A great way to build your local presence is by becoming active on any websites or forums specific to your local area.  Some of these may be in the form of review sites, coupon sharing sites, social media sites or forums.  Since logistics is at the core of any successful community’s economy, it’s especially important in our industry to make ourselves known.

How do you find these local online communities?  A simple Google or Facebook Groups search can turn up many different types of communities in your area.  Search for your city and state followed by the word “forum” or “moms” and you’ll likely find some websites that you weren’t even aware of where people share information about your city online.  Be careful not to join these groups and immediately start promoting your company, this may make you appear as spam.  You should practice the following guidelines when joining a local online group:

• Contribute to discussions where you can add value.
• Ensure that you are always observing website rules regarding self-promotion, use of URL’s in your signatures, etc.
• DON’T EVER create new threads with blatant self-promotion or copy and paste sales letters.
• How To’s are a great way to share information with your community and softly promote your own company’s services.
• Do not over do it, one or two posts weekly is typically favorable.
• Provide backlinks to your website when possible.  Then, a neat little trick is to get search engines to index that as a backlink for your website and allow it to potentially show up in search results all over the web.  Head on over to www.pingomatic.com and enter your post or article title in the Blog Name field, enter the direct URL to the post in the Blog Home Page field, check all Services boxes below and click “Send Pings”.  That’s it, this will send your article to various search engine spiders including Google to be indexed around the web.

Simple techniques like becoming active in your local community’s online portals are often overlooked but can be the most effective in promoting your business.  Not only are you providing value to your community when actively participating but at the same time you are gaining real visibility for your business.