If you are a blogger, you know there is a lot of behind the scenes work that goes into maintaining your blog and growing your blog readership and social stats. You also understand the importance of this for earning potential be it through sponsored posts, affiliate sales, direct sales or advertising. Generally speaking, the more readers you have, the more money you make. However, for many of us bloggers, (myself included) this blogging gig is very part-time. Which is ok, I want to spend time making homemade meals for my family and helping my kids with their homework, etc. I have to remember that there are more important things in life than being the most popular blogger on the planet. Sometimes I have to remind myself of this when I read very popular blogs with lots of traffic and social shares and comments. I've even read about blogger envy on other blogs including blogs I would consider at the height of popularity.
So today I decided to do something I have had on my mind to do for a long time. I updated my main photo on my Home Ec @ Home facebook page. The old photo was a single photo of dough slices stacked with butter and cinnamon and sugar to make cinnamon sugar pull-apart bread. Compared to newer photos, I have taken over the past year and a half since reading Tasty Food Photography, the old photo was terrible and yet I left it there on my facebook page for the whole world to see. Then finally today I took all of about 10 minutes to upload some of my favorite photos to create a photo collage on picmonkey, then uploaded the collage as my new facebook photo. I think it looks about a million times better and should do a lot more for my facebook page than my old photo. It gives a broader picture of my recipes and food photography. Such a simple thing and yet I put it off for so long. So if you sometimes feel a little blog envy, do something productive for your blog instead of feeling sorry for yourself. However, if you don't have time to do it at that moment, don't put unnecessary pressure on yourself. Write it on your to-do list and save it for later. Take care of your family, yourself, your career, whatever it is that needs your attention at the moment. Some other posts you might enjoy about improving your blog: How to Increase Traffic to Your Food Blog How I Am Improving my Food Photography and I Finally Made it onto Food Gawker and Taste Spotting! Read my guest post at Blogelina: 3 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Food Blog And if you have a moment, like my facebook page, tweet this post, stumble it, pin it on pinterest, share it on facebook, etc. because it really does matter to bloggers like myself. Thank you! I appreciate it! I am on instagram now too! You can follow me here. Linking up at Share the Wealth, Create with Joy
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Disclosure: I am NOT being paid to share this info with you, but I am sharing because I have received tons of blog traffic from Yummly and thought others could benefit too. Plus, I want you to Yum my recipes because more yums = more traffic.
Once you have written your out of this world fantastic food blog post and edited your award worthy photos that you know everyone would love if they just knew about it ... the tricky part comes. How do you get it in front of an audience, preferably a food loving audience? Of course you plaster your link all over social media, maybe put it on some blog link ups, but how do you get serious traffic? There are actually lots of places to share your food blog posts, but how do you know which ones will bring the most traffic for a small investment of your time? I have been posting to several food sites for a couple of months and hands down, yummly has brought the most traffic. Plus it is really easy to add your recipe posts to yummly.
It is no secret that bloggers want more blog traffic. After all a blog is a lot of work and it's nice to get paid for all of that work through advertising revenues, affiliate links, and sponsored posts. The tricky part is getting people to come to your site and see your amazing brownie recipe because there are about a gazillion other amazing brownie recipes on the web. How do you compete, especially if you are a newer food blogger?
Of course you have to write interesting and reliable posts. Your recipes must be tried and true recipes and you should include a back story to connect with your readers. You don't just want unique views, you want returning views too. Another important element is great photographs. Study food photos on Foodgawker and Tastespotting. Once your photos are good enough, consider submitting to these sites, but know that they are both really really picky. Don't feel bad if your photos are rejected. Many of them will be. Read the feedback given for each rejected photo and learn from it. Read books and blog posts about improving your food photography. I have to recommend Tasty Food Photography. It is a resource written by a hugely successful food blogger that has helped improve my photography skills by leaps and bounds. (affiliate link) So what is yummly anyway?
I created a publisher page on yummly and added a yum button to my blog. It is so easy to yum a recipe using the yum button. Simply click on the yum button at the bottom of my recipe posts and you can yum my recipes too. There is also a yum button in my sidebar, but make sure you are on a recipe page and not the homepage when you hit the yum button. My old recipes don't have the yum button yet and I am very particular with what I yum. I want my publisher page to showcase the best of Home Ec @ Home.
It is easy to create an account and if you are a food blogger, set up a publisher page. I noticed a huge increase in blog traffic within a week of using yummly. It is fun to see the yum number increase for each recipe when others yum them too. It's always nice to see that others appreciate your work and the increased traffic is an added blessing. So if you are looking to bring more traffic to your food blog, remember content is King, work on your food photography skills, and create a yummly publisher page and yum your recipes. And to all of my amazing and wonderful readers, yum my recipes (pretty please) because more yums = more traffic. Yummly puts every recipe in the world in your pocket. The most powerful recipe search, the recipe sites you love, your digital recipe box, recipe recommendations just for you, and a smart shopping list - all with you wherever you go. Yummly has the #1 iPhone, iPad and Android apps in addition to millions of website visitors. As recipes get more Yums, they get exposed more often throughout all of our platforms and features. |
Welcome to Home Ec @ HomeHi, I'm Faith, a former Family and Consumer Science teacher turned food blogger. I love God, my family, and food. You can usually find me in the kitchen preparing family friendly, homemade recipes and taking lots of pictures. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesFan Favorites
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