How do you make a website? What should my website be about? How do you make a website that is both profitable and popular? These are just a few of the questions that I am asked all the time. Today, I'd like to focus on one Japanese infopreneur that seems to have found the secret recipe.
The one thing that I think that we can all learn from this example is that there are thousands of great ideas out there. Just remember that everything must begin with the proper planning, niche and keyword research.
Cookpad.com is a Japanese website that has been profitable enough to become publicly traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Its initial basic premise, sharing recipes. Why was this such a great idea? Well, for the most part, takeout food is almost nonexistent in terms of Japanese family life. Most families cook everyday. As a result, having a war chest of great recipes is an essential part of the survival guide.
Cookpad.com capitalizes on this and makes money in several ways.
1. Visitors are offered free access to the site's recipes. Additional features are available via the purchase of a premium account. The cost is 294 yen, about $3 per month. Experts agree that offering a free product is one of the better strategies for creating new business. People love free stuff. Those that like the free version are usually willing to pay for an upgrade. Companies like Microsoft, Adobe and many others use this same marketing technique.
CEO and founder Akimitsu Sano always believed that people would be willing to pay for access to great information/websites.
2. In addition to monthly subscriptions, Cookpad.com also generates some of its revenues via paid advertisements. Today, a good portion of website earnings are derived from advertisers. Cookpad.com expects to earn over $3 million USD in profits for fiscal year 2010. The total revenue for the year is expected to exceed $18 million. Not bad for a niche website right?
The creators of Cookpad.com carefully chose a niche to focus its efforts. The website is entirely in Japanese. The target niche market is Japanese women between the ages of 20 and 30.
Now of course, Cookpad.com is no longer a small single-page site. Currently, it features over 550,000 recipes. By comparison, Allrecipes.com has around 40,000. Food Network has only about 25,000.
One of the most important factors leading to Cookpad's success was its content. The importance is not in that it had a lot of content but in that its users created the content. Many users submitted their own recipes. Successful website publishers, marketing experts and entrepreneurs highly suggest this type of content.
The more pages that a website has, the higher it ranks with the search engines. Creating hundreds of thousands of pages on your own would be impossible, even for a large company.
By getting visitors to publish the content, you have an endless amount of unique original content, something that the search engines love.
If you're a website publisher, you might not ever be as successful as Cookpad.com, but you can learn from its example.
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