Cooking Up Success on your Blog
While there is nothing new about blogging, restaurant owners should be wary of discounting a well run blog as obsolete or antiquated. Despite the fact that blogging is an old internet trick, in 2015 the right blog still can be a very powerful tool for small business owners to boost their bottom line, and can do a whole lot to help promote your online food ordering system.
We’ve talked a bit about how a well run blog can earn your loyal customers invested in your restaurant’s story, and about a couple ways for you to generate new content for your blog that is consistent and high quality. Today’ we thought we’d take it back to basics, with some tips and tricks for using your blog to boost SEO ratings and increase your restaurant’s exposure and help promote online ordering for your restaurant’s continued growth. Here are our ideas for how to cook up success on your restaurant blog.
1. Blog What You Know
Run an Italian restaurant? We think that’s great, and so do plenty of other people; so many that with a well-run blog, your restaurant could gain some great online traffic. But when you sit down to write a post to publish on your business’s blog, don’t forget that you will write most effectively and most interestingly about what you know. If you run an Italian restaurant but have never cooked Thai food in your life, don’t try to write well about Thai food. And if you don’t know anything about Italian history, just focus your blog on the food side of things. Whatever your specialty is, stick to that for starters. Readers will be much more likely to respond to your content if it is authoritative and authentic, and you can reach for both of those goals by blogging what you know.
2. Get Creative with Multi-media
If you scroll to the top of this blog post, what do you see? I’ll save you the scrolling time with an easy answer: a nice big, high quality, attractive picture. ALL of the posts on this site have pictures attached to them, and there’s a reasons for that. Your blog readers will respond to your material much more favourably when you include multi-media elements with your posts. Don’t just think about pictures though: get creative, and consider including videos, audio, and any other kind of media you can think of to spice up your blogging posts. Even consider including direct links and snapshots from your online food ordering system’s menu, to drive sale right on your blog. Simply put, if you want readers to devour every bit of your blog, make sure to spice it up and season it well by getting creative with multi-media.
3. Be Your Own Biggest Fan
If you are having trouble getting people to land on your blog, ask yourself one question: are you doing everything you can to promote your material? Are all of your blog posts going up on your restaurant and personal social media accounts? Have you built an emailing list, and to you send posts to subscribers? Do you send posts that you are proud of to your family and friends, inviting them to show support for your business by reading and sharing on their own? If you’ve answered any of these questions with a “no,” think about stepping up your promotion efforts. If you want people to read, share, and interact with your content, you have to be your biggest fan, and put almost as much effort into promoting everything you write as you spend writing it.
4. Get Data Driven
Have you published a post lately that got a lot of good feedback from your audience? Congratulations. Now figure out why that post was successful. To do so, experiment with posting similar topics, and see what connect’s with your customers and fans. See what people react to the most on social media, and run with those elements. Try to keep a record of what is successful, and develop strategies to replicate that success in the future. Investing some time and energy to analyze and record what is doing well on your blog can feel like a lot of effort, but it’ll pay off when your blog sees more visitors and your restaurant sees more success.
What’s It All For?
If all of the blogging tips above sound like too much work, and you’d rather just phone in a blog post or not blog at all, we understand. Blogging can be time consuming, and it can feel like it never pays off. But, if you do it well, your restaurant’s website will get more exposure on Google and other search engines. Which means more people finding your menu, and with the power of online ordering for restaurants that means more people ordering your food, more customers boosting your profits, and more opportunities for your eatery in the future. Don’t give up on blogging, even though it can be tiring. Cook up success with the tips above, and watch blogging help power your restaurant’s growth.