How to Keep Your Food Blog from Costing You Money

Whether you use your food blog as a source of income or not, the options of saving money or preventing overspending are always worth considering. While blogs can be perceived as a less expensive option for running an internet business or brand, they can actually mount up in expenditures and end up costing you more than first anticipated.

There are multiple things you can do to save money while running your food blog. Below are some of the most effective methods you can use to optimize your blog for maximum cash flow and savings.

Protecting Your Content
One of the ways you can keep your blog from costing you more than you’d like is to wrap up more sales and profits. If your competitors are stealing content and ideas from your blog, they may be taking customers from you as well. It’s important that you take action to protect your material as best you can. Taking measures such as inserting copyright notices prominently on your website will stop people from feeling as though they can freely take anything they wish to from your blog.

Plugins such as WP Content Copy Protection enable you to stop people highlighting and copying text from your posts, however, you’ll have to debate on whether this is necessary or not depending on your marketing strategy and people’s abilities to share your content resulting in more site traffic. Another plugin that can be useful is Tynt Insight. Tynt enables blog owners to see what content is most commonly being copied from their site and gives them the ability to create a link back to the original material when copied text is pasted.

Knowing the above details may help you act on protecting certain areas of your website.

Review Expenditures
Preventing your blog from costing you money can be achieved through looking at your current expenditures. Sometimes the best way to make more money is to save it on existing expenses. The most common overheads blog owners have are for hosting, paid plugins, marketing, and theme designs or custom graphics. Is everything you’re paying for 100 percent necessary?

When businesses are run online, it’s very easy to sign up for subscription plans for plugin services that are rarely used or inefficient. We forget to cancel because it’s a lot easier to miss than if we had physical goods or services being carried out in real life. Look at your monthly and yearly costs and see if you can find cheaper alternatives or cut expenditures that weren’t truly necessary in the first place.

Of course, you don’t want to sabotage the efficiency of your blog or the visitor experience, so keep that in mind when considering low-cost substitutes. If it’s the security of your blog that’s in question, you can’t put a price on that. Much like the secure connection service you use to protect your data and activity, however, you can still review the best options for those solutions and make a sound decision.


Increase Your Blog’s Conversion Rate

This will be relevant for those who generate income via their food blogs. A great way to stop your blog costing you money is to increase cash flow. Whether you make money through advertisements on your site or through selling products, you can improve your conversion rate to maximize profits.

One of the most effective ways to achieve a higher conversion rate is to split-test certain aspects of your blog individually. Google Analytics is equipped with enough resources to use for conducting accurate split-tests. Utilizing this approach will allow you to create educated alterations to your blog, which will result in greater conversion optimization.

Key areas to split-test would be advert placement, themes, design, graphics, marketing, content and your products themselves. Changing products is easier when promoting as an affiliate, as there are plenty of options to choose from, but if you only sell your own product from your blog, it may take a little more work.

Conclusion
Overall, to stop you from overspending on your food blog, you must keep a close eye on how the site is running. Through a combination of measuring expenditures, protecting your content and generating more profits from the blog, you can keep costs down and increase productivity. Think critically and rationally about your content, and you’ll be able to see yourself rise to new success.

About the Author: Diamond is a food fanatic and full-time blogger. She also enjoys helping blog owners secure their websites and data so that they feel comfortable enough to be creative with their content, adding to the internet’s vast stream of rich information.