Top Tips to Grow Your Blog from Food Blogging Experts

Do you ever wish you could just get all of the food blogging experts in one space to just learn their top tips and tricks for growing your food blog? Well, I’m so excited to share this episode with you today because I have gathered some of the top food blogging experts to share their number one tip for growing your food blog.

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Can’t listen to the episode? Read on for the transcript!

These food blogging experts also have something else in common. They are all speakers in the upcoming Food Blogger Summit. Now, if you were a part of the first Food Blogger Summit that we did back in February of 2020, then you are not going to want to miss version 2.0, that is going to be even better. I’m going to be sharing more details about what to expect from the free event, the Food Blogger Summit in the episode. So be sure to listen through, to hear all of that information.

Matt Molen: You’ve probably heard this advice before, right? You need to build an email list so that you can own your audience. So you’re not victim to the whims of algorithm changes or social media platforms to get traffic so that you can create better engagement with your readers so that you can create super fans so that you have a built in audience to share your new content products and services with.

Building a list is easier than you think.

In my presentation, email jumpstart, I’m going to share with you three secrets to help you start growing your list for good. These are real techniques that I use with my paid clients, tried and true tactics that have helped many successful bloggers to grow a list, to increase their traffic and ultimately make more money with their engaged email subscribers. So if you’re ready to get serious about growing your email list, I do hope you’ll join me in Email Jumpstart in The Food Blogger Summit.

Meagan Williamson: I want you to sit back and consider how you could leverage those additional assets as fresh pins. We know that Pinterest is obsessed with fresh content this year, and that’s not going to change heading into 2021. Using Pinterest. I hope that you found this tip useful and let me know, respond or send me a DM. And let me know if you are using all those assets that you take every single time, you shoot a new piece of content.

Think about how you can upload those additional assets, as well as creating more Pinterest graphics to help get in front of more people and grow your audience this year.

Jason Logsdon: To me, a lot of great content there for anyone that wants to make a little bit more money from their blog and continue to move their blog forward. But through my work at Makin’ Bacon, I see a lot of bloggers that make the exact same mistakes, and that is not knowing where they are going.

There are so many successful outcomes for being a blogger, but knowing which ones interest you is the key to actually achieving them.

If you want to become a professional food photographer, you’re going to want to develop your blog differently than if you want your own food network, show cookbook, authors and writers need different content than people that want to be brand ambassadors. Find some that appeal to you, then figure out how you can get there. It’ll make the process of blogging much more effective and much more fun.

Emily Perron: The number one question that literally hundreds of food bloggers have asked me is where do you find good freelancers? Now years ago, I wondered this myself.

The truth is you can find good freelancers anywhere, and it doesn’t matter where you post your job. If the best freelancers aren’t applying in general, good freelancers are really picky about which jobs they apply for it because they know what they’re up against. They know you may have 20 or 30 or 40 applicants, and there’s only one opening.

The real question becomes, how do you get the good freelancers to apply?

Write a super attractive job, posting a job posting or freelancers.

That’s why I’m hosting a workshop at The Food Blogger Summit, all about my five-part job posting formula. In this workshop, you will have the time and space to work on the job posting for your next position. Whether you need a writer, a social media manager, or a virtual assistant, you will walk away with a rough draft that you can refine and post when you’re ready to hire.

Jenny Melrose: One of the biggest mistakes I see food bloggers make is that they don’t tell their people how to engage with them. And of course, all we’re hearing is engagement. Engagement is what is important right now.

So you need to make sure that you’re giving your audience a call to action and telling them how they can actually get in touch with you

Marie Fiebach: My biggest tip for food bloggers, especially those who dream of having a cooking show is the best way to get on TV is to start with your local news station.

Your local news station needs you. They have four to five hours every day to fill. And viewers love recipes, and they love food content.

By working with your local news station, doing cooking segments, you are serving the producers and you are serving the viewers. And on top of that, your getting your chance to see whether or not you like food TV. I happen to love food TV. And after two years on my local news, it is one of my favorite things that I do every week. So if you are interested in ever doing a cooking show, reach out to your local news station, they need you and love to have good food content.

Dama Jue: Something I noticed with food bloggers, which by the way, happened to be some of my favorite clients, because I can always rely on food bloggers to bring beautiful, highly quality content to the platform, lovely recipes, lots of creativity, and always high quality, beautiful food photography.

Sometimes food bloggers get a little bit caught up or a little bit hung up on making sure that every single pin is branded and looks exactly the same.

The font stays the same, the color stay the same, the layout. It has to be perfect. Try a little experiment, take some of your favorite recipes and share the images just as vertical in two to three ratio, pin designs just as is, if you want to add your URL or a small logo, just so that it’s recognizable as your own go for it. But I want you to share a pin that is just the photography keeps the logo or the URL really minimal. You want the image itself to be the star of the show and see how they perform on the platform. In my experience, sometimes they perform better or they perform better with different types of audiences. And it really comes down to your audience and what they’re going to respond to you. So why not give it a shot?

Pinterest is very much a long game. It’s a low and slow. Give it time platform. And you’re not going to see overnight sensation type results. It takes time to build it up. The platform really treasures, not just SEO and consistency, but also of course, high quality images. So when you share a pin, I have seen it sometimes take months, even up to six months to really start to gain traction and take off, but it’s worth it because the life of a pin is so much longer than a piece of content.

Megan Porta: My top piece of advice for food bloggers is this take time every single day to disconnect, shut your laptop, put your phone down, put it in another room. If you have to and immerse yourself in real life, invest in your people and perform acts of self care every single day.

How does this affect your business?

When you don’t intentionally create space in your life for downtime, your work will suffer. Creating space translates into increased productivity, increased creativity and increased energy while you are working.

And otherwise here is my secret formula for finding success, inviting new opportunities into your business, and also being the happiest person. You can possibly be establish working hours and stick to them during work hours, work on only the things that are getting you closer to your goals, work efficiently and manage your time. Well, when your work time is up, stop working no matter what disconnect from work entirely and engage in life. If you follow this formula, consistently opportunities will start coming your way and you will also feel happier than ever before and much more capable of tackling anything that comes your way.

Did you enjoy those tips from those experts? I am so excited that that is just a two minute nugget of information that these experts have, and they are sharing even more at The Food Blogger Summit.

This is a completely virtual event that is going to be taking place from October 26, through 29th, 2020. With the craziness of this year, I realized that food bloggers really do need community. They also really need to cut through the busy work and really figure out what strategies to implement for their blog right now.

There is no shortage of information and advice and expert opinion in the food blogging world. It is everywhere you turn, but how do you really figure out how to cut through that noise and figure out what your blog needs, what your audience needs?

The reality is that your blog is totally different from even your friends in the food blogging space. So I am so excited to be hosting the second round of the food blogger summit.

I wish I could tell you that the magic trick to having a profitable food blog was just creating good recipes, but that’s not even close. On any given day, you are juggling about 20 different tasks just to get one recipe out the door to your audience. You probably knew that having a food log that was going to be a lot of work. But what if I told you that you didn’t have to do all of these things that everybody is telling you that you have to do?

Wouldn’t it be amazing if instead of trying to do all of those things every single day, you could just focus on the essential food blogging ingredients that are going to bring you the greatest return on investment?

What if you could really understand the best monetization model for your blog without letting your blog become a 24-7 job, without obsessing over your Google analytics and hitting refresh every three seconds?

You don’t have to do a million things. You just have to do the right things to grow your food blog and The Food Blogger Summit is all about that.

Focusing on what really matters for growing your food blog and your audience and letting go of the rest.

There are going to be 20 experts over four days who are going to teach you their strategies for streamlining focusing and cutting out the busy work instead of getting lost in it. So no matter what part of who blogging, you’re stuck on it’s time to focus on what matters in food blogging, the heavy hitters that are really going to bring you traffic and revenue and are going to let you fall back in love with food blogging.

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