Email list & newsletters for your audience

Email list and newsletters for your audience.

The email list and newsletters lay the foundation for book sales. An email list is a good way to stay in touch with readers who are interested in your writing, books, products, or services. Stay in touch with recent book buyers.

Getting traffic

Do you need traffic? It is a serious question and most often the answer is: Yes! You need traffic to build an email list. If you are going to be in contact with readers and book buyers on a regular basis, having lots of traffic is a must for securing legitimate email subscribers. This is particularly important if you have an online store.

SELLING ON YOUR WEBSITE

If you choose to make your site the destination, then you need to be writing many pages and posts. Optimize those by including images on your site and in your store.

Due to the nature of our business, Star Print Brokers puts in a great deal of time and effort into building and maintaining our website. Our business is brokering the printing of high-quality books. We also offer book design services. We do not need Amazon for marketing the services that we offer.

When I began to write Book Design: Simple & Professional, I put up another website to promote the book, linking to Amazon for book sales. There are plans for several more books in the Simple & Professional series. AuthorBookStudio.com does not expect immediate high-traffic. We are creating posts and pages for the site and optimizing keywords. Some visitors will find us this way. But more book buyers will find us on Amazon with searches that describe the books we sell or specific subject matter.

Perhaps you have already experimented with various keywords on your website. The same website keywords may be helpful on Amazon. If you wrote a cookbook for your restaurant, the more pertinent keywords might be more specific, like “seafood cookbook,” or more specifically “salmon seafood cookbook.” How about “blackened salmon seafood cookbook”?

Use longtail keyword phrases as well as single keywords

While there are a number of sites that offer keyword research tools, you can check results with the Google Keyword Planner.

While you can start with the Yoast SEO free plugin, I find the Premium version to be invaluable. The free version is fine for a site with little content. Depending on your products, services, and website, try their Local SEO, Video SEO, News SEO, and Yoast WooCommerce plugins.

AUTHOR PAGE ON AMAZON

Since being found on the web and building significant traffic is one of the hardest things to do — especially for a new self-publisher — then maybe just a website with links to Amazon is all you need initially. However, continue to collect names for important emails that must go out, like a new book launch.

Traffic is the biggest challenge and that is why I always recommend that self-publishers print with Star Print Brokers because we print the best books, Then sell your books on Amazon because they have an enormous amount of traffic which your website cannot match.

As of this writing, the top websites with the most traffic on the planet are in this order: Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Amazon. How are book buyers going to find you? If they are not already aware of your specific book or your name, they will go to Amazon to buy a book. Even if they know you or your book and do a search on Google, they may very well find you on Amazon as well as your website.

Sign up for an author page on Amazon

List all book titles for sale. You can either fulfill orders yourself, or have Amazon fulfill the orders at an additional cost. I suggest that if you are a new self-publisher and have 1,000 books or less, fulfill the orders yourself. If you print more than that, have us send them to Amazon for fulfillment. You will need to find out from Amazon which warehouse they will be delivered to. We need this information for the quote, as the destination and any split shipping changes the quote.

Use Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature. While it is a small additional cost, book buyers like to see a sample of what they are getting before they buy. It may well increase the number of sales for your book.

The most important thing you can do to be found is to be listed in appropriate Amazon categories and use unique keywords that people may be searching for. A keyword can be one word or a phrase.

WEBSITE SIGNUP FORMS for newsletters

Typically, people find your website and then use a form to sign up to receive your newsletter or email updates. Always put the newsletter or email sign up form on the home page. Visitors are more likely to sign up if they are offered a freebie of some sort. This is a “lead magnet.” Here are some ideas of things that you might offer:

• A free ebook or guide.
• A discount on a product or service.
• Percentage or dollar amount discount off first order.
• Promote your “subscriber only” benefits.
• Download a free article or how-to.
• Download a chapter or part in a book.
• A PDF with a sampling of something you sell.
• Download a free checklist or a list of something particular to your business,
• Offer a free mini-course.
• A free Cheat Sheet or Hack.

Email marketing software

MailerLite is fairly easy to use and free to start with for newsletters. We are using it currently. Most of the email services are free until you reach a certain number of subscribers.

Some of the other services are ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, Convert Kit, Drip (for ecommerce), Emma, HubSpot, iContact, MailChimp, MailPoet, Moosend, Pardot by Salesforce, SendInBlue, and more. I am not endorsing any of these services. Email marketing software may have different uses, complexities, costs, and functions. Know who your prospective client is, and do not turn them off!

Do you have an interest in taking an online course? You probably expect to receive a number of emails that are sent on a per-determined schedule. That is usually fine with most people, as they want the course and information. However, if they are no longer interested in a product or service, but are emailed daily or even every other day, they unsubscribe and sometimes block the offending email address. The point is that there is a distinct difference between providing valuable information and pestering people. Know your audience!