People set up business blogs thinking that somehow the blog will help them with their business.

However, it is important to remember that business blogging software is only a software system to manage your articles.  You need to write regularly around topics that are important to your target audience.

If you do this well, then you will experience some traffic to your business blog.

But traffic does not make you money.

You need to have a strategy to either make money via affiliates and advertising, or you need to do lead generation for your business.

A lot has been written about how to generate affiliate income in this way.  But what is less often written about is how to create real leads for your business from a business blog.

Here are some ways to do lead generation.

1. Download a white paper – Offer free white papers or reports to visitors in exchange for their contact information.
2. Autoresponders – You can use autoreponder tools to create automatic email courses or sales funnels.
3. CRM Integration – If you use a good CRM, it will have web forms.  You can use these forms on your business blog to invite people to schedule a free consultation or demo.
4. Social Media – Make following you in Twitter, FaceBook or LinkedIn easy.  These people will keep getting regular messages from you if you use the tools, and some may become leads eventually.
5. Webinars – Invite people to sign up for your webinar or teleseminar.
6. Video Download – Very common now – people will happily add an email to a form to watch a video with a great tip or secret in it.

There are many more ways to do lead generation with your business blog software, but these are some of the most common.  Just remember, when you get a business blog set up, that is your starting point for lead generation and writing.  It is not the final product.