13 Ways to Promote your Local Business for Free
February 8th, 2007 by Michael Gray in Local SearchIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Many local businesses struggle to find ways to promote themselves, get links, rank in search engines, and ultimately drive traffic to their websites. Most small businesses also have limited budgets making the task more difficult. For those businesses here are 13 ways you can promote your business online for free.
Google Local: If you don’t already have one Create an account on Google Local. 
Enter your company name, address, phone number and website. Verify the information with a postacard or telephone call. In a few weeks you will help you get a map listing for your company name or industry and town.
Google Coupons: Coupons are a great way to bring new customers into your business or remind old customers that you’re still around. Google has a free coupon tool that puts your coupon on relevant local searches.
Google Base: Google base is part of Google’s one box service. Google uses it to try giving the most appropriate answer from different data sources. If you are selling products you can upload feeds automatically into Google Base and often get preferential placement. You can also upload your business, or special event.
Yahoo Local: Yahoo local is a directory organized by category and geographic location. You can get a basic listing in Yahoo Local for free. People searching for your business or industry can find your listing
Get Reviews: An integral part of the Yahoo Local listings are reviews. Ask your good customers to write reviews for you on Yahoo local. Businesses with higher ratings will get preferential listings.
YellowPages.com: Yellow Pages have a strong brand name and recognition, and are still used by many people today. They offer a few levels of listings the most basic is free.
Press Releases: Doing something newsworthy? If you are you can always submit a press release for free at PRLeap.com. Be sure to check out their tips like 25 Action Words for Writing a Newsworthy Headline and Why Localizing a Press Release to a ZIP Code and City Matters.
Free Blog Promotion Tools: Does your company have a website or are you thinking of adding one? Websites like Technorati and mybloglog can help you gain exposure, visitors, readers, and subscribers to your blog.
Free Directory Advertising: It doesn’t get any easier than trying free advertising. Go to BOTW.org and sign up for a free 60 day advertising listing.
Create a Lens at Squidoo: Squidoo has a nice easy to use interface that allows you to give information to your visitors. You can talk about your business specifically or the services or products you provide.
LinkedIn: Join LinkedIn and get connected with people you know and make connections with people you don’t through introductions. Look at the new Questions and Answers section and try and be genuinely helpful. Follow the axiom of ‘Givers Gain’ and you may generate a few leads for yourself from your goodwill.
Email Signatures: Be sure to add your URL to all of your outgoing email. Try adding your mission statement, or a catchy phrase to help people understand what you do. Change it a several times a year so people notice it again.
Syndicate Your Content and Ideas: Take advantage of article distribution Services like EZineArticles, ISnare, and IdeaMarketers to spread your message and approach. Use them to bring leads to your site by offering things like free ebooks or PDF’s that they can download after entering their contact information.
For more tips on how to promote your local business be sure to check out my complete series on local search tips, tricks and secrets or visit my local search page on Squidoo.
Tags: local+search, seo
Sphere It
February 8th, 2007 at 10:53 am
I always end up in a 30-60 minute conversation with a someone when I was asked how to get a site online for their local business. The hardware store owner, a tax guy and even the postmaster in my town. I don’t want to design websites anymore but I do want to promote and market them.
Now between you and Rae, I can direct people to for help with promoting their local businesses. Juicy stuff my man.
February 8th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Nice post and lots of great links, but I think we should stop using the “free” terminology. If you have to spend lots of time / effort it’s not free. Everything has a price even if it’s not an upfront fee.
February 9th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
it says:free free free !! bla bla bla
then you follow the link and it is NOT FREE you have to give your credit card to be debited after a trial period ,nothing is free as promised.
I really hate that kind of lies over the net.
Michael
February 9th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
Almost everything you mention we do at MerchantCircle.com. 85,000 business owners are already using our tools. We created 15 million SEO’d business listing across the U.S. and merchants can claim their business, upload pictures, blog, link to other businesses, write newsletters and build coupons and ads and we distribute those coupons to coupon sites like Edgeio, Zixxo, and Oodle.
All of this is free of charge and we also aggregate business reviews from consumer sites so that a business owner can find out everything being said about them on the web. There’s no credit card needed at all!
February 13th, 2007 at 1:06 am
If your are selling a product, google base can certainly bring you good traffic - first hand experience
March 20th, 2007 at 5:08 am
Thank for such an original and informative article.
Cheers
May 5th, 2007 at 6:03 am
I’ve started to use some of these fantastic tips to promote my home mortgages site.
July 16th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Another free resource is Radiux (www.radiux.com) which provides free local yellow page type listings for businesses.
August 9th, 2007 at 5:45 am
Nice information you share others hope this information is helpful for me and thanks a lot.
good
August 14th, 2007 at 1:01 am
These 13 tips are very good. The best way to utilize them, in my opinion, is one by one. Do the first tip then move on to the second. I bookmarked this page for future reference. Got work to do! Thank you.
http://www.jobcab.com
August 22nd, 2007 at 5:50 am
Thank you give us so good suggestion.I will studay them one by one.
thank you again
John
http://www.jinmavehicle.com
October 9th, 2007 at 9:07 am
These were very helpful tips. Another great way to promote your business is with an all-girl street team. We represent for you and your company out in the streets getting you noticed..
Rare DIVa Squad ( The all-girl street team.)
http://www.raredivasquad.com
October 25th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Microsoft has recently launched their Windows Live Local Listing Center service that allows business owners to add (or edit) their business information within Live search and Virtual Earth.