How Do You Think About Tone and Voice When You're Writing?

Ann Handley is the founder and Chief Content Officer for MarketingProfs, a marketing and training education company with more than 600,000 subscribers. She is a well-known public speaker, and has been writing a newsletter called Total Annarchy for the last three years.

Ann is also a Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content, and Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business. 

Ann was named a top thought leader by Forbes and one of the seven people shaping modern marketing by IBM.

In this episode, Nathan and Ann discuss:
 - Tiny-house offices
 - How to connect with your audience and grow your email newsletter
 - How to grow your social media following by mastering the algorithms

Links & Resources

• Jeremiah Owyang
• Nat Eliason
• James Keller
• ClickZ
• FanBridge
• Rally

Ann Handley’s Links

• MarketingProfs
• Personal site: annhandley.com
• Ann’s Newsletter: Total Annarchy
• Twitter: @annhandley

Episode Transcript

Ann: [00:00:00]
The notion of voice is essentially how you sound. It’s important to read things out loud. It’s a thousand little choices that you make all along the way that over time, grow your voice and add up to something that’s wholly unique. Find those small moments. Those small moments are the things that become a big differentiation for yourself. 

Nathan: [00:00:27]
In this episode, I talked to Ann Handley. Ann is the Chief Content Officer for MarketingProfs. She’s been around the content marketing online business space for a long time, since 1999. She’s been writing a newsletter for the last three years on a lot of really interesting things. She’s also a really well-known public speaker.

So in this episode, we talk about a whole range of things like what she thinks of the multiple rises of email newsletters over the years. The trend email is dead. The balance between email and social media platforms. We get into algorithms. We talk about really a whole range of things. Probably my favorite is when we get into talking about style and voice and how you write, how to make things fun. Her newsletter is called Total Annarchy.

Annarchy, it’s spelled like her name. And so you can see if that gives you an idea of the way she likes to write, the energy and passion that she brings to a business and marketing topics. So, anyway, with that, I’ll get out of the way and let’s dive into the show.

Ann thanks for joining me.

Ann: [00:01:28]
I am delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

Nathan: [00:01:30]
So I want to start with something that has nothing to do with email newsletters, and it is just a shared love that you and I both have that I discovered in research and that is for tiny house offices.

Ann: [00:01:41]
Oh, really?

Nathan: [00:01:43]
Yeah, so I’m in my tiny house office that I built a year ago. I got it finished just before COVID which was good timing. If I understand correctly, you had a tiny house office built, like six or seven years ago.

Ann: [00:01:55]
Yeah, this is it. Yes. I was, it was, turned out to be a prescient move because who knew? This is very, so I’m in my tiny house office right now. It’s in my backyard. and yes, I built it, oh, six or sevenish years ago, something like that. And I built it at the time as a sort of place where I thought I can come and do my best work.

It’s, you know, small enough that it’s just me in here, me and my, and my little dog who’s here with me now. Little tiny porch on the front and a hard wire internet connection. And that’s it. So I built it as a place to really, as I said, do my best work as a place to write, essentially that was just sequestered from everybody else that, that I couldn’t hear anybody breathe back here. It was just, you know, a hundred percent perfect. And then, you know, fast forward COVID happens. And suddenly my tiny house is now thrust onto the international stage. It’s, you know, now the backdrop for all of these online programs that I’m doing, which is fine.

Just that I kind of had to clean things up a little bit. So, so yeah, its kind of been forced into that, the white hot lights of the internet suddenly and the tiny house it’s doing its best back here, but this is not necessarily what it was before originally.

Nathan: [00:03:13]
Yeah. So it started more as like sort of the writing shed, backyard office kind of thing. And now it’s the working full-time.

Ann: [00:03:22]
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, so MarketingProfs, my company, we’ve always been a hundred percent virtual, so I have a, an office in the big house where I lived. A lot of people think I live in a tiny house. I do not live in a tiny house. It’s a tiny house office only. So I live in a regular size house and I have an office there too.

And, and I use that mostly, you know, like in the, in the deep winter, it, this place is not insulated. As you can tell by the plywood background here again, this was supposed to be just for me. I didn’t understand that this was going to be, who knew it was going to be a subjected to the internet on a daily basis at this point.

But yeah, so it’s, it essentially built it, you know, for me, this is a place to, to come back when I really just needed some space and some quiet. It actually turns out to be probably, like the best investment I ever made. As a writer, it’s just been such a gift to have this place back here.

And you know, even in pre pandemics times, that was true. But especially now, because it does feel like it’s a world away from anything going on, not just in my house, but in my town and my state and my community, anything beyond it, you know? So it’s kind of nice just to have this one, place that as a writer, as a creator, you can feel like, all right, it’s all mine.

Oxygen is back here, you know?

Nathan: [00:04:43]
I like that. Yeah, for me, I, my tiny house office is just across the backyard, from my house and, and I have three little kids, and so getting outside the house, my old office is now our one-year-olds room and like, he can have that space. I can have this space and it’s perfect. So I think we’ll see a lot more people that build out tiny house offices or, you know, backyard things.

It’s a good trend.

Ann: [00:05:12]
Yeah, exactly. And in really creative ways too, like my friend Jeremiah yang has it is a digital consultant. he speaks a lot about, you know, what, what’s next, the future of, of digital. Of the digital evolution essentially. and he put an Airstream in his backyard that he retrofitted with, you know, as, as an office.

So, you know, there’s all kinds of diff...