Blogging really is the easiest and cheapest way for small businesses to get started online. The 52 Page Project was started to help guide small business owners along the way. Each week for a year they will write one post for their site. One year later they will have 52 pages of great content indexed by google and other search engines. My money says that people who do this will have their sites ranked higher by search engines than websites in the same industry who put up a standard, static
5 page site years ago and never updated it. Visit http://www.52pageproject.com and get started today. Your competitors are. Don’t get left behind.

I hear many complaints from my clients about how hard it is to find good, local gardening information online. Sure you can find sites that may have information about what’s growing in your zone and cooperative extensions offer great information. How come nurseries haven’t gotten into the gardening news business yet? After all, they so sell all the plants, fertilizer, tools and more to local consumers. It would be a cinch for them to tell anyone who walked in the door to check out their website and subscribe to an email newsletter.

I’ve started a site I’m calling Bergen Gardening where I’ll be writing all kinds of good gardening and landscaping articles for my area. Home gardeners, landscapers, nurseries and anyone else with something worthwhile to contribute can easily register for a username and submit articles, pictures and more. There’s also an amazon.com store where I’ve added several of my favorite gardening books and tools I can’t live without. Soon, I’ll add a forum using phpbb so people can discuss local gardening topics, trade plants and ask questions. I’m looking for an automatic way for businesses to add directory listings. Until then, it’s going to be done manually. I’m thinking about adding adsense or another ad network in case a business wants to advertise locally.

The hardest part is going to be getting regular visitors. I know I have my work cut out for me.

Check out http://www.neighboroo.com/. Enter in the zipcode or town your are interested in and all kinds of fun data shows up such as average income, home prices, population, schools, etc. The best part though is being able to see how the neighboring towns are doing too.

Why work in a place with an average income of 60k when 15 minutes away they are earning triple that? Just a little something I stumbled upon.