Blogging - A Long-Term Payoff?

An interesting thing has been happening lately - I am getting new students from my community as a result of this blog! Finally, after about a year and half of online existence, the site is paying me back in new student income. Since the middle of summer I now have three new regular students, all of whom found me via the internet. I am also finding that more people are inquiring about lessons (many through my profile at GetLessonsNow.com.)

I suppose I am writing this to help encourage others to start or continue to blog if it means to be an investment in your business. Now I realize that many folks blog for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is just the pleasure of writing about favorite topics. My main purpose at first was to establish an online presence and then just see what might happen. But after I started, it dawned on me that it might be helpful in actually building my own studio.

To be truthful, I was a little disappointed after the first year (I started the blog in the winter of 2007) - not one new student followed through! But it seems that now a longer-term payoff is beginning, even though I am not blogging as regularly as I have in the past.

It is easy sometimes to forget that a blog is also a larger body of work - not just an engine that always needs to produce something "new". It's clear to me that the more important element is the larger base of content that a blog can provide. That's what my new students (or parents) told me - they were able to get a better sense of what kind of teacher (and person) I might be from fishing around on the site.

So even if you're fretting about not having the time or energy to blog consistently, keep in mind that people will still look at the material you have posted in the past. There seems to be a slightly irrational reasoning in the blogosphere that you must absolutely post every day or else risk losing readership. This isn't necessarily true. For me, what's interesting is that I am getting increased business during a time when I've been actually posting LESS. This might just be a coincidence, but it definitely has made me question the "need" to post something new every other day in order to gain more business.

Could this be an excuse for laziness? Perhaps. But it is nice to know that the blog can keep working for you even if you're not nursing it every day. Go ahead and start that site you've always wanted to have - it may take some time for the investment to return something, but that's not a bad thing!

I'd certainly be interested in readers' thoughts on this. Please feel free to share your own experiences with blogging and business.