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

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

You can add Google Street View to your enhanced listing in Brownbook to show users exactly where your business is located, and Brownbook is the first business directory to provide this facility.

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Here are two videos from Dave that tell you how to make the most of your business listing on Brownbook – hints and tips, what to look out for and what really works:

And part 2…

I was asked the other day why we don’t do radiating search, and its a good question the answer to which is not immediately obvious.  I figured it may be useful to share the reasons why?

When we first designed Brownbook.net we set out to challenge all the established rules of how local business directories ’should’ work (coming from a big directory background as we do this was not always easy, but an exercise we def wanted to do).

#Evolution of tag-style searches in other web behaviors:
The use of tags to replace traditional ‘more scientific’ methods (tags versus hierarchical taxonomies/classification structures, and geo tags versus radiating search) is becoming more prevalent on the web and an accepted behavior that allows consumers and publishers (businesses in the case of business listings) to naturally reach a equilibrium of self regulation.  What I mean by this is that instead of maintaining a complex (and by definition rigid) taxonomy you use tags to allow that taxonomy to evolve naturally over time (some people may be familiar with the term folksonomy).  We see the same rules that apply to a hierarchical category taxonomy applying to a radiating geo search.

It’s not a short answer, but as with all simple concepts the wiring under the board is often more complex than you’d imagine.  But in short geo tags let users and busineses define what works best for them, without the arbitrary rules that the traditional directories had to enforce.

There’s been a lot of activity at ‘Brown Towers’ recently, not least of all was the release of Brownbook.net USA, Brownbook.net Canada, and Brownbook.net Australia.

So, in the last week we’ve gone from 2.2 million businesses listed to well over 27 million (2.2m UK, 22m USA, 1.1m Canada, 2m Australia).

Recent developments include:

- Added in FOUR new countries with base data – including the ability to search globally.  You can also add businesses in ANY world country and we’re even starting to see activity in countries where we haven’t even added base data.  We also added some diddy little flags to the home page content to denote which country the home page content is coming from.

- Re-prioritised the search results to give more weight to exact matches on business name

- Added the business name to the Recently Reviewed Businesses on the home page (so you can see which busineses people are commenting on

- Modified our OpenSearch API to support country selection in the API

- Added a more obvious link to enlarge photo reviews, and to play video reviews

- Added support for an ‘affiliate code’ so our partners can provide local search services using our PLATFORM, and they can earn money when businesses claim their listings.  This can be used in conjunction with our OpenSearch API.

- Our MOBILE PLATFORM is ALMOST ready for primetime.  A few people have been trialling it for us and initial feedback is good.  We’ve just got a few more tweaks of the UI to get it just right, and that should be live in about 2 weeks.

- We have a new member joined the UK Business Team: Sarah is responsible for getting the knowledge out about Brownbook.net and she’s going to be working on various news, promotional, and marketing-type activities.

I’ll make another update soon, the next version due in a couple of weeks has some great new tools for business owners and consumers, so stay tuned.

PS: check out this example of a business page with a photo gallery promotion (Emy Lou Photography in Brighton, UK).