The advantages of a newspaper advertisement are many, but what has attracted small business entrepreneurs for decades is speed at which a struggling entrepreneur (short of funds as many starting small businesses always are, and looking for customers fast) is able to get a very quick response.

Many extremely successful businesses today started off booking tiny classified newspaper advertisements, grew into larger display advertisements (that were still very tiny) and today are multi million dollar enterprises commanding lots of respect. If folks were laughing then because of tiny advertisements, you can be sure that they are no longer laughing today.

Many of those who know all this stuff are not aware of an amazing new development. That there is an equivalent of highly effective newspaper advertising online. And what's more it is FREE.

Most people know that free articles posted at relevant web sites with a good detailed resource box leading back to your web site or free course or whatever works for you, is most effective way of advertising online. However there has always been one very important missing link. And that is high readership.

In fact, here are 6 mouth-watering reasons why every marketer should be blogging:

1- Fast Search Engine Spidering and Indexing of Your Site:

Did you know that Google owns most popular blogging platform on planet? Blogger at http://www.blogger.com is used to produce thousands of blogs. Even a complete internet newbie can set up a blog in about 5 minutes at Blogger. And guess who can be counted on to come by and quickly spider all those new blog posts as they are written?

Yahoo is also embracing blogs and feeds in a big way. Savvy marketers know that adding their blogs and feeds to their MyYahoo page can bring Yahoo spider to their site almost immediately.

One of reasons that blogs get spidered so quickly is that most of them produce a feed. Many blogs automatically "ping" (or notify) some of large sites that carry these feeds and make them available for syndication. Search engines spider these sites many times a day. Blogger, for instance, pings Weblogs every time you make a post. You can also "ping" a free site called Pingomatic (http://www.pingomatic.com) every time you add a new blog post. Your ping will notify Yahoo and 11 other large feed sites that you've added a post. If it only were so easy to get Google to notice new pages on regular sites!

If you have a new site that you are having trouble getting indexed, adding a blog or RSS feed is one of quickest ways to get spiders to come calling.

2-Blogs can Build Your Backlinks Quickly:

If you've spent time trying to get reciprocal links to your site, you know how frustrating, boring, and time-consuming it can be. I've long considered reciprocal link building to be one of worst ways to develop link popularity. Many SEO experts consider one-way links to be far more effective.

A blog can build one-way links to your site fast. If you've just started a blog, you should submit it to large blog and feed directories. Here is a list of Top 55:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Once you've submitted your blog to these directories, you'll find your backlinks growing quickly. This past year, more webmasters are using RSS feeds on their sites to keep their sites fresh and spidered frequently. Software applications such as RSS Equalizer, Express RSS, and CARP make this easy.

After starting my first blog, I was amazed at how many different sites carried my feed with a link back to my site! These links can multiply exponentially over time.