Blogging is one of the best ways to communicate with the world. It’s so amazing to be able to put your thoughts across the world and see like-minded people connecting back.

There is no better feeling than seeing your ideas getting appreciated by a large audience and you make money from blogging.

Food is something that everybody eats, many times a day. Some fantasies to cook a delicious meal and some fantasy to eat a delicious meal.

Food is evergreen and much talked about the subject of life. Everybody likes to eat and experiment with new food. Hence, food blogs gain so much popularity and they never run out of business.

Can you make money from blogging?

You cannot just run a food blog to satisfy the fantasy of others, you need to make money from what you do. You as a food blogger would need to make money from blogging. So in this post, we will talk about 15 different legit ways of making money from your food blog and quit your boring 9-5 job.

What do Food bloggers do?

Food blogging is not just making a recipe and posting it on your blog. There is a lot more to food blogging. A food blogger is typically found involved in:

• Building connections on Social media
• Responding to comments and questions on the blog and other social media
• Dealing with the tech and non-tech issues of their blog
• Spending time in developing new Recipes
• Improving their skills in Food Photography
• Recording videos of their new recipe and then editing it
• Writing articles for their blog and social media
• Writing guest posts
• Involved in creating cookbooks
• Connecting with brands

15 Ways Food Bloggers Make Money from Blogging

Out of 15 possible ways to make money from your food blog that we are going to discuss further, we currently make money from 8 of them. We are at different stages on each of them with the highest revenue source for us being the workshops and online courses but our affiliate income and YouTube is picking up the race quickly.

Let’s begin.

1. CookBooks & Ebooks

Writing a book has always been an exciting thing for me. Remember how we used to first look at the name of the author of our school books and if my story books were of Ruskin Bond, I always used to get filled with joy.
Will people buy my books by just looking at my name on the book, because they trust me? The feeling itself is great. And best is that it helps you make money too.

So far I have only done one e-book. It was a trial to see how things work, and my first attempt was successful. It is a small book of 12 recipes. Nothing too great about photography because I was immature those days with my photography skills.

However, I was able to publish my book on Amazon. Made 5K from it. So all I need is just 20 such silly books to make 100K. And will I be making more if I produce higher-quality books? Of course yes. Quality content is worth much more than you think. And what about the hard copies of these books?

2. Sponsored Post

If you have a food blog and a good audience reach, you will have product owners reaching out to you requesting you to write something about their product in one of your posts with a link to their blog/site and in-return they are going to pay you for your services.
Sponsored posts are a great way to make money from blogging. The key to this is to keep sponsored posts limited to brands that you trust or have used personally. You want to be sure that you are not recommending the wrong product to your audience.
Your blog credibility something that you should be careful of. Also, Google might not favor too many sponsor posts in a short span.

You will also find marketers reaching out to you for sponsored posts for their clients and will pay you mere pennies, but if you happen to deal directly with the clients you will have a good pay-out. I have never preferred working with brokers.

Depending on your blog traffic people charge anywhere from ₹50 to ₹3000 per blog post. Higher the traffic, more you make per sponsored post.

I know a few people in the industry who own multiple blogs and make money from blogging via sponsored posts.

3. Food Critic

If you wonder who is a food critic, then for your academics, a food critic is someone who explores the restaurants and eating out places and writes about them and introduces the food businesses to people.
Food critics share their experiences with different places and different cuisines. Their opinion matters to their audience and hence they matter to food businesses.

Once again your follower-ship puts you at different levels in your journey of being a food critic.
Exploring different places, getting invites from restaurants all around who just want you to come, taste their food and write your opinion about them is exciting. And if you happen to be a foodie, it is too much rewarding too. But you need to be really careful as too much of an experiment with yourself and your body can also take a toll on your health.
The food industry is ever-growing and ever-evolving and so is the demand for food critics. Food critics may initially start on some barter system, but as their follower-ship and authority in the space increases their pay-out could range between 10K to 15K per visit to up to a few lacs to cover a complete event.
One of our friends in the industry gets full house booze with his gang. A pay-out of 20K for himself and 5K per gang member. The deliverables are to bring the gang of influencers for the tasting and each of the gang members should cover the event on their Instagram.
A lot of fun isn‘t it? Should we call it the best-entertained way to make money from blogging?

4. Recipe Development

Brands lookout for people to develop a perfect recipe using their products. One of our clients from Hyderabad approached us to get a perfect recipe for Pizza and Burger using their healthy flours.

We also had a café approaching us to design their menu and develop some recipes for them. However, since we did not like the proposal, we did not pick the offer. But that’s an opportunity area too.
However, social media is a game-changer here. If you have a strong social media presence, you will find people connecting with you.
But if you shy away from social media, you will need to hunt for the client and approach them for the work. How much you can earn completely depends on how strong your social media presence.

5. Offer Meal Planning Service

Because you have readers and followers who trust you, you can help them by offering a meal planning service. One of the biggest challenges that every homemaker struggles with at least three times a day is “What to make in the meal right now?” You can become their meal planner and help them with daily, weekly or monthly meal planning.

Along with that, you can also prepare a list of groceries they will need for the meal plan you have shared and use affiliate links on the grocery list. You might start with small, but this is an income source that is repetitive and can build a constant stream of money inflow for your business.

6. Display Advertisement

It is one of the simplest ways to make money from blogging. Different Ad Networks that pay you a certain amount of ₹₹ for displaying advertising on your blog. Generally, it is some dollar amount per 1000 impressions. Different ad types and categories will have different earnings and you will need to select what you want to display on your blog.
10 most popular ad networks that I know are:

1. Adsense
2. AdThrive
3. Bidvertiser
4. HilltopAds
5. Infolinks
6. Media.net
7. Mediavine
8. Popads
9. Propeller Ads
10. Revenuehits
    While you play your cards on display advertising, you must be really careful of not overdoing advertisements on your blog posts that it becomes an endless tunnel of advertisement and the user experience is destroyed.

You need to have visitors visiting your blog regularly and spending more and more time on your blog for you to get paid on display advertising.

7. Affiliate Income

Most of the e-commerce websites offer an affiliate program which when you join, you can promote their products and when people buy from what you have promoted you earn a commission.
It doesn’t cost anything to the customer, but because you have helped the e-com site to gain a new customer, they give you affiliate income. We at AnybodyCanBake use affiliate channels to make money from blogging.
Top E-Com sites offering an affiliate income are:

• Amazon
• Flipkart
• eBay
• Indiamart
• TataCliq
• Apple
• Snapdeal
• Shopclues
• Myntra
• Jabong
  Snapdeal, Shopclues, Myntra, and Jabong have affiliate programs through affiliate networks.
  Apart from that many companies have their affiliate program and you will need to join those programs individually.

If you understand affiliate properly, this could turn out to be a great source of income.

8. Food Styling and Photography

If your photography skills are great and you are creative with your plating, this is your area to make money from a food blog. Food, unless presented well and photographed beautifully, does not excite people. Brands, Restaurants, Bloggers, Advertisers, Publishers, they all need good food photographs.

Show your photography and styling skills on your blog, connect with prospective clients especially in F&B areas and sell your services to them. This is a digital age and company needs digital media to promote themselves.

9. Writing Services

If you are not good with your photography skills, fret not. There are tons of bloggers who need writing services. If you have the skill to articulate with words, you could start selling your writing skills. And since you understand food better than others, your writing skills will be much preferred by food bloggers

Depending on your writing skills, you can easily make between ₹0.50 per word to ₹2.00 per word. The more refined you are in your writing, the more you write SEO friendly articles the more the pay-out would be. However, more than the SEO friendliness of the articles it’s about how engaging your writes-ups are.
I know a few people who not only write articles for food bloggers but also create recipes and write recipes for them.
Once you join hands with a blogger, most likely it is going to be repetitive work. People who devote full time to this can write anything between 2000 words to 4000 per day. And it means that your earnings (only from writing) can range anything between 30K to 240K per month.
We at AnyBodyCanBake are always on a lookout of good content writers. And if you feel you have great abilities, connect with us and we will be happy to see if you can write for us.

10. Conduct Workshops

This has been our best source of earning until 2019, after which we went low on it and started testing other revenue sources like online courses.
Because you write, and have an audience that loves you and trusts you, they will be more than willing to learn things from you.

Now workshops can vary from self-hosted workshops to a workshop hosted by a partner. Collaborations with related brands can help you get a lot of visibility and audience for your workshop.
For example, you can collaborate with kitchen manufacturers and have a mutual association where you use their space and advertise them. In-return they also advertise you in their network creating a win-win situation for both the parties.
Exploring the opportunities of working with corporates could also be a great way to make money from blogging. Corporates look for new ideas to integrate into their monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and annual fun activities. Cooking workshops and baking workshops have been trending in companies.

11. Online Courses

Online learning is the current way of learning. The new generation has moved largely towards online learning because it provides a lot of additional benefits over the traditional classroom learning.
Online courses also open up the size of the audience you can cater to. The ability to cater to a large audience helps you maximize your earnings. Now you are no longer bound within the geographical boundaries.
And so is the student. You can have your followers from any part of the world, and they might be interested in learning from you. But because you are miles away from them, online learning is the only way to go.

We opened up to the world of online learning starting from September 2019 and by the end of 2019, we had already served more than 500 people. I like the scalability of online courses.

12. YouTube

There is hardly anyone who can deny the fact that videos attract the maximum eyeballs. And you would have seen many people turning to videos when it comes to content creation. It’s relatively easier and cheaper than ever, to create video content.
Creating video content is more fun when you know that it can make you money. YouTube is by and large is the leader in video content. You can open a YouTube channel and add video content and start monetizing.

YouTube will display certain advertisements on your video while it plays at the user end and in turn share the advertising commission with you.
There is a huge opportunity that lying on the table when it comes to video content creation. Somebody needs to take effort and pick it up. Read the story of Nisha Madhulika to find out what YouTube can do for you.

13. Social Media Collaboration

Again if you have a high social media presence and high engagement rate, you will have brands willing to collaborate with you. We have many brands approaching us for the same. All they want is to create content for them and promote that content in our social media. This content could be in the form of an article on a blog, or a video on YouTube or Instagram.
The amount of money you get paid could vary from the barter system to up to 50K per post. Some people charge a flat fee per post, some people charge based on the engagement level on their social profiles.
The current trend is of Instagram. If you have 10K and above followers on Instagram, I am sure you have people connecting with you for social media collaboration. As I write on the day we have close to 4.5K followers on Insta, but still, get many connections asking for the same.

14. Sell products on your website

This could go a long way. You can tie up with manufacturers of products that you trust and bring display their products on your blog. Help your audience with the benefits of those products in their life and start selling those products on your website.
You will need to convert a part of your site into an e-commerce site and start collecting orders. Pass on those orders directly to the vendors and earn your selling commissions.
The products could be anything from ingredients, tools, equipment, courses of other people and anything that helps your audience.
The start is going to be slow, but given the time and efforts into it, you will be able to build a sustainable source of regular income from it. Your audience size is going to be highly important to grow this stream of earning. You will need to focus more on the SEO and social signals for your site.
You might also like to join a vendor and take their exclusive rights to sell their products online. Like one of my friends has collaborated with a company making vegan food products and is now making money in promoting their products and conducting seminars that educate people on vegan food.

15. Teach Blogging

Remember your struggle during the early stages of your blogging. Most of the advice you got from online gurus just did not work for your blog and you had to find your winning formula with your hit and trials only.
Just like you, many struggles with their food blogging and most of them just crash because of lack of guidance.

You can transform your learnings into coaching and help budding food bloggers with the technical and non-technical aspects of blogging. You can help them learn the correct way of creating a blog, the content strategy, the keyword search and many more aspects of blogging.
We have put all our learnings in a 30 days Food Blogging Course. The goal is to help budding food bloggers to show them the path that has worked for us in a step by step method.

Finally

Looking at all the different possibilities of making money from your food blog is certainly exciting. But don’t mistake this with an easy money-making scheme. Making it work needs a lot of passion, persistence, and patience. It is a combination of hard work and talent that will make you successful.

by Utkarsh Bhandarkar