This post contains affiliate links. As a partner with Amazon and various brands, I am compensated when qualifying purchases are made through my referral links.
If you are just getting started, be sure to view the How-To Blog guide for beginners as well as the Pinterest for Business guide. You’ll find these below.
Both are going to help you start and grow your food blog. If you need a food blog system created for you, we have that too. Call 702-917-0755 and talk to my brothers Jeff and Paul. They have several Food Blog designs built and ready for you.
How To Make Money with a Food Blog
- Get your website. I like WordPress which you can get at Flywheel
- Add a food blog theme (see below) or a great theme like Essence Pro from StudioPress
- Add a Recipe Plugin (see below) if needed. You can also use the YOAST How-To structured block for WordPress Gutenberg.
- Build your recipes and categories
- set up a Pinterest For Business Account
- Begin creating your Pinterest Boards and start pinning
- Share your recipes on your social channels, make Instagram reels, TikTok’s, Youtube Shorts, etc.
- Drive traffic through SEO, SEM, and Social Strategies.
- Once you have enough traffic (think 1000 sessions per day), you can make money through ad platforms like Ezoic.
- Food bloggers often make money through affiliate links, ads, sponsorships, youtube channel ads, and courses.
6-figures in one year as a Food Blogger!
While no results are typical and nobody can guarantee what you an make as a food blogger, there are some bloggers living full time on that activity.
For most of us, the earnings from food blogging come from ads on the website, ads on a coordinating video blog (Youtube Channel), affiliate marketing, supplement sales, sponsorships, online courses, consulting, speaking engagements, and coaching.
That doesn’t mean you need to do all of those things. Find what works for you.
My Keto for Weight loss blog earns money from ads, affiliate income, an online course, and coaching.
I hosted a monthly recurring Keto Coaching program for one year and earned over 6-figures on the coaching program.
– Lori Ballen (Blogger)
Recipe Plugins:
WP Recipe Maker
WP Recipe Maker offers a free and premium solution. I’m a bells and whistles girl and generally go for the paid versions if I’m actively using the features.
Powered by Creative MarketHere’s what you get in the premium
- SEO for metadata
- Gutenberg friendly yet works with the classic editor as Well
- Optimized for Google Recipe Search
- Easy to add recipes
- Rich Pin ready for Pinterest
- Rating Section
- Easy Print Option
- Use Video in Recipes
- Affiliate Link options in the ingredient list
- Adjustable Servings
- Call to Action (such are sending them to your Pinterest Board)
- Kitchen Timer
- Equipment links for affiliate marketing
- Author Links
- Nutritional Label
- Custom Pin Image
- Interactive List Checkboxes
- Taxonomies for Recipes
- The ability to Clone A Recipe
- Import and Export recipes to and from .json
Upgrade to Pro:
- Unit Conversion (Metric and US)
- Create your own Custom Recipe Fields
- Nutrition Facts Calculation
- Define your own nutritional ingredients
- Create your own nutrients
Upgrade to Elite:
- Shopping Lists
- Create and Save Collections
- User Generated Content: Recipe Submission
Food Blogger Themes
Brunch Pro Theme
Cafe Pro
Cafe Pro combines elements of our two most popular child themes “Parallax and Foodie” to create the quintessential design solution for not just restaurants, but for any brick and mortar business looking to create a captivating presence online.
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Cookely
Cookely is the next-level WordPress theme for your food blog. Simple, yet packed with complex features, it provides flexibility for organizing your recipes in a compact, functional, and stylish layout.
Daily Dish
Check out Daily Dish for your food blog.
Divine Pro
Divine Pro is also a nice theme for a food blog.
Foodie Pro Theme
Features:
- Genesis 3.2 + HTML5 Markup
- Mobile Responsive! Customizer options for color & typography
- Recipe card styling
- Widgetized Home & Recipe pages
- Upload your own custom background
- Upload your own header design
- Create your own custom menus and Featured Images,
- Fixed width design
DIY Food Blogger Theme
She’s sleek and svelte with her minimalist approach and clean design, but she sure packs a punch when it comes to features. It’s the most flexible Genesis Theme to date – with a minimalist style and plenty of color and typography options.
Tasty Plugins
Learn Food Blogging with Food Blogger Pro
Food Blogger Pro is a website and community on a mission to teach bloggers how to build a successful food blog with simple step video tutorials. When you become a member of Food Blogger Pro, you’ll gain access to more than 350 beginners to intermediate flood blogging videos.
You’ll notice FBP works to simplify the process understanding that most food bloggers are foodies, not techies. They speak human while teaching technical strategies.
You’ll find peer to peer support as well inside the community. Have a question? Throw it up there in the group and watch the answers pile in. The community has thousands of members from across the world.
Lessons Focus on:
- Food blogging tools
- Food photography
- SEO
- Food Videos
- Website permalink structure
- Branded short URL’s
- Creating eBooks
- How to do Giveaways
- Submitting a Sitemap to Google
- Google Search Console
- Using anchor links
- Photoshop
- Branded email addresses
- Website backup
- Camera settings
- Caching plugin and CDN for your website
- Affiliate Marketing
- Photo Editing
Top Food Blogs
It’s important to know who the competition is. Rather than focusing on “beating out” the competition, we use these competitive food blogger websites as models, and for inspiration. We aren’t going to take their content, but we are going to create a content strategy for our own food blog based on the successful strategies of others.
Tasty.co
Easy Dinner Recipes
The Tasty.co food blog has more than 4 million users on its website in a single month. It has more than 400,000 top 100 ranking keywords on Google.
Top Page: Easy Dinner Recipes. It has nearly 5000 keywords ranking in Google’s top 100. Working with Buzzfeed, They took 20 dinner recipes created by other popular food bloggers and simply listed them on this page.
This one page has over 300,000 visits each month falling only a bit behind the homepage itself.
?The term ‘Easy Recipes’ is searched nearly 50,000 times each month. ‘What’s for Dinner’ is searched for more than 40,000 times each month. The term ‘Easy Dinner Ideas’ is searched 165,000 times. These terms, along with the word Dinner itself, make up the majority of traffic for this page.
In addition to multiple images, this blog includes a Pinterest size graphic as well as encouraging pinning.
Make Your Own Baby Food
This food blog offers 27 baby food recipes.
This example is exactly why we use competitive research tools like SEMrush. I’m not sure a regular food blogger would have thought to add a make your own baby food blog.
Tasty did and it landed in the top 3, along with their home page, for top traffic earners.
This blog post about baby food has nearly 3000 words and phrases ranking on Google’s top 100 positions for the topic and nearly 6000 visits.
Compared to the easy dinner blogs, it seems small, but most food bloggers would be very excited to generate 6000 visits to one single blog post.
Again, we find that Tasty.co did not create the recipes, they simply included them in a blog and linked back to the authors.
This is a common approach to food blogging and works especially well on Pinterest. You create the blog, and then make several pins to use on various boards linking back to the blog post.
Delish.com
Delish is a popular food blog with nearly 25 million visitors each month. It has nearly 2 million keywords ranking on Google just in the top 100 positions. Incredible! It’s top 3 keywords earning organic traffic are: Coffee Shops, Mexican Food, and Instant Pot Recipes.
Its top blog post is: What you should never order at a fast-food restaurant. The post is interesting in that it’s mainly a gallery of 40 photos that the user flips through to browse what not to eat at a fast-food restaurant.
Food Blog Ideas
- Easy Dinner Recipes
- Baby Food Recipes
- Brunch Recipes
- Easy, On-the-go Breakfasts
- Summer Pool Party Snacks
- Chicken Breast Recipes
- Cooking with Kids
- Trader Joes Food Reviews
- Cooking with Trader Joes Items Only
- Recipes A-La Cosco Haul
- Meal Prep
- Meal Planning
- Slow-Cooker Dishes
- 3 Ingredient Easy Meals
- On the Go Lunches
- Vegetarian Freezer Meals
- Keto-Friendly Recipes
- The Easiest Dinner Party
- Everything from scratch
- Going Bananas (all banana recipes)
- $20 Family Dinners
- Best Desserts
- Things to Avoid at a Fast Food Restaurant
- Halloween Party Treats
- Healthiest Yogurts
- How Long Should I Cook it?
- Best Food Delivery Services
- The Organized Pantry
- Best Foods To Improve the Immune System
- Foods to Avoid after 7PM
- Comprehensive Guide to Cocktails and Calories
- Sams Club Grocery Haul
- Perfect Eggs
- Air Fryer Recipes
- Instant Pot Recipes
