Adventures Of A Petrified Writer: A Dose Of Motivation

Hello! Thank you for stopping by!
Guess who recently concluded a 2 week series of email marketing? Yes! You guessed right! The journey was a learning curve for me and I’ll be sharing the lessons with you. Before I go into details, allow me to share with you some little tiny info about me.

First, I love writing. At the same time, I hardly publish them. Oh, wait! I publish them but in my imaginations (please don’t judge me). It’s an internal conflict I’ve been trying to resolve for God knows how long. I’m what you’d call a petrified writer. I’m not even sure if that word truly captures how terrified I get when it’s time to hit the publish button. Anyways, I recently started writing again (thanks to a certain Bootcamp) and I’m highly gingered to be deliberate about it.

I was part of the organizers of a 2-week intensive public speaking training and it was the most taxing 2 weeks of my life since the lockdown began. I have always refrained from publishing my writings, so writing emails to people wasn’t in my wildest dreams. If I was told that I would be sending emails to over 50 participants of the Bootcamp, I would never have believed. I guess the Universe has a way of making things happen.

First, these email writings helped me see the importance of constructive criticism and feedback. I had always known that they are important, but I’d always steered clear because I’d always felt that they would demotivate me from writing.

A friend, Toluwalemi Oluwadare, assisted in editing my emails when I started. I learned a lot from him. I honestly don’t know what pushed me to send them to him but one thing that opened my eyes is that people are always ready to help. He assisted me with the editing and he was supportive. His help gave me the confidence I needed to push out those emails. The President of the organization who is also a friend assisted with the editing as well, her support was unending.

I did not know of email marketing tools when I started. I used Gmail to send the first mail to over 50 participants of the Bootcamp. I never knew I was shooting myself in the leg until a recipient of the mail wrote back to me. He suggested that I used EmailOctopus for professional mails as it doesn’t expose email addresses of other mail recipients. I thanked him for that wonderful feedback and went off to register. To cut the long story short, I ended up using MailChimp.

By the way, MailChimp is an easy to use app for sending professional emails. Personally, it wasn’t easy to use at first, simply because I wasn’t patient enough to read through the knowledge base of the app. Patience is truly a virtue. It took me hours of trial and error to understand what I was doing. I sent the next mail and I was happy and confident because it was safer and looked more professional . I still hadn’t learned how to send personalized emails then. It had been on my mind but because I didn’t know how to do it, I just overlooked it.

I spoke with a friend telling her about how tough and exciting the first week had been for me. She asked to see the samples of the emails I sent. She was impressed and then suggested that it would be better if I incorporated the names of the recipients in the mail. She suggested that I asked a friend who also uses MailChimp for her organization. I sent the friend a message but she wasn’t online. I wasn’t patient enough to wait for her response so I went online instead. I googled it up and voila! The results appeared. I was happy and mad at myself at the same time. I was mad at myself because I didn’t check this up earlier.

Whatever it is you’re doing, always find out the tiniest of details.

By the second week, I had improved. By the end of the training, I got feedback from some of my recipients telling me not to stop sending them emails despite that the training had ended. The President suggested that I continue but that this time, I should do it weekly. I loved the idea. I enrolled for a course so that I can fully understand how it works and also get better. Three things I’ve learned from this experience is that writing encourages learning, helps you see mistakes and publishing them isn’t as terrifying as I’ve always imagined.

There you have it! The adventures of a petrified writer. Let’s hope that the fire that’s burning in me doesn’t extinguish by the time I publish this article. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section. Thank you.