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6 Easy Steps to Start a Food Blog

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Food brings people together, even online. With a food blog, you can share original recipes, review restaurants, demonstrate your cooking techniques, and share culinary advice with a wide audience. You can also use it to bolster your revenue by sharing information relevant to your food-related business or monetizing your blog. 

Reaching the right audience means taking the right steps early on, something that’s helped when you start with WordPress with Bluehost. The reliable and secure Bluehost platform hosts your blog site, while WordPress is made for blogging, so combining WordPress and Bluehost means you have a solid foundation for building your blog.

Crazy Egg’s Favorite Tools for Starting a Food Blog

Using WordPress as your blogging and site-building platform with Bluehost handling your web hosting is a great approach for starting a food blog. But it’s hardly the only route to take for success. Take a look at three other options below that can also help you spin up a food blog quickly and easily.

Wix is a drag-and-drop platform that’s easy for bloggers who are just starting out to get the hang of using it. Start blogging on Wix for free.

Strikingly is a great choice for bloggers who like to get creative while still getting a speedy setup. Sign up today to get started on Strikingly for free.

Squarespace is ideal for bloggers who have an online shop and plan to sell products alongside or within their blog posts. Try Squarespace free for 14 days.

Crazy Egg's Golden Eggs: Favorite tools for starting a food blog.

More Top Blogging Platforms

When it comes to creating a stunning blog for your business or pleasure, you have a lot of options. We’ve reviewed many of the blogging platforms available today to help you find one that suits your needs. Get all the details on these providers and their unique features by reading our post on the best blogging platforms on the market.

Step 1 – Get Started Using WordPress with Bluehost

WordPress is the best blogging platform because of its flexibility and scalability. You can use it to blog for fun or scale one up into an influential, money-making destination. 

One of the key complications with WordPress is that you need to buy your own hosting to make your WordPress blog accessible to visitors. That’s where Bluehost comes in.

Screenshot of Bluehost's WordPress hosting landing page

Bluehost’s WordPress hosting packages are affordable and give you extra support when starting out. The platform guides you through the setup and gives you options for spinning up your blog quickly with templates. And you can get started for as little as $2.95 per month and scale up your hosting plan as your food blog becomes more popular. 

We’ll walk you through more of the process of selecting a Bluehost plan in a bit. But first, let’s get into what your food blog is going to focus on. 

Step 2 – Choose Your Food Blog’s Topic

Before you even get started with your hosting service and setting up the website, you need to know what to call your blog. That involves getting a little deeper into your topic and narrowing it down into a specific niche that will attract your ideal audience.

Consider who you want to reach with your blog, whether that’s restaurant owners or home cooks looking to try new recipes. Knowing your audience gives you a clearer idea of your blog’s scope and what you can write about. The more refined you can be with your topics and target audience, the better of a chance your blog has to stand out from other food bloggers.

You have plenty of options when it comes to deciding what kind of food content you want to share. You might consider building your blog around:

  • A specific food culture
  • Different diets and habits
  • Restaurant reviews and where to find good food
  • High-ticket food items
  • Thrifty dinners
  • Recipes for cooking or baking

Know what your ideal audience needs before you jump in. Are they looking to improve their health, explore new locations with interesting dishes, or experiment with new recipes? Knowing their behavior patterns, values, likes, and dislikes will help you come up with a blog that appeals to them.

Choosing a more niche topic also helps your audience find you more easily and can also help you rank higher in search results. And, importantly, it gives you some ideas that will come in handy for the next step in the process.

Step 3 – Create Your Blog’s Brand Identity

By defining your topic and target audience, you’ve already done a good bit of the hard work that goes into crafting a brand identity. You can use this information to inform the remaining aspects of that, such as creating your blog’s name and how you want to craft your blog posts.

When you come up with a blog name, make sure your audience will find it easy to remember. That isn’t just for sticking in people’s memories, it’s also helpful for your eventual URL. A shorter domain name is much easier to market than a complicated or long one. Avoid names that people in your audience will find difficult to spell or search for. 

Your blog name should also be descriptive enough to tell people what your blog is about right away. So there’s a fine line to walk here. And don’t forget to look up your blog name ideas to make sure none are already taken or that there’s nothing too similar that will confuse readers. 

Maybe you’re having a hard time coming up with a unique enough name that also fits what (and how) you want to write. It could be worth checking out some domain name generators in order to find some options that can work both as a URL and your blog’s name.

Developing your brand identity also involves how you talk to your audience. Do you want your audience to perceive you as a mentor or friend giving cooking advice in a relaxed setting, or do you want to create more distance with a professional tone?

Creating a brand identity combines your content with your blog’s appearance right down to your logo. It sells your blog to your audience, so you want to make sure that you not only like it but that it serves your intended purpose, whether that’s sharing your ideas, promoting products and services, or positioning yourself as a particular kind of food expert.

Step 4 – Purchase Your Web Hosting Service

This is where you really start using WordPress with Bluehost. Now that you’ve named your blog and decided on your brand image, it’s time to get started on your hosting and domain. 

First, you’ll need to start the purchasing process on Bluehost for your web hosting. Bluehost offers a WordPress-oriented version of their shared hosting, which will work just fine for any blogger just starting out. 

These plans start at $2.95 per month for hosting that supports a single WordPress site with 10 GB of storage, a free CDN, a free domain for one year, and custom WordPress themes. You can scale up for the ability to host more websites, expand the site storage, and get some extra perks like malware scanning and site backups. That can range between $5.45 and $13.95 per month.

Bluehost's WordPress hosting pricing table

To compare plans and select the one you want to get started with, just head to Bluehost’s page for WordPress hosting, then scroll down to the four plans with their features laid out side-by-side. Then click Select and submit your payment information. After that, you’ll be able to select a domain for your new food blog.

Step 5 – Select Your Domain

When considering your domain name, keep it relevant to your content and audience. Make it short and easy for readers to remember. 

Your domain name may need to be different from your actual blog title. A lot of good domains are already taken. Ideally, you should have a few different name ideas in hand so that when you get to this stage where you’re looking to secure a domain that matches or is similar to it, you have multiple options to fall back on. 

You may want to consider whether you’re trying to reach local readers, as your domain extension and name can affect who finds you. Adding a city, state, or region to your blog title can make a unique, memorable, and effective domain name.

Fortunately, when you sign up for WordPress hosting with Bluehost, you’ll have the opportunity to search for available domains to secure at the same time as your hosting. Best of all, your first year is free.

Bluehost shows you if your domain name ideas are available, and it displays pricing for different extensions, from .com and .net to a wide array of others. It also has tips for making your domain name easy to find online.

If you have a domain already, it’s wonderfully easy to transfer it to Bluehhost in just a few steps. 

Bluehost’s domain pricing starts at $1.99 per year, though the most popular .com extension costs $12.99 per year. But, again, you may not have to pay for it at all—if you’re bundling your domain registration with a new hosting subscription.

Step 6 – Build Your Food Blog and Write Your First Post

Once you’ve finished the Bluehost checkout process, you can officially start setting up your blog. Bluehost comes with automatic WordPress installation, and you can take advantage of its WordPress Academy to guide you through the site-building process, which comes in handy if you’re new to blogging.

It’s a great idea to start with a template and make tweaks and changes to fit it to your brand identity. Bluehost has plenty of professionally designed templates that are fully customizable and optimized for WordPress.

Choose the idea you want to write first, whether it’s an introductory post or getting right to the meat of your content. Writing your first post may be the most challenging part of setting up a blog; it’s important to start populating your blogroll and getting your feet wet writing on this site for your target audience.

To add a new post, look for Posts in WordPress’ left-hand menu sidebar, then click Add New. You’ll find yourself in WordPress’ blog editor, where you can start writing and formatting your post, plus setting details like when you want it to publish and what you want the post’s URL ending to be. 

Screenshot from WordPress on a newly added post editing screen.

Add your copy, images, and everything else, then make sure your formatting is correct before clicking Publish to upload your post to your blog.

Once you’ve done that, congratulations! You’ve officially started your new food blog with Bluehost!

From here, there are two things to keep doing. One is to keep writing blog posts and adding to your content. The other is to try to get more eyes on your food blog. Promote it across your online presence, from email to social media to online communities, to get an initial audience. 

Stick to a blogging schedule. Whether it’s once a day, twice a week, or less frequently than that, the important thing is to stick to it. Your audience will expect you to post when you say you will, and keeping to your schedule keeps them coming back for more. 


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