Food Blogging FM 012: Be Everywhere

Food Blogging FM 012:

Be Everywhere Brought To You By: RecipeThis.com

Introduction Welcome to our twelfth food blogging Podcast.

Another fortnight has passed and I am here again sharing with you my words of wisdom of life as a food blogger. My goal is for my site to be generating 6 figure traffic and 6 figure income within the first 18 months of my blogs life.

I sold a 6 figure diet business to be able to dedicate my life to my passion for food blogging and before that sold a 6 figure internet marketing business in order to buy my house.

But I have never done it as quick as I plan to for RecipeThis but then again this is the first time that I have had all my time available to put into one blog.

It still has that exciting fresh feeling. The same fresh feeling of Dominic’s roast turkey or when you have just painted your house and the smell of fresh paint fills the room.

But as I look at the stats of my old diet site and wish those stats was my new food blog I decided it was a great time to show you how to achieve that and how to achieve it without too much expense.

Be Everywhere Is Key The most important part is to “be everywhere� if there is one system you are going to have in place it is this one and this again brings me back to the importance of niche selection. Because without a micro niche you will struggle to make this happen and to grow fast.

Let’s take a look at a few niches so that I can explain what I mean: Avocados – delicious healthy fat and very popular among people on a range of diets. If you had a site dedicated to avocados people would associate you with avocado recipes and avocado diet tips. You would have excellent scope with a huge range of diets including Weight Watchers, Slimming World & Paleo. Then you would also have those that avoid specific foods so the vegan, vegetarian, dairy free and grain free people would also be interested in what your recipes are about.

Pork chops – Pork chops would also be a great niche and your options here is that you will have a lot of people that are in the frugal niche that you could market yourself to. Also because you are marketing yourself on a type of food it would be easy for SEO and social media domination.

Diet blog – A diet blog such as one centred around Slimming World (which is what my old diet site was) would give you a lot of quick SEO positions and social media followers. We had about 110,000 page views a month even without blogging for a while. This of course shows that passive income does work!

By Gadget – the traffic is already starting to come together from the kitchen gadgets section that is our priority. For example we have had over 7000 SEO visitors to our site in the last 30 days and the majority of these come from keywords to do with the Airfryer. Avoid the slow cooker as everyone is doing that and look outside the box.

So to start with make sure you have a micro niche. If you don’t have a month dedicated to a theme on your blog that can be a micro niche. For example we had:      

Soup maker recipes for January Airfryer dessert recipes for February Spiralizer recipes for March One pot 30 minute meals for April Frugal family recipes for May And currently it is ice cream maker recipes for June

We are then getting a lot of traditional recipes out on our blog but at the same time focusing around gadgets and family cooking.

The Be Everywhere Action Plan So when you have a micro niche or a planned monthly theme you need to have a “be everywhere” action plan. The be everywhere basically means that if your micro niche for example is avocados that every time someone thinks about them or they are mentioned YOU are there.

You become the back bone of that keyword, the person that everyone thinks of and the content that people share. It is like dominating the market and holding the monopoly through your site.

Start with Twitter This applies whenever someone mentions avocados you should be there replying to them, retweeting their content and sharing your own. If someone was to put in any of the main avocado keywords into Twitter then they should find you. Of course you cant be the only one talking about avocados but you are keeping people talking and spreading the word whenever possible.

Schedule non-planned tweets on a daily basis talking about avocados and why you love them, the benefits and simple updates to get people talking and to get retweets.

I also use Hootsuite for this. They have a brilliant feature where you can have really quick access to tweets based around your keyword. So you could have a stream just for avocado and then quickly be able to reply to people and retweet content.

And also remember to use ritetag as it is a great software for checking out what tags are popular and which tags you should be using in your updates.

Bring the same plan to your other social media channels It is important that you do the same on other social media. Have the same plan for Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram and Google Plus.

With Pinterest the beauty is that it is easy to make it happen. You can have a board for each of the keywords to do with avocados and pin peoples content and your own that is niche specific all day. The more you pin other peoples content the more people will pin yours. Join lots of niche related groups as well and then you can use this to increase your niche visibility.

I also call this my Pinterest problem. I was looking on Pinterest recently for inspiration for new ideas for airfryer recipes as I am obsessed with making sure there are not any that I am missing. I searched airfryer recipes and found out of the top 100 pins that came up 70% of them were mine. And that is what you want to see.

If say you have a theme each month and each month ends like that and is in the Pinterest world that you can easily build up your traffic to 50,000 page views just from Pinterest per month.

With Facebook – Beyond sharing your content on your page and talking about avocados you can go beyond this. You can share other peoples avocado recipes and stories, you can post to peoples walls talking about your content, you can run Facebook ad campaigns and if there is a mention of avocados on Facebook it will have something to do with you.

With Instagram – I love with Instagram that you can do a similar thing to Twitter and Pinterest but it is much easier and you can do it on an evening while watching TV. Apart from your own Instagram content share other peoples, like every piece of content with your keyword in it and make sure you are following every person that is talking about avocados. This will make people aware of you when they think about them.

With Google Plus – Now this site is the easy one. Unlike the other social media channels it doesn’t require much work. You just want to search Google Plus and to make sure that your avocado content is out there and that people are aware of it. Share other peoples and they will share yours. On Google+ content does very well in the search engines because Google looks after its own, so it is your chance to do this.

Going Beyond Social Media So we have started with social media for putting together a be everywhere campaign but there are lots of other places you can be too.

Here are my favourites: Create an infographic – An infographic can spread the word very

quickly and really help to grow your traffic. Then go out there and connect with other bloggers in your niche and ask them to feature your infographic on your site and in exchange you will promote it and create a write up for them. Have it shared among as many social media groups as you can and because they are big and stand out they will get a lot of shares.

Complete regular guest posts and interviews – get yourself out there on fellow blogs sites. Offer your services as a guest poster and make sure your content is not only on your own site but on other peoples too. If you do 1 interview or 1 blog post on an average traffic blog you can expect 300 new blog visitors. Do 10 of these a month and you’ve added 3000 long term visitors to your site.

Blogger Outreach – This has to be what has helped me grow this blog so far and what helps it to grow. Get in contact with your fellow food bloggers. For many you might see them as competition but they are also your best friends and together you can help them grow as they help you grow.

Aim for contacting at least 300 fellow food bloggers a week if not more.

Connect with them and share their content on social media and build up a circle of fellow food blogging friends.

Work on your mailing list – your mailing list is your long term way of spreading the word about your blog.

You can have messages set up on autopilot so that people that were interested in your avocados six months ago are still part of your avocado community six months later.

Work on improving one area each month – There is only so many hours in the day and many people running

food blogs have full time jobs. They also have content to write for their own site and a life to live. Therefore I recommend that if you are listening to this Podcast and feeling overwhelmed start with one item a month. Work on social media one month, your mailing list another and then build your confidence up. Watch your traffic on a daily basis and see what helps it grow the best. Then simply rinse and repeat.

Our Podcast Sponsor For this fortnight our Podcast sponsor is Buzz Sumo. This site is very expensive for what you get, but they do a 7 day trial so you can do your research and then cancel your subscription as there is no credit card needed for the trial.

If it was the price it is per year instead of per month then I would be happy to pay for it.

But basically what it does is that you can search any blog or any keyword and it will tell you the social shares for it. So you could see what your top shared content or find other people to interact with that have a lot of shares.

You can find out more at buzzsumo.com

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 to increase their traffic when it just won’t move.

Well we all have times when the traffic stays the same. I find that you will have two months in a row with a similar traffic and then have a boost

on the third month.

To increase traffic I suggest that you look at your social media strategy and what you can do better this month compared to what you did last month. Then apply the same rules to your SEO and make sure you are getting out regular niche specific content.

I also find it helpful to read other peoples income and traffic reports as you can then see what their traffic sources are and which of these you are not involved in right now. If you go to RecipeThis.com you can access all our income reports and look at the traffic growth.

Well That’s A Wrap Thanks for joining us in our latest Podcast. We have worked off the “be everywhere” scenario for a number of years now and it works as a great way to build up your business.

If you think this is often what PR companies are there to achieve and as a newbie blogger (or one that wants increased visibility) you can achieve it too.

We recommend that you download the transcript so that you access all the links mentioned and that you come back regularly to listen to our other food blogging podcasts.

Links & Resources Mentioned In This Podcast        

RiteTag Recipe This Income Reports Buzz Sumo Hootsuite Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google+

 Instagram

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.

Alternatively you can listen to them like you are now. You can also subscribe to our iTunes feed or you can be kept in the loop by joining our mailing list at recipe this dot com forward slash the food blogging newsletter.

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:    

http://facebook.com/recipethis https://twitter.com/recipe_this https://pt.pinterest.com/recipethis/ https://www.instagram.com/recipethisblog/

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