3 Steps to Get More Email Subscribers with Author List Swaps
If you’re serious about building your author platform and becoming a best seller author, having an email list is a must. There are many ways to build a list, but one of the fastest and cheapest ways to do it is by using the lists other people have already built.
The way this generally works is that you need to find partners that will promote your free eBook to their subscribers.
It means they will send a promotional email with a link to your lead magnet landing page to their list. When people open the link, they will have to join your email list before they get your freebie. This is how you can quickly increase your reach, generate traffic to your landing page, and grow your email subscribers.
Of course, the success of this strategy is completely dependent on your niche, who your partners are, and the size of their list, but it’s possible to add hundreds or even thousands of people to your list in just a few days using this strategy.
However, what to do if you don’t have partners yet that would agree to promote your freebie to their list? Follow these three simple steps.
1. Create Your Lead Magnet
The first thing you need to do to start building your email list is to create a lead magnet that your readers will absolutely want to download. It means you should offer something valuable for free in return for a person’s email address. It could be another book, a free audio-book, online course, or anything else that might be valuable to your audience. Check out these lead magnet ideas. However, to follow the strategy described in this article, you will most probably need an eBook.
Anyway, your freebie or lead magnet must be something exciting that tempts people to fill out your subscription form. You want to make sure that your offer is juicy enough for your audience to want to exchange emails with you.
2. Participate in Email List Swaps
The way this works is that you need to find somebody with a similar audience that would agree to email their subscribers and encourage them to visit the landing page with your freebie offer. This is how you can quickly generate traffic to your landing page and grow your email list. It’s great if you already have partners that can do that for you. But what to do if you don’t?
Luckily, there are online platforms that are built for this purpose and can help new book authors to significantly grow their email lists. Websites like BookFunnel.com, BookBoast.com, MyBookCave.com, Storyorigin.com, ProlificWorks.com, and TCKpublishing.com provide a feature that allows authors to promote each other’s free books or only their samples to their email lists.
So, how it works?
Simply sign up on any of these sites and add a book or books you’d like to give away for free to readers in exchange for their email addresses. Then join group promos where authors in a similar genre to yours gather and promote each other’s free books to their lists.
In general, it works like this. Let’s say 10 authors join a non-fiction promo group. They add their free books that are automatically placed on a landing page like the one below.
When the promo starts, everybody invites their email list to check out these freebies on the landing page. That’s a win-win strategy, because thanks to the joint email campaign, all promo participants can grow their email list. When the emails are collected, import them in your email marketing software to start communicating with your new fans.
3. Create an Automated Email Sequence
A serious mistake many authors make is that they just collect email addresses and forget about them. They don’t regularly communicate with their new subscribers. Instead, they assume that these people will remember them even if they send an occasional email in a month or even a year. That’s a completely wrong assumption.
If you want to build your email list, you must implement an automated welcome email sequence and communicate with your audience at least a few times a week.
Otherwise, there is no point in even starting. Therefore, you will need to use an email marketing software.
My own favorite is GetResponse because it has all the features to build good-looking landing pages with subscription forms, pop-ups for my web-page, sophisticated email automation sequence, and even simple lead generation and sales funnels. If you are serious about building your email list and eventually – sales funnel, I suggest you consider using GetResponse because you can easily build lead generation funnels like the one below and see the statistics for every step the visitors of your lead magnet landing page make.
Moreover, you can create automated email sequences for different segments of your audience, which is crucial in order to have great communication with your subscribers. You can start with their free version and gradually grow to the paid version with more sophisticated features.
Whatever email service you chose, building your email list from the ground up is extremely important to your success as an author. Staying connected with your fan-base regularly is a key factor for successful book launches and sales in the future.
