Local businesses are losing sales by not taking advantage of the Web as a sales tool. This conclusion is based on two recent personal experiences which, in my mind, highlight how woefully inadequate most local businesses are at using the Web as a marketing medium.

I am researching gas and electric fireplaces for my home out in the country. A very large retailer in Nashville who I thought sold fireplaces has no search engine visibility and almost no information about its fireplaces.

The cost of college education continues to increase at a rate well above the growth rate of average American income. Federal student aid is therefore an important part of getting a college education for most students in the U.S. To get help from the government paying for your education, you need to fill out a Free Application for Federal Student Aid ("FAFSA").

There are quite a few benefits to consolidating your federal student loans, making it something you should give serious consideration if you have such outstanding loans. These benefits include:

You have a single monthly payment. After consolidation, borrowers only have one lender, the Department of Education, making it much easier to manage the debt.

Pay per click, or PPC, or paid search, or sponsored search, or search engine marketing, or SEM (the beast has many names) is a sure-fire way to go broke if you do it right. To make sure that you give as much money as possible to Google or Yahoo! (or some other deserving, cash-starved company), without actually receiving any economic benefit, follow these seven rules closely:

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Successful pay per click management depends on testing a number of variables to determine the optimum strategy for your company. Doing what someone else is doing probably won't work. Every business is different. Every marketing message is different. Every potential customer is different. To maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns you need to manipulate the following seven variables, trying different things for each until you find the right mix.

The pay-per-click ad writer has very limited space in which to persuade the reader of the ad to click and visit the advertiser's web site. In our experience, straightforward ads work better than cute or funny ads. Just about any time we've tried an ad that we thought was really clever, it bombed. Stick with the details. So...how do you use such limited space and so few words to compel the reader to click the ad? Following are five strategies that will make your ad writing much more successful:

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If you are going to be successful running Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns for your business, then you must use analytics to measure the performance of various elements of your campaigns. For instance, you need to know which keywords generate the most conversions. This will allow you to allocate your budget to those keywords that generate the highest return on investment.

Does consolidating debt via a debt consolidation loan affect your credit score? Definitely. But does it affect it negatively? That's a more difficult question. Credit score calculations are very complex entities involving many factors, so it's not a cut-and-dry issue as to how they are impacted by debt consolidation loans. Certain aspects of consolidating your debt will have a positive effect and other aspects will have a negative effect.

If you prefer your privacy and really want to make sure that no one ever reads your blog, follow these seven steps closely: your peace of mind could depend on it.

1. Write about lots and lots of different topics. Maybe write about the history of shoe strings one day and how to fly a kite the next. The more boring and mundane the topics, the better.

When writing landing page copy for your web site (or any other marketing piece), don't assume that the reader will understand why he should do business with you. Don't overestimate the intelligence of the reader. Write in such a way that a person who doesn't know anything about your industry will understand what you are saying. Don't worry about insulting anyone's intelligence.

When preparing to begin a pay per click marketing campaign, it really helps to go into the situation with an idea of what the numbers look like. By "the numbers", I mean what kind of return on your investment you can expect assuming different bid levels and different conversion rates. It's really all just conjecture because you don't know what your click-through rate will be, what your bids will have to be to generate adequate traffic, or what your conversion rate will be.