Does your tongue tingle, your tummy grumble, and you begin to drool when talking about food?

I love food so much. I start to dribble when I think of cheesecakes.

Do you know you can make money just by talking about the dishes you love to eat? 

Not just eat, but what you cook, or even the food joints you’ve been that served the best dish you’ve had in your life.

If you love food like me, you should start documenting your passion.

Let’s talk about how to start a food blog.

How to start a food blog and make money

Firstly, I don’t have a food blog. 

I did have a travel and food vlog, but that didn’t take off. Check out our old Youtube channel.

But, I wish I have the time and resources to continue.

If I did have the means, this is how I would start my food blog.

1. Determine your passion
2. Brainstorm blog names
3. Get a free domain from Bluehost
4. Install WordPress
5. Monetize your blog

Determine your passion

Starting a food blog is easy. Blogging daily, cooking, baking, cleaning up is hard and can burn you out.

But if you love what you are doing, you will succeed. To be successful in blogging, you have to love what you write about.

Why?

Imagine you started a blog about the most boring topic in the world. Can you keep writing about that subject day in day out? It’s like forcing yourself to eat mud cake when you think mud cake tastes like how it sounds like.

You need to be 100% that food gets you up in the morning, and the last thing you think of (eat) at night.

There are stiff competitions out there when it comes to food blogs. And, there are only ten places on the first page of the Google search results page. 

Tell you a secret?

No one goes to the second page of Google.

One of the sayings of SEOs is, “If you want to bury a dead body, do it on the second page of Google. No one will ever find it.”

So, you have to be able to stay competitive. And, you can’t stay competitive without working hard on your blog.

And that means you have to create recipes, cook, eat, take photos, write and talk about food.

Cooking is a lot of work. That’s why I love simple recipes and stir fry. But, I don’t think I can continue this passion because I’m starting to get bored with cooking. 

If we went back ten years ago, then yes. I loved to watch cooking shows, trying yummy recipes, and concocting new ones.

Brainstorm blog names

Here is the fun part, naming your blog. I take days or weeks to come up with a domain name. 

Some people don’t give a crap and just use the next available name they could think of.

There’s no right or wrong answer here. But if you are having a hard time coming up with a perfect name for your blog, you can try brainstorming.

Ask yourself the following:

• Why are you starting your blog?
• What is your blog about?
• What makes you unique?
• Is your blog going to be fun, dramatic, or fancy?

These are just some questions to ask yourself when coming up with blog names.

The most crucial point is probably what your blog is about. It’s ideal to convey that in your blog name.

The following are some tips you can use to name your blog:

• Mix and mash
• Verb
• Keyword
• Made up
• Suffix

Mix and mash

You can take two or three words and mash them together. 

For example: 

Photographer and Professional

Photog, togpro, photopro, phosional, photossional

Car and Expert

Carpert, carex, carrt, carxp, carert, caper

Having fun yet?

Verb

Is there a verb word that can explain what you do? 

Just some verb words that you could match with “blog,” for example:

Babble BlogBlog BackBake BlogBlog Barrage

Balance BlogBalk BlogBan BlogBlog Bark

Barter BlogBlog BasteBlog BatBattle Blog

Keyword

Google used to hold lots of weight for domain related keywords in determining which blog appears in search. An example of full domain keyword is, “https://howtoloseweight.com.”

Nowadays, Google made it clear that this is not the case, which is true. Just search for anything on Google. You’ll see in the SERP that the keyword used to search is not in the domain name.

However, having a keyword does help the reader recognize what your site is all about.

Take blogzn.com, for example. The keyword blog tells you that the website is about blogging.

Make it up

You can make up a word and use it as your domain name. 

It doesn’t matter, as long as you approach it the right way and build a brand.

What does Nike mean? Or Adidas? Fila? Fubu? What the heck do they mean?

Yet, we all know them. Hmmm.

Suffix ‘em up

What are suffixes? Well, they are letters added at the end of a word to make up another word—for example, blind-ness, swift-ly, small-ish.

The perfect example of a website that used suffix perfectly is Shopi-fy. Shopify has a great ring to it and very memorable.

If all else fails, try these two domain name finder to get some ideas:

• Domain name soup – Great way to quickly find available domain names. You can try available 3, 4, 5 letter domain names and make an acronym out of the available domains. Input a word, and you’ll get cool, business, and premium domain names. You can mangle some letters to your chosen word. And more…
• Namemesh – Namemesh is the same but a ‘lil different. Give Namemesh a word, and it will add fun, cool business words to your chosen word. Namemesh will suggest available domain names.

Get your FREE domain name

You came up with a catchy blog name? It’s time to put your mark on the internet.

You can get a free domain name when you join one of Bluehost’s hosting plans. I recommend the basic and cheapest plan for now. 

You can get your free domain here.

And as soon as your blog is getting plenty of traffic, you can scale quickly with Bluehost. You don’t have to go to other hosts and move all your data to theirs. 

Many could go wrong that will cost your blog some expenses. Sometimes, when moving hosts, a website can lose its rankings together with traffic and sales.

Use WordPress

Once you’ve joined Bluehost, you need to install WordPress. For a detailed guide to installing WordPress in your Bluehost account, click on the following: Install WordPress.

I believe wordpress.org has all you need. You’ll never have to worry about whether you’ll run out of options to scale your blog.

I’ve been using WordPress for all my blogs. It’s not complicated. 

Monetize your food blog

Now, it’s time to make money.

Making money is not bad. Don’t think that your audience will go away because you’re trying to sell.

Researching what to write to help your followers, writing blogs, creating graphics, and editing takes a lot of time. And time is a precious commodity, more than money.

You can always make more money, but you can never make enough time. 

Here are some ways you can monetize a food blog:

• Affiliate marketing
• Sponsored posts
• Ad space
• Sell your product or service.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is selling someone else’s product and getting commissions from qualified purchases.

How do you do affiliate marketing? Well, it’s easy. Just refer people to products you love.

You can recommend your go-to cast iron pan to your audiences, and when they buy, you get a small commission. 

You can join Amazon’s associate program to earn from their sales. Now, you may have heard the outcry of bloggers about Amazon cutting the associates’ commission rates. 

Bloggers who are dependent on Amazon coped it badly. The drastic cut put people in dire straits, and had to learn how to pivot to survive.

Some just couldn’t adapt and eventually lost plenty of revenue. 

You can join Walmart or other big eCommerce giants, but there’s no denying that Amazon owns this space.

Sponsored posts

Sponsored posts are a great way to make money on your blog while creating content. Brands can subsidize your time and creativity by writing for them and publishing it in your blog.

Why would brands pay you to publish your content in your blog? Awareness.

Awareness is what brands pay for when they advertise their products and services. Brands will happily pay you a few hundred dollars to write about their products and services especially when you have a large audience.

Ad space

Selling ad space is probably best for food blogs because of the millions of traffic a food blog pulls in.

I don’t recommend joining Adsense, but it’s the easiest way to monetize your blog without requirements.

You could put Adsense ads right away if you wanted to in a brand new blog.

Try to increase your traffic visitors, then join the big ad networks such as Mediavine and Adthrive.

Sell your product or service

Selling your product or services has its advantages. Those advantages are the following:

• You have full control
• More profit
• Your brand

Of course, there are also cons. The following is a list of them:

• You take full responsibility.
• Keep track of inventory, sales, and expenses
• Lot of work

Selling your product can be a bad idea when you don’t know what you’re doing. Due to trade wars, (at the time of this writing) it’s costly to source products to sell.

Bear in mind to keep your readers’ wants when coming up with ideas on what to sell.

A few ideas you can sell is an eBook about teaching working moms how to prepare quick meals—a recipe book for fussy toddlers. 

Conclusion

The following are five things you need to do to start your food blog and start making money:

1. Determine your passion
2. Brainstorm blog names
3. Get a free domain
4. Install WordPress
5. Monetize your blog

Don’t be too fancy with a name. You need to know that your topic is what you’ll be talking about for the next five years.

Blogging is not a get rich quick scheme. It’s a viable way to make money online. 

If you want quick money, get a job. 

But, if you want to make money online doing the things you love, click on how to start a blog the right way.

The sooner you start, the quicker you can quit the job you hate.

Hopefully, you loved this how to start a food blog article. Comment below if this brought you value. If not, comment anyway and tell me how I can do better. Cheers!