How to Grow Your Online Following + The #1 Way I've Used to Sell More Books

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Welcome back to the five Day Author Platform Challenge. Yes. I'm so excited that you're here and if you haven't signed up yet, you can sign up. Sign up for access@shellyhits.com PlatformChallenge it's all to celebrate the print version of my book, nine Strategies to Build and Grow youw Author Platform. Today I'm going to be talking about the number one way I've used to sell more books. So a recap. Day one was the B. We're going through the build acronym, the B in the acronym and B is a bridge to your readers. And I shared with you why you must have an author platform even if you're not selling many books or are still unpublished. Day two, which was yesterday, we rocked the house. It was amazing. You guys had aha moments, you had breakthroughs and day two was you for understanding your target audience. Yesterday I shared the power of getting crystal clear on who your ideal reader is and tips and tools on finding your audience online. Today we're going to dive in to the I. I stands for invite. And today I'm going to teach you how to grow your online following and the number one way I've used to sell more books. And if you haven't yet, make sure to share this challenge with your friends. You can share the link shellyhits.com platformchallenge Today we're talking all about the I, which is invite. Basically what I'm going to be talking about with you today is called permission marketing. Permission marketing is the basis of the marketing that I have done that's helped me sell over 103,000 books. And it's even more than that. That was a couple years ago. I counted basically able to grow thousands of people into my tribe into multiple niches. And I'm excited to share this with you today. So I want you to think about this. When you think about permission marketing, it's not going to be pushy, it's not going to be self promotional. I want you to think about this illustration. Some of you may have heard me share this before because I love using this illustration. If you're walking down the street and you see someone with a bullhorn and they're like, hey, hey, check this out, check this out, check this out. And they're yelling and they have the bullhorn and they're screaming at you, how's that going to make you feel many times you may be a little annoyed. You know, you might have a place to go and an appointment to get and you're busy and it's a little bit annoying and it's like, ugh. Now that person may actually get your attention. I mean, they get your attention, sure, but they're doing it in a way that's a bit pushy and a bit annoying. I bet that they don't get a really high conversion rate or amount of response because it's just standing on the corner with that bullhorn. Now, I want you to imagine another scenario. Let's say you meet someone for the first time and you guys just connect. You know how that happens, you just connect with someone and, and you're like, man, I'd really love to get to know you better and to hear more about your story, I'd love to invite you over to my home for coffee. Do you have some time available? So they look on their schedule and they're like, sure, I have this time next week available. You set up an appointment, they come over, you invite them into your home. Catch that invite. That's what today's about. Invite. You invite them into your home, you give them coffee, maybe a snack and you share some conversation together and they leave. Getting to know you better and you have started a relationship, it's completely different, right? And I want you to think about your marketing in those terms. So many people think of marketing like the sleazy salesman or the person with the bullhorn on the side of the road. Buy my book. Buy my book. Buy my book. Have you ever felt like marketing is like that? Like you have to just be screaming, screaming in everyone's face and pushy and self promotional and yet it doesn't have to be that way. Repeat after me. It doesn't have to be that way. You can actually instead invite people through permission marketing into your home online, give them something of value for free or like a cup of coffee and start a two way relationship where they grow to know like and trust you. Completely different. I want you to think about marketing in a completely different way. And I want you to realize the foundation of what I teach is permission marketing. That means someone has given you permission to have a relationship with you. That's what marketing is. Marketing is basically at the core, it's a relationship, it's sharing with someone. Now, how many of you have recently shared some sort of restaurant or some sort of just item you've bought online or on Amazon or you've shared A great movie or a book that you read. How many of you have shared something like that recently with a friend? Because whether or not we realize it, we're marketing all the time. We're sharing. We're sharing the things we love. We're sharing the things that. Those movies that we go to, and we're like, yes, I love that movie. Or the restaurant or the store that we go to, and we're like, whoa, I love this. Or one of my friends, the other day, she was posting a link to a pillow because it solved a problem for her. It helped her be able to sleep better. And she's like, it's a $50 pillow, but I highly recommend it. I want you to think about marketing as sharing as a relationship and permission marketing. It is huge when you start to see it in that way. I have thought about this illustration many times as well. It's like if you're trying to play catch with somebody and they're inside their house and you're like, hey, come out and play catch with me. I'd love to spend some time with you. And they're not interested, and they keep their window closed. If you try to throw a softball to them and try to play catch with them anyways, what's going to happen? It's going to cause damage, right?

We want to make sure that when we're marketing, when we're sharing about our book, which we're going to be passionate about, right? I mean, I hope you're passionate about it, but when we're marketing that we have permission, because if we don't have that permission, then it's. It's just like trying to play catch with someone that's inside their home with the window closed. It could actually cause damage, could cause damage to your brand, to you, to your relationship with that person. And one thing I see a lot of people doing is they'll add me to a group without my permission. That is not cool. That is not cool. Because you need to ask them if you have a group and you're using it for marketing purposes. Please, please, please, please, please do not add people to your group unless you have their permission. Because otherwise, it's like throwing a ball through a closed window. It doesn't feel good. It feels pushy. It feels like, why are you doing this? Because I didn't sign up for this. I didn't ask for this. Please, please, please do not import your LinkedIn contacts to your subscriber email list if they have not opted in. You need to allow people to have the Choice you need to make it Permission marketing. The number one way that I have used to sell more books is by building a tribe. Building my lifers through email subscriber lists. However, I talk about this and a lot of authors are like, email subscriber list or I tried it and it didn't work and it doesn't work for me. And there's all these mindset issues around email marketing. And one of the common mindset blocks that I see with authors is they just want free, they want to do it for free and they don't want to pay for an email subscriber service. I will tell you, if you have a very limited budget, the very one thing you should pay for, in my opinion, is an email subscriber list. It's taken time. I mean, it's not an instant thing, but it has been the best investment I ever made. It's also the biggest regret. I wish that I would have started it sooner and really had been doing that even earlier because I had the same mindset block. I had the same thing of the scarcity of, oh, I can't afford that. Oh, it's a monthly fee. Oh, I can't do that, I can't do that. I can't do that. It's too much. It's too much, but I'm not making money yet. This is the one thing. There's a lot of tools out there and there's a lot of things that are optional. But when it comes to building your tribe, this is the one thing that you own that you have control of and that where you can grow your relationship with your subscribers to have them know, like and trust you. So mailchimp is a service that you can pay for it or you can get a free service. I do not recommend that you use mailchimp, the free mailchimp service. If you are currently using the free mailchimp service, I recommend that you change that asap. The reason is because I want you to work smarter and not harder. The free mailchimp account does not. Let me repeat. The free mailchimp account does not come with autoresponders or automation.

Did you know that? It does not come with autoresponders. Yes, it is free for up to 2,000 people. But one of the things that has really helped me to sell more books through an email subscriber list is the autoresponders. That is the key. So people will tell me, but it doesn't work. And I'll ask them, well, what have you done? They're using the free mailchimp account. They're not following up with their subscribers because it takes time to send out the broadcast. They don't have any autoresponder set up. And I'm like, there's some missing pieces. We need to plug the leaks in your bucket. Are you ready to plug the leaks in your bucket? Are you ready to work smarter and not harder? Now, if you absolutely, absolutely, absolutely have to go free, then there's a service that I recently heard of. I haven't tried them, I don't know about them, but you can check it out. It's called benchmarkemail.com and there is a free account, benchmarkemail.com as far as I can see, does include autoresponders. But if you need a free account, I really, really, really suggest that you pay and that you set up the autoresponders, that you use this automation so that you're not constantly thinking, how am I going to, what am I going to be doing? But it's working automatically for you behind the scenes. You want to be professional. And so if you have a small budget, what I did in the beginning is I reinvested my profits into it. There's things you can do, there's ways that you can earn the money. You can have a little garage sale at your house, sell some stuff on Craigslist or sell some things on ebay, or have a service that you provide for authors. I don't know, I mean, there's creative ways to find the money. This is the one thing that if you don't pay for anything else, I highly recommend it. Okay, so you got it, right? We're not going to sign up for an email service that doesn't have autoresponders because we are going to work smarter, not harder. Right? And I want you to have more time, I want you to have more effectiveness. And one of the best ways is to use the automation available to you. How many of you are already using autoresponders? If you in your email subscriber service. So one of the things that I recommend that you do with your email service provider is set up at least a seven sequence email autoresponder. Maybe once a week you send out an email and you want these to be not just promotional, not just the bullhorn. Buy my book. Buy my book. You want to have them to be a sequence. And a lot of people call it a nurture sequence. Nurture is not just about being self promotional and pushy. It's about, hey, let's get to know each other. Let's get to know how can I serve you? So I want you to think about this and I want you to invest time into writing these autoresponders. Because if you do this and you do this really well, guess what? You're going to do this work one time and it's going to work for you over and over and over and over and Have I said over? It's going to work for you 247 every day, even while you sleep, even when you're sick, even when you're on vacation, selling books, building your audience. Can anyone say woohoo? I get excited about this stuff and this was a turning point in my business when I tapped into in to the power of autoresponders. Wow. And not just promotion stuff like telling stories. Right?

So I want to share with you an example of an autoresponder I have used. And my autoresponders are different. I'm not perfect. I'm still working on things. But when you set this up, I want you to create Evergreen email autoresponders. Evergreen simply means that they won't go out of style. It's not based on current events or something that may change a tool or something, but it's based on something that either you can teach them value, you can give them, you can share a story, statistics, things like that. Some of those may go out. But I want you to really think about this. I want you to be strategic about this because these are the emails that will go out to every single person that signs up for your email list. Make sense? I'm going to share with you an email that's worked really well for me, just to get your mind thinking about what kind of autoresponders you could create. Sound good? The subject line of this email, it says, find out why at 7 years old, I vowed to be perfect. Does that sound like an email that would intrigue you? It kind of is that curiosity thing and it's personal. One of the things you want to try to do is share a few personal stories. You don't have to share as much as I do or be as vulnerable as I do, but the more you can let someone into your world, the better. And so that's the subject line. And then I tell this story. I say pretty much all my life in one way, shape or form, I've tried to be perfect. And I share this story of when I was little, I was seven years old and I was part of a baton twirling team or whatever you called it, troupe or whatever. And we had A parade and we went and I performed perfectly except for one time I dropped my baton only once and that was the one time they took my picture for the paper. So the entire world, my entire world at the time was seven years old, saw my mistake. It was broadcasted to everyone. The one time I made a mistake. And so I tell that story. And then I said at that day, in my seven year old heart, I resolved to never allow myself to be humiliated like that again. I resolved to strive for perfection and work harder to avoid failure and mistakes. Now people are going to start resonating a little bit with that. You see how this is evergreen, but it's also connecting my audience with me because it's a story. And then I said, I've learned that one mistake does not define you. Remember, if you've never failed, you've never lived. Then I twisted into connecting with book marketing. Even if some of your book marketing efforts have failed, don't give up. Persevere and try something else. Don't give up. I provide tons of resources for authors. If your current book marketing efforts have not been successful, be willing to try something new. And I give them a link to check out my books. Did that feel pushy to you? Did that feel self promotional to you when I was telling you that story, how I transitioned it into how it might apply to authors and how my resources might be able to help you? Yes or no? Because I really want you to spend time thinking what can I share? What story can I include? What kind of advice or tips can I share in this evergreen autoresponder sequence? I've actually gotten really great feedback from this type of an email. I've actually had people reply to me and share their life stories with me. They'll share something with me really intense. They'll just connect with me and reply. That's when you know you have a good email. Email. So everyone understands what it feels like to have failed, to have made mistakes. What are some stories that were pivotal in your life that you can maybe relate to your niche or topic that you can include in your autoresponder sequence. So there's so many ways you can do it. You can offer value. So that's just one idea. And you can also do some sort of teaching. Like I have a video series. If you sign up@shellyhits.com free training. It's a three part video series. So that's very common to give content like that. But I tell stories in some of those videos and integrate some things there. But what can you do to connect with your audience and do it in a way that is working for you 24, 7 automagically, where you can work smarter, not harder. And you can set it up once and have it work for you over and over again. I want you to think about this. I want you to carve out some time and do some brainstorming on what you can do. I do have a list of what I recommend, like the different order for autoresponders in authoraudienceacademy.com if you are a member, I have that in there for you that you can look at. The other thing I wanted to talk about is when you're inviting people into your online home, you want to invite them in a way that gives them something of value. Just like my example in the beginning, you're offering that free cup of coffee. What can you offer as a lead magnet that your target audience will want? That will solve a problem for them. It will solve a pain point for them and they will want that. They won't even think twice about giving you their name and email because let's face it, there's a lot of stuff going on. There's a lot of people out there who. And there's times that I'll look at something and I'll be like, eh, eh, I don't think so. You want to provide so much value that the person is like, yes. And it's solving that pain point and if possible, that they can get some quick results. So let me give you an example. My free writing challenge@writingweek.com it's a free seven day nonfiction writing challenge. It's helping people to write more productively, get their first drafts done. It's solving that pain point and people will sign up for it. People have literally finished their first drafts in seven days. When you really apply the concepts and you do what I teach in writing Week, people go crazy. I mean, they get results and then they're probably like, oh wow, if I'm getting this kind of result from her free stuff, from her free training, what else does she have? Well then I invite them to a webinar and then they may buy some of my other books or sign up for Authoritarian Academy. I want you to also think about what can you deliver that solves a problem and if possible gives them a result. And not something that's a 60 page ebook. It can be a checklist, it can be something that is like an audit, a social media audit if you're into marketing, or it can be something very simple. But what can you offer of value? I have been reverse engineering my own book marketing success and it's just even this week kind of come a lot more clear on what has really worked for me. One of the things I realize is that one of the biggest ways that I've used to to continue to get new subscribers on a regular basis to my email list is having a perma free book on Amazon. And so you've probably heard of this strategy. I've used it since 2012 and I have had thousands and thousands of downloads. My book, self publishing books 101, it usually gets downloaded about a thousand times a month on Amazon on autopilot.

I'm not doing anything. I wrote the book, I set it up, I published it. I got this system set up once, can we say once? And it keeps working for me over and over and over again. Now there is a specific system and strategy on doing this. I'm going to be teaching this in Author Audience Academy soon. But one of the biggest tips is to have a keyword in in your title that people are searching for. Self Publishing books is a keyword people search for. That's why I titled my book self publishing books 101. So they find it, they download it. Some of my very best customers tell me they found me how.

Through that book, self publishing books 101. I also have a free book for my Christian author list. And it's how to find free Christian books online that has driven a lot of traffic. It's got me a lot of signups to that list. I think that list is probably around 8,000 and I have thousands on my author list. But once you set that system up, it works for you over and over again. However, so many authors I find are not willing to invest that initial work and I'm not sure why. Because you're actually doing something one time and it's going to keep working for you. It's going to keep driving traffic for you if you set it up right, if you do it correctly, if you use a strategy where you're using a keyword, people are searching for and solving a problem that they need. Have a call to action in your book to sign up for your email list. And it's related. There's a strategy to it, but it can all be automated. Awesome. All right, so today I've talked about how to grow your following online and the number one way I've used to sell more books, which is email marketing, but not the free accounts, not the free mailchimp account. Repeat after me. I will not have the free mailchimp account because I want you to work smarter, not harder. I want you to automate as much as you can. I mean make it good, make your autoresponders, make your perma free book. Make your things that you're doing and you're setting up for automation, make it good, invest time in it. But then once you set it up once, it will keep working for you. There is a worksheet that goes along with this challenge. It's@shellyhits.com platformchallenge and you should get all the information then in your email. If for some reason you don't get it, check your spam or you can contact my support team supporthellehits.com but there isn't like a transcript or a print outline of the the video but you can watch it as many times as you need. So the free book, self publishing books 101, it is perma free on Amazon and the main purpose of that book is to establish my expertise in self publishing but also to find my audience on Amazon. So people will search on Amazon for different books because it's free. A lot of times people will download it, give it a try, they'll read it. But what I'm finding and what I already said is it helps me build my email list. So they sign up to my list and some of my very best customers and they're in my author it's academy now have found me through that book. So they sign up for my email list, they get to know like and trust me. And then it's also my number one print book in sales most months. I mean some months if I'm having a special promotion or book launch or something. So that's a strategy too. If you have a perma free Kindle book, you can also publish it in print for a price. And then if they get the free book and they like it and they want it as a reference, they might also buy the print book. So it does bring in sales. But then my main strategy is to find new people that can be my lifers, that can be part of my tribe, that can sign up to my email list and that I can continue a relationship with. Does that make sense? Thank you so much for joining me for this day of the challenge. This was day three of the five day author Platform challenge. If you haven't signed up yet, make sure to get lifetime access to the videos and checklists@shellyhits.com platformchallenge and I would love for you to support my new print book launch. It's shellyhits.com build and it will take you to the print book. There's instructions. You can get a free $47 training if you buy the print book and there's instructions for that@shellyhits.com photocontest so that is the information and I hope that you found this helpful. Make sure to join me for day four tomorrow and I will see you next time. Buh. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her Six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.