6 Ways to Make Money Selling Recipes Online (Not eBay)

Last Updated December 13, 2016

Do you come up with unique and crazy recipes all the time?

If so, you might be able to make money selling those recipe ideas.

Whether you’re a professional cook, a food lover that can create unique and delicious dishes, or just like to share recipes your mom or grandma used to cook delicious food, you can do this.

Here are a few ways you can earn money online selling recipes.

1. Sell to food magazines

What better place to showcase your food creativity than a food related magazine?

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And if you think “No magazine is going to pay me for my recipes!”, think again. Magazines pay for unique recipes all the time. Where do you think they get all their “special” recipes from?

You, the reader!

Here are a few magazines that pay for your recipes:

Taste of Home: They have various contests throughout the year (Thanksgiving, Christmas, Halloween, etc) where you can submit your recipes for a chance to win awesome prizes. Cuisine at Home: They pay $100 for recipes as well as any “Amazing Kitchen Tip.”

If you like contests, check out CookingContestCentral. This is a site that acts like a directory of sort for all cooking related contests and sweepstakes.

2. Start a food blog

Having your own recipes makes a food blog even better and more attractive, as you can either sell them to your readers or, to attract more traffic, you can give them away as eBooks in exchange for their name and email address.

That will be a great way to build a list that you can keep in touch with and make money from.

You can make money by advertising on your site as well, provided your blog get enough traffic.

3. Publish on Content Mills

But if you want a more guaranteed and faster way of making money from your recipes, try publishing them on sites that pay you to write articles online.

You’ll need to sign up first (which is free), then you’ll be able to submit your work for approval.

If your work is approved and published, you get paid.

Some sites pay a one-time fee based on the quality and length of your recipes, others pay you based on the number of views your recipes generate. This is much better than putting recipes on a new blog which most possibly will land on the 10th page of Google results.

And if your recipe is delicious, then expect other food magazines and blogs to link to your recipe on their sites. This will definitely get your recipe more exposure, and result in higher earnings!

Now, you have to be realistic about just how much you can make, especially in the beginning.

There are some bloggers who earn as little as $0.05 per recipe, while there are others who earn as much as $40 per contributed recipe.

It might take plenty of recipes to start making good cash. But what’s good about it is that these earnings continue to accumulate over time.

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And the best part is that once you publish the piece, that’s it. You’ll start to earn passive income for as long as the content stays up. Yes, you’ll make money even while you’re sleeping !

4. Enter Contests

Yes, contests.!

Believe it or not, there are actually contests for recipes. And you can win some great prizes including cash.

Check out RecipeContests. com for a list of current contests.

5. Sell recipes on your own site

If you don’t like the idea of sharing your earning with a third party, creating your own eCommerce site and selling your recipes there is your best bet.

To get an idea of the kind of site you can create, check out BetterBaking.

This site was founded by Marcy Goldman in 1997. She started out by giving away her recipes for free. A few years in, once she had developed herself as an authority in the niche, she created a subscription plan for her newsletter where she charged people $39.99 for full access to the newsletter and all her recipes.

She also sells her recipes individually for $2.49.

BetterBaking is still going strong. In fact, it is still one of the most popular sites when it comes to paid recipes.

6. Become a Kindle Publisher

I just published my first Kindle book. So I know it’s not that hard to do.

You can do the same by compiling a few of your own unique recipes into a book and selling it on Amazon Kindle.

There are tons of people who are making money selling all kinds of recipes and food related books on Kindle.

With Kindle, you don’t have to worry about hiring a publisher, nor do you have to spend much on marketing. Put your recipe book together, find a proofreader to make sure everything looks good, upload it to Kindle, wait 12 hours for it be approved, and once it’s live, get the word out.

If you can manage to give readers truly unique recipes, you can not only make good money with the first book, but you also get some loyal readers who will buy your future books as well.