I have always been a huge fan of Google Local Business Center- a free way to drive foot traffic to your business. When you list your business with Google Local Business Center, you business is likely to show up alongside a Google map for certain search terms. Let say you need to find a dentist in Jackson, NJ- all the listings along the map are result of dentist offices taking advantage of Google Local Business center. I have written in the past how a friend of mind noticed increase of visitors to her shop after we listed her business in Google Local Business Center.
I also wanted to see more statistics and reporting inside the Business Center account. My wishes have finally came ture. It appears that Google is now providing some insightful statistics for your business’ local ads and coupons associated with your listing. Just go to your account and you should see a link to your report as shown in the image to your right.

The port shows the graph of impressions and actions associated with your business:

The actions are divided into three categories: clicks to your website, clicks to get driving directions and clicks to get more info on Google Maps:

It shows you top 10 queries that trigger an impression when an internet user is looking for terms associated with your business:

And it also provides the list of top 10 Zip codes associated with the requests for driving directions:

At this point I am not sure what statistics are available for coupons- as I do not have any active coupons running at this time. However if you do and are able to write a short post, with some snapshots of reporting for coupons, please come back and live a link to your post or article.

If you are a business owner and are looking to drive “foot traffic” to you store or business location you should definitely look into taking advantage of Google Local Business Ads- it is absolutely free!

If, over the period of last few days, you noticed a sudden increase in the number of subscribers to your blog reported by Feedburner, there is a simple explanation – now Feedburner includes the number of subscribers to your Friendfeed:

For many bloggers, especially the ones that are active on FriendFeed, this can translate into a significant increase of readership.

For many blogs out there, the number of subscribers is an important factor in determining the price for advertising and the value of the blog. Needless to say the Feedburners decision to include FriendFeed subscribers may help to diminish the value of readership on blogs.

For example two days ago the number of subscribers shown for Go Beyond MLS was in 90s – today that number is 326 which includes the subscriptions to my FriendFeed.

I would have been pleased with such increase of the number of subscribers if Go Beyond MLS was the only blog I author. Unfortunately majority of FriendFeed subscribers tend to gravitate around SageBlogger.com as well as my other blogs. But for the most part the interaction remains within FriendFeed itself.

Id don’t find the new numbers to be accurate nor helpful. Do you?

As of today you can subscribe to Go Beyond MLS using Amazon’s Kindle, or try it out for 14 days – the free trial.

If you would like to know how to publish your blog to Kindle as well, visit Kindle Blog Publishing for details. It takes about 10 minutes to set set your blog and once approved, Kindle users can subscribe to your blog using their device.

Now, am I going to get any subscribers? Very unlikely, but of course I would be grateful to anyone who would consider subscribing to my blog that way. I know however many outstanding real estate blogs that probably can end up with hundreds if not thousands of users. Giuve it a spin, it’s does not cost you anything and can bring some extra cash into your pocket.