Blogging and Marketing for the IT Consultant

I have been trying to find more ways to market my IT consulting business without spending a lot of capital. We have been very successful using the word-of-mouth and quality-of-service approach for the past 5 years, but I am always looking for new ways to gain footholds into businesses that need quality programming and architectural direction. A colleague mentioned that using blogging with social apps as a front end marketing tool is highly successful means of gaining a wider audience. I started this blog late last year and with the business being brisk, i find it hard to maintain a daily or weekly blog. So I figured out I would ask the community a few questions and determine if this is the best course of action.
Firstly, how long does one commonly spend updating their blog? How often are most executives updating their blogs, daily, weekly, monthly? Are most bloggers from a marketing perspective touting theirs wares and skills or are they giving input into general IT topics that are relevant at that time? And I think most importantly, what kind of return for new opportunities are bloggers seeing in the consulting field?