What is a Food & Recipe Blogger Business & Is It For You?

I may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.

My wife and I have had a Food & Recipe Blog since the spring of 2018. Since then, that blog has had over 1.5 million visits and has made a side-income that fifteen years ago would have been a full-time income for us.

Based upon our success, I really believe that you should learn more about starting a Food and Recipe Blog, and in this article, we’re going to share the basic things we’ve learned in the last two years.

So, what is a Food & Recipe Blogger Business? Food & Recipe Bloggers create content for the internet to teach people about food and help them find recipes they love. Food bloggers make money through a variety of income streams and millions make a full time living as bloggers.

Now I want to dig into the details with you and share what we’ve learned about food blogging with our Food & Recipe Blog Business.

We’ll start with a more complete description of a Food & Recipe Blog, then move on to the characteristics of this business model so you can more easily compare it to our other home-based food business ideas.

A More Complete Description of a Food & Recipe Blogger Business

A Food & Recipe Blog Business creates content for the internet that is designed to answer the questions that people are asking on the web. We could make it more complicated, but at its core, that’s the business.

A lot of people are making a lot of money with Food & Recipe Blogs, but many more have started this kind of business and failed without making any money at all.

The reason so many people fail in this space is that it is so crowded. Don’t believe me? Then Google for a recipe for your favorite dish and see how many thousands of recipes come up in the search results. That’s a lot of competition.

WAIT!

Please don’t quit reading yet…there is hope for an amazing business!

The truth is that this space is really crowded, and to be successful it takes more than just great content that answers the questions that people are asking.

In addition to great content to be a successful Food Blogger, you must have the following things:

• A niche with less competition.
• To be personality forward and build an audience who loves you, not just your recipes.
• A great social media marketing plan.
• A solid plan to build communication with your audience through email list building and marketing.

I know it’s very possible to be successful as a Food & Recipe Blogger, because we’ve done it. And I want to help guide you to succeed, too.

We’ve been successful with a Food & Recipe Blog Business, and we want to give you the same shot.

Here is what our Food & Recipe Blog looks like…

Niche – Our niche is the Ketogenic Diet and Keto Recipes.

Personality – My wife, Angela, is the face and personality of our Food & Recipe Blog Business.

Social Media Marketing – We’ve mastered Pinterest, which drives over 100,000 visits to our website each month (before the 2020 Pandemic which cut that by over 50%…but it will come back). Facebook drives over 10,000 visits a month.

Email Communications – We have nearly 6,000 people on our email list and they hear from us at least once a week. Those weekly emails drive over 8,000 weekly website page views to our website.

Just to be clear, these are always changing numbers. Our website has been trending up since we started our business, but in March of 2020 when the pandemic started we began to trend down. I’m writing this article in April, and at this time we’ve stabilized at about 40% under the pre-pandemic traffic. I’ll update this later to let you know how we are doing.

~Stacey

But How Do People Make Money With A Food & Recipe Blog Business?

Food Bloggers make money from two sources:

1. Income from your website traffic who arrives on site to consume your content.
2. Income from your audience who have opted in to hear more from you via email and social media.

From both sources, the income streams are similar. Here is how we make income from our traffic and audience.

• Information product sales
• Advertisements on our website
• Affiliate sales

We don’t have space here to tell you everything you need to know about monetizing a blog, but you need a basic understanding before you decide to start a Recipe Blog.

Food Blog Information Products

If you have a niche, you have the opportunity to sell information products to help your audience solve their problems.

We offer a super simple Ketogenic Meal Plan, A Keto Cookbook, and a really cheap Keto Shopping list. We sell a lot of these every month, though we sell a lot more of them around the new year.

With some guidance, every Food & Recipe Blogger Business can find information products that are cheap to create and easy to sell. And if they are sold online as digital products, your margin is nearly 100%.

Advertisements on Your Recipe Blog For Income

There are countless ways to sell advertising space on your food blog, and they all make you nearly ‘free’ money.

You can opt for ads that are related to what you are writing about, or you can opt to allow Google to display ads designed to appeal to your visitors…they are really good at knowing what your visitors are interested in.

Our websites (we currently have 3) make between $5 and $20 per thousand visitors. Some blogs do more, others less.

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If you’re interested in learning more about monetizing a Food and Recipe Blog, be sure to sign up for my emails. There is no reason that you can’t be one of the success stories that we all love to hear about.

Alternate Names for a Food & Recipe Blogging Business

• Recipe Blogger
• Food Blogger
• Cooking Blogger
• Home Cook Blogger

Pros of Starting A Food Blog Business

• Very low startup costs and overhead.
• It’s fun and probably something you already do.
• Lots of potential revenue streams.
• Very flexible work hours.
• Learn as you go!
• Cooking meals becomes part of your job!

Cons of Starting your own Food & Recipe Blog Home-Based Food Business

• This is a business that is slow to grow and start bringing in income.
• You need to develop some computer-based technical skills to be successful.

Cost To Startup (Scale: $ to $$$$$)	$
Full Income or Side Hustle	Side Hustle or Full Time
Income Potential (Scale: $ to $$$$$)	$$$$
Profit Margin (Scale: 📈 to 📈📈📈📈📈)	📈📈📈📈📈
Time To Build (Scale: ⏰ to ⏰⏰⏰⏰⏰)	⏰⏰⏰⏰⏰
Time To Run (Scale: ⏰ to ⏰⏰⏰⏰⏰)	⏰⏰
Complexity to Run (Scale: 🤹 to 🤹🤹🤹🤹🤹)	🤹🤹🤹
Employees Required	No

Cost To Startup a Home-Based Food Blog Business

This is one of the least expensive startups of a food related business that you can run from home.

Your bare-minimum upfront costs will be well under $1000 for the first year, and can easily be done for less than $200 for the first year.

If you’d be interested in learning more about starting a food blog business from the comfort of your home, be sure signup for my email list, and leave a comment below letting me know you’d be interested in a guide that walks you through the steps of starting a blog like this.

Is this home based food business idea a Full Income or Side Hustle?

Honestly, a food blog business can be either a fun and rewarding part-time gig, or an amazing full time job.

Working on a few recipes a week and doing a little social media (see the Time To Build section below) you can have a nice side hustle where you make some extra money doing something I hope you love; being a foodie.

If you put the peddle down, creating lots of content, working social media, and being very public to let your personality shine, you can make a full-time income as a food blogger.

Income Potential of This Business?

I know of food bloggers who have dozens of employees and make six figures a MONTH! But those aren’t the average.

Our Food & Nutrition Blog which we work on in our spare time when we’re done with our home-based prepared meal delivery business, adds enough to our income to change our lives.

To be clear, not “buy a mansion” kind of money, but “not worrying about a broken down car” kind of money. That does’t suck.

If you choose your food blog niche well, set your website up correctly, and master social media, then you can make money in this business.

How much you can make depends on how hard you want to work at it.

Profit Margin of A Food Blog

Running a food and recipe blog is really inexpensive. Your margin is insanely high.

Our personal food blog has a profit margin of over 85%, and we use a lot of paid services to make running our side-hustle blog more passive.

Time To Build a Recipe Blog To Make Money

I’m going to shoot straight with you…it’s going to take a lot of time to start making money on your blog. At least a year, probably more.

In my mind, this is the biggest downside to this otherwise fun foodie business.

If you get the niche, tech, and plan down right, it’s still going to take you at least a year to get enough traffic to start making money.

The vast majority of people who start a food and recipe blog from home quit before they start making any money. Don’t do that!

I’m am hard selling this, because I want you to pass on this idea unless you are committed to sticking with it through the months and months that your website is going to be a ghost town.

But then again, if you enjoy cooking, taking pictures of your food, and like to write, then these months of building traffic can be fun.

If you decide to do this, commit to publishing at least one recipe a week (hopefully more) for at least 18 months even if you don’t make a dollar.

If you don’t want to commit to that, then you should move on from this food business idea, and look at some of our other ideas that you can run from your home.

Take a close look at other food business ideas, such as recipe developer, cookbook author, or even food photographer. Each has lots of the same joy, but positive feedback sooner.

How Much Time Does It Take To Run A Food Blogger Business?

This is a little hard to answer, but let’s give it a shot.

When my wife publishes a new recipe, the actual publishing of it on our Keto Based Food & Recipe Blog takes about 45 minutes.

However, before that happens we do the shopping, cooking, and taking pictures of the process and final food. And those final shots take a little time to plate and set the stage…after-all, you’re shooting ‘food porn’.

But except for the pictures, this is all stuff we’d be doing anyway to make our breakfast or supper. So how much of this time is ‘work’ time? Let’s just take the photo time, which is probably about 15 minutes.

Then we make sure that we share the new recipe with our social media audience and email list.

The sharing of the new recipe doesn’t take much time, probably less than 10 minutes. But to create the images for various social media takes some time…probably about 30 minutes.

When you first start making images to share on social media, it’s going to take you longer, but I have some tips and tricks that will help you with both quality and efficiency. I’ll get to that article one of these days soon.

So, I think that posting a good recipe on our blog takes less then two hours of ‘work’ time. The rest of the time is just doing what we love, cooking!

You’ll want to post at least one new recipe a week. Hopefully more if you want to grow faster to actually making money from your blog.

How Complex Is It To Run A Food Blog?

In one way, running a home based recipe blog is very simple, but in other aspects it’s incredibly complex.

The actual work is simple. Cook, take pictures, write, hit publish. Easy.

However, there are some technical skills that you are going to have to learn to be able to do that ‘hit publish’ part well.

I’m not going to capture all of the technical skills you’ll need to learn, but here is a list of many of them:

• WordPress Maintenance
• Website Hosting Maintenance
• Photo Editing
• Social Media Image Design
• Email List Growth
• Email Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Selling Advertising On Your Site

Don’t get too freaked out by this list!

These are all skills that you can learn as you go, which is exactly what we did when we started our blog.

There are some great courses out there that will walk you through everything you need to know. Let me know in the comments if you want to learn more about how to start gaining these skills.

Do You Need Employees?

No, you don’t need employees. Most bloggers are solo-entrepreneurs.

However, in our growing gig economy, finding experts to affordably help you with the tasks that you don’t do very well or just don’t enjoy is really easy.

So, Should You Start A Food Blog Business?

We LOVE our food blog. We enjoy the food and the creativity that is the work and the extra income has made our life more secure and fun.

But, when we started our blog we had full-time income from our other food businesses, and this was just a fun side thing. I really think this is the best way to start a food blog.

If you need money right now, you should really focus on something that is easier to get started quickly.

Here’s a link to an article that I wrote with 27 other home-based food business ideas. Look at it and see if your match is there.

However, if you are ready to start a food blog, be sure to signup for my email list so I can help you work your way through starting your food blog. There’s no reason that you have to make all of the same mistakes that I made when we first started.

~Stacey