It's no longer enough to have an ad in the yellow pages. Direct mail advertising, leaflets, radio ads, billboards and television - who can afford all that? Cold calling and direct email campaigns can work, but they're time-consuming and difficult to target.

If your business depends on local customers, it is becoming increasingly critical that your business establish an effective presence online that takes advantage of local search engines and directories and methods. 90% of Americans are now using the internet to shop for goods and services, and 65% of them are using their smart phones. Businesses who aren't taking advantage of these facts are missing out on potential business! The good news is, it's not expensive or time consuming to get listed locally. Here are three methods every business should implement immediately.

If you have been writing and blogging for a while now, you have probably started to accumulate a nice collection of articles on various topics. These articles can and should be shared and re-shared across your social networks. One of the best tools we've found for that purpose is Buffer. With Buffer, you can share your content regularly, make sure you don't share too much, and make sure that every post you do share is posted in the correct, optimum format for each specific social network.

An increasing number of people are sending e-cards, rather than more traditional paper cards. The popularity of the format has been down, in part, to the realisation that e-cards are a cost effective, and environmentally friendly way to communicate the same message to loved ones. With more people switching away from paper communication to social networking, the manufacturing of paper cards, and the associated costs of packaging them, is having a detrimental effect on the environment. Online e-cards, by comparison, provide an eco-friendly alternative, and are discussed in more detail below:

Pinterest is currently the fasted growing social network on the planet, with a current user base of over 11 million in the U.S. alone. Businesses should strongly consider how they can use Pinterest to grow and promote themselves, and this video from MDG Advertising does a great job of summarizing the key points, benefits and strategies for Pinterest success. Read more »

One of the techniques that many businesses will use to market content is to "curate" it. This is when you provide your readers with an assortment of links to other sites or resources, typically with your own opinions or observations inserted. It's sometimes easier than writing entire articles on your own since you simply need to find and compile these links and add in some comments of your own. Since an article of curated content is not completely original, it's not a technique that should be used all the time, but one method that can be used daily is a daily newsletter with that day's top stories and articles. This is where Paper.li and other similar services come in.

The idea is that, each day, the website service will automatically put together a new newsletter for you that contains articles and media from around the web, and sends it out to your subscribers and designated social networks.

Each time your business adds a new product or service, participates in an event, or does something else out of the ordinary, you should be sending out a press release. A press release is a tool for businesses to share their news and announcements with various media outlets including newspapers, radio stations, tv stations, magazines, journals and of course the internet. One of the best ways to ensure that your shiny new press release reaches the best and largest possible audience is to use a PR company or distribution service.

A microblog is a great way to support your business website, internet marketing, and customer communication. First, though, let's cover what a microblog is and then we can get into the what it does.

A microblog is, as the name implies, a very small blog. Microblog posts are typically just a sentence or two in length and might answer questions like, "what am I doing?" or introduce brief topics. They may also be used to share brief links to videos, audio, or single images. Your Twitter feed or your Facebook wall could be considered microblogs.

Businesses should be using a Message Calendar to ensure that their advertising and marketing messages are consistent and planned. (See Using a Message Calendar for Social Media for more information on how and why to use a message calendar with your website and online business.) While there are a number of tools that you can use to actually manage what you're doing on a day-to-day basis, this guide will walk you through setting up iCal as your message calendar.

Unless you’ve built a website just to showcase your collection of salt and pepper shakers, you probably want to attract some visitors. If your business depends on your site attracting visitors and soliciting sales, then web traffic is essential.

Simply submitting your site to search engines is not enough. You should work with your Webmaster to implement these ten tips to increase the level of web traffic to your site.

1. Content, Content, Content

First and foremost, make sure that your site is informative! Don’t just list your services, elaborate on what you do and why you do it well. The more detailed you are in your website, the better your search engine results will be.

2. Classified Ads