Business owners sometimes don’t get the breaks that they deserve working usually more hours compare to the people who don’t have a business of their own. I know what it feels like because I’ve been there before. The Internet makes it possible for businesses to interact with one another no matter where they are and grow local business online at the same time. Unfortunately many small businesses do not even consider the Internet as a venue that can help them grow either because they don’t know how to benefit from the Internet, they don’t have time to do it or they assume that online marketing will be too costly.What you need to know is that online marketing is huge and still growing way of promoting local businesses. Online marketing is a future of marketing for big and small businesses which want to get more customers because that’s where their customers are looking now for products and services – online.The first thing that local business needs to have in order to benefit from Internet is to have their own website. But you can’t stop there. You can have the best looking website in the world but if you won’t promote it nobody will see it. It will be buried under thousands of other website. To benefit from online exposure the business website has to be on 1st or 2nd page of Google. How to do it? Simple, you have to use free or paid method to promote your website.- SEO (search engine optimization) of your website is one of the most important ways of making your site visible to the customers. This will require hiring a company who can optimize your website and make is search engine friendly.- Google Places – this should be the next important step for the local businesses: to claim their local listings with Google. Local listings shows at the top of the 1st page and this is what customer will see first when they are looking for particular service or product.- Social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are popular among many people whether they’re looking for a job or people to hire. These sites made it possible to spread the word for free which save many businesses some money. It doesn’t really matter whether you own a small or big business. But, places like LinkedIn and Facebook also let you have the option to pay to advertise which is shown on the very right side of the screen. The more people see it, the better.- Article marketing is another way to promote local business online – writing and submitting informative articles about local business to article directories and blogs for better Internet exposure.- PPC (Pay per Click) is paid method of advertising and require knowledgeable marketer to do this job right.But there are many other ways to grow local business online such as blog posting, rent-a-site method, link building, video marketing and more. The online marketing is not that expensive as some people think. Local businesses can do some of the promotions by themselves or hire a company who specialize in local business advertising.