What I learned at the Food Bloggers’ Conference, Bite ‘n’ Write 2011

 

The day before yesterday I went to Bite ‘n’ Write 2011, the first UK-based food bloggers’ conference to be held outside of London.

The conference took place in the Old Library, a building with a cathedral-like interior, which is part of a funky complex known as The Custard Factory (yes, named after that custard), located in the middle of Birmingham.

I went hungry for learning. I especially wanted to feast on WordPress and search engine optimization (SEO). Below are the points that I found particularly useful.

Some of the learning points that I’m highlighting will make me look dumb; weren’t we all born with the knowledge that you don’t use your flash when taking a photo, and that you don’t mess with the telephoto function when shooting video? Well, yes (almost). But the issue is that some of these points are so important that they are fundamental. And yet I often ignore them willfully. Hopefully now I’ll have re-learned some lessons.

But firstly, these are the topics we plunged into during the conference: food photography, social media and SEO, your writing voice, recipe developing and food allergy, WordPress and video blogging.

The programme of talks is on the Bite ‘n’ Write site.

First up was the talk on food photography given by Craig Fraser, from FraserShot. Because of near-mutiny conditions on my train from Shrewsbury (my trains were not only overcrowded, but also both early and late), I arrived towards the end of this talk.

Session 1: Food Photography Workshop, by Craig Fraser (@FrasershotPhoto), FraserShot

Key Points:

1. Don’t use your flash.
2. Natural light is the best light.
3. Get a tripod, even if it’s a small one.
4. Adobe Lightroom is very good for shooting raw (and is the business, generally).
5. Think laterally about the props that will enhance your photos. Craig takes a couple of short rustic oak floorboards with him on shoots to lend texture to his photos.
6. Buy an inexpensive sheet of silver card to bounce light back onto the subject of your photo.
7. If all else fails, buy a Hasselblad (Craig’s set him back a cool £20k).

Related to Craig’s workshop was a recommendation I got from Sarah Finn (@sarahknows1; one of my fellow conference attendees) about an excellent book on food photography by Helene Dujardin (@SweetTartlette), Plate to Pixel. Thanks for that tip, Sarah.

Session 2: Finding Your Blogging Voice, by Jeanne Horak (@cooksister), Cooksister

Key Points:

1. Define your goals for blogging.
2. Find your blog niche.
3. Include a ‘search’ box on your blog; put it up front rather than hiding it at the bottom of the page.
4. Write a lot. Read a lot. Edit a lot (hear, hear!).
5. Be nice; play nice: the food blogging world is a community.

Session 3: Recipe Developing and Food Allergy, by Charlotte Pike (@gofreecakes), Go Free Foods

Key Points:

1. Consider developing recipes for the kids in the UK who have a food intolerance; this is a significant audience.
2. Test and re-test recipes to make sure they work.
3. Make meticulous notes when testing recipes.
4. To avoid creating frustration in your readers, make sure your ingredient substitutions are accurate.
5. To ensure clarity, err on the side of simplicity when writing the instructions for your recipe method.

Session 4: Promoting your Blog Using Social Media, by Judith Lewis (@mostlyaboutchoc), Mostly About Chocolate

Key Points:

1. Sign up to Google’s Webmaster tools.
2. Use a maximum of two or three tags per category (in your blog).
3. Don’t ascribe a blog post to too many different categories on your blog.
4. Do link blog posts to other related blog posts on your site.
5. Check out meetup.com, WpRecipes.com and Cooklet.com.
6. Do use separate social identities for separate entities (e.g., Judith is both @mostlyaboutchoc and @JudithLewis).

Session 5: WordPress, by James Bolton (@DerezzedMedia), Derezzed Media

Key Points:

1. Around 14% of all websites are powered by WordPress (this includes sites like techcrunch.com and mashable.com).
2. You needn’t be spending more than £5 per month on web hosting (if you go down the WordPress.org route).
3. Host in the UK if you are targeting a UK audience.
4. To improve SEO, take time to give your images a description.
5. Do create a static front page.
6. Don’t ram your site with plug-ins; they’ll slow down your site.
7. Do install GoogleAnalytics.
8. Do install (and enable!) Askismet.
9. Do install NextGEN Gallery.

 

Session 6: Video Blogging, by Ben Fraser (@CupcakeArtisan1), Cupcake Artisan

Key Points:

1. Increase the lighting in the room in which you do your video blogging. The yellow ‘workman’ lights from any of the DIY stores do the job perfectly, and are not expensive.
2. ‘Daylight Blue’ lighting gel is an inexpensive way of making the light from ‘workman’ lights more natural.
3. If you’re going to buy a video camera, buy one that flips around on itself (that swivels); this is useful for the solo video maker.
4. Use standard definition.
5. Do two takes: one with long shots and one with close-ups.
6. If your washing line is in eye shot, take the washing off the line before you start filming.
7. Ban the telephoto.
8. iMovie is the best editing suite ever.
9. Break specific techniques (e.g. making puff pastry) into mini-tutorials (a tutorial within a tutorial).
10. Upload your video to YouTube or Vimeo and then pull them on to your blog. This way, you let another site take the memory strain and you get a link from these renowned sites to your blog.
11. Video blogging is all about showing your audience how to do something. It ‘aint about you.
12. Make crib notes that act as a map of what you will demonstrate. Above all, don’t waffle.

I learned a lot at Bite ‘n’ Write 2011. I can only imagine the monumental effort that will have taken place behind the scenes for this type of event to happen. I hope that Annie (@anniekoyk, www.annieko.com) and James are willing to make it an annual one.

Tagged as: Bite 'n' Write 2011, food blogging tips