The importance of blogging

Time and time again we stress the benefits of blogging. It's just such a great way to reach out to an audience, cheaply and effectively.

The Creativity Factor just posted a great little piece on the benefits here. Great stuff! We agree 100%.

So for merchants out there wondering about blogging; increase your traffic, grow your consumer base, and promote your deals today all through blogging on MerchantCircle.

Cheers,
Ryan

Small Business, Big Bucks

BusinessWeek has a great article on the Local Internet market and how Google, Yahoo!, The Yellow Pages, and entrepreneurs like us are all trying to grab a piece of the 15 billion dollar market.

Who can blame us when according to comScore Networks, search engines are already attracting 66% of online local-search users, while the Yellow Pages listings get 34%. These are pretty drastic numbers in my opinion and that's not all, check out this exert from the article.

"Researchers at Kelsey Group predict $3.8 billion of Yellow Pages money will move online by 2008. To put that in perspective, the total Internet ad market was $9.6 billion last year. "The local search market should be larger than [Google's] other markets because most people's purchases are local," said Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, at an investor conference on May 25."

Interesting stuff! We're pretty much at the birth of the Local Internet and seeing what may come is definitely exciting.

But, what's more important are that the millions of consumers online looking to find relevant local information will have the tool they need and that the millions of small businesses will have the channel to reach them.

Cheers,
Ryan

Local and Free DA

"The services' national focus enables them to have an easier time of populating their ad inventory, using Pizza Hut and other national companies. Pierz notes that 1(800)San Diego has the best quality service in many regards, and attracts 650,000 users a month. But it has had trouble selling enough ads in the 16 communities it serves to break even.

Going forward, The Pierz Group suggests that the Free DA providers must focus on local sales channels if their ads are to be relevant to users, and if the services are ultimately to succeed."


Local is 'Critical' for Free DA(Directory Assistance)


I believe this is the issue for a number advertising services that have a great opportunity to provide value to the Local Merchants, if they don't develop an effective channel to 1, 2, 5M merchants they will be missing a big opportunity. We remain convinced that this channel has to be a new channel and will not be the yellow pages sales force. Check out the results Jingle is seeing in the space.


On another note, I spent some time with Auren Hoffman who is on our advisory board as he was at Spoke. He is always good for a few insights and a fun guy to spend time with. I think he really understand some of our novel approaches to bringing 1, 2 or 5M local merchants online so they can better capture the opportunity to leverage the Local internet for advertising. As we discussed the different ideas on how to help merchants better express themselves, I became more convinced that providing merchants even easier opportunities to share their views was important to the company.

Auren also had an opportunity to update me on Rapleaf. I think Auren is taking on an important enemy with Rapleaf, the evil minority who use the anonymity of the web to create havoc. His very simple reputation system will help things like Craigslist go even further by helping people have more comfort about the person they are dealing with. It is still early and there are lots of challenges but Auren is tackling an important problem with passion which is the most important step in building a great company, in my humble opinion

Best,
Ben

Merchant Safety

Here at MerchantCircle we work hard to make our members more visible on the web. And it works. Our merchants see massive increases in their local visibility on the web within days of signing up with us. Frequently they can be found more easily because MerchantCircle local profiles appear among the top links in search engine results. We want to drive as many customers to our members' businesses as we can. However, some local searchers, not surprisingly, are not prospective customers. They're folks wanting to sell stuff - or even scam - our visible members. This seems to be just a trade off of being a highly visible business on the web.

Nonetheless, we want to help our merchants avoid scammers. In our book, they're not much better than Tony Soprano. There are a plethora of Internet scams, and we want to help you avoid them. Here's a list of Internet scams that our merchants should look out for as well as measures to take if they feel they're being taken advantage of:

1. Internet Advertising Hoax: Beware of companies wanting you to purchase Internet advertising packages. These companies frequently call prospects directly because they're promising to increase your traffic -- guaranteed. Of course, no one can guarantee results. Not even us. And that's why their pitches arrive via phone, because putting that guarantee in writing would expose their nefarious practices.

2. Phishing Scams: Phishing is the term used to describe criminal attempts to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as password and credit card data, by pretending to be a trustworthy business or official communication from a business you may know. If you're contacted by someone requesting billing information or other account details, stop. Never give out sensitive information. At MerchantCircle, we only request identifying information at signup, and we don't contact our merchants for additional updates. If you have any issues with billing or any other information, please contact our support team at support@merchantcircle.com.

3. Fake Prizes: We love to show our appreciation to all our merchants from time to time, and so we often give away prizes randomly. However, when receiving a notification of your prize, you'll rarely be contacted by phone and most importantly you'll never be asked to divulge personal information, such as your credit card details. If someone contacts you claiming to be a MerchantCircle representative, they can easily be spotted as fake if they ask for personal information.

We're excited by the opportunities the Local Internet offers to local businesses. That's why we started MerchantCircle - because we want to see local businesses thrive by leveraging the Internet to drive more local customers to their businesses. When it comes to scammers, however, we have zero tolerance. If you feel you may have been contacted by a scammer, report it to us at scams@merchantcircle.com. Include as much information as possible so we can track them down. We'll fight on your behalf and on behalf of all our merchants.


Thanks,
Ben

Guerrilla Marketing Expert Advice: Go online and focus on a highly targeted market

Jay Conrad Levinson, ad agency veteran and author of Guerrilla Marketing: Secrets for Making Big Profits From Your Small Business, cautions that radio, TV and metropolitan newspapers are far too expensive and unfocused for most businesses. Instead, he sends business owners online for less expensive and far more effective LOCAL customer acquisition. The one-two punch to drive more business? Post a succinct description of your businesses, complete with contact details, and offer free information to your customers.

Read more about Levinson's book in Scott Reeves' review from Forbes.com

Join Now to create a business listing and share your expertise with your own blog.

Best,
Liz

Time Saving Results

MarketingSherpa released a rather interesting study on local advertising with Google. I found this extremely interesting because of the elaborate amount of time it took, or for that matter, that anyone would have to take not using MerchantCircle to generate a web presence.

Take a look at the steps they had to do to generate some traffic to their business.

Talk about intensive and I highly doubt merchants have the 10 plus weeks to devote to doing something like this. This all just signifies the beauty of MerchantCircle even more.

With a MerchantCircle account, you can accomplish a lot of this up front and can gain even more with our additional tools and services. Not only do we focus on Google but we also run ads with Yahoo and don't forget our own ad network of merchants sharing deals. We also have the ability to create coupons instantaneously and best of all, all these advertising avenues are tracked in our system, which provides you with the details you'll need to measure the effectiveness of each campaign.

Check out Cambric of Los Altos, by having fresh content on their site and by utilizing all the features of their account they're continuously showing up on both Google searches and Google local queries all from our FREE account.












Imagine what kind of results you can gain from one of our premium accounts.

Cheers,
Ryan

Social Media and MerchantCircle

Update 6/16/06: Great article just released on Small Business Trends: MySpace, Not Much Value to Most Small Businesses


I want to take a bit of time to explain social networking online. Being of the MySpace generation it's been obvious to me what these networks can ultimately become and hence the value I see for merchants using MerchantCircle. However, for business owners not of the generation, it leaves a bit to be explained on how a site much like MySpace aims to help grow their business and build their relationships. Granted today's plethora of social sites are centered on youth culture, but the tools and communication that is happening within these sites cannot be ignored for other markets (ie. MerchantCircle). I recently stumbled onto an interesting article on the growth of these communities online. Most interesting about this article is the fact that these tools are assimilating outside of youth culture and presenting themselves in other business markets.

So if you take a look at what the youth are doing on sites like MySpace and then implement it for say business purposes, you have the makings of a very valuable tool. For instance, the youth on MySpace are creating content. This content comes in the form of blogs - web journals focused on issues at hand and pictures - usually to enforce the narrative in their blogs and or to create identity for the user. Among this content and the most centric part of MySpace and related sites is their unique ability to build and expose relationships online. Now it's here that the value resides. Users of MySpace and the like are creating unique content to share with their friends, family, and acquaintances online.

Keeping this in mind, let's shift for a moment back to MerchantCircle. Much like MySpace we bring the same ideas but to local businesses. Each individual merchant can create unique content; blogs, pictures, newsletters, coupons, and advertisements for their relationships online. A merchants relationships can consist of it's customers but also of fellow business owners, whom they promote, send referrals too, and overall just support in the community. So much like the youth creating for friends and family, merchants are doing the same. It's this network, this referral mechanism that helps make MerchantCircle great. This aspect combined with additional tools and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) help merchants connect and grow online without the complexities of promoting and building their own website. It's all about using current tools to simplify the web.

Simplicity is always much better, especially when you have a business to run.

I hope this act's as a better explanation to merchants trying to understand social networking online. I'll be glad to expand further if you have any more questions. Just leave me a comment and I'll get back to you ASAP.

Best,
Ryan