Looking to share Grandma’s secret recipe for meatloaf? With SilverCarrot Inc.’s relaunched Recipe4Living you can do so anonymously, avoiding being disowned by your family.
The publisher relaunched the site at www.recipe4living.com to create an interactive online community that shares ideas on cooking and healthy living.
“Our core competency as a marketer is that we have an in-house creative team that was able to produce Recipe4Living,” said Allan Levy, founder of SilverCarrot, New York. “We can focus on building out a network of content.”
The site debuted in 2002, but was not yet ready for the online community, Mr. Levy said.
Users now can connect to more than 20 community resource guides focused on recipe sharing, practical cooking tips and entertaining. The targeted users are women ages 25-50, ranging from mothers to those with specific dietary needs.
More than 15,000 recipes were available at launch time last month, with that number growing daily as users post their own recipes.
“The social network aspect is our key platform for growth,” Mr. Levy said. “We have added a user-rating system, allowing recipes to be ranked by popularity as well.”
A message board encourages visitors to post tips on cooking, family and health, computers, the Internet, human interest and genealogy. A coupon function is tied to ingredients needed for the posted recipes.
The service is free for users and subscribers.
“This is strictly an ad revenue model,” Mr. Levy said. “It is a performance-based network where advertisers only pay when something of theirs is downloaded or users sign up for e-mails on a daily basis that are most relevant and profitable to the advertiser.”
Recipes and commentary from chef Wolfgang Puck is a new feature. Early next year users will be able to upload videos of themselves making a recipe featured on the site.
“The site is also easier to navigate because we have an enhanced user-friendly search function and interface,” Mr. Levy said. “We can now pinpoint keywords.”
Mr. Levy reports Recipe4Living having 100,000 users who signed up via search or e-mail. The average user spends more than 10 minutes on the site and comes back four times. SilverCarrot plans to attract visitors through online marketing, public relations and word of mouth. It is also conducting six to seven direct marketing campaigns weekly to drive site traffic.
“We test against controls, then measure, analyze and recycle them,” Mr. Levy said.
Users also can create their own cookbooks online filled with recipes from the site. SilverCarrot aims to have 40,000 recipes online.
SilverCarrot provides marketing services to Fortune 1000 companies ranging from consumer packaged goods and pharmaceuticals to mobile communications.
“Forty-year-old women are not going to MySpace and creating profiles, because it does nothing for them,” Mr. Levy said. “But mom’s recipe is something they want to tell everyone about.”
