1. It can help establish your reputation as an expert in your industry.
2. It can help tremendously in search engine rankings.
3. It can drive direct traffic to your site from people who find your content on other sites.
4. It can result in products that you can sell, generating additional revenue for your business.
I look as content creation and distribution as a cycle. The cycle goes something like this: blog content feeds into article content, which feeds into press releases, books, and other material.
It all starts with the seed of discipline. You have to be disciplined enough to create content on a regular basis. A blog is a great vehicle for this. A blog post can be any length you want, so it doesn't matter if you don't have much to say. Just say SOMETHING. Force yourself to blog three times per week, at least starting out.
After you have done your blog for a few weeks, you should have enough material written down to begin repurposing it for other uses, such as articles. If you blog consistently about your industry, then a lot of your blog posts should fit together. Take three or four blog posts and combine them into an article. At my company, I've been doing this so long that there are a lot of times that I will reverse the process. I will write an article first and then break it up into a couple of blog posts. But for those just starting out, it is probably better to start with blog posts first because they can be much shorter.
Once you convert a few blog posts into an article, the article should be distributed via article directories. These allow anyone who needs content for his web site or ezine to easily find your content. The benefit to you from a search engine optimization standpoint is that users of article content are required to include the author's bio at the end. The bio will contain a keyword-loaded link back to your site.
Taking the content cycle a step further, a collection of articles can form the basis for a book or some other kind of content that you can either sell or give away. If you sell it, you have the opportunity to generate revenue. But it may be a better idea just to give it away to anyone who supplies their contact information. Giveaways such as free books and reports are great ways to build a mailing list.
If you are very confident in your writing skills and have some spare time, you could even turn this whole process upside down. You could first write a book, and then break content out of the book to create articles and blog posts. However you do it, you need to find a content creation and distribution strategy that works for you. It will do wonders for your business if you are patient enough to see it through.