Should I Have a Newsletter, a Blog or Both?

March 17, 2009 by yelena
Filed under Burning Questions, blog

Q: I am a solopreneur. I already spend a lot of time writing for my blog. Now I’m thinking about starting a newsletter, but I really don’t have much time left for content writing. Can I just copy and paste my blog posts into the newsletter?

A: The good news is if you are using e-mail management services such as AWeber or ConstantContact, you won’t even need to copy and paste your blog content. Instead, you can create what’s called a blog broadcast so every time a certain number of new posts is published to your blog, your subscribers get a blog update newsletter.

But blog broadcast is not a newsletter. If all you plan on doing is to send your subscribers your blog updates, you’re running the risk of disappointing and turning off some of them. There are other time-saving strategies that would allow solopreneurs to maintain both a blog and a newsletter:

Maintain the same theme – create a content calendar with a theme for each month. Base all the blog posts for each month and newsletter’s feature article on the current month’s theme.
Expand and Elaborate – blog posts are usually short. Instead of just copying and pasting them into newsletter, a good post can be re-written and expanded with more detailed explanations, step-by-step instructions, links to resources, etc.
Combine and Compress – take several longer posts and combine them into one short newsletter item. Instead of elaborating, compress your blog advise into a series of one-line “memory joggers”.
Review and Compare – example: if you blogged about getting taxes done on time, provide a review of a couple of tax prep tools or provide pros and cons of using tax prep software and tax accountants.
Answer Questions – blog subsribers might not be tracking comments RSS. If your blog attracted interesting comments, sparked a debate, or raised questions, use all this content to write a Q&A-based article for a newsletter.
Use Ezine Content - You can publish articles from EzineArticles.com and similar sites in your newsletter for free as long as you don’t make any changes to the content and keep the byline intact.

For more helpful tips on putting together a newsletter or ezine, check out this free online ezine course.

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