Its always great to hear from business owners who are using Brownbook to enhance their online presence, for better SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and to ultimately get more business. Its fantastic to hear from people like Kelly who takes her online marketing seriously and is getting real benefit from listing her business on Brownbook:

I signed up for the free trial website and will develop it later this week – again, so inexpensive for the exposure I get from your SEO efforts.  I’m waaay up in the search engines because of you and my keywords on my profile. Yeah!

I was pretty busy in business before but now I’m very busy and in large part, because of Brownbook! I can always credit my business and personal successes to GOD first, but tapping into all the abundance the Universe has for me as a result of Napoleon Hill’s, “Think & Grow Rich” book, first written in 1937, gets the 2nd spot.  I wonder if my best cheerleader, my husband Lattie knows he’s third?  haha

Kelly Robertson – Celebrity Lipstick

Lets see how you as a business owner can benefit from the new 30 day FREE trial on all the Brownbook advanced features.

The value add that the video does not show is how your business benefits from better SEO, online marketing ie. better ‘bread crumbing’ (the more places that people can find your business the better). With the ultimate benefit being that you generate more business.

Here is a link to the video above.

And a link to all the Brownbook shows here (click on shows – top right).

Feel free to help yourself to any of the banners below to put on your own web site, blog, email etc.

Click here for a zip file containing all the above banners

If you are interested in our affiliate marketing program, then please do drop me an email to get an affiliate code (marc[AT]brownbook[DOT]net). When business owners pay us to claim their listing as a result of clicking on a link that contains your unique affiliate code, then we will pay you 20% of that revenue.

This is how the code works for the affiliate code – TEST

You just put the affiliate code (aff=TEST) at the end of the Brownbook URL in any news letter, behind any banner (a href=), in any email etc

There are two ways that this gets added to the URL, either with a ’?’ or an ‘&’:
http://www.brownbook.net/?aff=TEST

Or, if you want to show people a specific search and there is already a question mark ‘?’ in the url then use &aff=TEST on the end:
http://www.brownbook.net/businesses/?tag=isle+of+wight+printers&x=0&y=0&aff=TEST

The last little subtlety is where you want to restrict the link or the search to a single country, in which case, add the following to the end of the url ‘&setcountry2=[country code]‘ where country code is the standard ISO 3166 country code e.g. US, CA, UK, AU &setcountry2=US:
http://www.brownbook.net/?aff=TEST&setcountry2=US

Any thoughts, questions etc then please do drop me an email (marc[AT]brownbook[DOT]net).

If you’re not, or even if you are, check out this article about using Twitter for business – http://www.socialforbusiness.com/2009/02/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business.html

Ten days ago we released version 15 of our website.  We’re so confident you’ll like all the premium features that we’ve introduced a FREE 30-day trial for all Brownbook’s premium business promotions.  This means you can actually try out what you’re getting before making any commitment.  So, if you’ve not yet claimed your listing, here’re just some of the things you can try now free for 30 days:

• Claim your listing – lock it down so only you can update it, and get alerted anytime anyone reviews or tags your business
• Make your listing stand out visually with a Bold, Highlighted, and Boxed listing
• Get priority in search results
• Customize your business page – add photos, videos, logos, detailed information about your services, even widgets like a Skype button or Meebo instant messenger
• Use Brownbook features on your other websites, like reviews, maps, and any photos and videos from your page
• Make a unique presentation of your business, by using drag and drop to customize the layout of your business page
• Create your standalone business website with your own design and brand – not a Brownbook logo in sight

To get all these for free for 30 days click ‘claim’ or ‘this is my business’ on your business listing page and follow the instructions.  It’s so simple, its takes just one minute.

Near to the end of the 30 days we’ll drop you a note to remind you to take up the full claim and any promotions you want to keep.  There’s no commitment, and no need to give us your card details, just give it a whirl on us for free.

If you want more help or info on anything, you can click here
http://help.brownbook.net

In our quest for ongoing improvements we locked our developers away for most of January to bring you the following goodies…

- Even better SEO of business pages – helps your business get found on Google and all the major search engines.  We’re now running at around 5.5million pages indexed on Google and climbing fast every day.  We’ll keep you posted.  Our target right now is 27 million.

- Development of our API to provide a regular feed of newly added businesses, reviews, images, videos, etc to a major well-known search provider (NDAs prevent us telling which one just yet), means that additional business information you add to your business listing will appear in their local search results.

- A whole range of improvements in our Create My Website product, including some extra help text, better spacing of images in the page creator, more settings to define link styles and colors, auto-save option for page changes when you move between different pages, improved image upload and library functionality when adding images to your pages

And in other news…

- We’re now up to 600,000 visitors per month, and growing by 40% month on month

- To keep up with demand we’re adding new servers to our existing facility in San Francisco; they should be up and running within days

- We’re presenting on the panel at Search Engine Strategies in London on February 19 (http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/london/speakers.php), and at the Outsell Executive Council on February 25 (http://www.outsellinc.com/services/outsells_leadership_council)

- And why not check out our Kyte.TV channel here (http://www.kyte.tv/ch/189747-brownbook) where you can meet Marc and I and find out about all sorts of Brownbook related information, including getting the most out of your Brownbook listing (http://www.kyte.tv/ch/189747-brownbook/293919-part-1-making-the-most-of-brownb)