Effective marketing strategies are essential for small businesses, but advertising can put a big hole in your budget. You can feel like a hamster on a wheel, watching the cash flow in, and then out to cover your advertising.

Blogs offer an inexpensive marketing solution, especially if you take the time to integrate blogs into your business.

With a blog, you can interact with your customers and can boost your Web presence. A blog gets fast indexing in the search engines - a blog can be indexed in days, whereas Web…

I recently added a page to Blogging Tips which I hope will make it easier for readers to ask blogging related questions via email.

Jay Wilson from Super Negro was the first to send me a question. Jay asked :

I have a quick question for the Blooging Tips crew - would a URL with
a swear word be able to pull sponsors? For example, if someone want to
start a blog about baseball called Hard”f’n”ball (with the f’n
spelled out), would that be very problematic?

Can blogs or websites with a swear word in the domain name…

Content hubs are a great way to direct your visitors to key content, and it’s a nice way to maximize your search-engine optimization efforts. It’s also a great way to drive traffic to older content that is evergreen, but doesn’t show high up on your blog because it’s older. Essentially, a content hub is one page that features links to various posts and articles that fall under one theme.

Another bonus is that developing a content hub can often times reveal gaps in your blog coverage, so it’s a great way…

How do I get in contact with you? - A reminder to all of you to make contacting you easy!

How much should you pay for a freelance blogger - A great post by Invesp on paying bloggers.

Group Writing Project - Marco is giving away some prizes to those who come up with the best idea for a WordPress plugin.

UniqueBlogDesigns.com Review: The Elephant in the Room - Small Potato isn’t a fan of UBD’s work. An interesting debate has sprung up over this. I’m a fan of SP designs and the themes from Unique Blog…

Many people are spending significant amounts of money to launch their websites on the Internet these days. But how many of these people are taking the right approach when it comes to building a memorable, positive brand image that online consumers will be attracted to over the long haul?

The first step when it comes to blog site branding is knowing who exactly will be viewing your blog on a daily basis. You always have to include this knowledge in your business plan, so why not make it a requisite…

If ever I feel so caught up in all the muddle of blogging life, I make myself go back in the beginning. A place where I consider the most important part of my blogging life. My fellow writer here in Blogging Tips, Deborah Ng (which I idolize ) also asked a similar question a week ago: Why do you blog? I decided to alter it a tiny bit for my blog post for this day.

What made me blog? Well, there are several reasons why I wanted to blog and some of…