The nearby search option on Google allows users to filter their search results based on a geographic location that they can set instead of appending location names directly to their search.  For example, many users have grown accustomed to performing searches like [business for sale New York] or [California franchise] in order to receive local results.  Now they don’t have to.  Instead, searchers will be able to refine their search by their default location or a custom one by using the search options panel that appears on the left hand sidebar.  Be sure to ensure that Google knows where your business is located.  That means getting the proper local citations, making sure your local business listing is accurate and that you localize your web content by using a complete address.

The integrate real time search option puts live news, tweets, and blog posts directly into the search results and gave small business owners yet another reason to be proactive about monitoring their online reputation.  Well, last week Google added another prominent source to pull content from and display in its real-time search results; Facebook.  While Google won’t be pulling information from your individual profile it will publish official updates from Facebook Fan Pages, profiles generally created for celebrities, major brands and of course, local businesses.  If you haven’t created a Facebook Fan page for your business, now is the time to do it.  Google is pulling this information into the search results and using it when someone searches for you.  Use this to your advantage.  Make sure you’re sending out valuable information and that you’re also letting them find a profile that is well-build and user-friendly

With more than 400 million users and increasing everyday, Facebook.com is one of the most powerful social media platforms around.  Facebook advertising platform is very similar to Google Ad sense; it displays ads on the right side of the screen allowing users to find out more information regarding the company/product.  There are a few more advantages to advertising on FAcebook, such as:

1. Target: The ad can be targeted towards the audience by gender, education, relationship status, workplace, and keywords.
2. Engage:  If you are promoting a page of event, Facebook will add the “Become a fan” or “RSVP to this event” button on the ad, therefor the users don’t have to leave their current page to engage with you.
3. Budget: Ads are shown based on cost per click model or cost per thousand model (pay per 1,000 ad views).  Depending on your ad the CPM model might work better for you.

Social media is evolving everyday, why not take advantage of it when you can and list your business for sale?

Bad customers are costing you more than you realize.  You already know that some customers are less profitable and more difficult to serve than others.  Accepting lower margins on some accounts and making higher margins on others seems reasonable, especially if your sales are slow. If your business has limitless resources and you have unlimited patience, then you can afford this overall profitable mix of good and bad customers.

Here are some types of bad customers to get read of:

1. Slow-paying customers:  These customers consistently pay late and only after a series of follow-ups calls
2. Customers with constantly-changing and ever-expanding needs:  These folks have full-service expectations with limited-service budgets, and are typically the bane of service firms.
3. Price-sensitive, demanding customers:  You offered incentives to these customers to attract new business and hope to nurture their accounts to targeted levels of profitability.  Or you accepted lower prices because you were convinced that these customers would require fewer resources or accept no-frills product lines.  Instead, these customers resisted standard pricing and insisted on high service levels and numerous product features.
4. Conniving Customers:  These customers seem to have legitimate complaints but they misrepresent problems to extract restitution in the form of full refunds or heavy discounts.

Holding onto a bad customer prevents you from serving the good ones.  Therefore cut your losses early.

Marketing departments of franchise chains are diving deeply into social media, with the latest frenetic energy to engage their customers going into the newly upgraded smart phones.  As more of our customers are integrating the smart phones and iPod touch into their everyday lives, franchise businesses want to be right there with them.  The goal is to get consumers to install and habitually use the application, engage the brand and find the most convenient franchise to patron.

“Creating a smart phone application is just one more way we are helping customers place orders in a way that best firts their mobile lifestyle.” Says Brian Niccol, Pizza Hut CMO.

If your franchise does not have an application for smart phones, contact your franchise today and ask them to help you develop one.  Who knows, this just might open a new market for your business.

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing.  It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a web page.  Twitter is a way for small business owners to talk directly to customers in a way that they were able to do only in person before, this helps to shorten the emotional distance between businesses and their customers.

Twitter is the digital manifestation of word of mouth, allowing users to broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.

Twitter is not just for businesses that want to lure customers but it can help find both suppliers and customers nationwide.  It can give a small business national presence in a way only large marketing and advertising budgets have allowed in the past.  Twitter is also a great place for information.  For example you can learn business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and start-up tips from the founder of several tech companies.

Click here to create your free Twitter account today and start connecting!

How do we judge if a math-learning center is successful? It depends on what types of learning centers. There are many types of math learning centers.  Some learning centers mainly prepare children for tests, some are for total skills training including thinking skills. It also depends on what parents want? Some parents only look at if there children’s marks have improved, while some parents also like to see if the math program can improve their children’s thinking skills. To put in a nutshell, a successful learning center is a place where children like to go and also enjoy it.

A successful math learning center is a place where children are smiling and happy while they are learning at the center and then come home telling their parents what they have learned and are happy to go again. A successful math-learning center makes kids learn in a happy mood.

A successful math-learning center will not be successful if their materials are boring and inhuman. Why will children be happy if all they do at the learning center is just drilling on math worksheets even it means their computation ability have improved? The untold negative side effect is they will not have fond memory and experience with this kind of learning center, I have my students in my class telling me that they “hate” this kind of math learning center but some of their parents “forced” them to go.  One thing I can say is these unimpressed children will not send their own kids to this kind of learning centers again when grow up to be parents one day.

I have done some research and also personally observed on what kind of math as pressure as their old brothers or sisters to just wanting to get high math marks for universities so these young children are happier to go to a math learning center where they do not just sit there and do pure math work.  The problem is most of math learning center cannot offer what these young children want. I know what kind of worksheets children like to work on since I have offered them choices and I have the chances to observe their reactions and feedbacks.

Children like to be entertained while learning; learning while having fun is a great way for children to learn.

We cannot turn math learning center into a circus so children having lots of fun but doing very little math. This is not an idea of integrating fun and math learning.

Many children like puzzles but not math work, so how do we “trick” them to do puzzles while they also have to do math work? We are not talking about computer games or computer-based learning here. We also are not talking give children some separate puzzle worksheets in a math class. We are talking about pencil, paper and re-printable “game, puzzles, and math” integrated worksheets.

If a math learning center can integrate math, game such as chess, and puzzles all into one worksheet then this is what children prefer to do rather than traditional type of math worksheets.

How to deliver these fun worksheets in a systematic way such that they will also increase children’s math marks is very important to make a math-learning center succeed.

A successful math-learning center must have fun worksheets and these fun worksheets also foster the environment of thinking.

A successful learning math-learning center offers something that children like and the end results are children are happy to learn and their math marks also improve while having fun.

Author:  Frank Ho, Canada certified math teacher and founder of Ho Math and Chess.

The number of businesses listed on the site has reached 2,700 and continues to increase daily. The number of brokers that have listed with site has been increasing steadily. The number of franchise opportunities that are listed in the site has also increased in the site showing the effectiveness of the company’s very active marketing campaigns. In Nov 2009, we attended the IBBA show in Reno, Nevada for the first time and received a lot of recognition from the broker community.

In 2010, we will be rolling out a new Marketing Campaign that will increase our presence within Social Media and continually increase our search engine ranking. We have introduced a Winter Promotional Offer where Business Brokers can register and renew their membership for $199 which includes a full year’s Featured Broker Membership and all the benefits the featured membership offers.

“The sites unique design, ease of navigation and clear and crisp content makes it a very user friendly site”, says a leading business broker. In addition, Franchisors appreciate the sites clean design and highly navigable interfaces. “We have invested a lot of time and resources in marketing the site, and we are very gratified with the growth and excellent feedback we have been receiving from our customers” said Sweta Shah, Marketing Director for BuyTradeBiz.com.

BuyTradeBiz.com is internet’s newest businesses for sale and franchises for sale listing website. Designed using the latest Web 2.0 concepts buyers and sellers are increasingly adopting the site as their favorite platform to buy a business and sell a business. Privately held BuyTradeBiz.Com, was founded by veterans of the software industry, to create a new paradigm for the business marketplace.

2010 brought with it a renewed sense of expanding the business.  With that came plans to target the untapped demographic and reinvent the company to include them.

Now that you have set your new goal, that hard part is achieving it.  Below are three ways that can help you recruit new clients:

1. Go where the growth is:  Identify key industry segments that are growing and reach out to them with something as simple as attending their trade show.  “At Homestead Resort, in Midway, Utah, general manager Britt Mathwich says the hotel made a quick shift away from the corporate and training market to families, after seeing a slump in business travel.  The resort picked up more business by attending home-decorating and bridal shows, he says.”
2. Strategy of secondment: Partner with companies that provide similar or complementary services.  “Maclay, President of engineering-consulting firm Voler Systems, is now working on two projects that combine Voler’s electrical-engineering expertise with the other firm’s mechanical-engineering specialty.”
3. Online Tools: Maintain a blog or a social media profile which includes facebook.come, linkedin.com, and twitter.com.  Social-networking tools are also places to post promotions.  “Mr.Maclay says he gained new clients by posting the company’s resume on Craigslist.”

Take a few minutes to update your marketing plan and get your business off to a great start in 2010!

Editors and Journalist receive thousands of press release everyday; On average only 3 percent get published.  How can you make sure your press release is the one that gets published?  Below are a few steps in the right directions:

1. One-on-One Time:  The best public relations strategy is to b uild relationships with key members of the press.  You can easily identify a core group of media outlets that can deliver coverage vital to your business.  It takes a bit of homework to create your own short list of the media that influence your cutomers when they’re considering buying what you market.
2. Choose the Right Tool:  When sending a press release, make sure its headline contains a stat, fact, or compelling piece of information that’s new or revelatory, and that your first sentence has the power to sell your story.  Never send a stream of ho-hum pitches in the hope that over time you’ll capture attention.
3. Follow up to seal the deal:  Follow-up is essential for taking your new PR relationships to the next level.  You can make contact by phone, e-mail, or both.  The key is to determine that your pitch was received and whether there’s any interest in that particular item.  Most of all, you want to uncover what type of information you can provide that each media contact will find most compelling.

Maybe you’re press release will be the next big story on the home pages of CNN, MSNBC, and all the other major websites!

Thanks to regulatory quirks text messaging is still a relatively uncluttered and spam-free marketing channel. In order for business to participate in this marketing channel, few basic rules must be followed:

1. Don’t even think about doing it the illegal way.

2. You basically have three (legitimate) options.

o The simplest and cheapest option is to hire the text-messaging equivalent of the old Valpak mailings.

o Create a custom approach specialized in by Distributive Networks. This involves registering for your own proprietary “short code,” the technical name for the five- or six-digit phone number that dialers use to access a text marketing campaign.

o Start with an off-the-shelf platform offered by companies like Mobile Commons or HipCricket that lets you share a short code.

3. Text marketing can be supported by traditional marketing.

4. It is better to give than to receive.

5. Don’t waste your time with one-offs.

6. Show restraint (and don’t get too cute).

As you are planning your marketing budget for next year, why not look into this channel, who knows this might be the most effective marketing tool you discover.