Once a business is listed on all of these sites there is very little maintenance required. You can run monthly coupons/specials and simply hit the top 5 sites and update your coupon. That should take @ 5 minutes per site once you are familiar with their navigation menus and you’re done. So 25-45 min/month to maintain and build a local presence is not a big deal.

What business owners really need is an attitude adjustment. They need to internalize and accept the fact that marketing their business is their job and that building their list is their #1 job. Once they master marketing and sales are coming in the rest will take care of itself.

So thank you for your comment. If you’d like to become an affiliate of The Sales Whisperer® and promote my local listing setup and maintenance program just click on the Affiliate link below. It’s free to join and the splits are generous.

Good Selling.

I agree with your comments about recommending local businesses to “claim” their listing at the five websites you have mentioned. This is much better than the “get listed” services I keep reading about that really don’t provide any benefit relative to the claiming process. The Internet is finally becoming a good local marketing tool for the local business to reach the local consumer through web searches and mobile searches.

What I am most concerned about are small and local businesses having to contend with multiple websites when it comes to their local listing. What I’m really talking about are “time resources”.

Afterall, there are over 60 websites in four different categories specifically geared towards local listings. How can a local or small business have the time resources to cover this space?

Even if you made a conscious decision to not manage all 60, there are well more than Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. The space goes to Local.com (they went public), Yelp, Merchant Circle, and many others.

Consumers will be the ones deciding which of these local listing websites they will go and post their experience through consumer reviews. This adds to the burden that no one single local listing website will do the trick.

Something we recently read at KillerStartUps are companies that are offering a low cost service to update then manage these listings for companies. You can read about this at KillerStartUps here:

http://www.killerstartups.com/Search/smartfindslocallisting-com-be-found-online

It is a changing world and the local business will benefit. There will be some adjustment to this space needed.

Good information from your post and hopefully varying opinions help give perspective.