There are hundreds of thousands of food blogs out there, but how many of them do you think get more than a hundred visitors each day. Ten thousand? A few hundred? Less?
One of the biggest reasons why food blogs fail is because they don’t pick the right topics to blog about. If you’re not improving on what is already out there or offering a unique insight you are just adding to the blogosphere without bringing any significant value.
How Do You Monetize Your Blog?
Before you can pick a topic to write about you, need to look at how that article is going to generate revenue for you. Depending on how you monetize your blog there are specific topics that you should and shouldn’t blog about.
If you use affiliate programs, then you need to bring in traffic that is interested in purchasing products, whereas blogs that have ads can monetize traffic from any source. Therefore, it’s critical that you understand how your blog makes money and the kind of traffic that you need to bring in to make that happen.
Competitor Research
The simplest way to decide on topics is to look at what your competition has done and find ways to improve on that. BuzzSumo has an amazing tool that allows you to input your competitors URL and see which of their articles has performed the best on social media.
This ideal if you know that social media traffic will bring in revenue for your blog, i.e., if you monetize using banner ads or sponsored content. But social traffic probably isn’t the best choice for websites selling products or promoting affiliate offers.
Instead, these types of food bloggers will see more success trying to bring in traffic from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Our tool allows you to analyze your competitors, to understand why they are succeeding so that you can reverse engineer their success and outrank them.
Hopping on Trends and News
If you want to receive vast amounts of traffic instantly, then you need to keep your eye out for trends and news. Any big reveals news or trends in the world of food give you the opportunity to create a time sensitive blog post that might be referenced by more prominent news outlets that are slower to catch on.
But that’s not all; you can also submit that blog post to Reddit and other forums where users are discussing the news as it’s being released.
Keeping it Seasonal
The holidays are the biggest revenue generators in existence. Not only do we as a society spend more around this period than at any other time, but it also makes content marketing much simpler. Suddenly, everything with a pumpkin or a snowman on it is fun to share, and this as true for the food industry as it is for anything else.
Starbucks sees a massive jump in revenue around the holidays because they sell seasonal drinks that get their customers excited. Similarly, you should ensure that you’re creating seasonal content that provides value to your users.
One example would be Halloween, where you could show your audience how to make homemade candy to give out. Then, you might show off your Halloween food on social media, Reddit, and forums. But even once Halloween is over you have the opportunity to write about how people can use all of their leftover pumpkin and candy.
Leaning On Other Niches
Finally, learn from some of the most excellent content marketers and lean on related niches. One of the most viral food bloggers we ever saw used to regularly create beautiful cakes for specific communities, who weren’t necessarily colossal food lovers.
For example; she might visit a gaming Reddit and create them a cake of their favorite character. The next day she could replicate a famous actor or singer.
You might not create cakes like that, but this can work on a much smaller scale too. Only creating content that is specifically for the food industry is a mistake, go broader and look for opportunities to create content that appeals to both food lovers and another industry.
