Food Blogging FM 009:
Getting Started With Tumblr Brought To You By: RecipeThis.com
Introduction Welcome to our ninth food blogging Podcast. And thanks so much for joining us in our food blogging journey as it means a lot. Well I never thought I would ever be talking to you about Tumblr. It is infact the last place I would go to for building up blog traffic, but if someone suggests something to me, temptation always comes first! So let me start by telling you about the last time I used Tumblr. It was for my diet site and everyone was raging about the place for traffic, so I put my heart and soul into it, just like I do whenever I am trying out a new traffic or income source for my site. If you don’t know what Tumblr is, then it is (well in my opinion anyway) a spilt between Twitter & Instagram with a big influence on a lot of graphics (like Instagram) with a big focus on short but sweet (like Twitter) and also works by the inclusion of many hash tags, just like you associate with Instagram. If you wonder why it’s not as big as the more popular social media channels, well it is kind of like MySpace, where it comes across as rather old school, but it is a very high traffic site. So how did it go when I used it? Over a 60 day period and many hours spent on the site and outsourcing VA’s for it as well. I had about 30 visitors. When you have a site that is bringing in 120,000 visitors a month, you don’t even notice traffic that brings you less than 100 a month, so I had to seriously go looking for the traffic. Disappointment set in and I didn’t use it anymore.
When I moaned about it many people told me stories about what a waste it was for them and it made me feel a little better as I licked my wounds. Fast forward about 18 months and I now have RecipeThis.com and as I am building my traffic from scratch I am intrigued by different sources of traffic. I don’t like to put all my eggs in one basket so my long term aim is to have about 20 favourite traffic sources. I still have access to the analytics of my diet site and 120,000 visitors a month seems a long way off, but unlike that site in the food niche you have so much more choice of where your traffic comes to and the diet niche is also often associated with spam. So each time I am working I look at my traffic and to see how it is coming along. I look on this particular week (which I believe was in February about 75 days after I started the blog) and there are 50 visitors from Tumblr. And I am like SERIOUSLY? How come I couldn’t get this amount while trying in the diet niche and here I am sat on this traffic right now? Well it seems Tumblr is perfect for the food bloggers and should be taken seriously. I decided I would give it another go and put a little bit more effort in and then see what the results were like. Well I haven’t even reached the end of my experiment and the traffic from Tumblr has climbed from 50 (without even having an account) to a total traffic count of 1778 since we started the blog. This means from a traffic point of view that is stands at number 9 for our top traffic sources. Above it we have Yummly, Food Gawker, Facebook, Pinterest and SEO traffic. But it is out ranking traffic from the likes of
Twitter and Stumbleupon plus many of the recipe sharing sites that we use. To say that we were bringing in traffic from Day 1 on Facebook and Pinterest yet we didn’t open a Tumblr account until the site was 4 months old (a month ago from recording this Podcast) it just shows you the potential that it has. So the big question you probably want to know, is what should you do on Tumblr to bring in a regular Tumblr traffic. Well keep listening as I am about to share with you EXACTLY what I do on Tumblr and how you could follow suit.
Getting Started With Tumblr The first thing you need to do is have a happening account. By a happening one I mean by branding it in the same way that you would with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or any other social media account that you have in place. Get your logo on there, create a nice profile and load up all your past recipes. Some people go on Tumblr and will just share their recipes on other people’s group areas, but this just looks bad and doesn’t show you sharing and being part of the community. Then if a reader clicks through to your profile and just sees an empty profile it will not go down well. So even if you have a hundred recipes, make sure you load them all up. I think we had around 120 blog posts to load up, so we were in a similar boat! Though I got the best VA in the business to do it for me, otherwise known as my 14 year old son that wanted some money for a new mobile phone!!! And he did them all over his Easter holidays. When you load up the posts make sure you add them as a photo that way it will give a really good sized picture of your recipe. And you get a
description area so you can add a description, a link to the post and of course tags. When you load it up you’ll see it is just like doing Instagram but with a clickable link. I also find that if you prefer, it is easy to do by phone, so if you are loading up new posts as they happen and are posting them to Instagram, do it to Tumblr at the same time. Then when all your blog posts are up to date then you’re ready to rock and roll.
General Tumblr Work There are only so many hours in a day, so all this general Tumblr work falls under the job list of my loyal virtual assistant from the Philippines. She does a marvellous job and on a daily basis she does the following: Follows back followers – if someone follows you it is important that you follow them back. Follow recommended bloggers – down the right hand side of your account there will be recommended bloggers to follow. It’s a good idea to follow these to get your following moving. You wont be doing it at a fast pace like you would for Twitter or Pinterest but you will be giving it some friction. Posting your latest blog content – it is important that you make sure your content stays up to date. We currently have 8 new pieces of content per week, but some of you will have more and some will have less, it just depends on the rate you’re building up your blog. Extra following – I also find that you can build up your following by following similar people. So find a popular post and follow the commenters or people that have shared the content. The best bit about following those that share content, is that they are more likely to share yours.
From a money point of view, getting the above done costs me about $2 a week and it is well worth it.
Tumblr Recipe Sites I am sure you have all heard of FoodGawker, Tastespotting and Yummly. You may even be members of smaller recipe submission sites like I am. But Tumblr has their own too and very few food bloggers are aware of them and they are BIG business. The popular ones can bring you the same amount of traffic that FoodGawker can. Plus it is like having 100’s of them to choose from. With general recipe submission sites I have a bunch of 8 that I submit to on a regular basis, but that’s it as there is a lack of good ones. You can simply Google Tumblr recipe submission sites and find loads of them and also there are lists doing the rounds on different food blogs. But it is trial and error. You’ll find that there are several that are not updated and some that bring you very low traffic. In the long term it is best to find 10 really good ones that you can submit to daily. So start off with 30 and when they don’t approve your first 10 recipes, move it from your list and move onto another one. We have a list of 10 at the moment, but some don’t approve very often and we have a list of new ones to try out and we are (slowly!) building our list up. But the point is that once you do have 10 amazing ones they will bring you thousands of monthly visitors to your blog and again this can be outsourced. And that’s all there is to Tumblr and getting your brand out there. It is simple, it is an easy social media channel and it is well worth the effort.
Though like with Instagram and Twitter you can get engrossed in what people are doing and forget that you have loads to do!
Our Podcast Sponsor For this week our Podcast sponsor is Upwork. I have never kept it a secret that Upwork drives me up the wall. Their rules, the way they treat the outsourcers and how they treat their freelancers is rather horrible. They got so bad that not long after they changed their name from Odesk to Upwork, which I am assuming it was down to the bad PR, but I don’t know for sure. BUT and it is a HUGE BUT they have a huge selection of freelancers that are desperate for work. I say they are desperate because they are often competing with over 200 people for each job. You can get really good staff on there and then just get them to work direct for you and then you can eliminate the use for Upwork. I don’t think they are as big as they once were, because in the old days I could get 600+ applicants for a job opening and now I get around 200. But it is still the perfect place to go to outsource your Tumblr work to. You could get a really good virtual assistant for around the $1 an hour mark and for what traffic they can help you build, it will be well worth doing.
Our Number #1 Tumblr Submission Site Well I thought I would share with you the number one recipe site on Tumblr for A) having quick approval on my recipes and B) bringing me regular traffic. Well it is called Really Nice Recipes and if you just did one of the recipe sites I would say do this one! I just need to find 10 just like this one and I am sure you’re thinking the same thing!
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 where to start on a new food blog for building traffic. In particular the top 3 traffic options for a brand new food blog. Now this is rather difficult to answer in one sentence as there are so many ways to build up your traffic but this would be my initial starting point while I find my feet: 1) Social media – I would start by sharing all my content on social media. If I have a new blog it will be on all my social media channels the same day. I would recommend starting with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and Instagram to start with and then expand over the next six months. 2) Recipe submission sites – I would then make sure all recipes went out to all the popular recipe sites. This would give you a good head start for traffic and get you used to how they operate. 3) SEO – I would make sure that every blog post that I do is optimised for the search engines.
Well That’s A Wrap Thanks for joining us in our latest Podcast. We have built up a Tumblr account over the last month with very little effort and we wanted to share how we did this with you…..our listeners. So if you are struggling to get your traffic off the ground, then this is your Plan B! 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
Recipe This Tumblr FoodGawker TasteSpotting Yummly Upwork Really Nice Recipes (Tumblr Recipe Group)
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Thanks again for listening and best of luck with your food blog.
Samantha & Dominic Milner http://recipethis.com
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