^{By Marissa Sánchez}

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Why?

According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), one out of every 18 people living outside their country is Mexican. In fact, Mexico ranks as one of the four brain exporting countries in the world –only below Great Britain, the Philippines and India–, according to data from the UNAM’s Center for Research on North America (CISAN).

Thanks to the benefits offered by the Internet, today it is possible to maintain contact in real time with Mexicans who even live on other continents. Therefore, a good business idea is to create an online Mexican cuisine cookbook. It is about designing and managing a site where Mexicans living abroad have the possibility not only of remembering how a dish from their country is prepared, but also of acquiring the ingredients.

How?

“The cookbook can be mounted on a content management system that is simple to use and easy to maintain. Something like WordPress is recommended ”, says Manuel Siordia, project leader at Infotypes. Finally, “it will be necessary to think of a good system for organizing recipes by categories or tags, to help users find everything easily”.

To generate traffic online, the expert recommends investing in search engine optimization (SEO), so Internet users will constantly come to the site in search of specific recipes. If you do not want to invest in having a professional do the SEO, you will have to make sure that you label each recipe well and include keywords thinking about how people will search for it.

The profits will come from the sale of advertising space in the cookbook. The advantage is that you can sell banners and mentions to large ingredient producers, agricultural producers and even entrepreneurs with organic product businesses. Remember that they must have the necessary permits to sell abroad (that is, export of food and perishables).

Regarding investment, it may vary. The most standard would be just the site (based on a template) and the entrepreneur would be in charge of feeding it with the recipes and images. In that sense, Manuel quotes it between $ 10,000.00 and $ 15,000.00 approximately, “depending on whether hosting services, maintenance and domain purchase are required.”

Examples of success

In Mexico: Kitchen and Share