Personal Blog or Newsletter? Which Should You Use as a Budding Writer

How will you reach your audience

Writing is hard. Making a career from words is even harder.

But in the long run, you get to appreciate the long hours you invest in yourself once the money starts rolling in. Once your stats page on Medium begins having more views and your work pays, it makes sense in retrospect.

However, we often need to think about life after Medium. How else can you monetize your impeccable writing and research skills?

By reaching more audiences.

How?

That’s where a dilemma comes in. You have to determine whether to choose your own blog or create a newsletter.

What do you really need?

Enter two college friends—Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief.

They had been developing a college project that would help their friends read more interesting business news and updates. Studying Finance in College, they had the perfect idea.

In a span of 5 years, their college project had grown into Morning Brew, a multi-million dollar company that generated $50 million in 2021.

But why do you need to know about this company?

Because it started as a newsletter meant for college students that informed them about business news and updates. Today, it has grown to more than 4 million subscribers and has more than 60 employees. What’s more, it is a successful money-making machine

Transforming your newsletter into a money-making machine is an amazing feat. Everyone would love to do it when provided with an opportunity, despite the slim chance of replicating such success.

So, as you sit behind your desk, you may need to think about the decision of whether to go for a blog or create a newsletter. Both have their perks as well as their downsides.

Personal blogs

With a personal blog, you have an opportunity to monetize using more ways including affiliate marketing, ads, and selling products alongside your services. A personal blog is also accessible to everyone across the world. Your content can be reached and you can easily develop authority in the world.

However, the downside with a personal blog is generating traffic especially for a new blog. SEO ranking and keywords search takes time and with the high competition in the blog space, you will need patience before you can get it to be monetized.

Newsletters

Newsletters are a different kettle of fish.

Existing platforms such as Substack, Beehiiv, and Covertkit help you get started.

Unlike personal blogs, you are writing to an audience that already knows you. That said, they have a higher level of engagement and help you curate your content. You also have more control over your audience and subscriber list and can take it to other platforms.

The juicy part is that newsletters are easily monetized through subscription fees for content.

Bryon Mayer simulated the implied earnings from popular Substack newsletters in February this year.

From the list by Bryon, some Substack newsletters make quite a huge sum of money—up to $5,000,000 per year for the Letters from an American.

So, newsletters can help you get monetized more quickly as you reach your audience. What’s more, with highly engaged audiences, you can partner with sponsors and introduce affiliate marketing.

The downside with newsletters is that, you have to work with the format of content provided by the platforms. Similarly, it can be challenging to build audiences.

Hence, at the end of each article on Medium, you will always find those words inviting you to join their newsletter.

I also add them to my articles. I write about productivity in my newsletter and welcome you as well.

Join 350+ others and learn more about actionable productivity tips.