Did a little digging in Google Trends for the Dutch habits when searching for takeout food.
Turns out “afhalen” is by far the most used. With takeout and takeaway coming behind. Funny thing was that to-go is more significant than togo. Guess we are grammatically correct rather than convenient.
Many people struggle to provide visitors on Instagram with quick and easy links to their website. Your viral post says “link in bio” but you’re only allowed a single URL in your Instagram profile. So how do you keep that current every time you want to show your visitors and potential customers your latest cool product/video/white paper and so on?
Linktr.ee is a cloud service that very quickly jumped into this gap and is doing very well. They provide a simple, lean, fast loading, quick way to make a landing page for your visitors where you can maintain a few quick links to either resources elsewhere or deep link into your own website.
But instead of using a third-party service to make a few buttons that link to some URL or deep link into your own site, why not simply create a basic, barebone webpage on your site, strip the bloated designer theme you may have and just offer buttons for those same visitors?
The benefit is that all your traffic lands from your social media profile directly onto your own website, using your own Google Analytics and trackers. You can directly track visits, clicks and referrers as part of your regular website without the need to visit Facebook Insights or Instagram Insights.
With the latest “Gutenberg” block editor by WordPress you can add a few regular buttons just as easy as with page editors such as Elementor or Beaver.
Interested in moving away from those “link in bio” services? Get in touch!
In these covid-19 times, many restaurants coffee shops and boutique stores sudden face the need to add reservations to their website. Sure, you can use Facebook events for each day and make a number of slots but not everyone wants to use Facebook or register for events.
Using Teamup, it’s easy and free to add simple guest booking service to your website. It is one of the case demos on their site for many have already discovered this great calendar service.
https://www.teamup.com/live-demo/
If you would like to add a guest booking feature to your site in these Corona times but don’t have necessary skills to do it or simply don’t have the time, get in touch with me!
Often, your POS vendor has modules he can add for you with the added benefit your reservations will seamlessly integrate with the rest of the system. Or you can use mijnplek.nl, an initiative by KPN, to add simple quick reservations to your website at the cost of installing an additional app.
I manage a couple of websites on the web and the effect of the crisis around the Corona virus is visually dramatic. For one customer there is a drop in web traffic of 2 orders of magnitude. Where 10K impressions during the last week of Fabuari were normal, now only 100-200 are expected.
People staying home don’t go out to eat, they get groceries and cook at home. People don’t need a coffee house if they can’t walk around or travel. If you can’t go shopping, you don’t need to check the collections of retail stores.
As soon as the “curfew” went into effect in the Netherlands, March 17th, traffic slowed to a crawl. While some businesses still see similar traffic to before Corona, a few even more I’m sure, that effect will not be as visual as the drop.
No visitors, means no sales, no sales means no income. So I can fully sympathize with businesses that went into panic mode. Adding additional products, such as vouchers and gift certificates can help create extra income for the time being.
With the crisis around the Corona virus, many businesses are closed either by force or voluntarily. Changing your opening hours on Google My Business (GMB) to notify customers of your changed hours of operation is not only a nice gesture to your following, but also great for your ranking in Google Search because active business entries in Google My Business are favoured over stale ones.
However, with rules and regulations changing over days, keeping up with the changed business hours is a little time consuming. There is also an option to mark your business as “temporarily closed”… Wouldn’t that do the trick too or does it affect your rating on Google negatively?
In light of the Corona crisis, Google has changed the way it interprets these settings and due to these changes it is safe to mark your business as “temporarily closed” if it’s for more than two weeks.
Google will not drop you from search results and will not filter your business out just because it is closed. While it used to do this to more accurately reflect the state of businesses, there are so many shops that are closed now, that they changed this behavior and better serve the businesses during this crisis.
Source: searchengineland.com/
With everyone suddenly turning to video chat, Zoom has seen an astronomical usage increase. However, several security experts warn that Zoom can tap into the data that you’re talking about and is able to link this data to information from Google, Apple, Facebook and others to turn it into targetable advertising.
Doc Searls, co-author of the influential internet marketing book The Cluetrain Manifesto last century, today warned [cached] Zoom not only has the right to extract data from its users and their meetings, it can work with Google and other ad networks to turn this personal information into targeted ads that follow them across the web.
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/
Update: if you’re using Google GSuite, then you may be better off using Hangouts Meet. It’s normally reserved for Enterprise customers but now released to the general public.
There is also a browser plug-in that avoids having to install the client version of Zoom.
Update2: Alternatives for using Zoom that are better at keeping your privacy private.
Update 3: ArsTechnica and Wired have a great write-up
If you have a business in the food and beverage industry, the Corona crisis puts you in serious danger. The forced closure of all these businesses cuts into your money flow. The local government may have some bail out or subsidy plans but who knows how long that will take?
Asking your loyal customers to buy gift certificates from you is a good way keep a relationship with them while your business remains closed. It provides you with some useful cash flow. And you are assured of guests once you are open again.
Alternatively, or in addition to the certificates, you can offer a limited online menu for guests that they can pick up or you can have delivered. Bit every city offers delivery options, but Corona is causing more delivery options and services to appear because demand is great.
Both services can easily be created in Google Forms using your business GSuite account or your private Google account. The former is better but both will work.
Big benefit is that all customer details remain in your possession and don’t get stored anywhere else. Downside is that you will have to perform a few manual steps yourself to fulfill all the orders.
The fulfillment process is also a good opportunity to put your contract staff to work or to hire a few temp people to help you do it.
Take a look at this sample ordering form for gift certificates that I made for restaurant XYZ. People fill out their name, email address and certificate value. Perhaps add a bank account number so you can send them a payment request. Once payment is received, easily verified using internet banking or notification from your banking app, you can print a certificate, write down value and details and mail it out using the good old postal service!
For online ordering menus, you create a similar form. Add a webpage with the menu and place a link to your order form there. To limit your need to stock up on everything and perhaps enable you to cook everything by yourself or with just one chef, out together a limited “Corona” menu. Include your bestsellers and evergreens. If things work out well, you can add weekly specials.
Again, with an order coming in, send out a payment request to the customer, plan the fulfillment of the orders with the kitchen staff and text the customer that their order is ready for pickup!
Of course, if you already have an e-commerce system and shop, adding vouchers or online ordering can be even simpler. But this is a simple but effective way to add these services for free to your business and website!
Als je thuiswerkt en verse koffiebonen nodig hebt, check dan deze megapost met links naar alle branders in Nederland, die bekend zijn, met een webshop om bonen te bestellen! âđą
Koffietje.nl worstelde met dezelfde gedachten als ik:
Hoe kom ik aan lekkere, goede, verse koffiebonen voor m’n koffie als ik het huis niet meer uit mag?
#stillroasting
Bezorgen natuurlijk, maar door wie? Wie brandt nog dagelijks koffiebonen en heeft een webshop waar ik die kan bestellen zodat ze bij mij thuis bezorgd kunnen worden? Want ik wil geen oude bonen! đ
Nou, het is een megapost geworden op Facebook en de lijst groeit nog steeds. Gelukkig hebben ze de lijst met koffiebranders in Nederland met een webshop ook op hun website gezet, daar is hij wat overzichtelijker!
En als jij zelf nog goede suggesties hebt, geef ze vooral door aan koffietje op facebook! Daar hebben we allemaal wat aan!
PS: Ben je een koffiebrander maar heb je nog geen webshop zodat klanten bij je kunnen bestellen? Neem dan ff contact op! Zelfs met een gratis Google Forms bestelformulier kom je een heel eind en dat is zo gemaakt! Shopify kan ook maar vergt meer tijd, heb je later ook wel weer wat aan.
Via het nieuwe platform http://www.helpdehoreca.nl kunnen vanaf zaterdag 21 maart 12:00 uur waardebonnen aangeschaft worden door iedereen die de horeca in Nederland een warm hart toedraagt.
Deze waardebonnen helpen de ondernemers aan inkomsten, ook nu ze gesloten zijn of alleen voor afhaal en thuisbezorging operationeel zijn.
Bron: missethoreca.nl
You’re probably familiar with the problem: you like to quickly post an update or photo to your personal or business Instagram, but then you spend a half copying that post over to all the other Social Media accounts you have. Facebook Pages, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, and so on. And last but not least, you really should not forget Google My Business (GMB).
GMB is your business profile on Google Maps and in Search. It’s where Google, if you are up to date and regularly refresh your content, retrieves semantic data about your company. It’s products, services, menus, opening hours, contact information and so on.
Businesses who are active on GMB have shown an increase in organic traffic from Google although how exactly remains a mystery. So it’s a shame that updating all of your channels (website, social, mailing lists) is so much work. Surely there must a tool that can help automate this? After all, they’re all services in the cloud so it should be easy to couple, link and integrate them all into a single dashboard/app where I can create my update with text, photos and/or video? Right?
Wrong. There are plenty of Social Media Scheduling tools out there, such as Hootsuite, Buffer, SocialPilot and so on. Sadly, these services cost money and to really get all their features you have to resort to an expensive albeit all powerful plan. But most of us don’t want to pay $250/month/user for these features, no matter how useful and beneficial to our business.
Check out Social Media Scheduling Tools: The Complete List (2020 Update)
https://blog.oneupapp.io/social-media-scheduling-tools/
However, if you are willing to sacrifice a little of your time in return for cheaper tools, you can easily tie two or three of these scheduling tools together to automatically update all the Social Media platform of your choice, including Google My Business, for little or no monthly fee. But you have to do it yourself and can’t work together in a team.
Why do I list Tumblr, even though the platform is mostly dead? First of all Automattic has acquired Tumblr and will breath new life into it, I think. Second and most importantly, Tumblr has a fantastic mobile app that lets you create the most media rich posts/updates of all. Text or photo, yes, but audio, GIF or posting video natively that you didn’t record with the app but with your phone’s camera, that where Tumblr’s App really shines. So it’s my go-to app if I want to cross post media rich updates.
Power Up Your Social Media Channels
Now for an example, let’s say you want to use the Instagram app for updating your followers. You want to use Instagram, Facebook (Page) and your WordPress blog. Then…
Total cost: $4/month plus your WordPress plan – which could be free.
Christian Peper 