You need to build an audience, serve them and grow their trust. You're going to need to learn your craft: improve your photography, understand how SEO works, become a better writer, have some basic tech skills, be able to adapt to a rapidly changing field that requires you to always be learning You are going to have to learn some business skills that have nothing to do with food or food photography or SEO. This is going to become your job, not your hobby. So lets get started.
But before we dive in too far let's address two big elephants in the room In a word, yes. We'll get to ad revenue in a minute but before we do, we want to point out that you do not need to be a "big" blogger to earn a full time income from your blog.
Most ad companies won't work with you until you have at least 30K sessions per month and it can take a new blogger months and, more realistically, a year or two before they hit that milestone. If they're extremely niche or overwhelmingly general, it can take even longer! But that doesn't mean you have to put your income dreams away until you hit those numbers. Other bloggers choose not to run ads even though they have the traffic to do so.
FBC Member Meghan Telpner has been very upfront with the fact that she earns 7 figures a year gross without belonging to an ad network. Here at FBC the only ad network we belong to is Google Adsense, which we use for filler in our sidebar on desktop when needed. And yet we're able to support 2 people. So yes, you absolutely can earn a full time living without ad revenue. Income diversification is important for all bloggers, regardless of how you earn money from your food blog.
We really can't stress this point enough. If you've been blogging long enough then you know that some of the best known revenue streams - like ad income and sponsored content - can have some significant ups and downs. If you don't have other sources of revenue that can pick up the slack, it can cause some panic the first time your revenue from one of those sources drops and doesn't recover!
Ad revenue via an ad network is currently on a high and is undoubtedly the main source of revenue for most full time food bloggers. It's not unusual for high traffic blogs to earn anywhere from mid 5 figures to even as much as 7 figures in a year from their ad network but bloggers with less than K sessions per month should expect to make considerably less.
Some of the more popular ad revenue platforms for food bloggers include Mediavine and Ad Thrive but there are many others out there. Some are better for blogs with less US traffic. It's also possible to earn ad revenue without joining an ad network. You can do this by selling ads directly to brands and small businesses, creating ads for affiliate programs you belong to and inserting them in your content or, you can run ads for your own products i. Sponsored blog content is another very popular way to earn direct income from your blog.
There are MANY variations on how sponsored content works but the basic premise is that a brand purchases content on your site or social media, usually to promote one of their products.
You will create the content after being given a set of specific guidelines or what's known as a brief and may be required to promote that content on your social media channels as we mentioned - there may be many variations on this theme. Influencer marketing platforms can take a lot of the stress of pitching away but, if you go this route look out for some common pitfalls:.
This is a variation on sponsored content but there are some differences. The most noticeable one is that a Brand Ambassadorship is a long term commitment - anywhere from 3 months to a year or more. It should be viewed as a mutually beneficial partnership between you and your brand partner. In its most basic form a Brand Ambassador will usually be required to create content for their blog and social media channels in the form of multiple sponsored posts over the term of the contract.
Other requirements of a brand ambassador may or may not include:. WATCH OUT FOR: when you become a brand ambassador you will most likely be prohibited from working with any of the brand's competitors during the term of your contract and for some time after the contract expires. You might be surprised who is considered a competitor so it's important to be very clear before you sign anything that you:. Freelance work is a big category that covers a lot of possible work.
Here are just a few of the ways you can freelance:. Freelance work is something a lot of bloggers do quietly behind the scenes. Much of their work will never show up on any of their channels. Some will have a separate portfolio site to showcase their client work. Others will include it as a service offering on their blogs. While we don't have numbers, we suspect a very high percentage of food bloggers do some kind of freelance work in the food space.
While this is technically freelancing, we mention it separately because it's something that often gets overlooked. Not many bloggers think to offer their services to other bloggers! And yet, it happens more often than you might think. Who is going to understand what a food blogger needs more than another food blogger? There are FBC members who create Tasty Style videos for other bloggers who don't want to learn video but appreciate how popular videos are. Others sell bloggers photography and styling services.
We've seen a number of FBC members teaming up in recent months to help each other out. One may do the photography while the other does the styling - each playing to their own strengths - to help each other produce their own blog content.
A number of food bloggers provide virtual assistant services to other bloggers - particularly with social media tasks. I help other bloggers write their newsletters and, as a graphic designer, I offer bloggers Pin Packages where all I do is create Pinterest pins for them! Do you have a skill or talent that may not be directly related to food but that you can use to help out other food bloggers?
Stock photography allows you to make some extra money from your food photography. If you're not familiar with stock photography this is when you license photos that you hold the copyright to, to other individuals or businesses. It's different from freelance photography where you are usually photographing something to meet the specific requirements of a client who has hired you.
With stock photography you are usually licensing images you've already taken and that don't have any exclusive license agreements already in place.
You can submit your photos to stock photography sites and, every time somebody chooses to download your images from one of these sites for their particular use, you will receive a payment.
Sounds great, doesn't it? You could submit your entire catalogue to stock sites and make some money! You could even shoot specifically for stock websites if you wanted to. There is a way to make money online with a recipe or food blog, and in this post I will provide a somewhat detailed overview of that process along with some relevant tips and tricks.
First, you might want to commit to coming up with a recipe each day. You have to prepare meals every day anyway right? Fast food, delivery, and take out is primarily unhealthy and expensive.
People want to learn ways to eat at home cheaply, conveniently and healthfully. It could be fun and rewarding. Perhaps you have a speciality that you can create a weekly recipe for, such as a flavored hummus recipe. For the enthusiastic, filming and taking photos of the process will bring you steps head of anyone else attempting the same.
The simplest approach is to get a domain name, some cheap shared hosting both can be purchased from HostGator , and to install WordPress which is free. To keep this article succint-ish, I will just say that recipe markup will enhance your recipes within search engine results, bringing in more traffic to your web site.
Now for the making money part. There are numerous ways that the web site can generate a revenue. I will go through the main ways here. For each recipe that you publish you should link the ingredients, and equipment used, to their own pages on your site. For example, create a separate page for a blender which reviews the blender that you use. Also, for each, or most of the ingredients, having their own page which details their health benefits, origins, or other interesting information is beneficial for the sites visitors.
Then from each of those pages you can and should run a geo targeting script that determines the country of the visitor. Then you could link the visitor to the appropriate Amazon web site for their country: Amazon.
And, if you become an associate or affiliate for those Amazon sites, you get commissions for any purchases made. Amazon is a widely known, widely trusted online store that sells a wide range of products. Since there is a wide range of products available on Amazon, and Amazon offers free shipping on purchases over a certain amount, customers often fill their baskets with other items, items that you will get commissions on as well if you reffered the customer to the site to begin with.
Besides doing the above, you can really knock this money making idea out of the park by performing some of the following tasks:. Embed the photos from those sites into yours to increase page load times and reduce bandwidth usage. Also, embedding videos into recipe pages increases the value of the page from both visitors and search engines perspectives.
If you have the time and gumption, it would be valuable to include each recipe into its own document, including links, and exporting it as a PDF file. You can do this using free tools. Also, I would add related recipes to a larger PDF book. Then, of course, create a booklet with all of your recipes, and either share it, give it away to subscribers, or sell it. Do your followers want longer videos, other types of content vlogs, hauls , written recipes, or printable recipes?
For example, if you post recipe videos on IG or Reels, what will make someone go to your YouTube page? Are you providing a different type of content there?
Are you sharing the full recipes there? If you are providing additional content, how much more time do you need to spend on that? Will this jeopardize your current content?
But each platform is like another full-time job, and it takes time and energy to maintain. Whatever option you choose, you want to dedicate a minimum of 6 months before seeing results. Since December , I average around making a gross income of K per month , not including my expenses grocery, courses, contractors pay, hosts, equipment, subscriptions, taxes, etc. However, since growing, my expense has now increased since I have also hired an FT employee to support me with my admin tasks invoicing, insight gathering, etc.
I can still provide FREE recipes to my audiences while making an income to upgrade my content, website, and brand. Suppose you are interested in starting a blog.
0コメント