82. Newsletters for Writers with Tarzan Kay

Self-promotion and marketing are likely scary words for newer writers. This week, Email Marketing Expert, Tarzan Kay, breaks down how simple it is to start an email newsletter, and why it is the most valuable thing you can do for your future writing life. 

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Tarzan Kay specializes in writing emails that are fun to read and more addictive than whatever you just marathon-watched on Hulu. Her programs and DIY courses teach business owners how to write highly-addictive, story-driven emails that sell without using coercive sales tactics. She spent the last three years quietly dismantling her 7-figure boss-babe empire and building a more inclusive online business that prioritizes people over profits. She lives in Ontario, Canada with her two children and one canoe.

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Transcript

0:45

Welcome to the show. Don't Tell Writing Podcast with me, Suzy Vadori, where I peel back the layers of how to wow your readers with your fiction, your nonfiction. Anybody can bang out a first draft, but it takes a little more work to make your book as amazing as it can be. Join me as I share the step by step writing techniques you could apply to your writing right away. As I host successful writers who share a behind the scenes look at their own writing lives, and as I live coach writers on their pages giving practical writing examples that will make your own writing stronger. Nobody is born knowing how to write an engaging book. There are real and important skills that you need to learn on this show. I cut through the noise and get you all the info you need. I can't wait to see how this information is going to transform your writing. My guess is writer, that you did not sign up to be an author, just to run your own business.'cause most of us didn't. But when you put your book out into the world, one of the things you have to do is make sure that people can find it. And there's lots of ways to do that. The way that I've chosen to do that is through email marketing. Now, if you have already dismissed, you don't wanna do this or you are already trying to do it, this episode is for you to think about because. Even though there are lots and lots of ways, when I met Paren K back in 2020, everything shifted for me because she said something really thoughtful. And that was what if, instead of going out and creating content and sending out a newsletter or an email to your subscribers, advertising that or sending them to the thing, what if your newsletter was the thing and what if it was just so good that people wanted to read it? Now you're a writer, so this is something that you can do without having to dance on TikTok or be out there on social media. It's an alternative. What if you just tried to write. In this episode, Tarzan shares all kinds of background information and behind the scenes information about what goes on in people's inboxes and how it really feels to readers to get newsletters. It's just something to think about as you decide how to promote your own books. She also teaches something called consent based marketing, which is the real reason I was drawn to working with Tarzan. Consent based marketing is all about making sure that your readers want what it is that you're giving them. It's not about tricking them into buying something, it's about delivering something that's valuable that they love, that they want to interact with. In Tarzan's official bio, it says she teaches online business owners personal brands, which is you because you're a writer and copywriters how to write story-driven emails that generate consistent profit without resorting to coercive tactics, so you can sell in your emails without trying to trick people right and without feeling icky. She does this through group programs, do-it-yourself courses and one-on-one support designed to help businesses make informed choices about persuasion. Building consent into every promotion and writing profitable emails that subscribers genuinely enjoy reading. Marza is talking about email and consent in a way that no other marketer out there is doing today, and it's been my absolute joy and pleasure to work with her. I've taken courses from her. I'm in my second year of a mastermind where she is my mentor. I am also her book coach, and we are working on a book to bring consent based marketing out into the world. It has been my absolute honor and joy to meet Tarzan, to work with her and to be inspired by her each and every day. We even have a band that we sometimes perform at when we can, and last year we performed in Portugal this year we plan to sing a few songs together in Italy, and it should be amazing. Join us in this episode to talk about your newsletter, how you can start one if you don't have one, and what you might be able to do to make it feel a little bit easier, a little bit more consistent, and make readers fall in love with you and your books. Welcome to the show, Tarzan K. This one's been a long time coming. Thank you for being here. I can't wait to have this conversation. I've been waiting for like a year to be invited. No big deal. Here we are. You know what I, I think, um, sometimes we forget that the people closest to us are people that my listeners need to actually learn from. And I'm excited to introduce you to my audience because I have learned so, so much from you and I, you Suzy. Because the thing is, is I think so many people come to me and ask, how did you greet your audience? And the biggest thing for me has been my newsletter. And I didn't really understand that could be the thing I thought that was nurturing afterward. Not the thing that might attract people to me until I met Tarzan. So let's dive in. How did you first get going? Just a little bit of background here. How did you first get going with your newsletter strategy for your own business? Because it, it's kind of one of those things where you were like, I don't wanna do all the things and I like to write. So I started my business in 2016 and I took a business course. I took many business courses as you and I have both done to grow our businesses and we have so many. Every program said you need to build an email list. You need to build an email list. And I focused almost 100% on building an email list. And I'll say for your viewers, your listeners to know, I don't, I'm not great at social media. There've been years where I paid people to do it for me, but mostly I've just been like a dog on a bone. Building my email list. Someone told me it was gonna be important. It seemed believable. Here we are 10 years later and my newsletter is the centerpiece of every part of my business. It's how I introduce people to who I am, what I'm all about. Email marketing, the principles of consent based business, which we'll talk about. So it's how people come into my world. It's how they hear about my offers. It's where I do all of my selling. It's also how I onboard customers. It's how I get testimonials. It's just like really like the hub of everything else. So I, and when I started, I'm sure someone told me this, but I've repeated it over the years. Like I asked myself, how many subscribers do I need in order for it to feel like worth it? For me, that number was 37 subscribers and a lot of them were people that were blood relatives. You know, my mom and my sister who have long since unsubscribed, I think my mom is still a subscriber, but it's mostly people that are blood relative, is also a subscriber. She might be listening right now. Hey mom, right? Suzy's mom. Yeah, so I guess more importantly, I emailed my past clients, people who I had worked with, like going back, I didn't have that much history in my business, but enough people that I could, like anyone who I'd ever worked with, I sent an email and said, will you like join my email list? And I recommend this to people when there's just starting out. When we think about how to grow an email list, people automatically go to these like highly scaled strategies like, oh, I should start a podcast, or. I should like run Facebook ads or like la da da da da. So many things you could do. Like, yes, you should do those things. However, what you should do first is just like go around in your warm network. Anybody you have an interaction with that you're like talking about your book to like, Hey, can I add you to my email list? Like that's just. Becomes, I mean, I've been doing this for 10 years and now it just falls outta my mouth everywhere I go. So that's like something important to train yourself early on. It's just like everything goes back to your newsletter and I'm sure we're gonna get to this, but like your newsletter that is owned media and it's really important to know the difference between. The list that you own and the followers on all your other platforms, which are also valuable, but you don't get to take them with you. Like if you decide today that Instagram is like not your platform and you wanna do like TikTok or like, oh now like Threads is new and cool, I'm gonna try that. Like cool. But you're always starting over versus email. Like you might find a provider that you don't really love. You could like take your email list with you, try a different place to be writing your newsletter, but you're gonna be building that. For years to come. Does it, did that answer the question? Oh yeah. Absolutely. And I mean, it's similar to me. I had, as a writer, I had been collecting, I mean, also they told me long before I met you, somebody told me it was important to have my own email list. And so. Every, I used to do a ton of events and I would have this physical signup sheet. Yes, you ought to be on my email list. Yes. And people would say Yes. And I was awful at, and we're gonna get to this, but I was really awful at sending anything out. Like I would do it when I had a new book, maybe, Hey, come to the book launch. But that was it. And I had about 400 people, which I'm really proud of on this email list. And so when I launched this service for writers, they're not the same people. So I struggled with, okay, I, I actually, you know, I said this in the introduction, but I met Tarzan. I was like, all right, I can do this. I'm gonna follow this strategy. Finally, I found a strategy that's gonna work for me that doesn't feel icky, and we're gonna get to that as well. But I had this email list of 400 people that liked my books, but they weren't necessarily writers. And so. Following that strategy, I sent out two emails to them and said, Hey, I'm launching this new service. If you're interested in writing, hit reply or hit a button. I forget what I said. Now let me know and I'll keep you on the email list. And I ended up with 120 people. And so for me, that number of 37 was 120, but it started out with five, right? Mm-hmm. Like when I first started, you know when I added, my mom was probably one of the first people I added to my newsletter list. Mm-hmm. And I ker, and that's okay. So, so start small and then we're gonna get to this, but be consistent. Because when I had that list of 400, lots of them were like, what are you talking about? You know, they'd added their name five years prior and never heard from me again. Yeah. So that's not great. Yeah. How about we just start there? Because a lot of people, what you're talking about is so normal. People come into my programs all the time. Like probably it's the most common question is like, I have this email list from like two years ago that. I've never done anything with like, do I need to start over or can I just like bring them along with me? And there are lots. What Suzy just explained is an absolutely acceptable strategy. Like, yes, there's ways to bring people along with you. The thing is though, is wherever your career is gonna take you, like there's gonna be a thousand pivots and you're gonna be growing this newsletter. Some people will come along with you and some people won't. But don't let, like not knowing six, seven steps down the road, stop you from starting today. Because this is a like essential skill. If you want to have an audience, if you want to sell books, if you wanna have a business, whatever it is, like this newsletter piece is very foundational and regardless, it's gonna take some time. To find its feet for you to realize like what you like writing about, finding the balance between what you like to write about and what your audience likes to hear about, that's gonna take time. I remember in something someone said in my first year in business, this was like when blogs were still a thing, and she said it was Danielle Still's, something in the writing world, by the way. Okay, cool, cool. Yeah. Yeah. So this person said, you know, just start your blog. Just start today and give it six months. To take shape and I thought that was just such good advice and is also applicable to your newsletter. Like just start those subscribers that you're hand signing up like in, you know, where you're doing a reading or you're in like a writer's group or what, wherever you are asking people to sign up to your newsletter, it's gonna take you some time to figure out. How to talk to these people. What is your communication style and email like? You almost wanna think about your first six months as like a sandbox, and ultimately the most important thing, Suzy and I already talked about this before we even hit record. Consistency is super duper important. It's actually better to send consistent. Like B minus emails than to send one email every six months once a year. That's like absolutely amazing. Like very few people can afford to get away with that. And the other thing is like you're not building the skill and just like writing books with writing emails, like you get better at it by doing it. So you're being consistent because it shows your newsletter subscribers, you're consistent and it helps 'em not forget about you. You're also being consistent for yourself so that you can figure out what the message is. Get better at writing emails and like develop this essential skill for wherever you go in your writing life. Absolutely, and I think one of the things that I always remind myself when I talk to other people about this is that would be so precious, right? Well, so right, because like they, what you said. I wanna send an email out every six months and it's gonna be perfect. That's what see most writers doing, and I can tell you it doesn't work. And if you've tried it, you'll know it doesn't work. And they've got all these sections and they wanna bring in all these informative things in this huge newsletter that's like so great. Has all this whizzbang and photos and links and things, but it's only every six months and it doesn't work. Right? Like why not just throw one thing out there every single week? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Where? Yes. And you'll get to see, like, let's say I'm just gonna put myself in a slightly different pair of shoes. Like I, you know, I have this. Email marketing business like I'm B2B, I serve other businesses. I teach them how to do email marketing. But let's just put that aside and say, I'm a writer who's like building an audience for my book. Okay, well what's my, well, you're also a writer building an audience. I, yeah, I am that as well. Thank you, Sue. And but let's say like, that's the main thing that I'm doing. Like there's so many different approaches you can take. Like maybe you're gonna be talking about. You're writing life like. That's very interesting. Even people who don't write are interested in like talking about books. How are books written? Maybe it's your writing life. Maybe you're talking about like your characters or your inspiration for your character. Like, oh, like what stage is your book at? Or like whatever. You're gonna cycle through many different topics and you will find through trial and error. I really like writing about this one particular thing, and usually there's a obvious cross section because what you like writing about will also make for the best writing, and it will probably make for the writing that your email subscribers love the most. But you watch for replies, like that's the main way. That I am able to gauge what works for my newsletter and what my subscribers want to hear based on how many people reply and what kinds of things do they say in the replies. So, you know, that's another reason. Just if we're trying to make this step by step, get to your critical mass of like 37 people, whatever your number is, we need to know that there's some people reading it because we're gonna depend on them to give us feedback on what we like hearing and the things that I love the most about writing. Is as a writer, I just cannot imagine like anything more rewarding than writing a newsletter. Like every week I send out this newsletter to 10,000 people and I immediately, immediately. Get replies from people saying things like, oh, that's like exactly what I needed to hear today. Or like, oh, here's my story about this topic, or like, whatever. Like, there's not too many places where you get this like very rich feedback on what you've just written. I find it is like, unlike, I don't have a super great experience on social media, which it feels like very public and sort of like, I don't know, I just, I don't, it doesn't make me very happy as opposed to the interaction that I get with email is so much more intimate. Like those conversations are truly a one-on-one conversation and it is just like it, you know, there's all, I could give you all of these like practical. Reasons. Like you need to start an email list, owned media, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like the thing that I am most grateful for, and I think this every single week after my newsletter goes out and I look at my replies folder, like, oh my God. The richness of having this platform people reading. I get their instant feedback. Like it keeps me going. Yeah. And I think, you know, listeners listening to this, writers are gonna, are gonna really resonate with that because. I teach the 30 different ways.'cause I've tried them all and I've tried social media, I've been active, I've been right now pretty inactive. And the thing that appealed to me about the strategy was sort of what if writing was my marketing? Mm-hmm. What if I wasn't sending out a newsletter every week to tell people about this new piece of content that I was putting out? What if my newsletter was the content? And what if that was the discussion, right? What if my writing could be it? And I think that really appeals to runners 'cause we're writers. And we don't necessarily wanna be dancing right on TikTok. So I think it's a really, really good strategy. Actually, as you were talking Tarzan, I was reminded because I was trying to think, I, I had a newsletter who told me to collect those newsletter names, and I think I was sitting, they actually know the answer. I mean, they call out my colleague Tina Holmes, who's wrote Street Romance at the time, and she gave a marketing session that I was at, and I literally went away and started asking people at that conference. I was like, I gotta do this. And I'm not sure that hers was a newsletter, but she had a strategy early on. She was an independently polished author, and she wrote, gave recipes, and because they were kind of related but not really related. And that's what she wanted to write about. And she sent birthday postcards to everybody on her list. So that was her. Oh my God. You know, like, yeah. It was crazy. Right. And she ended up. Like exploding. Like her books absolutely exploded. She sold hundreds of thousands of books, ended up getting a tra deal, like sort of reversed. And that's like the dream I can independently publish. And then later people are like, oh, I wanna publish these. It doesn't happen very often. Please don't hold a strategy on purpose. It happened to Stina and eventually she had to not. Send out postcards anymore.'cause I think it became really expensive. Yes. Not only, yeah. The, what I love the most about that story is she did something that's really dazzling that doesn't scale. And we already talked about this, like if you're getting business advice about what to do to grow your audience, you're likely learning all of these highly scalable things that are important. They're slow, they take time. If you want like the value of that list of like, let's say 500 people that saw you at some kind of event or whatever and got a birthday card from you is like amazing. You cannot compare the value those five people to 5,000 people that found you through like a Facebook ad or something. I mean, honestly, I mean. I never did get a birthday postcard from St like down my, she was just to Megan Stina, if you're listening, I'm gonna invite you on the podcast and we're gonna talk about, but the thing is, is yeah, it was just this allure. It was like, not just, but there was a thing. There was an incentive to sign up. It's like, well, I wanna see that postcard.'cause she travels and she wrote them personally. So she'd buy them when she was like, in Italy or whatever and, and like send them anyways. It was really cool. You don't have to have that coolness, but definitely building an audience. So the reason I thought of it was because of the recipes, because it didn't have it, I mean, it wasn't connected directly. Mm-hmm. To books. And so whenever it is that you like to write about, enjoy it, write about it, and you're gonna find your audience. Okay. So think we're sold. If we're listening and we don't have a newsletter yet, you're like, yeah, maybe we should get on this tar. What can a great newsletter do for a writer and what can it not do? What can it do for a writer? What can it not do necessarily? Gonna sell you books overnight? I'm, I'm gonna tell you that, right? Like, it's not necessarily gonna be you send out one newsletter and say, buy my book, and they're gonna click on it. And you're gonna have a hundred thousand sales. Like this is a relationship that you're building, so, so what? What should they be aiming for? Like what's the point of a newsletter for a writer, do you think? Okay, well this feels very alive for me because I hired this amazing book coach Suzy Vori. To help me write my book proposal, my email list, and what we're doing, what I will do with my email list is all over that proposal and I am counting on my email subscribers whether or not they purchase my book. To be my cheerleaders to talk about it publicly, to share it with their friends, to like help me create the momentum around this book. I think from a practical perspective, and you can talk about this better than I can, but like. That email list is central. Like I don't have a large email list compared to other authors I know, but it's quite decent. I have about 10,000 engaged subscribers, many whom have been with me for many years, but that, and I wanna get a tra deal, so that's like a big goal of mine. So that, and I think it's pretty important. I'm just gonna like hand the mic over to you, Suzy. You know about this better than me, so. Gonna say, uh, and, and I think I forgot what the number was, but we wanted to look at, because yes, Tarzan keeps her list very clean. And when I say that, I mean that she's saying engaged subscribers. So if you haven't clicked on something in a while, you're probably not on the list anymore. So when she says 10,000, that's like the people hitting reply. Yeah. Um, so, but I think we took a look at, and we were putting together your proposal. How many people have been on your newsletter over the years and that number was much, much bigger. I can't remember. Was it 40,000, right? Yeah. Yeah. We also added to the proposal, like 50,000 people have come and gone from this newsletter. We also cited like here, these are the partners. Who will share about this book and we like everything come back to email list size. It's like, oh, and my peer so and so with a list of 50,000 will also be sharing this book. So those email list numbers are all over it. So coming back to your question, like what can the list do for you? It is gonna be super important for selling your book if that's something you wanna do. I think the biggest, really the value of this list. Has been helping me refine my message, like I, I don't think there's anything that could be bigger and more important than what we've already discussed. Like they help me. I get this feedback on what do people actually care about? Like right now I'm working on, here's an example, practical example from real life. So in the spring I'm doing an online summit called the Girl Boss Apology Tour, and I just pulled my list and ask them two questions, which is, what do you think this is about and what do you hope to get out of it? I got all of this language, like people's questions, like how do they think about girl bossing? Like is that a, is that a compliment? Is that an insult? Like this? Your audience is how you are in touch with like the people out in the world. What are they interested in reading about? What are they thinking about like that? I think that is probably one reason why it's so effective on your book proposal to show. You have this audience because it's like, I, I didn't just make this idea about, of thin air, like here's all these people that are engaged and currently talking about this topic. Like it shows that you're in touch with your market and what they actually want. You know, we talk about the girl boss's apology tour, and, and I talked about this a little bit in the introduction, but you teach consent based marketing and I think that this is why you and I are so aligned. It's the reason I was attracted to your newsletter in the first place. Was because there are a lot of things that writers in particular, we come to this space and we want to write, and we all of a sudden are thrown into this experience where we realize we're actually small business owners and we have to, yeah, sorry. You're actually going to be, whether you are yet or not, you're going to be a small business owner in some way, and you get to decide how you show up to the world as. A marketer or as an author, and there's so many things that people will teach you that feel icky, right? Yes. Buy my book. Buy my book. I don't wanna dance on TikTok, I don't wanna do this, I don't wanna do that. And can you just talk a little bit about consent based marketing and how, what is that, first of all, and how would you flip that script so that you know, you're talking about what does your reader actually want and how do you show up for them? And how do we make it feel less icky? I'm just gonna stop. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Okay. I, if you are listening to this conversation, I mean, a lot of people are so resistant to doing email marketing that they'll just like, skip this episode. They're like, Ugh, email marketing gross. And that is a very valid feeling. And the reason, if you feel that way, is because there is so much in most people's inboxes. Where that they don't know why it's there. They don't recall signing up for it. Um, maybe they even, I'm like at war with this one newsletter right now that I've unsubscribed from like more than three times. And I teach. Well, I've done the same. Yeah. Yeah. So there's like so much shady stuff going on in your inbox that feels like intrusive. It might feel overwhelming. So a lot of people are just like, I don't wanna participate in that. Like I don't. Are you asking me to like be a spammer Tarzan? Because I do, to be fair, like I do send a lot of email. I send a newsletter every single week and when I am in a promotion and right now I'm like, I've like chilled out a lot in my promotions. But if I'm doing like a seven day promotion, I'm for sure sending like at least 10 emails, maybe 12. So I do send quite a lot of email. However, I found ways to do it that make sense and feel good for me, and that's where my consent based strategies come in. So for the, just as a starting point, when I started in business in 2016, it was and still is, all about having a freebie. So, you know, for an author that means, might be like a free chapter of your book for people in business. Like, let's say it's me, it's like the 10 emails to send to your list when blah, blah, blah. Right? So we, there's this culture of like, bribing and that's actually what people used to call it. They would call it an ethical bribe. Like some reason to get people to sign up for something so that you can email them and, um. I'll just start off by naming that like it's a little weird. It's like, okay, I'm getting, it's kind of like a bait and switch. It's like I'm getting you to sign up for something, but then I'm adding you to my email list over here for me, because I am B2B and I am an internet marketing, and there's like no place more aggressive and confusing. Then internet marketing. I use a super high level of consent no matter what you download. If you download like some freebie of mine, I will always ask and get permission to add you to my email list. So this isn't like something that everybody has to do, although I will say in in, if you're adding people in the UK to your email list, there's this law that came into effect in I think 2018. Called GDPR, and it basically said, you can't assume that just because someone bought something from you or downloaded some PDF that you're gonna add, you can add them to your email list, like you need to get explicit consent. So when they brought that rule in, I just applied it across the board to every single person that comes in. So if you join something like let's say you take a class of mine, whatever, like I will ask you, do you want to join the email list? And I tell people about this strategy because. Like it is as much for your subscribers as it is for you. I want you to be able to say like, all of these people explicitly said, yes, I want to join your email list. And it actually makes things a little bit simpler if you're like at an event or wherever you're not just saying like you could just like actually inviting people to get on your newsletter and tell them. What they're gonna hear about. You're not tricking them. Yeah, you're not tricking them. Yeah. You're just asking 'em to join your newsletter. It actually, in some ways can eliminate the confusion around like, what should my free offer be? Like, forget about all that. Just like add them to your newsletter, not tricking them. And I have to remind people a lot in my business when they're like, oh, but like sure, they wanna hear from me. I get that. And I'll say, I'll go back to like, okay. But they did give you their email address, like willingly. So they did consent to be emailed by you and you know, once people are able, oh yeah, okay. They did say so a, like, I'm safe to email them today. And then when it comes to sending out a higher volume of promo emails, I give people more options like they can, and the, the most obvious being like, you can turn them off, like you can stay. So I send a newsletter every single week. Then when I'm sending a promo email, you can always say, you can click a link that says basically, I don't want this, and then you'll stay on the email list, but you won't get all these promo emails. I also give people options for things like just a once a month newsletter if they again, want to like receive a lower volume of emails. So I'm always looking at ways to let people have more options. Around how much they hear from me and the kinds of things they hear from me. And part of that is, that's all the consent based stuff, but it's also so that I can feel confident sending emails like, 'cause there's also the Suzy Vadori of the world. That are signed up to my email list with five different emails. Because if they, yeah.'cause they want every single one of them. Like, yeah, you like, there's also gonna be like your super fans that are like, no, I like, I want everything this person has to offer. Let's not assume like people will apply. Their own overwhelm around their inbox and assume that like all of their potential subscribers are also like equally overwhelmed in getting like way too many emails. Like, well, maybe they're not actually like trying to build a business. They might just be like getting emails about like the PTA meetings. So maybe they don't have as many subscriptions as you do and boss. And when that's true, you know, there's a few things about writers that I meet and many writers are not on a lot of. Email list because we're spending our time writing and so mine might be one of the only ones that they get. And I, I gotta say, I have to remind myself what you said is absolutely true. Same thing with our books. It's not by my book because I want you to have it. It's, you gotta flip the script. And remember, people are out there waiting for your book and people are out there waiting for your emails and they expect it. And they appreciate the fact that you do show up consistently and, and just be okay with that and accept it and make sure that you're giving them the content that they're asking for. So what's wrong with sending out just one email, like about a book launch? You know, if we end up building this email list? Yeah. Uh, but we think, okay, I'm just gonna send something out when I launch a book or have something to announce. Is that okay? Problem is that by the time that happens, I've already forgotten about you. There's five subscribers on there that know you intimately and are like, oh my gosh, great. Their book is like finally coming out. This is awesome. However, that is not the case for most of your email subscribers. Like if you met someone at an event, you know, you went and did like a reading or whatever. It was like they lumped you and wanted to hear from you and asked you to email them. Yeah. Yes. And let's just say it's like someone I met at an event like. It's an event. There's like so many things swirling, like if that person didn't like sit down and write down your name and like why they thought the conversation was interesting and like what they should follow up on, like nobody does that. The other thing is inboxes are very crowded factor one. You just need to have that touch point to remind people, this is who I am, this is what I'm all about, and these are the kinds of things that you can expect going forward. So that like I would call that your welcome email, and there might even be two or three, is like, I just joined your newsletter. What do I need to know about you? Like what goals are you working toward? How often can I expect to hear from you? Those real basic stuff. So that's important so that people don't like, it's not kidding you, like, I signed up five minutes ago, like I already forgot who you are, so just pretend that I don't know anything about you and send me like two or three reminder emails about who you are and what the newsletter is. And then even after that, like, okay, now we've got like a baseline. But going forward we need, I would say, at minimum. A monthly email that you may remind people again, here's where you signed up. Or like, here's what who I am and what this is. Like, you know, that might be baked into the template of your newsletter, like your name at the top and like, I don't know, the book you're working on, or like, whatever your topic is. And then you go into it because, you know, inboxes, they just, they really are busy. Like, one thing you have going for you and a little bit against you is. The tools for sending a newsletter have never been better, and they've never been cheaper. So that means that there are more, there's just more competition in the inbox. It's noisier than it was 10 years ago when I started out. We might be in a bit of a bubble. I don't know. We don't know yet, but just remember that they will forget. A lot of that nurture, like that ongoing monthly email is so people don't forget about you. And then when it is time for you to launch your book, like I can get excited because I know who you are. Like how excited are you About like some stranger that published a book like, well, I don't really care 'cause I don't really know this person. But when I'm invested in this person, like now I can like get behind the momentousness of this person's book launch and really support them. Yeah, absolutely. And we're kind of getting into brass tacks. You talked about tech and the fact that it's the cheapest it the most, it's the, you know, it's the most accessible. What do we need? A writer listening, no email list. What do we actually need? Because a lot of what we're talking about is sort of down the road, right? What do we need? Yeah. Okay. Well, you need a tool to email for you. You cannot, even if you only have 40 subscribers. You can't send this stuff from Gmail. People need to be able, that's part of consent. People need, it needs to be revocable. IE, there needs to be an unsubscribed button. And fortunately there are lots of tools that will allow you to grow your email list for free. So I'm talking about tools like the, probably the most, maybe they're not the most famous anymore, but you know, if you're thinking about email marketing, your default might be MailChimp.'cause they were kind of like, yeah, it's free to start. Yeah, it's free. And also MailChimp was sort of like the first to market. With a really accessible email marketing tool. I started on MailChimp. Everybody started on MailChimp. Like me too. I started on MailChimp for sure. Yeah. However, there are better and more accessible tools. You have unlimited choice here, but I would say as a professional who's been doing this for 10 years, really the best for this type of business on the market right now. Kit, formerly known as ConvertKit and Beehive. If you're trying to choose between one or the other, like you're really just choose between Kit and Beehive. They both have a free subscription that is very robust, like I think Kit lets you have up to a thousand email subscribers. It's a bit limited in what you can do with automations, but don't even worry about that. Like right now you're just setting up. An opt-in page where people can say, yes, I wanna join your email list. And Kit has templates for how to do that. Um, Suzy will definitely put a link in the show notes. Yeah, so you need a landing page also called an opt-in page. Where people can fill out the form and join your email list, and then it will also let you set up an automated email that goes out and says, Hey, welcome, like, your action has been successful, blah, blah, blah. Here's what to expect. We already talked about that. So you need the landing page, which is usually powered by this when you're starting out. It is usually part of, like, you can use the same tool that you use to deliver email. So most providers let you set that up. Go ahead. Yeah. And if you're out there with your list and assigning and it's a physical list, then go type them in Exactly, yeah. Into your own opt-in list. That's what I do. Absolutely. Okay. And, and that just, you know, disclosure here, I use Kajabi, which, oh, right. I forgot because it, yeah, because it has email, but it also has course things. It's overkill for what you need right now starting out and what most people need. Yeah, but I started on MailChimp. The one thing I would say with MailChimp is, and maybe they fix this, but I had a really hard time and had to dance to get my contacts out. They make it difficult to export your contacts when you leave, which I found annoying. But the ones that you have named do not do that to you. Yes, totally. I, I guess it would caution, people don't get too hung up on your tool if you're already using something and it's like, I don't know, flow desk or something that we haven't mentioned. Like just keep going. You don't have to go change to get the fanciest tool. That's one thing that can like really slow you down. Most important right now is there's a way for people to join and something to welcome them after they've joined, like an automated sequence, a couple of emails to welcome them and then you could send on your frequency. Yeah. To brass talks. How do we find subscribers? Oh, great. Okay. We'll start with your warm network. As we've already discussed, people who you think might be interested in your book. I really like the most high value people are people who you have met in person. So Suzy, what kind of events do writers go to where they could be growing their English? You might be at a farmer's market or a signing or a, uh, like at a bookstore, or you might be at a conference anywhere. Yeah, really anywhere Writers gather, anywhere readers gather in the, in the height. When I did a lot of events, because I write for teens, we did a lot of teen events that were not book related and I loved being the only bookseller there. Awesome. Um, it was amazing. Yeah. That's so cool. Yeah, so those in-person things are just so valuable. And then the next thing is like now start looking at getting in front of other people's audiences. I am literally doing this right now, talking to Suzy, who has an audience of writers that would be an excellent fit to work with me, to grow their email, list, their message, dah, dah, dah, dah. So I'm doing that right now. Getting in front of other people's audiences is faster. Then starting your own thing. So you know, Suzy also has this podcast, which is great for nurturing her existing subscribers and her audience. Suzy, would you say your podcast is a list growth tool? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But I will also say, because I caution writers when they're starting out, it can be really overwhelming and I tell them to pick one thing. So if newsletters, your One thing newsletter was my one thing for like six years before I started a podcast. Yeah. Um, so I didn't do both of those things at once because I actually tried, I've had podcasts before, but until I could show up consistently. It didn't work. It didn't grow. And now the podcast is going gangbusters because I am able to show up consistently. I'm able to do it for you on the regular because I can do this now. Mm-hmm. Um, but I couldn't, when I was first starting out, I didn't have the systems. Yeah. How long should their email be? What kind of commitment are we talking? Are we have to write 10 pages, pages every month? Are we talking what paragraphs? What do you think? Yeah. Okay. This is another thing where you have to find something that matches your own personal style. It has to be sustainable for you, number one. What best would feature your style? Like this has really changed a lot for me over the years. For many, many years I wrote emails that were like around 300 words and they had a very obvious format. They would like start with a little bit of story and then they would end in like a sales pitch for whatever thing that I was offering. And that served me very well over the years. As I gain more experience, I'm able to bring like a lot more depth to the conversation. My emails have gotten much longer and now they're like around, you know, 750 words to a thousand words. I also have like a team of support. They edit the emails, upload them, all of that. So that's also a factor. And compare that to say Seth Godin, for example, has a daily email. He, if you subscribe at Seth's blog, he sends one email a day and it's like one paragraph, and it's incredibly. Thoughtful and it's just one thought and that's it. And it's like plain text, like there's no fancy formatting or anything, but he's got his thing that's like, that's his personal style, his personal email brand. So there are just, it is a tough answer because there's just so many options. Like they're intimate the right answer. Right? Yeah. These writers, they're creative. Find your group. Yeah. Like if you haven't. When do you all go and subscribe to Tarzan's email newsletter Now? Yeah. You are not going to want to unsubscribe because those stories that you tell are amazing and entertaining and, and deep and personal and all the things, and we get to know you and that's your brand, right? Right. Yeah. So that, and that is one thing that has not changed in 10 years is my newsletter has always been very story driven. No matter what happens, short emails, long emails, sales emails, newsletters, like even my onboarding emails, they're full of stories. But if you sign up to my newsletter, which by the way, you can at tarzan k.com/newsletter, you'll see a beautiful newsletter. It has an ad at the top. Then it has like say, seven 50 words of the main core content. And then there's like a link section with maybe things I'm selling or things I found interesting things other people are selling. It's a beautiful newsletter and also like it's produced by me and my team of three people. So I really want to stress, especially when you're starting out, it's probably gonna be a plain text newsletter, meaning like there's no fancy formatting. It's like black text on a white background. Maybe there's like a banner. Suzy, I think your newsletter has a banner. It's not a banner. What I do is I usually have either a gif or a photo, and it's often in the top 10% of the newsletter, so above the fold. And it's usually me, so they're always personal. Occasionally we do like a an out there gif just as a funny or something like personality driven, but lots of times they're photos of me. Yeah. Okay. How should they feel about unsubscribed? Let's talk about the elephant in the room. I'm gonna send out a newsletter and my bestie unsubscribes bad. Okay. I literally just wrote an email with the subject line, that feeling when you're best. Unsubscribes for your newsletter? Well, maybe Subc. I'm sure I read it subconsciously and I'm asking the question. Yeah, that was a, A lot of people replied and were like, oh, this happened to me. Like, yes, my bestie unsubscribe for my newsletter. Like both my besties, like I think my family member is like, it is just part of being in email marketing that people are going to unsubscribe. You cannot be reading. Meaning like stop making meaning out of people. Stop reading them. First of all, I don't even look at who unsubscribes. That's if you're, you're not unsubscribe to me. Go ahead. I will not know. Yeah. But I think so I still think about that sometimes if I have like a past client or something, I'm like, oh, I feel bad unsubscribing. But really, number one, I don't recommend that you look at the names of people that unsubscribe. Like it even feels weird to me. It feels like a breach of privacy. And that's one place where it's like coming back to consent. I don't look at who's unsubscribed for their own privacy. It's like data that my email service provider gives me, but I don't feel comfortable looking at because there's just infinite reasons why people unsubscribe. You don't know. It's a waste of time to make meaning out of it. It is good to check like I, but here's the thing, like when I write something that's like really is different than looking at personal names, right? Yes. That's very different aton of, yeah, like scribes. I don't think you're hitting your mark. Yeah. If I, you know, I might notice, like if I send an email and there's a disproportionately high number of subscribes. That's worth thinking about. Like, okay, is this topic like way too unrelated and I should just not talk about it? Is this topic like maybe controversial? And I could like think about the language I use. It is worth it to look at your unsubscribe rate and to make sure you have like a baseline, which I think the baseline, like a few percent is pretty normal per email. I think the ba, it's maybe 0.5%, so half a percent. Don't quote me on that. I, I have a really low one. Mine's almost zero, so, okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually, pardon me, I'm confusing this, that number with your spam rate, so you do wanna make sure your spam, but you know what, that's advanced stuff. Just know that it's normal to have unsubscribed all tars on key follow tars. I can, you can get all this information about all those different steps. Yes, exactly. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we've reached the quick fire portion of the podcast as we rounded down and, and I'm changing up the questions for Tarzan today. Awesome. How long did it take you approximately to get your first 1000 subscribers on your email list? I would say about eight months. So I got, and they came from posting in Facebook groups, asking people, yeah, eight months. Right. And what was your first big break with copywriting and your brand in general? It was a competition, an email copywriting competition. And at the time I thought it was a huge deal. In retrospect, I don't even know how many participants there were, but I went like, I really tried very hard to win and I did win. And it put my name in front of some important people who I ended up mentoring with, who referred me clients. Yeah, it was huge. And that was my first year in business, a competition. Huge. Huge for your own confidence as well, I would imagine. Huge. Yes, absolutely. Um, even whether or not, and this, this is a thing with all marketing, right? Whether or not it sells you a book, a client, a package, a course, whatever it was that you were selling at the time, a copywriting client, if it helps you understand that what you are giving to the world is valuable, then it's worth it. Yes, absolutely. What's your best advice for writers thinking about launching a newsletter right now? Start today, like literally right now, you could go to block some time. Even if I haven't published. Even if I haven't published yet. Yeah, absolutely. Of course. Way before you've published like ideally, yeah, ideally like one or two years before your publishing, so right now. Exactly. And I like to tell the story when I was running young adults and at the time Twitter was so cool, not so much anymore, but I was writing about my writing journey and. Young adult topics and I started getting calls to be a presenter at conferences for young adult books before I had a book and I had to decline saying, I don't even have a book yet. Like, I don't know what I'm gonna talk about. But yeah, it's, you can earn that credibility way before. Okay. Can you share a little bit about your services? What do you do exactly? How can we find you? How can we join your newsletter? Okay, so once again, Tarzan k.com/newsletter. If you want to experience how email, email being done differently, please join my email list. It's wildly entertaining. I talk about business primarily. I talk a lot about the just insane world of internet marketing. Girl bossy. So you'll learn all about that. You'll also get a, a pretty scintillating intro to my story in online business in the, the onboarding emails that I send you when you join my email list. So just pay close attention to those. You can use them as inspiration for what you send to your email list. And I, for the last 10 years, have sold courses about email marketing, and I have business programs that are like small group. Programs where we work intimately with other businesses, sharing information, supporting each other, that sort of thing. And in the next year, I'll be doing, the most exciting thing I'm working on right now is the Girl Boss Apology tour coming up in Spring. So if you get on my newsletter, you will have a chance to join that in the spring. I can't wait for that. But also the book, if you want to follow Tarzan's journey in writing the book about that. But then definitely we're gonna have you back on the show when it's time when we've got more details about the book to share. But if you want, can your first, yeah, thanks for, I'm not used to talking about that on podcasts, but I am so excited about this book that I'm working on, like it's gonna be. It's really gonna be enormously helpful for people who've come into internet marketing and they're like, oh my God, what the f? Is this? Like, this is such a weird world. So it's like very story driven. It's, yeah, it's like I'm so excited about it. Such achar on which in has been like so fun to weave together. Yeah. Right. Totally. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Tarzan, and can't wait to have you back. Thank you, Suzy. Thanks for tuning into the show. Don't Tell Writing podcast with me, Suzy Vadori. It is my absolute honor to bring you the straight goods for that book you're writing or the book that you're planning to write. Please help me keep the podcast going by helping people find us. You could subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you're listening. To show the show. That's how other listeners will find us. Also, visit Suzy Vadori.com/newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you'll stay inspired and be the first to know about all the upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community. Want my eyes on your writing, submit a page in your current draft for a chance to come on the podcast at the link in the show notes. I'd love to chat with you about your writing in my always positive, incredibly supportive way so that you can make great strides towards your writing goals. I'm here to cheer you are. Remember that book you're writing is gonna open doors that you haven't even thought of yet, and I can't wait to help you make that it the absolute best it can be. See you again right here next week.