Local businesses that want to succeed and compete in the modern marketing arena have been forced, sometimes kicking and screaming, to accept online advertising as a necessity. Those companies that were the front runners in this field certainly gained the biggest audiences in a highly key market… namely young adults.

The scenario now isn’t too different. The advertising methods might have altered a bit, but the fact remains that the longer a company takes to build brand awareness in a modern market, the faster they will be overtaken by the competition.

Social media has passed beyond “a growing trend” among companies seeking brand awareness. The smart companies understand that social media isn’t a ‘horizon’ tool, but a marketing necessity.

Facebook, Youtube, Myspace and others contribute to an advertising landscape populated by every age group, but especially young adults. For the tweens growing up, brand awareness is the key to a lifetime of brand loyalty. Who among us isn’t partial to the brand names of our childhood vs. the new thing that is coming out? Building that brand loyalty takes time, and it starts in the young. Do you really think that the last three Star Wars movies would have been a hit if an entire generation who grew up on it didn’t take thier kids to see it?

The way to build brand awareness in the tween and teenage age group is by aggressively targeting the social media marketing arena.

In order to compete in the business product world companies must ensure that they look beyond the playground of Social Media and see it for what it is, the base of a new generation of customers.

The “Big” search engines generally treat Local SEO differently than they treat standard SEO. The question is, if you are a local business, what can you do differently from standard SEO to increase your rankings for Local?In the Local algorithm, links still bring you direct traffic from people who click on them, but the links in question don’t always have to be the standard links to other sites and pages and content. In fact, sometimes they are not links at all. In many cases, Google for instance, is highly ranking Local sites that have many citations from geographically related sites. The citation, in these cases, is usually only the business name, address, and phone number. So in standard definition, these ‘links’ aren’t links or ‘votes’ for your site’s popularity at all, but simply citations or references to the local physical address. While it isn’t a vote for popularity, the link-that-is-not-a-link is actually giving your local website a vote of relevancy. It’s an important distinction for SEO specialists and business owners, because if the Local algorithm thinks it is important for your site, so should you.SEO gurus that are treating Local SEO the same as standard SEO should look into using this citation relevancy as a way to help their Local clients out.

One of the easiest way to increase your Local site’s relevancy is by making sure the site and business name, address, and phone number are included in the Local Government and Town websites.

Google tends to weigh government and town website citations as highly important and *relevant* by reason of their location. And location is what Local SEO is all about.

We’ve posted a few times lately about local online advertising vs. traditional advertising methods, and how the markets are changing. With the advent of streaming TV shows over the internet, iTunes TV show purchases and even Amazon un-box TV downloads, it is clear that more and more people are getting their TV from their computers. This quite obviously poses an issue for traditional TV/Cable advertising.

We all know that the advertising revenue pays for the TV shows that we love. The more popular the show, the bigger the hostage audience is to your ad, and inevitably the larger your bill is to show the ad during that time slot.

The flaws of this time-honored scenario really rose up when internet connection speeds increases and some networks started to stream their shows over the internet. Great. You’ve got a lot more viewers now. The problem is that they’re not seeing the commercials that pay to produce your show.

A couple of networks decided to take a giant leap backwards to avoid the advertising backlash and stop streaming their shows over the internet. Customers rallied, wrote, complained and boycotted until the networks back peddled again (how many ‘back’ words can I use in one post?) and resumed streaming the shows on their websites.

Techdirt profiled this exact situation with the CW network and the show “Gossip Girl.”

Limiting consumer choice is no longer a viable business strategy. Attempts to do so in the media realm are especially hopeless, and doubly so when, like the CW, you’ve already shown your users how much freedom they could be enjoying. Sure enough, the torrents for Gossip Girl are well-seeded. Given that, the CW’s decision to serve its viewers on their own terms is a wise one. Here’s hoping they do us all a favor and find a way to make their online ad stock more financially viable.

And so there it is. Once a business gives consumers certain freedoms, they cannot be taken away without an uprising.

Moving forward, networks will need to face the issues that they created when they accepted the risk of streaming their shows on the internet. Online advertising is a field that network television is going to have to get in bed with if they want to continue to compete in the market.

I would have posted about the new Cuil search engine hours ago, only I was too busy reading all of the tech junkies’ posts on how their first searches went. I alternated between hopeful looks, shaking my head, and laughing out load.

So what’s the scoop on Cuil, the new search engine created by Google alums? In their own words:

Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too. Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance.

That sounds, well, cool. Content and relevance are amazingly wonderful things for advertisers wanting to build their business without having to win the page rank competition first. What I really wanted to look at was the Cuil advertising, and see how it is working for them.

What are the effects of Social Media and Online Reputation Management on Cuil’s product brand? First off, the Social Media aspect:

1. Their kick-off got a lot of buzz by both national news media like CNN, MSNBC and NY Times, prompting a lot of look-sees blogs, and vlogs about Cuil.
2. Hundreds of Tech sites from Slashdot to Cnet to Techcrunch jumped on board to look at what could be a promising Google Contender and then posted their results in a Social Media extravaganza.

Honestly, a company couldn’t pay for advertising like this. Not only national online media and news outlets, but hundreds of social media and technial forums were reviwing and discussing their product too. But wait…

The amazing thing about Social media is that it will put your brand/product out there for all to see and talk about, warts and all.

There are definitely a lot of bugs. For example, the first page of a search for “Cambridge University” fails to link to the University of Cambridge’s official site, but “University of Cambridge” has it as the first hit

1. The forums are lit up with users say that their search returned pages and articles not updated since 1998, out dated material to say the least.
2. Users report that the pictures returned often have nothing to do with the site or description.
3. Users report that the site has been down numerous times due to high traffic levels.

Let’s see what kind of Online Reputation management Cuil has, and how they will manage what is looking like a difficult launch.

While the benefits of online advertising are obvious, it has been a long road to introduce more traditional clients to the internet advertising world. Once there, however, clients were able to recognize the value of using rich media, video, pay-per-click and search engine optimization to increase their business.

Advertisers are cutting back on their advertising budgets for just about every sector except online, because online advertising simply works.

Here are some of the reasons that customers are still moving ahead with their online advertising budgets while more traditional advertising budgets are on the decline:

Social Media: The popularity of social networking websites to increase brand awareness and ‘buzz’ has enabled many companies to break out from the pack and network their way to the top.

CGM: Consumer Generated Media allowed more companies to break out of a stale, over produced video rut and get into the thick of what products are being used and who is using them.

Pay-Per-Click: The PPC market did not slow so much as mature. The ability to the quickly measure the Cost Per Click, Conversion Rates, Click Throughs, ROI and Income are a major draw to advertising clients. Real, measureable outcomes and metrics allow businesses to know exactly what is working vs. what isn’t. A traditional advertising campaign isn’t able to provide that kind of feedback unless a customer answers a client survey, and even then the results are often skewed.

Local Classified Ads: With the availability of a fast, easily searchable classified database, local newspapers have found a lucrative new market that attracts businesses and customers, all while not printing a word.

Online marketing is easily available on a global capacity, even when the business itself has a local focus. In fact, many local businesses are marketing their product on both the local scale and global scale.

Why? Because the new global market has made every product available, people are finding that international markets are craving products that are local, but to another area. It is ‘trendy’ to have a product in your hands that isn’t available in your local area, but only through online ordering. It can give you the local feel even when you are half way across the world.

Think about it… you can get a bottle of water from just about anywhere, but a “special” bottle of water, from the badlands out west is cool, even if it costs a bit more. The same holds true for a lot of small business local products. Local is better, even if its global.

On my last trip oversees to China, I brought some locally made personal care products to some friends. The products were ‘Burt’s Bees’ items that are produced locally, with very retro packaging and styling as well as natural ingredients. My friends in China went nuts for these small gifts and I’ve ended up adding this local product to their global purchasing habits.

There shouldn’t be any boundaries for local online advertising. Of course you need to focus and advertise locally, but you might be missing out on a lot of sales if you don’t think globally. At the very least, try to accommodate a global market if you are lucky enough to find your product or service on the preferred list of an international market.

Mobile Marketing Watch had an interesting post on an AdMob campaign to get the best and brightest developers to fight for a 1 million dollar advertisig prize.

It looks as though AdMob wants to become the leader in advertising on the iPhone. To prove it, they’re offering $1 million in free advertising to developers that can create integrated advertising within iPhone native applications and functions such as iTunes, the App Store, audio access, video, phone calls, maps and browser access.

AdMob is reporting over 249 million ads in the past year, worldwide, and is positioning itself as a leader in mobile marketing with iPhones. The latest metrics released indicate an over 30% increase in ads placed in the last month alone.

The interactive advertising abilities and pinpoint local information make the iPhone a sweet spot for local mobile marketing. NowLocal is an application that detects the users location and then distributes news and ads, even down to the hyper-local, directly to the user. It’s no wonder that NowLocal is the fifth most popular application downloaded on iTunes.

With the already impressive local mobile marketing advantages of the iPhone, AdMob is now positioning itself within the iPhone family to be the go-to company for their advertising. They servie more than 2.5 billion mobile banner and text ads per month and offer both advertisers and publishers the ability to leverage targeted advertising for mobile over more thant 160 countries.

Whenever you are undertaking a local search engine optimization campaign you should know which engines are the most popular for your customers. Too many local businesses focus on local only search engines while the reality is that they need to focus on the main search engines, too.

Primarily, there are four general categories of sites that online users go to for local information/searches:

Main Search Engines: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.
Main Local Search Engines: Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, MSN’s Live Local.
Main online Yellow Pages, such as Superpages.com, YellowPages.com, Switchboard.com.

Don’t assume that someone doing a search for you local business will automatically search for you on local engines. The fact is that after many years of online computer searches, most people have a favorite engine and go there first, out of habit. That is the reason why it is imperative that you make sure you local business is listed and ranked in the top search engines, not just the local ones.

Where people go from their initial search should be important to you. Do they pass directly to your site? (If it is listed.) Do they pass from there to a local-centric engine such as Google Maps?

You want to make sure that your local business has the full business address clearly displayed on your site’s homepage for the big search engines to pick up. If you are an owner or a franchise owner of a national business, be sure that you have a page for each of your local outlet sites, with the full address and telephone number listed on it.

To have a professional send your business information to Google Maps, Yahoo! Local and MSN Live Local, please visit the Brick Marketing Local website at:  www.BrickMarketingLocal.com

It’s no secret that Social Media outlets add immense value to any local business. Professionals use social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to connect with other people and market themselves, their business, and their products.

Problems arise, however, when the more social aspects of Social Media take the spotlight away from the business aspects. The ease with which social media outlets let businesses and people connect also lend a certain amount of casualness to the atmosphere. Possibly too casual.

If you are using social media sites to capitalize on business contacts, don’t make the mistake of also using it to plan a three day bender with your buddies to Vegas. If you are going to use social media sites on a personal level, remember that if someone is looking up your name, they will find it:

A. With your business-oriented site (with possibly a well taken professional photo)
B. With your personal site (with possibly a more compromising photo)

In essence, a contact is going to see that the two sites are from the same person.

Many of today’s on-the-go professionals are also young, computer oriented people that have grown up with Social Media sites. If there are pictures of you from 12 years ago, passed out with beer cans tied to your hands, you can bet that those pictures are still out there. Don’t make it any easier for business contacts to find them by placing those “old college memories” on a social media site, no matter how funny they may be now. I can assure you that possible business contacts and clients won’t find the pictorial evidence of your wild days the least bit amusing.

If you wouldn’t want a client to see it, don’t have it out there.

If you are finding visits lagging on your local business website, you might want to try some online advertising strategies that will get you a lot of exposure, fast.

One way to do this is with an online press release or human interest story that will get picked up in different promotional and news outlets. Using this technique, your online press release will be used on news feeds through Google News, Yahoo News, and relevant Business News sites, and possible your local newspaper’s online section also.

Some sites will charge you to publish your online press release, however if you can get your press release out in the form of a human interest story, many outlets may pick that up and run with it as another news or entertainment item without expecting payment.

To do any sort of human interest story or entertainment item with the hope of being picked up and distributed by a lot of news outlets at no cost, you have to have something newsworthy to announce or promote. (There’s always a catch, huh?)

Look within your company, from employees to customers, for personal interest stories that have been affected by your business or product.

* Is your company actively involved in a local charity or cause?

* Is there a time-sensitive story that you can use as an angle? (Reimbursing gas to any employee willing to drive around with a company billboard sticker on the car was one recent story that had a small company in national headlines because of the time-sensitive issue of gas prices.)

If you can’t find a newsworthy story to submit to local online news outlets, then opt for a straight promotional press release to pay news sites.

Now that we have ascertained that Links are an important part of your overall Local SEO strategy as it relates to actual people, lets look at how Links affect your site from the perspectives of search engines.

Links provide navigation for people visiting sites, but also for ’spiders.’ (We also use bots, crawlers and other cool creepy-crawly type names for them, but you get the idea.) Basically, a spider is a program that goes out to websites and gathers up information, then gives that data back to a search engine to index your site for their search results.

Your site is mapped, and the Spider is the map-reader. The important thing to remember is that you never, ever, ever want the map-reader to get lost!

When the spiders index your site, they use your links to get to other pages, one by one. Because we want to the spider to get to and from the sites effectively to index your site, you need to use links that are good for not only human visitors, but spiders, too.

So, what links can a spider not follow? Here are some of the basic ones:

Drop Down Menu Links: Spiders are unsophisticated and have a seriously hard time with drop-down menus.

Flash Links: Flash it dynamic and cool, but Spiders just aren’t there yet.

No Follow Links: Um, it means no-follow. Spiders won’t follow.

JavaScript Links: Javascript is wonderful, but it essentially invisible to spiders. Spiders won’t be able to index your site and your links will be worthless. (Most drop-down menus use a Javascript function.)

Now that you know the types of links there are, let’s look at what they do for search engine page rankings, and what they mean to people.

At its basic level, links are the words people click on to surf the Web. To be technical, they are called “hyperlinks,” but most people today just shorten that to “links.” Links make the web work; it is how we find other sites because without them, we would all be sitting on one page forever with no way to get to anywhere else on the web.

From a person’s perspective, links mean that when someone says their site is “listed” in, Yahoo, it means that Yahoo has a link to their site. When you like a site you recommend it by putting a link to that site from yours. When you submit your site to the big search engines like Google and Yahoo, you are requesting that they list a link to your site so that others can find it and visit.

One of the ways that Search engines determine which sites will be listed for which search terms is by considering the site’s rank. The ranking formula is determined by how popular a specific site is on the Web as a whole. That popularity is, in part, determined by how many other sites link to that site. Google has its own vernacular for link popularity; they call it “Page Rank.”

Every link to your site is like a vote for your popularity. The more votes you have, the more popular your site. And you thought High School was over, didn’t you?

Link Me! Link Me! Building links in today’s Local SEO advertising world is a little like jumping up and down waving your arms in gym class hoping the jocks will pick you for their team. (Roll your eyes all you want, but you know you wanted to be picked!)

Every site looking to expand it’s foothold in the search engine optimization world wants to build some link love with other related sites. Good links are as resource that not only bring your more visitors, they can also improve your page rankings and increase your page reputation.

Links are one of those categories that seem so straightforward and simple and yet once a business starts delving into the process, they get overwhelmed and discouraged.

To give you a better understanding of Links and how they work, let’s start from the top and work out way down.

There are four main types of links out there.

1. Text Links: This is the most common type of link. It is a word or phrase that, when clicked, brings you to another page or site. Sometimes these are called Static Links.
2. Image Links: This is an image, a picture, that when clicked on brings you to another page or site.
3. URL Links: This is just a website url that is a link
4. Dynamic Links: These are Javascript links that take you to another page or website, but they have extra codes embedded to perform other functions as well.

Think about the types of links that you have on your site, what type they are, and where they lead.

We’ll talk about the type of links that you want for your Local SEO in another post.

Local online advertising can incorporate a lot of products and advertising styles but coupons will always be a great kick-start for a new product. Marketing Vox has a post about the coupon usage online and in the Sunday newspaper to look at the coupon clipping habits of consumers.

Internet coupons are of increasing interest to consumers, with 11 percent of households now obtaining them online — an increase of 83 percent since 2005 — according to (pdf) a recent analysis by Scarborough Research, reports MarketingCharts. However, the Sunday newspaper remains the number-one place for acquiring household coupons: 53 percent of households usually get their coupons from the Sunday newspaper.

I find it interesting but not suprising that coupons offered for online advertising still trail the rest of the markets so much.

Online coupons account for only 11% of the market, in comparison to in-store coupons.

Other leading places for acquiring coupons include the mail (35 percent), in-store coupons (33 percent), preferred customer/loyalty cards (22 percent), in-store circulars (22 percent), weekday newspapers (17 percent), product packages (17 percent) and magazines (15 percent).

There is a huge online market for coupons and entire blogospheres dedicated to it, but the market is still trailing. Why? I have my suspicions.

Online marketers that offer coupons usually do so through special ‘online coupon source’ sites that require membership and a site-specific printer download to print your coupons. For the average coupon clipper in a hurry, the 5 minutes of typing and downloading required for what may be one single 20 cent off coupon just isn’t worth it.

In comparison, the ability to whip out some scissors and clip a coupon from the Sunday paper is monumentally easier.

When companies advertising their products streamline their online coupon offerings to be in line with ease of the Sunday paper, we’ll see a larger increase the online market share.

Companies should remember the ease and entitlement which consumers feel is necessary to make the leap from interesting product to purchased product.

Mobile phone users and local mobile advertising specialists alike have been intrigued by the rumors of a Google gPhone for well over year but other than rumors, nothing much happened. A few people claimed to have videos of it, but it was actually a TI phone working with Google’s Android platform.

Last week some new rumors surfaced again regarding Google’s entrance into the mobile phone fray, sparking tentative interest in technophiles everywhere.

When the rumors surfaced last year, Google instead brought out the Android operating system; Android is a platform that allows that gave mobile manufacturers the ability to allow customers to get enhanced access to Google’s search engine from their mobile phone.

This year the rumors have gained momentum from comments made at a Google event that insinuated that Google was working on it’s own mobile phone to replace the iPhone.

Google dominated the search engines and added seamless applications for mobile lifestyles, as well as changed the advertising world online with Adsense. It only makes sense that a launch of a Google mobile phone will have some serious effects, good or bad.

Google’s dominance in the online search engine world and attitudes towards online adverting will most likely send a ripple effect to local mobile advertisers who want to jump in on the gPhone marketing party.

Of course Google could make a mess of things and turn out a substandard product or an iClone with nothing much new to add.

If Google does this, and does it well, the already booming local mobile advertising market could be in for a ride.