Food vlogging is one of the most fun and creative ways to create online content that people are going to find useful and entertaining. However, the competition is steep, with established food bloggers and vloggers having worked countless years to build up their following.
Thankfully, content creation is still relatively accessible, and it’s simple enough for budding vloggers to get started with some quality recipes and tools that allow for video editing, to create animations for YouTube that really help your channel pop, and to monitor and adjust your audio levels for optimising your videos prior to uploading to ensure high-quality content for your audiences.
But to really grow your audience and your brand, you will need to go the extra mile. How can you do that? Here are some simple ways you take your vlog to the next level.
1. Upgrade Your Gear
Did you know that it’s possible to generate an entire food vlog using just your smartphone? But just because you can do this, doesn’t mean you should – especially if the camera quality on your iPhone is particularly lacking.
Whilst it’s perfectly fine to start out with a minimal setting and some great ideas, ideally as your view count grows you should be looking at upscaling your gear as well. Consider investing in a professional DSLR camera when your vlogging funds allow it.
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Your accessories are going to play a vital role as well, so upgrade to a better, independent microphone as soon as possible. While some viewers are willing to sacrifice video quality, they are going to immediately turn off your vlog if the audio quality is poor.
Lighting is essential as well. While there is plenty you can achieve with natural lighting, tools like LED panels and softboxes are going to add a professional feel and a level of sophistication that cannot be matched.
2. Know Your Angles
In the beginning, you will likely have a few favourite angles that you will want to stick to out of habit. Pieces to camera and overhead shots of the cooking and food itself will be essential at every level.
But be sure to grow your repertoire as it will make your vlogs so much more engaging and professional. The 45° is the most commonly used angle in food photography, but by tightening the angle to 25° and 30° create subtle shifts in the perspective of the food and the overall composition. Experiment with both to discover more depth and dimension.
3. Temper the Urge to Spam
We live in the era of artificial intelligence and there are plenty of tools on the market already that give you the power to pump out rapid fire vlogs across multiple platforms. It might seem like a neat hack to quickly dominate the market with hundreds of vlogs in a short period of time, but there are plenty of reasons to avoid this strategy.
The first is you are not the first to the party, in fact, you are devastatingly late. The market has already been flooded with poor quality, high quantity food vlog spam, which brings us to the second point: People hate spam. Around 162 billion spam emails are sent every day so people are not going to accept it from their entertainment and education sources.
4. Create a Unique Brand
There are a lot of food vlogs out there. In fact, there are more than 2 billion blogs already running out there, a very healthy percentage of them based on food. So no matter how good your meals are, they are going to need the right level of spice to be noticed in the ocean of competition you are facing.
Carve a niche and stick to it. This could be something like five ingredient recipes or 10 minute meals to appeal to mothers and people who are time poor. You could focus on street foods to capture the interest of travellers or those wanting to experience other cultures from the comfort of their own home. Whatever niche you choose, ensure that you stay on brand and people will actively seek you out.
Try and find a unique selling point, something that separates you from everyone else. It could be staying ultra traditional (no cream in carbonara) or it could be ultra modern. It could explore the best cuisines people have never heard of, or it could be the talent itself – you. How you deliver these vlogs will be crucial, so ensure you give your full personality and stay on brand.
5. Stay on Trend
If you want to ride the waves of success, staying on trend is key. You will build a massive audience in a short time if you can identify the current trends and deliver food options that connect to those trends. People want to be at the forefront and impress their families, friends, colleagues and neighbours so bring them the content they need and they will respond in kind.
6. Be Approachable
The best blogs and vlogs don’t just funnel information one day, communication is a two-way street. Monitor your comments and DMs and respond to people asking questions, providing suggestions or even when they are being mean. A clever comeback at the trolls will actually bring you back a lot of goodwill from your audience and make your brand seem more real.
Try to communicate and network with other food vloggers and create collaboration content to leverage each other’s audiences. And be sure to listen. If people are having challenges following and implementing your blogs, follow their advice and modify the way you do things to make your blog user friendly.
7. Include grocery lists & fridge tours
Plenty of food blogs and vloggers don’t include these steps – which presents you with a window to provide a unique point of difference.
Including easy-to-download grocery lists is more likely to inspire people to try and replicate your recipes, because it gives them the tools they need in a way that’s super easy to follow. If people have to go to the extra effort to get the list themselves, they are unlikely to do it.
Likewise fridge tours that show people how to correctly store and arrange food for a healthy, hygienic fridge is a great resource for your viewers.
In all of your efforts to make your vlog pop, though, be sure to exercise patience at every junction. By implementing all of the above tips you will grow an engaged audience over time, but you will need to respect the grind. Take your time, adapt and change and scale and upgrade over time and you will be rewarded.
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