How GreenSmoothieGirl.com is doing

An internet marketing maven friend of mine wrote a report in Feb. called “[a very prominent raw-foods guru] versus GreenSmoothieGirl.” He wrote me this:

“You have higher traffic ranking than any of [Prominent Guru’s] web sites with a fraction of the name recognition. More traffic with fewer sites linking in, and you spend no money on advertising. You’re slowly and steadily nailing it.”

[Prominent Guru] has been out there for 15 years or more. I first ventured onto the internet a bit over 3 years ago with zero products to sell (I had early readers screaming about that, demanding recipes and help). I plan to keep steadily providing information in response to reader requests. I have never once accepted advertising dollars despite many offers of people who want to park their ads on my site or blog.

Google tells me lots of interesting things about my site. If you’re curious….

From Dec. 15 to Jan. 15, GSG had 70,000 visitors from 147 countries/territories. Highest traffic comes from U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, Germany, and New Zealand.

Search engines were sources of 52% of the traffic, other sites referred 15%, and 33% of you come here directly. The average time spent on the site is 5.23 minutes, with 3.37 pages visited. The 12 Steps program page is most visited, with almost 20,000 views. 8,141 people signed up for the newsletter in that time period. (Higher than usual. I think being in an article with Dr. Oz helped.) Three times as many people (over 7,000) searched for “green smoothie girl” than searched for “green smoothie.”

Three years ago I was a college professor/mom and knew nothing about the internet. Today I know just slightly more than nothing about the internet.

The site’s success has floored me, so when I am interviewed about it, I struggle to name the reasons. I think what it is, is that I just choose to support and nurture people, which is unusual in the nutrition space. The usual M.O. out there seems to be guilt and fear.

Someone at one of my Portland classes said that a prominent author in my space ends each chapter of one of their books with, “COOKED FOODS ARE POISON” or something. I really dislike hyperbole, hype, gimmicks, and especially negativity.

It’s easy to fall into that negative space. We could go on and on about how sugar or hot dogs or soda are killing us. I’ll touch on that occasionally, and I’m not Polyanna dancing on the Good Ship Lollipop: I’ll occasionally counteract voices out there I think are preaching false doctrine or skewing logic or common sense. I do believe in standing up for truth.

But as soon as I can, I’ll get back to the positive place. I dislike fear as a motive for anything–in parenting, in religion, in relationships, in school or career. So I like to keep it about hope and light here. New ideas. Encouragement. Sharing successes. Remembering children and families. (Not a place to beat you up about food. You’ve been doing that to YOURSELF for years. It’s not productive and I don’t want to add to it.)

I’ve always wanted GSG.com to be the place where we REPLACE the bad stuff with exciting ideas and delicious recipes and thrilling health benefits my readers report. I love unique or exciting, fresh ways to look at traditional practices of nutrition.

So this would be a great time to ask you this: what support do you need that you aren’t getting? What should be next for the GreenSmoothieGirl mission to bring back a whole-foods diet and kick the Standard American Diet to the curb?

Posted in: Lifestyle, Mind/Body Connection