Food Blogging FM 006:
Food Blogging Niches – Do You Have A Micro Niche? Brought To You By: RecipeThis.com
Introduction Welcome to our sixth food blogging Podcast. So you’ve decided to start a food blog. Congratulations as a fellow food blogger I couldn’t think of anything better to do! I love food, I love to blog, I love internet marketing and best of all I love brands sending me free chocolate in the post to sample. Talking about chocolate it was really hard to stop eating the chocolate just to record this Podcast. I have just had a huge amount of flavoured organic dark chocolate sent and it feels like it is all I eat at the moment. But before you dream of a world of free chocolate, free slow cookers, free herbs, free ice cream makers, there is a few decisions you have to make first. The first thing you have to think of, above everything is your niche. You could of course choose a catchy domain name and then post family recipe after family recipe but unless you are starting up in 2004 when food blogs were new, then you have about zero change for your food blog to get noticed. You need a niche. A good niche and something that people can remember you for. Something that is specific to your content and most important of all…….a niche that you actually like. There of course is no point choosing a niche that you don’t like enough to do justice. From a money and traffic point of view I would say the best niche to get involved in is vegan. It is a hot topic, there is lots of content to go at, there are a lot of vegan income opportunities and it will bring you millions of monthly visitors if you work hard at it.
But if you are really into your meat and you can’t live without your cheese then you could have a problem! Just think as a food blogger you need to be spending several meals of the week experimenting for your business so if you like you meat after a month you might get fed up. And could honestly say that a year from now you will still be into it and still want to do it as a business venture. In the same sense the popular cuisines would also work well for income and traffic. But if you hate Indian food, Chinese food or Italian food then it will soon have you bored. Ideally you want to pick a niche that has potential to build traffic and income that you really like. You might be diabetic and you could have a website with just diabetic recipes, you could be really into avocados and then every recipe could feature avocados. You could have a slow cooker blog with interesting slow cooker recipes or like me focus on kitchen gadgets in general. But either way choose something that you like and that you will still love in five years time. A lot of blogging is about passion so passion for the subject must be the first thing you want to think of.
Monetising Your Food Blog Before you go ahead and buy your domain name and plan your future in the wonderful world of food blogging you have to look to see if your chosen niche actually has the ability to put money on the table and feed your family. In the blogging industry things are always changing and that is why it is so important that you have multiple sources of income. Then if one fails you have your back up.
Even in your niche you want to be able to appeal to as many people as possible. For example we made the mistake in our previous site of catering towards the British market. This meant that a lot of sponsored sites were not available to us, that a lot of advertising networks would not touch us and that we had to go and find our own income elsewhere. So if you have a niche that most people would be into such as food blogging then you have a good starting point for income. There are loads of different advertising networks that will sign you up and then you can work with them until you decide on a selection that offer you the best revenue and go from there. If say you had an unknown niche in the food blogging industry then you will struggle for this income as the ads displayed on your site will not be relevant. Then when looking for sponsored opportunities (which is where the money is at as a food blogger) that if your niche is too micro or too broad then people will not want to pay you for advertising opportunities. Then of course there are the readers that will buy your ebooks. If your niche is too broad then how you can expect to have a good return on customers purchasing from you. You could have a general food blogging site and then bring out a sauce recipe ebook. Maybe 5% of your readers are interested in sauces and therefore only ½ of a percent will purchase your ebook. However if you had an avocado recipe ebook and you brought out a recipe ebook featuring your avocado sauce then you can probably expect 20% to purchase it and to also get really lucrative sponsored opportunities.
As someone that has found her niche the other great thing about it is that if you contact brands with expensive products in your micro niche they will not hesitate to send you their products. You may not even be thinking about monetising at this particular moment but as your blog grows you will start to see it as a business and will probably regret not thinking about it earlier on.
Building Traffic To Your Food Blog The better the micro niche = the easier it is to build traffic to your site. And if you are then relying on advertising networks for a big chunk of your income. Then the more traffic = the more you will earn. Let’s explore what the main sources of traffic would be through to your site: SEO is often the first thought – on a well established food blog you can expect that anything from 30 percent to 60 percent of your traffic comes from the search engines. It is good regular traffic and once your SEO traffic starts coming in you can relax more about your site. But the easiest way to receive results from the search engines is to be in a micro niche. If say you have a vegan recipe blog then they will always associate you with vegan cooking and you will be able to put recipes out and without much effort you’ll rank for them! However if you have a food blog that is really broad, such as general family recipes then you will find it a lot harder. Google will get confused because you will be asking it to associate you with lots of different keywords and they won’t know what your niche is.
If you say to them from day one “this is my micro niche” then they will think of you whenever you post new content and you will constantly fly to the top of the search engines. The other issue you have is that if you don’t stay blogging about the same subject the search engines will no longer associate you with it, so if you have one keyword you do really well for and have a broad niche that SEO position will one day vanish. And I believe this has happened with a lot of the broad recipe sites. Then take social media – when people follow someone it is because they are interested in something in particular that they have found you for. If your niche is too broad then they are not going to show interest in your content on a regular basis. However if they have just bought a slow cooker and you have a slow cooker blog then they will be obsessed with your content and will be sharing it all the time, thus adding to your social media shares and helping with your long term traffic. I also find that within your micro niche if you run themes that you will get traffic much quicker. For example we focused on just Airfryer recipes in December and February. The result ended with us being found for a lot of airfryer keywords and doubling our SEO traffic and our social media following. So think of the niche that you want to provide and give your readers an experience they won’t forget!
Our Podcast Sponsor For this week our Podcast sponsor is the godaddy auctions. They are basically a place where you can go to get aged domain names that people don’t want anymore.
Simply put your niche keyword into the auctions area and it will show you available domains. Many of them are aged domains and you can often find some great domain names. We bought Recipe This from there and I think including a years domain registration we paid about $25. Not bad for such a catchy domain name. Over on our blog post for “how to start a food blog” we have step by step instructions of using the Godaddy auctions that will help you when it comes to purchasing a domain name.
Techy Chit Chat So getting technical where do you start once you choose a micro niche? Or do you need assistant in choosing it? Well no you don’t. There are of course a lot of niche software out there but common sense will often win. You will always know that people will be interested in slow cooker recipes, Paleo will be a popular diet for many years, there will always be vegans and vegetarians and it’s not just the Indians that love a curry. The main thing you need to ask yourself is that there is a big enough market for you to make money from and that it is not too big a niche that you will drowned among your fellow established food bloggers. But use common sense and think about what interests you and that you will ALWAYS have enough content to write about. For example if your idea is a pork chops site and you want to add five recipes a week, would you run out of content after two months? Where as if it was a broader food like cheese or tomatoes you could be going for years.
Also (as the hubby points out) think about your waistline – can you seriously commit to a cupcakes site where you are cooking five different lots of cupcakes a week or even worse making everything with chocolate. I mean that would be amazing but I would be obese before Christmas.
Food Blogging Q & A Each Podcast I pick a question that has been asked on one of the Facebook Groups and then answer it for you. For this session I was asked what’s the difference between building up a food blog for a hobby to building up a business. Well they can often go hand in hand with each other. You choose to do it as a hobby and then you do it for your own enjoyment. Then what happens is that it takes off and you suddenly see this bit of fun as a business venture. Then you start monetising it and you want to look at building up the traffic at a quicker rate. However if you go into this from a business point of view you are building it fast from day one and counting down the days until you get the chance to quit your day job. You also monetise it from day 1 and spend a lot of time thinking about niche selection. Those that do it for pleasure will also avoid spending on their blog where as a business blogger knows that they need to spend money to make money. Whichever you are think of this – if you take your monthly blog income and multiply it by 25 this is the value of your business right now and that you are creating an asset with each blog post you publish.
So if you are just making $10 a month from Adsense just think you could successfully sell your site for $250. Just like the blogger that makes $10,000 a month could sell it for $250,000.
Round Up! Thanks for joining us in our Podcast and we look forward to sharing more of our food blogging wisdom with you in the future.
Links & Resources Mentioned In This Podcast GoDaddy Auctions Recipe This How To Start A Food Blog
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Thanks again for listening and best of luck with your food blog.
Samantha & Dominic Milner http://recipethis.com And don’t forget to connect with us on social media:
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