Marketing Restaurant Online

David  Meerman Scott is a blogger, great marketing & leadership speaker and an author of number of best selling books on Marketing Online. He helps business understand how to create an effective marketing using internet with a new approach discarding those old school style  of traditional marketing. His marketing philosophy is very relevant to today’s marketing world of Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Blogs, Twitter and many more.

Why starting a blog for your restaurant business is important?

Blog is one of the most common effective communication channel for small businesses like restaurant simply because it is a platform that provides means to communicate two ways with customers without paying hefty advertising fees to those mass media companies. Since blogs are controlled by the restaurant owners, managers or operators, it acts like a mini media empire where you get to advertise only about your restaurant unlike other advertising directories where your restaurant get buried with other thousands of restaurants and other businesses.

Blogs also get indexed by Google and if you write great articles and do article marketing, then you have virtually created free traffic which you don’t have to pay a single dime for the marketing. It is cool because you get to control the amount of traffic you want to bring at your blog and thus into your restaurant. No more do you have to depend at  the mercy of those televisions, radio or newspaper never knowing if they really work.

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4 things that you should consider before planning to start a blog for your business?

By any means Blog Marketing for your restaurant is not going to be easy and not complicated either. The key thing is you have to know what are the things you need to know before you jump into this new band wagon of blog marketing your restaurant. There are 4 things you need to keep in mind if you really want to get into blog marketing are:

1. Monitor
2. Comment
3. Make Friends with other bloggers
4. Start a blog

Monitor- Before doing any thing you have to know how blogs really work. So the way you find this is visit some of the popular restaurant blogs. One that I recommend you to check out is www.kogibbq.com just to get an idea how effective blog marketing can be for restaurants. You can also check out at technorati- a blogs directories which has collections of blogs that focuses on restaurants or healthy eating and other different kinds of food and so on. Once you find bunch of blogs that resonates to your style, stick to them and monitor how they do their blog posts, add YouTube video and upload photos on Flickr. Just by watching them over a period of few days and weeks you will learn a lot about blogs and blog marketing.

Comment- Once you feel comfortable about the blogs and how it works start participating on the blogs by making comments on them. You could simply visit a blog that focuses on healthy eating. You can go to the blog and use your knowledge to add value to the conversation on the blog. Don’t go in there as a restaurant owner. But go there as a regular guy who just happen to love the topic and want to join the conversation and help the users. That way once you build a strong relationship and they start trusting you, they will start trying to find more about you than you trying to forcefully introduce yourself or your business. It is always easier to sell when customers come to you than when you have to do cold calling and forcefully sell to the customers.

Make friends with other Bloggers- Start also making some friends with other top bloggers within the food industry. The reason you want to do is that these bloggers hold a great power. At a click of their mouse they can drive thousands of customers at your restaurant that you might not be able to handle.So make sure you have extra staffs to handle those flood of customers whenever those bloggers decided to write about your restaurants and your food. When you make powerful comments then the bloggers will also take a note of that. I would also suggest you to personally write emails inviting them to your restaurant for lunch or dinner just to get them taste of your restaurant and also tell them about your restaurant concepts.More importantly to start building friendships. If they like your restaurant concepts and your food then they might decide to write about it. You get hold of 4 or 5 of the influential bloggers. That might be the ticket to your ultimate marketing success. I promise you you will not have to be at the mercy of those televisions, radio and newspapers. From then onwards you can just focus on them. You can build stronger friendship and they will do all the wonderful marketing for you.

Start a blog- Now that you have understood the concept of blogs, and how it works and also built some strong friendship with other influential bloggers you are ready to start your own  blog of the restaurant. I would highly recommend you to use Wordpress as your blogging platform as it is one of the standard and easiest platform there for blogs.You can just go to wordpress.com and set up your blog for FREE. Just start and play around with it  to get a feel about blogging. Just by playing around, you will know how to post articles and create pages. If you can write an email, then you can create your own blog. It is that easy if you understand and learn once. Later when you gain more confidence on it then you can transition to self hosted blogging where  you have to know little more technological stuff but you have more control over your blog.

I wish you all the best and hope you will implement the blog into your restaurant marketing effort even if you have a static website already or not.

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