This article is written by guest-blogger Josh Olswanger of Thrive Web Designs, a Boise web design firm.

As a start-up business, your initial goal is to increase revenue by increasing business. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, believe it or not, it’s not always a walk in the park when deciding where to find your next customer or client. Luckily, with a great business marketing plan, you should be able to funnel your attention towards avenues that will undoubtedly increase your chances of finding new business.

Hence we have the Internet. Say goodbye to yesterday when looking for a local plumber involved pulling out the yellow pages and searching around. Today’s day and age relies on a quicker, more accurate, and effective approach. When businesses of all shapes and sizes decide to put a website up, usually it is to find new business.

Having a website live online is only half of the equation. How will you get customers to your site? Where will they know to look for you? The key is strategic planning on your behalf to ensure you’re setting the foundation for them to see you.

Here are 3 very useful and free online directories that every business should submit their website to.

1. Google Local Listings, AKA, Google Places.

Click here to sign up for a free account

Google local listings are the listings you see on a search results page at the very top. Normally, you’ll see a map and all of the alphabetical markers correlating to the top 10 local businesses. Depending on what your business does or sell, many potential customers will go to the nearest business on that map. Others will call around to find the best price. Either way, it is very effective and highly recommended for everyone to take advantage of.

Setting up an account is easy, and will only require you to open up a free Gmail account. Google will send you a postcard by mail to verify your listing, which will take about 2-3 weeks to receive.

 2. Yelp.com

Click here to sign up for a business account on Yelp.com.

Yelp.com is a very unique database to submit your business and website to. Not only does Yelp provide you with a platform to add company information, pricing and offer deals on, but Yelp integrates closely with Bing.com in displaying certain items on Bing Listings. For example, if you were to search “new york city pizza” in Bing, Next to the listing would include a little yelp icon advertising the promotion you create on the site. Free to sign up, we highly recommend using this tool and collecting as much feedback you can from past and current customers.

3. Thumbtack.com

Click here to visit thumbtack.com.

 Thumbtack is similar to Yelp in the fact that you can customize a profile and include testimonials, hours, pricing and more. Although, thumbtack seems to cater towards service-based businesses more than those offering a product. Reason being, is that Thumbtack offers a unique bidding system where potential clients can contact the company and put a request in for a quote right on the website. Even though this isn’t rocket science, they do a great job to make the process for both the business and customer very easy.

In the end, the more directories and websites you can network your business with, will definitely up the chances of finding new customers.

Josh Olswanger – Idaho web design firm

My wife recently signed up with the Kohls mailing list in an effort to secure the occasional coupon and special offer as we entered the back to school and consumer-spending-frenzied-fourth quarter. And because she’s been around me just long enough, she used our mutual Yahoo email address vs. her personal account. And in case anyone wasn’t listening closely let me repeat that little pearl of advice: Secure a Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail account and use them specifically for mailing lists, registrations and similarly disposable instances. They are easy to get, plentiful and available from any machine with an internet connection.

The first marketing email came in this past Monday and congratulations to them for keeping very close tabs on new sign-ups and getting right to work. As one that spent several years in retail internet marketing, I know that’s important. And with retail taking it’s current economic beating, it’s the cost efficient life-blood of most companies that are paying attention.

Then Tuesday came along. And another marketing email from Kohls.

The sun rose on Wednesday and my inbox was swollen with another offer from Kohls

As I logged in this morning–you guessed it–Kohls was back like a toe fungus.

I was hip to the marketing groove by day two so the UNSUBSCRIBE option was taken on Tuesday. They threw in the broad caveat that I might still get marketing emails for a couple days while the request was processed. Funny how you can be added overnight but to be removed, it takes several days. Things that make you go “hmmmm”

What the marketing team at Kohls has done is abuse their marketing mailing list. They abused the consumer by bloating their inbox day in and day out and risk numbing the consumer to their message. One day Kohls will want to ‘give away the store’ with ‘super savings’ but because they’ve nuked me with daily messages, they’ve trained mailing list users to either ignore (and delete without viewing) the marketing message that’s become email ‘white noise’ or simply scan and perhaps ‘miss’ the marketing target.

Or in my case, they might simply annoy me. Plain and simple. Call me a cad, but if my best friend wrote me everyday it would get old and tedious.

Whilst checking my email, I made a rare visit to the SPAM filter that’s doing a bang-up job and keeping my INBOX clear of mourning Nigerian’s and information about the “vacation cruise of a lifetime” It’s a rare occasion because I put a profound degree of trust in the Google/GMAIL system. And more recently, I looped in my Yahoo account which means those incoming emails are now subject to the rock-solid GMAIL filters. If it seems like I’m gushing about GMAIL, I am.

So how is it that the system that serves me so well made such an odd error by flagging a recent incoming message as SPAM? I mean it was addressed to me (not that it matters). In fact it was addressed to my dedicated GMAIL account vs. the Google Apps route that allows me to run my domain branded email.

The email in question was regarding a class action lawsuit levied against Google. CLRB HANSON INDUSTRIES, LLC d/b/a INDUSTRIAL PRINTING, and HOWARD STERN vs. Google Inc. As a Google AdWords client, I was included in the official notification. The email was simple version of the official court documentation and included a unsubscribe link at the bottom (good for them!).

This of course begs the question as to how and why was this email marked for death and relegated to my SPAM folder. While it’s content was lengthy, it didn’t promise length. While it promised the opportunity of money, it wasn’t coming from an African nation. It had no images…and so on…none of the traditional trappings of SPAM. Yet somehow, the unflappable GMAIL filter denied it entry.

Quite honestly I’m not a conspiracy theorist so I’m happy with the idea that it was a simple, automated action that over-reached. Above and beyond that, let’s not lose site of the fact that Google is a company created in a free market economy with no legal obligation to dispense what it most certainly considers slanderous and bad for business.

Nevertheless, the coincidence was an amusing and the $20,000,000 (the proposed settlement) is…how many other SPAM folders are littered with this same legal announcement.