Do you spend a lot of time knee-deep in Google Analytics, looking at the rise and fall of pageviews, unique visitors and referred traffic? While it pays to know your audience, focusing too much on the numbers isn’t the best use of your time. To gain more value from your marketing blog, think less about organic traffic growth and more about the impact of your blog on your pipeline.

A corporate blog’s success isn’t measured in pageviews or any other traffic metric. Why not? Well, your objectives are totally different. You aren’t trying to amass impressions to generate advertising views, which is the prevailing model used by most of the blogs you probably read. Rather, you want to attract attention that will translate to inquiries from prospects, who you then hope to advance through the sales cycle.

Over time, you can use your blog to grow an audience that can translate to business opportunities, but that takes time, and it will take quite a while for you to realize any ROI on this approach. Instead, accelerate the process by using blog content as fodder for direct marketing and lead cultivation campaigns.

Turn the results of your long-term investment into a short-term gain, too, by engaging your target market directly and watching visitor behavior to gain sales intelligence. For example, you could use an e-mail newsletter to drive prospects from your house list to your corporate blog and watch the clicks that follow for insights you can use in direct marketing and telemarketing efforts.

What really matters isn’t your traffic (or your blog, for that matter) but what comes from it. If you have interested readers executing on calls to action and entering your sales cycle, you’re headed in the right direction. A marketing blog isn’t like a mass media blog. There’s only one purpose, and that’s to increase your top line.