Are you thinking about creating a food-related blog? Are you thinking about starting a food blog? This post will give you some top tips on how to grow your food blog in 2025, whether you are trying to reach the threshold of an ad network or get that first visitor.

I want to preface this post with a warning: much of the blogging advice you’ll find online or in Facebook groups is outdated or may come from someone who hasn’t run a food-related blog.

I want you to know that I am there with you in the trenches. My fitness and food website has been my full-time job for over ten years. Although my site has a wide range of niches, I have also started three other food blogs. One is a small, profitable business I own and still run, while the other two are businesses I built up and then sold.

Here are my top tips:

7 Must-Know Food Blogging Tips

*Note: The first three tips are geared more towards brand-new bloggers. Tips four through eleven apply to both new and experienced bloggers.

Disclosure: This article may contain affiliate links. As an affiliate, I receive a commission for purchases.

1. Niche down

Food blogging has become more competitive than ever. Although I cannot find the exact number, there are more food blogs than ten years ago. Many of the food bloggers who started in the past few years did it with the intent to make it a profitable business rather than the “hobby” blogging that was popular in the early 2000s. They came into the industry ready to learn and work hard.

It’s difficult to create a recipe website that is “general”. This is because it’s a competitive market. It is difficult to build an audience (you’ve heard the saying, “if you talk to everyone, then you’re talking to nobody”) and to prove your expertise to Google.

Think about ways you can go deeper into a topic that you and your readers would be interested in. You could, for example:

• A specific course. A site that focuses on desserts, breakfasts or appetizers is an example.
• Write about a particular cuisine. Think Italian recipes, Southern cuisine, Korean cooking, etc. Be careful about cultural appropriation. Don’t be afraid to be yourself.
• Go all-in with one food. If you choose to go down this path, I recommend going with something popular, like chocolate or bacon (rather than something obscure, like starfruit recipes).
• You can cater to specific dietary needs, such as egg-free recipes for allergy sufferers or plant-based recipes for vegans.

2. Use a recipe card to build your website on WordPress

This is a 2-parter. Start by self-hosting your site and building it on the WordPress framework (dot org). It’s the gold standard for food blogging. It gives you more control over your website, allows you to use a plugin for recipes, and has much more functionality than most drag-and-drop builders.

Self-hosting allows you to build your “house” on the best “foundation”, i.e., fast servers. BigScoots has a great host. Although they may be slightly more expensive than other shared hosting sites, their customer service is quick and responsive.

You should use a plugin to create a recipe card when creating recipe posts. This is not only for aesthetics – it also adds schema to the post, telling Google that you are a recipe. If you want to see your recipe in the search results carousel, this is a must. I use WP recipe maker. This is an example of a recipe card.

Fill out the card with all the important information. It’s important to include all the information you can.

3. Building a blog is a long-term process.

Some people will ask me if I could teach them how they can make $100K in three months by starting a blog. I don’t think that is impossible because there are some exceptions. I’m also not trying to crush dreams. Realistically, most people will never achieve this. Even if they did, many bloggers would never reach that six-figure level in three months.

Do not let this discourage you. Let it give you food for thought as to how you define and plan your goals. You may feel bad if you expect to earn $100K in three months but only make $10. If you wish to make $1 within 3 months but end up making $10, then you have done well. !

To give you some context, it may take most bloggers who are approaching blogging as a business 1-3 years to earn a decent living from their job. Maybe less if you have a lot of time and know how to build a website. If someone has never learned the basics and does not pay attention to market trends, then it may cost more.

It takes time to establish your content and authority in order to rank on Google. It takes some time to get traction on social media. It takes time to achieve the benchmark set by major advertising companies (like Mediavine’s main program, which requires 50K sessions/month) or to get enough targeted traffic for your affiliate posts.

How can you grow faster? You should learn as much about traffic as possible quickly, then publish lots of great content. Assess what works (type of content or platform) and continue to do that. It sounds easy, but it takes a lot more work.

4. Search results may contain AI (but the good news is that it’s not all bad)

Google will release its AI-based answers called Search Generative Experience this year. Google will provide instant answers to users before any other search results are displayed.

Food blogs are one of the safest blogging niches for two reasons. 1) The AI responses are currently displaying teaser texts and directing users to links for complete recipes. 2) Even if they shift to providing a full recipe, many people will still prefer to see photos and read comments/reviews of other people’s recipes first.

Let’s say, for example, I am looking for a recipe for ginger cookies. This is the response I receive from SGE:

Compare that with the content I find when searching for a nutrition-related keyword like “supplements to triathletes”.

Do you see how dangerous the SGE result can be for a blogger who promotes nutrition? Some people will still look for more detailed blog posts. However, others will be satisfied with the SGE result and stop their search.

We’ll cross our fingers that the recipe answers stay the same, but they can change over time.

5. Search engine optimization (SEO).

It is important to create content that both a) benefits people and b) allows Google’s search engine to recognize how good your content is. Keyword research is also important. I wish I had learned this skill earlier in my blogging career.

You want to create content that is relevant to the keywords people are looking for but not too competitive. Competitive could be defined by the fact that there are a million simple recipes on a topic already (e.g., Chocolate chip cookies) or by being dominated by many large, authoritative sites that have excellent content for your keyword.

These are two examples of keywords that I wrote about in the early days of my blogging career, and both were bad ideas from an SEO perspective.

• Pumpkin muffins: This is too competitive. There are already many sites of high authority that have excellent recipes for muffins. It was unlikely that I would ever rank on this site.
• Butter bean blondies: This recipe is delicious and ranks high, but very few people search for it. Google doesn’t send much traffic to this page.

Since I am more familiar with SEO, I start all my recipes by researching keywords and using that information to generate organic traffic. Note that I am still creating some recipes and other content for Pinterest.

KeySearch is the tool I use to research keywords, but there are many other options. Read more about how to use KeySearch. You can save money on your subscription by using the code KSDISC.

6. Diversify traffic.

Diversifying your traffic sources is smart. While food bloggers may seem safe from the AI’s wrath for a little while, you should diversify them. It can be risky to rely too heavily on one traffic source. You may experience a massive loss of traffic if an algorithm is changed.

Consider the following:

• Post to Facebook groups with an active audience and a recipe group.
• Create titles that will drive traffic to your Facebook and Google Discover pages
• Pins are a good visual search engine for the food industry.
• Send regular messages to your email list and build an email list.
• Use Instagram to link people back to your website regularly.

7. Lean into Pinterest.

This is a continuation of the previous tip, but it deserves to be elaborated on. Comparing all social media platforms, we can see that Pinterest has the highest chance of driving traffic to your website. Here’s an example of Pinterest analytics on one of my sites – the outbound traffic (aka clicks) is pretty impressive!

This doesn’t mean traffic won’t happen. The effort required to create a vertical image to pin to a blog is much less than that of creating a polished video. Pinterest is a great way to get traffic for a small amount of time (if this is your main goal).

Here are some tips and tricks for Pinterest:

• Pin often. Once you have a lot of content in your blog, it will be easier to pin regularly. Do not pin just once this week and then fall off for a whole month. Then, come back to post 12 times a week. Choose a number that you can consistently do (like one pin per day) and stick to it.
• Pin your content. You can pin any content you like, even if it is not your own. Don’t spend a lot of time or energy searching for other people’s posts to follow arbitrary guidelines.
• Pinterest is a visual-based search engine. Make sure your visuals grab people’s interest. People in the food industry have more success with pins that have a text overlay with a catchy recipe hook. On a pin about healthy chocolate oatmeal, for example, you could have a text overlay that reads “The Healthy Chocolate Oatmeal That You’ll Want To Eat Every Day (With 20 Grams Of Protein )!”. Make sure that the font and text size are easy to see on mobile devices, as this is where most of your users will be. You can also experiment with posting just images without any text overlays.
• Use keywords to describe your pins.
• Try to create some recipes that are not conventional. Pinterest is primarily a search engine, but it also has an element of discovery in the form of its home feed. It can be fun at times to experiment in the kitchen and then see if your recipes are popular on Pinterest.
• Look at Pinterest trends. You can filter the page by “food and drinks”. Look at the monthly and growing trends. You can create a great piece of content based on the trends. Maybe there’s an underlying trending topic that you could put your spin on. This is an example of some popular topics on Pinterest as of the date of publication:

Be patient and consistent. It can take six to twelve months for Pinterest to gain traction.