CitySquares is looking to fill a few open positions. There are two in particular that we’re

most eager to fill. Do you know anyone for these roles? If you do, and we hire them, we’ll pay you a $500 referral fee! Check them out…

National Ad Sales Executive
ETL Engineer

Full Time Positions

• Contract Web Developer
• Account Managers
• Contract MySQL DBA/ETL

Internships and Other Opportunities

• Marketing Intern
• QA Intern
• SEO Internship
• Graphic Design Intern
• Referral Agents

If you’re interested in any of these positions, please email us as specified in the job postings. All our jobs can be seen on our Jobs page. Please do not call us. If you’re a recruiter or headhunter, no offense but please don’t contact us. We already work with a couple of firms that we’re happy with. So thanks but no thanks!

Here’s how to get started:

Let’s say you want to add a list of the restaurants in Boston’s Back Bay to your website. All you’d need to do is go to that page on CitySquares and click the Get this Feed button. Once you click that you’ll be able to copy it into your clipboard and do any one of the following:

1. Use Your Blog Platform: If you use a blogging platform like Wordpress or something similar, you should be able to add a Feed Widget to your sidebar. If you can do that, just paste the feed link into that widget. Your blog’s CSS will take care of the formatting for the feed and control how it’s displayed.
2. Get a Free Widget: If you’d like to use a third party RSS widget, there’s a bunch of options out there. One in particular at SpringWidgets is pretty good and its free, but there’s others freely available. Just Google for RSS widgets and you should get plenty of options. Once you find the widget you like, enter the feed link provided to you on CitySquares.com, then grab the snippet of code provided by the widget, and drop it into your website code.
3. Build it Yourself: If you’re a developer or you know what you’re doing, you can get a lot fancier, and you can control the look and styles for the feed on your website. Just grab the RSS feed link and have at it!
4. Subscribe: If you’re not looking to do something like this on your website, but instead you want to just subscribe to one of these feeds, that’s quite simple too. All you need is an RSS reader like any of the free ones out there.

The lists of businesses in these feeds are set up to rotate quite regularly, basically whenever business content is updated on our site, it’ll update in the feeds. This way you get a fresh list of businesses on your site, as businesses are added or edited on CitySquares.com. And based on how you choose to integrate these feeds into your site, you can choose to only display a list of businesses, or a list with verbose information about them. It’s up to you! For an example, look on the right side of this page for a list of South End, Boston Restaurants, where CitySquares is headquartered.

This is just the first implementation of RSS feeds for publishers and we’re interested in your feedback before we kick it up a notch. Please feel free to report any troubles, or submit your comments, suggestions, etc., below.

Thanks and happy feeding!

To get started, just click on the blue Facebook Connect button that’s at the top of every page on CitySquares.com. The pages that follow are very straight-forward, and within just a minute or two you’ll be good to go.

While implementing Facebook Connect we were able to effectively re-engineer the user profiling system that’s native to the CitySquares website (built on Drupal). This is a good thing, because it will allow us to start doing much fancier things. It opens the door to a more robust Facebook integration, as well as Twitter and soon much more.

The Local Web and the Social Web are related. OK they’re not sisters, but they’re definitely cousins. The now and the future of local will see much more social features and functionalities. Some of the things we’re working on now, and plan on launching shortly, include a more robust Facebook Connect integration so that, for example, when you leave a review on CitySquares.com for a local business, your Facebook wall will be updated with something like a snippet of the review and a link to it on CitySquares.com. Same for when you give a business a star rating, or even if you contribute content in other ways, like adding news, an event, or useful information about your community and neighborhood. We’ll also allow businesses to create fan pages through their CitySquares account.

We’re also going to be rolling out a Twitter integration shortly, for both users and for businesses. There’s a whole strategy we’re going to evolve that into for community and neighborhood pages, to effectively create a waterfall of real-time locally relevant information that both pulls content in, and distributes content out. I know that sounds a little too conceptual, but hang in there – you’ll see what we mean very soon.

We hope you like what we’re doing! Stay tuned, there’s a whole bunch more coming soon. We welcome your feedback and suggestions, feel free to leave your comments below.

Throughout 2009 scores of people will rate businesses on CitySquares.com and we invite you to rate your favorite destinations! Each season there will be a different All Star campaign, with Beauty & Wellness being the first, Dining & Entertainment being the second and Shopping starting in October.

Whether it’s the bicycle shop who helped you find some new wheels, or that local clothing retailer around the corner who had the perfect jacket, this is your chance to say thanks and give them some recognition. All Star winners will be picked according to your votes, there are no editorial picks. And hey, while you’re at it, why not share your experiences with these businesses as well? To add your review simply create a free CitySquares.com user account and add as many reviews as you’d like.

Thank you for supporting your local community on CitySquares.com!

The Health & Wellness Top 10 are as follows!

• Clevergreen Cleaners – Best Dry Cleaning & Overall All Star winner! This is their second year in a row!
• Unique Verve - Best Massage
  
• 379 Club – Best Barbershop
  
• State Street Barbers – Best Barbershop (runner up)
  
• Satin Wellness Personal Training – Best Personal Fitness
  
• Sain Visage Skin Care – Best Facials (runner up)
  
• Sole Tanning – Best Tanning Salon
  
• Indulge Day Spa – Best Day Spa
  
• Darque Tan – Best Tanning Salon (runner up)
  
• Stingray Tattoo – Best Tattoos
  

Congratulations to all the winners! Be on the look out for their All Star Winner decals in their windows and awards on their walls!

Coming up next… the CitySquares Dining and Entertainment All Stars… announced very shortly!

To add your free business coupon just search for your business on CitySquares and once you find it, click it so you go to your business profile page. On the right side of the page you’ll see a blue box to Edit your listing for free. You’ll then be taken to a page where you can edit your business information. Keep in mind that you do need to have a username and password on CitySquares to do this.

Lastly, we encourage you to enter a coupon or discount that is redeemable. For example, something that says “Free hair coloring for first time customers when you bring this coupon with you!” This way your asking the consumer to bring the coupon with them and you’ll be able to see for yourself that the coupons are working!

Take full advantage of this and spread the word!

Please email us at help@citysquares.com if you have any questions.

It’s probably a bit overstated, but perhaps if consumers have too much power, and small businesses can’t defend themselves, than they’re in trouble. Perhaps all that would be left are huge corporate chains, with substantially more money (and hence power) than any mom-and-pop. They can afford a PR offensive, they can afford hiring dedicated twitter people, dedicated social media experts, etc. The small businesses cannot. And it’s these small businesses that are the thread in our economic quilt. They are essential, and yet they are challenged everyday by huge obstacles, nearly all having nothing to do with the Internet. You’d be surprised by what small businesses have to deal with every day, that threaten their fate. From macro economic conditions, to micro economic conditions, to neighborhood/street construction, to local zoning laws, from tax policies, to crime rates, small businesses can be crushed in ways that might seem petty and insignificant to the average consumer, or to big business. More often than not we really have no idea what small business owners have to go through to keep their doors open, to make payroll, keep their lights on, keep customers happy and returning. Too often then not we’re quick to jump to conclusions, and make assumptions. More often than not, these small businesses are greatly affected by one persons opinion.

Some people will suggest that the best way to counteract this is for the SMBs to “get on Facebook” or “get on twitter” or “hire a social media consultant.” My response? Give me a break! The small business owners response? “What is Facebook? What is twitter? What the heck is social media?”

So, we decided to take another step towards solving this problem for small business owners, and it might be interpreted as a controversial one: CitySquares now allows businesses to opt-out of reviews all together on their CitySquares.com business profile page.

Why? Well, take the local dentist for example, who no matter how hard she tries, she can’t win over all her customers. Truth be told, not everyone enjoys the dentist, right? And we have reason to believe that not all reviews left on a dentists profile are going to be glowing reviews for her root canal skills. Is it fair for this local dentist to have virtually no way to combat this? Sure, we could give her an opportunity to talk back to consumers, but what does that really do for the dentist? It’s her word against another – it’s tit-for-tat, he-said-she-said. And ultimately, that single dentist is up against a whole lot of (mostly) anonymous voices, people who are hiding behind an avatar, a username, while everyone knows who the dentist is, where she works, and have the power to nearly destroy her operation. OK – maybe a bit overstated, but nonetheless, reality!

This is just one scenario – there are lots of others that could be described. But you get the point.

So now, if you’re a small business owner you can opt-out of consumer reviews on your CitySquares business profile.

Here’s how it works:

• If you are a paying customer, you can choose between having reviews, or not having reviews. Period. End of story. There is no gray area – reviews are either enabled, or disabled, for paying customers only.
• If you are not a paying customer, we cannot disable reviews. You must be a customer. And all it takes is $5.99/month to become a customer, and that is all it costs to have reviews disabled on your profile. Not a penny more.

This new feature is not intended to be a revenue opportunity, that’s not the point. It’s not some crafty bait-and-switch, or anything like that. The point of this is to give the merchants a little more power, a little more opportunity to manage their online reputation, at least on CitySquares.com.

We’d like to do much more – and soon we will be. There’s much more in store for small merchants, but I’ll save that for a later post.

What do you think?

Small business marketing is a tricky animal. When you’re starting out, money may be tight, and it may seem like a good idea to skimp on your marketing budget, but don’t. Without marketing, you don’t have customers, and without customers, your business will suffer.

The good news is online marketing can help businesses with relatively small marketing budgets compete with huge corporations by targeting customers looking for their products and services on the Internet. Whereas traditional advertising requires you spend on people outside your target demographic (consider this “wasted spend”), online advertising helps you eliminate wasted dollars by focusing marketing efforts only on people who are most likely to convert into customers.

1 – You Need to Have an Action Plan

What is the goal of online marketing? Growing your business. How do you do this? By driving traffic to your website…

…but how?

There are a slew of ways to drive traffic to your site, but not every strategy makes sense for every business. Before you dump money into pursuing the wrong online marketing strategy, figure out what makes the most sense for you. Consulting a professional online marketing firm is always smart, but try to do a little research first so you understand common terms.

To get you started, let’s look at three of the most common ways to advertise online:

- PPC (pay-per-click) advertising

PPC advertising allows you to target people searching for your products and services online by placing text ads in the results pages of the major search engines. To trigger your ads, you bid on keywords related to your business, indicating which search terms you want to trigger your ads and how much you are willing to spend for clicks generated by specific keywords.

- SEO (search engine optimization)

SEO is the process of driving traffic to your site by improving its ranking in the natural or organic section of the search engine results pages. SEO is complex and involves many factors like site usability, content creation, link building, and more.

- Online display advertising

Online display advertising is the process of placing banner or video ads on specific websites. The upside to online display advertising is the ability to raise brand awareness among your target demographic. The downside is you are usually required to pay regardless of ad performance. There are metrics to consult when placing display ads to help you make smart choices, but ultimately, you are taking a risking a low return on investment (ROI).
Arming yourself with details like the above will better prepare you to navigate the world of online advertising, but reading this blog post is not enough! We’ve only scratched the surface, and there is much more to be learned. Likewise, things on the Internet move and change at such a rapid pace it often takes a professional firm to manage your online campaigns, especially when it comes to PPC management and SEO, both which can be especially difficult to do well.

2 – Tracking Is Essential – Know Your ROI

One of the most attractive features of online advertising is the ability to track results in terms of ROI using analytics and call tracking tools. These tools make it possible to gather valuable data regarding the performance of your campaign(s) and help you make decisions that affect your bottom line.

For example, analytics tools can tell you whether email marketing or display ads are generating more traffic to your site. You can also see which visitors are converting into sales and evaluate which of your online marketing tactics are the most profitable.

3 – You Can’t Be Number One Overnight

Many who begin advertising online are dazzled by PPC and think there is some secret to getting top positioning for their ads, but there isn’t. PPC involves many complicated variables, such as the level of saturation in your market, your keyword selection, the amount of your bids, how well your ads are written, and the relevancy of your landing page. Others discover SEO and think if they toss a few keyword-rich articles onto their site, they will outrank competitors, which is false. The reality is generating website traffic takes time. Anyone who tells you differently is using fly-by-night methods or lying.

4 – Your Website Does Matter (and So Does Your Copy) – Give It Some TLC

While some business owners launch a fancy website and do nothing to generate traffic, others do the opposite: launch a poorly designed and hastily written site and spend tons of money advertising it. Yikes! The truth is your website matters, and a poor execution will hurt your results. Look at your business website as a long-term investment and spend time thinking about how it should look, what it will say, and what you want visitors to do once they arrive. A well-planned website is a gift that keeps on giving; gloss over your site now and you’ll pay later.

5 – Never Give Up

As veterans will tell you, you online marketing is a process. You must experiment and take risks, but you have to know how much you can afford to lose if something doesn’t pan out as planned. Say you want to try a media buy on a popular site, for example. As with most online initiatives, you aren’t sure it will work, but if it does, the results could be astronomical. The key is to know how much you are willing to spend with no return. If you put a big chunk of your marketing budget into something that doesn’t produce results, you’ll be short on marketing dollars down the line.

Good luck!