How to: Start a Food Blog in 4 Easy Steps!

It's easier than you think - making cash from a food blog

Given the flood of food blogs, you have to come up with something special for a new blog on the topic of food, cooking or baking in order to find readers and fans. The following tips and basics will help you get started.

The basic principles of most food blogs are similar: cooking, documenting, and sharing. A food blog does not automatically have to deal only with cooking and recipes. When you develop a peculiarity, you can stand out from the crowd and even build your own readership over well-established cooking recipes websites and blogs.

Be different, find your niche

Food is not only in the domestic dining room. Why not even look behind the scenes in the kitchens of restaurants, visit weekly markets, conduct interviews with chefs or food experts, talk to farmers about the peculiarities of different potato varieties, explore the history of an ancient vegetable and unearth historical recipes Spice traders to elicit their secrets or experiment with exotic fruit - just to name a few examples.

Find your niche - maybe as a specialist in fish dishes?

Convince with delicious photos

Photos play a crucial role in a food blog. To be honest, a risotto - cooked at home for the family - looks more like brownish pampa, a pizza that is not absolutely fresh on the stove looks a bit shabby on a photo. That's okay, because it tastes great and smells wonderful. For your blog but you have to show all this to the reader in photos. A few suggestions are here ...

1) Taste and smell in the picture hold

The reader of your blog can neither taste nor smell, so photos must convey sensory impressions such as taste and fragrance visually. With photos, you can trigger taste and fragrance memories in the reader's imagination, if you're a little tricky.

To make it clear what's inside - the avocado salad includes an unprocessed avocado in the picture

For example, you can mediate scent by placing a fresh, cut mushroom next to the risotto plate and steaming the risotto. You can also achieve taste sensations by mimicking ingredients - such as a heap of salt or ground pepper, a sprig of rosemary or oregano.

2) Conjure mood with environment and accessories

You awaken positive feelings with your reader, by bringing the appropriate ambience to the respective court into the picture: The red checkered table cloth creates alpine hut atmosphere for a hearty snack time. Candles and night blue background suggest candlelight dinner with a beef tenderloin with red wine sauce - do not forget the wine bottle, because the sauce you do not see the red wine. Light background, green or light blue color mood underlines the lightness of a fresh summer smoothie - here you should put papaya, orange, apple, cucumber next to the glass to show what pureed in the glass as such, of course, is no longer recognizable.

Wooden plank and spoon create a rustic ambience with simple means. A great source for accessories is flea markets, but also deco shops or the junk department at Ikea.

3) Working with perspective

The standard rule for food images is: photograph directly from above, if only because lighting is the easiest way to get it under control. And if you want to document work steps, for example, that's ideal. But when it comes to showing a dish in its fullness of look, taste and fragrance, other perspectives can be much more useful - just experiment a bit.

Get up close - details often convey a judgment more intensively than a total perspective.

By the way: forget about your zoom lens. Get as close as possible to the plate, work with wide angle and use a tripod to keep the image stable.

4) Choose the right lighting

The lighting when photographing food is a science in itself and of course this contribution cannot replace a photo course. Nevertheless some short tips:

·         Avoid mixed light - either daylight or lights, never both at the same time.

·         Work with indirect light that is thrown back, for example, by a white wall or a special reflector.

·         Lightning Never eat directly, do not light at all.

·         Good results can be achieved without too much effort, if you add a so-called light tent.

Close-ups often help with setup and light issues. For example, work with a blurred background Natural light is often the best and most uncomplicated lighting. Natural light is often the best and easiest lighting.

Beware of copyrights

Most of the time you will not develop recipes yourself but get ideas or at least inspiration elsewhere. It is important to know the copyright limits: Ingredient lists are not protected, the description of the preparation, however, already.

So, you can usually take the ingredients one-to-one from other websites or from cookbooks, but you have to formulate your own description for the preparation. Generally you should call your sources anyway - no matter if you just got inspiration there or a recipe in the kitchen. This alone requires the fairness and your readers will not accept you anyway, that you develop all the recipes completely yourself and without any suggestion from the outside.

Let 's support you by special themes or plugins

The best platform for a food blog is WordPress, as a web host the STRATO hosting packages. And if you want to publish more than just occasional recipes in your food blog, you should use a specialized theme that makes the launch very convenient and already includes all the features, from the structured input of ingredient lists to the recipe printing function. Alternatively, special recipe plug-ins offer functions that can be integrated into almost all themes, giving you more design freedom compared to special food themes.