Shop4aBiz Podcast Introduction

Hi, and welcome to the Shop4ABiz podcast! This series is meant to present small local businesses by highlighting their unique services or products. This podcast is designed to be informative, educational and entertaining. While at the same time supporting local businesses. We hope you enjoy this journey and share it with friends, colleagues and family. Also, feel free to visit: 

https://podcasts.bcast.fm/shop4abiz-podcast

Email: shop4abiz@gmail.com

https://youtu.be/4ZJcdTEisN0

Well basically i am a small business owner located in asbury park new jersey. I started a travel agency it's called cruise planners because that's part of a franchise that i bought into so i could do anything travel related obviously right now because of Covid 19 the travel industry is getting hit pretty hard and  business has been pretty quiet i've been working at the business for about a year now so i am technically a startup still building client base but i know i did have clients i've always had a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit and that's obviously how i got into the travel agency before i always did music i have like my own website for electronic music so i've always been interested in trying to market my music and and i like the whole idea of marketing my travel business obviously like asbury parks in the upswing right now there are a lot of small business owners a lot of restaurants a lot of cafes there's this this atmosphere of of growth and it's really exciting you know between the music art and and restaurant workers everyone is like you know interested in in the small business aspect of building the community they're getting hit obviously really hard right now because of covid 19.



They're doing you know you know pick up at curbside pickups and all that good stuff but you know everybody's hurting everybody's not the same i know it's a lot of people out of work and i realized that something that i've been doing is is setting up a website learning more about wordpress just because of just marketing my business to creating videos for my business as opposed to just posting photos and and blog posts of just text of something boring i was always into like multi-media s for myself i realized that i could try to maybe do something that can help the community right now and by putting together a directory of business directory and just giving free listings out you know for basic listings eventually maybe people will be interested in getting a premium listing and pay for that so what i did is i set up this website you know i got this dot com called shop4abiz and it's basically SHOP with the number four A BIZ () , and i set that up it's set up with google so i was able to import a lot of like local area businesses into the directory to populate the directory but i'm offering local businesses an opportunity to just sign up for free and they could put their logos they could put anything additional in there it's it's pretty great because what's interesting is that this website auto populates google reviews so if your business is in there and you're signed up basically you'll see like a scrolling section of different testimonials that's something that the person doesn't have to do themselves like the business owner doesn't have to do themselves i don't have to do that for them it's all auto populated with this uh this website which is great you could add more photos like an art photo gallery you can add a video like say you have a video on youtube um so right there will be like a screen with a video a youtube link so there's a little bit more of like an interactive um feature to it premium listing i'm just trying to get this built right now i'm not trying to like make money with this right now i look at it as a way of introducing myself to local businesses too so it's a way of me networking uh it's something that i think it's it's more community based which is great i think the main reason behind all this is networking you know like getting to know my neighbors a little better too as a way of you know everybody's stuck at home so a lot of people are trying to promote their businesses their restaurants their stuff on social media so there's a way another way of promoting another avenue.