Niammy Blog

You just started new food blog and couldn’t be more proud of the professional appearance you have managed to give it. But, your work is just getting started! Unless you invest time into driving traffic to your blog, your efforts will go unnoticed. To grow your readership, you need to take an active role in getting more visitors to your website.

The following tips are proven ways to build your following:

1. Share with other people/organizations that already have a following – Tell them in a few words what your latest post is about and why their readers might find it interesting. You can also offer your support for their bloggers by sharing one of their relevant links. 

2. Share on social bookmarking sites – Sites like Newsvine, Delicious, Technorati, Reddit, Scoop.it, Tumblr, Stumbleupon, Folkd, make it easy for readers to save, add, and edit the blogs that they want to refer to later. In addition, they are visible to other site members who may be interested in your posts too.

3. Cultivate social media followers – If you spend any time at all on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, you know that sharing recipes is an interest of all types of people. No other resource will get your posts out there and have people sharing them with all of their other contacts. Use a variety of websites including the most popular like Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest but also lesser-known and up-and-coming sites like Storify, Care2 and Digg. 

4. Tweet and retweet – Readers aren’t on Twitter at the same time so not all of your followers are going to see your posts the first time you tweet. Continue to retweet past content so long as it remains pertinent and increase the number of viewers each post gets. 

5. Invest in promoting your website – If you think your audience is spending time on Facebook, invest occasionally in sponsored posts. For as little as $10, you can grow the number of readers your post gets and increase its reader significance. 

6. Incorporate keywords in multiple locations – Content is king, and creating a food blog that your audience wants to read has become a priority for any online business. That doesn’t mean that SEO has lost its importance. Keywords and keyword phrases help Google to recognize the topic of a post and lead the right visitors to it. Determine the best keyword phrase for each post and place it once in the title, in the headline on the page, as part of the page link, and at least two times within the text. Without a well-thought-out keyword strategy, your audience may never know that your post exists. Also, link to credible outside sources to give your site more value to your readers.

7. Implement visual aids and videos – Research has repeatedly proven that people are more interested in content that includes visual aids.

8. Submit to Recipe Submission Sites- Submitting your posts to sites like Foodgawker, Tasteologie, Tastespotting and Finding Vegan (when applicable) is a great way to get new visitors to your food blog. If your photo is rejected on your first attempt, don’t give up. Either edit or find a different photo and resubmit.

Having a successful and thriving food blog takes some effort on your part to promote your website. Thanks to technology and the multiple ways that people are using the Internet, there are many tools available that even an amateur can manage.