How to Start a Food Blog

Disclaimer: This post is a breakdown of the decisions and best practices that went into our new Food Blogger Hosting package. Save yourself the time and headache and go sign up today. For those of you die-hard foodies that like to understand everything (or are sadistic and enjoy torturing yourselves), read on.

So you want to start a food blog

Amazing! We highly recommend it, and we’re only slightly biased! Food blogging can be highly rewarding – emotionally, intellectually and financially – with the right guidance and the right set of tools.

Successful food blogging is all about one simple thing:

developing recipes on your own blog to share with others, that reflect your personal values, and taking gorgeous pictures.

Everything else is a distraction. Everything.

Until you’ve nailed down your first 100 recipes, your sole concern should be creating and posting those first recipes. You need that base content to tell search engines and your visitors what your blog is about, and you need the practice. After that point you can start updating your branding, considering writing an ebook, working on generating revenue and turning yours into one of the best food blogs, or whatever else you wanted. Until then: write, write, write.

It’s easy to get caught up in the set up and technical parts. Skip ahead of it all and sign up for the Food Blogger Hosting package and get started today.

It’s all about that one simple thing

Keeping focused on the right thing is critical – it’s the difference between carving your name in stone and carving your name in the sand on a beach. Too many food bloggers get nowhere and give up because they lack either

1. the knowledge and framework outlined by the focus statement, or
2. the discipline to focus their energy on it by getting distracted with technical aspects

Let’s take a quick look at what the focus statement entails:

developing recipes

The backbone of a food blog is recipes. There’s debate about how unique your recipes need to be, but they do need to be unique. A good starting point is to pick a recipe you enjoy, research some variations, and add a twist to it – preferably themed around what your website (domain) is about.

on your own blog

Everything you do should be on your own blog, because this gives you the most control over the content and the most ability to make money with ads, sponsorships and commissions. Content on platforms and social networks is hidden from most of the internet, and designed to be buried the next second by the next piece of generic news.

We’re looking at you, Facebook.

Content on platforms that you don’t own serves to benefit the other website. Your own content on your own blog is the most valuable part of having a food blog – to the tune of 100x to 1000x more valuable than social networks or other websites.

to share with others

Your recipes are worthless unless others can find them and use them. You should be rewarded and fulfilled with knowing that the hours you spend into putting a recipe together is used to enhance other people’s live. Not only that, but your visitors are the base from which you earn revenue.

Sharing and outreach is where platforms and social networks come in – a snippet or “teaser” of your content should be put on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. This teaser content’s sole purpose is to drive people to your food blog.

that reflect your personal values

Some people get joy from spreading comfort with comfort food. Others get joy from helping others lead a healthier, more active life. Some just want to help those suffering from a gastric condition (lactose intolerance, gluten intolerance) to live better lives. Whatever values you have will determine your niche – the sub-sector of the food blogging universe where you can provide the most value. Aligning your blog with your values makes creating content much easier, and more rewarding (emotionally and financially).

and taking gorgeous pictures.

Food isn’t just something you eat to live. It’s an experience. It’s more than just tastes and smells, it’s visual and anticipatory. Pictures have the ability to get you to recall the tastes, smells, textures of eating a meal, and stimulate the imagination to create something new. As important as content is, high quality images will convey so much more, instantaneously. While they make up only about 10% of the content and importance for search engines, they’re responsible for close to 50% of your visitors experience on your site.

developing recipes on your own blog to share with others, that reflect your personal values, and taking gorgeous pictures.

Our minimalist themes are designed to be simple and distraction-free, in order to highlight your content and pictures and keep them the primary focus. Our Food Blogger Hosting (includes a free theme) is designed to keep you working on the only part that matters – writing the recipes.

Start a Food Blog for Free

It can cost literally nothing to get started – anyone can take pictures of their food while cooking with their camera-phones, edit them a little with free apps, sign up for a free wordpress.com blog and start right now.

Actually, that’s what we recommend everybody does for their first 10-or-so posts.

Then it’s time to move onto registering your domain, get proper hosting, sharing and marketing your recipes and upskilling your photography.

Those who are a little more ambitious can keep reading and jump right in.

Domains

A domain name is your first decision to make. The best domains are:

1. short
2. descriptive (keyword rich), and
3. are unique (brandable), offer a benefit, or some combination of those.

Some hosts include a domain name with hosting, but we think this is wrong. Your blog consists of two critical components:

• the domain name
• the content

Having both of these elements under the control of any single company is hugely problematic, because it effectively gives them full control over your website. If you have a backup of your content, you can move this to any host.

However, if you pick the wrong domain registrar, you can potentially lose control over your domain and will have to resort to expensive legal methods of recovering it. Because of this, we recommend that you go with only large, well-established companies that specialize in domains, such as:

• GoDaddy
• NameCheap

Most domain registrars will offer a hosting package, but these are sub-standard options and running a blog on them is like driving on flat tires. The performance is terrible and server configurations are problematic, which will cause errors that you have to troubleshoot and fix and detract from actually running your food blog.

Don’t get hung up on your domain name though. You can (and probably should) rebrand and update your domain after the first year, once you’ve got more of a groove and identity. This is as easy as registering a new domain and pointing it at your existing hosting, then making sure your host 301’s all your existing content to the corresponding page on the new domain. Most decent web hosts will handle this for you.

There’s a minor short-term penalty for doing this (even if it’s done properly), but the penalty is insignificant relative the benefit of starting now and the future growth of your blog.

A domain is the only area we recommend you go it alone – keep full control over this, and don’t combine it with hosting.

Should I enable privacy for whois?

YES! While GoDaddy charges for this, NameCheap includes it for free by default. The whois database lists contact information for the domain owner (that’s you) publicly to anybody – initially this was intended to make contacting the domain owner easy, but has been only used and abused by spammers. Keep your whois information private.

Hosting

You can go cheap with this if you want – and if you do, BlueHost has a decent reputation with very affordable plans. If cost is a concern (and it is for most of us), it can be a good option for your first year of blogging. Like most cheap options though, you’re sacrificing performance and can run into technical issues that will cost you time.

Performance

2017 saw website performance take center-stage, with pageload times becoming an important factor. This was evidenced by Google’s push for Google AMP (we have strong negative opinions about this) as well as big investments by web hosting companies into optimizing servers for speed. 2018 will see this taken even further, with websites designed for speed getting a bigger advantage over the others.

When it comes down to it, you hypothetically really only have to be better than your competition. If everyone’s pages load in 7 seconds, you only need to load in 5 seconds to have an edge. If everyone’s pages load in 2 seconds, you need to be at 1.5 or 1 second.

The state of food blogging today is that anyone that takes it seriously will pay for performance optimization, and they’re the ones who are leaving everyone else in the dust. Your blog will never gain serious traction against everyone else on cheap hosting – you will need to upgrade to a $30/month host for it to take off.

This is where your choice of hosting comes into play – the more expensive options put resources into making your website run faster with better hardware and specialized configurations. Some even have agreements with private services that further optimize speed. There’s dozens of options out there on the market – some of them adequate, some of them outdated, and only a few that really shine. You almost need a PhD and a decade of experience to be able to tell which is the best.

Our Food Blogger Hosting puts performance front and center. Our servers are configured specifically for WordPress, we offer caching thanks to agreements with premium plugins and services, and make it simple to integrate with a CDN (content distribution network). All of this ensures you’re on a level playing field with the best of the best.

There are a number of good hosts in the $30/month range that specialize in wordpress hosting generally, such as Studiopress Sites (now WPEngine), GetFlywheel and LiquidWeb.

Food Photography

This is something that everybody is embarrassed about when they begin, and something that everyone gets better with year after year. There’s a never-ending list of things to learn and try, and your personal style will naturally evolve and change as time goes on.

Here’s our Simple Tips to Make Your Food Photography more Pinterest-worthy.

Social

Food bloggers are part of a huge community that’s very supportive, open and helpful. Despite often competing for people’s attention, everyone is in it together and wants to see everyone else succeed. It’s like being part of the best company in the world.

Feast Design Co. has a Facebook community of foodie bloggers, exclusive to our customers.

Why You Shouldn’t Start a Food Blog

For all the right reasons to start a food blog, there are also wrong reasons to start a food blog.

• You lost your job and have to support your family right now
• You’re working 80 hours a week and want to take on more
• You’re not willing to put in at least 500 hours of work with no pay to get started

Starting from scratch means earning nothing for roughly a year – creating those first 100 recipes (3 hours/ea) and getting set up with ads and affiliates and sponsorships takes sheer will and time. But being in a desperate position of needing income or already having a full schedule is what dooms most would-be foodies. You simply can’t put in the required work on top of the learning and reading necessary (unless you’re the type of person who’s driven by being told they can’t do something).

Based on conversations we estimate it at about 500 hours which is either:

1. 3 months (90 days) of full time work
2. 1 year (250 days) of 2 hours per day

Over time you develop a process and the hours per recipe/post is reduced, and seeing money come in is rewarding and feeds a virtuous cycle.

Buy Your Way In

If you have at least $10,000 to invest and want to jump-start the process, reach out to us and we can connect you with someone who has already set up a blog and is willing to sell.