7 Tips on How to Be a Successful Food Blogger

Whether you are new to food blogging or just want to grow your existing food blog, there are some things that you can do to increase your audience. Even those who have been blogging about food for years sometimes hit a plateau and need to do something different to get new readers. 

My 7 top tips on how to be a successful food blogger

Although I do not consider myself an expert, I will share what I have learned so far. I learn something new every day, actually, so why not share so we can all grow our blogs to where we want them? Here are my seven top tips on how to be a successful food blogger.

Be real

Post recipes that you have tried already. Don’t just copy and paste recipes that you see online and post them on your own blog. Even if you change up some words and add new stuff. Make the food first before you try to write about it. Nobody wants to try a recipe that you have not tried yourself. 

Also, when you write your blog, be personable and friendly. Don’t just write the recipes and instructions without letting your personality show through. People do not like to read boring blogs. They can go to the library for that. Toss in a few slang words and jokes here and there to let people know you have a personality.

Be available

Make yourself available to your readers. Whether it is through comments on your blog, social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, or even through email. Talk to your readers and let them know you are not just some computer-generated chat bot. 

Have you ever tried to talk to a chat bot? It is not fun and can actually be downright aggravating. If you have an important question and the chat bot keeps giving you canned or preprogrammed answers that do not make sense, you get aggravated. Don’t let your readers feel that way. Communicate with them. 

Take photos

Do not steal photos from other food blogs or photo sites. Take your own. And take good ones from the beginning to the end. You want to take pictures of the ingredients, the cooking utensils, mixing the ingredients, and then post the finished product.

But don’t just take one photo of a cake or bread. Chicago food photographer Rob Grimm Photography recommends taking multiple photos of your completed recipe so you have more variety to choose from when posting on your website and various social platforms.  Take one shot of the whole thing, another of it cut in half, and some with bites taken out of it. Also, use brightly colored backgrounds for more festivity or plain white or pastels for detailed photos. Be creative.

Provide videos

Some recipes you just need a video to explain. If you are writing about making a certain kind of dish that requires a step that needs a visual, make a video. 

But don’t stop there, make videos of lots of recipes. Especially those that look especially yummy in person. And be sure your audience can see you, so they get to know you. 

Be Original

Copying off other food blogs is bad. Don’t think that your readers will not notice because they will. And once they do, they will not be reading your blog anymore. Not to mention the fact that you can actually get in trouble for stealing other people’s work. That is called plagiarism and it is not something you want to be guilty of.

This does not mean that you cannot get ideas from other food blogs. After all, we all have to get our recipe ideas from somewhere. We don’t all have grandmothers who gave us their secret recipes. But when you do borrow a recipe, make sure you try it out first and give some credit to the original blogger. 

Promote Your Blog

If you do follow tip number 5, this can also gain you friends in the food blogging business, which are good to have. You can promote each other and share tips with each other. But you need to promote yourself too. Repurpose your content, share your blog on all your social media sites, build links to your site, and use SEO tools. 

Monitor your blog’s performance too. Make sure you are using all the right keywords but not too many of the same ones. Those Google algorithm updates are helpful but can be confusing. Try some of the easier ones like RANKIQ, SEOquake, HubSpot, and SEMrush. 

Keep it clean

Nobody likes to be bombarded by video snippets and ads as soon as they get on your blog. If you have a bunch of videos going and too many advertisers popping up when your readers are trying to read your recipe, they are going to get sick of it real fast. I was testing out a recipe the other day and my view kept being blocked by ad after ad, so I gave up and found the recipe on another site. You do not want your readers to do that.