A Red-letter Day for the Recipe Site

As well as the more standard means of making income on my webiste (Amazon marketing, eBay Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, eBook selling) I also maintain more information-focussed areas on my website. Some of these are purely altruistic in nature (such as the Celtic regions of the celtnet.org.uk part of the site. Other regions, such as the poetry corner include Google ads, but are really there as a showcase for both ancient and modern poetry.

Then I havea growing recipe secion to the site which is intended to inform (in that it has recipes from the ancient (ie stone, bronze and iron ages), roman, medieval and Elizabethan periods, as well as specifically Welsh recipes. Allied to these are various ancient recipes for beers and meads without which no ancient meal is complete.

Over the years I've collected many thousands of recipes and I'm slowly adding these to the website in a miscellaneous modern recipe section. With the addition of this recipe repository I've now just passed the four hundred recipe mark, with an expected fifty additional recipes to be added to the site tomorrow. Partly this is a desire to get the information and all the recipes I've gathered 'out there'. But the recipes are also a good source of AdSense income.

To this end I've attempted to add value to the recipe site by adding a recipe search facility that allows every recipe in the collection to be searched by name, food section period as well as by free text search. A cut-down version of this recipe search is also provided on each page in the recipe secton. Though the recipes are all provided with metric measurements I do also provide conversion pages for volumes, mass/weight and tempreature that allow conversions between a range of units, both modern and ancient. Partly this is alturism in helping the website's visitors, though the pages also draw-in AdSense customers.

As with everything, the more content one has the better, and the more likely it is that someone will visit a page and click on a relevant link. I've also begun to add relevant Amazon links to my recipe-associated pages, such as the page on the history of the spice trade and the guide to spices which is slowly being linked out to varous recipes incorporating the spices described in the main text. This is increasing linkage within my site and within regions of the recipe secton (if you want to learn why this is important, have a look at my Maximize your Web Traffic eBook.

Oddly enough, the recipe site itself grew out of my main Celtic site and included recipes important to the various histories of Celtic Britain. Though once produced the section soon assumed a life of its own. It's even been an excellent marketing ploy and sectons of the site are being syndicated by other sites. As cookery is a growth area I'll soon be adding reviews of cookware and links to supplies or cookware and cooking products. As far as I'm concerned this is an area of the website that can only grow in value.