The first step to online promotion: simple, powerful and inexpensive. With all the choices, costs and confusion associated with online advertising and search engine marketing many businesses overlook an obvious and inexpensive step which can attract the most customers – this is making sure your business is accurately listed for online and mobile search. This is true for large corporations with hundreds of branches and for the small business that might operate off a cell-phone – they do not pay attention to how they are listed on local search sites like Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Superpages.com, YellowPages.com or 411 Directory Assistance. Why is a business listing on local search sites important today, compared to general Web Search which gets most of the attention? Local search simply means a user has added a geographical component to their search such as “Plumber Newark NJ” or “Divorce Attorney 21343”. If you are in business that gets customers locally or regionally, these are the searches that matter, and there are lots of them. More importantly, not only can search sites and browsers assume your location without you entering it, but they will return these business listings on top of standard web results. So a search for “Divorce Attorney” on Google’s main search page today might well return what is called the “7-pack” of business listings first – which will give them almost all the traffic. Experts say properly listing a business can generate 40% or more of “clicks” that otherwise would have to have been paid for. This can mean savings or earnings of tens of thousands of dollars a month depending on your business category. In these listings, businesses can add lots of enhanced information about their business, such as descriptions, keywords, categories, logos, brands – all of which are indexed by search engines. Unlike a search engine optimization effort for a website, where there are coding complexities and much debate about risky tricks, providing accurate details of your business for Local Search is as easy as filling out a form. The problem is: which sites have forms and how many you have to do? Unlike Web search, which is dominated by Google, searches with this local business intent are coming equally from online yellow pages, social directories, 411 and even GPS devices. And not all of them have forms for entering the data. Even the ones that do, can take 30-40 hours of submissions if you happen to know where to look. UniversalBusinessListing.org has a service that allows you to enter this data in one place, and they will deliver it to every major publisher and hundreds more. Not only is it a time-saver, but they work with the data vendors that provide the underlying databases to the publishers so they reach hundreds of outlets. The listings are only $30 per year and you can make changes through their online listing management portal any time. They also have an active and generous Affiliate program for sites that refer customers to the service, as well as an Agency program for Interactive Marketers. For Agencies and large corporations, they offer a bulk file delivery system, as well as APIs and “white label” submissions. UBL’s data delivery covers almost all of the content that gets published in Local Search, and some that is growing in importance such as social network links to Facebook and Twitter sites. Data fields include the ability to submit “Street” names rather than corporate record names, brands carried, descriptions, products, services, logos, photos, Website links, video links, hours of operation, payment methods and much more. Distribution points include: - - Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing - Online Yellow Pages such as Superpages, YellowBook and Yellowpages.com - Portals and Guides such as AOL, Yelp and CitySearch - Cell Phones and Mobile devices such as BlackBerry and iPhone - 411 Directory Assistance - In-Car GPS Navigation - Telematics such as OnStar The site is www.UniversalBusinessListing.org