MerchantCircle Amongst ComScore's Fastest Growing

comScore recently released their Top 50 U.S. Web Properties for August 2009, and MerchantCircle got a special mention:

Getting Down to Business
Business-to-Business was another fast-gaining category in August, growing 17 percent to 38 million
visitors. MerchantCircle.com led the category rankings with 6.9 million visitors.

While I wouldn't classify us as a business-to-business website, we're flattered to get the mention. Many of you members know MerchantCircle as a number of things, including a social network, a forum, a web site for your business, an online business directory, internet yellow pages, a leads driver, and recently, a place for consumers to find deals, ask questions, and a portal for two-way communication on the web between merchants and customers.

The growth in traffic is a reassuring sign that we're putting more LOCAL customers into more LOCAL shops. Recently in June, quantcast had us as the 5th largest online directory. And in January of this year, comScore had us as 8th fastest growing website from the two previous months. The growth and mentions are humbling, but an important part of what we do to ensure more local customers can connect with the nation's largest online network of local businesses.

Sincerely,
Community Relations

What Businesses Have the Most Risk of Failure?

Coming from a family of local business-owner/entrepreneurs (of varying success levels), I have first-hand experience of the difficulties of trying to start your own business. When I was young, my father started a restaurant in Huntsville, TX, which was successful enough, that he had to work 12 hour days, 7 days a week. I know this because I spent my single-digit years running around that restaurant! He sold the restaurant a few years later to finally get some rest and started another restaurant venture in Conroe, TX, which failed. Eventually, he owned a super market in Santa Cruz and a burger joint in Boulder Creek, CA, which I spent my teen years working EVERY single weekend. I am not bitter. What teenager doesn't want to work every single weekend while everyone else is out enjoying beautiful California weather?

My aunts and uncles have also had varying degrees of success starting and running their own businesses. I've even had my own thoughts of starting a business, but which ventures have the most risk of failure? I came across this interesting article on Yahoo!, titled: The 7 Most Overrated Businesses. No surprise here - 'restaurants' shows up on the list.

Here's an excerpt:

...about 60% of restaurants close in the first three years, according to a 2003 study at Ohio State University. That's quite a bit higher than the roughly half of all start-ups that close in the first five years.

The reason: Restaurants typically have low profit margins and need strong managers who can run an ultra-tight ship through seasonal fluctuations and other struggles. Most people don't have that kind of intense managerial ability to pull it off.

Well, I guess I should think twice about opening up my Houston Rockets-themed restaurant in California. In the meantime, no matter what business you start or have, MerchantCircle is the ONLY free network that allows you to blog, build coupons and newsletters, and email them to customers.

Join the free network here today or communicate with other local business owners in our forums here.

Sincerely,
Community Relations

Free Business Social Network and Online Directory

As the nation's largest social network for business owners with more than 600,000 merchants, we are constantly flooded with stories from merchants who have used our network to find more customers, communicate with merchants all over the nation, and show up high on search engines. We're honored and happy you're getting so much out of the network. While out in Chicago recently, we had the opportunity to meet with one of these merchants who had been telling us for months that MerchantCircle was helping him find more customers than he could handle. His MerchantCircle listing was coming up #1 for almost every automotive search term you can think of.

Here's the interview we did with Jeff's Automotive in Lake in the Hills, IL.



Sincerely,
Kevin
Community Relations

P.S. You can check out some of our other videos here.