I recently received the email below from a reader asking me for advice on her blog. As I responded to them I realized that it might make an interesting discussion starter and that perhaps the ProBlogger community might together have some good advice to give – so lets do tackle it together.
What I’m going to do is to share the email below (the blogger has given me permission to do this) and share the link to the blog and then open things up to discussion for readers to share their advice.
First the blogger’s name is Veron and the blog is Sparklette – a Singaporean Food Blog.
I am from Singapore and I have been following your blogging tips for 2 years now. It was through your blog that I first learned the concept of SEO. Because of what I learned from Problogger, I managed to improve the web traffic of my food blog tremendously to the present 10,000 pageviews a day.
Early this year, I attempted monetising my blog. Through your recommendations I have tried Google Ads, Chitika and Amazon Associates, but only succeeded in making dozens of dollars a month from Google, and zilch from the others. I’m thinking it has something to do with the fact that food blogs are, by default, hard to monetise. I might be wrong though.
Still, I would like to try harder. I really hope that this blog can one day replace my present day job as my primary source of income.
Are there any tips which you can recommend to someone like me – a passionate blogger who is willing to work hard and already sees substantial web traffic but somehow isn’t able to properly monetise it?
I’m no food blogger so am unfamiliar with the niche and how it monetizes best – so while I did give a few words of advice I wondered if others with experience in that niche might have some advice to share with Veron.
Do keep in mind that Veron is asking for advice on monetization – so lets keep the focus upon that aspect of the blog and lets try to keep things constructive.
PS: the main advice I shared with Veron was pretty simple but revolved around the possibility of producing her own product to sell (perhaps an ebook/cookbook) and perhaps also to do some looking around at other blogs in that niche.
The other suggestion that I’d probably be doing is identifying advertisers to approach directly. Are there food stores, publishers of cookbooks or even restaurants in Singapore that might be willing to sponsor the blog.
OK – over to you – what advice would you give?
I think the best way for Vernon to monetize the site is probably through either sponsored conversation (controversial, I know) or, like you said – producing a product of Vernon’s own. The latter is probably the best idea because considering Vernon gets 300,000 hits a month, a book is definitely shoppable! Say 300k to a book publisher, and they’re likely to get curious.
Another way is to speak. Speaking engagements make a great gateway into monetization. Build credibility online AND off, and you’ve got yourself set.
Can’t think of anything else off the top of my head – but GaryVee’s new book might be perfect for Vernon. Crush It!
I would definitely agree about approaching businesses directly to have a sponsored ad on the blog. If you are getting that much traffic it would probably be worth it to them.
She could also add some amazon books related to the type of cuisine the restaurant she’s talking about serves ~ I find cookbooks do pretty well on my food blogs.
The key is probably going to be to test things and see what works best. Make a list of possibilities and then test them a month at a time and see what works best. :) Keep what works, get rid of the rest.
Jackie
Foodbuzz is a nice community to join if they’ll have you on as a Featured Publisher. Also try Lijjit for added revenue. My daily traffic is just around 2000 page views & I have a long way to go.
The site seems to be more of a restaurant blog instead of a food blog. Maybe some kind of local coupon books or travel/lodging/location event affiliate type of thing.
The book idea would be good if it was a book reviewing all of the restaurants in a Singapore.
Amazon links to specific food products, maybe become a FoodBuzz featured blogger, affiliate links to food products that you review, maybe do a food podcast and try to get sponsors from companies who would like to tap that audience. Since you have a very niche website with 10K views a day why don’t you find sponsors who want to reach that audience. Get them to advertise on your site and don’t be shy about charging a premium for access to your audience.
My first thought would be to have some affiliate links around food providers. Something like gourmet food, coffee, chocolate, fruits, things like that.
My 2nd thought was the same as yours. Either producing a cookbook, or even a guidebook to restaurants in a particular area, depending on where his readers come from.
I’m kind of in the same boat. I have a narrow niche, and figuring out monetization is a little hard, but I’m getting there a little at a time.
I agree that creating a product, like a cookbook, might be a good way to go. As far as going for direct advertisers, I would try to work out some deals with the local restaurants. Selling gift certificates could be a good business.
However, you would have to set up stringent guidelines so as not to appear to be providing biased reviews of any restaurants to try and sell more gift certificates.
A possible product to put together and sell would be a tour book of Singapore’s cuisine and restaurants.
It’s a nice looking blog for sure. A few tips I have:
– Add an email signup box with some kind of incentive to sign up. You can use this to send them affiliate marketing offers whether you’re promoting a book, etc.
– Write more blog posts that are “advertising friendly.” These include book reviews adding in Amazon affiliate links or other reviews where you can do something similar. Evaluations work well also. How about “Gifts for Food Lovers” for Christmas? “Top 4 CookBooks for beginners, etc”?
– Join an affiliate network and add in affiliate links to Restaurant.com, grocery sites, etc. M&M even has an affiliate program.
Good luck!
i’ve been to this blog before (or at least one that looks cool and has sparklette on it.)
it’s friday… i need more good karma points for today.
a. start testing foods you like.. give feedback to those companies on your blog, make sure and SEO for their keywords in your blog posts.
You will show up in search results for their products and they may contact you about sponsorship or give you the inside of their food products.
Be sure and post recipes exactly..
as in.. “here is the coolest recipe i have for ramen”
marinate chicken in lemon juice and honey mustard dressing for 30 mins in fridge, etc..
cook ramen using chicken spices and half of the chili spice ramen packet, cook noodles
get some honey roast cashews and some chunky pnut butter, mash it all up, add some honey and tabasco sauce, set aside..
grill chicken, cut up add to noodles and cover with sauce,
viola! chicken pad thai,.. w/ ramen..
b. add yelp widget and own your location by doing restaurant reviews and feeding them to your blog as well as linking from yelp to blog.
offer to do reviews for free meal.. but STRESS honest reviews, ONLY. meaning write disclaimer.
“if you ask me to do a review, you comp the meal, but if service is bad or food is bad i have to say so. however if food is good and service is good, i will write good review AND come back for another meal at my own expense and follow up with addition to blog post on second paid visit.”
there’s 2 ideas to start, good luck.
Definitely join affiliate programs – link products from them into posts where appropriate. For example, I don’t know if she cooks at all, but if she does, she could try re-creating a restaurant recipe in her home, and link the ingredients to affiliates.
Sponsorship would probably be a good way to go, too. She would have to talk to local merchants probably. Or perhaps for the travel posts get advertising or sponsorships from travel-related companies.
And I would definitely write an ebook or two to sell through the site. She could also produce some sort of sponsored podcast or video series.
Food blogs are hard to monetise! They are best used as a portfolio to get recipe creation / styling / writing freelance projects.
I notice she has a ‘Hire Me’ button for her web company, but not for her ‘foodie’ services such as those I mentioned above.
Otherwise, targeted affiliate programs like Tastebook or paid product reviews. Beware not to look too sale-sy though or readers will run a mile. There’s too many food blogs out there to choose from that don’t try and make money.
With 10,000 pageviews a day, I’m assuming the blogger’s RSS subscriptions are pretty high, right?
Veron would definitely be able to get the Google $ amount up by:
1.Offering RSS subscriptions through Feedburner
2. Clicking on “Monetize” in Feedburner to set up Google Adsense on the feeds,
3.Offering only a summary of the posts through the RSS,
This makes the readers click through to see the entire post. Often they will click the ad on the feed (by mistake?), and will come to the site, giving the bloger more pageviews, value, and revenue.
At just 1,000 pageview a day and 1,000 subscribers, I always get at least $100 from Google each month doing this.
Hope that helps! I look forward to reading the other suggestions. ~ Lori Seaborg
She may also want to apply to BlogHer advertising. They have a Food blogger section, where the ad strips also show posts from other food bloggers – hers included.
So, she can pull in ad dollars AND increase exposure at the same time.
A cookebook is a great idea.
Maybe use Google Analytics to determine if certain types of content are doing better?
I would really just talk about what to buy during the recession, since we are all suffering from it. How to live healthy during the recession. In fact, I read a post about what to buy during the recession to stay healthy and frugal here – http://www.blogtoilet.com/2009/10/23/the-recession-is-good-for-one-thing-forced-dieting/
I not an expert at monetizing blogs but I think in this case your blog is your audience so making a tangible item (like someone already stated) is the way to go. Everyone always gets overwhelmed when people say write a book, ebook, etc. Remember that it does not have to be “New” content to go into a book. You can bring the “best of” articles together from your blog over the years and then you have a tangible item to sell and can promote through your blog. Just a thought
I would look into becoming a Featured Publisher with Foodbuzz and running their ad on your site. You could also look into other advertising networks.
If I were in Veron’s shoes, I’d definitely draw generous doses of inspiration from Gary Vaynerchuk and they way he built his wine-based social media empire.
Since I have a food blog, I can put in my 2 cents. I do use affiliate links but I also have an amazon store that only has cooking/food related items. It works well.
I have coupons.com embed into my site as well so people can print coupons. You can also implement something with Coupons.com like Kontera where anytime a certain ingredient has a coupon attached to it, if you hover over the link, it will give you the option print it.
Ebooks/cookbooks are a great way to generate money. I do VERY well with my recipe ebooks of different subjects, like Mountain cooking, 101 ways to use chocolate, etc.
I’m currently building a community of my own not set to launch for a while but it will be a membership site with a special private area for paid members.
I agree with the others that Foodbuzz rocks.
Veron,
This will be quite a long comment :)
1) You mentioned that you have Google ads on your blog. But I did not see any. Did you take those off? I was wondering if you tried different placement of Google ads to see if that made a difference. It might seem trivial, but I have seen my CTR increase by 300% by just changing the location.
2) You have lot of images in your posts. In that case, you can try to put one Google ad (preferably 468*60, only text) right below the first image. There is a WordPress plugin available for that (“Adsense under Image”). I am using this on my site, and it contributes almost 8-10% of my income. This is because pictures catch interest of readers, and ads right below those catch their attention too.
3) You have 125*125 ad blocks on your side. These are one of the best method for monetization for blogs that get good traffic (like yours). However, your rate seems to be a bit high ($200). I would recommend to lower the rate, and increase the ad spots. See the rate that works, and then increase gradually.
4) Try BuySellAds.com. They offer good monetization for such 125*125 ad blocks.
5) Did you try affiliate networks, such as CommisionJunction. Being a food and restaurant website, you can try to put some affiliate links from travel sites from CJ.
6) Last thing I would advise is to try Text-Link-Ads.com. They do not take lot of real estate on your blog, but can give good money sometime.
I think I have already written a lot :) If these work for you, I would love to hear about that. Give me a shout via my contact info here:
http://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/contact-us
You have a Beautiful Website. All the Best!
Darren,
My suggestions are very much the same with yours. She should start writing, perhaps books or eBooks on her niche. If I’m not mistaken, Singapore has varieties of good food and she should go to the field and collect those interesting recipes. She can use her blog to highlight her adventures and also as a marketing tool for her future books/eBooks.
These are all very good ideas. I would add:
– Doing some research about your readers and sell targeted ad space on your site.
– Get restaurants to pay for advertising whenever you review them. They are not paying for the reviews. You would simply treat it like an editorial calendar. Let them know when they will be reviewed and give them an option to place a promotional coupon, for instance, on your site. That way if it’s a good review, the reader also has an added incentive from the restaurant to visit.
– A little better layout to segregate your blog from your web site development business. It’s buried on the long list on the ride column. Once I go to that section, I get a blank white screen with some text. Not very compelling for a web designer. You might want to jazz up that landing page. And I would pare down the number of examples. Rather than a long list of jpgs, perhaps make them more like a few case studies. Before/after photos, challenges the client faced and how you solved them in record time, things like that. It looks like your sites are very artistic – that might be a niche you would want to promote.
i used to have a link to Darren’s 31DBBB on my food blog – and made a sale. so i am thinking even general blog related affiliate links could work – because we are all bloggers and often looking for resources…
but perhaps best a restaurant guide book for this particular food blog.
Mike is right, the blog is more of a restaurant blog then of a food blog. You can write about different community living in Singapore, their food habit, recipes, cuisine etc.
Veron you have 10k pageviews everyday, try to sell it to local food business like restaurants, food manufacturers/importer/exporters in the form of advertisements or others. You can write books and sell it, you can put others recipe in your book to advertise them and earn some extra bucks.
Veron, your site looks nice, but flashy – I think a white background could do better, have you visited BBC Good Food website?
That is exactly what I would suggest, Darren, is to sell her own products. She could do anything from food products, books, utensils, her own brand name merchandise such as T-shirts, mugs, calendars, pens – the list is endless! Think Martha Stewart. That is how I have monetized my blog with eBay & Etsy links to my own stores.
CONGRATULATIONS on 10,000 page views per DAY – that’s just incredible! I can’t imagine how busy I would be with the stores if I had that!
x0x
Anita @ModelSupplies
I can relate to this blogger’s question and have been working on answers as well.
I, personally, download far too many ebooks from online and I’m not sure that I would pay to download another one. That’s just me though.
I agree that ads seem to be a great place to start. I love foodbuzz and also write for a national website about food & local restaurants as it fits with my foodie blog and our B&B too.
Another avenue that I have in the “sketching out” phase is videos which will (hopefully) be sold eventually.
One last thought is taking the fact that she is writing about restaurants and asking them to share a recipe either as stated eariler in a cookbook or having a sister blog that shows the recipes which may capture a different kind of traffic that with ads will make it a double header,
Again, these are just a few thoughts as I am asking the same question about my blog. :)
I actually transitioned my efforts into a different niche because I felt it was so difficult to monetize a food blog without feeling like I was selling out.
That was over a year ago and now I see several options that are good for people who don’t blog about specific food products or cookware.
– cookbook/e-book/guide that is useful to your readers
– direct ad sales w/ other blogs in your locality or specific niche
I will respectfully disagree with Udaysree. I don’t think most food blog readers are bloggers themselves. While may are, I think its a risk.
The important thing is to be authentic and feel good about each decision you make in monetization.
The best method really is to create your own informative product like cookbook and just add a unique personal touch on it
I’m not sure how she’s linking to Amazon, but if she’s doing relevant, contextual mentions of specific products or cooking tools, I would think that it would convert pretty well. The best way to monetize is to recommend things only when they’re extremely relevant to what your reader is most engrossed in at that moment.
For example, even if it’s a review of a restaurant dish, you can have a “create this at home” type of language that leads to specific things on Amazon.
Hi Veron (and Darren) — Looking at Sparklette, I see at least couple of options for monetising. Direct advertising, paid reviews and putting together a Singapore Food recipe eBook or even a “restaurant guide” or such.
For direct advertising, I see you’re selling advertising already but you can also contact restaurants you have reviewed or otherwise presented on the blog and ask if they’d be interested in advertising on your blog. With your traffic rates you can can even charge a decent amount, and you can also consider adding more advertising areas, perhaps in the posts.
And it looks like you’re already doing paid reviews, which you can easily charge more (at least it doesn’t hurt to try). Perhaps contact the restaurants while looking for advertisers that you offer this option too. And if there’s data for results your reviews have accomplished, even better. I’d also like to see “best restaurants” or “recommended this week” list there… you could then charge more for advertising on those pages :)
And the last point, eBook or other information product. Restaurant guide could be a great idea, or combining that with a cook / recipe book. To prepare for launching that, you could start a mailing list or newsletter (which you could also sell advertising to, or weekly recommendations etc.).
Hopefully those will help you and I suggest you just continue testing different methods out. Anyway, good luck with the blog Veron, you’ve done great with traffic and I’m sure you find a way to make good money of it too!
I love this Asian food blog and the site seems to be doing all the right things to monetize it.
http://rasamalaysia.com
Amazon links and email marketing….
I’d like to see more articles like this. Practical, not fluffy.
Since there seems to be a big focus on restaurants, I would recommend trying to make money from them.
Here is a possible way:
You could have events once or twice a month at restaurants that are featured that month on your blog. This would be a great way to connect with your readers.
And for those who can’t attend the event on that particular day, they could go to the restaurants at another time during the month.
All of your readers could provide comments about their experiences at the restaurants.
I imagine the restaurants would be glad to pay you for all of the customers that you would bring to them. This might work really well with new restaurants who have a good concept but need those initial customers to get the word-of-mouth buzz going.
I read a year or so ago about a music blogger in New York City who made money by organizing concerts. This is basically the same concept.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that for most bloggers it is best to try to monetize blogs offline through things like speaking, consulting, organizing events, etc.
Greg Blencoe
Take a look at Orangette (http://orangette.blogspot.com/)–go all the way to the bottom of her sidebar. She has an amazon store of stuff she likes related to cooking. Not sure how that works, but I’m guessing she gets something for it.
I will only talk for myself, but I do run a food blog (recipe blog to be exact) in french, and I can make hundreds and hundreds of dollars with it each month.
I’m running Adsense, which is paying the most, and I’m also trying with a company that shows ads with by CPM, which almost pays as much as google.
I’m almost sure you can do it with your food blog. Just find the right emplacement for the ads. If I can manage to make a lot of money with a food blog in french, I’m sure there is a market for food blog in english!
Good luck!
I run a food blog that gets only about 15% of the pageviews she does, but manage to make a fair amount from it. I use Foodbuzz which provides CPM ads though she could use blogher or some other ad network. Moreover, I have a page that lists suppliers of hard-to-find ingredients and that also generates income. If she can’t find direct advertisers, or doesn’t want to put energy into doing so she can always sign up as an affiliate with online food markets provided she uses good disclosure practice.
Like other people have mentioned, she could sell e-books or premium content. This last month I started offering recipe content books to readers. While I offer the e-books for free, many readers have donated or purchased print versions as well. I made more money giving people the option to pay than I expected to make by charging them outright.
I don’t use google adwords at this time because I feel they visually detract from a blog in many instances, and the visual is an extremely important aspect of a food blog.
My small blog has almost nothing to do with food but the only pages that actually make any income have been my restaurant reviews while traveling and all of that is through Amazon sales.
I have amazon ads in the sidebar on every page, but when I noticed some unexpected big spikes in traffic coming from a couple of FoodNetwork shows featuring those restaurants I also put in some Amazon links to some cookbooks written by the FoodNetwork show star.
So people are watching the food show on TV and they go online for more information and find my (motorcycle) blog where they then find links to cook books from the tv show. Thats how I’ve monetized one of my food posts, and I think I’ll do the same with my food reviews.
I would try linking to similar cuisine cookbooks, restaurant review guides and other food related Amazon products. Visitors to the site are already interested in food so food related ads is what I would try.
We are from the US but have a website, blog and forum about Uruguay, we just moved here 5 months ago. Our blog, website and forum are all brand new, but we are getting a lot of traffic and everything is monetizing very well. We were just featured in an online and print magazine here this week.
We have a food section along with a Recipe of the Week. We sell a cookbook that we created that teaches how to make food from scratch that you can’t get here in Uruguay, like Sour Cream…
I would recommend making a cookbook with some of your favorite recipes from some of your favorite restaurants. Make a cookbook/ restaurant guide.
Promote your cookbook on your blog and have an affiliate program to go along with it.
A huge market to capitalize on are English speaking expats… Promote yourself on expat and tourist websites…
Your blog is very “pretty”, something you will definitely remember after visiting… That being said, the right side of your blog feels very cluttered, I would look at cleaning that up… maybe making 3 columns instead of 2.
I would put your adsense above the fold… maybe at the top of each post. Having adsense above the fold is very important to convert with it.
I would make sure to capitalize the 1st letter of each sentence.
Put a “Most Recent Post” or “Best of Post” on the right side as well.
And I really like HydrogenCarRevolution’s idea too… That may be something we try out down the road here in the near future…
Best of luck to you.
I have a food blog too – and hence can understand her point exactly. Agreed it is little hard to monetize as compared to other blogs – but its not a total lost cause. Get sponsored ads from leading ad publishers like BlogHer and FoodBuzz! The more traffic you get, better it is for you!
Contact them soon to get kickstarted! :) Hope this helps
The cookbook ebook is a good idea. I would also add to set up some kind of “recipe of the week” weekly newsletter as well.
I’d go with pretty much all the same advice: cookbook reviews for recipes you’ve tried with affiliate links to the cookbooks, write your own e-cookbook (but I think you’d have to make it really spectacular or unique, if you’re planning to sell it), review cookware products, etc.
I’m a little confused about the Google ad situation – I don’t see any on there. Consider better placement of Google ads, perhaps. For Google ads, placement is Really Important. Darren has good posts on “hot spots” for ads and they definitely are worth taking into consideration, even if you think the ads mar the look of the site if they’re in the “hot spots.” If you’re hitting 10K page views a day, you should be making more than a couple dozen dollars a month w/ Google, if your ads are placed well and formatted well for your website.
Not to sound cliche-ish, but I understand how you feel. I’m in the throes of figuring out how to branch out, rather than solely relying on Google income, but it’s hard to take a bold step when things are working “ok.”
Best of luck!
Having been to Singapore and loved the food, I would definitely do a travel-related restaurant ebook. I would focus on a simple theme like “5 days, 15 restaurants” and take the reader on a mix of places from hawker stalls up to “nicer” places. Explain that she’s going for a mix that shows the tourist as much of the variety of Singapore’s neighborhoods as possible while keeping the prices reasonable. Price it at GBP4.99.
(Oh, and review Zam Zam in the Islamic neighborhood, their murtabak is outstanding!)
I think coming up with her own product such as an eBook might do well. I too think approaching some of the businesses directly could help her. Maybe she could go to the restaurant and show them how much traffic she brings to her blog, then tell them she can bring them exposure through her blog.
The blog can monetize by create product. Book and magazine come to my mine for this food blog.
Do more paid reviews.
Googles Ads.. but within the text, a 200×200 or 300x 250 ad unit and a leaderboard (728×90) on the top of the blog. But don’t over do it.
More direct advertising..sidebars, leaderboard, footer and within text article.
Every little bit of revenue adds up.
Another thing, look at magazine publishers business model,, do they only have one magazine in their stable? No! They have many different magazines, on all sorts of topics.
One magazine by itself won’t earn enough money.. so the analogy is the same, the fact is you can only squeeze so much money out of one blog. Multiple blogs is the way to go to earn reasonable money.
Food niche is not that hard to monetize and that’s the reason why there are many food bloggers in the recent days.
The hardest part is building traffic. But since you already have built traffic (overcome the hardest part), it gets easier to monetize.
Here are my ideas (apart from what Darren said):
1. Build a list of subscribers. Not the one using Feedburner but using autoresponders like aweber, get response etc.
How to get people to subscribe: Write a small 7-10 page report with few tips or if you don’t have time, create a report using some of your best posts. Offer it for free to those people who subscribe to your email list.
2. Affiliate Marketing.
Go to Clickbank.Com or any other site that has a marketplace with products related to the food niche. Sign up as an affiliate and promote it in your blog.
The products in the clickbank marketplace offer mostly 50% or higher commissions. So you shouldn’t be having a problem even if the product you promote converts low.
3. JV
JV is short for Joint Venture. Once you build a list with x,xxx subscribers, go to an internet marketer who has a list of same size and tell them that you can promote his/her free report to your list if they are willing to promote your free report to their list. It is a win win situation.
You can also ask the person if (s)he has a product which you can promote to your list for higher commissions.
These are some of the basic ways to monetize the food niche.
Hope this helps
Yeah, I think she needs to find a way to capitalize on her exposure in other ways. Perhaps if she keeps gaining more and more exposure, those other ways will find her.
Well an ebook will do fine, but from what I know of Singaporeans (I am one too) are that they do not have the habit to purchase online. And cookbooks are available all over Singapore (Singapore is a very small country)
Since Veron have the traffic, she should consider using coupons to advertise for the restaurants. Let the readers print out the coupons, with their names and mobile to enjoy the discount.
For her, she will have to negotiate with the restaurants owners that whatever she bring the customers to the restaurants to eat, she will earn 10% of the food the total sales.
How to track the sales, we ready can’t track the sales, but she can track the no of people who have the coupons, as long as they opt in to the list she can find out how many have have printed out the coupons.
Hope this helps.
She has so articles on restaurant! May be she can write featured articles for restaurants! With 300k visitors a month, some restaurants may like to be featured on her blog by paying!
Also how about starting a restaurant directory with food availability with user ratings on food ?