Newsletters Are Not The New Blogs
Newsletters are new.
Newsletters are old.
They are definitely not the new version of the blog.
Yes, everyone seems to have a newsletter now. Cut to 3 years from now and this will be truer.
A newsletter doesn't have to be a blog.
The newsletters I love the most are useful.
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Insanely useful.
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Directly useful.
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Useful today
My Most Useful Newsletters
- Flow State: Music to work to, this morning.
- Scott's Cheap Flights: Flights I can buy, today.
- HARO: Journalists I can respond to, now.
Useful = Profitable
Make a useful newsletter, and you'll be able to build a business.
Make a useful newsletter, and it's easy to build an audience.
Make a useful newsletter, and you'll be successful.
Make a useful newsletter, and you can run ads. or sell your own products. Your readers will love you the same.
I made BetterSheets into a newsletter: you can get a free useful google sheets tip 5 days a week. Every single edition is an ad. It's an ad to buy the lifetime access to deeper, longer, more useful videos.
But at the beginning of each day, you get the free tip. You get a little better at google sheets every single day. The ads are at the end. I give you the tip up front. I show you the tip in a free video many times. Or a screenshot.
It's useful because we all use google sheets. Now use Better sheets.
Agreed. Blogs were used mostly to drive traffic, newsletters are used to drive engagement and buying behaviour.
And they can all exist in harmony :)
I think a useful analogy to draw might be:
The shelf-life of your median newsletter is going to be much smaller than, say, a blog or essay or info-product, which is the price you (as the writer) pay for immediate consumption. It also means that you can be a little more cavalier with how you prepare newsletters — they can be shorter, less polished, more experimental.
How useful is that analogy? In what ways are you using it?
TV was Radio on TV for 20 years. Internet was TV on the Internet for 20 years.
It takes a lot of time to innovate. and I think we're just now seeing newsletters break out of the "it's a blog... delivered"
Most of the best Newsletters are longer, more polished, less experimental
Stratechery, Sinocism and new entrants see that: http://trends.vc/
I find Maker Mind from @anthilemoon to also not be short nor un-polished, nor experimental. it's useful.
So are Podcasts the new Blogs? haha jk (kinda)
I completely agree with the points you make. I think the growing popularity of newsletters is likely due to the fact that people initially used the internet to go out and search for information. As technology advances, this has shifted to information we care about being delivered to us in a timely manner.
I was telling a friend the other day that I no longer find myself visiting news websites throughout the day, and instead wait for my daily newsletters to be delivered around the topics I care more deeply about. It's interesting to think that newspapers could be taking better advantage of this personalized newsletter trend.
I find myself too, wading through email often. But it depends on energy right? If I have the energy to go search for current news, I can. if I don't have the energy. I can wait for the newsletters to arrive and carry on with my day.
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