Food Blogger Pro Review – Is it worth it?

Hey guys and welcome to my Food Blogger Pro review. I don’t often do reviews and only stand behind products I’ve tested and believe in.

If I don’t like a product, I simply don’t mention it.

Well, that’s definitely not the case today. I’m saying A LOT about this course, so scroll on down and dig in or use the jumps below to get to where you want to be.

Quick intro, for those not in the know, Food Blogger Pro was set up by Bjork and Lindsay Ostrom, the couple behind the phenomenally successful Pinch of Yum website.

The Pinch of Yum income reports inspired legions of bloggers (including me!) to take a chance on food blogging and – ahem, shameless plug – also inspired my very own food blog traffic and income reports section!

• Why I tried it
• What does Food Blogger Pro cover?
• Is it suitable for beginners?
• Is it suitable for established bloggers?
• The Pros
• The Cons
• Pricing

Why I tried it

For those who don’t know me, I started The Fiery Vegetarian in November 2018 and already had a leg up when it came to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) due to my day job as a content editor.

I avoided doing any expensive courses initially, later did a few, and had some success. Lately, the dial has been refusing to budge and I have been frustrated with my (lack of) progress.

I wasn’t sure that Food Blogger Pro would be a good fit for me, given that I already had two and a half years of blogging under my belt, I guess I thought it might just be aimed at new food bloggers.

Then along came the opportunity to try out Food Blogger Pro for a month for just a dollar (sorry folks, it was a limited-time offer only). I guess I thought that for just a dollar, I had nothing to lose and I was really in a frame of mind where I knew something needed to change in my blogging in order to be more successful.

I have to be honest, I was blown away.

Best. Dollar. Ever. Spent.

Below I’ll get into the nitty-gritty, Food Blogger Pro’s suitability for beginners, what more experienced bloggers can get from it, pros and cons, recommendations, and you can decide for yourself if it’s a good fit for you.

Even if you’re not a hundred percent sure I would still recommend trying it out as there is a 60-day money-back guarantee if you’re not happy with your membership.

What does Food Blogger Pro cover?

Okay so let’s have a look at what the Food Blogger Pro course actually consists of because there are so many components (that’s a good thing, great value for money!) it can initially seem a little overwhelming.

Everything is gathered in one place on FoodBloggerPro.com and as soon as you log in you’ll see seven sections at the top, as shown in the image below.

The Courses section is the real meat of the course and is where all the separate courses offered by (and included with) Food Blogger Pro live. Courses are grouped and divided into these subsections:

• Getting started
• Building traffic
• Photography
• Video
• Creating content
• Social media
• Essential tools
• Organization and planning tools
• Email marketing
• Essential plugins
• Generating income
• Creating an ebook
• Quick wins

These subsections cover 77 individual courses! It took me just under a month to get through about a third of the courses and that was only possible because I had prior knowledge and could skip some bits.

The courses are in video format with a full transcription below each video.

This was a big plus for me because I prefer reading to watching unless it’s something quite hands-on like photography.

The videos were very pleasant to watch with the personalities of Bjork, Lindsay, and the rest of the Food Blogger Pro family really coming across as genuinely nice and affable people. Everything was very clear and explained in a very level-headed humble friendly manner (zero condescension, brashness, or mansplaining).

The Live section is where monthly Q&As and other member-only video material appear. I didn’t really use this section because honestly, I’m not a fan of live sessions, I prefer to read the transcripts afterward!

The Tools section has got some printable checklists for SEO, social media, blog posts, etc. as well as my favorite tool, the course tracker, especially useful for more experienced bloggers (I’ll comment more on it in the established bloggers section below).

The Deals section contains discounts and offers with other companies that Food Blogger Pro has secured for its members. There are a considerable amount of deals, some of which I really wish I had access to before as I had paid the full amount for some.

The Community section is where all the forums live and you can go there and check out what everyone is talking about and what products people are using or recommending. I went through everything in the forums, gleaning anything that might be useful to me, but didn’t really participate.

Personally, I prefer Facebook groups for this kind of thing. Having said that, the moderators were really on top of things in the forums and no questions went unanswered, with moderators stepping in and providing correct answers and solutions.

In Facebook groups, it tends to be more of a mixed bag of answers and no indication as to which one is correct.

The Blog and Podcast sections are available to everyone, members or not, and I highly encourage you to check them out.

The blog section has a lot of useful actionable tips. Before I joined Food Blogger Pro I already listened to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast on Spotify. It’s great for musing on when you go for a jog or are doing some repetitive work that doesn’t require much thought, and you’re free to jot down whatever nuggets turn up.

Is it suitable for beginners?

100%. Food Blogger Pro teaches absolutely everything you need to know about how to start up a successful food blog. Honestly, I wish I had joined back when I began, it would have saved me from making so many mistakes.

It can be hard to let go of any dollars at the start when your blog isn’t making any money, but you now have 60 days to decide whether to keep your membership or not, and you can really learn so much from FBP even in just two months.

Plus I ended up spending money on several different areas (such a waste of time) in my first two years of blogging that are all covered in FBP (think different social media areas like Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, photography courses, videography courses, multiple books on blogging and photography…)

Starting your blog off on the right foot means much less work and backtracking to fix everything later, and you could be earning an income from your blog that much sooner.

Is it suitable for established bloggers?

Yes, for the most part. If you’re comfortably earning over $5000 a month then I think it’s safe to say that you’ve got food blogging figured out and don’t need to do a general food blogging course.

For everyone else, absolutely yes. Food Blogger Pro goes VERY in-depth into photography, video, and other niche areas like Hotjar or how to use different social media schedulers, tools for editing, etc.

If you have a food blogging weakness, chances are the fix is available inside Food Blogger Pro.

For example, I started food photography as a complete newbie. I got the FBP ebook on photography, I bought Nagi from Recipe Tin Eats ebook, I got a creative food photography book, I did all the things that Joanie Simons from the Bite Shot on Youtube said…and I improved but still fell short of where I wanted to be.

It made a HUGE difference to me being able to actually see the setup and be brought through everything that Lindsay does when she’s shooting.

I was fairly good at Lightroom as well but learned new super time-saving hacks. I finally got to grips with a basic social media strategy, learned an easier way to edit videos (which was my stumbling block before), some proper time management skills, easily created a lead magnet ebook, and started planning my very own recipe ebook.

All because of this course.

I HIGHLY recommend it. I’ve earmarked some things that I’m going to come back to in the future – Adobe premiere pro editing when I attack DLSR video, how to do giveaways (I’m not flush enough with cash to do one now!), and in general, I feel a lot more confident and optimistic about blogging now.

You can see from the photos below the MASSIVE difference the course has made to my photography (pre-Food Blogger Pro photo on the left, new one after the course on the right) – honestly, I would join Food Blogger Pro for the video and photography information alone. I feel like it’s the final piece that was missing in my photography game.

For more experienced bloggers, I would recommend just ignoring the courses section and skipping straight to the “Course Tracker” in the tools section.

There you’ll see all of the courses listed in order and can click on them to expand and see what’s included in the subsections and tick off anything you already know really well.

Don’t be too quick to tick things off though – I thought I already knew Lightroom pretty well and just a quick browse through the Lightroom course material yielded two huge-timesaving tools that I hadn’t known existed!

The Pros

• Ridiculously cheap for the amount of content available.
• Very complete course offerings.
• Targeted specifically to food bloggers, unlike other courses which contain irrelevant content.
• High-quality content from successful food bloggers – NOT people who just blog about blogging.
• 60-day money-back guarantee, more than enough time to see whether it’s for you or not.
• Big discounts on other popular courses, plugins, and services for food blogging.
• Very responsive and knowledgeable moderators in the forums.
• Regularly updated – this is a biggie. It is the absolute worst when you shell out for a course that is out of date.

The Cons

These are just a few things that I would have liked done in other ways due to my personal preferences:

• The social media content is a little thin – great for formulating a basic strategy and for starting out on those networks, but not for people with experience looking to go more in-depth. Having said that Pinterest is a bit of a bust now, Instagram doesn’t drive traffic and Facebook’s algorithm changes mean fewer and fewer posts are getting seen…
• All the discussion is through the forum on the blog – I feel like new bloggers dominate with introduction posts and very basic questions and more experienced bloggers stay quiet as they don’t want to comb through the forums every day – I would prefer a private Facebook group for this instead of a blog forum.
• Some of the recommended tools are quite expensive – to be fair, they are clearly tools that the team actually uses – but for newer bloggers, there were quite a few decent cheap or free alternatives that could have been recommended. For example, a very expensive tool costing hundreds of dollars is recommended for previewing RAW images quickly, but something like XnView MP does the same job for just 30 dollars.
• I couldn’t see any content addressing some big movements in the blogging world at the moment, such as the Core Web vitals updates and the upcoming cookie apocalypse. This is a blogging course, not a cure for every technical ailment your website could potentially have so fair enough, but this did surprise me.

Pricing

The monthly membership of Food Blogger Pro was just $35, but the pricing has been changed to either yearly for $350, or a quarterly option for $99.

August 2022 update: The Food Blogger Pro team is offering a Free TikTok Webinar for food creators and if you sign up for it you’ll get a discount code and will be able to get annual Food Blogger Pro membership for only $250! The webinar is part of the brand new TikTok course included in FBP-

I really preferred the monthly pay version, as for many beginners or fairly new bloggers it can be tough to justify shelling out large amounts of cash until you know whether you’re going to be able to succeed as a blogger.

Having said that, I do think that shelling out that much money will also force you to stay the course more and really take advantage of everything Food Blogger Pro has to offer. For example, I think I paid about 300 bucks for just a Pinterest course about ten months into blogging.

Was it worth it? Absolutely, it revolutionalized how I managed Pinterest, increased my traffic, and reduced the amount of time I spent on it. You can also be absolutely sure that I looked at every single lesson, made copious notes, and really LEARNED at that price (I wouldn’t recommend it now though purely because Pinterest is not what it used to be).

If you decide to go the whole hog and pay for a year’s membership or gift it to a beginner/struggling/frustrated blogger you know, consider also that it’s $350 which is the same price as ten monthly membership payments, so you get two months free. You also get yearly access included to Nutrifox, the accurate food nutrition calculator, which is worth $89.

If you choose the quarterly $99 option, you get access to everything, but without Nutrifox thrown in. The pros of this option are that you can try out the course for less of course, and cancel before the next quarterly payment if it’s not what you were looking for or you found you weren’t spending enough time on it to justify the cost. The negative point of this option is that if you paid quarterly for the year it would work out nearly $50 more expensive.

In a nutshell, if you’re like me and did a copious amount of research before beginning blogging and were super determined from the start to succeed and have an extra income stream, then buy a Food Blogger Pro membership first before you get anything else. It will help you have everything set up for success from the very start and also mean you’ll avoid purchasing things that are a waste of money.

However, if you’re just a hobby blogger, or are already making a considerable amount of income from blogging which is regularly increasing, then I would pass on signing up. It’s not worth it if you’re not going to put the effort in, or if you’re already a very accomplished blogger.

For everything else in between, yes it’s suitable, and in any case, there is a 60-day moneyback guarantee just in case.

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I hope you found this review useful. Have you ever joined Food Blogger Pro (Enrollment is open! It’s not always, sometimes you’ll need to add your name to a waiting list), or thought about joining? Any doubts? Chime in below in the comments and let us know your opinion.