Book Review: Engagement from Scratch! How Super-Community Builders Create a Loyal Audience and How You Can Do the Same! by Danny Iny

There may have been a time for writers when notions of readership and engagement could be left to professional marketers, but that is certainly no longer the case. Anyone who wants to sell their writing needs to create a loyal and engaged audience. In a noisy world where everyone is trying to get noticed in one form or another, this is easier said than done, but Firepole Marketing’s Danny Iny has created a manual that contains excellent advice from some of the most well-known online marketers in the business.

Danny contacted the many people who inspired him when he was starting his business and asked each of them to write a piece on the topic: “If you had to start over and build an engaged audience from scratch, how would you do it?” The answers make up this book. Written in clear, simple language, Engagement from Scratch contains some 27 different perspectives on how to build a loyal and rapid following, primarily through blogging. Each writer's suggestions are a little different, drawing on their own experiences of what worked for them and providing real examples, but at heart, they all focus on the notions of honesty, real interaction, and good, freely provided content as the hub of engagement.

There are essays about the nature of blogging and enagement, essays on building an audience, essays on the best types of content and frequency of posting, essays on using social media, essays on encouraging and growing your followers, and lots more. All of the essays, without exception, provide personal examples, taken from the considerable experiences of the contributors. For example, Danny Brown, of DannyBrown.me and BonsaiInteractive.com provides three key things he’s learned from doing things the wrong way:

"A few of my early posts are the kind I would call “traffic jams”–lots of traffic, but not going anywhere. The list posts; the Top 10 Ways To… posts; the posts about Twitter, or Facebook, or blogging–basically, the posts that were easy to write but had little real substance."

Article Author: Maggie Ball

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of the novels Black Cow and Sleep Before Evening, the poetry books Repulsion Thrust and Quark Soup, a nonfiction book The Art of Assessment, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, …

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