Food Blogging: 9 Things You Need To Know First
According to statistics, food bloggers are the most popular and highest earning bloggers. They have four times more followers and earn almost USD 9,000 plus on average a month.This is understandable because everyone needs to eat and everyone especially loves to eat the most delicious food. It is even reported that many food bloggers are doing it not primarily for money but for passion.
But if you’re serious about succeeding as a food blogger, you must consider first what people are actually searching for in food blogs, in the end, food blogging is a business that has expenses that needs to be recouped.
Note: This research was based on the top searches on Google about food blogging.
9 Things You Need To Know:
1. Food Blog Statistics2. How to Start a Food Blog?
3. How to Make Money as a Food Blogger?
4. How to Start a Cooking Blog or How to Start a Recipe Blog?
5. How to Start a Food Blog for Free?
6. Best Food Blogs and Best Cooking Blogs
7. Vegan Blogs and Healthy Food Blogs
8. Traveling Snacks Ideas
9. Naming a Food Blog
Final Words
The Details:
1. Food Blog Statistics
- The food blog niche is the most profitable. It also has the highest median monthly income out of all major blogging niches at $9,169.
- Food bloggers have four times as many followers than any other in social media.
br> - Food bloggers make 42% of their money from ads, 25% on courses, 11% on sponsored posts, and 10% on affiliates.
- 75% of food bloggers created content for personal satisfaction, 29% for recognition of relatives, and 27% for the recognition of other bloggers.
- As of 2023, the largest communities detected in connection with the hashtag #foodblogger on Twitter include: healthy lifestyle: 34.92%, homemade food: 32.95%, fast food: 18.94%, breakfast and lunch: 7.56%, and food traveling: 4.64%.
- In 2021, 80% Generation Z adults enjoyed watching or interacting with food content on social media platforms.
- 70% of Pinterest users cited that their top pin was “cooking and recipes”.
- 79% of consumers trust blogs for recipe and food information.
- 89% of consumers go online for recipes
Sources: Blogloving, Deakin Business School, Maxwell PR, National Library of Medicine, Rank IQ, Statista, and Taylor & Francis Group.
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2. How To Start A Food Blog?
1. Calculate if You can Afford to be a Food Blogger:You would need to pay annually for domain name and website hosting (would be discussed later). Although these are affordable these days, still, not many can afford them.
You would need to own a smartphone, laptop, an internet connection and other electronics related equipment and services. Do you already own these or you still need to buy them? If so, do you have the money?
You would have to feature food in your blog which could be expensive unless you are also eating what you’re featuring in your food blog on a normal basis.
2. Brainstorm your Food Blogging Niche:
Anyone can blog about cooking and/or eating steak, pasta, burgers, Chinese food and so on. However, a food blogger must establish their own brand and identity so they can rise above the other food bloggers who are just making generic food blogs.
You should ask yourself some of these questions:
- Are you going to post recipes, ingredients or talk about food in general?
- Are you going to focus on specific food cultures such as Japanese or Mexican?
- Do you want to talk about food habits or diets such as Mediterranean, Spicy or Vegan?
- Will you highlight everyday food or focus on expensive food?
- What’s your persona as a food blogger? Are you a chef, cook, gourmand, guide, coach, friend?
- Who is your target audience? Are they stay at home moms, chefs, travelers, gourmands and so on?
3. Put Your Food Blog Online:
- Buy a Domain Name:
You buy a domain name from a Domain Registrar. A domain name is the name of your website. Make sure that the domain name reflects the actual theme and contents of your food blog website.
If possible, make sure that the domain name of your food blog website is catchy so that it elicits interest even by just its name.
- Buy Website Hosting Services:
Website hosting providers enables you to put your food blog website online in exchange for a monthly or yearly fee which are very affordable these days.
You can select from such providers as BlueHost, DreamHost, GoDaddy, HostGator, Namecheap and more. Some would even include domain registration free for the first year.
- Create Your Website:
If you are a computer programmer, you could program your website with such website programming languages as: HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript and more.
Alternatively, you can use WordPress which is freemium. You could create a website in WordPress with little to no programming skills. 4. Start Posting:
Lastly, all you need to do is to start posting. Remember to post beautiful images of the foods you feature in your blog.
You may skimp on a lot of costs in your blog at the beginning, but you don’t skimp on your food images which are the main draws of your food blog.
Reminder: High quality images can slow down the loading of your website pages which could hurt your rankings in Google.
Use the right image file type. Use JPEG, PNG, and GIF files. These file formats compress images without great loss to quality. Avoid TIFF and BITMAP files. They offer high quality, but are bulky in size, causing very slow download time.
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3. How to Make Money as a Food Blogger?
As food blogging statistics have shown, food bloggers make 42% of their money from ads, 25% on courses, 11% on sponsored posts, and 10% on affiliates.
Ads:
Food as a blog subject leans more toward cooking and eating it. It is simple and repetitive but nevertheless entertaining for many people. This is why for the most part, ads are the main monetization source for food blogs.
Courses:
A food blogger is in essence, a content creator who through being one, can offer courses on business, content creator, image and video editing and so on.
Sponsored Posts:
Selling space for sponsored posts and/or actually writing sponsored posts are also a great way for you, as a food bloggers to earn money. But remember to inform your readers that the content appearing in your food blog is a sponsored post. This is for legal purposes.
Affiliate Marketing:
Affiliates are a big income source for many bloggers. However, as the statistics have shown affiliates are not one of the biggest income sources for food bloggers. This might be because food blogging has a somewhat limited scope.
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4. How to Start a Cooking Blog or How to Start a Recipe Blog?
Many people ask these questions online. The question is the same as asking: “How to start a food blog” and has already been discussed earlier.
However, a cooking blog is as the name implies, all about cooking food. Your food blog would need an ingredients list as well as cooking instructions besides what you write about in a normal food blog.
This means that a cooking blog can be more expensive than a normal food blog because of the difficulty in creating one. Unlike premade food, a food blogger must buy whole ingredients as well as cooking utensils and equipment.
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5. How to Start a Food Blog for Free?
While many advise that you could use free online writing platforms like Facebook, Blogger, Medium and so on, the reality is that most people would not really consider you as a serious food blogger unless you have your own website and/or YouTube channel.
It’s better that you first find a way to financially support your food blogging before you actually start blogging. This might mean that you need to be employed or engage in some form of business.
Once you get started food blogging, you could use free software for website creation like Wordpress or program your website yourself. You could also use free images from free stock photo sites like Pixabay.
In the beginning, feature food and ingredients that are cheap. There are many food bloggers who still managed to be successful even though they feature cheap food or food that they would eat themselves that day.
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6. Best Food Blogs and Best Cooking Blogs
If you are a food blogger, a few of your staple articles should be a list of other food bloggers. Many people search online for such keywords as: ”Best Food Blogs” or ”Best Cooking Blogs”.
You might even write specialist list articles for your food blog like: ”Best Mexican Food Blogs” or ”Best Burger Cooking Blogs”.
This would establish you not only as a food blogger but also as an expert in the food blogging industry. Who knows, you might even be hired as a consultant for the food blogging industry.
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7. Vegan Blogs and Healthy Food Blogs
Many people in society are changing to a more health conscious one which includes their food habits. This is why vegan blogs and healthy food blogs are very popular.
Even if your food blog is not themed as a vegan blog or a healthy food blog, it is still advisable that you sprinkle your food blog website and its articles with such keywords as: “vegan, vegetarian, health, healthy” and so on.
Health conscious people and even parents would approve of your food blog, and these groups of people are willing to spend money on healthy food most especially for their loved ones.
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8. Traveling Snacks Ideas
Many people are also searching for ”traveling snack ideas” which you could add to your food blog.
You might think that people would just be grabbing snacks that fancy them in grocery stores and other food retails outlets, but traveling snack ideas are a serious business for many.
As already stated, consumers are becoming more picky and health conscious these days. With the enormous amount of snack choices available today, consumers are trying to make sure that they get the best snacks that are not only delicious but good for them as well.
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9. Naming a Food Blog
This has more to do with people who are just starting in their food blogging journey. As already stated, your food blog’s name should reflect the content of your food blog.
For example, if you want to cultivate an image that your food blog is a health food blog, you should steer away from such food blog names as: “oily, greasy, fast food and so on”.
There are people who are searching for such articles online. You should also have a few articles that tackles how to name a food blog. Your readers would be more than likely new food bloggers.
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Final Words
As the statistics have shown, food blogging is not only the most popular blogging niche around but is also the most lucrative.
But just like any business, to be a successful food blogger, you need a lot of luck and good planning & business management.
Don’t expect to make a lot of money by just blogging about food. You still need to market your food blog and establish relationships with other content creators just like any business.
But if everything turns out right in your food blogging business, you can be like the owners of the food blog Pinch of Yum which reportedly makes over USD 90,000 per month. Good Luck!
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