To start off, a bit of knowledge is required, so I am providing the information that can help you to maximise your profit first, so that you can make the most of this, and not lose focus on your main goal, which is selling a lot of food!
Before you begin: This can involve affiliate marketing but that is entirely optional. Recipes will help you regardless. You only need to employ this if you absolutely want to earn every single penny you can!
Restaurants can make a a tidy bit of extra income when it comes to their websites and most of them have no idea how to do it. There is a simple technique where they can utilise their site to provide recipes for the things they cook regularly, or even for things they don’t cook and make money out of it. To do this at maximum efficiency, please check out my Blogging Course.
Of course you can skip this and the next step, as I will explain everything you will need for basic income from this setup, but it is better to go in with full knowledge as this will benefit you more and you will actually see decent results across the board and hopefully an influx of new customers given time, effort and patience. Take your time and study and you will grow like bamboo, sharp, fast and tall!
In this optional guide, I will teach you how to absolutely dominate using your website in a way that crushes your competition locally. This video explains the value of blogging like a boss for your restaurant. You don’t need to do this but if you do it, you will be pulling in money every month without lifting a finger, as well as dominating your opposition.
So How Are We Gonna Make Money From Recipes?
Through Affiliate Marketing, Social Sharing and Increasing Time on Your Website (An important part of search engine optimisation – SEO)
Affiliate Marketing is a process where you act as the middle party selling a product for someone else, whilst making a small commission. Like with your food, the secret is in the ingredients.
I will explain how to set up an Amazon Associate Account a little later in this course, but it’s important to understand the steps involved, rather than just diving in at the deep end with no knowledge. That will go hideously wrong or get off to a bad start and I don’t want that for you. I want you to succeed because you are reading this.
So what makes Restaurants ideal for Affiliate Marketing?
You have a local audience of people who already love your food. This means that they will be more likely to try recipes you recommend. This also means they will be more likely to try your recommendations when it comes to ingredients too. This gives you an advantage over a lot of affiliate marketers.
This is why we are doing this. Because you are already in a prime position to make profit!
So what are the advantages of recipe blogs?
- They don’t have to be large blogs. They are some of the very few blogs that you can have a smaller wordcount. Making them shorter is an advantage as it keeps them simple and effective as a teaching method.
- They are evergreen content which can be shared many times throughout the year constantly netting you income through social media sharing.
- They can be used to compete with rival businesses.
- They are great for SEO because people stay on the pages for a long time which shows analytics programs like Google Analytics that your site is valuable.
- People Share Recipes, which is great for free promotion on social media.
- You can make money as an affiliate on the side that helps support your business. It won’t be a kings income but it might help you earn a bit more!
There are many more but these are our focus.
So how do we set up a recipe?
Name Of The Dish:
Short introduction of the dish. A bit of history or description.
Ingredients List
Instructions.
Example:
(Have a beautiful image that makes your audience HUNGRY!)
Spaghetti alla Carbonara
A Roman classic, Spaghetti alla Carbonara is beloved for its rich, creamy texture made without cream. Born in the mid-20th century, it’s said to have been created by Italian cooks using eggs, cheese, and cured pork provided by Allied forces during WWII. Today, it’s a symbol of rustic Italian perfection.
Ingredients:
- 200g spaghetti
- 100g guanciale (or pancetta if guanciale is unavailable)
- 2 egg yolks (Get Fresh)
- 1 whole egg (Get Fresh)
- 50g Pecorino Romano, finely grated
- Freshly ground black pepper
- Salt (for the pasta water)
Instructions:
- Cook the pasta in well-salted water until al dente. Reserve a cup of the cooking water before draining.
- Dice the guanciale and cook in a dry pan over medium heat until golden and crispy. Remove from heat.
- Whisk the eggs and cheese together in a bowl with plenty of freshly ground black pepper.
- Combine pasta and guanciale in the warm pan (off the heat). Wait 30 seconds to cool slightly.
- Quickly stir in the egg mixture, using tongs or a fork to mix well. Add reserved pasta water, little by little, until you get a silky sauce.
- Serve immediately, topped with more Pecorino and black pepper.
So did you notice what I did?
That’s right! Some of the ingredients are links to ingredients that can be bought on Amazon.
I know what you’re thinking! Oh Alex, you evil SWINE! Yes, I am very evil, I’m marketer, what did you expect? It’s in our nature!
But you can do this too and you see how easy it is!
Sign up here as an Amazon affiliate, and make note of the process that they require in regards to complete their signup process. This can change over time so it is best to follow their instructions rather than mine.
https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/
So how do we get our affiliate links. Simple. Look for the ingredients you are recommending, with fresh fruits and vegetables, you are going to want to recommend people pick them up at their local store, but herbs, spices, chutneys, pesto etc, you can go hog wild. The commissions are small. The earnings are slight, but you have advantages other affiliates don’t, which means if they are happy with this commission then you should be too!
When you have found the ingredient whilst logged into your affiliate account, you simply go to the top bar when you are on the page of the item you are recommending, click the get link, and add that link to your ingredients.
So why did I bother recommending you look up how to blog and how to rank higher on Google?
There are a variety of knock on effects.
- You will outrank your competition with good blogging.
- You will get more customers because you will be easier to find.
- You will show up for more search terms locally.
Results: More bookings, more sales and a little bit of side cash for those rainy days.
I want you to do well, you are giving me time so I want to give you my experience, and this will help you gain natural traffic towards your recipes. You can have them linked in a sidebar on your website for easy access when other people are looking at your bigger blogs. The more information you put on your website the stronger it will become, knowing a bit about keywords and the other information will help you master these survival tools.
Higher ranking benefits your entire site and makes it beat competition for search terms. Understanding how to localise your restaurant gives it more power against competition in local search results. Writing longer and more powerful blogs is better for this, but Recipe blogs have secret powers that don’t normally conform to short blogs.
So what kind of blog is a recipe blog?
A recipe blog is a micro blog. It has limited search engine power, but this increases above normal micro blogs because it is content people stay on when they consider the recipe or order ingredients. It’s one they go back to.
Basic Explanation
In SEO or Search Engine Optimisation we call these repeat visits and sessions and they are valuable. They show that specific information on your site is useful to customers, gaining you power. The more power you have the higher you rank. I’m obviously simplifying but if you have gone through my blogging course, and watched my supplementary video, you will understand exactly why you should be doing this and a lot more of the underlying power you can gain.
Writing Recipes to be Competitive
It is a rare thing when two restaurants share exactly the same menu. By focusing on recipes that your competition make, you will accomplish a few things.
- You may learn that your audience likes a dish you don’t currently make. You can consider making this for them. Try it out as a special and see if it sells well. 9/10 times it will!
- You will start to rank for dishes you don’t normally produce meaning that you will start competing in your niche where you couldn’t before.
- You will be sharing recipes that don’t eat you out of business.
It’s also important to realise that your audience will not replace you with their own cooking, and it will help them remember your expertise. Most people will try a recipe only once or twice before they decide they like you more.
My recommendation is to do one of two things with your blogs. Firstly, take every recipe link down with a simple sentence, something like this:
How to make: X
Our special guide to making an awesome X! (Or similar wording)
Link: (URL)
Take these and store them on a note keeping program so you can easily post them at times that feel right, or put them into an automation if you are a tech person. 50 recipes with one to two going up per week will be good.
For a complete list of my restaurant marketing tips, click here.
You can pick and choose whatever you want to learn about in my videos!
Following everything in this playlist will help you become lethally competitive, find new ways to promote your restaurant and obliterate your competition.
I try to keep things as simple as possible.
So who am I? Someone who has worked with restaurants for 8-9 years as a marketer. I’ve sold a lot of food, cooked a lot of meals, and taught many people how to improve their services. SEO through blogging and word of mouth have netted me the vast majority of my clients. But you stuck with me up to this point, so consider me a friend!
