I know it won’t be easy, but it might be fun, inspiring, awesome and wonderful. Therefore, I’m promising to make use of The DailyPost, and the community of other bloggers with similiar goals, to help me along the way, including asking for help when I need it and encouraging others when I can.

If you already read my blog, I hope you’ll encourage me with comments and likes, and good will along the way.

And yes, I grabbed this post (with very minor additions and edits) from Daily Post to get me started again. A lot of transformations have occurred in the interactive marketing industry in the past 12 months, and my goal is to help you, as a marketer, keep up with and own a specific niche of this ever-growing space.

To your success,

Ghennipher

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What does this mean for your business?

If you have an offline business, you stand to immediately benefit from location-based services. Here’s a few of the most popular mobile location-based apps you’ll want to leverage:

• Businesses using the mobile app foursquare engage in friendly competition to get locals back to their venue more often.
• Gowalla is a popular mobile app that allows customers to share their comings and goings with their friends, and every time they check in somewhere, their “passport” gets stamped, and they can win more prizes. Every city has featured Featured Spots and Recommended trips that your small business can become a part of.
• Every month, millions of customers turn to the mobile location-based app Yelp to share their experiences with local business. Small businesses can get a wealth of market information with the tools Yelp provides. The customer review power of this service is 26 million users strong.
• Another similar service is Loopt, which according to it’s website, “helps friends connect on the fly and navigate their social lives by orienting them to people, places and events.” You’d be smart to get your business and events listed on Loopt.
• Google Buzz is one of the newest mobile location-based apps to keep your eyes on. The site says that Buzz for mobile lets you “See what’s going on nearby, post a message tagged with your location, and follow your friends on the go.” Since it’s from Google, you can bet that Google maps is baked right in. Businesses promoting upcoming events have a huge opportunity for traffic with Buzz.

There are new mobile location-based services springing up all the time, but the most important thing you need to know to leverage these services is the power they have to fuel your business. Location-based apps increase traffic and sales to your business through the power of word-of-mouth. A customer is much more likely to come through your door if he knows her friends are there and love the place. A customer is more likely to impulse buy if the reviews about your business rock. An event venue is much more likely to be packed if people in a user’s geographic location are checking in with their mobile app. Businesses who ignore this inexpensive way to connect with their customers will leave millions of dollars of revenue on the table. Don’t be one of them.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Buzz is Going after FourSquare and Gowalla! (Pics) (cloudave.com)
• Mobile Location-Based Services Could Rake In $12.7 Billion By 2014: Report (techcrunch.com)
• HOW TO: Make Your Small Business Geolocation-Ready (mashable.com)
• Social media for small businesses 4: Using Foursquare to identify and engage customers (freshnetworks.com)
• Gowalla Android App Coming This Month! (phandroid.com)

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1. It hijacked my pages and redirected my US visitors to a China sex site (NSFW but not really porn)
2. Some of the ads on the redirected site featured pictures of people like Chris Pirillo and Darren Rowse who seemed to be celebrity sponsors (I really doubt they were!)
3. Ironically, there was even 1 video ad for Lysol disinfecting wipes at the redirected site!
4. My web host, 1&1 (in the Philippines) could not see the redirect when I phoned them for customer support — or else lied because they didn’t want to help

This was definitely unexpected and no bueno, but I had backups to fall back on in the case of something nasty like this happening. What about your business? Do you have a disaster plan in place?

Please consider running a virus/malware scan if you were redirected to some random site from ghennipher.net. I’d hate to be viral in a bad way.

Did any of you have other experiences with my hijacked site?

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