How Broad a Net Do You Cast With Your Blog?

Maui is a pretty interesting place to sell real estate. I find myself talking to prospective buyers about lifestyle as much if not more than anything else. When I started blogging, I used my other blog as another avenue to showcase Maui's lifestyle. I kept my topics diverse and touched on a lot of island events and activities above and beyond real estate. Much to my surprise, the lifestyle posts have drawn a lot of visitor traffic. Much of that traffic could care less about buying a property on Maui.

A good example of this is a post that I wrote on Stand Up Paddle Surfing. I wrote the post to describe something I enjoy doing and to give readers insight into yet another way to have fun on Maui. I talked about the history of the sport, my own misadventures and the feats that some were starting to achieve on stand up paddle boards. At the time, the sport had a pretty limited following. The sport's Internet presence was limited to the sites of a few surfboard shapers, a few small newspaper articles and a blog post or two. I thought I might get a comment or two from clients, but frankly didn't expect too much out of the post.

A few weeks after I posted, I got an inquiry on the sport. It was someone from California wanting to know where they might be able to buy a board. Another week passed and I got another inquiry and another and another... I checked my site logs and saw that this blog post had become a major entry point to the site. I Googled stand up paddle surfing and sure enough I was number one. The sport was growing in popularity and I became a point of contact for interested parties. I fielded inquiries from the mainland, France, Tahiti, Australia and New Zealand. I even was asked to publish my blog as an article in an Australian Paddling Publication.

While I enjoyed the notoriety, there came a point in time where the inquiries got to be a little too much. As much I wanted to share in the sport, I also needed to respond to clients inquiring about property. I added a directory at the bottom of the blog post that guided visitors to other Stand Up Paddle Sites. That cut my inquiries to a trickle. The sport continues to boom and as more sites dedicated slowly to the sport emerge, I find that I have slipped from my number one perch down to the bottom of page 1.

I just thought this was  an interesting by product of my blogging. Has anyone else had similar experiences? What other consumers do you attract to your blog?