Food Blogging FM 021: Food Blogging 3 Stage Action Plan

Food Blogging FM 021:

Food Blogging 3 Stage Action Plan Brought To You By: RecipeThis.com

Introduction Welcome to the latest Podcast here at Food Blogging FM and today is all about a very simple look at food blogging and what you need to be doing in order to turn your zero traffic into a lot of traffic.

If you want to reach 1000 page views a day, 2,000 page views or even 10,000 page views a day then this is how to make it happen.

This is our own method for the success of Recipe This and we have used it to go from zero to a million page views and it works perfectly!

This involves a lot of rinse and repeat for each and every new recipe that you produce or any other post you put out on your blog.

None of it is rocket science and none of it is difficult. I find it is more of a case of people wanting to sell you software or programmes that make it seem like you can’t achieve decent traffic without it, or that you need to pay for an expensive Pinterest training programme when you really don’t.

Just follow these as your 3 step plan, like rules of your food blog and you will hit the high traffic levels before you know it.

Stage 1 = The Content No matter what people tell you content will always be king and traffic will be queen. You have to have the amazing content in order for you to build traffic through to your content. You have to keep your readers engaged so that they will share your content and join your mailing list.

The idea is that every piece of content is your best, is of excellent quality and if you were the reader you would love it and return for more.

Next on the agenda is to see what your readers already like and give them more of the same. We are all in different micro niches so you have

to ask yourself what you would be looking for if you were them and give them more of the same.

Take me for example and the content at RecipeThis.com. We are very much focused around kitchen gadgets for families. We focus around the slow cooker, electric pressure cooker, Airfryer, spiralizer, blender and soup maker to name a few. Our audience is really into cutting down on processed food and wants to save time and to save money at the same time.

You can start off with the content on your blog to be widespread across your niche. For example if you have a vegan slow cooker blog you can focus each month on a different vegan food and then see what is paying off and what your readers want more of.

Then dig deep into your Google Analytics to see exactly which posts have taken off the most and rinse and repeat.

Let’s say you have a baking blog and you have done very well with your chocolate chip cookies. They’re your take on the classic recipe and you love them and so do your readers.

You’re on the top of the search engines for them, it gets pinned everyday on Pinterest and it’s the main source of traffic for your blog.

So what do you do to increase it?

Well you produce a series of different chocolate chip cookies. One could be a step by step tutorial, another could be for dark chocolate chips, another for white or another could be a really naughty one with 3 lots of chocolate.

You could then expand out to cookie dough cake, chocolate cookie dough ice cream and even one made into the most over the top cheesecake you have ever seen or tasted.

Then when you have done your main work around different versions of what your readers want then you go looking for something similar. You could do some British cookies, some French ones, and some Italian ones and so on. You could also do other kinds of biscuits that many associate with chocolate chip cookies.

After this you would put together a post highlighting your top chocolate chip cookies from around the Web. Naturally, it would start with yours and then you would feature other bloggers and ask them to share your post.

For us though we found that our popular posts focused upon healthy versions of fast food classics in the Airfryer. Therefore our first popular Airfryer burger recipe has been repeated with lots of other burger recipes.

Each and every one of them has done well and even though they are part of the same food family, they are all different without feeling like you are repeating previous content.

Another reason to do this is because Google loves association via keywords. Therefore if they associate you with a certain keyword then it is easier to rank for more and more similar ones.

I have just downloaded my data from Google Webmaster Tools and did a search for Airfryer burger and found that I have 28 positions in Google.com on the first page and for other similar keywords there is another 30 positions in the search engines.

If you actually put the effort in and find out what people are searching for you could soon end up with loads of traffic just from a series of blog posts rather than playing Russian roulette with the search engines and hoping for the best.

Plus I find it really interesting to see what ranks in the search engines and what people find me for.

I also recommend that you read our SEO posts so that you can see how simple it is to get your content search engine and reader friendly at the same time.

Stage 2 = Social Media These days to market a recipe blog all you need is social media. In the old days you needed article submission sites, accounts on loads of blog post directories and social media started and ended with sites that nobody has heard of now.

Yet these days we have it so easy. Promote and re-promote ourselves on social media and we have it made. It is literally as simple as that.

Post to your main social media channels – when your recipe goes live post it to all your social media channels. Then a week later post it again to them to remind people about the content and to suggest that they share it.

Take part in social sharing threads on Facebook – These are a great source for sharing each others content and you would be surprised how many people use these that have a high social media following. Just like the rest of us they want to grow more and more. They want to go viral again and again.

Post to social media groups – There are a lot of social media groups out there that are perfect for sharing your content. It is like being in front of millions of followers instead of the low amount of social media followers you actually have. I am members of over 300 groups on Pinterest, several on Facebook, subreddits on Reddit and not to mention all the groups on Google Plus. Just get yourself out there and in front of them everyday.

Be on Tumblr – Tumblr is often overlooked but it is a great social media site. It is like Twitter met Instagram and they fell in love. A good mixture of the two. You simply post your latest recipes to them, interact and also post to the Tumblr group pages. Tumblr is in my top 10 traffic sources and it is great fun too!

Finish with Yummly – Yummly is a fantastic recipe social media channel.

You simply share your recipe and that is it. Great traffic and we noticed excellent traffic from the site even before we even joined.

Do this for every recipe you bring out and before you know it you will be getting at least 500 social shares for each post and on a popular post over 5000 social shares. These social media shares also add to your backlinks for your site and because of these backlinks you will rank high in the search engines.

Then whenever people are searching for recipes that they want to feature on their blog then they will see you and it will open your traffic avenues even more.

There are of course many other ways you can promote your content such as the 101 ways we mentioned in a previous podcast. But just by doing the social media I have outlined above can make a huge difference.

So your social media and your content with bring you traffic from many avenues.

Stage 3 = Recycled Content Next on the agenda is the recycled content. You have made all this amazing content and you have published it on your blog and then shared it on your social media.

Then you move onto the next post!

And it is like “is that it?”

Well no it isn’t….

Next you need to be getting out there and recycling your content to make lots of other mediums to showcase it in.

My favourite ways of doing this are: Take a range of recipes and make them into an ebook. Use them to either build up a subscribers base for your mailing list or like we do have it for making an income and building up your mailing list at the same time.

We have a range of 10-30 recipe ebooks and all of them are available on the Kindle, Apple, Barnes & Noble and so many other places. These ebook sales add up to a great passive income and the more ebooks you have for sale the better your sales and long term subscribers.

Create them into an audio – Don’t just stop at the ebook you can also create a ebook into an audio file and also sell it on Amazon.

Create a Podcast – Podcasts are a great way to create a new medium for your content. Take a recipe that you have, record it as a Podcast and have it submitted to Itunes. Itunes is an amazing search engine in itself and while everyone else is producing videos for You Tube you can be there on an untapped market that is crying out for more and more recipes. Plus people love to listening to content on their phones and how much easier is it in the kitchen to follow a recipe via a quick MP3.

Create You Tube Videos – You can also expand on the Podcasts and create You Tube videos too. Then when people view your recipes they can have the option to listen to the Podcast or watch the You Tube video. It then allows you to have your work available in several mediums.

Create Infographics – Infographics are a great way to increase social shares and it is amazing how many times they will get shared. It is thanks to recycling content on a Paleo post and turning it into a graphic that one of my Paleo posts has received over 15,000 social shares. Plus if you have a blog post featuring a review, it is a great way to increase social media traffic and keep your sponsored partners happy.

Make small graphics – What about turning your content into social media graphics? Grab a witty sentence from your recipe and turn it into a quote, then share it on all our social media channels and point it back to the post.

Use it for email updates – When you send out your weekly newsletter to your subscribers why not include one with a full recipe. People like to see this and it’s a great way to bring more attention to a favourite recipe and it can include prompts for your social media links.

There are of course many other things you can do to promote your food blog. But these are the basics that are easy and that you can get long term traffic from. I want to mention other traffic methods, but sometimes it can be crazy and you can overwhelmed with everything, so consider this your starting point. Then once you are passed your starting point progress to our 101 ways to promote your recipe Podcast.

That’s A Wrap Thanks for listening to our Podcast and we have loved sharing with you our 3 step system for great traffic to your blog. We thoroughly recommend that you follow these stages as it can really make the difference to your blog. You might be trying to break the next level

of traffic on your blog and this will give you some new ideas to put it into practice.

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Thanks again for listening and best of luck with your food blog.

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