Coffee Shop Blogs
Posted by Patrick on May 23rd, 2006
I’m looking for case studies on how blogs word of mouth potential
impacted a small businesses bottom line. I’m primarily interested in
knowing if there are case studies whereby a retail shop had set up a
blog and the benefits that the retail shoped reaped from the blog.My reason for asking is that I run a web design and blogging
consultancy and I have a friend of mine who runs a coffee shop in my
neighborhood. She’s pretty internet savvy and wanted to know if a blog
could help her. I think it could, especially from a WOM perspective,
but I wanted to read up on some case studies before talking further.
This was a post that I received from a group to which I belong – the LinkedInBloggers group on Yahoo. Unfortunately, I have been to busy to respond until now.
I firmly believe that there are some businesses that would not see much benefit from blogging. On the other hand, with a bit of creativity, I think you could find a compelling reason for most businesses to have a blog. A coffee shop blog is a slam dunk IMHO.
Aldo Coffee is a great example of a coffee shop blog. The Aldo blog/website lists their menus, event schedules and other interesting tidbits without making the site cluttered or busy, but most importantly the blog tells a story that draws people to the coffee shop. The only thing that I would do differently is insert coupons with every post that readers could print out and redeem at the coffee shop. Adding coupons to newsletters/blogs worked amazingly well for me back when I was in the business. I talked about this back in March and you can find the post here. The following is an example of a branded coupon. Please excuse the fact that it doesn’t look that great – I’m no designer and I was in a hurry 
Back to the original question that my fellow group member posted in which he was looking for case studies that showed a direct impact of blogging on a small business’ bottom line…Unfortunately, I haven’t come across any such case studies. However, I don’t think that a lack of concrete ROI evidence should prevent a small business owner from starting a blog especially when the cost of getting started can be extremely inexpensive – free if you sign up with a service like Blogger.
If you’d like to learn more about business blogging, please feel free to download our Corporate Blogging 101 whitepaper. If you’re already up to speed on business blogging basics but would like to discuss whether it makes sense for your business to have its own blog and a rough estimate of how much it would cost to get your blog set up, please feel to contact me.
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on May 24th, 2006 at 4:27 am
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