For many food bloggers, the ultimate dream is to “go pro” and turn their blog into a business that can generate a full-time income. It’s possible, but it takes a lot of hard work, dedication, luck, and diversification to make that much money from your food blog. That last one, diversification, is a concept that people don’t often think about when they consider creating a full-time income from their blog.
People often use the phrase “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” when referring to diversification, but that phrase doesn’t really work for what we’re trying to communicate in this post. We like this phrase better:
Fill your empty egg carton.
Okay, we’ll be the first to admit that it’s not as catchy, but the visual of the egg carton helps to communicate the point that we’re hoping to make, which is this…
It is extremely challenging to generate a full income from just one income source, such as an egg, but it becomes much simpler to generate that much income from your food blog when you fill all of the potential income sources, such as the openings in the egg carton. Utilize some actual numbers. The most recent studies have shown that the median household income for a family in the U.S. is $70,784. We’re going to use this number as the base income for our “full-time blogger” experiment. We know that it’s not enough for some people to live on (and it’s more than enough for others to live on), but we had to pick a number to use.
The monthly (before tax) income for someone that makes $70,784 comes out to $5,898. We’re going to use this number and divide it among all of the possible ways to create an income as a food blogger. My goal is to demonstrate to you the steps you need to take to fill in the gaps in your egg carton (diversifying) and generate a full-time income from your blog. You would need to generate $5,898 in monthly income from just one egg (one source of income). Each of the two eggs would need to produce $2,949 per month. In our example, we have 18 different income sources, so 18 eggs would need to net $328 per month. That will be our “per egg” price range. Is it the objective to generate income from every conceivable source? No.
Is generating income from as many sources as possible the objective? Absolutely.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at each “egg” and estimate what it would take to earn $328 from that income source.
1. Display Advertising
When you think about how to make money from food blogging, display advertising is probably the first thing that comes to mind. Display advertising is commonly found in a blog’s header, sidebar, footer, and body of the text in a blog post.
Most display advertising is paid based on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) or CPC (cost-per-click) basis. Depending on the time of year, you can expect to earn between $1-$3 for high-quality CPM based ads and $.25-$1.00 for CPC ads (for a food blog).
Although it is difficult to provide a precise traffic figure, we are confident that you could earn $328 per month from display advertising with anywhere from 50,000 to 75,000 monthly visitors to your website.
2. Affiliate Marketing
Promoting a product or service to your audience via an affiliate link earns you a commission on any sales made through that link. This could look like sharing the kitchen tools or food products you use and would recommend for food bloggers. Let’s use Blendtec (a blender company with an affiliate program) as an example. A 8% commission is paid out through their affiliate program. That means anytime that someone clicks on your affiliate link and purchases a product, you get 8% of the purchase price. In order to get to $328 dollars a month, you would need to sell $4,100 worth of Blendtec products. That might sound like a lot, but many of Blendtec’s blenders cost at least $400, which means clicks on your affiliate links would need to result in 11 blender purchases in a month.
Keep in mind that these numbers are just for one affiliate program. There are thousands and thousands of affiliate programs (like Amazon) that you can choose from and promote on your blog (here’s a list of nearly 70 more options from our FBP Affiliate Expert, Justine!), so the $328 price point is easily achievable if you’re intentional about doing smart affiliate marketing.
3. Freelance Writing
Writing for a living is a great way to make the transition from your “regular” job to full-time blogging. If you find yourself getting to the point where you’re almost ready to make the switch to blogging full-time but can’t quite justify it financially, then you can use freelancing as a way to quickly bump up your income.
Just a word of warning with this one: be sure that you don’t spend too much time freelancing if your ultimate goal is to be blogging full-time. Continuing to add high-quality content to your publication (your blog), not other publications, is one of the most crucial aspects of building a blog. As soon as you can justify it financially you should prioritize producing content for your blog full-time.
Despite my note of caution, at $125 per post, you could earn $328 a month by publishing just three freelance articles.
4. Recipe Development
Many food companies need recipes to promote or integrate into their product, and oftentimes these food companies don’t have in-house staff that can do the recipe development for them.
Enter: food bloggers.
Food bloggers are frequently approached by businesses to develop recipes. As you grow the list of recipes on your food blog, you’re essentially growing your recipe portfolio.
Recipe development, much like freelance writing, is another example of an income source that can be used as you transition into blogging full-time. Carefully consider any jobs that pay less than $100 per recipe, as your time might be better spent developing content for your own blog.
You can develop three recipes per month at $150 per recipe, and you’d be earning well over $328 each month!
5. Recipe Authorization
Recipe licensing is a bit different than recipe development. With recipe licensing companies pay you for recipes that you’ve already developed (as opposed to developing a brand new recipe). The price point on recipe licensing is usually a bit lower than recipe development because it is work that you’ve already done.
If you licensed a recipe for $85 you could get to the $328 price point by licensing 4 different recipes in a month.
6. Food Photography
Much like recipes, many companies (think food and beverage companies, restaurants, publications, marketing agencies, other bloggers, etc.) need photographs of food to use. It’s important to know that the process will look a little different than when you’re photographing for your own food blog when you take on freelance food photography projects. This is a great way to make money from the skills you’ve developed while building your food blog. It’s important to know those three things when you’re determining your rate for food photography projects. For example, Lindsay, Content Director at our sister site, Pinch of Yum once did a photo shoot and asked for $100 per photo (one photo per recipe) shooting a total of 10 recipes. This seemed like a good deal at first, but we quickly found out that shooting 10 different recipes took a lot of time, effort, and money. On top of that, once we sent the photos over, they came back with specific requests for the photos to be different, like using a different bun for a burger or having less lettuce in a salad. In the end, we felt like $100 per photo wasn’t worth the time and energy it took, so keep that in mind!
A full-day food photography shoot could earn you anywhere from $300 (very low end) to $10,000 (very high end).