Your Business: How To Promote Your Local Business Online

I placed this tip first, as Michael does, because if you are reading this in your local business right now at this moment, it's so easy to ask your next customer for their email address while you are preparing their order.

With that email address you now have a way to reach your customer again and can start planning a strategy for keeping them in touch with what you offer.

Make sure that when folks are online searching for what you are selling that they'll find you at Google.

For free, click here to list your local business at Google (link opens in a new tab/window): Google Places For Business

It's all about relationships!

Connect through Twitter. Sign up, do a local search, and "follow" people from your town. Interact, and watch your Twitter fan base grow.

Post updates every so often. Be personable, be responsive, and do let your followers know about sales or other events that have to do with your business. (Learn more about How To Use Twitter from my good online friend, Lensmaster pkmcr.)

Facebook is another option and has many more bells and whistles.

However, if all of this is new to you, you might do well to purchase this book. It'll give you a rundown of social networking and help you know where to spend your time online. Your success will depend upon a "strategy" rather than a glut of social-site sign ups that you can't keep up with and that can very quickly become overwhelming.

I have not read this book, but I chose it for you because of its reader reviews - their responses fit where local business is right now.

Customers walking into your place of business notice far more than you may be aware of. If your store is nice and clean, it's noted. If it's dirty and cluttered, it's noted. Whether or not you have repeat customers can depend a lot upon their impression of you and your business.

Make sure to take care of the things that can be taken care of. A nice welcoming storefront with flowering plants out front that aren't dead or dying are worth eons more than the time it takes to make them flower and thrive to welcome your customers.

Dusting, organization, and all of the things that show you care are, indeed, noticed.

You don't have to like your customers. It should be a rule, though, to treat all of them alike - with kindness. This is not just from a business perspective, but an appeal to one's sense of decency.

It's always fascinated me to watch some store merchants. Depending upon what their customers are wearing, you can stand back and watch the business owner's demeanor change. Be nicely dressed, and you are fawned over. Be dressed shabbily, and you are brusquely waited on.

If you're a merchant like that, stop it. People notice, even the ones standing back and watching. And they may not return. I know I don't.

I am certain that if this is an area you know that needs changing, you'll notice a remarkable, maybe even an astronomically large, difference if you do implement it.

Your employees reflect on you. Their first rule of employ should be kindness in all dealings with your customers. Let your employees know in no uncertain terms that it will be an "issue" if a customer is treated disrespectfully.

The old adage, "The customer is always right" is not meant to give a customer carte blanche to treat you or your employees with disrespect. It means that, as a customer, "I am spending my money, and I don't want to pay for what I don't want."

So give your customers this concession. It truly is your job to make them happy.

A blog is a Web log.

On a regular basis, write about your business. Don't make it all about you, of course. Make it all about what you're doing for the customer. Keep folks in the know. Adding new inventory? Tell your customers why you are offering it. Having a sale? That's another reason to write.

Make it "for the customer's benefit" to read it. Write well-thought-out posts on a twice or thrice weekly basis so you have constant connection with your customers.

Start off with a free WordPress.com or Blogger blog. This is assuming you don't have a website from which to build a blog. Once you acquire skills with the free blogs, you'll be able to build or upgrade to another platform, such as WordPress.org where you will have complete control over your blog.

In Michael's blog post, he lists several suggestions for making your local business stand out through specialization. They are as follows:

Go local

Go green

Go high end

Go narrow

Go high touch

Go for the money

On going "high touch": As you can probably tell from this article, and from the #5 tip especially, I have a firm belief in the prospect of success through the human touch. Michael even suggests training. Certainly, formally or informally, you must train your employees.

Join Squidoo, and make a page about your business. Link your Squidoo page to your Website or blog so that you can send people to it that read about it here.

Tell some history on your Squidoo lens. Place testimonials. Add photos of your store. Add a video like the one below from Lensmaster OhMe.

Minus the border, and a little cropping, it is exactly as it looked when I found it at Flickr.com.

In the big image, you can see how I adapted it to make the store look more friendly. Notice the store name I added, and the addition of a warm welcome sign on the door. I also removed the cat dish. Although it's very nice to feed the kitties, I wanted the larger image to look a little more formal for this page.

The store name, Brenda's Treasures, is in honor of an online friend of mine. She's fellow Squid, Treasures_By_Brenda, and she's a hardworking online entrepreneur whose main concern is bringing you quality information.

But, that's not the most important thing about this image...

The online world is a sharing culture. The image was used free of charge (and with permission to adapt). In return, I credit the photographer with a link to their image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/koshalek/. The photographer is no longer active on Flickr, but the credit remains because that was the license agreement: CC BY 2.0.

Such is the wonderful world of the Internet.

Hope to see you around!