Good Morning everyone! I’m sorry this is a day late – this week has been getting away from me already but I’m fighting hard to get it back on track and move forward. So much has been happening lately and I’m so excited at how things are moving along! Did you notice the new look to the website? I hope you love the new look with the logo header and the new background image as much as I do! I also finished getting my monthly email newsletter all set up and the first official issue will be sent out to my email subscriber list on July 4th so don’t forget to subscribe now – just complete the form on the right side of the page to be added to my email subscriber list…and speaking of subscribing to my email list, that’s what I wanted to talk about a little today. 
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about using Email Marketing to help build your business (did you miss it? Look through my previous posts for all of the tips and tricks!) but today I really want to focus on using a giveaway to promote and build your email subscriber list. This is something that I’ve just started using this week and am already seeing new subscribers on my email list! A quick review from my previous post: you want to use a freebie as a giveaway to people who subscribe to your email list to help encourage more people to sign up and then you promote it EVERYWHERE – all of your social media sites, your blog posts, your websites, and anywhere else you can think of. As an author, I was struggling to figure out what to use as my freebie though. I didn’t want to give copies of my published book away – there was the risk of losing too much money doing that. So I had to do some research (something I do all the time actually) and I got online to start looking for ideas on freebies and came up with some really good ideas. Here’s the ideas that I liked the best:
- A short story
- A novella
- A Top 10 Tips list
- The first few chapters from one of your books
- A book or video about a topic of which you are knowledgeable
The idea that grabbed me the most was the last one and I thought that I could use one of my blog posts as inspiration for my short book’s topic. These were the top topics I had in mind: social media sites, marketing your business, and writing a book. I decided to go with the last one but add a little more to it and include information for publishing your book as well. 
Okay, so you know what you want to use as your freebie – now comes the hard part. You have to write the book! I know, since I’m an author this should be the easy part, right? The problem is that I write mostly children’s books, I haven’t written a more technical or instructional book before but I didn’t let that deter me. I sat down on a Saturday and after I finished working on marketing for my business, I got right down to work writing this short book. I’m going to be honest with you…I struggled. Besides the fact that I was writing in the afternoon and evening, and my usual creative time is morning, I was also writing about a topic that wasn’t my forte so I really had to push myself through this writing. There were several times where I had to stop and take a break and give my brain a rest while writing, but I’m proud to say that I didn’t give up or put it aside and after 8-9 hours of writing I finished my short book around midnight that Saturday! It was a LONG DAY, but I really felt accomplished and excited once it was completed! After a quick proofread and edit I saved it as a pdf and was ready for my giveaway.
Now, I’ve said before how I’m not really tech-savvy so I of course went to Fiverr.com to get some help with setting up the freebie. Hashem was awesome and he was able to set up my freebie to be automatically sent to my new subscribers as they signed up to my Mailchimp email list and it is sent via email to them 24 hours after they sign up (check him out at https://goo.gl/tpORWS).
I hope this inspired you to create a giveaway to build your email list, and don’t forget to subscribe to my list to check out the short book I wrote!
