Part I
Whetting Your Appetite
In this part . . .
Get your first taste of the food blogosphere by taking a careful look at how past moments in culinary media have shaped the present-day community. As you meet your fellow food bloggers, you’ll discover that the motivations for launching a food blog are vast and varied, from perfecting your slicing and dicing to kick-starting your culinary empire online.
Although some bloggers may be in search of fame, fortune, or even a cookbook deal, others strive to simply establish their voice and create a network of food-loving enthusiasts.
In Part I, you begin to zone in on your own aspirations as you discover the key factors to think about before your first post ever goes from private to public.
1
The Many, The Proud
In This Chapter
Assessing the current state of the food blogosphere
Understanding the many roles of food bloggers
Finding your voice in text and visuals
Meeting other food bloggers
Setting yourself up for the sweet taste of success
Creating, launching, and maintaining a food blog can be a casual hobby or a serious business. Regardless whether you’re a home cook and amateur writer, or a professional chef and James Beard award-winning author, managing your food blog will lend you a spatula to help shape the growing culinary scene.
Whether your goal is preserving your family’s legacy through food or becoming the next Pioneer Woman of the digital Wild West, the reach, popularity, and influence of food blogs is a rapidly expanding sector of the online realm that’s impossible to ignore.
In this chapter, I introduce you to the wide world of food blogging by providing context in terms of its size, scope, and robust growth over the past five years. As you look to the past, you can find your food blogging place in the present while planning for a beautifully designed, easily navigated, one-of-a-kind online journal. Understanding the many roles of a food blogger helps you in crafting a strategic and realistic approach to success, no matter how you measure it.
Assessing the Food Blogosphere
The field of food blogging represents an explosion of popular culture, and in this case, popular cuisine. From Bakerella’s cake pops to Hungry Girl’s Fiber One chicken strips, food blogs have cultivated some of the culinary industry’s biggest trends.
Where else can you discover the current craze — in the form of Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookies or the latest incarnation of bacon — than the thriving world of food blogging? Every day a new tastemaker launches a blog and joins the growing throngs of impassioned, dedicated, and driven food enthusiasts who are ditching the ketchup-stained 3x5 cards and taking to the web to publish and share content.
Food blogging on the rise
Five years ago, Smitten Kitchen, Orangette, Homesick Texan, and Simply Recipes could very well have been the names of my favorite local hangouts — the corner café I go to for my morning coffee, the downtown diner with the key lime pie, the steakhouse with the famous filet, or the bakery with the unbeatable sticky buns. And the names Deb Perelman, Molly Wizenberg, Lisa Fain, and Elise Bauer might as well have been the names of my favorite singers, or painters, or even childhood friends.
But if you ask any food blogger in 2012 whether they’ve ever heard of Smitten Kitchen, you might as well be asking them whether they’ve ever heard of a guy named Elvis.
A few of my personal heroes — Deb, Molly, Lisa, and Elise — are among those who have helped usher the field of food blogging from a quiet corner of the web to one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the modern digital era. Elise, for example, launched her wildly popular food blog, Simply Recipes, in 2003 as a way to document her family’s rich recipe history. Since, she has inspired countless readers whose eyes graze her page to do the same. Elise’s clear and concise policy regarding comments on her blog has set the tone for transparency and accountability in food blogging, and her generosity in advising less-experienced bloggers has advocated for a supportive community surrounding the creation and sharing of content online.
Food blogging has become a phenomenon whereby impassioned foodies have come to know these bloggers’ names, and countless others, through every typed word, every calculated recipe, every comment, every photo, every single thought — blogged publicly for the rest of the world to read, enjoy, react to, and most importantly, draw inspiration from.
So just how far-reaching is this epicurean explosion?
Technorati, an online search engine that tracks blogs, estimated in a Times Online article from February 2009 that there were roughly 33,000 food blogs on the web. That number has gone nowhere but up in the past three years.
BlogHer, one of the most expansive and robust communities of bloggers across every niche, reported a 70 percent increase in unique...
