I can think of no more sound advice than this. Every local small business person should have a social networking profile. Why? Because if you don’t, it could cost you.

This is a scary scenario, but what if …

A local competitor, or some cheesy high school prankster who hates your kid, decides to go and use your name to set up a profile at a social networking site like LinkedIn and fills it with links full of hate speech, porn, and other undesirable, potentially destructive information. I’m not talking about a prank phone call here. That’s annoying enough. But this type of “identify theft” could potentially be more harmful than someone stealing your credit card information, which can jack up your financial situation. But someone posing as you and using their profile on a social site (with your name) to make you look bad could be a reputation damaging nightmare than can stick around for life. And you can write to the credit card company to restore your good name.

That’s why it is important, even if you are a local business person who does business locally, to set up social networking profiles in your own name and manage them over time. You don’t have to manage them daily, but stop in from time to time, even if you don’t use them, and just make sure they are still active, links back to your site work, and there is no funny business going on. It’s called reputation management and it’s fast becoming a very important part of our lives.

If you have been wondering how you can build a true social website for your local community without shelling out thousands of dollars in technology and software to make it happen, there are two new tools on the way to beta right now that can help you do that. And both are recognizable names.

Facebook is in the process of rolling out Facebook Connect. And Google is opening up the beta version of Google FriendConnect.

Both of these applications look very promising. Which one you choose depends a lot on your preferences and there may be reasons why you’d want to use either one. Facebook, of course, needs no introduction. The friend connect application for Facebook will be limited to allowing your site visitors to connect using only Facebook. If Facebook is popular in your community then you might find that to be useful. Google FriendConnect, on the other hand, is more versatile. You’ll be able to add networking features on your local website that allow your visitors to connect with their friends through Facebook, hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, and a few other social websites.

That may make Google a bit more attractive to many users, but if you’re looking for online privacy, Google FriendConnect will likely be a less attractive application than Facebook Connect. With Facebook Connect you’ll still be able to tap into the same privacy features that Facebook has built into its community. But Google FriendConnect, being that it will be compatible with several networking sites, can’t promise that level of privacy. And some people are a little jittery about how much information they want Google knowing about them, so that’s one concern.

Both Google FriendConnect and Facebook Connect will allow you to turn your local website into a community portal. That could mean more traffic for you and a way to ensure that you can charge more for advertising dollars.

How to Use the Internet to Advertise, Promote and Market Your Business or Website with Little or No Money by Bruce C. Brown is an award winning book that was written for those who want to promote their business and website without having the budget that most have when doing so. This new book shows one how to promote and build their website while making money and using as little of their own as possible. It includes various low-cost and free methods of promoting and serves as a step by step guide for increasing overall web traffic and sales. You will learn how to research and use keywords, build web communities, brand your company, advertise on Google, use auto-responders and much more. It includes multiple real-world examples and ways that strategies have worked and can work for your company and what strategies simply do not have the desired success rate.

This book has been a finalist of the National Indie Excellence 2007 Book Awards, Bronze Winner in the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards and has been highly acclaimed by other experts in the industry. It is highly recommended for those who are just starting out a business on the web or as a refresher course for those already on. Other topics include search engine optimization, meta tags and their importance, banner ads, and even diving into pay per click networks such as Google AdWords.

Overall this book is a great first step in learning everything you need to know about getting a jump start with the online efforts in advertising!

Bruce C. Brown has authored several other award-winning books within internet marketing and is an active duty Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander which he has served in for nearly 24 years.

Superpages is one of the most important websites to get to know for small business owners. They’ve recently announced that consumers can now use Yahoo! Widgets and Google Gadgets to search for local businesses from their desktops. But how does that help you, the advertiser?

In a word, it doesn’t help you get better advertising. It does help you indirectly. When consumers download the widget they have access to Superpages and its advertisers instantaneously from their desktops. This increased user-friendliness gives Superpages advertisers a leg up in the local marketplace. But will users in your local area use it? They might. If they know about it.

That’s where you can help them. Why not put an icon, a message of some sort, on your website telling your visitors that you are a Superpages advertiser and encourage them to download the widget? Every advertiser you get to download the Superpages widget means that is one more advertiser more likely to find you when they are in need of your services. Become a customer-evangelist for Superpages and you can develop your own customer evangelists. What goes around, comes around.

There’s a new search engine in town that hopes to topple Google. It’s called Powerset. I’ve already read two reviews of Powerset, as well as tried it out for myself, and the two reviews could not have been different. Both were by bloggers that I respect and admire.

Greg Sterling of Screenwerk likes Powerset. Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim doesn’t. They both make good points.

Andy Beal is right when he says that Powerset simply appears to be another way to search Wikipedia. But I’d hope that Powerset has plans to take their search engine beyond Wikipedia. Just for the record, they do also pull information from Freebase, as pointed out by Greg Sterling. But the overriding question is, does it provide anything valuable?

I’ll have to agree with Greg Sterling and say that there is some value in it. I tested a query that would intentionally be ambiguous. “Poetry schools” can mean all sorts of things. Under traditional keyword-type queries, anything that mentions the word poetry or school, if the query is made without quotation marks, would be pulled into the SERP. If I’m looking for information specifically about poetic movements, which is what the terms Poetry Schools typically refers to, then the keyword-type query wouldn’t prove much helpful. I tested it in Google and I was right. I got a few results in the top 10 that were helpful, but most of them were not.

On the other hand, Powerset gave me exactly what I was looking for, mostly from Wikipedia and some from Freebase, but without the fluff that came in Google. So that’s one query in particular where Powerset was more useful. But what about local search?

Local searchers are going to be looking for information that is useful to them in their particular neck of the woods. For most people, especially rural searchers, Wikipedia isn’t going to be much help. A search for Texas brought up information organized into 4 tabs: Geographically (about the state of Texas), TV Series, Band, and Novel. In other words, somewhat helpful. But what about Sweetwater, Texas? 515 Wikipedia articles that mention Sweetwater, Texas, a community with less than 15,000 residents.

Among the type of entries found for Sweetwater, Texas are:

• Rattlesnake Roundup
• KTXS-TV
• Registered Historic Places
• Libby Thompson (a prostitute and madam of a famous brothel)
• Women Airforce Service Pilots
• Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway
• Bat Masterson (his first gunfight took place in Sweetwater, Texas)
• Clyde L. Garrett
• Asa Earl Carter
• Willie Amos
• Active Worlds
• Pig Show

So does Powerset, or semantic search, have any local search applications? Possibly. I think so in limited terms, but it can’t go on forever relying on Wikipedia. If Powerset could tap into the search algorithms of the major search engines and aggregate them with its semantic search technology then that would prove a lot more useful. It would have to filter out the fluff that is found and simply include useful search results based on the semantic intentions of the searcher - if that is possible. But for now, let’s suffice it to say, it’s off to a not-half-bad start.

If you are a local business that is trying to optimize your website locally to gain the most traffic from people in your area or because you do a lot of off line business locally and you want to have a website that reaches your local target market, should you put your advertising banners on other websites within your area? Generally, I’d say yes, but that’s not always the case. Some times when you might NOT want to put your banner on other local websites are:

• When the website is your competition
• When the website is out of your niche
• If it serves a different demographic than you serve (for instance, you sell women’s clothes for ladies of size, but another website sells clothes for teen age boys)
• There is nothing to be gained from the added exposure

If you run a local travel website then you probably want to look at every opportunity you can to have your banner on other travel sites within your area. The local chamber of commerce may be a good place to get a banner link. The local visitor’s center and city hall may also be good places for links.

It all starts with the proper research. Is your target market local prospects or visitors from out of town? Whichever is the case, you probably want your banner on other local sites that cater to the same market, but not the other.

Specific keywords may not be as important for a local business as for other businesses, unless the keyword is a geographic place name. If your primary keyword is your local home town, for instance, then you might gain from having a banner link on another website outside of your niche whose primary keyword is the same place name, but if your keyword is “motorcycle sales” and you just happen to be located where you are but do business over long distances then geographical place names won’t matter as much.

When it comes to placing banner ads on other local websites online, you have to weigh the advantages to you and to your target market. Will it pay?

Greg Howlett stepped on some toes with his post about SEO being a dying industry. Of course, he was just repeating what Shoemoney said a day earlier. Nevertheless, I like what Howlett said in this paragraph:

I think, however, that you would be better served by largely forgetting about SEO and focusing instead on building your brand.

That’s essentially what Shoemoney said too. Here’s a sentence buried within the meat of his post:

I don’t think anyone can argue that core SEO has gotten less valuable over the years and I see that trend continuing.

The overarching question is, are they right? And if so, what will this do for local search engine optimization?

Well, I do think that Shoemoney’s observation on SEO declining in value over the years is partially correct. It isn’t that it has declined in value per se, but that it has gotten more difficult to achieve for the average business. It is now more important to hire a professional SEO to help you rank better, but both Shoemoney and Howlett may have a point in that the current trend of hiring an SEO who strictly does technical SEO is going to fall by the wayside. If your SEO is not proficient in branding and marketing strategies then you might as well ditch him for someone who is because that is the future of SEO in general and local SEO in particular.

Branding has always been a core aspect of business marketing, whether we are talking local business or global business. Online, it’s even more important because people do not want to do business with someone they don’t know. You can have the best SEO in the world, but if you can’t built trust with your target market then your business will die. That’s where branding comes in. This principle is no less true if you operate a local business, but with local branding you have the added advantage of being able to draw your customers to your physical location to meet you face to face. Still, you’ll need to rely on branding to make that happen.

The future of local advertising online lies in your ability to create a brand that people will trust. SEO will just be a part of that branding process, though I don’t think that SEO will necessarily die out. It will simply be incorporated into the branding process. I think that’s what Greg Howlett meant with his follow-up post, and I can see the same the trending as well.

I found this to be rather interesting: Off line advertising giant Live Nation is partnering with online pay per click up-and-comer AdBrite to distribute local advertising online. The good news about this arrangement is webmasters no longer have to rely on Google and Yahoo! as revenue sources.

The idea is to advertising music venues through geo-targeting efforts. It makes a lot of sense because concert promoters plan a schedule for bands on tour, scheduling those bands to play in major cities around the world. If they can advertise their concerts through geo-targeted efforts online then they can be very effective in reaching their target market through local websites. Local website owners win because they can earn additional revenue through their websites.

Another encouraging thing about this arrangement is that AdBrite is successful in this endeavor, and I see nor reason why they shouldn’t be, then local advertising opportunities for webmasters who want to expand their PPC offerings could be developed through AdBrite. Currently, AdBrite is somewhat limited, but growing. I’m anxious to see what happens in the future.

Here’s a novel idea: Start a local search engine!

Before you think I’ve gone and flipped my lid, consider how easy it is to put a search box on your local website. It really is a snap. Google Custom Search Engine makes it so.

A useful way to attract new visitors to your website and keep them coming back is to use the Google Custom Search Engine, which now powers Site Search, to help your visitors find what they are looking for online. You can build your own custom search engine that helps your visitors find local businesses that have what they want.

For instance, let’s say you live in St. Paul, Minnesota. If you own a bookstore and you want to provide a useful service to your online customers then install the Google Custom Search feature and program it so that any business with a website in St. Paul, Minnesota can be found through a simple search from your website. If you have a Google AdSense account then this can become a new source of revenue for your business. And you tell the Google Custom Search feature to favor your website over others so that searchers looking for your competition using your search engine will more likely find you all over again. This is one great tool. Start your own local search engine.

Yellow Book has rolled out a new local advertising program that promises to take local businesses into the digital age much more quickly than they’d originally planned.

The new slogan is “Say Yellow To The Future” and they’ve evidently moved from a two-word name to a one-word name, nixing the walking fingers. From the online press release:

“Local businesses have relied on Yellowbook for more than 75 years to drive and support their client base,” said Gordon Henry, Yellowbook’s chief marketing officer. “While 87 percent of Americans use traditional yellow pages, there’s been exceptional growth online. Yellowbook.com has seen explosive growth in unique visitors, and our search engine advertising product, WebReach, has gained tremendous momentum. This campaign is part of our commitment to continued innovation and, importantly, to helping consumers find what they’re really looking for—wherever they search.”

It’s been known for some time now local consumers are ditching their Yellow Books in favor of online directories. Yellowbook.com is just one of those. Online yellow pages are growing in popularity every day. Local directories and advertising opportunities are on the rise as more local businesses grow more Internet savvy and learn to navigate the World Wide Web. If you have not already started you local advertising plan then you’re already behind the competition.

Can local businesses benefit from social media marketing? If you own a local business that does not do business over long distances or that has no way to deliver products and services through digital media or mail delivery, will you benefit from social media marketing? The answer, surprisingly, is it depends.

First, let’s define social media marketing: The use of social media to market one’s business online or through digital media. Social media marketing has grown into a big slice of the Internet marketing pie. Websites like Flickr, YouTube, StumbleUpon, BlogCatalog, Digg, Facebook, and MySpace are very popular right now and savvy marketers are starting to figure out how to make them pay. But can local businesses play?

I believe they can, but local businesses should go about it in a different way. You have to pay attention to who is where and what they have to offer as well as what you have to offer them. But you can use social media to leverage your online - and off line - business. Facebook, for instance, is organized by local networks. You don’t have to be a member of a local network in your area, of course, but you should be if you run a local business. You can actually use Facebook to network with other people in your geographical area.

If you are a Facebook user, you can build apps just like other members and use them to draw others to yourself. Think local. What kind of app would members of your local community be interested in?

Also, advertising opportunities on Facebook, StumbleUpon, and other social media can be lucrative if you use them properly. Again, think locally.

But are you limited to Facebook as a local business? Absolutely not. Every business no matter how local should have a blog. Then you should submit your blog to all of the popular blog directories. One of the most popular blog directories is BlogCatalog, which has become much more than a directory and actually has social media resources that can prove useful to your local business. For instance, on BlogCatalog - as well as Facebook, StumbleUpon, and most other social media sites - you can start a group and invite other users to join that group for networking. Why not start a group for your local area?

While social media marketing has many great applications for online-only businesses and businesses that are capable of doing business over long distances, local businesses can join the party and meet new contacts, network, and develop relationships with potential customers just like any other.

Debra Mastaler asked a great question on her blog, Link Spiel:

what’s better at giving us the quick qualifying factor like the PageRank toolbar?

In other words, she wants to know if there is a resource that webmasters can turn to in order to find information on authority - a kind of one-size-fits-all way to determine which sites are the greatest authorities within their niche. Then she recommends Myriad Search.

I hadn’t heard of Myriad Search until I read Link Spiel’s post on it. Then I tried it out. It seems a bit limited, but it does do what it promises to do and deliver results from the four top search engines for a particular key phrase. It looks like a good tool for competitive research.

Just for giggles, I performed a search for “Gettysburg Pennsylvania.” I wanted to try the local angle to see what would happen. You can see the results of that search here.

If I were truly interested in building a website to search the local market of Gettysburg Pennsylvania and wanted to use that place name as my primary keyword then this search for that key phrase is very telling. Here’s what I see:

• The most authoritative site for that key phrase is www.gettysburg.com. Not surprising.
• The most authoritative site for my key phrase is No. 1 on 3 of the top 4 search engines.
• It is also No. 2 on the fourth search engine (Yahoo!).
• The second most authoritative site for the local place name I’m interested in is a government website (the National Park Service) - very important to know that for competitive analysis!
• The Gettysburg Welcome Center’s website is the the third most authoritative site on the local key phrase.
• Also, GWCs website has only half the authority as the No. 1 most authoritative site - great information!
• Coming in below GWC are Gettysburg College, Wikipedia (who’d have thunk?), the local newspaper, and various nonprofits, tourism websites, and local businesses.

Now I know what the competitive landscape is for my key search term. But what if I wanted to compete locally for the key phrase “auto mechanic?”

Well, I tried using my first key phrase along with “auto mechanic,” putting both key phrases in quotes and all I got back was a bunch of useless websites. So let’s try it without the quotes. Here are the results of that search.

I can see who the most authoritative site in Gettysburg for the term “auto mechanic.” It truly is a competitor and I know where he ranks in each of the search engines. It doesn’t look like any of my other competitors are even close. After Mike’s Towing and Recovery, it’s government websites and the Chamber of Commerce of Gettysburg. The next real competitor is an About Us page for Eagle Software, which makes software for auto shops. It looks like I have an in here if I was an auto mechanic in Gettysburg.

So you can see how useful this tool is for doing competitive research at the local level. I hope you get some use of it.

Microsoft has spent the better part of this year trying to convince Yahoo! to sell itself and Yahoo! has spent the year trying to find other alternatives. Well, Microsoft has officially withdrawn its offer and left Yahoo! with no hope for its future. But how will that affect local online adverting?

It could affect local online advertising in a number of ways:

• If Yahoo! is unable to pull itself out of its looming financial crisis then it could eventually go belly up, leaving local advertisers with only two major choices for online marketing - Microsoft and Google (that’s not a real choice).
• As Yahoo! continues to lose share value they may decide to seek another buyer and end up having to take less than Microsoft’s offer to sell and reap any returns for shareholders. That could affect Yahoo!s own prices for local advertisers in the long run.
• Yahoo! has been tweaking its offerings lately and it’s possible that, in order to cut expenses and losses, the company will take to take some of its current offerings for local advertisers off the table.
• Yahoo! may decide to turn its PPC offerings over to Google completely, which could change how Google prices its PPC advertising for all businesses.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo! navigates the waters from here on out.

Google Maps is one of the best tools for local business owners to ensure being found online. In fact, I’d recommend listing your business with Google Maps and its competitors - Yahoo! Maps and MSN Live. But if you do it wrong you just may find yourself not being listed at all.

According to Tom on Google Maps Help Group:

If you put a
business description, or name, or anything that’s not an address in
either of the address fields, your listing may not display on Google
Maps.

While this isn’t a serious issue, because you can always go back into Google Maps and enter another listing, it can cost you some time and lost business if your listing is delayed by a few weeks. Save yourself the headache and do it right the first time. I’d hate to see you not get listed on Google Maps just because of a silly error.

If you’re looking for a way to analyze your local mobile initiatives then you probably need to check into a local mobile analytics package such as this one from AdMob.

Of course, if you’ve been online for very long then you know the importance of analytics for a website. With the right analytics package you can tell a great deal from your visitors and how they use your website, which is important if you want to be successful in marketing your business. Some of the ways that analytics can help you in your marketing - even your mobile marketing - include:

• Learning which links attract the click through
• Which pages on your website are most popular
• How long people stay once they get their
• Evaluate the traffic sources that deliver traffic to your website
• Find out which products convert best

By looking at the statistics of your website and how local mobile users are using it, you can get better at marketing yourself locally through mobile phones and increase your business credibility and presence in the local market.