#368: Marketing Minute: How Solo Email Swaps Can Grow Your Author Platform Fast

Welcome to Kingdom Writers, where we help equip and empower Christian writers of all genres to share your unique gifts with the world. We're your hosts, C.J. and Shelley Hitz.

This podcast is filled with spiritual encouragement as well as prayers to help you overcome the resistance you face as a writer. Your story matters.

Hey, friends. Welcome back to the Kingdom Writers Podcast. My name is Shelly Hitz, and today we're going to be talking about how solo email swaps can grow your author platform fast. If this is something that interests you, make sure to swipe up on your show notes or check out the description here, because we have a link for you to a toolkit where we're going to actually help you to implement this strategy. We're going to be the templates, the checklist that, you know, all the things, so make sure to check that out. And in this episode, I'm going to talk to you about solo email swaps. So what are solo email swaps anyway, you might be thinking, Shelly, what is this? Well, first of all, the first requirement is that you would need to have an email subscription list that you have begun to grow with an audience that is interested in your book. So we've talked about this in previous episodes, and if you want to want to get even more information, go to our recent conference, KingdomWritersConference.com email and you can find out so much more about email marketing. And it is one of the most powerful ways that you'll be able to market your books and grow your audience. It's something I, I just, I highly recommend for every writer. So that's the number one if you already have an email subscription list. Now, I was talking to a Christian Book Academy member about recently. She's a fiction writer, and she said, you know, I don't know if this would work for me because I only have 700 people on my list or 600 or something around there. Six or seven hundred. I said, oh yeah, it will work for you because you have an audience. You know, even if you have 50 or 100, whatever you have, you know, you have an audience that has started to form. Now you'll want to take into consideration the size of your current email list and the types of people that you would do a solo email swap with. You're not going to, you know, go after the huge names and those people that have really big lists. Because a solo email swap means you have an email subscription list, another author has an email subscription list, and you send emails for each other, recommending each other. You can either send an email recommending your book. So, you know, you do kind of like a book recommendation email, which is very common for authors to send out to their list. And if people are interested in reading your book, I guarantee they have already purchased a bunch of other books in that genre or on that topic, they're interested in it. And so you can send out an email for that other author's book saying, here's a recommendation, and then they send one out for you. Or, or what I really like to do because I like to grow my email list and then I can follow up with them asking if they'd like to purchase my book. But if you have a really compelling lead magnet, which is a free gift and you know it is converting well, which just simply means people are coming to the page and they're signing up, I would actually send them to your email subscriber list like your, to your lead magnet, and then have an automated system that follows up and invites them to purchase your book after they sign up, because then you can keep following up with them ongoing. But a solo email swap is so powerful because you're having instant trust with their audience because the person they trust, the person that they have signed up to their email list is recommending you and vice versa. So you want to be kind of picky who you do a solo email swap with. You're not going to just want to do it with anyone and everyone. You want to make sure that they have a high quality book, that it fits your audience, that it's something your audience would be interested in. And if so, it's going to be a win, win, win, a win for you, a win for the other author, a win for your audience and their audience. And so, so it's just amazing. My friend Jess Kotzer, she shares, she really just focused on this one strategy and over a year, about, you know, 52 weeks, she grew her email list to over, I think it was over 5,200. And it was just amazing because she really focused on this one thing and then now she has this email list, you know, that she can continue to communicate with, sell things to. And it's powerful when you apply it. I personally experience this with my art business. So if you don't know, I'm also an artist and I'm not focusing on that right now. Just really feel like God's told me to focus on helping you, helping writers. But we create scripture coloring pages over@livingcolorsonline.com so $5 a month, you can go check it out if you're Interested. It's great for, for adults, for stress relief, but for kids or for, for doing something away from a screen with your kids grandkids or whatever. So anyways, somebody had approached me through Instagram about a Bible reading journal or planner or something like that that she had and she was giving it away for free as a lead magnet to grow her email list. And at first I almost discarded the email and thought, oh, she's just trying to promote her thing. And then I thought, oh my goodness, this would be perfect for my Living Colors audience. And so we talked about it and we decided to do an email swap. She shared about my free coloring pages and I shared about her free.

Journal or whatever it was. And it was amazing. I mean, she actually shares it as an affiliate and it's now in her welcome sequence that she sends out to everybody. And, and, and I do the same thing. I, I put the email, you know, that recommends her in my email welcome sequence and it continues to send her new people. But I notice when, when she's sending new people to me because she sends them as an affiliate, so she's actually getting affiliate commissions too. But it just really worked out for both of us and I just thought, man, I just, I think more authors could really benefit from this. It's super easy to do. It's, it's great for introverts because you just, you communicate through email. You know, you just set up something and you can almost, you know, have templates that is, you just reuse over and over again. Whereas with guest blogging, you can't just use the same guest blog over and over and over again. Right, but you could literally send the same email to different people's email lists over and over and over because most people are not going to have the same people on their subscriber list. So you do the work once and then you can use this over and over again. And so I'm really excited to share with you that I have put together this toolkit. It's a solo email swaps toolkit for you with different templates that you can use with, you know, step by step plan. If any of you know my trainings from before, they, they are, you know, going to help you implement this in the easiest, simplest way possible. So check out the show notes for the link. So excited to share this with you. And we will actually be live with an implementation workshop that goes along with this toolkit on March 23rd. So if you're listening live, then this is something that you could join us on next week and Actually join us live to implement this, to use the templ. If not, you can get the recordings, you can get everything and put it to action at any time. But I really encourage you to pray about this, to think about this, to say, is there a way I could use solo email swaps in my business, in promoting my books? And it doesn't have to be something like Jess did. Jess, she focused on this and she sent I think an email out every week for someone else and they did too. It was literally 52 weeks, week after week after week she was doing this. Or you can do it like me. It could be a one off. It could be as you find people that you feel are a good fit. It could be once a quarter, it could be once a month. But whatever you do, I really think that this could be a way that many of you can use collaborations to grow your author platform but also sell more books. So check it out and I I will talk to you in the next episode. Bye Bye. Would you like more? If you are enjoying this podcast but want more, I have something exciting to share with you. We have released what's called a private podcast. So a private podcast you will not find by searching an apple, you have to know specifically how to subscribe to it. It's more private and exclusive and it just can be more more relaxed behind the scenes. And my new private podcast is called Hits Blitz and it's wisdom for writers that you're going to learn from my 18 plus years of experience in publishing and online marketing so that you can move forward in God's call to write. I am best known for injecting energy and enthusiasm into everything I do and inspire inspiring those around me to take action. So I encourage you to listen in to this exclusive private podcast. It is free, 100% free. You don't have to pay for it. And be prepared to be inspired by my next Hits Blitz. So you can sign up@trainingauthors.com hitsblitz and if you have any other writing friends that you think could benefit from it, definitely share it with them. They can go to the Same same link trainingauthors.com hitsblitz to get access. Again, this is a private podcast so you cannot get access to it any other way. It's completely free. All you have to do is sign up and then you'll get all the information on how to add it to your podcast player of choice. So I can't wait for you to join me over there. I share a lot of things behind the scenes and more content, just in a real time basis. So it's more like chatting with a friend or following someone on stories on social media. Except you don't have to get caught up in any of the algorithms. You'll just have this in your podcast player and be able to listen in wherever you're at, whatever you're doing. Some of the listeners told me this week that they were listening while waiting in the Target parking lot, while brushing their teeth. You can fit this into the pockets of time that you have, so I hope you'll join me. Come over to trainingauthors.com hitsblitz.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Kingdom Writers. We believe that you, as a Christian writer, have a specific role to play in the Kingdom of Heaven to impact lives for eternity.

And because of this, we choose to pour out our lives into encouraging writers like you to not only tell your stories, but to take the courageous step of self publishing your stories in books that will outlive you and leave behind a powerful legacy. This podcast is sponsored by Christian Book Academy where we help you give birth to your books. We invite you to join our community of Kingdom Writers.