It’s been a long time that I wrote for The Tastes of India. While I can blame part of it to the time crunch, it was also due to some procrastination on my part. Nevertheless, finally I am in and let me start by announcing some changes..
The Tastes of India has changed a lot of over the past few years. We went through a lot of ups and downs. This recipe blog was once on the 1st page of Google for a lot of competitive keywords but slowly faded away thanks to a hacker attack that we saw about 18 months back.
We lost most of the content on our blog and along with it our motivation and hopes. It took us some time to bounce back, but I am glad that when we did, it was with double the amount of motivation and thrust.
We re-designed the blog and updated it with whatever content we could salvage. We then started to build it again. 18 months into it and we are once again back in ranking for a lot of keywords that we were targeting.
The Strength Behind
In all of this, there needs to be a special mention to a very strong woman behind this blog. The chief author and editor – Puja, my beloved wife.
I have seen her putting in hours into this blog, in trying out new recipes, documenting it and trying to be as detailed as possible. She would ensure that she finds time, even if it meant losing sleep, in updating the blog regularly.
Being organized was one of the most important aspects of her routine and that helped her streamline things over a period of time and simplified her blogging efforts.
The Changes
Over the last 18 months we changed out blog theme, changed hosts, introduced a lot of new features.
At this point let me emphasize on something very important that we learnt. One of the most critical aspects in your blog (if you are running one) is the hosting company you are with. If your host is not reliable, you might end up facing some similar to what we did. Your host has to be one which has some good security features, who does periodic backups, is simple to use and has a good support. It is hence that we recommend Bluehost which is the host that we trust.
Some of things we introduced didn’t work too great, some others were okay and a few others did extremely well.
One of the things that we got a lot of appreciation on was our “restaurant reviews”. We started this in order to introduce some of the lesser known food joints, to the rest of the world. While we have received a lot of reviews and content from you all, we hope to see a lot more content from our readers on this front.
We brought our hobby as an amateur photographer into the blog, introduced the “tip of the day” posts which feature some handy little tips and ran the first giveaway in partnership with a few of our friend bloggers.
Our Plans
It is now time for some more visible change. Over the next couple of months, we are planning on a lot of things –
Change in Theme
First and foremost, we are looking at changing the theme for the blog, because the current theme looks a little too cluttered for a recipe blog.
Introducing 2 new sections
Travelogues and Informative articles. India is a land of versatility and it is not only in the food that eat, but in a lot of other aspects like our festivals, cultures, costumes etc. There are some very beautiful places that you would love to visit, if you are in India and we are looking at covering these in our travelogues.
You will also be reading food and health related article that we are looking at publishing here. For the health conscious, we will have a health section. If you are looking at dieting, we have a diet related section.
We are also looking at launching our first “Weight loss” diet guide before the close of this year.
Helping you to start a Blog
We have been getting a lot of queries from people on how to start a recipe blog. That is what has prompted us to start this section.
I have been an internet marketer for a long time now. I create a lot of blogs and flip them for profits. In addition to that I mentor and coach a lot of people who want to start an online business.
Then, why not help you to start your own food blog?
Over the next 6 months, you will see me writing a lot about how to start your own blog, if you are interested in doing that. I will also be helping you out by running some free Google Hangout sessions where I will take your questions and clarify them for you.
That’s a lot of things! We should hopefully be able to meet the timelines for each one of these. I will be writing periodically with updates on all of these projects.
Looking forward to your support as always..
