Four years ago, I started a local daily deal site which grew to the largest in East TN & Southwest VA. In that period, we pivoted by learning how to solve the digital marketing problems of the restaurants and spas we featured on our site. I have a number of tips for you on this. First, most small merchants will be lost and not truly see the value of SEO and citations. Those are long term efforts without short term results. Even then, the results are not tangible, at least not readily visible to the owner of a store. Reviews however are an immediate pain point - and also a quickly solved problem. So I use this as the way to prove value upfront to our clients. In fact, I have yet to pitch our marketing program to a small business owner and get a "no" since I began my emphasis on Reputation Management. Why? Because normally only disenchanted customers leave reviews. And the negative reviews seem to personally affect the ego of the business owner (as they should). Especially because they can massively affect bottom-line revenue, especially now in light of new developments and agreements between the search engines and the review sites. Reviews directly power search to a large degree. Feel free to reach out to me if you want to talk specific cases - I have found that the pain points and need are the same across almost all industries (hospitality, food service, medical, etc).

I have a tremendous amount of experience sending emails from new domains - perhaps 2,000,000 emails per year - and the long and short of it is this: email deliverability is tremendously complex. Why? For one thing, because of the constant battle between spammers, ISPs, ESPs and other players, among other things. Also, because email still uses some very old and outdated protocols that make this all more difficult. If your business is going to rely heavily on email, I would encourage to educate yourself now so that you won't be stymied as you grow. Many of the things I learned were through trial and error - which can be excruciatingly frustrating. Just a few of the things you should immediately begin working on: proper SPF, SenderID, DKIM compliance along with solid DNS set up. Additionally, if you will use email heavily, I would start now putting the pieces in place for later white labeling aa nd possible dedicated IP sending. In terms of the actual email content itself, that is another subject you will want to investigate. I'm not saying these things to discourage you - but rather to help you avoid the mistakes we made in the past. If you need a hand getting a little grip on this I probably can steer you in the right direction pretty quickly. Wish you the best in your endeavor! Adam