To Blog Or To Newsletter, That Is The Question

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With the sudden growth of audiences for newsletter writers on sub stacks as they start to use Notes so the question emerges on whether to dump blogging, for news lettering. In theory by news lettering on Substack we grow an audience that is pre-packaged and ready to go.

The drawback is that there are two types of content makers. Those that want their readers to read everything they write, and to pay them for the obligation to read what they write and the bloggers.

The point of blogging is never to get millions of views, or even thousands. The idea of blogging is to share ideas, adventures and thoughts on products, books and more. The idea of blogging is of writing about something that no may not be read for weeks, months or even years. The idea is to allow people to find what they were looking for organically, through search, discussion, or simple browsing.

The problem with newsletters, and email based articles, is that we have to “read” the message but instead we skim. We don’t read e-mails when they arrive, we read skim them, or just mark them as read, to make them vanish. I don’t like newsletters because they become backlogged in our mailboxes. They stagnate for days, weeks or even months, and they’re a ToDo because they’re marked as unread.

The beauty of blogs is that you visit the blog, you find the headlines that interest you, and then you read. There is no To Do. There is no expectation.

At the moment my blog is especially “noisy” because I am trying to write every single day, so there is a lot of worthless writing. If we were in normal times then I would be blogging about rock climbing, via ferrata, hiking and cycling. Instead I am writing about hiking in circles, random ideas, and cycling. In normal times my blog isin a focused niche.

Aside from anything else I feel that by using Substack rather than WordPress or other blogging platforms, we are making more money for someone else, than we are making for ourselves. People develop a platform, get people to engage and then say “look at us, we helped writers make millions”.

with Substack, Twitter, and other platforms we are creating content that someone else is monetising. Although we might get a percentage they benefit more than we do.

I write for pleasure, and for experience. I like to browse.

And finally

I could continue writing about this for hours but at the end of the day it boils down to something very simple. There are two types of content makers. Those that want to be industrially farmed like chickens and cattle, in industrial farms like Substack, YouTube and others, and free range bloggers, who like to be “outdoors, scratching a living, digging niches(nid-de-poules) and resting under trees.
Are you a free range blogger, or an industrially farmed blogger?”