I’ve been really focusing in on small business marketing here in Denver, largely with mom and pop restaurants near where I live. I’ve been really trying to learn the ins and outs of how to apply social networking, social media, and traditional SEO (which is my forte) to the elements of internet marketing for restaurants.
The first thing I’ve learned recently is how effective new technology can be for restaurant marketing in a new digital age. The hardest thing is getting new customers in the door. The internet can be a great engine for driving customers from their homes and into your restaurant.
The key thing is encouraging them, or providing them incentives to come try your restaurant for the first time. A mom and pop restaurant seems like it’s more able to build growth online because it’s outside of any abnormal corporate environment when it comes to handling and managing it’s marketing. Clearly because of this smaller restaurants are able to take advantage of word of mouth growth better than corporate restaurants.
Some things I’ve learned:
Use Foursquare to engage new customer growth.
Yelp Reviews are effective.
Keep it simple.
One campaign that works well is build out a flyer that asks people to check in between 5-9pm for a free side dish, beer, or other incentive based program when they purchase a regular entree.
I’ve seen this already start people down the path of growing their Friday and Saturday night production immensely with little effort.
I had a rough childhood. I had a rough set of teen years. I had a rough young adulthood. I guess I’ve had a rough life. Or have I ? I recently attended a funeral of an amazing friend of mine. A man who inspired me to really give everthing I had to living life to the fullest. Something he said inspired me so deeply it shook me to the core. This is a guy who died of brain cancer and I’m trying to reflect on a conversation that was discussed at the celebration of his life.
Imagine one day winning the lottery and being unhappy that you only received a majority of your winnings. That just wouldn’t be right. Well as an American who has lived a rough life, and has also lived, and appreciated living in a third world country I see things differently than I did when I was younger, and less exposed to the world.
My friend realized that even though he had cancer, he managed to do so much in life, and to have so many opportunities. I guess his life and death allowed me to continue celebrating life, even though I haven’t received all of my “lottery winnings”, because the lot I’ve been cast is much better than others. Imagine living in Africa, or Haiti, or any of the other places that are scourged with poverty. [click to continue…]
The other day I was ponder the RIGHT thing to do. I’ve tried and tried and tried to no end to rekindle old relationships, after awhile you begin to realize it’s all but hopeless. All you can do sometimes is reach out, and then turn around and turn it over to the creator of the Universe. For all our failures there is a great success around the corner. Although the pains that I have experienced have been sorrowful one of the greatest things I’ve learned is that we are all human and we must forgive ourselves and move on in order to achieve greater success.
Let Go. Learn to Dance.
A year ago I learned to dance Cumbia. It was one of the most invigorating activities I’ve ever done. Dancing brought to me much joy and healing. But it was not the dancing that brought the healing, it was the letting go of my inhibitions, my pains, my self confidence issues, it was me truly letting me be who I was inside.
Inside I was dancing, I was joyful. I was living life with passion. This came out when I was dancing.
Guess what ?
Your never too old to DANCE. Your never too old to learn to start living like a kid again, to living a life with passion, to shedding your inhibitions, to running through fields of wild flowers, your never too old to lay aside your doubts and live life to the fullest with reckless abandon.
The Time is Now. What are you waiting for ?
I take care of a 91 year old gentleman who obviously has a lot more wisdom than I do. I asked him for his opinion on a situation with a client. Here’s some of the tidbits of wisdom that I gleaned before he took his afternoon nap.
On Not Getting A Design Like the NY Times:
You don’t go to a used car lot with 800 dollars and expect to buy a Ferrari.
On Not Wanting To Pay:
If you order concrete, and it’s delivered to your house, and suddenly you decide you don’t want it. It’s still yours. As long as the concrete meets the general specs that were ordered and approved I don’t see how you get out of paying for the concrete.
What clients don’t understand
Plain and simple the web industry is a tough one, sometimes clients go away really happy, sometimes they go away not so happy. I try to relate to all of them, and compensate for them not understanding the economics of website creation.
A custom thesis costs around 1200 dollars, here’s how it breaks down:
1. Thesis License ~ $40.00 flat fee per site
2. Initial Consultation Time ~ $25.00 an hour
Up To 2-3 Hours
3. Graphics Development ~ $25.00 an hour
2-3 hours includes setup, and isolation into creative environment
4. Research and Development ~ $25.00 an hour
Let’s say a client needs Joomla integration, forum integration, or anything of the like this takes research. Sometimes a few hours to determine which plugins are ideal to implement with which version of WordPress to make a successful installation of WordPress and implementation into Thesis. I bill this research time into the cost of any project, even mine. In any given instance I might spend:
3-4 Hours in Rough Drafting
1-2 Hours in Plugin Research
4-6 Hours in CSS Development
5. Plugin Integration ~ $25.00 an hour
Often times once I find the plugins I have to install them, integrate them and make sure they are working, occasionally that includes creating some custom CSS, adjusting settings, etc. This can take a few hours to get 8 or so plugins working smoothly and ideally on a server.
1-2 Hours Installation and Tweaking
Minimal Time (Average) On A Thesis Project: 20 Hours
Minimal Cost To The Client: $500 Dollars
In conclusion:
I generally quote higher in order to actually make a profit, otherwise I’m actually losing money on development projects, something always comes up and I try to compensate for clients changing their minds, bumps in the road, last minute changes, requests after the fact, etc. Thus almost all my quotes hit in the ball park of $1200 dollars. Which in my opinion is very reasonable considering what you are getting. An amazing platform, with a simple design that is guaranteed to perform well in the search engines.
I’ve decided to launch a cool social media meetup here in Lakewood. Every Thursday at 7pm you can gain access to me, and my experience building killer websites, web businesses, and the like by joining me for dinner.
I will offer FREE consulting to help your business grow. I will explain blogging, twitter, facebook, yelp, and other social media tools. I will help you get setup using these tools and teach you how to grow your small business.
When: Thursdays 7pm
RSVP and I will buy you a beer
The Venue: Los 3 Garcias