NetBiz.com.com, based in Portland, Oregon, is giving away $1000 in free search engine advertising to one  small business.  All you have to do is ask us your Internet marketing questions!
Small business owner, entrepreneur, freelancer, or solopreneur. Regardless of what you call yourself, you’re busy managing your business and you don’t have time to maintain your [...]

Most Sparkplugging readers are…well, small.  Call it consultant, micro-business, or whatever you like.  Freelancers are small businesses that can benefit from a very small amount of business.  Today I’d like to show you how to snag some highly targeted web traffic that will get you some great business – and it’s something you should be [...]

Someone once said, “all search is local.”  In most cases, whenever someone goes online to look for something, they are looking for a local service or product from a company that they (hopefully)  recognize.  To that end, Google has created the Local Business Directory.  You’ve probably seen in action.  Do a search for a service [...]

My wife now knows not to ask me “Have you seen that web site?” since my response the majority of the time is usually similar to “It’s terrible”.
Here’s my problem: I started coding HTML right around the same time it became a standard. I gamed Google successfully when they were just starting out (I’ve since [...]

Bing has been all over the news since Microsoft announced its launch last week.  They’ve also done quite the commercial blitz.  Rumor has it that Microsoft has earmarked more than $80 Million for marketing their new search engine.
As a small business owner or freelancer, why should you care?
That’s a pretty tough question.
Google has made itself [...]

Do a Google search for click here. What you’ll find is around 1.7 billion (yes billion) instances in Google’s database where website owners have used “click here” as linked text on their website. Let me guess, that includes you, right?
But click here is seldom the best option for linked text. Take a look at these [...]

One of the things that has been the most fascinating part of running a magazine-style site is watching how each of the individual channels are growing in such vastly different ways. Momsational gets most of its traffic from contest aggregation sites. Freelance Parent is getting a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, because they put out [...]