It ought not to be a surprise that blogging correctly can garner you attention, and such attention can put you "top of mind" when people come around to thinking of certain topics. And being top of mind can help you get more customers, period! When I think of stories I enjoy, like the Lord of the Rings series, I have a few bloggers who I immediately think of. So too for politics, or religion, etc.
I also have a few blogs I think about when I consider business, getting more customers, and building your online reputation overall. Some of those people have other ventures that they dabble in (art, insurance, music, etc.), and some merely like engaging in online discussions.
The point is: if you have a good blog, with good content, it will make you one of the first people thought of by your regular readers when certain topics come up.
If you're a market leader in whatever your area of expertise is, and if you can make relatively compelling content about it, then whenever your readers think of your niche, they'll think of you. And they'll talk about you. And they'll share you, and appeal to you as an expert. And then others will view you in the same way.
Just look at the wildly successful blog by Brian Clark, Copyblogger. It's one of my favorite blogs out there for "learning to blog", and I refer to it on a very regular basis (and I'm sure I'll link to it not a few times here).
That said, will simply having a blog magically get you more customers? No. Of course not. But it can be part of an overall strategy that gets you noticed. We'll discuss more of this as we evolve this blog.
To get more customers, you have to build a brand -- an image. And a blog can help you do that. A blog is your own piece of digital real estate, in a much larger way than a twitter feed or facebook page is (though those are VERY crucial things to have, at the end of the day you're building on someone else's territory when you use such services, and thus putting eggs in someone else's proverbial basket.
Imagine having spent thousands of hours (and dollars) to build your brand on Myspace... You do remember Myspace, right? It's that platform that made that Justin Bieber kid famous, and others equally notorious. And it went from the top of the internet to beyond the top 100 places online (and it's falling continually, though attempts at resuscitation have been made).
You can set up a free wordpress.com account, or go professional with a hosting account from a company like BlueHost (I personally endorse and use BlueHost because they're inexpensive (they will even allow you to run multiple blogs from one hosting account!), and very reliable.
