How you start a blog can be overwhelming. All the technical terminologies and tutorials you need to read to understand how this works might leave you feeling stresses. Read this post to see how I started my blog with technical help I got for FREE!

If you want help getting started with the best hosting service most bloggers use, I highly recommend Siteground. It is the best one around, and you can read how to get started with it in 10 minutes without learning the technology behind it. You can sign up here to get a free set up with their online technical staff. They are extremely helpful!

A “THEME” is nothing but the layout of your website. Its how you design it and customize it with your recipes and images. It is important to have a bright and colorful food theme. A food blog engages its audience through visuals. You can’t have a dull and boring website and hope for readers to read your recipes, or turn into your fans.

My favorite theme for food bloggers is the Divi food theme. It looks elegant, neat and recipes flow well with the post. You can add nutritional charts, health information using graphs, create pretty recipe cards and ingredient listings and so much more. You can either use their pre-made templates where you just add your recipes and images like filling in the blanks. Or choose to customize the blog posts on your own from a blank page. You get a special 10% off my link and it’s well worth it, perfect if you are not that great with the technical side of web-designing. Their technical team are very helpful in assisting me to design my blog ( always respond the same day- bonus isn’t it?!)

Food background is something I don’t think you need to invest in when you start. You already have to pay to set up your site and pay for products to create recipes. With the background and props, you can definitely make do with things you already have at home. Check out some of my crazy backgrounds that actually worked!

Baking paper, newspaper, foil, rustic old pan. Even tried one with my cardigan and the driveway- ha!

Creating seasonal posts will bring you a good number of visitors to your blog. Always create seasonal posts 3 weeks in advance so you have enough time to promote it. Whether it’s the holiday season or its winter, you see a lot of people flooding the internet searching for a new recipe to try. This is your chance to get your post out there for all of them to see.

I created a traditional festive recipe post for Diwali and it got me a massive spike in pageviews and that was just the first few days of blogging! Notice I reached 410 pageviews on the 17th of October (it was an Indian festival-Diwali). See what I mean? Check your calendars for upcoming festivals and holidays to gain your audience.

Images need to be the “hero” of your post. It’s like you going into a restaurant and looking at awful images on the menu card. You’d most likely won’t want to go there again. Don’t make that mistake on your blog. Investing in learning to take that perfect image is KEY!

When you share your images on Pinterest you food photo should make viewers want to pause and click on your image and read about it. Not scroll past it! 

Tasty food photography is an affordable ebook written by food bloggers that have made it big in the food industry- so you are learning from the best! This is great learning resource on how to create rock-solid images for your blog. Image clarity and food styling give your blog a more professional look. You don’t need to invest in expensive photography tools, just need to learn how to take photos and edit them. I took these image on my Samsung Phone in natural daylight, with just a white foam board from a dollar store.

What do you think? 🙂

Picmonkey is great for editing food photos for your blog posts and for creating pin images to use on Pinterest. If you are looking for a premium option then Photoshop would be the best. Both photoshop and picmonkey have got way more editing features than canva. These tools help you create that perfect pin image to use on Pinterest.

Best way to make money from your food blog is ads and affiliates. Placing ads on your blog can help you build an income over time especially if you have a big audience. Certain ad networks like mediavine and adthrive pay bloggers thousands of dollars for placing ads on your site.

This guide will help you learn how to boost traffic to your blog, so you can apply to ad networks that can boost your income. Lena, the author of the guide went from  17,000 to 400,000 pageviews a month using these exact strategies. I have read this book and I still go back and read it because it’s just an overload of information!

Affiliate links are a good start for new bloggers, where you place links in blog posts that connect to another website that sells a product and if you do buy the product the blogger (like you and me) will make a commission from it!

If you are looking to take it to the next level, you can write your very own recipe book or create an online course (like a 10-day fat-burning challenge..). You can create one and sell it for free with teachable.

This is a great way to promote your posts regularly without any restrictions! You are the admin of the group and you have control over how many times you want to share your posts or promote your affiliate products. This can be a lot more profitable than sharing your recipes with other Facebook groups where the audience have different interest and may not be interested in a recipe blog. But with your own facebook group, you know the entire 500 or 1000 members on it have an interest in the recipes you share.

As a food blog is all about the visuals, sharing the posts on visual social sharing sites will make your images go viral. Pinterest and Instagram are the best places food blogs thrive. Try to engage and build followers on these sites, and make sure you post on a regular basis, so your blog stays fresh and updated.

Make sure you have an email subscription box on your blog, so readers that are interested can sign up. I recommend either Mailerlite which is free or the best one around is Convertkit which allows you unlimited access to everything. Just like owning a facebook group with “an interested audience” your email subscribers will be ready to buy the affiliate products you recommend once you have established a friendly relationship with them.

It is a hard task to grow followers on social media when you are just starting out. One tool that has been super helpful to me is MILOTREE. Did you notice the little Pinterest pop-up that showed up when you entered my blog? Yes, that’s the one! It comes as a non-intrusive pop-up on both mobile and desktop that gives a follow-up button for readers to instantly follow you, growing your social numbers. You can use this link to avail 3 months free to try out and see how it works for you. Its been doing great for me as these are genuine followers that are interested in your content.

There you have it! 10 steps to creating your very own food blog. Remember, as with everything it takes time to gain momentum. Give yourself a couple of months to find out what works well for your blog, and don’t forget Pinterest! If you don’t have a clue on how it works, or have read posts and ebook but still find it hard to understand, this A-Z Pinterest guide takes you from start to finish with Pinterest and has over 2 hours of video tutorials to help you understand this better.

Let me know if you have any questions about starting your very own food blog!

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