10 Reasons to Join Food Blogger Pro

Food Blogger Pro membership is now open for enrollment!  Read on for 10 reasons why I think Food Blogger Pro  is a great investment. Note: this post contains affiliate links. When I find a great product or service, I like to share it with my readers. Sometimes I use affiliate links so I can earn commission for my recommendations.

Let me share with you 10 reasons reasons to join Food Blogger Pro based on my experience as a FBP member and affiliate. If you are serious about growing your food blog, you will want to click here to join Food Blogger Pro. For another resource for improving your blog, you might also want to check out this article I wrote on Updating Old Blog Posts and Other Food Blog Strategies. 

1 ) Learn from success: If you are interested in starting a food blog that generates an income, or to take a blog you have to the next level, Pinch of Yum is a highly successful example to learn from.

Lindsay and Bjork are very transparent about how they generate that traffic and income–they detailed the blog’s growth in monthly income reports published on their blog for over five years. They have stopped doing those monthly updates, but you can get the past income reports from Pinch of Yum, but to get their insights on how build your own blog, you definitely need to join Food Blogger Pro. They have taken a very analytical approach to figuring out what things really drive traffic to a food blog over time, and break it down clearly in their instructional videos and posts.

2) Improve your food photos: Taking drool worthy food photos is crucial for growing a food blog.  Food Blogger Pro has wonderful instructional videos that have helped me learn how to take great photos in natural and artificial light, how to optimize the photos and get them accepted at sites like foodgawker. Prior to joining FBP and reading the Tasty Food Photography ebook, I hadn’t gotten any photos accepted at foodgawker. Now I’ve had over 150 photos picked up there! (one example below).

3) Boost your SEO knowledge: The awesome SEO tips have been a big focus of my time on  Food Blogger Pro lately. Unfortunately, I was blogging casually for several years hardly knowing what SEO means (Search Engine Optimization, BTW), let alone how to put SEO into practice to grow my food blog. FBP has a series of videos to get you a basic under understanding of how to use SEO to boost your blog. They also have a great SEO expert named Casey Markee as a regular contributor to the site, and I’ve found him to be super-helpful. There are something like 10 million recipe searches per day on Google, and you need to know SEO to get you slice of the search action!

4) Connect with a great community: The great community is as much of a selling point for FBP as the lessons you can get. Pose a question to the forum, you’ll get several helpful answers back in no time. For instance, I’m considering a new ad platform and got some good insights from FBPers that have used it. There are also a lot of opportunities for mutual support, like inviting each other to shared Pinterest boards and roundup posts.

5) Lindsay & Bjork are great teachers: Heck, Lindsay was a 4th grade teacher until making the move to full-time food blogger. She and Bjork are both great at breaking down blogging concepts with very clear, specific instructions. Plus, they have a nice friendly style and sprinkle in some humor to keep the learning fun.

6) FBP is chock-full of resources that stay fresh: There’s so much good info on Food Blogger Pro, covering photography, SEO, monetizing your blog and much more. In fact there are over 300 instructional videos available to FBP members. And Lindsay and Bjork are constantly cranking out more resources, so there’s always something new to learn. In fact, one reason that they are limiting FBP enrollment to brief semiannual enrollment periods is to focus on creating more resources to supper FBP members as best they can. In addition to the learning resources, they help members access a number of discounts that are helpful to food bloggers. For instance, I got a reduced monthly rate for Tailwind, a great service for scheduling on Pinterest.

7) Get your food blogging questions answered: In addition to all the great resources available on Food Blogger Pro, when I have I specific question I want feedback on, I will post it to the forum and quickly get great suggestions from my peers. For instance, lately I’ve been working on improving my post titles and content strategy to boost my SEO results. I will post to the forum about titles and topics I’m considering, and quickly get feedback on what approaches are likely to work best. It’s like having a group of food blogging coaches available 24/7, for one very reasonable monthly rate.

8) Well-organized information: OK, let me set something straight lest I lead you to think there’s an overwhelming amount of information on the site. There is a lot, but it is well-organized by topic area (this is true of both the community help portion and the instructional videos). So you can navigate around and find what you want quite easily. I dabble in some other blogger communities, mostly Facebook groups. There can be useful info in such sometimes, but it’s very hit or miss as to whether you are going to find anything useful when it’s not organized like FBP is.

9) It’s helped me grow my blog: I switched Cooking Chat over to WordPress in November 2014. I was getting about 3,000 page views per month at the time; now I’m up around 80,000 and growing steadily. With these numbers, I’ve topped $20,000 in ad revenue from blogging, while doing this alongside a busy full-time day job.

Understanding SEO from FBP lessons and tips from fellow FBPers has really helped with the growth. Another big reason is the photography tips I’ve learned from Lindsay. BTW, Lindsay and Bjork wisely counsel that growing a profitable food blog takes time, no promises of instant success.

For more on some of the strategies I have been using to grow my blog traffic, see this article on Updating Old Blog Posts.

10) Time is running out! There is a Food Blogger Pro CyberMonday deal with $100 off the annual membership. The deal starts at 8 a.m. on Monday, November 28th, and ends at 5 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, November 30.

I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have about the FBP membership based on my experience. Just leave a comment or shoot me an email and I’d be happy to share with you more about my experience with Food Blogger Pro.