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.
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- Single Domain
- Unlimited Storage
- Unlimited Bandwidth
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- Unlimited Domains
- Unlimited Storage
- Unlimited Websites
[/plan]
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- Unlimited Domains
- Unlimited Storage
- Unlimited Bandwidth
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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. Â 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.
