Read about Google Maps News

VERY GOOD NEWS – It has been estimated that Google’s new policy for displaying local results without the city and state or zip has INCREASED THE FREQUENCY OF BEING SEEN 61 TIMES GREATER BY ONE LOCAL SEARCH EXPERT. ENJOY IT.

MORE VERY GOOD NEWS - This week Google is now making available detailed statistics for local businesses.  Statistics cover the last 30 days and includes visitors who saw your listings (impressions), the actions including visiting your website (clickthroughs), seeking driving directions actions, etc, what terms were used to find you, and more. You can access this information by signing into your Local Business Center. You will need your username and password

For Your Information: Google has also updated their policy with regard to how they want listings to be handled. Its here. I recommend that some business may want to add a generic name d/b/a to protect its listing to comply with these new guidelines.

Ever ask yourself “How do I do that?  Who can I call? I’m not finding it on Google”  Well visit the The-Manuals.com

If you need to learn quickly how to use a program or a tool from a specific manual or handbook.

How-to-do-anything-manuals provides solution seekers almost unlimited (over 5.7 million) specific and accurate manuals about how to accomplish a task.  The homepage is clean with a Google-like search box.  Just enter the name of the manual you need.  That’s it.  It doesn’t matter if its about operating systems, iphones, hardware, software, you name it.  Your best bet to find out HOW TO DO ANYTHING QUICKLY.

Free Online MBA Courses

Well the Angels are now online.  YouTube offers MBA and college courses FREE online NOW here.  YouTube released YouTube EDU with thousands of free lectures from over a hundred universities across the country, including MIT, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and more.

Academic Earth offers more FREE education It was founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.  They have identified the barriers to higher learning and found innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning creating an educational ecosystem so anyone can find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.

And when you have recovered and become rich.  For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world, Stanford Engineering Everywhere. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other students. A computer and an Internet connection are all you need.

And when you finished Stanford online you can move onto MIT’s FREE 1800 (eighteen hundred) online seminars: MIT’s OpenCourseware

Local Search Growing

The study found that local search — the practice of using online search tools to find local businesses, products, or services — grew 58 percent in 2008, reaching an annual total of 15.7 billion searches. By comparison, overall U.S. Web core searches grew at a much smaller rate of 21 percent year-over-year, nearing 137 billion searches by the end of 2008. Local searches stand at 12 percent of core searches on the top 5 portals.

“Even if the searcher doesn’t know the company or brand they will ultimately give their business to, the decision to actually make a purchase has often already been made,” Norton said. “That is a strong argument for local merchants to develop and maintain an online profile, if they haven’t already done so.”

–  75 percent of the top 100 keywords searched on Internet Yellow Pages
sites were non-branded, indicating that a majority of consumers have not
decided on a specific company or product brand when they begin their
search.

–  Nearly half (45 percent) of Internet Yellow Pages and local online
directory searchers made an online purchase in the fourth quarter of 2008.

The comScore study measured real-life Internet browsing, buying and transactional activity of approximately one million U.S. Internet users who provided permission to be monitored from December 2007 to December 2008.

comScore Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital .marketing intelligence. comScore derives its information and analysis from a representative panel of more than two million Internet users worldwide.

Wifi.com is building a fast-growing network of free consumer and retail wifi hotspots around the globe. You’ll no longer be frustrated by the cost of hard to find secure commercial wifi hotspots?

free wireless everywhere

• A search field for information, forms, and government contacts (administrative and support)
• Access to topics of current interest to the small business community
• Access to a listing of all the licenses and permits that apply to you
• Videos featuring expert advice from successful entrepreneurs and small business owners

The YellowBot team is a self described ragtag band of merry pranksters focusing on solving how local businesses and consumers can best navigate each other because local is where its at.

Businesses can register their business to get no cost traffic for FREE here.

YellowBot is a local search site growing exponentially used for finding and reviewing those local places you go to in your community with ways for patrons and business owners to exchange tips and experiences.  Businesses can get FREE business listings accepting photos, videos and consumer reviews

The YellowBot team set its sights on “solving” Local search engine experiences because they don’t think anybody’s done it right yet.  They want to make better sense online of places where the story of your life is unfolding. They want to help you pull it all together a bit more and share it with the world to make it easy to find the best (or nearest, or most popular or cheapest) place to do that by searching by name, by location, by keyword or by tag.

Yellowbot encourages reviews which they call stories. You’ve been there, you’ve had an experience, people that you know were there (or else you want them to know what they missed). Their framework allows your stories to intermingle with the stories of neighbors, friends, and people you haven’t met yet. When there are enough stories, a picture of the place emerges.

Yellowbot provides tools (like RSS feeds and APIs) so that you can take your reviewss, content, etc. and re-use it wherever you want.  Their tagging system allows users to superimpose a ‘vision on the world’.  Customers or busineses can add Personal or Location pictures (JPG, GIF and PNG) and videos (MOV, MP4, AVI, MPG, MPEG, FLV, ASF, WMV, 3GP, 3GPP, 3G2).

Consumers can create lists and share them. User lists allow you to organize any group of businesses or locations that you find on YellowBot for any purpose you can think of and add any business to that list, or even add it to multiple lists if you want.  Businesses that you add to a list don’t have to be related such as a list called “Places To Check Out” and they are right there at your fingertips!  They can be Public or Private. This is an easy way to share favorite (or hated!) businesses with neighborhood friends.  Lists can be shared with your friends, and you get to control how much they can (or can’t!) do.

Matchpoint believes it’s an easier way for people to find and connect with local businesses. Consumers use Matchpoint.com to search for businesses in more than 3,000 service categories.  Businesses both large and small utilize Matchpoint.com to meet new customers searching on-line for local products and services.

In addition, Matchpoint’s search and listings products appear on thousands of web sites in partner networks.  Also available is Matchpoint Promote for business owners that want to get more exposure with better placement in Matchpoint search results as well as inclusion on related business pages.

Get started with a free listing now.  Expose your local business to local buyers one free directory at a time until your business can be found everywhere.

Finance, leadership, marketing and accounting are some of the categories in this video portal.  The web site also allows users to socialize with brain pick with others. Groups can be created.  Insights can be shared.

The site is a great self education business video portal for entrepreneurs and small businesses.  It already has a great collection of MBA videos.