Erin
Did you know that blogging can be your primary source of income? When done correctly, starting a food blog and keeping up with it can be as time-consuming, but also as lucrative, as a full-time job. Many bloggers and influencers online make a serious income from their efforts, and if you’re committed to creating a quality blog, so can you. Whether you just started blogging or you’ve been at it for awhile without thinking about profits, there are various ways to make money through your food blog.
How To Make Money Food Blogging
While you may simply enjoy sharing food on your blog, many bloggers work to profit from their efforts online. There are various ways to make money through your food blog, especially once you start building a following and increasing traffic. You can use one or all of these methods, although some will work better than others depending on the content on your blog.
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- Advertising
- Affiliate Marketing
- eBooks or Courses
- Physical Cookbooks
- Sponsored Posts
- Email Marketing
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Advertising
Advertisements are one of the easiest ways to earn money on your blog. There are different types of ads that you can place on your blog, but display ads are the most common. Display ads are the picture ads that appear next to or throughout content. Many bloggers use Google AdSense, which will place ads on your site and pay you a certain cost per click when someone from your site clicks on the ad.
Display ads don’t usually bring in a huge amount of revenue, but if you have enough traffic and you optimize the ad placement, look, and content, they can be lucrative. This form of monetizing your ad is also very simple, and requires little effort on your part. Most display ads pay out on a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) or CPC (cost per click) basis. The more people that see or click ads from your site, the more you can make.
If you have a YouTube channel for your blog, video ads can also be useful.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing allows you to make money by referring your readers to sellers online. You can sign up to be an affiliate partner for a wide variety of eCommerce sites – one of the most popular affiliate programs is through Amazon. You can then review, mention, or endorse their products, and if anyone clicks your link and makes a purchase, you’ll receive a commission.
Affiliate websites will give you a special tracking code, so when you create links it records that the customers came from your website. This form of marketing can bring in serious money, especially if you have a lot of traffic.
Writing conversion-optimized content will improve how much you make through affiliate marketing, so consider writing content for those with the intent of making a purchase. While someone might buy cooking supplies on a recipe page, if you write a post about the best hand mixers, the people who click that article are probably looking to buy a mixer and are more likely to purchase something.
eBooks or Courses
Once you’ve built a following for your food blog, you can consider selling an eBook or courses. Depending on the content of your blog, you could sell cooking courses, nutritional education, or even food photography courses for other bloggers. Making an eBook or online course is easy and cost-effective, as you won’t have to pay for the physical products and can develop the book almost for free.
Physical Cookbooks
Most people tend to find recipes online since there is so much free content on the internet, but with a strong audience you can make money selling physical cookbooks as well as online cookbooks. If you have loyal followers to your blog or you share unique content, they very likely may buy a physical cookbook.
You can easily self publish a book, and this can be a useful source of income. With the help of the right printing company, even hardcover book printing with high quality images can be relatively inexpensive. Be sure that you have an audience to sell a book to before you spend money producing the book, however. You’ll want to print them in bulk to save money, but if you can’t sell the books then you’ll end up losing money on this venture.
Sponsored Posts
Similar to affiliate marketing, writing sponsored posts can be a good source of income for your blog. When you begin growing your blog’s visitors and traffic, it’s likely that some people will reach out asking you to recommend their products, or even their blog. With a big enough audience, some people will be willing to spend a decent amount of money for a mention or endorsement on your blog.
If you’re writing recipes, you can feature cooking products that you use in the recipe. Big-time food reviewers may even get money from restaurants for a feature on their blog.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is not always the most lucrative form of income, but it can earn you some money and will also help bring visitors back to your blog. To make money via email marketing, get your professional email address so you could include advertisements, or promote products with affiliate links or from a sponsor.
Before you can try email marketing, however, you need to develop a mailing list. Many websites have a pop-up when you first arrive asking for an email address, but many visitors close this pop-up without providing an email. Try to offer a special deal in exchange for an email, like a list of cooking tips, a percentage off your cookbook, or some other incentive. Once you have a mailing list, you can begin sending out email blasts.
Don’t spam your mailing list with too many emails – this will only drive people to unsubscribe. Send interesting and informative emails that link back to your site to drive traffic and improve the potential for them to buy something or click an ad on your site. There are great email marketing tools that you can use to create and test ads, track sales, and much more.
Our favorite email marketing tool is AWeber. AWeber even provides a helpful, free PDF on what to write, including fill-in-the-blank email templates to make it easy for those who are new to email marketing. Check out the “What To Write” PDF here!
Make Money as a Food Blogger
With a little creativity, there are plenty of ways to monetize your blog. Use what works best for your specific content, or mix a few different sources of income. Before you can make any serious dough (food pun intended) you’ll need a decent amount of traffic. Learn how to increase traffic to your blog, find new food blog ideas, or look for inspiration from the best food bloggers.
