Just a Book with Ann Handley
Walker Sand’s third annual Just a Book Club for Marketers featured Ann Handley!
We read Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide for Creating Ridiculously Good Content the WSJ bestseller by Ann Handley, chief content officer at MarketingProfs. On Oct. 23, Ann joined us for a meet and greet and Q&A session with Chicago’s marketing community. Watch a video recap of the event below:
About the Book: Everybody Writes
From email copy to social media posts and the white papers, blog posts and landing pages in between, today’s digital age demands every marketer to be a writer. All eyes are on the interwebs, and the words we choose can make or break the messages we are want to convey.
Enter the much needed, fresh (and funny!) approach from Ann Handley in “Everybody Writes”. Through comprehensive breakdowns and her trusty list of grammar, syntax and style rules, Ann will help you break old habits and transform the way you approach and think about your own writing.
“Everybody Writes” is the smart marketer’s go-to guide for maintaining sincerity while communicating messaging that not only resonates, but makes sense to audiences.
About the Author: Ann Handley
Ann Handley professes how you can rethink the way your business markets. Forbes’ most influential woman in Social Media and one of ForbesWoman’s top 20 women bloggers, Ann Handley is the world’s first chief content officer of MarketingProfs, a training and education company with the largest community of marketers in its category. Her book, “Everybody Writes: Your Go-to Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content,” is a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
Ann is a former columnist for Entrepreneur magazine, a LinkedIn Influencer program member, and co-author of the best-selling book on content marketing, “Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business.” The book has been translated into many languages, including Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Portuguese and Czech. Ann has 415,000 Twitter followers and writes about content, marketing and life at AnnHandley.com.
A pioneer in the world of digital marketing, Ann is the co-founder of ClickZ.com, which was one of the first sources for interactive marketing news and commentary. She started her career as a business journalist and editor.
Ann is based in Boston, where she works from a tiny house in her backyard.
Related Resources
Just a Book, Part 1: Philosophy of Writing
Over the next month, we’ll take a closer look at Ann Handley’s bestseller, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide for Creating Ridiculously Good Content. For our first week, it’s only appropriate that we cover a few of the guiding principles Ann outlines in her book. Whether you want to call them rules, philosophies or something else entirely, read the blog post or watch the video for some of our favorite strategies that help lay the foundation for better content.
Related blog post: Philosophy of Writing
Just a Book, Part 2: Grammar Rules and Story Guidelines
Understanding grammar and word usage can be tricky for all writers, but it can be even more difficult for marketers, who often have a lot on their plates. With so much content to produce for complex and changing audiences, good writing can fall by the wayside. Fortunately, in “Everybody Writes,” Ann Handley gives us a much-needed refresher on the rules of writing — and when to break them.
Related blog post: Grammar Rules and Story Guidelines
Just a Book, Part 3: Publishing – It’s a Privilege
Every piece of great content deserves the right platform to host it, and an audience eager to read it. However, as content creators, we have to remember that every opportunity to publish is a privilege. And with that privilege comes an accountability to our audiences to produce content that is both accurate and honest. To help us navigate this responsibility, Ann offers a number of great strategies on publishing content that you can feel confident in.
Related blog post: Publishing – It’s a Privilege
Just a Book, Part 4: Write Like a Marketer
Now that we’ve covered everything from the philosophy of writing to grammar rules and publishing tips, it’s time to dig a little deeper on writing for social, web and email. Because while you may be a marketer by title, Ann helps us to figure out what it really means to write like one.
Related blog post: Write Like a Marketer