A small business can decide, on a slow Tuesday, to start writing, and be sorry by the second month when the first post is still the only post. I have worked this question through myself, and I should say up front that I publish blogs, so I am the wrong person to ask whether you need one. The people who wrote the guides below have their own angles too, and I have tried to say which is which.

Blog vs. Email Newsletter: Which One Is Better?, Robyn Bradley on YouTube

Two sources carry most of what follows: Constant Contact’s article Newsletter vs. Blog: Is One Better than the Other? and a short piece from For Dummies, Choose a Blog, Ezine or Both for Your Micro-Entrepreneurial Business. The first is published by a company in the email business, which has an obvious reason to be fond of newsletters. Keep that in mind when it tells you what newsletters are good for.

What each one does

Stack of folded paper handouts beside a register on a shop counter

A blog waits to be found, a newsletter goes to the people who asked

Constant Contact draws the line cleanly. A blog is written to educate or entertain an audience that may or may not know your business yet. Readers tend to arrive through search or social media, and the article is careful to say that blog visitors are not a list you directly own. Blogs are built to be found by search engines, which is why keywords matter to them.

A newsletter points the other way. The same article describes it as aimed inward, at current customers and prospects, and says it deepens loyalty by giving you direct access to the people on your mailing list. It is not built for search. It arrives in an inbox, though it can also be posted on a web page.

The Dummies article states the difference in terms of place: a blog is a fixed destination that readers visit online, and an ezine, its word for a newsletter, reaches subscribers directly in their email inboxes. Many blog hosts offer subscriptions that alert readers when a new post goes up, and many subscribers prefer to read a full issue right in the inbox.

The ownership point deserves a second look. If visitors reach a blog through a search engine or a social site, the shop does not control that road. A change in how the search engine ranks pages, or a change in how the social site shows posts, can thin the traffic without a word to anyone. A mailing list does not have that weakness, because the addresses sit in your own file. Against that, the list only grows if people have a reason to sign up, and a stranger finds a reason on a page they reached through search. The two formats lean on each other more than the comparison suggests.

So the first question is about the reader and not about you. Do you want to reach people who have never heard of you, or keep in touch with people who already have?

The work each one asks for

A blog’s cost is regularity, and a newsletter’s cost is a promise

Constant Contact describes a blog as long-form writing that needs research and regular publishing, and advises aiming for weekly posts, at least. A newsletter, by its account, is built from shorter pieces and takes a monthly or quarterly commitment, though it adds that a quality newsletter still takes time and strategy.

Read those two together and notice the trade. The blog asks for more often and longer. The newsletter asks for less often and shorter, but it also puts a date on the calendar and every subscriber knows when it is due. A blog that goes quiet for a month looks like a blog that went quiet. A newsletter that skips an issue has broken something it told people to expect.

The Dummies article opens on the same warning. It calls blogs and ezines “ongoing business marketing efforts,” so the first thing to weigh is the time and effort of sustaining one. That is a sentence about starting that is really about stopping.

Think of a kitchen. A specials board that is wrong or a day old does more damage than no board at all, because it tells the customer you stopped looking. A content habit works the same way, and the question to ask before building one is whether someone in the business will still be doing it in the slow season.

Goals decide it

Laptop on a workbench among hand tools where a maker writes

The Dummies article ties the choice to what you want out of it

The For Dummies piece gives two steps. The first is to clarify your goals. If building a list of prospects is central to your marketing, it says, lean toward an ezine. If earning advertising revenue is the priority, it names AdSense as the example, lean toward a blog. The pairing makes sense on its face: a list you own is the asset of a newsletter, and a page that attracts visitors from search is the asset of a blog.

The second step is research. Read competitors’ blogs, subscribe to their newsletters, and study what they publish and how they market. The article suggests the right path will become clear over time. It is a modest instruction and nearly the only honest one: you learn what works in your trade by watching the people already doing it, and you learn what you are able to keep up by doing it for a while.

I would add the question the sources leave unasked, which is who is going to write it. A restaurant, a leather shop and a landscaper each have people who know the subject cold and almost no time. If the person who knows the trade is the same person who closes the shop, the format has to fit around that person’s evenings.

Using both

The newsletter points to the blog, and the blog feeds the newsletter

Neither source treats this as an either-or. Constant Contact suggests using a newsletter to link to blog posts, so each format supports the other. Dummies describes creators who email a shortened version of their content and link to the full piece on their site with a call to action such as “click here to read the full article.”

That arrangement has a practical advantage. One piece of writing does two jobs. The blog post sits on the site and can be found through search, and the same post, trimmed, goes to the people who asked to hear from you. It also has a cost, which is that you are now committed to both schedules, and the guide that recommends it also warns, correctly, that both take work.

If you are going to do both, start with the one that matches your first goal and add the second only when the first has a rhythm. A blog with a month of posts behind it can supply the material for a first newsletter. A newsletter with a list of a few dozen readers can tell you which topics deserve a full post.

Neither is a real answer

Hand holding chalk in front of an empty specials board

A well-kept website can do the job

The sources are written by and for people who like content, and neither of them considers the option of writing neither. That option deserves more respect than it gets. A business that is open six days a week, answers its phone and keeps its site accurate is already communicating, and the site itself, with its hours, menu, products and contact details, does a good deal of the work a blog would do.

The Heritage Diner’s website, for instance, has images, videos, daily specials, phone numbers, links and menu items. That is a working site, and most of what a customer needs is on it before any blog is written. Whether a blog would add anything is a fair question, and the honest answer depends on what the site is for.

A practical way to settle it is to write a stop condition before you start. Decide how many posts or issues you will publish, over what stretch of weeks, and what you will count at the end, whether that is replies, orders mentioning it or simply whether you kept going. If the count comes up empty, you have your answer for the price of a few evenings. If you cannot think of anything you would count, that is an answer too.

Choose neither if you cannot name a reader you are trying to reach, if you cannot name the person who will write, or if the thing you would write about is already on your pages. Choose a blog if you want to be found by people who have never heard of you, and you can publish regularly for a year. Choose a newsletter if you already have customers who would open it, and you can send it on the schedule you promise.

I taught an introductory information systems course at Queensborough Community College in 2008 and 2009, with a direction I chose, new media in small business, and the question underneath that direction has not changed since. It was never really which tool to use. It was who has the time.

For informational purposes only. Marketing outcomes vary and nothing here promises results; consult a licensed attorney about email marketing consent rules before you collect addresses or send a newsletter.

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