Facebook mobile now includes a feature that lets you to tell your friends when you are visiting a specific business location. Facebook calls this “checking-in.”  This means that you can use a smartphone device to receive a list of local businesses in your area and subsequently “check in” at the one you are frequenting.  This “check-in” is then visible to all of your friends through your newsfeed and a posting on your personal Facebook wall.  Businesses are taking advantage of this new concept and adding certain deals and specials that are available only to those people who have “checked in” to the specific location.  With a constant increase in the number of mobile Facebook users, we can’t help but wonder what effects this will this have on local SMB owners. Some of the early participants of Facebook Deals included 24 Hour Fitness, Alamo Draft house Cinema, American Eagle Outfitters, Chipotle, Gap, Golden State Warriors, JC Penney, McDonald’s, and Starbucks.  Gap was one of the first to advertise their Facebook Deals through commercials. The first 10,000 customers to “check-in” to the Gap location received a free pair of jeans.  This got people lined up at 8 am to take advantage of the Facebook Deal.

Continue reading “Facebook launches check-ins and Deals: Pros and Cons for SMB Owners” »

A great business can take years to build a positive reputation, but it can be destroyed almost overnight with a few bad reviews.  In the past, when people talked about your business, it was behind your back and you almost never heard about it.  Today, most of these dialogues are right in front of your own eyes. For better or worse, internet buzz is there for the entire world to see. There are an enormous number of review sites, forums, facebook pages and twitter feeds where your business is subjected to hearsay and rumor mongering! Reputation management has become an essential task for every business. But for many small businesses, it is overwhelming. There are over 20 high-traffic sites such as Yelp and Google Local where customers or disgruntled ex-employees may be posting reviews. How can you keep up with all the comments, reviews, and chatter about your business across the web?

Continue reading “Secure Your Business from Negative Internet Buzz in 2 Easy Steps” »

If you’re a local business and have not heard of Groupon, you will.  They’ve been around for 3 years and have been building a coupon/offer business with a social networking aspect.  We’ve been tracking them for awhile and have heard many great success stories about their service for local businesses.  That’s just been further validated by a whopping $135 million investment, putting their company valuation at $1.25 billion!  Therefore, we thought it was time to put together a short blog on the service offering for local businesses to understand what it is, how it’s helped others, and what to expect.

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econsultancy has provided some great ideas on why you should be blogging for your small business. In addition, they have some tips on how to get started. check it out! A beginner’s guide to blogging for business http://bit.ly/c4PU15 from @econsultancy

A new report on the Q4 2009 is reporting a 111% increase in average small business search spending.  More and more businesses are turning online to find new customers and this report maybe demonstrating that many businesses are finding their stride online.   Of course, search engine marketing may not be for every industry, but you can see in the chart below who the top spenders are.

Here are some other highlights from the report:

Continue reading “Big growth in Video, Search Engine Marketing for Small Business – New report” »

Small business owners we talk to love to embrace the do-it-yourself attitude, so we thought it would be a good post to present the basics for do-it-yourself online marketing for local businesses.  We often here: “Why should I pay someone if I can do it myself?”  Of course, that’s usually if we had all the time in the world.  Unfortunately, Local SEO can become time consuming very quickly, especially due to the complexity of the fragmented local search market.  However, it is possible for owners to work on a little bit each month to improve their rankings on Google Maps for Local SEO, or improve their Yelp profile (Online Reputation Management) to reach new traffic, or add fresh content or a blog to their website (Search Engine Optimization) in order to improve their Google Search Rankings.  Part of the do-it-yourself marketing strategy is to prioritize your efforts based on what you’re trying to achieve and the amount of work that goes into each effort.  Many of our customers seem to ask a lot of the same questions, so we wanted to put together this list and prioritize it for those that are just getting started. Local SEO in the context of this article is the activity of updating your company’s business listings  and content (on both local search sites and your website) in order to improve your rankings on sites like Google Maps, Yelp, and other local sites and search engines.  After you have mastered, Local SEO, then you can start tackling Social Media Optimization (SMO), but that’s for another time.  Here we go, hope you’ve had your coffee today! Continue reading “How to improve rankings on google maps; Top 10 tips for Local SEO” »