There are two different reasons you’ve ended up here thinking to start a food blog.

First reason:

You love food. Don’t get me wrong, we all love food. In fact, all the animals need food to survive. To produce energy that allows breathing, thinking and moving. To grow and reproduce. But you, you are a different breed of food lover. You care about your food. You take the time to learn about food and experiment. You love to create, enjoy and experience food with all of your senses. You are passionate about food and if you are thinking about starting a food blog, you are most likely going to be successful.

Second reason:

You’ve heard, that food bloggers make a really good money and you want to join the show. You are tired of your current job, you like writing and you like food. You may become a successful blogger but be sure to very carefully think and choose the topic you want to write about. There is a very good chance that writing recipes would one day become boring and tedious.

The truth is:

No matter why you are here reading these paragraphs, food blogging ain’t easy. Blogging is time consuming, sometimes boring, very often unexciting and always takes time to produce income and become a full time job.

Success

Of course a successful blog is not always associated with the money it produces. Sometimes bloggers create their blogs to help others. Sometimes blogs are created to connect people and tell a story. That’s how you should think before starting your own food blog and sooner or later success will follow in all of its forms.
Here are some facts about food blogging:

• Some food bloggers make more than 100 000$ a year.
• You are not going to make a whole a lot of money blogging, if you don’t have a lot of quality content.
• You will have to write at least 100 of quality food recipes or blog posts before you see some good traffic to your blog, which will translate in some money in your pocket.
• The only way you’ll be able to sustain building a blog is, if you love the process and enjoy doing it without getting much in return. At least in the beginning.
• Creating more content for your blog brings you closer to the success.

Conclusion:

If you are still hanging around and still motivated to create your own food blog, follow these few easy steps to get going in less than 30 min.

In order to start a food blog the right way you will need to do a few steps.

• Buying Domain name
• Buying Web Hosting
• Installing WordPress
• Installing Theme

I mention earlier “to start a food blog the right way”. With that I mean that there are many ways to start a blog. You can for example use a Free service like Blogger.com to start your blog, but there’re reasons I can’t recommend that.

Free vs. self-hosted blog

• You’ll have a subdomain such as Blogger attached to your blog. For example, my blog would look like that – www.foodrecipeweb.blogger.com, which doesn’t look very professional.
• You won’t be able to customize your blog with things such as plugins. Some platforms may offer more than others, but overall it can be a cause of frustration
• You have limited advertising options, making it harder to monetize your blog and earn money.
• You don’t own your blog at all, which in my opinion is the biggest disadvantage with a free blogging platform.

So, if you think you are ready to own your own place on the internet and start a food blog follow the steps bellow.

Domain name

First thing first. You can’t have a blog without name. The domain is the address people use to get to your site. You can register a domain with any number of registrars or providers – basically you pay an annual fee to use that particular web address. If you stop paying, someone else can use the domain instead.
Although there are no specific rules in choosing your food blog name, there are some advices that will help you come up with good and unique name for your blog.

1. Keep it short. Shorter the name, easier to remember. That of course is not always easy, considering the fact that most of the short domain names are already taken.
2. Have a domain that’s catchy and memorable.
3. Choose domain name that includes a keyword of what you are going to write about. Keywords can help improve your SEO and help with ranking on search engines (Google, Bing) later on. For example, if you are going to write about food in general, use the keyword food, recipe, cooking, cuisine, etc. If you are going to write about vegan food, try to use vegan, fruitarian or maybe herbivorous.Don’t forget to keep it catchy and unique
4. Always try to use .com extension. It’s more familiar and easier to remember.

All that said, you can get a free domain name with buying hosting with Bluehost. Who doesn’t like free stuff? You can also check if your name is available below:

Web Hosting

Website hosting is the service that actually stores your website’s files. You will have to pay to rent server space from a company, that agrees to store your files. It’s something like iCloud for your website. I currently host this site with Bluehost. They are perfect to start with. They have great rates and good customer service in case you messed up something. You can even get your domain name for free if you decide to host with them. .

Install WordPress

WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool. It’s the easiest and most powerful system for blogging and website. You will need to install WordPress on your web host (Bluehost) but don’t worry this process is easy and free.
To do that, login to your Bluehost account,
Click on Hosting, then home in the top left corner and scroll down until you find a box named – Website. Click the Install WordPress button. When you are asked to put domain for installation, enter your new domain name. In the field next to the domain, you can enter a subfolder such as ‘blog’ or leave it blank if you want the site’s main page to be the blog. If necessary, you can edit the email address, username and password for the new WordPress installation. Click “advanced options” and you can change those settings. Username and password are important, as they will allow you to login to your new website every time you need to post recipe or update something. Read through the license and service agreements, check the boxes and select the Install Now button.

Voilà, there you have it. To see your site live simply enter your new domain name “www.yoursitename.com” in your web browser. To access your new blog, and start posting tasty recipes or make changes on how it looks, go to www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin/.
Enter your username, password and you are officially owner of a brand new website.

Make it pretty

Now, when you are logged in to your new blog, you will discover that you can do a lot of changes to how the blog looks and works. There are a lot of things that you will have to learn, a lot of mistakes to make and a lot of instructions on how to do stuff to read. One thing, you would want to do in the very beginning, is choosing your Theme. Under the menu appearance you will find another menu – Themes.


WordPress has tons of free WordPress themes to pick from. You can scan through the options but if you want something that really catches the eye, you would need to purchase Premium Theme. They cost money but you need to pay for them once and they really worth the money, as you will find out when start blogging more often. Here are some options to check out:

• Food Blog Theme by Nimbus Themes is really nice, user friendly Theme that this blog is currently using. This high-quality and beautifully laid out food theme is also responsive, which means it will look good on all devices.
• Genesis Framework – This is framework I run on some of my sites. It’s light fast and very flexible, which means you can change virtually everything. You will find out that most big WordPress sites use Genesis. Once you get Genesis framework you will need to get a child Theme. Here are some suggestions: Foodie Pro Theme
  “Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.”

  Norman Vincent Peale.