Yellowbook.com has built a new microsite called SayYellowToTheFuture.

It’s a cool looking site with a sleak design and the first thing you see when you land on the home page is an automatic play video commercial. Whether you want to advertise locally in print or on TV, YellowBook.com promises you great advertising at great prices. But even more important than that, they promise you results. And since people are migrating from traditional avenues of finding businesses - print directories - to online directories, advertising through online yellow pages makes a lot of sense.

One of the cool features I like about the new SayYellowToTheFuture site is the YouTube Channel. This will likely be a very popular way to advertise in the future. Companies like YellowBook will open up a video channel on YouTube. The videos will be entertaining and serve well as marketing messages. Consumers will subscribe to the channels for products and services that they have an interest in and watch only the videos that look interesting to them. How effective it will be, only time will tell. But the potential is there.

Twenty years ago, if you ran a local business it was imperative to have a yellow pages listing. Today, it’s just as imperative to have a yellow pages listing online and that’s Say Yellow To The Future is all about - a marketing slogan that makes a lot of sense for our times.

Microsoft also announced plans to further expand its mobile offerings for advertisers to now include mobile search advertisements on Live Search Mobile. For the first time invited advertisers can create keyword campaigns through Microsoft adCenter that target customers on the go while they are using Live Search Mobile.

Microsoft has finally entered the mobile market. It’s good news if you currently advertise through MSN Live, but if you don’t, then you might not care. To me, this is just another local mobile advertising service. Microsoft adCenter is a great PPC platform for advertisers who have used Google AdWords to optimize their PPC campaigns. You can take what you’ve learned from Google AdWords to Microsoft adCenter and take advantage of the less expensive clicks (and less traffic). It’s the same with local mobile marketing.

If you are a mobile advertiser then you can use other mobile marketing providers like Google to help optimize your marketing efforts then once you’ve got your mobile marketing ROI where you want it, take what you’ve learned to Microsoft’s brand and tap into the users there. Again, fewer users will result in less traffic, but it will also mean you’ll pay less for clicks. You might even try Superpages and Citysearch before going to Microsoft, but it is worth considering as an alternative.

For many local businesses, getting their name out there both online and offline can be a struggle. The competition seemingly increases each year and opportunities diminish for many. The best way for any local business to stay in front of their potential customer’s eyes is through online local listings. These days most consumers look to the internet when searching for the best place to provide them with exactly what they need. This is where Local Search Engine Marketing comes into play. By placing your business in these local listing sites with optimized content regarding your services, you are effectively allowing your site to be found multiple times within the search engines. For just 49.95 a month, Brick Marketing will submit your business profile along with your website, address, phone number and hours of operation to local search engines – Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, MSN Local, YellowPages.com and several more. The good thing about this service is that the business does not even need a website in order to be listed. Providing your business simply has an address and phone number, it can be listed along with every other business in your area. This is a submission service and does not guarantee a particular ranking on any search engine but does mean your business will exist on the web if it doesn’t already. At any time, you may change your information and there is no commitment period. You may cancel at any time for any reason.

With Brick Marketing offering this form of Local Online Marketing, you can be sure you are in good hands as they are members of the Better Business Bureau and are known widely for their impeccable service and reputation. Sign up now for Brick Marketing Local and enhance your local business today!

Here’s another reason to use Facebook. But there is more to online advertising than merely filling out a Facebook profile. One of the things that makes Facebook such a great place to network and advertise your local business is its local networks that you can join. Through those you can meet other local people to do business with.

But services like Yell adding applications for Facebook make it even better. Here’s what I like about this app:

Yell advertisers will get more in-depth exposure in the app than non-advertisers, but all the activity happens within Facebook.

But I like Greg Sterling’s recommendations as well:

The application only works for Yell coverage areas. In my opinion, the company would do well to either duplicate this for its Yellowbook subsidiary or combine the applications so that it offers US-UK coverage.

A mobile component (send to mobile) would be welcome as well.

Even without these applications, if you do business in a Yell coverage area then you’ll have a leg up on your competition by advertising with the service through its Facebook application. Not that Citysearch and Superpages also have Facebook networking tools that allow you to reach out to new customers and they’re available in the U.S. If you really want to make the most of apps like these, advertise within them and do your own outside-app networking and advertising as a “doubling up” effort.

Mobile marketing is picking up speed. Live Search recently announced some new additions to its mobile marketing applications, including:

• Weather forecasts
• Web search
• Traffic reports
• Bluetooth headset support
• Map a contact
• Delete a recent location
• Collections

Each of these applications can prove to be useful for your customers, but they can also be of use to you - the local small business owner. For instance, if you have a business that can be affected by the weather, encourage your customers to check the weather on their mobile phones before coming to see you. And they’ll be really happy to know that they can search for your business online right from their mobile phones with Live Search’s Mobile Web Search. Would your customers want to know how long it will take to get to your location right now? Introduce them to up-to-the-minute traffic reports.

There is more than one way to take advantage of mobile marketing and if your customers have cell phones and spend a lot of time in their cars, this could very well be an avenue for you to reach them.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) report, display advertising online is increasing. In fact, online advertising in general is improving despite recessionary concerns.

Display advertising is up 34% according to the report. Classified advertising is up 16%. All other statistics don’t look too bad either.

This is a good sign for all of us. It means that online advertising is growing, which means online business must be growing. And I think rising oil prices might have something to do with this. People are driving less. That means they are spending more time online and that means more online business in general. This could very well continue for a good many years down the road. What small business owners - locally as well as global - need to think about doing at this juncture, is learning how to make the most of their online advertising opportunities.

YouTube is getting to be a big deal - I mean a bigger deal. It’s a great tool for marketing as you know. But did you know you can use it for local marketing?

It’s true. There are several ways you can make YouTube pay for local marketing. The first thing to do is sign up for an account and set up a channel for your videos. Then be sure to upload videos for your business every once in a while. Once a week is ideal, but if you can’t swing once a week then try once or twice a month.

You want your videos to be relevant to your local marketing, though, so be sure to tag them with local place names. And if you have a Facebook account, run your videos through your Facebook profile because Facebook is organized by local groups and if you attract enough local people in your area to be your friends then you have a natural built in audience for your YouTube videos.

Also browse the videos of others and leave comments. Try to find videos of people in your local area and network with them. Add them as friends and share your videos with them after you’ve uploaded them. Video is such a good marketing tool that if people like them they will share them with their friends. Be sure to put your website URL in the videos so people will visit your website.

A couple of days ago we shared two social networking tools that small business owners can use to develop a social network at the local level. The tools are not public yet. They are still awaiting release. But the latest development could change a few things for you if you decide to use these tools.

Facebook has decided not to let Google tap into its user base to include Facebook profiles into its Google FriendConnect tool. The reason cited is because Google won’t promise the same level of privacy that Facebook demands and promises to its users. I think this is a good move for Facebook. It shows that the social networking site is serious about protecting the privacy of its users and it also shows that Google is not. This will likely be a serious consideration for local businesses that want to build a social network into their local platforms.

I can think of no more sound advice than this. Every local small business person should have a social networking profile. Why? Because if you don’t, it could cost you.

This is a scary scenario, but what if …

A local competitor, or some cheesy high school prankster who hates your kid, decides to go and use your name to set up a profile at a social networking site like LinkedIn and fills it with links full of hate speech, porn, and other undesirable, potentially destructive information. I’m not talking about a prank phone call here. That’s annoying enough. But this type of “identify theft” could potentially be more harmful than someone stealing your credit card information, which can jack up your financial situation. But someone posing as you and using their profile on a social site (with your name) to make you look bad could be a reputation damaging nightmare than can stick around for life. And you can write to the credit card company to restore your good name.

That’s why it is important, even if you are a local business person who does business locally, to set up social networking profiles in your own name and manage them over time. You don’t have to manage them daily, but stop in from time to time, even if you don’t use them, and just make sure they are still active, links back to your site work, and there is no funny business going on. It’s called reputation management and it’s fast becoming a very important part of our lives.

If you have been wondering how you can build a true social website for your local community without shelling out thousands of dollars in technology and software to make it happen, there are two new tools on the way to beta right now that can help you do that. And both are recognizable names.

Facebook is in the process of rolling out Facebook Connect. And Google is opening up the beta version of Google FriendConnect.

Both of these applications look very promising. Which one you choose depends a lot on your preferences and there may be reasons why you’d want to use either one. Facebook, of course, needs no introduction. The friend connect application for Facebook will be limited to allowing your site visitors to connect using only Facebook. If Facebook is popular in your community then you might find that to be useful. Google FriendConnect, on the other hand, is more versatile. You’ll be able to add networking features on your local website that allow your visitors to connect with their friends through Facebook, hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, and a few other social websites.

That may make Google a bit more attractive to many users, but if you’re looking for online privacy, Google FriendConnect will likely be a less attractive application than Facebook Connect. With Facebook Connect you’ll still be able to tap into the same privacy features that Facebook has built into its community. But Google FriendConnect, being that it will be compatible with several networking sites, can’t promise that level of privacy. And some people are a little jittery about how much information they want Google knowing about them, so that’s one concern.

Both Google FriendConnect and Facebook Connect will allow you to turn your local website into a community portal. That could mean more traffic for you and a way to ensure that you can charge more for advertising dollars.

How to Use the Internet to Advertise, Promote and Market Your Business or Website with Little or No Money by Bruce C. Brown is an award winning book that was written for those who want to promote their business and website without having the budget that most have when doing so. This new book shows one how to promote and build their website while making money and using as little of their own as possible. It includes various low-cost and free methods of promoting and serves as a step by step guide for increasing overall web traffic and sales. You will learn how to research and use keywords, build web communities, brand your company, advertise on Google, use auto-responders and much more. It includes multiple real-world examples and ways that strategies have worked and can work for your company and what strategies simply do not have the desired success rate.

This book has been a finalist of the National Indie Excellence 2007 Book Awards, Bronze Winner in the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards and has been highly acclaimed by other experts in the industry. It is highly recommended for those who are just starting out a business on the web or as a refresher course for those already on. Other topics include search engine optimization, meta tags and their importance, banner ads, and even diving into pay per click networks such as Google AdWords.

Overall this book is a great first step in learning everything you need to know about getting a jump start with the online efforts in advertising!

Bruce C. Brown has authored several other award-winning books within internet marketing and is an active duty Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander which he has served in for nearly 24 years.

Superpages is one of the most important websites to get to know for small business owners. They’ve recently announced that consumers can now use Yahoo! Widgets and Google Gadgets to search for local businesses from their desktops. But how does that help you, the advertiser?

In a word, it doesn’t help you get better advertising. It does help you indirectly. When consumers download the widget they have access to Superpages and its advertisers instantaneously from their desktops. This increased user-friendliness gives Superpages advertisers a leg up in the local marketplace. But will users in your local area use it? They might. If they know about it.

That’s where you can help them. Why not put an icon, a message of some sort, on your website telling your visitors that you are a Superpages advertiser and encourage them to download the widget? Every advertiser you get to download the Superpages widget means that is one more advertiser more likely to find you when they are in need of your services. Become a customer-evangelist for Superpages and you can develop your own customer evangelists. What goes around, comes around.

There’s a new search engine in town that hopes to topple Google. It’s called Powerset. I’ve already read two reviews of Powerset, as well as tried it out for myself, and the two reviews could not have been different. Both were by bloggers that I respect and admire.

Greg Sterling of Screenwerk likes Powerset. Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim doesn’t. They both make good points.

Andy Beal is right when he says that Powerset simply appears to be another way to search Wikipedia. But I’d hope that Powerset has plans to take their search engine beyond Wikipedia. Just for the record, they do also pull information from Freebase, as pointed out by Greg Sterling. But the overriding question is, does it provide anything valuable?

I’ll have to agree with Greg Sterling and say that there is some value in it. I tested a query that would intentionally be ambiguous. “Poetry schools” can mean all sorts of things. Under traditional keyword-type queries, anything that mentions the word poetry or school, if the query is made without quotation marks, would be pulled into the SERP. If I’m looking for information specifically about poetic movements, which is what the terms Poetry Schools typically refers to, then the keyword-type query wouldn’t prove much helpful. I tested it in Google and I was right. I got a few results in the top 10 that were helpful, but most of them were not.

On the other hand, Powerset gave me exactly what I was looking for, mostly from Wikipedia and some from Freebase, but without the fluff that came in Google. So that’s one query in particular where Powerset was more useful. But what about local search?

Local searchers are going to be looking for information that is useful to them in their particular neck of the woods. For most people, especially rural searchers, Wikipedia isn’t going to be much help. A search for Texas brought up information organized into 4 tabs: Geographically (about the state of Texas), TV Series, Band, and Novel. In other words, somewhat helpful. But what about Sweetwater, Texas? 515 Wikipedia articles that mention Sweetwater, Texas, a community with less than 15,000 residents.

Among the type of entries found for Sweetwater, Texas are:

• Rattlesnake Roundup
• KTXS-TV
• Registered Historic Places
• Libby Thompson (a prostitute and madam of a famous brothel)
• Women Airforce Service Pilots
• Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway
• Bat Masterson (his first gunfight took place in Sweetwater, Texas)
• Clyde L. Garrett
• Asa Earl Carter
• Willie Amos
• Active Worlds
• Pig Show

So does Powerset, or semantic search, have any local search applications? Possibly. I think so in limited terms, but it can’t go on forever relying on Wikipedia. If Powerset could tap into the search algorithms of the major search engines and aggregate them with its semantic search technology then that would prove a lot more useful. It would have to filter out the fluff that is found and simply include useful search results based on the semantic intentions of the searcher - if that is possible. But for now, let’s suffice it to say, it’s off to a not-half-bad start.

If you are a local business that is trying to optimize your website locally to gain the most traffic from people in your area or because you do a lot of off line business locally and you want to have a website that reaches your local target market, should you put your advertising banners on other websites within your area? Generally, I’d say yes, but that’s not always the case. Some times when you might NOT want to put your banner on other local websites are:

• When the website is your competition
• When the website is out of your niche
• If it serves a different demographic than you serve (for instance, you sell women’s clothes for ladies of size, but another website sells clothes for teen age boys)
• There is nothing to be gained from the added exposure

If you run a local travel website then you probably want to look at every opportunity you can to have your banner on other travel sites within your area. The local chamber of commerce may be a good place to get a banner link. The local visitor’s center and city hall may also be good places for links.

It all starts with the proper research. Is your target market local prospects or visitors from out of town? Whichever is the case, you probably want your banner on other local sites that cater to the same market, but not the other.

Specific keywords may not be as important for a local business as for other businesses, unless the keyword is a geographic place name. If your primary keyword is your local home town, for instance, then you might gain from having a banner link on another website outside of your niche whose primary keyword is the same place name, but if your keyword is “motorcycle sales” and you just happen to be located where you are but do business over long distances then geographical place names won’t matter as much.

When it comes to placing banner ads on other local websites online, you have to weigh the advantages to you and to your target market. Will it pay?

Greg Howlett stepped on some toes with his post about SEO being a dying industry. Of course, he was just repeating what Shoemoney said a day earlier. Nevertheless, I like what Howlett said in this paragraph:

I think, however, that you would be better served by largely forgetting about SEO and focusing instead on building your brand.

That’s essentially what Shoemoney said too. Here’s a sentence buried within the meat of his post:

I don’t think anyone can argue that core SEO has gotten less valuable over the years and I see that trend continuing.

The overarching question is, are they right? And if so, what will this do for local search engine optimization?

Well, I do think that Shoemoney’s observation on SEO declining in value over the years is partially correct. It isn’t that it has declined in value per se, but that it has gotten more difficult to achieve for the average business. It is now more important to hire a professional SEO to help you rank better, but both Shoemoney and Howlett may have a point in that the current trend of hiring an SEO who strictly does technical SEO is going to fall by the wayside. If your SEO is not proficient in branding and marketing strategies then you might as well ditch him for someone who is because that is the future of SEO in general and local SEO in particular.

Branding has always been a core aspect of business marketing, whether we are talking local business or global business. Online, it’s even more important because people do not want to do business with someone they don’t know. You can have the best SEO in the world, but if you can’t built trust with your target market then your business will die. That’s where branding comes in. This principle is no less true if you operate a local business, but with local branding you have the added advantage of being able to draw your customers to your physical location to meet you face to face. Still, you’ll need to rely on branding to make that happen.

The future of local advertising online lies in your ability to create a brand that people will trust. SEO will just be a part of that branding process, though I don’t think that SEO will necessarily die out. It will simply be incorporated into the branding process. I think that’s what Greg Howlett meant with his follow-up post, and I can see the same the trending as well.