5 Simple Ways to Build Your Mailing List

This post is a repost from Filles Vertes Publishing, posted with permission here. This post was originally written by me and posted on their platform.

5 Simple Ways to Build Your Mailing List

If you’re wondering how to help your mailing list grow, you’ve come to the right place. You might be a book blogger, an author, or a business owner, these 5 principles of building your mailing list will apply to you. I’m going to assume that you’ve signed up with a mailing list service and you have everything in place, but you’re struggling to see any jumps in the amount of people joining your mailing list.

Tip 1: Make Sure Your Followers Know About Your List

You may have gone through the effort to create a mailing list and place it on your website. You want to make sure that your readers will know that your mailing list is there. If they must scroll all the way to the bottom of your website, past all your other content, they might not even realize you have a mailing list.

The best spot to put your mailing list is on the sidebar of your website or right under the header. You want to make it easy to see and remember. You don’t want to make it so intrusive that it interferes with your reader’s ability to navigate your site, but you want to make it noticeable.

This is sort of a bonus tip, specifically for authors. If you’re an author, consider asking readers to join your mailing list in the back of your books. You may not have control over this if you are working with a publisher, but you can certainly make sure you have one as a self-published author.

One mistakes authors make is to leave the mailing list entirely up to their publishers. This isn’t as effective as having a list that is exclusively from you, the author. Readers might want to hear news about you, but they might not care about news from every other author on the publisher’s list. Create your own list to keep readers interested in you.

Tip 2: Give Away Free Goodies as Incentives to Join

If you want to make people interested in joining your mailing list, consider offering an incentive. These goodies should be tailored to your audience and of high value.

Many self-published authors choose to give away a free book as an incentive to join. If you are not allowed to giveaway your book or you don’t have a book that you are willing to give away, consider writing an exclusive short story or offering background information about the book. Maybe you create in depth maps for your Fantasy world and you’ve never shared them with the public. Share them on your mailing list! Your list is for readers that want to know more about you and your writing journey.

Tip 3: Give Away Goodies After They Join

This is particularly useful if you’re a non-fiction writer or a book blogger. You could decide to give away one free writing tip each weekend or offer advice on helping your followers take better photos for Instagram. Create regular content that keeps your readers coming back and wanting to stay on your list.

Tip 4: Provide Quality Content and Don’t Overdo It

Make sure that the content you are creating is not just filler text with many images. You should only reach out to your mailing list when you have something meaningful to offer or they will tune you out like white noise.

If you only use your mailing list to remind readers of old content on your blog or sell the same book, they will start to lose interest in you. This tip ties in to number 3, but make sure that you are taking the time to create meaningful content for the readers that are going out of their way to see what you have to say.

Tip 5: Participate in Group Giveaways

There are number of ways that group giveaways can work. For authors, you might decide to sign up at BookFunnel and join a Book Bundle with your book. This allows you to group your book up with a lot of other titles and it will be sent out to all of those new lists. You can ask that readers join your mailing list to download your book and bam! You’ve got an incentive tied in with a large group of targeted readers.

If you’re a book blogger, consider teaming up with another blogger and going in on a book giveaway or even prizes. You can both share the information with the other blogs and encourage the readers to join both lists.

Well, there you have it! 5 simple tips to building your mailing list. Use these tips and apply them to your own audience to see your mailing list grow naturally and consistently.