After finishing our food blog we got a lot of questions from friends, visitors and followers on social media on how we did it. We decided to create this page and show people what are the steps to follow for creating a blog. This steps can be applied to any blog, so here it is. Start your food blog today!
Think about your content – food blog content
Think about what type of blog you want to make. It is important to be passionate about the subject. Don’t do it thinking about the income, as you may not earn anything in the first months or maybe even in the first year.
If you are passionate about your subject, you will not be disappointed about low earnings. Motivation to continue working will come from your passion. Most people are doing a mistake here, so pay attention to what you choose.
Write down on a piece of paper names that are appealing and easy to remember. Those names should be linked somehow with the topic of your blog.
Domain and Hosting
Next step is to buy your domain and host. As my blog is new, I recently did a review on what the hosting companies are offering to you.
In the past I worked with GoDaddy and had issues with the site being down for too many times. HostGator was fine until I had to renew the contract as they were asking a very high renewal cost. This time I made a better review of possible options.
For our blog we are using BlueHost. It’s easy to sign in and cheap. They will also give you a free domain and a free SSL certificate for your blog, so head over to their website and check if your selected names are free as domain. Firstly, we recommend a .com domain, but if you want to have something local this is also possible.
For beginning we recommend the Shared Hosting solution as is the cheapest one. You don’t want to spend a lot of money at the beginning. You can always update later if you have to many people going on your blog. And this is just a matter of when not if.
If you want to check BlueHost offer, click here to go to their webpage. We are using an affiliate link so if you sign with them we will receive some $ but the price for you remains the same.
Registering on BlueHost
The welcome page looks like this. We recommend taking a WordPress Hosting which will give you WordPress already installed and ready to use. You may also get some 200$ for advertising your blog, which I find really useful at the beginning.
Go to the WordPress tab and choose the WordPress Hosting. On the new page you have to select your plan. If you are wondering, we have the PLUS plan. But this is just a matter of preferences. You can upgrade anytime.
Once you have selected your plan you can start searching for available domain names. Type in this field the names that you have on the paper.
Easy steps for a successful registration
- Find a free domain name.
- Type in your details
- Take a look at the Extras. We Recommend the Domain Privacy + Protection, for example, which will hide your personal information from curious eyes.
- Login in into BlueHost and you will be redirected to your dashboard page. You will see that WordPress is already installed and ready to use. Now you can login into WordPress and start building your blog.
Starting your food blog
In WordPress you will find a lot of options and themes for your blog. Here it’s just a matter of preference but for sure you will find something for your taste. You don’t have to be scared about it. The only thing which is necessary is will and motivation.
Here is the main screen in WordPress. What it’s really nice about it is that you don’t have to know code. Everything is self explaining and easy to use.
The community is big enough and you will find answers for mainly all of your questions by only searching on google. For the beginning choose free themes and free plugins. They are great and are doing the work. Once you blog has some momentum and people are starting to read your stuff you can easily upgrade to a PRO Theme if it’s necessary. Take a look at our recipes page here to have an idea about our theme.
Here it’s an example on what you can find as themes on WordPress. Almost all of them have a free version.
After choosing your theme your site will look strange. I suggest to start writing some posts, and creating the pages. The content you create has to be original and of good quality. This also implies a good picture quality.
Steps for your new food blog
- Draw how your pages should look like;
- Create content by adding pages and posts;
- Select a theme which corresponds to your drawing;
- Create your logo;
- Open the Appearance tab and start Customizing your theme;
- Take care of your front page – take a look at ours here.
- Install plugins for help with certain elements;
- Take care of SEO by implementing a SEO plugin;
For step no. 5 is very important to already have some pages and posts created, with high quality pictures.
Certain aspects of your page/theme will need coding to change. But we said that you can do the blog without it and here the plugins came in handy. You can install plugins to do certain things for you, like having recipe snippets on a food blog or removing featured photo from posts. All you have to do is to go to the plugin section in WordPress and search for it. If this doesn’t help, with a search on google for sure you will get the answer to your question.
We know it can be tricky and you my feel overwhelmed at the beginning, but with patience you will be able to solve everything. We can also assist you if you have questions in your new adventure with a blog. Just leave us an e-mail and we will get back to you.