How To Start a Food Blog
Over 2 years ago my sister & I decided to start a food blog. It was a long process & we didn’t start posting any recipes for several months because we had so much to learn & didn’t know where to begin. Over the past couple of years we have learned so much & we are still learning! I wanted to share some of my knowledge about what I’ve learned about starting a food blog to help others out there who might be interesting in doing the same. So I’ve decided to start a new series on the blog dedicated to How To Start a Food Blog.
The first thing I did when I knew I wanted to start a food blog was research. I hit the library, the bookstore, & the internet. I began reading any information I could on the ins & outs of starting a food blog. I think one of the most helpful books I read was: Food Blogging for Dummies. It’s written by a well known food blogger with lots of experience. Her book was really easy to read & very helpful on learning the basics of food blogging. I highly recommend her book because I believe it gave me a lot of insight into the world of Food Blogging & how to begin.
You have 2 choices when you start a food blog you can choose to self host your own site or to use a hosted site. Self hosted costs money, hosted is free. We chose to start with a self hosted site & paid the money up front to do it because we didn’t want any limitations & we didn’t want to have to worry about converting from a hosted site to a self hosted site in the future, it sounded like a pain. I’m glad we went this way but I know a lot of bloggers chose to do the opposite mainly because its free & its a hobby. So I’m going to tell you a little more about self hosted site vs hosted site.
Self hosted site is one where you have to buy the domain name you choose (www.thesemisweetsisters.com) from your web hosting company or a place like godaddy.com. Once we came up with our food blog name we went to godaddy.com to see if it was available & then purchased it from them.
After you purchase your domain name or website address you also have to pay a web hosting company like blue host or siteground to host your site. We started with blue host which was great starting with & cheap but when we grew & were getting too many views a day we ran into some issues & had to switch to siteground. We are currently running on siteground but I think blue host was great to start with & we used them for almost 2 years.
After we bought a domain name (www.thesemisweetsisters.com) & paid for web hosting (bluehost) we had to download wordpress.org (not the same as wordpress.com). WordPress.org is the free software you download & install on your web hosting server at bluehost (or wherever you host).
Next we had to choose a theme to run on our blog. A theme is what makes your blog customized & gives it design & functionality. There are several free themes on there to download but they were too limited for what I was looking for. After a lot of research I decided to go with the Foodie theme by Shay Bocks. It was simple, clean cut, made for food bloggers, it was perfect! We are still running the Foodie theme on our site & have been very happy with it. A ton of great food bloggers use her theme which you can customize or pay someone to customize more for you.
Hosted site are free (usually) & easier to use then self hosted. Sites like WordPress.com or blogger.com take care of all of the hosting for you. You don’t have to download software or pay for web hosting or buy a domain name. It’s a great place to start.
The End So after buying a domain name at godaddy.com, purchasing the foodie theme + genisis framework from studio press, & purchasing a hosting service from bluehost.com we were on our way. Well we were on our way but it took me over a month to learn how to set up the theme & get our site up & running. It was definitely a learning process but thankfully the internet has lots of resources on how to do most things. If I ran into a problem odds are a quick search on google could fix my problem. The foodie theme had lots of tutorials on how to manage & edit your food blog which was very helpful!
Any questions? Please ask!
Thanks,
Katie @The Semisweet Sisters
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