Starting a blog or ezine to market your micro-entrepreneurial business is a great idea, but consider the consequences first. Blogs and ezines are ongoing business marketing efforts, so you should think about the time and effort you’ll need to make in order to make either successful, before you plunge in.
A blog is a site that acts like an online journal with the writer’s comments, views, and other content and an ezine is an online newsletter. You need to commit to growing them for opportunities to sell more products and services before you start a blog or an ezine.
Blogs and ezines are both forms of content sharing, which means you regularly offer content to your audience to keep them coming back (and hopefully grow your audience too). However, the main difference between the two is that a blog is basically stationary — people visit it at that fixed Internet location. The ezine is an opposite delivery method — the content visits the subscriber at his or her email address.
Sometimes the line between a blog and ezine gets blurred because many folks put their ezine content on their blog (or website) and simply send an email telling folks that their current issue is ready to read. The email has an active link that the subscriber just clicks, whisking them away to the blog. Here are more differences:
Blog: Many blog hosts give you the ability to have subscribers. In other words, the blog has a subscription vehicle (maybe a button that says “subscribe to my blog now”), and the subscriber is automatically alerted when there is a new post at the blog.
Ezine: Many ezine subscribers prefer that the content is actually sent as an email message so that the subscriber can simply and quickly read the issue or message right there in the inbox.
Many ezines like to take a middle course. They directly send an abbreviated version of the content to the subscriber’s email inbox but include a link back to the blog or website where the subscriber can see the full content (“click here to read the full article”).
To determine whether to do a blog or ezine, choose by doing a two-step approach”
Analyze your personal needs and decide what you actually want to do.
If an important part of your marketing strategy is developing a list of prospects, then go the ezine route. If an important part of your strategy is more ad revenue (like AdSense), then go the blog route.
Research what others are doing in your niche.
Regularly visit your competitors’ blogs and sign up for your competitors’ ezines. Analyze what they do in terms of content and marketing. Sooner or later, you’ll see the benefits and choose your path.