For many of us, foods are an almost integral part of our life and for some of us, we eat foods not out of hunger, but we enjoy foods for pleasure and it’s our interest and hobby.
Food Blogging in India is not a new concept, so many food blogs or Vlogs are already popular on Social media like Instagram or YouTube. You will find all kinds of food blogs – some focus on health, others on tradition, someone on quick recipes. Some are doing this for the manifestation of a hobby and some are taking it as a niche for business.
Here, in this article, we will discuss how to earn money through food blogging in India and what are the best affiliate programs for food bloggers.
Food blogging is a lucrative niche especially if you are signed up for the right affiliate programs and you use Pinterest to drive traffic. Because Pinterest is one of the best search engines for promoting categories like foods or recipes and most of the users of Pinterest are women.
What is Food Blogging
As the name suggests Food blogging means blogging for foods and their related products. Generally, food blogging is related to three micro-categories.
- Blogging relates to Cooking and Sharing recipes
These are the bloggers who cook and post about their cooking recipes along with videos and pictures. It could be anything from a blog about highly authentic recipes, experiential food, or just about anything that one is cooking. There will most often be a story accompanying the blog post. You may include some of the cooking utensils or kitchen items in your blog posts. - Restaurant Reviews
These bloggers are the people who review restaurants for the quality of food, ambiance, service, price range, and so on. This is a kind of restaurant guide and will almost always include a little story about why they loved or hated the food, what motivated them to go in the first place, and so on. This kind of blogging somewhat relates to another popular niche i.e. travel blogging. - Food Photography
These bloggers take photos while roaming to different places or countries. The food photos or pictures may be from any unknown popular street foods of different cities to famous foods of any particular restaurant. You will find so many extremely popular food photographers’ profiles on social networking sites like Instagram or Facebook.
Best Affiliate Programs for Food Bloggers India
Now back to the article, how to earn some extra bucks if you are a food blogger.
Blogging is the best media for every niche. Your blog is a personal journal. And anything you want to say about food through your blog, and as long as your blog is mainly about food, becomes a food blog. It may be talked about with great detailing and storytelling and occasionally has product and restaurant reviews. You can start writing your blog with any of the popular blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, or Medium. I personally prefer WordPress, because it is the most dynamic and flexible with tons of customization options. If you don’t have a blog yet, you can start creating your blog today with some great hosting providers like Bluehost or SiteGround.
In India, the option for food bloggers is quite limited. Unlike other countries like the USA or Canada, food blogging in India is mainly limited to an Instagram or Facebook page.
If you have a food blog and are looking for ways to start incorporating some affiliate links on your blog, here are some affiliate programs for food bloggers to check out and see if they work well with your site content. Amazon associates, Viglink, CJ Affiliates, and Shareasale is a must for all affiliate marketers to be a part of so you need to sign up with them.
Note: Most affiliate programs are set up to track cookies. The usual range of these cookies is 14 days. This means that if you send your Twitter followers or blog subscribers to a recipe on an affiliate partner’s website and they end up making a purchase within 14 days, you will earn your commission.
Some of the popular Blog monetization marketers for food bloggers in India are listed below
Ways to Earn Money from Food Blogging in India
Food bloggers in the US and other developed countries earn $1,000-10,000 per month, sometimes even more. But, for food blogging in India, the earnings from your Food Blog will be much less than the other Developed countries. You will get merely Rs.5000 to Rs.10000.00 for 100,000 monthly page views in India. Therefore it’s a really very tough job if you choose Food Blogging as a niche in India.
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Referral and Affiliate Programs
Affiliate marketing is promoting someone else products for sale through referrals. Generally speaking, affiliate marketing works with those blogs that have some good traffic. But the option is not so much here for Indian Food Bloggers, most of the Popular Food Delivery networks do not run their own affiliate program.
1. Swiggy
Swiggy is now one of India’s fastest food delivery services. With its no minimum order policy, live order tracking, and super-fast delivery.
Swiggy runs its affiliate programs through various affiliate networks Cuelinks, Admitad etc. You have to check various Affiliate networks for the current campaign.
Launched in 2014, FreshMenu is also a popular Food Delivery network in India and growing very rapidly in every part of India. FreshMenu partners with various affiliate networks to run its affiliate programs. You have to check individual affiliate networks for the current campaign and CPC.
3. Zomato
Zomato also does not run its own affiliate programs. They have their own referral or Promo Code programs where you can earn some bucks in your Zomato wallet by inviting your friends.
If you are a food blogger based in India, then you can submit your blog URL in Zomato here. Once registered there, all the linked posts from your blog will show up automatically in the Blog Posts section of your profile on Zomato and you may get some free traffic to your blog from Zomato.
3. Amazon India
You can join Amazon India Affiliate Programs and promote their products from your blog. They have a huge portfolio of products for any specific niche and you can earn some extra money by selling Amazon India products like kitchen appliances, and utensils from the affiliate links. They provide a 4% to 10% commission for every product referred from your blog.
Similar to Amazon India, you can also earn money by promoting products of Flipkart India from your blog. The commission rate is more or less the same as Amazon India.
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Google Adsense
One of the most popular advertisement platforms is Google Adsense for publishers. You can apply for the Google Adsense Program, Complete the form, and include the Google Adsense code in your blog. Google will review your website and approve (or disapprove) of the network.
Before applying for the Adsense program, make sure that your website looks professional, and has substantial blog posts there. Suggested having around fifty articles and waiting for at least three months from starting your blog. (Your blog should be at least 6 months old if you want to apply for Adsense from India). It is also crucial that you include an About Us page, Terms & Conditions page, Contact Us page with contact form and email/phone, and Privacy Policy page that mentions whether you use cookies or not & how you show ads, etc. based on Google’s guidelines to its publisher websites.
Food bloggers in the US and other developed countries earn $1,000-10,000 per month, But to get that income from India, you really have to work hard as the value of Indian traffic is low. For every 1,000 page views, you can earn up to Rs 50-100 through advertisements shown on food blog pages. If your food blog gets 1,00,000 visitors each month, then you can earn Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000 through advertisements. For getting higher income from food blogging in India, you need more website traffic. However, Google Adsense is a very good source to earn some recurring income from your blog if your website gets a very high volume of traffic.
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Sponsored Reviews
You can earn by way of paid reviews for any restaurants or Apps. For sponsored posts and other forms of the blog, sponsorships work only for established blogs. Therefore your blog needs to be highly established in the field of the particular niche.
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Selling E-Books
Selling ebooks is one of the very popular blog monetization methods, and works for every Blog niche. If you enjoy cooking, you can create your own ebooks by sharing your recipes and selling e-books from your blog. If you have a high reader base, you can always earn some extra bucks from selling ebooks. You can also sell your cooking E-book at sites like Amazon and earn some passive income.
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Food Photography
Food photography is a great hobby and a very popular niche. For taking good photos, you don’t require any good DSLR with a very high price tag. You can easily take some good photos from your smartphone and sell these photos to different Stock photography sites like Shutterstock, Gettyimages, etc.
Let’s see how can use your food photographs on your blog
- Sponsored posts of the foods where you use your recipe, you can take photos of it and publish them in your blog.
- Creating content for restaurants or Apps, who will then publish your photos on their websites and use your images for their ad campaign.
- For creating your ebooks, which you can sell from your blog or through other channels like Amazon.
- If you can create some excellent photos, then many brands can approach you for printing rights.
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Selling Online Courses
Selling online courses is also another way, you can earn some money from your food blog. You can create a paid online course for your readers on a site like Udemy and share your recipes or techniques of cooking. You can sell also the utensils you used through Amazon Affiliate links from your blog.
You can also create a YouTube vlog and share your cooking videos on your blog. In this way, you can also monetize from your YouTube vlogs.
Final Thought:
Earning money from any blog is not a single day’s work, you need to dedicate so much time and effort to make your blog more successful, and it is also not an exception for any food blogging in India. The key is your readership and visitors. You have to create some great and useful articles for your readers so that they can find some means to visit your food blog again. So start your food blog with some best blogging platforms already available to you.
Thanks for sharing nice information and this article helping for every people
Good information.
Quite impressive, I like your story even though everyone doing the same. Keep doing it and all the best