October is here and that means two big food events coming up: Thanksgiving and Halloween!
Thanksgiving
That's right! Let's talk about Thanksgiving in October instead of November!
We've started a new thread in the forum under Recipe Related for you all to go post a link to your favourite fall or Thanksgiving related recipe on your blog and let us know why you love it so much. It's a great way to find some new fall favourites and check out some "new to you" blogs. The recipe doesn't have to be one you've posted this year - just make it your favourite!
Marketing Opportunities for Your Blog
Sometimes the word marketing can conjure up images that don't necessarily fit with how a lot of bloggers view their blog. But the bottom line is, most of us are blogging because we want to share and be part of a community. It's always nice to be able to reach out to more people and build a bigger community around your blog but it's not always easy to know how to do that. So for lack of a better word, you need to "market" your blog.
One of the things we want to be able to do is facilitate a way to get more involved in the food community through your blog, if that's something you are interested in.
This week, a new Canadian digital food magazine, Eat In, Eat Out (launching this November), approached us asking if any of our members would be interested in being a featured blog in their launch issue. For those of you interested, you can read more about this in this forum post.
We hope to pass on more opportunities like this to our members in the coming months and we will generally post them in the Marketing forum and follow up in the Weekly News.
Blogger Challenges
Another great way to get involved in the Food Blog community if you enjoy sharing or playing with recipes is to participate in some blogger challenges or clubs. These usually involve posting a recipe, weekly or monthly, on your own blog along a certain theme along with other bloggers participating. Lindsay from Vanilla Clouds and Lemon Drops is hosting a "Sweet Heat" challenge starting this month and she has posted about it on our new challenges forum. Head over and check it out.
Breast Cancer Awareness Month
October is Breast Cancer Awareness month throughout North America and Mushrooms Canada is once again running their Go PINK campaign, donating money from the purchase of specially packaged mushrooms as well as Facebook participation. And they're running a contest for a T-Fal dream kitchen! You can also find mushroom recipes from some of your favourite Canadian food bloggers on their Go PINK site, including FBC's Mardi Michels!
Member Accomplishments
Two of our members were published this month in the Canadian Living Holiday Favourites Special Cookbook Edition. It doesn't get much more Canadian that that! Dan Clapson and Ethan Adeland both had recipes shared (Dan had two!). You can find the edition on sale now, pretty much everywhere.
If any of our other members made it into this edition, we want to know! And please, if you have a noteworthy food related accomplishment or event happening, don't be shy! Get in touch via our Contact Form and we'll be sure to include you in a Weekly News update.
Forum Announcements
We've reworked the forum a little bit, adding some new topic areas and improving forum descriptions, which will hopefully make it easier to sort out where to post what. We've added a Blogger Challenge forum, a Blog Tech forum and a Recipe Related forum.
We really do want to encourage an active forum community because, believe it or not, this is one way that we can really show that we have the interest to host a Food Blogger's conference down the road. So if you have ideas for forums or have something you want to chat about, please don't hesitate to get involved.
As of writing this, we have 136 members so we are still steadily increasing and hope to for a while yet. We know there's still lots of you missing and we'd love to see some more voices from the Prairies and Atlantic Canada!
And if you have ideas or suggestions for future resource/Blogging 101 posts you'd like to see, be sure to drop us a line!
Until next week then!
Ethan, Mardi and Melissa
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Congratulations to Dan and to Ethan! How wonderful that they were published in the Canadian Living Holiday Favourites Special Cookbook Edition! That is just awesome…very exciting for both of them I’m sure. Going out tomorrow to get myself of copy.