Q. Please tell us a little about your background.
I am a Certified Database Professional by trade and I love to cook. I have a limited background in website design. I am married and have 4 kids, 10 grandchildren. Currently I am unemployed but do some contract training as it comes available.

Q. What made you decide to start a website in the field?
I love to cook and my daughter is a chef. So I started the site originally as a recipe exchange site. But as I acquired more recipe databases started to combine them together. My goal is to create a database of over 1 million recipes.
I wanted to create a website that had a large database of recipes, a place that people could come and exchange recipes.

Q. What kind of research went into this niche area before building your website?
Most of the research was into what to offer for the membership. Originally, I was going to charge for membership, so I wanted to make it worth while. I changed the profit model when no one was signing up. Now income is limited, but this I hope will change once the newsletter starts being published.

Q. How did you design and build your website?
Main site is based on WordPress and several add on, several other packages integrated into WorkPress to manage membership and administration areas. This is the 3rd major redesign since I put the sight up many years ago.

Q. What software do you use to run your business?
WordPress is the major package, I also used a program for link exchange and membership management. Next upgrade will be to remove membership software and add just a newsletter management package.

Q. How does your website generate income?
CD Recipe sales (direct), affiliate program (Amazon), Google Ads, Direct Banner Ads (no implemented yet), Radio ads ( I think this has died).

Q. How do you collect payments for your products or services?
PayPal

Q. What promotion methods do you use?
Articles, LinkIn, Tweeter, Yahoo Answers, MySpace, Signature Block, and Blogs.

Q. Which method has proven to give you the best sales results?
Recipe CD has made the most money. But nothing is really doing great. I am lacking constant traffic.

Q. Which method of traffic generation has proven to be the best for you?
Article posting seems to do the best. If I keep posting articles. I need to work on my resource box.

Q. What is your biggest challenge each month?
Traffic, Traffic, Traffic

Q. What's the biggest mistake you've made since starting your business?
Not learning how to work with search engines to generate traffic. I still believe I am missing a part of the puzzle as to how to list well and turn that listing into traffic.

Q. How has your lifestyle changed since you started your online business?
I am now unemployed. Money to spend on the site is now non-existent.

Q. How has your SureFireWealth.com membership helped you with your online business?
Recipe Books, PLR, Article ideas to research and rewrite for the website.

Q. What would you say to someone looking to start a website in the same niche as you?
Make sure you are doing it for love not to get rich quick. Once you know how to create consistent traffic you should do well in any niche, not just cooking.

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Thank you,

Jeremy Gislason
Webmaster
SureFireWealth.com