Resources for Bloggers

Welcome to my blogger resource section! This page is always growing with new content. Be sure to check back again for new blogger advice, or subscribe to my newsletter to stay in the loop. Happy reading!

Website tips

• Optimizing your images for faster page load times – Big, beautiful photographs have a bad habit of slowing down your food blog. This affects the reader experience as well as causing your recipes to show up further down in Google search results. In this guide I talk you through how to shrink the file size of your images before uploading them to your recipe, *without* affecting how they actually look, so that you can improve page speed without any ill effects.
• Organizing your blogging tasks – Us bloggers have an endless $!#@load of things to do at all times. I’ve given up my dusty old legal pad and started keeping track of everything using nice organized Excel spreadsheets, and it’s done wonders for me. In this guide I talk you through the major bookkeeping items that bloggers should have, and how I manage them.
• The one tool that doubled my Pinterest traffic  – The title says it all! When’s the last time you revisited your Pinterest strategy? In this guide I discuss three basic things you should do to improve your Pinterest referrals and the one tool that doubled my Pinterest traffic again, AFTER I was already doing the other things. A must-read!

Blog income reports

As of March 2017, I discontinued creation of new blog income reports, but you can see all of the existing ones here:

• April 2016
• May 2016
• June 2016
• July 2016
• August 2016
• September 2016
• October 2016
• January 2017
• February 2017

Additional resources I recommend

This food photography eBook by Pinch of Yum is truly the secret to how much my photographs have improved over the years. I purchased it in early 2015 and since that I have had only one rejection from Foodgawker :). This is a fantastic resource for bloggers who are creating great content and want their pictures to be just as great. It is absolutely worth the investment.

This food blog monetization eBook by Oh My Veggies was the next resource that transformed my approach to blogging. Frustrated by making nickels and dimes from Google AdSense? Found a better ad network, but not happy with the low fill rate? This book is an easy-to-understand guide to solving that problem, among others – and will walk you through how to create additional income streams for your website beyond just advertisements. The proof is in the pudding: in June 2016 I met my goal (income report coming soon!) of making over $1,000 in one month from Yup, it’s Vegan, and this eBook is where it all started.

Finally, if you’re looking to take your blog traffic to the next level, I recommend this food blog SEO eBook by Pickles n Honey. (What’s SEO? It’s Search Engine Optimization – the practice of designing your website and blog posts so that they appear highly in search results, especially Google). Organic traffic is so important for finding new readership and for mitigating the fickle tides of social media traffic. Amanda Maguire, the author of this book, was a Fortune 500 SEO specialist in her former life, so she knows her sh*t. This eBook is full of helpful tips for those who need help getting started with SEO.