Local Biz Bits
Local Search Marketing Information for Small Business

Today we are happy to have Julia Dalton Manager, Marketplace & Directory Services from ThinkLocal.com

Q.Tell us a little about yourself.
A. I began my experience in the internet industry working for MonsterCommerce, an Ecommerce company that is now part of Network Solutions. My background is focused mainly in online marketing and product development, particularly with search engine and directory related properties. Search and online marketing fascinate me because they are constantly evolving and changing, making this industry a challenging but exciting space to be in.

Q. What is ThinkLocal?
A. ThinkLocal is a local search engine that has over 17 million business listings in addition to local weather, maps and directions, local events, city spotlights, and business reviews.

We introduced the site in April 2006 with the goal of providing a good launching pad to getting online for many small businesses that do not yet have an online presence, which is a large percentage of the business population. It can also be an option for businesses that are already online to come, sign up for one of our listings, and enhance their online visibility.

Q. What costs are involved? (Standard vs. Enhanced listing?)
A. There is no cost to obtain a Standard listing on ThinkLocal, it is completely free. With a Standard listing you have the ability to manage your business information, including adding captions and a long description of your business and services. Additionally, your listing will show up among the regular search results for relevant searches to your business and category.

We offer an option for businesses to increase their visibility in our search results by purchasing an Enhanced listing. With an Enhanced listing, you have all of the same benefits as a Standard listing; however, your listing will show up in our featured sections of our search results. Business owners can select their package based off of the geo targeting and category options they choose to advertise within. For example, a plumber in Saint Louis who only services Saint Louis City may only want his enhanced listing to display for plumbing related searches in Saint Louis City to maximize the effectiveness of his ad. We give businesses those options to choose what target audience they want to impact with their ads. You can find more information about our Advertising options by going here.

Q. Do you submit info the business data anywhere?
A. At this time we do not submit our business information to any additional search engines or directories. Our goal is to get our small business clients as much traffic and visibility as possible, so working with other local directories or search engines is something we may look at in the future. However right now, our focus is providing the best experience for users we can on ThinkLocal.com.

Q. Reverse Yellow Pages -what is that?
A. Reverse Yellow Pages is basically a search that provides the ability to find business information, essentially in the opposite way in which people tend to think of finding businesses. Say, for example, you only have the phone number of a business but not the address, or you have the address but cannot remember the name of the business. A Reverse Yellow Page lookup will enable you to put in the phone number or address of a business and find the listing you were looking for with all of the information you need. It is simply another tool for us to offer to assist our users in locating the business information they are looking for.

to be continued….

Got an email a while back from a new website/local search, ParkingHunter.com. The purpose of the website is to help folks find places to park their cars.  From their press release:

ParkingHunter.com has created a marketplace for monthly parking spaces and currently has 2500+ parking spots available. The goal is to connect car-less home owners that have empty driveways, with motorists who want affordable parking. The service is at no cost for users to advertise their parking spots. In addition to renting, users can also buy and sell parking real-estate.”

I zipped over to the web site and this is not a bad idea. The site is in beta but I like what they are trying to do.  I recently went to Atlanta and was looking on Mapquest for parking lots in the city. So if you are curious, pop over to the site and take it for a spin.  Future plans, they say,  are being developed to allow for hourly parking and mobile reservations.

note: I did contact them for more information but they did not return my email.

Email marketing can be a very effective means of communicating on-line but one needs to be careful. With all the spam out there, it can be difficult. I recently sat down with the CEO of mobileStorm – email and mobile marketing, Jared Reitzin and picked his brain.

Q. Tell us a little about your site and services.
A. mobileStorm has pioneered the concept of multi-channel marketing for the small-to medium-sized business. We provide a turnkey, hosted email and digital messaging platform backed by world-class support and expert digital marketing services.

We have created the most complete digital marketing solution available, enabling our customers to reach their audiences via email, text (mobile) messaging, voice messaging or fax broadcast from a single provider. Our service is web-based, and client can sign up and send their first campaign in less than 10 minutes.

Q Where do you see email/direct marketing going in the future?
A. Presence marketing. This is where I get emails, SMS messages etc.. that is related to my presence or location. For instance if I travel to New York, my usual Tuesday morning ticketmaster email wouldn’t have events in So Cal, but in Manhattan. 

Q. How can local business use email marketing to help promote themselves? 
A. Let’s take a restaurant business for example. They should be asking on their comment cards for someone’s email address. In exchange for the address, the restaurant will send out offers only available from their “e-club”. They can offer last minute weekend specials, 2 for 1 drinks etc.. they can offer real coupons that can be printed out and redeemed. Email marketing is the perfect medium for local business because it is easy to build your database and inexpensive to market to it. Ever bought an add in the LA times or a 30 second radio spot? 

Q. How can one effectively email or direct market using your services without getting lost in all the spam out there?
A. It’s tough. Spammers have made it hard for legitimate marketers to get their messages into the inbox. The email inbox vendors like hotmail, yahoo, and AOL have an even harder job. They spend millions fighting spam. If their customer’s inbox is filled with spam, they will lose them, so they put very tight systems in place to fight spam. These systems aren’t perfect, legit mail gets blocked all of the time.  There is a war going on and the crazy part is that 90% of spam comes from 10 people/organizations.

Spammers are always one step ahead of everyone. The best thing a business can do is make sure they are following best practices , and working with an Email Service Provider (or ESP) like mobileStorm to ensure they have the best chance to hit the inbox. ESPs will offer things like authentication, dedicated IP addresses and whitelisting, all much needed services for email deliverability. 

Q. For a business just starting out-how can they use your services or where should they start? 
A. We built Stun! with the small business in mind. I actually wanted to make it easy enough so that my mom can use it. The first thing you do after you sign up is go through a 12 step wizard. Only one step is required, however if you do each step at the end when you log into the control panel, you will have your account set up and ready to go.

Our pricing is based upon the amount of messages someone sends on a monthly basis. We also offer a number of additional services to ensure your digital marketing success. A nice feature we recently added was a questionnaire at the beginning of our 12 step wizard. Based upon your answers we recommended services that will help your business grow.

Thanks Jared. This is a 2 part article that I am putting on the two blogs that I currently run. Part one of this article is about a number of “war stories” that I have read over the last few months, which I found to be very good. You can see which I picked at the ShowMeLocal blog.

Another quick post on a few articles on link building that I thought deserved your attention:

Link Building Secrets Revealed by Top Linking Experts put together by Pole Position Marketing. You can even download a pdf file.  

No Recession For Link Building by Eric Ward

How Social Media Becomes Link Fertilizer, by Eric Ward 
 

There have been a number of informative posts on the subject over the last few months, so I decided to share those I liked.

It is getting more important these days to have some idea of what is being said about you and your company. More and more business are now offering reputation management services.  Happy reading.

Mike B, the Internet Guy had a nice list of articles in his post, Online Reputation Management Interview and Resources

Interview: Online Reputation Management with Brett Borders over at seOverflow

Marketing Pilgram:
Five Steps for Recovering from an Online Reputation Crisis

Masable Social Networking News:
Online Reputation Management for Individuals

Search Engine Land:
Local Business Listings: Dealing with Negative Reviews by Chris Linnett

Reputation Monitoring Made Easy, And Free! by Aaron Wall- nice article on do-it-yourself reputation management.

Today I have the privilage of speaking with John A.Manning, SVP Business Development of GenieKnows.

Q. Can you tell us a little about yourself?
 A. My background is in Clinical Therapy and Educational Psychology which I practced as a private practioner until 2004.I am one of the founding partners of Genieknows.com which we started in 1999. At present I am the SVP of Business Development and my Barb is the CEO and President.
 
Q. What is Genieknows? How long has it been around?
A. Genieknows.com is an online Advertising Network that offers national and international premium traffic to advertisers or their  agents. At present our network of global publishers provides about 1.6 billion searches or queries per month from USA, Canada,Western Europe and UK,Pacific Rim countries, Australia,Hong Kong, Taiwan to name a few.

We provide geo targeting so advertisers can select where and when they want their ads to be seen. We have patent pending state of the art fraud detection techniques to protect our advertsers campaigns. What we have done most recently, in addition to offering results in wide range of search keywords, is focus on certain niche areas, particularly Games, Health, and of course Local Search.
 
Q. How can a small business use Genieknows to help promote their business, increase their online visibility?
A. Genieknows allows small and medium  size  businesses to have greater control over their ads and hence their potential market like they can not do with the larger search engines. We work personally and closely with advertisers on the phone, in real time to make sure they are having their needs met and not being victimized and losing money.

Our Local Search tools are part of the neighborhood for both the merchant and the purchaser, making the business of buying and selling user friendly and simple like it should be. People live in neighborhoods not “big cities”; they shop in neighborhoods, they visit “areas” for business and pleasure. They want to know the businesses and services that are there;and the businesses want to know their customers and what they want. Genieknows Local makes all that really easy and pleasant. Businesses have visibility and become part of the shoppers mental road map for goods.
 
Q. What is Genieknows Local?
A. Local.Genieknows.com is only one of three local search engines that provides results for all the USA and Canada; the other two are Google and MSN. Genieknows Local is a way of thinking and doing business that makes sense to merchants and shoppers. It provides tools and functionalities unlike any other local search  engine because it allows you to organize space and services like you want and need to do which may be different for someone else.
 
Q. Where does Genieknow Local gets its info? Any particular database(s) you use?
A. All of our patent pending technology is developed in house; we have our own research department and do our own crawling of the web.
 
Q. How can a small business get listed with Genieknows local?
A. Any size business can get listed with Genieknows local by simply going to our site and signing up as an advertiser or emailing me directly jmanning@genieknows.com  
 
Q. Where do you see local search going in the near future?
A. Local search is the future. 90% of people shop where they live and use services within a fairly consistent radius; so it make sense that as we improve the searching  search quality and personalization people will continue to flock to the market through the local vehicle.
 
Q. Anything else you would like to say about Genieknows or Genieknows Local?
A. We are extremely proud of what we have been able to achieve in this  industry since we are a very small, privately owned family business. We believe that if people set their minds to things, they can make things happen, dispite being small individuals; when the individuals come together they are a force to be reckoned with even against the Goliaths out there.

We believe this at Genieknows; that is why we need your readers to go to the site, use it and send us feedback so we can continue to improve it and personalize it for them and tell their friends about The Little Engine That Did.

Thank you John for your time and LocalBizBits readers, head over there and take a look.

When everyone is speaking /writing about local search engines, usually they mean Google and Yahoo, but what about Local.com?  They seemed to be in the news every other week last year,  (check out their press releases) and just recently this year - Local.com Wins Hitwise U.S. Top Ten Award. 

I get my clients listed there and from what I have seen, heard, and reviewed, Local.com is pretty good. They are one of the top players in local search.

So…my questions to you are:
Do you use Local.com?
Do you think they are a big player in local search?
Do you like what they are doing?

Look forward to your input.