Monday, May 4, 2009

3 Ways To Increase Traffic With Better Food Photos

Pecan Sticky Buns - Over The Hill And On A Roll

Better Food Photos = More Traffic

The food blogging world is getting very, very crowded. Thousands, upon thousands of people are taking to blogging about food and YOU have to find a way to distinguish yourself.

Improving your food photographs is a good way to create a unique blogging identity but it's also a good way to increase traffic to your blog. As soon as I started to work on my food photographs I saw immediate increases in traffic.


3 ways to increase traffic with better food photos in second part of post...

Here are three ways that improving my food photos helped increase my traffic.

#1 - Google Images

Improving the quality of your images and adding the appropriate "Alt" tags will increase the likelihood of readers finding your images while searching using google image search.

About half of my google traffic currently comes from readers searching for images using google. The better quality your image is, the more likely it's going to catch the eye of someone searching. If your photo is dark, blurry, or lacks visual interest, readers are likely to look past it. Don't let that happen!

#2 - Food Porn Sites

As soon as I improved the quality of my images, my photos started to regularly get accepted to sites like Foodgawker, Tastespotting, and Serious Eats. These sites publish blog submissions based on the quality of the food photographs.

When I first started blogging, my posts regularly got rejected because my photographs sucked. Now the majority of my traffic comes from these sites.

#3 - Professional Vs. Amateur

The quality of your images is one of the major factors readers use to judge whether or not they will continue to click through your site once they've found it. The more they click, the more likely it is that they will return and become loyal readers.

Having quality food photographs adds an air of professionalism to your blog which is also likely to convert readers from one-time visitors to loyal readers.

Like I said before, there are tons of food blogs....why should I click through post after post, of dark, boring photos? It screams AMATEUR, which doesn't convey confidence and authority--two of the qualities readers look for when deciding whether or not to return.

Any other ideas or thoughts about food photos? Why do you want to improve the quality of your food photographs?

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15 comments:

  1. I fully agree re #2 and #3. You don't need to be a professional photographer or even have a DSLR to take good photos. Just learning a few tricks about lighting can make all the difference.

    PS, I love this site. Thanks for all the great tips!

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  2. Great post! How is it that I didn't know about the sites listed in #2? Seriously. I'm a new foodgawker addict. Thanks a lot.

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  3. Thanks Esi! I totally agree...that's part of my goal with this blog: To show fellow bloggers that good quality photographs DO NOT require fancy equipment or expensive training...anyone can do it!

    Thanks Amanda, foodgawker is great....you should totally submit your recipes...would love to hear about your experience...I'm actually working on a post about submitting recipes to those sites!

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  4. Very good tips Danny! Totally true about the quality of the pics to be accepted at the food-photo sites.

    Cheers!
    Gera

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  5. Thanks! I would be very interested to read the post on submitting recipes to sites like foodgawker.

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  6. Couldn't agree more! I'll be sharing this with my readers :)

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  7. Hey Amanda...what type of information are you looking for? I'm crafting the foodgawker post and would love to know what type of information to include.

    Thanks Darya! It's really amazing what a difference the photos on my site made when it came to traffic....HUGE.

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  8. Seriously! Just to give people an idea, Tastespotting and Foodgawker brought me over 900 visitors yesterday alone. BTW, I linked to this in my post today :)

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  9. 900 visitors? Wow, that's amazing Darya!

    Thanks for the link!

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  10. Foodgawker and Tastespotting are beyond a doubt 50% of the traffic I get to my blog. One aspect of submitting to mention is that if at first they don't accept a photo, you should look at the reason why and see if you can fix it. That is why I take a bazillion photos of every recipe- you never know how it is going to look in a post until you get it there, so you need to have plenty of backups on hand.

    And could you enable Name/URL for your comments? Opens things up for us self-hosted folks. ;) My actual blog is http://dlynz.com. Had to use the WP.com one in order to leave a message.

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  11. Thanks Donalyn, that's a great tip!

    I opened up the comments so you shouldn't have a problem anymore.

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  12. Thanks for opening up the comments, I hate using my Blogger login ;)

    Yes, I admit that was a pretty good day, but that's what can happen when you hit big and then start trending in their most popular. It's like our own little version of Digg!

    Thanks for adding me to your blogroll :)

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  13. I get tons of traffic from Tastespotting and Foodgawker as well! This is a great site, thanks!

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  14. I totally agree about leaving a blog dark photographs or even worse no photographs. But, I would also add make sure the first photograph in the post is wonderful and compelling. Even if the first shot is well lit if it is uninteresting, I leave the blog.

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