In case you haven't noticed yet - Google have made some sweeping changes that affect over 80 million businesses and have essentialy killed Google places and migrated the pages over to Google + Local pages.

So is Google Places dead and what does this mean for your business or for your client's business?

Please watch the video below to find out more and check out the latest changes.

I was just talking to another associate who was also dismayed at how quickly Google can change things and how difficult it is to stay on top of things. As a matter of fact he had just posted this very useful (until this latest change) post on his own blog (notice the recent date):

Google Places Reviews: Follow These Simple Steps To Get Your Customers To Leave Google Places Reviews For Your Business Right On Their Smartphones

Google Places Reviews Are Easy To Get

Most business owners today do not even know what Google Places Reviews are so to get them to start paying attention to getting their clients to start posting positive reviews about their business on their behalf can seem difficult, however with the the process of getting somebody to leave a review from their mobile phone can be very easy if you know the steps.

Follow the steps below in order to get your clients to leave reviews while they are in your store at the time of purchase when they are happy customers.  Why not ask?  All they can say is no… and if they say yes to leaving you a review and you get one every other day it can add up and reviews can actually help you rankings on Google local results when people are looking for your business.  :)

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I love infographics and here is a nice one that "talks" about online marketing for bricks and mortar businesses:

Online Marketing = Brick and Mortar Success | Visual.ly

visual.ly4/18/12

The Internet can be one of the most effective tools your company can use to not only attract clients, but to keep them as well.

1. Getting visitors to your website.
2. Creating valuable content.
3. Growing an audience via social media.
4. Capturing new new leads.
5. Converting leads into sales.

There is a new technology available that solves all 5 of these challenges and it will quickly become the secret weapon for savvy small business owners worldwide. It will enable you to outsmart, outwit and outmaneuver your competition before they even know what hit them.

It will also enable you to generate huge buzz around your brand, product or services due to the viral social media nature the technology is built upon.

My partner and I created a comprehensive interactive demo that explains the power of the Viral Webinar Marketing platform.

When you click the link below, click the “Allow” button to start the demo right from within your Facebook account.

https://apps.facebook.com/viralwebinarmarket

If you have any questions regarding this new marketing platform, feel free to contact me directly at (334) 787-1713.

Transcript of the video:

Chris: Hi everyone, this is Chris Jones.

Allen: And Allen Crawley, creators of the Google Places business blueprint.

Chris: We just wanted to take some time and share with you a great new feature that Google has just added to the Google Places page. Actually to be fair, it’s not really a new feature, one of our current members that’s in the UK had actually pointed this out to us on his Google Places page. However, we did some research and at the time it was not available to us. However, Google has just updated this and made this new feature available in the US and what they called it is the Place page posts. And as you can read here, this is from the actual Google Places tour.

Basically it’s a place where business owners can now place updates into your Google Places page, and here, this is my Google Places page and you can see I’ve just placed a quick post that says “Google Places has changed again”. You now have this nice update section where you can let everyone know what’s going on. Again, this is pretty much like a Facebook status update or almost like a Twitter feed onto your Google Places page so it’s a great feature and now I’m going to turn it over to Allen.

Allen: Okay so what we’d like to do is go ahead and show you how to do this in 3 simple easy steps.

Step one, log into the Gmail account that actually owns the Google Places page and in order to do that, go to Google.com/places and there you’ll see the red arrow on the lower part of the screenshot, it’s pointing to a button that says ‘Get started’ so just click the ‘Get started’ button and it’ll take you to this login screen. Here is where you’ll want to log into the account that actually owns the Google Places listing.

Step two, Then what you’ll need to do is click on the name of the listing that you want to add. We’re going to take a look at a screenshot here. If you see the red arrow on the left hand side of the screenshot, it’s pointing to Old Inc, that’s the listing that we’re going to work with here. So the name of the business is actually a link. You don’t want to click on the edit, you see the edit in the lower left hand area of that listing. Don’t click on that, click on the actual name of the business that you’re going to work on and then all you got to do is type in your post. It’s very simple.

Step three, You see where the red box is on this next screenshot here, that red box and the arrow is pointing to the place where you can actually include your updated post. You’ll see on here at the top part of this red box it says November 23, that is the current page post that’s listed on this Google Places listing and you’ll see an open box now with grayed out text, that’s where you can include your new updated post, and one of the things we want to point out here, expires in 30 days, you can update your post as often as you like.

Like Chris mentioned, you can treat it as a Twitter status update or even a Facebook status update. If you want to change it multiple times per day you can do that. If you wanted to change it to highlight specials that you’re currently running to draw attention to those you can do that. But it does expire after 30 days so if you do nothing but leave it up, it will come down after 30 days, and the right arrow you see 160, that references how many characters you have to place your update into that post. Like on Twitter you only have 140 characters, here you actually have 160 characters. Anyway, we wanted to point out where you can actually find that and the fact that each listing or each posting will expire within 30 days but you can change it as often as you like and you do have 160 characters to make your statement.

Back to Chris.

Chris: Anyway, we wanted to share this with you because again, we’re the creators of the Google Places business blueprint and as such, we do try to stay on top of everything Google Places related and so if you want to find out more about setting up Google Places for your own business, setting up Google Places for a client, how to start your own Google Places business and how to use Google Places as a lead generator, you can go to our site and join our membership program then we’ll walk you through all of these in depth, and you can find this atwww.googleplacesbusinessblueprint.com and we’d love to see you there and hopefully we’ll see you on the inside.