How to scale a smoothie-recipe-site?

Hey everybody,

I nearly forgot about it, but when I looked at the stats of an old german smoothie-recipe-site of me I was really surprised that the traffic rose continuous from about 800 PIs in december to 1800 in february without doing anything on the site. Also I recognized that I am really ranking well on google with some recipe-keywords.

The site's content are recipes that people can search for by entering their ingredients. There's only little info about smoothies itself.

I have some google ads running on the site, that bring me about 1$ per month (1-2 clicks per week). Which is really not that much, although the ads are well placed. ;-)

So now I'm asking you if you have ideas or tips how to generate more traffic and milk the cow a lot more, as it seems that it runs pretty well itself.

I'm looking forward on discussing with you.

dampee

I would try and get email addresses of your visitors. How about a box/popup saying "New smoothie recipe each week emailed to you". Or if you wanted to be a bit more pushy perhaps force them to email register to see the content, there are lots of wordpress membership plugins about here for download.

Then when you build up an email list you can email them health related offers. Most people searching for smoothie recipes are probably into fitness and losing weight, which is a great niche with plenty of offers and products. For that matter why not try some fitness related products on your site? EG use amazon to sell abtrainers, diet books, smoothie recipe books and Clickbank for weight loss/get ripped ebooks.

You don't even need to worry about actually sending them the weekly recipes really although it would generate more traffic for you if you can be bothered. Just build a nice email list and then hit them everyweek with an offer.

Keep monitoring the traffic and see if that spike is steady because you are in a food related category, especially smoothies, I assume a lot of that traffic came from "new years resolutioners" looking for smoothie diets or recipes for their new years diets and the stats were just catching up.

Beyond making sure the traffic is steady, I like most of Jimbos ideas.

Sounds really good, what I read. Fitness and weight loosing is really a great niche. What is your experience with email lists? Are there really still people out there buying stuff in newsletters? How many of them?

What can I do to raise the traffic even more? Linkbuilding seems a good idea for me. What are the biggest traffic-driver? As I rank pretty well in google I might look for other resources...

Go to Aweber or similar and register. You will usually get a free month of email marketing then its only $20/month or so.

They make it very easy for you, they will give you a signup box (the one on the bottom of BHW is Aweber) and they have lots of tools for managing lists and creating emails. Its really a piece of cake.

If your list is targeted and you send them relevant offers you will make sales, its just a numbers game. If you want to improve CTRs with email marketing them send them some useful content as well as ads, make your product recommendations very personal and genuine, dress up emails, offer them some value. Its the same as anything my friend:

Effort=Performance=Reward

Great Tipps jimbo,

thank you very much for your useful tipps. I just bought Market Samurai and start playing with some gold-nugget-keywords to optimize the site first, to get the most out of it. Aweber looks pretty good. I think I know my road now. I'll keep you informed, how things are running.

And yes - I will work for it ;-)