You need to actively promote your business. Its the key to getting more customers and growing your business. The challenge is how? How can you promote your business locally and do it effectively and with a small budget. Advertising is the obvious solution but with so many advertising channels available, it can take a lot of trail and error before you find something that works. One of the most cost effective ways to buy advertising is with smaller local newspapers. Your ad is very likely to be seen by the right people and because these newspapers are so small, the advertising is still quite cheap.

For many businesses advertising is one of those many things that has to be done but is not given a lot of attention. It's understandable because often times businesses, especially small ones have so many different things to handle. The business owner can't be an expert in everything. So they agree with whatever advertising comes along. They do what everyone else is doing. They don't put much thought into it.

It all sounds very professional, right? And of course it is - but the reality is that I work from my home, usually in my slippers. I rarely meet clients face to face and I choose my own work hours. I love what I do and thoroughly enjoy seeing how my skills benefit my clients.

The best thing to do in relation to local business advertising and local advertising is for a business to use the internet. This might seem strange, since they will be using a world-wide computer system to advertise to people in a small area, but it is the best way to go. People today often just search for a product or a service through a search engine. If the local business can come up first on the search engine results page, more people will find them and realize that their store is just right around the corner.

If you read any of my other articles or blog posts you will see that I place a great deal of emphasis on delivering answers to the customers before they even ask the question. If you can do this and do it online, you will never have to be worried about being bumped 10 pages down in Google search results.

Ahhhhh. So you want to know the magic trick huh? Well, first you need to have a listing. You can create one by logging into your Google account if you have one, and bemol.com.ua selecting the local business center icon under your settings. If you don't have one there, just type into Google: "local business center" and follow the easy to use, step by step listing creation wizard. When creating your listing, it is very important to make sure all the information you provide is correct, including phone number and address as before you finish, you will be required to verify by telephone or snail mail that in fact the listing is yours. Now on to the pot of gold. Lets go over the top ten ranking factors for local listings...

Get listed on every possible directory, local search engine, hyperlocal search engine (local chamber, newspaper, or neighborhood site (www.ted.com)), and industry directory possible. In some cases this may be as many as 100 such listings. To go a step further, you may want to list on web directories, too.

Well things have changed. If you are a business owner you need to be on the front page of Google. Here is an example. Let's go to the Google external keyword tool and do an experiment. This tool is VERY helpful. You can access it by going to Google Search and typing in Google Keyword External. This is the tool that you can use to find out how many people type in a certain keyword or keyword phrase. For this example I am going to use the small city of Peterborough, Ontario. The population there is about 75,000 in the winter to about 100,000 or so in the summer (by comparison, the population of Toronto is around 3 million).

Search engine optimization - This is another method that will work for any business. You want to have a website online that SEO can be used on. Again, this is a method that you can learn to do on your own, or you can hire a service to do this method for you.