Step 5: Promote yourself (and your food blog)

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Step 5: Promote yourself (and your food blog)

On the Web

Once you have some blog posts, you will want to publicise your blog a bit, to let people know that it exists. You can start by adding your blog to the GetMeCooking Food Blog Directory, which is like a telephone directory for food blogs.

The best way to promote your blog though, is to visit other blogs, see what’s going on and contribute by commenting and getting involved in discussions. Once people see that you have something to offer or are an expert (or at least actively involved) in your area, they will be interested to find out more about you – and that is when they click on your link to visit your blog.

When posting on blogs and websites, watch out for the ‘nofollow’ command. You can only see this by looking at the HTML code of the page you are on. nofollow means that if you post your link to that website, search engines (such as Google) will not follow the link to your website (or at least they will give you no or few ‘points’ for it – this is informally referred to as ‘Google juice’). It is fine to add your blog address to websites that use the nofollow rule, but your time ‘may’ be better spent posting on other sites. On GetMeCooking we do not use the nofollow command on user comments because we like to help promote the blogging community. For more information, see the Google Webmasters page on About rel="nofollow”.

Social Media

You can also use other social media to help build an audience and in turn promote your blog.

twitter

twitter is a ‘micro-blogging’ tool that allows you to sent messages (tweets) of up to 140 characters in length. It is great for when you are on the move, or just want to sent out a quick message to let ‘the world’ know what you are doing, something exciting that you have just seen or done or about a blog post you have just added.

On the GetMeCooking twitter feed we often post about fun, exciting or interesting food related news items (usually not GetMeCooking related), as well as important/major updates about the GetMeCooking website. It is a great way to interact with the cooking community.

twitter Lists

On twitter, you can organise people and companies that you follow into lists. On the GetMeCooking twitter feed, we have a number of lists that include food bloggers, food companies, food events, etc. It is a useful to browse a list to get a quick ‘catch up’ on what is happening in that ‘space’.

su.pr

su.pr is the URL shortening service, owned by Stumbleupon. It integrates with twitter to allow you to post tweets, using shortened URL’s.

It then does these things:

• Monitors how many times each URL has been clicked on
• Builds a profile, allowing you to determine the best days and times to send out tweets (i.e. when they are most likely to be read)
• Allows you categorise each URL you have tweeted, meaning that su.pr is then able to better integrate it within its Stumbleupon service
• Adds it to the Stumbleupon service, where users can ‘randomly’ discover new websites, that are relevant to them (users tell Stumbleupon which categories they are interested in – e.g. food, cooking, blogging, baking, cycling, holidays)

Therefore using su.pr helps give your content a wider audience. If your audience like it, they will give it a ‘thumbs up’, which will raise its ranking in the Stumbleupon service, therefore helping it to be shown to other users.

facebook

facebook can be a great way to build up and audience and interact with them. To do this, create a facebook group for your blog and post some interesting content. The content in here shouldn’t simply be a copy of content that you post on twitter and your blog – people don’t like to see the same content in several places.

facebook groups can be a good way to interact with your visitors, like you would in an online forum. It is also a good place to post photographs and create events.

Offline (the real world!)

As well as promoting yourself online, it is fun to talk to people about food offline! Everybody likes food and if you tell people that you have a food based blog, people will want to find out more – so it’s a good idea to always have some business cards stored in your purse/wallet.

Step 6: Monitor your blog traffic