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.

No chain letters for you!

In my previous post, I have tried to convince people to help me do some direct marketing. I wasn't expect that much (given that you guys are all a bunch of _____ [this is the part where I loose the small audience that I might have remaining]).

But still, the result was pretty much 0. Flat. No change. I won't be wearing my "glass half full" shirt tomorrow... Oh, well... Life goes on.

I'll try something more effective. Stay tuned!

Not a chain letter, but...

In one of the previous posts, I have mentioned that the main sources of traffic are direct traffic (mainly someone sending an email explaining how great a site this is), links from other sites and search engines.


The first type is not very sustainable, but before completely forgetting about it, I've decided to give it a try. And here is where you come in! I would like you to send this truly wonderful site to everyone you think might be interested, and ask them to forward it on.


Some of you might be thinking that you are not the type of person who sends chain letters! This is not the case, my friends. We are all trying to figure out how to give our kids and families good healthy food while not spending all our day in the kitchen. And we know lots of other people who are also facing the same challenges. So send them a link to 1. Family. Friendly. Food. and make them happy. And ask them to make more people happy.


"But I don't know anyone who eats or has families", some of you might say. Hmmm... That's a tough one. Really? Are you sure?




To make things more interesting, we will take some bets. Please comment on this post with either how many people you have sent an email about this, or with your guess of what spike we'll get from this exercise. My goal is 100 visitors in 1 day. Click on the image below to see the current direct traffic.



Don't procrastinate! Click send now. Let's see who will be the first to add a comment.