Local online advertising is becoming more and more important. Customers are spending more time online to find local businesses than ever before, and the trends will keep rising for foreseeable future. It might be time to take some money out of the paper yellow page ads and put them into local listings online. If your not ready to budget for local online advertising, fear not! There are plenty of places to listed online for free.

Here are a few places to get started with local advertising:

• Google Local (Google Maps) - List your business for free. You can advertise on Google Maps through your Adwords account on a pay per click basis.
• Yelp - A local review site. Yelp feeds some Yahoo Local and other local search results.
• Yahoo Local - Another local review site. Huge in many areas.
• CitySearch - Ask.com and Live.com get some of their information from here.
• Zillow - Free Real Estate listings. This would be a great place to advertise for home services such as lawn care, plumbing, contractors, etc. It costs $.01 per ad view and can be targeted by zip code.
• Craigslist.org - We all know what this one is. Use it! Post a new ad every 3-4 days about your business.
• BackPage.com - Another free, local classifieds site.
• Facebook - This one might be a suprise, but you can get some pretty cheap advertising targeted on a local level.

This is by no means a complete list, but it is a good start. If you get one potential new customer a week from each of these sources, imagine how fast you could grow!

P.S. If you want more search engines to pick up on your website as a local site, you might try adding your mailing address to the bottom of each page of your website.