Merchant Circle threw itself a party last week at Nola’s in Palo Alto to celebrate a year in business and registration by 140,000 small businesses. I’m on their Evite list, so I knew about it. It is probably a good…
You learn a lot from talking to local advertisers. Occasionally, I get to leave my ivory tower and give a speech or appear on a panel in front of local advertisers. Generally, I'm talking “Local Local.” A couple of weeks…
Summary BizReport.com reports that Google will begin to axe websites from its AdSense publisher network that have an unfavorable "ad/edit" ratio (to use a magazine term). Though this seems detrimental to Google's strategy to extend its reach for brokering ads…
Spotzer CEO founder Andrew Klein makes no bones about being inspired by SpotRunner, the break-through company that broke out last year by making it easy for small businesses to produce video and place it on local media. Spotzer is pretty…
Most of us get a lot of e-newsletters every week. Most of them are powered by Constant Contact. But, given the alternative means that local businesses have to communicate (blogs, RSS, videos, podcasts, etc.), is the era of the e-newsletter…
HP is serious about working with small businesses and announced today that it is buying Logoworks, the disrupting producer of logos for small businesses. It will be a great acquisition for HP. When it launched in 2001, the premise behind…
It seems to me that precious little has been written about the fact that, according to the March 19 issue of eMarketer, four national portals Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL have seen their share of total Internet advertising…
One of the foreseen deficiencies that could hold cable companies back in the battle for bundled services is the lack of wireless service assets. Though they possess short-run advantages in the relative ease in building a voice business (compared with…
MerchantCircle may be best known as the bad boy of telemarketing for a negative marketing scheme that went awry last fall. But the eight-person Rustic Canyon start-up promises it has mended its ways and points to a growing base of…
TechCrunch published a report today that Insider Pages, the review site that has been actively shopped for some time, may have found a buyer for more than the $8.5 million it raised last March from Sequoia and Softbank Capital. I…
As Peter Krasilovsky reported last week, Citysearch will establish new Atlanta-based sales digs. Kevin Newcomb over at Search Engine Watch points to a ClickZ article today about the expansion. The company hopes to have 180 sales (inside, outside and national)…
There are a lot of reasons why Yellow Pages will continue to be the dominant local advertising vehicle. Certainly a major benefit Yellow Pages publishers have is that advertisers and people looking to buy products and services both know a…
Last week, we linked to a Search Engine Guide Piece by Jennifer Laycock that outlined some of the challenges that small businesses face in devising and executing online ad buying strategies. Today, Laycock takes a closer look in her article…
There has been a lot of talk in the past week over some of the apparent challenges facing local destination sites. Last week, BackFence endured a major downsizing, including the resignation of cofounder Susan DeFife (past writing on BackFence and…
Search Engine Guide editor Jennifer Laycock writes about how small businesses fit into the online advertising ecosystem. A prescriptive look at online ad buying strategies for SMEs (in going up against the big guys), it dives into lots of the…
ClickZ has an interesting article on the practice of advertising on Craigslist. Essentially this entails small businesses advertising products or services in the form of a Craigslist posting. I wrote about this for Search Engine Watch a few weeks ago.…
The Small Business Administration has released its annual report on the small business economy. According to the SBA, a new high was reached in 2005 of 25.85 million small businesses in operation. More from Inc.com.
During Day 1 of ILM:06, Google's head of SME product development, Dan Rubinstein, spoke about a new small-business Web site development tool for SMEs. Like many efforts we're seeing in the marketplace by paid search providers, Web hosting companies and…
