Google has started showing more and more local listings on non-local searches like Pizza or Plumbers. Google using IP lookups to determine where you are and they serve local content up along with web sites. So if you search for Pizza, Google will show a few Internet websites and then place their Google Maps 10 pack of listings.

So if you have a business, whether that is a web based business or a store with a front door you need to be listed in local search engines like Google Maps, Yahoo Local, MSN Live Local. Its not hard to submit your listings and it only takes a few days for each service to list your business.

Update: 4/30 Rhino Web Services listed on:

• Google Maps
• Yahoo Local – still waiting (6/7 still waiting – pretty lame)
• MSN Live Local – MSN letter received 5/15. The instructions were simple to follow and my business is now confirmed, but not yet in.. Update 6/7 – MSN is now Bing Maps and I am in.

While looking around for local news on Charlotte, I found a very cool local news site that shows stories on the map. Here’s a snippet:

This site will also automatically pickup your blog posts from Blogger, WordPress, Type Press and a few more.

http://outside.in/Charlotte_NC

EDIT: OK – 7 hours is a long time for them to pickup my posts and geotag them. This is kind of lame actually. But I will contact them via email before passing summary judgement.

Update: I chatted with Jared from Outside.In and he explained that I had to both add a neighborhood and a place for each story. I noticed that my blog page on their site now found a couple stories but I have yet to see my StoryMap update. Hopefully it will be ready in a few hours. DONE!

Twitter Ads

If you have a lot of followers on Twitter, you might be tempted to use a service like Magpie to monetize your tweets. If the ad is useful its good content. However, if its not the user will consider it spam and they might stop following you. Magpie to me seems just like when people started putting in Google and other text ads into their blog or podcast RSS feeds. It was really annoying and led me to unsubscribe to those feeds.

IMO Twitter and other social media sites like Facebook should be used to promote your main site rather than be a monetization engine themselves. Perhaps there are some folks out there that only use FB or Twitter and don’t have a web site and these kinds of solutions might be useful to them.

Local Twitter Users

Ever wonder if someone was tweeting near you? Use Twitter’s advanced search or construct a search like: near:Charlotte within:25mi and they show up!