Growing visitors to your blog doesn’t happen over night. It requires time, hard work, media knowledge, and bit of good luck to increase traffic to your site.
Beginning of Blog
As I mentioned earlier, the readers and supporters of Just One Cookbook for the first 2-3 months were all our friends. Nami started sharing her recipes on Just One Cookbook and didn’t know what else to do besides posting recipes to the site. Then she joined Foodbuzz and instantly met many bloggers through there, and some of them became her close blogger friends.
Social Networking
If you wish your site to have more readers, promoting your site is inevitable at this stage especially no one knows your site yet. The fast and easiest way to get immediate connection is to join the food bloggers community.
G+ Food Bloggers Community organized by Chef Dennis Littley is a wonderful network and resource especially for food bloggers. You get to learn tremendous amount of tips on food blogging, SEO, Social Media, Photography & Styling, and more from fellow blogger members and you can also put any question you may have on the discussion board. You will meet a lot of knowledgeable bloggers there.
Besides joining the community, Nami started to visit some food blogs that she finds interesting and leave a comment about their post. Some bloggers may respond to your comment and you may start talking to each other through commenting on each other’s post (blog hopping). In a way, blog hopping is more personal approach than talking in the Food Community Board, and you might feel easier to ask questions to your new blogger friends. Nami started to learn a lot about blogging from her fellow blogger friends. When some blogger comes to your site and leave a comment, it’s a nice gesture for you to do the same for him/her. If a commenter is a non-blogger, be sure to respond to their feedback, especially if you want to grow your readership.
In earlier days when Nami received a guest post request by her fellow bloggers, she never turned down and took the opportunity for her site to be exposed to a new crowd. She doesn’t guest post any longer due to two children needing more of her time, but she still appreciates her initial guest post opportunities on blogger friends’ sites.
At this early point, most of the readers were our friends and food bloggers and our site had very few readers from Google and other sites.
Keep on Improving Blog Skills
While you continue promoting your site, it’s important to constantly improve your site so that readers can easily navigate your site and find what they are looking for. If they enjoy your recipe and content, they will more likely come back to your site or even subscribe to your blog. Here are some of the elements that we are constantly working on.
- Food photography and styling
- Writing skills
- Unique and resourceful content
- Layout and functionality of the site
- SEO
- Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram)
- Recipe development
- Learning Japanese cooking culture and knowledge
As your photography gradually improves, start sharing your food photos on Foodgawker and Tastespotting. It’s a good way to raise awareness for your recipes and website to the general public on the Internet.
At the same time, make sure you understand the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Google for your site, as well as the power of Pinterest. Here is a good article on importance of SEO.
Currently, most of the readers of Just One Cookbook comes from Google search result.
*****
Our hobby has turned into hours and hours of hard work. Nami typically works on the blog at least 40-50 hours a week. She cooks, photographs, writes posts and replies to all the readers’ questions and emails she receives everyday. We are really glad that we started Just One Cookbook and get to share Japanese recipes with readers like you.
Thank you for all your support and we hope we learn more things this year to share with you.
– Shen
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Thank you for this great post!
I do have a question about the buisness model of a blog like yours.
you 2 work so many hours to create this amazing high quality content, and it sounds like more than 2 full jobs.
Is it realy that all the income is coming from promotions on the site and the amazone links and your ebook?
I guess you also have a high ammount of investments in photo equipment , social media and so on.
How many years until you could acttualy make it your main family income?
(I hope it’s ok I’m asking… I’m a food blogger doing my first steps, at the moment our buisness is still based on workshops teaching and we want to change our buisness model to a blog)
Thanx and best of luck with the great work you are doing!
Hi Shiran,
Thank you for stopping by and your kind comments. The post was written in 2013 (I should probably update it) so some of the information is outdated.
Yes, the majority of our revenue is ad-based. However, these day bloggers also sell courses, training, and other products to diversify and increase revenue if their pageviews aren’t high yet. As long as you have passionate followers this business model may work.
Photography equipment can be slowly improved over time. We started with a pretty basic point and shoot camera. You don’t need the best camera or super expensive one to showcase your photo. A bit of editing and taking the photo in raw format are probably the more important.
For income, it’s a difficult question since it depends a lot on where you live. We live in one of the most expensive places in the US so it’s harder to achieve “main family income”. If we’re in a lower-cost area, it may be easier.
Also, time does not equate to higher page views and revenue. Great content and building a following do. We set out with Just One Cookbook as a hobby and passion, and today it still doesn’t feel like work because we really enjoy what we do. If you look at it from a monetary perspective, you might get disappointed depending on your site’s growth rate and monetization.
One suggestion I have is if you want to run websites as a business and not get too attached, look into empire flippa and buy a site to run.
question
Can I register multiple sites in adsense?
Can suffer penalties to put the code on a site that signed up in my adsense account?
And how that is paid?
help me
1) Yes, you can register multiple sites in adsense. Each site and ad should have their own unique codes.
2) You will be penalized if you put your adsense on a site that is not approved.
3) Google pays via bank transfer.
Hope that helps!
Thanks so much for writing this article! I started my food blog a few months ago and am excited to move it to the next level. Nothing is easy though, and your suggestions look like they will help me get things moving.
Hi Namiko and Shen, thanks so much for all you do. I bothered coming to your website and reading through this entire post because I’m just so drawn to the high quality videos I started noticing on the Just One Cookbook youtube channel. I mean, the incredibly perfect HD videos, the wonderful selection of background music, the consistent content creation, all worked together to get my attention.
So I found myself watching the videos more than once because they’re just so delightful to watch – even if I’m not meaning to learn the recipes! I also found myself telling my friends about this particular channel, and they’re not necessarily foodie friends. I told them I watch the videos to relax!
And then when I read your article and found out just HOW MUCH hard work and the incredible amount of time you guys invest into this blog business, I truly understand that your hard work has paid off. Congratulations for all the success you’re experiencing!
More importantly, I appreciate you describing the entire process in this blog post. I have several sites and am experiencing slow traction, and your realistic description of your journey just encouraged me about just how much sheer hard work, determination, patience, and a constant strive for improvement is needed for online business success.
Thanks for all you do, both of you! I look forward to more videos and seeing more success!
Sandra
I do not know how to thank you … I think to start blogging and i’m looking in the Internet pages since a period of time for clear, useful and simple steps to direct me and show me the beginning of the road … and here I find the most fascinating story sharing your experience step by step after many pages frustrate me, your story informed and inspired me .
thank you very much
Hi Sabreen! Aww thank you so much for your kind words! I’m so glad this post was very helpful and don’t be afraid to ask questions around – food blog community is very nice, and everyone went through similar experience and they are happy to help you out. We’ve been blogging for 3.5 years and wish we had time to update what we learned last year (since this was written a while ago). Thank you for writing, Sabreen! 🙂
Hi,
Thank you for this post – as a newbie to food blogging I’m finding it trickier then I thought – who knew taking photos of food would be so tough! I also underestimated how difficult it is to direct traffic towards my blog! (although I’m confident once they get there they’ll want to hang around!) It’s great that there are so many sights like this offering useful advice – I’ll definitely look to get involved with a community to share ideas.
I’d be grateful for any advice offered for http://www.homemadeandhealthy.com – a work in progress!
Thank you again
Hi Laurie! Glad to hear this post was helpful. Good luck with your website! 🙂
Hi Nami. I’ve just started blogging and I chose blogger.com as my platform. (www.enzaladang-utak.blogspot.com). I am thinking of shifting to wordpress.org after reading your great tips. I just want to ask you how to monetize the blog using the said platform. See, I’m starting a food blog as a way to express my passion for cooking and as a hobby. I’m looking forward to eventually monetize and earn from it. Do you have some guidelines regarding this? Blogger, which is powered by google, has adsense to start with. How about wordpress? Many thanks in advance. I am learning a lot of good japanese foods by reading your blog. More power to you and your future endeavor!
Hi Enz! If you plan on monetizing your own site, I recommend starting with your own domain and hosting. You can find shared hosting for really low price and in the future it’s much easier if you ever decide to a more robust hosting platform. Most shared hosting services provide a 1 click install for wordpress. With your own site, you can run wordpress with no limitation on advertisement.
I know a few people who started on blogger and eventually migrated to their own site running wordpress. Also I think you mean wordpress.com and not wordpress.org. WordPress.com is where you can start with a free site. WordPress.com allows some affiliate links but they do not allow any banner ads or Google adsense (http://en.support.wordpress.com/advertising/).
Hope this helps! 🙂