JustRW – Canada’s Un-chef is one year old today!

Cake made as per recipe in The Un-Cookbook Pg. 112

If I had known you were coming, I would have baked a cake! Wait a minute, I guess I did… 😉
Today marks a significant milestone  for this blog. It is exactly one year ago to this very day that I wrote and posted my very first entry. At that time, I only had a very general idea of what I wanted to achieve. Someone once said: ” If you don’t know where you are going, how will you know when you get there?” But then someone else countered: “It’s all about the journey, not the destination!”  Well,  we have certainly had quite a journey and have not yet reached our destination, wherever that may be!

I know that statistics can be dry and boring but I feel that it would be the right time to share a few with you:

As you can see from the table above, we have experienced significant growth. In March of 2010, our site was receiving an average of 24 visits a day where today, we are approaching 200! Our increase in Google Search engine exposure is even more dramatic with less than 1 search a day in March of 2010 where now we average 30+ searches each day. Other than Google, our two main sources of referred traffic are from our Facebook Fan Pageand Urbanspoon. These three sources combined account for almost 50 percent of our total traffic.

Within the last 12 months we have authored almost 100 individual posts. The majority have been restaurant reviews: 62 in Ottawa, 10 in Florida, 2 in Ontario, 2 in Upper New York State, and a few in Europe. In October, we finally completed the 2nd edition of our cookbook: The Un-Cookbook: The Art of Cooking without Recipes. So, you can see that we have not exactly been inactive….

Although we have mostly stayed under the radar of the local media, there have been some interesting highlights:

• One of our posts was quoted in a local coupon deal and caused a sudden spike in traffic.
• A local restaurateur threatened to eject us if we ever entered his establishment again just because he didn’t like our review.
• Although rarely recognised by owners and/or managers, we have received special treatment on a few  occasions because someone obviously suspected that we might be reviewing them. After all, there are not many people other than bloggers and reviewers who get out their cameras every time a new dish arrives at the table! 😉

What’s in store for the future? We have some interesting things planned for the near future. Since we now have a following of 5,000+ monthly visitors, we are going to see if we cannot turn this to your advantage. We have already made a start by including an Ottawa Daily Dining Deals Page, where we list all of the various Coupons, Discounts and Group Deals from the various sites that have sprung up lately. Now,  instead of having to monitor a flood of disparate sources to make sure you do not miss out, you only need go to a single page. In the near future, we have in mind a way to leverage current trends to get our readers special discounts to their favourite restaurants without shelling out for ‘coupon deals’. We will keep you informed.

Finally, we would like to say a heartfelt thanks to you our reader for consistently coming back. Although we enjoy the blogging in and of itself, it is nonetheless gratifying to know that people find it of value. This alone spurs us on to bigger and better ventures. We will endeavour to continue to earn your trust and loyalty in the next 12 months.