Our Master Plan For Making Washington Road the First All-Blogging Commercial District in US

Perhaps we're over-caffeinated... or just crazy.  But we have this grand vision of a Washington Road corridor jammed full of shoppers every single day and night of the year.  It would be like having First Friday or the Mt. Lebanon Car Show all the time.

And all of those people will be drinking lattes and cappys and espressos and smoothies.

Here's the plan...

Over the next few months we are going to try to convince every single business on Washington Road to create a blog.  We know some won't, but we're going to try anyway.  Some businesses here are just made for it, others may not be... but we believe this is a project that's worth a try - the first fully-blogging shopping district in the USA.

The ultimate goal is that if you can think of a word for something that's sold on Washington Road in Mt. Lebanon, it will be on page one of Google searches for "thatword + Pittsburgh".  And maybe even "thatword" on its own (like we did for bicerin, when our puny little shop had #2 on Google - it's now #20 as we write this).  The result is when anyone Googles anything on Pittsburgh, some Washington Road emporium pops up in the top 10.

To that end, we're planning on hosting a business blog session in the coffeehouse the evening of Wednesday, May 24, which, if all goes right, will be sponsored by Stormhoek Wines of South Africa (long story there).  If the sponsorship doesn't go through, we'll probably still hold this, but the day/time may change.

This event will only be open to business owners and marketers along the Washington Road business district from the school down to Bower Hill and selected bloggers we'll be inviting to help explain things (and who wouldn't forgive us if we didn't include them in an event with free booze). 

Btw, "selected blogger" = regular customer who blogs.  So if you're not yet in that crowd with Professor Madison, Venky, Matt, and a handful of others, you've got about 10 weeks ;-)

So mark your calendars, Wednesday, May 24th, 6:30.

Comments

[Chris]

Hey guys, I just randomly stumbled upon your website from home-barista.com and now I can't wait until the next time I'm back in Pittsburgh so I can stop in and sample a few shots of Black Cat!

I'm originally I'm originally from Peters Twp, and I have a bunch of friends that live in Mt. Lebo, so I've passed by your shop many times, but never knew that you guys were such espresso afficiandos. I'm a big espresso addict myself, ever since I sampled true espresso at Intelligenstia in Chicago, so I'm glad to see someone in my home town serving the same beans that got me hooked to begin with.

I might be able to help with your all-blogging district as well, I'm good friends with a few of the employees down the street at Uptown Coffee. I know they're technically your competition, but they're nice people. They could definitely use some real barista training though...

[Rich]

Chris,
Hope to see you soon. We never know if we're competent enough for the HB geeks. We always feel like we're in a mechanical engineering class whenever we're on that site. We haven't installed a PID in the LM yet, nor have we drilled any holes for any purpose whatsoever. Sort of makes us feel unworthy at times. The CoffeeGeek folks who've been in have been kind, however.

Retail coffee on a commercial street like ours generally centers on a two or three block radius for the most part - that's the 80% in the 80/20 rule. So we don't get Uptown customers and they don't get ours for the most part. Besides, if we were in the Pacific NW there would be two other coffeehouses on the street and we'd all be either happy or miserable.

[Chris]

Haha, I know what you mean about HB, I've been searching there for info because I want an upgrade from my current starter machine (Gaggia Espresso) and I think they've managed to convince me that nothing less than an LM GS3 will be acceptable. :)

I'm definitely not up to that level of espresso geekdom yet, but I do know a good shot when I taste it and its great to know I've got somewhere to go in Pittsburgh now... which is actually more than I can say for my current home of Philly, I've yet to find a coffeeshop here that knows what they're doing.