Ebook Project: Launching an Email Marketing Campaign

This post will discuss the way in which I am conducting a campaign to market my WordPress ebook via email.

I first did one of these back in October when I released my Twitter guide. This was very successful and I had a great many responses to my emails and many of those people either blogged about my guide or Twittered about it.

What is Email Marketing?

When I talk about email marketing, all I mean is that I send out an email to selected people telling them about the thing I am promoting (in this case my free ebook) and ask them to promote it for me. My targets are bloggers and the desired result is that the blogger in question would post something on their blog mentioning my book and providing a link. Why bloggers? Because bloggers have a voice, they have an audience.

That’s really all there is to it. Now I’ve read a lot in the past about how to go about doing one of these things and the importance of developing a relationship with your ‘target’ first but I really don’t like that approach at all. It feels like I’m stalking my victim ready, buttering them up for the kill later on!

My book is about building sites that make money so obviously the whole of the ‘make money online’ niche is a target market for me and as I have been blogging in that niche for some months now then it follows that I will know many of the people that I write to. In that case, it’s a bonus and that’s great but I’m also going to be branching out further afield. In particular, I’m going to be targeting blogs that talk about WordPress and these are not likely to be people that I have spoken to before.

What I Say In My Email

I have a standard note that I copy and paste. I can’t show you because I haven’t written it yet but I can tell you the gist of what goes in it. I like to keep the email short and sweet – bloggers are busy bees and don’t have all day to read an essay.

I will briefly say who I am and then get straight to the point by saying that I have written this ebook and briefly state what it’s about. I then ask that if they feel the book would be of interest to their readers to please mention in. I don’t just mention the book – I ASK for a link.

That’s the basic email but I tweak it from there. Firstly, for every blog I’ll have a good look around and make sure that the subject material of the blog is relevant to my book. If not it’s just a spam email isn’t it? For example, when I did my Twitter campaign I came across blogs that were talking about Twitter in a negative way – saying how much they hated it, so I stayed away from those ones!

I’ll look at the blog, join the MyBlogLog community if it has one and try to find the name of the blogger. Note to bloggers out there – some of you make this difficult! Always have an About me page or similar – we like to know who you are! Then I’ll make sure I use the name in my email.

If I’m writing to somebody I know and I’ve spoken to before, then I’ll either tweak the email or I’ll just scrap it completely and write something from scratch. I loathe mass-distributed automated emails so I don’t want anything I send out to look like one of those!

Where I Find Bloggers To Email

I have two target markets in mind:

• The make money online niche
• WordPress bloggers / designers / programmers

The first niche is easy – I just need to open up my feed reader! I have a bunch of blogs in there that I regularly read! However, I don’t read them all and that’s where things like Mark’s Top 100 (which is now approaching 300!) list of blogs comes in very handy. Now because there are so many on that list, that is all I need so that has been my only source for this market.

WordPress users is slightly different though because I am not familiar with the area so this becomes a quest to find appropriate blogs. Now this is an exercise that I have done several times – for example, when looking for potential blogs to comment on in order to market a website in a certain niche.

Some months back I wrote a post about finding fresh content for a niche and much of that post is relevant to this quest, except that I am specifically looking for blogs. Here are the steps that I take:

1. Setup a Google Alert for “wordpress”. This will send me a daily email telling me about all blog posts written about WordPress that day.
2. Do a Google Blog Search
3. Search for WordPress blogs on Technorati
4. Type in “wordpress” into the StumbleUpon toolbar, and start stumbling – this will often pull up blog posts
5. Starting from existing blogs, follow links in blogrolls & major posts to other related blogs. For example, one of the more famous WordPress bloggers is Lorelle and her blog would be an excellent place to start.

Conducting the Campaign

With my Twitter guide, I was very prepared and I spent six weeks gathering blogs to target before starting the campaign. This time around I haven’t been nearly so organised but I haven’t actually started the campaign yet so I am likely to do the same thing to some extent.

Over the coming week or two I will use the above methods to gather potential blogs and I simply collect the links. This means that I can be sure not to accidentally email the same person twice! Once I feel as though I have exhausted the possibilities I will begin sending out the emails and I do a batch of them daily. When I did the Twitter campaign I spent about 2 hours a day doing this before I got bored and I think it took me 3 days to get through just over 100 blogs.

I estimate that this campaign will take a lot longer as there are easily 200+ blogs I could write to just in the making money niche!

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