I'm not a very consistent blogger, and mine hasn't been updated in the last month simply because I've not been home much. It's top of my To Do list for this weekend. But I have definitely sold stuff because of it. Regular customers are in the habit of checking it, and contact me to buy as a result. They can also link from there to my Flickr album, which I DO keep up to date as much as possible, resulting in yet more sales.
At the bottom of every email I send, I have four "signatures" - website, flickr, blog and etsy, so every email I send might result in a potential customer.
On a different track though, I had an old friend find me again through my blog. Ok, we hadn't totally lost touch, but we hadn't seen each other for a couple of years and we were down to just Christmas card contact, but he googled himself one day (as you do...), and found himself mentioned in one of my blog entries, so ever since then he has been a regular reader and we met up again a few weeks ago.
I tend to keep my blog for work chatter as the rest of my life is frankly dead boring!
I hate the term networking, but I think a blog is networking in a gentle way, not overtly pushing yourself into someone's life.
If people don't want to click on the links, then they don't have to, do they?
Hope this rambling is of some help.
Just thinking, in the time it's taken me to type this, I could have updated my blog!
Nia.