The Top 5 Challenges of Running a Cooking Website and How to Overcome Them

byMariaDale

2.2K followers

2 months ago

I operate several cooking websites, most of them are "recipe" websites with 2 main cooking websites that provides cooking lessons.

Foodblogs, Foodies, Cooking Niche, whatever you want to call it, one thing that remains is that FOOD and anything to do with FOOD will always be a HOT niche, with VERY HIGH competition.

Yet, because there are literally BILLIONs and TRILLIONS of recipes that can be developed with from the MILLIONS AND MILLIONS of herbs, spices, vegetables, meats....well you get the point....because there is such a magnitude of CONTENT for the taking (LITERALLY)...there are literally BILLIONS of long tail keyword recipes with ZERO (seriously zero) or very low competition yet HIGH demand.

Now for all of you foodies, I thought I'd share with you the top 5 challenges I have encountered when operating my food websites:

1. Creating High Quality Content Consistently

Ok, what I do is a 4 to 1 rule. I post 4 recipes, with NO keyword research. The purpose for doing this is to add fresh new content to keep site visitors coming back for more, and of course for the search engines.

Then I post 1 recipe that I have researched.

Where do I get my recipes? Well when I first started, I got my recipes from Gutenrberg. All of the cookbooks there are now in the public domain, free to use for personal use and profit.

Over the years, I have found many other ways to acquire recipes in the "public domain" with chest of books being a GREAT website for this, and of course by purchasing old recipe cooking books off eBay.

What I would do is select a recipe, add it to my recipe plugin, grab a photo of one of the ingredients from a stock photography site and use that as my featured image, then I'd write an article about the recipe, based on which niche food website I was posting it to. If it was a health site, the the health benefits of fresh home cooked far, if a country southern charm website then an article about sharing wholesome foods with your loved ones.

Get creative, and write about the benefits of serving that recipe to whomever, for whatever reason!

2: Mastering SEO

Eh, SEO is not as hard today as it was when I started online (I started before Google was born). Grab Yoast, get the green dot, follow partha's potions....STUDY THE SEO training found here! STUDY STUDY STUDY...READ READ READ...LEARN LEARN LEARN....TEST TEST TEST...ANALYZE ANALYZE ANALYZE

That's honestly the ONLY way you will ever master SEO...thankfully today there are MANY tools to help you become a master at SEO much quicker than back in the day when all we had was notepad and our brains as our best tools.

3. Building and Engaging an Audience

Once you start gaining visitors, of course you will want o keep them engaged, entertained and EXCITED about what you have to offer!

Encourage visitors to post photos when they cook the recipes you provide, and let them know the best one will be set as the "Featured photo (with glorious credit of course)

Build your mailing list, I have found weekly "Easy Desserts" to be the biggest hit, people love sweets and they love to cook them, but many dessert recipes are too complex for the average Jane or Joe.

Create ecookbooks and publish on Amazon, this alone can bring in a HUGE audience!

4. Monetizing Your Website

There are literally a gazillion ways you can make money with your website.

My fave is Amazon, I do not believe that many people realize what they have as an Amazon Affiliate.

You literally get an online storefront of MILLIONS of products that you can earn from! You do not have to pay for a storefront, insurance, you do not have to hire employees, you do not have to provide customer support, you do not have to worry about returns, complaints....all you have to do is create content, link strategically and collect your earnings!

There are also many MLM companies you can utilize like this (especially in the beauty and cooking niches).

Digital products are another of my faves, especially eCookBooks!

5. Staying Motivated and Avoiding Burnout

This is another thing that even I suffer from to this day. You get excited, start something new that YOU KNOW is going to do GREAT. You work your fingers to the bones, check your results, watch your sites traffic, all the while getting more and more excited as you continue to work towards whatever goals you have set for yourself.

Then you get what I call "Burned Bottomed Out" You get tired from the energy you have put towards your project, you take a moment to rest, maybe for a day, maybe for a week, then you get back to your tasks and get dismal as you see that after writing 25 articles in 5 days, you have gotten a total of "3 visitors".

You sit there thinking "What's the use, this is not working, where's the money and traffic???"

Now honestly, this is THE HARDEST part of running a website.

You want to give up, but you do not want to give up. But the motivation is not there any longer.

So what do you do to stay motivated?

What I do is this, I remind myself that Google is a snail, Google takes it's time indexing sites sometimes, it takes it's time ranking sites, it takes it's time approving for adsense. Google is in NO HURRY!

So what I do to stay motivated, is I FORGET GOOGLE. This is MY business, I run it MY WAY, and I want to make sure that it does NOT depend on just one course completely for my traffic!

By depending on just SEO, one is setting themselves up to fail DRASTICALLY.

All it takes is one change in the search engines algorithm and your site is DEAD (been there, seen that, suffered greatly, howled like a wolf, taught me a VALUABLE lesson, got back going).

So to break the burnout frustration, head over to Canva and learn how to create some great posts for your pinterest account! Use the free chatgpt to come up with some great tweets for your twitter account! Start participating in reddit, it can be fun!

eBooks, mailing list, all these things can help you gain traffic and help increase your profits.

BUT ABOVE ALL, Don't be a snail. Start as a turtle, then the more you do, the more you will accomplish, and the better (and faster) you will get at things.

Many years ago I struggled with wordpress, it would take me WEEKS to get a wordpress website up and running.

Today, I can get one up and running within a day, this includes site design, categories, at least 5 articles, my fave plugins, social follow links and my legal pages. And I do this WITHOUT outsourcing any of my work.

Anyone here can do the same, if you just keep pressing on and do not give up!

Now I know this post is about cooking websites, but it can be applied towards any niche. I just use cooking for this, because that is my second best niche.

So, how to overcome those challenges:

Keep pressing on

If you find yourself in a Rut, REACH OUT! You have a community of thousands here to cheer you on!

Find a skill to master, research it here, then master it! Don't know anything about pinterest? Search it here and start learning! Want to know how to make complex changes to your wordpress theme, search here, ask if you can't figure it out, find a mentor, or google it! You can LEARN!

Now myself, I do not know much about paid advertising because the one time I tried it, it ate way too much of my funds. So I can't help with that, but when it comes to wordpress, THAT I can help with and I encourage anyone to reach out to me if you find yourself in need of wordpress assistance!

You can also look at some of my previous blog posts and training to learn about some of my FAVE plugins and themes.

And if you are a foodie with a cooking related website, message me! I will gladly share the links to the public domain works I use to locate fantastic recipes!