Growing a food startup from the ground up is tricky business. There's a whole lot of trial and error and a whole lot of options for where to spend resources. With the tight constraints on any bootstrapped startup, coming up with a marketing budget presents tough choices that keep entrepreneurs up at night. Will this risky, expensive decision pay off?

Details. That's the difference between a hobby blog and one that turns into a career. Professional bloggers don't necessarily spend their time writing more content or shooting more photos. Instead, they use their time perfecting their light box set up or testing their recipe a third time to make sure they've gotten it just right.

Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, Safeway, Peapod, FreshDirect...the list of companies venturing into the next frontier of eCommerce goes on and on. That frontier? Online grocery.

Food blogging is a tough gig. While it often starts out of a desire to share your great recipes with friends and family, it can quickly turn into an all-consuming second job. Personally, I always feel like I can't keep up my pace. As soon as I post a new recipe, it's time to promote it all over social media, and when my shares are just about done, it's time for a new post.

Whether you are a personal blog, a small business, or just someone who enjoys to keep their Instagram looking fresh, these photo editing apps can truly take your feed to a new level.

Targeting bloggers and influencers with marketing is hard. If I was working with any other market, my first instinct would be the define demographic data and characteristics about the people in that market. Then, I would hit them with ads for my product on social media or search while I brainstormed some more clever marketing tactics. 

Top o' the month to ya! As we say hello to March and springtime and chirping birds and budding flowers--er, can you tell we're very ready to say goodbye to winter?--we also usher in one of the best food holidays of the year: St. Patrick's Day.

Above the fold, below the fold, in-view, high-impact, waste. Welcome to the jargon-riddled, hyperbolic world that is viewability in digital advertising. 

A recent IRI study found that online grocery will be a $100B business by 2022. For most manufacturers, this represents a not insignificant portion of total sales. Accordingly, here at Chicory, we have been approached by numerous brands asking us how to approach the swiftly advancing user shift to digital grocery shopping.

I think we can all agree that no matter which team we're rooting for this Super Bowl Sunday, we'll all be giving a big hip-hip-hooray for SNACKS! Game day snacks sit atop the totem pole of snacks, I might add: nachos!? Chicken wings!? Potato skins!? 

Hold on--there are HOW many blogs? According to our pals at Food Bloggers Central, over 227 million. Don't get too scared by that figure. Remember that only a portion of that total number are food blogs and a smaller chunk are bloggers who write in your same language and/or niche. Still, as every blogger knows, it's a saturated market.

Everyone and their editors scrambled, at the end of the year, to come up with the food trends to watch in 2017. Would poke come spread to more of the country? Was fast casual officially over?

I just got back from a quick trip to visit a friend who just moved to Stockholm. When I say that I bought my tickets just days before leaving, I'm not exaggerating. My month was hectic, filled with Chicory-related events or family functions. I was drained. So I skipped town for the long weekend. And, while I expected it would be nice to see a friend and do some traveling, I was surprised to find that the greatest vacation of all was from my blog.

Living two lives (one as a blogger, the other as a startup marketer) helps me to question both roles constantly. Blogging informs my work marketing Chicory to bloggers in countless ways--from knowing what's an appropriate RPM for a blog of a certain size, to understanding the ins and outs of Wordpress. Lately, I've allowed my worlds to inform each other in the opposite direction.

Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Vine (R.I.P.)--there are countless social media platforms to keep up with, and, with each different platform, unique opportunities to seize. As a brand or as a blogger, it can be hard to keep up. 

If you host your blog on Wordpress you know that plugins are king. There are OVER 46,000 of them to choose from. Guys, that’s crazy. I can barely choose what I want to order for dinner from Seamless. So, let's declutter and come to some decisions together. I’m here to give you the five plugins that you should definitely have running on your site that'll give the most valuable experience to your readers. 

At Chicory, we believe that advertising campaigns are only as good as their results. And the best way to not just get good results, but the best results, is to test. From copy, to creative, to landing pages, everything within a new advertising campaign is potentially just an element that a vendor should be plugging in or out to test performance.

We digital advertisers love our acronyms. We use them constantly, whether in emails, over the phone, or (gasp) in-person. In fact, some people have it so bad that this acronym obsession has extended beyond digital advertising to just about anything someone says (I’m totally not talking about my roommate Jon).

Young entrepreneurs often find themselves starting companies with their friends. It makes sense: one day you're sitting around and you realize that you have a great business idea. Next thing you know, you're all caught up in creating wireframes, brainstorming, and talking about your big plans for the future. 

If Instagram is any indication, bloggers already know that it's fun to join in on all of those "National This-and-That Day" hashtags. Oh, it's National Ice Cream Day? Pull that Chipwich recipe out of your archives and post on social for a few extra likes from new folks.