Food Blogging FM 002: Adsense & Food Blogging!

Food Blogging FM 002:

Adsense & Food Blogging Brought To You By: RecipeThis.com

Introduction Welcome to our second Podcast from Food Blogging FM. When you have had 11 years working online you have learnt a lot. You have found out that some things are not worth trying and other things you want to keep a deep dark secret as you don’t want your competition knowing about it.

But what really happens is that you become seasoned and going back to the beginning to teach others can be hard because you don’t want to throw at them information overload and you want to help them and not let them feel like food blogging is too hard.

Frankly food blogging is rather easy. You pick a niche, you build a site, you add content, then you market it and monetise. It is as simple as that. And starting with this Podcast we will be showing you just how easy it is!

Monetising Your Food Blog I decided to kick off these monetising chapters with the most famous income stream of them all. This is not unique to any niche, but the starting point that we all have.

And if you haven’t guessed we are talking about big, bad Adsense. Love them or loathe them they will always be the starting point.

This is simply because they are easy and you can be approved very quickly. Generally they require 10 decent blog posts on your site and then you can put in for approval.

Then based on your traffic depends on what you earn. For example you might get 1% of your readers clicking through to your Adsense ads and out of those you might get $0.40 per

click. So if you have 10,000 visitors a month which is about normal for someone with a young blog then you can expect to earn $40 a month.

But many blogs fail to get a 1% click through and $0.40 is a generous amount as many food bloggers report receiving less than $0.15 a click.

You add this up as a main income source and the effort you have put into your food blog and you’re suddenly earning peanuts.

This is also at the time when most people get bored and give it up as a bad job.

But unless you are getting a million visitors to your site a month you are never going to do well from it. I like it as something in the background as a filler while I am working on other things. You need to be thinking from day 1 how you are going to monetise your site without Adsense or with Adsense playing a small part in the deal.

Are you going to get an ebook out on the Kindle super fast? Are you going to sell private advertising or are you going to consult for other people?

So seriously think about it as if you rely on Adsense and you’re a low traffic site it will get rather depressing and you’ll be lucky if Adsense covers your main outgoings!

Building Traffic To Your Food Blog When you start a food blog the first thing you are thinking about is traffic. Why do all those food bloggers have thousands of visitors and I don’t? How long will it take me until I get the same traffic as them?

But I always say that those people have had blogs for years and that you on a two month old blog should never feel like you can compete with them.

But what you should remember is that most of these went into food blogging as a hobby and were never looking to build their traffic from day one, so you have an advantage in this.

But where do you start with your traffic building? Is there one place that I would suggest to do first?

Absolutely!

I would start by tackling both social media and SEO at the same time. SEO is made up of links back to your website and each time your content is shared on social media that counts as one link back. The more natural link backs you have then the better positions you will have in the search engines.

At the same time (because of your social media sharing) you are building up your presence on social media and building up a following. These are the people that in the future will share your content and spread the word.

You can achieve the basics of your traffic just by making sure every recipe you post goes onto Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest & Google Plus.

Then you can worry about other traffic once you are in a routine with this.

At the time of recording this and when our blog was just short of three months old we checked the stats and discovered that just from social media we had already generated 1939 visitors and from SEO thanks to our social media we have generated another 3141 so the traffic can add up!

Now before we move onto the Techy Chit Chat with Dominic I wanted to discuss with you our Podcast sponsor for today. I always want to use Podcast sponsors that are fitting with what we are learning about. With the topic being social media it felt right that I had to mention who we use to help us with our social media.

Well life wouldn’t be the same without Hootsuite (you can access Hootsuite by clicking here) what they do is schedule your blog posts ready for social media. It means that you can load up your blog post to Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram all at the same time. It makes life so much easier when you have all these social media channels to think about! Then if you also share engaging updates on your social media channels then you can do these in bulk too. For example we post engaging content daily to Twitter and we will load up a months worth at once!

I also pay for my Hootsuite yearly which saves a lot of money and it is so simple to use and incredibly newbie friendly.

I was also asked a couple of weeks ago by a coaching client what tools I pay for and I said just the basics and that Hootsuite was the main one. I think he was rather shocked that I didn’t own loads of them!

Techy Chit Chat For the techy chit chat this week we want to discuss the speed of your blog. Way too many food blogs load that slow that you get bored before you actually go to the recipe. You also end up scrolling down from large image to large image and something has to be done about this if you want to build a long term business. Yes social media is important but so are your readers.

So I am passing you onto Dominic while he talks you through website speed…….

Hello its Dominic here and this week i´am going to be talking to you about speed. That’s not the drug it’s the speed of a website one that I have noticed about food blogs in general is that they are pretty slow.

That’s because the pictures are of a very high quality and that is ok for the pictures of the food but for the speed of the website it is bad and the site can take along time to load and then your visitors will go somewhere else.

If your site is taking longer than 2 seconds to load then visitors will close the webpage and go somewhere else.

That is something you do not want. So at Recipe This I have narrowed the speed down to a few areas that are quite easy to understand.

Firstly a caching plugin and this plugin basically takes your webpage and squashes it down and when your webpage gets reloaded again and again it will gets saved in your browser so will load virtually instantly after a short time. On recipe this we use wp rocket and it integrates well with a cdn, and we will be getting onto them shortly.

Another plugin is wp-supercash and there is w3 cache as well and these I believe are the main plugins and we opted for wp rocket and we paid $35 for a licence for the year so we use that and you get the to renew the licence every year.

In my podcasts in the future you will see I like sites and companies that offer great support, so nearly everybody we use always has great support and that is why we chose wp rocket over the other plugins.

So to work with your caching plugin we use a cdn, content delivery network to describe a cdn I would say if your website or your server is stationed in Texas likes are is, through knownhost then if someone in the uk wants to load the website it will be pretty quick but not as fast as someone from Texas.

So if we add a content delivery network which we have and we use Maxcdn those files will be loaded onto an edge server from maxcdn

which will be based in London so when the English person loads are website it will be just as quick for them as for someone who live in America so that’s how a content delivery network works.

Also it stops your server resources getting out of hand, another different cdn is cloudflare and that also has security included but it is more expensive than maxcdn which we get 100gb a month to use and it is more than enough for $9.

Now to the images all you need is your server should be set up to be gzipped compressed and we have it on our server and I believe it is available on other vps servers shared hosting and dedicated servers which you do not need unless you are getting hundreds of thousands of visitors every month.

So what you need as well is an image optimizer this is when you have taken your image and uploaded them to your blog sometimes 6 images are uploaded to your recipe posts which is understandable. So you want to make the file size smaller but not compromise on quality so you need an image optimizer we use kracken.io.

Yeah abit weird sounding but it works and works very well we pay $5 a month for 500 mb of our uploads of our images every month and the support we have received from these is top notch again.

I have not come across another version of an image optimizer that has being around as long and has had so many positive reviews as kracken has. So you can set up kracken on your blog and set it to automatic and when you upload an image it will automatically compress your images into a smaller file and then your image will be optimized for your blog.

It will look the same on any device and you will not be able to tell the difference from your optimized image and your original 9mb image with the naked eye.

If you ever want to check the speed of your site then they are several websites that can do this we use: tools.pingdom.com and this is a free area where you can go and put your URL in with different servers and get your speed for your site. We have about a 6-7 second load time for Australia and from Texas we average about 2-3 second load time.

Our site is getting heavy now after a few months but also it comes down to the code and the fastest theme we have used is thesis. We like thesis but for the food niche we are now in we really like the genesis framework, we are on the daily dish pro theme and it does everything we want and also it is another very clean coded theme.

Its all getting abit technical now but another speed test site is: webpagespeedtest.com and gxmetric.com is another one. Just put into google page speed test and there is several to choose from. They will all give you an option to pay so you can have a very detailed version of your sites speed.

So hopefully you can take some advice and get your images optimized for speed and it should help with your search rankings as people are going more mobile now and it needs to be as smaller file as possible and you can check your website through googles mobile usability site which is part of your webmaster tools area. Anyway I will pass you back to the better looking part of this partnership now and speak to you again next week.

Food Blogging Q & A Each week I pick a question that has been asked on one of the Facebook food groups and answer it for you. The big question asked this week is whether or not you should be on blog post or with your own domain?

Well the answer is yes you really need to be on your own hosting.

You need to have your hosting in the same way that a market trader needs his own pitch. If a market trader doesn’t have his own pitch he could simply arrive for work one day to find out that his competition got there earlier and helped themselves to his pitch. No warning just gone and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it! Also no one will want

to sell their produce on his stall for fear that it will one day happen.

This can also happen with a food blog and using Blogspot. Someone could see that someone’s food blog is doing very well, report it to Blogspot and then claim the spare domain the next day. The blog is then gone and forgotten about and you will be forced to start again from scratch.

Plus from a point of view of monetising a lot of advertising opportunities will end up passing you by. Brands wont want to advertise on free blogs as they will consider it as being a short term site and this then limit what you earn.

When it costs just $10 a year for a domain name, or slightly more if you get an expired one like we did from Godaddy Auctions and then hosting for your blog often costs less than $10 a month. So its very cheap for what you are getting.

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      

Google Adsense Hootsuite Godaddy Auctions Name Cheap (preferred place for cheap domain names) BlueHost (perfect for starter hosting) Knownhost (our VPS hosting)

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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