One of the best ways to get traffic to your food blog when it's new is to share your recipes with aggregator sites or fellow food bloggers.
It helps to both build backlinks to your site (increasing the domain authority) and get new eyeballs on your content.
Why Share Your Photos
Some bloggers feel that their photos shouldn’t be used on any sites but their own, but I’ve found that encouraging other bloggers, websites, and magazines to use my photos has built backlinks to my blog.
Search engines like Google value the number of incoming links to a website or page. It’s important to grow your backlinks, and one of the best ways to do it is to have other sites use your photos and link to your site.
What to Know About Aggregator Sites
Aggregator sites allow bloggers to submit their content along with a photo and a link.
They send a small amount of traffic to bloggers. They no longer send thousands of pageviews daily to a single blog, but they are still a good way to grow your blog traffic, especially if you are just starting out!
There are many aggregator sites; some of the more popular ones include:
Buzzfeed allows community contributors to build a profile and post their own roundups of recipes on the site.
You can use several of your own recipes in these roundups and ask other bloggers if you can use a photo from their blog in exchange for a link.
Facebook Groups & Other Blogger Linkups
Link parties are no longer a good way of growing your blog - Google can view them as spammy behavior and penalize your site.
But you should still participate in roundup posts on other blogs. In several Facebook groups, you can find bloggers looking for specific recipes (and the permission to use one photo from your site).
- FBC Social Sharing
- Blogger Roundups
- Bloggers Sharing Links for Roundups
- Blogger Roundup Requests
- Food Blogger Link Building
If you qualify for Mediavine, they also have a private Facebook link/social sharing group for Mediavine bloggers, which is very good!
Adding a Sharing Clause to Your Blog
If you want sites like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post to use your photos and link to you (which can result in thousands of pageviews a day), email them and give them carte blanche to use your content.
Another way to let these big sites or other bloggers know they can use your content is to post a sharing clause on your FAQ or About page.
This is the first thing on my FAQ page - you can copy what I’ve written:
Can I use one of your photos?
Sure! You are welcome to republish one photo on your website/blog/newsletter - please link it back to the recipe or blog post you pulled it from.
Some bloggers require two links - one to the recipe and one to their main page, but what you want to require is up to you.
Good luck in building your blog traffic! Let me know in the comments below if you have other suggestions.
Lia says
Another suggestion can be https://foodsom.com . It's a newer food sharing website similar to Pinterest and easy to use.
Vanessa Okamura says
Thanks for writing this. It’s the most helpful article I’ve read this year on this topic. Great advice.
callie says
Thanks for this! This was really helpful and gives a great starting point!
Natasha says
Thank you! Does food gawker give do follow links every time they share your photo with recipe?
EW says
No, food gawker links are no-follow. But they do two important things when you are starting out - they provide some traffic and larger sites may use it to do roundups and find your content there (potentially resulting in a do-follow link from another site).
JD Walsh says
This was super helpful as we are trying to get our recipes and content out there. Thank You!
Peter says
Thanks for sharing this!