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Whether you're brand new to food blogging or a seasoned pro, we're here to help you with proven tips and strategies for growing your blog. Here on the Food Blogger Pro blog, you'll learn about building traffic, food blog SEO, social media tips, and more. Keep an eye out for a new post every week!

Email with Purpose: How your inbox can help you grow your blog

Bjork
by Bjork on Sep 3, 2014 in

If you don’t get a lot of email right now, you will someday.

That might sound negative, but I'm predicting your future success. 🙂

Here's how it'll work: Your blog will continue to grow, and as your blog continues to grow so will the number of people you impact, and the more people you impact the more people will email you.

It’s a good problem to have, but it’s a problem nonetheless.

But it's possible for emails to be a pleasure, not a pain, and to be helpful, not hurtful. You just need to make sure that you approach email with a purpose, and that purpose should be to help you grow your blog. 

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There are two general types of emails:

  1. I want to say hi.
  2. I need some help.

The first type of email gives you a chance to connect with one of your readers. If you can, you should try and respond to these emails. Showing someone you heard what they said (and that you genuinely care) can go a long way.

The second type of email comes from someone that has a problem. The primary goal for this emailer is to solve their problem, not necessarily to connect or say hi.

These emails, the “I need some help emails,” are the type of emails I’d like to talk about in this post.

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The Definitive List of Takedown Notice Forms

Bjork
by Bjork on Aug 20, 2014 in

Are you looking for a certain company's takedown notice form?

You’ve come to the right place.

Does my word not convince you? I bet this ninja karate chopping a computer will.

Convinced now?

Good.

🙂

Before we look through the list I want to talk about what a takedown notice is and when I think you should use them.

Quick tip: Want to watch a video instead of read the post? You can scroll to the bottom of this post to check out the "video recap" from our YouTube channel.

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7 awesome apps we’re using to build Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro

Bjork
by Bjork on Jul 16, 2014 in

Trying to build a blog without good applications is like trying to build a house without good tools. You can do it, but it will take a lot longer.

Have you ever searched for a password you wrote down on a piece of paper and put “somewhere safe” (but you’re not quite sure where that is)? Have you ever tried to communicate a design concept over email using written text? Have you ever written the same sentence over and over in different emails to different people?

All of those things are examples of ways that we try and build our virtual house (i.e. blog) using crummy tools.

If you’re looking to build an awesome blog then you need awesome applications for your virtual toolbelt. The following seven apps are the first "tools" that I'd suggest you purchase (or download for free).

Note: Some of these apps are specific to Mac OS. If there’s an alternative option for Windows then I include it at the end of the description.

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How we improved our landing page conversion rate by 138%

Bjork
by Bjork on Jul 9, 2014 in ,

Three months ago I wrote a post called How to Increase Your Conversion Rates with A/B Testing. In the post I promised to put together quarterly updates to let everyone know how the A/B testing is going.

My hope with these quarterly updates is to:

  • Encourage you to do A/B testing if you have the time and energy.
  • If you don’t have the time and energy then I want to show you the changes we made to help increase conversion rates.

You can take the things we’ve learned about increasing conversions and apply them to your sales pages without having to do any A/B testing on your own (but I still think you should do A/B testing if you have the time).

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Introducing The Nutrition Label Generator

Bjork
by Bjork on Jun 26, 2014 in , ,

Today is a big day at Food Blogger Pro Headquarters (otherwise known as the Ostrom’s basement).

Food Blogger Pro is launching our first tool for food bloggers. We couldn’t be more excited!

We’re calling it the Nutrition Label Generator.

Any guesses as to what it does?

Yep! You got it. It generates nutrition facts labels.

We have three goals with the Nutrition Label Generator.

We want this to be a tool that is:

  1. Easy to use
  2. Accurate
  3. Value adding

Before I explain the three goals I want to quickly show you how to use the tool, explain why we're developing software tools, and discuss our software philosophy at FBP.

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The best type of affiliate marketing: What it is and why you need to do it

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by Bjork on Jun 7, 2014 in ,

I always get giddy when I talk about affiliate marketing.

It’s just so darn cool.

You know what I mean?

You don’t?

Okay…fine then. I guess I'll have to convince you.

And I'll do so by telling you about how the best type of affiliate marketing can help you increase the income you’re earning from your food blog (and I know you think that is pretty darn cool).

I want to make sure we’re all on the same page before we jump into my main point for this post, so I’d like to take a moment to share a thrilling short story entitled “A Very Basic Example of Affiliate Marketing.”

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How we increased our blog’s monthly income by over $1,500 without increasing traffic

Bjork
by Bjork on Mar 12, 2014 in ,

Traffic represents tangible numbers that allow you to easily see how your blog is performing, but it’s only half the battle when it comes to monetizing your blog.

Yes, you need to be smart about ways to increase traffic to your blog. You also need to be smart about ways to increase your effectiveness at monetizing the traffic that is already coming to your blog.

The good news is that this doesn’t require you to squeeze every last penny from your blog readers by showing more ads or pitching more products. Quite the opposite, actually. You want to be squeezing every last penny from the advertisers and affiliates you work with so you don’t have to show more ads and pitch more products to your readers.

In this post I’m going to share an example of a change we made with Pinch of Yum to increase our monthly income by over $1,500. I'll also share how this information impacted the way we structure payments for Food Blogger Pro affiliate program.

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5 ways to make more money from your food blog

Bjork
by Bjork on Feb 19, 2014 in ,

{image5}If you’re making a dollar from your food blog, you could probably be making two. If you’re making $100, you could probably be making $200. If you’re making $1,000, you could probably be making $2,000. I could keep going with that, but I’m guessing you get the point: you’re probably not maximizing the earning potential from your blog.

It’s easy to increase your blog’s income by adding additional ad units, writing spammy posts with lots of affiliate links, or pitching unrelated or untested products to your readers. That might get you a short-term income boost, but it will also zap any trust that you’ve established with your readers and crush the quality that you’ve worked so hard to establish with your brand. Not a good long-term plan.

The focus with increasing the money you make from your blog should be on finding ways to increase your income without degrading the quality of your site, which is what we’re going to focus on in this post.

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