Free Local Marketing

Are you looking for ways to market your business locally?  Local traffic is the bread and butter of most businesses.  Many shoppers use mobile devices when they are out shopping to check prices and look up nearby locations.  Here are some FREE ways to get a higher impact in the local market. 1. Claim your business on Google Places and fill out your profile completely.  Here’s a link: http://www.google.com/places/   Try to include as many keywords as you can, because when people search for say, “restaurants fort smith ar” the first thing you see will be place listings and they will be in the order that the listings match your keywords.  Don’t stop short either, put some photos up, your logo, and if you have a video, put it up, too! 2. List your business on Bing’s Business Portal. http://www.bing.com/businessportal Similar to Google Places, you can also list your business here, to claim the Bing searchers. 3. Social Media – you can set up business pages on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube.com all for free.  These frequently perform well in searches, and all of them are available in mobile versions. 4. Perhaps one of the biggest little known tools is http://getlisted.org.  With this tool, you can check all the commonly used directories to see how your business appears and list it if it is missing. 5. It’s not free, but consider a mobile site.  If your website is based on content management like Joomla, Drupal or WordPress, you can get inexpensive templates that will display your site in a mobile format.  So get listed and have more business in 2013!