PayPal Local opens door wide for regional Internet marketing!
The growing use of Android, Blackberry, IPhone, and other smart-phones surfing of the web is undeniable! In the United States over the past several years Internet cell phone usage has grown over 100% annually. Today in the US and Europe over 90 percent of mobile subscribers have an Internet-ready cell-phone.
Yesterday, while visit a friend in Canton, Ohio I discovered a new Local or Regional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) opportunity of the growing usage of smart-phone applications for today’s technology. Upon taking advantage of the new fast speeds of 4G to update my Android Thunderbolt from a Loews store parking lot using the Verizon 4G network, I found myself checking out a new update for my PayPal mobile application.
Upon signing into the updated PayPal software for the Android and clicking the Tools tab, the first two new features that caught my attention were the ability to accept checks written directly to you and a button labeled “PayPal Local”. I quickly signed up my PayPal account to accept checks and moved on to the new PayPal Local feature.
When I clicked the PayPal Local tab it took me to a screen that had three tabs labeled “Nearby”, “Categories”, and “Favorites” which defaulted to Nearby. I was very shocked to only see about a half dozen businesses listed in a thirty mile radius considering EBay owns PayPal and also that Facebook pages and story advertising recently started accepting PayPal as a payment option for their over five hundred million users. Only one of those had a logo or image beside the name of the business and that was a hair salon in Ravenna, Ohio which I recently moved away from to just outside the more rural Village of Bolivar in beautiful Tuscarawas county, Ohio. Within a 30 mile radius of Bolivar, Ohio, which I promptly checked upon returning from Canton there was only three available listings and they were all in the Akron-North Canton area. Not a single business listing was from a thirty mile radius of Bolivar within rural Tuscarawas county, Ohio!
My Internet marketing career spans almost two decades and I still love learning new things that cause one to hit a home run out of the Internet park! Surely, I must not be the only Entrepreneur surfing the 'net with an Android smart-phone using PayPal of the 92,585 people within Tuscarawas county and 375,586 people within Stark county, Ohio according to the U.S. Census Bureau. I then researched how to setup a FREE PayPal Local listing and clicked the Android Menu button within the PayPal Local screen and then saw a "Change filter" tab which gave me choices of the radius to show the closest businesses, and an "About PayPal Local" tab which explained how it worked. The last sentence read "Go to http://www.paypal-labs.com/local on your computer to sign up your business today!” which I did for both the business I founded config.com and for my e-commerce Internet marketing consulting services.
I have always been a believer that a businesses should offer the consumer as many options to more easily conduct business transact ions as possible. I still do barter, cash, checks, merchant services with all the major credit cards, Google checkout and invoices, and of course, PayPal to make it as easy as possible to compete with those companies that don’t. Now, with PayPal Local as a free directory listing service of participating PayPal merchants, a small local entrepreneur can easily attract walk in traffic to their brick and mortar store or office business facilities ;)
Best ‘net regards,
Joe Rinehart, Search Engine Optimizer (SEO)
Founder config.com
