Recipe content on the Internet is a valuable commodity. Google receives more than 10 million searches for recipes every day! And 70 percent of people going to food brand sites say “finding recipes” is a primary reason for their visit.

Incredibly, most blogs and recipe sites are missing a golden opportunity to engage these recipe searchers and take advantage of the advertising revenue potential because:

• They have no recipe-specific search capabilities on their sites.
• Recipes fade away into archives of chronological CMS.
• Most sites don’t have tools to engage users and drive repeat visits.

In early July, we launched the new beta version of Kitchen Monki. It provides powerful tools that an increasing number of partners are using to enhance recipe community functionality on their sites.

Online publishers and food bloggers such as America Now with Leeza Gibbons and Bill Rancic, KING 5 Seattle’s New Day Northwest, CW Jacksonville and Dizzy Busy Mamas are just a few of the sites with recipes Powered by Kitchen Monki White Label.

Kitchen Monki White what?

The Kitchen Monki White Label partner program, that’s what! This means you can take all the amazing features and functionality of Kitchen Monki’s consumer suite and rebrand them on your site: recipe search, recipe tools, meal planning, mobile grocery lists, calendar and more!

Kitchen Monki White Label helps you make money and engage your users by embedding our powerful recipe planning tools and content management system into your site for a complete recipe experience. In addition to longer visits and more pageviews, the Kitchen Monki API lets you reuse your web content for mobile and Facebook apps.

Sounds great! How much?

Ad-supported Kitchen Monki White Label provides all the functionality of Kitchen Monki’s cooking suite and recipe network, plus the ability to build a food community, at no cost to you by running Kitchen Monki’s ads. You can embed the proven Kitchen Monki experience into your site immediately.

The Food Community includes:

• New & Featured member listings
• Featured recipe rotation
• Admin tools panel
• Pageview and advertising analytics

Take Kitchen Monki White Label a step further and you can run your own ads for only $2 per CPM with a $20/mo (10k pageview) minimum. The cooking suite, recipe network and food community are still yours. Plus, we add in Facebook tab integration so that you can leverage recipe content on your fanpage and broaden your food content reach and user community.

Getting Started

You can see that it is quick and easy to start publishing with Kitchen Monki now to engage your food community and entice advertisers. Adding the web’s most powerful recipe management platform and tools to your site couldn’t be simpler. We even provide detailed how-to videos for help setting up Kitchen Monki White Label on Tumblr, WordPress and Blogger.

For more details, you can learn about our pricing and features and see how Kitchen Monki White Label works. Questions or comments? Connect with the Monki, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, or post them below!

Tune in next Tuesday and we’ll talk more about how to give your site super powers with Kitchen Monki Private Label.

Larger Website Network = Even Better User Experience

Returning visitors to Kitchen Monki will notice a major change to our home page. Don’t worry—everything you’ve been using is still here.

If you’ve been coming here for recipe management and sharing, you already know that Kitchen Monki has created one of the Web’s best experiences for organizing your recipe content. Some time ago, other websites began to ask whether we could help their sites do the same thing. Beginning with a plugin for WordPress bloggers, we’ve evolved a whole toolset for other sites to use our powerful and popular recipe management tools within their site.

The good news for users: all of your recipes, tools, and sharing operates the same across every partner website. When you visit a Kitchen Monki partner site, you’ll find that your recipes, bookmarks, meal calendar, and shopping list have all followed you there. You can easily bookmark a recipe on one site, add a recipe to your calendar on a second site, and prepare a grocery list on a third site. We think this is the beginning of a powerful future.

We haven’t left out our new and potential partners with good news! The new home page communicates our message and value more clearly to other publishers. The more partner sites we have, the more valuable will be your user experience. We hope you’ll welcome the change, and look for continued new functionality from us at Kitchen Monki.

A Brief History

Kitchen Monki traces its origins to the founders’ beliefs that recipe content could be automated in ways that make life simpler. Top Banana Sam Kinney was determined to never-again write a grocery list by hand, referring to recipes in books, on cards, in emails, or on web pages. By organizing his cooking around a set of powerful recipe management tools, he’d become a better cook, enjoying the fun parts (cooking and eating) while simplifying the less-fun parts (searching for recipes, writing lists).

While the early tools proved as useful as envisioned, it soon became apparent that the Web is a disorganized jungle when it comes to recipe content. Thousands of sites publish recipes, but they are rendered hard to find and use because they use incompatible data formats. And while some websites offer a way to save recipes to “My Recipe File”, those various file folders aren’t compatible across websites. It’s as if every musician used a different file format for his or her music, and you needed different playback software for each artist – not a consumer-friendly situation.

Because so many websites publish recipes (but only a few are large enough to really invest heavily in recipe management technology), we expanded our offering to include partner sites into our network. Visitors to partner sites will find what they need – a universal set of personal recipe content that is compatible with the recipe content on the partner site.

Kitchen Monki makes it easy to make money and engage your users by embedding our powerful recipe planning tools and content management system into your site.

Upgrade your recipe content, create a real food community, and get paid with Kitchen Monki. For more info, go to
www.kitchenmonki.com/publisher.

Not seeing the numbers you want to see with your blog? No one reading your food blog, despite you sharing links to it all the time on major social networks? There are many things to worry about when food blogging, and some of them many bloggers don’t even consider, let alone the major problems like finding a readership. These are eight common mistakes bloggers make and how to make you avoid them successfully.

1. Not doing SEO properly
Glanced at a few articles about SEO and now using keywords to optimize your blog? While stuffing some keywords here and there might seem enough, most bloggers have to realize that SEO also works with video, images, and links.

Here is one big tip: optimizing photos, such as naming the photo with keywords and then uploading it to your blog (this is especially helpful with WordPress blogs). Before saying you know everything about SEO, take a crash course and jot down some notes or reminders, as we can all forget some steps to optimizing.

2. Font, layout, and design
Yes, even font and layout can turn-off a reader from looking through your blog. Default themes, themes that are “too crowded,” and even poor font choices can all lead to poor numbers. Invest in a good design, a font that can be easily read, and a layout that is easy to use by all sorts of Internet users. Serious blogging takes a little bit of sacrifice, whether it is monetary or time (or both).

3. Incentivize readers to stay with it
Have you ever seen a blog that said subscribe for the latest updates, features, and news for that blog? While that be enough for some, most people need more than that to subscribe nowadays. Food bloggers can give away freebies in the form of an e-book for recipes, or even a physical book. Give readers a real reason to subscribe.

4. Not utilizing jumps or breaks
One thing that can get bothersome on the main page of a blog is showing full-posts, which can get a bit confusing when scrolling down a page. A food blogger must be able to tease with bite-sized pieces of content.

5. No automatic sharing options
Automatic sharing, like those little buttons you see at the top or bottom of articles that allow you to tweet, Like, or post about the article you just read have become a staple for most bloggers. Even a food blogger must offer automatic sharing for readers, so don’t skimp out!

6. Pop-up ads, intrusive marketing
What’s more annoying than being totally drawn into an article, being right in the middle of the juicy bit, and then a pop-up advertisement blacks out the screen and makes you lose your spot? It’s annoying to everyone, including your readers. Just don’t do it.

7. Focusing on yourself, not the readers
While everyone has their own intentions as to why they are blogging, all bloggers must make sure they are catering to mostly their readership–at least 98% of the time. It is good to have some self-focus, but, they are the reason you are seeing positive results from your blog, so why not see things through their eyes too?

8. Owning an actual domain name
Hobby blogging can get by on domains such as “thisismyblog.blogger.com” or other variants, but professional blogging should have all the works: a nice design, a memorable logo, and an independent domain name. People are going to remember “thisismyblog.com” more than the alternative.

What do you think? Do you have any tips to pass along to others? We’d love to hear your comments!

The Kitchen Monki White Label for Recipe Publishers is a fantastic way for you to build your own food community. Check out this introductory video for the heads up on why it is becoming a favorite tool for bloggers alike.

For more information on the White Label, visit www.kitchenmonki.com/publisher.