#399: Marketing Minute: Why SEO + Email Marketing is a Winning Combination for Writers

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.

Are you a published author and have said at some point I wish someone else could market my book, I just want to write. If so, keep listening. My name is Shelly Hitz, one of your hosts here at the Kingdom Writers Conference and the founder of ChristianBookAcademy.com where we help you reach more readers with your message in a way that doesn't feel safe, hillsy or slimy, so that God can use your message to impact lives. And in this episode, we're going to talk about why SEO search engine optimization plus email marketing is a winning combination for writers. So I have been doing this for a long time and I cannot tell you how many times I've heard somebody say or I've received an email or social media post comment saying, who do you know that can market my books? I just want to write. I love writing. I don't love marketing. And the thing is, so many of us have an idea that marketing is social media. It's doing live videos. It's, you know, all these things that maybe that you don't enjoy doing or you're not good at doing.

But the truth is marketing is a wide variety of things and you get to pick and choose. You can choose based upon what you, your strengths are, what your resources are, your time, money and energy, where your readers hang out. You know, there's so many things that you can base it on, but you don't have to feel like you have to do marketing a certain way. And what I find is that many writers like to write.

You may be, you know, an exception to that rule. But, you know, the majority of people that I have talked to over the years just say, shelly, I just want to write. And so this combination of SEO, search engine optimization and email marketing uses your skill of writing and you can write to your heart's content. And you don't even, it doesn't have to even feel like you're selling. You are just writing. You're helping people. You're building relationships. Selling is helping. Selling is building a relationship. You don't have to feel like a used car salesperson at the side of the road or, you know, with a bullhorn saying, hey, we've got 20% off today, you know, but you can use Your skill of writing, and this is something I think a lot of writers overlook. You know, you can write blog posts based upon phrases people are searching for on Google. So. So that's the whole concept of search engine optimization. You're writing blog posts and you're writing content that's helping people answer a specific question they have or a specific search that they're doing and they find you and they're ready to learn. They're ready for that because they're asking for it. It's permission based marketing at its best because you're not saying, okay, handing out a flyer on the side of the road. They're actually searching for you, they're actually searching for answers and then they find you. So number one, you can use your skill of writing both with writing blog posts, but also writing emails. Number two, search engine optimization. SEO is one of the ways that you can find new readers. So many times when we're doing marketing, we're actually speaking to the same people over and over. And what we need to do on a consistent basis is find new people to share our message with. And that's where search engine optimization comes into play. So you can use paid ads, you can use collaborations like podcast interviews, multi author books, which we talked about last week, and many, many other options for collaborations. But you can also use SEO search engine optimization. And one of the ways that you can do this is through blogging. So, so you have a blog and you write a blog post around a specific phrase that people are already searching for and there's not already a ton of blog posts for that topic. Now if you're wondering, like Shelley, how do I even do this? I don't even understand any of this. You're speaking a different language. And I totally get it. SEO is how we first launched our business back in 2004, just had a little website that started to earn money and it began to pay our mortgage. And then over time, we've grown our, our business. And I kind of got away from SEO and I'm getting back into it this year because it's so such a good option to find new people interested in what you have to share. So if you're like that and you're just like, I don't even know what to do, well, we have training for you inside Christian Book Academy. We have a training all about SEO search engine optimization. We have a training on the different tools you can use to find those keyword phrases and all of the above. So we can also answer specific questions you have related to it and so if you're interested, come join us@christianbookacademy.com and we can give you more content and information about that. But number one, the reason why search engine optimization and email marketing is a winning combination is because you're using your skill of writing. It's, you know, you're typically wanting to just do more writing, and so this is a way you can use your writing for the marketing piece. Search engine optimization, number two, is a way to find new readers, so you're finding those new readers. And as a bonus, these blog posts will continue to work for you for potentially years to come. We don't know what's going to change in the landscape with AI and all the things, but I have a blog post that I wrote years ago. I think it was like seven years ago and it's still one of the top refers to my website training authors calm that that blog post from seven years ago. Now not every blog post is going to be like that, but there will be some blog posts that really are valuable, that are offering great content and that stay in their search engines for a long time. So unlike a book launch or a promotion or you know, something that it's like a blip on the radar, this is something that can continue to work for you for a long. So the third reason that this is a winning combination for writers is because you can schedule both your blog posts and your emails to your subscriber list ahead of time. You can write them ahead of time, you can schedule them ahead of time. And this really helps you to manage your time and energy. So I know most of you are doing this on the side. You have another business, you have another job, you have other responsibilities. You're a parent, a grandparent, your doing ministry, whatever it is that you are doing. This is something that typically is on the side and so you can fit this in to the nooks and crannies of your life. And you can also, you can write all your blog posts or write emails when you are inspired to do it, when you have the energy to do it, when you feel excited to do it. And I like to batch these things. So batching just means I like to do a set similar task in one chunk of time. So, you know, sit down and write my emails for the month in one chunk of time or write my emails, you know, for, you know, every Thursday we send out an email currently about our podcast. It has some encouragement in it. We share some, some case studies and some testimonials of our members and we write those all in one chunk of time, once a month, schedule those ahead of time and then they're ready to go. And so many times writers can be introverts. Now, whether you're an introvert or not, if you are an introvert, this is an amazing way to work with your energy. So you again, you're using number one, your skill of writing. Number two, it's a way to find new readers through the search engine optimization side of things. And number three, you can schedule blog posts and emails ahead of time to manage your time and energy. So I haven't really talked about the email component too much yet, but with the SEO, you're writing blog posts that are specifically for certain people and then you want to have calls to action in your blog post to have them sign up for your email list. You want to offer something valuable, something that is really going to capture their attention they are really interested in or that is similar to that blog post. You can also put things for your freebies and your sidebar and your navigation bar, you can have a little pop up that comes up, but you want to then use your blog post to funnel people into your email list. And then with your email list you can set up automated emails, a welcome sequence that they get after they sign up. And it's, it can just be a set it and forget it system. Now you're not going to become a full time author, you know, and be able to pay all your bills. Most likely doing this, you know, I mean it's, it's something that is a long term strategy, but it is something that it can trickle in people and build your platform and it's something that will last over the long haul. Like I said, the time and energy you put into it, it's not one and done. It's something that can continue to work for you for years to come. And then your email list is your number one ass. So you have control over that. Social media, they can shut down your account at any time. They can say, oh, you broke a term, one of our terms of service, you know, and shut you down. And we have no idea what the landscape is going to be in the coming years towards Christians or people who are speaking truth or biblical messages. But.

Social media is still a great way to find people and to connect with people. But with your email list, it's something you control, you manage and you own. So it's the difference between owning and renting social media. You rent that space, it can be shut down at any time. And before we owned our current condo, we rented. And that happened to us. We were asked to leave and because the owner wanted to sell the condo and we were out and we were like, we want to, we want to stay in the same complex in the same area. We love it. You know, God opened up another condo for us to rent in this same, in the same complex and then we've went on to purchase this. All God stories, I mean his provision everything. But it's just an example of like you're not in control when you're building your platform on somebody else's platform. But if you're growing your audience and building your platform on email, this is something that you can have for years to come. So I hope that this has encouraged you. It's not a get rich quick method, but it is something that I really believe can be a strong foundation for everything else that you do. When you use SEO plus email marketing, it definitely can be a winning combination for you as a writer. So I hope this was encouraging to you and helpful for you. If you want to dive deeper into SEO or if you're interested in starting an email list, we have resources for you in Christian Book Academy. I already told you, we have trainings on SEO, but we also have a training on how to get set up on on Mailerlite for free. Start your email list. Start your subscriber list. We also have training on how to create that free gift that you're going to offer. But also we have welcome email sequence templates so you can use those like we just offer a lot of resources to help you get started, get up and going with email marketing faster and easier. So if you're interested in this winning combination of SEO plus email marketing, come join us in Christian Book Academy. You can sign sign up now@christianbookacademy.com and we would love to help you reach more readers with your message and impact lives. Because you know you've spent all this time writing this book and so it's time to get it out to the world. And if you don't have a book yet, this combination is still a great way to build your platform and to prepare for your book launch. All right, I will talk to you next time.

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 and 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.