How to Start a Restaurant Blog

If you want to start a small business blog for your Restaurant, what kinds of things do you need to consider?

#1 Local Search

You are going to want to chose local search engine keywords that will be searched on by your target audience.  If you are in an area that tourists visit frequently, you may have to change the strategy a bit.  Also, consider things like downtown Chicago (as in Italian Restaurant Downtown Chicago)

#2 Converting Visitors

Your Restaurant blog must have a clear blog ROI which means putting people in chairs.  How you do this depends on the kind of restaurant you run.  Fine dining may ask people to call for reservations, while a diner may offer a sign up for online coupons.

#3 What to Write About?

The blogging search optimization strategy requires that you write regularly.  So what should you write about?

• Recipes
• Wine and Beer
• Local Events in the area
• Specials and cooking secrets
• Cultural aspect of food

Your restaurant blog can be really interesting.  It will depend on what your customers are looking for.

Click Fraud

A blogging strategy like Employee Ambassador is very valuable because it is a flat fee and creates organic search engine listings and traffic.

Is it easier to do Google Adwords or a similar strategy?  Sure.

But not if you want to do it right and within a reasonable budget.

See this article on Click Fraud.

I had one client report to me that his online advertising produced mostly job applicant (he was not hiring) and people with business opportunities.

Factor together Click Fraud and the difficulty of targeting your audience, and do you really want to pay per click?

The truth is, it can work but it takes a lot of work to research keywords, manage your adword campaign and build different landing pages for each keyword (that is what the experts recommend as maximizing your customer acquisition.)

Wow.  That makes a blogging strategy like Employee Ambassador, where you just have to post your thoughts a few times a month seem really much easier and cheaper.  Plus, organic search engine listings will get more clicks and have higher credibility.

5 Ways to Get Your Blog Found

Here are the five most common ways to get your blog found.

1. Search Engines – By writing your blog with search engine optimization in mind, you can get more visitors from organic search.
2. Commenting – Commenting on other blogs and including a link back to your blog via the comments  can generate nice traffic.  Don’t just leave a lame comment like “nice blog” or no one will check you out.
3. Interviews - Interview interesting people on your blog and they might link to it and send it to their friends, plus people searching on that person may end up reading about them on your blog.
4. Link Building for Your Blog – Use other resources and tactics to get your blog linked to from other websites.
5. PR – Good press in the right place will generate traffic to your blog.  Get mentioned in a big publication  and it can really send your traffic through the roof.

There are more than five ways to get traffic for your blog, but I will save some of those for another post.  For now, think about how to use these five things to get your blog found.