Chapter 13: Marketing Your Personal Chef Services
Chapter 13: Marketing Your Personal Chef Services
Throughout this book, you have learned about many aspects of setting up your personal chef business. You have learned how to write an effective business plan, how to choose the equipment you will need to provide superior meals for your clients, how to deal with customer service issues that will occur during the course of your business, and how to set your prices to attract quality clients and build a profitable business.
Now, let us turn to the topic of marketing, where you will learn many effective ways to promote your business so that your venture can continue to grow while you are busy preparing meals for existing clients. In this chapter, you will find out how to use the Internet, print materials, and word of mouth to build a successful and profitable personal chef business.
This chapter will begin with Internet marketing, which many personal chefs use to successfully build a client base. Do not worry – even if you have never built a Web page or written a blog before, this chapter will show you how to set up an Internet marketing strategy to effectively attract clients.
Internet Marketing: Bringing your Business to the Web
Because personal chefs typically operate in a limited geographic area, they often do not consider the Internet to be of significant importance when building their businesses. However, even with a local business like personal chef services, the Internet can be a very important tool. You can use an Internet presence to gain customer interest, educate potential clients about the benefits of using a personal chef, and convince people to use your services.
Building Your Web site: Your Online Business Card
One of the most important aspects of online marketing is the Web site. Your Web site is your business card, brochure, and billboard all rolled into one. It will tell your Web site visitors about the types of services you offer, get them excited about having a personal chef prepare meals for them, and give them an opportunity to contact you to ask questions, make suggestions, or request a consultation for service.
Even though most of your clients will live and work in a small geographic area, people who are interested in your services will still want to visit your Web site to learn about the types of meals you provide, the rates you charge for your services, and your experience as a personal chef. People want to gather as much information as possible before contacting a professional to obtain a service, and your Web site can give visitors all the information they need to make the decision to hire you.
Building a Web site can seem like a daunting task, especially if you have never created one before. Fortunately, there are a number of tools that can help you quickly and easily create a Web site that will attract clients and persuade them to contact you to inquire about your services.
Creating a Web site for a personal chef business is easier than creating many other types of sites, since it is primarily informational in nature. You will not have to worry about setting up a merchant account or a shopping cart to take credit card payments on your Web site, because all payments will be taken care of after you meet with your clients during initial consultations. You will simply need a site that will tell potential clients about you, provide your pricing structure, and give examples of the types of meals you have available.
Here is some basic information about how to get your personal chef Web site up and running quickly, with minimal effort and expense.
Choosing and Purchasing a Domain Name
The first thing you will want to do to establish your Web site is to choose a domain name. A domain name is the address that an Internet user types into the browser bar to access a Web site. It is usually in the format of http://www.domainname.com.
When choosing your domain name, you should try to choose a name that reflects your business as closely as possible. For example, if your business is called Bob’s Personal Chef Service, you might choose a domain name like http://www.bobspersonalchefservice.com or http://www.personalchefbob.com. These names will allow your visitors to know exactly what to expect when they access your Web site. It will also help you attain high search engine rankings so that more people looking for personal chefs in your area will be able to find your Web site.
Because there are millions of domain names that have already been registered by other Web site owners, it is a good idea to come up with a list of eight or ten possible domain names to choose from. That way, you will have a good chance of finding at least one domain name that is still available.
Once you have a list of possible domain names, you will want to find out which ones are available for purchase. There are numerous Web sites you can use to check the availability of domain names. One of the easiest sites to use for this task is www.godaddy.com. On the home page of this Web site, simply type in one of the domain names you are considering and click “Go” and this site will tell you if that domain name has already been taken. If it has, the site will suggest alternate domain names and will allow you to search for other possible names from your list.
If the domain name you have chosen is available, GoDaddy will give you the option to purchase that name for a period of time. Purchasing a domain name is typically inexpensive – GoDaddy will register your chosen name for less than $10 per year, and will usually give you discounts if you register your name for two years or more. Once you have registered a domain name, it is yours to keep for as long as you wish to renew your registration. This means that no other Web site owner will be able to use the domain name you have chosen and purchased.
You will notice that GoDaddy and other domain registration sites will offer you domain names that end in an extension other than .com, such as .biz, .tv, and .info. It can be tempting to use one of these extensions, especially if your favorite domain name is not available with a .com extension. It is not a good idea to use other extensions for a business Web site, though, because Internet users have become so accustomed to seeing .com extensions that they perceive Web sites with other extensions as being less professional. Using an extension other than .com can also hurt your business because if an Internet user visits your site and comes back to find it later, he or she may not remember your Web site address if it has an extension other than .com.
Once you have purchased a domain name for your personal chef Web site, you will need to find a hosting provider for your site.
Choosing a Hosting Provider
A hosting provider stores the pages of your Web site on its servers and allows visitors access to your Web site via those servers. Think of it like conducting research in a library – people want to visit your site, so they type the domain name in their browsers or find your Web site through a search engine, and they are able to access the pages stored on your hosting provider’s servers.
For a monthly or yearly fee, a hosting provider will store your Web pages and give you a certain amount of access for your visitors, expressed as “bandwidth.” Bandwidth refers to the size and number of files accessed by each visitor, and is calculated for each Web page that a visitor accesses. A simple Web page with text and no pictures may use relatively little bandwidth when accessed by a visitor, but a dynamic page with a textured background and multiple high resolution images or animations may use a high amount of bandwidth each time a user accesses that page.
The amount of bandwidth allotted each month varies depending on the hosting provider and the hosting package you purchase. When you are looking for a hosting provider, it is a good idea to choose one that offers a variety of hosting packages and will allow you to upgrade your package as your personal chef Web site grows and becomes more popular. You might not need 30 gigabytes (Gb) or bandwidth each month when you first launch your Web site, but as your business grows, you might need a package that provides at least that much bandwidth to keep up with the number of visitors using your site.
Keep in mind, though, that once you have reached your allotted bandwidth for a given month, your hosting provider may begin assessing overage charges for additional visitors. In some cases, your provider may even suspend access to your Web site until the following month – a very bad scenario when you are trying to build a business. It is a good idea to keep tabs on how much bandwidth is being used by visitors to your Web site each month so you can upgrade your package long before you start incurring overage charges or service suspensions.
There are several affordable hosting providers that offer packages to meet your business needs. GoDaddy offers packages starting as low as $7 per month. You can also obtain cheap Web hosting at sites like www.ixwebhosting.com, www.hostmonster.com, and www.hostgator.com – all of these Web sites have hosting packages starting at less than $10 per month.
Most Web site hosting providers will also offer software to help you build your Web site. Although the quality of the site builders offered by these companies varies, if you are looking to build a very simple Web site without spending too much time on aesthetics, these site builders can be a good way to get your personal chef Web site up and running in just an evening or two.
Setting Up Your Web Site
Once you have selected your hosting provider, you are ready to begin designing your Web site. If you have knowledge of HTML, you can design the pages of your Web site yourself and customize your site any way you like. If you are not proficient with HTML, there are several options you can use to build a site that is aesthetically pleasing and informative:
If you do not want to spend the money on premium software, you can download PageBreeze for free from www.pagebreeze.com. Pagebreeze works much like Expression Web and Dreamweaver, but is an open source program, which means that users can customize the software to provide additional features without violating the terms of the license agreement. PageBreeze allows you to drag and drop elements into your Web pages, create templates to ensure that all the pages of your site have the same look and feel, and toggle between a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view and an HTML view so you can fine tune elements of your site to look the way you want. You will learn more about these Web site creation tools in Chapter 14.
As you can see, creating a Web site can be as cheap or as expensive as your budget allows. It all depends on how much money you are willing to budget for a professional site and how much time you have available to handle some or all of the design tasks yourself.
Developing Content for Your Web Site
No matter what method you choose for designing your site, you will need to provide the content that will make up your Web pages. Your personal chef business is your own unique vision. You are ultimately responsible for whether your Web site sells your visitors on your services, so it is a good idea to provide most or all of the content yourself.
One of the best ways to determine the types of content for your site is to browse the Web sites of other personal chefs. You can review sites owned by chefs in your area and sites owned by other chefs around the country. Undoubtedly, you will find elements of these sites that you like and other elements that you will avoid using in your own site. There really is no “right” or “wrong” when it comes to Web site content – you will need to select and create the content that uniquely reflects your business and your personality.
That said, here are examples of the most common types of content pages that appear on personal chef Web sites:
This is not to say that you should not include your achievements as a personal chef or information about your training or professional designations. This information will help put visitors at ease by letting them know that they are dealing with a true professional. However, the content of this page should help your visitors understand how you can use your experience and training to prepare meals that are beyond their expectations and how they can gain valuable hours each work week by using your professional services. Although this page is about you, it is important to remember that it, along with every page on your Web site, is about your customers and potential customers as well.
To help further establish a relationship with your potential clients through your Web site, you might also want to include a photograph of yourself on your “About the Chef” page. People like to see whom they will be dealing with, and including a picture of yourself adds to the sense of trust that you build through the content on this page.
When you are writing content for your menu page, be descriptive. Use words that will make your visitors’ mouths water and make your potential clients feel like they would be truly missing out if they did not hire you to cook for them. After all, they are not just buying convenience – they are buying meals that are better than they could get in a restaurant. Anyone can eat fast food every night to avoid the task of cooking. The purpose of this page is to show potential clients how much better your meals are than anything they could pick up from a take out restaurant.
If you have set up weekly or monthly packages, clearly list your prices for each of these packages. Also state whether your fees include the cost of groceries. Personal chefs sometimes charge extra for groceries, especially if a client is only purchasing one or two meals at a time, so it is important to let potential clients know up front whether they will have to pay amounts above your stated fees.
If you provide personal chef services for one time events, such as parties or reunions, you will also want to list your fees per meal, along with any hourly fee you charge for cooking for this type of event. Again, if you charge extra for groceries, you will want to state that as well to avoid confusion.
If you do not have the time or inclination to set up a CGI form for your contact page, you can simply give your e-mail address, along with instructions regarding what information potential clients should include in the e-mail. However, you may find that you spend more time asking clients for pertinent information than with a CGI form, because some visitors will forget to include information you need to set up a consultation or provide a useful response to questions.
Content serves two purposes. First, it allows your readers to connect to you. The more your visitors know about you and your business, the more likely they will be to trust you enough to hire you as a personal chef. Since you will not have met your potential clients face to face before they request an initial consultation, visitors must rely on your Web site to find out what kind of a person you are, what kind of experience you have, and what they can expect if they decide to hire you as a personal chef.
It also helps your Web site rank higher in the search engines. The better your search engine ranking, the more people will find your Web site and potentially hire you as their personal chef. Having content that gains high search engine rankings for your Web site is crucial to letting people know about your business online. It is also one of the cheapest ways to market and advertise your services because you do not have to pay for organic search engine rankings.
Using Your Content to Gain Prominent Search Engine Rankings
How can you use the content on your Web site to gain better search engine rankings so that you can attract more visitors and potential customers? The answer lies in the use of keywords within your content, and in several other areas of your Web site.
To understand how keywords can help you gain more Web site traffic, it is important to understand how search engines work. When you upload the pages of your Web site to the Internet, automated virtual robots called “spiders” will scan the pages for content and report results to the search engines. Each search engine has its own methodology for interpreting and using the results reported by the search engine spiders, and uses these results to determine the order in which Web sites will be displayed.
When an Internet user accesses a search engine page, such as Google or MSN Live Search, he or she enters words or phrases related to what he or she is looking for. A person looking for a personal chef is likely to use phrases and words in terms related to the idea of having a chef come to his or her house to prepare meals. A user might use search terms like “personal chef,” “in home chef,” “meal delivery,” and so on. A user might also include terms related to his or her own geographic area, so if he or she is looking for a personal chef in the Cleveland, Ohio area, the search might look something like “personal chef Cleveland Ohio.”
Once a user enters a search query, the search engine will return a list of all of the Web sites in its database that contain the search terms within its content. These Web sites are ranked according to a number of factors, including how many times the keywords are used within their content, how much traffic each Web site receives, and how many other Web sites link to them.
Fortunately, many Web site owners do not fully understand how search engines work, and so they do not love creating content that is rich in keywords users will likely enter. They simply write content that is interesting and informative to the readers, which is great for people who visit the Web site, but not useful for search engines.
You can take advantage of this knowledge by including keywords in your content. To determine which keywords you should use, taking a few minutes to stop and think like a potential customer. If you were looking for a personal chef in your area, what terms would you enter into a search engine? Think of several terms that you would use, and write them down. These terms should be the work of your content, and should be used throughout your Web site to attract the attention of the search engines.
How often should you use a particular keyword in your content? Many Web site owners feel that the more often they use a keyword, the better. However, it is unwise to use a particular keyword so often that it makes up more than about four percent of the words on a particular Web page. This can cause search engines to ban your Web site from its listings, because it perceives heavy use of keywords as “spamming,” or using keywords so frequently that the content will not make sense to human readers.
Most Internet marketers agree that the most important keywords for your Web site should make up between 2 and 4 percent of your site’s content. Many marketers try to have a keyword density of between 2 and 3 percent for importing keywords so they can gain high search engine rankings without making the content unreadable for human visitors.
You should only focus on two or three keywords when writing the content for a particular page. The secondary keywords should be used at a density of 1 to 2 percent. Again, this helps make your content readable and makes it less obvious that you are using your content to improve your search engine rankings.
Techniques to Avoid When Using Keywords in Your Web Site Content
All the techniques described above for including keywords in your Web site’s content are considered ethical and valid. In Internet marketing circles, they are known as “White Hat” techniques, referring to the old Western movies in which the good guys wore white hats.
Over the years, though, Web site owners have used a number of other techniques to try to gain additional advantages for search engine ranking purposes. Search engines are aware of all these techniques and have programmed spiders to detect the use of unethical techniques, known in the Internet marketing community as “Black Hat” techniques (use of keywords that is clearly unethical) or “Grey Hat” techniques (use of keywords that is highly questionable).
Not only will the use of unethical or questionable techniques fail to improve your Web site’s search engine rankings, it can cause search engines to permanently ban your Web site altogether. This means that, even if you correct the problem, you will never be able to have your Web site ranked on that search engine. If your Web site gets banned on a small or regional search engine, it is bad news for your marketing efforts; if it gets banned on a major search engine such as Google or MSN Search, the consequences will be downright disastrous.
Here are a few of the keyword techniques that will get your Web site banned on nearly any search engine.
Keyword Stuffing
Earlier in this chapter, you learned about keyword density – using keywords in a certain ratio to the total number of words on a Web page to improve your search engine rankings. As noted earlier, a keyword density of between 1 and 4 percent is considered useful for building rankings.
Some Web site owners reason that, if 4 percent is good, then 10 percent or more must be fantastic. Unfortunately, using keywords excessively constitutes a technique known as keyword stuffing – using a keyword so many times in a Web page’s contents that the text cannot possibly be useful to Web site visitors.
Keyword stuffing is fairly easy to spot, even for people who are new to the Internet. Read the following example of Web site content that uses keyword stuffing in an effort to gain a better search engine ranking for a Web page (use of the primary keyword is shown in bold):
Do you need personal chef services? Joe Smith offers personal chef services to meet your need for personal chef services. What personal chef services does Joe Smith offer? All kinds of personal chef services – vegan personal chef services, vegetarian personal chef services, low fat personal chef services…nearly any personal chef services you can think of!
This brief, 55-word passage uses the keyword “personal chef services” 9 times – that is a keyword density ratio of over 16 percent. For the human visitor, it amounts to a ridiculous passage that has little value and is rather irritating to read. For a search engine spider, it amounts to keyword stuffing, and a Web page containing this passage would stand little chance of ever being ranked in a search engine’s listings.
Aside from using the generally acceptable ratio of 1 to 4 percent for keyword density, another good rule of thumb that can be used is less mathematical and more intuitive. If you or a friend cannot read a passage without picking up on the fact that a certain keyword is being heavily targeted, you are probably overusing the key word in that passage. Even if your Web page does not get banned for keyword stuffing, the overuse of search terms is likely to irritate your Web site visitors and send them looking for products elsewhere.
Invisible Text
This is an old favorite for those who use Black Hat techniques. Invisible text has been used on Web sites for several years in an effort to improve Web pages’ search engine rankings. This technique uses elements of keyword stuffing (albeit at keyword density ratios that are much higher than those used for visible text), but users of this technique try to hide its use by making the text color the same as the background color, so human visitors will not be able to see it. The hidden text is usually placed at the bottom of a Web page, where human visitors are not likely to notice a section of seemingly blank space.
The hidden text consists almost entirely of keywords without any regard for useful comments or principals of good grammar. If you scrolled down to a blank space at the bottom of a Web page on which this technique is employed, clicked, held the left mouse button, and dragged the mouse across the blank space, you might highlight a block of text that looks something like this:
Personal chef personal chef services vegan personal chef services vegetarian personal chef services low fat vegan personal chef services low fat vegetarian personal chef services low fat personal chef services personal chef services vegan vegetarian low fat
While most human visitors will not pick up on this use of hidden keyword stuffing because they are looking for a personal chef and not trying to find Web sites with unethical keyword usage, search engine spiders will definitely pick up on this technique. Not only that, but they will recognize this as an attempt to cheat the ranking system and ban the Web site from search engine listings.
It can be tempting to use this technique. Many people who try to use invisible text reason that, since the search engine spiders cannot tell what is contained in an image, they cannot tell what color the text is in relation to the Web site’s background either. Since this technique has become so popular, however, search engines have programmed spiders to not only pick up on text and background colors that are the same, but also color combinations that are very similar. Thus, using a light pink text on a white background will garner no better results than using white on white.
You will gain nothing by using this strategy and run the risk of permanently losing the ability to have your Web site appear in search engine listings.
Doorway Pages
This is another technique commonly used by Web site owners to try to cheat their way to better rankings. A doorway page is a Web page that is never seen by human visitors because, as soon as a visitor lands on that page by clicking on a search engine listing, the visitor is redirected to another page on the Web site.
The content on the doorway page is laden with keywords – in essence, an entire page of text similar to that used in the invisible text example above. The theory is that the search engine spiders will read and index the content from this page, and the content’s high keyword density will cause the Web site to be ranked higher in the search engine listings.
This is not an effective technique because search engine spiders are programmed to recognize a doorway page by the redirect instructions written into the page’s code. Although there are some other legitimate uses for doorway pages that are outside the scope of this book, the combination of a redirect command and heavy keyword density will cause your doorway page to be marked as a Black Hat technique. Then, you will not ever have to worry about how to improve your Web site’s ranking again, because it will never appear in the search engine listings at all.
Other Ways to Use Keywords to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
Although the actual content that makes up your Web site is very important for building search engine rankings, there are other areas of your Web site where you can also use keywords to help improve visibility.
Including Important Keywords in Title Tags
The Web site builder or software you will use to design and construct your Web site will give you the option of choosing a title for each Web page – if you are using Internet Explorer, this title will appear in the blue bar at the very top of the page when it is viewed online.
If you do not specify a title tag, your Web site creation tool will assign a generic tag to each page – “Home,” “Page 2,” “Page 3,” and so on. Although this may not seem like a big problem, settling on default page titles robs you of a chance to improve your page search rankings.
Instead of letting your page titles default to your Web site creation tool’s default settings, craft your page titles around the primary keywords for each page. For example, instead of allowing your home page’s title to default to “Home,” you could name this page “Joe Smith’s Personal Chef Service.” If you have room, you can also include a secondary keyword in your page title – just make sure that the title is ten words or less. If you specialize in providing vegan and vegetarian meals, “Joe Smith’s Personal Chef Service – Vegan and Vegetarian Cuisine” would be a good page title that describes the purpose of your Web site’s home page to your visitors. It will also help gain visibility for your Web site, since you are including two keywords for search engine placement purposes.
Web Page Description
Your Web site building software will also give you the opportunity to provide a description for each Web page on your site. This description will not appear on the Web page, but when an Internet user searches for keywords relevant to your personal chef site, the description will appear in the search engine listing under the page title.
This description will give people who are scanning search engine listings a little more information about what is contained on a particular Web page. It should be easily readable and should give your potential visitors a brief overview of what they can expect to find if they click on your link in the search engine listings.
This is also another good opportunity to use your important keywords to improve your Web page’s ranking. Spiders will use text contained in these descriptions as a factor in determining where your Web page will rank in relation to other Web pages targeting these keywords.
Here is an example of what a description might look like for your personal chef Web site’s home page:
Joe Smith’s Personal Chef Service – Vegan and Vegetarian Cuisine
Need a personal chef service to deliver delicious vegan and vegetarian meals to your door? Joe Smith’s Personal Chef Service saves you time and hassle by providing ready to eat meals delivered right to your home or office. Receive 20% off your first order today!
This description tells Internet users exactly what they can expect when they visit your Web site. This is important, because when a visitor arrives at a page that does not contain the content they expected, they will immediately click the “back” button and find another Web site to visit. The description also gives search engine users an incentive to visit your site – he or she can save 20 percent off his or her first order. Even though a search engine user probably has no idea how much your services cost before visiting your Web site, the prospect of saving money will still entice them to click on the link to your site.
One note about providing incentives in your page descriptions (and in your Web site content) – it is a good idea to find a way to avoid using the word “free” when describing an incentive. For example, if you decided to provide the first meal for free for new clients, you would want to find a different way of describing this offer – perhaps “Your first meal is on the house” or something similar. The reason for avoiding the word “free” is because it is viewed negatively by most search engines – they associate the word with spam, and can penalize your Web site or even remove it from search engines completely for using the word “free” in your page descriptions or content.
Meta Tags
Another element you can include in your Web pages to improve your search engine rankings is the meta tag. Meta tags are words or phrases that are inserted into the header section of the HTML code of your Web page – the part of the code that tells the browser certain information about the Web page that human visitors need not be concerned with.
Your Web site visitors will not see the meta tags you use for each Web page, but search engine spiders will see them. You can use your keywords in the meta tag field to tell the search engine spiders about the contents of your Web page, above and beyond the information available in your page content.
If you looked at the HTML header code for the home page of a personal chef Web site, here is what it might look like:
<HEAD>
<TITLE> Joe Smith’s Personal Chef Service – Vegan and Vegetarian Cuisine</TITLE>
<META Name=”description” content=” Need a personal chef service to deliver delicious vegan and vegetarian meals to your door? Joe Smith’s Personal Chef Service saves you time and hassle by providing ready to eat meals delivered right to your home or office. Receive 20% off your first order today!”>
<META Name=”keywords” content=”personal chef, personal chef service, vegan, vegetarian, vegan cuisine, vegetarian cuisine”>
</HEAD>
Some Internet marketers will tell you that meta tags are no longer important for improving your search engine rankings, and that search engine spiders do not use meta tags when determining rankings. However, since the algorithms used by search engines are proprietary, it is impossible to tell which search engines use meta tags as criteria for ranking Web pages.
Since it is not possible to determine whether meta tags are used by a particular search engine, the small amount of time you will spend creating tags for your pages will be, at worst, a way to easily remember which keywords you targeted for each Web page and, at best, another way to augment your Web site content to help your pages achieve better rankings.
Image Tags
A frequently overlooked technique for using keywords to improve your Web site’s search engine rankings is to place relevant keywords in your image tags, also called ALT tags.
If you have ever browsed a Web site and held the pointer over an image and a small yellow box appeared with a short description of the image, you might have wondered why the Web site owner bothered to do this. After all, is not the content of the image self-explanatory?
Although you can look at an image and tell right away what is contained in the image, search engine spiders do not have this ability. The spiders know that an image exists, but they cannot derive any useful information from it. The ALT tag is a way to describe the image to the search engine spider. It is also a useful tool for loading your Web pages with a few additional keywords.
Your ALT tag should be short – no more than eight to ten words – and should contain no more than one or two keywords. It should also accurately describe the image with words that are as specific as possible to the image’s content.
An example of an ALT tag for an image of a tikka masala dish might look something like this:
Tikka Masala – Joe Smith’s Personal Chef Menu Item
This ALT tag gives Web site visitors the name of the dish and includes the primary keyword targeted for that page.