Ep #12: How to Increase Traffic for your Food Blog with Gerry Speirs

Having great content is one thing, but creating a process to help your content be seen by others can seem like a mystery sometimes. Gerry Speirs is the mastermind behind the relatively new and cleverly named blog, Foodness Gracious, and he’s here to break through some of the mystery and talk about How to Increase Traffic for Your Food Blog. Listen in for tips to grow your traffic too!

We all know that creating quality content is an important first step to increasing traffic for your blog. But what happens when you’re delivering that content and you look at your analytics and all you see are crickets. Well, not literally of course. That would be a different story altogether.

If you’re new and hoping to grow your blog or if you’ve been at it awhile and find your traffic has plateaued, this podcast episode provides some great tips for helping you jump past some hurdles. That’s because Gerry Speirs rolled up his sleeves and put into process some specific strategies that helped grow his food blog to over 100,000 page views.

As Gerry explains, it’s not rocket science, but it does take some persistence. And Gerry is also a stay-at-home dad so he has a limited window on which to make everything happen, because spending time with his family is a priority as well.

Gerry explains that his focus on producing high-quality content is an important part of his strategy to increase traffic to his site. He also talks about the importance for having a passion for what you do. Your passion will show through in everything you do.

I love it so much, what I do, and it’s slowly involved into a mini-business, so that’s why I do it and…I just love it. — Gerry Speirs, Foodness Gracious

If you’re interested in growing traffic to your site, check out the link to the Chopped Podcast Guide to Growing Traffic for your Food Blog below that includes some of the tips shared by Gerry along with a few others.

Featured Content – How To Increase Traffic For Your Food Blog with Gerry Speirs

Here are some of the highlights of my discussion with Gerry:

• How Gerry started his blog after becoming a stay-at-home dad
• How he came up with the name for his site
• How Gerry and his wife met!
• How Gerry improved his food photography skills
• Why Gerry created a goal to get to 100,000 monthly page views
• Gerry’s favorite strategies for growing your food blog traffic
• Gerry’s favorite tools for sharing content to his best-performing social media platform

Show Notes

This episode includes references to several resources you might find interesting. Here they are:

• Learn more about today’s guest, Gerry Speirs on his site, Foodness Gracious
• If you’re interested in growing traffic to your site, check out the Chopped Podcast Blogging Tips – Growing Your Traffic. Do you have other tips that have helped you? Leave a comment below or share something on social media.
• Gerry and I talk about Pinterest sharing/schedule tools such as ViralTag and TailWind.
• Gerry and I both use Yoast’s SEO plugin. It’s a great tool to help you cover some SEO bases with your posts.
• Gerry mentions that StumbleUpon has been a good source of traffic for him. If you’re interested in using StumbleUpon too, check out the Chopped Podcast interview with Andrew Levine of StumbleUpon, including tips and best practices for how food bloggers can use it.
• Want to be featured in the Chopped Podcast Listener Shoutout? Send a description of the creative ways you listen to the podcast using @choppedcon via Twitter or Instagram.
• Why not give Gerry a shout-out on Twitter or Instagram and say thanks for the Chopped Podcast interview

Announcements

1. Learn about future Chopped Podcast episodes by subscribing to the ChoppedCon newsletter. Just add your email in the subscribe section at the bottom of this page. You’ll be glad you did!
2. The next episode of Chopped Podcast will feature an interview with food blogger, food photographer and one of the speakers at the 2015 Chopped Conference, Matt Armendariz. Matt and I talk about food photography tips for food bloggers, and he’s one of the best so he’s got some great advice to share. Subscribe to the podcast to be sure you don’t miss it!

Subscribe to the Show & Feedback

Thanks so much for listening to today’s podcast. I hope you found it informative and helpful to the work you do every day. Make sure you don’t miss out on any of the Chopped Podcast episodes by heading on over to iTunes to subscribe to the Chopped Podcast. While you’re there, provide a review and rating is a great way to help other podcast listeners find it too! That’s it for today’s podcast. As always, thanks so much for joining in the discussion!