Two major search engines have made recent changes to their local small business listings and offerings to make it easier, and more affective for small businesses to market online.

Both Google and Yahoo have made changes to their local section to help make it easier for searchers to find their local small business, and to make it easier for business owners to get their business found.
Check out this Google Youtube Video promo for their Google Local Small Business website.
Google is now offering small businesses information about their website, and their visitors. Their also offering local businesses help for common problems. The …read more

How easy is it for customers to find you? They used to say the most important thing about your business was location, location, location. Where you were located could make or break your business. That’s still true today, but these days you need to look at your physical location, and your online locations.
Getting people to find your business online can be just as difficult as getting them to find your actual store front if you have one. If you build it they will come is not necessarily true in real life or online.
You have to promote your online store, as …read more

Yesterday I talked about some of the different places you could set up an online store front for your small business. Today I want to follow that up with a few ways to promote your online store once you’ve set it up. I think I’ll follow up with more detail for some of these online promotion methods in the upcoming weeks. Today though I just want to give you the basics, and some of the possibilities.

Most of these methods are either very low cost or free.

Twitter~ If you have an online store, set up a Twitter account in your name, …read more

Is your small business on Yelp yet? We talk a lot about the various social media sites and how you can leverage your presence online. And nowhere is this more effective than on Yelp. Here’s why.
I have personally used the site recently to find out about restaurants that we wanted to try. My husband came home with tickets to a fundraiser dinner at a sushi place. Since we’d never been there (nor heard of it before), I checked it out on Yelp. It had high reviews. And those reviews were spot on. The place was excellent. That, coupled with some …read more

Is video a good method for marketing your small business? Someone asked in the comment section on an earlier post if video was a good way to market a small business. I think online video can be part of your marketing strategy, if you do it the right way. Video marketing is becoming more and more popular these days, and there’s a reason.
Most of the time it doesn’t cost you anything to upload your video, and some websites will even pay you for good video content. Video is easy for people to grab and post at their own website, or …read more

Do you know who your target market is? If your answer is: men, or women, or everyone under 40, or worse yet, you just don’t know… you have some work to do. The more you can learn about the demographic of the market who is looking for the exact product or service your small business is offering, the more success you will have marketing to them.

Ask yourself, “Who needs my product or service?” Picture them in your head. When you get a good visual, write it down. Write down the details of the person you are marketing to. If the …read more

People love free things, and there are catalogs full of great stuff you can give them.  Give-aways are another way you can promote your small business, as I was discussing yesterday.  Looking over the huge number of possibilities (so many, they fill catalogs), you may wonder which are the best.  These 5 are, I believe, the ones that can give you the most for your money:
Why Give Stuff Away? Three reasons why you should be giving stuff away to people: (1) People respond to gifts by feeling a sense of obligation.  It’s the principle of Reciprocity I talked about several …read more

Since this is Freedom from Fear of Speaking Week, I thought I would follow up my discussion yesterday of why you need to do public speaking to promote your business, with some tips for Effective Business Speaking.
The TED Conference has some great “commandments” for public speaking:

In addition: Some tips from my experience as a public speaker and teacher of public speaking:

Find a topic you enjoy talking about. If you don’t enjoy the topic, your lack of excitement will show through.
Show your expertise. As I mentioned yesterday, don’t directly promote your business, but show your expertise indirectly and people will want …read more

There are so many businesses vying for attention online right now. Especially in the social networking and blog arenas, as I’ve mentioned before. So as the noise increases, how do you make sure you’re heard above it all?
In the article I mentioned from Marketing Roadmaps, Susan mentioned that small businesses should try different tactics than big-budget companies do. For instance, Frigidaire is giving away appliances. A lot of appliances. Smaller businesses obviously can’t give away numerous appliance suites. It would kill their budget. But Susan suggested that companies instead try sending a microwave when they notice a blogger wrote about …read more

Why does every hotel offer free breakfast and free wireless Internet?  Because everyone expects it. The key to  making your small business stand out from others is giving people what they want – plus the unexpected.
My husband and I are traveling and this morning we went down for our free breakfast.  My husband complained about the “microwave eggs.”  This wasn’t just your “couple of bagels” breakfast.  They had an assortment of bagels, muffins, and pastries, plus several cereals, and a hot breakfast of eggs, sausage, and biscuits.  Everything was free.  But it was expected.
Same thing with Internet.  When even the …read more