Important Tips for Food Bloggers
If you’re thinking of starting a food blog or are a food blogger, there are a few important tips you should keep in mind to become successful. Food blogging can be hard and highly competitive, but fun. These are some things that everybody needs to know going in.
This post isn’t telling you how to become a successful food blogger. Nobody can guarantee that you will be successful, there are many factors involved.
These are food blogging tips that are rarely discussed when bloggers start posts about starting a food blog. Many times they pump out all their affiliate links and hope that they make money by recommending things.
While I have affiliate links in some of my posts and I respect wanting to earn income, I also really want to see my readers succeed!
If you are new to food blogging or looking to start a blog you may love our series that shares what you need to do to start! The first part to the series is starting a food blog, the first steps. The series will help you with what you need and don’t really need.
Have realistic expectations
It takes time and effort to build up a following, so be patient and keep at it. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see results right away.
Blogging about food is a lot of work. If you’re not prepared to put in the time and effort, you’re going to struggle with becoming successful. Make sure you’re realistic about what you can achieve and how much time you’re willing to commit before you start your blog.
You can certainly start a food blog with part time hours while working a job out of the house, but understand that it might take longer to build it up. That is ok! I started my food blog while working 2 jobs. Just understand that it may take a little longer to see results.
Having realistic expectations will help you understand how long it may take given the time you can put in.
Do not compare yourself to others
I cannot stress this enough! Let me repeat – do not compare yourself to other food bloggers when it comes to stats.
There are so many factors behind every food blogger’s success or failures. Sure they may have a million dollar blog now, but they may have worked 18 hours a day on their blog.
Maybe they had enough money to invest in courses or hiring people to help them. You may not, I didn’t have the funds when I started out.
It’s possible that they picked out keywords that were easier to rank for or maybe they are more niched down. They also could have started on social media and had a large following already. Really there are so many things that come into play here.
Do not worry about other food blogger’s stats being “better” then yours. This can cause you to feel quite discouraged.
Adapt to change
The food blogging world is constantly evolving, so you need to be flexible and willing to change with it. It’s important to stay on top of trends and new technologies, but do not jump on every new idea.
Trust me if you go into a food blogging group on Facebook, you will see people doing many different things to grow traffic and income. It’s great to get so much advice, but you just cannot try everything you hear.
Be selective, and only adopt new ideas that you think will work for your blog. Try new things that are out of your comfort zone too, don’t be afraid to try new things! If these new ideas do not work out as planned, change your plan and try something else.
Do not fear failure
Failure gives you knowledge. Fear of failure holds you back. Every successful blogger has failed a few times, probably over and over again. Let that sink in for a minute please.
Kind of like when riding a bike, you probably fell the first few times you were on it. I know I did and well many years later I still have a scar to prove it. But you know what? I got back on and tried again, then again. It didn’t take long before I knew what I shouldn’t do on the bike – what made me fall (fail.)
Same goes with starting and running a food blog. You will have failures before you will see success. We do not wake up knowing how to start a food blog. I didn’t wake up with all the knowledge needed to create a successful blog.
Jump in and try new things, if it doesn’t work go to plan b then plan c. Constantly change your blogging plan as you find things that work and don’t work.
Don’t get too bogged down in data
It’s important to track your progress when starting a food blog, but don’t obsess over things like pageviews and unique visitors. Analytics is an amazing tool, but you do not need to be in it all day long. This will distract you from things you should be focusing on – creating great content! You can check in once a day or even once a week, but no reason to be there all day.
In the beginning I always had a tab with Analytics open. I would randomly (every half hour or less) check to see how many visitors were coming to my site. That is excessive! Then if it looked like less people from the day before were visiting, I would panic and try to fix things. DO NOT do this please! Total waste of good time and energy.
There are ups and downs every day and from season to season. Do not panic, look at your search rankings and see if you lost rankings. If there has been no change in rankings, it is likely that those search terms are just not what people are searching for at the moment.
There are many reasons that traffic may be declining and it may be beyond your control. Things like weather, holidays and world events all can have an impact on your food blog’s traffic.
Conclusion
Food blogging can be a lot of fun and very rewarding, but it’s important to keep your expectations realistic. Don’t expect to become an overnight sensation and don’t get discouraged if you don’t see the same results as other bloggers. Be prepared to adapt to change and cultivate a thick skin – not everyone is going to love your work. And finally, do not let yourself be consumed by analytics – focus on creating great content that speaks to your unique voice, and the numbers will follow.
Do you have any tips for food bloggers just starting out? Let us know in the comments below!
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