Food Blogging FM 004:
The One Year Content Plan Brought To You By: RecipeThis.com
Introduction Welcome to our fourth food blogging Podcast. I love this theme as it showcases what our focus is on our food blog throughout the first year Many people have a set plan of action and that is ours. We will be working on a clearly planned content calendar from the start of the site on the 15th November 2015 to the 14th November 2016. Daily content, lots of social media, lots of SEO, lots of opportunities for people to sign up for my mailing list, lots of recycled content, but all this will happen through the content. Then after that the focus will be on less content and more promotion. But you only have that first year once and it is a perfect time to build up your own traffic and income machine. So using content as your vice listen away to see how it is done
Monetising Your Food Blog Okay so your site is in its first year and you are going to be monetising it with content. So you’re probably wondering how this happens and in mind there is one way that stands out more anything else. And that is the Kindle. But not just the Kindle there is Draft2Digital for getting yourself published on Barnes & Noble, Ibookstore & many others. Each month you have a theme on your blog. For example in January our focus was soup. We did a different soup maker recipe each day for the
majority of the month. Once we had them all scheduled we created an ebook out of them and put the ebook up for sale on both the Kindle & Draft2Digital. (If you grab our transcript you can see examples of these) Then you are creating a good income from your blog. If you are doing one of these each month and each one brings you a sale a day, then after 12 months you have created 12 sales a day, resulting in a monthly income of $750. This is particularly good for turning these channels into an extra source of traffic but at the same time you’re not relying on your own traffic so it wouldn’t matter if it was not that good! Plus as you can edit an ebook and have it ready for the Kindle in an hour, it is not a major effort to add this to your “to do” list. If you like shooting videos you could do the same thing for video. Simply by repurposing your content for video course sites instead of ebook sites. I love doing all this because you have gone to such effort putting your content together so it would be wrong not to make the best use out of it.
Building Traffic To Your Food Blog Many people are put off by the idea of not putting that much effort into their traffic. But what they don’t realise is that their content is creating the traffic. They need to start by making their content SEO friendly. If you think that the majority of bloggers will get at least 60% of their traffic from the
search engines it is something you need to take very seriously from day 1. I have written an article about how I achieve my SEO results and you can read it via the transcript or on the blog post among the links featured. What else should you do though as you don’t want to rely just on the search engines? Well as part of my daily ritual I also: Post all my recipes to recipe submission sites. My favourites include Food Gawker, Taste Spotting, Dishfolio, Healthy Aperture & Oh My Veggies. I have also started this week with My Recipe Magic, Delishogram & Finding Vegan. Make sure that with every recipe it goes to these sites. They wont all be approved but you could get some traffic from it. And the better your recipes are the more chance you have of them being accepted. Next on the agenda is the social media. This will always form an important part of your traffic machine. Some food bloggers complain that their traffic is not moving fast enough and then they mention how limited their social media actually is. So what should you be doing with social media? Firstly – you should be building up your brand on social media by sharing people’s content, getting involved in the conversation, sharing your content and reminding people about your content. I use the hashtag #repost a week later to highlight last weeks blog posts. It gets me a lot more RT than the original post did.
I share all my content to my profiles on:
Twitter Google Plus Facebook Pinterest Instagram
Plus don’t overlook the personal account on Facebook as you want this to be a business machine as well. By people making friends with you on Facebook you can invite them to like your page, add them to your group and chat to them on a personal level. Plus it is so much easier to get 1000 friends on Facebook than it is to get 1000 likes on your page. So make use of it. Plus you also show up in a better position on your personal Facebook page than on your business one. I mentioned using Hootsuite in Podcast #2 and the idea with it is that when you post to your page you can post to your personal account at the same time. So when I post using Hootsuite I have the same update going to Google+ and both my Facebook’s at the same time. The social groups Next on the list should be the social media groups – there are loads of recipe submission sites on Facebook & Pinterest. I have a hard time deciding whether the Pinterest ones or the Facebook ones are best. But when you take into consideration that we do both each day and we get double the traffic from Facebook, maybe Facebook has the X Factor!!! But then again the amount of re-pins and the chances of going viral are so much higher on Pinterest.
Focus on getting approved on 20 high quality groups for both Facebook & Pinterest. Then each time you have a new recipe share it with as many relevant groups as you can. Making sure you are utilising each of the groups you’ve joined. These groups are like you starting off with loads of followers as you are using someone else’s followers to get the content promoted. We personally do this everyday and we have been surprised by the results. But I do suggest that you monitor the shares and likes from each group, then the groups that don’t bring you results you can ditch! Just imagine if you did this with every blog post and how using your content you can be building yourself a fantastic blog business.
Our Podcast Sponsor For this week our Podcast sponsor is Aweber. We personally use it for all our email marketing. We have been with Aweber since 2005 and it has lots of great features for when you want to build up a mailing list. I have looked into Mailchimp and other alternatives but have always found that it always lacked in some of the features. With Aweber you can load up follow up messages so that every X days your new subscriber receives an email from you. Along with the weekly newsletter I send out and the retargeting to the no-opens this allows me to make money direct from my list and is a great starting point for when you want to build your list. The biggest regret bloggers always have is never starting their email list soon enough, so remember the sooner into your first year the better!
Techy Chit Chat
For the techy chit chat this week I wanted to share with you what Plugins you really need on your blog in order to get your content shared. There are always questions on groups over which plugins to work and which ones are useless so Dominic is going to share with you his words of wisdom. Hello, this week I am going to be talking to you about social plugins and which ones we think work the best. Firstly I like plugins which work on all platforms. Mobile, desktop and tablet. This means that when you load your blog on either one of these your social share plugins should still look ok and not out of place. The one we like for a tweet button is called click to tweet. There is a lot of these around but the one we found that works well is the one made by Todaymade. This works on all platforms and you get the same experience on a mobile device as you get on your desktop or laptop. Another plugin we are using is the genesis simple share. We use this one because we like how it looks and it is made by the genesis team so will work flawlessly with your chosen genesis themed blog. The next plugin we use is the Pinterest pin it button. There are a lot of these about so be careful if you are following us. The one we use is made by weblizar. It has had plenty of updates and works well within our theme. We have had paid options like the pin it pro plugin and it seemed to conflict with a few of our other plugins so did not work correctly but this one at the moment is working fine. Another plugin we use is called simple social icons and is made by Nathan Rice. I think we also got this from the Genesis plugins section so it will work with your chosen genesis theme. We have not had any trouble using this one but we are starting to feel like we may need to find one with more options. But at the moment it is doing its job so we can’t complain.
One thing I have found especially when you start optimizing your site and adding caching plugins and cdns to your site some of your plugins may not be compatible so be careful. We have had several issues with plugins not working and conflicting with other plugins so just because I have recommended some good ones we use make sure they do not damage your blog and after adding any of these plugins make sure your blog is working ok and all plugins are working correctly. The last thing you want is your blog to not be working. Do not just check it on one day and think it will be fine because your plugins get updated as well as your theme and one update can conflict and bring your site down. So it is best to check it everyday and make sure there are no issues especially after adding anything new to your site. I will now pass you back over to Sam so she can go over another question asked to us through our Facebook group.
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 how do you approach brands in order to get them to work with you on sponsored opportunities? Well for me I get my virtual assistant to contact the brands for me (as it saves a lot of time looking for contact details or choosing brands to work with) and then once they have the contact details give them a template to send out. Always make sure it has the following details in it:  Their name – very important as it shows that you are not a spammer and you have looked for their details
The product you are interested in – You may be contacting a PR company that handles 300 brands Highlights about your site – It is important that they know what is in it for them What you are offering – is it a social media mention, a blog post and is there a price? You don’t include your address for shipping or any other fine details as this can be discussed later. You just want to get to the point and get brands to give you a maybe or a yes or a no. Then in the next email you can discuss any other details and give them your shipping information. Don’t get upset if a brand says no, some will and some won’t. But when you think about the millions of brands out there a lot will say yes. So go for it and don’t think you need an aged blog for this to happen as we started it from week 1. And our kitchen is full to bursting of samples and we have more of them that we can handle!
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
Our Kindle Ebooks Draft2Digital Soup Maker Recipes Category Soup Machine Recipe Ebook On the Kindle Aweber How To Get Brands To Send You Products Click To Tweet Genesis Simple Share Pinterest Pin It Button Simple Social Icons The 3 stages to completing SEO on your recipe posts Taste Spotting DishFolio Healthy Aperture
Food Gawker Oh My Veggies My Recipe Magic Delishogram Finding Vegan
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:
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