Easy Food Blog Promotion for Beginners
Using the Foodie Community to Increase Traffic to a Site
Mar 22, 2009
The first step to getting more hits to a new food blog is to improve content and appearance. This can be done through an attractive layout that is easy to read and pleasing to the eye, beautiful food photography, tasty and clearly-formatted recipes, compelling narrative-style blogging, and/or exciting giveaways or events.
The goal of promoting a blog is to draw more viewers in, but it is content and appearance that will keep a viewer on the page, bookmark the content, or add the RSS feed to a feed reader. Once the blogger has done all these things, she can then move on to promotion using two simple concepts that work wonders in the food blogging community – events and reciprocal traffic.
Food Blogging Events
One easy and fun way to get involved in the food blogging community and attract hits to a new blog is to participate in food blogging events. Many of these events simply ask participants to post a recipe that falls into a theme, or a more specific challenge that requires strange ingredients or a specific presentation. These can be a fun way not only to get involved but to challenge a new blogger in the kitchen. Popular events of this type include Sugar High Fridays, Waiter There's Something in My, and Blog Party.
Other events are organized more like clubs, where members are required to take part in a certain number of challenges to stay in the group and each challenge is to make a particular recipe, sometimes with variations allowed. Two popular baking challenges of this nature are Tuesdays with Dorie and the Daring Bakers.
Finally, still other events are organized like contests, sometimes with a physical prize or a banner to display on one's blog. These include Cupcake Hero and Does My Blog Look Good In This? A good strategy is to choose a few events to participate in that have a fair amount of participation (this can be discovered by checking past round-ups) and cater to the blogger's cooking preferences by scanning an index like Is My Blog Burning? Repeat participants gain attention, and those who comment on other participants' blogs are likely to get attention.
Reciprocal Traffic
Reciprocal traffic is a concept that operates according to the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Bloggers who comment frequently will attract the attention of the blog owners receiving comments, and possibly lead to bookmarking or word of mouth advertising. Bloggers should keep their own list of blogs in a bookmarks folder or RSS feed reader and comment as frequently as possible, as well as commenting on blog event entries when possible.
Trying out recipes posted by foodbloggers and commenting with a link to that post is one great way to attract attention, as is linking to related recipes (for example, one blogger posts about her love of potatoes with a hash browns recipe and another blogger comments with a link to a great smashed potatoes recipe). Events can also generate reciprocal traffic, when the participants make an effort to visit each other's posts once the round-up is posted. Hosting one's own event can also be a great way to get more traffic.
These tips are sure to not only increase traffic, but make blogging more fun. One of the best parts of food blogging is that it is not an individual activity – it's all about the community.
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