Blogs (short for web logs) are not only free and easy to create, but they can be awesome traffic generating tools if you use and promote them properly.

If you haven't learned by now, the key to building free search engine traffic is to get as many related, high-quality sites to point back to yours. Search engines like Google take this into great consideration when ranking your website.

You can create your own blog that can act as that "related website" to point to your own, and in the long run your blog can not only attract its own traffic, but will help you build traffic to your main site.

My Blog Example

I have another site called www.flat-stomach-exercises.com. It shows you how to trim and firm your stomach by eating and exercising properly.

I created a blog for that website that documents some of the emails I receive from my visitors. It's almost like a Q&A section so people can reference some of the problems that other people are experiencing with weight loss and read my advice.

As I mentioned before, search engines look for related websites that link back to you, so I link the blog back to my main site's homepage to help with search engine rankings.

User Blogger.com

There are a lot of good, free blog hosts out there but I chose to use Blogger.com because with every new post you make, it creates a separate search-engine-friendly web page.

In a sense, it's like having a whole other website. Also, the more posts you have, the larger your blog becomes. Remember, search engines seem to favor sites with a lot of content.

Also keep in mind there are tons of blog directories out there that will list yours for free. So you can submit to these free sites/directories to help increase your traffic.

Let People Subscribe to Your Blog Feeds

Another benefit of creating a blog is that people can actually subscribe to it. You may have heard of RSS feeds (RSS stands for really simple syndication). It's a growing Internet trend where people can receive updates from their favorite sites without having to visit them.

They use software (or the Firefox browser) which allows them to manage all of their feeds in one place. So let's say someone subscribes to CNN.com and USAToday.com's live news feeds, they can open up their RSS reader and quickly browse the latest headlines from these sites. They can choose to read the articles that interest them and ignore the ones that don't.

Blogger.com will automatically create your own RSS feed URL so people can subscribe to your blog feeds. So when they open up their live feeds to get the updates from their favorite sites, any new posts on your blog will show up in their reader.

Add Adsense Ads

Once your blog starts bringing in traffic, you'll want to maximize the revenue potential by adding Adsense ads. If you aren't familiar with Google's Adsense program, go here to learn about it.

In Conclusion...

As you can see, a blog can really help increase the traffic to your main website if you continue to update and promote it. Many webmasters are finding that Google sometimes spiders blogs faster that some websites giving them that added boost of traffic.

If you remember nothing else from this article, remember that the key to having search engine success is to get as many related websites to link back to yours. Having a blog in your posession is like creating another vote for your site.

Be sure to update it often with unique content so the search engines will visit frequently. Happy blogging!