Online Places Your Business Needs to Be Listed

The use of Yellow Pages has declined over 50 percent in the last five years. People now conduct quick searches on one of the many popular online directories. Since Internet search is the primary tool to finding businesses today, it’s vital to make sure your business is listed on all applicable online directories.

To get you started, here’s a quick guide to the top 20 online directories and links to their sign-up pages:

Google Places for Business

Listing your business on Google Places for Business should be at the top of your priority list. Google outperforms every other search engine by a long shot. In fact, Google receives nearly 6 billion searches per day.

Advantages

• Registering for a business listing on Google is easy and free
• Business listings appear in Google Maps
• Happy customers can leave reviews on your Google+ page

Create your Google Places for Business listing.

The Business Journals

The Business Journals is a local listing that has 4 levels of service options— free, bronze, silver, and gold. Each service option displays your listing in the directory, but the more you pay, the more opportunities you have to receive targeted traffic to your website.

Advantages

• 8 million monthly searchers
• Searchers have an average income of $97K+
• 84% of searchers shop online

Create your Business Journals listing.

Angie’s List

Angie’s List is one of the most well respected online directories for services, and is touted for its ability to provide accurate and reliable reviews for readers. If you’re looking to establish an online reputation through positive reviews, Angie’s list is a must.

Advantages

• Online reputation management services
• Ability to read and respond to reviews
• Access to additional helpful business tools

Create your Angie’s List listing.

Hotfrog

Hotfrog is a free online directory whose aim is to help get your website listed in Google’s search results.

Advantages

• Registration takes less than 5 minutes
• Add as much detail to your profile as you would like for free
• Create coupons to incentivize your customers

Create your Hotfrog listing.

Kudzu

Kudzu is free and geared toward homeowners that are interested in making renovations. If you offer any type of home improvement services, make sure you list your business on Kudzu.

Advantages

• 93% of Kudzu users are homeowners
• 74% of those homeowners are interested in home renovation projects
• Enhanced profiles come with a dedicated account manager to help you boost your website in search results

Create your Kudzu listing.

Bing Places for Business

Bing is the second most visited search engine on the Internet. If people aren’t searching on Google, chances are, they’re searching for your business on Bing.

Advantages

• Quick, easy, and free to register
• Add multiple business locations at one time
• Include other content in your business listing like photos, videos, and more

Create your Bing Places for Business listing.

Yahoo! Local Listing

Yahoo is the Internet’s 3rd most popular search engine, bringing in millions of searches per day.

Advantages

• Yahoo Local Basic listing is free
• Include photos, company description and more for $9.95/month
• Get maximum exposure and listed on 40+ other directory listings for $29.99/month

Create your Yahoo Local listing.

Yelp

Yelp is one of the best places on the Internet for consumers to find a quality review. If you’re looking to tap into the word-of-mouth advertising world, then Yelp is the perfect place to start.

Advantages

• Create deals for loyal customers right in your Yelp account
• Send messages to your customers, publicly or privately
• View business trends in Yelp’s reporting tool

Create your Yelp listing.

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MerchantCircle

MerchantCircle is an online directory that helps small businesses connect with local customers, and other local small businesses. They offer free marketing tools to help you build your business.

Advantages

• Geographically localized to your target audience
• Ability to advertise to boost your listing
• Host a business blog on the site

Create your MerchantCircle listing.

Yellow Pages

Yellow Pages is the online version of a modern day phone book. Besides listing your business in an organized directory, Yellow Pages also offers advertising, lead generation services, and online payment options.

Advantages

• Well-organized interface
• Detailed ad performance data
• Receives millions of searches per day

Create your Yellow Pages listing.

White Pages

White Pages is the online equivalent of the white pages in a phone book. It’s a great way to make your business contact information available to over 200 million people.

Advantages

• List your business among 30 million other businesses
• Premium text message service for mobile marketing
• Sponsored advertisement opportunities available

Create your White Pages listing.

Superpages.com

Superpages.com is another online directory that is easy to navigate. Superpages.com includes some unique features like cars for sale, lottery results and helpful tips for finding business services.

Advantages

• Local weather listings right on the home page
• Facebook sign-in option
• Popular search categories listed on the home page

Create your Superpages listing.

Yellowbook

Yellowbook.com is a subsidiary of Hibu Business, and allows you to create an easily searchable business listing on their network. Listings come with access to a full profile that includes business information, a link to your website, product descriptions and more.

Advantages

• Information distributed across yellowbook.com network and partner sites
• Display and video ads available
• Cool map feature included in every listing

Create your Yellowbook listing.

YellowBot

YellowBot is yet another online directory similar to the yellow pages in a phone book. YellowBot provides basic contact and location information about businesses, and allows online reviews from customers.

Advantages

• Easily sign in with Windowslive, Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Twitter
• Premium Listing opportunity for easy account management
• Ability to add searchable tags to your listing

Create your YellowBot listing.

Manta

Manta is an online directory that receives over 30 million unique visitors per month. According to Inc., it is one of the fastest growing business sites on the Internet.

Advantages

• A fantastic way to increase your website traffic with paid business optimization packages
• Get set up within minutes
• Highlight your products and brands on your business profile

Create your Manta listing.

Citysearch

Citysearch is an excellent network for restaurants, bars, spas, hotels, restaurants and more. It’s free to get a listing and easy to update your profile once you’re listed in their search results. Citysearch also offers city guides for the most popular cities in the United States.

Advantages

• Vast partner network including Expedia, Urbanspoon, MerchantCircle and more
• Profile includes a fun welcome message for viewers
• Customers access business listings through popular Citysearch mobile app

Create your Citysearch listing.

MapQuest

MapQuest is a web mapping service to help bring local customers right to your business doorstep. This listing is great for businesses that are trying to get customers to visit a physical location.

Advantages

• Detailed driving directions to your business are available
• Only $3/week
• One central dashboard to manage business listings across multiple sites (paid service)

Create your MapQuest listing.

Local.com

Local.com is a free business directory powered by Yext.com. Local.com offers searchers detailed information about everything going on in their city, including events, deals and information on popular businesses.

Advantages

• Additional advertising options available
• Add a coupon to attract customers
• Resources available to make sure your business is listed correctly across the web

Create your Local.com listing.

Foursquare

Not only is Foursquare a popular business directory, it’s a popular social networking site. Customers can check in and comment on your business — ultimately leading more potential customers to your business.

Advantages

• Connect your Twitter handle, so visitors can Tweet you
• Add a map so people can “check-in” to your business
• Popular mobile app available

Create your Foursquare listing.

DexKnows

DexKnows is a popular online directory that not only allows a business listing, but provides a way for you to track how your customers engage with your profile, thus allowing you to track your online reputation.

Advantages

• Identify places where you can advertise both online and in print
• Detailed lead information available through reporting tools
• Monitor your ratings and reviews

Create your DexKnows listing.

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Blogging Tools to Help You Save Time,To Keep You Organized Work Better

Everyone loves to scoff at bloggers because from the outside, blogging seems like an easy job, although in reality it is anything but.

There’s just so much that you have to do right from ideation to distribution of content: Plan, research, organize, write, design, share, and those are only the most obvious steps!

stunning images—these tools have got you covered.

  Slack

Slack is team communication for the 21st century. It allows you to organize your team conversations in open channels. Make a channel for a project, a topic, a team, or anything—everyone has a transparent view of all that’s going on.

For sensitive information, you can create private channels and invite a few team members. No one else can see or join your private channels. To reach a colleague directly, send them a Direct Message. It’s completely private and secure.

All your files, images, PDFs, documents, and spreadsheets can be dropped right into Slack and shared with anyone you want. Add comments, star for later reference, and it’s all completely searchable.

If you use any services like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Box, just paste the link and that document is immediately in sync and searchable too.

Keywordtool.io

Keyword tool is the best alternative to Google Keyword Planner. Every search is an expression of people’s needs, wants, interests and desires. Imagine how your business would benefit if you could analyze these search terms that are related to your business domain and customize your product to serve the actual needs of your customers.

Keyword Tool will help you discover thousands of the new long-tail keywords related to the topic that you specify by generating Google’s auto suggestions. The suggestions will be generated based on the Google domain and language that you choose.

Evernote

Evernote is the app to manage it all.

Create a project to-do list. Jot down a reminder. Or snap a picture of a sketch. A note can be anything you want it to be. And once you make a note, it’s accessible wherever you go, forever.

Capture a note once, and it’s instantly available on all your devices. Never worry about where you saved something because it’s in Evernote, and Evernote is wherever you are.

Whether it’s text, images or documents, you keep things for a reason. That’s why Evernote makes sure the notes you’ve saved are easy to find. You can even search for handwritten words buried deep within your notes.

Share what matters with the people who matter to you. Capture life’s little moments and share them from wherever you happen to be. Or share big ideas by collaborating seamlessly with co-workers in a group notebook.

Image Suite

Image Suite is a WordPress plugin that finds and lets you edit 100% free images you can adapt and use at will. It comes with an advanced filtering technology that fetches only images which are free for commercial use.

Your images come from the best sources—Flickr, Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons, Europeana,  Openclipart, Find Icons, Instagram, Icon Finder and Youzign.

Find 100s of relevant HD images with a click–just enter your keyword in the search box and within few seconds ImageSuite will return a range of high definition quality images you can adapt and use in you blog post.A click on an image brings it up on a clean lightbox preview–click the next or back arrow to navigate between the result pages. Everything happens within your wordpress dashboard. Working with ImageSuite is easy, simple, fast and hassle-free.

A click on an image brings it up on a clean lightbox preview–click the next or back arrow to navigate between the result pages. Everything happens within your WordPress dashboard. Working with ImageSuite is easy, simple, fast and hassle-free.

RescueTime

RescueTime helps you understand your daily habits so you can focus and be more productive. It runs securely in the background on your computer and mobile devices and tracks time spent on applications and websites, giving you an accurate picture of your day. It also gives you detailed reports and data based on your activity.

Here are some other features of RescueTime:

1. Set alerts to let you know when you spent a certain amount of time on an activity.
2. Log highlights about what you accomplished during the day.
3. Block distracting websites by choosing an amount of time to focus and RescueTime will block those websites.
4. How much time did you spend on email? In meetings? RescueTime gives you the answers.
5. Time measurement when you want it. Pause or quit at any time. You are in complete control.

EMV Headline Analyzer

This free tool will analyze your headline to determine the Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) score. As you know, connecting with your customers in a deep and emotional way is a key to successful copywriting, and your headline is unquestionably the most important piece of copy you use to reach prospects.

Your headline will be analyzed and scored based on the total number of EMV words it has in relation to the total number of words it contains. This will determine the EMV score of your headline.

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

Some headline types get more traction than others for social shares, traffic, and search engine ranking. The headline analyzer helps you understand your headline types to capitalize on this research.

It will also help you ensure that you have the right balance of common, uncommon, emotional, and power words in your headlines. This structure makes sure your headlines are readable while commanding attention from your audience.

Headline analyzer also tells you the optimal character length for search engines like Google and email subject lines, while also giving a glimpse of how your readers will scan your headlines.

Grammarly

 

Grammarly Editor is an automated proofreader that corrects contextual spelling mistakes by instantly finding and correcting over 250 types of grammatical mistakes, detects plagiarism by checking your text against over 8 billion web pages, and improves your word choice with context-optimized vocabulary suggestions.

PhotoPin

PhotoPin helps bloggers find photos for their blog and makes adding them to their post fast and easy. Just search for any topic using the search box (e.g. “Kittens”, “Flowers”, etc.), preview the photo, and click “get photo” to download the photo as well as the proper attribution link. PhotoPin uses the Flickr API and searches creative commons photos to use for your blog.

Wunderlist

Wunderlist is the easiest way to get stuff done. Whether you’re planning a holiday, sharing a shopping list with a partner or managing multiple work projects, Wunderlist is here to help you tick off all your personal and professional to-dos.

Set Due Dates and Reminders and Assign to-dos. No matter whether your lists are work related or just for fun, you will never miss a deadline again with Wunderlist in charge.

Share your lists and collaborate on projects with your colleagues, friends, and family.

Selfcontrol

SelfControl is a free and open-source application for Mac OS X that lets you block your own access to distracting websites, your mail servers, or anything else on the Internet. Just set a period of time to block for, add sites to your blacklist, and click “Start.”

Until that timer expires, you will be unable to access those sites—even if you restart your computer or delete the application.

Canva

Much more than just an image tool, Canva is a web-based design tool that allows people who aren’t designers to create beautiful graphics Web or print: blog graphics, infographics, book covers, flyers, posters, invitations, and much more.

The drag-and-drop interface is a delight to use and makes the process of designing ridiculously simple. You can either use pre-made layouts or add a background, text, and design elements to create your own custom design.

WiseStamp

The WiseStamp email platform offers a free easy email signature solution with hundreds of elegantly designed templates, tons of email apps and services, an easy-to-add browser extension, and fast email signature generator.

It works on all email platforms, including Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Outlook, MacMail, iPhone, Thunderbird and more, and offers lots of social media apps and icons, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and more.

Lightshot

Lightshot is the fastest way to take a customizable screenshot. The app allows you to select any area on your desktop and take its screenshot with 2 button-clicks. It has a simple and intuitive user interface that makes your work with the app easier and faster. You can upload your screenshot to the server and get its short link right away.

You can edit screenshots instantly or later using a powerful online editor. Lightshot is available for Windows/Mac, Chrome, Firefox, IE & Opera.

Fiverr

Fiverr is the world’s largest marketplace for creative and professional services with instant access to access to millions of “Gigs” from people who love what they do. Categories in which you can find service providers include: Graphics & Design, Writing, Translation, Business, Tech, and many more.

There are no bids or negotiation, you just need to pay $5 per gig. Transactions and communication are safe and secure. You’ll never pay for a service that’s not delivered. Should you have any issues, Fiverr has outstanding 24/7 customer support.

Trello

Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.

A Trello board is a list of lists, filled with cards, used by you and your team. It’s a lot more than that, though. Trello has everything you need to organize projects of any size.

Open a card and you can add comments, upload file attachments, create checklists, add labels and due dates, and more.

You can invite as many people to your board as you need, all for free. Drag and drop people to cards to divvy up tasks. Everyone sees the same board and the whole picture all at once.

StayFocusd

StayFocusd is a productivity extension for Google Chrome that helps you stay focused on work by restricting the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites.

Once your allotted time has been used up, the sites you have blocked will be inaccessible for the rest of the day.

It is highly configurable, allowing you to block or allow entire sites, specific subdomains, specific paths, specific pages, even specific in-page content (videos, games, images, forms, etc).

Easy Tweet Embed

Easy Tweet Embed is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily add embedding pre-populated tweets to your blog posts/pages which can lead to more shares, more traffic, and more subscribers.

Just click the Easy Tweet Embed button in your Visual Editor, add the anchor text you would like to display in your post/page and the tweet that you would like to embed, then click “Embed Tweet”. Easy Tweet Embed takes care of the rest!

Google Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner is a free AdWords tool for new or experienced advertisers that’s like a workshop for building new Search Network campaigns or expanding existing ones. You can search for keyword and ad group ideas, see how a list of keywords might perform, and even create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together.

As a publisher, you can use Keyword Planner to help you get historical statistics such as search volume data for new keyword ideas, or to get forecasts on keyword ideas so you can plan your content and search traffic strategy accordingly.

Buffer

 

Buffer shares your content at the best possible times throughout the day so that your followers and fans see your updates more often. Get the most out of each post.

As you add content, you can easily select which of your social accounts you want to post to. Post the same message to all accounts or add context by customizing each.

Whether you are browsing the web or on the go, you can easily add content to your queue with our browser extensions and mobile apps. Save time and get more done by working from anywhere.

WP Distraction-Free Editor

A great feature built into the WordPress interface that almost no one uses, the distraction-free editing mode hides everything that can get in the way of your writing, and helps you stay focused.

To switch it on, click the small screen button on the top left corner of your WordPress WYSIWYG editor.When you first switch on  When you first switch on distraction-free editor, you’ll see a minimal toolbar, a title, and your post’s (or page’s) content.

To push the distraction-free mode to the limit, Firefox and Chrome have a Full Screen feature that makes the current page fill the entire screen—this means that the title and the content of the post or page you’re working on will be the only things you see.Auto-save means you don’t even have to worry about saving–just write.

Auto-save means you don’t even have to worry about saving–just write.

Feedly

Feedly is a single place to organize, read, and share all the content that matters to you — and your team. Whether it’s the New York Times, Business Week, industry journals or more—don’t miss a beat from any of the publications you trust.Dive deeper by following blogs from the latest movers, shakers, and thinkers.

Dive deeper by following blogs from the latest movers, shakers, and thinkers. Follow anyone on the web. See new videos from the YouTube channels you follow—in the same place, you read the rest of your news.

Monitor news about your company, your product, your craft, and your competitors by plugging in Google Alerts. Crunch through more content in less time by organizing your feeds into easy-to-read collections.

Click to Tweet

Clicktotweet is the best, easiest and simplest way to promote and advertise your blog, website, and business on Twitter.

Easily view and keep track of all links you’ve created in the past. Create folders to better organize links by project or campaign. Access to edit, view stats, and copy your links are all easily accessible. You can use a text link or select an image to embed on your website.

View reports of click activity on all your links. Analytics are tracked for all links you embed inside of your message/tweets, too!

Every time someone clicks one of your links, Clicktotweet records where they clicked from and presents this data to you on a map.Increase your followers by suggesting your (or anyone’s) Twitter account to Increase your followers by suggesting your Twitter account to be followed every time someone tweets from your ClickToTweet link.

Meme Generator

Memes are hot, they can make your content interesting and refreshing—provided you don’t overdo it. MemeGenerator.net provides is a free meme creation service that quickly and easily allows you to customize the most popular memes and download them for use on your blog or website.Manually creating memes can be quite a task as you have to go looking for an image, elaborating it and adding text. MemeGenerator takes all the hard work out of meme creation and makes the process fast and fun.

Manually creating memes can be quite a task as you have to go looking for an image, elaborating it and adding text. MemeGenerator takes all the hard work out of meme creation and makes the process fast and fun.

Toggl

Toggl is the leading online time tracking tool, which is extremely popular among freelancers, consultants, and small companies. It allows users to track the time spent on various projects and analyze productivity. It’s cloud-based and can be up and running from scratch in less than a minute. You can use Toggl on the web, as a desktop widget or on your mobile—all your data gets synced in real time.

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Easy Ways to Reduce, Compress & Zip PDF Files Free

compression software The software that helps you in compressing the size of a big file, so that you can share it via emails or other sharing options is termed as a compression software or tool. For Windows users, there are many freeware file compression software’s available online. The most popular among these available software’s are WinRAR and WinZip. But in addition to these there are a few more tools that are effective enough in compressing large files

7-Zip
This is a free and open source file archiver or file manager and more. The basic format on which this compression software operates is the 7z format, but in addition to this, it can also read and write other format options, making it one of the best available freeware compression utility. 7-Zip is loaded with many useful features and the list of supported formats just goes on.
Another useful feature of this file compression software is that it reads most of the archiving formats. It supports the following file formats – 7z, RAR, GZIP, WIM, CramFS, DMG, ISO, MSI, XY, ZIP, GZIP, UDF, Z, MBR, XAR, NTFS, DEB, FAT and many more.

IZArc

Using this free software utility, you can create, extract and repair any archive. IZArc supports almost every important file format and the features provided by it will enhance your experience of file compression. It provides with a drag and drop feature, which simplifies your compression task.
Other important and useful features added in IZArc are – virus scan feature, repair broken archives, create a self-extracting archive and many more. It supports the following file formats – 7-ZIP, ACE, PAK, TAZ, TZ, Z, CDI, BIN, B64, RAR, YZ1, IMG, ZOO, ISO, LIB, MDF, PK3, CPIO, BH, A, LHA, TGZ and many more.

PeaZip

This free and open source file managing and compressing tool or software is available for both Windows and Linux Operating Systems. The best way in which you can make use of this software is in the compression of large files. PeaZip uses and runs on its own format; the PEA archive. But the appreciating part is that it also supports other popular file formats. The user interface offered by this application is quite interesting and easy to navigate through.
Other important features offered by PeaZip are – file splitting and joining, byte-to-byte file comparison, system benchmarking, keyfiles generation, secure file deletion, archive conversion, archive encryption, hash files, find duplicate files and much more. It supports about 130 file formats including – ARJ, LHA, ZIPX, RAR, CAB, ACE, DMG, UDF, ISO and more.


Hamster Free Zip Archiver
 
Hamster Free Zip Archiver makes a great first impression, especially compared to all-business 7-Zip and PeaZip, thanks to its attactive user interface and a bouncy GIF animation. From the start, Hamster feels fresh and new, a pleasure to look at and use.


It's easy to use, too. To create a compressed file, you simply drag-and-drop the files you want to include onto HFZA main screen. Hamster tells you the folder's current size and asks you to choose between the ZIP and 7Z formats. Choose your file format, whether or not you want to split the file, and whether or not you want to lock the file. You then press "compress," and Hamster does its job.
Hamster Free Zip Archiver is fast. The Hamster Soft website claims that the program takes advantage of multi-core computing, and the results I got testing Hamster on a new Windows 8 PC Quad-Core supports that assertion. The company claims to best competitors on older machines, too.
Hamster reduced my folder to the usual 26MB file, so there is no extra advantage. But, like PeaZip, Hamster offers the ability to split compressed files and let your recipient reassemble them.
Another downside to Hamster Free Zip Archiver is that the company's support team did not answer my many emails. For tech support, you might as well consult your hamster.

Universal Extractor
Universal Extractor is extremely useful for opening archives, but it does have a limitation if you want to create an archive. And that limitation is severe: UniExtractor can't create anything. As its name implies, UniExtractor only extracts. But despite this limitation, it is a neat little app to have.

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