Are you relying on yellow pages to generate sales? Recent studies show that more people are finding the businesses, products, and services they are looking for with a search engine instead of the yellow pages. For many years just about everyone looked for a local business in the yellow pages. Today the computer or smart phone using the internet, are the preferred method to locate your business and products.

Read more: Fingers Type More Than They Walk

Lisa H. Harrington, CPCU, CAE, AAM, AAI, AIAM, AIP is the founder and CEO of Sapphire Enterprises LLC.  Harrington will also be a full partner with BMP, focusing her efforts on marketing the flagship product, Social Autopilot.

Harrington has nearly 30 years experience in the insurance industry, including underwriting, agency sales and operations management, plus over a decade as Vice President of Education at the Florida Association of Insurance Agents. Her consulting practice includes agency management consulting, training, expert witness service, and products that help agencies grow. 

Social Autopilot is an innovative new service. In addition to website design and hosting, the company provides a turnkey solution for firms which need a presence in social networking, forums, blogs and other social media.  Founded to help small businesses enter and penetrate the world of social media marketing, Social Autopilot will help companies take advantage of several viral marketing channels.

The firm’s goal is to provide the means, technology, and talent to level the playing field so that small and large businesses compete equally.  Education of the customer in the process is a major component of the strategy, raising businesses to the next level with these techniques.

From creating an entry level system to premium services, Social Autopilot provides the assistance to help clients succeed in an unfamiliar arena. By acting as a strategic partner they can assist any business with the tools needed to succeed in the new world of social media marketing.

The comScore 2010 U.S. Online Auto Insurance Report presents a detailed overview of the online auto insurance market, with insights into overall industry trends, the competitive landscape and key areas influencing consumers’ online decision-making process. The study analyzes the online behavior of comScore’s passively-observed panel of 1 million U.S. consumers, as well as attitudinal insights gained from a comScore survey of more than 2,000 U.S. online consumers conducted in March 2010

Read more: Highlights of comScore’s 2010 Online Auto Insurance Report

The growing popularity of social networking has attracted the attention of businesses that believe these platforms open up new business opportunities. They are discovering its value as an essential tool for communication, customer engagement, lead generation, immediate customer contact, customer service, customer interaction and relationship building.

Read more: Social Networking’s Value - Making the Case

In these hard economic times, it is extremely important to appear to the outside world that your company is reliable as well as stable. Social media marketing is by far one of the easiest ways to spread news about your company building an brand image that has dependability and success written all over it.

Read more: Social Media Marketing – Share Good News About Your Business During Bad Times

Social Media is gaining popularity, so its no surprise why so many businesses are stammering to promote their products or services on such sites as Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In, and Myspace.

Marketing to an audience of literally millions is nothing to scoff at, and with a growth of over 1000% alone in the last year for Twitter, it’s a good time to learn how to capitalize on this ever growing community of possible prospects.

As we all know, at the core of any great marketing strategy is the art of networking. If you combine a sea of these prospects through social networks, you can easily turn those within your online social circle into customers.

Read more: Small Business Marketing: How to Capitalize on Social Media for Beginners

If you are reading this, you have probably heard the term “Viral Marketing” and may possibly be even questioning the actual term “viral”. You probably want to find out more about how what it has to do with marketing, but for those who understand how it works, viral is a good thing when it comes to social media and viral spreading of information.

Read more: The Mechanics of Viral Marketing and How to Make it Work

In today’s environment, getting the most out of your technology investment is critical to maximizing staff productivity and bottom line profit. While training your staff to fully use the functionality in your company document  management systems is certainly important, we have found that the effective implementation of small, innovative tools can also produce significant productivity gains. In this blog we discuss our candidates for the top ten cool tools in 2009 that deserve your attention.

Read more: Nine Technology Tips to Enhance Your Company's Productivity

Search engines are like any company product. They are constantly being improved to better serve their customers, and to increase their effectiveness over their competition. Over the years most of the major search engines have improved their algorithms or how they look at web pages. Let’s take a look at some of these changes and how they can impact the ranking of your web site.

The whole idea about search is to find something or some kind of information. Now that the internet has been around for over 25 years (hard to believe), there are so many web pages out there that making the newest pages more important than the old pages only makes sense. Why would you want to read an article about current economic conditions that was 3 years old? Search engines take into account how often new content is added to your website, and uses that information as well as other criteria to determine your rank.

Search engines scour the internet using programs called “spiders”. Spiders walk, or search the web to record what is out there. One of the things these spiders look for is how many links there are to a particular page. The theory being, more links make it more important. When you type in a search for something the engine looks for that search phrase and then delivers those web pages that match your search and puts the ones with links higher in the rankings.

If you wrap up these two thing as well as other criteria, this all adds up to where a search engine places your web pages in a search. So the key is to have a lot of fresh original content and have a lot of links to your website.

Whether you are an insurance agency, a retail store, or an automotive repair shop, having help forums attached to your web site does not only add refreshable content that will redirect people to your website, it adds functionality to your site that most people in small business do not have or think they can’t afford. If you develop enough momentum, it will also generate leads or customers organically.

Let’s say you are a 4X4 business that specializes in Jeep restoration. If you had help forums that addressed topics that people were interested in, you would not only get name and brand recognition from your current customer base, your site will attract non-customers (potential customers) that would find these forums useful because they either found it by doing a search or your own customers were spreading the word about it to people they know. I can’t tell you how many times I have actually used these to work on my boat or other hobbies I have. I searched a help forum about 2 months ago that actually helped me with a bilge pump problem I was having on my boat, and now I go back to these forums all the time, and have even bought items from the web site of that company. Also, there is virtually no cost to this type of advertising, and when tied to your blog, website and other social media accounts, can be a very powerful viral marketing tool!