic Tools
Google tools, other search engines setup.
Setup Basic Tools
Search Console formerly Google Webmaster – helps you track blog traffic. (Note: install the tracking code in your WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin settings.)
Goto https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home
And click on Add property
Then enter the URL of your website
Then you need to verify that the site belongs to you. Follow the instruction listed.
There are alternate methods to verify, but let’s stick to the easy and quick method.
Alternatively, you can use the Yoast plugin to verify the ownership.
Once verified you will see the dashboard. On the left, it has many links that show various statistics about your blog and your rank in the google search.
It also shows any site errors related to servers and domains. It should be all in green most of the time.
Any messages from the webmaster about your site. Issues such as Google is not able to understand your content or Google is not able to reach to your content.
Sitemaps is a way for you to manual tell Google about your content.
To add the sitemap to your blog. Go to Yoast Sitemap setting and click on XML sitemaps.
Then check the checkbox for XML sitemap.
Save changes
Your sitemap is available at http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml
Now test the sitemap in the search console.
Once it tests good, then submit the sitemap.
Google Analytics Setup
The next step is to set up analytics to your site.
Analytics will tell who is coming to the site and where they are coming from.
It will also tell you the number of people visiting your site and how much time they are spending on the site.
Enter https://www.google.com/analytics/
Sign up using your google account and in the dashboard click admin link.
And click create an account. And enter all the details in the next screen.
Once you get the tracking id, install the ID in your Google Analytics by Yoast plugin settings.
You can install this in 2 ways.
Either authenticate with Google account or manually enter the ID in the given box.
FeedBurner to burn your RSS
For people who are new to this term. RSS means Simple Syndication is an XML-based format for your blog content. RSS feed gets updated automatically when new content in the blog published.
Your RSS feed is readily available with WordPress. You can find your RSS feed at Http://www.yourwebsite.com/feed/
You can use RSS in various ways.
1) Email subscription: You can create an account with Feedburner and burn your RSS in Feedburner. And set up email subscriptions. Once you have this activated, Feedburner would automatically send emails to the subscribers when the new posts come out from your blog.
2) Social Media: Similarly you can automatically post your content to many social media platforms automatically.
3) Directories and content aggregates: Like telephone directory, there are directory services for the Internet. Submit in these sites for search engines to find and index your blog.
Bing Webmaster
Similar to the Google webmaster you can also go to http://www.bing.com/toolbox/ webmaster Bing webmaster tools and register your website and submit your sitemaps.
Permalinks
Permalinks are permanent URLs to your blog post. This is important to set up, as this will determine the structure of your links.
The default one from WordPress is ugly. It looks something like this.
Looking at this link, I can’t tell any details about the post. Similarly, Google or other search engines cannot understand any details about the content in the post.
So we need to make this permalink more pretty for everyone to understand quickly.
Like this http://yourblog.com/great-recipe-of-mine
Or with date
I like the former better since its short and easy to comprehend.
Go to the setting in the admin panel. Under settings choose permalinks
Select the format shown in the picture and save.
Now your blog is all set with the basic setup.
If you would like to make, your blog looks more professional keep reading.
Step 9 Advanced Steps
These are the steps that make your blog different from others.
9) Advanced Steps to Start your Blog
If you want to set up a personal blog for a hobby and never want to make money from it (even from ads) then skip this and go to the last step to start blogging.
Completing the above necessary steps is sufficient enough to start blogging, however, if you want to stand out of the crowd you need to polish things a little bit more.
Although it seems like there are tons of blogs out there if you look closer only hand full of blogs are professional with the right elements at the right places.
That is the reason only a few blogs make it to the next level and make a ton of money and fame from it.
Ok, all that sounds good. Let’s get to work and make your blog a masterpiece.
10) Setup Social media accounts
People hang out in all social media, so you need to be there too. Setting up the business accounts will help you to gain followers to your blog.
11) Setup Email Marketing
Snail mail is dead, no one likes phone calls, all communications are happening in emails. Make sure you send people emails.
12) Polish your design
Branding is the first impression that your readers get. From a professional designed logo to defining the colors makes a real difference in your blogging journey.
13) Start planning for SEO
If you want free traffic from Google and have more people come to your blog, then we need to focus on this. It’s a slow process but definitely worth the effort.
14) Plan your Content schedule
You need to have a plan on the posting time and the content being posted. Figure out the trends and what people like to see in your blog.
15) Share your blog on relevant sites
There are more food related sites that want your content to be featured. You need to open an account and start sharing your recipes there too.
16) Join communities and start networking
Meet like-minded people who share similar interests. They will help you get through the hurdle when you are stuck.
17) Start blogging
The final step, start blogging and stick to the commitment.
Step 10 Setup Social media accounts
People hang out in all social media, so you need to be there too. Setting up the business accounts will help you to gain followers to your blog.
Setup Social media accounts
You probably might have an account in most of the social media.
Similarly, we need to create an account for your blog as well. Each social media is used for different purposes and work differently.
Let’s look into the details of the popular one.
Facebook is one of the largest social media in the world. With millions of people hanging out on Facebook, there is a good chance that a lot of your audience is already there. Let’s start creating an account for your blog.
In Facebook, you can create a business page for your blog. It is different from your personal account. This page would help you in many ways.
- Brand building – You need to look professional if you are planning to make money from your blog, whether it’s through ads or by selling products. Your Facebook page helps you give that impression quickly.
- Build your community: You need fans and followers for your blog, only when you build your community you will have people visiting your blog on a regular basis.
- Engage with your readers – Facebook fan pages also provide you an ability to talk to your readers privately. This is a useful tool to answer questions and build relationships with your audience.
- SEO: Having a dedicated fan page also gives you SEO benefits, as Google can easily find out your social media engagement levels to rank you better in search results.
Pinterest is a new kid on the block it is most valuable social network compared to any other medium.
According to this research, Pinterest is dominated by 68% of female and 57% of Pinterest users pin, re-pin and interact with food-related content
Pinterest Business page: Just like Facebook, create a business page for Pinterest. https://business.pinterest.com/en
It offers 2 main benefits.
- You can promote your pins for a lot less cost.
- Rich pins – The description for each pin will have more details about the recipe when these rich pins are enabled. Enhancing user engagement.
It is a visually driven social network. Since the main components of food blogs are pictures.
Instagram is one of the best places to start building your audience base.
There is no business page for Instagram, so you can just create a regular account for your blog.
Also, Instagram doesn’t allow to add links to the pictures, the only place to display the link is in your profile.
Google +
Google + is a tricky one. As many say there is not a lot of engagement on Google + or this platform can drive a lot of traffic.
However, it is critical to have g+ in the mix for one main reason. Since G+ is part of Google, sharing in Google + helps in sending your link to Google faster than the crawlers finding it on your blog.
Google + has a business page just like Facebook, so go ahead and create one.
It is one of the popular ones next to Facebook but I have not heard it worked very well for food bloggers.
Twitter is the best place to network with others quickly. You don’t have to make friends, and still, you can send direct messages to anyone on Twitter.
You can use your own personal account on twitter or create a separate brand account. It’s up to you on how you want to manage it.
Step 11 Setup Email Marketing
Snail mail is dead, no one likes phone calls, all communications are happening in emails. Make sure you send people emails.
Setup Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most efficient ways to make money from your blog. Although there are so many social media and other channels available email marketing is the cost-efficient and highly effective strategy for your online business.
Here is how it works.
- Sign up – You have the
sumome plugin installed already. Now you need to configure thesumome apps in your blog.
Once you create your list builder or scroll box. Now your blog is set up to collect email - Set up an email marketing system to send emails using Constant Contact.
- Whenever you have a new post or something to say your subscribers you create a campaign in Constant Contact and send out the emails.
- Now that your email subscribers are used to receiving emails from you regularly. You can send out emails about your products now and then increases your sales.
- Since you have sent a lot of useful content before and your audience knows a lot about you now. There will be less resistance to buying your product as well.
This is how email marketing is effective to sell products quickly.
Step 12 Polish your design
Branding is the first impression that your readers get. From professionally designed logo to defining the colors makes a real difference in your blogging journey.
Polish your design
Once you decide to make your blog professional, then the first step is to make it more professional and high in quality. These few things would improve your blog dramatically
Logos – Get a logo done by a designer. A logo is something that will be used to represent your brand everywhere on the Internet. So make sure they are high in quality and clearly communicates your brand image.
Colors – Pick brand colors, one base, and one secondary color. Going forward, you will be using this color pattern whenever you talk about your blog. Having consistent colors will help your audience remember your brand.
Images – You may have to write this in stone. Always use high-quality images. No matter what it always uses bright and good pictures. More importantly, use relevant images.
Videos – Videos help boost your brand quickly, try to create a video to tell what your blog says. It doesn’t have to a super expense, just a self-shot video with you talking about your blog. It is personal and gets your visitor to trust you immediately.
Step 13 Start planning for SEO
If you want free traffic from Google and have more people come to your blog, then we need to focus on this. It’s a slow process but worth the effort.
Start planning for SEO
A lot of bloggers overlook this part entirely. I admit it, SEO is super complicated, and it is a nightmare for many of us.
The good news is search engines are becoming smarter and is figuring out the context of the content easily.
Rather than we doing a bunch of optimization for Google to understand our content and rank higher in search results.
All we have to do is consistently post good quality content. With some few extra things to help search engines rank our content better.
Keyword Research
This is important to find one keyword for each content. The keyword should be researched so that you can get low competition ones. Low competition means it is easy for you to show up at the top on google searches.
Also, when you are doing a keyword research look for a long-tail keyword. The long tail is using lengthy keywords that focus more on a particular problem. Eg: Let’s say you are writing about cupcakes, instead of using cupcakes as keywords try vanilla cupcakes with cream frosting. This keyword targets people who are specifically searching for cakes with that type of frosting.
You might get tempted with the search volume with the short keywords. However, these are high in competition compared to the long tail ones. So it would be easy for you to rank higher in those search terms.
Links – The Internet is all about connecting related contents with each other. The better links get good ranking in search. Therefore, building quality links should be part of your content strategy.
Every post should have links linking to one or more of your related content and also, should link to relevant content from other blogs.
Similarly, you need to get links from other blogs as well. The more authoritative websites linking to you shows the search engine that you are more trustworthy.
Content length – If you had to compare the quality of the content between two posts. And you don’t know anything about the subject how would you rank the quality of those 2 posts?
The length of the content duh.
That’s how Google looks at the content. The lengthier the content it is better, however, it’s not just the length is the only criteria to rank your post. It also requires people engagement, links and other quality signals for Google to rank better. However, content length is the fundamental requirement for better ranking.
Step 14 Plan your Content schedule
You need to have a plan on the posting time and the content being posted. Figure out the trends and what people like to see in your blog.
Plan your Content schedule
The content schedule is equally important compared to all other strategies. Decide your posting schedule and keep it consistent. If you choose to post a content every day, once a week or even month stick to it consistently.
Similarly, plan your content upfront. This method helps to create a content marketing strategy. Like you can create a cornerstone content and sell more related products.
Step 15 Share your blog on relevant sites
There are more food related sites that want your content to be featured. You need to open an account and start sharing your recipes there too.
Share your blog on relevant sites
Once your blog is ready then you need to submit to relevant sites in the same niche. Especially the popular ones.
Directory submissions
There are tons of directory services out there on the internet. These directory services provide information to search engines as well. Submit your blog on the relevant ones. Also, make sure you submit only on high-quality ones like Dmoz
Food blog sites
Similarly, there are many relevant food sites where you can submit your site. Some of these sites will also help bring more visitors to your blog.
Once your blog is ready, then you need to submit to similar sites in the same niche. Especially famous ones.
Step 16 Join communities and start networking
Meet like-minded people who share similar interests. They will help you get through the hurdle when you are stuck.
Join communities and start networking
I saved the best for the last.
When you join a social network, you need to find the groups where co-bloggers or people interested in your subject meet. Join these groups and start making friends. You know you need more help from other people for you to succeed, so start making those relationships as early as possible.
Google plus community – There are many communities in google plus, and they are important to build your social media portfolio.
Facebook Groups – Facebook has many groups on any subject, especially in food related subject. Search for food groups and join in the group. Every group has different guidelines and policies so make sure you follow them.
Pinterest Groups – Pinterest works little different compared to other social networks. They have group boards for all the members to pin their pins. Join as many boards as possible and pin regularly. Use tools like viral tag, buffer to automate these activities.
Comments – Many people frown away from comments. But it is one of the great places to start interacting with people. So reply to all the comments if possible. Everyone has opinions so be nice to people and offer constructive feedback while commenting.
Step 17 Start blogging
The final step, start blogging and stick to the commitment.
Start blogging
Now the time has come to start blogging.
Good Luck for your success.
Further Reading
Once you have the blog set up here are some useful tips to grow your food blog.
Social Media Management for Food Blog
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