One of the biggest benefits of building a blog for your company is the increased traffic that comes from new content and new search listings in the search results. In fact, extra listings in the search results is one of the best selling points if you are trying to convince your company to launch a blog. Especially if you're dealing with someone who thinks people don't read blogs.

John Jantsch reminds us of how well blogs and search fit together over at Duct Tape Marketing today.

More often than not someone in the crowd will remark, "I don't read blogs, nobody has time for that, why would I want to start blogging."

I then proceed to dissect this comment like:

1) I don't read blogs - chances are you probably do - not like a magazine or a diary perhaps, but every second of the day millions of folks go online to search for products, services, companies, solutions and answers - and guess what kind of content they find - you bet, content from keyword rich, search engine friendly blog posts.

John goes on to offer up a few other reasons why blogs and search engine optimization fit so well together, but it's that first one I really want to drive home.

It's so easy for people to write off blogs as something people don't read, especially if you are one of the people that doesn't tend to read blogs. ;) But spin through a half a dozen or a dozen random search results though and you might be surprised at how many blog posts rank in the top ten. This holds especially true when you get into long tail search phrases.

If you're trying to sell blogs to someone who doesn't understand the medium, then your best option is to explain blogging as more of a content management system. Let the decision maker know that a blog is really just about making it easy for people to post new content on the web site and that blog content is search friendly. Point out that the blog will give you more opportunities to rank well in the search results.

While it's about the conversation, you sometimes have to point out the potential traffic to sell the idea to those who don't quite get it yet.