Finding the perfect cooking blog name can seem like an overwhelming task. After all, there are countless recipe websites out there already. The amount of competition suggests that you need a stunning blog name to stand out.
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Thankfully, this isn’t really the case at all. The name that you choose for your blog won’t have nearly as much impact as you might expect. Any effects are minimal and there are many more significant areas to think about (which I’ll cover below)
After all, the names of some websites sometimes have very little to do with the content of the site. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to read a keto blog called “Avocado Head” instead of something obvious like “Cooking Keto Meals”. Great brands are great because of the amazing content the produce, not because of some kind of magic in the name.
That being said, it’s also important that you are confident in the name you choose. While you can redirect your site to a new domain later on down the road, it’s time consuming or expensive to do. That’s why I came up with these 50 cooking blog name ideas to, at the very least, spark some ideas.
This post aims to help you by offering some blog name ideas, along with details about how to choose and purchase a good domain name, how to get traffic and ways to then make money from your site. While it is worth spending some time to pick a name that suits your goals, you don’t want to be spending too much energy on the process.
50 Cooking Blog Name Ideas
- Fine Cooking for One
- Affordable Cooking for One
- This Dauntless Chef
- The Solo Chef
- My Heartfelt Food
- Dinner Gone Right
- Meal Prep for Health
- Cooking with Shortcuts
- Tastes of Childhood
- Brazen Cooking
- Meals for Less
- Meal Prep World
- Never Skip the Cake
- Comfort Food for the Masses
- Kiwi in the Kitchen
- Raw Food Game
- Pete’s Daily Simple Cooks
- Rave Cook
- Food for Thought
- Simple Eats at Home
- The Art of the Chef
- Food for the Heart Cook
- Paleo Cooking World
- Solo Meal Prepping
- The Pleasure of Food
- Cooking from Scratch
- Tomboy in the Kitchen
- Don’t Skip Dessert
- Cook Like an Artist
- Mobile Meal Prep
- Simply Delicious
- The Gallant Chef
- Comfort Foodbook
- Affordable Cooking from Scratch
- This Colorful Cook
- My Simple Eats
- Your Digital Cookbook
- Wholesome Food
- Sweet Treats First
- The Foodie Cook
- Good Cuisine Online
- All Things Nice
- Paleo Cooking Life
- Vegemite on Toast
- Cream Puff Creations
- Food for Delight Online
- Weird Wonderful Eats
- Fudge It
- World Cooking for Kids
- Daily Dinner on a Budget
How To Choose A Good Blog Name
While there isn’t an ideal name for any blog, following a few tips and tricks can help you avoid serious problems. The first is to think about the site you’ll be making. What is your goal, your audience, your inspiration? Those areas can all provide ideas.
The meaning behind the name isn’t obvious when you land on the site, but with my logo, navigation, and the fact that you landed on a page from Google search means that you pretty much get that the site has something to do with making money online. Right?
Should you go broad or focused with a blog name? A name with a narrow focus can be problematic if you want to expand the areas that you write about later one. If you name your blog something like, Cooking For One”, but then you get married, you’ll need to get a new domain name, rebrand, or sell the site. If you call it something like Cooking From The Heart, it doesn’t matter what you write about. Change your tagline and logo and you’re good to go.
Picking something memorable works well. Playing on words can be a good way to do this. Blog name generators often come up with surprising gems too. For example, if I stick the phrase ‘tasty treats’ into the generator NameBoy, I get plenty of weird names and a few interesting ones like Tasty Treats Forest, Tasty Treats World, Affordable Tasty Treats and My Tasty Treats.
Another trick is to make sure your domain name makes sense if someone says it out loud. This involves avoiding misspellings, dashes and numbers as much as you possibly can. Doing so helps ensure that people can find your site, even if they’ve never seen the domain name written down.
Be careful about the domain extensions too. Uncommon extensions like .blog, .fun, or .biz can make your site seem less trustworthy and could even affect the way that your website ranks.
Keyword VS Branding
Blog names fall into two general types. The first is to use your keyword in the domain name. This can provide some keyword power, which may help your website to rank. It’s also easier to narrow down what domain name you want, as you have a simple starting point.
The style is also limited, as you can end up with a domain that is very similar to others in the field. Plus, because there are so many smart SEOs using the same keyword generators, a lot of the high traffic phrases are already taken.
Because of this, keyword-based names make the most sense for fields where the competition is limited. When it comes to cooking, a keyword-focused name may only be viable if you have an unusual keyword and angle.
For example, if you were cooking for a nutrition blog with a focus on vegan protein sources, you could call it bestproteinforvegans.com. A focus on traditional Greek cooking could be traditionalgreekrecipes.com.
Alternatively, you can focus on a branded domain name, which doesn’t need to be related to your keyword or field at all. There are plenty of examples out there. Just think of all the popular brands where the name has very little to do with what the company sells (like Amazon). With regards to cooking, you can think of Damn Delicious, A Pinch of Yum, or The Kitchn, which are three examples of extremely popular blogs which started out with zero keyword power.
A branded name is often memorable and is more unusual than a keyword-based name. On the flip side, there are countless options, so beginners often struggle to find one that they like. You may also need to do extra work initially, as your site’s focus might not be clear from the name alone.
How To Buy A Domain Name
There are many domain name companies out there, but some are better than others. Common problems include fewer features, hidden costs, too many upsells or a price that is too high.
GoDaddy remains one of the most popular choices because of their first year pricing. I don’t like the service personally, as domain costs after the first year are relatively expensive. They also try to sell far too many addons like hosting, plus their SSL certificates and privacy packages are outrageously priced.
Other options include Bluehost, HostGator and Register.com. My personal favorite is Namecheap. I like how clear the pricing is for this service. They don’t try to shove too many extras in your face either. The simple interface also makes this a good choice for anyone who hasn’t purchased a domain name before.
You can choose any registrar in combination with any host.
How To Build & Make Money From Your Cooking Website
Once you have the domain name that you want, it’s time to build a site. There are plenty of options here too, but the process doesn’t need to be stressful.
The first question is whether you want to use a free website or a paid one. There are many free options out there, like Wix, Weebly, WordPress.com or Yola. They all come with limitations. For example, affiliate marketing may not be allowed, your site size may be restricted and/or you may need to host ads for the service that you’re using.
Most free sites have a paid option as well. This provides more versatility, but you’re still left with whatever limitations that particular service has. One example is Wix. This service gives you a lot of control over the way that your site looks, but it can be frustrating to use as you start to optimize your pages for search engines.
If you want long-term income from a site, self-hosted WordPress sites tend to be the most powerful. This style gives you the most control over the way your site looks and how it functions. WordPress is fairly easy to use and you can check out my tutorial on building an affiliate website for details about how to get started.
I’ll talk about income strategies in depth shortly. The general idea is that most people earn through affiliate marketing, hosting ads or a combination of both. You may develop and sell your own products over time (like cookbooks!), but it’s typically best to grow your reputation and traffic first.
How Much Do Cooking Bloggers Make?
Despite the sheer number of cooking blogs out there, many bloggers are highly successful at making money. Just take a look at Pinch of Yum, which is run by Lindsay and Bjork, a husband and wife team.
The couple published six years of income reports, starting in 2011 and running to the end of 2016. Their initial report highlighted earnings of just $21.97 per month.
The final month showcased total income of more than $95,000. Expenses were high too, as Lindsay and Bjork now hire staff members. Even so, their profits were more than $66,000. That’s a seriously impressive figure for a single month.
In fact, their cooking & recipe blog was so successful that they launched their own course called Food Blogger Pro, which is aimed at helping people grow an online brand making money from their recipes. You learn everything from food photograph (lighting, composition, DSLR operation), to recipe SEO, recipe plugins, and of course social media promotion on places like Pinterest or Twitter. It’s a flat-out amazing course, and tailored specifically to you.
Another great example of earning money from a cooking blog is the site Piping Hot Curry offers another example of income. The blog owner Meeta was earning around $5,000 per month toward the end of 2018. Most of that income came from ads, with a little from affiliate marketing too.
Display Ads
Display ads are the easiest way to make money with a site. You can simply set them up and then forget about them – if you want to. There are also various ad management plugins that can make display ads more effective still. If you have recipes on your site, these recipe plugins can help you actually put ads inside your recipes so that people reading your free recipe content will still be earning you money.
Optimizing income with your ads takes more work. Doing so might involve playing around with ad formats and testing multiple techniques. You’ll also want to make sure that your ads (and the rest of your site) look good on every screen size.
Ads are especially appealing for cooking sites, as you don’t need to base your content around them. In fact, some networks like AdThrive are tailored to food and cooking niche websites This gives you the chance to write whatever you want to.
There are some disadvantages too. One is that ads can be annoying. You won’t make much money from ads if people leave your site as soon as they visit it. The other issue is that ads don’t earn you all that much money. You need a considerable amount of traffic to start seeing good income from ads.
You can choose from multiple ad networks, including Google AdSense. The best choice will depend on the amount of traffic that you’re getting and your specific needs. Regardless of the network, ads can be a key source of income if you stick with them.
Affiliate Links
Affiliate marketing is the other main way to make money with a website. While the process requires more planning and effort than ads, the income potential is higher too. You don’t need as much traffic to earn significant income either.
The basic idea is that you’re linking customers to products (or services) that other companies create. You earn some money whenever a customer ends up buying an item that you’re promoting.
The reason it takes less traffic to earn money is that your promotions are targeted. When you write something like, “Vitamix review”, if someone lands on the page you know they are already somewhat interested in buying a Vitamix machine. Your commission for that that single person buying a $500 item is a whole $25 compared to the pennies per view you get from display ads.
How much you make per sale can vary considerably. Sometimes you’ll receive a percentage, while other companies will offer a flat fee per sale. There are even recurring affiliate programs, which can provide monthly income.
To make affiliate marketing work well, you need to be promoting products that are relevant to your audience. If your site is about being a vegan, then you don’t want to promote Butcher Box. Obvious, right?
One angle would be to use affiliate marketing to promote unusual ingredients, along with cooking tools that you use (such as an Instant Pot). Highlighting ingredients is especially common for sites in specialized fields, like bloggers who create keto or paleo recipes.
You don’t need specialized skills or experience to learn affiliate marketing. You simply need to be willing to put the time into learning the processes and then implementing them.
Final Thoughts
When it comes down to it, a domain name is never going to make your website a success or a failure. The name is just one factor out of many. In fact, the name of this site breaks most of the ‘rules’ that I suggested earlier and it still performs well.
If you choose a domain name and end up really unhappy with it, you could change it later by using a domain redirect. While doing so takes some technical expertise, you can find plenty of information online.
Just find something that you like and move onto making your site. Your writing and your personality will end up having a much larger impact than whatever name you happen to stick on the site.
Should You Start Your Own Blog?
Honestly, the sad thing is that most people who want to start a blog get a domain name and a website set up, but never really do much beyond that. They are leaving a serious amount of money on the table!
If you want to actually make something of your site, and earn the kind of income that could allow you to quit your job and work full time online, then this members-only training site is what I recommend. If you’re serious about making some moves, they’re your best shot at building some fat traffic to your brand and profiting from your blog!
What’s up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. I started my first online business in 2010 promoting computer software and now I help newbies start their own businesses. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!