If you love to cook and have some recipes you’re pretty proud of that you wouldn’t mind sharing, you can potentially earn a little money through a few different sources. But honestly, my research turned up few options.
It seems like there should be an easy way to just sell your recipes online. But it’s not that simple to do.
I tried to find a way to possibly make a living writing and sharing recipes online, but the options I found don’t guarantee that. Still, if cooking is a passion of yours, you may really want to consider some of these ideas:
Start a Food Blog
I’ve never started a food blog although I did help set one up. Taking appetizing pictures is key! Look at how popular recipes are on Pinterest! If you can take high-quality photos of the things you make that are guaranteed to catch people’s attention, then you’ve got something special.
I know that if I had a food blog, I’d be taking the best pictures I could and using Pinterest to try and help me get traffic.
Of course, there’s a lot more to blogging than just taking good pictures. How can you earn with a blog? There are tons of ways. Ad revenue, affiliate marketing, writing sponsored posts, in-text ads … the list goes on.
I wrote a post a while back with five ways you can earn money from your blog if you need some ideas. But I’ve said it before and will say it again: blogging is not fast income for most people, which is why making a living with a food blog is probably not going to happen overnight.
And if you don’t believe anyone could ever make that much money from a food blog, you should take a minute to check out Pinch of Yum’s monthly income reports. Very impressive.
If you’d like to get some step-by-step guidance on starting and successfully running a profitable food blog, I highly recommend the Food Blogger Pro e-course.
Self-Publish a Cookbook
Self-publishing is huge right now! And publishing and selling a cookbook is an indirect way to sell recipes.
I admit that I don’t know a ton about self-publishing other than that a lot of people are just completely bypassing the major publishing companies and using some of these self-publishing sites to get their work out there fast. And many are making good money.
This is an area I need to look into further, and I’ve been meaning to. But for now if you’re interested in self-publishing your own cookbook, you can browse around some of these popular self-publishing sites to see how the process works.
You  might also want to read this blog post I found from someone who actually did self-publish her own cookbook. Apparently it is quite a process.
Enter Your Recipes Into Contests
This is for sure no guaranteed way to get paid for your recipes, but if you know you cook something amazing, it might be worth trying. There are recipe contests going on all the time!
The Contest Cook website has a list of ongoing contests you can enter. It never hurts to try it!
Sell Your Recipes Online – Not Unheard of!
I mentioned above that finding a way to sell your recipes online is difficult, However, I read this article today where someone ideas for getting them sold.
You can sell them to food companies as well as post them for sale on online marketplaces (like Etsy).
You could also offer your recipe writing services on Fiverr. There are likely people out there who need recipes and would be willing to pay you to either come up with something, or share the recipe to something amazing that you already make!
I have no idea how successful you’d be trying to do this because I’ve never heard of anyone doing it before, but it might be something to think about. It seems like something easy enough to try out if your curiosity is piqued.
Good luck if you try any of these ideas.
Recipe Side Business Idea – Open a Dog Treat Bakery
A little bit of an outside the box way to earn from recipes is developing recipes for dog treats, baking the treats, and selling them.
My friend Kristen had some success doing this, and she’s started a new business helping others learn to do what she did using her exact steps.
You can sign up for her free workshop here that explains a lot more about how to do it.
Good luck!
Anna Thurman is a work at home blogger and mom of two. She has been researching and reviewing remote jobs for over 13 years. Her findings are published weekly here at Real Ways to Earn.