Men in Aprons: Secrets of Successful Food Blogs: Print This

Austrailian celebrity chef Benjamin Christie has sent me another link to his blog about how to make your food blog a success. It's a great article with a lot of information about successful bloggin, but with a slant towards us foodies.

Christie brings up some very excellent points, the 5th of which is my number one rule of food blogging: pictures, pictures, pictures. The more I think about my cardinal rule of food blogging, I am beginning to believe that it should be a rule for all blogs. This is the web, afterall, and unless you are vision-impaired, the experience is a visual one. Web sites need pictures, otherwise it would be like 1994 all over again, just reading pages of text with blinking headlines and links.

One of the things that many food bloggers forget is to create a central recipes page which includes all of your inclusions in an easy to read style. My Australian Recipes page lists out all the recipes by course, i.e. appetizer, entrée and dessert (or entrée, mains and dessert for Australians and Europeans).. Another way to lay out the recipes page is to list them by the main ingredient in the dish, see Ideas in Food as an example of listing dishes by ingredient. They do this visually by displaying a photo of each dish they create.

The flip side of adding recipes to your site is that you need to add more than just recipes. You should add recipes, but they need to include pictures. Then you need to go beyond just posting recipes. Unless you do nothing but cook food all day long every day and take pictures of it, you will eventually run out of things to post unless you post other information such as tips, tricks, opinions, and product reviews.

I really love what kind of attention food blogging has been receiving lately. Sometimes I feel we're such an underappreciated niche of the blogosphere. Benjamin got it all right with his post. Tips number one through six were all basic stuff for any food blog, and the remaining have a lot to do with the technical aspects of blogging such as RSS, Technorait Tags, and advertising. All are important for successful food blogging, but the basics begin with food and pictures.