Can I become an “influencer” in the “cooking” niche? Let’s see :) (27)
Can I become an “influencer” in the “cooking” niche? Let’s see :)
Can I become an “influencer” in the “cooking” niche? Let’s see 
WARNING: Wall of text incoming! I’m sorry but I couldn’t help myself
Content creation has been hot for the past few years and it’s always been a world that kinda fascinated me.
All the influencers, bloggers, youtubers and what not… looks like this is the new dream job of the youth, everyone wants to become an influencer, right?
Even my own kids! When I asked my youngest son what he’d like to do in his life, the answer was clear: “I want to be a YouTuber!”
Ok, but what about an old dog like myself? Could I still do it? Let’s find out, shall we?
NOTE: I created a new forum section for my upcoming “Organic Content Marketing” posts, check it from time to time and don’t hesitate to start a thread too!
The basic idea:
So, the general advice seems to be clear. You need to dive into something you’re at least remotely passionate about.
It makes sense in the end… if you’re about to make content about some topic, you better be good at it and enjoy doing it. In my case, the choice was clear… Since the past maybe 4-5 years, I really started to enjoy cooking. I’m not saying I’m some super skilled cook, but whoever I cook for, the plates are usually empty once they leave. So “cooking” would be my niche.
The downside: this is probably one of the most crowded niches out there with heavyweights like Buzzfeed Tasty, Kitchn, Food52 etc.. occupying the top spots in Google and taking up the lion's share of traffic. On top of that, ever since the Pandemic started, whoever could hold a spatula or knife in their hands without hurting themselves has started a cooking channel, blog or TikTok in the past 2 years.
But whatever, fuck it, I’m grown up, I can take a few punches and on top of that I like challenges.
Research:
I’ve done a solid amount of reading, I’ve watched many presentations and these were my findings. There are several approaches you can take in this game. Since I picked cooking as my niche, I will be referencing it all the time, but you can apply all the (or most) principles to any other niche out there.
1. What people want
There are two main motives that people have when looking for a specific type of content. It’s either to entertain themselves or to learn something. This principle is very obvious in the cooking niche.
On one hand you have these videos where people do crazy stuff like the biggest chicken nugget, 100-layer lasagna, roasting a whole cow in a mega grill, tasting food in the most expensive restaurants or dining on long haul 1st class flights etc… this is purely for entertainment purposes, nobody is actually going to try to cook this at home or jump on a flight that costs $10k because of the video.
This type of content is produced by individuals who love the camera, the SHOWMEN type of people… which I’m not, unfortunately. On top of that, this requires higher budgets, bigger teams… something I’m not willing to invest into, at this point.
So I had to choose the other approach, which is making content that serves the “educational” purpose. In other worlds, recipes that people can actually make themselves, cooking tips etc… This is easier to pull off, I don’t even have to show myself too much, the cost and production time is much lower too.
There is one more piece of general advice given to starting content creators: pick a narrow niche and stick to it.
I decided to break this one as I didn’t really have one in mind and I didn’t want to limit myself to any single particular type of food, for example. Hard to say if this was a good idea… we shall see.
2. The setup
Whoever starts with content production has a few options here.
You can focus on one social media platform and conquer it. Many people are doing this with Instagram or TikTok. If it takes off, it can work well, but there are limitations.
You can also decide to focus on several social media platforms and try to find out which ones work well for you. Again, many people are doing this with short form video content. What works on TikTok will likely work on Instagram reels and YouTube shorts as well. So with one piece of content, you can target 3 platforms at once.
But, based on the advice from seasoned creators, it's best to take a hybrid approach. The core idea is to build a website/blog that sits in the center and several social media profiles around it.
There are several benefits to this approach. The blog can get SEO traffic, which is not possible with a social media platform. You can collect emails or push subscriptions, again this is not possible on social media.
Anyone with a blog is also in a better position when negotiating deals with sponsors… because an Instagram story only lives for a day, while a blog post can attract traffic and clicks “forever”. Any video or photo content that you produce for a blog can be repurposed on social media, with some modifications of course.
The downside to this approach is that it is way more work heavy.
It’s no longer just about shooting a short video with your phone, this approach is way more complex… KW research, making the post, setting up the blog and optimizing it, making several versions of content, posting it on all the platforms etc…
But in the long run, it should be worth it.
It’s also necessary to decide what social platforms you’re about to use, because obviously, it’s not possible to be on ALL of them.
So how to choose the ones to focus on?
The general advice is clear again, not all platforms are suitable for every niche. Take Pinterest as an example, while it’s a clear choice for the cooking niche, you likely shouldn’t bother with it if you’re about to build something in the IT niche.
I decided to start with as many as I could handle and then choose those that show some traction.
Youtube because I had to host the videos somewhere, Instagram because that’s all about the visuals, Facebook because I had an old cooking page there that I planned to revive (that was a mistake as I will explain at some point), TikTok (hard nut to crack, will explain why laters) and Pinterest (I overlooked this channel at the beginning, another mistake).
And since I’m building a blog too, a domain name was needed. As you can imagine, every decent name was taken and the fact I wanted to create matching social media profiles made this all even more complicated.
In the end I went with this : CookWeWill.Com
I don’t even remember what domain name tool suggested this one, but it is kinda short and easy to remember, though it’s not grammatically correct and sounds a bit weird. Anyways, I’ve run this by @shishev who happens to be a master copywriter and he said it had a funny “Yoda” style sound to it so I was sold and decided to go with it.
On top of that, all the social media had this username available.
So right now this is the setup of properties I have:
Blog: https://cookwewill.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CookWeWill
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/cookwewill/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cookwewill
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cookwewill/
The Content:
As I mentioned, I decided to go with the educational approach and create recipe content that people can actually follow and cook the meal themselves.
The initial plan was to use a phone and do it all myself, but then I realized I had a good friend who is actually quite good at making videos and shooting photos. We made a deal where I offered him a part of the future income and as he wasn’t that busy we agreed to make 1 video once in 1-2 weeks. We started to work on this about a year ago and we made MANY mistakes and bad decisions at first.
The plan was basically having no plan and just throwing some shit out to see if it sticks. Now we have a much better understanding of the ecosystem and how it works and we know what to focus on more.
This is actually one of the main reasons why I have decided to start posting about this project here on STM. I know that there are quite a few people on here who play with the same idea of making content or SEO based properties. So if someone can learn from my mistakes, that’s gonna be great. This is just the intro thread, many more are to come
The Mistakes:
1. The biggest mistake was treating this as a hobby in a “let’s try and see” way.
We ended up making one video every two weeks which is clearly not enough. My initial idea was to just try something and if it shows signs of picking up, we would scale the production up. The problem was, I just didn’t have time to make more, but that’s about to change now and we will be shooting at least once a week. We are getting some traction now, so I will give it the time it needs from now on… which we should have done from day one.
So in case you’re planning to do something like this, go all in or don’t start at all. Organic traffic takes a LONG time to build, so whatever you delay or do half-way will just prolong this time by a significant time.
2. Not doing proper KW research.
There is literally ZERO chance to rank for competitive keywords with a new blog, especially in a crowded niche like cooking. Whatever recipe you come up with, there are already 50 similar ones out there, all aged and ranking for the KWs you want.
But there are ways around it, you just need to be creative with the naming and kw research. Kw research tools like AHREFS are of great help here.
Just to give you an example: I wanted to make some chicken wings recipe, but the kw “chicken wings” is one of the most competitive ones and there is virtually no chance to rank for it. But, upon playing with ahrefs for a while, I discovered that there is something like “breaded chicken wings” which still gets decent search volume and the competition is MUCH lower.
So I made a blog post about that and I’m already ranking for it a no.1-3 in google. This post alone brings in about 200-300 visits from google per month. From now on it’s simple math… make 100 posts like this and you are set
I will write a separate article on how to do KW research later on, it’s actually quite simple.
3. Trying to be everywhere and not choosing the right channels.
My thinking was simple, the more social channels I’m on, the bigger audience I can build. Which was the wrong way of thinking. This could probably work if I could clone myself, but since there is only so much time I have, I ended up trying to run too many channels, but none of them properly.
This is another thing I’m changing now. My main focus will be on YouTube and Pinterest. Instagram is a bitch to grow organically, my old Facebook page is a trouble to revive and TikTok has one stupid limitation that I need to figure out (more on that in some other post).
The advice here would be to think properly about the social media channels and only choose those that are the most relevant to your niche and focus on those that also let you link back to your blog, since that’s the main property with the setup I’m doing.
What's the current status?
To put it simply, we are growing… at a slow speed. But that’s enough of a validation to me so I have decided to dedicate much more time to this project from now on.
Starting a series of posts here on STM is a direct result of this. I want to show you how it’s going, I want to tell you what worked and what didn’t. I want you to learn from my journey and maybe motivate someone to join me in my efforts and build something similar.
So where we at now?
Let me post some screenshots.
This first one shows the total search volume, the screen is from “google search console” and as you can see the growth is significant and steady. This graph shows just the main search volume, there is also the “discover” audience that adds some more clicks daily.
This second screen is from Ahrefs, it shows the basic info about the domain such as domain rank, number of backlinks, an estimate of organic traffic (this shows less than what’s real) and the amount of organic keywords I’m ranked for.
The KW part is interesting, as you can see there was a steep spike and then a decrease close to the end of that particular graph. The reason is site speed. Shoutout to @quintyfresh who helped me to optimize the WP blog. When he did his magic, the spike started. Then I installed an ad network which killed the speed again, hence the decrease. This is something I need to work on soon. Loading speed is way more important than I thought, it really does affect rankings.
The following shows a list of keywords I’m ranked for according to ahrefs, the full list is WAY bigger btw, I just took a screen from the first page that shows no.1 rankings… I already have about 100 of such keywords, though most with lower search volume as was to be expected at this point. In total, the blog ranks in top100 for 3200+ keywords as of today.
This last screen shows a traffic snapshot from the google analytics dashboard. Steady growth again as you can see, I finally crossed the 10k a month traffic point and this month should be better again.
As for the social media profiles, I have about 900 followers on Youtube, 4000+ on Facebook, 2300+ on Instagram.
Tiktok and Pinterest are new ones with not much traction. I recently took a course on Pinterest and applying the findings now, so let’s see how that goes. I will start another thread for growing Pinterest traffic soon, along with how to make the Pins and how to do KW research on Pinterest, it’s quite easy again.
In total, we have made 50+ videos of various quality levels. We tested a few approaches, from using just subtitles and music, trying to talk while I cook (fail, I cannot do that) and recording a voiceover separately and using full subtitles (this is what we decided to stick with).
If you want to see a sample, here is the most successful video we have made so far. It has close to 25k views on YouTube, nothing massive but still a success to me
Feel free to subscribe btw
I know there is still a lot to improve on. I know my accent kinda sucks and I need to put more energy into the voice (I've been cold on and off for the past few months so my voice is not normal right now). But hey, there are successful youtubers out there with worse accents so I gotta work with what I have, right?
Conclusion:
Ok, this was supposed to be an intro post and as usual, I wrote more than planned. Hopefully at least some of you made it till the end, post a comment if you did
Questions, criticism, suggestions… all are welcome!
I have way more posts planned for the near future… KW research, monetization options, SEO advice such as linking structure, where to get some basic backlinks, Pinterest organic growth and much more.
So watch this section for future updates.
If any of you guys are working on something similar, please drop me a PM, maybe we can help each other out.
Cheers,
Matej.
Great post! I know most members here run paid traffic, but organic traffic can be an amazing way to build an asset that can generate passive income, and/or be sold down the road for another nice sum.
This type of content really rounds out the content on STM!
Looking forward to more!
Amy
Just subcribed. I watch many cooking videos every day, love it, haha
@matuloo
Yeehaw! Glad to see its performing like we wanted it to. Truth is, you already had the the power plant for the drag car, I just bolted on speed parts to get a better 1/4 mile time. 
The project really is high quality and is well done. Like I originally said as well in the beginning, it was/is my pleasure to offer you help as a friend when you give a lot to this community and ask for nothing. I leaped at the chance to do that for you as well.
Here are some tips for YouTube growth and keyword research. GET VIDIQ BOOST. Best YouTube research tool of all time. Go through their simple schooling program and you will see how different your YouTube channel will be. Like I was saying to twinaxe not long ago, people want to use KEYWORDS in their YouTube searches but secretly YouTube is changing its algorithm.
More user readable titles may not get SEARCH volume as much but they get WAY MORE RECOMMENDED VIDEO sidebar requests. Also, VidIQ tracks what users are coming into your videos FROM meaning similar channels so its easy to make content more specific to what your audience is viewing. It can show what other channels they are subbed to for same reason, etc. You can hone in your YouTube game a million times over.
FYI I am not an affiliate of theirs or anything, I just really like their product. Anyway I am always around as usual to give you a hand when you need anything. Ideas, advice, or just shooting the breeze
Good work my dude.
Originally Posted by vortex
Originally Posted by affpayinggao
Do you have any particular channels that you follow?
Originally Posted by quintyfresh
Yeehaw! Glad to see its performing like we wanted it to. Truth is, you already had the the power plant for the drag car, I just bolted on speed parts to get a better 1/4 mile time.
The project really is high quality and is well done. Like I originally said as well in the beginning, it was/is my pleasure to offer you help as a friends when you give a lot to this community and as for nothing. I leaped at the chance to do that for you as well.
Originally Posted by quintyfresh
LFG!! I've been looking forward to this as I want to start something like this for myself as a long term play.
Originally Posted by stungads
Starting and growing something like this takes quite a bit of time so do not delay it!
How do u intend to monetize your content? Display ads on your blog? Referral links? Sponsored posts? Which would be the biggest money driver?
Originally Posted by momopotato
1.ADs - this is the most simple option obviously and the first one I will use. There are several Ad networks that bloggers are using.
Google Adsense - one of the worst options right now, the RPM (revenue per mile) is way too low there. I could get anywhere between $1-$5 on average in the food niche.
Ezoic, GourmetAds, Monumetric... these are a little bit better, I know people who are getting about $10-$12 RPM with ezoic.
AdThrive and MediaVine are something like the holly grail for all the bloggers out there. The RPMs in the cooking niche can go as high as $30 or even more in specific cases. BUT, these two require higher traffic levels in order to accept a blog into their network.
50.000 - 100.000 sessions/pageviews are required for a site to be accepted so I still have a long way to get there, but thats the initial plan
I have tested ezoic for a few days just to get an idea about the way their system works, but I have removed the ads just a few days ago... their system had a VERY bad effect on the site speed scores. So for now, I run without Ads and wil focus on growing the traffic first.
2. Affiliate offers ... most blogger use Amazon, but there are other options I will look into in more detail soon.
3. Partnerships... there are many companies in this niche that are looking for influencers or bloggers to work with. But again, need to grow my traffic and audience first.
4. Email list... I started to collect emails too, for now i have about 600 people on the list and 5-15 new ones optins daily. This is another channel I need to learn to work with. Since it's all organic subs, I have to treat these people in a different way than I would normally do with paid email clicks/ads so again, all new to me
Originally Posted by matuloo
1.ADs - this is the most simple option obviously and the first one I will use. There are several Ad networks that bloggers are using.
Google Adsense - one of the worst options right now, the RPM (revenue per mile) is way too low there. I could get anywhere between $1-$5 on average in the food niche.
Ezoic, GourmetAds, Monumetric... these are a little bit better, I know people who are getting about $10-$12 RPM with ezoic.
AdThrive and MediaVine are something like the holly grail for all the bloggers out there. The RPMs in the cooking niche can go as high as $30 or even more in specific cases. BUT, these two require higher traffic levels in order to accept a blog into their network.
50.000 - 100.000 sessions/pageviews are required for a site to be accepted so I still have a long way to get there, but thats the initial plan
I have tested ezoic for a few days just to get an idea about the way their system works, but I have removed the ads just a few days ago... their system had a VERY bad effect on the site speed scores. So for now, I run without Ads and wil focus on growing the traffic first.
2. Affiliate offers ... most blogger use Amazon, but there are other options I will look into in more detail soon.
3. Partnerships... there are many companies in this niche that are looking for influencers or bloggers to work with. But again, need to grow my traffic and audience first.
4. Email list... I started to collect emails too, for now i have about 600 people on the list and 5-15 new ones optins daily. This is another channel I need to learn to work with. Since it's all organic subs, I have to treat these people in a different way than I would normally do with paid email clicks/ads so again, all new to me
Based on the info I was able to research, the display ADs and affiliate offers are the biggest income drivers in the beginning and once a blogger really makes it big, the sponsored deals can grow a lot too.
Originally Posted by momopotato
There are more monetization options available, I will be exploring them one by one later on as/if they become relevant.
It all depends on the traffic levels and following I will be able to reach.
I'm following quite a few people in the cooking niche...
- some made it to the TV, for example Susie now has a show on FoodNetwork: https://heygrillhey.com/grill-power/
- many sell their own recipe books
- some work with companies in the niche and build custom lines of products, these guys do it really great: https://spiceology.com/collaborations/
- specific social media channel offer monetization options, YouTube for example. There are several guys with big channels that earn solid $$$ from the YT Ads alone and on top of that, they have sponsored messages in the videos, here is a guy who really does that great: https://www.youtube.com/c/GugaFoods
- quite a few successful bloggers start programs/courses that teach aspiring bloggers how to make money online.
The options are quite diverse and plentiful... the only problem is to position yourself in a crowded niche. It's not easy, but what is?
I'm certainly not going to give up easily!
Monetization wtf...?
Come on guys, I'm Italian, let's talk about serious things...
The Tiramisù.
You citizens of the world, have you ever tried tiramisù?
Follow matuloo's tutorial and get ready for heaven!
I see you choose the ingredients carefully, great job bro, keep it up!
Originally Posted by just_g
And I'm super stoked to see it got the seal of approval from an Italian! That's quite an achievement and I'm dead serious about it
Originally Posted by matuloo
Do you have any particular channels that you follow?
AdThrive is still using Google Universal Analytics. If you just created your site, you probably are already with the new version of Google Analytics (GA4).
If you think you will need to apply, do the following around one month in advance, not to loose time:
https://help.adthrive.com/hc/en-us/a...roperty-to-GA4
Originally Posted by jeremie
Wow matuloo!
From dating to cooking influencer!
Great people great in everything 
Definitely, when there won`t be a break between sirens in Kyiv I`ll try to prepare some of your recipes.
Good luck with all your ideas!
You citizens of the world, have you ever tried tiramisù?
Originally Posted by twinaxe
Was that like a summer type of job when you were still a student?
For some additional traffic you can use Flipboard. This works pretty good in the cooking niche.
https://www.shoutmeloud.com/flipboar...ger-brand.html
Originally Posted by gunnar
EDIT: Looks like a nice "tool" and I have already created an rss based "magazine" over there: https://flipboard.com/@cookwewill/ho...ipes-70ke14dmy
Apparently, they need to approve my "publisher" application so let's see how long that takes and if that adds some more options.
BTW: there is something similar specifically in the cooking niche called whisk.com, have you seen that?
Are you using flipboard yourself @gunnar?
Hi matuloo,
no i don't use flipboard myself, but a friend of mine has a cooking site and he told me that flipboard really helped kickstarting his site. The next big boost was discover traffic.
Originally Posted by gunnar
I'm getting some clicks from there too. Can I get in touch with your friend in order to exchange some ideas?
I will ask him this weekend, and come back to you.
Super interesting, god speed !
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