I am always amazed at the number of small businesses centers that do not know about Google Local Business Center. The word is getting out there but slowly.
If you search on a keyword phrase that includes a geographic term, especially a city name, you will likely get a list of several results (often 10) that click into a map results. These are local businesses that have a physical presence and relevance for the term you typed in.
The idea was to give local brick and mortar businesses visibility in the SERPS. Usually these businesses have no or an inadequate web presence and can certainly use the help.
Registering with Google Local Business Center is free. You can add pictures and video to your entry. Make sure you have your physical address on your web site and participate in the verification that google will do when you add a listing into the LBC. Check out the below video for more:
Are you ready to blastoff? With the Blastoff Network Internet users can customize a portal to access news, games, social networks and shopping all in one place. It’s not a new idea, as it is similar to iGoogle, but what’s different is the affiliate program and partnership with PrePaid Legal.
The idea, like with many MLMs and affiliates, is that you build a network of friends, you then all shop together in Blastoff’s network of online stores and receive commissions on yours and your friends’ purchases. Before visions of riches start dancing in your head, keep in mind you are going to need a big downline to make any serious dough. Blastoff also partnered with PrePaid Legal to give its associates early access (and extended genealogies), getting in return a group that was tailored made to do some serious buzz marketing.
And marketing they are. MLMs, just like their salesman cousins, thrive on excitement and hype to drive recruitment. I’ve seen some “Wow” emails circulating around, sadly with some bogus unsubscribe links. Hopefully these folks are not intentionally spamming.
So is it worth the hype? Some might enjoy the custom page you can build with the network. You can set it up to connect to your facebook account (the video mentions twitter as well but that seems to not be there yet), add news feeds, games, and media sites such as hulu all with selectable themes as backdrops. Since I’m not a heavy user of portals or aggregators, I turned to a millennial (early 20s) to get an opinion of it. His take? “…very clunky and unusable. Sure you could spend hours getting it just the way you like it, but it should be user friendly right off the bat. The sites different ‘hip’ colors hurts the brain and at first glance you have no idea what the site is about.” Harsh words.
I agreed with him about the non intuitive user experience with customizing the site. On the FAQ, it advised using Firefox 3.5 for the best experience. I had some problems with Firefox 3.0, but it did better with Internet Explorer 7. And I simply could not figure out how to get rid of the ESPN widget (sorry I’m just not into spectator sports). You also are limited in the sites you can add. It’s not like you can drop any feed into your page. Let’s hope the experience is improved in the future.
The shopping picture looks a bit brighter. Blastoff does have some promising looking deals on “wireless” and “home services” that might be of interest. There are some prominent names in the mall section. Of course you can find deals independently, but it is convenient to have them gathered up for you. I’ve purchased one product from the network. Looking around, I did find cheaper deals for the same thing, but when I purchased through blastoff, I got a coupon auto filled in for a 10% discount making it competitive.
Since it is completely free to join, Blastoff will cost you nothing to check out. And if you invite enough friends that like to shop, those pennies might add up .. for you as well as for me.
If you have a business and you are not online then you are missing out on a ton of leads and sales. You know you need a web presence so why don’t you have one yet? And if you have one? Is it working for you?
Ok, so it’s a shameless post to get some good ideas for blog posts. But I do have useful knowledge to share. I’ve been around web technologies for 9 years, and done HTML, opt in pages, and SEO. But I don’t always know what people get stuck on. So ask me a question! Tell me what to write about that will help you. Just add a comment to this blog to tell me what’s on your mind.