Web Advertising?

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to get people to check out my little restaurant guide. I’ve tried a few different channels that I’d like to talk about.

First of all, I am currently willing to spend about $100 per month; this is because I fund this endeavor out-of-pocket. Since I launched the site back in July, I’ve tried buying Google adwords, and also experimented with Facebook ads. When I first configured my Google ads, I was getting about 8 clicks per day, but I was getting a lot of users that I simply couldn’t offer value to (foodfinder.net is still has very limited US restaurant coverage). On the next round, I did a bit more targeting by geography both in terms of keyword selection and making my landing pages a bit smarter. By click rate dropped to 2-3 per day, but my bounce rate also fell by about 10%.

Facebook offers super targeted advertising, but I started with a small geographic search area (San Diego and surrounding cities). This yielded about 1-2 clicks per day (although my total ad spend was under 10 dollars over a 14 day period).

Clearly, I’ve got a steep learning curve here. I think I’m going to try some less conventional forms of advertising. A friend and co-worker who just release a cool viral object tracking game site turned me on to a cool new ad channel. The site is called Girl in Your Shirt and it takes an innovative approach to marketing via social networking.

This will be my next endeavor--I’ve got shirt printing now, and will soon drop $75 bucks to see what kind of traffic this can drive. I’ll keep you posted. In the mean time, any thought on how to spend $100 a month to drive some web traffic? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

My Biggest Challenge: Data Acquisition

I've gotten a couple of requests this past week that relate to the most difficult part of building the intrepid restaurant guide that is FoodFinder.net. Both of these, while very different from each other, tie into the same theme--gathering restaurant data.

The first one inquired about adding international restaurants. Wow...this would be super cool. I really look forward to expanding overseas. Unfortunately, I'm years, not months away. Reason one--I have limited database space (about half a gig). Even my US coverage is a work in progress. I've collected restaurants in about 20 major markets, and have filled out areas around the two places where I've lived (southern New England and Southern California). These 2 regions also get the most attention in terms of new restaurants and updates.

The second request was for an update to the menu for Martha's Exchange & Brewery. Normally, this would be a simple matter, but their menu is not available electronically (normally, I would have told the manager to send me an electronic copy of the data, but since I used to frequent their on the weekends, I figured I'd knock it out and brush up on my typing skills at the same time). In the future, I won't make a habit of doing this.

Also, I'd like to expand the amount of data available for an individual restaurant. I think Yelp does a great job providing detailed meta information about their listings. I plan to add this by opening up control over some of the restaurant data to the community and the owners or managers. So much to do, and so little time.

Food and Restaurant Resources

When promoting a website, one of the most important criteria in organic SEO is backlinks. A few days back, my little restaurant rating website was included in a blog post. The site is called www.culinaryschoolguide.org and the topic was 100 useful food resources.

At first, I was just happy to get an unsolicited link to FoodFinder.net (the first of it's kind). Of course, I took a few minutes to check out the entry and there are some really great resources on there, ranging from search engines for micro breweries to cooking videos.

If you're a foodie, check it out.