Comment by andrewchilds

If your definition of a return on your blogging/writing investment is how many likes you got, you're doing it for the wrong reasons.

I am in no way a good writer, and I don't have an audience, however a few of the articles I've published on my personal site have resulted in a small number of extremely high quality responses from almost exactly the people I wanted to reach. For example, I wrote a review of an insulin pump and received a reply a few days later from a director at the company thanking me for the review and that he was sharing it with his team.

So I'd say blogging can absolutely can pay off, if you think of it in terms of making connections with the right people over time.