🌿 Tcmplate

Building a TCM Food Website From Zero — Month 1

June 27, 2026 · Transparent Build Log

Five weeks ago I launched tcmplate.com — a reference site for traditional Chinese medicine food therapy. No marketing budget. No existing audience. Just a VPS and a lot of content. Here's the honest data for the first full week of tracking (June 20–27, 2026).

The Numbers

Metric	This Week	Last Week
Unique visitors (non-bot)	1,911	1,084
Pinterest pins	151	—
Gumroad revenue	$0.00	$0.00
Amazon clicks	1 (test page)	—
Google clicks	0	0

What "1,911 visitors" actually means

The nginx log counts every request. After filtering crawlers, the real number is closer to 30–40 humans per day. Most land on the homepage and leave. This is normal for a site with zero backlinks and DA 0.

What I built

• 405 ingredient profiles in Chinese with herbal properties and classical references
• 18 English blog posts on yang deficiency, summer cooling foods, TCM principles
• German and Spanish translations for every English post
• 12 English herb encyclopedia pages with classical citations (Shennong Bencao Jing, Bencao Gangmu)
• AI food therapy consultation — 56 assessments served this week
• Automated Pinterest — 30 pins/day, now with CTA-optimized descriptions

What's next (Month 2)

• Wikipedia citations from herb encyclopedia pages
• Weekly articles syndicated to Substack via RSS
• Cold outreach to TCM school faculty for byline articles
• Reddit community participation