As a new food blogger, there are many mistakes that can be avoided. Most people realized these mistakes when they already happened.
Avoiding these simple mistakes can give you a great start and you can focus on driving more traffic and creating more attractive and consistent content. As a new food blogger, there are actions you can take that over time will benefit these decisions.
Here we’ll show you the most common mistakes that almost every new food blogger do and how to avoid them.
Why Do Most New Food Bloggers Fail?
When you start a food blog, in the beginning, is very important to work harder and post as much content as you can.
According to GrowthBadger there are over 1.7 billion websites and more than 600 million are blogs. There were 31.7 million active bloggers in 2020 alone and 77% of internet users read and interact with blogs.
Most new food bloggers just gave up after a few months. You have to allow the food blogs to grow and don’t expect overnight success. it is important to find your food niche.
But the most important thing is to be consistent! Most of the food blogs are products of passion for food and they do not see it as a business. And after months and months with less than 1,000 visitors per month bloggers just gave up and let the blog dies after all that hard work.
If you have a food blog focus on a food niche and don’t try to have a few recipes then other posts about lifestyle.
1. Picking the Wrong Domain Name
When you decide to start a food blog or just have a website one of the first and most important things to do is choosing a domain name. Picking the wrong name can have a negative impact in a long run.
There are many things to consider when buying a domain name. Your domain name will have also an impact on your SEO. People often can make a mistake or forget the address when a domain name is too long. Your domain name needs to be easy to remember and short. It is important to choose a name that represents your company, you, or what’s about your website and choose the right domain extension.
Use one word or one set of words in your domain and avoid using hyphens and no numbers.
2. Using a Not Reliable Hosting Company
As of 2020, there are over $370.7 million domains registered across all top-level domains. Almost 5000 web hosting companies are located are in North America, which makes the majority of hosting providers 58.08%.
With so many options for hosting companies is not easy to find one that can suit your needs. There are a few different types of web hosting services with the most popular are shared hosting, dedicated server hosting and VPS hosting.
We create a post where you can find out the top web hosting companies we recommend but if you decided to do research on your own there are a few factors you need to pay attention to when you look for a web hosting provider. Check uptime stats, server bandwidth, customer support, 24/7 available chat for any web hosts are some of the most important factors.
3. Not Choosing WordPress for Your Food Blog CMS
One of the most common mistakes for new food bloggers is choosing the wrong blogging platform. WordPress powers over 40% of the world’s websites.
Choosing the hosting for your food blog is one of the first and most important things every new food blogger has to do. Finding the right hosting provider for your website is not always an easy task.
WordPress hosting is designed to cover specifically the platform’s needs and has easy set-up and management, better security, better speeds.
4. Choosing a Wrong WordPress Food Blog Theme
Having a nice website is one of the main reasons people keep coming. A great UI interface, easy navigation, great speed and functionality are one of the top factors for a great website. Using a theme is a perfect start for every new website owner, especially if you are a new food blogger.
Using themes saves you a lot of money but can also save you tons of time. There are many places you can purchase a high-quality WordPress template. Here we’ll mention just a few of them: Envato, Elegantthemes, TemplateMonster and more.
These templates come with dummy content and can be installed in just a 5mins. They also usually come with the support that can help you with any issues during setup. But one of the main criteria is to choose a theme that is using SEO best practices.
5. Using too Many Plugins
Plugins can be a great thing when you want to expand the functionality of your CMS. WordPress as the most popular CMS in the world is normal to be attractive for developers to create plugins. For example there are over 50k plugins available for WordPress.
You can run anywhere from 5 and 20 plugins on your site without any issues if you use cloud hosting, VPS hosting, or a dedicated server. It is good to know that is recommended to avoid exceeding 20 plugins since this can decrease the performance of your website, it will make your site slow and can cause functionality issues.
Make sure at least once a month to spend a few minutes to regularly update your plugins and check if they are working properly.
6. Not Building an Email List from the Beginning
Having a good size mailing list can be really important for generating incomes from your blog.
Building your mailing list is not an easy task and the earlier you start the better. Comparing to social media where you do not have the emails of your followers, here you actually own the mailing list of your subscribers.
I recommend GetResponse or Convertkit as a great way to build your mailing lists by connecting the opt-in forms on your site. You can also make it more attractive for your visitors to sign up, like offering something for free like a free recipe e-book or a simple meal plan.
7. Not Being Consistent with Your Post Schedule
One of the main mistakes a new food bloggers make is not stick to a consistent post schedule. In order to do not lose your regular readers you need to create a routine of regularly posting on social media and on your blog. This way you’ll keep your users keep coming back for more.
One of the best ways is to create a calendar with posts and you can schedule them ahead of time even on social media. For a new food bloggers to increase your traffic, you may want to publish more often since that’ll make your blog noticed by search engines and give opportunities for your site to be found and bring visitors to it.
8. Not Including a Call-to-Action
Every website should some kind of action for your readers. This could be either sign up for your email list, a link read another blog post, leave a comment, or buy your product. This is especially important for new food bloggers so you can keep your visitors longer on your website which will also reduce your bounce rate in Google Analytics.
Your visitors who just read your post and they really enjoyed will be willing to read more posts or follow you on social media.