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

Food photography

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.

As for the photography equipment I use, I haven’t invested (I don’t think) an obscene amount of money into my setup. I still use the same Nikon D3300 DSLR camera that I’ve been using for years.

A couple of years later I added the Nikkor 40mm f/2.8G Macro Lens to my setup. It does this much more effectively than the lens that comes with the camera, but is not able to zoom. I also occasionally also use a Hoya Polarizer if I’m shooting in natural light that has a lot of glare.

When shooting in artificial light, I use the Lowel EGO Tabletop Light, and a homemade reflector made of poster board and aluminum foil. I keep my camera steady using a Vanguard Alta Tripod.

Building an income

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.

One caveat: I’m now updating this resource page in 2019 and my blog’s income and readership has surpassed the level where this particular book is helpful. Advertisement waterfalls are no longer something I manage myself because I have a more boutique advertisement company managing all ads on the site for me (including both ad placement and ad fill). I would suggest the book if you are starting out. My advise to brand new bloggers though, is DEFINITELY to focus on building up a lot of quality content on your site, which means the best initial investment on this page would definitely be Tasty Food Photography!

SEO

Note: in this section I previously recommended a book called SEO for Food Bloggers by Amanda Maguire. (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). However, in 2019 the eBook contains a lot of outdated or plain ill-advised information and so I no longer suggest the book.