How to start a food blog and make money like top food bloggers? Is there any fast way to become the foodie influencer on Instagram, Youtube, and other platforms? Is blogging dead?
Okay… You love cooking. And you love reading food blogs.
You might be thinking how cool it is if you have your own food blog and become the next foodie influencer. You can make money from your blog and could be able to turn it into a thriving business.
Get paid to eat? That’s doesn’t sound bad, right?
Don’t wait! Today is the perfect day to start your very first food blog!
Stick around on this post for the next 15 minutes and follow the three easy steps of how to start a food blog below. I’m willing to bet that you will have a gorgeous food blog within the shortest time possible.
Don’t forget to PIN this post on Pinterest!
Let’s get into it!
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no added cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more information.
For those of you who prefer watching videos, I have made a short tutorial on how to start a WordPress blog with Bluehost in less than 5 minutes!
THE 3 MAIN STEPS TO BUILD A GORGEOUS FOOD BLOG
1. Choose Domain Name and Web Hosting
This part is easy and fun!
A domain name is simply your blog address on the net.
Here are several tips on how to choose the right domain name.
- Pick a super catchy domain name for your food blog.
- Keep it short, easy to spell and unique – to make it stick on people’s mind.
- Avoid using hyphens and numbers. Hyphens in a domain name usually considered as spammy.
- Wherever possible, always go for a .com extension. It’s the most popular domain extension on the net.
How to find the perfect domain name for your food blog?
Simply brainstorm as many different ideas as possible. It may take a couple of minutes.
Now, put your possible domain name in the box below to check its availability. Don’t forget to include ‘.com‘!
Found a catchy, available domain name?
Great!
Now, it’s time to pick the reliable web hosting.
Hosting is a place to store your website files like images, videos and other content including your domain name. It will make your blog can be viewed through the net. It’s like a hard drive on a computer.
Bluehost is the most affordable yet secure and reliable web hosting company.
Here are the other reasons why I recommend Bluehost.
- 1-Click WordPress Installation
- Excellent Uptime
- 24/7 Customer Support
- FREE Domain Name for 1st Year
- FREE SSL Certificate
- 30-Days Money-Back Guarantee
Click here to get started your food blog with Bluehost! You’ll be directed to their homepage. Click the Get Started button to initiate the process.
Select a plan that suits your needs. I would suggest choosing the ‘BASIC’ plan. You can always upgrade your plan in the future as your food blog’s audience grows and you need more options.
Enter your picked domain name in the “Create a new domain” box and click the next button.
Create your Bluehost account. Sign up with your Google account or enter your info manually.
Fill out all the required fields!
In the package information section, I personally recommend you to pick the 36-months plan. It will make sure you’ll get the lowest price at $3.95 per month.
Don’t forget to add Domain Privacy Protection to shields your domain information from public display. Skip the other services for now.
In the Payment Information section, you have to input your billing information by providing your credit card information, check the box that says you agree to Bluehost’s Terms of Service and Cancelation Policy.
Click the “Submit” button to place your order!
After you complete your payment, you need to create a password. Make sure you create a strong and secure password to protect your account from brute force attack.
Your password successfully created. That’s great!
Next, log in to your Bluehost account!
2. Installing WordPress
Now, it’s time to installing WordPress on your server. No need to worry, it is very easy – it is not rocket science.
WordPress is the world’s most-used blogging platform, or in other words, the world’s best blogging platform. It’s the platform that I use for nickysae.com.
Luckily, Bluehost provides the 1-click WordPress installation feature. It means, with just one click, your WordPress blog will be ready to go. Thanks to Bluehost!
Let me show you how! 👇
After you get inside your Bluehost account, you’ll be asked to pick a theme for your blog.
Don’t think too much over this detail, simply choose whichever you like. It really doesn’t matter.
Go ahead and pick your theme now!
Please wait for seconds…
Bluehost is going to automatically install WordPress. You don’t have to do anything. Bluehost is doing all the work for you. In just a couple of second, your WordPress blog will be ready to go.
On the next screen, click the “Start Building” button. BINGO!
Welcome to WordPress!
If you see this warm welcome, it means that your blog is successfully installed on your server and it’s ready to go.
Hooray! You officially have your own very first food blog!
How does it feel? Welcome to the food blogosphere, my friend!
You’re just minutes away from sharing your delicious double-matcha-mozzarella-marmalade butter cookie recipe with the world.
The next steps, you have to do a few tweaks to improve your blog. This process to ensure your blog easily recognized, easy to navigate and search-engine friendly.
- Setting up a Site Title and Tagline. Go to Settings » General. Write them down as you wish.
- Setting up your homepage display. Go to Settings » Reading. Set it as you like.
- Setting up your “Contact Us” page. Go to Plugins » Add New. Install a free plugin called Contact Form 7
- Change WordPress theme. Go to Appearance » Theme » Add New. Install your favorite WP theme.
- Permalinks setting. Go to Settings » Permalinks » Post name. It’s the most SEO friendly permalink structure.
- Setting up your menu. Go to Settings » Appearance » Menus. Arrange your menus as neatly as possible.
Click the verification link in your email and your domain will be ready to go.
3. Beautify Your Blog!
This part is important. You should change your default WordPress theme to make your food blog look gorgeous and marvelous.
WordPress provides tons of free WordPress themes you can choose from. You can search for the best one here. If you’re looking for the best premium WordPress themes for food blogging, check out these options below:
- Foodie Pro – This premium WordPress theme might be the best option for food bloggers. Built on the high quality, SEO-friendly Genesis Framework, Foodie Pro theme ease any food bloggers to get their blog up and running. This is probably the best WordPress theme for food blogging.
- Foodica – Like its name, this theme designed for food blogs. This rich-features theme allows you to create a beautiful recipe gallery. Give your blog the look it deserves!
- Cookely – This is a premium, SEO-optimized recipe WordPress theme for all types of food blogs. This theme brings a new experience for any food bloggers with their flexibility for content listing.
3A. Best WordPress Plugins for Food Blog
Plugins are like little programs that can be used to add certain features on a WordPress blog. There are thousands of plugins available for bloggers. I’ve compiled a list of all the must-have plugins and the ones I believe are the best WordPress plugins for food bloggers.
- Tasty Recipes – The premium WordPress plugin you can use to adding your recipes to your blog. It’s easy to use, search-engine friendly and integrated with Pinterest for social media optimization.
- Pinterest Pin It Button – This tiny plugin helps you to pins your blog posts, pages and images into your Pinterest account boards. If you use Pinterest as your main traffic source, this is a must-have plugin!
- Social Pug – This is one of the easiest to use social sharing plugin. It’s lightweight, won’t slow down your site, and has enough functionality that suits your need.
- Yoast SEO – Probably the most popular SEO plugin on the planet. Whatever your blog niche, this plugin will make your blog as search-engine-friendly as possible.
- Loginizer Security – A tiny plugin that will secure your WordPress blog by shields its login page. Loginizer will limit wrong login attempts by recognizing users IP and automatically block that IP from accessing login.
3B. How to Drive Traffic to Your Food Blog
Here are 3 proven ways to drive massive traffic to your food blog. Make sure you focus on 1 or 2 methods to get the best result.
1. Food Photo Submission
Here is a list of the food photo submission sites that you can use to start driving traffic to your food blog. Okay, it’s not an instant process, it takes time.
Your submission needs their approval. If they approved your submission, you will get some traffic. If your recipes featured on their social media account, you will get more traffic.
Here are some photo sharing websites you should join.
Tastespotting • Food Gawker • Tasty Kitchen • Healthy Aperture • Finding Vegan • Whole Yum • Food Yub • Fridgg • Recipleaser • Foodie Portal • And so much more!
2. Pinterest Marketing
One of the best platforms to reach food enthusiasts to follow you is Pinterest. It’s recognized as the most reliable traffic source for a new blogger.
Pinterest is a visual search engine to find ideas, new interest, and inspirations on various topics. It’s like a web-based pinboard or bulletin board with more advanced functionality.
Here are some tips you should follow if you want to drive traffic to your food blog with Pinterest.
- Create visually stimulating pins. Pinterest is a very visual platform and the quality of the images is a very important factor that you should never ignore. Vertical images with 2:3 aspect ratio have proven to get more clicks and engagement on Pinterest. The images with the size of 600×900 pixels can be your best choice. Use Canva to create beautiful “click-worthy” Pinterest images.
- Be an active user. Don’t fill your Pinterest boards only with your images from your own blog. You should repin content from other bloggers. It will look natural and more people will love it. Don’t be selfish!
- Join relevant group boards. You should join the food group boards and related. It will make your pins can be seen by more people and could drive more traffic to your blog.
- Use Tailwind app. Tailwind is a secret weapon that will bring big success on your Pinterest marketing. It’s a scheduling tool that you can use to schedule pins on Pinterest on a regular basis. Tailwind is a great time-saver.
Read this post to learn about Pinterest Marketing in details.
3. Email Marketing
Let’s say, your blog has generated massive traffic. My question is how much people will come back to your blog again and again? With a bazillion blogs on the net, it’s hard for you to remember a lot of blogs you’ve just visited yesterday, right? You just can’t blame them either.
That’s the only reason you should build an email database.
How to do it? Simply create a sign-up form on your site along with your free offers or services. Ask them to subscribe by entering their email address.
Build a strong relationship with them!
This way, every time you publish a new blog post or recipes on your food blog, you can notify them via email and they will be coming back to your blog.
Recommended and reliable email marketing service: Aweber, Getresponse or ConvertKit.
4. Dominates Instagram and Youtube
Do you ever hear about the power of Indonesian netizen?
Instagram and Youtube are currently the most popular platform in Indonesia. Indonesia is a big country with over 250 million people and most of them are very proud of their country. They always love if foreigners talking good things about Indonesia.
And you know what? That’s a big opportunity you shouldn’t ignore!
So what should you do now?
- Create an Instagram account and a Youtube channel.
- Learn Indonesian foods and related things.
- You can just react about Indonesian foods and try to cook them.
- Post your video on your Instagram account and Youtube channel.
- Don’t forget to include an Indonesian subtitle in your video.
- Collab with Indonesian YouTubers who live in your country or currently traveling to your country.
- BOOM! Your followers and subscribers will increase rapidly.
Prove it yourself!
3C. How to Monetize Your Food Blog
You might be wondering how to make money from a food blog. How do you get paid for blogging? Here are the 3 monetization methods that will help you earn passive income from food blogging.
1. Display Ads
As a rookie blogger, you might use Google AdSense. Some food bloggers recommend using Gourmet Ads or Sovrn Ads. As your traffic grows, it’s good for you to switch to Mediavine.
What is Mediavine? On their Twitter bio, Mediavine described as a full-service ad management company and monetization partner, dedicated to helping influencers build sustainable businesses.
Mediavine is officially a Google Certified Publishing Partner. That’s such a great thing. There are only a few companies out there can acquire that certification status.
How To Become A Publisher At Mediavine?
Mediavine uses sessions as their metric of choice and requires your blog hits 25K sessions a month (usually around 30K page views) according to Google Analytics.
These tough and strict requirements created to ensure that your blog really sends high-quality, massive traffic to the advertisers via Mediavine. Make sense, right?
Mediavine pays you based on RPM which is stands for Revenue per Mille. It means you’ll get paid every 1000 visitors, sessions or page views on your blog. It’s usually between $10 to $25 per 1000 sessions.
Let say you have a blog that could hit 50,000 sessions per month, your monthly revenue would be $1,000 based on a 20$ RPM.
If you’re able to meet these requirements, go ahead and submit your request through their online application form here.
2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process which an affiliate promotes other people’s stuff online and gains a commission. It’s about put the right offers in front of the right people and in the right way. If they end up buying the item through your referral link, you’ll get a commission.
There are plenty of good products related to food or recipes that you can promote. Think about the ingredients or cooking tools that might not be easy to find at local stores.
Below are some affiliate program related to food/recipes niche:
$5 Meal Plan • Gluten Free Cooking School • Graze • Thrive Market • Vitamin Shoppe • Hello Fresh • Paleo Hacks • Paleo Que • The Fruit Company • And so much more!
Go ahead and join those affiliate programs and start to promote their product on your food blog.
3. Sponsored Post
One of the great ways to monetize your blog is by accepting sponsored blog posts.
Believe it or not, some companies or brands are willing to pay big money to bloggers to feature their products/services. They believe, working with bloggers is a very lucrative way of advertising.
Most bloggers charge anywhere from $50-$500 per article, depending on their amount of traffic and engagement.
Here are a few sites that connect influencers (including you) with brands for sponsored posts and other promotional gigs:
Izea • Mom it Forward • Acorn • Tap Influence • Speakr • Linqia • Pollinate Media • Social Fabric • Influence Central • Influenster • Cooperatize • BlogHer • Activate • Weave Made Media • And so much more!
Go ahead and joining these networks to find the sponsored posts opportunities. Don’t be afraid to get in touch with the companies personally. Introduce yourself along with your blog stats to explore the opportunities for partnerships.
Final Words
Become a famous food blogger or the next foodie influencer is very possible if you follow these steps above correctly and persistent.
There is no shortcut!
You must go through all the steps above and I believe you will be a successful and influential food blogger.
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