Many of our members have told us that they love food blogging, but they aren’t quite earning what they’d like from it.
If that’s you, don’t worry because you’re definitely not alone.
In fact, most people who blog earn little to no money with their blogs. That shouldn’t discourage you though because it’s the same with all small business owners. Sadly, MOST are not successful.
The good news is, you can choose to be successful and do what you need to get where you want to be.
Over the past 12 years or so, we have helped a lot of people grow their online businesses. And, of course, we’ve been growing our own all along as well. In that time, we’ve discovered a number of key things that make bloggers successful and we wanted to encourage you with one right now.
Here it is. It’s so simple…
You HAVE to get Help
Food blogging is certainly a labor of love. There is absolutely no doubt about that.
But there’s a problem.
If you’re spending all your time making food, taking photos and painstakingly writing our recipes, there isn’t a lot of time left over for business building activities. Add to that, if you’ve got a job outside the home or another business, it’s like you can barely find the time to get the blogging done at all.
We can completely understand that.
But there’s one thing we learned over the years and that’s to GET HELP. When you’ve got people taking care of various details, you can focus on developing products and figuring out what your business needs to grow. That means hiring people to help you with various tasks, partnering with other blogger to share workload or even using ready-made content like we have at Foodaplenty.
Of course, when we tell people that, there first objection is “I can’t afford that.”
Well, you can’t really afford to stay stagnant where you are either. Getting more help for your business is part of a growth process. You do just a little bit at at time. Each time you pay someone to help you, you can focus on money-making activities and when you see that money come in, you can invest in more help.
Think about businesses in the “real world”. There are employees and there are managers and in very successful companies, there are CEOs. You might work your way up the ladder, but your goal is to be the CEO of your business. You need to be the person who has the vision for your business and makes sure you get there. You might be a hands-on CEO that might still create a lot of content, but you need to start removing yourself from the daily grind.
This is such a labor of love, but what happens to it when you can no longer keep up with it? What if life gets in the way or you want to retire? You want something in place that allows the business to continue to grow while you’re not there. Now, that may or may not be a long time from now, but it’s something to prepare for.
If you need some starting steps to get to being CEO, here are a few ideas. Take one, start small and grow from there.
- Hire a Virtual Assistant. A virtual assistant can help answer emails, schedule interviews, update your web pages and do all kinds of things that take up your day.
- Hire a Ghostwriter. There is no reason you have to write all your content yourself. Plus, a well-trained ghostwriter can take on your voice and put your ideas into print.
- Get Help with Graphics. Even if you take all your photos, you can have someone else edit them or create shareable graphics for you. Shannon Smith at Appetite for Design does a great job of this.
- Get Some Ready-Made Content. Our Bite-Sized Bundles white label recipe packages feature original recipes with photos, social media graphics, product reviews and much more. Or try one of our recipe book or other ready-to-publish content packages.
- Be a Part of our Facebook Group. You can connect with others to start new projects, find guest writers for your site and more. Click here to join us.
As you can see, there are even ways to get help for free. Take advantage of what’s available to you and build on it.
Now before you head off and start getting help, we just wanted to encourage you further because…
Here’s Something Successful Bloggers Don’t Always Tell You
This one is really important because this is where a lot of people get stuck.
You don’t have to have a HUGE following to make plenty of moolah. If anyone has led you to believe that, they are just plain old flat-out wrong.
The secret is to be smart and approach your blog as part of your business. Many people just keep blogging and blogging, hoping that once their RSS subscribers reach a magical number, they’ll be rolling in the dough (figuratively speaking, of course). It rarely happens that way.
So for now, abandon the idea that you have to be the next Simply Recipes or some other huge food blog. Just start working smarter and get help to grow your business. It will get you far.
