Food Blogging FM 005:
The Art Of Working With Brands Brought To You By: RecipeThis.com
Introduction Welcome to our fifth food blogging Podcast. I have actually discussed this already on Recipe This but with so many people asking questions and wanting to know more I thought I would come back with a second helping. So let’s talk all about the art of working with brands. The first brand I ever worked with online was a British retail brand. They wanted me to review their product on my local travel blog and I was over the moon that someone was actually interested in partnering with me. It was back in 2009 so a lot has changed since then but it got me hooked on working with brands and makes you realise that anything is possible if you put the effort in. Plus if you think that once you have a site with traffic you can earn $10,000+ a month for reviewing brands products then it is something that needs to be high up your plan of action for your food blog. Think of it in stages and start your branding from as early on in your blogs life span as you can. When your food blog is new brands will send you products, they wont give you any money for doing so because you don’t have the traffic, but they will accept an exchange of a review for a product sample. Then as you grow your food blog and you do have traffic and you want to charge for reviews you can contact companies and say I have worked with X,Y and Z here is the reviews, here is my media kit and I would love to work with you. It is your way of completing your internship before charging for the real thing! But at the same time offer a couple of review slots a week and have a minimum value that you will accept in order for them to receive a
review. It might be $30 retail value of goods, that way you can make your money back by selling anything you don’t want on eBay. It really is that simple so let’s get started…..
Monetising Your Food Blog So your end goal will always be making money. You are not there to work for free. And just because you are receiving samples in exchange for reviews doesn’t mean you are not going to make money out of it. You receive a $2000 ice cream maker and use it to make your kids loads of ice creams with. You then have a tug of war with the kids whether it will be sold after the review or you will keep it. If you sell it you could easily get $1000 for it because it is a state of the art Italian one and all of a sudden your review is worth $1000 and you have already made another $160 thanks to the Amazon associates programme. Then on top of that you rank on the first page of Google for the item (as it is fairly unheard of) and this leads to a regular affiliate income. Then you ask a brand for one of their juicers. But the brand is a really nice company and they send you three of their products to choose from to review. You then end up with $800 worth of product and only need to review their $200 juicer. You keep the juicer and sell the other two products and although you have sold on eBay you have still made $500. You also realise that your slow cooker, blender, casserole dish and spiralizer all need updating and it is much cheaper for you to spend a couple of hours of your time reviewing them, compared to buying them from scratch. All the above is us and what we achieved via working with brands in our first couple of months on RecipeThis.com. A brand new blog working with brands. We have worked with a lot of brands already and the blog
is four months old. It has got a long way to go as far as traffic is concerned and right now we are working with brands so that we can build up our portfolio and then when our traffic is at acceptable levels for charging then we will charge a fee. If you follow our blog post about brands you can read an example of a letter to send out to interested parties that we use. The link is in our resources at the end of the transcript.
Building Traffic To Your Food Blog What I love about working with brands is the traffic you can achieve from it. You are standing side by side with one of your favourite brands and it is your opportunity to really shine. You post their product as a review on your blog and then you share it on all your social media channels. Then if it is a recipe that you have made with their gadget or with their seasoning you will also share it on recipe sharing sites. Because unlike doing a recipe about something rather common, you are doing a review about a product that hardly has any reviews, you are then creating lots of SEO traffic along the way. This can then lead to lots of long term affiliate sales via your affiliate link in your review. So in the long term you are creating a long term passive income stream. But the best bit is yet to come. Not only will you get found when people search for your brand, but your brand will share your review too. They want great PR and a good quality review is perfect for them. They will share it on Twitter and any of their other social media channels without you even having to ask. The best benefit of this is that the more social media shares you get, then the better your SEO positions will be, so you are into a winner.
Plus when you get loads of social media shares you will be able to show this in your future media kit.
Our Podcast Sponsor For this week our Podcast sponsor is the KDP. I wanted to focus on the Kindle Direct Publishing as they are a great way of bundling up your recipes that feature your favourite brands and making some extra money from them. Last week I featured on the blog how I recycle content onto the Kindle and this can just as easily apply to brands that you are working with. The only difference here is that you can get the brands permission to use them in publicity and the majority will let you. Or alternatively at the end of doing a review on a Stevia product you can find all your Stevia recipes on your blog and then bundle them up into a really good recipe ebook. It can then end on the review you have just published about their product. Everybody is then a winner!
Techy Chit Chat So for this Podcast I am actually continuing and not passing you onto Dominic. He is still here editing this Podcast it was just my department with the technical side of working with brands. The first process is to decide which brands to work with. I work mainly off Amazon.co.uk because this is the local Amazon to us and is easy for finding products that ship locally to us in Portugal. I will have keywords or categories that my assistant will work off. For example she has just finished completing the entire grocery section on Amazon.co.uk for the last 90 days. In 30 days she will do it again for the
last 30 days so that we are always going after newly listed products that need promoting. She also works on the kitchen section, kindle section for ebook reviews and other similar areas. She also works off common keywords such as slow cooker, food steamer, juicer, spiralizer etc. Then she will present me with a spreadsheet which will have the results for the keyword including the Amazon link, the email, the alexa rank, product name and of course the brand. This spreadsheet is then added to each week and it makes an easy reference when I have a lot of brands contacting me. But once you have the research in place you have the next stage to think about. Your first concern is what your sign up rate is. If 1 in every 10 sends you the goods and you need 2 goods a week, then you will need to have 20 emails being sent out a week. We do more than this just to make allowances for some brands taking ages to send you goods. So what should you put in the email?
Your name Their name What you can offer them Your website so that they can check it out Previous reviews that you have done Why they should do a review The name of the product
For me the most important part is that you are sharing with them what is in it for them. Secondly it is very important to mention the product as the chances are you are dealing with a PR company that deals with 200 different brands.
In our working with brands blog post you can find a really good template to use that we alter for the different campaigns we are doing. Our assistant will then forward any replies back to us and we will make sure we are quick to respond so that we come across as a reliable brand. Then when the goods arrive we will write down what we have and keep a copy of emails. Then email them back when the product has arrived and then again when the review is live. We will then promote the post via social media and then after that the process starts again. In reality it is really easy to do. And of course practice makes perfect!
Food Blogging Q & A Each Podcast I pick a question that has been asked on one of the Facebook Groups and then answer it for you. For this session I was asked how much you could charge brands to review products on your site. As a general rule I say the following works out pretty well: Charge $1 for every 1000 page views you have per month. So if you have 30,000 page views you can charge $30, for 50,000 it would be $50 or for 100,000 you can increase your price to $100 and so on as your blog grows. Then if your niche is a micro niche to the product you are reviewing. I.e. you are a Paleo breakfast site and it is a Paleo breakfast product or if it is a slow cooker and you are a slow cooker blog then you have leverage to
charge more. In these cases you can triple your rates as you are very niche specific. Also if you are reviewing ebooks you can charge double those original rates up there. So expect to earn $60 as a starting rate and then once you hit 50,000 page views you can then charge $100. And then as your traffic grows your income does too. It is like you are promoting yourself each time you boost your traffic. With ebooks you can also charge a flat rate of $60 from the start. Take the recipe ebook I reviewed for a Small Cheese In Provence I received just over $60 for doing that.
Round Up! Thanks for joining us in our Podcast and we look forward to sharing more of our food blogging wisdom with you in the future.
Links & Resources Mentioned In This Podcast A Small Cheese In Provence Review The Ultimate Guide To Getting Brands To Send You Products How To Create A Recipe Ebook Every Month (using recycled content) Kindle Direct Publishing
How To Get Involved In Our Podcasts Our Podcasts are easily accessible no matter how you prefer to access them. You can download them as a PDF from our blog by going to recipe this dot com and visiting the Podcasts category. This is also very good for getting the links to material that is mentioned in the Podcast.
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Thanks again for listening and best of luck with your food blog.
Samantha & Dominic Milner http://recipethis.com And don’t forget to connect with us on social media:
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