How to Create a Catalogue for Your Food Blogs

One of the things that most people love about cooking is that the possibilities are virtually limitless. You could unleash ten different people in a kitchen with the same ingredients and still walk away with ten completely different dishes depending on that unique and creative flair that each person brings with them.

This is one of the reasons why food blogs are so popular - people love seeing what other people come up with when left to their own devices. But in terms of that blog itself, those same endless possibilities could be your biggest challenge to overcome in terms of one very crucial area: organisation.

Just as you would with something like a travel blog, you still need to make the information on your food blog easy to find and digest (no pun intended).

To improve content discovery, it might be wise to create a catalogue - something you can do in a few key ways depending on your preferences.

The art of catalogue creation for food blogs

How you choose to organise your food blog by way of a catalogue will end up being a large part of what makes your domain unique. It will also be dictated by two core elements - your personal preferences and those of your audience members.

Generally speaking, there are several different catalogue "types" you can choose from when looking to add a new level to your food blog.

These include but are certainly not limited to ones like:

Main ingredient

A lot of food blogs use this because it makes collections of similar recipes and blog topics very easy to find. However, if yours is a blog devoted to a very niche topic - like if you only focus on pizza - this won't necessarily be the best way to narrow things down.

Type

If the goal of your food blog is to help someone figure out what to make for dinner, for example, this is a great way to catalogue things because readers can quickly find anything you've written on pasta, or soups, or Indian dishes with the single click of a button.

Course

This is also a great way to break things up a bit based on which meals are designed to be had at which times of the day. In addition to breakfast, lunch and dinner, you could even break things down further by criteria like snacks, healthy appetisers and more.

Special Occasion

People often wonder what they should be brought to a neighbourhood potluck, for example, or they might be on the hunt for something easy they can make to bring for Thanksgiving dinner. This type of catalogue would be a great way to support those with this particular preference.

With any of these, you could even use a presentation maker to create something of a "master document", allowing people to download ALL the recipes in a special category right to their computer or mobile device.

Once you've settled on a general theme for your catalogue, use a grid of images to allow people to find what they're looking for quickly. Someone might have a favourite dish, but they might not be sure what it's called.

A layout that puts the images of those dishes front and centre is a perfect way to appeal to both seasoned kitchen veteran and novice alike.

Additional considerations for building the best food blog possible

Once your catalogue itself has been created, you'll still want to use all of the best practices of content creation to your advantage. Use a service like Respona to build quality backlinks to your catalogue (which primarily serves the same function as a landing page in this scenario), all in the name of gaining as much organic traffic as you can.

Don't just publish recipes and photo essays - use a graph maker like Visme (which I founded) to vary up your content, presenting things both visually and in a unique way as often as you can.

But more than anything, make sure that you inject as much personality into your food blog as possible. People don't just want to learn about delicious dishes.

They want to learn about them from you. The pretty food pictures are how you get someone's attention for the first time. Using those pictures to give someone a positive impression of who you are is how you keep them coming back for more.

About the Author

Payman Taei is the founder of Visme, an easy-to-use online tool to create engaging presentations, infographics, and other forms of visual content. He is also the founder of HindSite Interactive, an award-winning Maryland digital agency specialising in website design, user experience and web app development.

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Tags: Food Blogging, Content Marketing, Guest Post