A friend of mine just opened a really cool ice cream, coffee, cakes place here in Denver. It's called TheRedTrolley.com

He and I got to talking and I mentioned that he should get listed in lots of local directories to drive more traffic into the business.

He's a smart individual, and so must have passed the idea along to the local business manager.

The manager for the store called me a few days later (today), saying that he didn't know that much about how to get the business listed in local online directories, and asked if I could offer him some help.

I don't know that much about local directories either, as my business is worldwide and Internet based, but I know there are hundreds (if not thousands) of web sites which can be used for getting local business listings "out there" and promoting a local-based business online.

So here's some quick discovery stuff I did with a little Googling...

Some are free, some cost something... you'll have to research...

But, I would exhaust all free local listing possibilities first (and then move into the pay ones, if you aren't getting the foot traffic you want).

Getting listed in all of these local directories will gain you more customers, particularly if you're a restaurant or hotel, and especially if you offer them something for free, in order to get them to come in to your business.

Google Adsense recently published some basic beginner guidelines for getting listed in Google.

Among these are to add a Google site map to your site and to use Google's webmastering tools.

As well, they talk about the benefits of having appropriate title tags and appropriate ALT image tags for your site (Two things we've discussed here previously at Affiliate Advice).

However, it can be difficult (assuming you're using static methods of building pages) to update your Google site map every time you build new pages for your site.

This is why I recommend building your site using a content management system like Wordpress or Movable Type.

And below, I have posted the code you will need for building a Google Map with WordPress or Movable Type.

I love GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. These services have saved me countless hours and actually helped me to earn a fair amount of income as well.

So, I made a recording to showcase some of the things that this service can do.

I recommend you use the GoToMeeting Free Trial, and give it 30 days.

If you like it, pay for it. If you don't, it's easily removed from your computer registry.

But I recommend you give it a try. It's simple, has yet to cause any errors on my computer (after nearly two years of use) and is actually fun to use.

Transcript of this video: Being someone who does a lot of things online, Go To Meeting has become one of my favorite online tools for getting things done. Go To Meeting is basically a service that lets you show people what's on your computer, or you can see what's on their computer. Some of the nicer things about it are that it's basically an online video conference recording, which allows me to see what's on someone else's computer. And I know that lots of corporations, and large corporate conglomerates, are looking for online software solutions for meeting each other online. And they don't want to pay per use because that can become very expensive. So what I'd like to do just very quickly with this video is show you the affordable services that are offered by Go To Meeting. I'm not really selling it necessarily, but if you decide that you might like to check it out, there's a free trial link right next to this video and you can use this for your online meetings. And I may have misspoken just a minute ago too, because you don't have to be like a large corporate conglomerate. I'm just an individual who does a lot of things online, but a lot of times people are wanting to know how it is that I do what I do. And so Go To Meeting has been a really invaluable tool for doing online video conferencing so that they can see what's actually going on, on my computer. And that happens through this online meeting solution.

So when I first sign in to Go To Meeting, it asks if I want to host a meeting now or if I want to schedule a meeting for later. While you can schedule it for later, for purposes of this quick video, I'm going to show you how this works, so I click to meet now and then the software goes ahead and starts a meeting. Now as part of starting this meeting, it actually sets up a phone number for me for people to dial in to, and it then gives me all of these controls right here on the screen. And it says hey, if you want to invite people you can use this information. You tell them to go to Go To Meeting and join a meeting. So you just tell somebody on the front page to meet you at Go To Meeting and click on join a meeting. And so they will go to that website and I'm actually going to do this on my desktop. So I will go ahead and get signed in here, but you can see they gave me a meeting ID to use at Go To Meeting. So I'm clicking to go ahead and log into this meeting on my desktop, but this recording you are watching is actually on my laptop. So you're going to see me show up here in just a minute from my desktop into this meeting.

So now you see Jonathan-desktop has arrived right here into this meeting. So the first thing is if I want to show whoever else is in this meeting what's on my screen, then I click play here and now I'm actually showing them my screen. These controls are blurred out, but if you could see my desktop, you would actually see that I am watching what's going on, on my laptop, from my desktop.

Cheap Christian Stuff sells high quality tee shirts with Christian messages at wholesale prices. These radical Christian tee shirts are taking the world by storm. Christians and non-believers alike are reading the biblical messages on the shirts, and are reacting! Cheap Christian Stuff can add your site traffic's group or church name to these Christian tee shirts, as well as any custom design. Quantity discounts are available on bulk orders!

Cyboretum.com is a hosting company for discriminating businesses, corporations, organizations and individuals. Cyboretum.com Hosting is a leading provider of e-commerce, business-to-business and mission critical on-line application hosting solutions.

Dedicated to unrivalled reliability, customer support and ease of use, their roster of satisfied and loyal customers is growing on a daily basis. Your site traffic will find that Cyboretum.com's standard as well as custom tailored hosting packages and solutions are affordable, scalable and are guaranteed to satisfy the most demading clients.

American Soccer Shirts makes novelty soccer t-shirts. All t-shirt graphics are unique hand silk-screened designs ranging from funny to the serious soccer fan. They also have Zodiac Horoscope t-shirts along with music & wildlife tee shirts. Soccer clothing makes great soccer club fundraisers.

Shirt apparel comes in both short & long sleeve, & are made with 100% preshrunk 6.1 oz heavy weight cotton. Fleece Sweatshirts and Hooded Sweatshirts are made with 80% heavyweight 9.5 oz cotton and 20% polyester. These t-shirts, sweatshirts and hooded sweatshirts make great gifts for your site traffic's family, friends, team and coach.

Dream & Win is a raffle site that makes players' dreams come true by offering them the chance to win one-of-a-kind prizes, ranging from piloting jet fighters to luxury shopping sprees. Dream & Win's transparent, true random draw allows players to know in advance their odds of winning, and even provides them the chance of improving their odds. Dream & Win uses proven industry-standard lottery software and payment system to ensure customer security and fair gaming practices. Headquartered in London, Dream & Win serves players across Europe, Canada and Australia.

At Home, Online & Live Training Options University offers a complete line of training products, classes, and seminars to help you learn how to trade options at your own pace.

Options University has seminars taught by experts in their field. Options University instructors have at least 5 years of experience as either floor traders or educators from other major brokerages. The quality of education is unparalleled and Options University guarantees their seminar education and their programs are the best in the world.

Your site traffic can learn how to trade options at home with their award winning courses, designed by expert option educators and traders

Options University has a unique technology which allows them to teach students worldwide in real-time, using their cutting-edge web conferencing platform, putting you in front of a professional instructor no matter where you live. You site traffic can ask questions, interact with other students, and learn options in a virtual e-learning environment, or they can attend one of the live seminars held all over the world...

Q&A With Options University you can ask your most pressing question about options trading, and one of their experts will answer it!

Buy & Sell Anything Pink

Pink Auctions is an online auction website where people can buy or sell pink themed items including: clothes, shoes, handbags, electrical items, car accessories, mobile phones, toys, mp3 players and playboy items. There are over 10,000 tems for sale.

MyTickets goal is to 'Help you find tickets faster'. Just think of them like a search engine for tickets - and only tickets.

MyTickets doesn't sell tickets. Instead, they help solve the often time-consuming and frustrating task of finding tickets.

Instead of jumping from website to website, and from phonecall to phonecall, they offer consumers a one-stop destination to find the tickets they want.

MyTickets has event listings from all major ticketing websites, event websites, and even lots of the less-known websites that are harder to find!

MyTickets is a relatively new service, developing new features and adding more listings everyday. MyTickets would love to hear your questions and comments, so if your site visitors have any thoughts they want to share, they just have to send MyTickets an email.

My friend Mark Widawer sent out some GREAT advice about how to get JV Partners to work with you.

I liked what he had to say A LOT, so I'm re-posting here.

Again, if you're looking for JV partners, this is GREAT Advice!

(The only thing I would add to it is to say that a great way to get someone to become a JV and promote your stuff, is to become an affiliate for their products and services and promote their stuff first.)

I have one big Internet marketer I've been bugging for almost a year now to get his affiliate program set up so that I can be a JV and promote his stuff.

I've never promoted for him, because his affiliate program doesn't work at the moment, but I send him an email about once a month to say that I'd really like to be a JV for him, and to ask when his affiliate program will be up and running.

He always responds back and lets me know that he appreciates my persistence and is glad that I want to JV with him.

I'm not annoying about it, just a gentle reminder.

When it comes time to ask for help promoting my stuff, do you think he might be more receptive to it than if I approach him out of the blue?

Of course!

Mark Widawer has another suggestion for getting JV partners - and that is right below.

-----------------------------
Ever send emails to potential JV partners and never get a reply back?

Here's how to get around that problem, and to truly and genuinely be known as a "Giver," too.

AWeber Systems

For many online businesses (and I would argue for all online businesses who want to stay in business), an autoresponder is a necessary tool. An autoresponder (or software or system which controls multiple autoresponders), can do many amazing things for building relationships and segregating markets.

An autoresponder:
- manages databases of current and prospective customers
- enables a business to send personalized emails, either to a selected group of these customers or to all of them at one time
- automatically responds to incoming requests and comments, including the request to unsubscribe.

An autoresponder should also be able to send blog entries as emails for those readers who prefer to receive blog entries via email. This is known as an RSS-to-email service, and a good autoresponder should include tracking software to measure the performance of these emails and any ads contained within them.

One of the most highly regarded autoresponders currently available is AWeber. To illustrate, when I began searching the Internet for information for this article, I was astonished to find no negative feedback about Aweber Systems - none at all.

1ShoppingCart

What Norton Utilities is to maintaining a hard drive, 1ShoppingCart is to running an ecommerce business: a suite of all-inclusive programs designed to do everything that's necessary for the task.

Side note: Go to www.ZShoppingCart.com for a thirty-day trial for only $3.95.

Founded in January 2000 in Eugene, Oregon, One Shopping Cart's major component is the shopping cart software, designed to plug into a new or existing website and allow businesses to sell up to 10,000 products of their own.

This also includes an option for automatic ebook delivery/digital product downloads.

1ShoppingCart calculates shipping and sales tax, allows coupons and discounts, prints invoices and packing slips, and sends customers an email receipt while notifying the seller and his drop-shipper. It also contains a database for affiliates and existing and prospective customers for broadcast emailing, all with high data security fully certified by Visa.

An additional level of ecommerce utility is provided by 1ShoppingCart's Internet marketing tools. Their autoresponder facility harvests email subscribers via online forms, scores emails for spam prior to sending, broadcasts emails and newsletters, and automatically identifies undeliverable ones.

Other marketing tools include ad effectiveness tracking, a pop-up wizard, affiliate tracking software capable of handling multiple sales programs (though 1ShoppingCart's affiliate module can take a little time to learn), up-sell and cross-sell modules ("Would you like fries with that?"), and a questionnaire facility for market research.

This is a powerful ecommerce software suite, and coupled with a credit card acceptance account (also available through 1ShoppingCart), it's basically a "business in a box" all you do is supply the product and the marketing to make the tool sell your stuff for you.

WidgetBucks features pay-per-click shopping widgets that help their customers (people with web sites) make money fast. WidgetBucks advertising instantly display the most popular products based on buying trends of 100 million shoppers.

Thus their ads are highly engaging, which means instant dollars for you, the site owner who is displaying their ad. The "widgets" see $3-$6 CPM - pretty good compared to traditional ad networks that deliver less than $2 CPM.

ListOpt's List Builder has helped hundreds of publishers build large, highly profitable opt-in email lists.

You can profit by helping your site visitors start building their own lists. Just refer them to ListOpt's Coregistration program. When they sign up fo the coregistration service offered by ListOpt, you make a commission.

Very simple.

Click here to check out and sign up for ListOpt's Coregistration affiliate program.

Here's the Marketing copy from ListOpt's web site, that your site visitors witll see:

A subscriber is the most powerful customer you could ever have. As you know, having a powerful newsletter means you have a powerful list of customers who trust you and can provide a never-ending stream of income. Simply put, "Treat a subscriber well, and you'll have a customer for life." But creating that powerful revenue generating list of lifetime customers is the hard part... It could take you years and can cost you a small fortune trying to come up with just the right combinations of advertising and promotions to develop a revenue generating list. But don't worry, you no longer have to put up with all the headaches. Now you can have it practically overnight with our List Builder lead generation service. Just imagine, each morning when you open your email inbox, before even doing an ounce of work, you'll have a subscriber summary report, with the email addresses of hundreds of people who have explicitly requested to be subscribed to your newsletter!

Click here to check out and sign up for ListOpt's Coregistration affiliate program.