Due to the ever evolving world of technology, people are looking to the internet to find business recommendations locally. Businesses that appear in the local search results are found on several online business listings. Submitting your business online can help with your companies search engine optimization. So don’t wait to be found! Submit your business information to get listed on some of the free directories including:

Google Places

As the number one search engine, it’s critical that your business has a local search page. In doing so, your business can be found and you can physically verify your information. Google also allows your business to stand out among the crowd. You can make the public aware of what types of products and services you offer and upload photos, videos, current offerings and more. The best part? You can get insightful information about your listing and make sure you’re making wise businesses decisions moving forward.

Bing Local

Bing Local allows your business to appear in the results when users are looking or are near your location. Bing Local gives you the opportunity to improve or update your business listing at any time. If you have more than one business location you can manage those listings as well. A thorough verification process further enables you to protect your account and authorize your changes.

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Local listing permits you to customize your business listing by selecting a basic or enhanced profile that is easy to manage. The basic option lets you display your business contact information, store hours along with your products and services and it’s free! With the enhanced feature, you will have everything the basic listing includes in addition to your business logo and tagline, photos, and a detailed business description.

Yelp

Yelp allows every business owner or manager to setup an account to post products and services, hours of operation, offerings, photos and even message their customers. Users can rate and provide comments on your business as well as forward the listing to a friend for more information. You also have access to see who your competitors might be of those viewers who viewed your listing.

Best of the Web Local

Best of the Web Local allows you to provide your business contact information including website and email as well as driving directions, photographs and payment options. BOTW Local Premium offers you more visibility and detailed information that can ultimately drive greater foot traffic to your location.

It’s important to keep in mind there are a slew of other online business listings that must be completed to really make an impact and get your business found.

Of all the inventions in the last 50 years, few have changed the world as much as the Internet.  Destroying mail, books, television and dignity, life has changed much thanks to our electronic friend.  Here are 15 ways, for better or for worse, the Internet has changed marketing.
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What is Linkbait?

For those who are familiar with ProspectMX and linkbait, it’s no surprise that link bait and link baiting is a strong marketing tool used to attract new website visitors and more importantly, backlinks for greater rankings on search engines. But the more important question is, what is a successful piece of linkbait?

The good news is that there are several types of linkbait that can be deemed successful. First, like any marketing campaign, you have to know your target audience for the company, product or service you wish to promote. Any marketer or link baiter knows this is a critical element for the overall success of the campaign being put into action. Once you have your target audience down to a science, you can then determine which type or piece of link bait is most relevant to your audience.

Once you decide who to target, the fun part begins. It is now time to decide which form of linkbait is best for your website. Listed below are some of the most modern forms of linkbait flowing through the internet today.

• Useful Web Based Tools/Software
• Lists of Valuable Resources
• Interesting Infographics
• WordPress Themes/Plug-ins
• Widgets
• Just About Anything Funny (Videos, blog post, etc.)
• Press Releases
• Contests

Once you have created your linkbait master piece it is time to market it through the right channels. Remember when we found our target audience, well here is where it makes life a bit easier. Most linkbait ideas are always Digg and StumbleUpon worthy especially if it is funny or controversial. These sites allow you to display your linkbait in front of millions of viewers where it either goes viral or just gets a few hits. You can also market the piece on your social media outlets, broadcasting it to all your Fans and Followers. Other types of linkbait such as blog posts and press releases are useful as well to help with web traffic, rankings and online presence. If submitting press releases online, a few well noted ones are:

• I-newswire
• PRLog.com
• Pressreleasepoint.com
• PRWeb.com (Paid)

How do you tell if your linkbait is working?

If you are using Digg and StumbleUpon to market your linkbait, they provide a system that tallies up how many viewers were interested in your linkbait. The more Diggs or Thumbs Up you receive the more interesting your viewers find your linkbait. If you are using blog posts and press releases to announce your linkbait, your best bet is to use a web tracking service. Google provides this for free, it is called Google Analytics. Within this tracking system you can tell exactly where your website visitors are coming from. You can also track individual URLs (the exact URL that your blog post or press release was listed on) and view how many people are coming from those sites.

Example of a Successful Linkbait Campaign

One example of a successful linkbait campaign was performed by Red Bull, a company well known throughout the Western and European countries for their energy drinks. The company has built their website upon a strong foundation of linkbait. Their target audience is adrenaline junkies who thrive on high risk sports.

One of their most popular contests was the Flúgtag, or in English, Airshow. It was an event where a bunch of idiots decide to launch something off of a pier 30ft over a reservoir of water. What makes this contest so fun to watch is the fact that most participants create flying contraptions that rarely fly at all, and plummet the moment they are pushed off the pier. Once these flights are filmed they immediately become linkbait on the internet and are posted everywhere.

Contests are just a scratch in the selection of linkbait ideas available out there, as you saw when reviewing the “Types of Linkbait” above. But, since Redbull has such a well known brand there may not always need a backlink. All they need to do is advertise their logo, which encourages viewers to go to the website to see more.

Conclusion

So, the result? Any piece of linkbait can be successful as long as you know your target audience, gear the piece to them, and market it well. If you want a jump start with your linkbait piece, check out StumbleUpon for some starter ideas to get the juices flowing. Also, more brains are better than one, so call in some friends or co-workers to discuss creative ideas. It is important to remember that linkbait can be implemented into a project at any time during your products life cycle. It just depends on the form of linkbait you wish to implement.

Google Instant Search Case Study and Explanation

We have had  a tremendous amount of questions surrounding the topic of Google’s new instant search. Most of the questions  seem to relate to expectations that the business executive should have on the impact of traffic and conversions.

Now that we’ve actually had a week and a half to monitor some phrases that we personally rank for and check the impact of instant search on those keyword phrases, we figured it it would be best to share them with our customers and, of course, you.

I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other about instant search.  It’s almost like in some areas it will be a detriment and others a positive, so it’s almost a wash.  But read below, and I’ll explain why.

How It Used To Be

Before instant search, the default by Google was to offer suggestions in a drop-down fashion as the user would type their query into the search input box. However, no results would be displayed until the user pushed enter or click the search button.

A good example, which we are using in this case study, is the phrase “home value”. As you would type “home value,” you would indeed see suggestions drop down. They would not be that great of an influence, but may give you a few good ideas.

How Google Instant Search Changes Search As We Know It

Google automatically displays the results for the phrase "home values" when a user may be trying to search for "home value."

Now, you’ll notice that by the time you get to the letter “v” in the phrase “home value,” Google has already displayed the searches for the plural term, “home values.” so, “what’s the big deal?” You ask. The big deal, for us anyway, is that our website doesn’t rank on the first page for that  plural term. It does, however, rank for the singular term. So, if Google instant search is followed by the user 100% of the time, then we’d have just lost all of our organic traffic from Google for the term “home value.” In our case, this could literally mean hundreds of dollars every day in revenue.

In this "instant search," the user could be looking for a small business that sold home products and is then distracted by "Home Depot" all over the page along with maps, etc.

Let’s think about a small town hardware store named “Home Store.” Imagine yourself going to Google and searching for, “home store.” Once you type in the first “m,” you have Home Depot staring at you in the face along with a great shiny map. I believe, this small-town store may just lose some sales as a result of instant search.

I’m not stating an opinion one way or the other, only that it’s definitely something that needs to be thought about by the small business owner moving forward about the organic search (and paid search for that matter) marketing that is being done for an organization.

What Our Data Shows About Instant Search Surprised Me

My initial reaction when I saw that Google was automatically displaying the results for “home values,” as you were typing in the phrase “home value” was one of true despair. I assumed that having the results automatically appear for a different phrase would be so much of a distraction that people would automatically flock to them.

This is not what we found out in our data however. I go over this in great detail in the video above, but here is a synopsis.

• Google instant search was launched on September 8, 2010.
• We compared two different sets of data. Both  datasets were individuals searching Google for the phrase “home value” who landed on our page that ranks for that term.
• In the national search results, we have consistently been ranked at number three during the entire time frame of our datasets.
• We compared Wednesday, August 25, 2010 through Sunday, September 5, 2010 to Wednesday, September 8, 2010 through September 19, 2010. This gave us an accurate day by day comparison, because search volumes vary greatly during different days of the week.

The results?

18.64% increase in search traffic from Google after instant search distracted users away from our tested phrase.

We found that even though users are defaulted to search results we do not appear in, we actually saw an increase in traffic from Google of 18.64%. To be honest, I can’t logically explain it.

One of the few things is happening. Either Google is showing different instant search results to different people, and the phrase “home value” is one of them or people are disabling Google instant search. The only other explanation would be that the results are simply being ignored. Maybe the average Google user, who doesn’t live in this stuff every day like we do, is almost seeing them as advertisements and doing what they want to do anyway.

We’ll see how this affects things in the future, but as for now… I’m not nearly as worried as I was 12 days ago.

Over the last few weeks, we have been meeting several people on the internet marketing public speaking scene. Since nearly every internet marketing speaker has a slightly different approach to how they tackle the process of online promotions, we wanted to take the time and pick the brains of some of the experts we’ve met.

The first internet marketing speaker we had the chance to sit down with was Michael Temple. Below is the transcript of our awesome conversation.

Q: Why did you get into Internet marketing?
A: I had a bit of a rough trip through the dot com bubble back in the late 90s and early 2000. I worked for a dot com that had a very good product and great concept, one of the few that was proven successful in the long term. Unfortunately we didn’t market very well and we ended up going under from lack of capital as so many other dot com companies did during that time. When the company failed like so many others my stock options became worthless and I lost a lot of money. I vowed I would learn everything I could about Internet marketing and the next company or project I was involved in would not make the same mistakes. I believe I have kept that promise I made to myself so long ago and I believe my clients all benefit everyday from my hard won experience.

Q: What types of projects and work do you do now?
A: The aspect of Internet marketing I find so fascinating is how much effect it has on almost every industry and company. I have never found a company that couldn’t benefit from doing some type of marketing online. Because of that philosophy I have been very fortunate and been able to work with companies in a variety of industries. I help clients in B2B set up lead generation online systems, eCommerce for B2C firms, and a variety of other projects like copywriting and search engine optimization. I am also a passionate entrepreneur so I spend a lot of time working on my own projects and web sites. I now have several different web site projects that earn an income for me and I am constantly tweaking them to make them better. Finally, I travel the country working as an Internet marketing speaker and training companies and associations how to use Internet marketing to build up their businesses.

Q: What do you think makes you different as an Internet marketing consultant?
A: Two things, first, I am not afraid to talk about and learn from my failures. I doubt there is a marketing person alive who doesn’t have failures. Unfortunately too many people are afraid to talk about or acknowledge those failures, which is unfortunate because I almost believe you learn more from them than your successes. My dot com failure back in early 2000 was big learning experience for me and while I certainly didn’t have control of the entire company I did still learn from that failure. Second, I am an entrepreneur out doing my own projects every day. The strategies and ideas I provide to my consulting and speaking clients are ideas I have tried with my own money and time. I didn’t just read about them on web site or in a book. I have actually tried and continue to use the strategies that are most effective. In addition, I am an adjunct professor of marketing at the University of Toledo and have the opportunity to do a lot of research and writing in my role with the University, which my clients get the advantage of.

Q: What great insight can you share with your readers?
A: Being successful in Internet marketing is about marketing – not fancy technology. I think one of the critical mistakes made during the dot com era was that people focused too much on creating marvelous technological advances without asking the fundamental question of who will buy this and why? I still see it today. Too many web developers focus on creating fantastic web sites that nobody ever visits. The technology is wonderful, but it is like building a 3D Imax Theatre on a dirt road, nobody will ever find it. You have to answer the fundamental marketing questions before you decide which technology tools to use. Technology is a tool, nothing more. It is a means to an end, not the end in itself.

Q: Can you give our readers a good tip on how to improve their marketing prowess on the web?
A: Yes, focus on the concept of direct marketing. Direct marketing involves writing powerful copy and persuading someone to take action. It is measurable and causes the proverbial cash register to ring. Remember nothing happens in business until somebody buys something so focus on the one area of marketing that has consistently produced money making results for decades and that is direct marketing tools and strategies.

About Michael
Michael Temple is an Internet marketing consultant, speaker, and entrepreneur. In addition to his consulting practice Michael also is a professor of marketing for University of Toledo teaching Internet and direct marketing to the next generation of marketers. He is the owner of several different businesses both on and off the web and is passionate about helping his clients achieve measurable and effective marketing results. If you need a consultant or a speaker for your next event you can learn more by visiting his web site at http://www.web2gold.com.