Food Blogging FM 003: Food Blogging In 2016

Food Blogging FM 003:

Food Blogging In 2016 Brought To You By: RecipeThis.com

Introduction Welcome to our third food blogging Podcast.

This week’s theme has come together after coaching a new client last week. He wanted to know why his blog was not generating traffic and income and that he had been hard at it with his online business for more than five years. He then mentioned that he was a huge fan of mine and he had been following my methods for all that time. He liked my content, he liked my traffic and income ideas yet he was heavily in debt and it had never worked for him.

He wasn’t very forward with information about his business so it took me a while (well about 90 minutes) before it was really clear about what he had done with his business so far and why it had all gone wrong for him.

First of all he had broken the worst rule of blogging and that was that he hadn’t blogged in a long time with his last post going out in 2013. And then even worse, he was using auto content brought to him from article directories to produce the content.

So in other words no content and duplicate content. In 2016 it is a disaster waiting to happen. He was also driving traffic using article directories. Article directories were fantastic as a source of traffic back in 2007 before social media took off but not now.

I spent the rest of the coaching session explaining the main differences and how his methods needing to change and it is from this coaching session that made me realise that more and more of us need to be thinking about their blogging business from a modern 2016 point of view.

Monetising Your Food Blog In 2016 I remember when I created my first blog in 2008. It was based around internet marketing and the income sources were very different to what it is now.

You made money from emailing out your subscribers with a paid advert.

This was called a solo advert and it helped the other person build up their mailing list. It was good easy money. It didn’t matter if your mailing list converted or not. This is because it was the responsibility of the person that was paying for the ad to write amazing emails that would do the converting for them.

This was also before the Google Panda and people would pay to have good link backs on people’s sites and basically it turned them into these ugly SEO machines and the personality of a good quality blog just didn’t exist.

You also made more money from banner ad placements than you do today because there was less competition and people felt like it was the best place for traffic.

Now in 2016 the best sources of income are: Private advertisers – even though you can’t make as much for a banner advert you can still get sales. Plus you have the added benefit of sponsored reviews and sponsored articles being the rage. On a popular food blog with 100,000 visitors a month you can expect to make at least $1000 a month from sponsored content.

Advertising networks – What I love about advertising networks in 2016 is that there is a much greater choice. In 2008 you had Adsense or you had Adsense there really wasn’t much choice!

Ebook sales – I was selling ebooks before there was a Kindle. It was the simple PDF and the sales were fantastic. I still get ebook sales but they are never in the level that there were at back then. This is because of more competition but mainly because we are more frugal than we were before. But if you offer an ebook with something unique in it then there is no reason why you won’t get sales.

Affiliate marketing – I really don’t feel like this has changed that much between now and a decade ago. You still had Clickbank back then as the best source of affiliate income and products that converted. The same applies now.

However in 2016 there is a much better choice with affiliate networks and you have the like of Amazon that is perfect for food bloggers that want choice when it comes to which products to promote.

Building Traffic To Your Food Blog In 2016 My first ever website was a diet site that also had recipes on it. It was 2005 and people were suddenly learning (mainly thanks to eBay) that there was the chance to make a living on the internet.

Back then you had very limited places to promote your online business. With no social media, no recipe submission sites it was hard work. You relied on forums, article directories, your mailing list and of course Google Adwords.

Yet in 2016 things have changed a lot. You have social media channels that are perfect for promoting your latest blog posts, everything is about the content and Bing proves to be the leader in decent pay per click traffic.

It is also a waste of time and effort to complete articles for article directories and if done right forums can still bring good traffic your way.

But for us we find that our best sources of traffic (in the order of highest first) are as follows:          

Facebook Google Organic Traffic Bing Organic Traffic Yahoo Organic Traffic Food Gawker Pinterest Oh My Veggies Twitter Taste Spotting AOL Organic

So it is fair to say that on a new food blog in 2016 that SEO, social media and recipe sharing sites are responsible for my traffic!

But we find that if we had stuck with the traffic that had worked in 2005 and not what works in 2016 we would have only ended up with a handful of visitors. So if you are one of those people that still writes articles for article directories or relies to heavily on black hat SEO then take this moment as a time to change and improve your traffic once and for all.

Our Podcast Sponsor For this week our Podcast sponsor is the Daily Dish Theme by StudioPress this is the exact theme that we run on our blog. We chose this as our blog sponsor as this was the best thing to happen as far as blogs are concerned in 2016 compared to in 2006.

Back then the best you had was free food blog themes and nothing special and all that code did a lot of damage to your site. Yet you have something lovely and simple and modern to take your blog to the next level.

Techy Chit Chat In 2016 For the techy chit chat this week I wanted to share with you the way that the world has changed as far as blogs and websites are concerned.

It was Christmas 2008 when I started my first blog, a few months later I had a blogging course out. I remember writing a module showing people how to install Wordpress for the first time and picking a theme. Back then Dominic wasn’t involved in our online business and was home schooling our son Kyle. So when he was ready and we had finally got Kyle into school, I gave him the modules and he followed my tutorials.

Now in 2016 he knows a lot more about Wordpress, setting up blogs and the technical side that we should know about blogs. So he has just come into the office now to give his input, so let me pass you over to Dominic‌‌ Hello, things change so quickly on the internet and I have to check everyday to see if we need any plugins updating or the theme has an update. But this was not always the case.

When I first started helping out with the business wordpress was around but not as big as it is nowadays. You had to rely on normal webpages using html to get a decent page template for a sign up page.

But not now. Wordpress uses php and it has had numerous updates over the past few years and now we are into version 4 and you have so much choice now regarding themes and plugins. So you just do not need extra html pages added on just use the page templates within your WordPress

install and theme. You can even get themes that are based around sign up pages now.

We have used several different themes and we have not really being happy until we tried Thesis for the first time but unfortunately I was not confident enough to use it so we ditched it for a cheaper theme because we did not think we would get our money’s worth out of it.

After last week and me talking about the speed of a website this comes down to the theme you choose as well. How well coded it is makes a big difference. Like anything you get what you pay for and after getting to grips with Thesis version 2 we loved it did not have what we were looking for and genesis did.

We consider both these companies to be as good as each other and the themes speak for themselves I would give the edge to The Genesis Framework for a beginner because to change any elements of these themes does not require any coding.

But we found with Thesis 2 you now do not have to know a lot about coding to run it but knowledge if things go wrong can be useful. In my opinion Thesis is the faster of the 2 main themes but does not have as much choice.

When I say heavy on code it just means some themes are coded with the minimum requirement to make the theme work as less code means less time to load the theme. Some themes have a lot of code in them you can take alook in your editor section of your Wordpress installation, it is located under appearance.

Have alook in there and try different themes and just look at a number of files and you will see if you take screenshots between each theme how different they can be and how clutted some can look to others.

Now is a great time to get into blogging and use Wordpress as your blogging platform. You can always start with a .wordpress installation before going straight into your own stand alone installation.

We are now settled with The Genesis framework and the child theme Daily Dish Pro. It does everything we need and if we need extra coding

for the blog they even do a separate plugin so you can make more changes to your blog without touching the code.

I will pass you back to Sam now who will continue with her food blogging Q & A thanks for listening.

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 buy all the domain extensions.

Well should you?

When you buy .com should you buy .net, .biz, .org and all the other extensions?

If you work for a big corporation with Apple or Google then of course you need to. After all you don’t want people profiting from your organisation or people using your name in a negative way. But unless you are a trademark then no one is going to care or want to do it. You have to be a big company for it to be worth their while.

And there are that many different extensions to choose from that you would end up with a huge yearly domain name bill.

We have just our .com and we have no plans either now or in the future to buy up the range.

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 Our Coaching Service Food Gawker Oh My Veggies Taste Spotting Pinterest Twitter Studiopress/Genesis Framework Daily Dish Theme By StudioPress

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/

And to get regular updates from us sign up for our free food blogging newsletter below: http://recipethis.com/thefoodbloggingnewsletter/ We also have a food blogging group on Facebook that you can access at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/472542536277443/ And don’t forget to sign up for an account with this Podcasts sponsor: