Inbound Marketing Guide for Local Businesses - How to promote your small business

Inbound Marketing Methods

1. Focus on search engine optimization - if your website is badly managed, there is no content, site is broken, contact forms don't work and if you just havelo one big image with your name and phone number on it, may be it is a good idea to work on it and make it better since 61% people do onlne search and research for a given product and service.
2. Set up a blog and publish regular content - Other then having a decent site, you certainly want to have a blog too through which can you can publish regular content.
3. Content Marketing - Check out this article on 25 ways to do content marketing to find various content marketing methods through which you can promote your business locally as well as to global audience.
4. Build an email list - You do want to capure leads and want to have subscribers/email list to whom you can do freqent followup and who can bring further lead and sales.

1. Support fundraisers - You can search facebook and linkedin to find if people are looking to have any fundraiser and you can help them. You can also search for local charities in US through lic.
2. If you have a news worthy item, you can use Haro http://www.helpareporter.com/ to spread your news through local media by contact local reporters.
3. Support a local event - use linkedin and meetup to find people who are active in local community and organize/sponsor local events. This doesn't mean you have to spend money, you can always help organizing the event by providing space and promoting it on the web and managing the .
4. Join local chamber of commerce - You can join US (every country has its own) local chamber of commerce. SBA and BBB.
5. Use local classified sites - If you are looking to sell your service or product locally, do check local classified sites including craigslist.
6. Groupon - Groupon is not for everyone but if you think it will fit into your marketing strategy, you can contact grouponworks.

Facebook - If you are not having your business page on facebook, create right now as with over 1.3 billion users, not having a business page on facebook is like not having a website for you. In fact there are good chances that your facebook page will rank better in search engine over your site, not to mention you can built local followers for your company. You can create your company on facebook from this link.

  Twitter - Twitter with over 700 million users is another must for small businesses as the profiles on twitter also rank really well in search engines. You can create a custom background for your business where you can mention your address and phone number. Do follow others (not businesses but real humans), do update your feed with some genuine content, do not just keeps on retweeting can be some other ways to have a healthy number of followers. 

Google+ - Google+ is now the 3rd largest (actually this happened few months back) social media network behind Facebook and Twitter and as it is tightly integrated with so many Google properties like youtube, you can imagine how much secondary visibiliity you can get. How to use Google+

 To know more how you can use major social marketing sites to promote your local business, check this article.

Reputation management for your small business 

As a small business you do want to keep an eye on social media and web to track who is talking about you. Here are some ways to manage and build online reputation

1. Google alerts - Use Google alerts to find places where you are getting mentioned or anything related to your niche is getting mentioned including local events.
2. Check SocialMention to find your mentions on the web and you can do the followup accordingly.