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. 

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: