How To Monetize A Food Blog – The EASY Way!
This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclaimer for more information
After you’ve started your food blog, and you’ve started to publish recipes to your blog, the next thing you need to focus on is monetizing your blog.
I started monetizing my food blog (ohsofoodie.com) from day one because I wanted to ensure that I didn’t have to come back and update articles months later when the blog started to grow.
I started by adding affiliate links to every recipe post I published on my food blog, recommending grocery items or the cookware I was using to make each recipe. I got my first few dollars doing this and this is why I was able to get motivated to keep blogging even when my website visitors were still very small.
Today, I’ll share all the ways you can monetize a food blog so you can start earning your money.
Disclaimer, while a food blog can start to earn money from inception, this is not typical. You may earn a few dollars every now and then, but it typically takes about 6 months to a year to start earning some money consistently. This is why I always suggest starting your blogging journey right now. In a few months, you’ll thank yourself.
Traffic or visitors to your food blog are what will really start to drive your earnings.
Therefore, I recommend you spend about an hour+ of your free time each day learning how to promote your food blog via Pinterest as well as learning how to promote your recipes via SEO.
You can do so by taking free courses, watching youtube videos, or taking some of the more popular paid courses that cut through all the noise and teach you how to drive thousands f visitors to your blog so you can start to earn a decent income.
I recommend courses like Pinteresting Strategies and Stupid Simple SEO. I’ve used both to help me grow my blogs over the years.
How to monetize a food blog
Displaying Ads
The most popular way to monetize a food blog is via ads. There are many ad companies that will pay you to host their ads on your blog so your visitors can see, them or take action (once you start to receive traffic of course).
Mediavine
I currently use Mediavine Ads for my food blog. They’re a fully managed ad company that manages ads for bloggers and content creators in all industries. Mediavine requires that you have a blog with original content (which is not a problem for a food blogger) and 25 thousand monthly sessions before you apply for their ad network.
Over 6000 bloggers use Mediavine as their ad network. I highly recommend that you start working on our blog so you can apply to join Mediavine as soon as possible.
Adthrive
You can also use Adthrive which is another fully managed ad company. Adthrive requires that you have 100,000 monthly page views before applying to join.
Ezoic
Once you start to receive 1000 page views per month, you can join Ezoic ads to start making some cash.
Ezoic is not as premium as Mediavine or Adthrive, but they’re a great place to start to earn your first few dollars from our blog.
That way, you don’t start to get discouraged during the first couple of months when your blog visitors are just starting to pick up. One of the main reasons why bloggers fail is because they quit way too early.
Google Adsense
You can join once you start to receive some traffic too. They don’t pay as well, but you could sign up with them so you start to receive a trickle of ad income to keep you motivated.
Affiliate Marketing
As a food blogger, you can make money from your blog via affiliate marketing. This is the process of sharing links to your favorite items on your blog and earning a commission when someone purchases the recommended item.
On my food blog, I often recommend grocery items, cookware, recipe ebooks, and food subscriptions within my blog posts/recipe posts to my readers. Therefore, If they’re interested in one of the items I recommend and they make a purchase, I get paid a commission from that sale.
I use Amazon associates to promote grocery items and cookware on my food blog.
Sponsorships
Brands and companies are often willing to pay you or send you free products to be featured on your blog. This is not an area I’ve delved into extensively. But you can learn more about blog sponsorships from this ebook.
Creating your own products
Blogging is a marketing strategy. Therefore, if you create a product of your own, you can offer it to your blog visitors and make money that way. On my food blog, I sell food-related ebooks to my readers via a Shopify store which I promote on my blog.
My ebooks include meal plans, workbooks, and 1-page pdf files with helpful information.
These are some of the most popular ways to make money from a food blog. Once you start your food blog, you can try out these ideas to see which ones work for your blog best! Happy blogging!
