The love for the culinary arts is what drives us all to food blogging. Being able to share your creative ideas and recipes with other enthusiasts is exciting, but what if it was profitable too? You might be wondering, “how do food bloggers make money?” There are quite a few ways of making money off your food blog, and we’ll explore them. Of course, you’ve also asked yourself, “how much do food bloggers make?” The most exciting part of it all is this: you can make as much as you are willing to work for! Sounds good, right? Only one problem; how do I create a food blog?
I curated this piece to answer all these questions and in detail! So, here’s how to create a food blog and start earning a decent income from it.
What You Need for a Converting Food Blog
If you’re going to create the perfect website and make it convert, you should ensure that you have a few things. These include:
WordPress – WordPress is, hands down, the best Content Management System that you could use to create a reliable website fast. It powers over a third of all active websites in the entire world! It owes its popularity mainly to its ease of use and extensibility. It offers many addons, plugins, and themes that enable you to create the exact website that you have envisioned.
All you have to do is install it on your browser or your computer (local server).
A Top-Quality Food Blog Theme – A good food blog will come with pre-made templates of pages and sections, so you’ll have to do very little to have a seamlessly working site. Free themes are available, but as they say, “cheap is expensive.” If you want to make money from your website, you’ll find top themes, such as Ranna, to be worth the small cost. Don’t forget to check out best food recipe WordPress theme list which may help you finding best theme for your food blog.
Plugins – You may need some plugins for your website to run as smoothly as it needs to. We will help you with the info on the ones that you need.
Top-Notch Photography – Ever taken a photo of a mouthwatering meal, but the image failed to do the actual food justice? You don’t need that. Just acquire good photography so that your food images will attract people to your blogs and recipes.
5 Steps for Setting Up Your Own Food Blog
Choose a Host
You have a few choices when it comes to WordPress hosting services. WP Engine offers managed hosting, which means that they have real-time backups of your website and can restore it in case you lose some data. This hosting relieves you of the worry of backups, installations, and updates; it takes care of all of it. You’ll only have to pay $29 each month for the services. Flywheel, a company with similar services, is an excellent alternative and only demands a monthly price of $15 for its services. Your other option, which we recommend, is Siteground. it is pretty affordable and already comes with a quick WordPress installation option.
Install a Theme
Creating a website is an unnecessarily arduous process, mainly if you haven’t done it before. That’s why WordPress themes are so handy. A good food blogger’s theme must have a user-friendly interface and high customizability. If you want a unique website, there are many things that you can’t add to it without first getting a suitable theme.
A food website should manipulate the visual senses of its users. You want a site that has a clean layout, too, so that your users can navigate between your blogs easily.
These and many more qualities are instantly accessible when you have a good theme, such as Ranna Food & Recipe WordPress Theme.
Ranna offers premade pages and other elements so that most of your work will only involve adding content. Among these pages are 2 homepages and 2 recipe pages so that your site and recipes can look as tantalizing as your food. Ranna also offers 2 recipe detail pages, 2 recipe archive pages, 3 post detail pages, and 2 category pages. You can beautify your pages with any of the 5 footers and 3 elegant headers that also go with over 10 variations.
Ranna saves you a great deal by offering a few vital plugins. It is highly customizable and allows you to edit it with Gutenberg, the refreshing WordPress block editor. What’s more, it has a preinstalled version of the Elementor Page Builder, a page builder used on over 5 million active websites. Both these tools allow you to drag and drop elements onto your pages. Ranna also comes with the One-Click Demo Installer, with which you only need to make a single click on the demo you want your site to resemble.
This theme offers an array of stunning predefined color schemes from which you can choose the one you want people to associate with your brand. However, you can choose still choose the one you want from scratch. Visitors can get bored with dull or unreadable fonts and leave your site. Ranna ensures that they don’t with its amazing typography and delivers hundreds of Google fonts. Your scrumptious meals should look impeccable on high-resolution devices with this theme’s Retina-ready build. Ranna also makes your site fast with techniques, such as Lazy Loading.
Install the Necessary Plugins
Its highly extensible nature and availability of plugins are among the main reasons why many people prefer WordPress. If you want to access your website’s full potential, you should consider installing a few plugins. Using Ranna saves you the need for installing a handful of plugins, but you may still find the need to install one or two more. One such plugin that you’ll most possibly need is the Akismet plugin, which secures your site from spam.
You could also add the Yoast SEO plugin to your site so that your pages and posts rank better on search engines, such as Google. Having an SEO-friendly recipe plugin can help you in writing SEO friendly recipes. In this case, search engines will showcase your recipes on search results with extra information, such as food images, ratings, and preparation time. If you want all that, just install the WP Recipe Maker. If you’ve never handled the installation of plugins before, you can check out our comprehensive guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Now all you need to do is create your posts. If you have any trouble handling your site, you can rely on Ranna’s exceptional customer support.
Use Images
As you use images, you need to make them your friend rather than your foe. If you do it wrong, images can compromise the speed and appearance of your site. You need to optimize your images so that they take up the least space possible without losing their aesthetic appeal.
Optimizing your website’s images means that you have to choose the right image size and format. The next steps are cropping and compressing the photos. A few more details go into image optimization. Take advantage of our exhaustive tutorial on how to optimize images for WordPress.
Monetize Your Website
When you have already added a handful of your best recipes, the next step is to figure out how to monetize your food blog website. There are a handful of ways of monetizing your food blog. Here, we’ve outlined the most effective and easiest to implement.
Selling Your Recipes in eBooks
The most effective way of earning from your blog would be to sell digital downloads or your own products. You can choose to sell delicacies and branded merchandise or digital downloads like eBooks.
All you need to start selling stuff off your site is WooCommerce. It is accessible at no extra cost from the WordPress dashboard. However, you may need to add a few WooCommerce plugins to make your shop page fully interactive and highly converting.
You can also have paid membership plans on your site so that the members can download secret recipes, eBooks, videos and even submit their own recipes or blogs. All you need to get on with this is to add a membership plugin to your site and get started.
Display Ads Using Google AdSense
Google AdSense is arguably the easiest way to start earning from your website instantly. It allows you to show advertisements on your recipe blog and earn money every time a user clicks on any of them. You don’t need coding skills to add Google AdSense to your website.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing simply implies adding links to affiliate products in your posts. Each time one of your visitors purchases the products by clicking on your links, you will earn a commission.
Many of the best food industry websites have affiliate programs. Since you need to find affiliate programs, you can check out others, such as the Amazon affiliate program.
Final Thoughts
That was easy, right? Following these instructions, you can create a food recipe blog that satisfies your passion and earns you money. Even if you’re a first-timer in creating a website, you should have no problems at all. Get started now!
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