These days, it seems everybody has a website. Photo by Becky McCray.
This week, I have a tip to help you promote entrepreneurship.
Use a social bookmarking site to collect the websites of businesses in your area.
This idea is one way of recognizing your existing entrepreneurs, presented by Dave Shideler in a webinar called “Building Entrepreneurial Communities.”
Why use social bookmarking?
1. As you bookmark those businesses, you’re building a resource that you and others can re-use. It’s a resource that is always synced up. You don’t have to rely on various website owners to update their list. You don’t have to update the list in more than one place. And by sharing it all over, you reach more potential customers for your businesses.
2. I see this as a great Shop Local tool, also. Most people don’t realize how many local businesses they really have. Your bookmark list can help them find stores and businesses they didn’t know existed.
Learn more about social bookmarking using Delicious with this video from Common Craft.
Use tags to organize and make sense of your small business list.
- Tag your business links with keywords so they are easy to find: restaurant, service, accounting, etc.
- If a business closes you could delete the link, or tag it as “closed”
Share those bookmarks on your website:
- Make a Linkroll: http://delicious.com/help/linkrolls. This could be all your links, or just one tag. So that could be a linkroll of just “Eateries.”
- Make a Tagroll: http://delicious.com/help/tagrolls. This makes a list of your tags, so readers can click on “Shopping” and go to a page with all your Shopping links.
Share the bookmarks other places on the web:
- Share on Facebook with a Delicious application: search on Facebook’s App list
- Share anyplace that uses RSS, using RSS feeds: http://delicious.com/help/feeds
- Share on Twitter, via Twitterfeed: http://twitterfeed.com/
Local bloggers and others can take that RSS feed and integrate it in their sites. Another instant avenue for sharing.
What ways can you think of using social bookmarking for sharing the links to local businesses?
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
