Ep 048: “3 Tips For Building A Mailing List”

Written by Book Marketing Tools in Marketing,Publishing,Social Media,The Author Hangout

048 featured

Welcome to the 48th episode of The Author Hangout, a podcast designed to help authors, especially self-published and indie authors, with marketing their books and improving their author platform. Authors struggle with various aspects of marketing and we are here to help!

“If readers like to hear about the things you have to offer, then by providing great content on a consistent basis, they’re going to eat it up.”– Shawn Manaher

3 Tips For Building A Mailing List

In this episode, Shawn Manaher & R.J. Adams from Book Marketing Tools discussed 3 tips for how to build a mailing list, by using examples for how they are building their own mailing list for their business, and what has worked well for them.

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Using Twitter To Grow Your Mailing List

We’re engaging with the authors who have connected with us on Twitter, and working to get them onto our mailing list:

“I really want to call out that if you’re on any social media platform, that your main goal…you have to be social right? But you have to turn those individuals into subscribers who then in turn will become those raving fans that will ultimately want to buy your book when you have it on sale, or you’re releasing a new book in your series or what not. So, when you’re on social media, that’s your main goal.”

Here are some details about what we’re doing:

“We started combing through our Twitter followers and we’ve been steadily growing that as we shared great content on our Twitter account. We then made a process of reaching out to these individuals to say “Hi”, letting them know what we’ve been working on seeing if we can chat with them more. Some people responded some people didn’t. For those who did respond we went a little bit deeper, chatting with them and ultimately tried to get them connected on to our mailing list. It’s free content for them. Its great tips and advice that can help them as an author. We’re just giving something away. We’re not trying to sell anything, we’re not doing any of that. We’re just trying to get them connected one level deeper. You’ve probably heard all the statistics, social media doesn’t help to sell books. That’s not the goal of social media. The goal of social media is to be social and to engage with people. By doing that engagement then you get people toward your mailing list where you can then sell books from there.”

We also discussed some details such as exactly what we say, the results we have seen, and more, so be sure to listen to the podcast for these details.

Using a Popup like Opt-In Monster on Your Site/Blog

People don’t like popups, but they WORK! We installed a popup on our blog using the WordPress plugin Opt In Monster, and saw great results:

“We saw a 25% increase in the number of people subscribing to our list in that first month. And then from then on we continued to see that result. By simply adding Optin Monster onto our website and letting people know about the offer that we already had in existence. So what this practically meant was, we got Optin Monster, we installed it as a plugin on our website, we enabled it on our website, we configured it and then we gave them the offer that is one of our most popular offers and that in turn turned into this huge wave of new subscribers. We didn’t do anything additional in terms of trying to drive more traffic.”

While Opt In Monster is available for WordPress, you can find popup software for other websites too.

You may be thinking that you hate popups, but… it works. Shawn talks about a little bit about why:

“The reason why it works is you’re giving them and telling them, helping them make a decision. Ultimately, when somebody comes to your website, they’re going to make a decision within 3-6 seconds whether or not they’re interested in your content. In the way this is positioned is that this lets them know that this is the best piece of content that you have…your offer should be pretty stellar and they would want that if they’re the right type of person coming to your website. This is what they want, you’re giving it to them right in front of their face and they have a decision to make.”

Create Consistent Content For Your Readers/Followers

We have used this podcast to bring weekly content for authors like you, and this has helped many authors to be able to get connected with us, because of our consistency in producing the content.

Here is why it works well for you too:

“Why that’s important is because individuals like things that are consistent. If they like to hear about the things you have to offer, then providing on a consistent basis, great content, they’re going to eat it up and they’re going to begin to appreciate the consistency that you bring on the podcast to the content that you’re writing so that they ultimately are able to find that value and do something with the content that they’re listening to. For authors, if you knew by having this consistent stream of content, whether it’s on a podcast or a blog or whatever, videos, social media, whatever that might be that translates into traffic.”

R.J. shares how this relates to you as an author:

“For an author, it might not mean a podcast for you. It might just mean sharing things on a blog on a consistent basis so that those readers who are interested, those ones who are like your super fans, you’re continually pleasing them. They’re continually getting something that they enjoy from you and you’re keeping that relationship solid. Whether that’s sharing stuff on social media. You can be talking about books that you are writing or talk about various aspects of the book that you’ve already written. It’s not just “buy my book”… “Hey, this is something interesting about my book…” and if there are people who are interested, they’ll look further and possibly buy the book. So it’s just about getting that steady stream of great content out there to the people who are following you and the cool thing is, for the people who are currently following you will enjoy it and for the people who find out about you 6 months from now have this whole back catalog of enjoyable things for them to connect with, search through, to find, read, watch, listen to and it’s all there for them. So you’re giving them so much more.”

The key is to share great content, whether on a podcast, on social media, on your blog, etc.

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