While Google still is the dominating search engine, local search is growing by leaps and bounds. 40% of all searches have a local intent – that is a number all businesse should sit up an notice!

Americans conducted 15.4 billion searches in March, with Google Sites accounting for 65.1% search market share, followed by Yahoo Sites at 16.9%, and Microsoft Sites at 11.7%. The Ask Network captured 3.8% of the search market, followed by AOL with 2.5%.

So where does this leave Local Search? As a searcher’s location becomes a standard bit of metadata to be factored into the PPC bid process, geotargeting is likely to become the norm. On the other end of the geotargeting search equation, we see that landing pages are somewhat neglected. Survey results showed that few marketers were taking advantage of geolocation-specific messaging once the searcher clicked through. For retailers, in particular, this is a huge missed opportunity.

Social sites can also help marketers find consumers that purchase wine, clothing and cars. “People who have expressed intent are accessible here,” he says.

Video also presents another opportunity. More than 174 million U.S. Internet users watched online video in February, according to comScore Video Metrix. Video viewers on Hulu watched content on average 2.4 hours per viewer.

LocalProud is a discount card program to help vitalize local economies. Businesses offer discounts that are honored when consumers show their LocalProud card. They get to determine the offers and are able to change them via a convenient website…

Have you ever wished you could carry around a card that would be honored at any business who offered coupons? Well, we have which is why we’ve created Local Proud – a Coupon program that eliminates the hassles of finding, printing and organizing coupons.

This is the way of future discount programs and we are now bringing it to life. Consumers want great deals. Businesses want to offer great value. Now, Local Proud is bringing the two together buy offering an easy to use discount card called the Local Proud Perks card.

We are pleased to annouce that we have partnered with our first television station as well – an innovative thinker located in Buffalo, NY. WKBW is where you’ll find great deals in western upstate New York. Currently we are offering many deals in the Buffalo and surrounding areas.

The great thing is you can use the card or, if you’re old school (sorry:-) you can also print coupons from the website. Sometimes it take a little while to inform the community as to what a new value proposition is so in the meantime, you can still print coupons via Local Proud. We are adding new offers daily so keep coming back – we’re about to overtake the Buffalo, NY area!

As you all know, we are fans of local search – we’ve written about it, we have even partnered with a local search directory called MyLocalLookup. Well, we now have something new to tell you about. It’s called Local Proud!

LocalProud is a brand new discount card program designed to help vitalize the local economy. Area merchants offer discounts that are honored when consumers show their free LocalProud card. The business get to determine their offers and they’re able to change them anytime via a convenient web interface. No special equipment is required for the business or your customers.

By becoming a part of the LocalProud program, the business will receive Local Proud cards to distribute to their customers as well as a window decal to display in your storefront. The program will be promoted through various local media, including television.

Pre-Launch Phase
During our pre-launch phase, they are offering free enrollment to the first 100 businesses. That means there is absolutely no-risk involved to get started. It’s time that local businesses come together and make a difference in our community. This Program allows that aspect to take hold.

Benefits To Consumers

• No Points to Collect
• No Coupons to Print
• No Waiting for Rewards
• Instant Offers
• Supports Local Businesses
• Keeps Money in Local Economy

Here is where to get started. Log onto Local Proud and hit the Advertise with us tab. It’s free and its a very cool concept! Or you can go to their pre-launch page to get sdtarted. If I were you, I wouldn’t wait another minute – I believe this will be a big hit with both consumers and businesses!

Besides the hard work, commitment, sacrifice and long long days of first starting your company, it takes planning, strategy and a whole of mistakes and failure to build a profitable business.

That’s right… I said it, mistakes and failure! However, one can always learn from anothers misfortune. In other words, you will make mistakes along the way however you can learn from other people and not make the “same” mistakes others have made. Which brings me to the point – Profits. I have had the idea of writing about this for weeks but never had gotten around to it. Today, one of my fellow Twitter friends by the name of Steve Pohlit.

The following was written by Steve and can be found on his blog: Thanks Steve for writing this!

It is important to understand that in order to build profits, a profit must first be earned. If your business is a start-up or has been losing money, the main focus of all your activity is to make a profit.. not just any profit, but a cash profit. Cash profit is where your cash balance is growing after you cover all your expenses whether they be paid daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually.

If your business is not in a cash profit situation, you will not be able to stay in business indefinitely. There will be a point when you run out of cash and you have to close your door. In the Proof of Concept article I mentioned Twitter as an example of a company whose business model is exciting but whose excitement will eventually die if it does not turn profitable.

One of the best ways to begin making a cash profit and then make even higher cash profits, is to develop a financial performance picture twelve months in advance. This financial picture is how you want you business to look financially a year from now. I always advise clients when doing this work to look at what the business has been able to earn in the past and then increase it significantly.

Individuals use a technique know as vision boards to focus on things they want including lifestyle improvements. The financial model of what you want your business to look like is your business vision board. “If you can see it you can achieve it.”

There is more to it than creating a picture twelve months out but that is a key starting point. For purposes of building profits I do not advocate going beyond a twelve month horizon as there are two many variables. However, when doing strategic planning a more forward outlook is appropriate. For now we are focused on building profits near term.

Written by Kevin Conway.

OK, I finally said it publicly, Social Media for business is Crap! .

Maybe because my feeling for the hyped-up benefits of social media was recently confirmed by a top millionaire online guru. If you follow the most successful gurus his name is always at the top of the list. As a matter of fact, he was the first online entrepreneur to make a MILLION $$ in a day. That said, recently he published a PDF where he said “I think social media Su-ks”. When I read that I felt a sigh of relief, “maybe I am not off the tracks after all”. You see when you don’t “follow the pack” you tend to sometimes feel like you are going down the wrong path or at least missing an opportunity. Now, I must admit I use all the major social media outlets including Twitter, Facebook, Squidoo, etc, etc. However, not for direct marketing. And, even though I publish new product releases on Twitter, analytics tells me no convertible traffic comes from that source or Facebook. My primary use of social sites is for building backlinks, but that is for SEO purposes. And, of course the added exposure. i.e. “branding” doesn’t hurt.

However, I never felt like any of the exposure or traffic was ever really serious “convertible traffic”. In other words social media is used for entertainment and communication, ahh, socializing. “Socializing” people are not in the “consumer mode” when they are cruising the social sites. They are looking for friends, maybe a date, etc. Proof of this observation is that these social sites still cannot monetize themselves via paid advertising to nearly the level of search engines like Google or Yahoo. Why? Because you really cannot target potential consumers when they are out at their “buying behavior mode”, i.e. when they are specifically looking to buy a product or service. To try and pull social surfers out of the “social mode” and into a “buying mode” requires many steps before a behavioral shift is realized. Sure, you can start a dialogue and maybe down the road they will recall your business, but the effort to generate business is much more ROI effective using PPC or SEO. The one bright spot for social media as a business tool may be list building, but my own results have been mixed (via measuring quality of opt ins).

And yes, I have read the eMarketer predictions that social ad spend will increase by about 400% by 2013. But, these same groups are also publishing reports like today’s “Does Social Media Work for Small Biz?” where 88% of all small business owners say social media is not helpful to their business. Proof that most of us are not yet seeing the tangible benefits, i..e., sales, leads, etc, from our social media profiles. Personally I am not even seeing much return on creating and maintaining groups within the social media outlets. And, one of the most raved about tools within social media is creating specialized groups.

So, at the moment using social sites for business generation, in my opinion is still highly overrated. As an owner of several e-commerce business I don’t see myself investing advertising dollars in social media any time soon. And, even though there are those that will disagree, I don’t think many of them can show you their own e-commerce business that has experienced any serious ROI using social media. If anyone can show me any REAL results otherwise, please I am all ears. But please Hold the HYPE.

The rest of this article comes to us from Mark Dolliver…

Here’s a bit of Internet Age heresy from small-business owners: 46 percent regard it as a “myth” that every company needs a Web site.

That’s one tidbit from a release this month of supplemental data from the ongoing Discover Small Business Watch polling. When small-business owners were asked in an August round of polling whether their company has a Web site, fewer than half (45 percent) said it does.

Among respondents whose business doesn’t have a Web site, the foremost reason (cited by 41 percent) was that “my business doesn’t need one.” Other reasons included “cost” (cited by 19 percent), “not enough time to monitor and manage” (16 percent) and “complexity” (9 percent).

Do consumers penalize small businesses that choose not to have an online presence? Not as much as you might expect. Polling in September among consumers asked, “Are you more likely or less likely to use a small business that has a Web site?” While a plurality (47 percent) said they’d be more likely to do so, half said either that they’d be less likely (17 percent) or that “it would have no impact” (34 percent).

Nor is there a consensus among consumers that it’s odd if a company doesn’t have a Web site. Asked whether they “expect every business, large or small, to eventually have a Web site,” those saying “yes” (46 percent) were outnumbered by the sum of those saying “no” (37 percent) or “not sure” (17 percent).

The same poll also asked consumers whether they would “consider using a service or small business that you heard about on a social or business networking site.” Forty-three percent said they would consider it, but 32 percent said they wouldn’t and 26 percent weren’t sure.

1. Mine Your List. You’ve heard this a hundred times, but you would be surprised at how many companies really don’t analyze their database accurately. A couple of thoughts before you take this on: If they haven’t responded or had some interaction with your business in 12 months, spend your time elsewhere; size doesn’t matter in this instance. And seek wisdom from interaction, not non-channel traits. Segmentation is so valuable, yet you need another dimension of data for decisions, and behavioral data will tell you so much more about timing and cadence. Put this at the top of your decision pyramid, we are creatures of habit.
2. Own The Point Of Intermediation. Simply put, you should maximize and build messaging around all events important to you. If it’s that important and you don’t have the resources to set up an API or some event trigger, do it manually. This will pay off more than any other effort you take this year.
3. Have Fun. Creative should be an exercise in interrupting the inbox experience, and you should have fun developing it. It can become so mundane over time with templates and production — yet you really should test the limits of what you can/can’t do and have fun with subject lines, have fun with creative messaging and know that testing is an exercise in making you better. Have a contest with your team or departments for the funniest subject line or funniest metaphor to sell your widgets or services.
4. Don’t Be Lazy. We often get so artful in production we forget about the value or doing creative briefs. These are so important in forcing us to lay out what we know and intend to do — and the only form of archiving. They make you think about whom you’re talking to, the justification you have to communicate, making you write campaign and program goals and think about the experience you are intending to drive. All great exercises for young teams.
5. What You See Is What You Get. With all the monitoring tools today, we can see the rendering of email in all the various ISPs –but I’ve found that this has become a so-what exercise. Are you doing anything about it? With images blocked in AOL, Yahoo and MSN, what impact does that have on your retails goals? We can’t optimize to all the environments, but you should consider picking a few ISP worlds and understanding really well what experience you are driving, potentially testing newer, simpler designs that get the consumer to “click and pay.”
6. Report As If Your Job Depended On It. I talk a lot about measurement, which is really important, but if your job depended on performance improvement, what variables show the value your efforts bring to the business? Site traffic? Revenue? Reach? Or do you need to craft this story into a couple of customer segments, to show the value you drive to identifiable customer sets that your management team can easily grasp? Sometimes these measurement stories are more easily communicated in vignettes rather than a general view of a large database.

While I’m a big believer in checklists for many things, strategically they are really hard to take on. If you really think about this list and what you do day in and day out, putting on a few filters, you might pull out a few nuggets you didn’t think about last year – and didn’t think you had time for this year.

Well it’s really not rocket science, maybe one needs to understand the propulsion portion of rocket science in order to understand local search. Local search is about being in the right place at the right time when someone is looking for what you are selling. Here is an interesting fact about how consumers are searching today…

Research shows that 85% of all consumers go online to research whatever it is they want to buy before they decide on where or who they are going to buy it from. The recent Cash for Clunkers is a testiment of this. 85% of consumers who participated in the government funded Cash for Clunkers had already made their decision on what car they wanted, the color, and from whom they were going to buy it from before they walked into that dealership. In other words, they searched online and made their decision based on what they found via search.

Who benefited from this process? I’ll tell you who benefited… it was the local car dealers who made the investment to use local search as part of their strategy. And I don’t just mean Google or Yahoo, these smart marketers also use local search as part of their complete online marketing strategies. Here is a great example of local car dealers using local search in San Antonio, TX.

The thing I like about this site is the listing page for the premium advertisers – this is there exact listing, one that demands respect within the search business.

My point is, you must be using local search as part of your strategies, if not you are missing out on some great opportunity for your business.

Which brings me to why I’m writing about MyLocalLookup.com. WhattheYahoogle has formed a partnership with mylocallookup in order to provide our readers a great tool to find local businesses. In addition, we want to add that you can now get your bsuiness featured with a Jet Package for 75% off the annual subscriptions rate. Simple type in the code “Yahoogle” to receive your 75% off at check out.

This is a great opportunity for small businesses who want to get involved more search engine marketing but don’t have the budget to afford the big guys. With this discount, the cost is $25.00 a month and can be cancelled anytime.

As our friends at Growmap wrote a few weeks ago, MyLocalLookup is the only local search engine promoted in 44 TV markets across the country. They have built a unique startegy partnering with TV stations and offering great solutions on a local level. If you haven’t already checked out MyLocalLookup and their TV commercials, you can view their TV commercials here.

SEM (Seaarch Engine Marketing) is a term all of us need to get use to and an action we all need to take. Give your business every opportunity to be found when a customer is looking for you and you accomplish this through SEM.

Business owners… It’s time take control of your business. Get involved with local search, hire someone to help you with SEM, be a part of the Social Networking opportunities. If you don’t have the time, let us know, we can direct you to the right company.