Glen Forsyth
23 February 2020
A lot of people are under the impression that recipe websites make money by selling books and up-selling of visitors to another product. Well, there’s a lot of truth in that advice. The sad reality is that you’re going to be leaving a lot of money on the table if you follow that kind of advice.
If you have managed to put together one of the best recipe websites on the internet, listen up, you are hanging onto a gem. Now, you’re maybe thinking to yourself, “Well, I get a lot of traffic from Pinterest and Instagram, and I’ve been voted as one of the best recipe websites on the planet.” That’s all well and good and I really appreciate the traffic, but how do I make money?
Well, as I mentioned, if you were to just feature paid recipe books or cookbooks from Amazon. You’re just not going to make that much money. Forget about it.
The real money to be made, believe it or not is in product sales. This is where affiliate marketing comes in. The great thing about your website being listed as one of the best recipe websites on the internet is that you can monetize pretty much all your recipes. This is no joke.
A lot of recipe website owners would probably roll their eyes, they’re probably thinking that there’s really only one way to make money. And sadly, affiliate marketing is not one of those ways. Stop selling yourself short. You have to understand that whenever your recipe or any kind of cooking guide deals with some sort of cooking process, you need equipment.
Anybody who has to spend any time in the kitchen knows this. If you are cooking any kind of recipe to produce an amazing tasting dish, you need ingredients. Here’s where you make money. There are lots of exotic ingredients, not just Australian fruit and vegetables. It doesn’t matter whether you are featuring exotic recipes from halfway around the world or you offer the best recipes Middle America has to offer.
When people see hard-to-find ingredients, that is a monetisation opportunity. Recognise it for what it is. You can make a tremendous amount of money trying selling ingredients that your website visitors cannot find at their corner grocery. That’s pretty much the long short of it.
But there are other ways you can make money. You can make money through the pans that are going to be used, especially if you are offering recipes that feature Chinese food or some sort of cuisine that your audience members are not all that familiar with. Those audiences are more susceptible to affiliate product marketing. Why? You tell them that they’re going to prepare the ingredients in a wok.
So they see a picture of a wok, they’re impressed by the matching video so they’re more than willing to click on the affiliate link. Sure enough, when they click on the link, they see a nice wok in action with all different angles, so they want to buy.
The key here is to use the recipes to build up the appeal or necessity of the affiliate products that you re pushing. In other words, it’s the content itself that is doing the selling, and not necessarily some sort of add or some sort of call-to-action link. Because those things stick out like sore thumbs. Advertising that way is too obvious, you’re basically telling the reader of your best recipes content that they have to buy certain things.
Nobody likes to be told what to do. Nobody likes to have their arms twisted. Nobody likes to be manipulated. Well, when you incorporate the sales message smoothly and seamlessly into your best recipes, people are more likely to look at those products as necessities.
Let me tell you, if you’re serious about making money off the best recipe websites on the internet, you have to precision the stuff that you are selling as necessities, not luxuries or options. This is the secret. Unfortunately, a lot of people behind the successful recipe websites are clueless to this. They just preset these pieces of equipment as options.
These are the things that people normally wouldn’t buy, but these are options that they should look into if they really want to produce the very best tasting dishes. They are simply phoning it in if they do that. They’re just taking such a weak approach.
You have to be subtle, but you also have to be firm. In other words, you have to make sure that you position these products as essential to the cooking process. You’re not going to flat out say that you need to buy this stuff. Otherwise, the dishes that you’re cooking will turn out lows. You’re not going to go that far.
But when you suggest that picture after picture that this type of product leads to these beautiful-looking pictures, people will get the message. They will be able to connect the dots. And before you know it, you would have subliminally influenced them into buying what they need to buy. That then and only then will they be able to put extra dollars in your bank account. That’s how it works.
Don’t neglect to cash in on the experience you are providing. The experience people get when they read your stuff and click on page after page of your site is your brand. It would be a shame if you were to sit back and refuse to make money off your brand. Know what your brand is and actively work to shape it and increase its power. If you do this right, you can pretty much write your own pay cheque.
The best part? It’s all passive income. That’s right-you work once to write your content but for the life of that content, it continues to pull traffic from the Web. When those visitors click on an ad or buy something, you continue to make money off content you wrote a long long time ago. Awesome, right? I thought you’d agree. Now’s the time to get to work!
