View My Top 10 Recipes of All Time
- Raw green vegan collard wraps
- Avocado chickpea salad with vegan pesto {Gluten-free}
- Grilled chicken thighs {Gluten-free, Dairy-free}
- Reeses peanut butter cheesecake and my travel plans revealed
- Zucchini chickpea burgers {Gluten-free, Vegan}
- Baked pork chops {Gluten-free}
- Sweet potato and chickpea salad {Gluten-free, Vegan}
- Oven roasted potato wedges {Gluten-free, Vegan}
- Toasted quinoa with mushrooms and asian flavors {Gluten-free}
- Turkey avocado roll-ups {Gluten-free, Dairy-free}
Resources For Food Bloggers
Landing Page Creation
LeadPages: This tool is for building landing pages to increase your email subscribers. It is the leading tool out there and can be very powerful. However, it is also $37/month so unless you are making money online and have a compelling offer, I would not recommend it. However, if you are selling a course, a book, or making money on your blog, it is valuable.
Blogging
WordPress: The #1 Blog Publishing Platform. Free and easily customizable with wonderful support. All of my blogs use WordPress.
The THESIS Theme: I originally used Thesis for Avocadopesto, though now I switched in recent days. I think it is a great theme for starter bloggers.
Hosting
I use a few different hosts for my blogs. I cannot say they are the BEST hosting around. There are thousands of hosts. I can say that they work, they are reliable/dependable, the sites go relatively fast and the support is relatively good. There may be better options out there, but these are certainly sufficient.
WPEngine:This is what my boyfriend is currently using for the SelfMadeBusinessman blog.
HostGator: This is what I use for the majority of my websites. Their shared hosting plan is solid and they have decent support.
SiteGround:We no longer use this for Avocadopesto. Although they have great support, when we upgraded to a more expensive and faster plan, we went with Traffic Planet.
Traffic Planet:We now use Traffic Planet as the host for avocadopesto. We switched rom SiteGround because although siteground had great support, we upgraded to a more expensive and faster plan, and for this Traffic Planet was a better option.
Product Distribution & Shopping Carts
paypal: For handling online transactions between people. I both pay and accept money through paypal and have never had a problem with security..
Keyword Research
longtailpro:This is a tool for keyword research. I am currently not using it because I am not doing keyword research, however, back when I was building niche sites (very briefly) I did use this tool. It helped me find a keyword that ultimately led to the creation of a site that has been making over $150/month on average, so it has paid for itself certainly.
Email Subscriptions & Marketing
Aweber: Aweber is my go to email software for building my email list. I find it is very simple to use and has the functionality I need. I have used MailChimp before and honestly find the UI to be pretty nonintuitive.
Advertising
Google Adsense:This is a very well known and reliable display advertising platform that I have used on many of my websites.
Google Adwords:If you want to begin advertising on Google, you can select keywords and locations and you pay each time someone clicks on your advertisement.
Testing Results
Google Analytics: Google’s free website tracking and analytical tool. A must have for anyone with any type of website.
Getting Help from Others / Outsourcing
Read my ultimate guide to Virtual Assistants for more information.
Elance:If you are looking for freelancers Elance is a great source. I find it is particularly good for writers and have hired a bunch of people from there.
Odesk: Nowadays Odesk is probably my go to resource to hire virtual assistants, especially general VAs.
