One of my friends recently launched WhoDelivers.com an online Austin Food Delivery website & directory. It’s a really cool idea - basically, you get on the website, plug in your zip code, and it spits out all the restaurants that deliver to you (with their menu & reviews.) He has a developer working on an app to take into account exact address & delivery radius to be even more accurate.
He’s seeing quite a bit of good traffic through PPC (pretty cheap, too) and his bounce rate is sick (as in good.) He’s working on monetizing it, so I’ve basically been helping him w/ that, and with SEO. His programmer put together the site with a really intuitive hierarchy, so it should crawl really well. I introduced him to “anchor text” & PR, so he has the basics. He won’t need too much link building in order to take on the guys showing up for local results.
Regardless…check it out. If you’re in Austin, it’s a sweet service to use. If you’re not in Austin, maybe he’ll expand to your area soon!
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November 20th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
That is a pretty slick idea. I think you will easily be able to monetize it once you have the rankings and traffic. Go get em!
November 20th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
It should be pretty easy to sell advertising…the only problem is selling online ad space to people who don’t typically buy online space. I’m leaving all that to him - just giving him good pointers on getting organic rankings & some pointers on how to ease into the monetization.
November 21st, 2007 at 7:08 am
It is still a really good idea. What I have trouble with is knowing what should be charged for ads on a site that rank well. Are there any guidelines for that?
November 21st, 2007 at 9:48 am
Absolutely. I think that free market economics will help settle out the pricing on the advertising. He’s going to offer “sponsored results” & allow the sponsors to include coupons, so they’re advertising will be trackable. He has data on the volume of zip code searches, so he can get super-local. Thinking about it more, I really think he needs to monetize it for Austin, and then try to get into the bigger markets & just do a massive PR campaign. Once he has the traffic, I think the restaurants will find him - he’ll only need to seek out a couple of sponsors, and the others will then want in on the action.