Growing Your Food Blog to Two Million Pageviews Per Month, SEO, and Building Diverse Revenue with Amanda Batcher

Today we’re talking about Growing Your Food Blog to Two Million Pageviews Per Month, SEO, and Building a Diversified Revenue Stream. The guest is Amanda Batcher of the site The Chunky Chef. If you dream of the day when you can take your food blog full-time, today’s episode will enlighten you on Amanda’s process for doing just that!

Growing Your Food Blog to Two Million Pageviews Per Month

Today’s discussion is a lively chat with Amanda Batcher about growing your food blog to two million pageviews per month. Amanda shares why she started her blog, The Chunky Chef which she grew to 2 million pageviews per month. And then started another blog, The 5 O’Clock Chef.

She’s obviously not someone intimidated by a challenge! She talks about how she learned about SEO by taking a course and chatting with other bloggers. She also read a little bit about photography and then experimented a lot to improve her food photography. I call this a bootstrapping model, where someone takes the task at hand and experiments until they get it right!

Amanda explains that she has worked toward a diversified income portfolio, including the following:

• Ad Network
• Affiliate sales
• Sponsored Posts.

The other thing she pointed out is that as her traffic grew, she was surprised at how much she could ask for regarding sponsored posts. I talk about this in my post on the top 3 revenue models for food bloggers. If you’re building an ad-based site, you’ll want lots of traffic in order to make a living. However, there are places where all three areas can overlap, such as Amanda points out. She’s making money on the ads, but also her revenues increased from sponsored posts as well.

I asked her what she thought made the biggest difference as far as traffic was concerned. We all want to know the answer to this question, right? And her response was not surprising: Amanda felt that improving her food photography made a big difference.

If you want ideas on how to improve your food photography, be sure to listen to Matt Armendariz talking about Food Photography Tips!

I asked Amanda how she is able to accomplish everything. Running two popular sites is a lot of work! Her response? She uses a Plum Paper Planner to help stay organized (see link below).

This is an informative and inspiring conversation with Amanda and I hope you find it inspiring as well!

Show Notes

This episode on Growing Your Food Blog to Two Million Pageviews Per Month, includes references to:

• Connect with today’s guest: The Chunky Chef and the 5 O’Clock Chef
• Say thanks to our guest today with a shout-out on: Chunky Chef: Instagram or Twitter  5 O’Clock Chef: Instagram or Twitter
• Related Post: Listen to The Fast Growing Food Blog with Sabrina Snyder
• Learn about the Plum Paper Planner
• Connect with Chopped Academy Online:  Instagram  | Twitter
• Related Post: 3 Revenue Streams for Food Bloggers
• Connect with Marly: Namely Marly |  Instagram  | Twitter
• Today’s post production, music, graphic art & sound design by Shawn Beelman
• Subscribe below to be the first to hear about future Chopped Podcast episodes. You can subscribe at the bottom of this page. You’ll be glad you did!

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