How To Start a Food Blog
Want to learn how to start a food blog? If you have a passion for food – whether it’s making recipes, cooking, baking, or just eating food – creating your own food blog can be fun and easy.
Food blogs have grown in popularity – these days, many people find most of their recipes online as opposed to in a traditional, physical cookbook. Since there are so many food blogs out there already, it can be difficult to make yours stand out.
Luckily, there are endless potential food blog ideas and types, from recipe blogs to review blogs to everything in between. The more unique your food blog is, the easier it will be to set it apart and attract an audience.
While you may enjoy food blogging because you love food, blogging can also be a lucrative hobby and even career! To begin, you’ll just need some basic website knowledge.
We’ll break down the steps to help you create your own website for a food blog, and from there it’s up to you to post great content! Take these 8 simple steps to start a food blog.
How To Create Your Own Food Blog
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- Pick a Niche or Type of Food Blog
- Come Up With a Catchy Name
- Buy Your Domain Name and Hosting Plan
- Install WordPress
- Choose a WordPress Theme
- Add WordPress Plugins
- Set Up Tracking for Your Blog
- Start Sharing Content
Pick a Niche or Type of Food Blog
Before you can create a food blog, you need to decide what kind of content you’re going to post! If you have little to no experience in the kitchen, fear not. There are plenty of food blogs that share restaurant reviews, food product reviews, or even try cooking recipes from an inexperienced perspective!
Figure out what you’re most interested in about food and what kind of content you want to share. You can share original recipes, reviews, recount your experience trying recipes – the list goes on. Many food blogs focus on a very specific niche of food and dive deep on that topic. This could be all baked goods, all foods from a certain culture, or even all one type of food, like an all pizza based food blog!
You could also run a local food blog, where you try all the best food in your city and target local followers and readers. Another option is a travel blog, where you try food in your travels around the world! There are endless opportunities for topics – you just have to find the right one for your blog.
Ideally, your food blog topic should be somewhat unique. If there’s nothing to set your food blog apart, it can be harder to compete with food bloggers that already have a huge audience or thousands of posts. Try to make your food blog unique so that it stands out!
Come Up With a Catchy Name
Picking a name for your food blog is more important, and often more difficult than you may think. The name of your food blog should also be unique, in part because you need a unique domain name, and in part to make it easy to remember. Try to come up with a food blog name that is:
- Unique
- Memorable
- Short
- Easy to spell
Since the name of your food blog will likely be your domain name, it should be relatively short and easy to spell. That way, it makes it easy for readers to remember and to navigate back to your website.
Your blog’s name should include one or more of the following things:
- Your name
- Your location
- Your niche
- Food terms, sayings, or puns
Combine these elements to create a name that is specific to your blog and the content you’ll be sharing.
Coming up with a catchy name can be hard, but there are a few tricks you can use. One is alliteration, using the same first letter multiple times. For example, if your name is Leah and you live in Los Angeles, it could be something like LeahLovesLAFood. You could also incorporate food puns, sayings, or other quippy jokes that are short and easy to remember.
Buy Your Domain Name and Hosting Plan
Once you’ve come up with a name, you need to check to see if the domain is available! If a website already exists with that name, you’ll have to change the domain or come up with a new name idea altogether.
This free tool from BlueHost makes it easy to check if your domain name is available:
If the name you came up with is available, you can now purchase it or get it for free with a BlueHost hosting plan.
You can choose to buy your domain name and then shop around for a web host, but we recommend using BlueHost since it’s reliable, inexpensive, and you can get your domain name for free all in one step. It’s also very easy to use, so it’s a great choice for beginners.
A web host is the server for your website, so you have to take this step for your blog to appear on the internet.
How To Set Up BlueHost
Setting up BlueHost is simple; once you’ve checked that your domain name is available, click next to get it for free and set up your account.
There are a few different hosting plans offered by BlueHost to choose from. Most blogs, especially for beginners, work well with a basic plan, shown below. This one is also the least expensive!
Fill out basic account information, and then choose the 36-month plan – if you’re serious about starting a blog, this is a pretty short time frame, and it also offers the cheapest price.
There are other options offered by BlueHost, called “Package Extras”. The only one we recommend is the Domain Privacy Protection, and we strongly recommend it. This prevents your personal information, like your name, address, and phone number from being visible to the public on the internet.
For your own privacy and safety, it’s well worth the 99 cents per month for this protection. The other extras are unnecessary, however. We recommend that you uncheck the other add-ons and save your money.
Complete your purchase and you’re onto the next step in building your website!
Install WordPress
WordPress is probably the most popular blogging software and website creation tool today – most bloggers use WordPress. It’s incredibly intuitive and easy to use, and it’s free with BlueHost, so you’re already well on your way.
Follow these steps to install WordPress:
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- Log into BlueHost.
- Under “Web Builders”, click WordPress.
- Click “Install”.
- Enter your domain name and click “Check Domain”.
- Agree to the Terms and Conditions and click “Install Now”.
After the installation is complete, click “View Credentials” to receive your login information.
Choose a WordPress Theme
Now that you officially have a website, it’s time to make it look good! WordPress themes help you figure out what the website will actually look like, and there are a lot of themes to choose from. Some themes come for free, but for a better looking website, we recommend investing in a premium theme.
Choosing a good theme has many benefits. First, you want your website to look good and reflect your style and the tone of your content. But more than that, a theme can affect how your website performs outside of its visual appeal.
Premium themes ensure that the website is functional and responsive, which is vital to people being able to navigate your blog. A responsive theme will also transition well to smaller screens, like smartphones. Having a high quality theme is also important for SEO purposes. Low quality themes often have coding issues, user issues, or errors that will prevent Google from showing your site in search results.
Since you want people to see your blog, we recommend getting a premium theme. There are a few well-designed, user-friendly themes that we recommend especially for food bloggers.
Recommended WordPress Themes for Food Blogs
Explore these themes or other premium themes and purchase your favorite – be sure to read reviews to learn how it performs. Once you have a theme, install it by following these instructions:
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- In WordPress, click “Appearance” on the left side panel.
- Click “Add New”.
- Click “Upload Theme” and choose the theme you purchased.
- Click “Install”.
- Click “Activate” to make the theme live on your site.
Now that your theme is installed, you can start adding content to your website!
Add WordPress Plugins
If you want your website to perform its best, it’s worth installing some plugins as well. Plugins are tools that add extra features to your site. Some are free, and others are paid.
There are endless plugins that you can look into, but we’ll recommend a few for food bloggers:
- Yoast SEO: SEO is complex, so to learn more you should do research, but a good start is installing the Yoast SEO plugin. This will ensure that your content is optimized for search results.
- Social Sharing Plugins: There are plenty of these to choose from, but all food blogs should have a social sharing tool. This makes it possible for readers to easily share your blog posts on social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and so on.
- Tasty Recipes: If you’re starting a recipe blog, this plugin is for you. This makes it easier to format recipes, and makes it easy for others to share them.
- Tasty Pins: Pinterest is a common place for food bloggers or people searching for recipes. This plugin helps share your posts and pictures to Pinterest with links back to your website.
Set Up Tracking for Your Blog
Once your website is up and running with all your great content, you’ll want to know how that content performs! There are a variety of analytics and tracking tools you can use to see where your posts rank on search engines, how much traffic they receive, and much more.
Some analytics tools are expensive, but there are also free options that work great. Google offers free tools, like Google Analytics, that every website should use. All you have to do is set up a free account and then add a tracking code to your website.
Another free tool from Google is Google Search Console – this offers more performance metrics, and ensures that your website is running well and the pages are recognized by Google.
There are other paid tools like SEMRush that offer more comprehensive metrics, so if you’re serious about your food blog it may be worthwhile to look into other tools!
Start Sharing Content
You now have a fully running website, complete with a theme, plugins, and analytics – so get posting! As always, share quality content and you are sure to find an audience. Promote your food blog on social media, with hashtags, or through other free channels. Learning how to write for SEO can help your blog posts rank even better, but focus on quality and have fun with your new food blog!
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