Do you love trying new recipes? Could you spend hours on Pinterest looking at mouth-watering dishes? Do you love to write and share your passion with friends and family? If you answered yes to these questions, then you have probably considered starting your own food blog. While it is hard work, it is also fun, flexible and rewarding. It could even become your full-time job! Here are the first steps to staring your own food blog.

Define Your Purpose
When you decide you are ready to start your own blog, it is tempting to dive in, buy your domain name and start writing. Before making the leap, decide what your goal is. Is this a hobby or would you like to replace your fulltime income? Do you plan to have advertisements on your site? How many hours per week can you devote to your blog? Answering these questions now will save you stress and time in the future.

Find Your Niche
This is one of the most important steps that most new bloggers skip. With so many blogs out their, it is essential to find your niche and stick to it. Start by thinking of your ideal reader. Make her (or him) up, and write down everything - her family, her job, what she likes to eat, where she vacations, what stresses her out, what scares her. It sounds silly, but by zeroing in on your target audience, you will be much more likely to give them exactly what they want, which means more page views and shares. Rather than starting a healthy food blog, what about a healthy, gluten-free breakfasts blog? Don't be afraid to be specific. Establish yourself as the expert in your niche, and you will grow quickly.

Choose Your Platform
Once you have your vision, it's time to get started. If you want to turn this into a job and possibly offer ads, look into a self-hosted platform such as Wordpress.org. Hosting your own blog gives you total design freedom, but does require some tech knowledge (or desire to learn it). If your blog is more of a hobby, and you don't have the time or desire to learn web design, then look into a hosted platform like Wordpress.com. You will be given template choices, and can be up and running within minutes. However, a hosted platform does not allow you to run ads. You will also choose your domain name and web host.

Schedule Your Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar is simply your writing plan. Ideally, your blogging schedule should be consistent. Evaluate how many quality posts you can writer per week and write them in your calendar. Posting once per week is better than posting 3 times one week, then none the following.

Experiment, Evaluate, Try Again
Finally, blogging is an incredible amount of trial and error. You just won't know what your audience wants until you start writing and then evaluating the response. Set up a free account with Google Analytics to track your blog traffic and see which posts are the most popular.