Get your website SEO and Marketing started yourself.

Google Places:

• Get your business listing at google.com.au/places
• Probably the #1 thing you can do for your website.
• Something that needs to be done by the business owner to confirm details via phone.

Google+ Business Page:

• Details coming soon.

Bing Business Portal:

• Claim your business listing on Bing at bing.com/businessportal
• Help increase your visibility and influence customers to visit your business.

Foursquare:

• Add or claim your venue at foursquare.com/business/
• Even if you don’t start offering specials or offers yet.
• Start collecting  data about people visiting your business and what they are saying about you.
• Michael and AusClicks are a Super User Level 2, so can edit your basic venue for you if you like.

Yelp:

• Are you listed at yelp.com.au? (Yellow Pages users should already have their listing included)
• If not – add your business to Yelp.
• Yelp is new to Australia, but probably the most respected & reliable user ratings and reviews.
• Apple uses Yelp listings and reviews for Siri search results. Get listed now.

Facebook:

• Visit Facebook.com to set up your business page.
• See our friends at BosWeb if you really want to make the most of Facebook.

Twitter:

• Visit twitter.com and set up your business name as an account.
• It’s not compulsory to tweet about what you had for breakfast.
• Twitter is probably the easiest way to interact with customer complaints and compliments.
• People are already complaining and complimenting on Twitter – what are you doing about it?

Submit your website:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Bing
• Please note these links are correct as of January 2012.
• Not uncommon for them to change or be removed from time to time.

Why give away all these great ideas?

Good Karma mostly.

But for the most part – most of these ideas need to be done by the business owner, or at least someone physically AT the business. These directories verify listings via a phone call or SMS. We can extend, enhance and optimise these listings once they are set up, but you need to get the ball rolling for us.

Don’t feel any pressure to actually “use” things like Foursquare, Yelp and others – though users will probably have a better idea how others will use their listings. Just make sure your business is available for other users to check in and promote your business for you.

We hope these ideas will help your business online – especially for our new Dubbo friends. The more people who can succeed online, especially in regional and rural Australia, the better for everyone.

Seriously – stop reading this and go get your Google Places page.