The Future of Food Blogging: Three Key Takeaways from Flavor Media Summit
The inaugural Flavor Media Summit took place last week in Denver, bringing together a collective of accomplished food bloggers for two full days of strategic networking and sessions. The goal was to help creators maximize their brand’s potential and ignite long-term growth. From navigating the intricacies of SEO, to diversifying revenue streams, here are some key takeaways from this inaugural event.
Search Engine Optimization - Create Helpful Content
With ever-evolving SEO models and recent changes to Google’s automated ranking system, or “helpful content,” bloggers are experiencing impacts to their site traffic and in turn, their ad revenue. The updated system, aimed at ensuring that web browsers see original and helpful content that provides a satisfying experience, utilizes a range of signals and systems to bolster sites that successfully meet these requirements. SEO experts shared a few key tips that bloggers can follow to make sure they satisfy the algorithms and support their rankings.
Authority: In addition to marketing their recipes, bloggers should get into the habit of marketing themselves. The “About” section of one’s site is just as important as the rest of the site’s content and can impact rankings. By taking authority of a niche, bloggers can establish themselves as the go-to source.
Relevancy: Food bloggers should lean into their niches, ensuring their recipes are relevant and in line with their specialty. A baking-focused site should feature baking recipes, not main courses.
EEAT: The EEAT model serves as a guide to help creators provide high-quality and relevant content.
Experience
Expertise
Authority
Trust
Email Marketing - Cultivate a Loyal Base
When a Google search for “lasagna” turns back thousands of results, how can food bloggers keep their readers coming back for more? By growing their subscriber base. Email marketing remains a powerful tool for retaining and engaging customers, and food content creators need to have a strategy. Multiple sessions at Flavor Media Summit emphasized the importance of the list and offered suggestions on how bloggers can capture and nurture their highly targeted readers.
The simplest way to gain a reader’s trust is to offer them helpful content, which, for food bloggers, can include offering one special gated recipe per month, or tried-and-true cookware recommendations that aren’t overtly promotional. Users are more willing to offer their contact information in exchange for something unique and authentic from a source they know and trust. From there, periodic newsletters featuring new or seasonal recipes will keep users coming back regularly. And in time, their audience will become their community, and unlock future monetization opportunities, including membership, cookbooks, and merchandise.
Monetization - Diversify Revenue Streams
There are a number of ways that food bloggers can monetize their content – subscriptions, advertising, affiliate links, brand partnerships, YouTube, TikTok, cookbooks, and cooking classes, to name a few. However, as food bloggers turn their hobbies into sustainable businesses, there are external factors that can jeopardize one tactic’s potential, making diverse revenue streams critical to a site’s longevity and financial success.
One ongoing industry shift that will threaten a site’s ad revenue is the lessening reliance on third-party cookies. Without the ability to track users across the web, programmatic advertising is expected to see lower performance–early reports indicating up to 30% lower. And lower performance will mean smaller payouts to the sites that enable these ads. While Google’s phase-out has just been delayed for a third time, it’s important to be prepared for when the shift inevitably takes place.
At the event, Chicory was able to unpack the power of contextual commerce for food bloggers, showcasing the potential for contextual commerce to be a key alternative as we see less reliance on cookies, and also to provide more relevancy and a better experience for site visitors.
Why Contextual Commerce is Valuable to Your Site
Relevancy: Direct relationships with CPG brands ensure that brands featured in ads make sense within the context of recipes.
User Experience: E-commerce capabilities provide improved user functionality and an elevated experience.
Future-proof: Contextual commerce does not depend on third-party cookies for targeting.
LEARN MORE about how Chicory can help you drive ad revenue.