Three reasons why your food Blog is failing to cook with fire

Food blogs are an amazing way to make your mark online with a pretty much guaranteed audience. After all, everyone’s gotta eat, and more of us than ever now turn to trusted online resources over traditional cookbooks. Get this right, and you could even be rubbing shoulders with top dogs like Gordon Ramsey in no time.

The trouble is that according to the latest exhaustive survey, there are as many as 16,588 food blogs online. In other words, anyone starting out here is certain to come up against a fair amount of competition and, sometimes, that alone means you struggle to truly get cooking (excuse the pun.)

This can be disheartening, especially given the runaway food blogger success stories that often come to the fore. Luckily, it is possible to overcome even a lukewarm response for success later on, and doing so simply relies on considering whether your slow start is due to the following common mistakes. 

​Failing to write your own recipes

Image credit: Annie Spratt from Unsplash

Food blogs come in all forms, with some reviewing food, while others trace the process of cooking every recipe in existing cookbooks. The trouble is that blogs like these will always have a shelf-life. By comparison, the food bloggers who are really making their mark are doing so by putting their own recipes at the forefront. Following in their footsteps is, by far, your best chance at broadening your blog for ongoing appeal, and ensuring that readers return time and again, even if just to revisit that much-loved recipe. 

No room for growth
Ultimately, readers love a blog that they can grow with. As such, you should always be moving forward in some. There are an array of options here, with many food bloggers starting subscription boxes, launching cookbooks, or even selling to stores. Or, you may want to reach for the top with a restaurant business that sees you hiring a hospitality unit, employing an entire team, and even designing your own equipment using photo etching and expert advice. Either way, readers will want to know that your foody efforts are likely to come to something they can enjoy. Otherwise, it’s unlikely that you’ll gain the loyal following you need to find real success. 

Failing to leave your readers hungry
Food blogs that are intermittent and afraid of the notorious ‘CTA’ (call to action) are never going to drive any urgency or passion. This will see people failing to engage, or even return. To avoid that, work at leaving your readers hungry. In some ways, a drive towards one of the business ideas mentioned can help, but you should take things even further, with regular recipe upload days, and a call for readers to take some action, be that social media shares, comments, or cooking challenges. Like cliffhangers at the end of a book, these efforts can make a huge difference to adding peril, excitement, and a general drive to return to your page.

Image credit: Tamas Pap from Unsplash

So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to turn up the heat and get cooking at last.