I need some feedback on food and recipe websites. What kind of experience has anyone had with these types of sites? I'm looking at buying a small network of 4 recipe sites and I'm curious as to what this topic is like for maintaining traffic, members, maintenance, etc. Questions I have are: Traffic Trends - is general traffic going up or down? Advertising Possibilities - what are PPC rates like? Any other feedback available would be greatly appreciated. Thanks everyone, I really appreciate this info.
traffic trends are steady, advertising .. pay per click is best maybe with PPI when you get lots of users i get around $.80 a click. Getting into the market is hard it is fully SEO'ed out i would say so you looking for other meth's to bring traffic to your sites. Videos do extramly well at the moment if yo have a shrt video sowing how to make somthign your just about laughing, if no video then step by step pictures are next then finally plain text instructions. Un saturated area is long tailed keywords, Enjoy (i run a recipe site as well as a recipe section on my student site )
I would recommend a community type site like http://recipesgalour.ning.com where you can interact with people in a niche area. Especially if you are looking for recipe ideas and you can actually communicate with the person that actually made the recipe or offer suggestions for improvement and they are useful tips to someone.
I have one that I haven't even added any recipes to nor promoted at all and it has 204 registered users as of this posting. I just happened to be doing some keyword research and found a keyword that got quite a few searches and the domain name was available so I bought it, threw up a recipe site and people started registering for it. foodchannelrecipes.com I was stunned quite frankly. But it is a good niche.
I have one recipe site,and the traffic is increase everyday but it only small increase such as +1 or 2 unique visitor.I have used several PPC site such as bidvertiser and the click is only 1-2 click/day and the earning is quite low.The niche is already saturated but if you want to join,you must offer something new that current recipe site don't have.