This post is for those really small businesses (that are usually based in someone’s home).

I’d define a really small business (RSB) as one that operates out of someone’s home or other residential location.  The RSB does not have a ‘main office’ or even a place for customers to drop off checks or view products.  A majority of these businesses have a website, and rely on it for most, if not all, of its revenue generation.  Most of these businesses have one to five employees.

Since these RSBs rely on their website, and thus their marketing/ranking of their website for a majority of their income, it would make sense that they need to rank well for local terms.  It would also make sense that they would prefer not to use their local address (ie home) on places such as Google maps, Yahoo local, etc. - yet they really need to be listed on these sites.  Plus, these websites won’t accept PO Boxes for addresses.  They want a real physical location.

Well, these businesses can have a ‘real’ address, not a PO box, and can use that street address to add their business to these sites.

Everyone knows that the UPS store will ship things, but you may not know that they also provide post office-type services as well.  They have PO boxes, but with a twist.  Instead of your address being PO Box 123, you can use their street address and then use a Suite # or Room # to distinguish your business.  This gives you a real street address for your business.

For example, my hosting business is run from my house.  But I don’t want people showing up at my house, and I don’t want to list my house address for my business on Google maps.  So I went up to the UPS store and bought a box, at a whopping $8/month, and now I have a real address which I can list on all the various websites.

Lighthouse Technologies Web Hosting
1243 Water Tower Place
Suite 180
Arnold, MO 63010

I could also say

1243 Water Tower Place #180

or even

1243 Water Tower Place
Room 180

The goal here is to get a physical street address, which this accomplishes.

I should also mention that there are other companies that do this as well.  MailBoxes Etc is a good example, and there are other local ones that may work for you.  The trick here (pay attention) is not to get the cheapest one, but to get the service that is physically located the closest to the center of your town, or the town you are targeting.

Why? Because when someone searches Google maps (for instance), they may type in something like ‘widgets in Utopia KS’.  If your fake PO Box address is located closest to the center of Utopia, KS, chances are you’ll be the first listing for widgets in the area.  This, of course, means you’ll have to optimize your business listing to have the word ‘widgets’ on it, which isn’t a hard task.

So how do you find the ‘center’ of town? Easy. Simply type in the name of the town into Google maps.  This will give you what Google maps considers to be the starting point of reference for anything related to that town.  In most cases, it will actually give you a street address.

Now you can go do a search for local mail box providers (make sure you weed out mailbox manufacturers and sellers, like hardware stores), then get a box there.

It should also be noted that it’s not necessary to get a box in your town.  If your ‘target town’ is one of more affluent people, then get a box in that town!  Wherever you think more people will search for your products or services, that’s where you need to list your address!

Lastly, there’s no rule that says you can’t have more than one address, neither.  If you can afford it, get a box in several target towns!

Advance warning - this post has absolutely nothing to do with search.

My wife is a gambling nut. She just loves to go play the slots, and lately she’s getting in to video poker.  She does well most times, and it makes her smile, so I don’t mind going to a casino now and then.

The new Lumiere Place casino in downtown Saint Louis is our latest hangout.  We are probably there 2-3 times a month, sometimes more.

Well we’ve been saving up for vacation so we’ve kinda laid off going, but last night I took her down there for a while.  I don’t mind going, particularly if there’s a Cardinals baseball game on.  I’ll sit in one of the bars, drink beer and watch the Cards.  I usually sit in a bar that’s right in the middle of the casino because it’s actually fairly quiet in there, surprisingly.  But last night I ventured over to another bar, dubbed the “Burger Bar” (how original!).  It’s a nice little place, and best of all its non smoking.

The wife wanted to play video poker, so I met her over at the Burger Bar and she went to it.  She has some crazy strategy which usually works to her advantage.  I just sit and stare at the TVs.  But last night I was starving, so I asked for a menu.  I ended up ordering the turkey burger with blue cheese and skinny fries.  Man oh man was it good!!

I was a little cautious about ordering turkey, but it was worth it.  I’d order that baby again today if I were there.  It had the normal tomato, lettuce and onion. I got a wheat bun and put some mustard on that bad boy.  Good stuff.

Oh - and the wife did well.  She hit four of a kind on about three or four different machines there, totaling about $300.  Not bad considering we walked in with about $140.

I have a friend who is a bona fide member of the YTB travel group.  She promotes her stuff, and claims to make a nice commission each month.  She is trying to get me to sign up, since she knows I’m already an Internet marketer and a good public speaker.

I first talked to her about YTB about a year ago, and today I stopped in and asked her how it was going.  She claimed that they (her and her husband do it together) were doing well and once again she urged me to check it out.

So I’ve done a little research online.  Some people call it a scam, others debunk the scam myth.

I’d like to hear from some people who have dealt with YTB before, both those who are currently working the system, and those who signed up and then quit.

For those currently promoting travel via YTB:
How are you doing?  Are you averaging, say, $300/month in commissions?  $500? $1000? More? Or are you finding out that bothering your friends and family to sign up through your website is a pain?

For those who were members and quit:
Why did you quit?  Big promise but no real money? You don’t know how to promote it beyond just friends and family? They screwed you?

Leave your comments and thoughts below.  I’d love to hear them.

In preparation for the family vacation, I realized that there are several things I’ll be doing differently than in years past.

I signed up for OnStar’s Three Months on Us Trial.  This will give me emergency contact info if my 15 year old wrecks the Denali on Highway 57.

My Mom just bought a new Garmin for her husband.  I’m going to see if I can’t borrow it for our trip, and if we like it, we may just buy one of our own.

I’ll also be using the Garmin for some geocaching fun.  The kids have been talking about this, so what better way to introduce ourselves to it than on vacation?

I’ll have Google Maps on my Treo for restaurant location and any other info I may need on the fly. I’ll also use it to find known wireless hotspots so that the wife and I can check email.  Unfortunately I’m not at the point in my business where I can trust the biz to someone else while I’m gone, or else I’d be avoiding the email altogether.

I’ll also use Google Reader on my Treo to keep up with the latest feeds (when I’m not driving).

We’re considering signing up for XM radio so we don’t have to change the radio station every 100 miles or so.  That gets old, particularly on an 1800 mile trek across the US.

Sphinn this article

I’m a big fan of Google Alerts. I love letting Google scour the web for me and provide me with a nice little email that tells me about (and links me to ) new articles about a particular subject that I may be interested in.

For example, I run a very local website called Arnold Talk (ArnoldTalk.com) which I post news articles and events that are related to my little town. So I set up a few alerts such as “arnold mo” and “arnold missouri”. Any time someone posts an article that mentions that phrase, I’ll get an email about it.

It’s great because I can have information about upcoming events before anyone else does, including the local newspaper.

So how can you use Google Alerts for your business?

Let’s say, for this example, that you run a business selling football supplies. You stock and ship footballs, helmets, pads, even trophies around the country.

You notice that your ranking for “red helmets” is low and you want to get a few links for that phrase. So you log into Google Alerts and add a new alert for that phrase. Make sure you use the quotes, or else you’ll end up with results that just mention the word ‘red’ and the word ‘helmets’ on the same page. That won’t do you much good.

So a day or two goes by and then you get an email from the Alerts telling you that there is a blog with your phrase. You click the link and see that its a high schooler who is blogging about his day, and he mentions the new red helmets they got this year. You look around and find his email address and shoot off an email similar to this:

Dear Johnny Quarterback,

Today I noticed that you had mentioned that your team got some new helmets for this years football season. Congrats!

I am an Internet marketer, and I would like to know if you’d be interested in creating a link in your recent post where you mentioned the helmets. If so, I’d be happy to pay you $5 for the link.

I hope your team does a great job this year, and wish you the best of luck on your football career.

Joe Mama
SportsRus.com

Now, it may work better for you if you just mention that you are a sports store owner, or you may want to skip that part altogether. The point is to get the link, and cheap. Since the chances are this blog isn’t read by too many people, the value of the link is not going to be high. But it’s a permanent link. And Johnny Quarterback will be thrilled to get $5 bucks.

Do you use Google Alerts to help you with your link building strategy? If not, why not? What’s more fun than using Google to beat Google?

By the way, if it works out and you get the link, I’d also follow up with him asking him not to post the fact that he sold a link (for obvious reasons).

How many very popular websites were built without private funding/VC?  Is it possible?

Here’s a cool way to get some possibly original content for a local community-based website.

Watch the local newspapers for articles written by freelance writers.  These local newspapers often don’t have a website, but are usually pretty stable in their small market area.

Hence the writers are getting published in the paper, but possibly not online.  So why not contact them and ask them if they’d like to be featured on your website as a writer for that local niche?  They’d probably be happy to get more attention, and you’ll get free local content.

I used to write an IT column for the Missouri Jaycees newspaper.  They were thrilled to have content for their newspaper, and I was excited to get the byline (and mention my website).  Had they put that online, I’d have more links and more exposure.  Win win.

Every designer screws up. Somewhere in that ever-growing website of yours is a link that goes to a page that doesn’t exist. Perhaps the designer fat-fingered it. Maybe he made a link with the intention of making the new page. Whatever it is, its fubar’d now.

So in the very likely event that a customer clicks on that link, and gets the generic 404 page from their browser, its your designer (or you, if you’re the designer) who gets the credit for losing that customer. Bad bad.

I’m sure you’re not interested in losing customers, not even one. So make sure you have a 404 page that’s not only there, but one that’s helpful too. Here are some tips to make the page better.

• Match the layout with your current site
  Make the page look like any other page on your website, but with a nice little message that tells the user that they’ve encountered a page that doesn’t exist. Match the headings, the text size, everything. Basically we’re going for a page that looks nothing like the big bad error that it is.
• Notify the User of the Error
  This would be a good time to explain that someone screwed up (you may want to put it a little kinder than that). Assure the visitor that this isn’t a common happening. You could even go a little further and tell the user that someone has already been notified about the bad link (which your designer/SEO will see in any server log/analytics report or on Google Webmaster Tools) (also see this script for emailing the webmaster important info)
• Give the User Some Options
  Don’t just tell the user the page is gone, give them some fodder to help them figure out what you screwed up.
  • If you’re a good coder, you can perhaps take apart the bad URL and suck some keywords out of it, do a search for related pages and list those for the visitor
  • Give them a nudge to use the search box (which you’ve included on the 404 page)
  • Provide them with a nice sitemap that gives them plenty of options to find what they were looking for in the first place (see Apple’s 404 for a great example)
• Put Your Contact Info on the Page
  Good lord, do I have to tell you this? Assuming its not already in your header, give them a way to contact you. This may be a good thing, as you’ll find out immediately about the broken link, and you’ll also have a warm lead that you can coddle and caress to your hearts delight.

http://stlouis.craigslist.org/act/708702664.html

With every TV newscast, radio program and newspaper screaming about the recession, this is the perfect time to be spending.

No, I’m not nuts.

Think about it.  Everyone is saying it’s time to cut back.  And nearly everyone is.  Your competition probably is.  They’ve cut their advertising.  They’ve even cut employees.  The marketing budgets are being sliced - but why?  If everyone is cutting their spending, that means there are a lot of open markets that you can get in to.  This is the time to start building the foundation for your future.

Mom & Pop, listen up.

When you start building now, you’ll be way ahead of the big dogs when the economy recovers.  And it will recover.  That’s not a question, it’s a fact.  A year from now when companies are finally starting to put a little money back into their marketing budget, you’ll have a stronghold that’s going to be hard for them to break through.

Build now while the gettin’ is good.