How To Become An Influencer & Make Money (2024 Guide for Food Bloggers)

A lot of individuals express their passion for cooking and eating on food blogs. However, what if you also want to profit financially from your passion? Blogging about food may be very enjoyable and financially rewarding. Will you be one of the food bloggers who are already profitable in 2024?

Although the food and culinary niche might be competitive, there can be significant rewards if you put in the work to produce excellent content and foster a readership. This post will act as your how-to manual for becoming a food blogger, taking you through each step necessary to turn your love of cooking into a successful business.

How Much Do Food Bloggers Make?

So, what is the potential income for a food blogger? The largest food blogs bring in millions of dollars a month more course, there are a lot more blogs that have no revenue at all at the opposite end of the scale. Let’s examine a few motivational cases of the most prosperous food bloggers who have made money off of their blogs to get a sense of the possible income in this industry.

• In 2021, Tiffy Cooks, a well-known food blogger, made an astounding $45,000 to $55,000 a month.
• In 2019, The Clean Eating Couple declared their yearly income to be $150,000.
• Stephanie’s Sweet Treats reported earnings in the range of $4,000 to $9,000 at the beginning of 2022.
• Just the first quarter of 2022 brought in almost $60,000 for the Midwest Foodie Blog.
• Pinch of Yum sticks out as a shining example of what culinary blogging can achieve. In 2019, it brought in $90,000 per month, and by 2021, it was making $10.5 million.
• A Sassy Spoon makes a consistent $7,00 every month.

Food Blogger Salary

It’s crucial to have a reasonable estimate of future earnings if you’re thinking about becoming a professional food blogger and are searching for jobs rather than launching your site. As of January 31, 2024, the average annual compensation for food bloggers in the US is $62,275, according to ZipRecruiter.

This amount might give you a ballpark indication of what to anticipate, but remember that earnings can differ significantly depending on experience, region, and particular company.

How Food Bloggers Can Earn Money

You most likely don’t know where to begin when it comes to monetizing your food delivery app development if you’re new to the blogging scene. You have access to hundreds of distinct cash streams to select from. The majority of really profitable blogs have several revenue streams, but you may first concentrate on only a few.

1. Display Ads on Your Food Blog

One of the most popular methods to monetize a recipe blog is through display advertising. WordPress display advertisements are easy to get started with, but before you can start earning a substantial amount of money, you will need a lot of visitors. Simply said, display adverts are sections of your website with text and picture links promoting other websites. Display ad networks will pay you automatically each time a visitor clicks the link in the advertisement and sets up these online adverts.

The simplest ad network to get started with is Google Adsense. Ad space on your recipe blog will be provided by Google depending on the content of your blog. All you have to do is create an account and upload a few lines of code. Additionally, they will provide you with a tracking ID so you may monitor the number of clicks and money each advertisement receives. There are no minimum traffic criteria, to begin with, but to be accepted into the program, you must have an established blog with excellent content.

If your blog starts to receive more visitors, you should switch to a higher-paying ad network, such as Mediavine or Adthrive. These networks may pay you a lot more for each ad placement and work with big-name businesses. Every network has its standards for acceptability, most of which involve a minimum amount of traffic each month.

You may add video advertisements to your website in addition to text and picture ads on certain ad networks. This may be a very effective method of increasing revenue.

2. Selling Ad Space Directly

Instead of going through an ad network, you may sell companies ad space on your website directly if you want to optimize your advertising revenue. This strategy has the benefit of allowing you to keep all ad income without having to pay an ad network commission. Also, you have more authority over the kinds of advertisements that appear on your website.

You will, however, have to locate sponsors, haggle over costs, and post the advertisements yourself. Also, the majority of companies will only wish to purchase advertising space from websites that have a track record of strong reader engagement and traffic.

Create a page on your website with the various ad packages, traffic statistics, and contact data to get things started. Additionally, you may create a list of companies that you think would be interested in advertising on your site and get in touch with them.

Businesses won’t be willing to purchase ad space directly from you unless you have a significant volume of visitors and a solid reputation with advertisers. However, once you get to this stage, you may demand prices that are far greater than those offered by an ad network. Fortunately, adding and managing adverts on your WordPress site will be a breeze with the help of free plugins like Advanced Ads.

3. Affiliate Marketing

You may monetize your blog without having to saturate it with ugly advertisements by using affiliate marketing. A merchant and an affiliate have a connection known as affiliate marketing. In exchange for promoting the merchant’s goods or services, the affiliate earns a commission on each sale that results from their efforts.

For example, you may have a pancake recipe on your website and mention in the recipe description that you use a certain whisk to achieve the ideal batter consistency. You will get paid a small commission for recommending that whisky to readers who go on to buy it from Amazon or another online store after clicking on your affiliate link.

Because Amazon is a reputable eCommerce company with a large product variety, it’s one of the easiest affiliate programs to get started with. All you have to do is register as an affiliate with Amazon and utilize a unique link each time you connect to a product there to begin earning affiliate commissions. You can cash out as soon as your balance hits a specific amount, and your commissions will be computed immediately.

Additional affiliate programs are available for enrollment. While some merchants provide their direct affiliate programs, many use third-party affiliate programs such as Pepperjam, CJ.com, or ShareaSale to recruit affiliates for their items.

Physical goods aren’t the only things offered as affiliate items. Promoting digital services like the finest WordPress hosting, online courses, and software tools may also bring in money.

4. Sell Recipe Books & E-Books

Using affiliate links and ads on your site is a terrific method to generate passive revenue. However, why not think about selling your goods if you have a loyal following and have established a reputation for yourself and your culinary recipes?

Several accomplished food bloggers have transitioned from blogging online to selling cookbooks. For instance, Ree Drummond’s cookbook, popularly known as “The Pioneer Woman,” which is the inspiration behind the wildly popular blog of the same name, is now the best-selling cookbook on Amazon.

You can think of publishing an eBook of a different sort in addition to traditional recipes. If your writing skills match your culinary prowess, you could even publish a fiction novel with a culinary theme. Other ideas for blog posts include how to start a food blog or organize your kitchen.

To become a successful writer, you no longer need to sign a contract with a publisher. Not only can you sell eBooks straight from your food blog, but self-publishing on Amazon and other sites like Kobo is also quite straightforward. In addition to the eBook edition, you may choose to publish a print copy of your book. You won’t need to invest any money upfront with the “print on demand” concept; instead, you’ll get paid each time a book is sold.

5. Sponsored Posts & Brand Deals

Sponsored articles and brand deals are two other common ways that food bloggers make money from their blogs. Blog entries created in cooperation between a blogger and a business or brand are known as sponsored posts. The company will frequently pay the blogger a fee or provide them with free ingredients to utilize in their delicious recipes in exchange for the blogger publishing the blog article.

company agreements, as opposed to sponsored articles, are a continuous agreement between the company and the blogger. In these agreements, the brand may pay for an agreed-upon package of blog articles and social media mentions, or it may pay for frequent mentions on your blog.

Sometimes referred to as a “brand ambassadorship,” food bloggers might receive thousands of dollars in exchange for endorsing a particular company or product on their website several times a year. The ability to start with a small following or blog traffic and progressively boost your revenue as your site grows is one of the wonderful things about monetizing your blog in this way. For instance, as your traffic and social media following grow, you may begin to give brand mentions in return for free items and progressively raise the price you charge for each post.

Make direct contact with businesses or sign up for an influencer marketing agency to begin working with them. Agencies handle discovering jobs and negotiating pricing in addition to taking a part of your expenses.

6. Create an Online Course

You can think about making an online course to teach people the skills you wish to teach them. Because they have already developed a devoted following of people who rely on their recipes and culinary guidance, food bloggers are in a unique position to offer online courses. Furthermore, a lot of food bloggers specialize in particular fields, such as baking or gluten-free cuisine, which might serve as the foundation for a course for readers who want to advance their knowledge in these areas.

An online course might essentially be an eBook, and you could sell a PDF or other electronic file that has all the content in it. On the other hand, if you want to provide your students with a more engaging learning environment, you might want to think about utilizing a platform like Teachable or Udemy, which let you incorporate video lectures, tests, and other interactive elements that students can do at their leisure in your course.

These platforms operate in various ways. For instance, you may determine the cost of your course using Teachable, but there is a monthly fee for the course hosting in addition to a fee for each transaction. Conversely, Udemy doesn’t collect fees; nonetheless, the majority of its courses are quite inexpensive, and the platform will take a cut of the money you earn.

Should you find neither of these models appealing, you have the option to explore alternative online learning environments or create your own interactive course by utilizing a WordPress LMS (learning management system) plugin.

If you’ve already developed a following for your food blog, creating an online course might be a highly lucrative method to monetize your site. However, it can also be incredibly labor-intensive. If you are an expert in a field, you may be able to charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a comprehensive course that teaches students all they need to know.

It’s not always necessary to design a cooking course. Creating a prosperous food blog can also assist you in learning useful skills like social media administration and food photography. Take a look at some other food blogs to gather ideas for potential courses.

7. Develop an App

If your cookbook is already well-received, you might want to think about creating an app to go along with it. Developing a recipe app is one of the best ways to interact with your audience. It offers interactive material and videos of recipes. It may also be a very profitable endeavor if it succeeds.

You have the option to charge a one-time price for your app or to have users pay a regular cost to access updates and new recipes. To make sure that people are still paying for it, though, you’ll need to dedicate time to producing fresh material regularly.

Developing a free app that earns revenue through in-app purchases is another method of generating income using apps. However, compared to many of the other monetization strategies on our list, creating an app is a little more challenging. To design an app, you could pay a coder, but this would reduce your potential earnings.

Using a no-code app development platform, which provides you with a set of drag-and-drop tools to construct your app, is an additional choice. Using these tools is far simpler than learning how to code an application yourself.

8. Sell Merch & Physical Products

Though it may be a wonderful method to add another consistent revenue stream, this option is best left until you are already experiencing significant success with your blog. You might offer branded goods like tote bags, aprons, and clothes bearing your blog’s branding if you have a devoted following.

You can even think about creating your brand of food, dinnerware, or kitchen appliances. Some well-known bloggers collaborate with an established company to launch their product line. For instance, Joy Cho, a lifestyle blogger, has collaborated with Target to create many collections with items such as cake stands, picnic supplies, and party décor.

9. Create a Membership Site

If your fans are just begging for more of your writing, you can think about starting a membership website where you could post recipes and other content that is only available to members. This is a fantastic method to give your most devoted followers something of value, and it may be an additional source of income for your site.

A membership site could have fresh content every month, so you’ll need to invest time in developing enough recipes or other useful content to draw visitors on a regular basis. Many membership plugins let you password-protect individual resources or entire areas of your WordPress-hosted website.

10. Advertise Your Freelance Services

In addition to receiving passive revenue from their blogs, many bloggers also generate money by providing freelance services. You might provide your services to companies and people who want assistance with their own blogs or online presence if you have expertise in social media marketing, content writing, food photography, recipe formulation, or any other relevant sector.

You are free to choose how much work you wish to do and to set your fees. The best thing is that your blog shows that you are skilled and that you already have a captive audience to whom you can market your services. Although you can’t generate money from your blog through freelance work, it’s a terrific opportunity to capitalize on your following and brand to earn some additional cash on the side.

11. Coaching & Consulting

Similar to this, several well-known food bloggers have made a career out of their love by mentoring and consulting with anybody looking for guidance on food photography, blogging, recipe development, or marketing.

Offering coaching or consulting services is different from freelancing in that the former normally entails substantially higher prices and the latter usually involves limited availability of services. This is so because, unlike with particular services like writing or photography, customers pay for your expertise and counsel. Although not everyone has the skills necessary to be a coach or consultant, this might be a fantastic way for your food blog to make extra money if you think you have a lot of expertise to impart.

Start a Food Blog and Make Money Today

These are only a handful of the 2024 opportunities for starting a compensated food blog. The options for earning money from your blog are endless since new opportunities to monetize your content appear regularly.

Find out what works best for you and your audience by conducting research and experimenting with a few different approaches. There is no “correct” or “incorrect” method for monetizing your site. You may be innovative and come up with a profitable plan as long as you deliver value and produce material that readers want to read.

Now is the perfect moment to launch your food blog, if you haven’t already. Proceed accordingly when you have completed this easy, step-by-step tutorial on setting up a WordPress food blog. You may be in the kitchen killing it this time next year.

Author Bio:

Yokesh Shankar is a very experienced founder who has a proven track record in the Quick Commerce sector. As COO he oversees a unique capacity to incorporate operational efficiency and client-centricity in Transgenie technologies which has resulted in major decreases in delivery times, increased order fulfillment rates, and overall customer happiness.