All posts by Carol Vitagliano

Finding Success Within My Restaurant

38, restaurant gurus, restaurant SEO

A while back, I noticed on Facebook that my niece and a bunch of her friends were going out for dinner together via a post she put up on Facebook. She said that she had been emailed a coupon from this restaurant for her and five friends and she was able to easily assemble a group over the social media site.

It was at that moment I had a light bulb go off in my head that I needed to reconsider the marketing strategy I was employing for my restaurant. We did not even have a website that was worth visiting let alone any presence on social media sites like Facebook. I could not help but imagine that people were getting together and talking about coming to visit our restaurant because of a campaign to reach out to them.

It Was Time to Hire Outside Help with my Restaurant

That night I could not sleep because of how concerned I was over this. In the morning, I contacted the nearby restaurant marketing gurus immediately and made an appointment to come in.

It felt great to meet with this online marketing firm because they were eager to hear about the specific needs of the restaurant, they also cared about how they could help turn things around for it. They listened intently to my specific problems and I could tell they were hard at work finding a solution from day one.

Sometimes it is a Lack of Visibility That Hinders a Restaurant

In their estimation, my restaurant suffered from a severe lack of online visibility. Almost everyone does their researching, shopping and appointment making online these days so if you are not among the many companies with functional websites and a great online visibility you might find yourself out in the cold. I had never really considered how important it is to be visible online but after they laid it out in such broad terms how was able to see what they meant.

So, as one portion of the team helped us to make a great restaurant web design, the other began helping to spread us across all form of social media site. If everything timed out perfectly we would have a functioning Facebook and Twitter page up and running about the same time as our website was published. It was an exciting time for our restaurant and I was able to fire up the crew based on future projections.

Finding Success in Our Campaign

To make sure that our campaign went off successfully we also commissioned a hefty amount of restaurant SEO articles to be used before and after our site were published. This would certainly drive the volume of customers we needed tour site and from there they could get information on our hours, menu and directions to find the restaurant. It was as if our restaurant was finally joining the 21st century with all of the other restaurants we routinely compete against for the better food and service.

Up until then it did not seem like a fair fight but now we were using the same tools but had a superior product to offer. The Restaurant Marketing Gurus gave us our confidence back and we have not had any issues since! The difference in our business is night and day.

How Can I Choose the Best Drapes for My Home?

38, blinds, drapes, shades

As we continually hear in the news, our planet is getting closer and closer to the breaking point and it will all come down to our ability to change our current ways of living to be more environmentally friendly. There will be some struggles involved, but it is also a great opportunity to look at the little things that we can do to make a big change. Some of those little things can be done in your own home. The first that comes to mind is around energy savings.

hunter douglas shadesEveryone has seen the CFL bulbs that are shaped a little differently than many of the incandescent bulbs we are used to. Those bulbs actually make a huge difference and can save about one hundred dollars over the course of their lifetime. That may not seem like a lot when you think about a single light lasting for about ten years, but when you add that to all of the bulbs in your house, about thirty of them possibly, there is a good chance that you could be saving yourself some serious money in the short and long term if you just start to replace those bulbs now. The other thing to keep in mind when we are talking about energy efficiency is that a lot of heat is let in during the summer and out during the winter through windows. Not all windows are perfect, even the double paned ones, so it is important to have a strategy with how to utilize your blinds and shades. What I try to do during the winter is keep the shades open during the day, so the sun can get in and warm the place up, but close them at night. This keeps the room warmer because the residual heat actually makes a big difference. One thing that you could also do is add some drapes for really cold days. Drapes are an excellent way of keeping all of the cold from the windows out. You can actually feel a huge difference if you have the drapes in place or not.

A final thing to consider is the type of blinds that you purchase. Hunter Douglas makes some great blinds that are coated to keep them more energy efficient than some of their immediate competitors. Utilizing those blinds are a great idea to make sure that all of your heat stays centralized in one place. It allows for minimal heat transfer between the outside and your room and that is critical to making sure that your house is energy efficient. Some other things that you can do around the house are turn off lights when you are not using them, plant trees on the east, south, and west sides of the house to provide shade in the summer and sun in the winter, and finally minimize your water usage by taking shorter showers. There are a number of things that you can look up online, but for right now these are some great tips to get going on.