The local listings directories have been around for only the last couple of years, and can provide you with quick, easy, and free direct response advertising for your business.

Best of all, after you setup your accounts, you’ll be able to include a direct link to your website or landing page, your direct email address, your physical address, your phone & fax numbers, and much, much more.

In addition to photos and graphic images, some local listings allow you to add video images. You will want to use every option available when creating your local listing, and using videos may give you the competitive edge in your unique niche market.

Creating videos may sound like a daunting task, but you will be surprised as just how easy they are to create, edit, and use to the advantage of your business. If you do not already have one, go ahead and create a YouTube account. Google local will give you the opportunity to upload YouTube videos. If you already have an account with YouTube, you are ahead of the game and can get started! YouTube is a free service that will be a great benefit in helping you promote your business on your local listing.

As you would with graphics and photos, you want to make sure you watermark your videos with your company name, website and phone number, or your call to action. There is a very easy service you can use if you absolutely no background in video production whatsoever, and you don’t have any tools locally or you don’t want to wait to learn. That service is a website called www.animoto.com. They have different pricing packages and you can choose the plan that suits you best. The cost is well worth it because the site takes your photos, your videos, your text, and your music and puts it together in a really slick, professional looking package. They create a high resolution video that you can download to your computer and from there you can upload to YouTube in a matter of minutes. There are some great tools out there for you to use that will help you get started whether you are a novice or expert at video creation.

In order to get you started, Animoto is the easiest. You can just as easily use Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, Final CutPro, or whatever software you may have. There are even programs that will take photos that you have locally and make little videos. For the money, Animoto is a pretty good buy. Be sure to take your time and try to create really high quality videos. If you do that, you’re going to see a lot of constant results by putting these videos on your local profile. Creating a video is as simple as having pictures you can put together in a cohesive form.

Ideally, you will want to put together five videos, as that is the maximum Google allows you to upload to your local listing. These five videos will allow you to do a lot of different things. You can get a lot of different rankings from the videos themselves, so it is in your best interest to use them.
Videos are a fantastic way to set you apart from your competition. Give your business an actual “face” to your potential customers. Videos are your way to ‘show off’ your business in ways many businesses don’t think about.

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If you’re a small business owner who needs more new customers, leads, & prospects, check out the Local Biz Bully local marketing home study course at http://www.LocalBizBully.com

The local listings directories have been around for only the last couple of years, and can provide you with quick, easy, and free direct response advertising for your business.

Best of all, after you setup your accounts, you’ll be able to include a direct link to your website or landing page, your direct email address, your physical address, your phone & fax numbers, and much, much more.

Pictures, photo’s, and graphics are an important aspect of your website and listing. Your customers will expect them as part of a professional and trustworthy business. Using photos and graphics in your local listing will give customers the opportunity to relate a photographic image to your specific business. Your listing will give them the means to contact you should they like an image they see.

Ideally, you will want to have a group of ten graphics or photos. You can use anything that shows more about your products, services, and who you are. You may wish to use your logo or show off your facilities, and other comparable things. Your photos should help identify your business, and separate it from your competition
What you should do is go to your website and save your photos. Ideally, you want as high a resolution as possible. Use tif format or jpg format. The larger and the higher the quality, the better off you will be. After you have those ten together you want to watermark those graphics with your company name, website and phone number. These photos will show up many places and you’ll always want to have some sort of insignia to let people know where they’re from and how to get in contact with you if they liked what they saw.

In order to watermark and protect your images, you will need to invest in some photo editing software. You don’t have to spend $1000 on Photoshop, although it is definitely worth it if you do a lot of photo editing. There is a similar product called Photoshop Elements and it is really good and very powerful. If you don’t have a photo editing software, this is the one to invest in. It’s an industry standard, it has a lot of different capabilities; it’s very capable, especially when compared to Photoshop. It is also relatively inexpensive and fairly easy to use. Feel free to read reviews on the product to get a better feel for how it can work for your business as well as comparing prices on various online sites to get the best possible deal on your software.

The reason behind creating a watermark is part protection and part promotion. You want to clearly mark all of your images with your call to action, or your offer, your website, email address and phone number and ideally your company name. This way people know when they see these images they can contact you to get more information about your products and services.

Photo editing software, such as Photoshop or Photoshop elements will allow you the freedom to play with the images you already have. You can clean them up, change the size, and generally tweak them to best suit the needs of your business. Your internet photos and graphics are the first contact many customers will have with your business. It is worth taking the time to make them professional looking in order to best benefit your business and profit potential.

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If you’re a small business owner who needs more new customers, leads, & prospects, check out the Local Biz Bully small business marketing home study course at http://www.LocalBizBully.com

The local listings directories have been around for only the last couple of years, and can provide you with quick, easy, and free direct response advertising for your business.

Best of all, after you setup your accounts, you’ll be able to include a direct link to your website or landing page, your direct email address, your physical address, your phone & fax numbers, and much, much more.

Once you have set up your local listings on the 3 main sites, you will want to begin promoting your listing. Essentially, you want to make it so that Google can go out to a variety of different places and find the same information about your business as you have in your local listing. This is basically to make sure that you’re a real business and that the information you’re giving them is relevant.

At the end of the day, Google’s business is providing the most relevant and most up to date content to its searchers because they know someone can very easily switch over to a competing search engine like Bing or Yahoo. They want to make sure they are providing the most relevant updated and correct content.

If you’re searching for a particular service provider on Google and you’re continually finding bad links or links to companies that look bogus or fake, you’re not going to have a lot of trust in their service. You’re going to go use someone else. Google’s ad dollars all tie into your eyeballs, so they want you to be there to see their ads!

Your goal is to get your unique website out there and to get your listing to a lot of different places . One way to do this is a paid service called: UBL.org (http://www.ubl.org). This is a very cool service. It will actually distribute all of your business information for $30 a year and it will put it in a variety of different directories.

Instead of having to go out to each different directory and actually submit your information, all you do is pay one fee and they have an automated system built to actually go out and submit that information for you. There are a lot of services that do this I find this site to be easy to use and it works very well.

The second tool I would like to share is Pingler (http://www.pingler.com). If you give it a website name and website URL, it submits to ping services. Ping services were developed for blogs. Anytime a website is updated a ping is automatically sent out. It says “I just added some new content, come out and check it out.”
All these different things will lend more credibility to your listing and show that other websites have found you and they know about you and they think enough about you that they have indexed your content. All of these different things will help promote your listing and get it to rank the highest that it possibly can.

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If you’re a small business owner who needs more new customers, leads, & prospects, check out the Local Biz Bully local internet marketing home study course at http://www.LocalBizBully.com

The local listings directories have been around for only the last couple of years, and can provide you with quick, easy, and free direct response advertising for your business.

Best of all, after you setup your accounts, you’ll be able to include a direct link to your website or landing page, your direct email address, your physical address, your phone & fax numbers, and much, much more.

One thing you will want to do is gather up some basic data pertaining to your business in an easily accessible location. After you gather the most essential elements, namely, business name, address, and phone number, you want to compile a little more detailed information.

The first thing to consider is your website URL. I always recommend to not send your customers directly to your public website. You’ll want to make a landing page. Essentially, it is a stripped down version of your website that has very minimal distractions along with minimal information. It might have a video; it might have a special offer and might have a call to action; a coupon or something that you want the person to do.

Often times, as you send people to your general website, they get lost and they might not be able find exactly what they are looking for, or may have trouble finding information as easily as they would like. You always want to send customers to a site where there is no other choice but to call, email, or contact you or come into your office.

Make sure your landing page contains: Your website URL, your email address, your fax number, and your hours of operation. It’s very important to have that.
Another vital piece of information you need to have accessible is a description of your business. Make sure you keep a list of top rated keywords to include for people searching for our product or service. The Google Keyword Tool is a free service that will allow you to see the specific keywords people search for globally in any type of market. If you compile a list of top rated words to use on your listing, you will help boost your rating.

Other great things to have handy are any awards or professional organizations that you’re involved with. Also have your contact person name, phone, and email.
You also have the ability to put testimonials out on your listing. The customer can give you those or there are ways to actually get those online yourself. If a customer is giving you a happy customer testimonial, you’ll definitely want to put all of that information together so you can include that in your listings. It will give you a lot of bang for your buck and help you get ranked more highly.

Finally, you’ll want to put together a special coupon graphic and offer. This can simply be a PowerPoint slide; you can download free templates all over the internet that will have a coupon layout. Create an offer, it can be a free month or a bonus when they buy something else, or a limited time offer. Make that the call to action for all people you get from these local listing leads. You certainly don’t want to waste these people coming to your site-so give them an offer they cannot refuse.
You want to find exactly what they are looking for as quickly as possible and get them to contact you. If you keep all of this basic information together as your customers initially find your site, they will be willing to explore your business site in depth after they have found what they are looking for. Encourage them to come to your site by catering to their needs for quick and easy contact information.

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If you’re a small business owner who needs more new customers, leads, & prospects, check out the Local Biz Bully local web marketing home study course at http://www.LocalBizBully.com

More “traditional” forms of advertising, like yellow pages, print ads, newspapers, radio, tv, and even billboards are continuing to decline in popularity due to their high ongoing costs and ever decreasing returns for the businesses they advertise.

Its with that in mind, that you should know about a new online marketing “weapon” thats not yet very well known or understood by small business owners looking to increase their business.

The new “weapon” is the local listings directories on Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and in this article, we’ll be discussing how you can use these type systems to basically dominate your local market in a matter of weeks.

Now, the local listings concept is something that’s relatively new in the internet marketing landscape but it has the potential to totally change the way we all market our products and services on the internet.

When you have a properly optimized local listing on each of the three largest search engines that exist in the world you’re going to win. You’re going to win over your competitors because you’re getting some of the most valuable exposure and screen real estate that’s possible on a search results page.

Over the last couple of years each of the three major search engines have devoted an enormous amount of area above the fold or the area that you can see on the search results page without using your browser scrollbar to these local listings.

Furthermore, it’s been shown through research that the number one listing captures 41% of the clicks on the first page of search results. That’s 41%, and best of all the clicks that you’ll get to your website are offered for free, not pay per click; at least at the current time of this article.

So when you have a highly ranked listing you’re going to be seen as more relevant and most importantly, more helpful to your potential prospect as you act as a trusted advisor. You’ll be providing them not only with your company name, phone number, and website contact information but you’ll also be giving them educational information in the form of videos, articles, pictures and even special offers in an effort to build that strong bond before you ever even meet or do business.

You’re truly ahead of the curve and by using the Local Listings directories to your advantage,; you’ll gain a huge advantage over your competitors both now and in the future.

Local marketing is the future of internet marketing and if you want to truly remain relevant and more importantly competitive in the market of the future this one the most valuable and profitable techniques that you can possibly learn or implement.

I look forward to being your guide throughout this journey and I can guarantee you that if you follow the clear step by step processes that I’ll show you and you invest the time to put together a high quality and well written details you will be successful and you will get results.

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If you’re a small business owner who needs more new customers, leads, & prospects, check out the Local Biz Bully online marketing course home study course at http://www.LocalBizBully.com

The local listings directories have been around for only the last couple of years, and can provide you with quick, easy, and free direct response advertising for your business.

Best of all, after you setup your accounts, you’ll be able to include a direct link to your website or landing page, your direct email address, your physical address, your phone & fax numbers, and much, much more.

What are some ways to help you optimize your site and help you stand apart from your competitors? After you have created your local listings, you will want to add reviews and testimonials to your site constantly. Whenever you have customer testimonials, be sure and add those and ask the customers to add their own.

You can add testimonials on Yelp. There are a variety of places where you can add your testimonials all over the internet. Every place you can add your reviews and testimonials is going to help your local listings. It’s going to give your listing more credibility, and in turn it’s going to get you a lot more clicks. Be constantly trying to get these testimonials from your customers and continue constantly adding and updating them.

You’ll want to link to local listings from your website or blog. For example, you’ll have three URL’s; one from Google Local, one from Bing Local and one from Yahoo Local. Each listing is a page that has your business on it. You’ll want to then take those links and add links back to pages from your website or blog. That’s going to give your listings authority, and let Google, Yahoo, and Bing that this is a real business and that they should trust your listing.

Where ever possible, you should submit market relevant articles for back links. A website’s ranking is for a particular keyword phrase and is determined by page optimization on the site. What that means is how optimized is your site, and most importantly what are the number of back links from high authority websites pointing back to your site?

An easy and a quick way to do this is to write a series of articles and submit them to the big boys; ezinearticles.com, isnare.com, goarticles.com, squidoo.com and hubpages.com. On each of these sites you can create an account in order to submit the articles. Some sites allow you to have hyperlinks within the article. In most cases you can add your bio at the bottom of these pages. In your bio you want to link to your local listings pages and also to pages on your own website. This is going to help you get your own website ranked higher as well as your local listings.

Making your listing appear authentic and authoritative to the various search engines is going to help you boost your ratings, and your profits. You are taking vital steps that will get people to your website. Take the time to do the extra work and your business will definitely reap the benefits.

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If you’re a small business owner who needs more new customers, leads, & prospects, check out the Local Biz Bully local search engine optimization home study course at http://www.LocalBizBully.com

The local listings directories have been around for only the last couple of years, and can provide you with quick, easy, and free direct response advertising for your business.

Best of all, after you setup your accounts, you’ll be able to include a direct link to your website or landing page, your direct email address, your physical address, your phone & fax numbers, and much, much more.

There are tips and tricks to help you find the ideal optimization for your site. One sure way to do this is to be sure and develop a mafia offer. What this means is make potential customers an offer they can’t refuse. You’ll want to put together an offer that none of your competitors are doing. Make it something that is so simple and brain-dead easy for a person to accept that they really can’t turn it down.

This is what you want to focus all of your marketing around. You want to be seen as different and you want to make it very, very easy for customers to come in and do business with you. This mafia offer can be included on your actual local listings or you can put it together on a landing page that you develop with a video and maybe and opt-in form.

Make sure you develop a landing page for your listing. If you don’t know how to do this, there are a lot of resources on the internet. The idea is that to remove 100% of the distractions that are typical on a business homepage. If a customer is unable to find what they are looking for on your site quickly, you stand the chance of losing them. You’ll want to drive customers to one page that has a very specific call to action-it might be your phone number or it might be an opt-in form. It must definitely have an offer you want to make to the person visiting your site.

Be sure and take advantage of the traffic that you’re going to be getting from these local listings and drive customers somewhere which very specifically states what you want them to do. Don’t just drop people on your homepage, they’ll get lost, they’ll get into other things and they’ll forget why they came there in the first place. You want to make sure you convert these people into customers.

It is worth the effort to take the time and develop this very special offer, because in the end you want to make sure that people not only come to your page and learn about your company, but they take that next step; they call you, they contact you and they do what you want them to do. Making this offer helps you to stand out from your competition, which as you know is not an easy thing to accomplish. Follow these simple guidelines and enjoy the fruits of your labor with active leads. Don’t let any lead go to waste.

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If you’re a small business owner who needs more new customers, leads, & prospects, check out the Local Biz Bully local business listings home study course at http://www.LocalBizBully.com

The local listings directories have been around for only the last couple of years, and can provide you with quick, easy, and free direct response advertising for your business.

Best of all, after you setup your accounts, you’ll be able to include a direct link to your website or landing page, your direct email address, your physical address, your phone & fax numbers, and much, much more.

Before you get started, its always a good idea to setup a new & separate email address to use for these new accounts. to ensure your primary email account doesn’t get inundated with spam, etc. In addition, when you’re setting up your new email account(s), try to make your new email address include some of your business’ main keywords.

For example, if you owned a gym in Houston, Texas, you might try to make your email address something like “houston-health-clubs@gmail.com”, etc. Although the benefits of this customization are minimal, they can be, nonetheless, beneficial to your local listings rankings.

As a side note, I highly recommend setting up a Google gmail account as your primary “secondary” email address, as it has an excellent spam filter, provides you with ample storage space, and is very quick & easy to search.

Now to get started, you’ll definitely want to do some basic keyword research to find out exactly what your target customers are searching for online.
All you need to do is go to Google and search for “Google external”, and you will find a great resource. It’s called the Google external keyword tool, and this is a free tool put out by Google basically to help it’s advertisers to find keywords that are related to them, to show them the volumes for which people are searching, and to show them how much it would cost to advertise for those top keyword terms to get in the top three ratings for a listing.

When you go through this you should find 2 or 3 different keywords you think someone who was searching for your products or services would look for. For example, for a local gym it might be “health club”, or “Fitness Club”, or “gym” or even “gym membership”.

All you need to do is just type in your words or phrase and click “Search.” Your results will come back and you’ll want to make sure and click “global monthly searches” to be descending.

After performing the search, you can see that the most popular terms are at the top, less popular ones are down on the page. Don’t lose sight of these lower traffic terms.

Even though some terms are low search volumes globally, they are generally very targeted people that are looking for your products or services and they are definitely worth going after. However, initially, for your local listings, we want to concentrate on getting you the “biggest bang-for-your-buck”.

Finally, you’ll want to weed through the terms that are not specifically related to your business, or terms that may be related to a competitor’s business name. You basically want to do this two or three different times with different source keywords that are general and those will give you some good ideas for different keywords that you should go after.

Keep in mind that for these local listings we’re not going to be going after all these different keywords. You should pick your largest ones and build everything in your campaign around those large keyword phrases because they are going to give you the best return on your time investment.

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If you’re a small business owner who needs more new customers, leads, & prospects, check out the Local Biz Bully local search engine marketing home study course at http://www.LocalBizBully.com

The local listings directories have been around for only the last couple of years, and can provide you with quick, easy, and free direct response advertising for your business.

Best of all, after you setup your accounts, you’ll be able to include a direct link to your website or landing page, your direct email address, your physical address, your phone & fax numbers, and much, much more.

One thing you will want to do is gather up some basic data pertaining to your business in an easily accessible location. Begin with your company name. Your company name should not be just your company name. Rather, it should be an optimized version of that. For example, if your business were a local gym in the Austin, Texas area, it would be something like Austin Health Club and Fitness Gym. You can see the city is mentioned in here, as well as the highest search volume term.
Unfamiliar with optimizing your site for specific keywords? All you need to do is go to Google and search for “Google external”, and you will find a great resource. It’s called the Google external keyword tool, and this is a free tool put out by Google basically to help it’s advertisers to find keywords that are related to them, to show them the volumes for which people are searching, and to show them how much it would cost to advertise for those top keyword terms to get in the top three ratings for a listing.

Once you use this tool, you can search for a variety of terms pertinent to your market. Create a list of optimal terms someone may use in order to find information in your market. You should have an entire list containing all of your keywords. Take out all of the duplicates, remove any that aren’t applicable and then pick the top ten or twenty. The first one would be the one that you would optimize for in your actual company name, Austin Health Club and then the next keyword term.

Have your address ready. One big note about your address; it needs to be in the actual city that you’re trying to optimize for. If you are optimizing for Austin, Texas you have to have a physical address not a PO Box. A physical address, as close to the city center as possible. If you go to Google maps and search for your city, wherever it says is your city center, that’s where you would like your address to be. It seems to help a little bit in getting your rankings a little higher than if you didn’t have that. Just something to keep in mind if you are doing business in multiple different cities, you need to actually set up an address in each of those cities. That’s very, very, important.

If you just have an address somewhere else that’s fine, if you need one all you need to do is call a UPS store that’s around the city center and set up an account with them to get a physical address.

Having these essentials kept together is going to make creating your local listing a much easier task . These pieces of information are vital in providing potential customers with the means to contact you in your market area. If you take the time to gather up your essential information, you will find that marketing your business will be a piece of cake.

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If you’re a small business owner who needs more new customers, leads, & prospects, check out the Local Biz Bully local marketing home study course at http://www.LocalBizBully.com

The local listings directories have been around for only the last couple of years, and can provide you with quick, easy, and free direct response advertising for your business.

Best of all, after you setup your accounts, you’ll be able to include a direct link to your website or landing page, your direct email address, your physical address, your phone & fax numbers, and much, much more.

There are tips and tricks to help you find the ideal optimization for your site. First of all, you’ll want to do a search on Yahoo, Bing and Google. This way, you can see if your business is already out there and has a listing. If you do see that, then you can actually just claim the existing listing and update that versus creating a totally new listing. This going to get you a lot quicker turn around as you already have placement, and you are just going to enhance what already exists. If you can ever claim your existing listing go ahead and do that versus creating a new one-it will save you a fair amount of your valuable time!

Next, before you optimize, make sure you go to each of the three search engines and do a search for the specific keyword phrase you’re trying to optimize. For example, if you’re trying to optimize for the business name Houston Plumber, then you want to do a search on each of the search engines for Houston plumber. Then look at what returns from your search. If there is no local listing returned, then typically it means they haven’t had a chance to index the information and include it in the results. It’s probably coming down the road.

If you haven’t already, start a spreadsheet that contains all of the keywords you have researched for frequency. If the term you are trying to optimize does not come up, go to another keyword term to optimize and make certain that one appears. There is no point in optimizing for a phrase that doesn’t show up. Only go after two to three keyword phrases in your business name. That’s one of the biggest factors for determining your ranking.
For example, a good business name would be home plumbers and 24 hour or plumber, or something similar. You’ll only want to include the city name once. Don’t say Houston plumber and Houston emergency plumber. You’ll want to just make the name look fairly natural but make sure you include at least two of your main keyword phrases in your business name. If you can fit in three that’s even better. Google is changing the keywords allowed from time to time, so just go within their rules and do what you can.

In addition to including a business name in your listing, you need more information, such as a local location. In your listing, try to use a physical address whenever possible; not a PO Box. Physical addresses have been shown to rank more highly.

One trick is if you have retail store local you should create a separate listing for every city that you’re in. This is pretty huge! If you’re multiple cities in and around your main city, you can create separate listings in each of those. They will be considered as different listings, you’re going to get ranked higher in that specific city and that’s more links pointing to your website, so definitely take the time to create a separate listing for every city that you’re in.
Using these incredibly simple but highly effective tricks will definitely boost your listing. Accumulating necessary information and putting it into a local listing helps you beat out the competitors who are spending tons of money to get their sites to the top of search listings. Not only are you reaching top listings, you are doing it for free!

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If you’re a small business owner who needs more new customers, leads, & prospects, check out the Local Biz Bully small business marketing home study course at http://www.LocalBizBully.com