Just got an email in my inbox from iBegin, the baby of Ahmed Farooq. Like BOTW Local, iBegin is a very well-structured directory that is just a no-brainer for small businesses to get themselves a local citation.

Hopefully Ahmed won’t mind me copying-and-pasting from the release :)

It’s been a few months, but the time has finally arrived! You can submit your business here: http://www.ibegin.com/business-center/submit/

No, I am not all of a sudden flush with gobs and gobs of cash. But a good friend of mine, Neil Patel, recently launched a community of early-stage entrepreneurs in Seattle, called Founder’s Coop. Neil’s post promoting the launch answers more questions than I ever could, but if you have a great business idea but don’t know how to fund it in this economy, here is your chance!

I was among about 80 small business owners to attend the brilliant Learn About Web conference this Friday in Tri-Cities, Washington. Craig Sutton of Bright Web Marketing arranged an amazing lineup of speakers which included Matt McGee, Jennifer Laycock, and Stoney DeGeyter. It was incredibly refreshing to be among small business owners for whom this was the first time they were hearing this information. It was also eye-opening, and a great wake-up call, for where we are as an industry among this very important contingent of prospective customers.

I wrote awhile back about getting banned after a spammer injected a scummy footer into my Wordpress blog.    Despite upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress, it seems to have happened again.  I’ve filed all the necessary reinclusion requests with Google; I’m obviously hoping for the same outcome.
The offending links aren’t showing up in [...]

Evil Schoolmarm by zenamoonbeam
Last week, Business Week announced its Top 25 Young Entrepreneurs for 2008. The “youngsters” (they’re all younger than I by at least a year) featured by Business Week have started some pretty neat companies, from a Muslim fashion company to a flavored plastic manufacturer.
Somewhat surprisingly, despite growing up in the online [...]

This is a first here at Mihmorandum — a guest post! It’s written by Ed Reese, a budding Local marketer from Spokane, WA. Ed described his situation to me at the recent SEOmoz Seminar, and I thought his story held some important insights for the Local Search community. It’s a two-part series–the first being the case as described by Ed, and the second being my reaction to his data (coming on Monday, September 22). So without further ado, here is Ed’s story…

I wish people would stop thinking that I somehow ‘have it in’ for the Yellow Pages. Certain Sphinn commenters and a few responses to previous posts I’ve written on this blog seem to imply that I am starting from a “gut reaction” when I criticize their value. This is just not the case. I’m going on hard data from my own clients, and analysis of their business models in comparison to their online competitors’. This article dispels some recent arguments from a YP Association rep, and offers my opinion on the true value of Yellow Pages for small businesses.

Hidden in the middle of Will Scott’s excellent piece on Yelp last month was the following insight, which certainly rings true in my experience with small business owners:

“For me it all leads back to a central frustration I feel from small businesses: they understood the Yellow Pages. You pay more, you get a bigger ad, you get more calls. How hard is that?”

As skeptical as I am of the print Yellow Pages, Will is absolutely spot-on with that comment. It is an incredibly easy-to-understand business, and has been around long enough where pretty much everyone understands how it works.

Search engine optimization, even for the rare small business owner who has heard of it, is much more complicated and is inherently somewhat opaque.

Local Search aficionados will of course immediately recognize the eerie similarity between the title of this post and the title of a famous series by Local Search guru Mike Blumenthal. They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery so, Mike, I hope you approve.

At any rate, I’ve read a couple of exceptional posts in the last few weeks (in addition to my small business reputation management roundup) that I haven’t had a chance to highlight just yet. And I also wanted to make a few announcements of my own.

Having just returned from the SEOmoz Expert Seminar, it’s safe to say the conference offered an incredible value. I learned from Brian Carter’s Recap that SEOmoz would like to keep the bulk of the sessions confidential since they’ll be selling the content on an upcoming DVD, but I got the go-ahead from Rand to post just a few teasers.