Active Rain November 27, 2011

New Group: Small Business Spotlight

Small Business SpotlightSince so many of us wrote on a local enterprise yesterday for Small Business Saturday, I thought it would be a cool idea for us to put our posts on local small business in one place like so many other themes. Moreover, why blog on local small businesses once a year or once a week? With that in mind, I have started a new group, Small Business Spotlight, as a place for you to post your articles on hyper local businesses in your market area. 

This is where you can pimp the best coffee shop, ugliest bartender, fastest service, top bowl of pasta, and a thousand other hardworking local “Main Street” ventures you want to support. There are some distinct advantages to creating the directory: it is a one-stop shop for fellow members if and when they find themselves in your city, and it is also an awesome way to bolster the comment flow on these hyper-local posts, since they are typically very light in that department. 

We all know and appreciate the importance of hyper-local blogging and the urgency of keeping commerce local. Here is our opportunity to put our money where our blogging mouths are. This is the red meat of long tail SEO, it is a big part of Raincamp, and it is something all of us can support. 

I’ll need some help; if you are up for assisting in the moderation, please email me and we’ll talk. In the meantime, join, post, participate and sharpen your skills. This is big time Google juice and will build good will for you with local entrepreneurs. I am actually ging to go back and edit (note: don’t put anything back to draft or you re-date thepost) many of my restaurant reviews, etc and put them in the group to get my contribution to the “directory” in motion. You can too. 

Get jiggy with it. Post photos, video, maps, directions, backlinks to their site, interviews with the owner, whatever you think will separate the place from the crowd. Hopefully, this will make hyper local blogging a little more sexy, and get the comment discourse going as well. 

Click here to join the group and start pimping promoting your local businesses!