Are you looking to grow your business and engage customers by partnering with trusted food brands? Verdify Solutions’ brand promotions offer the perfect solution to boost your website revenue by featuring healthy sponsored ingredients and food products.
Are you a food blogger or publisher trying to find new and innovative ways to monetise your platform? Over the past few months, I have been running a trial with Verdify Solutions to promote healthy food choices within my recipe content. There have been no annoying pop-ups or banner ads that detract from the overall user experience. Instead, certain items in my recipe ingredient lists and methods have been linked with a discreet hyperlink to specific sponsored ingredients and products from Verdify Solutions’ hand-selected brand partners that includes household names such as Doves Farm, Bragg, Schar, and Arla.
I started The Flexitarian to document our meat-free journey. It was created with the intention of nurturing healthier and more sustainable individual and family lives through sharing delicious, healthy recipes. Initially beginning as a hobby, it rapidly became so much more than that – The Flexitarian is now a business that presents me with a lot of opportunities and challenges including the ongoing dilemma of how to diversify my website revenue while finding the right balance between user experience, creativity, ethics and profitability!
Diversifying my website revenue
Currently, most of The Flexitarian’s website revenue comes from commercial partnerships including product reviews, recipe creation, photography, etc… Make no mistakes, while it is a lot of fun, it is also very time-consuming. I spend most of my days developing recipes, creating a diverse range of media assets, writing content, and nurturing the blog. I love it, but without the help of a marketing team, it doesn’t leave much room for finding other sources of regular income.
User experience has been a top priority during the creation process of The Flexitarian platform and we strived to ensure easy navigation as well as smooth and intuitive operation. I considered using advertising platforms in the past but quickly realised it interfered with the page loading speed. Also, from time to time, I found that the ads that were automatically displayed on the blog were not always appropriate for my audience. I also had little control over restricting ads from certain brands and/or products I did not necessarily want to be associated with. As some savvy readers were quick to point out that they were surprised to see certain ads on the blog, deemed inappropriate with The Flexitarian’s overall message, I found it time-consuming to adjust ads. The decision was made to forgo advertising platforms altogether.
Health and Planet are two key pillars of The Flexitarian’s message, and I always strive to cooperate with companies that have the same values. When Verdify Solutions reached out I was instantly drawn to their ethos and philosophy. They offered a unique opportunity to generate a steady income derived from sponsored ingredients in my existing recipe content while promoting food products and companies that encourage a healthy lifestyle and care about sustainability.
Who are Verdify Solutions?
Based in The Netherlands, Verdify Solutions are an impact-driven food-tech company that has developed innovative software for recipe personalisation through targeted sponsored ingredients. Verdify’s ambition is to be a key driver in the global shift towards healthy and sustainable eating by enabling consumers to make better food choices.
Verdify’s subtle food brand placement, through sponsored links and sponsored ingredients, ensures that healthier choices are more visible and easily accessible without overtly influencing customers. Their publisher platform is not solely built around food bloggers but also includes food social media influencers, food retailers, lifestyle bloggers, magazines, newspapers, websites, and so on.
Verdify Solutions not only provide the technology but also build relationships with sustainable food brands that share the same philosophy and ethics as The Flexitarian does, leaving me time to concentrate on the day-to-day running of the blog.
How do sponsored ingredients work?
Verdify Food Brand Promotions’ code is an HTML/JavaScript snippet that is installed solely on my website’s recipe pages. Once the snippet was installed, it started to generate auto-running recipe ads by linking some of my recipe ingredients and methods to matching products from Verdify Food Brand Promotions’ partner brands Doves Farm, Bragg, Schar, and Arla.
Verdify’s code was easy to set up on WordPress as I simply copied and pasted the code within the WPCode plugin. As far as I can tell, it has not slowed down the blog, which was one of my main concerns.
The hyperlinks are discreet, and inconspicuous, and do not negatively impact the user’s experience. They are created seamlessly and automatically by matching my website’s ingredients to partner brands’ products. A simple hovering over the link displays a text box with a picture of the product as well as some general information. Should the reader want to know more, there is an external link to the brand’s website.
I have had no issues so far, as Verdify is able to do precise keyword matching, making sure that the right products are matched to the right content. The keyword matching is based on recipe imaging, taste, texture, and nutritional values. Verdify also aims to communicate any new product or brand additions in a timely manner, so that I can opt-out if desired.
With a focus on healthy and sustainable food, it is really important that The Flexitarian promotes products and brands that abide by the same ethos. I was really pleased when Verdify mentioned that all products are selected using exclusion criteria to only include products that match a healthy lifestyle within intended use and exclude products such as meat, ultra-processed snacks and desserts, sugar-rich drinks, and alcohol. If a brand is not suitable for a particular publisher, it can be excluded on request.
While we are still in the early stages of our partnership, my experience working with Verdify Food Brand Promotions has been very pleasant. There has been no glitch and their team has been really responsive and accessible. As Verdify builds relationships with new food brands, this leaves me with more time to focus on the blog content.
If like me, you are looking for an innovative way to enhance and increase your website revenue you can find out more about Verdify Solutions by visiting their website or connecting with them on LinkedIn.
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post. All thoughts and opinions are my own and completely honest.
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