So, you’ve decided you want to become a food blogger. That’s great, but what next? How do you get started?
I’m going to help with some key points that a new food blogger should keep in mind.
1. Decide your focus
First of all, you need to decide whether you’re going to be a food blogger or a recipe blogger. Many times, the term food blogging will encompass both food and recipe blogging, but they are actually quite different.
Food bloggers may decide to occasionally incorporate recipes into their posts, and certainly recipe bloggers will be doing a lot of food writing, but you should decide which aspect will be your primary focus. This decision will help you best decide where to allocate your resources.
So what’s the difference? As a food blogger, you’ll be writing about favorite dishes, where to eat, unique or hyper local dishes not found elsewhere, and giving your honest opinion about restaurants and meal experiences.
Recipe bloggers will be creating new recipes to share with readers, as well as culinary tips and tricks.
It’s also important to know that neither of these are necessarily food critics. Instead, you’re a regular consumer or cook sharing your opinions with your followers.
Also, you may want to consider niching down even more than just being a general food blogger. You may decide to be a dessert recipe blogger, where your entire site is dedicated to creating desserts. Others have had great success with focusing on diets such as keto, low carb, vegan, or paleo. Still others have created entire sites built around cooking with certain kitchen instruments. Currently, sous vide cooking and InstaPot sites are trending.
2. Choose a name
Next, you’ll want to decide on a name for your site. It should be short and memorable, and give readers an idea of what to expect when they visit your site.
It’s very important before you register your domain that you check to see if the major social media channels have that same name available. You would hate to come up with a great name for your site, pay to register it, and then find out someone is already using that name on Instagram or Facebook. You want your handle to be the same across all social media platforms.
3. Make it look good
It’s important that your blog looks professional and polished. For this, you’ll need both a technically well-made site, and attractive photos.
You will need to have some basic technical skills to build your site. You don’t need to have the skills of a web developer, but you will need to know some basics to get your site up and running. (Or you can simply sign up for GEP’s Money Making Travel Blogs and let them do it for you.)
Whether you’re a food blogger or a recipe blogger, photos are going to be very important to the success of your site. Food blogging is very visual, so you’ll want to learn how to take impressive food photos. You will need photos not only for your site but also to promote your blog on social media. (Thankfully Great Escape also has a ton of courses and programs to help up your photography game.)
These are the very basics to get you started on your food blogging journey. I’m excited to read your work and try your recipes as you begin publishing your food content!
[Editor’s Note: Learn more about how you can fund your travels and make an extra income with photography, travel writing, blogging, and more in our free online newsletter The Right Way to Travel. Sign up here today and we’ll send you a new report, Three Fun Ways To Get Paid To Travel: A Quick-Start Guide, completely FREE.]
