Use A Blog As A Newsletter Discussions Forum V2.0

February 25, 2010

I specifically wrote this post for a man named Sam. Sam is a sales and marketing professional that provides group sales training seminars. His website was in dire need of a redesign and or some SEO. Sam was great at in person selling but could not get his arms around internet selling. He is very active with newsletter marketing but this approach was eating up huge volumes of time.

The problem with newsletters is that they can generate a whole bunch of email responses. Many of them tend to ask the same or similar questions. After a while this can become very difficult to manage. My suggestion to him was that he add a blog on his website where he could post his newsletter. This way he could more easily manage the conversations about his articles. This I thought offered him a wonderful solution to his problem. But Sam needed to be sold and I am not that kind of person.

I am more interested in articulating the advantages and letting the client eventually come to a buying decision themselves. I don’t like a hard sell and  will not do this to others. I specifically wrote this article for him. He never did become a client. Oh, well!

Here is the original post from fall 2008.

Today we are going to take a look at using a blog on a business website. A blog is simply an online conversation. It is another channel that can be used to communicate with customers or potential customers.

First we want to suggest that if you are going to create a business blog that it be hosted on your website and not somewhere else. You never want to direct traffic away from your website to a blog hosted elsewhere. There is almost no advantage to a blog that is not on your businesses website.

Many websites include a sign-up form for their newsletter, as part of the design process, which they periodically send out in an email form. This is a very common practice used by coaches, trainers and consultants. The newsletter gets sent out and then the responses begin to trickle in one email at a time. If the newsletter is especially good, interesting or provocative it can generate a fair amount of emails.

The end result is that a collection of separate conversations begins to occur on the same topic but they are not connected to each other. The newsletter owner can end up answering the same or similar questions over and over again.

Our advice is to post your newsletter on your blog and then send it out and include a link or links to your blog. Then ask that the conversation be moved to the blog. One of the advantages of having a blog in combination with a newsletter is that it allows you to address the questions generated by the newsletter quickly. It eliminates answering the same question over and over. It can also stimulate an ongoing discussion between those who have read the newsletter. It can create its own little community interacting on your blog.

This format allows you to expand on your original newsletter concept in more detail. Most newsletters cover multiple topics and each can be given its own blog post and conversation. This process can breathe new life into your newsletter and create a much more powerful marketing tool.

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