Google "Liz". Just "Liz". (Click here to do it.)
Who do you see? Liz Claiborne, Liz Hurley, Liz Taylor? Sure.
But a whole lot of those top 10 results are Liz Strauss, blogger goddess.
Liz is a good blogger, but more important is that she has tons of fans who link to her regularly. It makes her not just a blogging star, but a Google star too. I guarantee that a lot of marketers are paying megabucks to get the same level of search engine visibility.
Lesson: Blogging is your #1 search engine optimization tool. It will easily justify the time/cost of one person writing one interesting paragraph each day.
P.S. Google "word of mouth marketing" — I get more than my share of pages too.