Local Internet Marketing for Small Business

Having just made some changes, I was in need of some furniture. I think I found “Lizzy” on Craigslist, but can’t really remember. Lizzy has a blog called Lila’s Pockets and updates it with the newest piece of furniture she has for sale. But, like a lot of products, it’s not easy to sell big furniture online so she is marketing herself locally in the Indianapolis area. Fortunately for her, I live in the same town as Lizzy (Fishers, Indiana) so I was a perfect potential client.

Fortunately for me, Lizzy has some really cool stuff. She finds old furniture like coffee tables, end tables and mirrors at garage sales or elsewhere, and refinishes them with a simple vintage look that I like.

Several items that I liked sold pretty quickly, but then I saw a new item in my RSS feed that caught my eye. And then another one. I emailed Lizzy and asked to buy the items, and then picked them up the next day. It was that easy. No auctions, no shipping costs, no weird phone calls for her . . . just a visit from a fellow resident who likes her work.

With such an easy and great potential at-home business, how could Lizzy expand her local online presence?

A Facebook Page is the obvious first one. This is different from a Facebook Profile. Lizzy could set up her Facebook Page to automatically update with every new blog post (piece of furniture.) Then ask friends and customers to join, and mention her Facebook Page on her blog and other social media sites.

Speaking of social media sites, Lizzy should create a Twitter account with her business name. Because she is only using these social media accounts for business purposes, she could use a website like FriendFeed to update all at once.

Lizzy could market her products on local sites like SmallerIndiana.com, sell her furniture on eBay for pick-up only to get more attention, use FeedBurner so customers could subscribe to her new posts via email, and even start a social media site geared to local used furniture to become the leader of the pack.

Those are the easy ones. What’s left? She could buy a domain name like IndianapolisEndTables.com (yes, I stopped myself from buying it) and start a micro site with an About page, Contact page, and a RSS feed of her blog on the home page. Lizzy could start local micro sites for mirrors, bookshelves, coffee tables and other furniture using keyword-rich domain names. When anyone searched Google for local furniture, her websites would have a very good chance of getting a visit.

There’s more, just contact me. The point I would like to end with is although using social media can be very beneficial for gaining local business, you can’t forget about the search engines. Normal people aren’t searching Twitter or Facebook for used furniture, not yet.