Everyone’s talking about Groupon these days.

From daily deals to tasteless Super Bowl commercials, this company is getting a lot of attention. And the attention they want most is from the local small businesses that power their revenue model.

Does your local business need Groupon? No, not at all. In fact, there are much better alternatives if you’re up for it.

If you faithfully serve your local community with valuable content, unbeatable offers, and amazing service, you won’t need Groupon.

Here are a few fine ideas on how to do it …

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“First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.”
~ Blake, Glengarry Glen Ross

Sometimes you’re on a sweet little vacation in Italy and you need to convert miles into kilometers.

Sometimes you’re smashing your thumb with a hammer doing some light roofing and you need to switch inches to centimeters.

If you’re in business (or sales, like the Glengarry boys above), and you want to stay alive, you need to find a way to regularly convert prospects into paying customers.

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“There’s just no quiet in Vegas.” ~Barry Manilow

Same thing online, Barry.

Like driving down the strip, even at an ungodly hour, our old pal the Internet feeds us an unending spread of exactly what we want.

Between the inbox, RSS, Twitter, and name-your-social-network-of-choice, the competition for our attention is aggressive and utterly incapable of mercy.

How can your stuff get read, watched, or listened to if it’s buried alive (see: invisible) under the non-stop avalanche of an entire civilization’s most mundane and brilliant ideas?

It all starts in one place…

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Yesterday, Brian told you how to avoid hopelessly screwing up your landing pages.

But does that guarantee your landing page is good, much less great?

Survey says … not so much.

Turns out, Brian’s already told you about a three-step “big picture” approach to crafting copy that results in a killer landing page. You might have missed it because it was delivered under-the-radar. He does that.

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Change … and it’s not the kind rattling around in your pocket.

We’re talking about the kind of change that keeps you up at night. The kind that makes you wonder why, for all your marketing efforts, not enough folks are finding and doing business with you.

What can you, the small business owner, do about it?

For starters, start thinking like a media company, because that’s the first step to reaping the huge rewards that come from content marketing. And it can work for any small business.

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According to this awesome Roland Emmerich documentary I just watched, the world is going to end on December 21, 2012. If John Cusack participates in a Mayan end of days depiction, you know it’s the real deal. Just like Say Anything.

We here at Copyblogger are keeping our heads together in the face of this news and will continue doing our level best to help you accomplish your business goals before the floods arrive and Los Angeles turns into a molten field of flaming limousines.

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