Do you offer local training, seminars, conferences or other, “open-to-the-public” events and need a better way to get the word out? Then you might consider using FullCalendar.com to promote your next event.

Their service is pretty straight forward. You sign up for an account. Create your event listing. Pay $19.95 and voilà, FullCalendar will send your event’s announcement to the event publishing newspapers, websites, radio stations, & email lists that they have compiled for your area. In my area, Denver, they have 126 media outlets listed. In San Francisco, their HQ area, they have over 350 outlets listed.

They don’t guarantee your event will be listed and they’re only operating in a limited number of markets at present but for less than $20 bucks it might be worth giving it try. I know I intend to use them for a seminar on local search that I’ll be hosting in the Denver area in the 1st quarter of 2008.

Well, I’m back after a bit of a hiatus devoted to vacationing on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. If you’ve never been–we hadn’t–I can’t recommend it enough and if you have been …. GO BACK! My blogging suffered as I caught up with projects … a website redesign for a client and a couple of projects of my own including one that I hope to launch this fall focused on leveraging local search to best advantage. What the yellow pages were to local business after the invention of the phone, the internet will be to local business moving forward.

Savvy business owners in your market are already reaping the benefit of local search positioning. You should be too. If you’re interested in where I’m going with this, call or send me an email. I’d love to talk.

It’s amazing to me the number of businesses that I patronize locally that don’t show up when I search for them locally using local.google.com or local.yahoo.com or just thai restaurant 80227. Even if they have a web site many sites fail to register locally for the simple reason that they don’t do a good job of populating their sites with the geo tags (ie, zip code, city, etc.) that a search engine uses to assign you to a particular geographical area.

To find out if you’re registering locally, just enter your key search terms into your favorite search engine and include your zip code – if you aren’t showing up in the listings that follow, you have some work to do.

Here’s what I find when I enter the terms “internet marketing services” and my zip code of 80227…

Now being found locally may not be as big a deal to someone like me who really only needs a phone, pc and an internet connection to connect with my customers but it is VERY IMPORTANT if you offer products or services that depend on local trade. Here’s an example of what happens when I try to find my favorite pizza parlor locally…

Yep, the lights are on (for all of their local competitors) but nobody’s home (for them).

So what do you do to insure you show up when potential customers are trying to find you locally? Well to start look at your web site and determine if…

• your address & phone number are prominently displayed in search engine readable text, not embedded in a graphic or flash module.
• you use geo tags to modify your key words and phrases. Pizza delivery in Lakewood, CO rather than just Pizza delivery.

If the above are missing or lacking then fix them. I guarantee that you’ll be pleased when you start drawing customers locally because they found you locally on google, yahoo or aol. I don’t have any hard numbers but a significant number of web browsers are just like me; they eschew the yellow pages (even online) for the simplicity of typing in ‘service’ or ‘product’ and ‘location’ to their favorite search engine. Believe me, you don’t want your business to be the missing tag on the local google map. Do you?