It’s not every day you find yourself on the news stands of America… on the front cover!!! Here we are, Dave and I, on the front cover of the July / August issue of Home Business Magazine.

Home Business Magazine has a readership of 210,000 home-based entrepreneurs and business owners; people who work from home; and telecommuters. HBM Online is loaded with content to help home-based business start-ups succeed.

Many thanks to the team at Home Business Magazine from all of us at Brownbook.net.

Free free global business directory that anyone can edit now lists 28 million businesses worldwide

United Kingdom: Brownbook.net, the free global business directory that anyone can edit, is celebrating its first year in business; a year of sustained growth. Today, the site continues to thrive, with thousands of businesses being added, worldwide, every week. The international distribution of listed businesses can be seen here: http://www.brownbook.net/countries.

• Miamism.com, USA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rFyBJT5CeM
• R A Hilton, Jeweller, USA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX0SAmObg-k
• Bush Marketing, Australia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBF9qDwHPRU
• Carpet Doctors, UK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx2__rhjsYI
• Sort Out My Visa, UK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQOARcUve0k
• OM2 Marketing, UK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_GcM_LqIug
• Elite Advertising Consultants, UK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jWHP6yb8qw
• Pople Web Design, UK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIAotTqPvkk
• French Tutoring, UK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpXlAk2W8Es

Brownbook also regularly enjoys positive reviews about the site; these left, for example, on Brownbook’s own listing page:

“Love it… Love it… Love it. This is SEO magic for the uninitiated. Simple, quick and powerful. Love it! Have recommended BrownBook to ALL my friends! Actor Expo Team, www.actorexpo.co.uk, May 25, 2009 17.23”

“I had a wonderful review of my business appear on my [Brownbook listing] a few days after signing up for your service. It was an unsolicited endorsement from a business associate. Right on! May 22, 2009 11.06”

Marc Lyne, co-founder: “We are currently listing 28 million businesses from all around the world. One of the reasons for Brownbook’s success, I would say, is that we never stop providing innovative new features to businesses, helping them to get found online. This keeps the site fresh and on its toes. Here are 2 of our latest enhancements, for example:

1. Stats counters and stat graph on every businesses page; plus a global stats league table, since May 5, 2009, here: http://www.brownbook.net/user/hof/top-viewed-profiles

2. Bidget (Business Widget) for reviews. Now anyone can add their reviews that appear on Brownbook to any other website, blog or forum. See an example here: the Brownbook page for Onedrywash: http://www.brownbook.net/business/31008544/sjk-products-ltd, and their Brownbook reviews which they have placed on their own blog: http://onedrywash.blogspot.com

“Online Directories and Internet Yellow Pages in Europe”

This report by Forrester principal analyst, Nate Elliott, published on May 29, 2009 includes Brownbook.net among the online directories that it discusses. Here’s an excerpt:

UK-based directory Brownbook.net offers user reviews too but also takes the idea one step further: The entire directory is a wiki, allowing users to edit basic information like shops’ phone numbers, addresses, and store hours.

Source: Forrester Research, Inc

To buy this report, click here.

We used Skype to talk with a random selection of people who have added their businesses to Brownbook, we asked them why they did it and what they got from it. We recorded the interview in its entirety - no editing.

What we found was both interesting and revealing.

This is something we would advise every small business to do for many reasons:

1. you get to find out what people really think about what you do
2. you get to find out where they see the value in the service you provide (this may be very different from the reason you think people come to you rather than your competitor), this will enable you to tailor your advertising and marketing to be more effective in attracting new customers and keeping existing customers
3. you get to hear of any improvements you can make, and solve any outstanding issues they have
4. they get to see a human side to you and your business and hopefully hold you in higher regard, confirming their decision to use you and therefore they are more likely to recommend you to their friends
5. by capturing the video call, you get to create an open and honest video of you and your customer that you can distribute on video sites like YouTube, add to your web site, add to Brownbook, blog about, twitter abot… etc, all of which will help you get found online
6. you give something back to your customer by mentioning them in your video and adding links to their business, helping them also get found online

Here are our interviews with our customers from all round the World, see what they said and the gold-dust that they left us with:

Greg - Bush Marketing - and a link to Gregs Brownbook page
Ines - Miamism.com - and a link to Ines Brownbook page (great page with video reviews and more…)
Robert - R A Hilton Fine Jewelers - and a link to Roberts Brownbook page
Anthony - Carpet Doctors - and a link to Anthonys Brownbook page (see the reviews Anthony has collected)
Veronica - Sort Out My Visa - and a link to Veronicas Brownbook page (uploaded pictures)
Anthony Morris - OM2 Marketing - and a link to Anthonys Brownbook page
Steve - Elite Advertising Consultants - and a link to Steves Brownbook page
Soren and Thomas - Pople Web Design - and a link to Sorens Brownbook page
Stephane - French Tutoring - and a link to Stephanes Brownbook page

From the outset we saw Brownbook as being a global open platform, available to other websites via OpenSearch and a platform on which any business anywhere in the World could add themselves (via self service) for free and then pay a small sum ($22) to claim, enhance and customize their listing.

For small businesses that are not able to add themselves or choose not to, then we provide the Brownbook platform to publishers that already have relationships with those types of businesses, and who also have production capabilities to customize the Brownbook pages for their customers (see this page to understand what page customization looks like). Publishers further add value for their adverisers by driving traffic from their web sites to there advertisers’ businesses pages on Brownbook.

Here’s an example of the same page on Brownbook seen as if you were visiting Brownbook from each of these different web sites:

Friday-Ad
Boats and Outboards
Trade-It
Horse Mart
Wight Bay
Brownbook

Not only do business owners benefit from the generation of leads from their presence on the publishers’ web sites, but they also benefit from the great SEO that Brownbook provides.

Publishers benefit through the turnkey delivery of a new richly customizable product that monetizes their web traffic and also charge the businesses themselevs a fair price for the customization work. The Brownbook platform enables instant delivery of an advanced web 2.0 business directory across all their sites quickly and easily. This enables the publisher to concentrate efforts on connecting with their prospect base and delivering benefit to them, rather than development of new web site functionality. This approach saves management time, development costs, ensures market leading functionality and reduces time to market therefore increasing revenue opportunity.

The more the Brownbook platform is utilized by businesses and publishers around the World the greater the benefit it provides to all the businesses using it. Rather like Wikipedia for encyclopedias, Brownbook is becoming the most complete and up to date business directory in the World.

Any questions, thoughts, then please do email me: marc[AT]brownbook[DOT]net

Widget from Boats and Outboards web site

Here is a great example where www.boatsandoutboards.co.uk has created a widget to insert in its customers Brownbook pages to show the inventory that that business has for sale on Boats and Outboards:
http://www.brownbook.net/business/74779/lancing-marine-ltd

If any online publishers anywhere in the World who would like a Brownbook business directory as part of their site or to utilize the web 2.0 business listing functionality of Brownbook, then please drop me an email: marc[AT]brownbook[DOT]net

This is how the page for Lancing Marine appears when it is accessed from the Boats and Outboards web site: http://fal.brownbook.net/business/74779/lancing-marine-ltd&falid=boa

Boats and Outboards are linking to these pages from within their web site and providing their customers with a product where they create the page on Brownbook on behalf of the customer (add photos, videos, text, prices, logo etc) and help generate traffic to that page from within www.boatsandoutboards.co.uk

By popular demand we’ve added a new ‘Page statistics’ unit to all business profile pages.  Now you can see exactly how many times your profile page has been viewed, and how many times your website, blog, twitter and email links have been clicked - since today May 5th 2009.

If you’ve claimed your listing we’ll also do the math to calculate how much each page view and click has cost you, so over the course of the year you’ll be able to easily see what you’ve got for your money.

Brownbook V18 went live today, with a couple of changes which I’ll outline here.  Aside from a whole heap of back-end stuff, the key front-end improvements revolve around the customizable business pages.

When you add new information to your business profile page (e.g. text, images, videos, widgets, etc) you can now choose to show or hide the unit titles, show or hide the unit borders, and edit the titles on most of the units.  If you already have a customized page go have a play.  On the face of it that sounds kinda small, but the result is your business profile page now looks rather more ‘clean’.  You can take a look at a few examples here:

Kosibah Creations Ltd - all borders showing, all titles showing

Woodland Skills - all borders showing, all titles showing

and our own Brownbook - some borders hidden, some titles hidden, some titles edited

Have fun

Dave

The London-based Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) has written about Brownbook in the 10-23 April 2009 edition of their Library & Information Gazette.

It reads:

Interactive Business Directory Launched

Brownbook.net is an online global business directory which is free, and can be edited by anyone. Users simply type details of new companies into Brownbook to share with other web users. Similarly, international suppliers of a particular item can be tagged, and searched for by keyword. Brownbook lists 27m businesses in 240 countries, and is available at http://www.brownbook.net and on mobile http://m.brownbook.net

Really pleased to be speaking at the ICMA conference in Tallinn, Estonia on May 14th 2009 (International Classified Media Association). The event is titled “SHAPING THE FUTURE OF CLASSIFIEDS” and the session I am speaking at is titled: “Spotlight on innovation”.

It should be interesting as there will be a cross section of publishers present, some who are facing significant challenges to their traditional print revenues and are battling to resolve their online strategy, and others who are very advanced with the execution of an online strategy that is working very well for them.

And what am I talking about: Read the rest of this entry »