Free And Easy Online Promotion

Small businesses with a local market presence can take advantage of several free online portals to promote their website. Unlike trying to get ranked in the search engines, this method of website promotion (technically known as "structured business data") simply involves submitting your business data to get automatically listed. The two big portals are Google Local and Yahoo! Local. In both cases, of course, you will need to register for an account. Don't be put off -- if you don't register for an account with either of these behemoths, you will be missing tons of the latest stuff on the web. That's just the way it is.

Yahoo! Local -- Fun And Easy

Yahoo! seems to make everything fun these days -- with their graphics, their personalization, their interactive features. After you've listed your business on Yahoo! local, head over to their new, interactive, local maps section. It's quite an amazing setup, and incidentally, it pulls the local data from the information you just entered at Yahoo! local. My one complaint with the Yahoo! Local interface is that they made it tough to find where to click to add a new business. It's at the very bottom of the page.

Google Local -- Serious But Useful

Google needs to get a sense of humor, but apart from that shortcoming, their local business portal is extremely important. To register your business, go to Google Local and follow the simple instructions. For some reason, they revert to a weird snail mail process to verify who you are, so you have to wait a few weeks for your PIN code to arrive by mail. When it does, you can plug it in and your business data will spread throughout the Google empire.

The Other Guys

For sheer exposure, there really aren't any other guys yet. But it doesn't hurt to seed your data wherever you can, for free (as long as it's in safe neighborhoods, and not with link or spam scams that will get your site banned from search engines). The other guys? Here are some places to seed your data so it gets into useful databases for better online visibility: InfoUSA - they are a major mailing list vendor, and supplier of business data to all kinds of companies. Verizon's SuperPages.com - they also currently feed InfoSpace and AT&T's AnyWho. Then there is also Switchboard.com - another of the big, phone directory-type portals.

Some of these portals offer "enhanced listings" for a monthly fee, but unless you are embarking on a planned, local internet marketing campaign, you don't really need to go that route. It should only take about an hour to get your business website data into all these resources. If you don't have time, or feel intimidated by the process, an internet marketing expert can help you with this task.