Yummly is an awesome new way to find recipes.  Find your YUM 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 Yummly

How to use Yummly for fun and as a Food Blogger

So last week I discovered Yummly and fell in LOVE!  Yummly is a fantastic site for finding delicious recipes to make AND it’s a hidden gem for bloggers to promote their recipes.  After I added the YUM button to my site Yummly became one of my Top 5 traffic sources.  Once you learn how to use Yummly it becomes just as addictive as Pinterest!

Yummly isn’t just for bloggers though…I now use it to personally keep track of recipes I want to try.  There’s no people to “follow” or status updates to “like”….it’s just pictures of delicious looking food and a YUM button.  There is a search feature if you’re looking for a specific type of recipe or you can just browse categories or even 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.

If you’re like me and want to get more organized then you can sort all of these recipes into Collections.  For example, all of my recipes from this site are in my Serendipity and Spice Collection. You can make any kind of Collection that you want– Chicken Recipes, Veggies, Snacks….etc.

You can even enter in your own recipes for safe keeping. Or ask a cooking question too!

Yummly is a great way to search for new recipes!  When you click on a recipe you see how many times it’s been “YUM’d”, the ingredients, the calorie estimate, how long it takes to cook, an easy to print button, a click to email button, etc.

When you scroll down 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, Tastes (I love that this gives you a better sense of the flavor!), 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!

I’d LOVE it if you would go YUM some Serendipity and Spice recipes!

How to Use Yummly for Bloggers

Now, if you’re a food blogger you’re going to LOVE Yummly more than any 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! And the BEST part is……I don’t have to remember to go post regularly.

You can either add the YUM button directly or if you use a social sharing plugin like SumoMe, Shareaholic, Simple Share, etc. you can add it through those.  I use SumoMe (I’ll tell you all about why I LOVE them in another post!).

Whenever I publish a post I go to that post and click the YUM button. That’s it!  Okay, I do put it in my Serendipity and Spice category but that’s for my own organization purposes…..the post is now out in the Yummly world!

From there people visiting my site will click the YUM button…increasing my YUMs and people from Yummly will come across my post and click the YUM button.  The more YUMs you have the more likely your recipe will show up in searches.

Now, here’s the deal, you can’t change anything about your YUM’d post….meaning there’s no editing the photo…it gets auto chosen.  There’s no editing the text…that get’s auto chosen from your post title.  Once you’ve YUM’d your post you can only do it once.  So it’s different than Pinterest because you can’t pin to multiple boards or keep pushing it out there.  It’s a one time, wham-bam-thank you mam.

But, I went through and have only YUM’d 1/4 of my recipes and it’s already my #3 traffic provider….can you imagine what it will be like once more people 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!

Have you used Yummly before? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Bloggers, make sure you check out the How to Build a Successful Blog Series!