This is for anyone who has had a new site setup using our GraftedPro clone service, which saves hours of technical setup so that you can get started food blogging immediately.
Page structure
Understanding the page structure helps with working with the site. Broadly speaking, the site is composed of:
- header
- content
- sidebar
- footer
Every URL on the site loads different (2) content, but has the same header, sidebar and footer.
Except for the full-width homepage, all pages are designed to use the sidebar. The contents of the sidebar are built into the homepage content.
Administrative pages (about, contact, policies) belongs in the footer.
Note: the web in general refers to URLs as (web)"pages", and WordPress choosing to use the term "page" for some types of content was a poor decision, but one that we're stuck with.
Posts vs pages
All recipes and content you want to rank for should be built as posts and organized into categories.
The recipe card is a part of a post and recipe-containing-posts are generally referred to as "recipes". It's important to distinguish that when you create a recipe in WP Recipe Maker that what you're actually creating is a recipe card that gets inserted into a post.
Confusingly, WordPress uses the word "pages" refers to content that is almost identical to "posts" but is treated slightly differently on the backend. Our setup reserves the use of "pages" for administrative content.
Demo content
The demo content exists only as a layout assistant and should be deleted immediately after you create 20 of your own recipes.
How to win food blogging
Your only job for the first 12 months is to put out 100 keyword-researched, high quality recipes. Nothing else will make any difference for your future success at this point - not styling, not newsletters, not social.
Based on seeing thousands of our customers succeed over the years, here are your benchmarks:
- 1 year: 100 recipes + 100 backlinks
- not monetized but traffic ~10,000/month and growing
- 1.5 years: 150 recipes + 150 backlinks
- ~50,000 pageviews/month
- ~$1,000/month in ad revenue
- 2 years: 200 recipes + 200 backlinks
- ~200,000 pageviews/month
- ~$5,000/month in ad revenue
- 3 years: 300 recipes + 500 backlinks
- ~500,000 pageviews/month
- ~$15,000/month in revenue
- 5 years: 500 recipes + 1000 backlinks
- 1,000,000+ pageviews/month
- ~$35,000/month in revenue
What makes us the saddest is seeing people who have been blogging for 2, 3, or even 5 years and still don't get any traffic and can't qualify for an ad network to generate income. This is due purely to content.
Content
Content is broken down into:
- keyword research
- content quality
- image quality
- video
There's far too much for us to cover here, and you'll be learning and adapting for years to come, but here's a brief overview:
You must write content that is properly keyword researched - that means it has enough search volume to justify investing time writing, and is low enough competition that you can actually rank.
Use the Recipe Post Template to format your posts. Your post content must be the best formatted and complete for the specific term you're writing for.
It must have HIGH QUALITY photography including process shots and clear instructions.
As of 2021, video is more or less essential was well, because it monetizes the best, all social platforms are moving towards promoting it, and Google is requiring it as part of recipe schema.
Once you've been blogging for about a year, you can expect to spend a full 8 hours researching, writing, cooking, photographing a recipe (except video). Video adds another ~4 to this.
Before you get competent at this process, it will take you multiple days for a single post.
Categories
Put all of your content into an "all recipes" category until you have 50+ of your own recipes. Categories have no importance until you actually have enough content to categorize.
Images
Review the image optimization guide as this is a key underpinning for all your sites images.
Logo
You'll want to review the Modern Menu document to understand why things are set up the way they are.
Customizer
The customizer is no longer used at all, except for "Additional CSS". The customizer never worked well and is being neglected by WordPress as they move towards the Full Site Editor. No part of our setup uses the customizer and you shouldn't spend any time in it.
The only thing you need to do is upload a new logo following the instructions in that document.
Styling
How your websites look determines 0% of your success. We've provided a layout and template that is used by sites doing $500,000/year and more.
Do not waste time on styling until you're at least 2 years in. When you're ready to customize a site, pay a competent developer like CultivateWP for a $20,000 fully custom site design.
The reason this is necessary is because our setup has had almost 10 years of iteration with feedback on SEO, accessibility, mobile optimization, pagespeed and user experience. Complying with all of this severely limits design choices and 90% of customizations we've seen any non-full-time-web-developer make will violate one or all of these requirements.
The only way to safely customize a theme that complies with modern standards in a competitive food niche is with a competent, experienced developer guiding you through the process.