Shooting your food can be a great way to draw people into your blog. The experience of eating is universal and so it is almost universally appealing. You can easily create content every day just by documenting your food. I wouldn’t completely recommend that, but it’s possible. Some blogs focus on the importance of beautifully shot dishes, or disastrous results with cake decorating.

When you’re shooting your food think of what would appeal to your audience. Do they want to know how the food was prepared? Do you want to instruct them on how to create the same meal? Or do you just want to show how the delicious your meal was? These are the questions you need to ask yourself before you shoot your food.

Some of my favorite food blogs give me instruction and recipes. They are very detailed and provide photos, or videos to supplement the written instructions. I think this is a great enhancement to a blog especially if you’re teaching someone how to use a recipe or to prepare a meal. So it is important that your content is accessible and appealing to your readers.

My favorite food blog is the Average Betty blog. I really love the way that Sarah (AKA Average Betty) not only shows me how to create something through video but also includes photos of the finished dish. The videos are entertaining informative clear and concise. With the written recipe there are photos of the different steps to take to create a dish as well as photos of how the dish should look in the end.

I made one of Average Betty’s Recipes the Hoffapenos.

When you are deciding what type of photo to take of your food you need to consider lighting, composition, and and how it will make your reader’s mouths water. I traveled for almost 7 years straight all across the country and into Canada and across the pond to London. In that time I took photographs of many of my meals. I got a lot of ribbing from many of my friends. Photographing your food is often the punch line to people joking about how bloggers just talk about what they ate that day. But the joke’s on them because many blogs have popped up around food. I see many photography projects based on what people ate that day. And whenever I attend a blogging convention half of the people at the table whip out their cameras to take a photo of their meal before they eat.

Eating food, talking about food, seeing videos of food it is something that I can definitely get behind. If you are thinking of a way to create some content on your blog go to a food site look at the recipe and then try to prepare that meal yourself. Photograph the steps you make to prepare the meal, video portions of the preparation, photograph the finished product, and then interview the people eating the food. I did this with one of Average Betty’s recipes, the Hoffapenos and we be came friends when I linked to her and chatted with her. One of the highlights of Blog World Expo was actually getting to meet my friend Sarah.

One of the highest search terms for my blog is for that of Fry Sauce. Fry Sauce is basically a mixture of ketchup and mayonnaise with additional spices or other ingredients. One day I was looking for something to photograph for my Photo-A-Day project. I was at a restaurant and took a photograph of a bottle of A1 Steak Sauce and Frank’s Red Hot Sauce. I posted that to my site and asked my readers what they put on their burgers, hot dogs, french fries and so on. One reader was incredulous that I did not include Fry Sauce. I had never heard of what it was and so I did some research.

I began to experiment on my own to discover what the appeal was for Fry Sauce. Not only to discover the true deliciousness of Fry Sauce but I turned it into content for my blog. I held a contest for the Ultimate Fry Sauce. I asked for 10 people to submit recipes. I then prepared all 10 recipes. That was a lot of ketchup and mayonnaise. I do not want to see or smell fry sauce for a month. However, through this contest I generated blog posts, videos, photos and attracted a number of new readers. Resulting about from a simple day where I shot a photo of a couple bottles of sauce.

And here is the video I made about the contest.

Can you see how food blogging can get you some great content?

Andrew Bennett has been blogging for the past seven years. During that time he’s taken over 2000+ photos on as many consecutive days and has attended every Blog World so far. When he’s not on Twitter (@BenSpark) he can be found at BenSpark.com. You can contact him at benspark@benspark.com.