I've been teaching an Online Marketing Course for the Small Business Development Center Technology Advisory Program (SBDC TAP) since 2005. The course is subsidized by the Small Business Administration and costs $25 for 3 hours.

Here are the upcoming dates and locations for my course for the Second Quarter of 2006:

May 2 5:00-8:00 PM
San Francisco – San Francisco Entrepreneur Center – 455 Market St. 6th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105

May 10 2:30-5:30 PM
Oakland – Cal State East Bay SBDC Training Center – 1000 Broadway, Suite 109, Oakland, CA 94607

June 5 5:00-8:00 PM
San Jose – San Jose Entrepreneur Center, 84 W. Santa Clara Street, San Jose, CA 95113

You can register online.

There are many other courses offered at very good rates:

• Small Office Computer Networking Made Simple
• Smart Tools to Manage Your Small Business Finances
• Successful Business Contacts Management with MS Outlook
• Technology Tools to Succeed in the Retail Business
• Web Fundamentals and eCommerce Principles

Maybe I'll get to meet some of you there!

This year local search is really taking off:

So, the question is, how do local searchers search?

For shoes they type “Kansas City Shocks” or “Omaha shoes”
For an accountant it's “Chicago west suburb accountant”
For computer programming it's “Idaho .Net programmer”

That's the reality of search on the local level and the search engines get it and are rushing in to be the big players in the local directory game and deliver search results all around town instead of just around the world..

This is from Duct Tape Marketing, who is offering a new service to submit to the many local Search Engines. Here's the handy list of the main local Search Engines' submittal pages:

Google Local - https://www.google.com/local/add/login?hl=en_US
Yahoo Local - http://listings.local.yahoo.com/
Super Pages - http://www.superpages.com/about/new_chg_listing.html
City Search - https://selfenroll.citysearch.com/
True Local - http://www.truelocal.com/getlisted.aspx
SwitchBoard -
http://www.switchboard.com/cobrands/sb/help_yp.asp#YP31
YellowPages.com -
http://www.yellowpages.com/sp/contact/update.jsp
Local.com - http://www.local.com/partner.htm
Insider Pages - http://www.insiderpages.com/
Judy’s Book - http://www.judysbook.com/merchant/