Welcome to my week 4 of food blogging. I wanted to share with my readers (YOU) what it is like for the first few weeks of food blogging and the process that goes into setting up and building your food blog.
I am in a lucky position to have spent many years in internet marketing so I know what works and what doesn’t so I can bring that experience straight away to my food blog.
If you’ve not read my weekly food blogging posts then you can grab week 1, week 2 and week 3 and read those first.
This week I am on with week 4 and it feels crazy to be back where I started again. Today (well after writing this post) I am on with starting the process of getting all the content written for December. I also have three other blogs to write for as well so my Friday through to Monday is going to be a writing marathon.
Not that I mind as I like to write 
but I want to be in a position where the writing is up to date so that I can concentrate on other elements of the business.
Here are a few more highlights of what was achieved during week 4:
Blog posts written for December
After getting our other blogs up to date I cracked on with the blogging for Recipe This for December and it feels crazy to be doing this amount of blogging in one go, but at the same time it allows me to have the space to do other things for the blog.
In one weekend I end up doing all the recipe posts for December (18 of them) and then another 7 of various other posts for throughout the month.
The recipes posts are of course the ones that take the most time to do. It is planning what your recipe is going to be, perfecting it, writing about it and then getting it ready for social media. Then there is also working with the graphics designer to get the graphics side of things done.
This is one of the reasons why I like to blog about other things (not just recipes) because then you’re balancing out what is taking you the longest and what is the quickest to do.
Social Media
Social media hasn’t changed much other than us getting a few linked posts out there that have led to extra social media sharing. How this goes is that you publish a blog post that links to other bloggers, you tell them about it and they will often share it on their social media channels. They’re happy as they have had some link love and you’re happy because they have given your blog post lots of social media shares.
Here are two posts in action where we have done this already:
The ultimate guide to butternut squash
The ultimate guide to cauliflower
On both of these posts we linked out to 10 fellow bloggers and from that we received over 200 social media shares. With this being for a brand new blog is really not good!
Working on mailing lists
We are also working on our mailing list already and using Bing ads to promote our free newsletter along with social media. I love Bing ads and they are very good for bringing traffic at a very low rate to your mailing list. I will of course be including these figures in my income report for November but expect to pay around $0.05 a click for traffic for a food site.
You can see it in action on the link below:
http://recipethis.com/novemberrecipes/
And here are our Bing ads in action so that you can see that we are getting such a good low rate for our clicks:
For our soup recipe post for example we are paying just $0.03 a click and it is converting into getting numbers on our mailing list already!
Real Life Food Blogging – Week 4
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What we next have to do
Well everything….we have this to do…..that to do…..and the other. Clearly there are not enough hours in the day on a new site and I just wish that there was. Please can someone borrow me some extra hours?
Priorities are where things stand at the moment. First of all I want to be working on the social media for the month of December, followed by finishing the rest of December’s blog posts and then we will be working on the sales funnel for those interested in food blogging.
Right now I have half finished ebooks in production and lots of other things that need doing. So it is going to be an interesting few weeks with the run up to Christmas!