What Should Food Bloggers Write About?
/Learn what food bloggers should write about so you can create a plan for your food blog and grow quickly, developing a loyal fan base along the way!
What Should Food Bloggers Write About?
The obvious answer to this question is food, duh!
However, when it comes to the world of food blogging, the online space is getting fairly saturated. Therefore, it’s no longer wise to throw in a variety of recipes differing in diet type, ingredients, ease, and affordability.
Instead, if you want to stand out in the crowd, your first steps should include:
Picking a Niche
Posting the Basics
Building Out More Nuanced Recipes
Branching Out into Series and Reviews
But let’s dig a little further into what all that actually means.
Picking a Niche
This is one of the most important things you can do to fast-track your blog’s growth. Not only does it make it easier to do efficient keyword research with a tool like SEMRush or AHREFs, but it also helps readers know what to expect.
To begin, I recommend picking up to three focus points, honing in on one to include as an encompassing theme for your blog. A few examples of primary niches include:
Diet Specific Topics: Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, Paleo, Whole30, Vegan
Ethnic Cuisine: Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Mediterranean
Cooking Method: Instant Pot, Slow Cooker, One Pot, One Bowl
Time: Under 30 Minutes, Quick and Easy, 60 Minute Recipes
Pick one for your blog, and make sure every recipe and the targeted keywords fit. For example, instead of posting chocolate chip cookies, post gluten-free chocolate chip cookies or one bowl of chocolate chip cookies.
Posting the Basics
Now that you have your niche narrowed down, you should make sure your blog covers all the basic recipes readers may need from simple sauces and dressings to homemade bread and guides like “how to cut” or how to cook”.
This lets Google know that you’re an authority in your niche and allows for a lot of interlinking later down the road. As a result, readers will always be coming back for more! Plus, it should give you ideas for content for quite some time, meaning you're never scrambling to figure out what to post.
Building Out Nuanced Recipes
After you have the basics down, start branching out into “fun” versions of recipes. Start experimenting with different flavors, seasonal options, and cooking methods.
For example, once you have a basic banana bread recipe you could add chocolate banana bread, chocolate chip banana bread, banana bread with walnuts, banana bread muffins…you get the point.
Of course, again, you want to make sure the recipe stays within your niche. You wouldn’t post a double chocolate chip bundt cake recipe if your blog focuses on healthy eating. But you may post a gluten-free, dairy-free chocolate cake.
Use the posts on your blog, and get creative! Just make sure there are keywords to back up your posts. Otherwise, you might be wasting a lot of time.
Branching Out
At this point, your blog should be generating quite a bit of traffic and income with a host of loyal fans who trust your recipes and opinions.
Try reviewing products and foods that fit within your niche, and branch out to your secondary topics from earlier. Just make sure everything continues to fall under the initial theme. Otherwise, you might confuse Google.
However, if you run a holistic blog with homemade recipes, you might be interested in reviewing popular non-toxic pans or the best sourdough starters. This is a great way to introduce some variety into your content and can lead to sponsorships down the road!
In Conclusion
When running a food blog, you’ll obviously be writing about food and recipes. However, to stand out from the crowd, you’ll want to choose one primary topic, and cover all the basic recipes. Then, branch out into fun, flavors, and methods. Eventually, you can also begin to add in other content you’re interested in such as reviews and guides.
No matter what you post, it’s important that you choose a topic you’re truly interested in, deliver helpful, informative content, and have fun!