So you’re down to the final moments now. Business is already picking up. You are closed on Thanksgiving (well, most of you are anyway), and then the next six weeks are going to be loooong.
So how can you prepare for this holiday shopping weekend in these final preparation hours without working too much or getting your family mad at you? You can’t start working on any significant marketing campaigns now. But you can spend an hour and get your business signed up with the free business-listing websites.
Then at least when shoppers are out and about this weekend, they’ll find if you they search for “gift shops near me” in any of the free online services.
So your last-minute, one-item, pre-Black Friday Checklist consists of this one job that can have an impact this weekend: If you haven’t already, claim your business listings.
Here’s a checklist for you.
Google Business: https://www.google.com/business/
Bing: https://www.bingplaces.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/business/
Merchant Circle: https://www.merchantcircle.com/signup#step=stepOne
Yellow Pages: http://m1.adsolutions.yp.com/free-listing-basic-benefits
Foursquare: https://foursquare.com/venue/claim
American Express: https://marketingcorner.americanexpress.com/map
Yelp: https://biz.yelp.com/support/claiming
And then there’s Yahoo!, which can be confusing, as this writer described, Yahoo! farmed out its services and now it can be hard to claim your free listing. It is here:
Yahoo!: http://www.yext.com/pl/yahoo-claims/index.html
You can also pay Yahoo! (or a number of other services) to manage all of this for you, but we’re not recommending that this moment. Yahoo!’s service is $30/month.
But you’ll have time to research whether you want or need to pay a business to manage this for you later. For now, sleep better in the hours before holiday shopping season by accomplishing this one task.
