How To Nail Weekly Meal Plans As A Recipe Creator
“If you could have a shortcut for one part of cooking, what would it be?”
That’s exactly what Julie Pollitt (aka @backtomysouthernroots) asked her email subscribers recently.
The #1 response? Meal planning.
And while weekly meal plans make your audience’s life WAY easier as they prep recipes and groceries for the week, it can be really time consuming to pull off.
So we took a peek at how 5 recipe creators crush weekly meal plans for their audiences and boiled it down to a playbook you can tweak to make your own.
Which creators are killing meal plans?
With a combined 2.6M followers on Instagram, these creators are doing an incredible job putting together weekly meal plans for their audiences:
Keep reading to find out exactly what they’re doing…
Pros and cons of weekly meal plans
Before you jump right into creating meal plans for your audience, it’s important you know exactly what you’re signing up for:
It’s pretty clear the pros majorly outweigh the cons if you’re willing to make time for it. So if you’re ready to make meal plans a part of your playbook, here’s a step-by-step guide you can follow to make it happen.
1. Curate the recipes
The first step is to pull together recipes from your site. It seems simple enough, but if you have hundreds (or more!) of recipes to pull from, this can be overwhelming.
Make it easy on yourself. Don’t be afraid to repurpose. Once you’ve put together meal plans for a whole year, you can easily update them for the future (for example, Your Week 17 meal plan can be the same every year, just make sure it’s up to date). Similarly, you can include the same recipe across multiple weeks. Especially if it’s a fan favorite.
You also don’t need to plan every single meal for the whole week. Pick a formula and stick to it (for example, you could include 5 dinner ideas, a couple breakfast ideas and 1 dessert).
Here’s a great example of Molly Thompson’s (What Molly Made) weekly meal plan formula:
The more you can systematize, the easier it will be to keep up with. Plus, your audience probably doesn’t want you to overload them with recipes for every single meal for the whole week. When in doubt, prioritize dinner ideas. Because that’s probably your audience’s main concern. Then, you can sprinkle in breakfast/lunch/dessert ideas as bonus recipes.
2. Put together a shopping list
Once you’ve picked your recipes for the week, it’s time to put together a categorized shopping list your audience can use for everything they’ll need for the week.
It doesn’t need to be fancy, but it should be easily printable/savable, which is why PDFs are often the way to go.
Here’s a sample grocery list from Sarah Bond (Live Eat Learn):
Don’t feel like you need to go over the top with the design. Prioritize making it easy to read and save. That’s what your audience is really going to care about.
3. Promote your meal plan
If you’re going to put the work in to create meal plans every week, you need to have a solid promotion plan to get as much as you possibly can out of them.
Which means social posts, blog posts, and emails are a must. You also want to make sure you’re not making people search for them. Make them easy to find by including them in your Instagram bio and adding a section to your nav.
Instagram posts and stories
Posting every week about your meal plans is a no brainer. Catherine (aka Weelicious) uses the Grocers List Story Reply Automation and Save to Email to share her meal plans.
Here’s what that looks like:
In this case, her audience just has to reply to her story with the number 12. Then, they’ll get a DM with a link to the week’s meal plan (as a blog post) and an option to have it sent to their emails. If they enter their email address, they’ll get a message that links out to the same blog post.
This is something you could easily incorporate into your posting routine. Every week, just share a link to your blog post or a landing page to get your Instagram followers to sign up for your meal plans.
You can also use reels and static posts to promote your meal plans for the week. Just like in the example above, you can use Grocers List to automate the process. With Comment for Recipe (to allow viewers to comment a keyword to have your meal plan sent directly to their DMs) and Save to Email (to give them the option to have the meal plan sent straight to their inbox).
Blog posts
Putting together a weekly blog post with your meal plans makes it really easy for your audience to find them on your website.
Plus, it gives them a single place to find everything for the week. AND they’re the perfect place to incorporate affiliate links organically. Love to use a specific product to make a recipe in the meal plan? Include it!
If you’re looking for killer meal plan blog posts, check out Live Eat Learn, Weelicious, and What’s Gaby Cooking.
Sarah (Live Eat Learn) has a table of contents for what’s on the menu, how to use the meal plan, and a PDF with the recipes, like this:
It’s SO smart to have QR codes people can scan to head straight to each recipe. She also includes a grocery list with everything you need to make each recipe and tips for making each dish.
Catherine (Weelicious) and Gaby (What’s Gaby Cooking) follow a similar playbook with their blog posts. They keep it really simple and include gorgeous photos of the recipes for the week with links to each.
Luckily, since you already have the photos and links, this approach doesn’t require extra work (outside of putting everything together into a single post) on your part. So if you’re looking for a low lift way to turn your meal plans into blog posts, start here.
Emails
Every week, you should be sending an email with your meal plan. Here are a few examples to inspire you:
There’s no right way to do this. You can point people to a blog post with all the details or include everything in the email. You can keep the email focused only on the meal plan (which means you might not need a blog post) or incorporate it into a longer message.
To find out what resonates best with your audience, test, test, test. Don’t just copy what other creators are doing. Find what works best for YOU.
And by the way, your emails are another great place to include affiliate links organically. Lexi (Lexi’s Clean Kitchen) does an amazing job with this if you need inspiration.
Make them easy to find
Once you’ve done everything else, make sure your meal plans are easy to find on social and on your site.
Here’s what Molly Thompson’s Instagram bio looks like when you click:
Another great place to add them is in the nav of your website, just like Gaby and Sarah do:
The most important thing is to make sure people can find your meal plans easily. Don’t make them dig through your blog or social feed. Because the easier they are to find, the more people who will see them and ultimately sign up.
4. Design a landing page
Want to take it a step further? Put together a landing page like this to promote your meal plans and help you grow your email list:
That way, you can send people to one place that makes it really clear what they’re getting when they sign up for your meal plans.
This means every week when you’re sharing your meal plans, you can point people to a page like this. And while this is definitely not a need to have, it can be a huge help. Especially if list growth is your biggest priority.
Ready to start your own weekly meal plans?
There are tons of paths to success with weekly meal plans. You don’t have to do everything in this post to get results.
Start by figuring out what you want to achieve. If list growth is your biggest priority, you might want to think about gating the content. But if you’re just trying to create something your audience will love, you might not need to go that route.
Just to recap, here are the 4 steps to bringing meal plans to life as a recipe creator:
Curate the recipes
Put together a shopping list
Promote your meal plan
Design a landing page
If you want to simplify, 2 and 4 could easily be scaled back to start. And step 3 could be simplified to an email and social promotion.
The beauty about this playbook is that you get to make it your own. Don’t just copy what others are doing. Use it as inspiration, but find what works best for you. Figure out what your audience is actually looking for!
And remember that weekly meal plans have SO many benefits. From making life easier for your audience, to driving affiliate revenue for YOU. Plus, you already have the content. All you need to do is put it together.
