Recently I’ve received an increasing number of requests to guest-post on my site, which makes me ecstatic, but it also sets me in a difficult position to evaluate what is interesting. Of the millions of food blogs out there, what makes yours interesting? It’s you. Your voice, your emotions and your own experience with the food can set your post miles above a recipe that I can find just 0.2 seconds after I google its name. I’m no professional blogger, but I’ve read a fair share of food blogs, and from the ones that I keep returning to, I’ve learned and formed my own set of guidelines on how to write a post (which I try to follow, sometimes more successful than others).
In general, recipe posts have more room for personal stories, and they also comprise the most common type of food blogs (small sample: of the top 50 food blogs on Delish, 43 are recipes), so these guidelines are more geared toward recipe blogging than reviews. I’m gonna skip the photos, although they’re important, they’re the varnish and the writing is the wood.
1. Write statements with specific details, geographically and historically. Let’s say you want to write about grilled catfish. You need an opening sentence. Your first thought is “When it comes to catfish, there are many American dishes. They are mouthwatering and delicious.” These two sentences sound choppy and unimpressive, so you can remodel them into “Our American cuisine has no shortage of mouth-watering dishes with catfish, such as Catfish Tuscany and Catfish Gumbo.” Then you give more background details to it: in which regions in America are these dishes most common, who usually like them; or give a more personal touch: do you have a childhood story related to one of these catfish dishes, how did you come to like catfish or fish in general, etc.
