Treat your all-important subscribers list like gold
If there’s one thing all the experts agree on these days, it’s the importance of your subscribers list. By that, I mean the list of people who subscribe to your website or whatever content you provide, such as a semi-weekly blog, like mine, or the monthly newsletter many authors use to stay in touch with the readers of their books.
Why is a subscribers list so important?
It’s the only means you have of communicating directly with your people/followers/readers that you truly have control over.
“But, Kim,” you might say, “I have many more followers on Facebook/Instagram/TikTok than those who subscribe to my list.”
That may be true, but you don’t own those platforms upon which your followers are collected. Those platforms might collapse without notice, and you could lose your connection to those people. That’s probably not going to happen overnight, but what could happen overnight is that the rules for those platforms could change, algorithms could change, privacy policies shift, servers go down … and all of those things are out of your hands.
Your subscribers list is your personal audience. It may be slow growing—most writers’ are—but it’s yours and no one can take it from you. You may not be happy with the low number of people on that list, but even if you have only fifty subscribers, that’s fifty people you can reach out to personally. That’s fifty people who like you and your book enough to want to stay in touch and know what you’re up to.
Imagine fifty people in a room standing before you. If you spoke to those fifty people, wouldn’t you feel like that was a decent number? A large number, even? I would!
Whatever the number of people on your list, treat them with the utmost respect. Present content they can use, fill them in on the news, and be as entertaining as possible. Slowly but surely your list will grow. Remember that everyone starts at zero, and that it can take years to build a large following, but if you stick with it, the sky’s the limit.
Here are some ways to help it along.
1) Create a landing page on your website and include the link to that page on all of your posts for social media. When someone clicks the link, they arrive at a place made to entice them to do just one thing: sign up for your subscribers list.
That usually means offering them bonus material as an incentive, as in, “When you sign up for my blog, you’ll receive [this free thing] as a bonus.” The bonus might be a short story, an extra chapter of your novel, or a tool, such as a Self-Publishing Checklist, which is what I offer (see my landing page here). 2) Put the link to your landing page in each of your e-books. Some say to put it on the first page of your book as well as the last page; others recommend putting it only on the last page. I put mine on a “Thank You for Reading” page after the last page of the novel.
You can also add the link to your email signature so that everyone who receives an email from you has access to it.
In addition, you can make it part of your various social media profiles.
3) Write guest posts for popular websites. When you write a guest post, readers who enjoy the post and/or find it packed with valuable information will most likely visit your website, and they may even subscribe. Be sure to put a link to your landing page in your bio. Cross-promote with writers in the same genre. This is a relationship that can help all of the authors involved expand their audiences. Reach out to self-publishers who are in a similar place in their self-pub journey. You may already follow each other on Facebook or Instagram.
Cross-promotion can be as simple as introducing your subscribers to the author’s website/books, and having the author do the same for you. You might incorporate a review of their book in your newsletter or blog, or simply post a photo of the book and promote the Free Book promo they’ve planned. They can then promote your book release or giveaway, or whatever you have going on, to their subscribers.
The more authors you can find in your genre to cross-promote with, the better. At some point, you might get together with three or four of these authors and plan a book bundle giveaway together. With each author emailing their subscribers and posting about the giveaway on social media, you’ll get far more attention than you would on your own.
Growing a subscribers list is one of those things that’s really hard in the beginning but picks up speed as it goes along. Start by creating a landing page on your website and go from there.
What methods have you used to grow your list? Leave a comment below.
