Does your love of food have you wondering if a cooking blog is right for you? Share your culinary adventures with a planet full of food enthusiasts. Food bloggers can definitely get paid for sharing content. Here are a few common ways:
- Work on getting a ton of traffic to your recipe blog. When people get there, have some pay per click ads ready for them to click on. Each time someone clicks, you get a little cash.
- Make little recipe packs to give away. You’re looking at a full calendar year of cooking, with people out there hunting for great meal ideas for every season. If something’s going on, you can bet there will be a recipe to match the occasion
- Create gorgeous cookbooks in PDF format for people to purchase online.
- Create cooking videos – recipe tutorials, cooking techniques, product demos, to generate views and follows. Websites like TikTok will pay you a respectable monthly chunk of change for your effort.
- Definitely sign up as an Amazon affiliate. Example, a food blogger friend of mine just posted a pureed soup. She used an immersion blender to save time and mess, and that would definitely be a potential product for her to recommend to her audience.
- Offer paid membership levels for people who are serious about cooking and recipes. You have many niches – healthy weight loss, vegan and vegetarian, diabetes crowd, keto dieters, people who love to create ethnic recipes, beginner cooks, busy cooks looking to save time… the possibilities are endless.
- Sell meal plans and grocery lists. People who want to commit to something like the keto diet are hungry for this type of information, inspiration and guidance.
- Send that email. The more you email, the more likely people are to make a purchase.
- Sell a bigger cooking course. The way to do this successfully is to create funnels.
Tips for Getting More Clicks, Signups and Sales from Your Cooking Blog
This is the e-cover of an actual information product – a digital guide to food preservation. You can create something like this for your food website, and sell it people who crave the information! Think of all the possibilities and what people might want to learn.
Set up a method for collecting email addresses.
Permission based list management software like Aweber or ActiveCampaign is the best way. This gives the subscriber full control. Make it hands off… they are the ones opting in or out of the list.
Be transparent with readers.
If you plan to email daily, make sure people know that. Tell your subscribers up front what you plan to share with them. If you’re sharing affiliate links that will bring in some profit, say that in your disclaimer.
Share important details and teach people what you know.
I included some jars of homemade salsa at the top of this post because canning is a popular food preservation method that people hunt for exact information on. Other topics like this are sought-after by your blog readers. So put in the time to teach, explain, go into detail, and break down the science and art of recipe creation. The more detail you provide, the happier and more satisfied your readers are bound to feel. That means loyal customers and visitors who come back again and again to learn from you.
Automate your digital product sales.
If you sell cooking courses or recipe ebooks, make everything automatic, not manual. Manual sales of information products quickly turn into a hot mess. You have many options to choose from in the way of info and digital product selling platforms. E-junkie.com makes it easy to upload a PDF file to sell as an ebook by email, via PayPal and using their platform as a file transferral method. Teachable lets you sell a multi-faceted course that includes written lessons, student assignments, videos, pictorials – all created by you, and uploaded to their member area where your paying customers can log in and learn. They even offer a built-in affiliate program so you can have other people push out your course farther and make some nice online commissions. Go check out their free trial!
Get a system going.
Make a daily ritual of sharing your newest blog posts on social media. Have a presence there. If you’re going big, this can get hairy. You’ll improve your results if you hire a virtual assistant to handle this for you.
Team up with other bloggers.
Open your mind to collaboration, not competition, online. Affiliate programs are the way to go. Be transparent and let people know that the links you share with them may generate a small commission if they purchase.
Big, fat list! Biiiggg list.
Grow a big list, and increase your odds of making money. Remember that huge corporations do this with their teeny tiny fees that they slip into every transaction. Small amounts add up to HUGE profit when you channel the flow into your bank account.
Take content shortcuts.
It takes a lot of time and effort to create new and engaging content, drive traffic to a blog, get new signups and so forth. You’re going to want to create try before you buys and free giveaways to bring in some new faces. The best way to balance it all is with content shortcuts. One huge help in this area is the use of PLR or private label rights content. You’re purchasing pre-researched, prewritten articles on a topic of interest. Then you’re tweaking them to suit your own brand and audience. You can cut, paste, edit, and share or sell the content in any way you like.
Sure, food bloggers want, and should, create original content from scratch. But just like how in your life as a busy chef, you sometimes grab that pre-made can of soup for a recipe shortcut, sometimes you want to just pop in some already-cooked content to save you time, money and effort.
Purchase PLR content.
My friends at Kitchen Bloggers have a terrific Try Before You Buy pack of recipes with private label rights. Next time you want to create a free mini pack of recipes to share, or post a fresh blog entry, open up the folder that contains these ready-to-go recipes and food photos. You’ll save yourself SO much time, and you’ll have found a highly useful method of generating high quality content to get you more clicks, follows and sales.
Want great food content? Kitchen Bloggers is the master! Sign up to kitchen-test their free PLR recipes and cooking content today