Does your business need a blog?

Hands up if you have a blog that you haven’t updated in ages. Yup, that used to be me too.

Or, maybe you feel like you should have a blog, but you just haven’t gotten around to it.

Or maybe you’re just confused about the difference between your blog and your newsletter and wonder, Do I need a blog at all?

In this post, I’ll answer the question that many clients ask me, “Do I need a blog?”. I explain the role a blog can play in your marketing, easy ways to stay on top of a blog and how I make it work for me.

Blog vs Newsletter

Your blog and your newsletter do different things in your marketing ecosystem. Yes, they’re both (usually) written forms of marketing, but what they do and can do for your business differs.

A newsletter:

• requires explicit sign-up which means the readers of your newsletter are ‘closer’ to you and to your business. They’ve moved beyond the ‘discovery’-phase and are now getting to know you. Your newsletter is a way in which they might even become your fans.
• is generally hard to discover on its own. While you’ll have a sign-up page, readers need to subscribe in order to read your newsletter.
• gives you direct access to your readers, making it easier to share about your business.

A blog:

• does not require sign-up and as such less commitment from readers. They tend to stay in the ‘getting to know you’-phase, if they move beyond ‘discovery’ at all.
• can be linked to, pinned to Pinterest and used for SEO.
• gives you little to no information about who reads your posts, and as such gives you less direct access to the readers.

If we think of marketing in terms of stages, from ‘discovery’ via ‘getting to know you’ to ‘becoming your fans’, a blog lives much more in the ‘discovery’ and ‘getting to know you’ stage. Your newsletter gives your readers more direct access to you—allowing them to become fans—and gives you more direct and targeted access to them.

The biggest reason why I have a blog is that it very easily taps into two of my favourite marketing channels: SEO and Pinterest. I love both for requiring so little attention from me. Once they’re uploaded, the blog posts and pins just tick along in the background, acquiring new readers through search engines and Pinterest.

A quick look at my website stats shows me that over the past 30 days, my most popular blogpost had 1367 visitors.

Of the 1900 visitors to my website during that period, 1328 landed on my website through search engines (and thus, SEO), 293 through Pinterest and the rest through a combination of other sources.

All of those visitors are people that potentially sign up to my newsletter or buy my services and products.

Hundreds of people are visiting my site every month, while I do absolutely nothing. That’s my favourite kind of marketing.

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There is no pressure. A blog needs to work for you first and foremost.

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Making a blog easy

If you have the time and energy to maintain it, a blog is absolutely worth it. While regularly updating your website helps with improving your SEO, even older blogposts can help draw people to your site— my number one blog post is a post from January 2023.

So how do you make maintaining your blog easy?

• Upload your newsletters to it. I started uploading my older newsletters to my blog a few years ago. Even now that my newsletter posts live on Substack and can be read here as well, I’m still doing it, to create blog content and more ways for people to find my work via SEO and Pinterest.

• Start a series on your blog. One of my favourite things from the earlier days of my business was an interview series I did with other small business owners in which I asked them how they run a slow, gentle and profitable business. This was a great way to create regular content, create connections and get in front of other people’s audiences.

• Use your blog for the ‘editors’ cut’ of your newsletter. If your newsletter is running too long but you still have more to say, consider adding a longer version to your blog—to which you can also refer in your newsletter.

• Add posts on niche topics, or posts that are more off the cuff. Two of my most popular blog posts are “Should you move your newsletter to Substack?”and “Substack 101”. I wrote both of them relatively off the cuff which makes it especially cool that they’re so popular. And, both of them are fairly specific. While I do write about Substack for small business in my newsletter, I don’t want to do that too often. A blog post is a great alternative.

Remember: as useful as a blog is, there is no pressure. As with anything in business, it needs to work for you. Take an approach of loose consistency, and be gentle.

Finally, if keeping on top of your blog takes too much of your time and energy, consider getting help. Since early 2023 I’ve been working with the lovely Laura McMahon, who uploads my newsletters to my blog once a month, and creates Pinterest pins for them.

So, do you need a blog?

It depends.

I always recommend clients that are just starting out to launch a newsletter. And mostly I recommend that they don’t overburden themselves. It can be so easy to feel like you need all the marketing channels and to end up completely overwhelmed.

If you’re starting out, or have limited time and energy, focus your marketing on the thing that will bring people closest to you, which is most likely your newsletter.

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I’d love to know what resonates with you from this post.

Please feel free to share this post it with business friends, in your newsletter or elsewhere. 💛

I’d love to support you in all phases of your business. Providing clarity, focus and next steps is something that my clients tell me I’m really good at. If you’re curious about how we can work together through 1:1 mentoring, check out what I offer or send me an email–no strings attached. I have payment plans available, and flexible options for mentoring calls.

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