First of all, congratulations! Getting a business blog up and running is a notable achievement. Working at it consistently to get a core group of readers is something 95% blogs out there will never have. If you’re running a blog as a marketing program for your company though, you’re likely still short of your overall objective, which is to get sales leads. If that’s the case, you’re probably nailing some of the leading indicators, like unique visitors, reader interaction, subscriptions, and maybe even trackbacks or tweets.

But for most people in your organization they want to know how many leads you’re generating. It’s at this point that we want to be very clear about two things:

1. You have built a successful blog. Anything that happens now is separate from what you’ve already done.
2. The challenge now is to convert your readers into leads

Depending on a number of different factors, converting these readers to actual leads may not be important to you at all. Maybe that’s not what your blog is for. Or maybe leads matter, but you’ve decided to embrace the new thinking that your readers will become leads through osmosis rather than conversion. For a number of reasons, I happen to think that’s the most efficient way to operate. But for some of you, that won’t matter.

Many people who start a corporate blog have to sell it internally. One of the easiest ways to do that is to promise leads! If that’s the case for you, waiting for these unique visitors to qualify themselves and send you an email when they’re ready to buy is just too slow of a process. Your company will expect people to register themselves as a lead whether they’re ready to buy or not. This means that having a successful blog gets you only halfway there. You now need to successfully convert.

Challenges like this a result of a “happiness problem”; like having tons of customers come into your store at once.

Stay tuned for the second part of this blog post about converting your readers to leads.

Originally posted on Marqui's Web Marketing Blog, written by Randa Codron, a Marketing and Communications Specialist for WaterTrax, one of Marqui's SaaS partner companies.