SmallBizResource Blog -- Women in Business

Menus4Moms Founder Mary Ann Kelley: Wednesday's Woman

Posted by Gayle Kesten Wednesday, Jul 15, 2009, 11:41 AM ET

When Mary Ann Kelley began home-schooling her children 10 years ago, little did she know the education she was about to give herself. An idea for a Web site, and then another, catapulted Kelley into a world of coding, advertising, affiliate programs, e-newsletters, and plenty more -- and what she has learned she generously shares.

Kelley, married 17 years and a 43-year-old mom of two daughters, earned a business degree from Virginia Tech. She began her career as a buyer for a retail department store, but because her husband is in the Marines, she eventually stopped working given their many moves. She did, however, do some volunteer work while they were living in Japan in the late 1990s. "I was getting mommy brain just staying at home with toddlers," she told me.

Kelly and her family returned to the U.S. in 1999, which is when she decided to home-school her girls. She put herself on a variety of home-schooling email lists in which fellow parents would share their plethora of tips and resources. "I thought it was really sad that this stuff was getting posted to email lists, but it wasn't in one concise place online where just anybody can get it," Kelley said. "I thought, 'I could do that,' even though I didn't know anything about making a Web site."

And so she began the process of teaching herself. "I started with probably the worst thing you can do -- well, Microsoft Word is probably the worst to use for a Web site -- but Publisher is a close second," Kelley said, laughing. "I created a really pretty Web site and uploaded it not knowing that the code it was creating was just absolutely hideous. But at this point I was looking at it from the consumer side, the pretty side, as opposed to thinking about the impact of what code the looked like."

So how did Kelley become enlightened? And how did her Home School Mom Web site lead her to building a second Web site in 2005, Menus4Moms, which is among the winners of StartupNation's Leading Moms in Business contest? (This post is the second of three women I'm profiling from that contest; click here for the first featuring TwiddleMuff Maker Margaret Light.) Read on -- and feel free to take notes.

SBR: How did you get the idea for Menus4Moms?
MAK: In 2004 someone randomly wrote to me and said, "You've got this section on your home-school Website about the home-school mom in the kitchen, and I thought it was going to have all of these menu plans." It didn't at the time; it just had links to different sites and some tips. Over the next six to eight months I started thinking, 'You know, I could do that.' I love to cook, and I love organize, and those two things meet perfectly in menu planning. So I thought I'd give it a try. I put [the content] on the home-school site. I would publish dinner menus with all the recipes and make a grocery list. I put it up for free because at that point I was just trying to drive more traffic to the main site. I wasn't looking to do anything professional. I was looking to help a busy mom who was trying to avoid McDonald's. Our food is real food that real families eat. You're not going to find Beef Wellington on the menu.

SBR: I don't home-school, but this sure sounds like a service I could use!
MAK: After six months, I thought, "Maybe I shouldn't have it hidden away on this home-school site. There are a lot of people who don't home-school who would like this." My husband came up with name Menus4Moms. So I switched it over to its own Website, which kind of gave me a hiccup because Google doesn't always play nice when you move content from one domain to another. Google figures in a lot of different things when it's ranking your Web sites, including how long you have had that site and how long you've paid for the domain name.

SBR: Why should that matter?
MAK: Spammers tend to buy up domain names for short periods of time. If you've paid for it for five or 10 years out, they're going to think you'll be around longer than someone who is only paying a year at a time. I didn't really know all of that at the time, plus even if I had I'm not sure it would have really helped because I was starting from scratch, and they're seeing that this site just started. They're not seeing it was actually around and just part of another site that was broken off. It took a little while to gather the momentum back up, but, boy, when it started rolling, it started rolling. Now that one has as much traffic as the home-school Web site -- about 200,000 page views a month, and around 55,000 to 60,000 visitors.

SBR: What software would you suggest to someone who wants to start her own site?
MAK: There are a lot of free WYSIWYG [what you see is what you get] programs online that you can find by doing a Google search. The advantage to using them is you not only see what's happening [to the design] when you make a change, but you can also see the code changing, and that helps you to learn the code. Google has been my best friend. It's how I found all the information I put on my home-schooling site. I'm not a home-schooling expert, but I'm an expert in finding resources. That played into how I learned to code.

SBR: For our newbies, why care about the code?
MAK: When your browser goes to a server to allow you to view a Web page, there are all kinds of stuff going on in the background that you never see. Two pages could look exactly the same to you, but the code in the background is processed entirely differently. There are certain things that search engines look for, and if you don't know that, you're thinking the search engine is viewing your page one way when it may be viewing it completely differently. For example, you can do some really cool things with JavaScript, like make rollout menus on your navigation bar, but what some people don't realize is search engines can't read any of that. They can't browse your pages.

SBR: So how did you find out?
MAK: I got thrown into a group of online home-school Webmasters, who started teaching me these kinds of things. It has been a wonderful collaborative community and has been THE biggest help to me in my business for both Web sites, especially for the cooking site because I get almost all of my traffic organically through search engines.

SBR: Which Web site program do you use?
MAK: I finally invested in Dreamweaver. When I did it was an enormous purchase for me -- it was $400 -- and to think about plopping that down for software at the time was mind-boggling, but a week after I had it I couldn't imagine why I hadn't done it years before. It saved me so much time with some of the built-in features of the program. If someone can afford to put a little bit into it, I would say go to eBay and buy an older version. I bought Acrobat on eBay. When you're starting out, you're not going to use all the latest and greatest newest features on the most recent version anyway, so it's a good way to cut the price almost in half and still get a powerful program.

At this point both of my Web sites are pretty much database-driven, but I didn't know anything about databases when I started. I use my SQL and PHP. I can put all sorts of information in the databases and then manipulate them in so many ways to feed into the sites so that it automates a lot of what I used to have to do by hand.

SBR: How did you initially get the word out Menus4Moms?
MAK: I did a lot of promotion on the home-school site and in its newsletters, though I didn't automatically enroll anyone into it. I also made a little JavaScript plug-in that people could put on their Web page that would list what was for dinner each night of the week, with a link that said, "Click here to get the recipes." Bloggers would put it on the sidebar of their blogs, which was helpful. But I've always been newsletter-driven. I have double opt-in lists where people not only have to sign up, but confirm through a link to make sure they don't feel like it's spam. I put up more hoops to show everything was on the up and up. The list just snowballed from 10,000 to 20,000, and now we have 40,000 people on the list. It goes out every week. I send out a listing of what's on the menu for the next week, and then they have to go to the Web site to get the recipes.

SBR: Do you engage in social media?
MAK: I could probably use some help in that area. I do post to Twitter when we're having specific promotions, and I started a Facebook page. I started a network on Ning that has about 800 members, but it's not as active as our YahooGroup, which has about 4,000 members. When it first started I used it as a place to answer questions about the menus, but now there are so many women on it who use the menus that by the time I read a question, three other people have already answered it.

SBR: How do you make money?
MAK: I had started out with just an advertising model on the Menus Website, but I found that advertising on a cooking site is nowhere near equivalent to advertising on a home-schooling site. The home-schooling products have so much more value and are more likely to be appealing to the visitors, so those ads pay a lot higher. So for the Menus Web site I went with some affiliate sales for different products and other site subscriptions. But then I decided, why was I giving other subscription sites my business? People were signing up and paying them while I was only getting a portion of it. So at that point I decided to add value to the free versions of the menus and charge. Now I offer three subscription-based plans.

SBR: How has your business grown since 2005?
MAK: In terms of traffic, it's moderate each year. Income has continued to rise. Every year you kind of hold your breath and ask, "Is this the year it's all going to evaporate? " But the company brought in in the six figures last year. I try to remain completely debt-free, though I have more expenses now. For example, I had to switch to a dedicated server, so instead of paying $8.95 per month you're talking closer to $200 a month.

SBR: Do you have full-time employees?
MAK: No, I have individual contractors who work from home, on their own hours. We came to an agreed-upon price for their time, and then they submit to me at the end of the month their hours and what they have accomplished. They know what my overall expectations are, and they are pretty much allowed to get from point A to point B however and whenever they want to. It's nice because I've been able to give other work-at-home moms an opportunity to earn extra income.

SBR: What aspect of your business do you enjoy most?
MAK: Working with the advertisers -- I like the give and take, and I enjoy developing the relationships. There's such a direct relationship between that activity and the income you see coming in. A lot of times in business it's not easy to see that cause and effect.

SBR: Has the recession impacted your business?
MAK: Interestingly, we've seen several unsubscribes from people who have written to say their husbands became unemployed, and they're trying to cut out every extra thing. But we've had a lot of new subscribers because of that other group of people who are tightening their belts by not eating out anymore and are at a loss of what to do when they have to cook every night.

SBR: What is the toughest part about running your own business?
MAK: Trying to keep the dividing line between personal time and business time. It's wonderful that I don't have to call a boss and ask for time off, but at same time when the buck stops with you, you have to find time at another point to do that same work. The thing that's the biggest blessing is also what's most difficult.

SBR: What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
MAK: Not to look at where the money is. A lot of gurus out there are saying, "This is the business model you need to use to make hundreds of thousands." To me, it's more about taking something you're personally interested in and know something about, and figuring out to make it into a business, instead of looking at a business that makes money and trying to figure out how you can become that. Because eventually it's going to become drudgery if it's not something you really love.

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Recent Wednesday's Woman articles:

• How To Say No -- And Live With Yourself
  
• Shustir.com Co-Founder Shu Kim
  
• TwiddleMuff Maker Margaret Light
  
• Social Media: Where The Girls Are
  
• RosieKnows.com Founder Rosemary Blandford
  
• Archives

The Wednesday's Woman series is written for today's community of hard-working, small-business women, featuring profiles, industry trends, research, work/life balance issues, and other topics of interest.

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