Alta Vista Business Services Blog

Alta Vista Business Services is pleased to announce the launching of a new eCommerce site for Beadorable.com.

 
Beadorable is a jewelry company based in Concord, NH. Molly Brandt, the owner and designer of Beadorable Custom Belts and Jewelry, required a site with enhanced eCommerce capabilities with a highly customized look and feel.

Primarily, Molly was looking for a site that she can maintain herself going forward. Molly's inventory changes a lot, since creates original pieces and therefore needs to be able to manage the products and catalogs on the fly. AVBS is able to provide that and much more! Beadorable also publishes an eNewsletter and has an extensive customer database that can now be managed entirely from a single dashboard.

Visit beadorable.com to see the beautiful jewelry Molly creates and the Website that is making her business life so much easier!

Marketing is probably the most complex subject for any entrepreneur. If you use the many hats metaphor, we business owners wear many throughout our work-week. But the marketing hat has to be the one that converts from a rain-hat to a designer hat and still to a winter hat. There is so much planning and so many tasks, that I often feel overwhelmed. So, when the invitation to attend the WIW Marketing Inspirations workshop landed in my Facebook wall, I jumped on it.

In addition to building my marketing skills, I was thrilled about the chance to hob-knob with local business owners and other women entrepreneurs and meet local gurus like Link Moser, and Allen and Lani Voivod, Catherine Blake, and others. 

The information shared during the Women Inspiring Women Marketing Inspirations Workshop, covered subjects like “How to put sizzle into your brand”, how to leverage the power of the press in your business, to the big buzz-word of the day-- Social Marketing, and still Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) tactics for your business Web site. 

Everyone goes into a workshop with varying degrees of understanding of the material, but I was really surprised at how much I learned in every area—even areas where I would consider myself highly knowledgeable. For example, I use the top four social media platforms presented, but I didn’t know some of the tools available to make them work even harder for me. 

It was especially enjoyable to experience the other attendees’ exclamations of revelation, or sometimes confusion with the information presented. Most of the attendees were women, and at an event with mostly women you experience so much more than in a mixed group. Women connect and have fun when learning together. We drop our inhibitions about questions, which really raises the level of experience for everyone. 

I must say, I learned so much about all these subjects and truly enjoyed the personality of each presenter. It was a full-on, 10 hour day, but I was completely drawn in the entire time. It wasn’t until I sat behind the wheel did I realize how exhausted I was. 

Women Inspiring Women event Marketing Inspirations was held at SERESC in Concord, NH, Friday, November 13th, 2009.

When I started my business last year with very little start-up money, my first main focus became "What can I do to get my name out there for little or no cost?"

I would search the Internet for information, just like anyone would and found lots of opportunities if I pay money, but not much for free or almost free. One day I was conducting a "local search" for a nearby restaurant and it suddenly occurred to me, that my business should probably be listed on Google. I didn't think it was, since I have a home office. But just for grins I looked. Of course it wasn't there. BUT, I noticed a small link: Can't find what you're looking for? * Add a place to the map.

So I did. I was a little nervous about it since, who am I to change things on Google? But Google actually allowed me to do it. Creating my own listing on Google was easier than setting up phone service through the phone company! Google simply required that I verify my business location and information.

One thing leads to another. So, I say to myself, if I can do it on Google, can I do it on Yahoo? I soon discovered, Yes, I can! Similar process: Search..., not found, okay  login to (or create) account, then create listing, wait for verification letter, logon and verify with pin. Voila!

It is clear that many small businesses have not taken advantage of this free marketing opportunity. Much of the info among the many business listings is incorrect. Some owners may not be aware that their listing is not even there! I'm talking established, local restaurants, here. Search engines use spiders or bots to crawl the Web to get information for their databases. So, it is likely that some of the information is incomplete. We, as business owners, have every opportunity to rectify this, but it can be time consuming. So on to my next point.

Later, on one of my favorite sites, websitemagazine.com, I discovered an article posted that was all about taking advantage of free listings on search engines. They were highlighting a resource called getlisted.org which allows you to locate or create, and claim your business listings for four major search engines, all from one dashboard. That allows you to go back later and check on the progress of those listings, add or change information as needed, and best of all, take advantage of the great tools the search engines offer that let you add value to your listing. But I don't want to get ahead of myself, there will be more on that in part 3...

So for now, go ahead and logon to getlisted.org and see if you can find any listings for your business (or your Uncle Joe's pizzeria-- ya never know!). Go ahead. Why not? it's FREE!

According to getlisted.org, there are well over 10 billion unique searches done each month, and that's just in the United States! Of those searches, 40% of queries have Local intent.

What is "local intent?" Local intent means the entered search criteria specifies a locale in some manner.

Now this is where it can get confusing. Local search doesn't necessarily mean that you are searching in your own locale! It simply means that in your search you have specified A locale, any locale by using a zip code, city, state, neighborhood, country or any other criteria to narrow your results to a place in this world. (A note for those who cater to visitors or tourists.)

Why should you know this? Why should anyone care? Well, for a business owner, if you live and work in a location and want to attract people to your locale, you want to use all the necessary tools to do that. And if you are a Search Engine user, you may not be completely aware of how useful local search can be to help you choose the right company to give your business.

Most of the big search engines have a network, or for lack of a better term, sub-feature, called LOCAL. Google has it, it's called Google Maps (maps.google.com). Yahoo!'s is called Local. Bing has a local search category too.

How do you know which results are one of these networks? When  a person performs a local search in any of the above search engines, your first indication is that a map appears in the results. The map displays circles or balloons, and alongside this map are the referring circle/balloon business names. Click on this map and you suddenly have many opportunities to drill down and get lots of information about these businesses. This helps you decide who you want to do business with.

From the other perspective, if you are a business owner, how can you capitalize on this feature? Business owners can create a free account with any of the three aforementioned search engines and "claim" a business listing. Once they claim it, and go through the verification process, they have the opportunity to change or upgrade the data the search engine keeps for that business.

Features vary from search engine to search engine. For example, some allow you to list your business hours, leave a link to your Web site, post photos, create coupons, and they also have a review feature for customers to rate and leave comments on the quality of products and services.

To see if your business data is found in a search engines local network. There are instructions in our previous blog.

In the next installment  of this three part series, we will address ways to manage your listings with various search engines in one place.