Blogs can be personal, journalistic, informative, or even be a sales pitch for your products and services, or someone else's. Depending on your Internet business needs, there are many reasons why you may want to publish a blog. These are, most predominantly, to promote your business, or even just to earn a living via advertising and/or affiliate program revenue.

On the ad revenue side of blogging, the Google AdSense program documents case studies of bloggers earning US$15,000/m or more, and of some blog networks (a loosely-coupled group of blogs owned by the same publisher) earning the equivalent of US$1,000,000 per year.

There are other reasons for blogging, even if you never earn a cent of advertising or sell a product or service from the pages of a blog. The most important of these reasons is that of gaining traffic for your other websites or blogs. The fact is, the SEs (Search Engines) current love blogs. Blogs may get indexed one or more times a day.

Successful bloggers have already learned that is important to blog as often as possible. Some of them blog up to 10 times in a single day. That means that some of the large SEs are indexing these highly-active blogs, and thus their content (blog entries) will rank highly on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Ask yourself, when you use a search engine to find websites (or blogs) for specific topics, which search results do you most likely click on? The first 10 or 20 results, or those way at the very end of a list of thousands or even millions of webpages? Well, unless you're doing intensive research, you probably don't even look beyond the first page of results.

This, of course, is the reason that many companies spend thousands of dollars a month to get their static websites ranking high in the SERPs, little knowing that publishing a well-written, regularly-updated blog not only builds confidence with potential customers, but also creates a traffic vehicle.

Ad banners for your static website can be published on the blog's pages, thereby channeling traffic. Writing a blog, while certainly not easy work, is within the abilities of many business owners. Optimizing webpages for top SE rankings (known as SEO - Search Engine Optimization) usually requires hiring outside the company, and may be beyond the company's advertising and Internet publishing budget.

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