Making money – the livelihood

The world of monetization in food blogging is far from the reality portrayed in movies. The story of making millions off a blog is a bit like Hollywood. Very few make it big and most struggle to get anywhere.

Having a monetized blog usually requires hiring an agent. The agent reaches out to brands to bring in deals like endorsed or promoted posts. Making these connections can cost the blogger a pretty penny; anywhere from 20–40% of the bloggers profit. This can vary depending on the agent, your relationship and negotiation tactics. Most bloggers I have met ultimately did not get a fair deal.

Cucumbertown wants to cut off all these intermediaries and make this a level playing field. We want to ensure that as a platform, we can provide the most efficient monetization mechanisms for food blogs. This will include things like an enhanced ad management system incorporating traditional networks like Google Adsense, Yellow hammer, GourmetAds, and an inbuilt affiliate marketing tool. Additionally, having a critical mass of traffic gives us the leverage to talk to brands and media agencies directly, giving us the control over who we advertise to and why.

^^^And not like this^^^

A team dedicated to Growth

YouTube has something called preferred partners. They have a team dedicated to helping video creators monetize, grow and reach out to more people. The fact that you have a team dedicated to doing this changes everything.

Cucumbertown has something very similar. Some of the most experienced people in the industry work on this at Cucumbertown. Here’s how a typical conversation goes

Hey Cherian, my trending report indicates that bacon and pineapple is getting a lot of traction for thanksgiving. Do you think we should let Pandara, Raymond and Indu know about this? Maybe they can post a turkey and bacon club recipe.

This kind of intelligence is something that we invest a lot of time and energy in. Understanding sentiments, market trends, etc. and merging it with our traffic intelligence is extraordinarily costly and requires a lot of manpower and intelligence.

Not everyone has the capability to work in this kind of business environment. Some bloggers do. Most don’t. Nearly all bloggers learn this with time. And when I say time, I’m talking 5+ years.

Being a platform that concentrates on these details for the user gives Cucumbertown an edge, and its users a seamless experience.

Marketing

I often see people posting their new recipes in Facebook groups. It’s almost always easy to detect this. You see that friend posting to virtually all those Facebook groups you know of. Some block it and in most cases it irritating for others. It’s a spray and pray approach. While there’s nothing wrong in that approach, its in most cases hard work and not smart work.

Cucumbertown wants to make the process very smart. It gives you, the creator, the intelligence to make right decisions like,

“Ok, so the way I wrote it isn’t something Google likes”. Or, “I am not getting any traffic from Pinterest since last week. Maybe I should focus there.”

Our Dashboard simplifies interactive measurements, or Google Analytics like data, and gives you the intelligence to market and perform in areas with iterative measurements.

Here’s a little peak at what the dashboard looks like

More to come on this – Keyword performance, detecting plagiarism, evaluating Pinterest performance, etc. This intelligence alone should be a reason to get on board Cucumbertown.

Of course, you can still use GA for an in depth understanding, but this is a great way to get comfortable with analyzing trends and making educated decisions on what kind of content to create.

Cucumbertown will not market the content for you. But it will give you enough intelligence to make informed marketing a breeze. It will be so easy, you’ll love it!

Structured Data

Some food bloggers have evolved but for most food bloggers writing recipes or cooking videos is like writing literature. This creates problems when you start partnering with companies.

For instance, Cucumbertown’s recipe data is used by the largest cookbook and meal planning companies. We can do so because these recipes, videos and notes are stored in a way machines understand. We can communicate this to other companies via API, a format that computers understand.

We do a lot of work to ensure the integrity of data. If you try to do this yourself, it's cumbersome. In fact, I don’t know of a blog that can provide such data to other companies to initiate any collaborations.

When other companies use your data, they’ll pay a royalty for it. And that becomes another source of your livelihood.

SEO

Cucumbertown does not use any SEO black-hat tactics. Most of the content grows on its own, but there are some fundamentals that we get right.

As you can see webpages are crazy fast.

The recipes and the data that you create on Cucumbertown look structured in the eyes of Google. This is because we use structured data called schemas to make our editor a robust, SEO friendly interface. There are more subtle things, but I’ll stop here for brevity.

There’s another important factor called birds-of-same-feather phenomenon. When you are on a site that’s just about cooks and cooking, slowly and steadily you gain trust in the eyes of Google. Everything that gets added to it has a much higher value than if you were to start this own your own from scratch. A simpler example is, let’s say you run a traveler forum. After couple of years, Google recognizes you as an authority in traveler related domain. Every post and comment that’s added to the traveler’s forum has a much higher shot at being discovered via Google search results than another person writing the same content in a new blog.

There are no short cuts to this. If you try to cut your way through, there’s a high chance you’ll be penalized. It’s a trust you accrue with Google by having good content over a period of time.

Then there’s something called negative SEO or witch hunts. Recently one of the most popular food blogs became a victim of this. The way Google gives a web page prominence is when other websites point to it. The more the number of websites that point to a page, the more the relevance in search results. That’s how PageRank, Google’s algorithm works. When people understood this, they upstaged Google by creating websites that point to pages. Google evolved and started penalizing people who did this. This opened up another hole in the system. One where I could artificially point quite a few websites to your website and make Google think that you are engaging in nefarious activity. These things are usually very sophisticated, and a normal blogger will not understand he/she is being targeted until it’s too late. While this is not a reason you should be on Cucumbertown, this is something a platform will have to take care of for you. The robustness and growth of the platform is our bread and butter, and we have tools to monitor and react to such issues.

A strange problem in food and fashion blogging – Too much good content

While researching and building Cucumbertown I came across a very strange problem that really surprised me. Too much good content.

Remember the SEO algorithm that Google uses? That applies to webpages that have links pointing to them. Turns out that a lot of webpages do not have many links pointing to them. Or very few. When that happens, Google falls back to relevancy of content (besides quite a few other factors). How well you write, how useful it is, etc.

So what happens is, there are tens of thousands of people writing about crepe recipes. All extraordinarily good recipes and pictures. My grandma’s potpie, aunty Han’s potpie, dairy free potpie, etc. It’s leading to a space that’s extremely crowded.

So if you are going write about the crispy baked chicken thighs, welcome. Get ready to get in line, people!

Competing to get traffic from Google just became near impossible. It is also one of the reasons why relying on Google to give you traffic is an extra-ordinary amount of work. I’d rather climb Mount Everest. The answer to this problem is to not do anything with Google but to grow within the platform.

Partners are most often programmers or techies

Quite a few of the food blogs that managed to succeed are a result of I-have-all-the-talent or have their spouses help them out. Blogs like pinchofyum, minimalistbaker are excellent examples

They either come from the technology or the online industry and have in-depth knowledge of design, online revenues and managing the technical aspects of the website.

Here’s the most popular cooking blog — SimplyRecipes

Elise’s expertise is certainly the unfair advantage here.

Earlier today when browsing a popular food blog that I admire, I came across this

This website blocks people who use a particular browser extension. It was evident the person who managed this food blog has in-depth understanding of the online world and the technical aspects of it.

This is a huge, huge plus.

Running a food blog is a bit like running a company.

It’s all about how much you can run and run without making mistakes until you can go on autopilot and start seeing results. Notice the making mistakes part? That’s the problem. Most people have no idea of the mistakes they are making. Most people do not have the expertise to tweak something. Most people do not have the design know-how. 99% of the bloggers do not have access to agents. Most of them do not even know how to negotiate. Monetization for the vast majority is Google Adsense, Lijit, GourmetAds and other ad networks.

A week back I was looking at the analytics for a food blog, and I asked the author why the traffic was going down. She had no idea and had no clue to analyze. I chimed in to help, but there was a limit.

That’s where the husband-wife team changes the game. The author’s expertise matters. Cucumbertown wants to change that and create a level playing field.

You the creator should be all about creating good content. You should be given the level of intelligence any expert out there has.

Being on a platform that’s all about doing one thing really well

Or let’s say collective food traffic has a cumulative effect

This is a bit like uploading videos to YouTube. Technically with a little bit of effort you can create your own YouTube clone, similar to Wordpress.

But people don’t do that. The recommended bar on the right and similar videos in YouTube are extremely powerful mechanics that jump-start a video’s life. You get a shot at showcasing this to a lot of people vs. being a nobody shoved into obscurity.

When content and people team up together on a single platform/website, something beautiful happens – network effects. A bit like a busy playground or like Facebook with friends. Google starts loving you more. You become the authority. As an author, you grow much faster than otherwise. And a lot more.

It gives the platform extraordinary abilities to work at Economics-Of-Scale. Read economics-of-scale in bold. This gives the platform abilities to cut off intermediaries like ad networks, agents, etc. Cutting out the middle men, means shaving off the costs and making everything efficient. It also means that food companies need to talk to only one company vs. talking to 100 food bloggers. Here’s a recent example.

This company, halfteaspoon reached out to Cucumbertown to work with the top creators.

We were able to provide them with data to make the right recipe choices to sell.

Here are some of the recipe ingredients sold off HalfTeaspoon

Baby Corn Manchurian

Stir Fried Mushrooms

Mushroom Masala

Soon enough this will be a source of royalty for the authors. It would have been a lot more work connecting to individual food bloggers. All of a sudden we are the solution to a lot of companies.

This is also the way YouTube works with creators, dubbed “Google Preferred”

Finally – The beauty. Features

Most people who joined Cucumbertown so far, came in because they fell in love with the platform. They heard from someone and wanted to try it out and never turned back.

On a more serious note, Cucumbertown has the best recipe-publishing writer out there. And we really have worked our socks off to create a product that redefines traditional concepts of food blogging. Simply put, it’s addictive and I guarantee that you will be creating more content than ever before.

Every aspect of content creation is extremely simplified on this editor. From writing structurally beautiful recipes with step by step images to allowing you to customise images to be shown on different social media outlets, everything about the creation and promotion of a blog post is taken care of.

And the result, is clean, minimalistic and just plain pretty.

With very little effort you end up with a beautiful recipe page.

You know very well how difficult it is to replicate this experience in a blog

That was pretty long note. And a bit staccato. For any other queries please reach out to me at cherian@cucumbertown.com