Julie Broad recommends three tools for authors to quickly build landing pages and grow email lists before their full website launches: BookFunnel for easy setup, ConvertKit for integrated landing pages and email, and StoryOrigin for reader-magnet specific features. An email list is the most valuable part of your author platform.
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Having an author website is an important piece to your book marketing success. But while your author website is being built, you might want somewhere you can direct people to join your newsletter list without a lot of hassle. Want to know how to set that up? Quickly and easily. There are a lot of different ways you can do it, but today I have three for you. Hey there. I'm Julia the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, a full service self publishing company helping you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book. If you're new to Book Launchers tv well hello, I hope you've subscribed with the notifications on because man do we have fun and learn a lot here. But if you're new, you might not know that I am a huge advocate for authors making a big impact and a bigger income from being an author. And a lot of that starts with building your platform or growing an existing one. And by platform, I don't really mean social media. That has value, but it's not the most valuable. The most valuable is your email list. Now, to grow an email list you need a place for people to subscribe and a great reason for them to do that. We've talked about what makes a great lead magnet or reader magnet before right here and I'll link to that at the end and in the description below. But for this to work, you need somewhere where people can subscribe to that reader magnet. And you really should be building a really nice looking author website because. Because when you are marketing yourself and your book, the website will be the place media and event bookers and even potential clients look to check it out. But if you don't have that done yet and you're already getting booked for podcasts or media articles or running, and you need a link to put at the bottom so you can capture the readers. The good news is there are plenty of ways to do this so easily and cheaply and have it look good. I'll give you just three ways to do it today. First, first Book Funnel. You can set up any sort of lead magnet to give away on Book Funnel. I've done this with my books and you can see what it looks like after it's been set up right here@selfpromoteandsucceed.com audio. It's super simple to set up. Here's a quick look. Just choose the Add a book option after you've created an account, of course. Then create a landing page. The hardest part is entering the info for your freebie, but once you do it, it creates a really great simple page where readers can download your book. Now it doesn't integrate direct to Kit Keep which is infusionsoft which is what we use. So I have to export the readers or set up a zap with Zapier to automatically port the emails over. Here's their list of places they integrate with and you can see our recommended service for creating your Author opt in page and your email newsletter list. ConvertKit is on their list. You can use our affiliate link which is book launchers.com convert to set up your account if you'd like, but it also supports a lot of other systems and if it doesn't support yours you can create a connection with Zapier, which is what I've had to do. Regardless, this is a good solid option for a nice looking page and if you want self promote and succeed in audiobook for free, well now you know where to go and what the back end is. Book Funnel Another option is in fact the one I've mentioned. ConvertKit. You can get started for free to create a basic page, but you have to give them some details before they will approve your account. See here they want to know your audience size, your purpose and your URL, et cetera. Once you have all of this set up, the first thing you'll see is an option to create your landing page. Walk through these steps and you're good to go in minutes so long as you have the copy you'll use and the images. What I like about using ConvertKit is that it's your email system so you are automatically integrated. All your data and emails are in one place. It's quite clean and ConvertKit was created by an author for creatives. It's an all around great system for authors to build and maintain their email lists. Oh, and while there are plenty of great ways to create an email newsletter opt in page, the last one I want to mention today is storyorigin. Storyorigin has so many great tools. We've talked about them before in a video on data reviewers and also on newsletter swaps. So they are a great tool for you to check out. And of course we have an affiliate relationship with them as well. You can go to book launchers.com origin and that's our link if you want to join with them. But let me show you why they are on the list. For simplicity as well. It's literally labeled Reader Magnet on their website. Now I don't have anything set up in here to show you, but you can see right here they have tutorials on every aspect at the top and they ask for the same information as the other providers. They have integrations not with keep and there isn't a zapier integration mentioned on this page. But most of the email providers you're likely to be using are here for your integration. Or you can export and upload the list you need titles, images, descriptions and if you have Facebook ads or plan to put that pixel in here so you can see how it all works on this demo on their site. The page looks very similar to Book Funnel. When it's done, your book cover headline and description are what have to sell it. But again, now you've got a simple page you can use to promote without having a website set up. You can set up a redirect link for all of these if you want to do so, which is simply inside of your domain service. You redirect it. So a link to the URL you'll build in the future for your website or landing page currently goes to this page that you've set up. We do that with things like las vegasbookpublisher.com it redirects to book launchers.com so you could do the same thing or or create a pretty link if you want. There are a lot of great options to quickly and easily create a landing page so you can build your email newsletter list even if you don't have an author website ready to go. Now you need to know how to grow that list. This video right here is a perfect one to watch next. And if you're feeling good on that subject, well this is the video I did right here on Story Origin as a tool for beta readers. So go ahead and click on over. I'm waiting for you.
