Now you can incorporate PayPal’s “Buy Now” button into your specials.
Just follow instructions in the Miscellaneous/PayPal Settings to set up a valid PayPal email and start placing “Buy Now” button into your specials.
Have a great day,
The Development Team
To be successful, you need to engage your customer. You need to talk with them, not at them. You need to be open and answer questions. This is one of the harder things to do on-line since you are not on-line 24×7. This is where your web site comes in.
You need to have a web presence on-line that engages your visitor enough so that they become a customer.
Starting Conversations with Contact Pages by Bill Slawski over at Search Engine Land is an excellent article on the subject. Bill specifically addresses the contact page.
“It can also help to start conversations that can provide you invaluable feedback, which can make the pages of your site easier to use, more informative, and easier to find. Listening to the language of your customers can give you insights into their perspective on what you offer, and the words that they use to describe those offerings.”
Bill goes over what to include and why it is important. I have to say, since I updated my contact page, I have gotten more calls and emails.
In addition to your contact page, I think the whole web site needs to engage your visitor. Provide the critical info your visitors need. Make it easy for them to get a hold of you.
Blogging is an excellent tool you can use to interact with your visitor. You should use a blog to provide info, ask questions, answer questions, and so on. Blogging can be done for free-only thing it will cost is your time. One of ShowMeLocal’s features is providing some blog space, so can engage your customer. Take the time to show them you know what you are talking about.
Remember your web presense is your chance to make a good impression, so take some time to organize what you want to say and how you want to do it. You will find it is a very wise investment.
Geo-targeting does not take a highly expensive computer or military tracking system to run but it does take some effort. All small business participate in some sort of targeting-always looking to get their messsage to the “right” customer.
Geo-Targeting online simply means adding a geographic component to your website or ad and is a very important part of any local business’s marketing campaign.
There was a series of excellent articles on Geo-targeting at Local Point:
Geo-Targeting Primer - Part I - Users
Geo-Targeting Primer - Part 2 - Advertisers
Geo-Targeting Primer - Part 3 - Systems
The articles break up the concept of geo-targeting into 3 components and discusses each one individually. They are good articles but for some beginners, might be too much. Geo-targeting has 3 aspects: the user or your customer, the advertiser or the business owner and finally the system of how do you use geo-targeting.
In this post, I want to introduce the general idea of geo-targeting on your website. This is an important component for the on-line business since the Interent really knows no boundaries. You want to do whatever is necessary to make sure your website or business profile show up in front of the right audience.
Another good article for you to read is The hCard Microformat & Local Search Optimization by Chris smith.
“The hCard microformat is a standard method of semantically marking up your HTML to inform the search engines (and other devices/applications) very precisely about which part of your page text contains address, phone numbers, and other typical directory listing info.”
Chris goes on to discuss how to add the hcard to your website. Now in addition to the hcard, you need to make sure your geographic information is on the web site proper.
The last point is that you get your business listed in directories, (such as ShowMeLocal 
) that allows for geo-targeted searches. Being able to be listed in your city, state, or region is also very important. Remember want to make it easy for folks to find you.
Anotehr aspect that ShowMeLocal has, that I find useful, is how you can create a network of business listings via your business network. Networking with other businesses in your geographic location is a win-win situation.
So when you are working on your on-line promotions, make sure to remember the geographic aspects of things.
Running an off-line business can be a very time consuming and frustrating venture, yet at the same time it can be very rewarding. Running an on-line business is the same way. One of the biggest issues that I find with those trying to do business on-line is a lack of understanding of the “on-line world.” In general, doing business on-line is not very hard, it simple takes some time to understand all that is involved and some patience.
This is a 2 part article that I am putting on the two blogs that I currently run. Part one of this articles is about a number of “war stories” that I have read over the last few months, while part two is about a service I have found and tried at mobileStorm.com.
Stories of on-line business experiences:
Local search success at photo site by Carol Krol is a neat story how a business turned to local search marketing to build their business
The Power and Impact of Google Maps over at SEORefugee is a very interesting post about how one business depended on Google Maps for business
A Small Business Marketing Success Story: Pink Cake Box is an interview by Matt McGee with a small business that is building up its business using its web site, a blog, public relations, and social media.
All of these are good reading and should provide plenty of food for thought.
Part 2 is an interview I conducted with mobileStorm.com, a company that provides email marketing. 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 sat down with the CEO of mobileStorm, Jared Reitzin and picked his brain. You can read the full interview at LocalBizBits.
As you have surfed the web, you probably have seen many websites that offer affiliate programs. What is the goal of an affiliate program? Basically, an affiliate program is there to help promote that website or business.
ShowMeLocal is growing and working hard to improve its services for you and your local business. They are very happy to announce that they have launched their own affiliate program. All current members of ShowMeLocal are able to join and the program is free. Please note, this program is primarily geared towards local business marketers.
This affiliate program does not provide financial compensation to its users, it provides something just as valuable-marketing visibility. As an affiliate of ShowMeLocal, you will help build the ShowMeLocal community by getting more businesses listed.
When you add a business, via your affiliate link, that business can be added to our business network on ShowMeLocal. If the businesses you add are in the same geographic location, you can create a nice local network.
Also your custom business listing will be visible on each business profile you add. If you are a marketer, is a great tool to promote and increase visibility of your clients.
I spoke with Eugene Belenky, owner of ShowMeLocal and asked him, “What is your vision for the affiliate program?”
“Larry, We are looking forward to working together with professionals across the country and not only giving them a great tool but also listening to their comments and requests to make ShowMeLocal better and easier to use.
In addition to promoting yourself, we will be open to doing revenue sharing, once the subscription service is introduced. We think this is a win-win for all involved.”
To summarize, the ShowMeLocal Affiliate Program will:
Feel free to contact Eugene or myself if you have any questions, and thanks for helping building ShowMeLocal.
Today’s post I will answer a question, I received from one of our readers.
Warren J. Sonne of Sun State Investigative Services, Inc., asked, “Is it helpful to periodically change the content on webpages?”
Warren stated he has seen conflicting info on the subject..well Warren, I have seen that too. Over my years on-line, it seems everyone has an opinion on the search engines and what matters. I pretty much have decided that experience is the best teacher. So my general answer to your question is YES. Google and the other engines definitely like fresh content. My blog posts are picked up very quickly (aftger writing them) by the engines and indexed.
Google and the others do look at the date the pages were last updated. If you use a Google sitemap, it will look to see when the page(s) were last updated.
I found this article on the subject too.
I also asked my friend and associate, Nick Stamoulis of Brick Marketing for his opinion. This is what he said:
I would recommend adding content for the following reasons (in order of importance):
1. Improving the visitor experience: Visitor usability and experience is the most important factor when it comes to content on a website.
2. Search Engine Optimziation: Adding relevant content to help with natural rankings is a good thing to do, only if it gives visitor useful information (articles, tips, etc)
I agree with Nick that your visitor experience is just as important as the search engines. Hope this helps.
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