The Secrets of Successful Food Blogging, via Twitter
The South By Southwest Interactive panel "The Secrets of Successful Food Blogging" wrapped up less than an hour ago. We hear from panelist Zach Brooks that it wasn't recorded, and until someone blogs it, we'll have to rely on the pointillist picture emerging from Twitteronia.
Searching the hashtag #foodsxsw gives you the tweets of folks in attendance (those who bothered to hashtag their tweets, anyway). We've excerpted the most interesting ones.
Panelists were Zach Brooks (Midtown Lunch), Cathy Erway (Not Eating Out in New York), Kalyn Denny (Kalyn's Kitchen), and Addie Broyles (Relish Austin)—moderated by Rachel Kramer Bussel (Cupcakes Take the Cake). Tweets below occur roughly in order.
On Post Frequency and Traffic
kittygutz: Don't get wrapped up in statistics. Don't care about how many people follow you on Twitter or read your blog.
kerri_qunell: "Post every day," says @MidtownLunch. Agree?
dirttodish: @kalynskitchen says if you do recipes don't worry updating every day. More people will find a good recipe if you leave it up.
amnichols: @kalynskitchen Write for SEO terms, put alt tags in the pics, take good photos - quality is much more important than frequency
[After the jump, food bloggers on community, ethics, and harnessing Twitter.]
Shams and Snark
amnichols: Blog awards are a total sham ;-) but each blog has its own measure of success.
soakland: #foodsxsw panel so far is all serious with actual information on running a food blog... unlike #urblogsux earlier which was all snark
On Community
broylesa: It's very important to give credit where credit is due (ie linking to other blogs, even if it is the competition). @midtownlunch
vegansaurus: food bloggers are the most community oriented group. totally agree! the vegan food bloggers are mad tight.
tastytouring: Brooklyn may have a great foodie comm but I bet the Austin food lovers/bloggers community is the best! Maybe I'm a bit biased tho
On Ethics
lauriewrites: @midtownLunch will not accept free food from any restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. Never intros himself to a spot before eating.
amnichols: If your review sounds disconnected (PR fed) you will lose credibility
broylesa: I write about less than 2 percent of the swag (cookbooks, restaurants, food, etc) that people send me.
Hmm, I Wonder What This Was All About
elmundodemando: Good discussion but a little weird dynamics going on up there. A little competition is always good though.
What It Takes to Start a Food Blog
foodzie: You need passion & focus to start a food blog. @midtownlunch I'd say it's the same for starting any business.
amnichols: Find a niche, get a SLR camera, and be entertaining, timely, and useful
WTF?
momopeche: Someone just coined the term "recipe gangbang." what's next? "gravy bukkake"?
On Twitter
lauriewrites: Panel split on value of twitter. @cupcakesblog digs it. @midtownlunch wants you to read his blog.
amnichols: @midtownlunch Twitter is great for letting readers know some quick info, don't post original content, use Twitter to promote blog
broylesa: Original content is GREAT for Twitter! That's why they call it "microblogging"
robquig: Yes, Brooks, you are missing the point on Twitter. See @broylesa
As always, you can follow Serious Eats on Twitter: @seriouseats
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9 Comments:
I live in Austin and I missed the panel. (I have a one-year-old.)
A panel on food blogging is a little ridiculous. I have thousands of items of original content up and don't make enough each day to buy a $5 footlong sub sandwich. (And I did original research on "footlong" and "sub.") The conference cost about $375+ to attend.
http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/food2/
Food bloggers rock (and bash pretty well, too)
By Addie Broyles | Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 01:44 PM
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we have the best food blogging community in the country right here in Austin.
(She said that--I didn't!--B.P.)
barrypopik at 8:45PM on 03/17/09
Nice! Thanks for posting that...
The coolest part of the panel was that it brought together five very distinct bloggers, with five different kinds of blogs. The one thing I hope people got out of it (which may not be conveyed in the twittering) is that you can go about creating a great food blog, and growing an audience in many ways- depending on what you are looking to achieve with your blog.
A perfect example would be this: For Kalyn's Kitchen, she does long recipe posts- that are very meticulously researched. It's not realistic to post every single day or multiple times a day. And 75% of her traffic comes from Google searches, so the success of Kalyn's Kitchen does not rely as much on the same visitors returning each and every day.
But if you have a site like mine- which is focused on helping office workers find good lunch- posting every day is incredibly important, so that your audience feels compelled to return every day.
And finally, I just want to clarify that I didn't say I didn't like Twitter, or that it wasn't good for original content. I love Twitter! And Midtown Lunch has a Twitter account... I'm just not totally sold on using the Midtown Lunch twitter account to do anything but occasionally tweet about something breaking on the site (note: occasionally. Nothing is more annoying than people who twitter every single post on their blog.) If something is important enough to twitter about, under the Midtown Lunch name, I should just blog it! That's what the blog is for, right? Personal accounts are a different story...But I'm just talking about twitter accounts you start specifically for your blog. Anybody have a thought about this? (I know you must Adam! You love twitter!)
Zach Brooks at 11:51PM on 03/17/09
Thanks for the insight, Zach. I'll have to watch the blogs for reports on the panel.
I think you're right on about the posting schedules. On recipe blogs, once day or once every few days seems fine. I am always in awe of the recipe bloggers who do one post a day with beautiful pictures. I rarely shoot photos while I'm cooking because it's too much to stop the process to capture images. Plus, the lighting in my kitchen sucks.
As far as Twitter goes, it's a mixed bag. I saw @castlebuilder tweet about using Twitterfeed to turn RSS feeds into tweets. I think that's bad news. I did that early on with @seriouseats, and it just annoyed people. Twitter is best when you use it interactively and there's actually a human behind the tweets. With the SE twitter account, I usually use it as a microblog to post things that we're either thinking about blogging on SE or for things that might not be 100 percent appropriate for the main site. And every now and then I tweet about a post we've done.
I've also used it sort of as a testing ground to gauge possible interest in an item for posting on the SE blog. But it's interesting to see that sometimes things that get a lot of Twitter play don't necessarily translate to items of interest on the blog. The Twitter audience seems different from the blog audience.
I wouldn't necessarily dismiss Twitter as a promotional tool for your blog, though. Sometimes I see someone's blog-promotional tweet before I see their post in my RSS reader or see it on their blog. But if all you use it for is tweeting that you updated, then it gets a bit old.
Adam Kuban at 12:17AM on 03/18/09
I managed to record the entire panel conversation on my phone. I'll be releasing the mp3 of it sometime tonight if I get the okay from all of the people on the panel.
nosetotailathome at 2:19PM on 03/18/09
Great! Can't wait to hear it, Ryan. How's the quality?
Adam Kuban at 2:21PM on 03/18/09
Pretty decent, all things considered. You may have to turn your speakers up a little bit though.
nosetotailathome at 2:53PM on 03/18/09
Hi Adam,
Thanks for covering this. It was great fun being on the panel. I was delayed due to a death in the family so the five of us didn't even all get to meet until we walked in the room, I'm glad to hear people thought it turned out well. I thought it was great that all of us had a slightly different take on "food blogging" too.
I do have to confess thought that Zach is overstating it a little to say that my posts are "meticulously researched." What I thought I said is that writing a home-cooking blog (where your goal is to have people actually cook the food) is very labor intensive, since you have to find something interesting to cook, buy the food, cook it, take photos, edit the photos, (clean the kitchen, hate that part) and then you can actually start to blog. I do spend many hours on my posts but not hours doing research, so I wouldn't want to claim that!
Kalyn at 7:12PM on 03/18/09
Glad for Twitter to share Nose to Tail at Home's mp3 of the panel:
broylesa: Squeal! Nose to Tail posted the mp3 of the food blogger #foodsxsw panel: http://tinyurl.com/dlz4hh
9 minutes ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
Adam, I'm so sad I didn't get to meet you after the panel! As you heard, I have a lot of respect for what y'all are doing with Serious Eats.
And now, off to clean the kitchen (you're right, Kalyn, it's the worst part of this whole gig....)
broylesa at 11:06PM on 03/18/09
Hey all! I attended the panel, and first of all, thanks to the panelists for giving us their time and expertise. You guys did great. I have some opinion to offer on a couple of the topics that came up.
On Twitter: When I tweet about food I like to think of it as the margins of a blog post. Some thought that may be interesting or useful, but doesn't really fit in as a whole thought during a post. Also, to use a lame social media term, it helps "build personal brand." Or in real world terms, it makes people realize there is a person behind the website, and possibly one that you the reader may be interested in interacting with.
On food porn & recipe blogs: Kalyn adamantly urged recipe bloggers to use nothing short of a DSLR camera and create what we now call food porn. It's a fantastic suggestion, but I'm not sure that it's the only way for recipe bloggers to find success. I think one just needs to differentiate somehow in such a crowded space. If it's amazing photos, then awesome. But it may be funny writeups, focused niche space, or excessive outlinking to real, relative information. Anything that makes you stand out and keeps people interested.
Anyways, those are my two little pennies. I believe most of what was said on the panel would be very useful to any blogger, not just the foodie community. Thanks again guys!
Food Goes In Mouth at 4:13AM on 03/23/09