By: Andy Sambandam

If you are a small business owner you probably know that these are times you simply can’t rely on referrals alone. Many people cope with struggling economy in different ways. Most of them cut back on expenses and even reduce workforce. But some see it as an opportunity to firm their base, build a stronger groundwork to grow their business. In any case, you need to be wise in your spending and find innovative ways to gain visibility.

A wise marketing strategy is to make your name known locally and to give yourself a chance to be found online, without spending too much!

Targeted Marketing
Let’s face it. Not just younger generation, but almost everyone goes online to find products and services and in many cases people things get done online. The Internet and social media segment of the web has revolutionized everything forcing businesses to re-think their marketing strategy. In other words your potential customer is out there and looking for you even before seeing your advertising message. Internet Marketing is the key to build a successful business.

The Numbers Speak for themselves
Let’s look at the facts. Local search and advertising is the fastest growing segment in Internet for the past 3 years. The number of people using yellow pages is constantly dropping. Of the 220 million people who use the Internet in America, more than 70% of them have performed more than 1 billion searches looking for local businesses. A study by COMSCORE, a news analysis company shows more than 110 million people perform searches every month looking for local businesses.

We all know, when people look for things online, they go to Google. In some cases they start at Yahoo and AOL. Regardless of where they start, they are looking for things using specific keywords combined with their location. For example, they search for “Beauty salons in Wilmington Delaware”, or “Day care centers Dover”, or “Restaurants Rehoboth”.

Fired up and ready to go?
So, what do you do? You need to be ready, and be there with your message. How do you bring all these potential customers to your website, or to your listing?

You need to get listed in a local online directory that will give you incoming links to your business and help you get top rankings in Google and Yahoo, for specific keywords.

“Perfect SEO” is time-consuming, expensive and not permanent. Simple online advertising or PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is not ideal for everyone. If you do not know what you are doing, you can max out your daily or monthly budgets without seeing much ROI. You need to have an expert search-marketing specialist do it for you and the costs can be higher.

An ideal alternative is ZipListing. ZipListing is a micro-targeted online local directory that will help you gain visibility and provide you incoming links, which are crucial for search engine rankings. Their push technology creates entry points for your business listing across the web including social media sites. Google loves these incoming links and your business listing (or website), will eventually get higher rankings as a result. Unlike yellow pages online and big companies like AT&T, ZipListing has multiple local directories with SEO keywords at the domain level. Better yet ZipListing is a local company and is building the Delaware valley market.

The key is to have your business listing in a unique page with SEO friendly title and keywords in the URL itself, all of which is designed to improve your search engine rankings. ZipListing even provides Google maps integration with satellite street views showing your business. Your ad banners and logos appear on the page to increase brand visibility. Depending on the package, you even get guaranteed front-page results on Google.

Building a successful online presence takes time, but if you partner with the right people, and make wise decisions, you can dominate the online marketing game and gain the much-needed visibility for your business. If you are a consumer, you can save tons of time by searching locally on a directory such as NewarkZip.com or any one of the tens of local directories by ZipListing.

Andy is an entrepreneur and a visionary involved in developing technologies that bridge businesses and consumers online. He has held several key technology management positions in his career and has served fortune 500 clients and top management consulting firms. He holds a degree in Engineering and is committed to helping small businesses and women entrepreneurs.