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!