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Forfreecars.com – Free Car Location Site.
Nov 12th
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How To Use Location Based Marketing To Grow Your Business
Jun 25th
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Google to Charge for Directions Location Extension
Jun 2nd
Google’s Local Extensions in AdWords have been a favorite paid advertising technique for small business owners since it was released in 2009. With Local Extensions, business owners are able to attach relevant business information (like their address, phone number and a link to directions) directly to their ad, making it easier for searchers to take action after seeing the business appear in the search results. During this past holiday weekend it was announced that Google would be making a small change to the system. Business owners will now be charged when a user clicks on the directions link in their ad, the same way they’re charged when a user clicks on their headline or on their phone number (Hat tip to Search Engine Land).
If the change comes as a surprise, it probably shouldn’t. Google showed its hand a little when it began reporting on how users were interacting with these extensions earlier this year. First Google gives you metrics to let you see how valuable something is; then they find a way to monetize it. Not a bad strategy. You also have to wonder if this change means anything for Google’s mobile advertising network and if these extension-type features will begin to play a bigger part there. We’ll have to wait and see.
If you don’t want to be charged, Google’s asking you to remove the location extension associated with your AdWords campaign. Google does, however, caution you against doing this, noting that these location extensions provide valuable information to local customers about your business. And Google’s right–they do. If you’re noticing a lot of clicks on these areas, it’s a good sign you should be optimizing your site around this information.
Take a look at your site. How easy it is for a searcher to find your business address, your business phone number, directions and a map to your storefront? While we’re talking about mobile, do you have a mobile version of your website that prominently features this information? If this is what searchers on the go are looking for (and your own analytics will tell you if that’s the case), then you want to make sure you’re making it easy to find, whether you’re using Google’s Local Extension in Adwords or not.
Overall, the change shouldn’t affect small business owners’ paid advertising budgets that much, but you should be aware of the change if you’re using Local Extensions as part of your AdWords campaign.
Google to Charge for Directions Location Extension
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Share Your Business Location With BatchGeo
Jan 11th
There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that goes like this: When one of Albert Einstein’s colleagues asked the eminent physicist for his telephone number one day, Einstein reached for a telephone directory.
“You don’t remember your own number?” the man asked, understandably startled.
“No,” Einstein replied with a shrug. ”Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a book?”
Today, I think Einstein would say, “Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a phone?”
Location is something important you can get from your phone; most small business owners want customers to have that critical bit of information. If you want to map your retail locations, or provide driving directions for your restaurant, or embed a Google map on your website, the little-known, but super-useful BatchGeo is a site you’ll want to check out.
In about five minutes, I created this cool sample map highlighting some of the Small Business Trends contributors, based on their Twitter profile location. You can see the full size, Google-powered map here.
You can reportedly do some of these same things in Google Maps, but they are not as easy to do. BatchGeo makes it easy, and even kind of fun. Some of the uses that I’ve seen for BatchGeo include mapping real estate properties (agents and brokers), coordinating with mobile workers by sending map links to field crews, showing a distance calculator from prominent locations to a specific store (probably useful for tourist towns), and mapping out sales territories by rep. The Seattle Times published a Holiday Lights 2010 feature using BatchGeo; see the map here. Finally, you can create an interactive store locator, so that when your customer uses a smartphone (which knows its own location), they will be given the nearest store location to them.
Here are a few more cool ways to use BatchGeo:
- Create an interactive map – Copy directly from a spreadsheet app like Excel, Numbers or the free Google Docs or OpenOffice Calc.
- Driving directions – Mapped addresses are linked to Google Maps for satellite photos and driving directions.
- Easily map an address list, postal/ZIP codes, cities or any geography.
- Save a map – Create a map with your locations and associated data to save to a Web page for later use.
- Create a mobile optimized store locator - Map your store properties, and then link to them from your website.
- Visualize many address data points plotted on a single map, separated into groups by color.
One of the sweetest things about this service is you can take your data from any spreadsheet, dump it into BatchGeo and it will do the heavy lifting for you. You just cut and paste your table into their entry form, and within minutes you have a map that you can embed, share or just marvel at. BatchGeo also has a big brother called Maptive, which is a premium professional level service that may fit your needs better. Find it on their home page.
Overall, I found this tool to be easy to use and practical. With more and more opportunity to market your business via Google Maps and other location-based services, having a robust map of your stores or locations, or using maps to understand your customer base for geographic targeting, BatchGeo is worth a look.
Learn more about BatchGeo.
Share Your Business Location With BatchGeo
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
5 Ways For Small Businesses To Get In The Location Game
Sep 7th
5 Ways For Small Businesses To Get In The Location Game
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Location based check-in type services are this year’s overhyped topic – with good reason. While you may not understand why someone wants to be the mayor of their barber shop, you do need to recognize the behavior that social location services such as Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp! and Facebook Places represents for the local business.
Shoppers these days are using the Internet to find everything locally and increasingly using mobile devices, services and apps to effectively bypass even the web to find a merchant. What that means is that local small businesses need to find ways to tap into the behavior and not necessarily try to ride the hype wave to Foursquare fame.
Below are five ways the local small businesses can capture their own personalized version of social location behavior and tap what may be the ultimate online to offline combo to produce sales.
Create virtual rewards programs – Rewards programs such as those offered by most coffee shop via punch cards or large retailers like Eddy Bauer have been around for years, but smart offerings by folks like PlacePop are making the punch card concept an easy virtual or online play. Merchants can offer their own version of a check in and capture rich data on their most loyal customers.
Ride the group buying craze – If you’re not familiar with group coupon buying services like Groupon, then you’re probably not reading this blog. Facebook app maker WildFire offers small businesses the ability to create their own group buying offers and take advantage of the viral and social nature of this play to create local Facebook engagement.
Google Places coupons – When local shoppers do turn to a search engine for local shopping they often uncover your Google Places Page (or at least you should be working to make sure they do) Google has a handy coupon tool that automatically creates mobile versions of your coupons and offer. Here’s more information on Google Places Mobile Coupons
Advertise on mobile coupon networks – You can also place your ads on Mobile coupon networks and get distribution of your coupons across many local sites.
Make your own game – The game playing aspect of many of social location biggies is an aspect that should not be overlooked when trying to develop your own strategy. The web app SCVNGR is a tool that allows you to create your own game and have it related to verified checkins for a specific QR code. This would be pretty cool for a merchant association to use to create their scavenger hunt check in game.
And, of course, make sure your business is listed with the major players – Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places
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View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Facebook Places: social network adds location check-ins
Aug 19th
| The social network, which has over 500 million members, has launched the new mobile phone tool in the US-only, with plans for a global roll-out… |
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View full post on Home Wealth Project Riot!
Social Media For Hotel Guests & Airlines Passengers When Location Isn’t Enough!
Jul 10th
| Flip.to, the comprehensive social media service for hotels and airlines distinguishes itself from other tools currently available in that it communicat… |
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Will Location Checkins Change Social Networking?
Jun 29th
Will Location Checkins Change Social Networking?
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
This post isn’t so much a declaration as an observation.
With the success of location aware tools like Foursquare and Gowalla and the looming rush to grab this space by Twitter and Facebook, I wonder if there’s an evolution in the works.
Here’s my observation. It’s easy to friend and follow perfect strangers on social networks. Some of these even develop into business contacts, partners and customers, but most go nowhere and some may even turn into minor annoyances. But, when Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and every minor player start baking location check-ins into the mix, will you be choosier about friending and following and giving your exact specific location to thousands of unknown folks?
My guess is that these services will need to develop layers of settings, but that’s yet to be seen. I know I think twice about accepting follow requests on Foursquare. Again, I’m as social as the next person, but not ready to let folks I don’t know have access to the hotel I’m staying at this week. It will be interesting to see how this space develops. Mature players like Twitter might actually have trouble adding this feature unless it’s selective.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
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View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
CarbonCopyPRO Announces Location for Master Marketing Event 6
Jun 12th
| CarbonCopyPRO’s Master Marketing Event is an… who come to learn about the latest internet-based marketing strategies, technologies and tools. … |
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Google Says New Location, New Page
Jun 9th
There are a few things we know to be absolutely true in the world of SEO – Links are important, keywords help everyone find you, and if Matt Cutts ‘recommends’ some SEO advice, you’d be wise to listen.
If you’re not familiar with Matt, he’s part of Google’s Search Quality group and last week he delivered a very important bit of SEO advice for small business owners. If you’ve ever wondered how to best handle multiple business locations, Matt gives you your answer in a new post entitled SEO Advice: Make a Web page for each store location. Well there ya go.
From Matt:
If you want your store pages to be found, it’s best to have a unique, easily crawlable url for each store. Ideally, you would also create an HTML sitemap that points to the web pages for your stores (and each web page should have a unique url). If you have a relatively small number of stores, you could have a single page that links to all your stores. If you have a lot of stores, you could have a web page for each (say) state that links to all stores in that state.
Many times, small business owners don’t make pages for each of their locations. Instead, they’ll use an uncrawlable drop-down or simply use one page for all of their locations. According to Matt, this makes it really hard (if not impossible) for Google to identify and server individual store locations for users. As a searcher, you probably know how frustrating it can be to do a search with local intent and then be directed to a company’s main page, instead of the specific store you were looking for. To get around this, Matt suggested small business do two easy things:
- Make a web page for each store that lists the store’s address, phone number, business hours, etc.
- Make an HTML sitemap to point to those pages with regular HTML links, not a search form or POST requests.
You can also take this advice when creating Google Place page profiles. Create a profile for each individual location and use the location name as the page URL, not the URL for the main site.
Outside of simply being good for SEO, this is great advice to increase the usability of your Web site. We want to get away from directing people to our home page, because that’s often not the page they’re looking for. By creating pages for your individual locations, you give users the information they’re after. Include the hours, location and directions for that store so that users find it when they do a search. And of course, when you create the pages, make sure you include them in an HTML site map so that Google can easily find them and serve them to users. It’s all part of helping people find the information they’re actually looking for.
Google Says New Location, New Page
View full post on Small Business Trends
