What is a newsletter swap?
Recently, I have spoken in great depth about how important it is for you to have a newsletter and have also looked at some of the possible ways to build your subscriber list in the blog post “Top Tips For Building Your Mailing List.” One of the best ways to do that is by using newsletter swaps. This is considered a highly effective promotional tool whereby one author promotes another author in their email campaign in exchange for that author also doing the same.
Facilitating newsletter swaps is also a great way to network with authors who write within the same genre as yourself and also connect with the community as a whole. I am a firm believer in helping each other rise and not tearing each other down and this is a great way to help each other! It’s all about the giving as much as it is about the receiving.
How do newsletter swaps work?
If you are new to the newsletter scene, I highly recommend signing up for some of your favourite author's newsletters. This will give you first hand knowledge about how they facilitate swaps within their own newsletters.
Consider how you want to appear to your readers? What type of books do you want to feature in your own newsletter? Consider how many authors you wish to feature in your newsletter each month?
There are a number of things for you to consider. What generally happens is you would share another author's work usually with the book cover, blurb, and purchase link (Keep clean links), in exchange for them to do the same for one of your books.
Where can I find newsletter swaps?
There are a number of places where you can come across newsletter swaps with story origin being one of them. Story Origin is a platform for authors where you can do a number of different things such as; build your newsletter, create review teams, beta copy feedback, create lead magnets, newsletter swaps and group programs. Story Origin allows you to connect with authors in your genre and cross promoting, you can check out how it works here.
Another great way to find newsletter swaps is by interacting in author groups and reach out to those that write in your genre or subgenre. This not only helps you with cross promotion, it also enables you to network with other authors and create success for each other. By using groups and networking you build trust and also gain knowledge about the author you are promoting, trust is a huge circle in the reader community, you want your readers to be sure that they can trust who you are recommending too. For example, if you are a multi genre author and write erotica content and young adult you are not going to want to promote anything erotica to your young adult audience and vice versa.
Top Tips for Participating In Newsletter Swaps
Stay Consistent - Stick to your genre, only share books which are suitable for your audience. This also applies for those you are swapping with, look for authors that are likely to have the same reader as you.
Research the Books you are going to include - This doesn’t mean reading every book which you share, but certainly take a look at amazon, making sure they are relevant to your audience as well as checking their reviews, remember you’re building a connection with your audience, you want them to trust your recommendations, so if they go against Amazon’s community standards with practices such as book stuffing be sure to avoid.
Keep Track - It is important that you keep track of those you have taken part in. A number of authors use a spreadsheet so they know exactly what authors are coming up and which books they want to promote when. This ensures you don’t duplicate content, you can also save posts on Facebook to set folders this isn’t as efficient but certainly does the trick. Other authors also have sign up forms to keep track of their material or even a Trello board with all the relevant content.
Stay Genuine - Most people when opening their newsletter don’t just want a sales pitch they want a connection with you and they want your recommendations. Connect with your reader on a personal level you can even include blog posts, you can read more in my post “Blogging Strategies for authors”.
Sign up to their newsletters - Be sure to sign up to the authors newsletter you are swapping with this will allow you to see whether they have shared your content in their newsletter.
Share their sign up - Be sure to share a link to their newsletter too so that you are sharing readers.
When you sign up for a swap be sure to actually share it, this community rides on trust and support of each other.
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