Yummly is an awesome tool to find new recipes. It’s so easy to find your favorite dish and keep it in a virtual recipe box! This post will help you understand how to use Yummly for fun and as a food blogger.
Understanding How to Use Yummly
So I recently discovered Yummly and totally fell in LOVE! Yummly is a great site for finding delicious recipes quickly. And if you are a food blogger, it’s not only a great source of inspiration and ideas, but it can be a place to promote your own recipes as well. After I added the YUM button to my site, Yummly became one of my Top 5 traffic sources. Yummly is super easy to use and becomes just as addictive as Pinterest! Once you learn how to use Yummly, I think you’ll make it a favorite!
Yummly isn’t just for food bloggers though. I have found it very helpful in keeping track of recipes I want to try. It’s almost easier than Pinterest and Facebook because there’s no people to “follow” or status updates to “like.” It’s just filled with pictures of delicious looking food and a YUM button. There is even a search feature if you’re looking for a specific type of recipe. You can also browse categories or have Yummly make recommendations based on what you’ve already YUM’d. All you do is click the YUM button and it automatically saves the recipe to your recipe box.
And best of all, you can organize your recipes into “Collections.” For example, all of my recipes from this site are in my Sweetie Pie And Cupcakes collection. You can make any kind of Collection that you want– Crockpot Recipes, Vegetarian Dishes, Holiday Treats, Snacks….etc.
You can even enter in your own recipes for safe keeping, or ask a cooking question too!
Once I learned how to use Yummly, I found it to be a great way to search for new recipes! When you click on a recipe you can see how many times it’s been “YUM’d”, the ingredients, the calorie estimate, and the cooking time. It even has a handy print button and a click to email button! I love sending recipes to my email box so I can remember what I want to try next!
When you scroll down the page, you can click to see the directions for the recipe. This will open up in an iframe to the site that developed the recipe, that way you stay on Yummly but the blogger who made the recipe still gets credit. You’ll also see the Nutritional Values, recipe tags, and comments!
You can even add the bookmarklet to your browser and YUM recipes that you find across the internet… that way you can easily find them later!
How Food Bloggers Can Use Yummly
If you’re a food blogger, you’re going to absolutely LOVE Yummly more than any other social network out there! Once I installed the YUM button on my site, I started seeing a nice traffic increase that has progressively grown every day! If you are a new food blogger looking for ways to get more traffic, then go visit Yummly and get set up right away!
Here’s how to get started:
First you must add the YUM button directly to your site. This is very easy to do if you already use a social sharing plugin like SumoMe, Shareaholic, Simple Share, AddThis, etc. Simply add it through your plugin. I use AddThis and find it very easy as a plugin.
Once you publish a post, then simply go to that post and click the YUM button. That’s it! Your recipe is now out there for everyone to see and share!
I also like to add the post to my Sweetie Pie and Cupcake category within Yummly, but that’s for my own organizational purposes.
The YUM button makes it easy for food bloggers to increase traffic. YUMs and people from Yummly will come across your post and click the YUM button. The more YUMs you have the more likely your recipe will show up in searches. It’s a great source of free traffic to your website.
Note that you can’t change anything about your YUM’d post once it’s been posted. You won’t be able to edit the photo or the post title as they get chosen from your original blog post. Also, once you’ve YUM’d your post, that’s it, you can only do it once. You can’t keep pushing it out there like you can on Pinterest. But, I will tell you I went through and have only YUM’d half of my recipes and it’s already my #3 traffic provider. Can you imagine what it will be like once more people start to discover Yummly AND once I finish YUM’ing all of my recipes?!
So get out there and start using Yummly! You’ll love watching your stats go up, up, away! And you’ll especially love the free exposure and traffic! Woohoo!
Have you used Yummly before? Share your comments below!