Throughout 2009 scores of people will rate businesses on CitySquares.com and we invite you to rate your favorite destinations! Each season there will be a different All Star campaign, with Beauty & Wellness being the first, Dining & Entertainment being the second and Shopping starting in October.

Whether it’s the bicycle shop who helped you find some new wheels, or that local clothing retailer around the corner who had the perfect jacket, this is your chance to say thanks and give them some recognition. All Star winners will be picked according to your votes, there are no editorial picks. And hey, while you’re at it, why not share your experiences with these businesses as well? To add your review simply create a free CitySquares.com user account and add as many reviews as you’d like.

Thank you for supporting your local community on CitySquares.com!

The Health & Wellness Top 10 are as follows!

• Clevergreen Cleaners – Best Dry Cleaning & Overall All Star winner! This is their second year in a row!
• Unique Verve - Best Massage
  
• 379 Club – Best Barbershop
  
• State Street Barbers – Best Barbershop (runner up)
  
• Satin Wellness Personal Training – Best Personal Fitness
  
• Sain Visage Skin Care – Best Facials (runner up)
  
• Sole Tanning – Best Tanning Salon
  
• Indulge Day Spa – Best Day Spa
  
• Darque Tan – Best Tanning Salon (runner up)
  
• Stingray Tattoo – Best Tattoos
  

Congratulations to all the winners! Be on the look out for their All Star Winner decals in their windows and awards on their walls!

Coming up next… the CitySquares Dining and Entertainment All Stars… announced very shortly!

To add your free business coupon just search for your business on CitySquares and once you find it, click it so you go to your business profile page. On the right side of the page you’ll see a blue box to Edit your listing for free. You’ll then be taken to a page where you can edit your business information. Keep in mind that you do need to have a username and password on CitySquares to do this.

Lastly, we encourage you to enter a coupon or discount that is redeemable. For example, something that says “Free hair coloring for first time customers when you bring this coupon with you!” This way your asking the consumer to bring the coupon with them and you’ll be able to see for yourself that the coupons are working!

Take full advantage of this and spread the word!

Please email us at help@citysquares.com if you have any questions.

How do you know you are getting targeted traffic? Website analytics.  Many small business owners really have no clue about what sort of traffic they are getting or even how to figure out what the numbers mean.  This post is meant to be a quick introduction to website analytics.

Most web hosting packages you will come with some sort of statistics. There are also programs or services you can purchase.  Probably the best free option right now is Google Analytics.   When looking at a web analytics program/service, you need to be able to answer the following questions:

* Who has been to your website?
* What were they looking for?
* Where did they come from?
* How long did they look at your content?
* Were they locals?

To answer some of these questions, you will need to understand the terms used in web analytics.  For a good list of terms used in analyics, please see Wikipedia .  Below are two terms that I try to point out to folks because they very important.

Visitor / Unique Visitor / Unique User – The uniquely identified client generating requests on the web server or viewing pages within a defined time period. A Unique Visitor counts once within the timescale. A visitor can make multiple visits. Identification is made to the visitor’s computer, not the person, usually via cookie and/or IP+User Agent. Thus the same person visiting from two different computers will count as two Unique Visitors.

Bounce Rate – The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.

The last point I want to make about web analytics is time.   Time will show trends and this is very valuable when understanding your traffic.  If your website is new, or you recently updated portions of the site, you will need to give it some time to see how that will effect your traffic. The more data points you get, the better informed you will be.

I want to encourage all small business owners to take a few minutes and take a look at your traffic. Can you figure out what is going on with your site?  It is not that hard, once you understand the basics.

Additional Articles:
Below are some excellent articles, written by fellow local search marketers about how analytics can help with your local search marketing campaigns.

• The Most Important Analytics In Local Search
• Using Analytics For Local Search Optimization
• Tracking Local search Traffic with Analytics

The quick answer is “yeah, but….”

A small business needs to be involved with social marketing. Being able to connect with customers and more importantly potential local customers is what it is all about.  Social marketing is growing at a tremendous pace right now and with anything online, if it is hot, you want to be a part of it.

I recently came across a couple of related articles that are worth reading:  How SMBs Can Optimize their Social Networking Time (2 part article) and Small Business Owners Need Twitter and LinkedIn by Carrie Hilland and Social Media Marketing for Small Business.  Both provides some good ideas on small business and social marketing

Ok, back to the “yeah , but…” Social marketing/networking biggest problem is TIME. It takes time to read blogs, write tweets, get friends, reply to emails, etc. Time is the one thing we the small business owners do not have enough of; trust me I am speaking from experience.  I find myself spending tons of time on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. trying to keeping up with things rather than getting my work done. It is addicting!

I really do not think it is realistic for the typical small business owner to be doing a lot of social online marketing. You really cannot keep up with it all. Your best bet is to hire a professional web marketer to monitor/maintain your online social network.  Now if that is now an option, I would:

• Get an account on each of the major social sites and try them out. Each one has its own unique or signature feature.
• Talk to your current customers and see what they use.
• Decide what is your reason for social marketing- plug specials, converse with customers, simply provide updates, learn more about your field, teach others about your field, etc.
• Once you find one that works for you, use and use it daily. Don’t have to spend hours on it, just set aside some time each day.

Customer are the key to any business and relating and conversing with customers is how you keep them.…Sorry I need to go…. someone just sent me a tweet, I got a new Facebook friend,  got to update my flickr page, need to stumbleUpon an article, check my rss feeds, read some emails, and I got to finish my blog post on social marketing!

It’s probably a bit overstated, but perhaps if consumers have too much power, and small businesses can’t defend themselves, than they’re in trouble. Perhaps all that would be left are huge corporate chains, with substantially more money (and hence power) than any mom-and-pop. They can afford a PR offensive, they can afford hiring dedicated twitter people, dedicated social media experts, etc. The small businesses cannot. And it’s these small businesses that are the thread in our economic quilt. They are essential, and yet they are challenged everyday by huge obstacles, nearly all having nothing to do with the Internet. You’d be surprised by what small businesses have to deal with every day, that threaten their fate. From macro economic conditions, to micro economic conditions, to neighborhood/street construction, to local zoning laws, from tax policies, to crime rates, small businesses can be crushed in ways that might seem petty and insignificant to the average consumer, or to big business. More often than not we really have no idea what small business owners have to go through to keep their doors open, to make payroll, keep their lights on, keep customers happy and returning. Too often then not we’re quick to jump to conclusions, and make assumptions. More often than not, these small businesses are greatly affected by one persons opinion.

Some people will suggest that the best way to counteract this is for the SMBs to “get on Facebook” or “get on twitter” or “hire a social media consultant.” My response? Give me a break! The small business owners response? “What is Facebook? What is twitter? What the heck is social media?”

So, we decided to take another step towards solving this problem for small business owners, and it might be interpreted as a controversial one: CitySquares now allows businesses to opt-out of reviews all together on their CitySquares.com business profile page.

Why? Well, take the local dentist for example, who no matter how hard she tries, she can’t win over all her customers. Truth be told, not everyone enjoys the dentist, right? And we have reason to believe that not all reviews left on a dentists profile are going to be glowing reviews for her root canal skills. Is it fair for this local dentist to have virtually no way to combat this? Sure, we could give her an opportunity to talk back to consumers, but what does that really do for the dentist? It’s her word against another – it’s tit-for-tat, he-said-she-said. And ultimately, that single dentist is up against a whole lot of (mostly) anonymous voices, people who are hiding behind an avatar, a username, while everyone knows who the dentist is, where she works, and have the power to nearly destroy her operation. OK – maybe a bit overstated, but nonetheless, reality!

This is just one scenario – there are lots of others that could be described. But you get the point.

So now, if you’re a small business owner you can opt-out of consumer reviews on your CitySquares business profile.

Here’s how it works:

• If you are a paying customer, you can choose between having reviews, or not having reviews. Period. End of story. There is no gray area – reviews are either enabled, or disabled, for paying customers only.
• If you are not a paying customer, we cannot disable reviews. You must be a customer. And all it takes is $5.99/month to become a customer, and that is all it costs to have reviews disabled on your profile. Not a penny more.

This new feature is not intended to be a revenue opportunity, that’s not the point. It’s not some crafty bait-and-switch, or anything like that. The point of this is to give the merchants a little more power, a little more opportunity to manage their online reputation, at least on CitySquares.com.

We’d like to do much more – and soon we will be. There’s much more in store for small merchants, but I’ll save that for a later post.

What do you think?

As CitySquares.com grows we need to make sure that the site continues to be easy to navigate and that all the people who use the site can find everything they’re looking for. One of the big additions to the site is a greatly improved navigation system that makes getting from one place to another much easier. We redesigned the header area at the top of the site so it would take up less space which in turn moves important content higher up the page. Now you can just change your location by typing in the city, town or zip code directly into the ‘change location’ text box as shown in the sample below.

Speaking of improvements, we created a cleaner and simpler home page that better articulates to our neighbors and merchant audiences just what CitySquares.com is about, and what you can do. On the new home page we added a really cool ‘What’s New’ scrolling ticker so users can see, in real time, what is happening on the site. The ticker shows the latest reviews, ratings, merchant profile edits and other activities on the site. We also added a more obvious call-to-action so small businesses can quickly jump into updating or upgrading their profile. There is also a list of top cities and a prominent location text field so users may jump to the location of their choice with ease. Visit the new home page here.

We think we’ve done a great job at providing valuable business content to users but we wanted to add more fun and engaging stuff too, so users could share their favorite businesses with friends and family as well. After figuring out what we wanted, and coincidentally meeting the folks over at AgendiZe, we entered into a partnership with them to bring you just the goods we envisioned! Agendize offers a plethora of viral tools for users such as sending a text message, add to Facebook and other bookmarks as well as instant messaging, saving to Outlook and so much more. You can see a sample of it here on this profile. Just click on on the of yellow buttons below the profile information and you will get a window of options. Every single profile on CitySquares.com has these tools so please start sharing your favorite businesses.

Lastly we added national events to the site which is just one of the early steps to truly become what we’ve long envisitione – to be your neighborhood online. The events are brought to you through our partnership with another great company called Eventful. You can find local, and hyperlocal, events all across the country on all the city, town, and neighborhood pages on CitySquares.com. Go here to see hyperlocal events in Wrigleyville Chicago!

Well, that’s quite a bit since our national roll out! And that’s not it either. Very soon we’ll be rolling out even more – including hyperlocal news, community information, classifieds, and some really fun tools to allow users to find everything they need about their location on CitySquares but more specifically, in their real world, their community.

Stay tuned for more updates and improvements to the site! We’re on a mission to provide the most hyperlocal content on the web – from business info, to real community info, events, news, classifieds, you name it. We aim to be Your Neighborhood, Online! Now the fun really starts.

If you have any questions or feedback please feel free to leave some comments here! We’re always happy to chat and hear your thoughts.

Throughout 2009 scores of people will rate businesses on CitySquares.com and we invite you to rate your favorite destinations! Each season there will be a different All Star campaign, with Beauty & Wellness being the first, Dining & Entertainment being the second and Shopping starting in October.

Whether it’s the bicycle shop who helped you find some new wheels, or that local clothing retailer around the corner who had the perfect jacket, this is your chance to say thanks and give them some recognition. All Star winners will be picked according to your votes, there are no editorial picks. And hey, while you’re at it, why not share your experiences with these businesses as well? To add your review simply create a free CitySquares.com user account and add as many reviews as you’d like.

Thank you for supporting your local community on CitySquares.com!

What I found was that the major search engines have a mobile version of their site but after that there is huge drop off in quality mobile search engines or directories. There are some out there but I had to search hard for them and I could not see many folks accessing them.  So my question is, should small business worry about mobile search?

Mobile search is growing but it’s not quite there yet. A recent press release from comScore: Mobile Internet Becoming A Daily Activity For Many showed that the daily mobile internet user population has more than doubled in one year! Accessing news and information was the top activity and then accessing social network or blogs was second.  So folks are using their mobile phones more, but the question is should you get a .mobi website?  In general I would say no. Now I will qualify my answer saying that some industries such as restaurants, hotels, movie theaters etc that really cater to those on the go should invest in mobile search.

Another great article I found recently, Getting Closer to Mobile Local Search’s Day by Mike Boland provides a nice overview of where mobile search is today and some forcasts for the future. Some points Mike makes:

• Mobile web users will grow to 95 million by 2013
• Changing device standards are bringing mobile search into the mainstream
• Smart phones are settling around $200, making the mobile Web a mass market opportunity for the first time

Again mobile search is growing but has not yet reached the level many have been expecting for some time.  With the growth of smart phones with full html browsers it does not seem necessary right now for the majority of small businesses to create a .mobi website or spend hours submitting the mobile search engines. If you optimize your website for local search and get listed in the major search engines, you should be just fine for right now in the emerging mobile search.