How to promote your food blog?

Yesterday, I wrote a post on how to start a food blog. It was for all those people who have a deep love for food and want to express it through blogging. That post is pretty basic and enlists whatever you need to do to begin. This post is in continuation with that post, and I try to dive into the details of how to promote your food blog.

If you’re someone who just started out or who needs more traffic to his/her blog, this post might help. I will start from some very basic and obvious points and then pick the specifics.

How to promote your food blog?

1. Make a community

If there’s one thing, many bloggers miss out; it’s the importance of a community. Some try to focus too much on writing or some try to focus too much on just earning money. Both are eventually going to make you fall.

Real life and virtual connections are what should matter to you to promote your food blog. Don’t just think that as a blogger, all you need is readers. There’s the other aspect which is necessary to help you survive. You need to build connections with PRs and likewise people who play a significant role in helping you make money through your blog.

So, overall you require to get recognized and have people behave like they’re your family. How to do that?

Start with reaching out to people. Talk to them and make friends with them. Ask for help or assist them and then stay connected. Eventually, you will have this set of people who will follow you anytime and anywhere. That’s when you can consider yourself successful at the first step. Remember that it takes time, and you must be consistent.

2. Make your content shareworthy

As a blogger, your fate depends on how many people talk about your blog. You need a quick way to reach out thousands of people, and that can happen if people start sharing your blog posts. That’s a two-step process. The first step is to make your content worthy enough to be shared.

I understand that you require a lot more tips on writing good content for your food blog than I will put here. I suggest you stay connected with me through my Facebook group so that you can get a sure update on whenever I post a blog about creating good content for your food blog.

For starters, you must understand that pictures are critical. Always include good-quality photos, clicked in good lighting and properly edited in your blog posts. Make your content a blend of information and entertainment. Put in efforts in including more information for your readers and they will come to like and share your content.

3. Make it easy to share your content

The second step to getting more traffic on your food blog is to make your content easy to share. You require having social media sharing buttons placed on your blog in an efficient manner. Here’s an easy way to tackle this. Make sure you have social media sharing buttons on the left-hand side of your blog. It is also a good idea to have buttons at the bottom of the blog post. Food photos are vital for Pinterest. So, make sure you have a plugin to help your readers easily pin your food photos. Also, always encourage your readers to share your content by asking them to do that within your post.

4. Post more often 

The post frequency directly impacts your blog traffic. The more posts you write and then share, the more visitors you get. As a newbie, you must try to do at least five posts a week. I used to do three per week, and that slowed down my progress. It’s not a rule!

Just keep in mind that the speed of your progress directly depends on how often you post on your blog. So, post according to how you want your progress to be.

5. Do the SEO

SEO refers to search engine optimization. It’s a way to ensure that your blog gets found through Google. There are billions of searches made on Google every day, and a large part of those are food-related searches. Imagine if you can rank on top for a few of those searches. You will get an enormous amount of traffic. Traffic is what keeps your blog alive.

Now, SEO isn’t something you can learn in a day. I have so many people who ask me how to do SEO, and they expect a one-line answer. There isn’t any. I will post more on how to do SEO for a food blog but as a beginner & until I write that post, you can start with reading Neil Patel’s blog posts on SEO and marketing. They will help you a lot.

6. Blog commenting

In this step, you will find some bloggers who post in the same niche as yours and comment on their blogs. It serves more than one purpose.

First of all, you will be interacting with an already established or active member of your community. That will bring you recognition and an opportunity to build a community.

Second, most of the times you can leave a link to your blog in the website section of the comment form. This is an essential activity related to SEO. It will help you get backlinks which are crucial from SEO point of view.

Third, you can get a lot of traffic from comments themselves. But this one is tricky. Such kind of traffic via blog comments come when you leave a comment on a viral post or on the authority blogs.

My friend, Nikhil has written a post about blog commenting where he excellently explains how to do commenting the right way. You should check it out to get started.

7. Join blogging communities

Several blogging communities can help you spread the word about your blog. To be truthful. I don’t use many of these currently, but when I started out, I was an active member of a lot these communities. They help to get you noticed.

Some of my favorite blogging communities are Indiblogger & Aha-Now blog community by a very famous Indian woman blogger – Harleena Singh.

Make sure you’re an active member of the community and not just there to dump the links to your blog. Only then, you will be able to get the full juice out of this activity.

8. Sharing in Facebook groups

Social media is an important part of promotion strategy of any blogger. If you’re connected to me via social media, you would know that I am very active on various social media channels. It isn’t just for fun. It is a part of my strategy to bring more traffic to my blog.

Now, as a beginner, I naturally expect you to share your blog posts on your personal Facebook profile. If, for some reason, you don’t want to, please do. It’s important. Your early readers are always the people who already know you. Don’t miss out the opportunity of getting initial traffic on your blog which is a must to keep you motivated to work harder.

Then there are two kinds of Facebook groups where you must share your content. One is the usual groups where link sharing is allowed. These must be groups related to food or food bloggers or blogging in general, and you can share your link in five different groups every day. This won’t bring you loads of traffic but certainly, send you some useful visitors.

Then some groups have various promotion threads. For example, this group. They have threads every day for blog posts, social media sharing and more. These groups work on a sort of like-4-like basis and are usually hated by the blogging community. But they are extremely useful in bringing you some right kind of people. Moreover, if you work on these threads honestly, you can build amazing connections that can help you amplify your reach.

9. Share on Google+ communities

Google+ exists, and I am sure a lot of you don’t use it. In fact, Google+ is mainly used by bloggers and marketers. But it’s an important medium to bring you traffic or at least some SEO benefits. Though no one in the industry can give you proof that Google+ contributes to SEO, no one will deny that. Also, if you can get some clicks from the platform, what’s bad in that?

10. Pinterest

It just astonishes me how many food bloggers aren’t using Pinterest. Pinterest is a fastly growing platform, and if there are just two things that could work on Pinterest, it would be food and fashion. So, you need Pinterest to promote your food blog. Being a food blogger or even a fashion blogger, you need to include Pinterest in your promotion strategy.

There are a lot of tips that I want to share about using Pinterest, but I will do that later. Currently, you need to setup your account and start sharing. Vertical images work better on Pinterest. Make sure you’re actively using the website and use visually attractive images.

11. Instagram, Snapchat & Twitter

These are the three most important social media channels after Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ to promote your food blog. Don’t ignore these. The key to master these channels is to be consistent, post actively on these channels, interact with other people over there and be an active user.

That’s it. You need to start working on these 11 things to promote your food blog. Get started with these and you will see sure shot results. As obvious, this post needs more details and follow-up posts. I will post them soon and if you want to follow those, join me on my Facebook group and you will get the updates.

Participating in Half Marathon Blogging Challenge with Blogchatter.