How to become a food blogger in 7 steps

If you’ve previously sought resources on how to become a food blogger with no success, have a read of this article and see where you stand. Becoming a successful food blogger is attainable if you have the passion and willingness to learn.

The passion will keep you creative and interested in the blog. A willingness to learn, on the other hand, will help you acquire the skills you need to overcome certain blogging challenges, which we’ll talk about later.

These are the two major success factors of food blogging. If one is absent, your blogging is unlikely to succeed because you’ll face challenges that are difficult to overcome without passion and knowledge. 

Following the launch of a successful blog, you can then generate income from membership programs using Member Kitchens (more on this later).

Secret sauce: Don’t focus on the money yet.

It’s a big mistake to start your blog with the sole purpose of making money. When the challenges kick in, each piece of content you put out will seem like an uphill task.

Considering that you must work for at least several months before starting to see revenue, dropping out of the blogging race will start to look like an attractive option to you. This is why you should learn how to become a food influencer before jumping in or thinking about how much food bloggers make.

On the contrary, if you have a passion for food, you’ll largely ignore any premature concerns about revenue. Much of your energy will go into expressing your mind and listening to people’s (readers’) feedback. Before you know it, your website has a library of articles, and your readership has grown significantly.

There’s usually a difference between the content quality of passionate bloggers and those who blog only for money — not the quality of writing but the quality of thought. Passionate bloggers will likely acquire a large subscriber base when they launch membership programs with Member Kitchens' white-label recipe and meal planner app.

How to become a paid foodie in 7 steps

Here are the steps on how to become a food blogger:

1. Know your niche inside out
2. Acquire some basic skills
3. Clearly define your food blog’s niche
4. Choose a brand name and website address
5. Choose a hosting platform
6. Choosing the topics to write about
7. Do plenty of keyword research

Step 1: Know your niche inside out

Do you have the knowledge or skills to make people spend time on your website?

Food blogging won’t favor you if you can’t hold people’s attention. And you can’t have their attention unless you give readers what they want.

Are they looking to learn new recipes?

Do they seek information on what restaurants to visit?

Perhaps they want coaching and recommendations on specific diets?

If your blog promises a solution to these problems, it needs to be good. No one is likely to return to your website if the first piece of content they consume turns out to be wrong, contains significant errors, or provides mediocre solutions.

A saturated blogosphere isn’t a problem

You should still learn how to become a paid foodie even if the niche is saturated. It’s not a problem if people are already blogging about your niche of interest. In this case, the silver lining is that there are many ways you can outperform them.

Maybe they aren’t covering all the recipes or don’t provide enough detail. Maybe you know a new cooking method or are more passionate and can publish more often. It may also be that you’re better at explaining processes, or your language is more appealing.

We cite these examples so you aren’t discouraged by the many blogs you may find about your target niche. You can outperform the best and have Google promote you to the top spot, but you’ll have to put in the effort for that to happen.

Step 2: Acquire some basic skills

This is also one of the first steps on how to become a food blogger on Instagram and get paid to promote brands. Be willing and be prepared to learn and apply your knowledge and skills in your niche. It’s just one requirement among several others to become a successful food blogger.

In summary, you need to learn the following:

• Some of the technical aspects of managing a website
• SEO (search engine optimization)
• Infotainment writing
• Reader psychology
• Monetization skills
• Using different platforms to promote your food blog

Don’t be intimidated by our list of requirements. You needn’t know everything before launching the blog. You’ll gradually learn these skills as you work on your blog, and someday you’ll apply them like an expert.

So, what skills do you need as a beginner?

Based on our experience, here are the skills we think you should have when starting out:

• Basic computer skills
• Online research skills
• Knowledge of SEO

Basic computer skills

Computer skills are a must-have in learning how to become a food influencer on Instagram and other platforms, including TikTok, WordPress and Squarespace to name a few. These will help you in setting up and running the website, practicing SEO, and online research. 

While building a website, you may drag and drop items in your website theme, install and customize themes and plugins, or use third-party platforms like Elementor.

Basic computer skills will help you in performing these tasks. You don’t need any programming knowledge to build a food blog today. Provided you can operate a computer, you can build a website.

Online research skills

Research skills are a must-have unless you intend to hire an expert to run your blog. Experts already know the solutions to most problems and can rely on their own knowledge to tackle any issues.

In your case, you must be able to look for solutions on the internet to solve even the most fundamental problems. You won’t get the results you need without the proper use of Google.

Unless you’re a seasoned webmaster, Google will be your best friend or companion on any blogging adventure. Assuming you won’t employ a coach or webmaster, you must study Google search techniques. This is a critical skill whether you want to learn how to become a food blogger on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Squarespace, or WordPress.

SEO Knowledge

As a food blogger, you’ll learn SEO, whether you like it or not. Otherwise, much of your work won’t realize it’s full potential in terms of audience reach.

Any content you put up on your blog will be made visible to the public via SEO. SEO helps search engines (like Google) to understand your content and classify and rank it accordingly. Experience shows that any article or blog post that Google doesn’t understand will be demoted until it disappears from search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google search will try to understand and classify your articles whenever you publish them. SEO helps Google determine what information you aim to provide with each article. Then, Google randomly shows your article to users to gauge its performance.

If people spend some time reading it and clicking around, Google views your content as helpful and will bump up your position compared to others.

Step 3: Clearly define your food blog’s niche

The food niche is pretty broad. Finding a blogger who covers every aspect of the niche is rare. Usually, they’re specific to recipes, food item reviews, restaurant reviews, etc.

Just one of these niches is enough for a start because when you start writing about these niches, you’ll discover the potential topics are innumerable. Before branching into other food niches, you should have covered all or most of the topics in your initial chosen niche. That’s how to start a food blog that pays.

Why have a clearly defined blog niche?

It’s essential to narrow down your selection to a perfectly defined food niche, so it quickly gains a reputation in the eyes of Google. When you choose a niche that’s comparatively small in scope, the keywords you use for all the articles will be closely related. Google analyzes all the keywords on your website, and the cumulative result will affect your website’s entire SEO.

If most or all the keywords of your website revolve around a particular niche subject, you’ll have more credibility with Google and other search engines. After exhausting the topics under any particular niche, you can later branch into other niches and continue to expand.

Covering all essential topics in a particular niche before expanding to other niches is important because most, if not all, readers find your website while searching the niche. Hence, they’ll continue to visit your website since all the information they need is available due to your exhaustive coverage of significant topics.

Step 4: Choose a brand name and website address

No matter your hurry to launch a food blog, you shouldn’t rush this step. It’s a critical step in how to start a food recipe blog.

Your chosen brand name should reflect your work on the blog and be appealing and easy to remember. And you should craft a good web address from that brand name so visitors can easily remember it. When you pop out of Google searches, the brand name alone should tell the user what to expect on your blog.

There are websites online that can help you discover your unique brand. However, we suggest you read extensively on choosing a brand name and website address. Most readers can gauge your level of intelligence from your brand.

An example of a poor brand name

When looking at examples of poor brand names, there are a few that come to mind. Your brand name should be unique and describe what you are achieving. For example, the website getassist.com tries to convey the message that they are a company which assists people. However, the message is vague since you don’t know the kind of assistance offered there.

Secondly, getassist doesn’t sound grammatically correct despite not being a sentence — you can’t construct a correct sentence from it. A better version could be getassistance.

Such brand names give the impression that you don’t know your grammar. But, of course, the blogger probably didn’t figure this out while creating it. That said, great branding is important, even if you just want to learn how to become a food blogger on YouTube.

The cost of a branding mistake

The problem with making mistakes about choosing a brand name or website address is that it’s hard to change it without negatively impacting SEO and your revenue. The example website we just talked about could be changed to a better brand name and web address. However, doing so would affect not only the SEO and revenue and also the user experience of a regular visitor.

When you redirect people to a new website, you’ll likely lose some regular visitors because people don’t easily let go of the familiar. Moreover, your new brand and the new website will appear strange to some of your most loyal readers, potentially creating distrust.

A 5-point checklist when choosing a brand name

Here are the five factors to look into when choosing a brand name for your blog:

• It should closely reflect your online activity
• It shouldn’t be too long
• It shouldn’t look like a copy of another brand
• It should be easy to memorize
• It should be easy to pronounce

Whoever sees the brand should know the name originates from a powerful mind — the kind of mind they would want to read or learn from. That’s how to become a food blogger wielding a powerful brand.

You should also try to envision where your blog will be in the next five years. Perhaps you intend to diversify into other niche topics. If so, your brand name shouldn’t be restricted to a particular niche.

For example, you want to start by blogging about the keto diet, but you also intend to cover mediterranean and vegan diets in the future. When you give your website a brand name that implies strictly keto content, a user browsing about the mediterranean diet won’t be inclined to click on your title because they would assume you don’t have enough authority to talk about the mediterranean diet since your website address implies a keto community. Therefore, you have to take into consideration any long-term goals.

Step 5: Choose a hosting platform

Dealing with web hosting companies is an essential step when considering how to start a food recipe blog. After obtaining a good brand name and website address, your next step is to look for a web host. These web hosts provide storage for all the files on your website, such as programming files, your content (articles, audio, videos, and images), any plugins you use, and other blog features.

The web host saves all these resources in a secure space online. Visitors can only have access to content that isn’t protected by a paywall. You know, someday, you may decide to monetize your blog using membership programs, ebook selling, and more.

Qualities of a great web hosting platform

A good web host should have the following features:

• Highly secure
• Lightening fast
• Very transparent
• Affordable
• Easy to navigate
• Great support

So basically, you want a web host to protect all your files from unauthorized access and keep everything about your blog confidential. You also want a web host that’s fast and accessible almost all the time.

Note that the speed of your website can have a positive or negative impact on SEO. Google doesn’t want to show websites where users will waste time waiting for pages to load. Not only does this affect user experience, but it also makes Google a less favorable choice for searching content online.

Learning to use hosting services is essential when seeking how to become a food blogger on TikTok and other social media, as you’ll promote your blog on these platforms. Most web hosting companies also have a website builder, so you won’t need WordPress or other content management systems to design and launch your website. However, these are usually more expensive than content management systems that typically have a lot of free or freemium themes.

We’d advise using WordPress to manage content instead of your hosting company’s website builder. This is because there’s a higher likelihood of obtaining affordable solutions on these platforms than on a website builder.

Research potential web hosts

Trustpilot is a good starting point for investigating web hosts because, as a newbie, you’ll have many simple problems that require timely and quick solutions from your host. This is why using WordPress is better than a hosting company’s website builder.

It’s difficult to have a problem in WordPress without getting a timely solution. It’s also a highly secure content management system with worldwide volunteers working 24/7 to make it better and cheaper.

It’s possible to not spend a dollar on WordPress but still blog successfully. For example, you can use the free WordPress default themes. However, understand that customizing themes is critical to knowing how to start a food recipe blog or other food blogs.

These themes are decent and even better than some paid themes. Yet, you can use their full features forever without paying a cent. The only one-time investment you need is to learn how to customize the theme.

WordPress also works seamlessly with Google. Almost every important analytical feature of Google has a plugin or is integrated into a WordPress plugin. The same applies to all the primary SEO tools on the internet.

Step 6: Choosing the topics to write about

Start with introductory topics about your niche for which there isn’t much competition. If you choose topics based on your heart’s desire, it’ll be almost impossible to rank on Google’s page 1 anytime soon, as several food bloggers may write detailed pieces about any topics you choose.

Start with relevant topics that have the least competition online. In other words, treat topics that don’t have much content online. Google can’t just start ranking you on Page 1 for critical topics — by this, we mean vital topics that can profoundly impact people’s lives and have high search volumes.

The food niche is a sensitive category, and Google is cautious about showing content on these topics to the public. Google tries to find experts in such fields whose information is accurate so people don’t suffer harm from implementing such information. You have to convince Google about your credibility. That’s how to start a food blog that thrives.

Step 7: Do plenty of keyword research

Mastering keyword research is a critical step on how to become a food blogger. To choose suitable topics, you have to do some intense keyword research.

Using keyword research tools like Keywords Everywhere and Google Keywords Planner, you can just insert one seed word, and the tool generates several related keywords, including the long-tailed ones.

Target the longer and more specific keywords with low search volumes first. Targeting a low-volume keyword and getting a few hundred visitors a month is better than targeting a high-volume keyword with almost zero monthly visitors.

Also, ensure you understand the search intent behind all keywords before starting to write — you can’t write satisfactory content without understanding search intent. If Google ranks your articles on page 1 and nobody reads your content, Google will assume it’s terrible and demote the ranking.

Focus on the readers

Write for the people, not search engines, but include enough keywords for search engines to understand and store your content in the correct categories. This is our biggest tip on how to become a food blogger that generates traffic. You don’t need many keywords in your content for Google to understand it, provided you meet the user search intent — a keyword density of 1–2% is recommended.

It’s a good idea to set aside time each month for keyword research. Do it all in one go and it’ll minimize the reluctance to do keyword research anytime you want to write, and speed up the process. 

The final aim of your blog is to generate enough monthly income to quit your day job. Once you’ve achieved substantial readership, Member Kitchens can help you achieve that via membership platforms. Check out these insightful case studies to know the true income potential of a successful food blog and membership program.

You’ll find a lot of helpful content about food blogging on our blog. Once your blog hits a certain level of monthly traffic, you can introduce a membership program using Member Kitchens to reap the most financial benefit from your readership.

You should start monetizing your food blog when you’ve built enough readership or social media following — you can see our recent guide on how food bloggers on Instagram make money for viable ideas. You can learn more about monetizing a food blog by contacting the Member Kitchens team.

Conclusion

Many foodies want to know how to become a food blogger with millions of readers and followers. We’ve provided a simple roadmap with this article — follow it properly, and soon, your efforts will be handsomely rewarded. It’s a balance of using your passion and learning new skills such as SEO.

Member Kitchens aims to help as many food bloggers as possible to monetize their skills and passion through memberships. See how it works by watching this demo.

Frequently asked questions

Do food bloggers make money?

Yes, some food bloggers make over $90K monthly. In a previous article on how much food bloggers make, we outlined the top 10 food bloggers and how much they earn monthly. Most of them started blogging to express their passion for cooking. In no time, their readership was massive enough to start generating income.

Several food bloggers are making money from membership programs using Member Kitchens. In this free master class, Taylor Stinson, founder of The Girl On Bloor, narrates how she scaled from zero to $2,000 monthly with Member Kitchens. If you’re already a food blogger, try Member Kitchens today.

What qualifications do you need to become a food blogger?

To become a food blogger, you need to be able to write engagingly and have good cooking skills. If people don’t follow you for your tasty recipes, they’ll do so for your knowledge of foods. You can be a self-taught expert, but it’s essential to rapidly build a reputation on social media platforms like Instagram so Google can trust you.

How do I market myself as a food blogger?

Marketing yourself as a food blogger starts with owning a blog. This is why we spent time putting together this detailed guide on how to start a food blog, as it’s the first step towards becoming a successful food blogger. After you have set up your food blog, use your social media presence to direct readers towards your website.

Is it hard to start a food blog?

Starting a food blog is relatively easy. All you need is a passion and willingness to acquire the skills needed for blogging. You can launch a food blog within minutes by following the steps outlined in this guide. Starting a successful blog, however, takes time and perseverance.