Top Seven Strategies To Help You Market Your Local Business
Online And Market Your Virtual Business

Copyright 2006 Donna Gunter
Roughly 75% of the business owners I speak with in any given
town or city see little, if any, need for an online presence
They believe in doing business the way it’s always been done,
with local advertising, foot traffic, telephone book listing or
advertisement, special promotions, and word-of-mouth marketing,
and assume that local residents will find out about their
business in these same ways
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with these promotional methods,
but it does create a tunnel vision view of marketing in this day
and age In September 2004, a Kelsey Group-BizRatecom study
found that more than 74% of respondents said they had conducted
local searches and confirmed that 20% of all searches among
respondents was local Whether business owners acknowledge it or
not, the Internet is here to stay, and using the Internet to
find local businesses has now become mainstream, and will only
continue to grow as today’s children and teens, who have been
online almost all of their lives, become adults
I know that when I do a search for local businesses, I am often
taken to one of the local city directories, where I am given the
address and phone number of the business, and if I’m lucky, the
website URL, if they have a website Most days, I search out the
website of a local business to “check them out” before deciding
to do business with them
One of my most frustrating times comes when I want to place a
takeout order at a local restaurant and don’t have a takeout
menu handy I’ll go online to find the menu of the restaurant,
and unfortunately, unless it’s a local chain with multiple
locations, I don’t typically find what I’m seeking That
restaurant usually ends up losing my business to one in which I
can scope out the menu online and call in a takeout order
If you have a brick-and-mortar business, how much business are
you losing because you don’t have an online presence, or your
website doesn’t contain enough information to help someone
decide to do business with you? Or, if you have a virtual
company, what if no one can find you when they conduct a local
search of businesses in your industry?
I do no marketing locally, as there is little demand for the
type of services I provide in this area However, I began to
wonder if I were losing out on what little local business might
exist for my virtual company, so I did some research to find
what websites would help my company website show up in any local
searches
1 Local Portal Sites: Search Google, Yahoo, and MSN for your
city name and see what comes up Are there any sites on the list
with which you can exchange links, buy advertising, purchase a
membership, submit articles, etc? If you live in a small city,
as I do, you might also search for larger cities that are close
to your location, or search for a regional name that your area
might have For example, I found more portal sites by using
“Southeast Texas” as a search term, rather than an individual
city name
2 Search Engine Directories: Search Google Directory,
http://directorygooglecom for your city name and look for a
category that ends with “Guides and Directories” When you click
on that, you’ll see the directories listed by importance, as
determined by Google’s Page Rank feature (you’ll need to
download Google’s toolbar to see this info The toolbar can be
found at http://toolbargooglecom The higher the rank (10 is
high), the more traffic the site has Or, you can manually
search Google as follows: Regional Directories (by
continent/country): http://wwwgooglecom/Top/Regional/ By state
in the US:
http://wwwgooglecom/Top/Regional/NorthAmerica/UnitedStates/
You can also search Yahoo Directories, http://diryahoocom To
suggest your business for inclusion, see Yahoo’s guidelines
here: http://helpyahoocom/help/us/dir/suggest/indexhtml
Yahoo’s regional directory listing can be found here:
http://diryahoocom/Regional/ and listing for the US states is
found here: http://diryahoocom/Regional/USStates/
3 Yellow Pages Sites: There are a number of bigger city options
here: YellowPagescom (SBC and BellSouth):
http://wwwyellowpagescom/guide/cityguides/ Super Pages
(Verizon): http://wwwsuperpagescom
4 Nationally-Based City Guides: The largest of these services,
CitySearch, http://wwwcitysearchcom/, drives content to many
other city guides Other city guides include AOL CityGuide,
http://wwwdigitalcitycom, Area Guides,
http://wwwareaguidesnet, Online City Guide,
wwwonlinecityguidecom, and Associated Cities,
http://wwwassociatedcitiescom/
5 Newspaper-Based Local Sites: If you live in a larger urban
area, your local newspaper may sponsor a site for your city,
like Charlottecom, sponsored by the Charlotte Observer) or
Bostoncom, sponsored by the Boston Globe
6 Locally-Based City Guides: Again, in larger urban areas, your
local chamber of commerce, convention and visitor’s bureau, or a
private business may operate a local portal for your city Here
in Southeast Texas, our locally based site is
SoutheastTexascom, owned by a private business Others, like
FortWorthorg, is sponsored by the Ft Worth Convention and
Visitor’s Bureau
7 Association Guides: Your membership to your local chamber of
commerce, convention and visitor’s bureau, professional
association (by industry), general business groups (networking
groups, men’s or women’s business associations, civic groups)
may pay off if the association has an online membership
directory where your listing might be found Make sure that the
listing includes both your contact info and a link to your
website
I’ve only scratched the surface of the local possibilities
available for both virtual and brick-and-mortal companies In
doing the research for this article, I discovered there are
thousands of businesses who aren’t listed in these directories
Don’t let yours be one of them Get your business listed locally
so you local customers can find you!

Tags | brick, business, businesses, city, mouth, promotions, telephone, traffic, word