Why Use an Email Newsletter and a Blog?
We use both a newsletter and a blog. Each one is used to communicate to our clients and people who wish to stay in touch with us. You may want to use just one or both.
The rest of this post explains why we do what we do and what you should think about when deciding which system to use.
Our newsletter is a larger document made up of information from the blog and news about client services. It’s published once per month. Currently, we’re mailing it via USPS and e-mail.
The blog is designed to provide more information to our readers on specific topics. For instance, our post on Transferring Audio and Video to WebMedley includes detailed information on how to set-up FTP to transfer media. We would not put this in a newsletter.
The WebMedley blog is also a way to stay in touch with us within 24 hours of any post. Some people subscribe to the blog via e-mail. They get a message each time the blog is updated. This can be very handy for breaking news or other updates.
Which system should you offer? In our opinion, the answer involves knowing your audience (as put to the audience last month by Nick Huhn).
Since we just launched the blog, we don’t have a great deal of people who have subscribed to it. We also know that a lot of people like the “once a month” frequency of the newsletter. So, we’re going to publish both of them.
A newsletter is generally more involved than a blog post. People expect newsletters to be a bit fancier (wording, graphics, etc). My blog posts are written in a “near stream of consciousness” and have a tone like I would have if we were to talk on the phone with one another.
Should you make the content available on your web site? Absolutely. By its nature, blog content is posted on the web. I believe you should also list your newsletter content on your web site. The newsletter may contain articles absent from the blog.
Make sure people can subscribe to the blog and newsletter via e-mail. It’s very easy to do this using a service like WebMedley and/or FeedBurner. No cost to FeedBurner.
You can also link your blog posts to various social media services. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have blog widgets. You can take your blog feed URL (ours is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Webmedley) and link them to these services. This allows people to see your content no matter their preferred service.
If you have other ideas, please list them in the Comments for this blog post.
