Wanted to share a particularly useful email that arrived in my inbox recently:

We’re talking here about search engine marketing. This is when you want your business to show up on Google when someone types in a certain word or keyphrase. For example, if you type “Indian restaurants Melbourne” into Google you’ll get a ton of results (over a million in fact), some of them sponsored (the coloured ones at the top and side of the page) and the rest “organic” (the ones that show up naturally without sponsorship). The organic results can be affected by a process called search engine optimisation (SEO).

The Welcomer Edge is a book by Richard R. Shapiro. It was released recently and teaches how you can deliver excellent service to your customers. Aimed at service professionals such as restaurant and cafe owners, this book will show you how you can turn customers into loyal repeat business.

A lesson in marketing from a family restaurant that achieved 3000% growth in its first 5 years

Bertucci's is a US chain of Italian family restaurants. They're kind of like the American version of La Porchetta, but with a brick oven in every restaurant. 

Okay I lied. These aren't all that common. But there are still lots of people making these mistakes. Are you one of them?

How to Create a Facebook Page for Your Restaurant or Cafe

The fastest and easiest way to put your business on the web is to create a Facebook page. And it’s free! You might already have a personal Facebook account, but a page for your business is independent from that and is not publicly connected unless you want it to be. 

The ubiquitous role of technology in our everyday lives means it is now becoming possible for small businesses to compete with their corporate counterparts in the digital realm. As we touched on in our post about Small Business, Big Marketing, many of the tools employed by the big end of town are now available to small hospitality businesses like suburban cafes and restaurants. The only difference is the budget, which will generally determine the scale on which these techniques can be employed.

I was going through some photos on my computer today and I came across some pictures I took a few weeks ago. My wife and I were in a town nearby where there's a Chinese restaurant with photos of the menu items in the window. Once we stopped laughing, I took some photos of the dishes:

I recently listened to a podcast by an organisation called Small Business, Big Marketing, and I found it so informative and motivating that I decided to share it here. I hasten to add that we aren't being paid to promote things in our blog. If ever we have a commercial arrangement with a company it will be made clear at the outset. Stuff we put in our blog will be there because we think it's useful and cool.

Welcome to Gourmet Marketing Australia! We are an emerging web design and communications company based in Melbourne. Our goal is to provide professional websites at an affordable price, tailor made specifically for Melbourne's hospitality sector. For now our scope is small, we are aiming to provide brochure-style sites for small businesses who don't yet have a web presence.

This is our new Blog section; established both to inform about what we're up to, as well as provide an example of how a blog could work on your website. Blogs are a great way to get your site noticed because they are so information-rich. Google regularly scans websites for words and phrases which it uses to summarise the content of a site. It then uses this summary to help people find what they are looking for when they enter a particular search term. This translates to having your site more easily found when you have a blog with lots of information about what you're doing. It's also a great way to let your customers know what you're up to, providing a sense of community and brand loyalty.