Colleen Wainright over at the very successful Marketing Mix blog was talking about her resistance to starting a newsletter.
This sparked me, because I’m in the exact oppostive place. I’ve been very successful with my newsletter for some years now, publishing every Wednesday for the last two, with great response and impact for the articles, as well as it being very helpful for my business.
Yet, I’ve been very, very reluctant to blog. At first I was just downright ‘fuhgeddaboutit’- I had too much else going on. Then, I wasn’t convinced it was useful, business-wise. And it seemed like a time-drain. Yadda yadda.
I’ve explained how Dawud Miracle finally turned me around about blogging.
Now, I think it would be useful to talk about what a newsletter does, why it’s there, and why it’s important to your business, and to your customers.
In my limited exposure to blogging, the strong impression that I come away with is that blogging is an interactive medium. Even if the vast majority of readers never comment, there is an intimacy and immediacy to the writing that invites the possibility of conversation, even if an individual chooses not to respond.
I blogged earlier about LA columnist Joel Stein’s comment about “false, easy community”.
Intimacy is scary to most of us, most of the time. Showing up, being known, making connections with others. We thirst for it, and yet it’s easy to avoid.
Your customers, because they need help for a problem they are facing, already feel vulnerable, and perhaps a little helpless. Overwhelmed. Not exactly the best state of heart for connecting with a stranger.
The immediate, intimate, conversational tone of a blog can actually be intimidating to some. Your potential clients may not want that much intimacy, that quickly.
Your newsletter, on the other hand, is clearly a one-way giving. You can invite comments, but it’s like reading a magazine. As a reader get to curl up with it, read an article, and practice applying it in your business or life without needing to do it in public, without needing to show up anyway except in your own life.
I wrote this article on the topic of Why and How to Create Information Products which actually hits this same issue about newsletters dead-on.
Unfortunately, many bloggers, and many people in general, bring a sense of conversation to their newsletters which can be nice for the readers, but avoid the generous nature of the ‘information product’ approach.
Those of you that do want to be in the conversation- what are you impressions of newsletters? How do you see the difference? What insights have you had either as a writer of newsletters, or as a reader?
