How local businesses are turning to the internet for increased visibility and sales.

Nowadays, people just do not find businesses and services the way that it was done 50 or even 10 years ago.  The internet has changed all that with instant comparisons, maps, community review sites, videos, photos and search engines.  How is a local business supposed to compete with national and international companies?  They too must learn to leverage the internet and local searches through search engine optimization and social network marketing and bookmarking. 

Traditionally people would do "Searches" for businesses by looking in their phone books, newspaper,  magazines, mail and home circulars. Radio and Television advertising were the biggest winners in the advertising market even a few years ago.  Almost all of those businesses have seen a dramatic fall in revenue.  Whereas the classified ad was one of the main source of revenue for newspapers, today most are seeing miniscule traffic when compared with an internet giant like Craigslist.com.

Internet Must Do’s for Local Businesses:

• Local listings in Search engines. The 3 big search engine companies, Google Local, Microsoft’s new Bing Local listings and Yahoo Local Features, allow businesses to add their business address, phone number, hours of operation, coupons, photos and even videos.  It’s a great way to attract local customers and helps visibility immensely in local searches.  Your business can appear at the top of page one in the maps area like the following for Ashland Web Design.
• Community Review Sites.  People do like to take the advice of others when looking for online shops, but they do it just as much for local businesses. Yelp and citysearch are the 2 biggest sites out there for this, but you can even create your own by creating a local community site at Ning.com or some of the other network sites.  Looking for the perfect dentist in Ashland or a good Ashland Oregon plumber?  Searching the internet and looking to the review sites is definitely the way to go.

To find out how you can get your company to page 1 in the search engines and increase local traffic as well as online sales contact me at Bey 12 Consulting – or reach me by skype at roosterweb.

SocialMarker – Free online social bookmarking tool for submitting to most of the major sites, currently 49.  If you use the toolbar add in link then when you on on a page that you would like to submit, you click on it and it automatically fills the information but you’ll want to make sure it’s all correct.  It allows you to select the social bookmarking sites you want to submit to –
All, Best sites, None, Bookmarking sites, News sites or Dofollow sites.  This is a handy feature when all you want to do is post to bookmarking sites. The process is semi-automated and very tedious, but does appear natural since it is slow. One positive thing I can say is that the interface works a lot smoother than it did last year, however some of the sites seem to still experience some error when submitting and some of the sites they have are down.   I guess if they had a script to check that for them, the site would work great – especially if you have accounts at all the sites and are logged in to them already.  All in all a nice piece of work for the price…free!

Onlywire – Doesn’t have nearly as many sites (19) as Socialmarker and it is not semi-automatic.  Once you enter all your login information for all the sites you can then add urls, meta information and tags.  The rest is automatic.  I find that I usually have to go into a lot of the sites it posts to and tweak what it automatically fills into fields incorrectly when I’m posting critical pages. Onlywire is not completely free and offers two methods of "payment".  You can use the service for free by adding a Bookmark and Share icon to each post or you can pay $24.99 a year and not have to put the icon up.  Sometimes it is not quicker if you must go to each site and verify correct listing.  I like that they offer you a free subscription and personally don’t mind the icon on my blog, but then again this blog is about internet marketing and social media marketing so it’s likely that I will keep trying sites like these and experimenting.

SocialPoster -The 79 sites to submit to are impressive and I like that you can submit to All, None,Top, Dofollow (for SEO), News, Bookmarks, Twitters, Multy, Entertainment, Soft/Webmasters or Pligg based sites.  It seems to use the same or a similar interface that SocialMarker does, but is a little more robust.  You also can drag the icon to your favorites/bookmarks to submit a page that you are on like socialmarker allows.  Submission is done semi-automatically through a frame which I prefer or it will post a list that allows you to clik on each site which then opens in a new window.  It moves a lot quicker if you have accounts at all the sites and have either saved login info to your browser or have it handy.

PostToaster -Comes in with 72 sites to post to and has a single page posting interface and allows 4 multiple  variations of title and description tags which it will randomly send for each semi-automated post. All links are opened in a new tab with a not so easy shift T right mouse click/select open new tab which often doesn’t work quite as planned. It also allows various kinds of sites to be selected, but doesn’t seem to automatically enter the content directly into the sites sometimes which along with the clunky key/mouse/open combo makes for tedious and long winded sessions and are drawbacks.One positive feature is taht some of the sites they feature are unavailable on the other submission sites like china’s haohaoreport.com.

The good news for internet marketers and especially those utilizing social and social media sites as vital tools with SEO, is that these tactics are now seen as one of the most valuable marketing tools alongside video.  Sites like twitter, facebook, squidoo and wordpress.com have consistently shown that organic top results can be had with the proper strategic approach.

Just a little thought for the new year – may your skies be filled with rainbows and your coffers filled with the gold of old from the pot at the end of the rainbow.

This is a case study one of the top social sites to post to, Wordpress.com.  Correct use of this site will help raise your search engine page ranking much higher than a lot of other social linking and social information web sites.

Google really seems to love wordpress.com.  I don’t mean the blog you have at your web host or server, I mean the blogs hosted by wordpress at their site.  If you create a blog with some good information in it, it will be listed very high in page ranking.

Here’s a real world example.  For Reno Modern Luxury Homes, a wordpress.com site was created as well with a blog title of Reno Luxury Modern Homes. A post named Reno Modern Luxury Homes For Sale was created as well.  The user name for the site is renohomes – It’s a good idea to have your user name contain keywords as well.  If you do a search for Reno Modern Luxury Home, you’ll see that as I write this the top 2 spots are the wordpress.com tag pages for tags put on that blog.  The 3rd and 4th links are the actual site.

If you do a search for Reno Modern Homes, you’ll see that the first spot is the actual site itself which is RenoModernHomes and the #2 position is the wordpress.com blog post Reno Modern Luxury Homes For Sale.

Tags are incredibly important as you can see from the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP).  the first 2 listings are in fact tags that were created and put on the http://renohomes.wordpress.com blog.  The fist google listing is for the tag reno-modern-luxury-home-for-sale and the second is for the tag reno-nevada.  Variations on the searches prove fruitful as well.  Reno Luxury Contemporary Homes brings a page 1 position 1 and 2 of the tags used!  A search for Reno Luxury Homes brings a page 1 position 6 ranking. Adding a tag for the company Pavich and Associates brings a page 1 position 3 position in a google search, the first 2 are the Pavich and Associates company website.  All of this with one blog and 1 post.

Google truly loves Wordpress.com

One of the more useful sites is the “Do Follow” Blog Directory.  I encourage you all to read up about follow/nofollow sites.