To assuage the fears of local business owners who don’t want to wake up one morning and see a $10,000 Adsense bill from keyword bidding, Google offers flat fee pricing for local businesses.

Anyone who’s set up an AdWords account to do marketing online knows how “iffy” things can be. Either you limit yourself to inexpensive clicks and get your ad buried on page 27 of the search results or you don’t know how to estimate the value of a click for a local business and you expose yourself to a massive bill – at least once, as in “burn me once”.

This makes great sense though. If a local business can make sure they are getting nearby regional traffic and they are paying a flat fee for measurable results, Google will have found a way to tap the local market place and open up an entirely new revenue stream for themselves… and hopefully local business.

Right now people can become certified for adsense. It would be great to see a local certification arise so that home based people could be paid to help local businesses set up adsense accounts.

There’s even a video:

But as with any gravy train, there is always competition. Google is stepping up efforts to reach your local small business customers and make them theirs.

This doesn’t mean you still can’t sell websites in a lucrative manner, but part of your sales pitch should include maximizing the value of their local Google listing in my opinion.

I recently ran across this Techcrunch article that will help you adapt in this marketplace.

Per Techcrunch:

Google wants more small businesses to claim their listing profiles on Google Local (which is basically listings that pop up in Google Maps and local search results). To entice them, starting tomorrow it will give local businesses in the real world with physical addresses a free dashboard akin to what Websites get for free with Google Analytics (see screenshot above). Except that it will show stats such as how many times their business comes up as a search result, how often people click through, as well as how many times people generate driving directions to their business son Google Maps and where those people come from.

Related Links:

Local Business Builders Forum Helps Market Products Online

It’s a way to take control of your business listing.

It’s a very helpful site for local businesses – just launched in January, 2009 you will definitely want to check it out!

Why? Latest stats show that 40% of internet searches involve a local/regional search of some sort!

You can get a glimpse of some of the “do-it-yourself” help offered by the site.

HT: Maine-SEO.com… at the link you’ll find a great article about optimizing your site for local search.

Related Links:

Get a Free Business Directory listing for your local business!

How Simple Reports Can Generate Qualified Leads For Your Business

If your business

1. Serves a LOCAL BUSINESS AREA

2. Has a website

3. Wants another link for some extra exposure

Get that Free Business Directory Listing

Only “Family Friendly” businesses please. I’ll be the sole judge of what’s appropriate. Affliliate links will not be approved.

You can visit the Nashville Business Guide at InNashville.net if you want to understand the range of possibilities open to you for serving local companies.

This site is built on WordPress 2.6.2 and incorporates a variety of plugins that make page ordering, page creation and site management easier.

If you click through pages like this one for Nashville Contractors you’ll find the same basic format and navigation as the main page. But when you click through to the final landing page where individual business listings go, you’ll see that a completely different page scheme can be set up in order to serve the particular business listing more effectively and not “bleed off” traffic due to gratuitious links. Instead, these terminal pages are designed to give maximum value to Nashville Business advertisers.

Given the time it’s possible to “waste” fooling around with a WordPress template to get the exact match for what you want, in page templates, plugins etc., you will have to have a firm grasp of the value of your time to determine whether it is “worth it” to purchase such a customized business package.

I suspect that even fairly adept WordPress programmers might take at least an hour or two to customize such a package. If you’re just starting out… you might take days and never get exactly what you want.

So whether you’re visiting the site to see options for Nashville Business advertising or you just want to get some ideas for a website designed as a local portal of sorts, this Nashville Business listing page will at least give you some ideas about the potential of WordPress to accomplish your mission!

If you’d like me to partner with you in building a local portal, email me about it.

You can visit here to get your  Free Online Business Listing

There’s just ONE rule – these must be family friendly local businesses that sell products and services in a given market area. No “online” businesses where you’re not selling a real product LOCALLY. These will be deleted.  What’s “family friendly” and “local” is at my discretion.

You can visit here to get your  Free Online Business Listing

The plugin lets your blog tap into

1) A database of businesses in the US and Canada

2) The accompanying reviews given by customers “instant Social input”.

3) While keeping traffic at your site because the information appears on your blog or review page.

4) Let’s you incorporate Google maps instantly

5) Let’s you post to Wordpress with a click or two

As I said, if you’re doing local restaurant or “Secret Shopper” reviews and want to integrate data quickly via a plugin, this is the tool for you!

Here’s the kind of content you can access for your site – if you’re in a city where this media network has content.

Set up is easy and fast. You WILL be required to get API keys for both Praized Media and Google Maps but these are just a few clicks away for  any blogger.

Now even your local hardware store needs to think about how it ranks in Google’s (and others’) local search rankings for it’s product and services.

At this stage of the game on 10/2/2008 even ONE back link to your website can help boost your services profile on Google Local.

That’s why I set up and am publicizing a free business directory listing service.

Note: All directory listings are manually approved. NO “internet only” business that does not sell products and services in its local business area will be accepted.

The day people started using “Google” as a verb instead of a noun was the day that Yellow Page advertising started to die. “Local Search” is the name of the game these days for every small business!

In the Local Search marketing world, every “one way” link back to your business is crucial so that when people search for your product or service in your city or town your listing is the first one they see if at all possible.

Because MOST businesses have NO links back to their website, every link helps.

So help yourself out – it’s free.

Free Business Directory Listing

Jim Cockrum, the author of the best selling “The Secret Sales Machine hiding on Ebay” has stumbled upon another wide open market… Brick and Mortar businesses.

Here’s how he puts it as he opens a new resource.

It all came about when I started noticing a trend locally.

Businesses in my hometown were seeking me out to ask about the most basic of Internet business strategies.

They were willing to pay up to $750/hr for my advice!

I’m not the only one this is happening to either. The simple tactics we know are priceless information to traditional “brick and mortar” businesses.

You can do this! OfflineBiz.com is all you need.

The “early birds” that have already jumped in to my new site are saying things like this:

“$1,500 the first day”
“$3,000 with my first sale”
“Got a great project with my first try”
“Got paid on the day I tried it”

Even my web site programmer tried it…and it worked for him…to the tune of $2K!

*You can access the discussion forum at No Cost and see these conversations for yourself!

Pricing will be going up after launch.

Now you can easily tap into the HUGE trend in helping CLUELESS “real world” businesses tap into the
online marketing – without doing the “work” yourself! We show you how to OUTSOURCE IT!

We BACK YOU UP if you have questions!

We tell you WHAT WORKS!

Even SIMPLE strategies give them MIND BLOWING speedy results. You save them a TON and they pay handsomely! It’s insane.

After 8 months of hard work and thousands of dollars of programming and content I’m proud to announce…

http://www.OfflineBiz.com

Get in early and save.

NOTE:
Free-memberships available temporarily for those that want access only to our active, robust discussion forums. At a minimum take advantage of that.

1) Decent looking and

2) Search engine friendly

That’s important because as the old “Phone Directories” die because people “Google” what they’re looking for, then basically every local business will rise or fall in part based on whether it has a website that “works” for them.

You don’t have to be a web programmer to makemoney doing that kind of work.

You can represent key players who give you far more resources for potential clients than you’ll ever have for yourself (at least any time soon).

If helping local businesses get on the web is a field you’d like to explore, you may want to read this brief report on Marketing Websites To Local Businesses