If you own a skateshop, read this.

Alrighty gents, I used to own a skateshop in the pre-Internet days. I handed out fliers at skate spots. I talked to people. I did everything I could to get the word out, but like you, I didn’t have money to slap up a billboard or anything, so I relied mostly on word of mouth. Luckily, skateshops in that day were pretty rare, and so when a new one popped up everyone for an hour drive around knew about it overnight. You could have the lamest skateshop with no product and people would still get their mom to drive them an hour each way to check it out. And then they would still come back!

The Internet changes everything. It’s not all that hard to slap together a website, create a profile on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. If you’re a skateshop it’s a piece of cake for skaters to find you…right? Well, maybe you’ve got the system down, but even if you do, you could probably use a little more foot traffic or online sales. As you can tell if you follow this blog, writing posts here is not my full time job. Have I even written 10 times on here in the last year? Nay, my full time job is doing search engine optimization for other companies that have nothing to do with skateboarding. And recently, I launched a new business that builds online directories. I’m going to stick up one for every state and one for every major metro/city, but for now we’ve got a few up and running.

SkateShopDirectory.net

BostonSkateboardShops.com

CaliforniaSkateboardShops.com

LosAngelesSkateboardShops.com

NewYorkSkateboardShops.com

UtahSkateboardShops.com

You can go and list your skateshop on any of these websites for free. You get a whole page where you can put whatever information in there that you want, as well as a link to your website. If you know anything about getting better rankings in Google for your website, you’ll know a big part of it is getting links back from sites that are relevant to what you do. These websites are highly relevant, and as such are going to help your rankings quite a bit.

There’s no catch, other than this–if you want to be on the homepage, it costs $20/month (or $50/month on the national one, $20/month for a featured listing on a state-level page). You’ll still get some value and some traffic if you get a free listing, don’t get me wrong, but you’ll get a lot more traffic and SEO value if you’re on the homepage with a featured listing. Trust me, I know how money can be tight when you’re running a shop, but for $20/month, you can’t beat this deal.

Yeah, I know the websites don’t look like anything to do with skateboarding. My company has launched 723 of these in the last week (see DeclareMedia.com) and we might customized the look and feel down the road, but there’s no time for that at the moment. And hey, it doesn’t really matter. You’re still going to get traffic and SEO results, no matter what the sites look like.