Why a Good Blogger is Like a Top Restaurant

4 Weeks ago I read a post by Chris Garrett on why a good blogger is like a Top Chef and the other day I was thinking of that post again. When I initially read it, I thought yeah cool, I can so relate to that, having been a chef for years and studied Hotel and Catering Business.

But now, a month later, my thoughts have changed a bit. I still believe that in order to be a good blogger, you have to love blogging, just like you have to be in love with food in order to be a good chef. However I feel the comparison isn’t all that great as I felt in the beginning, I think we should take it a step further.

But blogging isn’t just writing good content (or at least trying to), but so much more than that. In order to get interesting posts online, you need to do at least some planning on what your post is going to be about. You have to do research to make sure your facts are straight, read and reread the text to make sure it flows nicely, run a spell check and then recheck again before hitting that publish button. Plus you might like to find some nice picture in order to complete the presentation of your text, the finishing touch.

Much of this is completely comparable to the work of a Top Chef, going out to find great ingredients (doing the research), planning (the mis-en-place/prepwork), putting it all together (the cooking process), checking and rechecking (final tasting to see if the taste is 100%) and completing the presentation; preparing the plate before it goes out into the dining-room.

Truth is that even the best Top Chef will have little success if his dishes don’t reach his customers, so I feel we need to go a bit further than that initial comparison.

He needs a whole team around him in order to really be a success. The restaurant itself, the entourage you can compare in many ways with the theme and layout of your blog. It is the first impression the customer has of the place and even though it isn’t the only reason people will leave or stick around; initially it is of great importance.

The functionality of the furniture is also important. If a customer in a restaurant is really uncomfortable in his chair, feeling a draught, annoyed by the noise, he is not likely going to spend more time than the absolute necessary to finish what he came for.

Same goes for a blog. Having a lot of flashy content, colours that shout in your face, hard to read posts, no navigation system, a lot of unfinished bits and pieces, will have your reader run off without ever coming back.

And then there are the waiters who not only serve you but are also there for the PR, making you feel at home and trying to advice you on your choices or highlighting the “specialties of the day”. Their goal is to make your stay as pleasant as possible, elongating it in order to sell more and try to make you come back, without having you feel you are pushed around.

They are giving the customer what they came for and ideally a bit more.

So by now, blogging is certainly becoming a multitask activity, where it is not just about the content anymore, but where all other aspects of a complete Top Restaurant have to be taken in account in order to make it a success. If one of these aspects fails, it has an impact on the success of the whole blog.