Do you have a food blog? Or are you thinking about starting a food blog? Here are a few things you should know about how to make money with a food blog.
Let’s go.
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Table of Contents
1. Ads on blog
44% Of Food bloggers’ income actually comes from ads. Ads make up the majority of food bloggers’ income.
Upon seeing your delicious-looking food on social media, many will want to find out the recipe on your site and the good thing is that they’ll return again and again to check out the same recipe when updating their grocery list and when cooking the food.
Most blogs that get 50,000+ monthly sessions are actually food blogs.
It’ll be easier for you to gain traffic to your blog when you’re in the food niche vs when you’re in other niches.
You’ll want to make sure you join some of the highest-paying ad networks so you can make more from ads.
The highest paying ad network include:
- Mediavine
- Adthrive
- Ezoic
Keep in mind that many of these ad networks do have minimum monthly pageviews requirements so if you don’t have over 50,000 monthly pageviews you may be excluded from the ad networks.
2. Sell recipe books
You can easily set up an ebook to sell on Amazon’s KDP.
Want to learn how to self-publish books for free on Amazon? Click here.
You can also choose to sell a physical book on Amazon.
All you have to do is to upload your document and cover and you can start selling at no cost.
When someone purchases the book, Amazon will print out the book and ship it out to the customer without you handling it.
You can have someone on Fiverr format your book for you if you don’t want to spend time learning how to format it.
You can also buy preformatted recipe books from CreativeFabrica or Etsy.
People do judge a book by its cover so you should hire someone to design the cover for you on Fiverr as well.
3. Sell printables
What is a printable? Printable is basically a PDF that you can print out, again and again, an unlimited number of times.
Some people sell calendars as printables or even daily schedules as printables.
Want to learn how to make money with printables? Check out this step-by-step guide.
Here’s a list of 23 printables you can easily make and sell.
You can sell the following types of printables as a food blogger:
- Printables with your own recipe on top
- Printables of recipe pages for those looking to develop their own recipes
- Printables of a table of conversion between cups, tsp, tbsp, ml, g, etc
- Printable of recipe binder cover
- Printable kitchen labels
4. Affiliate
Affiliate income is the income you get for promoting other people’s products. You get a cut of the profit for every item you sold.
Say you found a mixer you really like. You can bake using the mixer in your video and when someone likes it, they’ll buy it from the link you include in your blog or on your social media site.
You can use Linktree or Beacons.ai to include more than one link in your Instagram and TikTok bio.
There are many companies and products to affiliate with as a food blogger. Hellofresh is a common choice.
In fact, did you know that most bloggers’ income comes from affiliates except for food bloggers? Food bloggers’ main source of income is actually ads so there is still quite a bit of room for affiliate income growth as a food blogger if you can find good companies to work with.
5. Guest posts
When you have a high DA score or lots of traffic to your site, it’ll entice other bloggers to have their posts on your blog so they can attempt to drive some traffic to their own site.
Guest posts are sort of like marketing between bloggers.
You can allow a guest to post on your blog once in a while. It won’t affect your monthly readers too much and you can make some money while helping other food bloggers with building their brands.
You can make $150+ per guest post depending on your monthly page views and DA score.
6. Teach a course
Teaching a course is one of the easiest ways to become a millionaire.
Imagine you price your course at $199, you just need to sell your course to 5025 people to make a million dollars.
Pricing your course at $199 may deter some people from buying but since you’re making more per sale, you may actually make more by pricing your course higher.
I’ve heard of a blogger who grew his blog from scratch and makes more than 1 million per year less than 2 years in and he’s selling his course for $999 believe it or not.
He only needs to sell 1000 courses to make a million dollars.
If you know who I’m talking about, let me tell you something, it’s not as easy as he made it seems. He spent a lot of money hiring writers and employing AI tools to write articles for him and he also had connections that helped him land guest post opportunities for his blog. A couple of months into blogging, he also hired some people to help him build backlinks.
I really wouldn’t recommend you to spend $1000 on his course.
What his case can teach us however is that teaching a course can make us money.
As a food blogger, you can teach a course on the following:
- Food photography
- How to cook certain food
- How to start a food blog and make money
- How to pick the best ingredients
- How to bake certain food
You decide what you want to price your course at. You can price it at $50, $100, $500, etc it’s up to you!
7. Sell merch
Another thing you can sell is merch as a food blogger.
Merch isn’t the best thing to make money from as most people aren’t looking to own a hoodie with someone’s logo on even if they like watching your cooking videos and reading your blog.
However, this is something that you can try.
Instead of selling merch with your logo on it, however, you can hire a graphic designer on Fiverr for cheap and design some cute food theme characters to be printed on merch.
Maybe even some inspirational food theme quotes.
If you know how to draw, you can also design it yourself using Canva or Procreate.
Click here to learn how you can make money with Procreate!
8. Ads on YouTube
I would really recommend you to start a YouTube channel as well if you’re a food blogger.
YouTube algorithm and its policy do change so you shouldn’t rely on YouTube for your only source of income.
However, YouTube can be a great way to raise awareness of your food brand and help you establish authority in your niche.
YouTube can also be another source of your blogging income as well.
When someone watches your YouTube video, you can make money from the ads.
Keep in mind, however, that YouTube shorts can’t make you ad money. You have to make your videos longer if you want to make money from YouTube ads.
Click here to learn how much YouTubers make and how you can do it too.
I would recommend you to make two types of content for YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
- 2–15+ minutes long video for YouTube
- 5–15+ seconds long video for TikTok and Instagram
You can film the video and resize it for both types of content.
YouTube videos accept a ratio of 16:9 while TikTok and Instagram reels accept a ratio of 9:16
9. Sell social media shoutouts
Once you gain enough social media following, you can sell shoutouts spots where you’ll talk about someone else’s brand in the same or related niche in exchange for money.
10. Dropship kitchen gadgets
You can dropship kitchen items to sell. This is kinda similar to affiliate marketing but you aren’t just providing a link to your audience and taking a cut of the profit. You’re sharing profit directly with the manufacturers when you drop ship a product.
How it works is this:
- You find a product you want to dropship from Oberlo or Alidropship
- You order a sample to test it out and give your approval
- You can also add your own logo if you want
- You put the product on your blog
- When your audience buys it the product gets shipped to the customer without you handling the packaging and shipping
All you do is find the product, put the product on your website, and promote the product.
You make all the profit after subtracting the manufacturing expenses. You can cover shipping for your customers or they can pay for the shipping themselves.
Final thought
What do you think? Is there any other way to make money with a food blog? Let me know in the comment below.
Click here to read the 10 reasons why you should start a food blog.
And if you want to find a specific niche in food blog to start from (which you should), click here for the 15 different types of food blogs you can start today.
Click here to read the step-by-step guide on how to start a blog for beginners.
I am grateful for the valuable insights you shared on how to monetize your food blogging passion with ease. It’s no secret that food blogging is a thriving industry, especially for those who love to whip up scrumptious meals and explore different cuisines from around the world. As food vlogging continues to gain momentum, more and more people are discovering creative ways to turn their passion for food into a lucrative career. I am also good hand experience in baking different types of cakes like:- birthday, anniversary and wedding cakes etc.