10 Easy Steps To Start A Food Blog

If you have at one period in time asked yourself what the necessary steps in starting a food blog are, it is because you like to cook. That is essential, but we are also sure that you have felt the urge to share your recipes or your knowledge with the world, because you think that what you do is worthwhile and can be useful to many people. It may sound presumptuous, but it is an unavoidable condition needed while thinking of building a cooking blog.

To start with, you do not need to be a computer engineer, but the more you develop in the use of computer hardware, the better. You should think that your instrument to create your kitchen blog is going to be the computer, so you should feel comfortable sitting in front of your PC.

In this article, we will explain the 10 essential steps that will lead you to create an extraordinary food blog.

Steps To Start A Food Blog

1. Define Objectives

What do you want to achieve? What is your motivation? These are two questions that you must ask yourself and that you must have clear before starting your project. In this sense, we could talk about people who want to make a cooking blog with these two objectives:

1. With the sole purpose of overturning the passion for cooking in a public space, where your friends and the rest of the world can access the content you publish.
2. In order to earn money.

The truth is that the goal of making a profit with a food blog has to be linked to the objective of feeling motivated by what is done and published. Creating and maintaining a blog implies a daily effort that is impossible to maintain over time without a minimum of passion.

However, feeling totally connected to the theme, cooking nice and well, and having the gift of engaging the audience to end up getting an interesting volume of visits, does not imply being interested in making money with it.

You can go ahead! Making money with a cooking blog primarily means getting a fairly high fixed audience, whether it is thinking about placing ads, working affiliations, or publishing content sponsored by brands.

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2. What name to choose for your food blog?

Google and other search engines give more importance to the name of each website, while users search for specific contents.

Therefore, what we recommend is that you choose a name with meaning – something that is available as a domain, and that it is as short and simple as possible.

3. Where to host your blog

The task of choosing a name and hosting for your blog can be done at the same time if you want through the many providers that offer two-in-one packages. There are many, but one we can recommend is HostGator due to the great service they give, for the prices and for how easy it is to make a blog with them – even for the first time.

In addition, they also make it very easy to address very basic aspects such as the installation of the SSL certificate (the one that will make your food blog show an “https” instead of an “http”).

4. WordPress

If a few years ago there were still those who hesitated between using WordPress or some other platform like Blogger to set up their blog, today there is no discussion.

WordPress is, without a doubt, the best option to work efficiently and dynamically, and have at your disposal all the resources that you will need at the beginning, such as themes, plugins, information, etc.

If you opt for a hosting service, the logical thing is that you purchase a package that includes the latest version of self-installed WordPress, that allows you to start your blog with your first entry in a matter of minutes.

5. The plugins you need

One of the advantages of using WordPress is the immense number of plugins that exist for almost any need that arises to you. This is something very useful in case of not having a trusted computer that manages to hit every code you can think of as for the personalization of the themes, the design, the style sheet, etc.

However, an indiscriminate use of plugins would result in the slowdown of the load of your page, and this is something that you have to avoid at all costs if you do not want to start falling out of favour of Mr. Google. Here are what we consider as the basic plugins that will be useful to you:

• An SEO plugin that allows you to edit the metadata of each page or entry, as well as the general goals of the site. Examples are Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack
• A plugin that allows you to reduce the file sizes of the photos you upload. One of the most used is WP Smush.
• An anti-spam plugin in case you want to open comments on your cooking blog. Although, there are many, we recommend Akismet Anti Spam.
• A plugin to edit the cookie notice. Many themes incorporate it as a series.

6. Basic SEO notions

Obviously, we cannot summarize in this article what SEO is, and what are the basic notions that you must master to make a food blog, but it is something you should know.

What is clear is that the higher your aspirations with your blog, the greater your SEO knowledge must be. But even if your only motivation is to publish your recipes to put them at the service of the people, if you are interested in that potential audience who will later end up discovering your wonderful dishes, you must have a minimum of SEO knowledge.

SEO is everything related to the technical part, and also to the editing itself of a website, aimed at positioning each content in the search engines. But if it’s the first time you hear the word SEO, or knowing it, you probably must have been living under a rock.

We recommend you read everything you find before you start working on your cooking blog and, if you can, do a SEO course of the many that Google itself offers.

7. Your editorial calendar

When you are clear about the above, you will feel the need to create an editorial calendar. You will see it needful editing specific contents based on your own objectives, and therefore create a kind of more or less large, and more or less fixed list of what you should write each day.

You have the option of working without any planning, letting yourself be guided by what your inspiration tells you at every moment, but in that case, you are not focusing on any goal and your cooking blog will be at the mercy of chance itself.

Without going any further, and taking into account the SEO notions of which we spoke before, you must start from the basis that no one will find your “Christmas recipe”, for example, if you publish it on Christmas Day (Google may take up to a month in indexing the contents you publish), which is why you are obliged to publish the seasonal contents always with sufficient time to give them visibility.

8. Marathon mode

With all of the above controlled, once you start, you must activate in your interior a discipline that allows you to publish at a fixed rate and with constancy. For that, it is necessary to have long-term goals, and not to have the idea that your cooking blog will be done in a matter of weeks.

A blog knows when to start, but not when it ends, so you have to write with enthusiasm and without looking too far forward or backward, in the same way that a marathoner faces the 42 kilometers of each race.

9. Control the stats

The moment you start your food blog, you must register it in at least two tools that will allow you to control every aspect of the site’s activity:

• Google Analytics: Here, you can control everything that happens on your blog once each visitor has access to it: the time they stay in it, the most read contents, the countries or cities from which you are visiting, the type of device from which more people have access to your blog (mobile, tablet or PC), the origin of each visit (organic or external), etc.
• Search Console: The webmaster’s tool is a compendium of tools that allow you to control many aspects related to your blog: sitemap, search analysis that ends up generating visits to your blog, errors, loading speed of the site, preferences of the site, etc.

However, it will be when you have spent some time working on your cooking blog and have a certain volume of visits when you can really draw conclusions from the analysis of the data generated by your blog.

10. Use the networks

Finally, it is very important to multiply your chances of dissemination and obtain more visits. You have to make profiles on all social networks that you are willing to cover: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram etc.

Think that the more the better, but that it does not make sense to create profiles on social networks that, in the end, you will not be able to make use of due to lack of time. In this sense, it is almost better to work very well on one or two social networks, then try to cover them all and not reach any of them.

Bottom line

Obviously, there are many more aspects that must be controlled to make a food blog, such as working with the photographic material, or interacting with other bloggers, etc. But so far, we think we’ve done a pretty complete review of what you cannot ignore if you’re thinking about how to build a food blog.

Article brought to you by the Onlinefoodblog

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• How to Succeed in Food Blogging: Tips for Beginners