If you’re a small business owner who’s looking for a better way to get more new customers, leads, & prospects, then one of the best ways is to setup a “local listings” account on Google, Yahoo, & Bing.

The local listings directories have been around for only the last couple of years, and can provide you with quick, easy, and free direct response advertising for your business.

Best of all, after you setup your accounts, you’ll be able to include a direct link to your website or landing page, your direct email address, your physical address, your phone & fax numbers, and much, much more.

Pictures, photo’s, and graphics are an important aspect of your website and listing. Your customers will expect them as part of a professional and trustworthy business. Using photos and graphics in your local listing will give customers the opportunity to relate a photographic image to your specific business. Your listing will give them the means to contact you should they like an image they see.

Ideally, you will want to have a group of ten graphics or photos. You can use anything that shows more about your products, services, and who you are. You may wish to use your logo or show off your facilities, and other comparable things. Your photos should help identify your business, and separate it from your competition.

What you should do is go to your website and save your photos. Ideally, you want as high a resolution as possible. Use tif format or jpg format. The larger and the higher the quality, the better off you will be. After you have those ten together you want to watermark those graphics with your company name, website and phone number. These photos will show up many places and you’ll always want to have some sort of insignia to let people know where they’re from and how to get in contact with you if they liked what they saw.

In order to watermark and protect your images, you will need to invest in some photo editing software. You don’t have to spend $1000 on Photoshop, although it is definitely worth it if you do a lot of photo editing. There is a similar product called Photoshop Elements and it is really good and very powerful. If you don’t have a photo editing software, this is the one to invest in. It’s an industry standard, it has a lot of different capabilities; it’s very capable, especially when compared to Photoshop. It is also relatively inexpensive and fairly easy to use. Feel free to read reviews on the product to get a better feel for how it can work for your business as well as comparing prices on various online sites to get the best possible deal on your software.

The reason behind creating a watermark is part protection and part promotion. You want to clearly mark all of your images with your call to action, or your offer, your website, email address and phone number and ideally your company name. This way people know when they see these images they can contact you to get more information about your products and services.

Photo editing software, such as Photoshop or Photoshop elements will allow you the freedom to play with the images you already have. You can clean them up, change the size, and generally tweak them to best suit the needs of your business. Your internet photos and graphics are the first contact many customers will have with your business. It is worth taking the time to make them professional looking in order to best benefit your business and profit potential.

Author Bio: If you’re a small business owner who needs more new customers, leads, & prospects, check out the Local Biz Bully small business marketing home study course at http://www.LocalBizBully.com

Category: Business
Keywords: google places, local search engine optimization, online marketing course, online lead generation, se