oinka.com

Even if your business is done completely online, you may benefit from getting listed in Google Local or Yahoo’s local listings. People often feel more comfortable doing business with someone who is local; and potential customers may stumble across your business while searching for other things. Submission to Local Search at both Google and Yahoo are free, and may bring you more business than you expect.

Here are the URLs for the signup forms below, but before you get started you should have the following information ready at hand:

1. The first thing they will ask for is the physical location of your business. If your business is in your home, that is no problem, just use your home address. You shouldn’t, however, use a post office box, as Google doesn’t accept them.

2. The telephone number(s) of your business - If you use your home phone number for your business, be sure you have an appropriate answering machine message, and that your phone is answered in a professional manner.

It is best to get a separate telephone number for your business, even if it and your budget are very small. Check with your phone company and the VOIP companies, you may be pleasantly surprised at how cheaply you can get a second number. Many people use VOIP for their business, and pay just $25 per month for unlimited local and long distance through their broadband internet connection. If you have a fax number, have that ready also.

3. A business email address - Use an email account at your business domain. If you don’t have a website for your business, buy a domain for your site from a registrar such as registerfly.com who gives website space with a domain purchase, or at least put up a “one page business card” website on the free space Yahoo offers to local listers. In any event, don’t use an America Online address or a “freebie” email service such as Hotmail or Yahoo for your business. This is considered very unprofessional.

4. Your business website address - Get a site if you honestly mean to have an internet business. Yes, a website is not strictly required in order to earn online, but to anyone with online business experience you will appear as a rank amateur without one.

5. A description of the services or products you sell. This should be a short 1 to 3 sentence summary such as:

“Your Business Name provides widgets to all widget users, with special emphasis on blue widgets for widgeteers. We also offer widget payment plans.”

Don’t make it a blatant advertisement, just an explanation of services.

6. Categories your business falls under - You’ll be able to choose up to 5 categories for your listing.

7. What types of payment can you accept? (Cash, credit card types, etcetera)

8. Your business operating hours and days at your location.

9. Contact Name - likely yours.

Google users will need to setup an Account. Fear not…if you have Gmail, Google Sitemaps or any other Google service requiring an email address you are already registered.

When you have your information ready, go to http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter.

Sign into your Google account and follow the onscreen instructions. Once you have finished, Google will telephone or send you a postcard (your choice) with a confirmation number. When you receive the pin number in the mail or by phone, you will then need to go back to your account and enter that pin number before your entry can be activated.

After that, just wait for the phone calls from new customers.

For Yahoo, the information needed is nearly the same, and they will give you a free 5-page website for your business to boot!

Sign up at Yahoo here: http://listings.local.yahoo.com/

Get going and boost your business into areas you might not have thought of trying.

For those who have a passion for scrapbooking, making money from their hobby is a dream come true. It’s not such an absurd idea, many people are doing it and you can too.

Scrapbooking is now used by adults as a way to remember and preserve the special moments in their life. It is the fastest growing hobby in the United States right now. Scrapbooking is used for everything from holding photos, poems, newspaper cut outs, cards and just about anything else that has sentimental value to its owner.

There are several profitable ways to make money with your love of scrapbooking and this article will show a few of them.

Become A Scrapbook Consultant

Companies like Creativememories.com and Scrapinasnap will pay you to sell their products for them. They are always advertising positions for sales consultants on their website.

Teach A Scrapbook Class

If you have a love for scrapbooking and you have the knowledge, even the basic knowledge of putting a scrapbook together from the start, you can teach a class on it very easily.

Community colleges and education schools are always looking for new ways to raise revenue and teaching short courses is a great way to do that. Go talk to your community college and ask them if they would be interested in your services.

Make Scrapbooks For Other People

This is probably the best way to get started making money with your love of the scrapbooking. This is a pretty competitive business and your scrapbooking skills must be of a high nature.

If you want to learn more about how to make money scrapbooking for others, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Scrapping4Others. This is a forum dedicated to professional scrapbookers and will answer all of the questions you need to know about making scrapbooks for others.

Start An Online Scrapbook Supply Store

Setting up your own E-Commerce store to sell scrapbooking supplies is not as hard as it sounds. The easiest way to do this is to become an affiliate (reseller) of an existing scrapbooking store online. These companies will pay you a percentage of the sale every time you make a sale you don’t have to stock any inventory at all. That’s the beauty of becoming an affiliate.

Freelance Scrapbooking Writer

Scrapbooking magazines, online websites, forums are always looking for writers to write about scrapbooking for them. You can even write your own ebook and sell it. The ideas are endless.

Yahoo! has recently launched Creative Commons Search in Beta. This Yahoo! search service finds content across the web that has a creative commons license. While almost anything you find on the internet has a full copyright, the creative commons license allows an author to share their content with others, under certain conditions. This type of license is very beneficial to the article marketer.

The creative commons license is gaining wide acceptance across the internet. Yahoo and Google have now both incorporated creative commons search into their engines. The main creative commons search engine is located at http://www.creativecommons.org. A creative commons search has even been adopted into the Firefox browser.

Why is this important to Article Writers?

Every smart article writer concentrates on wide exposure. You want your articles to be on as many web sites as possible. By putting a Creative Commons License on your articles, you are allowing other web sites, e-zines, online publications and print publication to publish your article, therefore expanding your visibility.

Now, with a powerhouse like Yahoo! coming in with their new Creative Commons Search, you can have hundreds of your articles to be placed in a select search on Yahoo!.

To get your articles into Yahoo’s Creative Commons Search, you must follow 3 simple steps.

1. Select the license that suits your preferences at http://www.creativecommons.org/license/ .

2. You will then be prompted to choose whether or not you want to allow commercial use of your work and whether or not you will allow modifications of your work. After you have set your preferences, hit Select License.

3. You will now be taken to the page that will let you cut and copy a piece of text to paste into your webpage. This text will indicate that your articles have a creative commons license.

You should choose the license that meets your preferences. However, if you are going to be using the license for article marketing, there are some preferences that would be more beneficial for you. It is best not to allow any modification of your articles because this could dilute their value. You want to brand yourself as a trusted resource in your area of expertise. If someone is allowed to modify your content, this could lead to negative branding for you and your web site. With than in mind, do make sure that you put a lot of thought into the type of creative commons license you choose. Creative commons licenses are non-revocable.

Once you put up the license on your web pages, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks for Yahoo! Creative Commons Search to find your pages as long as you have some well-placed back-links.

This strategy can create hundreds of very targeted links pointing to your site through the creative commons search engines. These are indexed pages in the Yahoo and Google specialized engines. You can do the same simply by applying the Creative Commons License to your site and letting Yahoo discover you.

The Creative Commons license allows you to declare a certain amount of rights to your article, while still encouraging its duplication across the internet and ensuring that you are credited as the author.

However, while the creative commons licenses hold much value, there are still relatively few people who are taking advantage of it to gain more visibility for their articles and their website. Therefore, now is the perfect time to move into this lucrative market. With Yahoo Creative Commons Search leading the way, you know there is sure to be significant growth to come.