Hey! You should become a fan of CityCliq on Facebook. We’ll be posting semi-regular updates about the site, promoting our amazing new clients and occasionally offering some sweet specials.
Oh, and feel free to write awesome things about us on our wall. 
The fine folks at Visual Website Optimizer just published a case study about how we recently used their service to test headline messages on our homepage.
If you’re a website owner interested in doing some split testing, we strongly recommend checking out VWO. It’s incredibly easy to use and delivers very useful data. In our case, we tested a few variations on our homepage tagline and found that the simpler, more direct copy led to a tremendous increase in clickthroughs to the plans page. Testing messages is just one way that we can make CityCliq better for business owners and we plan on doing much more in the future.
It’s been a tough couple of years for small business owners. Down economies put a strain on everyone, but it’s those of us on tight budgets that get hit the hardest. Costs of goods and transportation increase while consumers tighten up on their spending. Unfortunately, layoffs, bankruptcies and foreclosures become common problems in our communities.
As an advertising provider who works almost exclusively with small business owners, we talk to a lot of them. Those that have survived this tumultuous economic period don’t often feel that advertising and marketing are things that they can afford or even have time for. But we also know that people still need to buy things. They still need their coffee in the morning, they still need to get their cars fixed, they still like to do things on the weekend. Bottom line: in a downturn, people still spend.
But how do people find the things they’re looking for? How do they decide what and where to buy? Studies by the Kelsey Group show that around 43% of search engine users are looking for local goods and services; researching online and buying offline. So what does this mean?
It means that if you’re a small business owner, you want a web presence. You want to be found in the major search engines and on mobile search. You want to be found by the people looking for you. The great thing about advertising online is that it’s targeted directly at your potential customers. The technology behind creating relevant search results and advertisements to people using the web or their phones to find businesses gets better and smarter everyday. If you use the web to find local businesses, you probably haven’t even noticed how much easier it is today than it was 2 or 3 years ago.
And the best part: getting found online can be affordable and easy. Gone are the days of expensive web design and hosting costs. Sure, having a nice-looking website for your business is great, and we’re not dismissing that, but if no one can find it in a search engine and if it’s not getting them in your door, what’s the point in shelling out cash that could be used to improve your business?
We think one of the best advertising strategies for a small business owner on a budget is to shoot for low-cost, far-reaching exposure. The idea behind this is to throw a wide net at a very targeted group of consumers. Web classifieds, search engine advertising and social media tools like Facebook and Twitter are great ways to accomplish this.
The shameless plug: CityCliq offers a very high-quality, low-cost online advertising solution. It’s incredibly easy to get started and we guarantee that we can get you found on the first page of every major search engine within 90 days of signing up or your money back. You also receive your first 30 days free. If you decide you don’t like it, you can cancel at any time. If you do like it, it costs a very affordable $8.95 a month.
We’re here 24 hours a day to answer any questions you have. Email us at: mail@citycliq.com. The links below go to our list of features and our About page, where you can learn more about our service.
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! Our pants are definitely fitting a bit tighter after the holiday weekend, but we’re back hard at work on lots of cool stuff for CityCliq.
First, we know that it’s been a difficult couple of years for business owners and we know that reaching new customers can be difficult. We’ve been devoting more and more time to search engine optimization for our businesses, which means that, in most cases, your CityCliq listing can be found on the first page of search engine results — which is where people click the most.
We’ve also worked hard to get listed higher on mobile search results, so that people out and about, searching for businesses on their BlackBerries, iPhones and other smartphones can find you right away.
Lastly, we’ve had a lot of requests for a new, mid-level pricing plan, so we’ll be implementing that soon. But since your success is our success, we need to know what features YOU want. We have lots of ideas in the hopper for development, but we really need to know how we can help you.
So, please use our Get Satisfaction feedback form or email us at info@citycliq.com with suggestions on things we can do or features we can add to help increase your presence online and connect with more customers.
We’re also on Twitter, where we’ll be advertising specials, discounts and giveaways on account upgrades every so often. Follow us and we’ll follow you back!
Thankful for our great customers,
The CityCliq Team
We’re working out the kinks right now and will be launching the new CityCliq Plus account option by the end of the day today. New features, at $8.95 per month, will include a coupon creator, page traffic stats, unlimited photo uploading and custom content creation as well.
Please bear with us if you experience any difficulties accessing your account features. We’ll be working diligently to address errors or problems you may experience.
Thanks!
The CityCliq Team
A few members of the CityCliq team and our longtime technology partners, Hashrocket, took part in From Us With Love’s charity golf tournament yesterday at the beautiful Queen’s Harbour golf course in Jacksonville, FL. Aside from sending out two foursomes, we sponsored a couple of the course holes and provided some gifts for the tournament participants. And while neither of our teams took the cup, we shot well and had a great time for a great cause.
CityCliq team members trying to get a leg up on the competition.
From Us With Love is a charitable outreach organization that aims to help communities in South Africa by supporting sports, nutrition, voluntourism, arts and health programs. We at CityCliq believe in trying to affect positive change in the world and look forward to working with FUWL and other organizations like theirs in the future.
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In other news, we’ll be launching our all-new premium advertising plan, CityCliq Plus, very soon. When we do that, free accounts will have a very limited set of features. All of our current member businesses, however, will be grandfathered in and given free Plus accounts for as long as you’re a CityCliq member. So, if you haven’t yet, sign up and tell a friend. This offer won’t last much longer!
Best,
The CityCliq Team
In the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out our new, paid subscription plan called CityCliq Plus. This new plan will include traffic stats for your business page, unlimited photo uploading,
a coupon creator and several other features designed to help our clients reach more customers and grow their businesses.
The Plus account will cost around $19.95 a month, but ANYONE that signs up between now and OCTOBER 1ST will get this subscription free of charge FOREVER. That’s right — it’s not going to cost you a thing. Ever. There’s no catch. It’s just our way of thanking you for helping us test and grow the site from its humble beginning.
That said, if you have any other business owner friends or colleagues that would be interested in having FREE high-powered and search engine-friendly online advertising for their business, please refer them to www.citycliq.com by October 1st.
For our existing clients, we hope you’ve been finding CityCliq easy and enjoyable to use. We’ve been steadily improving the site’s stability and speed over the past few months, so if you haven’t logged in lately visit http://www.citycliq.com/login and make sure your page is up-to-date.
We have more features and services in the works, too, that we’ll be blogging about in weeks to come.
As always, feel free to email us at info@citycliq.com with any questions or concerns.
Have a great day!
Nick Strate
Director of Marketing
We recently added Get Satisfaction to our site in order to help our site’s visitors and users more easily provide feedback about CityCliq’s features, usability and content. It’s easy to use and it provides a more direct means for us to have conversations with our clients about the ways we can improve our service. Here’s how it works:
The “feedback” tab is located on the left side of every page on CityCliq.com. Clicking it brings up a dialogue box wherein you enter in your question, suggestion or problem.
Once you complete the form, we’re notified and will then respond as soon as possible. Get Satisfaction also allows you to see the things that other users have said or suggested to us, which we hope will be helpful in establishing transparency and trust in our product.
We’ve already seen some constructive feedback that we’re taking into account as we develop features for CityCliq. Thanks to all of those who have used Get Satisfaction so far — you’re helping make this site better for everyone.
Nick Strate
Marketing Director
CityCliq.com
It may seem relatively mundane, but we recently changed our signup from a multi-step process to a short, one-page form. It’s a lot better.
New CityCliq Signup Form
The old multi-step process allowed new businesses to fill out either a partial or entire profile, add all of their content and preview their CityCliq page over a series of steps. And while we strove to make this process as painless and user-friendly as possible, we ultimately felt that providing too many options as to what and when information could be entered was causing confusion.
So we stripped the form down to the bare essentials, requiring only contact information, login information and terms of service acceptance. It takes about 1 minute to complete and once you’ve registered, you’re taken to your dashboard where you can complete the rest of your profile.
Making it easier to register is just one way we’re seeking to improve our service and help get more businesses found online. Your feedback is welcome.
Hi everyone!
This post will be the first of many aimed at helping you drive traffic to your CityCliq webpage. We’ve designed our pages to be easily accessible by people searching online, and we want you to take full advantage of every feature available. We’ll start by talking about photos and how they can help you reach more people searching online.
In the “Photos” tab of your dashboard, you’ll see our photo uploader.
CityCliq Photo Uploader
Notice the “caption” field below the browse button. After you upload your image, enter in a descriptive caption, or title. This title will be read by search engines and help make your page more findable for people searching online. If you have a restaurant, for example, you may want to upload pictures of your signature dishes and title them something unique like, “Mario’s Has the Best Chicken Cacciatore in Cleveland!”
The same goes for other types of businesses serving a specific city or region. Whether you’re a masseuse, a house painter or a fisherman, you should make your photo captions really mean something. Try to give your site visitors as much information as possible about where you are and what you offer.
For our e-commerce businesses that aren’t as dependent upon local traffic, your image captions can feature things like item URLs, prices or descriptions. The key is to be as descriptive and relevant as possible.
We’ll keep the tips coming. Until then, try uploading some more photos and writing great captions for them. We’ll post some of the best ones here next week!
