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Food Niche Guide

Ultimate Food Niche Guide for Blogs and Niche Sites

This ultimate guide dives deep into the food blog niche. It will give you the insights you need for starting and growing a successful food blog or niche site.

We will look at positioning, subniches and types of content in the food niche, how successful food websites drive traffic, how monetization works in the food niche and which technical setup (such as themes and plugins) food bloggers and food niche site owners use.

This guide is intended for online entrepreneurs who want to make money with a food blog or niche site and treat it as a business. This means:

  • You care about positioning and competitive analysis.
  • You will follow a research-based content strategy for your food niche site or blog and not merely write “what you feel like”.
  • You want to know which traffic generation techniques work particularly well in the food niche (and which traffic sources work for which types of food-related content).
  • You are keen on learning the details of monetization in the food niche specifically, such as which affiliate programs exist, which ad networks have the highest payouts and so on.
  • Yes, you also want a technical setup that supports your goals. But you understand that market research, content development, traffic strategies and monetization come first, and your technical setup follows your business needs.

If this is you, then you may want to save and bookmark this page. I promise you: In this guide, you will not find a list of general blogging tips where someone simply added: “… for food bloggers”. This ultimate guide is based on dozens of hours of research conducted specifically for the food niche.

Positioning Your Food Site – Competitive Analysis of the Food Niche

How you position your site makes or breaks your food blog. Let’s take a look at what kind of positioning works in the food niche. 

In this chapter, I will introduce a few (mega) successful food sites, provide an overview of subniches within the food niche, analyze the level of competition and the consequences for niching down and provide tips for choosing a food-related domain name.

Successful Food Websites and What We Can Learn From Them About Positioning

The food niche is full of big and successful websites. That’s because there is a great demand for food-related content.

Examples of Successful Food Blogs and Niche Sites

There are way too many wildly successful websites in the food niche to list them all in this guide. To provide a helpful overview of what kind of different sites are successful in the food niche, I have chosen example food blogs or food niche sites from a variety of food niche categories.

In other words, instead of listing ten big websites for healthy family food, I have selected one site for healthy family food, one for baking, one for wine and so on.

(Mega) successful food blog and niche site examples:

  • Natasha’s Kitchen
    A cooking blog with a focus on family-friendly meals and family life. According to Natasha’s about page, her blog receives more than 7 million visitors per month.
  • Deliciously Ella
    Deliciously Ella is a massively successful food blog that you may well know from mainstream media. The blog focusses on a plant-based diet. The way Ella puts it: “Deliciously Ella is a resource to help you live better and make vegetables cool.”
  • Skinnytaste
    Skinnytaste puts an emphasis on recipes that are good for your weight but also taste good. In their words: “At Skinnytaste.com, you’ll find healthy dishes that don’t sacrifice any of the flavors that can be found in their full-fat origins.  My creations must be both “skinny” and “tasty”.”

    According to Skinnytaste’s about page, the site reaches more than 17 million unique visitors per month. That is just insane and shows the traffic potential the food niche has to offer.
  • Fit Men Cook
    Another huge blog that has its own apps and a spice collection. Fit Men Cook emphasizes that going to the gym is not sufficient, but if a man wants to look fit, he also has to eat healthy. In their own words: “Our bodies are built in the kitchen, sculpted in the gym.” So Fit Men Cook has a similar angle as Skinnytaste, but with a focus on men and, as a consequence, more on looking lean and muscular as opposed to just skinny.
  • Minimalist Baker
    Minimalist Baker is actually not only about baking but shares all kinds of recipes that require ten ingredients or less, one bowl, or 30 minutes or less to prepare.

    (This is an example of why you need to think carefully about your domain name. Minimalist Baker’s domain name gives the impression that they are a blog about baking. However, if you look at their content, that is, in fact, not true. I guess that they started as a baking site and later expanded into other recipes. But since they boxed themselves in with their domain name, the name now no longer fits the content.)
  • Sally’s Baking Addiction
    Sally’s Baking Addiction is a very successful blog that does focus on baking only.
  • Pinch of Yum
    Pinch of Yum is an example of a successful food blog that has niched down only very little. They publish, in their words, “fresh, flavorful, (mostly) healthy recipes that I [Lindsay, the founder] love to make and eat in my real, actual, everyday life.”

    Do note though, that Pinch of Yum is not a one-woman-show, but has an entire team behind it.
  • Wine Folly
    When I write about the “food” niche, this includes “drinks” as well. Wine Folly is a big wine website that teaches its readers about wine. They have been featured on, among others, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Forbes.
  • Restaurant Business
    To provide an example from the b2b world, Restaurant Business is a leading media brand in the commercial foodservice industry. They provide business intelligence for restaurant owners and help them to grow their business and increase their profits.
  • Brew Cabin
    Brew Cabin is an example of a niche site in a more specialized niche: the home brewing of beer.

What These Sites Teach Us About Positioning in the Food Niche

From these successful food blogs, you can learn a couple of things:

  1. None of them is just a “general food blog”, but instead, each of them targets a specific subniche or angle.

    The widest one is Pinch of Yum, but even they do have a focus: They write about recipes for the everyday life, as opposed to fine-dining with wine pairings, and place emphasis on healthy recipes.

    The food niche is simply too big for a single blog (in particular if you do not have large amounts of capital and a team behind it) to be perceived as an authority on the subject or the leading brand by google and the readers. As a result, Google won’t send you traffic, and it will be challenging to grow your blog.
  2. Once food blogs start to grow, they gain authority and can get a lot of traffic. That’s why it can be a good idea to start with a smaller niche and then expand later.
  3. Food blogs are personal. The concepts of the different sites often reflect the values, beliefs and life situations of their readers (family-friendly meals, meals for men that take care of their body, meals for women who want to be skinny, vegetarian food and so on).

    Because of this personal aspect of food blogs, you should carefully think about the beliefs and life situation of your readers and plan your positioning and content accordingly. That way, you can create a feeling of community and belonging for your readers.

Level of Competition in the Food Niche

At first glance, the competition in the food niche seems fierce. There are so many food blogs, websites and recipes out there.

However, demand and traffic in the food niche are also huge. As you can see from the above examples, even blogs that only target subniches within the food niche can get millions of visitors per month.

Once we dive deeper into the analysis of different search phrases and traffic channels, we also see varying degrees of competition.

Competition in the Market for Recipes

Competition on Google for recipes, for example, is very tough. Before you base your traffic generation strategy on gaining traffic for recipes from Google, please google a couple of recipes and look at the search results.

Even if you google the native names of less known foreign recipes, you can still find English language recipes from big sites.

Don’t believe me?

Try googling “Ziran yangrou”, which is a specific mutton recipe from northern China or “yangrou shizi tou”, which are “lion head mutton meatballs” from the Chinese province of Jiangsu. Both searches have results from very reputable sites with English language recipes.

At the same time, these exact searches can however also serve as proof that you can, in fact, still find market gaps even in the crowded market for recipes on Google:

The recipes for ziran yangrou that come up on Google are of rather poor quality, without pictures or any explanations. If you create a good recipe here with excellent photographs and a detailed how-to, you could probably beat these sites.

The first recipe that comes up for “yangrou shizi tou” is actually “lion head pork meatballs”, so not exactly what I was looking for.

Of course, you shouldn’t expect large amounts of traffic from recipes like these. But extreme niche recipes like these can be a way in and gain you recipe-authority with Google, meaning you can slowly start to tackle more popular recipes over time.

The good thing about recipes is that you are not as reliant on Google as with other search terms. Pinterest, YouTube, and recipe sharing sites are additional ways to gain traction for your recipes. Getting traffic from visual search engines such as Pinterest and YouTube is significantly easier than in many other niches. We will look at these options in more detail below in the chapter on traffic generation.

Competition in Other Parts of the Food Niche

Outside of recipes, competition in the food niche is still high, which is not surprising when you consider the massive amounts of traffic that await as a prize. However, it does get easier once you move away from recipes and into general educational posts, specific meal plans and other food-related topics (we will get into these and more content types in detail below in the section on content strategy).

For example, as of writing this, useful articles teaching readers how to prepare Sichuan peppercorns should have a good chance of ranking high on Google.

When I search for phrases like “How to prepare Sichuan peppercorns” or “should I grind Sichuan peppercorns” or “Sichuan peppercorns preparation“, even the top results Google gives me do not really answer my question. They teach me how to grind or how to roast Sichuan peppercorns, but I want to know whether I HAVE to roast them or grind them at all or whether there are also other preparation methods.

You can see that this kind of article teaching me about the preparation and use cases of Sichuan peppercorn would rank on Google much easier than a recipe. At the same time, the Chinese cuisine is a popular one, and Sichuan peppercorns are one of the cornerstones of Chinese cooking. So we are not talking about some absurd teeny-tiny nerd question here either.

Side note: If you run these search phrases through keyword tools, depending on the tool you use, it may show zero searches. That doesn’t mean anything. The results these tools show you are extremely imprecise.

Keyword tools can give you a broad idea of whether a search term receives more than 100,000 or less than 10,000 searches per month. But they will often show zero searches even when there are, in reality, thousands of searches to be grabbed.

My sites are ranking for many search terms that should bring in zero traffic according to keyword tools but still bring me thousands of pageviews per month.

Also, forgive me for using another example from Chinese cuisine. It is just one that I happen to like and know relatively well.

Conclusion: How to Deal with the Level of Competition in the Food Niche

Thanks to massive demand and traffic and ever new appearing trends and inventions, the food niche still leaves room for additional blogs and websites.

A few tips for dealing with the competition:

  • To deal with the competition in the food niche, you can start with a very specialized niche and work yourself up to broader topics. For example, your blog may start as a blog about organic hamburgers. Once your site has gained a certain level of authority on that subject, you could expand to American organic food or organic meat-based foods. As a next step, you could target the organic food niche as a whole.
  • A similar principle applies to your articles: Start with very specialized articles that target low competition key phrases and work your way up to more general key phrases with higher competition.

    You will probably never rank for “How to make a burger”. However, your chances with different types of spicy organic burgers are much better (For example, finding a good recipe for an organic mutton burger with fresh chili is quite difficult.). You can start with extreme niche terms like this and then work your way up to more traditional burger recipes.
  • Target new cooking styles and technologies. For example, when sous-vide cooking was new, the market for sous-vide related search terms was not hugely saturated. You can try to anticipate rising trends in the industry and build your site around them. This works particularly well for niche sites that are typically more focused than blogs.
  • You can circumvent the toughest competition by utilizing different traffic generation techniques for different kinds of food-related content. We will cover this in detail below in the traffic strategy section.

Food Niche Categories – Niche Ideas for Food Blogs and Websites

As you have seen from the previous example, there are many different types of food blogs or food niche sites. In this chapter, we will take a closer look at various food blog categories, and I will show you a list of food blog niche ideas to help you find your subniche.

Food niche ideas, sorted by category:

Regional Food Niches

  • Asian Food
  • Mediterranean Food
  • Skandinavien Food
  • Central and Eastern European Food
  • African Food
  • Latin-American Food
  • US-American food
  • Russian Food

Food-type Niches

  • vegetarian food
  • meat dishes
  • barbecue
  • soups
  • salads
  • fish dishes
  • burgers
  • sushi
  • finger foods
  • desserts
  • baked food
  • raw foods
  • chocolate
  • breakfast
  • brunch
  • coffee
  • tea
  • liquor
  • ice cream
  • cake
  • cookies
  • spicy food

Diet-specific Food Niches

  • food for a Paleo diet
  • food for a ketogenic diet
  • vegetarian food
  • vegan food
  • food for people with specific allergies

Reader-type Food Niches   

  • family food
  • food for kids
  • food for busy people
  • food for university students
  • food for readers who believe that healthiness is the top priority when preparing food
  • food for readers who believe that tastiness and indulgence is the top priority when preparing food
  • food for readers who believe that impressing others is the top priority when preparing food
  • food for readers who believe that easiness of preparation is the top priority when preparing food
  • food for men
  • food for women
  • food for the elderly (Your target audience would not just be the elderly themselves, but every son and daughter who is taking care of their parents. This niche may not be as sexy as “Becoming a muscle machine on a Paleo diet”, but often the unsexy niches work best because they are not as crowded.)

Preparation-type Food Niches

  • Pressure cooking
  • Sous-vide cooking
  • Barbecue
  • Baking
  • Smoking
  • Steaming
  • Cooking with Thermomix

Purpose Driven Food Niches

  • food for losing weight
  • food for building muscle
  • food for fine dining
  • food as a hobby, cooking as a way of relaxing
  • food as a hobby, cooking as a social activity to do with friends
  • food as an adventure (for example, preparing food in the wilderness, food for camping holidays)
  • Preparing and storing food for surviving a catastrophe (“prepping”)

You can combine niches to niche down even further. Examples:

  • No Meat Athlete helps athletes (niched down by reader) meet their high protein demand without meat (niched down by food type).
  • Leslie Chen of ricelean.com helps women (niched down by reader type) to lose weight (niched down by purpose) with an Asian diet (niched down by region).
  • Brew Cabin teaches you to brew beer (food type: beer) at home (purpose: hobby).
  • 1WineDude delivers entertaining (food as a hobby) wine knowledge (food type: wine) for intermediate-level wine enthusiasts (reader-type: readers with intermediate wine knowledge)
  • Latest Fuels is a niche site that informs busy people (reader type) about meal replacements (food type). In case you are wondering, this is the stuff that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and esports professionals drink to save time on lunch. Soylent or Huel are brands you may have heard of.

    By the way, upon initial research, this may be a niche where there is quite some room for competition and a lot of growth potential. Food replacement is also suitable for long-term storage so that the prepper community may be another target group for this one.

Choosing a Domain Name in the Food Niche

When you are niching down in content, be careful not to niche down too much in the domain name. You can always expand your content later on, but you cannot expand the scope of your domain name.

As mentioned, it is quite common for sites in the food niche to start with a small niche and then niching up once they have reached more authority. Do not make that option unnecessarily difficult for you by choosing too narrow of a domain name.

For example, if you want to blog about high-protein snacks, high-protein cookies may be a topic you could start with. However, if you name your website www.proteincookies.com, you are limiting any future expansion immediately with that choice.

Better to go with something like www.proteinfoods.com or www.deliciousprotein.com to leave room for expansion.

This tip is not limited to the food niche. I own a German website called Juratopia.de, which translates to Lawtopia. It started as a niche site for legal trainees only. After more than 25% of all legal trainees in Germany were signing up for my email autoresponder, I felt that I had dominated that market and expanded to law students and young legal professionals. That expansion would have been very awkward if I had called my site Legal-Trainees.de.

Food Blog Content Strategy: Ideas for Posts and Articles in the Food Niche

In this chapter, we will analyze different categories of food-related content to help you set up or fine-tune your food niche site content strategy.

I also provide many examples of different kinds of food blog posts to help you find food blog post ideas or content ideas for your site.

Recipes

Even though, as mentioned, recipes are fiercely competitive on Google and generally require high domain authority (i.e., a well-established blog) to rank well, in the early days of your website, you can use social media, recipe sharing sites and internal linking to drive traffic to your recipes. More on this in the traffic section below.

Recipe Presentation and Design

When it comes to recipes, the visual presentation is crucial. Readers want their mouth to get watery when they read through your recipe post, but at the same time need the information highly organized and easy to follow while cooking.

To meet these requirements, you need not only great photos but also a mix of pictures, tables and lists that make your recipe appear well structured and easy to grasp.

Achieving that on a website can be quite challenging unless you really know your way around custom CSS coding. A great plugin to help you create beautiful and well-structured recipes is Tasty Recipes, which even includes video integration so that your recipes can be a multimedia experience. Another good plugin with even more functionality in its higher price versions is WP Recipe Maker, but this is one that requires a bit more time to get the hang of.

Recipe Post Content

Efficiency-Driven “Minimum Viable Content” Recipes

A recipe post can just be short and efficiency-driven. This is the recipe with one picture of the finished dish at the top, a table with the ingredients, and a few bullet points that explain how to process those ingredients into the end result shown on the picture.

There is definitely a high demand for this kind of short recipe post. In particular, if you already know a dish but want to know how to make it, many people will just look for an efficient recipe that tells them what to do.

An example is this New York Times Spaghetti-carbonara recipe.

Efficiency-driven recipes for well-known dishes can drive a TON of traffic. In theory.

In practice, you have to compete with websites like the New York Times in the search results.

Another problem with efficiency-driven recipes is that they provide you with little opportunity to differentiate yourself or build a brand.

The readers won’t notice if this kind of recipe is given to them from you or someone else.

Expanded Recipe Posts With Bells and Whistles

That is why many food bloggers decide to spice their recipe posts up with additional content.

For example, you see many recipes where the blogger added

  • Additional pictures, from different angles and different stages of the preparation process
  • A video, which is showing them how to make the dish.
  • A bit of story
  • A “what to serve with” section

Adding Multimedia

An example of a recipe post that includes not many words, but several pictures and a video, is this recipe for cucumber tomato avocado salad by Natasha’s Kitchen.  The more than 1000 comments it has received show how successful this kind of multimedia experience can be.

Adding Story

An example of a recipe post where a story element has been added is this chocolate chip cookie recipe by Pinch of Yum. They tell us all about how they discovered and fine-tuned the recipe – starting with an old oven in the Philippines that they had to light with a match.

Do you notice how much of a connection they build with their readers that way?

This particular recipe post has received more than 3000 comments, while comment numbers on Pinch of Yum recipes usually range “only” in the dozens or hundreds.

As a side note, it is also well worth studying the many photos in this post. The ingredient-close ups are just ridiculously good.

Adding a “What to Serve With…” Section

Adding a “what to serve with…” section to your recipe is great for two reasons:

  1. It helps your readers to get more out of your recipe.
  2. It gives you a chance to link to other recipes of yours, thus keeping your readers on your website and reducing your bounce rate.

To see an example of how this can be done, take a look at this recipe for Lamb Shanks Massaman Curry by RecipeTin Eats.

Adding a “Troubleshooting” Section

You can also consider adding a “troubleshooting” section at the end of the recipe to assist your readers in finding out what went wrong if their dish didn’t turn out as intended. Pinch of Yum has done something similar in the Chocolate cookie post I introduced above. They have added pictures of failed cookies and an explanation that points out what the mistake was in each case.

A troubleshooting section may not be suitable for every recipe but can add significant value in the right situation.

Articles and Videos That Teach Cooking or Food Preparation Techniques

If you attend a cooking school, you won’t just learn how to follow recipes. You will learn basic principles of cooking, different cooking styles and preparation techniques for all kinds of food.

The same is true for web surfers. They don’t only need recipes, but many are searching for “how-to” type information.

How-to website content and videos are proven to work in the food niche. Yet, ranking for informational posts on Google is often much easier than for recipes. But of course, it still depends on the topic of the article. Not every how-to post is suitable for every website and every traffic medium.

Let’s look at three kinds of how-to content for food blogs:

General How-To Information

This is the kind of information that has a broad application and that everyone is interested in. Martha Steward’s articles What’s the best way to reheat leftovers or How to Freeze Fresh Vegetables and Herbs are examples of this category.

Unfortunately, you have to be Martha Steward if you want to rank well for search phrases like that.

Niched down How-To Information

That is why for most food bloggers and food niche site owners, writing more niched down how-to information will be the better choice.

An example is this article on how to form a pellicle on smoked meat. This kind of more niched down how-to article will often be an excellent way to get Google traffic.

Case in point:

The above article came up as number one for me when I googled “how to form a pellicle on meat“. That article on number one here is long and detailed, but challenging to follow if you’re not already familiar with the subject. The quality of the photos is not high, either. The article is also not published by a huge site with massive domain authority.

Below that article, aside from Wikipedia, the next ranking sites are already forums, which are typically rather easy to beat.

You see how competition for these niched down how-to posts is much weaker than for recipes.

Another example of niched down how-to information is this extensive guide on vacuum packing. You could also go more specific and write a blog post or shoot a youtube video about vacuum packing for sous-vide cooking.

Teaching Cool and Fun Tricks

You can get creative and teach tricks that are fun to learn and to perform. I like this post about how to flip an egg in the pan without using additional tools.

This kind of fun how-to post will typically better be suited for YouTube and social media and may not do so well on Google.

Meal Plans

If you do not want to eat the same dish every day, planning what to eat three times per day, finding the right recipe and making sure you have the ingredients available can be quite time-consuming, even more so if you are following a specific diet.

Meal plans help to streamline this process and save time by listing a specific dish for each meal over a certain time, including the recipes and often also a shopping list with everything you need to prepare the dishes that are included in the meal plan.

The meal plans by Skinnytaste are good examples.

Skinnytaste gives you a new meal plan for becoming or staying skinny every week for free. You can download the meal plan from Google Docs. It includes every meal of the week and a link to the corresponding recipe on Skinnytaste. Since this website focuses on your weight, it also states the calorie count for every meal and ensures that the daily calorie total stays within a certain amount.

The meal plan further includes a shopping list with every ingredient you need for that week (and how much of it). If you want to eat well and balanced, you can easily see how such a meal plan can be a massive timesaver for achieving that goal.

Of course, there are many target audiences for which meal plans could be useful: Think meal plans for vegans or vegetarians, meal plans for a Paleo diet, meal plans for bodybuilders or meal plans for busy families.

Some bloggers even sell meal plan subscriptions, like Momables does here.

Kitchen Equipment Reviews

Reviews of kitchen equipment are another popular article type among food bloggers.

You can either review several products and compare or focus on one product and really go into depth.

Examples for Product Reviews That Select and Compare:

Examples for Product Reviews That Focus on One Product:

If you focus on one product, it may be better to choose something that is priced a little higher because most people will not research cheap items in great detail.

For example, many people may read a comparison post of several brisket knives that cost between 40$ and 100$. But not so many will take the time to read an in-depth review of one particular 60$ brisket knife.

However, they may read an in-depth review of one particular 400$ ice cream maker.

Kitchen equipment reviews are popular among food niche site owners and food bloggers because they are easy to monetize: you simply include affiliate links to the products you recommend.

However, for that same reason, the related keywords can also be quite competitive on Google. Consequently, it may be a good idea to niche down very deep in the beginning and start by reviewing equipment that is unique to your subniche (for example, “best frozen yogurt machines for home” instead of “best ice cream makers”).

Articles on How to Use Cooking Equipment

After your readers have purchased their new cooking equipment, they will need to learn how to use it. This makes for another category of articles.

Examples:

Since the how-to-use category will often be quite competitive in the google search results, you may want do consider going more specific.

“How much water is needed for pressure cooking” will be easier to rank for than “How to use a pressure cooker”. “How to clean your frozen yogurt machine” is easier than “How to use an ice cream maker”.

Videos That Show You Cooking

The standard in this category is to film yourself cooking recipes. You upload the video to YouTube and embed the YouTube video into your recipe post. That way, you improve the user experience of the recipe articles and, at the same time, have an alternative traffic source with YouTube.

But you can also get creative with video. An out-of-the-box example is Tasty’s video showing how Katie makes A 3-Course Meal In One Pan.

Food Reviews

Reviewing food doesn’t have to mean critiquing a dish that another chef has prepared. Instead, you can simply review a recipe.

Recipe reviews work best for recipes that are trending online or for recipes of famous chefs. To become inspired, take a look at The Kitchen’s recipe review collection.

Alternatively, you can, of course, also review a whole cookbook or a restaurant. However, restaurant reviews will – for obvious reasons – only be suitable for blogs with a local focus.

Ingredient Deep-Dives

Ingredient deep-dives teach your readers all about a particular ingredient: For what kind of dish it is used and why, methods of preparation, possibly different varieties of the ingredient (such as white truffles and black truffles), nutrition and health effects, how to store it, where to buy it, how much to spend on it and maybe even history and cultural background, depending on how your site is positioned.

Examples:

  • What is Fleur de Sel, and How Is It Used? by the spruce Eats. The article explains what fleur de sel is and how it is different from sea salt, which varieties of fleur de sel there are, what it tastes like, how it should be stored, where it can be bought (perfect chance to place an affiliate link, even though they don’t do it in this case) and, of course, links to recipes by the spruce Eats that make use of fleur de sel (leads the readers to click further into the website).
  • The Spruce Eats has a whole collection of these articles, so apparently, they are working for them. Another example is their article on Grana Padano Cheese which explains what Garan Padano Cheese is, how it is made, which substitutes there are, how it can be used, again, how it is stored, whether you can eat the rind, and, of course, links to recipes that use Grana Padano Cheese.

Do you see how versatile this article is when it comes to search engine optimization? While it may be difficult to rank in the top three for the term “Grana Panado cheese”, this article could also rank for more specific search phrases such as “Can you eat the rind of Grana Padano Cheese?” or “how to store Grana Padano Cheese“, which may be much more achievable.

Dish Deep-Dives

Something that I see very little in the food blogging world, but that I think could be worth a try, is to go deeper into famous dishes. For example, when I search for “coq au vin“, I find a million recipes, but each site just gives me their favorite one recipe.

What if you were to make a “master page” about coq au vin? On that master page, you don’t just stick to one recipe. Instead, you introduce the most famous coq au vin recipes (For example, you can make coq au vin with red wine or with white wine. You can add different vegetables, different kinds of potatoes, etc.)

You could also suggest wine pairings and a cheese selection follow up. We are talking about French cuisine, after all.

If you want to give the article a refined touch, you could also add information on the origins of coq au vin and explain why it has become such a famous dish and how the different variations have developed.

I have not seen many of these kinds of dish deep-dives, so there is no guarantee that this will work. But on the other hand, it may be a chance to conquer new territory and rank for extremely high traffic keywords like “coq au vin” that may otherwise be unattainable.

Warning: I’m using coq au vin as an example here because it is a dish that everybody knows. Even with a very well done dish deep-dive, targeting “coq au vin” as a key phrase on Google would be extremely difficult and should only be attempted by websites that already have an extremely strong domain authority in the domain of food or French cuisine.

Depending on how much authority your site already has, you should go for dishes that are famous enough within your subniche to have people searching for them, but not crazy famous like coq-au-vin.

Occasion Focused Articles

You can also center food or drink related articles around certain occasions, such as weddings, birthday parties, bar mitzvahs or bachelor parties.

Examples of occasion driven articles could be:

  • What to serve at a vegan wedding
  • The cleverest finger foods for party nights (including liquor pairing)
  • Three menu ideas to impress your in-laws
  • What to look for in a restaurant for your first date
  • Five fun foods for your child’s birthday party
  • Which wine to serve when your boss is coming for dinner
  • 10 Mother’s Day breakfasts you can’t go wrong with

More Food Blog Post Examples

If you would like to see even more examples of blog posts for the outlined post categories, you can find those in my list of food blog post titles.

How to Drive Traffic to a Food Blog or Niche Site

The food niche has insane amounts of traffic. There are several food blogs run by individuals (though often team-supported) that reach millions of unique visitors per month (examples at the beginning of this article).

It is also a great niche for driving traffic because you do not have to rely as heavily on Google as other niches do. Food content does well on social media and YouTube, which means you can promote your food content on social media and establish a traffic mix that is coming from several different sources.

However, my food blog traffic research has shown that when it comes to bringing that traffic over to your website, Google and Pinterest are dominant by far. Other sources such as Instagram may work well to build connections with potential advertisers, monetize with sponsored posts, and to establish a brand presence. However, they are not as suitable for bringing traffic to your website.

Let’s dive into the details:

Google as a Traffic Source for Food Blogs and Food Niche Sites

To drive traffic from Google, you should have a basic understanding of SEO (search engine optimization). If you are new to SEO, I recommend reading through the Beginner Guide to SEO by MOZ, which is an SEO company that publishes an extremely reputable SEO blog as well as SEO training courses.

In this article, I will assume that you have a least a basic understanding of SEO and will focus on certain SEO specifics for food blogs and websites.

Recipes

Competition on Google for recipes is very high. Even though there may be very niche recipes that you can rank for straight from the start of a new website (cf. examples provided above in the section on recipes) and that does help to build authority with Google, traffic from these niche recipes probably won’t be substantial. It may be advisable not to base your strategy on driving Google traffic to recipes in the beginning.

Once your website has a strong domain authority, you may be able to make driving google traffic to your recipe articles part of your traffic strategy.

A way to shortcut this process may be the dish deep-dives that I suggested above – but as mentioned, they are experimental. If you succeed with dish deep-dives, please let me know so that I can update this guide.

How-to Information

Articles that teach users to use specific cooking equipment, articles and videos that explain cooking techniques and ingredient deep-dives generally have a better chance of ranking on google if you niche down sufficiently deep (see examples provided above in the sections on the respective article types)

Meal Plans

Meal plans could also work well if you niche down because the competition is not as fierce as with recipes.

Final Thoughts on Google Traffic in the Food Niche

With a young website in the food niche, you will probably need to niche down and target rather specialized search phrases. Since the competition for more general search phrases in the food niche is tough, niching down can help to achieve a good ranking.

Fortunately, the food niche is characterized by an abundance of traffic as well, so that even with very niched down search phrases, you can still gain sufficient amounts of traffic (and you can start to target broader search terms once you are more established).

Many bloggers use the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress to help them optimize their articles for search engines. Whether you need it or not depends on how experienced you are with SEO yourself and what kind of SEO options your WordPress theme already provides. But if you are new to SEO, I would recommend using Yoast SEO. The basic version is free.

Pinterest as a Traffic Source for Food Blogs and Food Niche Sites

Food and drinks are huge on Pinterest. The two defining elements of Pinterest as a social medium are that it is

  1. visual and
  2. used as a search engine. Already as early as 2018, Pinterest reported more than 2 billion searches per month.

This makes Pinterest highly suitable for driving traffic to recipes. It also means that there is such a thing as Pinterest-SEO.

If you want to learn how to use Pinterest to grow your food blog, it could be a good idea to join Melyssa Griffin’s Pinterest course. Melyssa is a leading authority (I would even say the leading authority) on Pinterest.

To help you optimize your posts and pictures for Pinterest, you can use the WordPress plugin WP Tasty. WP Tasty is developed by the team behind Pinch of Yum, whose Pinterest page has more than 10 million viewers per month. You can assume that they know something about promoting recipes on Pinterest.

Instagram as a Traffic Source for Food Blogs and Food Niche Sites

Like Pinterest, Instagram is highly visual and, therefore, in principle suitable for food content.

However, unlike Pinterest, it is not used as a search engine. Growing on Pinterest, therefore, relies on your content being shared appearing in users’ feeds.

Moreover, Instagram tries hard to keep users on Instagram. Even if you have a large following on Instagram (and some food bloggers have huge audiences), it may not be easy to direct your followers over to your website.

Despite this problem, many food bloggers have Instagram accounts, in particular the bigger ones.

Facebook as a Traffic Source for Food Blogs and Food Niche Sites

At first glance, Facebook still seems to be prominent in the food blogosphere, because some food bloggers have huge Facebook followers.

However, most of them built these Facebook pages a couple of years ago. Today, you can still build very large followings on Facebook, no doubt. But Facebook makes you pay big bucks to actually reach those followers with your posts.

That’s right, if you post a link to your latest blog post on your Facebook page, Facebook will only show it to a fraction of your followers, unless you pay.

For that reason, Facebook may not be the best pillar to build your food blog traffic strategy on.

YouTube as a Traffic Source for Food Blogs and Food Niche Sites

Food channels on YouTube can be massive. Sometimes, it is even difficult to tell whether the YouTube Channel or the website is the heart of the business. At other times, it is obviously the YouTube Channel.

When you get on YouTube, consider that the entertainment factor plays a more important role than on websites.

Food vloggers can succeed on YouTube with purely informational videos. Natasha’s kitchen’s YouTube channel, for example, has more than 1 million subscribers and is very informational.

However, you also have very successful YouTube channels with a specific entertainment angle.

Consider, for example, Rosanna Pansino’s YouTube channel, which has more than 12 million subscribers. Her main category, “Nerdy Nummies & Recipes”, features baby Yoda macarons, Star Wars milk, Scooby-Doo snacks, brain cupcakes and testing viral TikTok food hacks.

On Binging with Babish, Babish recreates recipes from TV-shows. Ever wanted to know how to make the Ratatouille from the movie “Ratatouille”? 22 million viewers did. And 7 million subscribers prove that this little entertaining edge can work wonders on YouTube.

Maybe centering your whole YouTube channel around one entertainment theme doesn’t fit your strategy. But you could consider adding one entertaining twist to each of your videos.

TikTok as a Traffic Source for Food Blogs and Food Niche Sites

There is no question that you can gain large amounts of followers for a food channel on TikTok. Joshua Weissman’s channel flakeysalt, for example, has gained about 3 million followers so far.

However, as with Instagram, it is not easy to get these followers out of TikTok and onto your website. There have been rumors for a while of TikTok experimenting with in-video links, but if they do come, they may well be limited to specific websites and not allow you to link to your blog. At the moment, the only option to link to your website is from your bio.

Recipe Sharing Sites as a Traffic Source for Food Blogs and Food Niche Sites

Recipe sharing sites are a specialty of the food niche and a convenient way to drive traffic to your recipe articles. They are content aggregators. You submit either your recipe or a teaser thereof to the recipe sharing site, and they will display your recipe as part of a collection of recipes from all over the web.

There are two types for recipe sharing sites:

  • those that only show a teaser of your recipe and then link to your website, and
  • those that show your full recipe.

For you, submitting your recipes to food sharing sites that only show a teaser is generally preferable. It allows you to drive more traffic back to your own website, and you don’t compete with the recipe sharing site in the search engine results.

While Google has stated numerous times that there is no penalty for duplicate content, big recipe sharing sites will usually outrank you for your own recipes if you allow them to publish the whole recipe.

Examples for recipe sharing sites that only show teasers and link back to your website:

Example of a recipe sharing sites that displays your whole recipe:

Conclusion: How to Promote a Food Blog or Niche Site

We have seen that there are various channels to promote your food blog or food niche site effectively. It is easier to establish a traffic mix than in other niches that rely almost exclusively on Google.

A good strategy could be to focus on Google, Pinterest, YouTube and Recipe sharing sites. This traffic mix would go well with a content strategy that includes both

  • recipes to promote on YouTube, Pinterest and recipe sharing sites and
  • other article types such as how-to articles, deep-dives and reviews that may not do as well on social media, but are more suitable for driving traffic from Google and can be connected to your recipes with internal linking.

See the chapter on food content types above for more details on this type of food-related content.

Monetization in the Food Niche – How to Make Money With Your Food Blog or Niche Site

How Much Money Do Food Bloggers Make?

There is a lot of money to be made in the food niche. My market analysis of the profitability of food blogs indicates that some food bloggers generate millions in profit each year.

For example, I estimate that Skinnytaste makes more than $8 million in profit per year, possibly even eight-figures.

Of course, the vast majority of food blogs do not make this kind of money. But many food bloggers nowadays generate a full-time income.

To see examples of how much revenue and profit real food blogs generate with various quantities of traffic, head over to my food blog profitability market analysis. You will find a handy table that nicely summarizes the data.

According to my analysis, food blogs achieve an average of $32.10 in revenue per 1000 pageviews (RPM, “Revenue Per Mille”) and an average of $26.57 in profit per 1000 pageviews (PPM, “Profit Per Mille”).

However, the RPM that food blogs generate varies wildly. For example, Kitchen Sanctuary and Piping Pot Curry reach only a $19 RPM in the sample periods I have analyzed, while Butternet Bakery achieves a $61 RPM.

For you to get to the high end of the spectrum, it is well worth spending some time on your monetization strategy.

You have many options for monetizing your food blog. The best practice for the food niche is to not rely on one stream of revenue alone, but to establish a revenue mix, just as you establish a traffic mix. (By the way, if you would like to see the revenue mix of 11 real-world food blogs, head over to my article on how food blogs make money.)

Let’s take a closer look at different monetization strategies and how they can be implemented:

Ad Networks for Food Blogs and Food Niche Sites

The easiest way to monetize your food website or blog is with ads. Adding ads to your websites does not require much work and can by itself generate a nice revenue if you have sufficient traffic. Pinch of Yum made more than $ 50,000 per month just with ads alone (this was in 2016 when they not as big as today and still publishing their income reports).

You should be aware, though, that ad revenue does not increase linearly with pageviews. As your site grows bigger, you will gain access to more profitable ad networks that pay a higher sum per 1000 pageviews. Consequently, as your website grows bigger, you not only have more visitors to show ads to, but you also earn more ad money for each visitor.

The most common ways of monetizing a food website with ads:

  • When you are just starting out, you will probably begin with Google Adwords. Google Adwords pays very little compared to other networks. If your traffic is small, you will earn almost nothing. That is why some people believe that you cannot make money with ads.
  • However, once your site gets more than 50,000 pageviews per month, you can apply to Mediavine food. Mediavine food is much more profitable than Google Adwords and used by many food bloggers.
  • Once you reach 100,000 pageviews per month, you are eligible for AdThrive. Adthrive can be even more profitable than Mediavine and is used by many of the giants in the food blogging niche. An example of a food blogger who significantly improved their income by switching to AdThrive can be found here. AdThrive is owned by CafeMedia and, among others, used by Natasha’s Kitchen, Pinch of Yum and Skinnytaste. (You can tell from the line “An Elite CafeMedia Food Publisher” in their footer and from the AdThrive disclaimer in their privacy statement, here, here and here.)
  • If your website is an authority in a rather specialized niche with high-value items, it could also make sense to negotiate your own ad deals. This may be the case, for example, if your site is about expensive food production machines for commercial use.

Monetization with ads is popular in particular with recipe blogs because they often receive a lot of traffic, but a large chunk of that traffic has no buying intent. Ads are a good way to monetize these visitors.

But even niche sites that focus on traffic with buying intent (such as kitchen equipment review niche sites), ads can be a nice addition to the revenue mix.

Affiliate Marketing as a Food Blogger or Food Niche Site Owner

The food niche is abundant with affiliate programs, and monetizing via affiliate marketing is common practice for successful food bloggers and food website owners.

There are several unique ways to place affiliate promotions on a food website:

Ideas for Adding Affiliate Links to Food Blogs and Food Websites:

On specific product recommendation pages

Many website owners and bloggers in the food niche have separate pages where they list recommended products and include affiliate links. This is sometimes a general “shop” page, but can also be broken down into more specific categories such as

  • “equipment”, which could list kitchen equipment the blogger uses,
  • “ingredients”, which may be key ingredients, foods or drinks that the website owner recommends (for example certain spices, wines, liquor or chocolate) or
  • “services” or “subscriptions”, which could be food box subscriptions, meal plan services or wine, tea or coffee subscriptions.
  • Below recipe articles

Right underneath each recipe, you can recommend products that are useful for the specific recipe. Pinch of Yum does this. They have an “equipment” section right under each recipe, which shows the products that they used for making this dish with an amazon affiliate “buy now” link.

For example, underneath a recipe for a fruit smoothie, they have an affiliate link for a recommended blender that sells for more than 400$ on Amazon. Underneath a recipe for a couscous salad, they recommend a set of stainless steel mixing bowls (about 60$), a skillet (about 50$) and a food processor (about 150$).

Ingredient shopping with Relish

You can monetize your recipes by making them shoppable. To do that, you have to work with a company called Relish.

The way it works: You add a “Shop ingredients” button beneath your recipe. When readers click that button, they are shown a choice of three food delivery services.

 They select one and are redirected to that service’s website. The clue: Their shopping cart is already pre-filled with all the ingredients for that particular recipe.

Having their shopping cart automatically filled with the right items saves your readers serious time. As the website owner, you can get a commission for sales or get paid if advertising brands are displayed in the shopping cart.

This recipe monetization technique is, for instance, used by Skinnytaste (example) and by Serious Eats (example).

On kitchen equipment review pages

This is one is so evident that I am a little embarrassed about listing it, but for the sake of completeness: Of course, your kitchen equipment reviews (or wines reviews, or liquor reviews …) lend themselves to affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Programs in the Food Niche

In the food niche, you can choose between a bazillion affiliate programs. Whatever you want to promote, there is a high chance that you will find an affiliate program for it.

Examples:

Sponsored Posts

Sponsored posts are a common monetization method in the food website industry. Bloggers either work with brands directly or use influencer platforms such as TapInfluence, Social Fabric or Sway as a middleman.

If you have never done sponsored posts, starting with an influencer platform may be a good idea because it helps you understand the rules of the game of sponsored posts in your particular subniche. For example, the platform will let you know the prices for the posts – no need guess on your end. You also won’t need to cold-approach brands to find sponsorship opportunities.

On the flip side, you are not free to negotiate your own prices, and the platform will take a cut. Therefore, you may be able to achieve a higher profit if you contact brands directly. Moreover, when you approach brands yourself, you are not limited to an influencer platform’s associated brands and have a more extensive choice of companies to approach.

Infoproducts in the Food Niche

The food niche offers ample opportunities to create your own infoproducts, which can take your profitability to a whole new level:

Online courses

Online cooking classes are the first thing that comes to mind, but you can go tons of different directions depending on your subniche.

  • Ready for Raw sells an online course on living a high raw diet. Participants not only learn how to prepare all kinds of raw food but also how to set up the kitchen for efficient raw-food preparation, how to keep a budget and to eat raw when you’re on the go. The course sells for 197$.
  • Online wine courses are widespread in the industry. They can sell for as little for 19$ (Wine Folly’s wine tasting online class) or as much as $ 1095 (Certified Specialist of Wine Online program by San Francisco Wine School, which prepares participants for the Certified Specialist of Wine (CSW) exam). There are also all price ranges in between.

Meal Plans

While meal plans make great free website content, I already mentioned that many websites also sell meal plan subscriptions. An example would be the PaeloPlan meal plan subscription, which costs 9,99$ per month.

You could even connect your meal plans to Relish, so that your readers get a pre-filled shopping cart with everything they need for next week’s meal plan, and you earn extra money from the affiliate program.

Cookbooks

If you run a recipe website, you could sell cookbooks. Actual paper made cookbooks, kindle cookbooks, self-published cookbooks, cookbooks published via a publishing house; there are many options. The simplest way is probably to start with a simple downloadable pdf.

An example of a successful cookbook by a food blogger would be Skinnytaste’s “The Skinnytaste Air Fryer Cookbook: The 75 Best Healthy Recipes for Your Air Fryer“.

Selling Food

Some bloggers decide to create their own food and sell it online. For instance, FitMenCook sells its own spice collection, and Deliciously Ella has their own food product line, including granola, muesli, porridge and snacks.

Food Related Apps

You can also create food-related apps. FitMenCook has its own apps, for example, a recipe app that includes recipes, a shopping list and a calorie counter. They also have a meal planning app.

You can make the app free and earn money with in-app purchases, or you could charge for the app from the outset.

Food Photography

You can offer food photography for sale on stock photo websites, such as StockFood, iStock, Adobe Stock Premium or Shutterstock’s Offset or even sell your food photography directly to brands. However, this is, strictly speaking, not making money from your website.

Recipe Development

Several food bloggers develop recipes for brands on demand and get paid for that. Same as food photography, developing a recipe for a brand is not really making money from your website. However, your website will usually serve as a lead generator to attract a brand’s attention.

Live Online Cooking Classes

You could also sell live online cooking classes where participants join via skype a zoom video chat. You teach the participants how to cook a dish, can give pointers and answer participants’ questions live on air. They can also show you their food via video, and you can help them to improve.

Live online cooking classes are often offered by companies that specialize exclusively in providing cooking classes, such as Festcooking, but this could work very well for a food blogger, too.

Food Niche Secret Sauce: Special Tips for Food Blogs and Food Websites

Photography Is King

In many niches, you can get away with buying stock photos or shooting a bunch of quick ones with your phone camera.

Not so in the food niche. If you want a genuinely successful food blog or website, you need GREAT photography (unless maybe if you focus solely on kitchen equipment reviews).

If you don’t believe me, read these comments by successful food bloggers on how vital food photography was to their success:

“Here on FBC, I’ll regularly share tips for how to improve your food photography because I strongly believe it was a key reason why I’ve been able to grow my blog at the rate I did.”

Nagi, of Food Bloggers Central and RecipeTin Eats

“I can’t stress enough how important your food images are in driving traffic to your food blog and increasing your exposure. You eat with your eyes first.”

Farah of The Cooking Jar

“We all eat with our eyes and I can say with 100% honesty that my blog did not start to grow until I saved my money, bought a fancy camera, and actually learned how to use it.”

Sally of Sally’s Baking Addiction

If you are still not convinced, go the mega-successful food blogs I listed at the beginning of this article and pay attention to their photography. It is out of this world.

If you are serious about growing a blog or website in the food niche, you should do as Sally says: Buy a (reasonably) good camera and learn to shoot excellent food photos.

A cheap way to get started learning the basics of food photography is the Tasty Food Photography eBook by Pinch of Yum, which sells for only 29$.

Email Newsletters and Autoresponders for Food Bloggers and Food Niche Sites

Since food is something that your readers enjoy occupying themselves with regularly, email newsletters and autoresponders work well in the food and cooking niche.

An email newsletter can turn one-time visitors into regular readers that know and trust you. It not only allows you to drive them back to your website again and again but, due to the increased level of trust, also makes it much easier to sell them products.

The simplest way to run an email newsletter is to simply notify your readers when you have published a new article on your website. However, you can create much more value by setting up an autoresponder, which is a pre-determined sequence of emails that every subscriber receives. A good provider for creating newsletters and autoresponders is ConvertKit. (more on this below in the section on food blog equipment).

Two kinds of autoresponders are particularly popular in the food niche:

“Basics of” Autoresponders in the Food Niche

One popular choice for an autoresponder is a “Basics of” autoresponder. When somebody signs up for your newsletter, you send them an automated frequency of emails, teaching them the basics they need to know in your food subniche.

For example, if your blog is about organic food, you could have an autoresponder explaining what the benefits of eating organic are, what makes organic food organic, what kind of different standards of organic food there are, essential tips for buying organic food and the most popular organic food recipes for your everyday meals.

If your website is about wine, you could teach the basics of wine tasting, wine pairing basics and how to choose the right wine glasses.

Autoresponders on Specific Aspects of Your Food Subniche

Alternatively, you could also use your autoresponder to go deep into one specific aspect of your niche. This method is particularly useful if you sell a product on that aspect.

For example, if you have a premium membership on losing weight with Paleo, you could have an autoresponder on that same topic.

In that autoresponder, you can start by explaining why a Paleo diet is suitable for losing weight and explain a few basic principles of how weight loss works with Paelo.

In one of your next emails, you mention how important it is to have a good meal plan that is designed for weight loss on a Paleo diet and explain what to pay attention to when creating such a meal plan.

You can then point out that drafting a new meal plan every week can be very time consuming and that the readers can save themselves the hassle by subscribing to your membership, which includes weekly meal plans specifically designed to help you lose weight on a Paleo diet. You get the idea.

Should Food Bloggers Activate Comments?

Nowadays, many bloggers deactivate comments to avoid the time and energy you have to spend on managing spam, dealing with trolls and responding to comments. In particular, in niches that are very transactional and fact-oriented, say, for example, in the insurance niche, there is a strong case for deactivating comments.

However, comments do work particularly well in the food niche.

First, food is a very emotional and social topic. It is something people enjoy spending their time on, and they like giving their opinion and feeling that they are part of a community.

Secondly, when readers share their experiments and modifications to recipes in the comment, they help to improve the content itself.

You can boost both effects if you later modify the article to include recipe modification suggestions that have been made in the comments as alternative recipes and credit the commenters. References like that not only improves the recipe post but also create a feeling of community and belonging – which makes your website unique to your readers and keeps them coming back.

Food Blog SEO: Recipe Schema

If your food website contains recipes, then you should use recipe schema. Schema is a special code that helps search engines to understand certain kinds of content better.

You usually don’t need schema when you write regular articles – like this one. But when you present more structured data, such as recipes, it helps search engines like Google and Pinterest to better understand your content.

The result: Google and Pinterest will present your recipes more prominently, thereby providing for a better user experience, which again results in better search engine rankings.

An example of how a recipe that uses schema is shown in Google’s search results:

Google search result for “Ratatouille recipe”. Thanks to recipe schema, Google pulls the photo, rating, preparation time and calorie count from Cookie+Kate’s recipe article.

Fortunately, to implement recipe schema in your own recipes, you don’t have to learn how to code. Recipe plugins like WPTasty or WP Recipe Maker create your recipe schema for you.

Recommended Tools for Food Blogs and Niche Sites

Recommended Hosting for Food Blogs and Websites:

To deliver a good user experience (which Google cares about as well), you will need a fast and reliable hosting provider.

After having used many different hosts over the last ten years, I recommend either:

  • Bluehost because it is dirt-cheap, easy to use and still good enough for small websites, or
  • WPX Hosting because it is fast, also easy to use and still not overly expensive.

When choosing your host, you should consider the characteristics of your niche. As a rule of thumb, the food niche gets quite a lot of traffic, which means that you could outgrow your Bluehost account pretty fast.

Moreover, traffic in the food niche is very international, which goes well with a special feature of WPX Hosting: They have their own VPN. A VPN is a technology that makes your website load fast from all over the globe.

Therefore, if you can afford it, I would recommend starting with WPX in the food niche. I started this website on WPX Hosting even though it had no visitors in the beginning because I was optimistic about its growth and wanted to avoid the effort of having to change hosts later on.

Of course, if you plan on specializing on something with few, but high-value customers, Bluehost may be the better choice (for example, if your website focusses on commercial bubble tea making machines for US-based bubble tea bars).

And, if you are short on cash, just start with Bluehost. It is good enough to not hold you back in the beginning months of your site.

The Right Platform for Food Blogs and Niche Sites

You should use WordPress as a platform for your food blog or food website. Do not use Wix. Do not use Joomla. Do not use Drupal. Do not use static HTML pages. If you have doubts about this, please read my article on why you should use WordPress for your website.

Recommended WordPress Themes for Food Blogs and Food Niche Sites

To make your WordPress website look good, you use a WordPress theme. Because WordPress is so popular, you have thousands of themes to choose from.

I recommend the Genesis theme by Studiopress. Genesis is a hugely popular theme framework with all the benefits which come with that (security, support, choice of designs, updates), but in contrast to other popular solutions (such as Divi) is doesn’t lock you into a propriety system that you can’t get out of. Genesis is also what this website uses.

You can read more about why I recommend Genesis in this article.

Genesis employs a child-theme system. That means Genesis as a theme framework provides the functionality, and you can then choose a Genesis child-theme which determines the look of your website.

Thanks to this child-theme concept, Genesis offers a variety of food blog designs. The following Genesis child themes have been created specifically for food blogs and websites:

Recipe Blogger

Mai Lifestyle Pro

Cook’d Pro

Daily Dish Pro

Foodie Pro

Lifestyle Pro

Brunch Pro

Recommended WordPress Plugins for Food Blogs

In this article, I will not go into all the plugins that may generally be useful for WordPress websites but will focus only on those that are specific to the food niche: Recipe plugins.

If you publish recipes on your food websites, then you will need a recipe plugin. Two very popular and frequently praised options are:

WP Recipe Maker

WP Recipe Maker helps you to create fantastic-looking, well-structured recipe posts that include recipe schema. The basic version is free but lacks certain features of the premium versions, such as nutrition labels. You can get WP Recipe Maker here.

WP Tasty

WP Tasty is another recipe plugin that does not have as many features as the paid versions of WP Recipe Maker but is easier to use. There is no free version of WP Tasty, but it is significantly cheaper than the elite version of WP Recipe Maker. WP Tasty has been produced by the team behind Pinch of Yum, so they know the user’s perspective well. You can get WP Tasty here.

Recommended Email List Provider

Over the last ten years, I have tried many different email marketing providers. Nowadays, I recommend Convertkit for hobby-centered niches such as the food niche.

I do still use Mailchimp and Cleverreach for two of my older projects, but that is mainly because each of those projects has particular functionality requirements that only those services were offering at the time I started building the respect email lists.

Recommended Software for Food Bloggers

Since photos play such a massive role in the food niche, most food bloggers use Adobe Lightroom to organize and edit their photos. Some use even the full Adobe Creative Cloud.

Services for Food Bloggers

40A offers virtual assistance, specifically for food bloggers. 40A belongs to the thriving food blog 40Aprons.

Bonus: Food Niche Site Idea

As a thank-you for reading this far, I would like to give you a food niche site idea that I would do myself if I didn’t already have too many websites for my own good:

Create a website centered around healthy meals that can be prepared in 5 minutes or less. The target audience would be are people who value efficiency in their eating. They want to stop feeling hungry, not waste time on food preparation, but still eat healthy and not get fat.

They do not strive for a phenomenal culinary experience, but just want the food to taste reasonably good so that they do not have to force it down. (That’s me when I’m in a blogging frenzy – just give me a healthy alternative to the frozen pizza so that I can keep blogging and feel full without gaining weight.)

The key here is to center the website around efficiency. The readers need meal plans and shopping lists, and ideally integration to Relish so that they can directly order the complete content of the shopping list online via a pre-filled shopping cart.

They want nutrition tables which prove to them that what they eat is balanced and healthy.

In summary, they just want to be able to stop worrying about food preparation without sacrificing health.

Your domain could be something like www.healthyflashmeals.com.

Further Learning Resources for Food Bloggers

If you’re going to invest a lot of your time into growing a website in the food niche, do not employ the trial-and-error technique. You will waste so much time.

Instead, go deep and learn everything you can about growing blogs and websites in the food niche. That way, your time on building your site will be spent much more effectively.

Excellent learning resources:

Food Bloggers Central

Nagi grew her food blog RecipeTin Eats from zero to 1 million monthly views in 8 months. On Food Bloggers central, she shares her tips.

Food Blogger Pro

A membership site for food bloggers by the founder of Pinch of Yum. You get more than 350 videos that teach you food blogging and a food blogging community to ask any question you have along the way.

If you’re either new to the food niche or have been active for a while but haven’t quite figured out how to go full time yet, then I recommend you try Food Blogger Pro. They have a generous 60-day money-back guarantee, so you have nothing to lose. You can sign up for Food Blogger Pro here.

Pinfinite Growth

Due to the central role that photos play in the food niche Pinterest is an excellent way for food bloggers to drive traffic – if done right. Melyssa Griffin is the authority on traffic generation with Pinterest, and her course Pinfinite Growth teaches you how to master Pinterest to drive traffic to your food website. You can join Pinfinite Growth here.