Writing for Your Wealth

Whether you’re selling biographies, cookbooks, or crime novels, the internet is doubtlessly the most cost-effective way to promote your books. If you’re an author in this day and age, you know you’re supposed to have a website, a blog, and maybe you’re even Twittering, MySpacing, and FaceBooking too. But do you have a mailing list yet?

Believe it or not, out of all the online tools you can employ, a mailing list is probably going to sell more copies of your book than anything else.

The Power of Mailing Lists

Those in the internet marketing world know all about the power of newsletters, and you won’t catch a successful ebook author, software distributor, or even online candle company without a list.

Why a list?

A list…

• is the easiest way to build a personal relationship with your fan base.
• lets you send messages right to a person’s inbox (where they’re more likely to be read than blog posts competing for attention in a feedreader).
• reaches the folks who may be interested in your message but weren’t ready to buy the book the first time they visited your site.
• makes it easy for your fans to forward news of your books on to friends.
• reminds readers you exist! (Hey, people get busy and don’t necessarily remember authors they read a year ago, but if they’re getting messages from you every month, they’ll remember to check out your new books when they’re published.)

In short, a mailing list is the one tool that’s essential for anyone selling anything online.

How to Start up a Mailing List

The easiest way to start a list is to simply add a sign-up form to your existing website or blog.

That sign-up form should be prominent too. It’s easier to get people to sign up for a free newsletter than plunk down $20 for a book right away. And once you’ve got them on your mailing list, you’ll have a lot more chances to sell that book (and the next one, and the next one, and … you get the idea).

As for the technical details, you’ll need some software to automate subscriptions, unsubscriptions, and the mass sending of messages.

You can sign up with a company such as Aweber (I use these guys, and they’re something of a gold standard in the internet marketing business). It does cost money to sign up with them, so if you’re pinching pennies, you may want to look into some of the free options. Even a yahoo groups mailing list is better than nothing. (The downside with the free lists is that the company will add advertising into your messages.)

Through the use of a wizard, an outfit like Aweber makes it easy to set up an “opt-in” box (the form that goes on your site and tells people how to sign up).

Aweber also lets you set up messages ahead of time. For example, with the list I have on this site, I wrote the 7-part “Writing for Your Wealth 101″ e-course back in September, but if you sign up today, you’ll get the daily messages as if I were writing them each morning this week and sending them right out to you.

What to Write About in Your Mailing List

As you might guess, just sending emails to people that say “buy my book” isn’t going to be that well received. You’ll probably get a lot of unsubscribe requests that way.

The best thing to do is to send out helpful information related to your niche. Send the sort of stuff your fans would be thrilled to get in their email boxes once a week, twice a month, or however often you decide to communicate.

If you send valuable information (or, for my novelists out there, entertainment), nobody is going to begrudge you a “sales pitch” mixed in here and there. There’s nothing wrong with putting a “Oh, and if you want to buy my book…” P.S. in each newsletter.

The marketing gurus say a person may need to be exposed to a product up to 7 times before deciding to purchase–this is why getting people to sign up for a newsletter that you send out regularly has so much potential to increase your book sales.