Why Your Newsletter Content Should Never Come From Your Blog
Dawud Miracle recently wrote a post about why your newsletter content should come from your blog.
I disagree with this idea quite strongly.
This is because it fails to separate two important processes that your business needs to execute as efficiently as possible:
1. Generate leads
2. Sell to those leads
A BLOG is 100% permission based. The only way you get visitors to it is by being relevant, useful, and interesting. To do this well, you have to give away a lot of value.
It’s the pollen you use to attract the bee’s who want to make honey with it.
A NEWSLETTER is far LESS permission based. Sure, the person has to sign up initially, but once signed up, you have direct access to send whatever you want to their inbox.
The newsletter is the bee farmer who extracts the honey from the bee’s.
In other words, the blog is a permission based traffic and lead generation tool - and a newsletter is a sales tool.
If you’re trying to use your sales tool to stimulate discussion on your blog, you’re being very inefficient in both attracting traffic and discussion, and you’re not maximizing revenue, because you’re using access to people’s inbox’s for reasons other than selling to them.
I disagreed with Seth Godin over one of his points about RSS and Email recently, which will further increase your understanding of this topic: R.S.S. And Email: The How, The When, The Why
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September 7th, 2007 at 3:15 am
SBJ, What’s wrong with giving away information? I give everything I can to clients and prospects alike (albeit more to clients) and my business is thriving. I find that since I’m not concerned about what I give away free, my prospects relax and we can have a real conversation around what their business needs are. Usually by the time we’re done speaking, they’ve already made up their mind. How much I’m going to charge them becomes a an afterthought.
And for those who don’t hire me, I’ve often made such an impression by spending my time and knowledge on them that they tell others. Which leads to more business. I’ve been doing business this way for years. And all I get are clients and prospects who get more than they expect - which leads to fans who want to talk about what I do.
September 7th, 2007 at 4:05 am
Thanks for your thoughtful comment Dawud.
I don’t disagree with giving away information at all.
However, I think it’s important to structure strategy in a way that maximizes the return on the time/energy/money you spend on creating content and giving it away.
I’m sure that for you, and others, using a newsletter to get blog traffic works to some degree.
However, I operate in hyper competitive markets (using an initial 3 product structure - free first, 100% affiliate second, first monetized third) in which you cannot get away without cutting the fat out of your marketing process.
[This blog is about advanced risk management business structures - as such, it is part of my goal to make people aware of proper campaign structure - and to think like the people who are making 7 figures or more running a scalable online business.]
February 14th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Hi SBJ,
Nice post. I have a question:
Currently I use Aweber for delivering RSS Feed Broadcasts. Here is how it goes:
1. I have a regular weekly ezine. People will need to subscribe to my list to get the ezine.
You maybe aware of the fact the AWeber also allows email delivery of RSS Feeds (just like Feedburner email subscription but a lot better). Now, I have tied the RSS feed of my blog to my ezine list, so people who subscribe to my ezine by email also receive the blog broadacsts by email. My ezine’s article is exclusive and not published on my blog; people will HAVE to subcribe to my list to get the weekly ezine.
So, in a way, my subscribers don’t receive ezine issues through blog.
Question: is this the right approach for me, or should I separate the two (viz. blog subscription and ezine)? I am in the internet marketing niche.
Arindam