Newsletters & Subscribers - To build or not to build?

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sherifredricks
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Newsletters & Subscribers - To build or not to build?

Post by sherifredricks » April 9th, 2017, 5:15 pm

There seems to be trends in marketing and promotion, like selling a 20-author anthology set for $0.99. If it works, everybody jumps on the bandwagon and floods the market.

I'm seeing the latest trend in gathering newsletter subscribers. Businesses popping up online that cater to just this sort of thing and promise 10k or more subscribers for your free book and a hefty chunk of change.

My question: How important is a newsletter to an author who struggles for visibility and sales?

I've paid the pretty penny for almost 2k new subscribers, only to have 3/4 of them unsubscribe almost immediately after the free download. I used to hate to blog, but it's looking better (and less expensive) all the time.

Your thoughts, Nathan?

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Nathan Bransford
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Re: Newsletters & Subscribers - To build or not to build?

Post by Nathan Bransford » April 9th, 2017, 7:12 pm

Newsletters can definitely be a great tool, but they're *a* tool, and yeah, I think you're going to likely have a better result with organic lists than you are with paid ones. One of the challenges with paid advertising is that unless you are very sophisticated it's pretty difficult to get revenue positive and it takes quite a bit of experimenting and prototyping to find something you can scale up.

To me, the most important thing when it comes to marketing is to do the thing that works best for you. That may be a blog, it may be social media, it may be gaming newsletter subscriptions, it may be speaking engagements... whatever works best for you personally and whichever one you enjoy. I tend to think that's the better way to lean than trying to hop on the flavor of the moment.

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