Fourteen months ago I started food blogging, one of my first recipes was a traditional Madrid Sea-Bream recipe, today I cooked the same Sea-Bream recipe to celebrate the last post of KitchenVoyage, I am restarting my professional IT career.
I would like to say thank you to the 30.000 visitors that I had in all these months, I hope that everyone has enjoyed reading like I did writing and learning about cooking, blogging on social media, really was a pleasure and a great experience
Here are my conclusions about my food blogging experience
Cooking at home
1. Eating at home is healthier and the best way to lose weight. Before I started I used to "cook" or just heat from M&S or Waitrose easy cook or ready meals, since I cook at home I lost 8 kilograms having 5 meals a day including pasta twice a week, home-made pizza and cream and butter based dishes.
2. Eating and cooking at home will develop your palate and you will have a most accurate sense of flavours and food cost and learn when an ingredient is at its best.
3. With the time you will get more selective when you are eating out and you will appreciate the skills of a good chef and understand which top restaurants really are worth visiting.
4. Traditional local British food can be very tasty and healthy like Mediterranean cuisine.
5. Eating healthy, organic and local has a cost, but a good shop planning switching between your supermarket and local food store can be the key to becoming a greener consumer.
Food blogging
1. Amateur food blogging in Europe is economically unsustainable and very competitive, a company will pay you to have a banner or promote their products in your blog, for me it is a mistake because this kind of blog are the closest with the clients. But writing is the only way that they will get in touch with you and you will receive offers for joining their social media team.
2. Dont just write your blog, you need to Tweet often, have a facebook page or Google+ make interesting comments in another foodpages and activitly participate in at least 2 food blogging communities and when more local you can be more popular. It took me a while to understand but for me was a 200% increase in my visits.
3. Reply inmediately and listen to your followers and learn how to use Google Analytics and you will see which are your strong and weakest posts, when you reach that point focus on your best. I didn't and that was one of my problems to get more visitors. Funnily enough when I started I tried to make a blog about British and Spanish Food, but my most popular blog are about travelling and Japanese recipes, but I didn't change my subject and I reach a ceiling level of visitors.
4. Many social media say that the content and find a niche market is half of the job done, and it is true but when you are writing recipes the most important is the photography by far, shot professional pictures has a cost.
5. The last one more than a conclusion is some advice. For the Spanish speaking food bloggers just let you know that the American, British and other countries that speak or understand English are very keen to learn about your local cooking, so will be very good idea to translate to English all your food heritage instead to make them to read the food interpretation of out culture of the marketing teams of Jaime Oliver or Rick Stein (for example). The other advice is for the American/British digital marketing companies, Spain and mainly South America are catching up and growing fast with the new technologies and are a really big market with a big number of companies and business that with a good local digital marketing platform can be a good investment.
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