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WordPress is the most famous and popular blogging platform. The platform is so popular that it’s believed that out of 1.3 billion websites on the web, WordPress powers more than 455 million sites, a fact that’s astonishing.

Users love WordPress because it’s a powerful platform that is reliable and offers endless customisation options. WordPress is an excellent platform for your blog if you’re a food blogger. Not only because it’s the best blogging platform but also because it offers countless plugins that will transform your ordinary food blog into perfection. The best part is that WordPress’s CMS is super user-friendly, so it will be super simple to manage your food blog and make it successful.

WordPress offers more than 58,000 free plugins for bloggers. It also offers thousands of plugins that cost additional money, but we guarantee you’ll find a useful plugin among the 58,000 you can use free of any charge. Before you start your food blogging journey, it’s important to remember that you first need to find a reliable web host. There are many web hosting companies on the internet, so research before you decide on one. Since you’ll be working with WordPress, the best thing you can do is choose a web host that offers WordPress hosting. To choose the best web host for your food blog, read as many reviews as possible on the Internet. For instance, HostAdvice offers countless valuable reviews, where you can find excellent information about web hosting companies that offer WordPress hosting, such as the Kinsta review; feel free to learn more about the web hosting companies that offer excellent WordPress hosting plans.

The best plugins for food blogs

As we already mentioned above, WordPress offers more than 58,000 free plugins. WordPress is the best platform to start your food blog, so make sure you get the most out of the platform by using some of the best plugins. Let’s see what the best WordPress plugins that will help you improve and transform your food blog are.

WordPress recipe plugins

There’s nothing better than adding food recipes in an instant. WordPress offers excellent recipe plugins that will make the job easy for you. The plugins will help you create recipes faster and easier, optimise your recipes for better SEO and improve the overall user experience thanks to the design and formatting.
Two of the best WordPress recipe plugins include:

Delicious Recipes for WordPress: a plugin that enables you to collect recipes from people visiting your blog. To increase your blog’s revenue, you can add an affiliate link directly to the recipe. The plugin also has an analytic dashboard that will help you track the progress of the recipes and discover which recipes are popular among your visitors.
WordPress Recipe Maker: this plugin is the most popular among food bloggers. There is a free version, but you need to pay for the premium plugin you can buy. The premium version will enable you to insert Amazon links, access the nutrition database, etc.

Yoast SEO

Whether you have a food blog, an eCommerce store, or a small business website, SEO is important. Yoast SEO is something you must download right now to make your food blog successful and attract more traffic. The plugin will give you anything you might need for SEO optimisation. Yoast SEO has incredible features, including on-page SEO analytics, readability analysis, built-in sitemap generator, snippet preview and editor. The plugin integrates with your WordPress editor and will maximise the SEO of your content as you work.

Social Snap

Social media can be crucial for success, so you must start using SocialSnap. The plugin will enable you to embed social sharing buttons on more than 30 social networks, and the best part is that it is super user-friendly. The SocialSnap includes an image sharer, creative display options, advanced customisation options, share counters, social meta tags etc.

ShortPixel Image Optimizer

ShortPixel is one of the most popular WordPress plugins among bloggers. This plugin is popular because it reduces the size of the images in a post and boosts site speed. The best part is that the image quality doesn’t get compromised. ShortPixel has recommended settings during the installation, but you can also configure the images to properly meet your needs.

Akismet

As your food blog grows and attracts more visitors, the number of spammers will also increase. To filter out spam, you will need Akismet, the plugin that monitors comment submissions. To start using the plugin, you first need to download it, create an account and then paste the API key generated for you. You also have the option to choose Akismet’s level of strictness when handling spam: keep the spam in a spam folder or get the spam deleted immediately. Akismet is popular because it has excellent features such as account spam statistics and the option to display privacy notices. The plugin is free, but a Plus or Enterprise plugin also has extra features.

Conclusion

Starting a food blog and making it successful is not easy. The reality is that the competition is tough, and you need to work extra hard to make your blog stand out from the crowd. Luckily, the WordPress plugins can help impact the food world and create a unique food blog that people will love coming back to.

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Once upon a time, blogging was the domain of a few internet-savvy people, journalling their daily lives. Fast-forward to 2018, and the blogosphere is a very crowded place. How do you make yourself and your content stand out? How can you get people to visit your blog, interact and return again and again?

We’ll share with you 11 of the key tips that we’ve learned about creating good blog content during our decade of writing and publishing.

Research your subject

Even though you may know a lot about your chosen niche, you can’t know everything. That’s what the internet’s there for! Stuck for ideas? Find inspiration for your content creation. Most importantly, visit other blogs that publish content in a similar vein. Every blogger worth their salt needs to size up the competition! Spend a few minutes or more browsing sites like Pinterest and StumbleUpon; flick through books & magazines. Lastly, attend events in person – blogger meet-ups, press days and launches are fab ways to get ideas, network and meet new people.

Know yourself

What are you good at? What do you know about? What are you interested in? Do you suffer from wanderlust? A travel blog is a perfect way for you to share your recommendations for stay-cations and trips abroad. A parenting blog can be a useful tool for stay-at-home mums & dads to connect with like-minded folks. Have you just got engaged? Then, it’s a good time to make and share your plans via a wedding blog. A general lifestyle blog can incorporate all these different segments as your life takes its different twists and turns.

Know your audience

Getting to know your audience helps you develop your niche. Find out who your readers are; investigate your visitor numbers and how many pages they visit. Demographic information including their age range, gender, location, whether they’re likely to have children and the type of device they use to visit your blog is all available from sites such as Google Analytics, Quantcast and Alexa.

Content is king

Perfect use of grammar, punctuation, vocabulary and spelling should go without saying. Check, recheck and recheck again your content before hitting that ‘publish’ button. Use a catchy subject line. Pitch it right – don’t use too much jargon, cliché or acronyms. Make it interesting; use humour and find your ‘voice’.

There are a number of tools you should be using to ensure your copy is in tip-top shape. There’s a free version of Grammarly which helps you improve your sentence structure, punctuation and check your spelling. Activate the built-in spell check if you’re using a CMS such as WordPress or Blogger. Make sure your settings are set to your mother language – in our case, UK English as opposed to US, CAN, or AUS. Save thesaurus.com in your browser for when you encounter that ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ moment. Ditto, dictionary.com – sometimes you need to check if a word actually means what you’re trying to say, or find out that the adjective form of the noun ‘adjective’ is… ‘adjectival’!

In your own words

Under no circumstances plagiarise other people’s content. Firstly, it’s just rude. Also, you (and they) may be penalised by Google. Lastly, your credibility will be seriously damaged. If you must use other people’s words, enclose them in quotation marks and credit them using a link, if appropriate. For example:

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe. Albert Einstein

If you want to use someone else’s image, contact them for permission first. If you don’t receive a response and you still want to use the image, credit the source and include a link back to the website or web page where you found it.

Consider the layout

Make use of headings, paragraphs, bullet points, numbered lists, bold fonts & italics; but don’t go overboard. Make it easy to read, otherwise, visitors will click away somewhere else.

Ensure your content is accessible to disabled people. Think about your visitors who may be visually impaired. Include alt tags for all your images for those that use a screen reader. Set your font size large enough to make the text easy to read. Make certain the contrast between text and the background is easy on the eye. Dark grey, sans-serif text on an off-white background, is ideal.

Include media

Break up text-heavy posts with photos, diagrams and illustrations. There are a number of websites where you can download copyright-free stock images for use in blog posts. Two of our favourites that offer high-quality, eye-catching photos are Pexels and Unsplash.

Make short, informative, relevant videos. Upload them to YouTube or Vimeo and embed them into your posts to save on your precious hosting space. Being stored on YouTube/Vimeo also makes them available to a global audience.

Don’t play hard to get

Be SEO-friendly – If your blog is on the WordPress platform, Yoast is one of the first plugins you should install. There is a free and a premium version (currently £69). It makes light work of inserting SEO title, focus keyword(s), meta description and so much more!

Go international – Do you have a fairly large foreign readership? Use tools/plugins to make your blog multi-lingual.

Share your hard work

It can be time-consuming, however, cross-posting your content across social media is essential. Luckily, there are a number of free scheduling tools at your disposal. We like Postcron, which allows you to share and schedule posts (with images) on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn and others… all in one go!

Engagement goes both ways

Regularly leave relevant comments on other blogs and Instagram posts. Pin/repin other people’s Pinterest images. Join groups in your niche on Facebook, comment on posts and engage with other members. Doing these things often results in people going to check out your blog.

Analyse your stats

Which of your posts get the most hits? What subjects are the most popular? What gets commented on and shared the most? What time of day is the best time to post? Conversely, which of your posts get no attention? Can you go back and improve them?

Continuously tweak and work on your content. Over time, and with experience, your blogging will steadily develop and improve. Do you have any other ideas for creating good blog content? Share your content marketing tips below!