Photo by Stuart Miles, www.freedigitalphotos.net
By Sarah Santacroce at Simplicity
During a workshop on newsletters one of the participants asked “What is the difference between a blog and a newsletter?
Below is my attempt to answer this question
A Blog is your hub
On a blog which ideally is part of your website, you create content, share your knowledge, opinion and experience. Depending on your schedule, you submit monthly, weekly or daily blog posts. These posts are then public, on the internet, visible to everybody who visits your website, who’s subscribed to your RSS feed or who you’ve shared the post with on Social Media platforms (read this post on ‘Not blogging? You’re wasting your time on Social Media’).
A Blog is the driving engine to create traffic to your site
Without a blog your site is static, there’s no new content and except for SEO no real traffic creation for your site. Every time you publish a new blog post, share it with your social platforms, you create traffic back to your site.
Use your blog to get subscribers for your newsletter
Your blog is also one of the best ways to get more subscribers for your newsletters. They are reading your content, and at the bottom of the blog post you ask them if they’d like to receive regular updates from you via your newsletter.
So what is a newsletter?
A newsletter is a regular communication between you and your subscribers. It is content that’s being sent out via e-mail. It may include links to your blog posts, to other content on the internet as well as other valuable information for the subscriber. And of course you will also include occasional promotions, information about workshops you’re running or other deals.
Your subscribers are your VIP crowd
People who are happy to receive your e-mails in their inbox are essentially telling you “I like your stuff that much, that I want to hear from you regularly, so I don’t miss a future article or promotion”. So you really need to treat them like VIP: acknowledge them, treat them special (special discounts, presents etc)
Can I send my blog posts as newsletters?
That’s another question that came up. Yes you can. Most Autoresponder services (I use Aweber) will let you send out your blog posts via e-mail broadcasts. Now I don’t recommend you send your list the whole blog post via e-mail. It’s too much text to read within the e-mail browser and your missing out on one of the main points of a newsletter: bring people back to your website. So if you decide to send your blog posts to your list I’d recommend you create a little intro or description and then a link to ‘read more’.
Now it’s your turn. What do you do in your business ?
Author's Bio
Sarah Santacroce is a certified social media, internet marketing, and virtual event specialist. She enjoys every aspect of small business marketing. It is her mission to help other small businesses and solopreneurs increase their visibility and use social media tools as part of their marketing strategy.
Sarah draws on 12 years of experience in Business Administration, in fields ranging from Employee Training to Public Relations at big and small companies. She became interested in Online Marketing and Social Media to promote her own business and after lots of research and numerous classes and webinars she is now offering that knowledge to other small- to mid-sized businesses who struggle to find their place on the web.
This article is the second in a series of regular contributions that Sarah will be making to her guest blog on knowitall.ch. You can see more articles from Sarah on her own website at: www.simplicityadmins.ch
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