How to start a food blog in 2021 (easy & fast)

30. Oktober 2020 2 Kommentare

It can be quite overwhelming to start a food blog in 2021. I remember when I started my blog, it was such a daunting task to begin! Since my technical understanding has always been quite limited I was afraid of not being able to pull it off myself and pushed the project out as long as I could. Once I finally tackled it I realised it wasn’t that hard after all and I am sure you will have the same experience. Starting is always the hardest part.

With this blog post I want to make it a bit easier for you. I won’t give you a million different options that you can use or do. However, I will simply recommend and share what I have done or know what good blogging friends of mine are doing. I will only recommend the best of the best and easiest solutions for you to set up for food blog in 2021.

I also wanted to keep this blog post as shot as possible and exclude all unnecessary information. We will only look at the things you absolutely need when starting a food blog. Before we start off let me introduce you to my personal food blogging online course: Food blogging success! As Austrias biggest fitness food blogger I will be sharing all my secrets on turning your hobby into your dream job. Kickstart your food blogging career with one single course!

Where to host your food blog

Let’s start off with web hosting. Without a hosting provider you won’t have a website. So this is absolutely essential. I know of two hosting providers that are well known in the food blogging niche. One of them I am using myself and the other is was recommended to my highly from a lot my American food blogging friends.

All-inkl. – If you come from a German speaking country this will be your goto hosting provider. I am using them myself and they have a free WordPress integration through their service, that make setting up your blog very easy. They have a killer customer service that will answer you no matter what time of day. Signing up is very easy and they have very fair pricing! On All-inkl. I have the private plan and it works really well for me.

Bluehost – This is an internationally renowned hosting provider. It also offers the 1-Click WordPress installation even gives you your domain for free for the first year! It has a 24/7 support team, which I have only heard good things about from my fellow blogging friends. Bluehost powers over 2 million websites world wide and they are very reliable.

Through the web host you will also receive your personal email address. This is something that will make you look way more professional than just using a .gmail or .hotmail address.

Installing wordpress

Once you have found your web host Bluehost or All-inkl. you can install WordPress. Bluehost and All-inkl. both offer 1-click WordPress installations. Like this you can install it hassle-free on all accounts. Of course you can also code your own website, but since I am guessing you are like me and not the biggest tech-nerd I highly recommend you use WordPress.

WordPress will be the home of your blog. This is the backend where you will be making changes to the design and layout of your website, write your blog posts and be installing plug-ins.

This brings me to the next topic: finding the right theme for your blog.

WordPress themes for food bloggers

The most important choice you will want to make is finding the right theme for your blog. If you don’t want to or can’t code your own website design themes are an awesome solution to have a beautiful website without getting to techy!

When you start a food blog you have to make sure that you choose a theme that reflects being a food blogger. You will want a theme with nice header pictures and blog post previews that already give a sneak peek into the recipe.

In WordPress there are many different themes to choose from. Some are for free and some you need to pay for. I am currently using the Olsen theme, which is a free template. I am not particular happy with it though and had to make a lot of changes in the back-end. So I wouldn’t really recommend my theme for food bloggers. If it wouldn’t be so much work going back and changing everything now I would pick a different one.

If I could choose again I would probably pick one of the beautiful, feminine WordPress templates you find on Blossom themes. These are all SEO friendly, features-rich and easy to use WordPress themes! They even have one very specific one for food bloggers! It’s called Blossom recipe Pro! It’s the perfect theme for food bloggers as it really showcases the recipes well. You can also book their installation and setup service where they set up the entire theme for you. All you need to do is lay back and relax while your blog is being created. Definitely check them out now.

Plug-ins you need as a food blogger

Once you have set up your WordPress you will want to install the most important plug-ins to have your blog running smoothly and optimize for SEO.
Plug-ins can really help to customize the blog experience and improve website speed and search results!

Here is a list of my favourite three plug-ins for food bloggers on WordPress:

Pin it Button – As a food blogger you will want to encourage your readers to pin your awesome recipe photos to their Pinterest boards. The plug-in will show a pin it button once someone hovers over the picture. This makes it easy and convenient for your readers to save your recipes.
Yoast SEO – In order to achieve high blog traffic and a good google ranking it is important to optimize your blog posts for search engines. This plug-in will help you exactly with that. Yoast will analyse the blog text and will give you helpful information on what to improve. It’s an absolute must have plug-in!
WP Recipe Maker – as a food blogger it is absolutely ESSENTIAL to install a recipe plug-in. Not only because it formats the recipe better, but it also helps your blog post to show up higher in search results. You can even add a „jump to recipe“ button in the beginning of the blog post to make it even easier for your readers to find the recipe. I am now using WP Recipe Maker, but I also used Recipe Card in the past which is a bit more simple. I wasn’t very happy though with the search results coming from the Recipe Card plug-in, which is why I changed!

Here is an example of a recipe card I make with the WP Recipe maker:

5 von 1 Bewertung

Drucken

Pumpkin Bars

Healthy pumpkin bars that will melt on your tongue!

Gericht Snack

Keyword Kürbis Riegel, pumpkin bars, vegan raw bars

Zubereitungszeit 15 Minuten

Resting Time 1 Stunde

Portionen 8

Kalorien 193 kcal

Zutaten

150 g pumpkin
70 g coconut blossom sugar alternatively date sirup, Xylit or Erythrit
1 tsp pumpkin or gingerbread spice
200 g oat flour
40 g coconut oil
30 g protein powder optional
70 g dark chocolate

Anleitungen

Cook the pumpkin in a pot. Drain and blend in a mixer.
Add the coconut oil to the hot pumpkin puree in a bowl and stir.
Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well.
Place saran wrap in a small plastic container and press the mixture evenly into the box. It should be around 1.5cm thick.
Melt the chocolate and spread as a layer over the entire oat mixture.
Place in the freezer for 1h and then cut into 8 or 16 bars.
Keep in the fridge and eat cold.

Rezept-Anmerkungen

If you ommit protein powder or use date syrup you will have to use a bit more oat flour.

These are all plug-ins I have installed and find very helpful! Others that I also find very helpful, but that are not food blogging specific, are: Ajax Search Lite, GDPR Cookie Consent, W3 Total Cache, SEO Friendly Images.

More useful tips for food bloggers

Now that you are all set-up you can start writing your first blog posts!

Let me leave you with another word of caution regarding starting a food blog in 2021. As food bloggers we absolutely love our wonderful, colorful pictures. When you upload them onto your website tough make sure to compress the quality!! Uploading huge file sizes will only make your website slow and google doesn’t like slow websites. I recommend to keep your image size under 150kb per picture!

Another helpful tip is to always use your „hero photo“ aka. your best photo from the recipe in the beginning as an eye catcher. Don’t start your blog post with a photo of the ingredients or preparation steps in the process. Start with an amazing photo of the finished dish that will make everyones mouth water!

Zubereitung Teig für Kuchen — Ingredients versus

Apfelkuchen mit Pudding ohne Zucker — finished recipe

I hope you enjoyed this blog post and will start your own food blog soon!
Make sure to sign up for my free food blogging email series:

Here are some other useful pieces on the topic of how to start a food blog in 2021 for you:

xoxo,

Food Blogging

Most useful tools for food bloggers – tips & tricks!

16. Oktober 2020 Keine Kommentare

It’s been a while since I wrote a piece on how to become a better food blogger which is why I wanted to go in a more detailed article today on the best tools for food bloggers. Over the years as a professional food blogger I have learnt so much and wanted to share my knowledge with you. Like this you will be able to work more efficiently, see better results and drive more traffic to your pages.

I will share some of the best tools I use as a food blogger that help me plan, organise and schedule my content. Operating on multiple channels like I do (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube & my blog) can be very challenging at times and it is absolutely essential in my opinion to have tools that will make your daily tasks easier.

Over time I discovered some extremely powerful tools for food bloggers that helped me tremendously. I use them every day. I basically couldn’t live without them anymore and that’s why I want to recommend them to you as well.

Unum – plan ahead

I could not live without this app! If you follow my Instagram you will certainly already know that I color code my feed. This means I always pick a main color and arrange my photos around that color scheme. Color coding your feed is definitely something that will make you stand out and this is only possible with preplanning your feed. You will need to know exactly which photos will look good next to each other in order to create the perfect „orange“ or „pink“ feed.

Take a look at this blog post on how to improve your feed with my best tips for Instagram aesthetics!

Unum helps you to do exactly that. You can switch photos around to see what looks best next to each other. You can also pre-write the caption. This will save you so much time during the week if you just sit down for one hour a week to plan your gallery and pre-write all your captions. You only have to press upload and add the hashtags in Instagram and you are good to go!

Canva – make outstanding designs

Canva is definitely one of the most useful tools for food bloggers! If you don’t want to buy the Adobe inDesign or some other expensive design tool, this will be your go to program! The basic version is free and really all I am using.

It’s perfect for creating any kind of designs you need to promote your content. I use it to create my YouTube thumbnails, Insta story swipe ups, Pinterest Pins, flyers or anything else that comes to my mind. You can chose among thousands of different designs and so many fonts. Canva is so user-friendly and fun.

You will want to use Canva definitely to create your personal Pins for your recipes. I always put them at the end of the blog post so people can save them to their favourite board on Pinterest. Like this you are giving them an easy way to save a beautiful picture! It reminds them of making the recipe and brings them right back to your blog.

Here are some examples of Pins I did with Canva:

Kicksta – maximize your Instagram growth

Gaining followers on Instagram can be a time-consuming and tedious process. Especially in the beginning you will need to spend a lot of time liking and commenting other peoples pictures. It’s a social network – you need to be social to receive likes and comments in return!

Instagram growth services, like Kicksta, use specific methods such as liking photos posted by people in your target audience, following users in your audience or auto-commenting, to name a few, to get you more organic Instagram followers. This obviously saves you a lot of time on a daily basis!
Using a high quality service like Kicksta will avoid gaining robot followers and have you on your way to reaching your goal of becoming a big Instagram blogger.

Tailwind – Boost your Pinterest traffic

As a food blogger you simply have to use Pinterest! For me its one of the tools for food bloggers that bring the most traffic onto my website.
If you have been using Pinterest in the past you might think it’s a lot of work and time consuming! Usually you should pin 10-15 new pins a day! With Tailwind this will become so easy.

All you need to do is sit down for one hour every week and prepare the posts for the upcoming days. Tailwind makes it so easy to schedule hundreds of pins within such a short amount of time. You can group your boards and then pin similar pins to those boards without having to manually type in each individual board.

For example if I want to pin one of my healthy fitness recipes I schedule it for my „fitness food“ group board which entails 4 different Pinterest boards (keto food, low carb, fitness food, easy & healthy recipes). Instead of pinning it 4 times its only one click!
It also has so many functions like smart loops and tribes. You can have your favourite and most popular blog posts run in a loop and be rescheduled automatically. Tribes are active Tailwind groups that help each other out by reposting the groups content to their own boards.

I usually try to schedule 2-3 weeks ahead of time because then I can set and forget it! Being consistent on Pinterest will make such a huge impact on growing your traffic and Tailwind is the perfect tool to make this as easy as possible for you. When you sign up you get a trial period to test the tool for yourself. After that you can decide if you want to continue the paid membership.

Here is what my Tailwind schedule looks like currently:

Trello – organise your day

Trello is super practical why I think it is one of the most helpful tools for bloggers to organise their daily tasks. If you are like me you will have hundreds of ideas swirling around in your head and it would be best to do everything right away. Trello can help you to bring structure into your tasks and prioritise them in different lists. You can create individual tasks and add notes, comments, photos and links to each of them.

For example I have only three different lists on my Trello account:

-Things to-do: Here I write done everything that comes to my mind that I need to do sooner or later. Ideas I have for promoting my content, new business projects or general to-do stuff. This is basically where I collect all the ideas that come on.

– Today’s priorities: Here I pick a couple of important things out of my first list that I need to accomplish today! If I finished the task I move it to done and if I didn’t finish it it stays there until the next day. Be careful to not have too many things in this list and really only focus on todays priorities!

– Done: This list is a collection of all finished projects. I use it as a reference if I need to look something up or have repetitive projects I need to move from done to to-do again after a while.

Whats awesome about Trello is that you can have it on your phone as an app and also as a desktop version. So wherever you are and an idea comes to your mind you can simply write it down or mark it as done.

Here a little screenshot of what my Trello looks like:

Audible – get your mindset right

Audible is probably not so much of a tool. However, it is still a very important app for your personal and professional development. I love listening to Audible audiobooks because its the perfect way to learn new things and grow as a person. Most people think it’s only for romance novel, thrillers and other entertaining books.

Audible makes it so easy to get your daily dose of new knowledge in. You can listen to the audio books on your way to work or university, anytime you spend waiting around for someone or doing mundane tasks that don’t need a lot of attention.

Here is a list of my favourite entrepreneurial and motivational books I have listened to on Audible! I totally recommend them to you:

Superfans – The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, and Build a Successful Business
You Are a Badass – How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life
Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion
Unscripted – Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship

When you sign up for Audible you even get a free book at the beginning and can cancel any time after that. So do yourself and your personality a favor and download one of those books which I recommended for free now!

More useful tools for food bloggers & resources

I hope these tools for food bloggers were helpful for you!

If you are really serious about becoming a food blogger you should definitely check out my food blogging success online course. It is such a wonderful, well-rounded course. It will be teaching you everything you need to know in order to become a successful food blogger yourself. It’s a location independent, self-study course!

Let me link to some other very important articles I wrote about this topic:

Especially on my YouTube I focus heavily on helping people to become better food bloggers. Please make sure to check out my channel if you are interested in this topic in more detail. It’s always easier to explain things in video than via blog posts!

You can also sign up for my free food blogging email series! I will send you helpful content via email to you!

xoxo,

Blogger Help, Food Blogging

How to make money as a food blogger

24. Mai 2020 Keine Kommentare

Let’s talk about how to make money as a food blogger! If you are a passionate foodie yourself sooner or later you will probably ask yourself how to monetize what you have been working on so hard in the past months. My name is Carina and I am a full time food blogger myself. It’s my full-time job for almost three years now. Today I want to share with you different ways to monetize your food blog, because there are actually a lot of possibilities for you to earn money being a food blogger.

Finding your value

Advertising as an influencer/blogger on your social channels is something that gives companies a lot of value because you, as a food blogger, reach a very specific audience – a super targeted niche – that the company usually wouldn’t have access to. If they would get a product ad printed in a magazine, or have it played on a radio commercial, or a TV commercial, they would never ever reach that same specific targeted audience that you as a food blogger can reach. Your followers are specifically interested in the recipes you share and the products you use for them. That’s something where companies are willing to pay money for because you give them a great value. Therefore, don’t be afraid to charge money for your posts! Even if you have a small account, if you have good content, you can totally get paid for your postings!

So let’s look at different ways on how to make money as a food blogger!

1. Company Collaborations

So the first way to do this is through company collaborations. I usually work with 3 to 6 brands per month. This is how it works: A company reaches out to you, you send them your media kit with your pricing rates, and then they pay you per IG post, blog article, YouTube video or per Insta story. You pick a product or they send you the products that they want to be advertised, and then you use it for your content. For example I would use that product for my recipes, put it in the background of the photo set-up and then take some awesome pictures with it. I upload it on my social accounts, tag the brands and send them the invoice for it.

For IG postings I charge more money than for stories because stories are less work. How much to charge for a posting as a food blogger? The general rule of thumb is that you can charge 10 euros per 1000 followers. This number depends on your engagement though and can be more or less.

2. Affiliate Links

Another great way to make money as a food blogger is through affiliate links. There are many affiliate networks that you can sign up for. If you recommend a product and embed that link into your blog posts or add a swipe-up to your Insta stories your followers can buy through that link and you earn a commission. The commission can range from a couple percent to 50% depending on what you are promoting.

I for example use Amazon affiliate a lot. For example I like to recommend my favorite sugar alternative to my followers by guiding them straight to the amazon shop through this affiliate link. I will get around 10% commission on every sale. Another example is my affiliate link for Kicksta – the most powerful organic growth tool for Instagram. It will help you to boost your real followers through an artificial intelligence technology. No spam, no fake followers, no bots. Just pure organic growth! I can really recommend it, plus I get 50% commission on every sale so you should really check it out 😉

If you keep embedding those links into your blog posts, once you have substantial traffic on your blog these affiliate links can generate passive income for you as a food blogger!

3. Commissions

Maybe you’ve seen a lot of bloggers promoting codes something along the lines: „Use my code xyz15 to get 15% off your entire purchase“. You can most likely assume that those blogger will get a small commission on every sale they make. This really depends on each company, but usually you will get between 10 to 20% comission. If yo have a big audience and you promote discount code where your community can also save a lot of money this can be a powerful way to make money as a food blogger and generate passive income.

4. Food photography

Make money as a food blogger through food photography. That’s something I like to offer companies that don’t really align 100% with my brand and where I wouldn’t upload the photos on my profile because they just don’t fit into that fitness and healthy lifestyle niche. So, I would still take pictures for them, edit them and send them the pictures with all the rights. However, I wouldn’t upload it on my social media platforms. The companies just pay me for the food photography. I usually offer them a package of 3 edited photos per set with all the rights including the recipe.

5. Your own products

Another way to monetize your food blog is crating your own products. These could be digital or physical products. For example, I have created several E-books in the past that I am selling online. In case you speak French you can check out my healthy breakfast recipe cookbook here.

Moreover I have several online courses. The one that will probably be the most interesting for you is my food blogging success online course. It will teach you everything on how to kickstart your food blog and start making money with it. For all the German speakers I can recommend my fitness food cooking course that is also totally online.

Courses or E-books are genius because you have the put in the work once and when it is all up and running you can lean back and make passive income will focusing your energy on other things. It is really an amazing feeling, if you get an email in the morning that somebody just bought your online course while you were sleeping.

Selling digital products is definitely a great way to make money as a food blogger. Share your knowledge. Find some topic or niche that you are passionate about and really have a good amount of skills and knowledge in.

6. Events

You can actually get paid for attending events as a food blogger. In the past I have been invited to give keynote speeches at big fairs or events. You simply charge money for your time being there and for the travelling costs to get there and back. I usually have a daily and half-daily rate. If you are invited to share your knowledge or cook with an audience that definitely has value and you should charge for that.

I have also charged for attending photoshootings and giving talks in schools and universities in the past.

To sum it up

So you see there are a lot of different ways you can make money as food blogger. It all comes down to you and how proactive you are. Don’t be afraid to reach out to companies and to really work hard for what you love! Being able to do this full-time is so rewarding and my absolute dream job. It’s really a dream come true and I know you can do this as well. Start small, write a lot of emails to companies and don’t get discouraged by the first rejections. I also started with product sampling and wasn’t earning money with my blog for a long time. Sometimes you have to put in the work first before you get the rewards later. If you stay consistent you will be very successful and have no problems to make money as a food blogger!

More resources

I hope this blog post was helpful for you and you actually can put something into practice now. If you have any questions feel free to put them in the comments and I’ll answer them. You can also check out my YouTube video on this topic:

Another blog post that could be very interesting for you is my article on my favorite Insta growth tips. Click here to read on.

Last but not least you can sign up for my free food blogging bootcamp. It is an email series that will guide you through my best and most helpful food blogging content.

xoxo,

Blogger Help, Food Blogging

5 tips for bloggers – beginner guide on how to increase blog traffic

30. Januar 2020 2 Kommentare

In this blog post I am sharing my 5 most valuable tips for bloggers that are just starting out. If you are a beginner looking to grow your blog traffic then you found the right article. The advice I am giving you in the blog post is priceless and has helped me grow my monthly impressions continuously.

1. Do keyword research before you write a blogpost

A big mistake I made for a very long time when I started out with blogging was not researching keywords before I wrote my blog posts. I would think of a recipe, cook it, shoot it and write a blog post about it using a random keyword that came to my mind. No wonder I didn’t get any blog traffic in the beginning. My blog traffic exponentially grew once I started to do proper keyword research before shooting the actual recipe. It saved me so much work as well. Now I only shoot recipes that I know will rank and are searched for on Google. Guys – this tip is a game changer for your blogging statistics.
Some tools I can recommend for keyword research are:

Simply plug your keyword in and find out if you are going to be able to rank for it. If you are just starting out and have a small blog I would recommend you try to go for keywords of about 700-1900 searches per month. These are not too competitive and you will be able to rank on the first page faster.

2. Have a content calendar

Every first of the month I sit down and plan the content for the new month. I do this by printing out a calendar that shows me exactly the days and dates. For example I dedicate every Thursday for uploading a new blog post. Every Tuesday and Wednesday I schedule my content creation days in the mornings. That is when I record Youtube videos, Tiktoks, shoot food pics and do photoshoots.

I also add to the calendar special promotion events that I want to do for my followers like for example last weekend I did an Instagram live cooking class or next week I am planning a fitness shoutout day. Doing this really helps me to spread out my content and stay consistent with my postings across all platforms. It also helps me to not forget about new, exciting I ideas I have for my followers and put them into action.

3. Website loading speed

Google likes fast websites. So make sure your page is loading fast. How do you do this?
By optimizing your content for it. In the beginning I exported my Lightroom file in the best quality possible to make sure they are perfect for my blog. One image often had over 20MB in size – which is a humongous file size! After some time I checked my website speed online and was flabbergasted by how slow my page was loading. Now looking back I know why. My images were too big. When you upload images make sure to keep them under 150kb. This means when you export images you need to reduce them in size. These are my specifications I use for my blog images when I export them from Lightroom:

4. Link to Pinterest

Starting to use Pinterest resulted in much more traffic on my blog. Now I am always pinning the photos on my blog posts to my Pinterest account. Each individual photo is linked to my blog. So if someone is looking for a healthy low carb breakfast, finds my photo and clicks on it that person lands directly on my blog. For example last month I got 113,809 impressions on my blog just from people who found my pins on Pinterest.
Also make sure to shoot your recipes vertically and not horizontally. Pinterest doesn’t like horizontal photos.

Regarding tips for bloggers I can recommend Tailwind (affiliate link) to schedule your pins. It makes it so much easier and takes a lot of work off your hands since it is pinning automatically for you. I sit down one hour every week to plan my pins on Tailwind (affiliate link) and then I’m good to go for an entire week. Once I started to use this tool I saw such a tremendous growth of blog traffic. It makes life so much easier.

5. Optimize text for SEO

Make sure the text you write for your blog post is optimized for search engines. Define a keyword and use that keyword throughout your paragraphs. Use variations of that keyword to enhance chances of getting found on Google. I find related keywords by typing my main search term into google and then checking out “searches related to keyword” section at the bottom of the first page. You also find a “people ask” section there. I try to incorporate answers to these questions in my blog postings.

Don’t use complex word structures or long sentences. Use paragraphs to make it easier to read the text and define a meta description.

My recommendation: If you are using WordPress install the free YOAST Plug-in. It will give you useful tips of how to optimize and improve your text.

More resources

If you want you can watch my YouTube video about this topic as well:

Here are some other helpful blogging articles I have written in the past:

I also have a food blogging success online course in case you are a passionate foodie wanting to kickstart your food blogging career:

And last but not least you can sign up for my blogging bootcamp where I summarize my best blogging content for you in an email series:

I really hope you found these tips for bloggers helpful!

xoxo,

Food Blogging

How to become a food blogger in 2021

10. September 2019 Keine Kommentare

Ever wondered how to become a food blogger in 2020? Then let me give you a quick rundown of food blogging 101 and explain what it takes in order to start a food blog! I will be giving you many helpful tips and share some important insights of how to get started in the blogging sphere with you.

What fuels you with passion?

Make sure to find a topic or niche that you are really passionate about. I am a fitness food blogger and since I have started my blog I did not have one day where I couldn’t think of a recipe I wanted to make. The ideas just keep coming and I could be in the kitchen everyday whipping up my next low carb or keto creation. I just have so much love and interest in what I do that the ideas keep coming. So, my tip for you is to really pick a topic that you know won’t get dull and boring after making 30 recipes. If you think you should be a vegan foodie because vegan food is trendy right now, but don’t eat vegan yourself or find it that interesting because you would rather eat juicy burgers and cheesy fries you will soon run out of motivation.

Setting you up for success

After having defined your niche and blogging topic you can start to set up your blog and Instagram account. These two platforms are the most important right now in my opinion. I get most partnerships over Instagram, a lot of them also requesting a package deal of a blog post and Instagram posting in combination.

If you decide to start your own blog you will need a web host. I can recommend signing up with Bluehost! This is where you can buy your domain name (they have a one year for free offer right now) and get your email address. Bluehost also has a one-click WordPress installation, which makes starting your own food blog so much easier. Moreover, they have really great customer service, which is always important if you run into any troubles and need guidance.

For my website I also use WordPress. This can be a bit challenging at first, but after a couple of hours you will get the hang of it. It lets you do much more than other sides with easier user interfaces like jimdo or wix.

Regarding Instagram I recommend you open a business profile because this will give you much more access to interesting statistic. Also make sure your account is set to public and to to private! Start learning about how to grow on Instagram with my 10 top tips. You might also enjoy this YouTube video explaining some growth tips.

The right equipment for a food blogger

In order to take photos I really recommend you to get a DSLR camera. I shoot with a Nikon D750 which is great because of its speed and easy handling. If you are just starting out I recommend the D7500 with a 50mm 1.8 lens. Right now I am shooting with a 35mm 1.8 lens that takes beautiful photos as well.

Besides camera equipment it is important to have a nice setup for your photos. It makes sense to get a backdrop paper or a big marble platter you can use for shooting. Gather some nice kitchen towels, cutlery, glasses, dishes and other fun deco items.

I have an amazing blog post on „basic food blogging equipment“ that you should definitely have a look. It shows you the absolute basics you should acquire as a food blogger.

Food Styling

What can really set you apart from hobby bloggers is the way you style your food. Anyone can make a cake and take a photo of it. But to really draw attention to the shot you should master some basic skills of food styling. Decoration can make all the difference. Experiment with flowers, sprinkles, berries and so on to really add details and layers of interest to your photos.

Here are two blog posts you simply need to check out:

Useful tools for a food blogger

There are some tools that make your life a lot easier when it comes to scheduling posts or designing layouts for your Pinterest. My favorite tools that I use all the time are: Canva, UNUM, Unfold, Lightroom, Hype Type, Mailerlite and Hyperlapse.

With Canva you can design all kinds of awesome layouts. I use it to make my Youtube headers, Infographics and invitations and Pinterest graphics.
UNUM I use for scheduling my posts and planning my gallery. It is very useful to see how your future feed will look like!
I edit all my photos in Lightroom. This tool literally makes all the difference and you should invest your money in it.
Hypetype, Hyperlapse and Unfold are great tools to pimp your Instastory
Mailerlite: this is my email marketing provider which I use to create email lists

There is another awesome blog post about this topic here.

Putting in the hours

Many people don’t see the work that goes behind producing high quality food pics and engaging posts on Instagram and our blogs. There are countless hours invested in the kitchen, preparing the dishes, the set, shooting the photo, editing it, writing amazing copy for the blog posts, putting the recipe together and then promoting the whole thing on our social channels. If you really want to become a food blogger you need to know that you also have to put in the effort and hours to make this successful!

To sum it up I am sharing with you my personal story of how I became I food blogger:

If you want to stay up-to-date with all my food blogging tips you can sign up for my food blogging email list. I will be sending you a bundle of my best food blogging tips and tricks straight to your inbox <3

I also have a full fletched food blogging online course that will teach you everything you need to know in order to become a food blogger and start getting your first company cooperations. Click here for more infos.

xoxo,

Food Blogging, Inspiration

Inspirational Interview with Jess from Choosing Chia

6. Juni 2019 Keine Kommentare

Inspirational Interview with Jess from Choosing Chia

With this blog post I am starting my new blogging series: Inspirational interviews! I strongly believe in always thriving to learn more and improve upon oneself. I do this a lot by finding mentors and talking to experts in a specific niche. Through my inspirational interview series I am going to start speaking to some of the people that inspire me the most and share their valuable insights with you!

Why Jess inspires me:

For my first inspirational interview I talked to one of my biggest food blogging inspirations since day 1: Jessica Hoffman.
She is the beautiful face behind the vibrant food blog Choosing Chia. Jess is from Canada and such a lovely person inside and out. She was one of the first people I followed on Instagram and has been a huge inspiration ever since.

The photos you find on Choosing Chia are magnificent and I love the professional look and feel of everything Jess does. Jess grew her blog to 60.000 monthly sessions this year and is one of the few food bloggers, who shares her knowledge regarding how to grow a blog, work with Pinterest and gives photography tips. I recently attended her Food Blogging Bootcamp, which was a 4 week blogger course where she taught us everything about systems, workflows, SEO, social media marketing and monetization.

It meant a lot to me to finally be able to sit down with her for an interview and ask Jess some important questions regarding food blogging, personal development and fitness.

With Choosing Chia Jess shows her readers easy, yet delicious vegetarian recipes that focus on fresh ingredients. A lot of her recipes are plant-based and suitable for a clean eating diet. Have a look at Jess‘ Instagram account if you don’t know it already.

Let’s jump into the interview. I divided it up into three different sections: food blogging, personal development and finally healthy lifestyle.

Talking about food blogging

How did you get into food blogging and why?

I grew up in a family where everyone loved to cook a lot. By the time I was 20 I really got into Yoga and did my yoga instructor certification in India. When I got back from my trip I realized how much I loved healthy, plant-based cooking and eating. That’s when I really started to get into blogging.

I set up my blog in 2015, but was only posting sporadicly. Only after my trip to India in 2016 I really started to post constantly and grew my Choosing Chia blog ever since.

How did you come up with your blog name Choosing Chia?

I sat down and realized I need a name for the blog – something healthy. So, I set down with a pen and paper and a little note book. I started to write out different names and combination of words. Then I found the word chia, which I found could be cute and chia seeds were starting to become popular at the time. Then I tried to figure out what could sound good with that and then somehow found Choosing Chia.

Banoffee-pie-chia-pudding-2

Looking at recipe development – how long does it take you from the first step into the kitchen until the uploaded post on your blog?

These are the steps I usually take:

getting the groceries
recipe testing
making the final recipe
taking the photos
editing the photos
writing the blog post
uploading and publishing it

If I had to put an actual time on the whole process I would say at least 4 hours. It would be around one hour for recipe testing, another hour for the final recipe, an hour to shoot and edit the photo and another hour to prepare the blog post. I used to do this in one flow, but I recently started to do batch working more.

Instead of jumping from place to place I now started to batch work a lot more. So I will do recipe testing in one day, then I’ll take a nice cloudy day to shoot all of them, edit them on the next and finally write out the blog posts. So I can always be focused on one task.

Vietnamese-fresh-spring-rolls-8

What is your favorite recipe out of all the ones you have created?

My banana cream pie chia pudding. I love the recipe, I love the photos, it really fits my brand and its simply so yummy. It’s my favorite chia pudding.

banana-cream-pie-chia-pudding-3

What was your biggest blogging accomplishment so far?

I think it would have to be launching the food blogging bootcamp. Being at a place with my blog and business where I can teach other people and help them on their blogging journey to grow their blog.

Now looking back at your blogging journey. What piece of advice would you have given your 21 year old self, when you started out blogging?

I would have to say having a process, system and schedule in place and sticking to it.

When I started out and would randomly post one week and then didn’t post anything for the next weeks I didn’t see any growth. Only once I started to get a content calendar, blocked off time in my schedule it made a big difference. If you really want to see growth and want to make something out of your blog you also have to block off time and make it a priority. It’s also less stressful, because you know when things are happening.

You can check this blog post from Jess to sign up for a free content calendar template!

time-management-tips-for-productivity_

Finding out more about personal development

Would you mind sharing a little bit about your morning routine?

I start my day at 7 o’clock in the morning and have a coffee. Then I work out for an hour around 8 o’clock. Like a cardio or yoga workout or a combination of both. After the workout I like to meditate for 10 minutes.

Then I like to take the dog for a walk and finally get ready for the day and make my bed. I always make my bed in the morning. Then I have breakfast, I love to drink a green smoothie or have something nourishing, especially after working out in the morning. Then I sit down and start my workday around 9.30am. I just find it very important to exercise in the morning and get outside to get some fresh air.

Tri-lanka

Who has inspired you in your life and why?

A person who has recently inspired me a lot is Marie Furleo. She puts her videos online every Tuesday, is a published author and does a lot of work with women. She has been a really big inspiration to me to turn my blog more into a business and branching out to do something like a bootcamp or start online courses.

How important is reading to you and what’s your best book recommendation?

One of my favorite books is „you are a badass“ from Jen Sincero. It’s a great book for personal development and being a better, more successful and confident person. I also love to listen to audio books. I can cook and shoot my photos while listening.

10-must-read-books-for-creative-entrepreneurs

Who are your role models and why?

Jamie Oliver is someone I have always looked up to in the food industry who has really built his own food empire.

Ella from deliciouslyella inspires me as well. She is one of the first foodies that I have followed and who really built something for herself, beyond just having a food blog. She has products in grocery stores now and has built something really big with that.

Jenna Kutcher who does online course creations. She is another female entrepreneur who built an empire out of nothing. She has the goal digger podcast. I listen to her podcast every week.

And of course Marie Furleo, who I have already mentioned.

What is the next big goal?

My biggest goal is to really grow the blog into a big platform where I can transform it into a whole community. I would love to launch an online course and eventually turn the bootcamp into an online course. I would love to put out the course for other people to grow their blog and get to the same place where I am today, or even surpass where I am today.

Speaking of health and well-being

Being a blogger means to be very connected all the time. Do you ever take off time from social media?

I started doing digital detox more this year. I feel so much more recharged when I take a social media break. Sometimes I try to implement it more and take at least 48 hours (or a weekend) off. No Instagram, no email, no checking the Choosing Chia blog.

When I do it I feel so much more recharged and energetic not looking at my phone for a period of time and simply taking in the moment. It is definitely something I would recommend for everyone to do. Especially if you want to make it your full time job. Taking breaks and recharging is equally important as working.

Tri-lanka

How do you keep a balanced lifestyle and take care of your body and health?

I always make sure to take time to exercise. (at least 5 times a week) Sometimes it’s also just yoga or a long walk with the dog. It’s important to me to stay physically active. I make sure to eat overall healthy and have green smoothies, vegetables and salads, but then also indulge in ice cream and french fries if I want to. I think finding that balance is important. I’m not saying to myself that any foods are off limits.

I simply try to overall eat healthy and be active. I actually block that time off in my calendar. Having time on the weekend to do things I love also helps me to stay balanced.

This was my inspirational interview with Jess. I hope you really loved this interview with Jess from Choosing Chia and learned some things along the way. It was such an honor to interview her and Jess is really such an inspiration! Make sure to check her social channels and blog for more inspiration!

Are you looking for more helpful food blogging content? Check some of my other blog posts concerning this topic:

Let me know in the comments if you like this new inspirational interview series and if you have any suggestions on who to interview next!

xoxo,

Blogger Help, Food Blogging

Basic Food Blogging Equipment – what you need as a food blogger

16. Mai 2019 2 Kommentare

In today’s blog post I want to give you an overview over the basic food blogging equipment you need in order to start out as a food blogger.

At first, beginning a food blog can be quite a big and daunting task at first. You have this big vision of taking awesome food pics and sharing your wonderful recipes? However, you are unsure of the equipment you need? Then look no further! In this blog post I have summarized all the basic things you need in order to start taking amazing pictures of your recipes. Food photography hacks included!

We will look at topics like camera equipment, props, kitchenware and decoration items. I will only mention the essential food blogging equipment. Everything you need in order to start out. Nothing super fancy or advanced – just the basics to get you startet.

How to photograph for your food blog

First things first. Let’s talk about camera equipment. When you are just starting out you might want to take photos with your camera. That is okay for the beginning. Most phone cameras have a „depth of field“ or „portrait“ mode already. Try using these as it will make the background blurry, which will look more professional.

However, if you want to become serious about your food photography you should consider switching to a DSLR camera. It made all the difference for me and was a real game changer! For over three years I have been shooting with Nikon already and can highly recommend their cameras. Currently I am working with the Nikon D7500 which is a great camera also for beginners. Regarding the lens I am using a 35mm 1.8 lens. I like this lens because you can be pretty close to your dish and get a very nice blurry background.

Here are some food photography tips for beginners:

Shoot with natural, diffuse light
Using a flash for food photography is something I would not recommend as it distorts the colors in the picture.
Shoot on automatic mode until you become comfortable trying the manual mode
Use a portrait lens to get a nice bouquet effect
Invest in a reflector and tripod – this is the reflector and tripod that I am using

Food Blogging Props

You will want to acquire a little selection of different kitchenware. Buy some nice plates, bowls, platters, forks, knifes, glasses and jars. Try to stay consistent with the style and color of the props you buy. When taking food photos it is always nice to have different props to choose from. There is nothing more boring than always using the same plate and same set of silverware on every photo you take!

I have probably up to 30 different plates, around 20 glasses, more little tea spoons than I can count and a couple different marble platters. This gives me a good choice to always arrange my food picture in a different style. Here are some of the spoons that I have ordered online:

Kitchen Towels and Background Fabrics

A range of different colored kitchen towels can’t be missed in your food photography equipment! Placing some kind of fabric on the area you are shooting makes it look smoother and blends together with the dish and the background. I like using kitchen towels for that. In the background I usually put a very smooth, silky white fabric to make the background blur out.

Food Blogging Equipment – Backdrops

Having a nice surface to place your dish upon is very important when it comes to successful food blogging. That is why I bought varies backgrounds for my photos. I recommend to get a darker and a lighter one. Marble and wood work really well for food pictures.

A great food photography tip is to go into your local hardware store and ask them for floor samples. These usually come in different awesome wood optics and I always ask them if I can take some samples home. Like this I have free background surfaces for my photos in different styles!

Here are a couple links to some background papers that I have bought on Amazon, which are very practical because you can roll them up and take with you when traveling:

Marble Backdrop
Wooden Backdrop

Decoration items

I believe that you can make the most boring chia pudding look incredible with the art of food styling. In order to be able to make your creations look unique I suggest you get some fun decoration items to add more layers of interest to your photo! Sprinkles, flowers or coconut flakes work great. I also bought some tiny little cookie cutters to decorate my dishes with.

I recommend you also get seasonal decoration items to include in your food blogging equipment. For Easter I bought a couple of little Easter eggs, for Christmas I have golden stars and for Valentines Day heart postcards.

Here are two deco items that I have ordered and like very much:

Mermaid Silicon Molds
Little cookie cutters

This post contains affiliate links. All products & services recommended in this post are ones that I’ve personally used for my blog.

Do you want to take your food photography to the next level?

Finally I wanted to leave you with some more great support material on your way to becoming the next great food blogger out there. I have many more other articles on how to grow and develop your food blog! Make sure to have a look at my top ten food blogging tips for Instagram growth! There is also a YouTube video on it!

I also have my own food photography online course. It is a full fletched food blogging course that will teach you everything you need to know to kickstart your food blogging career!

You can sign up to my food blogging email list where I am sharing free cheat sheets and amazing food blogging tips from time to time. Definitely don’t miss out on this great opportunity:

I hope you found this basic food blogging equipment blog post helpful and that you will be putting some things you learnt today into practice. Let me know in the comments if you still have questions!

xoxo,

Food Blogging

Food Blogging Online Course – grow your food blog!

7. März 2019 Ein Kommentar

Want to have your first company cooperations? Want to start making money with your food blog? Or even want to become a full time food blogger?Then check out this blog post about my food blogging online course where I will teach you everything you need to know in order to take your food blog to the next level!

My expertise as an instructor for this course

I started food blogging in 2016. In the beginning I started off with posting mobile phone pictures on my newly opened Instagram account, back when my name was still strengthberrynutrition – a word I still can’t even spell today. Fast forward three years I am proud to say that I became Austrias biggest fitness food blogger being able to blog as my full time profession and having turned my hobby into my dream job!

Here is a short video explaining you a bit more about my food blogging background and how I got started:

I have been through the process of starting with nothing and building your blog and Instagram from scratch and want to give all my knowledge to you now. Along the way I have learnt a tremendous amount of skills necessary in this field of business and made important mistakes that I can share with you now. That is why I developed a food blogging success online course! This course is an extremely valuable source of information. Basically I put everything I’ve learnt in the past years about food blogging and how I made it into my full time job into this online course.

Recently I am getting more and more requests from international events and university to speak to their guests and students about social media blogging and content production. I was also featured in some of the most important international food magazines and had a national media food blogging campaign in Austria reaching 1 million people a day, having them participate with their healthy dishes. I would consider myself an expert in the food blogging niche and can’t wait to share my knowledge with you in my own food blogging online course!

Food blogging online course chapter breakdown

I really wanted you to learn from a first hand experience and that is why you will find a lot of personally recorded videos in the course with a lot of practical real life examples.

Food blogging basics

The course is structured into 6 chapters. The first chapter is the introduction. Here you will find an overview of the course and I will explain a thing or two about the right blogging mindset and content creation in general.

After the introduction you will find the food blogging chapter, where you will learn how to find your vibe and voice, develop great content and a content policy, learn how to set up a blog and I will also be touching on legal requirements. I will help you to find the best wordpress plug-ins a food blogger needs on their website and we will talk about SEO optimization on your blog so your blog posts have a higher chance of ranking on Google.

This is important to set the base for that is coming in the later chapters. You will learn how to define a brand for yourself and how to set up your blog as a website. I will be sharing some of the important plug ins you need as a food blogger and help you find the right niche!

Click here to go to the food blogging online course.

Food photography

The third chapter is dedicated to food photography, where I will share my camera equipment with you, tips on how to prop and style your food, how to find the right light, how to edit your pics with and without lightroom and some more tricks along the way. Most photos really come down to how you present your dish and we will be going into a lot of detail to make sure you know how to decorate your dishes.

Food Styling Course — Without Decoration

I will also show you what kind of food props you should acquire and the basic things that are necessary for your food blogging equipment. Without the right equipment it will be hard to take high quality images. We will also touch on things like ISO, aperture and shutter speed. Taking good high quality images is easier than you might think!

Click here to go to the food blogging online course.

Instagram Growth

The fourth chapter is dedicated to Instagram growth. Since I started on Instagram and grow my account up to 50k followers this platform really is my main expertise. I had my Instagram before I had my blog and was able to acquire a deep knowledge in this field. You will learn how to make use of the Instagram algorithm and make the features of the app work for you. Learn how to get reposts and post content the right way, join the right shoutout parties and create your own Insta highlights.

This chapter is dedicated to showing you how you can maximize the platform and become noticed out there! With Instagram you can attract a lot of people onto your blog so this can be a very powerful medium.

Click here to go to the food blogging online course.

Monetization

Before the final send off I dedicated a whole chapter to the topic of monetization. I’ll be sharing with you how to find your pricing rates and put together your media kit with great examples. We will talk about how to reach out to companies, negotiate prices and the important topic of disclosing a partnership.
The reason why so many bloggers fail to become successful is that they don’t know how to monetize their work. Most are afraid of being rejected by companies or have the fear of charging too much money. I will take you through all these issues and show you a couple of simple tricks to look so much more professional to companies.

Click here to go to the food blogging online course.

Learning outcome

You see this is a well rounded course giving you all the insights you need. By the end of the course you will feel comfortable building your food blogging empire because you will have the skills and knowledge for it and won’t be afraid to charge fair prices for the work you create!

I know that the course has its price – but I am pretty positive after all the company cooperations you will get after this course your money will be well spent! See this as an investment in yourself and in your dreams.

So head over to the course page right now. Read through the curriculum and I can guarantee you this food blogging online course will bring you to the next level!

Food Blogging, Inspiration

Blogging while traveling – a how to guide

12. Februar 2019 3 Kommentare

Over the last half a year I have been all around the world, food blogging while traveling at the same time. I love how my job as a food blogger gives me so much freedom and flexibility and combining my two biggest passions: the love for healthy food and my excitement for seeing new countries makes me feel like I created my own dream job. In this blog post I would love to show you and explain how you can travel and still keep up the quality of your food pics along the way.

My story of blogging while traveling

I became a self-employed food blogger in February 2018 and couldn’t be happier ever since. Turning your hobby into your profession is something extremely special and I am grateful every single day to be able to do this kind of work. Since I am very flexible with my working hours and do mostly everything online I decided last year to travel the world while still working and creating content like I would in Austria. I figured it shouldn’t really matter if I sit at home in Austria or work from a beach in Panama. Simpler thought as done – this I can tell you already. Obviously there are quite some challenges when you want to travel and still produce the same quality results for your clients as you would at home in your familiar surroundings. In this blog post I would like to share some important food blogging travel tips.

In the fall of 2018 I planned my first big international working trip. I set out together with my boyfriend to travel through Costa Rica, Panama and Mexico, both working full time. For our first trip we were gone for almost three months. After that we came back home for Christmas and left again for our trip to Asia, visiting Taiwan and the Philippines. The second time we were gone for one month, creating content and doing company promotions just like I would have at home. By now I would say I have gotten pretty good at knowing what things are essential when blogging while traveling and would love to share these insights with you in this blog post.

Challenges you will face

On your trips there are quite some challenges you will face at some point. Especially when you travel to developing countries like I did. The infrastructure simply isn’t the same as you would find it in Europe, America or Australia. You simply can’t expect to find internet everywhere, good lighting or a quality working place. Here are some challenges I ran into on my trips:

Time difference
Shipping difficulties of products
Non availability of certain ingredients
Poor internet connection
Terrible lightning situations
Broken props (plates, bowls) due to rough airport handling

Food blogging travel tips

Here are my major tips for food blogging while traveling that will help you to smoothly create content on your trips without frustrations. Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I may earn a commission. Know that I only recommend products, tools, services and learning resources I’ve personally used and believe are genuinely helpful. This is not because of the small commissions I make if you decide to purchase them. Most of all, I would never advocate for buying something that you can’t afford or that you’re not yet ready to implement. The products are simply the ones I use when blogging while traveling and where I thought you might find the direct Amazon link helpful as well

Use waiting time: Especially in countries with polychronic tendencies, meaning they don’t really value the concept of punctuality you will run into a lot of unnecessary waiting time. There will be a lot of time lost waiting for planes, buses or being stuck in traffic. Especially in the Philippines I had to learn the hard way to use my waiting time wisely for work projects. Literally every plane, bus or taxi was delayed and it always took us twice the time than expected. That is why I recommend you always save some work you can do offline. For me that was usually editing my pictures, planing my gallery or like right now – just sitting on a flight to Coron island right now actually – writing a blog post. This way you will use otherwise dead time super efficiently and will have more time for yourself once you arrive at your destination.

Always have your charging devices with you: This is a mistake I kept making for a long time. I would charge my laptop and phone thinking it would last for our traveling days. Each time we had another airport delay or spent another hour in traffic I ran out of battery not being able to charge my devices. Blogging while traveling means keeping your batteries charged! I would also recommend buying a strong power bank so you always have a charging opportunity. This is the one from Anker that I have and can greatly recommend. Another tip I can give you regarding managing your device compatibility is buying an charge-all-in-one device. Like this you only need to bring one cable and can charge all your devices. This is the one from VONMÄHLEN that I use and can recommend.
Schedule in enough working time: When blogging while traveling make sure to schedule in dedicated working time every day. I was better with this on my Central America trip than now on my Asia trip. I simply had too many things planned changing location almost everyday leaving very little time to work. In Panama and Costa Rica I defined a pretty fixed working schedule for me. Work from 6am-12am then time for beach or activities until 6pm and back to work from 6pm-8pm. Since the sun set at 5pm I really wanted some daytime to enjoy and scheduled in that long lunch break. Now in the Philippines I tried to travel more, see more places and I really noticed how much it reduced my quality working time. Now on this trip I did the bare minimum. So my take-away is definitely to schedule in definite working days where you have no trips or excursions planned or like I did in Central America go to one location for longer (at least 7 days) work from Monday to Friday with a fixed schedule and do day trips on the weekends.

Thoroughly screen your accommodation:
- Kitchen: This will be one of the most important things to consider before leaving for your trip. When you work and travel at the same time you simply won’t be as flexible as the average backpacker booking the accommodation one night before and rearranging the entire trip from one day to the next. When food blogging while traveling you must consider a couple of things: you need a kitchen, good lightning and at least a supermarket close by. From experience I can tell you that hotels are generally a really bad idea because it is quite impossible to prepare your own dishes. I recommend booking an Airbnb with a full kitchen. Inquire about the kitchen appliances. Do you need a baking dish and a stove? What about a blender?
- Lightning: Besides the kitchen inspect the lightning situation on the photos of the Airbnb listing. Is there enough natural light coming into the apartment? I have gotten quite creative here, also shot outside in front of the door because sometimes the actual accommodation ends up looking different than you imagined on the photos.
- Internet: Last but not least, make sure the apartment has a good internet connection. I always ask them for a speed test. I can recommend this one by Ookla showing you the exact download and upload speeds. The results of the upload speed should be somewhere around 3mb and the for the download around 2mb. Having good internet is really the most vital thing for a productive work day. Especially when traveling to developing countries the connection can be unstable. We had internet blackouts because of Typhoons, earthquakes and over-usage already. So make sure you always have a back up plan like a close by Café with Wifi. I think this point is the most crucial one when blogging while traveling. One time I was stuck on an island without internet for 8 days and wasn’t able to do anything which created quite some problems for me. So make sure you always check the internet situation before you go somewhere!

Find a co-working space: When we stayed in big cities we were usually looking for co-working spaces. This is a great way to get out of the apartment and mingle with other like minded people. Internet is usually fantastic there and it’s great to switch up the work atmosphere. Co-working spaces provide you with great infrastructure and are designed to give you the best working experience possible. I always found myself super focused there and having the most productive work days.

Be aware of time difference when blogging while traveling: My tip is to write emails at least one day earlier than you would have done at home. Since you won’t have the entire day to monitor your inbox the email conversation will just take longer than it usually would if you were in the same time zone. Try to work at least 2-3 hours overlapping your home country’s time zone or the time zone where most of your clients are. When I was in Costa Rica and had an 8 hour time difference I was always working from 6am-9am so I would still reach them in Austria for their last 2-3 working hours of the day. In the Philippines I was mostly working at night time because of the 7 hour time difference in the other direction. I was usually working from 5pm-8pm to reach the Europeans in their first working hours of the morning.
Plan your gallery/blog posts ahead: This is something that has help me tremendously on my trips. When I know I have a big trip coming up I usually already take a lot of photos before. So when I leave I have a buffer of about 10-15 recipe photos that I can post without having to produce anything in between. I also already pre-take all the photos for my long term cooperations. So in case I won’t have good photo opportunities on my trips I can at least go back to these photos I took beforehand. Like this it is also much less stressful because you already know you have got your „posting to-dos“ covered for the trip. I schedule my posts with an app called UNUM, which I can highly recommend you to use as well to plan your IG gallery ahead.
Preorder products for promotion: When I know a long trip is coming up I give my cooperation partners a heads up and get the products I need to promote during my time abroad shipped to me in advance. I made the experience that companies don’t want to ship overseas because it is simply too expensive for them. That is why my suitcase is usually pretty full when I travel. I would say 1/3 of the space is taken simply by the products I need for my cooperations. Plan ahead of what you are going to promote on the trip and then just bring the essential things for those posts or IG hauls.

Get a local SIM card: Blogging while traveling means you will probably need internet on the go. If you want to make your life a lot easier I recommend getting a local SIM card. You usually already find little SIM card stands at the airport and the prepaid plans are really affordable connecting you to the internet without a problem. This can also be super useful if you need taxi services like Uber or Grab. I however decided against a local SIM card because I consciously wanted to force myself to some internet free time when away from the hotel or restaurant.
Bring the right props: Being gone from your save home set-up can be quite challenging. At home its quite easy to get a good photo because if you are like me you will probably have various plates, kitchen towels, decoration items and other fancy props to choose from. On your trip however you can only bring the essentials. This is what I brought with me on my trip: 3 of my best plates (neutral but unique), 1 white background fabric I could always use for a nice blurred out background, my favorite little spoons, a golden knife and fork, my mini cookie cutters for decoration and one coconut bowl. Like this I could create a wide array of different settings. It might also be a good idea to ask the Airbnb host about the color of plates and silverware. Another insider tip is to buy plastic backdrop paper. In Austria I usually use wooden backdrops which are bulky and quite heavy. Before my trips I bought this marble backdrop paper that I can simply roll up and is super light!
Bring the right equipment: When you are gone for a longer period of time you surely still want to keep producing amazing content but simply can’t take all your inventory with you. Photo equipment can get really heavy and your suitcase is usually limited to 23kg per flight. This is what I had with me: A super light travel tripod, my reflector, my favorite 35mm 1.8 lens together with my Nikon D7500. Since I travelled together with my boyfriend it was a bit easier to bring more equipment because he also had some suitcase space. Therefore, we brought also the drone and the gimbal.

Blogging while traveling and still keeping up the quality of your content can be a challenge at first, but also presents amazing new opportunities for different content and unexpected shooting possibilities. I hope this blog post was helpful. If you have any unanswered questions feel free to put them in the comments. I will make sure to answer them all. You can also always reach out to me on Instagram. You might also be interested in my online food blogging course that will teach you some more about the art of food blogging.

If you want, you can also sign up for free food blogging tips and tricks here:

I recommend you also check out my top food blogging tips as this blog post is teaching the essentials of amazing food pics and could be super helpful for you as well! If you are interested in how to make money as a food blogger you might want to watch this YouTube video on different ways to monetize your blog.

xoxo,

Food Blogging

Food blogging tips

15. März 2018 Keine Kommentare

In this blog post I want to share some of my favorite food blogging tips with you! I brought a very specific example with me today. I will show you my food blogging tips while preparing coconut bowls with you!

Food blogging is an art for itself.

Don’t you think that most dishes look extremely hard to make? Looks like we spent hours doing it?

I will explain some simple steps by showing you how to make pastel coconuts. Anything with yoghurt is usually a good choice for a great foodpic. It stays in place and doesn’t start melting like if you were for example taking pictures of nice cream.

The simplest thing is to give the white yoghurt some color. You can do different shades of one color or in our case have an array of pastel colors. If you look at the picture on your left even the simple colored yoghurts already look like art for themselves. Don’t they?

Tip #1: yoghurt always works

Tip #2: add some color

Once you have your basics go and find a good place to take the pictures. Once you have got the dish ready you won’t have that much time to start preparing your setting or find the right light. So before you start giving your dish the final touches explore your apartment to find the perfect picture lighting spot. Make sure to take pictures with natural light, using flash for food pics is a deadly sin 😉

Tip # 3: prepare the setting before you finish your dish

Tip #4: shoot with natural light, no flash

Another simple trick that I love to use is pouring the yoghurt, chia seed pudding or nice cream into tropical fruits. Coconuts work extremely well, as they usually give great contrasts to your pictures. But you can also use pitayas, pineapples or melons. All of these will be a true eye-catcher.

If you work with nice cream, make sure to freeze the coconuts or any other fruit you will use as your bowl before so your ice cream won’t melt that quickly when you are trying to take the perfect picture.

Tip #5: Use tropical fruits as bowls

Tip #6: freeze before filling

Now we come to the most important part: the decoration. What always works wonderfully is to freeze berries. Once the thaw a bit they will have a beautiful silver shimmer. Make sure to spend a lt of time on the decoration. This can make or break your dish. This can turn your plain boring yoghurt into a piece of art. So get creative and have an eye for details. food blogging tips

Tip # 7: freeze berries for decoration

Tip #8: get creative and have an eye for detail – personally I think a great decoration is the most important thing!

So now you know some of the basic super important food blogging tips and tricks. Please let me know if you want me to write more blogposts on this topic. Is there anything you would like to know in specific? Let me know in the comments!

Also if you are looking for more helpful food blogging content, I recommend you check out my Instagram Growth tips and tips on how to food blog and travel! I also have a wonderful YouTube video on my best food decoration tips.

Lots of love,