Resources for Bloggers

Resources for Bloggers – My Recipe

I started blogging about a month back. April 28, 2012 was the day when I published my first recipe on my WordPress.com blog. Shortly afterwards, on May 25th, I moved on to a self-hosted WordPress.org blog with GoDaddy.com as my hosting partner. What motivated me to move on to a self hosted blog was the number of clicks and followers that my WordPress.com blog had garnered in the first month itself. When I moved from WordPress.com, my blog had 3036 clicks and 130 followers.Now that isn’t an eye-popping figure but it sure motivated me to take more control of my blog and of course made me quite happy 😉

Thus, I don’t have an experience of tens of years of blogging to be talking about resources for other bloggers. But I am going to share my experience at blogging – the things that proved to be of great use to me when I started this blog. I’ll talk about web-hosting, domain names, plugins for WordPress, themes for WordPress my experiments with Food Photography and since you can see all those banners on this site, I’ll also talk about monetization after I make some real money from this blog. Unless I don’t make at least ten dollars, this wouldn’t be a topic I’d touch upon :). Moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.org is another topic that I’d really like to share my experience about.

Before I start my journey, I wouldn’t like to leave without giving due credits to a few useful resources from other food bloggers on the internet. These are the blogs that I learned from. The blogs that I feel every newbie food blogger should pay a quick visit to and they have their own resources section. I don’t get any incentive for referring them – I swear by that 🙂 But yes, Sharing is Caring they say. This is my way of caring for others like me

• Pinch Of Yum – Visit this site run by Lindsay and Bjork and you’ll be drooling over the delicious food porn pics they have posted. But more importantly, Bjork also shares a quick insight into how they monetized their blog. Did I say quick? No no, it might be quick but it’s actually quite detailed. They have shared their income reports since August 2011 and they have recommendations for you. Plus their Resources for Bloggers section is also a must-visit place. From Photography to Web Hosting, they have it all covered here.
• The Endless Meal – Kristen is an amazing person. In all her pics, she wears a lovely smile and of course her style of writing, food photography and the yummy recipes are just as amazing as her. Kristen also shares insights into food photography and suggestions for increasing traffic to food blogs in her Resources for Bloggers section. She recently started monetizing her blog (this month she has earned enough to take herself and a friend out for dinner) and she shares her experience with fellow bloggers.
• Cook and Be Merry – Run by Lynne, this site is free from commercials and focused on food. Even her FoodGawker Gallery is equally awesome. What’s interesting here is her post on “25 Food Porn Sites that are not TasteSpotting”. Those who have been in the flogosphere (‘F’ood + B’logosphere’) for some time now, know how crucial food porn sites are in bringing traffic to the blog. My first acceptance on TasteSpotting got me 798 views in a single day. That was how my stats for the first month on WordPress.com went to 3036. But I have a confession to make. Not all food porn sites and TasteSpotting or FoodGawker. You might not get huge hits from other sites but you get a small amount of pleasure when you see your food photo on one of these sites. Submitting to these sites might be a good way to feel better about any rejections from TasteSpotting and FoodGawker 😀

Next Up, I’ll talk about my photographic disasters with Food. Some of them did make it through to TasteSpotting though ;). So keep coming back to this page. Ciao till then!

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