English chef, author of many famous cookbooks, restaurateur and TV presenter James Trevor «Jamie» Oliver turned his passion for cooking into a stable income
Experienced culinary bloggers advise novice freelancers to choose a culinary blog as their main occupation only if the authors truly love cooking activities.
For the success of a culinary freelancer, it is important to consider the following factors:
• Choose your niche in cooking.
• Give the blog an interesting name and buy a good domain name.
• Create your own unique website design, not tempted by free standard templates.
• Develop a strategy for promoting the blog on social networks.
• Decide on a strategy for earning from the blog. Today it is not a problem to find descriptions of various ways to make money online that will help you monetize your site in the future.
• Publish your own and, most importantly, beautiful photos.
• Engage blog readers in commenting and discussing recipes.
• Know your competitors.
• Follow trends in cooking.
You can use your own proven recipes or translate them from foreign sites. It is wonderful if you can publish your own photos for the recipes. However, you can also use borrowed ones – from stock photo sites and photobanks. For example, you can illustrate your culinary blog with images from free photo resources Depositphotos, iStockPhoto, or Shutterstock.
For the culinary 'brainchild' to become popular with readers and interesting to advertisers, the blog needs to be 'promoted' in search engines. SEO optimization services can be ordered from web studios or from freelancers you know.
You can earn from your kitchen hobby through advertising: this can be teaser and banner advertising, as well as contextual advertising (Google AdSense or Yandex.Direct). All together, this can bring an income of about $200 per month. If the blog becomes truly popular, a manufacturing company working in your niche may take an interest – for example, a manufacturer of sauces, juices, or kitchen equipment. Such a sponsor can furnish your kitchen in their style or provide useful equipment. In addition to SEO promotion, it is important not to forget about promoting the culinary blog on social networks.
A properly developed strategy for earning from a culinary hobby will eventually allow you to replace office work. Moreover, maintaining an online culinary diary can be supplemented, for example, with offline baking of cakes or pastries to order.