If you have a small/local business, you know how hard it may be to create a viable presence online.  However, there are a number of tools available to you which can be used to boost the online performance of your business.  This article on entrepreneur.com outlines their top fifteen sites to promote such a business.  Refer to these tips and you will quickly build a respectable online presence.

Remember that to grow a presence takes more than just being there.  You must also act on various SEO tactics on each one of these sites.

Stumble Upon is great.  Most Stumblers log in and use the site’s services to:

1. Kill time
2. Find new, interesting websites
3. Explore the vast annals of the Internet
4. Increase their online business presence

Wait.  Most Stumble Upon users will admit to they “stumble” for first three reasons, but the fourth one – probably not why most people joined the growing number of discover-ers.  Katie mentioned that marketers should use Stumble Upon to reach potential customers, and they definitely should.  But so should internet entrepreneurs.  The self-made business men and women on the internet know that when you have an online business, web presence is HUGE.  The more your site’s out there, being viewed by people, the better chance you have of making a sale.

To generate business exposure and increase their sales, business owners should create an account on Stumble Upon and start submitting their sites to categories people might find interesting.  Whether you link your sales page or an informative blog that you’ve created to compliment your business, you need to start stumbling.  It takes seconds to create an account and minutes to recommend a new page.  What entrepreneur – internet or otherwise – wouldn’t want increased exposure in reaching people that have said, “Yes -I’m interested in your type of business.  Show me what you’ve got.”  Businesses thrive on professionalism, but sometimes, it doesn’t hurt to stumble.

Unless you’re a young teenage girl new to Facebook, like my sisters, I’ll bet you hate all the Facebook application requests you get.  I know that I do; I usually delete them without even reading what they are.

Facebook allows programmers to use Facebook’s platform for free, which does two things.  First encourages programmers to come up an endless stream of programs.  Second, this low barrier to entry allows almost all of the advertising revenue for these applications to be profit.  (Some applications make between $2,148-$22,499 a day).

Everybody loves Facebook, but hates applications; however applications are the black and Facebook is in the red…ironic.

AntHillz.com is a Philadelphia startup looking to fulfill the desire of many business professional by providing a  network of trusted contacts.  The Key to achieving this goal lies in necessity of all professionals to “write recommendations of each other’s work before they can connect.”  AntHillz.com hopes to reinstill the necessity of reliable connections, by accentuating the futility of random ones.  Furthermore, the peers recommendation aspect of the site should further their aggressive entry into the business networking market.

This summer I worked for a company that was pretty early with online marketing.  So when I started working for them I submitted their site to different databases and got links from other sites.  To go along with that I decided that we should try to promote using YouTube.  This company is a manufacturing company that deals with automation.  So in order to get the best results I linked the video to their homepage and I embedded links into the text with keywords as well.  This not only had potential to drive traffic to the homepage but also got people to look at their product and engineering.  Furthermore, as a website or business owner in order to get your Idea out YouTube is a great place to start because you can get 100,000′s of views in a day.