…and hot on the heels of our last post comes a story that illustrates the potential of Foursquare for local online marketers.
If you live in Baltimore, you may know Miss Shirley’s Cafe. This popular brunch spot is particularly hard to get into – on Sundays, the wait often passes 2 hours to get a table.
Miss [...]

In a study released today, Forrester Research recommends marketers should stay away from location-based services like Foursquare.
The reason? As reported by Ad Age, after finding that only 4% of U.S. Adults have ever used location-based services, Forrester’s study also revealed that:
Almost 80% of location-based service users are male. Close to 70% of them are between [...]

If you’re using AdWords to market your local small business, you should already know about location extensions. They allow you to show your location to potential customers before they click through your ad.
Numerous advertisers have experienced exceptional results after adding ad extensions to their local advertising campaigns. From pizza delivery companies to paint stores, they [...]

On Thursday, Robert Scoble posted a blog about two new services that illustrate the direction the local internet marketing world is headed.
Dealmap and Goby are both taking the social out of local internet marketing. In its place, they’re providing something of much more tangible value to the user.
Goby helps its users find things to do [...]

When you think about it, social media is just an organized extension of the way the web has worked since the beginning. You would see something you liked, then copy and paste it into an email and send it to your friends. Services like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. just automate the process for you.
It’s really [...]

We’ve spoken a lot about how Twitter is a great medium to build relationships with your customers and prospects…but Twitter can also be an effective tool for generating local leads.
As Jonathan Volk points out, you can even automate the process. By feeding various articles to a locally-targeted Twitter feed, you can direct prospects to a [...]

You may not have really noticed it – or at least didn’t recognize it’s impact from a marketing perspective, but some changes rolled out in the last week by Facebook will have a big impact on the local online marketing universe.
Facebook is essentially becoming “the internet” for a lot of users, similar (and yet totally [...]

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Today, Google announced a rebranding of one of its key features: the former Local Business Center is now known simply as Google Places.
One out of every 5 searches is location-based, so naturally Google wants to find ways to improve their local search results and make money off of the space, too. For that reason, along with [...]

One of the most mis-understood and frequently mis-represented concepts in online marketing is how the Google Ad Auction works in terms of pricing and the impact of Quality Score on pricing.
I’ve probably heard 100+ different explanations of this over the last few years, and almost all of them were wrong in some way or another.
How [...]

Up until now, the Google Local Business Center has had some real limitations for the following scenarios:

Service businesses that work in multiple cities but only have an office in one
Home-based businesses that don’t want to reveal their home address on their Google Maps listing

The first scenario has been particularly troublesome for us and many of [...]