Have you wonder how to start a successful food blog in 2021, but have no idea how to do it? Whether you want to follow the path of successful food bloggers and make money or just want to share your favorite recipes with the world, these tips will reduce your technical problems.
This guide includes everything you need to know and all the tools you’ll need through the process of starting a food blog. If you really want to learn how to start a food blog that you can make money, then this guide is for you.
Start a Successful Food Blog in 2021
Below are the steps for self-hosted WordPress with your own domain name. I highly recommend going that route, especially if you are planning to scale and start making money from your food blog.
The best option you can go with it is having a self-hosted site for your blog. That includes web your own domain name, hosting, and free CMS.
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Choose your niche
That’s right! You have to choose your niche. The food blog is too wide broad. There are many food blog niches you can choose from. If you’re still having trouble choosing your food niche, take a look at these possibilities to inspire you:
- Specific diet food blog such as healthy, vegan, keto, paleo or gluten-free diet recipes
- Focused on old family recipes from around the world or traditional recipes
- If you are more passionate about a specific cuisine like the Mediterranean, African, Asian, Thai, etc. recipes
- Food blogs that are focused on specific cooking methods like slow-cooker, baking, etc
- And more
It’s always better if you pick a niche that you are passionate about it and match interests and expertise when you start a food blog.
Purchase domain name & hosting
We recommend choosing your domain to be similar to your blog name. This way your followers will be easy to remember you and you’ll be able easier to create a brand presence across different social platforms as well it will be better for SEO.
Below are our top choices for hosting for your WordPress blog. We’ve used them and we loved them.
Namecheap
Great Reliable Services
Namecheap is a leading domain name and web hosting provider, offering cheap domain names with the most reliable service.
Siteground
Ultra-Fast Support
Siteground Hosting is rated as #1 hosting by WordPress. It comes with one-click WordPress installation and outstanding support.
Install WordPress
It is very important to choose the right CMS platform from the beginning. We recommend WordPress because it is easy to expand its features and you can make money from your blog without any limitations.
WordPress is fairly easy to install with all the hosting providers recommended above it comes with one click. They all come with a WordPress installation tool.
Choose WordPress theme
WordPress plugins/tools
Jetpack is a really handy tool that offers instant downtime alerts, protects your blog from possible security threats, malware, and automatically backup on your schedule. It helps load pages faster, and serve your images and static files from their global network of servers.
Mailchimp is an automation platform and email marketing service. It is an all-in-one Marketing Platform for small businesses that helps you manage your email marketing activities including sending marketing emails, automated messages and targeted campaigns.
Tasty Recipes is a powerful WordPress recipe plugin for food blogs with everything you need to publish beautiful, SEO-solid recipes. Their other products Tasty Pins and Tasty Links together, reduce the time saved preparing and publishing each recipe.
Tailwind is a platform helping over 100,000 brands succeed on social networking platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. It gives you recommendations based on data from billions of pieces of content published.
Just by using Tailwind and following their recommendations, you can see a 4x increase in the engagement on your content.
Photoshop CC is an advanced photo editing software included in the Creative Cloud. It is a more powerful, reliable, and advanced image editor compare to just Photoshop. It has versions for WIndows, Mac, iOs and Android. You can even use it on Chromebook.
Lightroom CC is a creative image organization and image manipulation software and it is also part of the Creative Cloud subscription family. It is supported on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and tvOS.
Set up Google tools
Many people do not realize how powerful can be the Google tools for your business. You can get a tremendous amount of data about your website, how people find you, recommendations from Google to improve your website, web speed tests, and more. Google tools like Google Analytics, Google Webmaster tools, PageSpeed Insights, Google Adwords’ Keyword Planner tool are tools that must be used by any website or business.