A new blog is born on the internet every half a second. About 95% of these don’t go through to the second month because of obvious reasons. But that doesn’t deter anyone from starting a blog. And in fact it shouldn’t. Because if you know how to run with your blog, then there is no reason why your blog cannot be on the top 100 blogs on the blogosphere.
Talk about recipe blogs and the story is not any different. They are in thousands on the internet. And there are a few more thousand that gets added everyday.
So how do you stand out from the crowd?
What do you do so that your blog gets the kind of attention that it deserves? How do you succeed in Food Blogging?
It is not possible to limit all of the aspects that go into getting your blog the attention that it needs, in a single post. So in this particular post, we will be looking at one of the key aspects of starting and running a successful blog – Niche Research. (I will be writing a detailed guide on SEO and the basics in some time. Don’t forget to subscribe to us so that you stay updated).
Find a Narrow Niche for your Food Blog
Niche research is the first step in optimizing your blog for the search engines. It also helps in ensuring that your blog stands out of the competition and that you are able to make money with it.
Let me start by putting some things straight. If you start your food blog today on a generic topic like “Recipes”, then the odds that your blog will succeed are very low, given the kind of competition that exists today in this niche. If you put in a lot of hard work and spend a lot of time building and nurturing it, you might find some success. But then that is too much of work and will need a lot of time.
The best way to start is by narrowing down on your niche and finding a specialized niche for your blog. Let me explain that with a few examples. Some of the narrow niches are; kids recipes, south indian recipes, vegetarian south indian recipes, oven recipes etc.
I hope you understood what I meant by narrow niches.
So your question is, “If I become so focused on a specific niche, where will I get the content for all my recipes”?
Let me explain it a little more. Narrowing down your niche doesn’t mean that you only write on that specific topic. It means that your blog will primarily focus on that topic but will also be covering the other topics as well.
Then how does the narrowed down niche help?
It helps in optimizing your blog. You will get a fair amount of audience if you are able to get your blog ranked on the first page of google for search terms in that specific niche. And that is what our target is.
How will you find what niche is good to go after?
Magazines, Newpapers, Television, Other media, Google, Amazon etc., all of these are good sources that can help you find good niches.
- Go through the recipes that appear in the magazines.
- Look out for those special section in the newspapers where you will see a lot of articles on recipes. They would be extremely focused towards addressing a specific problem.
- Check what books are selling well on Amazon. These are also good leads to niches that are doing well.
But the easiest way is to go with your cooking experience, and this is what I recommend to most of my coaching students. You will know what sub-topics go into the broad cooking category. Just identify them and note them down.
Then head straight over to Google to research the topic and come up with some deeper topics that you can base your recipes on. That’s all that is there to it.
Keyword Research – Finding keywords to rank
Once you have identified the topic that you want to get into, go to http://google.com/adwords. You might have to create an account if you do not have one. If you have a gmail account, you can use that one to login to Adwords.
On the home page select “Keyword Planner” from the “Tools” option on the menu as seen in the below screenshot.
When you go into “Keyword Planner”, you will get a couple of options. Under the “Find New Keywords” section, click on “search for new keywords using a phrase” as in the below image.
You can then enter your topic in the search box as in the below image. Keep all the other options the way it appears below. In fact you don’t need to change anything there.
Once you are ready, you can click on “Get Ideas” and you should get a list of ideas based on your topic. You can see some of the results in the below image.
The primary keyword “Oven Recipes” has almost 4400 searches per month and is a very low competition keyword. In the below screenshot you will also find a lot of variations of the keyword and most have a good number of searches coupled with medium to low competition.
This shows that the topic “Oven Recipes” is a good one to go after.
You can make a note of all the keywords that have searches greater than 1000 per month with low and medium competition (you can add these filters in the options that you find on the right hand sidebar). This is a good collection of keywords that you can focus on when you write your recipes.
Now all that you need to do is, ensure that you post an “Oven Recipe” once a week or, maybe thrice in 2 weeks. This is entirely upto you. You can continue with your normal recipe posts for the rest of the week.
Tip: I would recommend that you use one of these terms in your recipe posts and optimize the post for it. Add a few paragraphs as a write-up to all your recipes and ensure that you add the keyword in it.
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