Blogs have become very successful and popular lately, and SEO consultants say that they can be very profitable if they are managed and marketed the right way. Generating profits from a blog doesn't require selling anything. Profits can be from ad placements, banners, or contextual advertising. The best blogs draw the attention of a large audience and keep them coming back for more.

There are many types of blogs available. The most common types are:

• Professional blogs: These blogs are focused on discussions about professions, job aspects and career building

• Personal blogs: These blogs take the form of an online diary and contains thoughts, poems, experiences, and other personal matters

• Topical blogs: These blogs focus on a certain topic or niche, discussing specific aspects of the chosen subject

• Business blogs: As its name suggests, these are discussions about business and/or stock market

Other types of blogs include but are not limited to science blogs, cultural blogs, educational blogs, and photo blogs.

In order to have a successful blog that attracts a lot of visitors and keep them coming back, you need to follow some simple rules. Here are some tips from SEO consultants:

Before you begin blogging, carefully consider what you are going to write about in your blog as there are lots of interesting topics out there, waiting to be discussed. You can find them in every day life, in the media, in the news - anything that attracts attention and a loyal following is good. You can look for blog subjects in many places, the most important being the Internet of course.

Put quality content in your blog. If you have quality content people like to read, they will return to your blog and tell other people about it as well. Posting articles containing useful information on your blog is very beneficial for attracting more traffic. Make sure you add your URL address below your posted article! If other web site owners find your articles useful and decide to include them within the content of their web pages, the added link will contribute to increasing your popularity every time it is hyperlinked.

Update the blog on a regular basis. If you don't do this, visitors will not return and they will move on to reading another blog that is updated more often. You should try to update your blog daily. Many newcomers have blogging fear, fearing their inability to update it daily. If your blog is interesting enough, offer your readers the ability to keep it updated by posting their own personal thoughts and share stories so you won't have to do all the updating work yourself.

Listen to what your readers have to say. Always pay attention to the readers' suggestions and try to find out what people were actually searching for when they found your blog. Try to focus on that theme and even consider developing it by encouraging the visitors to discuss new aspects of that particular theme.

Keep it short and concise - You don't need material that takes hours to read, people usually like to quickly skim a blog for quick tidbits of useful information and if you post materials that are difficult or take a long time to read, you will most likely drive them away.

You can also include some artistic work or pictures in the blog, to make it more visually appealing. Blog picture managers such as Picasa are freely available on the Internet to accomplish this.

If your blog has interesting, original content, bloggers might decide to add links to it on their web sites and comment on your suggested topic. By gaining back-links to your blog from other web sites, your web site will place higher within search engine queries, thus boosting your link popularity.

Announce the launch of any new blog with press releases. Free publicity through press releases are powerful tools for increasing incoming traffic. Search engines love press releases and it gives them a good reason to spider and to index your site quickly.

Include free downloadable viral reports on your blog to turbo-charge visitor traffic and build a subscriber/viewer base quickly.

In order to simplify the creating and updating process of a blog, take advantage of the many blogging tools and software readily available, a number of them are free. Blogging software such as WordPress or Movable Type helps you update a blog easily. There are even free blog generators such as Blogger which allow you to host your content on Google’s servers without having to install any software or obtain a domain and host content.

Offer to inform readers of your blog with free email management services like Feedblitz (if you don’t have an email list management solution) in addition to offering RSS feeds for subscription. Readers and visitors can be kept updated of any new information being added to your blog without having to check the site constantly.

Utilize blog and ping to get sites indexed quickly by the search engines. By notifying popular ping servers monitored by blog search services such as Google Blog Search, you attract search engine spiders to a blog. A blog can automatically be setup to ping certain web sites. An easy method of doing this is by adding the Pingomatic service to the sites to ping in the blog software which pings many popular ping servers at once.

Finally, remember to submit to popular, high quality blog directories such as Feedster, Technorati, Blogstreet, and Best of the Web Blog Directory to boost your web traffic and link popularity!

If you respect these rules you will most likely have a successful blog, and you will be rewarded in the process. Ask a SEO consultant for further information and assistance if you are stuck for ideas to promote your new blog.