How to Start a Food Blog

Do you want to learn how to start a food blog?

Food bloggers make a juicy $9k per month [1].

Not only can you make decent money from blogging about food, but you can also enjoy blogging about your passions as a foodie. Whether you want to launch a food blog for the money or as a hobby, you’ve got to start.

👉 In this post, you will learn how to start a successful food blog in ten simple steps.

Let’s dive in.

Step 1: Determine your food blog niche

A food blog can take many directions. 🧭

To give readers value, enjoy your food blogging journey, and profit from it, focus on a niche you are passionate about.

Types of food blogs worth running (proven by data)

There are many types of food blogs you can build. For inspiration, here’s a list of some of the popular ones:

1. Reviews Blog: Gives detailed reviews of food joints and restaurants in a specific area. Roadfood reviews dishes from across the United States.

According to Ahrefs, the blog draws an estimated 71.7k organic visitors every month.

2. Recipes Blog: Provides users with new or classic recipes.

Stephanie’s Sweet Treats, a blog that focuses on developing recipes is a good case study. The blog made $9,296.88 in March 2022 [2].

how-to-start-a-food-blog-recipes-blog-example

3. Healthy food Blog: Teaches people about healthy food and eating habits. Vegancalm is popular with vegans. It attracts over 30k people to the site monthly according to Similarweb.

4. Cuisine-specific Blog: Focuses on food from a particular country or region, e.g. Mediterranean cuisine, Asian food, African dishes, etc.

Step 2: Choose a name for your food blog

Once you’ve picked your niche, it’s time to select a name for your blog.

You can tackle this task a number of ways – depending on how hands-on you want to be with the process.

For starters, you can do the brainstorming yourself – come up with a number of suitable names and then check their availability for domain name registration one by one. Or, you can go the alternative way and use DomainWheel to help you out.

DomainWheel will suggest a number of name ideas based on the seed term you provide it. For example, here are the ideas it generated based on the term “healthy bites:”

Step 3: Choose a hosting company

Nailed your food blogging niche?

Coined a catchy website name?

The next step when launching a food blog is choosing a hosting service for it. Features of an excellent hosting service include:

Reliability. A dependable hosting company guarantees you high uptime (99.99%) so your site is always available for users to access.
Speed. A rock-solid host ensures your site pages load fast so users don’t abandon them.
Ease of use. A great hosting service has a simple user interface.
Affordability. A pocket-friendly host helps you not to strain your budget.

Speaking of affordability, you can get a shared hosting plan from Bluehost for only $2.95/month. This allows you to scale later and host many websites from one domain if you like. It’s also easy to use and offers no-fuss 1-click WordPress installation.

Step 4: Pick a CMS for your food blog

Next, pick a content management system (CMS) for your blog.

You can use Tumblr, Wix, Squarespace, and a host of other platforms. But the king of them all is WordPress, which powers 43.4% of websites on the internet [3].

Why should you choose WordPress over the rest of the CMS platforms?

To begin with, WordPress is a flexible platform. You can use it for any site in any industry. Whether you want to start a blog, personal site, business blog, online store, or membership site, WordPress does it all.

Also, WordPress has thousands of plugins that can enhance the functionality of your blog. There are plugins for virtually anything you want to do, from sharing posts to securing your website.

Finally, WordPress is easy to use. Even as a total newbie, you can launch a functional and eye-catching site in minutes.

ℹ️ In the next couple of steps, we’ll show you how to start a food blog on WordPress:

Step 5: Install WordPress on your site

Installing WordPress works differently based on who your hosting company is. We’re going to show you how things work with Bluehost since it’s our favorite all-around web host.

Head over to your Bluehost dashboard:

Click My Sites
Hit Create Site

Step 1 of installing WordPress on Bluehost

Then fill in your Site Name and Tagline info.

Step 2 of installing WordPress on Bluehost

After inserting your website details, choose your domain name from the domain drop-down space.

Step 3 of installing WordPress on Bluehost

To finish the installation, click Next and then Login to WordPress to log in to your site.

Step 4 of installing WordPress on Bluehost

That’s it! You should now land in the main WordPress dashboard where we’ll take care of all the other steps on your way to an operational food blog.

Step 6: Select a theme for your food website

While having a solid CMS gives you a start, you should also get your blog design right.

A website theme helps you to do just that. It determines the layout and overall feel of your blog.

To choose the best theme, focus on:

Aesthetics. Is the theme beautiful enough to wow your visitors?
Customization. Can you personalize the theme to suit your needs?
Ratings. Does the theme have many positive reviews from satisfied users?
Affordability. Is it a free or paid theme you can afford?

Wondering which theme to pick?

For starters, try out Neve, which is perfect for food bloggers.

The theme comes with a number of starter site designs, and a handful of them have been hand-built to suit food-related sites:

Step 7: Install plugins to customize and optimize your blog

While WordPress is good to go out of the box, you might want to customize it to better suit your needs.

That’s where plugins come in!

A plugin is software that adds new functions to a host program (WordPress in this case) without changing its core function.

There are a few key plugins to consider.

WP Recipe Maker or WP Tasty for pixel-perfect recipe displays that draw readers in.
GS Pins for Pinterest to pin posts and drive traffic.
WP Super Cache for caching to speed up your site.
Yoast SEO for SEO suggestions to help your pages rank.
Vault Press to back up all your content and database.
Akismet to keep spammers at bay.

Add these plugins to improve the performance of your blog and enhance your WordPress experience.

Step 8: Write and publish your first blog post

After installing all the essential plugins, you’re ready to write and publish your first post that announces your blog to the world.

To do that, simply launch the WordPress editor:

Go to your WordPress dashboard.
Hang the cursor over Posts
Click on Add New.
Insert your title and write your post in the given space.

No matter which niche you choose, include high-quality food photos. Visuals are a key ingredient of success when blogging about food. Whet your readers’ appetite by posting amazing photos of:

Food-making process.
Sumptuous-looking plated food.
Colorful ingredients.

Thankfully, WordPress allows you to embed image and video files in your content.

Also remember to use the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize your post for SEO before you press publish.

Step 9: Drive traffic to your food blog

Another crucial step when starting a food blog is to attract readers to your site.

There are two primary ways of driving traffic.

First, make sure you have share buttons on your pages. This enables your readers to spread your content all over social media platforms. In particular, promote your content on visual social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. These work best for visual-heavy food industry content.

Second, submit your blog to industry-specific website directories like FoodGawker, Finding Vegan, or Tasty Kitchen. People who frequent these sites will follow your website URL and visit your blog.

Not only does submitting your site to web directories drive new visitors to your site, but it also boosts your SEO. When directories accept your site and link to it, your site gains more authority and visibility on the internet.

Step 10: Monetize your food blog for bumper profits

Food blogging can be lucrative.

You can make a decent income off your blog even if you are a hobby blogger. Here are a few tips on how to monetize your food blog based on numbers from a Rankiq research report [4]:

Courses. Create online courses which account for 25% of food bloggers’ income.
Sponsored posts. Charge brands to write and publish blog posts related to their products. 11% of food sites make money this way.
Affiliate marketing. Put affiliate links in your content to sell products and services related to your topic as 10% of food owners do.
Display ads. Host display ads on your blog since successful bloggers make 40% or more of their money from this type of ads. For example, according to Shopify, the TiffyCooks blog gets up to 40% of its revenue from ads: