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!

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.

As Social Media continues to be a huge part of what Businesses need to do in order to help build their brands, I wanted to put together a list of websites that can help you get even more “social” with your business.

 I have compiled a list of 8 websites to help you get started. Facebook and Myspace are crucial however there is a plethora of other site out there too. Here is 8 to get started.

 Xing: Search this global site for business partners, contacts and professional opportunities.

APSense: Tap into an affiliate marketing revenue stream by promoting products and sites on your business profile, and get paid for the friends you refer.

Biznik: Join your local business community to connect and collaborate with nearby entrepreneurs, and find out about local seminars and events.

Entrepreneur Connect: Share ideas, join groups, publish content and promote your business on Entrepreneur’s own network.

FastPitchNetworking: Create a profile, product listings and blog, and take advantage of e-mail marketing and virtual trade shows.

GoBigNetwork: Get serious about fast growth in this startup community focused on finding funding, talent and expert advice.

Konnects: Build a network among other startup entrepreneurs and launch your own branded network when you’re ready.

Marzar: Connect with other business owners while promoting products and services in the marketplace.

Of course there is Facebook and Myspace so now is the time People – The year is ending and if you’re anything like my business, now is the perfect time to get out there with your social marketing.

I recently asked the question to a few small businesses and clients that I’m close with around the country… How effective has Local Search been for your business.  The answers that I’ve been given have been all across the board, some good, some bad but more over what most people say to me is “we don’t use it at all” 

For the businesses that use local search as part of their Internet strategies, you get it… but for the latter, I find this to be fascinating. Let’s look at a few facts about local search and how consumers are online today.

92% of all people are online today and let’s face it, the Internet has become our lifes, both personally and professionally.

97% of people with online access will research products and services online before they buy – we still like to buy from the bricks and motars. 
Interesting enough, 35% of all searches are done with an intent to buy.
and 55% of all local searches are done with an intent to buy.
Of all local searches, 8 out of 10 call or visit a store and 60% of those result in a purchase of some kind.
Times are rapidly changing and traditional advertising mediums are losing their effectiveness.

The internet has changed the way the world communicates, gathers, stores and sends information. However, this global connection has created a problem for the local business in their local markets. Why? Traditional print advertising has become less effective.  Most people have thrown their Yellow Pages away and search online instead and Newspaper’s readership is down over 50% and many papers are declaring bankruptcy.

On the other side of local business and local search is big business. It’s true that search results in general are dominated by large companies. That is proven to be true with Local search as well. The big guys understand that us consumers are smart and we’re looking everywhere for the best deals, including using local search engines.

Business owners reading this post, I hope by now you are reading all there is to read about search, search engine marketing, blogging and anything else related to getting you better exposure with your online presence. We’re doping everyday and we’re a small business just like you!

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.

While this may seem like a daunting method of advertising for some, it’s actually quite easy and can end up becoming that one marketing method that you can’t live without.
What I’d like to do today is provide some tips and techniques that I personally use when creating and monitoring PPC ad’s. Hopefully these tips will help you in your future marketing endeavors.

Experimenting With Different Search Engines

There are many PPC search engines, with some being better than others. The top two are Google and Yahoo, which was previously known as Overture. It’s a good idea to start your PPC campaigns with a small budget, spreading it out over a few different search engines to experiment and see where your target market may be lurking.

Generally speaking, I’ve found Google Adwords is better for more technically orientated products or services, including software, hardware, web design etc. Yahoo, on the other hand, is better for general consumer products, including insurance, toys, music etc.

What I wrote in the previous paragraph is very general, and you should analyze your campaigns carefully to see where they are performing their best. We’ll discuss this in detail a little later in the article.

Selecting the Right Keywords

The keyword selection process is probably the most important of all when it comes to creating your PPC ad’s. You’ll need to select keywords that are specific to your product or service offering, but you need to be careful not to select keywords that are extremely popular, as this may deplete your PPC funds sooner than expected.

The keyword selection process begins by asking yourself just one question:

“If I was searching for a product just like mine, which words or phrases would I search for?”

Using your answer(s) to this question as your base, you can then use a thesaurus and common sense to start building your keyword list with plurals, synonyms, similar words, etc.

To see which keywords your competitors are using, simply try searching for them. If you see a PPC ad along the side for your competitor, then note that keyword down and add it to your list.

Another way of coming up with great keywords is to use the overture search suggestion tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Type in a set of keywords and it will list similar keywords, including the number of times that keyword has been searched for on Overture (Yahoo) in the last month!

There’s often a fine line between selecting keywords that are either too specific or keywords that are too general. Try to keep away from these, as they can often result in wasted PCP funds.

A typical example of this would be an ad that I created recently for our latest product, TrackPoint, which — not coincidently — is an internet marketing return on investment (ROI) tracking tool. Although the product is heavily geared towards internet marketing, using such a broad term would have made it virtually impossible to compete with the other advertisers.

The term “internet marketing” is searched for 825,674 times per month on Overture alone. Combined with the huge number of different advertisers that target this keyword, the top bid for “internet marketing” on Google AdWords is $13.84 per click! With an average of 240 clicks per day, a single day of advertising alone would cost $505!

Now, unless you have an extremely high conversion rate of visitors to sales, or you’re selling a high priced item that usually has a high customer acquisition cost, I suggest targeting more specific keywords. Not only will this decrease your overall competition with other advertisers, but it will also increase the chances of turning your newly found web site visitors into customers.

Back to my earlier example, I chose to be specific with my keywords. One keyword was “ROI tracking”, which is searched for 1,828 times per month on Overture and has a much cheaper top bid. This keyword is also more targeted to the product I was marketing, meaning that a large percentage of people clicking on my ad should turn into customers.

It’s also helpful to note that taking the top bid is not always necessary, and anywhere in the top 5-10 can generate great leads. This really does come down to budget and analysis.

Attracting People to Your Ad

Now that we’ve selected our keywords, we need to get those searching to click on our ad, which in turn will result in them clicking through to our web site and potentially purchasing our product.

One of the simplest ways to get peoples attention is to use their search keywords in the title of your PPC ad. This has been proven to increase click-thru rates on ad’s by over 50%.

Why? Simple. If the potential customer is searching for “ROI Tracking” and the title of a PCP ad begins with “ROI Tracking”, then their attention will be grabbed instantly. He or she doesn’t need to know much else, other than that the PPC ad is catered specifically for him or her.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can sometimes create a more relevant title by combining your different keywords into one PPC ad. For example, I could have easily used something like “ROI Tracking PHP Script” as the title of my ad, which effectively would have decreased my click-thru rate, but definitely caters my ad more to a specific audience. Once again, this comes down to analysis and adjustment.

Another important technique to attract attention to your ad is to differentiate yourself from your competitors. In our particular case, the majority of our competition offer hosted solutions, whereby they manage the software on their servers in return for monthly or per traffic fees.

Our product caters to a different audience, those that want more control over their software, as well as those not wanting to pay monthly fees. So, in this example, I would make the title of my ad “Pay no monthly or per traffic fees”.

Next — and this is where experimentation is extremely important — we need to create a description for our PPC ad that will attract the potential customer and let them know that our product is exactly what they are searching for. To do this, I start my ad’s description with “Track PPC, campaigns & search”.

Finally, it’s good practice to add a “Call to action” at the bottom of your ad. If you’re not familiar with this term, its usually an instruction to tell the person to do something, such as “Click here to view a demo”, “Download Now”, etc.

Marketing experts seem to agree that the average human needs to be prompted to click on an ad or take action, so we’ll add this line to the end of our PPC ad’s description:

“Track PPC, campaigns & search. Try demo!”

Reducing Click-Thru’s

Sometimes it’s important to reduce the number of clicks your PPC ad is receiving. This could be because you are attracting people who are only after free products/services, or even the wrong target market.

The two quickest ways to reduce click-thru’s are to make the description of your ad more targeted and to add the price of the product to the ad.

Making the description more targeted (as I’ve discussed above) can reduce your overall click-thru rate, but potentially increase the likelihood of a click resulting in a purchase.

In my earlier example, by adding the words “PHP script” to the description, we are effectively filtering out those looking for a hosted solution, downloadable software or even those with a server that isn’t capable of running PHP scripts.

We also increase the targeting of our ad because we now know that the majority of those clicking on the ad are looking for a PHP script, which is exactly what our product is.

Secondly, by adding the price of the product you are selling to the end of the ad, you instantly eliminate those looking for free products, and target those willing to purchase your product or service.

Tracking Your Clicks and Conversions

The fundamental core of a successful advertising campaign — whether it be a PPC ad, banner ad or even newspaper ad — is knowing whether or not your ad’s are actually converting into sales or not.

If your ads aren’t making you money then you’re more that likely better off saving your advertising dollars and adjusting your ad’s or using your marketing budget elsewhere in your company.

Both Google and Overture have built in tracking and conversion tools that you can use to get a holistic view of your current PPC ad campaigns. You can even use external tools which let you add conversion code to your website to tell you exactly which of your ad’s are converting into sales and which aren’t. This is often referred to as knowing your ROI or Return on Investment.

We need to know exactly how much money we are making per dollar spent on every PPC ad. If the ROI is positive and we are making more money than we are spending, then the ad is working and we can use this knowledge to further improve our other ad’s or increase ad spending for that particular ad/set of keywords.

If, however, our ad’s are costing us more than they are returning, then we can reduce our spend, change our approach, or remove these ad’s altogether. It’s a rather simple formula, but frustratingly ignored by many advertisers.

You must track your ads if you want to succeed with any form of Internet advertising. You should also constantly monitor and adjust your ads according to how they are performing, your return on investment, etc.

Conclusion

Hopefully I’ve provided you with a clear insight into PPC advertising and techniques that you can use to improve your advertising campaigns. It pays — pun intended — to do your research and understand your target market, because the rewards can sometimes be much more than you

JoseGoes.com is a nice looking niche website focusing on mexican and latin restaurants in the state of Texas. The idea is to completely define who your customers are, who the target is for potential revenue and the next thing you know, you have a business model. We really like this site!

What we liked about Jose Goes other than the business model is the fact of how easy it is to use and the potential opportunities it brings for restaurants. You can upload videos, incorporate your menu as a pdf, include pictures, google mapping and much more. Though the site is very niche, it certainly has a lot to offer both the restaurant and the visitor.

Though it looks as if they’re just getting the site up and running, It appears they have plans on incorporating television advertising as well. Just click on the video player to watch it.

We are going to keep an eye on this site… in the mean time, have a look for yourself – we’re including a link to the site itself and to one of the featured members. Good searching!