Seth Godin’s memo to the very small

The other day I found a good post from Seth Godin on a way for very small businesses to get an online presence, quickly and cheaply. I don’t agree with the specifics of his method necessarily – it’s quite heavily weighted towards Squidoo lenses. But it had the desired effect which was to make me think about how it doesn’t have to be hard for a very small business to have a decent online presence – they can set it up themselves very quickly. What counts is having a presence in the first place. He recommends Typepad, which you pay for, but there’s plenty of good, easy to use, free blog providers – Tumblr, Blogger or WordPress to name a few.

If you’re a niche business in a specific area then you should be on Google Maps. It can be very easy to garner top positions in Google search results by setting up a Google Places profile. An even if you’ve got loads of local competition you still need to be on there – the other guy most probably is. And if you really want to use it to your advantage then ask your customers to leave you a review there. It’s a high profile place for your potential customers to read about what your existing customers think. You can also copy the best reviews to your blog/website/facebook page.