Advice for New Bloggers is a new regular feature here at Sarah’s Cucina Bella. Inspired by Dine and Dish’s Adopt-A-Blogger event, and written with my adoptee in mind (Hi, Rachel! Click here to check out Fairy Cake Heaven), it appears every Tuesday.

This one is pretty simple.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to produce a lot of content for the sake of doing so. Maybe you think it will drive more traffic to your site or perhaps you think that it will help you to gain credibility in the blogosphere faster. Lots of bloggers, myself included, have fallen into that trap at one time or another. But when I looked back at the breadth of quantity content I created, it was no where near as good as the quality content I created before and after that point.

Posting every day is great, but it can drain you — especially if you have 50 million other things going on in your life. Take it slow, write every piece with thought and care (and don’t forget those photos!) and your blog will be something to be proud of.

See? Simple.

none

Advice for New Bloggers is a new regular feature here at Sarah’s Cucina Bella. Inspired by Dine and Dish’s Adopt-A-Blogger event, and written with my adoptee in mind (Hi, Rachel! Click here to check out Fairy Cake Heaven), it appears every Tuesday.

I was stumped about what to talk about next. Fortunately Cate from Sweetnicks came to the rescue with a great idea: photos.

So, you are just starting out and trying to figure out this whole blogging thing, right? Figuring out what to post about and when to post and what to say is hard enough, but you need to take pictures too? Come on!

No, you really do need photos, particularly if you are a food blogger. People want to see your food. And they want to know what to expect when they make it. And, if nothing else, there are a lot of us out there who love food porn (heads out of the gutters, please. That means tasty looking pictures of food. Geez.).

It’s no secret that I am still learning the ropes of food photography myself. I’ve learned the hard way that the best photos happen during the day in natural sunlight and that at night, it’s very important to make sure you have enough lighting. Keeping the camera still helps, and the darker it is, the more important that becomes.

Do you need a fancy camera? No. It helps, but you don’t have to have one. The first trick is to learn to use the camera you have. No matter how many pixels it is, figure out how to take the best photos with the equipment you have. (And it’s a good idea to read that pesky manual. It actually does help.) And when you are ready, upgrade.

So what do I shoot with? I have a very handy and tiny Sony Cybershot that is great for taking inconspicuous photos (like in public). Until recently though, my main camera was an 8 megapixel Canon ProShot Pro1. Although it isn’t made anymore, the PowerShot Pro1 is a powerful camera that takes great pictures when used correctly. It was really great for getting the hang of taking still life photos.

For Christmas this year, I upgraded. I was ready for more. And gosh, I love my new camera. It’s a (squeak of excitement) 10 megapixel Canon Digital Rebel XTi. Talk about power. But this is a camera that you need to spend time learning how to use right (thank you, Sonja, for helping me!). When used properly, the photos come out in exquisite detail (see above). There are better camera bodies, but this is right for me now. It’s like learning to ride a bike – you don’t go from training wheels on a Huffy to a giant Harley, so why would you do that with your camera?

If you are really serious about taking great photos, you may also want to invest in a Photo Studio in a Box. This handy, dandy box and lighting helps to make your photos look more professional with the perfect amount of shadow and highlights and a non-competing background. Cate tells me that they fold nice and flat so it won’t overtake a room in your house or anything. (This is next on my upgrade list.)

For photo editing, I used to use Microsoft Picture It! Premium 10, but really it wasn’t powerful enough for my needs. These days I have upgraded to Adobe Photoshop Elements 6, which is plenty powerful enough for beginner to intermediate photographers.

Need some more advice? Here are some good resources:

  • The Food Photo 101 series from Nika’s Culinaria
  • Still Life With …’s 2007 Guide to Food Photography Gear
  • Matt Bites’ Notes About Photography
5 com

Advice for New Bloggers is a new regular feature here at Sarah’s Cucina Bella. Inspired by Dine and Dish’s Adopt-A-Blogger event, and written with my adoptee in mind (Hi, Rachel! Click here to check out Fairy Cake Heaven), it appears every Tuesday.

This is a pretty easy, but important, tip.

Use spell check on all of your posts. Having accurate grammar and spelling might seem like a tiny detail but it’s really distracting to be reading a blog with all sorts of spelling errors and poor grammar (Thanks, Patti, for helping me see the light on this one!). If you pay attention to your spelling and grammar, then readers will judge your site on the merits of your writing and your recipes. I don’t know about you, but that’s a judgment basis I don’t mind.

Coincidentally, it took me quite a while to really buy into this point. “Why bother?” I thought. But when I started to consistently check my spelling, I realized that I was also putting more time into what I wrote and turning out better posts. And ultimately, I would trade those 20 seconds of spell checking for better blogging any day.

What’s that you say? Your blog interface doesn’t have a spell check feature? That is so not an excuse. Download and use Mozilla Firefox to surf the net and you will have a built-in spell check that will highlight misspelled words as you go. In fact, it just caught me misspelling “spell check.”

*Sigh.* I never said I was perfect.

5 com

Advice for New Bloggers is a new regular feature here at Sarah’s Cucina Bella. Inspired by Dine and Dish’s Adopt-A-Blogger event, and written with my adoptee in mind (Hi, Rachel! Click here to check out Fairy Cake Heaven), it appears every Tuesday.

Give Comments and Get Comments

I’ll let you in on a little secret: If you want to get comments on your blog, the best thing you can do is comment on other people’s blogs. And, as long as you are checking out other blogs, really read them and comment when you have something to say. In other words, don’t comment just to comment — make meaningful contributions and others will be compelled to check out your blog (and comment) too.

So, where to start? Find some blogs you like and start following them regularly. I personally follow my favorite blogs on Bloglines, where I have all of their feeds saved.

Here are a few resources to help you discover good blogs:

Check out last week’s tip for new bloggers: Define Your Goals

8 com

While checking out sites when I was judging the 2007 Food Blog Awards, I stumbled on this post at Dine and Dish. I loved the idea of Adopting a Blogger. After more than two years at this, I’ve developed some great insight that I hope will be helpful to others. Anyway, I signed up and forgot about it until Kristen of Dine and Dish left me a comment last week to let me know that I had been paired with Rachel of Fairy Cake Heaven (love that blog name! how fun!). She wrote a really nice post about me and this blog — check it out here.

As part of my commitment to the program, I have to write a post too (which is what I am doing, duh!). So, I thought about what to write in my post. Then it came to me: Why write one post when I could write a series of posts that would tackle subjects that might be helpful to Rachel and other new bloggers? So here it goes:

Define Your Goals

Ask yourself: What are your goals for your blog? Why are you blogging? Who are you blogging for? Read the rest of this entry…

8 com

BlogHer

Platefull

At the Table

Tablespoon

Follow Me!

Tasty Bites

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive new post notifications by email.

Archives

Babble Food Mom Bloggers