This one might be geared a little more toward writers, but I think anyone who needs to write a regular newsletter would get valuable tips from this book.

I picked this book up because I really wanted to learn how to do my newsletter better. I want to have an engaged audience, not just a whole bunch of emails where the owner, assuming they have actually given you a real address and not a spam account, actually opens them up and reads them rather than letting them go to die.

I know several people read my blog. I only hope that they enjoy it. I have to assume that you do, or you wouldn’t keep coming back. I appreciate that. It’s always been my hope that there will get to be more engagement here too. I keep shifting, trying things out, waiting.

I’m not a very patient person.

But I also want to do the same thing with my newsletter and I knew that would mean that I’d have to improve my skills. Since I just started writing a ninja series, this caught my eye. Yes, I wanted to be a newsletter ninja.

Now Tammi fully admits that she teaches classes on this and the introduction was done by one of her students who was in a very similar position to me. It was his introduction that spurred me to buy the book in fact. However, Tammi doesn’t use the book as a sales tool for her classes. She actually gives you all the tools you’ll need to build your newsletter on your own. She says at the end that she didn’t want it to be all sales-y and does say that if the reader wants more help, they can contact her. I appreciated her honesty about this whole subject and feel that she did a great job.

She had a large subject to tackle here and was trying to cover a huge scope. It made things occasionally feel a bit disjointed to me, but overall I felt she did really good touching all the bases. I did also jump forward at one point in the book because I needed to get some information quickly — I wanted to get a newsletter out to my current subscribers about the promotion I’m currently in and that you’ve seen the pictures for this week — but I haven’t been very good about consistency there. I wanted her tips on re-engagement. I hope I did well.

I had lots of work to do for the promotion and onboarding new subscribers for it. I was really glad that I had this book to lead the way for me. I’m proud of what I’ve built and I look forward to going forward with my newsletter next year.

As I said, this book is geared toward writers. Sometimes it really does help to have guidance that is centered around your industry just so that you can see the parallels and really grasp it. I’ve read a lot of articles about email newsletters, and I knew I should be doing things differently, but this helped me to figure out the path as a writer.

There’s also a lot of information about using the psychology of sales and other techniques to getting people to make the click and buy your product, whatever it is. Tammi’s approach is so different.

So now I’m looking forward to writing my newsletters this next year. It’s going to be a great new adventure. I’m glad I found a good map for it. Now watch me move stealthily along, like a ninja!

Do you have a newsletter? What are some things you do to engage your audience?