Dietitian’s site attracts major advertisers
Port Moody’s Gloria Tsang saw 5 million unique visitors last year at Healthcastle. com
We actually take a stand. A lot of us dietitians always say moderation is the key. I don’t like that word at all. Everybody can say moderation is the key. You don’t need a dietitian to tell you that. If I believe in ‘ No Diet Coke’, I will say so.
GLORIA TSANG
CREATOR, HEALTHCASTLE. COM
Gloria Tsang’s little nutrition website had five million unique visitors last year.
Major players such as General Mills, L’Oreal and ConAgra Foods ( Hunts, Healthy Choice, Orville Redenbacher, Chef Boyardee) vie to fill her pages with their ads. When the Canada Revenue Agency asked for Tsang’s list of advertisers recently, she faxed 50 pages before finally giving up.
“I really can’t count any more,” the Port Moody dietitian said.
Tsang pulls no punches on HealthCastle.com, which has its strongest following in New York City, Los Angeles and, surprisingly, Texas. When B. C. recently faced beef recalls due to an E. coli contamination at an industrial processor, she posted a Vancouver specific blog detailing stores to avoid and listed the names and addresses of five independent butchers she believed would be safer bets.
“We actually take a stand,” Tsang said. “A lot of us dietitians always say moderation is the key. I don’t like that word at all. Everybody can say moderation is the key. You don’t need a dietitian to tell you that. If I believe in ‘ No Diet Coke’, I will say so.”
Her site does not “preach the ABC’s of nutrition, because that’s boring,” she said. Instead, she debunks diet myths and tries to help readers make sense of breaking nutrition news.
Tsang originally started the site to share nutrition information with the families of cancer patients she met while accompanying her father to radiation treatments in 1996. She had just graduated from the University of B. C.
“I got to know these groups of families and they would ask me questions about taking care of my dad,” said Tsang, now 39. Pretty soon, they were plying her with nutrition questions, so she learned HTML, the main language used to create web documents, and created the site to share her answers.
By 2005, her site had attracted advertisers, as well as many more readers, so she decided to turn her hobby into a business.
“The first step was obviously to do more content,” Tsang said. “Instead of one article per week, I had to write more. I remember making a ‘ Careers’ tab on the site saying ‘ Hiring: dietitian/ writer’ and people actually submitted resumes. That’s when I knew I could do it.”
By year end she had 1.5 million readers and $ 100,000 in revenue with $ 30,000 in expenses.
“I had some smaller ads here and there. I think Google had some ad platforms,” she said. “It was probably the only site at the time run by dietitians. People just came to look for content. I had content back to 1997.”
Tsang created an editorial calendar, started attending Internet marketing tradeshows and began seeking publicity in the U. S.
“I could have made it a local Vancouver food site, selling ads to local cafes and food companies,” Tsang said. “But I had a national ( U. S.) audience so I had to go where the national food companies are, that is U. S. and New York City. In 2011, we served five million readers.”
Today, HealthCastle. com is fully booked with advertising three to six months in advance, depending on the geographic territory. Most of Tsang’s readers are still in the U. S. ( probably just a function of population size) and 85 per cent are female.
The site’s back end infrastructure allows Tsang to readily meet advertisers’ geotargeting needs. For example, a national U. S. advertiser might want to target specific cities and states, and to have each HealthCastle reader encounter an ad just three times per browsing session regardless how many pages are viewed. Tsang, who competes for advertisers with sites such as Yahoo Health and WebMD, responds to each advertiser’s Request for Proposals by detailing relevant sections of her site where she can place the ads, and offering reader interaction instruments such as giveaways or a coupon.
She publishes an editorial schedule, but has learned that large companies buy ads based on their campaign schedules rather than her calendar. “When they have a campaign, they want to advertise now and for three months or six months,” she said.
Tsang has discovered she loves the excitement and pace of entrepreneurship. “Networking is the key for me. It is probably what makes me a success and an expert within my industry. There are tons of dietitians out there and tons of people doing similar things. I was first to get into the space.”
She uses Twitter to get the word out or to look for sources. She spends about five minutes on social media each morning, then 15 minutes at lunchtime and 15 minutes after work. She employs four — three writer/ dietitians, and her husband, Ian Lee, who manages sales and marketing.
“One lesson I learned is that it’s not always good to hire contractors and have work done remotely,” she said. “At the beginning, I hired a lot of contractors. I couldn’t get a hold of anyone and accountability is virtually non- existent. It took me a while to move the operation back to Vancouver.”
Tsang has invested time in HealthCastle, but little cash — after all, advertisers sought her out long before she viewed the site as a business. She is now beginning to licence local chapters of HealthCastle to dietitians in Canadian cities. Her licensees own their own web pages within the HealthCastle site.