Although not one of the first in blogging, I have had a food blog for a couple of years now and in that time I have seen some really good food blogs appear over time and some have also disappeared too. Given what I have learnt and understanding what works for my food blog, I thought I would offer readers and future food bloggers my thoughts on how to not only create a successful food blog but retain a long term audience. Here, you’ll find about 15 points which I’ll update from time to time. I would, however, appreciate other food bloggers’ opinions, questions, comments and suggestions on my article.

1. What exactly is your food blog all about?

My food blog is my primary marketing tool for what I do promoting the flavours of Australia around the world. When appearing on television, radio or magazines I always mention the website for people who want to learn more. It so important to my long term strategy that I include my domain name to my newly revised logo and branding.

Over the past few years the website has created an enormous network of thousands and has created long term personal and business relationships. Just some of the people I have connected with include Charlie Ayers aka the Google Chef, Cat Cora from Chefs for Humanity (and of course Iron Chef America) and Mark Tafoya from The Remarkable Palate Podcast to name just a few.

The first thing to do is to establish what your food blog is going to be and the outcome you require. Like most people, my time is extremely limited and I only invest in projects or tasks where there is a solid and strategic outcome. You may just want to create a food blog for the sake of creating a food blog, that’s great. You may want to create a food blog for your retail store or online gourmet food store and feature your own reviews of products in your store. You can from time to time divert your attention to other articles or blogs about different topics, but its best to have some sort of long term strategy.

2. Design of your food blog

Once you have developed and refined the concept of your food blog, you’ll need to give some thought as to the design of the site as well as the structure of the content. Firstly identify what the features of your food blog will be i.e. articles, podcasts, recipes, videos, photos, comments, about page, contact page, competitions etc. Then start to determine how they are going to appear on your homepage.

Back to the design, do resist the temptation to use a blog template, as ultimately they all look the same and don’t create any uniqueness. You’ve created a unique concept, so why should you have a food blog that looks like the next one. I suggest at this stage you should locate a web developer that has advanced CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) skills. They should be able to mockup a style initially, then actually develop it and implement it with your content management system (see following).

Depending how serious your food blog will be and how much you would like to stand out from the crowd, you could even design a logo for your site. I use my own name as branding on my food blog. However, many food blogs have their own blog logos. An example of good logos on food blogs would be Chocolate and Zucchini logo or 101 Cookbooks logo. I cover more on this later in this article.

3. A Content Management System for your Food Blog.

Once you have a design in mind you really need to decide on a few technical things regarding your food blog. You’ll need to decide what type of content management system (CMS) you’ll use; whether it’s a managed blogging system or your own hosted solution, using an open source CMS system.

Managed blogging systems are relatively similar with the facility to sign up for a free basic service and blog the same day or pay a nominal fee for their advanced service. Often their advanced service includes being able to host your own domain name which I discuss further on. The challenges when you’re using a managed system, is the lack of customization of design, especially if you wish to include different features to the proffered. The main managed solutions are Blogger, Typepad and Wordpress has an online managed system.

Serious food blogs will opt for a hosted solution, using one of the many open source CMS systems available. The main reason for choosing this approach is for the ability to fully customize your food blog with CMS plug-ins as well as third party applications like specialized statistics programs or photo gallery applications. There are just too many open source CMS systems available to list everyone, a great resource can be found at www.opensourcecms.com

Hosted solutions require a vehicle to actually host your blog. Depending on the CMS you choose you’ll need to make sure that your host provides the correct environment for your package. Most packages operate on the PHP environment and require a MYSQL database – make sure you check the specifications provided by your CMS company.

Hosting will depend on traffic volume and the amount of downloads from your site. I recommend that you choose a hosting package which can ultimately be upgraded to a higher volume usage account when your site traffic improves or you move to include podcasts or vodcasts which all take up bandwidth and hence add to your cost of blogging.

I've gone down a different path all together, I've actually bought my own dedicated server, which is an IBM xSeries 345 Server and used an enterprise soltuion CMS called Sitedock from Wiliam Web Design.

4. Your food blogs domain name

The majority of successful food blogs around the world have their own domain names as the website site address or URL for their blog. This is because they have created an identity or brand and keep it consistent. A food blog with your own domain can attract links, publicity, attention, trust, search rankings and even requests to place advertising. I don’t know how many times I have seen food bloggers write an article about changing their address from a blogspot or typepad address to their own domain name.

The domain name you choose could just be your name or could even be the topic about your food blog. For me the best resource to locating a domain name for your food blog is at DomainsBot . You can use multiple word searches to find your desired domain name. In their results they also offer domains which are for sale and expired domain names which are similar. You may find that a domain name which sounds good is available for just a few hundred dollars; it all depends on your budget.

5. Food Photography on your food blog

Recently I wrote an article about Food Photography and the article discussed how easy it is to achieve professional looking shot for your blog. Even if you are an amateur, there is no better way of expressing your cooking style to your readers, so plan to include food photos on your food blog. It’ll guarantee a higher visitor rate and more subscribers in the long term. Think if the difference between a cookbook with food photography and one without. Which would you choose to use more often?

6. Recipes on your food blog

When you have decided what direction your food blog will go, you might start creating dishes writing recipes and taking some food photos or commenting on meals you had, enjoyed or review. So many food blogs just keep adding recipe after recipe and don’t really think about new visitors and the ease of navigation as the blog grows.

One of the things that many food bloggers forget is to create a central recipes page which includes all of your inclusions in an easy to read style. My Australian Recipes page lists out all the recipes by course, i.e. appetizer, entrée and dessert (or entrée, mains and dessert for Australians and Europeans).. Another way to lay out the recipes page is to list them by the main ingredient in the dish, see Ideas in Food as an example of listing dishes by ingredient. They do this visually by displaying a photo of each dish they create.

If you are using ingredients which maybe foreign to readers from other parts of the world, I often provide a link to an online shop where they can be purchased from. For example I am sure that not many people have ever heard of Lemon Myrtle or even how to use it, so I provide a link over to Vic Cherikoff’s online store where readers can purchase then and there. Don’t forget here, that by publishing a recipe and photo on your food blog you are inspiring others to either learn about the ingredients you used or simply make your recipe. 
It’s the real power of the food blog.

7. Tag your content and get your Food Blogs on Technorati

When you start writing there is an increasing trend to tag (or categorize) each article with keywords or keyword phrases used to describe the subject matter or topic of a blog post. You’ve probably seen them at the end of an article (if not scroll to the end of this article I use them religiously).

I tag my articles with Technorati as I consider it’s the best of the blog search engines. y tagging your content, you are effectively creating traffic for your food blog on a particular topic. Technorati has gained in popularity because there is only a few seconds delay from the time an article is published to it appearing in the Technorati database. Technorati allows users to make keyword based searches (just like at Google). The results are simply an extract from and a link to the article. Users can also grab RSS feeds on particular keyword phrases like “food” and add them to the RSS reader of their choice. I have about 25 RSS feeds from Technorati for a variety of topics I enjoy reading about.

Before you start tagging your content, you’ll need to claim your blog; you do this by going to Technorati and going through the registration process. It’s free and relatively painless. Once your blog is claimed, Technorati provide a Blog Info page which gives you a ranking and lists your most recent articles, your top tags, recent inbound and outbound links as well as some statistical information.

To start tagging your articles, you’ll need to work out what tags to use. Do a search for a related topic like “Food and Drink” at www.technorati.com/tag/Food+and+Drink. You’ll see on the results page there is a comment “Add this tag to your posts”. Simply copy and paste the HTML there into the bottom of your article. I suggest that you have about 8-10 tags for each article, this way you’ll offer a good description of your content.

If you have a food blog already and haven’t claimed your blog, then there is no time like the present, you’ll be amazed at the traffic increases you’ll receive by just tagging your content. 

8. RSS feeds

When deciding on a CMS, you need to make sure it has the capability of providing your users with an RSS feed for your food blog.The majority of CMS’s publish an extract of each article in your food blog’s RSS feed. However as other sites begin to take your content and networks grow it will be more advantageous to syndicate the entire article. There is also the ability to publish multiple RSS feeds from your food blog; these could be your global RSS feed, your podcast or vodcast RSS feeds etc.

9. Pinging your food blog

Pinging is where your food blog automatically sends a simple ping (for the technical folks it’s called a XML-RPC signal) to ping servers each time you post an article. These ping servers the create lists of recently updated blogs which have new articles.

My CMS automatically pings all major ping sites, but if your CMS dosen't then after every post visit a pinging website such as Ping-o-matic or Pingoat and do a ping of all the major services. This ensures that your blog gets promote, then noticed which in turn brings increased traffic.

10. Syndication Networks and Food Blog Aggregators

Apart from alerting users of updates to your content, RSS is a great way to syndicate your content to other sites. Syndication is where your content is republished on other websites. It’s a great way to lift your own profile and reputation and the standing of your food blog.

There a number of syndication sites on the web, one such syndication service is Blogburst which tries to match your content with major traditional newspapers like the Washington Post, Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News.

Recently I wrote a short article on Food Blog Aggregators and how they can be used to syndicate your content to the main food blog portals on the web. Each has their own way of registering, but usually it’s as simple as sending them an email or filling out a basic form to advise them of your blog.

 
11. Social Bookmarks on your Food Blog

 Social bookmarking sites have grown in popularity over the past year and more recently even more as main stream media starts to incorporate links to their articles. Social bookmarking is the ability to save a link to an article, blog or website in your own account which other can see and then categorizing it. The major services which you can to add your food blog are del.icio.us, digg and reddit to name just a few.

Once you have arrived at a site like del.icio.us and created a free account, you can start adding bookmarks and tag the link with appropriate keywords or keyword phrases. Try now – Add my food blog to your del.icio.us account

Lee Odden from TopRank has developed a Social Bookmarks Tool which you can use to add to Social Bookmarking link to your food blog. Simply choose which services you want to offer to your readers to use, then add it to your food blog.

12. Food Blog Events

At the start of this article I suggested that you should create a food blog with a unique topic and style. From time to time your food blog might include stories, themes or events to which other bloggers can contribute. A recent food blog event was initiated by the Travellers Lunch box and was entitled Things to Eat Before You Die . This invited food bloggers around the world to contribute to what they would like to eat before they die. At the time of publishing this article, over 1135 suggestions had been contributed.

Food Blog events are a good opportunity to contribute to the community whether you are hosting or contributing to the event and they are a great way to gain exposure and get noticed if more traffic is your outcome.

 
13. Directories to join

There are so many free web directories on the internet its hard to know which ones to get listed in, but I thought I would offer a handful of locations definitely worth being listed in.

Dmoz (or The Open Network which is associated with Google) is the largest directory on the internet. Well worth submitting your site, but it can take weeks to appear.

Yahoo has a great directory of food blogs. Yahoo can also take some time to add your foor blog.

Like me if you’re a chef and your food blog talks about food, then I suggest you get listed on Chefs Blogs.

Only new to the blogosphere is Food Blog Blog which lists all known food blogs on the web.

14. Newsletter

Many of the popular food blogs on the Internet publish their own newsletter from time to time. To do this you’ll need to create a signup form and preferably use software which automatically add subscriber’s details to your database and you’ll need to use a specialist mailing program which can help stop your newsletters appearing as spam.

Every couple of weeks I email out my newsletter, well it’s not really a newsletter as such, it’s basically just a short email with a few links to food news, recipes, native food ideas, interesting products as well as Australian promotional events with which I am involved. Subscribe to my newsletter here

15. Advertising and Affiliate programs

I’ll be honest; having a food blog, maintaining the content, hosting the blog and bandwidth does cost money. To offset some of these costs, a lot of food blogs now have advertising on their pages or use an Affiliate Program to generate a little revenue. Many blogs use Google Adsense