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A big, fat Yellow Pages landed in my driveway the other day with an audible whomp. I promptly picked it up and deposited it into the recycling bin with a second whomp. Harsh, right? But when I’m searching for something local–be it a snow shovel or a cinnamon roll–the last thing I’d do is flip through the phone book.

Chances are, you feel the same way. A study last year by Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 51 percent of U.S. adults get information about local businesses from the internet, rather than from newspapers, word-of-mouth, TV reporting or those tragic phone books.

So, the question becomes, How good is your local business at generating online leads? Here are the basics.

Build a website with your own domain.
This is obvious, right? But according to stat site Statistic Brain, up to half of small businesses don’t have a website.

One business owner told me she didn’t need one because she has a thriving Facebook page with great customer interaction. That’s awesome, for sure.

But think of any social platform as an “in addition to,” not an “instead of.” Why? You wouldn’t build a house on rented land, so don’t place your sole web presence on a platform you don’t own.

I’m a big fan of WordPress for building websites. The software is highly customizable–you’d be surprised how many WordPress-powered sites don’t look like typical blogs–and fairly straightforward to update and maintain. It also allows for easy integration of social widgets, so your site feels more inherently “alive” with customer engagement and interaction. You might consider importing a calendar of local events your business supports, too.

Use keywords to attract local traffic.
There are numerous ways to increase the likelihood your site will be found–a search-engine expert could fill this magazine with information on that topic alone.

But I’ll leave it at this: At a minimum, your site should have your physical address and phone number (don’t smirk–you’d be surprised how many overlook this!) and should contain geographically specific keywords in various combinations. (For example, a roofing company in Glendale, Calif., should include phrases like “Glendale roofing company,” “greater Los Angeles roofing” and “Glendale, Calif., roofing business.”) Place keywords in the page title, header tags and, where appropriate, in the content of the page itself. Use online research tools like Google AdWords, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery to research the words and phrases people use when they are searching for the product or service you sell.

Convert visitors into customers.
A “contact us” form is a nice start toward giving the public a way to reach you online. But how do you juice up your efforts to convert visitors into leads? One way is to offer free, downloadable how-to kits, guides or worksheets with an eye toward becoming a resource–a trusted advisor who can help potential customers as they inch toward a purchase decision.

I like the way Los Angeles architecture firm Modative offers nicely designed resources to would-be clients, including a site evaluation sample report and a design process guide. Both are free of charge at Modative.com in exchange for providing your contact information.

Create local profiles.

Claim your profile on search engines and online local business directories like Google Places, Yelp and, yes, YellowPages.com. A great list of 50 online directories is available on HubSpot.com’s blog.

If you don’t claim your profile, you’re either needlessly invisible or you risk letting others publish faulty information about you. Writing at MarketingProfs.com, Jon Schepke, president of digital marketing agency SIM Partners, tells of a family restaurant that failed to capture its town’s brisk tourist trade because Google had it listed as a grocery store, Yelp described it wrongly as an Italian restaurant and Bing had an inaccurate address. Don’t let that happen to you!

Search engines like consistency, Schepke says, so be sure your business’s name, address and phone number are listed the same way across the web.

Encourage reviews.
Customer testimonials (presumably positive ones) enhance search rankings and increase click-through and conversion rates. Positive reviews validate your business not only to search engines, but also to actual, well, people.

When you want to start an online business, the first thing that you need to ask yourself is where you want to sell your product. If you’re really serious in running the business, creating a website will give you an advantage better than any other means. In order to have good quality website, having to choose good website hosting is a must. As a result, you’ll find many companies running business hosting these days.

Getting good hosting doesn’t always mean you need to pay lots of money for it. You can pay cheap hosting and receive good service instead. The key is to find hosting that is enough for your business. Make sure that the capacity that is being offered to you is enough for your website so that your website will be able to function perfectly.

If you don’t want to take a risk for finding good hosting, you can search for information on what is the best hosting these days. There are plenty of reviews given for many hosting companies that you can take advantage of. Do your homework by comparing them all. Choose the one that is in accordance to your budget and of course to your need.

Most people surveyed recently were just as likely to turn to the internet, as they were to ask for personal recommendations about local businesses. For business owners, this is a good indication that now more than ever, it’s important to have a strong online presence. We’ve highlighted a few key takeaways from the survey below:

1) “There has been a significant jump in the number of consumers using the Internet to find local businesses, and the regularity of their ‘searches’ has also increased.” In fact, only 15% of consumers surveyed have not used the internet to find a local business in the past 12 months. This number is down from 21% in 2010.

2) The majority of consumers surveyed use online reviews to make spending decisions. 27% of consumers are regularly reading online reviews, while another 49% are occasional readers.

Local directories like Business Faves is a great place to get a free business listing to help SEO for your business and to help local customers find your business on the internet.

Toyota Motors is recalling about 680,000 vehicles in the United States in two separate recalls. One recall involves airbags in pickups, the other is for faulty brake lights in sedans and crossovers.

The larger of the two recalls involves almost 500,000 2005 to 2009 Toyota Tacoma trucks. Part of the trucks’ steering wheel mechanism may rub against a cable assembly. That could result in a damage to the electrical connection for the driver’s airbag module, causing the airbag to be deactivated. If this happens, an airbag warning light on the dashboard will be illuminated and the airbag won’t work in a crash.

The second recall involves about 70,500 2009 Toyota (TM) Camry sedans and 116,000 2009 to 2011 Toyota Venza crossover SUVs. Brake lamps on some of these vehicles were incorrectly installed so that silicon grease may have gotten inside the switch. The grease impedes the electrical flow inside the switch.

The vehicles’ “shift interlock” safety systems rely on that electrical signal. The “shift interlock” system is designed to prevent the car from being started and shifted into Drive or Reverse without the brake being firmly pressed. The purpose of the system, which virtually all modern cars have, is to prevent accidental acceleration when a vehicle is first being started up.
Cool cars from Geneva Motor Show

While the brakes will work normally without electricity flowing through the switch, the vehicle’ interlock systems may not recognize that the brake pedal is pressed, which will prevent the vehicle from shifting out of park.

If that happens, a warning lamp on the instrument panel will light up, the vehicle may not start and the gear selector lever may not shift out of the Park position. In some cases, the brake lamp itself may also not work.

No accidents or injuries have been reported as a result of either problem, according to Toyota. To top of page

An initial public offering (IPO) or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises. Many companies that undertake an IPO also request the assistance of an investment banking firm acting in the capacity of an underwriter to help them correctly assess the value of their shares, that is, the share price (IPO Initial Public Offerings, 2011).

S.O.P.A. is a new initiative that gives domain registration companies the power to shutdown websites and even take the domain of a website if they have possible stolen images or content. Obviously we need to stop people from stealing content but giving the power to shutdown domains and businesses over a image that might or might not have a stolen image.

This is a huge issue and needs to be stopped. The first step is let these businesses know you do not support giving them the power to take a business over a picture maybe not being used correctly.

There is a way to stop content thieves but this is not the way! This will give too much power to the registration services.

Cal, write, or do whatever you can to tell these companies that SOPA is corporate corruption and needs ti be stopped. It just takes a matter of votes to have this actually go through and every year they try over and over.

60 Plus Association
ABC
Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP)
American Bankers Association (ABA)
American Federation of Musicians (AFM)
American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA)
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP)
Americans for Tax Reform
Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States
Association of American Publishers (AAP)
Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies
Association of Talent Agents (ATA)
Beachbody, LLC
BMI
BMG Chrysalis
Building and Construction Trades Department
Capitol Records Nashville
CBS
Cengage Learning
Christian Music Trade Association
Church Music Publishers’ Association
Coalition Against Online Video Piracy (CAOVP)
Comcast/NBCUniversal
Concerned Women for America (CWA)
Congressional Fire Services Institute
Copyhype
Copyright Alliance
Coty, Inc.
Council of Better Business Bureaus (CBBB)
Council of State Governments
Country Music Association
Country Music Television
Creative America
Deluxe
Directors Guild of America (DGA)
Disney Publishing Worldwide, Inc.
Elsevier
EMI Christian Music Group
EMI Music Publishing
Entertainment Software Association (ESA)
ESPN
Estée Lauder Companies
Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)
Godaddy web hosting
Gospel Music Association
Graphic Artists Guild
Hachette Book Group
HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, Inc.
Hyperion
Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA)
International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE)
International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC)
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW)
International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT)
International Trademark Association (INTA)
International Union of Police Associations
L’Oreal
Lost Highway Records
Macmillan
Major County Sheriffs
Major League Baseball
Majority City Chiefs
Marvel Entertainment, LLC
MasterCard Worldwide
MCA Records
McGraw-Hill Education
Mercury Nashville
Minor League Baseball (MiLB)
Minority Media & Telecom Council (MMTC)
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
Moving Picture Technicians
MPA – The Association of Magazine Media
National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)
National Association of Prosecutor Coordinators
National Association of State Chief Information Officers
National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA)
National Center for Victims of Crime
National Crime Justice Association
National District Attorneys Association
National Domestic Preparedness Coalition
National Football League
National Governors Association, Economic Development and Commerce Committee
National League of Cities
National Narcotics Offers’ Associations’ Coalition
National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA)
National Songwriters Association
National Troopers Coalition
News Corporation
Pearson Education
Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA)
Pfizer, Inc.
Provident Music Group
Random House
Raulet Property Partners
Republic Nashville
Revlon
Scholastic, Inc.
Screen Actors Guild (SAG)
Showdog Universal Music
Sony/ATV Music Publishing
Sony Music Entertainment
Sony Music Nashville
State International Development Organization (SIDO)
The National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO)
The Perseus Books Groups
The United States Conference of Mayors
Tiffany & Co.
Time Warner
True Religion Brand Jeans
Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)
UMG Publishing Group Nashville
United States Chamber of Commerce
United States Olympic Committee
United States Tennis Association
Universal Music
Universal Music Publishing Group
Viacom
Visa Inc.
W.W. Norton & Company
Wallace Bajjali Development Partners, L.P.
Warner Music Group
Warner Music Nashville
Wolters Kluewer Health
Word Entertainment

Link to list

Link to wiki

Swedish automaker Saab has filed for bankruptcy after months of struggle to stay alive. Saab’s owners have turned the company’s assets over to a Swedish court-appointed receiver.

General Motors (GM, Fortune 500), Saab’s former owner, had objected to a recently proposed deal under which the company would have been sold to Chinese investors including carmaker Zhejiang Youngman Lotus Automobile.

The deal required GM’s cooperation because it still supplies parts, designs and engineering for Saab products. China is one of GM’s largest markets and the U.S. automaker was reportedly concerned that its technology could end up in competing vehicles.

GM still maintains an ownership stake in Saab.
Saab’s greatest hits (and misses)

The Board of Saab Automobile subsequently decided that without further funding the company will be insolvent, and that filing bankruptcy was in the best interests of its creditors.

There is a chance that Saab could be purchased, in whole or in parts, out of receivership, Saab spokesman Eric Geers said. Potential buyers would have to negotiate with the defense and aerospace company Saab Group, a separate company which still owns the rights to the Saab name and trademark, and with GM.

“Once an administrator or a receiver is appointed, it is up to them to see what they can do,” he said.

GM had no immediate comment on Saab’s decision.

GM sold Saab to Swedish Automotive in early 2010 as part of GM’s bankruptcy reorganization. Swedish Automotive is a Dutch company that was then known as Spyker, a high-end brand of hand-made sports cars. But Saab continued to struggle under the new ownership.
The most disliked cars of 2011

Swedish Automotive said it does not expect to realize any value from its ownership of Saab.

Saab had announced a different tentative deal with two Chinese companies in June. But within weeks it said it had run out of the cash it needed to pay its workers.

Even after Saab arranged financing to resume paying salaries, it had problems making payments to suppliers, which essentially stopped it from resuming production. By early September it was forced to file for bankruptcy protection.

Saab still operates a network of U.S. dealers, but sales have been suffering as the company has struggled to survive. This year, U.S. sales dropped to 5,305 as of the end of November. As recently as 2000, it had sold 39,479 cars to U.S. buyers.

Saab was founded as airplane maker Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget (Swedish Airplane Inc.) in 1937 and entered the car business in 1946. The defense company Saab Group is a separate company today and remains in business.

The best time to buy a stock and make a lot of money off of it is often when the company is universally hated. When so many investors think a company is doomed, it doesn’t take much to move the stock higher again.

Research in Motion (RIMM) is probably not one of those stocks.

The BlackBerry maker is now absurdly cheap based on any conventional metric. Shares fetch less than 3 times earnings estimates for its next fiscal year. The company is trading at about a third of its expected sales.

And RIM is well below book value, the price it theoretically would be worth if it liquidated and sold off assets.

But none of that matters. For anyone who thinks RIM may be a value stock, I give you these sage words of advice from Admiral Ackbar in “Return of the Jedi”: “It’s a trap!”

There is no sugarcoating RIM’s latest earnings report. The company warned that sales and profits for the next quarter will be far below already reduced forecasts.

It also announced that its new BlackBerry 10 smartphones, trumpeted as the company’s savior, have been delayed until the end of 2012. That’s an eon in the fast-moving consumer tech world.

That’s why the stock plunged 12% Friday morning. Shares are now down 77% year-to-date and are trading at their lowest level since January 2004.

The company can’t afford to be Research in Slow Motion at a time when it is facing brutal competition from Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) and from handset makers like Samsung and HTC that have latched themselves to Google’s (GOOG, Fortune 500) Android wagon. Even Nokia (NOK), thanks to an alliance with Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), is a threat.
BlackBerry drops BBX name after court order

If you take a look at some of the analyst reports on the company following its most recent disaster, you have to wonder if it maybe should change its name and ticker to GRIM. Or DIM.

“We give management credit for an honest appraisal and outlook,” wrote Cowen and Company analyst Matthew Hoffman.

That’s about the most charitable thing I could find.

“We now believe that RIMM needs to adopt an existing ecosystem (Windows Phone) in order to remain a relevant player in the smartphone market,” wrote Alkesh Shah with Evercore Partners.

In other words, RIM has to become the Canadian version of Nokia.

“We have modest BB 10 sales estimates,” warned Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley.

“If management’s marketing-based strategy to support sales fails, then the company may have to resort to gross margin cuts to retain relevance. Once this happens, we expect device business margins to fall to zero and possibly into negative territory,” was the dire prediction from Nomura analyst Stuart Jeffrey.

If you’re looking for gloomiest forecast of all, Kris Thompson at National Bank Financial in Toronto — essentially RIM’s home turf — takes first prize.

“This could be game over for the BlackBerry franchise,” Thompson wrote. “We can’t be confident RIM even hits the 2012 holiday season.”

For the win!

So what, if anything, can RIM do to save itself? The company had no comment beyond what co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis said during the earnings conference call. They stressed the need for patience and touted RIM’s strength outside the U.S.

But that is unlikely to end calls for one, if not both, CEOs to step down — even after each agreed to cut their salary next year to $1 (American, not loonies). Many investors feel that RIM desperately needs a fresh new look at the top.

“The cosmetic change of taking a dollar a year in salary is a slap in the face to shareholders,” said Vic Albioni, chairman and CEO of Jaguar Financial, a Toronto-based bank that owns a stake in RIM and has been pressing the company to make leadership changes.

“They see it as an admirable thing to do. The admirable thing to do is recognize they are the problem, not the money that they receive,” he added.

Still, even a new CEO (or two) may not be enough. At this point, with product launches for phones and new PlayBook tablets massively delayed, the company may need to follow the lead of Palm — the company RIM is drawing unfortunate comparisons to — and sell out.

Palm, which like RIM was once a leader in mobile devices, sold itself last year to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500).

Of course, HP wound up shutting down Palm’s hardware business only a few months later and is now “contributing” its WebOS software to the open source community. But that’s another story.

To be fair, RIM may be able to get a lot more than what is trading at now in a takeover or breakup scenario.
New BlackBerry tool to support iPhone and Android

The company has a treasure trove of patents, and tech giants are showing a willingness to pay up for them. The most prominent example of that was Google’s stunning decision to buy Motorola Mobility (MMI) for a more than 60% premium earlier this year.

Evercore’s Shah estimates that the sum of RIM’s parts could be worth $20 a share, with more than a third of that coming from its intellectual property. A $20 price is about 50% higher than its current price.

Then again, the stock began the year at $58.13. Oops.

The fact that RIM is so wounded right now doesn’t help the company’s chances of a takeover at a big premium. Nomura’s Jeffrey wrote that RIM may only be worth $15 in a break-up — and that a suitor may not need to make a bid unless the stock falls below $10.

That’s a big problem. Albioni worries that things will have to get even worse before RIM will decide to do something drastic like look for a white knight. In that regard, Balsillie and Lazaridis may be acting more like European leaders dealing with the debt crisis.

“We don’t have tremendous confidence in this board stepping up and putting someone in charge like Sanjay Jha at Motorola who sold the company to Google,” he said. “I hope we’re wrong.”

If recent RIM history is any guide, the best chance for a major change in the executive suite may only come if one of the CEOs gets inebriated and kicked off a plane. But you probably shouldn’t hold your breath — or chew through restraints — waiting for that.

Best of StockTwits and reader comment of the week: RIMM wasn’t the only tech stock making waves Friday. A little gaming company called Zynga went public too.

howardlindzon The 100th person to short $ZNGA tomorrow gets a virtual cow….exciting times in the markets

Hail to the chief of StockTwits! Very funny, Howard.

intelligentspec: $ZNGA to be valued at $7B with $306M revenues last quarter compared to $LNKD $6.4B val with $140M revenues…

Good point. One reason for the “lackluster” first day performance of Zynga (ZNGA) is that the company and bankers did the admirable thing and didn’t overprice the offering as much as other recent social IPOs.

ZorTrades: So if $ZNGA is coming out with 100 million shares then what is the lock up going to look like 180 days from now? Probably small, everyone selling now.

Another good point. The big initial float may reduce lockup expiration and secondary offering risk. This isn’t Groupon (GRPN), which sold only about 5% of its total shares in the IPO. LinkedIn (LNKD) also sold a smaller percentage of its total shares in its offering than Zynga.

As anyone following me on Twitter knows, I have been OBSESSED with a certain NFL quarterback this week. Readers have had plenty to say about the former Florida Gator play-caller. But my favorite was this one from Alex Ferguson.

“I wonder if they’ll start calling the last 2 hours of the trading day ‘Tebow Time’ $SPY,” he tweeted.

If stocks keep experiencing big moves up in the closing moments, trademark that puppy Alex! Although the realist in me has a sinking feeling that the wheels on the Tim Tebow bandwagon will fall off against the Pats Sunday.

A bankruptcy hurts everyone. It besmirches the reputation of the CEO. It destroys stockholders’s faith in the company. It threatens the livelihood of employees. It disrupts the lives of customers, and it is a harbinger for hassles that children of the future will face. So how could a company that was the first to offer curbside check-in, the frequent flyer program, computerized reservations, and the supersaver fare, see its $41 peak share price in January of 2007 fall to 39 cents share today?

The simplistic answer is that debt caused American Airlines’ bankruptcy. A universally accepted definitive answer will never be agreed upon, but a few factors need to be admitted reluctantly as evidence to examine: fuel cost, labor costs, governmental deregulation, 9/11, and a cracked crystal ball.

But what about competition? Did other airlines providing a superior product or price give American a run for its money? Did giving each passenger access to Direct TV on Frontier Airlines flights contribute to American Airline’s financial hardship? It’s hard to say how much of a factor competition was.

Papers filed in a bankruptcy court in New York revealed that the AMR Corporation, the parent company of American airlines, had $24.7 billion in assets and $29.6 billion in debt. AMR was unable to reduce labor costs by obtaining new contracts with the unions. AMR claims it spends $600 million more than other airlines because of labor-contract rules. The cost of pensions has had an impact on American Airlines’ profit. A credit downgrade has increased the cost of borrowing money. In the past five years, the cost of jet fuel has risen by more than 60 percent.

Both economic and common sense declare that the cost of baking and distributing bread has to increase over time if the economy is growing. The same economic and common sense declares that the cost of collecting and distributing people should have a corresponding upward direction. It is true, technology and other factors bind together to bring down cost, but at some point the economic law of diminished returns will impact services, just as it does production.