1) Give something really huge away (trip to Hawaii, Napa Valley, 5 iPads or $1,000 in iTunes) or that's extra relevant to your consumer base (maybe it's a month of free rounds of golf), incentivizing a random drawing or the 5,000th follower on your Twitter or Facebook. Make sure to use a platform like Votigo to manage this legally and with precision — Make sure you have Ts & Cs and indemnification covered! You don't want to be paying shipping on an iPad to Germany.

Looking for endless free promotion of your small business? These 7 steps may take a few hours, but what's it worth in terms of reach and free promotion? Invaluable. The only cost is your time. The Return On Investment is up to you. Engage with customers online where they spend the most time, and win big! Simple. These are my top picks which I believe should be your first priority each day to get the most traction to rise to the top in your local arena. 

Local Search Optimization (LSO) is the investment you make in the most precious real estate your business can occupy; the first page of search results.

The Royal Flush of Local Search 

Choose your cards wisely and get started ranking on the first page of local search! If you took nothing else but these five actions, you would already be so far ahead of the game of your competitors. Only 15% of American businesses have even taken step one. (However, realize that quality LSO takes time and consistency so please check out the rest of this blog for in depth tactics and strategies to increase your visibility in the local search market.)

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." - Leonardo da Vinci

Some of these strategies are basic. Some are advanced. Some are VERY advanced because they are so simple. It is hard for many of us to get back to basics to leverage the power and simplicity of the fundamental social network structure rather than relying on the sophisticated platform solutions that may exist to tie them together, causing automation and speed yes, but perhaps dehumanizing our engagement efforts to highly personalize. There is power in granularity and personalization. With the surge of social media evolution, people have become caught up in the cool widgets and technology for technology's sake mentality, often at the expense of the basic details. "The devil's in the details" as my mentor Kevin O'Connor, founder of DoubleClick, always likes to say.

Visually stunning infographics are cropping up at a record pace all across the internet, as Jeff Bullas highlights in an insightful recent post. We have gathered some fantastic ones on the topic of Local Search here to show our appreciation for the designers, so please visit the respective blogs provided at the links attributed to each below.

"How can I use the power of Social Media to my advantage?" It may be worded a hundred different ways, but this is one of the top questions we receive here at Local Market Launch. Now that social media has officially moved beyond "shiny new toy" to essential and quantifiable, it's vital to discover exactly how to leverage its power for your benefit.