Last time you heard from Ol’ Sam, we talked all about Content Marketing for Your Food Company, and one of the most effective ways I discussed was creating recipes. Well, hope you’re still hungry (cringe) for more on that very topic!
Whether you are a food company trying to show off your product’s versatility or a food blogger trying to get more traffic to your website, one of the best ways to visually market you and your product is with recipes. You give your audience a little eye-candy, you establish yourself as someone who knows a thing or two about food and you give people a reason to come back for more. Everyone wins. But is publishing recipes to just your website enough?
Expand your reach by joining conversations on food sharing sites
Sure, you can share your recipes on Facebook, but at the end of the day you could be missing out on a ton of potential to reach a much wider audience. Lucky, a couple of really smart people thought of this and lo and behold food sharing websites started popping up like wildfire.
There are many places on the web where you can market your food, but which ones are the best and most effective? Let’s run down the top three food sharing sites I’ve come across.
Foodgawker
Foodgawker is a bit of an oddity. It is regarded as one of the best food sharing sites with beautiful pictures. It maintains those high standards by being extremely picky about which photos and recipes it will share. There are numerous horror stories I’ve read about people getting their posts rejected by Foodgawker time and again.
There are two ways to look at this, and I’m going to take the positive one! You can use the feedback from rejections to keep honing your craft and working on your presentation. However, if your posts are good enough to get on Foodgawker, then you’ve obviously done something right which gives you a chance to pat yourself on the back or do a victory dance.
As for the site itself, it is extremely straight-forward and easy to use. The layout isn’t anything to write home about, but it does it’s job effectively and allows for easy sharing across other platforms. Foodgawker has a very refined search engine, allowing new audiences to find you relatively easily if you’ve carved out a niche for yourself and specialize in a particular food or recipe.
It also has a really cool feature that allows you to see the most popular posts from the day, month, year or even all time. You can use this to steal copy learn from those that have done it best.
Yummly
Yummly doesn’t get a whole lot of pomp and circumstance, and I have absolutely no clue why.
It is actually not only a mobile app and website but you can install a widget on WordPress that automatically goes live when your recipe post does. All you have to do is install the button, put the recipe, instructions and picture in and Yummly takes care of the rest and so much more. The site’s algorithm takes key words and numbers from within the recipe and does some really impressive and helpful things from the perspective of your audience.
Yummly breaks down nutritional information, serving size and category based on what you’ve presented it. If it is wrong, you can obviously change it, but in my experience it is very accurate. Your audience will definitely love getting this kind of straight-forward information.
Aside from that, Yummly impresses with a slick interface, easy to use search and a convenient connect back to the website where the recipe was originally posted. If you run your website or blog through WordPress, I highly recommend taking advantage of Yummly. The only warning I would give is that text put into Yummly doesn’t count towards the word count on the post, which can be a problem with SEO. Just make sure you have plenty of content.
I know, shocker. You probably saw this one coming from a mile away.
Well, there is a reason: Pinterest does it best. They were one of the first ones to do it – starting back in 2010 – and hit all the right buttons on their way to becoming the most popular visual share site on the web.
You know what it is, so why is it the best?
Pinterest allows for long photos, which is one of the most genius ideas ever. It allows for your post to eat up additional space on the page, demanding the attention of your audience and allowing for more visual appeal. There is a lot of strategy that can go into those tall pictures, bet you never really thought about that.
The site is easy to use, laid out cleanly, easy to navigate and available on a mobile app. All very good tools.
Pinterest is good marketing for your business or blog because it allows you to easily track data on your posts with analytics. You can see what posts did well – or not – and learn over time how best to present and market your product. Pinterest also does paid ads which is a great way to give yourself that little bit of extra visibility for not a huge investment. We’ve seen ads as very effective on other social platforms like Facebook.
Above all that, in plain speak, it is by far the most popular site of its kind out there and you’d be foolish not to try and get a seat at the cool-kids table.
Where is your community? What are your favorite food sharing sites?
Roundpeg is an Indianapolis content marketing firm.