The following guest post is from Mike McGrath  of Blendr Media who wanted to share with you all a new social web company that offers a local-social solution to finding businesses through trusted word of mouth.

I‘m always surprised that many small businesses don’t take the time to claim their listings in online directories or keep an eye on Yelp.

It doesn’t take much time and it can lead more traffic to your door. With the effectiveness of print Yellow Pages diminshing every year, you’ve got to pay attention to all flavors of IYP (Internet Yellow Pages).

A New Local Referral Solution

 One of the latest entrants to the local referral market is AlikeList.

AlikeList just emerged from Beta and is designed as a directory and a social engagement platform for businesses. It really lowers the barrier for small business operators to engage their customers and prospects.

AlikeList has developed a local-social solution to finding businesses through trusted word of mouth. AlikeList makes it very easy to put together lists of businesses you like and share them with your friends. That puts a level of trust into referrals that you can’t get on anonymous review sites.
 
AlikeList connects businesses with the local customers that like them. Businesses can use AlikeList to build a customer community and easily make offers or promotions available to them as well as a larger pool of local prospects. It’s an effective and simple self-serve tool that even sole proprietors can take advantage of.

It’s surprising that after 15 years of the Internet, local search is still a hard nut to crack. The founders are all veterans of previous local search websites such as Geocities, SmartPages and Yahoo. Their lessons learned are all being applied to AlikeList’s feature set.

Whether AlikeList becomes one more tool in your bag of online tricks or grows to become your small business CRM tool, I hope you’ll agree that online directories are an important part of local business marketing. Make sure you claim your listings, ensure their accuracy and pay attention to what people are saying about you. Manage your reputation and you’ll reap the rewards.

More Information

To learn more about AlikeList, visit the site at AlikeList.comor see the AlikeList video on YouTube here.

Why not share your expertise with our readers?  Be our next Guest Author!