Let’s be honest; this COVID-19 thing turned the world upside down.

It’d be really better to go and eat out in our favourite restaurants or explore new ones that would satisfy our cravings. But now, we’re all stuck in our houses and depend on deliveries or drive-thrus.

With this, people now switch to online dining. If you are a restaurant owner or manager, you should be prepared for this. One of the things you need to do cope with this pandemic is to be virtually active and present in the online world.

This blog will tackle why websites are essential to food businesses, most especially at this time.

Here are five reasons why:

1. Websites give an impression of a legitimate business

Most people will think that when a business has a website, then it’s well-established and legit. It adds to the professionalism of your image. Not having a website might be okay, but your business can be suspected as sketchy or judged as somewhat amateur. 

Although you might think that it might be enough to own a page on Facebook or a business account on Instagram, it still hits differently when you have your own website that’s being linked to all of the social media platforms you have created.

2. People can be informed with your services

Make sure that your website should contain all the relevant information about your business. Start with the basic stuff like location and what kind of food do you cater. Of course, you mustn’t forget about the menu!

With a website, your potential customers can easily browse your menu with just a scroll by their fingers. If, for example, customer orders through call, they don’t need to ask you what the available meals are. If it’s all updated and stated in the online menu, they know what to order in advance without wasting time to ask you what’s in.

3. Websites can include online ordering

Because of the pandemic, over-the-cashier payments aren’t a thing anymore. With just a few taps on their phones or gadgets, you’re good to go.

Restaurants would shift to online transactions now, and it’s a significant advantage among all other competitors who don’t have. People will likely switch to online payment as well because of the risk of having a person-to-person transaction might be very dangerous.

4. You own your website

The best part of having a website is that you own it. When you own your website, you get to do anything with it. It’s time to establish your brand colours and showcase your professionalism through your visual themes and food pictures.

Put your best foot forward. Even when the COVID-19 might let the customers feel limited, let your website feel limitless. Give them as much relevant information they need, entertain and make them crave for your services by just making them look at your website.

5. You can showcase your customer reviews

Of course, you earn money for every customer’s trust. Every rating counts. A review is a ripple, just like kindness is too. When somebody recommends your restaurant to others, the probability that the person who receives the recommendation gets to tell it to others, also the same as when a customer isn’t satisfied with your service, he/she gets to tell it to others. The others who were told might avoid your restaurant either.

That’s why customer reviews are essential, and showcasing them on your website is a big deal. Your reviews can help boost your potential customers to push through with their orders, and when they do, then you got yourself a customer! A customer earned is customers earned.

Your food business should cope with what the world labels as “new normal” now. When you can’t cope with it, you’re left out. It doesn’t mean a new normal system is rising; you’re all back to zero. In reality, the competition just keeps heating up. In this time of the pandemic, how can you stand out among all the others?

Start building your website, and when you already have one, improve and enhance it even more.

Don’t own a website yet? We’ve got the perfect tool for you to build one! FOR FREE! Click here now and start putting your stress to rest!

Into blogging? Or finding a platform to publish your articles online easily?

We always have goals in mind, and we’re dying to achieve those in the most efficient and fastest way possible.

Say, you’re planning to build a website or platform that’s personalized. But of course, you don’t know how to. You think it’s a hassle to be assisted by your techy friends or family. But then again, you think you can’t really learn coding in just a day, nor master HTML in two days.

Now, you’re reading this blog, and you’re just the right person who had thoughts like that before or until now. 

Yes, it is possible to create your online platform by yourself, even without human help nor previous knowledge about coding and stuff. How?

WORDPRESS is the key.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is the simplest, most popular way to create your website or blog. According to statistics, WordPress powers over 37.6% of all the websites on the Internet. Uhuh, it’s most probably like WordPress likely powers more than one in four websites that you visit.

Let’s get to the point.

Why should you use WordPress?

I’ll give you just two reasons:

1.  Easiness

Like I mentioned a while back, you don’t really have to be a tech genius to create your website.

• No HTML Editing! There are more than 5,000 ready-made themes for you to choose from. With a few clicks, you’re done in no time.
•  A Blog is Built-in and Ready to Go! Since WordPress was created as a blogging platform, blogging capabilities are built-in and are easy to integrate, if desired. 

2. Controllability

• You control your site. You can update it whenever you want, change whatever you want, post whenever you want. It’s YOURS.
• Your site is customizable. Since it’s yours, you can make it feel like yours. Reflect your unique vibe to your site, or choose the colours and theme that best represents your company.
• Play with Plugins. Currently, there are over 50,000 free WordPress plugins. These primarily change how your website functions. Plugins can be something small, like a contact form, or huge, like creating an eCommerce store, and other examples include event calendars, video galleries, Twitter Feed, and Facebook.

BUT ON TOP OF THE EASE AND HAVING CONTROL OVER WEBSITE, WORDPRESS COSTS NOTHING. LIKE, Z E R O. IT’S AMAZINGLY FREE.

Although you get to pay for the hosting of your website, the use of WordPress itself is free.

If you search on WordPress sometime later, you’ll get to see there are two kinds of WordPress: WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

“What’s the difference,” you might ask.

A website called kinsta.com summarizes the difference between both of them for us:

WordPress.org, often called self-hosted WordPress, is the free, open-source WordPress software that you can install on your own web host to create a website that’s 100% your own.

WordPress.com is a for-profit, paid service that is powered by the WordPress.org software. It’s simple to use, but you lose much of the flexibility of the self-hosted WordPress.

Most of the time, when people say “WordPress”, they mean the self-hosted WordPress available at WordPress.org. If you want to truly own your website, self-hosted WordPress.org is almost always the best option.

All you need to do to get started with self-hosted WordPress is purchase web hosting and a domain name.

Simply put, WordPress has everything and is everything! This could be your next big thing, and this could be the solution to boost your company’s reputation and a step closer to engaging with your clients/customers.

If you want any more assistance other than putting up your own website, we can help you!

CLICK HERE and we’ll make a FREE WEBSITE just for you! Yep, you saw that right. FREE. Or book a schedule for us to discuss the matters you’re facing right now just by clicking this!

What does it take to become one of the top respected brands on the web, in any niche?
It takes a LOT of hard work and grit – that’s for sure. But it also takes a lot more than that. It takes strategy, cunning and actually a big helping of luck!

If you want to be one of the major players in your chosen niche, then you need to know exactly how to build an audience, gain their loyalty and keep them coming back to your site time and time again. But there’s not just ‘one secret’ to this. In fact, there are countless little things that the very best do differently. These are the things that set apart those incredible brands and make them the huge household names they are today.

Things like Bodybuilding.com, The Verge, Mashable, Tim Ferriss, Smart Passive Income, Engadget, Wired…

While these companies also have the advantage of having built up their name over countless years and huge amounts of investment to pour into their marketing and sales, it’s still really the strategy that is the big difference.

And this article is going to share that strategy and some of the most powerful tips that set the very best apart from the less special. You will learn…

How to make the most of your online brand

How to leverage the power of social media to gain shares, likes and followers

How to integrate your social media with your website for better synergy

The most important platforms you need to be on

How to make your brand professional

How to grab attention with great headlines

How to deliver true value

How to avoid losing followers

How to become part of a community

How to work with influencers

 

Provide Value

Here is the single most important thing you must know about thriving on social media: it is absolutely imperative that you always provide value. What does this mean? It means that you’re going to be offering something concrete and tangible to your audience and giving them something that they can benefit from. Think of your social media much like a product or a service in its own right and NOT just a means to get as many people to your blog as possible.

This simple paradigm shift is the absolute difference between a successful social media channel and an unsuccessful one. You need to give people a reason to follow you, a reason to share your content and a reason to keep checking back to your page. Don’t just expect people to follow you on Twitter because they ‘like your brand’!

So how does one go about providing value? In the case of social media, this can mean offering:

• Entertainment
• Information
• Discounts and offers
• Inspiration

A good example of this is any of the thousands of successful channels on Instagram that post pictures of healthy lifestyles. There are a lot of great Instagram accounts run by fitness experts and enthusiasts and that include images of people working hard in the gym, looking great topless on the beach or downing protein shakes.

People find this inspiring in helping them move toward their goals and so if the images are well-composed and they are well designed, then they are providing value in that way. People know that by following that account, they’ll get updated regularly with new inspiring pictures to help drive them further in their own training.

Another example might be to share links to informative posts on a Facebook account. If you have a blog about online business, then you can post links to news stories regarding SEO, to tips and ideas for creating content etc. Don’t only post your own content – find and share the kind of exciting content that your audience can benefit from! (Note that this is all much easier if you genuinely are passionate about the subject matter – as that way you can simply share the things you’re reading anyway!

But perhaps the best example of ‘social media as product’ would be one of the many Pinterest boards on Pinterest. These tend to act as collections of ideas for interior design, for weddings, for personal style etc. Thus, many people will head to these pages whenever they need ideas and some brands that have come up with related boards have been able to garner huge followings that way.

How do you know if you’re doing this right? Ask yourself this simple question: if your social media channel were to shut down today would your followers be disappointed? We’re not asking if they would notice – we’re asking if they would genuinely feel that something they enjoyed had gone.

If the answer is yes, then congratulations! You are officially providing value.

Don’t Just Promote

That’s what you need to do then but just as important is what you need to avoid doing. What is the polar opposite of providing value? The answer is simply promoting your business. And this is what too many misguided small businesses actually use their social media to do. These tend to be the kinds of companies that feel a little stuffy and out of touch to the user.

Local service businesses like plumbers and removal men, or more corporate operations like EPOS providers and time clock solutions/accountants. These are the companies that will use their social media to post things like ‘Visit our site and see why we’re the best at what we do!’. Or, ‘Our software solutions are second to none!’.
This is literally just advertising and it completely misses the point of social media.
Don’t do it!

If you found this information useful and would like some help, feel free to a 1on 1 with us by pressing here. Or contact us at [email protected]

I’m going to recommend the use of WordPress to build the site, just because it’s easy, quick, has pretty decent built-in SEO, and has tons of customization options available for appearance, security, functionality, etc.
I’m not going to give you a step-by-step guide to building a site with WordPress, because there are thousands of those online already.

Just search Google or YouTube if you need a tutorial on how to build a site with WordPress. It’s a lot easier than you probably think!

You’ll need the following:

• A domain name purchased through NameCheap or another registrar
• Hosting purchased through NameCheap, HostGator, or other
• WordPress, free and easy installation often included in hosting
• A WordPress theme, free or paid

Once you have a basic website built, all you have to do is start adding content. You can create this content yourself, or hire someone to do it for you. Just make sure the content is well-written, grammatically correct, and interesting because Google has become a lot more strict about the quality of the material it indexes. We’ll talk more about content creation in the next section, so let’s move on.

Content Creation

The content on your site is probably the single most crucial element of this system for many reasons. Because you won’t be focusing solely on getting traffic from Google and sending that traffic straight off to an Amazon product, the content on your site must attract the right types of traffic and grab and keep their attention and interest. We’re going to take a look at a few different factors regarding the content on your site.

Content Quality

The quality of the content on your site will have a lot to do with its success—more so than ever before. Not only are web surfers more in-tune with what quality content should be like, but Google also uses quality as a ranking factor.
Google does check the overall content on your site to make sure it’s relatively free of typos and errors, so it’s important to make sure your material is well written.

In addition to this, Google also pays attention to the average length of time a visitor spends on your site, and whether or not they visit other pages of your site. This is known as “bounce rate.” If you have a high bounce rate, it means people are leaving your site without looking at any other pages, which Google takes to mean your content isn’t what people are looking for. This will hurt your rankings.

Google wants to see the average user staying on your site for a good length of time, as well as visiting other pages. Make sure your content quality supports this! Keep in mind that visual content like videos and photo slideshows, along with interactive content like quizzes and surveys, are more likely to go viral and bring in a lot of traffic, as well as to get people to spend more time on your site.

Make sure you include relevant images in your articles, too. Images are vitally important these days. Not only do they make your article more interesting to visitors, but they provide a great way to let people share your content on social media and bring you more traffic. If you don’t include relevant images, you won’t see anything show up on social media, or you’ll see only your site’s logo or background, which could be worse than having no image at all.

Content-Length

The length of your content goes hand-in-hand with its quality, at least in the eyes of Google. While it’s been proven that the average surfer these days has a very short attention span, Google seems to think that very, very long content is “quality,” and short content is not.

It used to be that putting up ten 150-word articles would bring in far more traffic than putting up one 1,500-word articles s, but those days are gone. These days, content should belong—the longer, the better. Not only that, but Google seems to favour content that is updated on occasion—meaning it’s better to add a bit of substance to an older article than to create a new one—at least once your site already has a right amount of content on it.

Generally, articles should be at least 500 words, and up to 3,000 words (perhaps longer in some cases) is even better. Who knows why Google seems to be so adamant about longer content considering declining attention spans, but as it is length matters.

Content Variety

Another important factor is making sure you create a variety of content, including various forms of media such as videos, slideshows, and even downloads. You don’t actually have to create videos yourself. You can just embed other people’s videos in your pages. But if you can create your own, it will help you get additional traffic from places like YouTube and Facebook.

Having a variety of posts on your site will help you get more traffic and make your site more interesting, so try to include some different types of content for variety. Aim for having at least ten posts on you site before you attempt any type of promotion or add any affiliate links. This will help you rank in Google, as well as giving visitors additional content to visit, hopefully lowering your bounce rate.

There are a whole lot of different aspects that you require to take into account if you desire your website to be as successful as possible. Which of these is crucial all depends upon who you ask but something that we generally understand to be very essential is ‘depend on’.

Google intends to provide its customers with responses. This is just one of its main solutions and if Google cannot deliver this other search engines online– such as Bing– to get what they’re looking for.But in order for Google to offer answers, it requires to know which websites it can rely on.

The outcomes pages are not ‘curated’, suggesting that Google doesn’t have a group to really inspect the material. And also that means that it requires to start recognizing sites that deliver popular solutions in a programmatic, algorithmic fashion.

Exactly how can you ensure that this all works for you as well as your site is taken into consideration amongst the ‘trusted’?

The Right Links

The initial as well as essential means to accomplish this is with the right links. You require to draw in web links from websites that Google currently trust — yet how do you recognize what websites those are? One technique is to consider Google’s ‘In The News’ area. Here, Google highlights breaking stories by sharing articles from prominent news sites and also websites because of niche.

This is a very vital pointer since in order for Google to share that content as news, it should currently have a high amount of depending on for those websites– and also this will abrade on you a great offer. An additional suggestion is when feasible, to get a link and also attempt from a.edu or.gov domain name. Google likes these websites since they have actually obviously obtained a specific amount of reputation and by aligning on your own with them, some of that credibility is most likely to scrub off on you!

Branding

If your site name is presently the same as your key phrase– rather than a memorable firm name– after that you’re doing yourself a disservice. Likewise, you should likewise attempt to obtain web links from various other huge brands. Google understands brands like Coca-Cola, like the BBC and also like The Verge and that suggests they can pass on a great deal of credibility.

Degrees of Separation

Naturally, it’s not specifically very easy to obtain links from the BBC, or from the greatest websites in your particular niche that Google is including. So what can you do if you’re still ‘little fry’? One response is to consider this as a game of ‘levels of splitting up’. If you can not get a link from the BBC, then getting a link from a website that has a link from the BBC can work a lot!

Looking into Backlinks

Exactly how do you recognize what links a site has indicated it? Simple: use a backlinks tool. And this also has the benefit of allowing you to research study precisely which links functioned for the largest sites in your particular niche … to make sure that you can develop the very same ones!

You require to attract links from sites that Google currently trusts– but how do you recognize what sites those are? Here, Google highlights breaking stories by sharing articles from popular information websites and websites in that particular niche.

If your website name is presently the same as your keyword phrase– instead than a catchy business name– after that you’re doing yourself a disservice. Likewise, you should likewise try to get web links from other large brand names. Of program, it’s not exactly simple to get links from the BBC, or from the greatest sites in your particular niche that Google is including. If you can’t obtain a web link from the BBC, after that obtaining a web link from a site that has a web link from the BBC can work a great deal!