Start a Recipe Blog

Birthday Cake

A Blog Can Help Establish You as an Expert

I know that you may not want to share your favorite recipes if your dream is to open the latest greatest restaurant. You don’ t have to. All of us have recipes that we can share with others that won’t fit into our business dream.

In the real world, we start building our reputation by networking with others, and giving out samples of our food. All grocery stores have people preparing food in front of you so you can sample whatever product they are promoting. You have to do something similar, you may know that your barbeque is the best, but you have to have other people saying that your product is awesome.

Online, you have to have something to offer people to enable them to get to know you. When you begin to share recipes that get rave reviews, people will trust that the product you want to sell will be even better. Therefore, the more traffic your site gets, the more buzz you will have.

I have talked a lot about foodie websites lately. The reason is that it is a topic lots of people are interested in. Recipes are searched for everyday with millions of searches per month. Why not get in on that action? You know that you have valuable information you can share, so do it.

There is a lesson to be learned from the big retailers. As recently as just a few years ago, many of them did not have an active web presence. Now most of them have very profitable e commerce sites. They have realized the incredible power of the web for their business.

The same thing applies to the small businesses. For many of us, starting online will give us the edge we need to succeed. You have heard me talk about the expense involved in brick and mortar storefronts. That is a reality, and can be avoided.

Have you noticed that many of the big chain stores are closing storefronts? For some it is a sign of the economy and they are simply going away. For others, they have seen that they can accomplish sales online without the high overhead of a walk in store.

You may be impatient with me if you just can’t wait for your product to be available to the public to taste. What I am trying to get you to realize is that there is a ton of competition out there with lots of money to advertise. Sadly, competing with the giants is hard.

I said hard, but I did not say impossible. You just need to have the smarts to figure out how to coexist with them. They are not going away, so carving out a way to get a piece of the action takes making strategic decisions.

One way to do that in the beginning is to check out affiliate programs. You start a blog that appeals to many people. Then you not only offer them good advice and how to information, but monetize it with an affiliate suggestion.

With affiliate programs, they are paying people who like what they do a commission simply for talking about what they like about the product. You only talk about something you authentically could recommend to your mother or grandmother.

It does not cost the customer an additional penny. You see, the product owner avoids paying high advertising costs, and is more than willing to pay a commission to folks who love their product. It is a win-win-win.

Many of the big retailers now offer affiliate programs, you just scroll down to the bottom of the website and click on affiliates. All the information to sign up is there.

Last year I used my friends affiliate link to Amazon. I did all my shopping while still connected to Amazon through that link, and she got a commission on all the purchases I made there. I did not pay more for the products I wanted, Amazon just got a little less profit because they shared some of it with her.

You can find topics related to food to promote, and get a share of the money that is made. It is so easy to promote something you believe in because you want others to get a good product or deal, knowing that promoting it does not mean they will have to pay more to cover your share. I suggest that you go find some affiliate programs to include in your blog.

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