There are a lot of ways to develop healthy back links to your business website. MerchantCircle is on our short list because it really does a great job gaining exposure for local business.

This is no stagnant listing, as most are. The more active you are at building connections and adding blogs and newsletters, the more local exposure you gain. The MerchantCircle Newsletter goes out to every business listed in the directory, regardless of whether or not you’ve written a blog post or newsletter. But if you do want the areas and cities you’ve chosen to hear about your company, all you need to do is post a short blog, newsletter – or even answer a question – to be circulated among your neighboring businesses at no charge!

If you budget an hour a month you’ll be able to see big advantages to this directory.

Newsletters
A newsletter through MerchantCircle goes further than their blog post option. It actually goes out to all email addresses you want to import, as well as to the business connections you make when you use their ‘connections’ option. It also goes to every business MerchantCircle sends to in the areas and cities you’ve chosen. You can set the publish time and even review it before you send. I’ve found they actually send it more than once.

Why I don’t use this as my primary account:
This isn’t the most professionally crafted newsletter, and often the edits I’ve made before publishing don’t take. Also, I find images are hard to add correctly. The preview usually doesn’t appear as expected, so as a professional writer, it’s not the best place for me to showcase my work. I truly believe ANY OTHER business could use this more often effectively.

Blogs
When you blog through the directory, the MerchantCircle Newsletter will announce that your business recently blogged and share the title with their recipients. It’s smart to link to your business website from here, the authority link is great.

Why I don’t use this often:
Once again, as a professional writer, I have enough to keep up with! Every once and awhile I do post to my local business account, SusanHamiltonCopywriting.com, but image issues and spacing bug me. It simply takes too long for me to keep up this platform as my sole broadcast, and I have no time to deal with those issues when I can use higher quality services for that.

I don’t recommend this as any company’s sole blogging platform, but it is definitely worth using to discuss local recommendations, promotions, and seasonal discounts or coupons. The information will definitely be circulated through their newsletter and benefit your website.

Connections
Connections are a brilliant way to share B2B information and get other companies to frequent your main business website/blog. You become interesting when you’re actively sharing your perspectives throughout their newsletter and blog services, and other companies tend to want to know more about you. Also, they’re more likely to comment on your material and that interaction is pure gold. You get notifications through your email when others want to connect with you, making it very easy to stay involved. I love this feature!

Questions
I give this both a thumbs up and a thumbs down. I see where this is great for local business; I even see where I could use it better. But I’ve also seen really bad recommendations written poorly in response to questions. The answer box can go as long as you need it to, but there isn’t any HTML so even if you think you have paragraphs and links in your answer, you may not. The whole thing can look like a big, unreadable paragraph.

My advice:
Use with caution. Keep answers as tidy as possible, and use sparingly.

Reviews
I suggest taking advantage of the review option. Review other companies, and accurately share your MerchantCircle business listing URL in follow up emails after a sale or service appointment to encourage reviews of your company. Actively ask for these reviews, they weigh heavy and will benefit your reputation for a long time. Bad reviews happen once and awhile, and if you can’t find a solution for an unhappy customer, know that more good reviews push the bad one down the page. Encourage happy people to post reviews for the most benefit from this feature. Ask after a sale, and then send a request link in a follow up email for best results.

MerchantCircle Listing Services
We developed a listing service because MerchantCircle and other local listing services mass upload your company information to many locations, but the listings are often inaccurate due to different criteria requirements between directories, and one solution just can’t do it all well.

We now charge a sizeable fee to do it right, and it includes listing your company with MerchantCircle and 349 others. If you’re going to pay to have it done, have it done right or you’ve wasted your money. If you want to do it yourself, we’ve developed a series of video tutorials that will help you understand what not to miss as you fill out your information.

Sign up to learn how to pace yourself at one per week and get it done right, for free! I’ll show you common mistakes so you can avoid them, and help you develop a plan to help your search engine authority improve realistically over the course of a year.

Sign up today!

As a matter of fact, not all directories are harmless.

Yes, we agree with listing your business in human-edited directories. We teach you how to do it correctly yourself, and we  also offer a service that takes the work out of it for you, making certain your company is listed accurately and professionally in over 300 top-level directories – including search engines and mobile directories like Tom-Tom, Garmin, and On-Star. We suggest and promote listing your company in as many reputable locations as possible to improve your back links and gain exposure.

But watch out.

Some sound good but can suck hundreds of dollars out of your account in the blink of an eye.

I know enough about this stuff that I should have seen it coming, but if I can get swindled, it’s that much easier for a business that doesn’t understand what’s happening.

The directories we use are free. We charge for the service of managing the mundane, time-consuming work you can do yourself. You can spend all your time listing yourself and still get it wrong. When we do it, it’s accurate and completed quickly because we know what we’re doing.

Our directory listings are human-approved, too. They’ll call and confirm your information or email you and expect you to approve your inclusion. It’s all reputable.

But here’s where it can get confusing for many, and now I can include myself because I was ‘had.’

I was in the middle of several tasks, like anyone would be in the middle of the morning. Got a call from a directory ‘updating my listing.’ U.S. Directory no less. I’m listed in so many places I couldn’t possibly, by memory alone, know if I had requested inclusion there. It sounded like a place I may have submitted to, so I answered all of their very detailed questions for quite some time.

Eventually, this guy mentions that it will cost me $5.00 a month, and that I have to give him my credit card info to get started. Now, that made me pause. That was the first I realized that this was a sales call! I had him verify a ton of stuff. He emailed me. He gave me his supervisory credentials and I ended up thinking to myself, “What if this is a great, inexpensive idea that I could use for my clients? I’ll go ahead and check it out for $5.00 a month.”

So then he tells me that I’ll be getting trackable leads, and for that it will cost .25 for each lead that I get. I’m thinking, “Hmm, let’s see what that means. Paying clients are easily worth that. I’ll monitor this and see where it goes.”

One month passes. Got a five dollar charge. Another month passes, got another five dollar charge. I totally forgot about this thing.

On the third month, I was almost charged $400.00! My bank flagged it, and it didn’t get paid, so I got an email. Had I not received the email from U.S. Directory telling me that they paused my activity due to non-payment, I never would have known what they were trying to do!

I immediately went online to my account with U.S. Directory to see what was going on, only to find that they were claiming they had sent me over 1400 leads! Really? No one I spoke to had referred to them – and I ASK. I went into my Google Analytics and could easily see that was crap. They must have counted every robot that ever went into my site as a lead. None of my analytics tools can verify the leads they said they sent me!

Conveniently, their ‘trackable’ analytics were down. Go figure.

I’m not paying for that, and neither should you. I went to my bank to see what could be done, and we disabled that card so they couldn’t  syphon any more money from my account. It bothered me all day. What if this had happened to a business owner whose bank wasn’t as protective and thorough as mine?

That’s a painful bite for anyone to take, for NO REASON WHATSOEVER. I would have gladly paid that for 1400 leads! But it was completely fraudulent. It didn’t happen. How stupid to try that on someone who knows where to look to verify claims like that!

So beware, people. Not everyone sporting a great name is out there to help you. Some are downright predatory.

My advice? Ask at the onset of the call if the directory is paid or free. Many have free versions, and for the back link, that works. Paid versions will claim to post your business listing in premium locations on the search engines. They didn’t send me any leads, folks.  It was a big, fat, hairy lie. Run, don’t walk, away from any service that will fraudulently claim to send you leads for money.

You absolutely have to have your own analytics solutions.

Not all paid directories are dirty, but telling the difference is mighty hard to do. Get a service, like our Local Listing Service, to manage this for you. I tried out the competitors, and quite frankly, for your sake, I’m glad I did.