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Tuesday, July 29th, 2008...10:57 am

MerchantCircle can clone you

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MerchantCircle.com is a directory service for local businesses. I first heard of it when one of our customers asked us to verify for them. Later, I found more mentions of the service on the forum. Read this post for a great explanation of the service.

There are many directories on the web for local businesses. Some specialize in regions, such as a city or a state. Some are national, but do not offer any other services or specialities. Before spending a lot of time submitting your business to those directories, be sure to check them out thoroughly. I will have more on how to do this next week.

One criteria for a good local directory will be how much of the site is crawled. MerchantCircle.com has over 12,000,000 pages indexed by Google. This tells you that the search engines will find your listing quickly and get you posted on their search results.

The major benefit for working with a good directory is that your listings can appear elsewhere, driving even more traffic to your business. I was researching blogs that post about air brush tattoos when I came across this listing:

Related Blogs:

Tiki Hut Airbrush Tattoos on MerchantCircle – Tiki Hut Airbrush Tattoos Coupons

Family Fun Airbrush Tattoos Blog – Family Fun Airbrush Tattoos Blog

Airbrush Gypsy Temporary Airbrush Tattoos Blog – Airbrush Gypsy Temporary Airbrush Tattoos Blog

Exotic Airbrush Tattoos Blog – Exotic Airbrush Tattoos Blog

That’s TAT Temporary Airbrush Tattoos Blog – That’s T.A.T. Temporary Airbrush Tattoos Blog
Note that there is a link embedded for each of these blogs and all of these links lead back to a posting on MerchantCircle.com. To let you know, four of the five businesses listed here are TatStore customers with successful operations and websites.
So in essence, a simple thing like listing your business on a good local directory can clone your Internet presence many times over. It is well worth the effort.

3 Comments

Internet Marketing, Mark

3 Comments

  • Franco
    July 29th, 2008 at 11:24 am

    I love MC!! One of the tools I like most about it is the Reviews section. After a party, I call the client to see how things went (my co-workers do most of the parties these days) and I ask them if they would leave us a review about our service. I tell them I will send a link (I already have their emails) taking them directly to the Leave a Review page. I don’t want them surfing around looking for it. While this is a great tool, I would say about 1 in 30 clients actually leaves a review.

    Funny thing is, when I do a generic search for airbrush tattoos in Google, I have great placement. However, sometimes, in the Sponsored Search section on the right-hand side of the page I see my MC listing under the heading Martinez Airbrush Tattoos. I still don’t know how I got there, but I’m not complaining!!

  • Franco
    July 29th, 2008 at 11:25 am

    Oh yeah, I also use the blog, not as much as I intend, and Google always picks them up within a day. Always…

  • Mark
    July 31st, 2008 at 12:23 pm

    It is about using the power of a large site that gets crawled frequently by the search engines. An easy, no cost way to get your site – and more importantly your business – noticed.

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