Benfits of blogging

Andy Lark has been looking at benefits of blogging and adds these elements:

Some of the other areas we also see benefits in are:

1. Reduced cost of customer acquisition: customers are looking at the blog for education and insight reducing the requirement for hard materials and ongoing dialogue with sales engineers. In short, blogs reduce the sales cycle. We can measure this in hours of people time taken back.
2. Reduced SEO costs: By participating in other blogs (especially those of pundits and analysts) we see more inbound traffic against key topic areas reducing our dependency on paid search to drive traffic. We've seen this go as high as 25%.
3. Participation reduces research costs: Closed blog communities are a great source of insight for polling and thought taking. They reduce the cost of insight.