by Andrew Patrick

Is it any wonder companies like Reach Local, Yodle, Service Magic, Yelp, Angie's List, Google, Yahoo!, etc... are targeting local businesses and making Billions of dollars. The new and easy money is helping small business owners get new customers via the Internet. Plumbers, dentist, lawyers, mortgage brokers, restaurants, and retail store get more customers by having an online presence.

The old media is out, what used to work in marketing no longer...

Last night I put up a new WordPress website and blog about the Gulf Oil Spill. Waking up, about 8 hours later, I see my first comment on the site.

Awesome.

Even though it was a spammy comment. It told me my site was already listed in the search engines - without any promotional effort on my part at all.

Checking Google. Yep, there it is. #1 for its targeted keyword.

Nice.

So much for having to spend tons of money and...

Just in case you are not aware, Bum Marketing involves writing articles and distributing them to the various article directories and in particular ezinearticles.com, and making sure that you have a link back to your website, blog or affiliate link in the resource box which you include with every article.


When someone goes to the article directory and chooses your article for their website they must keep the resource box with the article so what in effect happens is that you...

You probably know that one of the most effective ways to use Twitter to build your business is by directing your followers to another web page so that they can sign up to your mailing list.
There is another great way of promoting your business depending on what type of business you are promoting.


Let’s look at a situation where someone is promoting their restaurant through Twitter and they have built up several hundred followers and Tweet to them on a regular basis...

To really take advantage of your Twitter account you really must build up a list of responsive followers but where an earth do you start? This is a question that I have been asked many times over and because it confuses many people they end up not doing anything with their Twitter account and simply give up.


One of the easiest ways I know to get followers is to find someone who is well known in your niche and who already has quite a large following.
You then go through...