Beyond the Recipe: The Marketing Magic of Food Bloggers 🥗
Hello Reader,
👉 Quick Note: Our first workshop of the year is scheduled for early February. If you're ready to learn all about the little billboards hiding in plain site that help turn clicks into clients, sign up for Magnetic Metas. I'll write more about this workshop later, but just hit reply with any pre-sales questions.
Last week I talked to you about how there’s a vast difference between blogging AS a business and blogging FOR your business. (If you haven't read that yet, go do so right now.) As a reminder, when I say "blogging for your business," what I mean is using the blogging functionality of your website as marketing leverage.
To reiterate, here's where the two types of content (AS vs FOR) diverge:
- We are not focused on behind-the-scenes content, unboxing reveals, and that kind of "cutesy" (technical term) content. Those are definitely in the lifestyle blog arena, and that is not going to work for a serious business
- We are not going to be overly focused on monetization of our content. That doesn’t mean that we won’t be able to monetize some of our content (I do, it's awesome!), but it’s not going to be the primary focus.
- We are also not going to be overly worried about tactics like display ads or brand partnerships; again those could potentially come your way if you build enough authority on the Internet, but that is not where our energy will be.
- Finally, we are not talking about a volume-based blog. One of my clients recently told me that they Googled how many blog posts they need to have to dominate their niche and the search engine told them that they need to publish four blog posts per week. That is far more than anyone who has leveraging a blog in their business marketing needs to do. However, it’s actually a pretty good target number for someone who is trying to create a business by writing a blog. Now that’s not to say that increasing your volume won’t help you see results more quickly. It will. Volume can accelerate your authority if it’s done consistently. But that’s not the typical path for most businesses with a blog. We are not playing a numbers game. We are playing a strategy game.
When I talk to clients and potential clients about this, one of the things that people often misunderstand about this difference is that they think that business blogs need to be cut and dry—very just the facts, almost like doing homework in school.
This could not be more wrong.
As much as I want to emphasize that the STRATEGY is different for these two different types of blogs, we can learn a whole lot of incredible tactics from folks who blog AS a business.
My favorite example is the marketing magic of food bloggers. I know everyone loves to magic jokes about "skipping the story and just getting the recipe," but that's part of why it works and something we can borrow from that niche (more on that in a second).
Let’s talk about what we can learn from our favorite food bloggers and how we can engineer those lessons into our own business blog strategy.
- Food bloggers are brilliant at creating a multimedia experience on their blogs.
I’ve talked about this extensively in my Image SEO Workshop, but let’s talk about this on the top level. What I mean by a "multimedia experience" is that if you go to one of these blogs you’ll see that they have unique imagery, they may have videos, they may have illustrations. They have well formatted, headlines, and lists and summaries and key takeaways.
You visit these blogs and you are immediately immersed in a diversity of media. That is incredibly effective because it appeals to multitudes of ways that humans think and take in information, and food bloggers get that. Plus, Google absolutely loves this (we love free SEO juice) and effectively gives you what I think of as "bonus points" for organizing your content in this way. People who are blogging to grow their business often miss the mark on this; there is not engagement and excitement in the actual formatting of their blog post and what that does is it actually makes it uninspiring for people to stick around, and their bounce rate skyrockets (bounce rate is the rate of people who visit a site and immediately leave).
I predict is going to become more and more important in the coming years. - Food bloggers do an incredible job of infusing personality and stories into their blogs. The readers can SEE and FEEL the recipe before they ever make it. One of my rules of business blogging is that every single article that you publish on your blog needs to include one or more of the following:
1) A story: that can be an anecdote that can be a personal experience that can be something in the news that can be something from your favorite TV show—whatever makes sense in creating a narrative. Food bloggers will often tell you about a place they visited that inspired the recipe, or that is reminds them of something their grandmother cooked—you get the picture.
2) A statistic: these are the numbers that prove your point. For example, food bloggers love to share surprising facts about chia seeds, or almond flour, or olive oil. These nuggets of data surprise and educate your audience.
3) A success: that means some some success that you have helped create or what a lot of people call a case study. Food bloggers do this all the time, sharing how they adapted recipes, how their audience adjusted a recipe for allergies, or how it fit into a holiday meal.
By infusing these things into your blog articles for your business, you are adding credibility and interest and connection to your blog content. This is also where authority comes from! - Another thing that those of us blogging FOR our businesses can borrow from the food blogging industry is the norm of creating really cohesive interconnected content. Again, this is where a lot of folks blogging as a marketing tool fail to do strategically.
Look at your favorite food blog. (Seriously, go look at it right now.) They likely have everything organized by meal type (snacks, breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert), perhaps by theme (gluten free, under 30-minutes, kind-friendly), even by ingredient. But they don't stop there! They also integrate this throughout their individual pieces so that the readers keep exploring.
It's a brilliant technique that build brand loyalty and amplifies SEO quite successfully. - Food bloggers also are impeccably about optimizing their blogs for conversions. The vast majority of business owners I talk to who try to leverage blogs in their marketing toolkit have focused on traffic numbers, not their conversion rates.
Again, check out your favorite food blog with this perspective in mind. Do they make it super obvious how to get new recipes emailed to you? Do they have a low cost ebook you can buy? Or maybe they are encouraging you to follow their YouTube channel. They're relatively low-risk asks designed to turn searchers into raving fans.
Most business blogs I audit miss this entirely or make too big of ask before letting folks test the waters somehow (this doesn't have to be free, as I've said before, but asking people to book a sales call immediately after reading your content is a big ask). - Food bloggers focus on compounding content first. What's compounding content? Think evergreen articles but more—this kind of content GROWS over time. So, you write article A in January and in July its reach has expanded by a factor of three—but by by the following January, its reach has expanded tenfold.
This goes back to the third point in this list, the cohesion and interconnection, but it's also very "ear to the ground," and understanding what your audience needs before your audience even knows it.
Picking up on micro-trends, shifts in the industry, and whispers before they become full-blown conversations is key to creating compounding content.
Here's a little homework for you. Find your favorite food blog (or lifestyle/home decor/whatever your "thing" is) and deconstruct it with these insights in mind. Those little stories before the recipe make a whole lot more sense now, don't they? What can you learn from them?
As a reminder, this is a continuing series, so if there's anything you're hoping I'll cover, just reach out by hitting reply!
Talk soon,
Sarah