Merchant Circle is more expansive than many of the other options for listing your business in Local Search. Listings can include coupons, add photos, other Merchant Circle users can add reviews of your business, and you can create blog posts within your Merchant Circle account. If you have your own blog you could use posts in your Merchant Circle blog to drive traffic to different posts in your own.
It is not always obvious what features at Merchant Circle are free and which incur additional charges so do read the fine print. To get started simply enter your primary business phone number on the Merchant Circle Submission page and click submit. This is a screen capture of that page:
If your business is not already listed you will get the form below with text reading “The phone number you entered does not match any business in our system.” Fill out this information and click Submit.
Merchant Circle will send a confirmation link to the email address you used. Click on that link to continue the process. If you want to start out with just the free Merchant Circle account, click on the link in the top right corner of the Merchant Circle Pricing page that says No, thanks. Set up my profile as shown in the screen capture below:
If you want to start out with just the free Merchant Circle account, click on the light gray link in the top right corner of the Merchant Circle Pricing page that says No, thanks. Set up my profile as shown in the screen capture below:
You will see references to verifying your Merchant Circle listing. There is more than one process for Merchant Circle Account Verification for doing so:
- Pay $2.99 per month, billed in one year payment of $35.88
- Free if you can to provide two out of these three: Sellers Permit Number, Business License Number, or DUNS Number
- Although it first appears that supplying the business name and email of five businesses that will verify yours would allow you to verify your account without charge, going through that process brings you to a checkout page asking for the $35.88 annual fee.
It appears that unless you provide two of the three numbers mentioned above that if you want your business verified you will have to pay the annual fee.
Merchant Circle is one of the most ambitious of the Local Search Directory sites. You may want to spend some time getting familiar with what they offer and then decide which of the directories with advanced functions is the best fit for your business. You may want to keep notes on your activities and measure the amount of traffic you receive when you are active and when you are not. Let your results determine how much time to spend on each site.
Not convinced yet? Watch the video or read how one business made $15,000 with their Merchant Circle listing. He says “Merchant Circle is like a MySpace for business owners plus a lot more.” He also said “I started to show up on the first page of Google for specific keywords about my business and yes all for free.” and “My phone started ringing.”
MERCHANT CIRCLE HOW-TO RESOURCES:
- Official Merchant Circle How-to Guides
- How Do You Use Merchant Circle
MERCHANT CIRCLE GUEST BLOGGER SERIES:
- Andrew Shotland – Local SEO Guide – @AndrewShotland – How to Do Local SEO in 5 Minutes or So
- John Jantsch – Duct Tape Marketing – @ducttape – How to Listen in the Age of the Customer
- Dane Carlson – Business Opportunities Weblog – @danec – Small Business Branding Online
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Merchant Circle made some major changes that were unleashed in early 2012 and the regular users of the site are NOT happy, and that may be the understatement of the year. I have my doubts about how much longer the company will remain in business in anything even remotely resembling its current capacity.
Peter would love you to read ..Does Vitamin D3 help prevent Fibromyalgia?
This looks interesting. Thank you for sharing. I wasn’t even aware of its existence.
Has anyone had any success with Merchant Circle?
I am new to merchant circle but from what I have experienced it is a great network and its seems to have a lot of members. As soon as I registered I was getting all kinds of connection requests. And I like the blog functionality they have on that site.
Interesting! So Merchant circle will submit your business to business directories? I guess this is useful in local business where they can put their NAP(name,address,phone number).
Merchant Circle is worth a try. thanks for the heads up!
Site traffic is extremely important for merchants. Whether it is just information being relayed or there are actual sales transactions taking place on the company website, getting high traffic is the only way the company’s name will get to web viewers.
I could see that Merchant Circle is a very nice website and it has the power to help many companies in driving traffic and more sales. It could also boost one’s reputation and we could easily see user comments based from the reviews.
Your input are simply the best. To join a merchant circle, is really a worthwhile organization. Your quick and easy guide and absolutely helpful.
That’s interesting. How popular this MC is? I haven’t heard of it before. Judging from their Alexa ranking, they are quite popular. I know some people who have had success with Linkedin but that is tended more towards corporative world while the MC looks more of a small-business thing.
Hi Teko,
Merchant Circle is very popular with those who have heard of it and they have enormous room for growth. You are correct that LinkedIn is more suitable to network with professionals and big business; however, it can also be used effectively by individuals and small businesses.
Every citizen in every economy in the world would benefit greatly from supporting small businesses instead of corporations. The post I’ve featured in CommentLuv explains why.
.-= growmap´s featured blog ..Support Small Businesses =-.
Thank you for this wonderful tip. I will bookmark this.
The “circle” in the company’s name comes from the idea that merchants will create networks of affiliated businesses by adding their names to their profile pages and swapping ads with each other. The idea is to give merchants an incentive to invite other merchants into MerchantCircle. Indeed, Smith is relying on this type of viral marketing to build his business because he doesn’t have a cadre of salespeople to recruit business owners.
I am listed in Merchant Circle and have greatly benefited from it both in traffic and future clients.
.-= ivy@small business resources´s last blog ..Dec 2, Small Business Grants Alabama =-.
thank you so much for this informations !
i’m a big believer in the power of customer reviews for ecommerce sites. i definitely saw an increase in conversion rates when i added reviews to my site. this looks worth considering.
Hi Tim,
Every business needs to pay attention to reviews and get them as many places as possible. Great reviews greatly increase sales and bad reviews can temporarily damage sales. The challenge is that annoyed people are more likely to write reviews so a business needs to encourage reviews in the right way.
Do read the fine print (or subscribe here) as I am currently researching the review policies of sites for a future post. I know that Yelp specifically prohibits incentivizing reviews while other sites that have reviews hold contests to increase their numbers. You don’t want to run afoul of the rules anywhere.
You may want to also read The Importance of Online Reviews – How the Public Finds Trustworthy Businesses
.-= Internet Strategist @GrowMap´s last blog ..Did You See Our Guest Post at Merchant Circle? =-.
Well, merchant circle is certainly a worthwhile organisation to join – so I thankyou for writing this quick and easy guide.
.-= Si@Leadership´s last blog ..Leadership Development Training =-.
Welcome Si,
Some businesses have been very successful at using traffic and reviews at Merchant Circle to increase their business. Did you see the new post on how to write reviews at Merchant Circle?
.-= Internet Strategist @GrowMap´s last blog ..How to Write a Review at Merchant Circle =-.
This is an example of comment spam at the expense of the business paying someone to get them incoming links. I will delete it later but wanted the site owner to see it first. I may put up a post letting businesses know that this is a very bad idea.
.-= Internet Strategist @GrowMap´s last blog ..How Much Is A Memorable Logo Worth? =-.
How’s the community? Because with the stuff like that the community is everything – if it sucks and everyone acts selfish the whole thing’s pointless. But with right people it might be pretty great!
Hello Copart,
I have spent more time assisting businesses in getting their listings and not nearly as much participating in the community. They do have a lot of active reviewers there and reviews are very important to getting the most from the time and money we spend.
.-= Internet Strategist @GrowMap´s last blog ..How to Add Your Free Business Listing to infoUSA =-.
IMO, this is much better than yellow pages.com. I hope merchant circle doesn’t cold call you to buy ads after signing up like ATT yellow pages does.
Hi Ryan,
They haven’t called any business I have listed there so I don’t believe they do. I suspect they rely on visits to their site to offer advertising and paid options. How is your online jewelry business going? How often do you post your “Jewelry Steal of the Day”? I was going to share it at Twitter today but wasn’t sure the last one you posted was still in effect.
.-= Internet Strategist @GrowMap´s last blog ..How to Get Your Free Business Listing in Yelp =-.
Merchant Circle hasn’t been as effective or search-worthy, since IAC -CitySearch bought the site, about two years ago.
Note that I’m considered a “Top Merchant” despite the fact that I have NOT submitted the verification nonsense.
My Merchant Circle page still gets a handful of hits, but the links are “no follow” so I don’t spend very much time updating as much as I should.
The more you post to the Free Blog (provided as part of the free Merchant Circle account), the more times your MC page is “crawled” by Google or Yahoo.
I cannot stress enough about NOT paying for the Upgrades, because they’re worthless!
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the input. Most major sites make all links nofollow so when we use them we need to focus on sending real readers from that site to ours. Have you checked ALL the links from MC to your site? I would think at least one of the links is dofollow. If not we should recommend MC consider providing at least one to make their listings more valuable to businesses.
Internet Strategist’s last blog post..Be Pro-Active and Take Calculated Risks