If you are starting a small business, your small business bank account should be one of the first things you aquire. Small business banking is big business to the banks and for this reason you should be able to secure a great deal on a small business bank account.

Search through the high street banks for their best deals on small business bank accounts. Talk to the small business account manager in each bank.

If you are not looking for an overdraft or any funding from the bank you should be able to open your small business account straight away, with appropriate ID.

The banks should offer you a small business account with chequebook and switch card.

Shopping around the different banks for small business accounts should produce offers of interest on credit balances, no fees for a year, no fees ever!, free small business banking, personal banking manager for you to call etc.

Don’t be suckered into the first small business bank account you find, or for that matter the closest bank offering small business banking. The bank 100 yards further away might offer you substantial savings over the closest bank on a business bank account. Do your research carefully.

If you do require an overdraft or a business loan in order to get your business off the ground, make sure you have created a feasible business plan. You’ll need to convince the bank to back you, but you should still be able to get great rates. Shop around whatever.
Remember, the best time to shop around for a small business account is before you start trading. Once you are into the day-to-day grind of building your business you’ll find it much harder to switch, so do your research first.

It seems that everyone recently has heard of someone making insane amounts of money from blogging. So how do you do it. Can anyone do it and will you make bucketloads of money with a blog about your cat?

Blogging is simply a way of publishing things on the internet quickly and easily. It’s about taking control of your website and not having to wait for a webmaster to update pages on your behalf. Think of it like a content management system.

You can keep a blog on absolutely any subject. It can be as vague or as targeted as you like, contain images, articles, short posts, quotes from other blogs etc.

Most bloggers making money from their blogs are doing so by showing adverts on the side of their blog. Adverts are often from Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network, but a recent buzz has been the use of adverts from Chitika. The method is usually the same in that the advertiser pays you money through the advert network for each person that clicks on the adverts.

You will not make a load of cash immediately. It takes a long time for a new blog to gather enough of a readership and gain enough results in search engines to bring visitors to the blog. If only a few percent of those visitors click on your chosen ads and you only get paind a few pence per click then it becomes obvious that you need a lot of visitors to make any serious money.

Resist the urge to tinker with the design of your blog all the time. Once you have a reasonable looking design at the start, save it and forget about it. Your goal is to write everything you know about the subject of your blog. Sometimes you will struggle to find something to blog about. Bloggers block can often be overcome by just doing some research about your subject, read a magazine, read other websites, pretty soon something will pop into your head to write about.

Set yourself goals in how many times you want to post per day. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.net is probably one of the web’s most successful bloggers and he aims for 25 posts per day across his network of 20 or so blogs. You can learn a lot from him. Consider each post as a new doorway that visitors can enter your site through from search engines. The more people that find doorways, the more visitors you will get. If you posted 10 times a day, in a year you’d have over 3500 pages on the internet, all being spidered by search engines and attracting traffic.

Each piece you blog about should be well written and contain quality information. Don’t just ramble about nothing. Give good information and your visitors will keep coming back for more and pretty soon your blog will have a decent subscriber base.

Never give up. When you’re 6 months down the line and are still only making a dollar a day from your blog, don’t give up. Keep going, keep blogging. Only by pushing through and writing more will you achieve those goals you’ve set yourself. It might take a year or 2 years for your blog to be read by thousands of people, but rest assured if you leave it to go stale, it will never be read. Keep striving and keep blogging and eventually you’ll get there.

Happy blogging!