Local small businesses are gaining more and more advantages for using the Internet every day. As stated on SearchEngineLand.com today, if you combine social networking and local search you will have a diversified mix of sales tools that will empower circles of families, friends, co-workers and organizations to share experiences and opinions about your local business.

According to Stephanie Hobbs – Small businesses will risk missing important growth opportunities if they don’t learn to harness “local-social search”.

These are the highlights of the article on SearchEngineLand.com -

• Google has recently launched Place Pages where you can discover a lot of relevant information about a particular business, all in one place. Here is an example of some of the information shown about a Gold Coast resort in Australia:
  
• Google maps also integrated a user review in their searches, and the resort above has a number of user reviews shown in it’s description.
• Yahoo! Local now includes review content in its index.
• YellowBot offers local search results based on networking and tagging.
• Internet Yellow Pages continue to provide up-to-date local content and are adding a social aspect.
• There may even be a Twitter feature for SuperPages

Go to the following page on SearchEngineLand, to read the article written on Local-Social Search: A Powerful Marketing Channel for Small Businesses

What is the highest ROI for Your Local Australian Business Online?

Get your business a blog.  Setting up a blog is one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective ways to promote your business and expand your customer base.

Blog = High ROI

However, just setting the blog up will not be enough to get the dramatic results and profits that everyone ultimately wants. You can’t just build a blog and have people come to it automatically.

Here are 3 ways you can use your blog to build and promote your business in Australia:

1. Keep People Informed

Particularly in today’s economy, if you don’t correspond, people will assume you’re gone.

Make sure everyone knows you’re around and ready to leap into action whenever they need you by posting updates, tips and even sales information on your blog.

2. Develop a Rapport

People are more likely to work with people they feel an affinity for.  – Maria Gudelis, VP Social Media

However, you probably don’t have time to develop a meaningful friendship with every potential client. (more…)

Infinite Marketing Consulting released a Press release about their innovative web marketing system for Australian small and medium businesses. They said that many businesses have a website, but they don’t realise it has to be marketed so it will get seen on Google and other search engines.

The rest of the press release can be read here about Infinite Marketing Consulting