If you want to be successful at blogging, make sure you love what you choose to write about, and if you love food, love trying different recipes. Here is a guide for you to learn how to create a successful food blog.
Having created a successful food blog myself for my wife, I am going to tell you the exact process you need to follow to set up your food blog all by yourself.
Choosing and Buying a Domain Name
You must be aware that you need to buy a domain to set up a blog on, many people turn down their idea of creating a blog just because they have to deal with all the technicalities of buying a domain name and setting up a blog on it.
Use
Godaddy.com to register your domain name, there are many more companies but I like GoDaddy.
Recommended Reading:
Tips to Choose a Perfect Domain Name for Your Blog.
It’s not that tough to buy a domain name and doesn’t cost much either (only $10/year), decide a name you want to choose as your domain name, it can be your full name, or it can be something descriptive, for example,
foodmagic, foodmagazine, evergreenrecipes, etc. While all these fancy names might not be available now, but you can still try by combining two words to make a unique name for your blog.
Also, make sure you can get the twitter and Facebook username using the same term; it will help you in branding.
For example,
twitter.com/foodmagic, facebook.com/foodmagic and so on,
But don’t be sad if you have found a good name for your domain name and it is not available on Twitter or Facebook, you can always use _ or prefix/suffix to your social media profiles.
Buy Hosting and Connect Your Domain Name with it
Now that you have bought a domain name, you have to buy the hosting for your blog.
Hosting, in plain English, means a remote hard disk where all your blog content will get saved and gets browsed by people who visit your site. The companies that offer hosting, maintain these hard disks that are always connected to the internet.
The most recommended hosting is Hostgator; it is the hosting I am using for this blog. There is another excellent company called Bluehost, which is equally popular. Choose any of the above, and you will thank me later for the ease of use they bring for users.
Choose the plan that lets you host one domain name, if you plan to expand and create multiple blogs later, you can buy the other plan that lets you host multiple domain names.
[pricing_table]
[plan name=”Hostgator” price=”3.96″ before=”$” period=”per month” btn_url=”https://asiogroup.net/go/hosting/” btn_target=”blank” btn_text=”Sign Up” btn_background=”#C2353A”]
- Single Domain
- Unlimited Storage
- Unlimited Bandwidth
[/plan]
[plan name=”Bluehost” price=”4.95″ before=”$” period=”per month” featured=”yes” btn_url=”https://asiogroup.net/go/BlueHost/” btn_text=”Sign Up” btn_background=”#C2353A”]
- Unlimited Domains
- Unlimited Storage
- Unlimited Websites
[/plan]
[plan name=”Hostgator” price=”6.36″ before=”$” period=”per month” btn_url=”https://asiogroup.net/go/hosting/” btn_text=”Sign Up” btn_background=”#C2353A”]
- Unlimited Domains
- Unlimited Storage
- Unlimited Bandwidth
[/plan]
[/pricing_table]
When you register for either of them, you will get an email with the information that is required to connect your domain name with the hosting,
Find Nameserver values in your email and put them in your domain by going to GoDaddy. It will take a few hours for nameservers to propagate and connect the domain name with hosting.
Setting up the Blog on the Domain
Now that you have bought a domain name, hosting and have connected them, you have to set up the blog on your domain.
We use the WordPress.org script for our blog, which is the most popular platform for blogging; it powers over 40% of the websites on the internet, which is enormous.
The hosting services offer a one-click solution to install WordPress on the server, so the process is smooth.
Download the eBook to set up your first blog
[sociallocker]
Download [/sociallocker]
If you still don’t get it, I have written an eBook explaining about it, it is for some other blog the process of setting up a blog is almost the same. Download the eBook from above.
Installing Plugins on Your Blog
This is the step where you will realize how awesome WordPress really is, it lets you install plugins that lets you increase the functionality of your blog without doing and coding stuff.
We will be installing a few plugins that I am using on my food blog.
Here is a list of Plugins
Akismet: For preventing your blog from spam comments etc.
Contact Form 7: For Creating contact forms,
like this one.
Easy Social Share Buttons: Beautiful share buttons, these will cost you $12, you can use
Digg Digg which is free.
Evergreen Post Tweeter: Food Recipes are timeless posts, you can use this plugin to tweet your older posts which will help you get more visitors from Twitter.
Go Codes: This plugin is useful if you plan to monetize the blog using affiliates, this plugin will turn those long urls into sweet one which will be much easier to remember.
Google XML Sitemap: Use this plugin to create Sitemaps, which is very important for your blog to get indexed in Google quickly.
JectPack by WordPress: Jetpack is a plugin that has too many great features like Wp-Stats, Endless Scroll, Short Links etc.
jQuery Pin it Button for Images: This plugin will enable a ‘Pin it’ button on your images, which is a great way for visual content to get shared on Pinterest.
Quick Adsense: This is a great plugin to put ads (not just Adsense Ads) in different areas of your blog, like below post, above post, afters 1st paragraph, after 1st image etc.
SEO Friendly Images: It tags the images with the title of the post, which makes it useful for people to land on your blog when they do image search for a particular term.
W3 Total Cache: Optimize your blog and improve your site speed.
Wp-Optimize: It helps you delete spam comments, post revisions, empty tables in the database. Will be helpful in the long run.
WP Smush.it: You will use High-Quality images of your recipes, which will be very large-sized images that will take up a lot of bandwidth on the server, and will make your site slow. This plugin will decrease the size of images without decreasing the quality of images.
Rich Schema: It’s a lovely plugin to put rich data into your posts that will reflect in the Google search and make your blog stand out in the search results.
WordPress SEO by Yoast: Being a newbie, your whole focus should be on creating quality content. Still, the least you can do to help your blog with SEO is install this plugin and do a little bit of on-page SEO, like proper title, tags, etc.
[shadow][note]
Remember: You can install as many plugins you want, but that doesn’t mean you should install hundreds of plugins. It takes resources of your hosting servers and will result in slowing your blog down, so use the only plugins you want, the above list is enough. [/note][/shadow]
Designing Your Food Blog
Now, the design part is interesting, you might think it’s beyond your limits, but it’s the power of WordPress themes that let you create nice designs without actually doing any coding stuff at all.
I am using
Newspaper Theme on my food blog, (
Evergreen Recipes) and I created that design in less than 40 minutes and that too without any coding stuff at all.
WP-Prosperity is a fantastic theme that lets you create any layout you want. I have been recommending this theme to every blogger, no matter which niche they are into. I am using it on this blog as well.
Here is a list of amazingly beautiful
WordPress themes for a Food blog we have tried and tested and recommend to everyone.
Publishing Recipes on the blog
[shadow][note]
Remember: Consistency is the key to a successful blog, try to be regular, whether you post one recipe a day or 2 recipes a week, try to follow the routine, you will see great results[/note][/shadow]
Use of Categories and Tags
Now that you are all set to post recipes to your blog let’s understand the use of Categories and Tags to organize your recipes accurately.
Categorize the recipes into parts like Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Healthy Recipes, Fast Food, etc. What you can do is create different categories for the type of recipes you will be posting daily.
Use Tags like Drinks, Pasta, Tomato, Salt-Free, Sugar-Free, 5 Minute Recipes, etc. and use them for recipes you put in different categories, as one type of Pasta can be in Lunch. The other can be in dinner, or a recipe from any category can be under the tag of 5 Minute recipes. The same goes for drinks, tomato, salt-free, etc.
The basic funda is to link to similar kind of recipes into one post easily, or, say, someone asks for salt-free of sugar-free recipes, you can give them the link of the tag or mention it in a blog. It has many uses and makes life easy once you have a lot of recipes posted on the blog.
Formatting the Recipe Posts
Decide a format for your recipes and stick with it. It will be easy for regular readers to understand your methods; the proper format is crucial for a blog’s success.
Usually, food bloggers post the main photo of their recipes on the top. Then they provide preparation time, ingredients, etc., there they write the method along with step by step photos followed by the final images of the recipe.
It is the format we have been using on our food blog since day one, and it has been appreciated by all the readers who tell us how easy it is to read and follow the recipes.
So, I suggest you create your format and stick with it.
Capturing Photos of Recipes
You may have visited many popular food blogs on the internet. All have one thing in common, excellent photos. You can invest some money in a nice DSLR for that. We are using Olympus EP1 Macro Four Third Camera, which produces reasonably lovely images, but we are looking to upgrade the camera whenever the budget approves.
The all this comes to the point that you should invest in a good camera only if your budget approves it like ours was under $500 and I don’t see the point of buying a $1000 camera to increase the quality of pictures slightly, there are other things to worry about. So, if you don’t have a budget to invest even $500 in a camera, that is perfectly okay, use your smartphone, most of them have excellent quality cameras these days, mine has a 13 MP.
Always remember, the best camera is the camera you already have, make use of it. Use photo editors like Gimp or Picnik to make them look good, here is a list of
free photo editing tools.
Promoting Your Posts on Social Media
Food recipes is a type of visual content that works well on Social Media, so you should use your primary images to lets users know what exactly you are sharing. Pinterest and Facebook work well for food blogs because of the same reasons.
Sharing your recipes on all Social Media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc. is also very important as it lets you showcase your recipes to as many people who will directly influence visitor count. Use services like
Buffer,
Hootsuite to automate the process of sharing, These tools also let your schedule your posts so that you can reach maximum audience.
Alternatively, you can also bookmark the pages of your social media accounts to share your recipes in one click.
[shadow][note]
Remember: Try to be consistent in sharing recipes on Social Media channels, choose the only websites where you are sure you can share recipes consistently, inconsistency doesn’t reward anyone.[/note][/shadow]
Monetizing your Food blog
It is recommended to even think of monetizing your blog after at least three months, and I have already written a couple of posts related to monetizing a blog, A food blog has it’s a limitation because of the lack of advertisers or at least lesser than any other niche out there. But you will do pretty well with a food blog.
I talk about giving three months to the blog so that it can gain some momentum, and you can put your energy on things that will grow your blog. Three months you give you a lot of ideas about how things work on the internet.
This article will give you some idea about what you can do in these three months.
After three months, you can try the
advertising model, of the affiliate model, or maybe product selling model in later stage.
So the number can tell you that it’s a big platform where you must have a presence. A couple of years ago, I wrote a handy guide to get a decent amount of following on Instagram, some parts of the article are still relevant.
If you are an influencer or a blogger, who uses Instagram, I am sure you may have read a lot of articles about how you can utilise Instagram.
Aside from the smart use of locations, #hashtags, and beautiful photographs, there is one more area you can take advantage of, and it’s the bio section.
You may be aware that you cannot put clickable links in your posts on the Instagram feed, and the only place where the link is clickable is the bio section, where you can put only one link.
Instagrammers are already taking advantage of the bio section, all they have to do is, write down a call to action in each of their posts and ask users to check out the link in the bio to find more details revolving around that post.
About.Me started in the last decade and has evolved a lot ever since it has added more features which I think Instagrammers can take advantage.
Although most of their features come under their Pro version, you can still benefit from the features included in the free version.
And the free version of about me as a feature where you can showcase your podcasts or videos from platforms like YouTube, and the best part is it can also dynamically change whenever there is a new podcast or video.
It is helpful because you won’t have to change the link in the bio, every time you update something on your other platform in want let your Instagram followers know about it.
Natively you can use other services such as Create which is more premium but is also easy to use, Create we are also let you that up Splash pages for your Instagram followers, which you can put in the bio section.
Ideally, you can put any link on Instagram by a section that can take the user on a webpage where you can mention more than one thing, suggest the collection of items.
It is a blog about my local city where I am currently living, and I use Instagram for teachers of the videos and a mix of content that I put up on my website and YouTube.
So on the Splash page, I have a button to let the users watch my latest video on YouTube and also links to other social media platforms where they can follow for updates.
And then at the bottom, there are articles from the blog. I currently show three of the most recently published blogs on the Splash page and then a button that will take them to the homepage.
So the next time I have to tell my followers to go check out the recently published article or video I can simply ask them to check out the link in the Instagram bio, which is easier for a lot of people, rather than going to another platform and then checking out the content all by themselves.
I use the Newspaper Theme, on my blog, which has several options to design a page, input the elements required, so you don’t have to know coding are web designing. It’s an awesome theme, and I have written a review of it on the blog. The wordpress theme is currently on its version 10 and has improved a lot since then. 
To convert the articles into audio, we will use a service created by Amazon and is a part of their ASW (Amazon Web Services). It is known as an Amazon Polly. It converts texts into lifelike speech and keeps the audio files saved on their cloud server.
Since it is a premium service, you’ll have to pay for it, but it does have a free tier. Here is an excerpt from the pricing page for Amazon Polly.
The free tier includes 5 million characters per month for speech or Speech Marks requests, for the first 12 months, starting from your first request for speech. For Neural voices, the free tier includes 1 million characters per month for speech or Speech Marks requests, for the first 12 months, starting from your first request.
You are billed monthly for the number of characters of text that you processed. Amazon Polly’s Standard voices are priced at $4.00 per 1 million characters for speech or Speech Marks requests (when outside the free tier). Amazon Polly’s Neural voices are priced at $16.00 per 1 million characters for speech or Speech Marks requested (when outside the free tier).
For example, this post has roughly 7000 characters (updated after published). So, if you use the Neural voices, which has 1 million character requests in the free tier, you can convert approximately 140 articles.
Once it appears, you can click on the install button and then activate the plugin. Once the plugin is activated, you will find its option appearing below settings.
When you land on the General tab inside a table, you will find that you will have to type AWS Access key as well as the Secret Key.
To get these access and secret key, you will have to click on the link mentioned below.
Once you are on the page, it might look a little intimidating, but trust me, it is not. Click on Users. For me, it is showing one user since I already was using one of the services from AWS. For you, it might show 0 users.
Click on Users, and on the next page, you will get the option to add a new user, click on the button ‘Add User,’ and you will be taken to the next page, where you will have to write down the username.
You can be a little descriptive by using your domain name or the website name, along with the service you intend to use this for. For me, Lifetippr is the website name, and speech is the service I’ll be using it for.
Once you have selected the name, click on Next. On the next page, select ‘Attach existing policies directly’ Indian search for ‘WordPress’ in the policies. Select the policy which reflects in the results and click on Next.
This page is optional, where you can add the text so that you can organize the services better. If you are not planning to use a lot of services, you can skip this and click Next.
On the next page, you have to click on ‘Create User’ and go to the next page, where you will be able to see the access key ID and secret access key for the user you just created.
You can use these in the WordPress plugin with just installed. After typing the Access key ID and Secret access key, the third option is to select the region.
I would suggest you select the region closer to the majority of your visitors. But you have to keep in mind that some features like neural voices would only be available in all regions having the US and UK English.
So, for the sake of this article, we will be keeping it US East. After you are done, click on save changes, and then click on Text-to-Speech, found below General under AWS options.
Keep the English language selected, and check the box to enable text-to-speech support, and click on Save changes. You will notice several options appearing on the page.
This is where you will be able to select the voice for your podcast from several options available. It has voices available for English US and English UK, English Australian, and English Indian, with different male and female voices.
The other option is to enable neural text to speech, which will offer a more natural, human-like sound.
[note note_color=”#fffda6″ text_color=”#333333″ radius=”5″]Note: As we talked earlier in the article, Neural voices have only 1 million character requests in the free tier, and also costs 4x the standard (which is $16 per million characters). [/note]
If you have neural text to speech enabled, there are two styles available, one is the Newscasters style, and the other one is conversation style. You can pick the one which you feel is right for your type of article.
If you have a website that covers news articles, then the newscaster style would be a perfect fit; otherwise, you can go for the conversation style.
By default, the WordPress plugin embeds the audio player inside your article, and you can select the position of the player on this page by default it is before post, so I suggest you keep it that way.
You can use a descriptive label to the player, such as Listen, Play the Audio, etc. Then at the end of the page, there is an option to display or hide ‘Powered by AWS,’ you can do as per your liking and then click on save changes.
The changes are saved, you can go to the post editor area in your WordPress blog, and open any existing article.
In the screenshot below, you will find that the Amazon Polly WordPress plugin will give you the option to select the voice for individual articles as well. You can also enable or disable the feature for individual posts.
Click on the update button for the article to publish a new article it will take a few seconds for the audio to get generated.
When you go to the particular article, you will notice the podcast player would appear before your article starts, giving your readers an option to listen to the article.
I am currently using different voices for different types of blogs, and the sound does feel natural. I am currently in the free tier, but I may continue doing so for some of my blogs.
It lets you convert up to 3000 characters into audio format and download them immediately so that you can use them elsewhere as a podcast. It means even if you do not have got a blog are you do not want to create podcasts out of your articles. We can still use this feature directly first to write down and then convert it into audio.
If you follow this particular article, you will know how you can turn your audio into the video so that you can upload it even on YouTube since YouTube is also one of the popular Pro platforms where people prefer to listen to informative content. 
A blogger is a very creative person, he wears more than one hat at a time as he is the one who creates content, promotes it and looks after the maintenance of his blog. You know all that stuff, keeping the WordPress versions and All the plugins updated, looking after the drafts and scheduling the posts etc. It’s a full-time job, or perhaps a job of more than one person.
Multiply that with the number of blogs you own and the pain gets multiplied as well. If only there was a way to make things automated so that you don’t have to worry too much about the maintenance part.
If you own multiple WordPress blogs, you will find this post very useful as I am going to tell you about an ultimate service that makes managing multiple WordPress blog as easy as eating a piece of a cake.
ManagaWP gives you the ability to add all your WordPress blogs to your account and manage them just from a single Window.
There is a similar service we covered on the blog a while ago that lets it’s users 
So, with ManageWP, you can do more than just keeping your WordPress versions and Plugins updated.
Features like Moving and copying WordPress plugins or the Whole WordPress blog to a different domain is an ultimate time saver.
If you are someone who runs a business of providing blog services, you can also offer a service of maintaining their blogs charging them monthly or annually. Just add them to your ManageWP account which will make the process of maintenance very easy.
Even if you decide to use ManageWP for your own network of blogs, it still has a lot to offer. You might want to use the same type of contact or about or policy page on all your blogs, you can easily duplicate the pages on all your blogs.
Imagine how sorted the life can be when you can see all your posts, comments, stats on different blogs from a single window. ManageWP offers exactly that.
ManageWP has a premium revenue model, so going premium can get you more features if you really want the hands-free experience that can save you some more time to create content for your blogs.
ManageWP has changed to their pricing model, and now you can add unlimited websites in the free plan. And you get a bunch of free add-ons or features that you can use.
Such as, manage and update plugin somethings from a single dashboard, monthly cloud backup, one click login, collaborate with team and clients, manage comments, and much more.
Such as, taking backups will cost $2/month per website, you can get white label for $1/month per website. It will allow you to to customise the branding of WordPress dashboard where you can set your own logo and hide plugins you do not want your clients to see.
There are other Addons also available, surcharge uptime monitor for $1/month per website. There is automatic Security Check as well as automatic performance check along with link monitor all of which cost $1/moth per website.
So there are really a lot of features included in ManageWP.
I have been using this service to manage 5 of my blogs from the free account and I am still loving the ability to manage them from one place. It definitely saves a lot of time even with the free account.
It also offers an easy way to delete all the files that were infected and were not part of the core WordPress. But there would still be some files left, which you cannot delete because the course was injected in the core WordPress files.
For such files, you will have to edit the WordPress core files. You need an FTP client to access the root directory of your website and then open the file to make edits. I would 
Once you have removed the codes from infected files and deleted the files that could be deleted, go to the advanced settings of the scan and enable us to scan the folders and files outside of the WordPress directory, so that it can find other infected files if it has been placed elsewhere.
Enabling this will increase the scanning time because it will have to scan more files and folders, but it is totally worth it because sometimes you may find infected files outside of your WordPress.
Once you are done with that I would suggest you to go to the firewall section of Wordfence and click on optimize WordFence firewall, it will ask you to download the .htaccess the file for backup and will automatically update with quotes that will maximize the WordPress firewall.
If you are saying something like the website is partially secure, it means that some of the content of your website is still hosted on http.
If you have a bit of knowledge about codes, you can open inspect elements and view which website links are in http and try to make them https.
This can be done by simply removing and uploading the file that has got an HTTP connection, such as the logo of the website or any other file.
I have been using ManageWP recently to manage all my WordPress sites from a single tab. It lets me update plugins, take backups, view the admin dashboard of all the sites, and notifies for the same. I am also using it to access the WordPress editor to publish blog posts.
Earlier I was using 
It’s the newest edition to my productivity suite. I did not even try to find something like this initially, because Checking and analyzing the different type of data of my websites is something every blogging expert has asked everyone not to give importance to.
It can suck a lot of time, so one should not bother about it too much.
I tried a lot not to get carried away with such kind of data, but I’ve found that this gives me a lot of room to improve the direction of my blog as well as the earning.
Cyfe allows me to save a lot of my research time while still giving me an overview of the essential data from a single dashboard.
You can connect widgets from different services like Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Adwords, Calender, WordPress, Aweber, Mailchimp, and what not, to your dashboard. There are over 90 sources you can add widgets from. You can 
Knowing about all the projects you are involved in is a basic thing everyone should keep track of, and how you keep yourself informed is a bit tricky.
I started with the traditional Pen and Paper, where I wrote down all the websites I owned, which one I was actively working on, what projects I am planning to do for what sites, what’s the revenue model, traffic generation methods.
I used to write all that on a paper, but then it started to become challenging to have access to that paper all the time, then I moved to sticky notes (those fancy yellow notes on my desktop).
I loved using them, they were editable, movable, and they were always in front of my eyes. But it was still not available on every device I work, including mobile.
That made me shift to 
Microsoft Office used to be my choice of tool when I started blogging because that was the only tool that could correct my spellings, do auto capitalizations after a full stop, and I could change font styles.
But when the workload increased and it was challenging to make time for sitting on the desktop and write. I Moved to Google Docs as the files can be accessed from anywhere. Now, I have access to all my documents even when I am traveling on the way.
I love the collaboration part of it. I love that it is available on the mobile phone so that I can add a few more lines to them when I have something in my mind while waiting in a long queue or before going to sleep. It has also helped me switch to Chromebook without compromising much on productivity.
I have linked Writebox (
I use Dropbox for saving important files, hosting eBooks in the public folder, and put the link on the blog, and it becomes straightforward to update the eBooks with the latest information without much hassle.
It is a super fantastic tool that I rely on for saving my most essential files in the cloud. It has helped me keep screenshots and other data from 2007 and even earlier, secure also though I changed so many computers since then.
I also share files with other team members. It is just like a folder on PC where the files magically appear, it saves a lot of back and forth emails with the files attached to them,