Is it still worth having a food blog in 2024?

Well, a large portion of readers are interested in the topic, so I went to research data from specific blogs in the field. I found some very interesting information about successful blogs and the monthly income of each of them. Some of these figures are quite high, by the way. And that's what we are going to talk about today.

Is it possible to make money with a food blog?

Yes, it's perfectly possible. And in various ways: partnerships, promoting products of interested brands, promoting your own material (ebooks, courses, consulting services, items you use for cooking, and so on), in addition to earning money through advertisements on your site. But, to strongly emphasize this "but," it depends.

And what does it depend on? Your effort and consistency in creating the site and the nature of your site. Your knowledge of the subject matters, and like all the other niches I’ve talked about here, you have to really like what you write about. Just imagine how awful it would be to have to post every week about something you don't enjoy writing about? This definitely applies when building this food blog.

Remember an important factor: competition. You are just starting, which means there are many other sites that have been on the internet for a long time. So, of course, they will have more visibility than you at the beginning (here’s a reading tip for you), so your consistency will be crucial for the growth of your site. Gradually carve out your niche.

Know that earning $55,000 a month (YES, there are food bloggers who have reported making that much with a site, and you will see who they are here) is not something that will happen overnight, so grow and develop your site, slowly but surely.

How much can a food blog earn in 2024?

It varies a lot, but generally speaking, yes, it can generate substantial income. Here are some examples of success:

• Tiffy Cooks: $45-55k per month, according to her in this post published on her site
  

  
  
  

• The Midwest Foodie Blog: Another very interesting site, focused on sharing simple recipes. The latest report released by the site in 2024 reported an income of $96,436 in Q2 of 2024.
  

  
  
  

• A Sassy Spoon: The site focuses on Cuban cuisine applied in America. The author herself takes the photos of the dishes featured on the site. The income is around $7,000 per month and comes from ads, brand deals, and other sources.
  
  
  
  

  
  
  

These and many other blogs with their earnings are available in How Much Do Food Bloggers Make? Income Insights - Recipe Card Blocks.

How can I create a food blog? Is it free?

Yes. Creating a website is free and can be done on platforms with free hosting (The Blogvertiser is a Blogspot domain, which is free). If you want a different domain, you will have to buy a domain and hosting, which has a cost, but you will certainly rank better on Google if you have good SEO and site performance.

What is the best way to make money when starting a site?

Is it hard to make money at the beginning? Yes. But it largely depends on your effort and the monetization methods you use. Of course, the chance of you landing a $500,000 contract with a less popular site is small, so you’ll focus on other strategies, such as advertising and affiliate marketing.

How to use advertising as a source of income on a food blog?

If your site has a considerable number of visits, you can earn money through ads that run on your pages. In 2024, a food blog with 50,000 monthly visits (1,667 daily visits) can earn an average of $716 per month with AdSense once it's well-established.

If your site is eligible for AdSense, you can apply for monetization. I wrote an article about how to increase your chances of getting approved by AdSense, and you can read it here.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate programs like Amazon's pay an average of 8% commission on sales of household items, kitchenware, and appliances, and 13% on food and beverages. Want an example of how you could apply this?

If you have a blog and post a video or article teaching how to bake bread, you could include affiliate links in the article that show the kitchen appliances, utensils, and other items you used for that recipe. For example, a beginner baker kit on Amazon costs $43. You would earn a $3.51 commission if someone buys that product. And not only that, here's the secret: you will earn a commission on any other product that person buys on Amazon if they accessed it through your affiliate link. If they buy, say, a set of bowls for $85.99 as well, you would earn a $6.87 + $3.51 commission.

Just by promoting items you used, you would have earned $10.38 from a sale of a product you didn't even have to stock. If your site has 1,000 visits per day and can convert 0.5% of those visits into a sale (5 converted visits), you would earn: $10.38 * 5 = $51.90 per day.

In addition, you can promote recipe e-books, stories about specific cuisines, and more. An example of an article that talks about this is available on this site: Discover the Flavors of Brazil: Why You Need These Recipes in Your Kitchen.

Reaching your audience for a food blog

Social media, along with organic search on Google (and others, like Bing), are great sources of traffic for a food-focused blog. Since food is very visual, you can have significant success using traffic sources like Pinterest, Instagram, and others.

Google is an excellent source of recipe searches (who hasn’t looked up how to cook decent rice there?), so make sure to optimize your site for SEO and performance.

Instagram is great for engaging with your content. The ease of creating viral videos there (as well as on TikTok) can attract a lot of traffic to your posts.

Pinterest is a tool that has been keeping many blogs afloat after Google's algorithm updates. Pins are great traffic generators. Searches for easy dinner recipes and cooking tips are always popular there:

If you still don’t know how to create pins and use Pinterest for more traffic, check out this article.

Conclusion

As you can see, it's still very much worth having a food blog in 2024. The income through ads, partnerships, affiliates, and other methods makes this niche very profitable, potentially earning you tens of thousands of dollars if you manage to reach the top. Focus on building content, generating traffic, and again, on the content (yes, repeating to emphasize this). That is what will keep your readers coming back.

Thank you very much for being here, and I’ll see you in the next article.