Food blogs have made up a considerable chunk of blogs ever since the early days of blogging. One only needs to have a look at how many cookbooks there are in any one bookstore to see how much people want to both write and read about food.

With so much competition in the area, you really have to offer something special to stand out. Ideas in Food has just that very uniqueness to do so.

Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot are two very talented chefs who run a consulting business in New York. But what makes them so special is that they are fascinated by the ideas of taste and the science of cooking. Most of their recipes are experiments designed to question and push the traditional boundaries we have in our cooking and eating.

Flavours from Prickly Pear to Yuzu to plain old Apple are explored. It’s not just exotic ingredients but new ways of cooking that are attempted. However, don’t think that all these ideas are unapproachable and not something that can be used in a non-chef’s kitchen – some ideas are just twisting around traditional recipes like steaming instead of baking brioche (a simple French bread) with the result a Chinese style “bao”. 

The blog is run from the TypePad platform with plenty of sidebar content modules used including photo albums for all their key ingredients.

And if you have the good fortune to be living in New York (or visiting) – they run private workshops and cooking classes.

The Happiness Project is such a wonderful idea for a blog – spend a year test-driving principles, tips, theories, scientific studies on how to be happier from Aristotle to Oprah and record the resulting insights on a blog. Fortunately, it’s not only a good idea – it’s well executed. The blog has been going since January and looks like making its target for a year of daily posts on happiness.

The blog’s writer Gretchen Rubin has a great personal story. She used to be a lawyer but she discovered that her true calling is writing and she now has four published books to her name (including Forty Ways to Look at JFK and Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide). Through the blog, she has discovered that she is also a happiness evangelist and she encourages everyone to have their own Happiness Project. 

A great idea that we all can do for ourselves, is that she has spelt out her guiding forces:

Role models: Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson
Mission: Be happier now.
Motto: Do good, feel good.
Symbol: Bluebird
Patron Saint: Saint Therese of Lisieux
The Two Splendid Truths:
1. To be happier, think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth. 
2. One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.

This information doesn’t need to be made public (that’s your choice!) but taped up somewhere you can see it from your work desk or first thing in the morning is a brilliant way of keeping on your path which is well known for making us feel happier.

The Happiness Project is on the TypePad platform and Gretchen has made good use of her sidebar to put lots of interesting content for her readers. In the sidebar, Gretchen includes her goals for each month and her twelve commandments (you can do the same using TypeLists in TypePad)

Another nice feature of the blog is that every Wednesday, she gives out a tip for happiness like 10 tips for being happier which includes this really counter-intuitive but completely accurate advice (if you want to read a whole book on this concept, have a look at Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less):

7. Don’t insist on the best.
There are two types of decision makers. Satisficers (yes, satisficers) make a decision once their criteria are met. When they find the hotel or the pasta sauce that has the qualities they want, they’re satisfied. Maximizers want to make the best possible decision. Even if they see a bicycle or a backpack that meets their requirements, they can’t make a decision until they’ve examined every option. Satisficers tend to be happier than maximizers. Maximizers expend more time and energy reaching decisions, and they’re often anxious about their choices. Sometimes good enough is good enough.

Another great post is Nine helpful yet REALISTIC tips, one favourite tip being:

9. Remember my Eighth Commandment and “Identify the problem.” This sounds so obvious, but it’s astonishingly helpful. For example, I like to work in coffee shops, and for years, and I mean years, I spent a lot of time running out of battery power and chasing around looking for someplace to plug in my laptop. Then I asked myself: “What’s the problem?” Answer: “I need more battery power.” Light dawned. I could buy an extra battery! I did, and it gave me a huge boost in productivity.

So check out the Happiness Project and make your day happier!

Like TypeLists in TypePad, Photo Albums can be used by multiple blogs. You’ll find that Photo Albums have their own tab, select it.

Creating a New Photo Album

You will then find your albums listed. As we don’t have any yet, there’s none. To create a new album click on “Create a new Photo Album”

You will then get the option to give the photo album a name. It will automatically create a folder name to house the photos and will serve as part of your photo album’s web address – you can edit this if you want. When you’re happy with the names, click on “Create New Photo Album”.

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TypePad Lists or TypeLists as they are known, make it fun and easy to create lists of things (which then can be used on your blog).

If you want to create a TypeList, you are creating a separate entity that doesn’t belong to any one blog. This is because any one TypeList can be used by multiple blogs if you so wish. 

Look for the TypeLists tab and select it.

Creating a TypeList

Click on the “Create a new TypeList” link.

Select the one that is best suited to your list type and give it a list name.

Read the rest of this entry »

Once you know the niche market that you are targeting with your blog, you will want to do some research on the existing market.

If you already have a business, you should know your competitors well enough. However, things are a little different online. Often your apparent competition can also be your allies.

The first thing to do is look for other blogs, websites and forums in your niche using a search engine. Once you’ve found some sites, see which sites they are linking to. Try to pinpoint which are the most authoritative sites online and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses – how could you do a better job? What is missing that would be useful to the audience? Are there are areas that are being ignored? 

The next thing to do is evaluate whether these sites are true competition or potential allies. Your particular niche has some bearing on this as some niches are more exclusive than others. 

For example, if you are a plumber, your clients only really need one plumber so other plumbers would be your direct competition. However if as a plumber, you had a home improvement tips blog if a home decorator had another home improvement blog you shouldn’t see this as competition necessarily. The truth is people read multiple blogs in the same area. It’s just like how people will buy multiple books in an area they are interested in. While there is a limit to people’s time and attention, it is flexible and often people do keep up with a handful of blogs or more. And because plumbers are complementary to home decorators, cross traffic between the two blogs can help to build both the plumber and the home decorator’s businesses.

It’s even worth considering seeing your direct competition as your potential allies. This works particularly well when you are selling a product that someone might buy endless variations of that product – eg clothes, stationery, recipes, patterns, books. In fact, information is definitely a product that people can have infinite amounts of and still wish to have more. So as a cook, if you promoted another cook’s blog and even another cook’s book that is unlikely to have any effect on your own readership or cookbook sales. 

In fact, you’ll find that there can be a lot of traffic advantages to networking with other bloggers in your niche, it is certainly one way that you can quickly build an audience. Have a look at your niche and see how open people are to cross promoting.

Often markets are large enough to support multiple suppliers and connecting with others in your niche can also help you understand your niche better and give you personal support and help. Generally bloggers are nice people and you may find yourself developing wonderful friendships.

It’s a good idea to create a spreadsheet to record your market research – list the blog or site address, contact details and your thoughts about it including the potential for making an ally.

When you are doing this market research, not only look to see what is offered but who it is offered to – read the comments on blogs, look through forum posts – get to understand the audience because these are the same people you will be targeting.

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Next time, we’ll be looking at understanding your blog’s audience.

We try to keep any Sunday posts dedicated to the other stuff that supports our business lives but that which often gets ignored – Goal Setting, Productivity, Motivation, Review, Health (we’ve categorised these under “Constant Progress”) and Higher Purpose (giving back to the community and feeding your soul). This will continue during the How to Blog series – only we will be focusing on how this is related blogging.

This is part of our super series on How to Blog. Subscribe to our Newsletter for some special surprise How to Blog stuff over the course of the lessons.