HOW TO INCREASE BLOG TRAFFIC
You have spent hours in the kitchen creating something fabulous. Another half an hour or so serving it up and making the plate look like something out of a magazine. Now you meticulously photograph your creation, edit such photos and upload them along with your delicious recipe to your blog. You’re proud. Damn proud. You wait for the traffic to come pouring in. After all who wouldn’t want to be left drooling at their computer screen at what you have made? You get a few comments from your regular readers but no drastic spike in traffic, comments or “likes”. What’s a Blogger to do to get noticed? Well I have the answer for you and it is self promotion! I am not saying go spam every piece of social media you have access to but be smart and utilise such devices. Here a few of my go-to methods of drawing attention to my recipe posts;
1. Pinterest: Okay so this one isn’t actually something new or unique but if you’re a food blogger or a blogger that posts about food you should be on Pinterest and pinning your photographs. To be honest unless you have a heap of established followers pinning to your own boards isn’t going to draw in a lot of traffic. Yes you may get lucky and have some Pinterest Bigwig repin one of your recipe for her/his thousands of followers to see but with Pinterest housing millions of pins your chances are slim. My solution; Community Boards. Community boards often have a huge following, some in the hundreds of thousands. Joining is pretty easy and often just requires a quick email to the creator or commenting on a pin with your request. Finding such boards is the main issue with this however, once you find a few and join the invites will come rolling in from other board creators and users (or so I have found). To get you started you can view a few here on my profile (marked with a little 3 crowd icon) or request to join my own community board “I actually Made this!“. A side note: Some board creators are super strict and will delete you from pinning to their board/s if they believe you are spamming. To ensure this doesn’t happen don’t overdo the pinning and be sure to follow any board rules or guidelines.
2. Online Food/Recipe Galleries: These websites are somewhat similar to Pinterest except you need to manually submit your recipes and images to be reviewed for submittal. If your recipe and image makes the cut your photograph will be added to the websites recipe database where readers can search for it via category or keyword. I find that with majority of these websites in order for your submission to be accepted you need an exceptionally good photograph. I personally have about a 50-50 success rate when it comes to these websites and often have to crop or re-edit some submissions for them to be accepted. Although this seems like a lot of effort once accepted you will receive significant traffic to your blog that keeps on coming month’s after your submission has been published. Below are a few Recipe Galleries that I submit to (In order of what I find drives the most traffic)
FoodGawker, TasteSpotting, Tasteologie, Foodvee and Serious Eats. I am yet to try these fully but here are some similar websites which may be worth a shot: Food and Fizz, Food Epix, Dessert Stalking and Bakeolicious.
3. Food Blogger Communities: Food Blogger Communities are a great way to connect with fellow bloggers, share links, ideas and tweets. My faves are Food Bloggers Australia and Serious Eats, but I am sure there are hundreds or more specific to your location and recipes. If you become an active member you may have your recipe featured on the websites homepage, ultimately drawing in a lot of new traffic and hopefully regular readers.
4. Facebook Related Groups: Joining Facebook recipe, food or food blogging groups is a great way of gaining exposure for your blog and make new friends. Friend’s who are often nice enough to exchange Tweets, Facebook shares and Blog Buttons, which are all great ways to expand your audience and increase page views. Most communities allow you to post links to your most recent posts, which is always helpful in increasing traffic.
5. Let your readers spread the word: My final tip is to utilise social media sharing buttons. So be sure to include them within each of your posts. This will encourage your readers to share your recipes with their friends and followers. Most blog platforms have these already built in so you may not have to worry about manually adding them, if not not it’s well worth the extra time it takes to include them.
I hope you have found these useful. If you have any of your own tips feel free to share them below. Becky xo
Your 2 cents!