October 2008 Results

October was by far the best month for 1. Family. Friendly. Food. so far, with the number of visits going up 483% month over month to 1825 visits. There were 1480 unique visitors (up 492% from 250 in September). In November, I expect the number of visits to go up 50% to about 2750 (see detailed analysis below).

Here is the week by week change in number of visits since July (click on the image for more details).



The income was still $0.00, with no clicks on ads. Currently there are no ads in the web site itself, only in searches.

Below you will find the distribution of visits by category, a quick overview of the status in each category, and the expected number of visits in November.

Search. This is traffic coming from search engines. The number of visits from search in October was 303, up 573% from 45 in September. See this post for more details about search engine traffic. In November, I expect a 60% increase in search engine traffic due to more posts (and therefore more hits), better rankings, and adding the blog to Live Search and Yahoo! Search.

Social sites. This is traffic coming as a result of publishing the posts in sites such as facebook, digg, reddit, etc. In October, there were 909 visits in this category, up from only 26 in September. This was by far the largest category in October, accounting for half the visits. 97% of all hits are from reddit.com, and I'll publish a separate post about this topic. In November I expect an increase of 75% in this category, due to a planned marketing push to several of these sites.

Other Family Friendly Food properties. This is traffic from other blogs that my wife writes (such as her new blog at Seattle P-I and Good Food Bad Food) and this blog. Traffic was up 907% to 141 visits in October. In November, I expect an increase of 50% primarily due to traffic from the Seattle P-I blog (which only came online a few days ago).

Other referring blogs. This is traffic originating from other blogs, usually food blogs. There were 93 visits in this category, up from 12 in September. Bloggers try to increase their traffic by posting comments in other blogs with a link back to their blog. Nurit is not very active in this, so I only expect a modest increase next month.

Direct traffic. This is users directly navigating to the site, probably by clicking a link in an email. There were 258 direct visits in October, up from 102 in September, but I don't expect any increase in November. I am planning to see if there are ways to improve the instrumentation for this category.

Web Mail. This is users clicking on a link in mail programs such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. There were 39 visits in October, and a similar number (35) in September. I don't expect any change in November.

Portals. This is a new category including things such as My Yahoo!, iGoogle and web news readers (such as Google Reader). It only had 15 visits in October (up from 2 in September), so it is too early to have a good plan for it. I will track it closely in November.

In terms of the quality of the visits, the number of pages per visit and average time in each visit went up slightly in October, after going down in September.

On the way to be rich

I have added ads to my blog. Not yet to 1. Family. Friendly. Food. (more about that in a separate post), but it's a start.

In the first 20 days of October I have already made $0.18. Some of you might think it's not a lot, but I can tell you that you are wrong. If I continue at this rate, it will be about $100 until I retire. As you can see, that's a lot. :-)

More info: 135 impressions, 10 clicks, 7.41 CTR, $1.31 eCPM. I only have a vague idea what these terms mean, but I am plannign to learn.

Seriously, now

OK, so I had some fun with the Q1 FY09 financial results, but I am taking this seriously, and I need your help to succeed.

In the next posts I will start drilling down into the business and marketting side.

First Quarter Results

Bellevue, WA - October 7, 2008. 1 Family. Friendly. Food today announced first quarter revenue of $0.00 billion for the period ending September 30, 2008, a #DIV/0! increase over the same period of the prior year. Operating income for the quarter was $0.00 billion, and dilluted earnings per share were $0.00.

“We are pleased with the increasing pace of revenue growth throughout this fiscal year fueled by strong demand for our new offerings,” said the chief financial officer. “We are now accelerating our investments in the business to drive future growth, which is reflected in our financial guidance. We believe next fiscal year will deliver even stronger double-digit revenue growth than this year.”

Business Outlook
Management offers the following guidance for the quarter ending December 31, 2008:

• Revenue is expected to be in the range of $5 to $10.
• Operating income is expected to be in the range of $4 to $9.

Forward-Looking Statements

Statements in this release that are "forward-looking statements" are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially because of factors such as:

• challenges to our core business model;
• intense competition in all our markets;
• our continued ability to protect the company’s intellectual property rights;
• claims that we have infringed the intellectual property rights of others;
• government litigation and regulation affecting how we design and market our products;
• our ability to attract and retain talented employees;
• delays in product development and related product release schedules;
• significant business investments that may not produce offsetting increases in revenue;
• adverse results in legal disputes;
• unanticipated tax liabilities;
• impairment of goodwill or amortizable intangible assets causing a charge to earnings;
• changes in accounting that may affect our reported earnings and operating income;
• exposure to increased economic and regulatory uncertainties from operating a global business;
• general economic and geo-political conditions;
• natural disaster, cyber-attack or other catastrophic event disrupting our business;
• acquisitions and joint ventures that adversely affect the business;
• limitations on the availability of insurance and resulting uninsured losses;
• sales channel disruption such as the bankruptcy of a major distributor;
• implementation of operating cost structures that align with revenue growth;
• and foreign currency, interest rate, fixed income, equity and commodity price risks.
  

Vision and Target Audience

In order to make 1 Family. Friendly. Food. a success, one has to understand first its vision and target audience.

Nurit's primary goal is to show that it is not difficult to eat healthy homemade food. Here are the main types of posts in her blog:

• Dinner tonight posts give easy recipes and tips for preparing dinner at home (entrée and side dishes)
• A cake for the weekend is a collection of simple recipes for dessert. I love the smell of fresh cake when coming home from work on Friday evening!
• In the try something new posts, Nurit dares people to expand their culinary repertoire
• Cooking with kids tell stories on how our son is helping in the kitchen. Kids and food are some more thoughts around kids menus and teaching kids the basics of healthy eating. Those are some of my favorites.
• Other categories of posts include reviews of good cookbooks, making good use of leftovers, some time saving kitchen tools and more.

The primary target audience of her blog are busy people, mainly families with kids. They want to eat good, nutritious food, and educate their children for a healthy life, but are pressed for time. They are looking for simple, proved solutions.

The follow up question is who is the competition and what are the characteristics of this market. I have not explicitly looked into this yet, but I will start looking into this in one of the next posts.

In the next post I plan to give an overview of what we have done so far, and the current status of the traffic to the site.

Thoughts? Send me a message or comment.

The Beginning

I'm starting this blog to track the progress of the blog that my wife Nurit is writing (1 Family. Friendly. Food.) from its humble start till its success (I am wearing my "half full" shirt today, so not succeeding is not an option).

My definition of success is getting a lot of traffic and being able to monetize it. My bet right now is that getting a lot of traffic will be the difficult part, monetizing that traffic should be easier.

The theory is that in order to succeed, I need to define a goal (something like $1M in revenue in 1 year), but I am an incremental guy. So I'll start with measuring the current traffic and define the first goal derived from that, and keep increasing it. Stay tuned for details in one of the next posts.

Why would you read this blog?

• You want to see how my marketing / business efforts are going. That should be fun.
• You want to hear my observations on the technical side of things. Don't expect too much.
• You are bored.
• You want to be an active participant and forever be remembered as someone who helped make this experiment a success.
• You wonder if things are recursive, and if there is a relationship between this blog's success and Nurit's blog success.

In the next posts, I'll give a brief overview of Nurit's vision, some background of what we've done so far, where we are today, and start defining goals and strategies going forward.

Thoughts? Ideas? Send me a comment.