For this week’s Yodle Tipster, we’ll be discussing online business directories and how to know where you should list your business. Listing your business website with directories is a solid advertising tactic. Basic listings often give you a free (or nearly free) way to drive traffic to your website. Search engines are more likely to find your site and give it an individual organic listing on their results page if you have your business site placed on a number of directories. But there are scores and scores of directories out there. Getting listed can end up being a never-ending time…

Here’s a question. What is the first thing you should online? Is it….

a. Buy pay per click ads b. Build a professionally designed website c. Hang out on social networks d. Get listed in local directories

Once bitten by the online advertising bug, a lot of business owners get ahead of themselves, seduced by pretty flash banner ads and other impressive-sounding tactics.  It’s understandable since online advertising tactics tend to be cost-effective and easily tracked, but the reality is that most people should go back to basics first.  The single most important thing you can do online as…

For this week’s Yodle Tipster from Local Online Advertising for Dummies, we’re going to be returning to Chapter 3 to talk about that whole series of three letter abbreviations like CPL and CPA that are important to understand in order to measure how your business’s marketing campaigns are performing.

So without further ado, we’re just going to dive right in:

CPM – This often confusing abbreviation stands for Cost per Thousand.  That’s right, don’t let that pesky “M” throw you off (because in this case that “M” is actually the Roman numeral for thousand).  Cost per Thousand…

For this week’s Yodle Tipster from Local Online Advertising for Dummies, we jump all the way to pages 300 through 304 from Chapter 16, Staying at the Top of Customers’ Minds, to discuss cost-effective ways you can keep in contact with your current clients.

While a quality service, a competitive price, and superb customer service are huge factors in maintaining repeat business from your customers, nothing quite compares to the emotional connection a customer has to your business.  If your customer feels personally connected to your business, they will come back, even if you’re not all that different…

For this week’s Yodle Tipster from Local Online Advertising for Dummies, we’re going to be turning to pages 44 & 45 in Chapter 3 (entitled Planning Your Local Online Advertising Campaign) to talk about a topic that transcends online advertising, and is really something every business owner – local or national, big or small – should think about.  That is your business’s USP or unique selling proposition.

First off, what is a USP?  In the book the term is described as “the factor or consideration presented by a seller as the reason that one…