How Your Blog and Your Ezine Work Together to Build Your Health Coaching Business

I often get asked what the difference is between a blog and ezine. They’re both communication and marketing tools, they can and should work together, but ultimately, they are very different things.

Without getting too technical, I’d like to help clear up the difference between blogs and ezines (also known as newsletters) and explain how you can use both to grow your health coaching business and attract new clients and followers.

Your blog and ezine have one big thing in common: they are both tools that help get your message out into the world. They are both excellent ways to express your viewpoint, share your expertise, tell success stories, make recommendations, review products, share recipes and create ways for your tribe to interact with you.

How that’s done is a bit different for each system, however.

Your Blog

Your blog should be part of your business website, and not a separate stand-alone blog, to be most effective. WordPress is an excellent platform for a perfectly integrated health coaching business blog and website.

The blog is designed to be the most dynamic part of your business’ website, where you post regularly and update your site. The rest of your website, such as the Home, About, Services, pages are designed to be mostly static. They’re not meant to be changed often, only as needed as your business evolves and grows.

Use your blog instead to share your ideas, your expertise, your upcoming events, your book recommendations, your recipes, and anything else your ideal client would find relevant. As you post articles, audios or videos to your blog, you increase potential traffic to your site by organically adding new keywords and improving SEO.

Further, every time you create new content your confidence grows. You grow clearer about your brand’s message, you find your unique voice, you gain new perspective, come up with new ideas and energetically grow increasingly more attractive to your potential clients.

That said, not everyone who visits your website will be the ideal client and not every ideal client is going to spend time revisiting your blog on a regular basis. That’s where “lead capture” comes in. An effective website makes it easy for the ideal potential client or referral partner to contact you and stay in touch. I recommend offering an attractive and highly relevant free gift incentive in exchange for an email address.

Using an email marketing service (see below) you will create a list optin box on your website to integrate the two systems together. You will use your website and blog to grow your ezine list. In addition to a prominent optin box visible from every page, you might invite the reader to get your free gift at the end of each blog post.

Your Ezine

Your ezine, or newsletter, is the product of an email marketing system, such as AWeber, Get Response, MailChimp, etc. Subscribers are added to your email marketing list through a variety of avenues and you then send emails (your ezine) to all of them at once.

Some ways you can build your ezine list include adding an optin box to your website, offering your free gift with a sign up sheet at live speaking events, by integrating your optin box with your social media accounts and with a link at the bottom of your personal emails.

The power of email marketing is the direct line of communication between you and your reader’s email inbox. Some marketers will tell you email is old-fashioned, and becoming irrelevant. I don’t see that happening just yet though. I’ve read and responded to a dozen client emails today, as I do everyday. I have a website, a blog, a Facebook business page, a Twitter account and other social media profiles, and email is absolutely the #1 way my clients, both current and potential, communicate with me, and I with them.

That’s not to say those other communication platforms aren’t an important part of your overall marketing strategy, but I find for my clients and my business, email marketing still delivers the most return on investment, ie, the biggest bang for your buck. This is because everyone you’re communicating with through your ezines has opted in, or chosen, to be on your list. They get your ezines because they asked for them, they are interested in you, your business and your message. Your list is your very best source of new clients or customers for your health coaching business.

I recommend sending an ezine to your list at least twice per month. If you’re just starting, get in the habit of sending it once per month and build up to twice per month. When you write infrequently, your readers tend to forget who you are and may be irritated by your sudden email out of the blue. Write consistently and you’re in relationship with these people, they look forward to your emails and are more likely to respond.

Integrating Your Blog and Ezine

Done right, both your blog and ezine become essential and consistent parts of your marketing strategy. With good habits, they will become easier to maintain and you will reap the rewards as you watch your health coaching business grow.

Creating new content for your blog on a regular basis becomes the material you’ll use in your ezine. At least once per month (twice ideally) you’ll write or record something new and publish it to your blog. Then you’ll create a new ezine to your subscriber list. You can copy and paste the beginning part of your blog post (just 2-3 paragraphs or so) into the new ezine and then add a link back to the blog post. The link could say “Click here to continue reading” or even better, make it interesting by referring back to the title of the post, for example “Keep reading to get my best 5 Tips for Better Sleep”.

Those clicks back to your website have a few benefits. For one, the more visits your website gets, the better it will rank in search results which will lead to more traffic for your website. The more often your readers visit your website, the more it will be in the front of their mind when a friend asks for a recommendation for services like yours. Finally, when your reader is on your site, they may read another blog post, check out your About page, review your services and possibly schedule that Breakthrough Session. You want your tribe to spend time on your website so they grow to know, like and trust you and want to work with you.

You can see that both the blog and ezine serve different purposes. They reach your potential clients in different ways: the blog more generally, to anyone in the world whether they are the right fit or not, and the ezine in a very specific targeted way straight into the inbox of interested readers. And the blog helps to build that list of interested readers, ie, potential clients.

There’s a lot more fancy tech you can use as part of your business’ marketing strategy, but most of it isn’t necessary. Especially if you get into good content-creating and content-sharing habits. You can build a successful business with just these two essential blog and ezine tools.

If you’re ready to get serious about your health coaching business and want expert support to get online in a professional way, I can help! Start with an Awesome Business Breakthrough Session so I can get to know you, your business and your vision and recommend the best action plan for you. You don’t have to figure out all the tech stuff yourself, and it’s time to stop letting it hold you back from taking things to the next level in your business. Use coupon code HCW20 for a discount!