CityVille by Zynga for Facebook guide, tips, tricks, hints, cheats and strategies

Your decorations should be the centerpiece of your other buildings, because of the effect that they have on how much money your businesses earn you, and how much of an effect they have on how much rent you collect from each house. Try to concentrate them next around your most profitable businesses.

Or, even better, here's a little cheat to maximize your earnings from a business, especially a high-dollar business like the coffee shop, or (later on in the game) the pool hall, sunglass store, and wedding store. Once a store is ready to have money collected, use the "move" tool to move it to a wide open space in your city. Then, use the "move" tool to move all of your decorations to be within range of the business, so that your payout bonus is massive. Next, collect your payout, and watch the extra-large payout flood your account with money. It doesn't matter that the customers weren't served near the decorations, only that the building is near decorations when you collect the payout. Once you're done, move them back to their normal locations and carry on with the game as normal.

To start moving your franchises into your friends' cities, go to your neighbor's city and find their empty lot. Click the empty lot and choose which business of yours you want to place there. Once you choose, you have to wait for your friend to accept your business. 

Once they accept your business, you get a pop up with two options. Choose the "new headquarter available" option, and you can build your franchise's "headquarters" in your city, where you can supply your franchises, as well as collect from them. Build more branches of that same franchise in more friends' cities as well, and your franchise headquarters building will grow taller and taller.

To increase your citizens' happiness (as well as increase your population limit), build community buildings. After you unlock one community building, you can build multiples of the same building, and continue to increase both the happiness and the population limit of your city. You don't need to wait to unlock more and more types of buildings.

That's all for now! More tips? Post them as comments!