Pitstop Cafe: Small Business Blog Interview with Astroboy

Pitstop Cafe was kind enough to answer my questionaire. They were featured as the Small Business Blog of the Day on April 17. Astroboy let me know they were not four homeless college students, but rather two undergrads and two people just trying to earn a living. Here are the answers to the questions:

Pajama Market: How has the blog impacted your company?

Pitstop Cafe (Astroboy): The blog started as a means to share our experience with friends. As we go along, we talk more about the cafe, some interesting stuff that goes on within the crew, etc. However despite the number of readers in the blog, most of our customers came to the cafe from word of mouth from other customer rather than just through reading the blog. Hence in general the number of new customers attracted just because they read the blog is not really significant. Nevertheless, the blog provides a good platform to build rapport with our exisitng customer base and keeps them updated about what we do or the promotions we had, etc. I beleive the blog also let us gain better awarness and better interaction with potential customers compared to a normal website used by business.

PJ: What has the response been from your customers/clients?

PC: The response from the customers has been positive. Most have enjoyed reading our blog and when they come down to the cafe they feel more at home in the cafe as they kinda of like keep it touch with it through the updates from the blog.

PJ: What types of things about your work day inspire you to write a post on your blog?

PC: Most of the stuff written in the blog were inspired by daily happenings and encounters with the customers, among ourselves or something interesting in the recent news. As we have new stuff like games, things that we implement (e.g graffiti wall, new food item) we blog about it too :)

PJ: What have been the biggest surprises with your blog so far?

PC: I think the nice surprise is that despite the lack of publicity, people do find out about the blog and enjoy reading the blog. It is also a surprise that when some customesr come to the blog, although you have not really seen them before, they seem to know everything that has been going on in the cafe!

PJ: What blogging program do you use for the blog? Did you create this blog yourself? How do you like the program?

PC: The blog was kinda of a new medium for us. We started using the blog only because we were setting up a cafe and trying to figure a effective way of establishing online presence. The tools I used are just notepad and I modified from an existing template, coding and previewing as I go along.

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