More and more people are starting to run their own businesses out of their home. While this saves on overhead costs, it can mean less publicity overall. Home businesses are ideal candidates for local online advertising.

With the right type of publicity your home business can really take off. People in your area may be looking for exactly what you offer, but simply aren´t able to find you! Since more and more people are looking online to find the services and products they need near them, this is the ideal medium to advertise in for any small business that is on a budget. Local advertising is often more cost effective than print advertising and can be an excellent method to get your home business publicity campaign off the ground.

Local advertising is a way to draw some attention to your business and bring in more clients on a local basis. Many small business owners don´t realize the amazing potential of local online advertising. If you haven´t tried it yet it is something worth looking into as it works with any budget to grow your business on a local level.

Do you run a local hospitality business? If so, then you need to check out this post by Miriam Ellis on where Google Local Maps are sourcing their reviews. This is great news if you have your own local business in the hospitality industry . . . send your happy customers to one of the following websites to review your hotel or restaurant and you have a far better chance of getting some great reviews showing up on Google local maps.

10best.com
Aol.com
ChefMoz.org
Citysearch.com
Dine.com
DiningGuide.com
Dinnerbroker.com
Frommers.com
Gayot.com
Giatamedia.com
Greenopia.com
Holidaycheck.com
Holidaycheck.de
Holidaycheck.es
Holidaycheck.fr
Holidaycheck.it
Holidaycheck.nl
Holidaycheck.pl
Holidaycheck.ru
Hotelchatter.com
HotelGuide.com
Hotelguide.net
Insiderpages.com
Menupages.com
Mytravelguide.com
Priceline.com
RestaurantRow.com
Travelocity.com
Travelpost.com
Tripadvisor.com
Virtualtourist.com
Yahoo.com
Yelp.com
Zagat.com

All of these are from Miriam´s research of over 1,000 Google local map reviews. While some of these websites may not be very well known, they are obviously interesting to Google and should be watched carefully. Others, like Tripadvisor and Yahoo, are obviously already huge. Using these websites to your advantage can be a very intelligent move!

Local online advertising is rapidly gaining ground on regular online ads. According to WebPro News, we can expect to see a substantial increase in the amount of local online ads in the next few years, while general ads aren´t expected to increase much at all.

Local advertising will increase by 13 percent from 2007 to 2012,faster than online advertising as a whole, which will see 12 percent growth during the same period according to a JupiterResearch report, “US Online Local Advertising Forecast, 2007-2012.”

The difference may be just one percent, but that is pretty substantial, considering that local online advertising was virtually non-existent a few years ago. People were very resistant to searching online for local businesses. These day, however, it´s quite common to jump on the internet to find the nearest pizza place or to get directions via Google Maps to the local Barnes and Noble.

As I´ve said before on this blog, if you have a local business and aren´t using local online advertising, now is the time to jump in. Soon, everyone will be online, but for the moment, you have a chance to get ahead of the competition.

Local online advertising isn´t just about creating cool banners or buying pay per click ads. You can also have great success by getting listed in local directories. There are thousands of website and business directories online and most of them won´t be of much use, but if you can find local business directories, they can help your business gain exposure.

Look for local online advertising opportunities with the directories that you find, in addition to getting listed. Many of these websites will offer a special section for paid listings or may highlight your paid listing and place at the top of the page. This extra exposure can be just what you need to help your listing stand out to directory visitors.

Having a listing in a local business directory isn´t the only benefit of this type of local online advertising. You will also see a boost in your SEO because of the incoming links from all the directories that you´ve submitted to. These backlinks are often from directories that have at least a PageRank of 3, so they are valuable links to get. Even if you end up with no traffic from the listing, you should still get a better ranking in the search engines and thus gain traffic indirectly from this type of local online advertising.

It´s normal for us to blame everything else for our low conversion rates, but the fact of the matter is that the majority of the time, poor response rates come from poor local online advertising. Even if you don´t want to admit it, chances are that your poorly converting ads are really at fault.

Poorly performing local online advertising can be a good lesson, though. Use it to figure out what doesn´t work and then never use that technique again. You often only need to tweak the wording of an ad in order to make it work. If you like, test your ad in your email newsletter, switching them up every couple of newsletters. You can then track the results and figure out which ad works best before spending huge money on local online advertising that doesn´t even work.

Never assume that you have hit the highest point in your local online advertising. When you find a gem, use it, but continue to test variations. Does your latest ad get a 6% conversion rate? Then keep trying, maybe you can boost that number to 10% or even higher! You won´t know unless you continue to test and track.

Local online advertising is a science that is constantly being refined. You should never figure you have what it takes and sit back on your laurels, always change things, tweak and you never know where you might end up!

As you probably know, blogs are loved by the search engines, so using local search engine optimization on a business blog can be far more effective than a static website. If you have a blog that you use to promote your website, here are a few local search engine optimization techniques that will help it move up in the search engine ranks.

• Use local search engine optimized titles. Using your keyword phrase at the beginning of your blog post titles will help the blog and the individual posts rank well for your keywords.

• Use tags. Using your keywords in the title isn´t the only way to make your blog posts stand out to seach engines, you can also add tags. If you use Wordpress, this is now automatically added at the bottom, just type in your keywords or tags.

• Link to other blog posts. Having interconnecting links is a great way to boost local search engine optimization, but you can boost the effect by picking one post per keyword and having all other articles with that keyword in them point to that particular page.

• Get backlinks. Local search engine optimization doesn´t stand alone, you need links from other websites to really get great rankings, so comment on other blogs and do what you can to gain backlinks from other sites.

• Use post titles in the URL. If you are using Wordpress, this is very simple to do, you just need to go into Options, Permalinks and select Custom under Common Options. You will need to place the line inside quotations in the box “/%postname%/”. This will give you an URL with the actual post name in it, making it easier for people to remember and search engines to index.

Local search engine optimization is something that can be used very effectively for business blogs, especially local ones. Using local keywords in your blog titles and posts will help you get pretty high up in the search engines, if not in the first place.

With a user base that is expected to grow to 462 million by 2012, mobile television is heating up phone circuits everywhere. But the latest developments have local mobile marketing experts excited . . . as mobile TV goes local.

According to Fierce Mobile Content, not one, but TWO companies are vying for the position of local mobile television provider.

Independent telcos seeking a competitive edge against cable and satellite providers have long made local programming a cornerstone of their IPTV efforts–after all, any cable or satellite service can deliver network sitcoms, premium dramas and Hollywood blockbusters, but only a broadcaster rooted in its community will offer on-demand viewing of the high school football team’s thrashing of its cross-town rival or a particularly heated city council meeting. It’s a situation mirrored in the current mobile TV environment, where operator-backed services deliver programming selected for maximum demographic-wide appeal, offering little that isn’t already available via other national broadcast platforms.

A-VSB and MPH promise something truly different, expanding the personal relevancy of what mobile subscribers watch as well as when and how they watch it. For example, a local affiliate could make the latest headlines, traffic and weather available on-demand immediately after the traditional newscast airs, enabling viewers to tune in and catch up via mobile whenever the opportunity presents itself. Add search and advertising revenues to the mix, and local-centric mobile TV seems even more lucrative.

It may not be Super Bowl coverage, but the ability of local mobile marketing to place ads during live coverage of the college football game offers unlimited possibilities! Or have shots of your restaurant and delicious food come up around dinner time, when your potential patrons are looking for a place to eat.

While the majority of local mobile marketing is done on a text message level, there´s no question that mobile phones are rapidly improving and local mobile marketing can only follow it on the upward curve, of which, video ads are the next logical step. This is definitely something to keep an eye on.

While local pay per click can be an excellent method of driving traffic to your website, it won´t do you much good if the traffic isn´t targeted. You´ll end up paying for clicks that are completely worthless to you, so it´s important to makes sure your local pay per click ads are optimized to bring in the visitors who will be most likely to earn you money.

One way to boost targeted traffic is to ensure that your keywords stand out. You can do this in Google AdWords by using the following code when typing your headline:

{KeyWord: }

Enter your keywords after the colon, leaving a single space. This will cause Google to highlight your keywords when someone is searching for them and you will automatically draw a higher level of interested traffic to your site. Make sure that you use the description lines to describe exactly what you are offering so no one who isn´t interested will accidentally click. This will save you wasted money and ensure a better quality of traffic.

This is a super simple trick that any local pay per click advertiser can use on Google Adwords, so go ahead and try it, track your results and see how much better it works!

Or at least it could, if people stopped receiving paper directories that they never use. A recent report by welovelocal.com, a British local advertising company, indicates that 17,500,000 printed business directories are delivered each year to people who don´t want them! That´s a lot of trees and if you´re into the environment, you can do a lot of good by focusing on local search engine optimization.

According to the same report, 51% of people prefer to use the internet to look for local businesses, as opposed to just 24% who used print directories for reference. While printed business directories are still very useful (we certainly can´t discount that 24%!), the internet is obviously becoming a favorite medium for doing searches, making it that much more important to do local search engine optimization on your website.

While saving trees may be secondary to your desire to earn money, local search engine optimization can do both at the same time. All that is left to do is convince those who produce the business directories not to send them to those who have no need for them. The internet is faster and more efficient than a paper book and for this reason, more people are interested in using it as a resource.

According to Biz Report, there is a movement toward local online advertising, as opposed to general online advertising. More small businesses seem to be realizing the value of creating local search engine optimized websites for their offline businesses and they are also beginning to venture into the world of local online advertising with pay per click campaigns.

In a report titled “U.S. Local Online Advertising Forecast, 2007 to 2012”, JupiterResearch analysts predict that local online advertising will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13 percent in the next five years, compared to online advertising as a whole at 12 percent, to $8.9 billion. Local search accounts for $2.5 billion of that figure.

Local search is still at the top of the list of local online advertising methods that small businesses use, probably because it is an area that requires little or no investment. However, display ads are coming up right behind search and the internet in general seems to be swinging over to local search. People like to know what´s available in their area, and local online advertising helps consumers find what they need near their homes.

Local online advertising isn´t going away. The search engines realize this and have been leaning toward providing more localized searches, along with maps and addresses. Local online advertising is definitely coming into its own in 2008.

One third of Americans with mobile phones have noticed ads on their phones in the past few months. That´s about 78 million people, not an insignificant number! This data was reported by mobile entertainment company Limbo, which teamed up with GfK NOP Research, a British marketing research company, to analyze local mobile marketing.

You can read more about the report at MediaPost Publications, but here is an interesting tidbit:

Among other key findings, the report confirmed that SMS text messaging remains the dominant non-voice service used by U.S. mobile subscribers, with 56% tapping away on phones. Mobile gaming and surfing the mobile Web were both about half that percentage, while less than 10% watch mobile TV.

Of the one-third of cell customers who have seen mobile ads, most received them via SMS or MMS text messaging. “A third of mobile phone owners saying they’ve seen advertising on their phones is significant,” said Rob Lawson, CMO at Limbo, which creates games and other mobile content. “It means the first hurdle has been crossed to reaching the mass market.”

For small businesses who are still hesitant about local mobile marketing, the proof is in the pudding. It´s time to jump in now, or you´ll quickly become a straggler as local mobile marketing starts to go through the roof. The simple fact that 78 million people are seeing and paying attention to ads on their phones lets us know that this is a marketing medium that simply won´t be going away.

Yesterday, we looked at some methods of on-page local search engine optimization techniques to help boost your website´s search engine rankings. The ones covered yesterday were pretty basic and something that anyone can do, really. Today, we will take a look at some slightly more advanced local search engine optimization techniques. You´ll need to know a bit more to get these ones done, but you could also hire someone to help you integrate them into your blog.

Meta tags. Including your keywords in the meta tags of your webpage can really help with local search engine optimization.

Keyword tags. Add all your keywords and keyword phrases to the keyword tags. The latest version of Wordpress makes this super easy with a separate line below the posting area.

Text links. Using text links that have your keywords as the anchor text can help things as well.

No-follow tags. This can be very useful when linking out to a “bad neighborhood”. Search engines won´t penalize you for linking to sites they don´t approve of if you use a no-follow command.

Sitemap. A sitemap lets search engine bots find each and every page on your website quickly and easily and helps you rank higher for keywords.

Themed keywords. Use your primary keywords, but add other ones in the same topic category. For example if your keyword is “make money online”, you might also use “earn money” and “home business”.

These more advanced local search engine optimization techniques allow you to get higher rankings, thus bringing in more traffic. It´s a good idea to employ as many local search engine optimization methods as possible to boost your chances of making it to that number one spot.

On page local search engine optimization is one of the best ways to catch the attention of search engines like Google. Using your keywords in the text on the page is good, but it´s just part of what you can do to optimize your website. Here are a few other places you should be looking at for local search engine optimization.

Titles
Using your keywords at the beginning of any titles and subtitles helps them stand out to search engines and this is a technique that should definitely be used if you want to get into local search engine optimization.

Headings
Put the keyword in your heading and at the top of your website where it will be scanned first by local search engine robots.

Anchor text
Use your keywords as links between pages and from other websites or blogs. This adds importance in the eyes of the search engines and is an excellent and well-used local search engine optimization technique.

Alt tags
When adding images to your website, be sure to include alt tags that use your keywords. This will help those searching for images to find you and can be a method of reaching internet surfers who wouldn´t normally come across your website.

Local search engine optimization isn´t just about articles that include your keywords. There is much more to it and by using these techniques and more advanced ones, you´ll put yourself ahead of the competition.

For Canadian Yellow Pages advertisers, their recent press release holds some interesting information. Businesses with a listing on the online version of the Canadian Yellow Pages will shortly have the ability to enhance their listing page with video, photos and custom information. It will no longer be limited to a phone number and address.

From the Yellow Pages Group:

“The introduction of the new Profile Plus is yet another clear example of YPG’s commitment to using the latest technologies to bring businesses and consumers together and to making buying and selling easier and more productive for all concerned,” explains Jean-Pascal Lion, Vice President of Marketing, Yellow Pages Group. “Given that more Canadians than ever are viewing online videos, we are convinced that the video service will provide advertisers with a more compelling and value-added vehicle for bringing their business offerings to more customers.”

Once the new Yellow Pages Profile Plus system is up and running, businesses will be able to get a lot more value from their business listings, as well as offering more information to the general public. We´ll be keeping an eye on this one.

Local mobile marketing allows you to reach consumers where they are, literally anywhere. This has great benefits and if you market correctly, you´ll end up with a very successful campaign. However, when operating in a medium that is so intimate, such as local mobile marketing, there is always the risk of problems.

Creating a successful campaign is obviously the goal in local mobile marketing. The problem is when your local mobile marketing interferes with what your potential clients are trying to do. They will get annoyed and fed up and rather than buy your product or invest in your service, they are far more likely to hate you! So, this is a pretty delicate situation.

Ideally, your local mobile marketing ads should be useful and interesting so they don´t irritate mobile users. Also, you want to be careful that you don´t send anything that could be construed as inappropriate. Keep in mind that people are going to be accessing your ads in public places, like the subway or at the office. Avoid using images that could be construed as racy or insulting.

Local mobile marketing should be something that fits seamlessly into mobile browsing and doesn´t interfere with the user´s tasks. Once you manage that, you will be quite successful.