How to make your food blog stand out

 How to make your food blog stand out

How to make your food blog stand out

There are plenty of blogging niches to choose from. Cooking is one such niche that many bloggers choose. Many housewives have thrived blogging in this niche. Thus, it is a lucrative niche for those who have a genuine interest in cooking, trying out new recipes and experimenting with recipes etc. But to set-up a successful cooking blog is not a cakewalk. To get more traffic and visitors to your cooking blog, you must follow a set of guidelines. Here, I will be describing to you some tips and tricks to build a successful cooking blog with good number of daily visitors and monthly traffic.

The good thing about cooking blogs is that even people with less technical knowledge can set it up and run it. For example, as I mentioned above, housewives can do it easily. If one manages to attract without wasting time, let us head straight to the steps and tips involved in making a great successful cooking blog.

Learn to set-up a successful, high traffic cooking blog

1 You Must Have Deep Knowledge and Passion

The first requirement is that you must have deep knowledge about your niche. When it comes to niche blogging, knowledge is your most valued asset. Cooking blog is no different. It is a niche blog. To thrive blogging in cooking niche, you must have great and deep knowledge about cooking.

If you have no deep knowledge about cooking, chances are that your cooking blog will end up being a mediocre blog. Internet has got loads of such mediocre blogs. Knowledge combined with passion is what will take your blog to the next level. When it comes to blogging, content is the king! For your content to become a king, knowledge about your niche is unavoidable!

It goes like this- the better your knowledge, the better the content on your blog will be. The more passion you have, the more your visitors will like your blog. To improve your knowledge, go through cooking books, other cooking blogs on the internet etc.

2 Absorb some technical knowledge related to blogging

This tip is particularly for housewives and less-tech savvy users of internet. With the availability of CMSs like WordPress and Blogger, blogging has become a lot easier than before. With easy interface, these blogging platforms even enable those with less technical know-how to blog!

While this is good, it is always important to learn some technical aspects related to blogging. Even less tech-savvy folks who run cooking blogs should try get familiar with aspects related to blogging. Make yourself aware of concepts like SEO, building backlinks, Google Webmaster tools, Sitemap, Plugins and their uses etc.

For gaining technical knowledge related to blogging, refer great blogs like problogger.net. These blogs are treasures of valuable and useful information. Make it a point to refer such blogs regularly. The knowledge you’ll gain can be applied on your cooking blog!

3 Use Social Networking Sites to your advantage!

If you want to build a successful blog, you just can’t ignore social networking sites. These sites have millions of users who spend hours each day socializing. So, by sharing your blog posts on these platforms is not a bad idea at all! Dedicate particular amount of time a day just to share your blog posts on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The time spent doing this ritual is worth the benefits that you’ll reap later.

A blog with a strong presence on Facebook will get huge visitors from there. This is due to the ‘ripple effect’ that Facebook is very famous for. When a friend of yours likes a blog post you posted, a friend of his/her will also see it. If your blog post is attractive, this ripple effect will continue, grabbing more eyeballs in the process. All this guarantees huge traffic flow to your blog.

4 Use attractive images on your cooking blog

Cooking is all about tasty food and recipes. The recipes are not only appealing to taste buds, but also to the eyes! Make it a point to use attractive images of the recipes on your blog. Images attract more visitors!

While sharing blog posts on Facebook and Google +, the images you used in the post will be used as thumbnails. Thus, using attractive images will gain more attention. A good picture and a catchy title will definitely make people click on your blog post!

5 Improve writing skills

If you are really serious about blogging to earn revenue, consider brushing up your writing skills. If you are not well versed in English, consider improving it. For making your cooking blog a success, writing blog posts in English is recommended.

6 Use these important and useful plugins

These plugins are for WordPress users. Plugins helps increase productivity. If you use WordPress to maintain your cooking blog, use these following plugins- Yoast SEO, Related Posts plugin, Social sharing plugins, WP Super Cache and Akismet.

How to make your food blog stand out

Yoast SEO will take care of basic SEO aspects of your blog. Related posts will help you get more page-views. It will reduce the bounce rate of your blog. Social sharing plugins are useful to get your content shared on Social networking sites. I usually recommend the Async Social sharing plugin. WP Super Cache is a caching plugin. It helps your site load faster. It is an unavoidable plugin. Akismet is an anti-spam plugin. Deleting spam comments manually is a tedious and time consuming task. Use Akismet and this plugin will take care of spam-fighting.

7 Create a YouTube Channel

YouTube is a platform where you can upload videos. Recording the cooking videos of your recipes and uploading them on YouTube is a great idea. This will make you more popular (based on the number of views your video gets).When you write a blog post about a recipe, also embed the video of that recipe from your YouTube channel.

These are some basic but fundamental methods to get more visitors to your cooking blog. Following these methods will definitely help improve your blog’s traffic and user friendliness. Implement them and you are on your way to building a successful blog! Happy blogging!