The minute you hear the scampering of paws across the  CitySquares’ office floor and the sound of excited panting, you know that the CitySquares canine entertainment is about to begin.

Elmer is CitySquares’ co-founder Ben Saren’s 15-month old dog and of course an essential part of the CitySquares’ team – he comes to work every day and keeps us all entertained with his tail-chasing, begging for food, and random excitability.

Because Elmer is always around the office, we thought it would be great to put his adorable mug at the forefront of a new weekly blog entry titled “Elmer’s Weekly Small Business Tip.” These ideas will give neighborhood businesses insight into what they can do to promote and market their businesses every day.

We also want our readers to get to know the CitySquares team and its dynamics. How better to start doing so than by introducing Elmer, the office dog?

Elmer’s Weekly Small Business Tip

Nov 19, 2009

Include a CitySquares Badge on your website so your website visitors can see that you’re on CitySquares and can check out your reviews and other information that might not be on your website. Also, when you add a badge that links to your profile on CitySquares.com, you’re helping your overall search engine optimization. Search engines love links – and links to and from your website and to/from your CitySquares profile is good for your online presence.

Just copy and paste the following HTML code into your website site and remember to personalize both the business name and city within the code.

Small Badge HTML Code

The code below, underneath the images, is what you want to copy and paste into your website’s HTML. The red text is the code you want to customize with the URL of your page on CitySquares and with your city.

<!– Begin CitySquares.com Membership Badge –><br />

<a href=”[URL of your CitySquares profile, including http://]” target=”_blank”><br />

<img src=”http://badges.citysquares.com/smbadge.gif” alt=”[your business name, City] on CitySquares” border=”0″ /><br />

</a><br />

Large Badge HTML Code

The code below, underneath the large badge, is what you want to copy and paste into your website’s HTML. The red text is the code you want to customize with the URL of your page on CitySquares and with your city.

<!– Begin CitySquares.com Membership Badge –><br />

<a href=”[URL of your CitySquares profile, including http://]target=”_blank”><br />

<img src=”http://badges.citysquares.com/badge.gif” alt=“[your business name, City] on CitySquares” border=”0″ /><br />

</a><br />

And that’s it! Once you do that you’ll have a fancy shmancy new badge on your website that links to your profile on CitySquares, and watch the search engines pick that up and give both your own website and your CitySquares profile higher ranking.

If you have any questions about this, just give Elmer a call at 877-61-LOCAL!

]]> http://blog.citysquares.com/2009/11/19/elmers-local-business-tips-nov-19-2009/feed/ 1 http://blog.citysquares.com/2009/01/16/new-citysquares-blog-with-guest-writers/ http://blog.citysquares.com/2009/01/16/new-citysquares-blog-with-guest-writers/#comments Fri, 16 Jan 2009 01:48:31 +0000 Ben Saren http://blog.citysquares.com/?p=395 We first launched CitySquares back in 2005, for just a few neighborhoods in Somerville and Cambridge. Now, three years later, we’re rolling out the site nationwide. Bob, Justin, Michael, and Clay (our product team) are doing some amazing things, and working very hard to bring CitySquares to every community across the country, and the goal is to have that done by the end of this month!

Our company blog has been running for about a year or so, and it’s served us well as we’ve grown. But now, it’s time to take it to the next level. We believe in an open and candid dialog with our audience, and that’s what modern marketing is, a dialog – a conversation. One-directional marketing is dying, and it’s dying a long and slow death. Conversational marketing is here and here to stay, there’s no doubt about that.

So welcome to the new and improved CitySquares blog! There’s a much improved user interface and experience, but also a host of new features like videos, easy access to our archives, tweetbacks and tweetsuite (for you twitter users), but best of all, coming in the next few days, articles from guest writers!

We have some special guest writers lined up for you too – mostly small business owners who live this life every day, who are in the heat of the fire. They’re perspectives extend far beyond those of us at CitySquares. It’s high time that someone gives them a voice. CitySquares tries to do that through small business profiles, and we succeed in a marketing sense, but now it’s time to let them talk openly about anything and everything else on their minds – through their own eyes, as experts in their particular areas. Expect to see these folks up on CitySquares’ blog within a few short days!

The goal of this blog has always been for CitySquares to communicate with our audience, first and foremost, and that’s easy, we can do that until the cows come home. Our new goal of this blog is to continue to give you access to content that’s more important that what we might have to say. I’m confident that our guest writers, along with you’re participation on this blog (through comments and so forth) can make that happen.

As CitySquares goes national, so does this blog. If you’re interested in becoming a guest writer, please email me! We’re especially interested in hearing from small businesses all across the country, whether they’re in small rural towns or bustling urban districts. Please reach out and let me know if you want to be heard! The only requirement we have is that the topics must be within the broad spectrum of small business matters. That’s a huge range of topics – spanning from hiring practices, to marketing and advertising trends, to finding the right summer student help, to working with your town on zoning, to the green or local movements, to taxes, bookkeeping, inventory management, or anything else! There’s far too many topics for me to think of. That’s where you, the small businesses come in… join us.

So that’s what this is – the company blog. You’ll hear from me, probably most frequently, as well as Bob Leland (cofounder), Phillip Dias (sales manager), Justin Leider (web engineer), Kim Hillis and Jason Chehade (account managers) and others. They’ll have their own perspectives on CitySquares the company, and CitySquares.com the website. I look forward to their contributions!

Furthermore, we all really look forward to hearing from you – our audience, fans, partners, customers, industry insiders, bloggers, anyone. We encourage you to interact with us here and leave comments.

All that said, let’s get going!

Thank you,

Ben Saren
Founder & CEO