I learned an interesting thing about meditation this week.
Meditation is not an act but a consequence.
Many things in life seem to be romantic and magical. Right now, Jasmine in my pots is blossoming, and the fragrance is divine. But there is no magic behind it—just pure science. Anyone who knows what the plant needs and does the right thing will get flowers and fragrances.
You don’t sit and chant flower, flower, flower. You can’t meditate to make flowers bloom. Rather you provide good soil, manure, water, and sunlight. You handle these things right, and flowers will happen. The flower is a consequence. The fragrance is a consequence. It is not something you do.
Similarly, meditation is not something that you do. If you handle the body and the mind and the energy correctly, you become meditative.
And you thought you could beat the meditation into you.
Authorpreneur Journey Step 7
Okay, let me clarify one thing. Even though they are numbered, Authorpreneur journey steps are not in any specific order. Why? Because there is no one specific path. You can take any route or wander in the jungle and find your own oasis. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that you keep taking one step at a time.
So far, we have covered:
Pick a niche and explore it by going deep even before you start writing anything.
Build a list of topics and start writing simple articles.
Build a reader base and connect with them through a newsletter.
Tackle the About page on your blog.
Grow organically through social media.
Today’s topic is how to get your first 100 subscribers.
Now that you have written a few articles, you will be itching for someone to read your work and leave you some encouraging comments. I know I did.
No writer can write in isolation for long. We all need someone to read our work and acknowledge our effort. The first few encouraging comments make a lot of difference. I used to walk on air whenever I would get a positive comment. I still do. They become the reason to keep putting in those insane hours that most budding writers do while learning their craft.
How do you find your first 100 subscribers?
You handpick them.
That is right.
You do the same thing which you did to find 100+ sub-topics to write about. You write down the names of people who you think will support you with your endeavor.
You start writing down ten major categories: family, friends, colleagues, social circle, gym buddies, writing group friends, hobby groups, people you attended courses with, and social media friends. Any categories you can think of.
Don't worry about if you don’t want your family members or your colleagues to subscribe to your newsletter. Just write down the category.
Next, write down at least ten names in each category. In some categories, you might come up with just 5 - 6 names. That is alright. In others, you might come up with 20 - 30 thirty names. That is great. Write them down. You aim to collect 200 names.
Now pick ten names that you think are the easiest to contact. Invite them to join your newsletter. Write them an email (or even a handwritten note for a personal touch). Keep it direct and simple.
Dear Friend,
I am starting a newsletter to build a reader base for my blog/website. I will really appreciate it if you can subscribe to it and give me occasional feedback saying what is working and what is not and perhaps give some suggestions for improvement. As I am totally new to this, I am counting on your support to help me start.
Here is the link to subscribe to it.
Thank you.
Regards,
Your Name
The next day, choose ten more. Keep going until you have sent an invitation to all of them. It will get easier as you will go down the list. Some will send you congratulatory notes and will subscribe immediately. Others will procrastinate. They either don’t want to subscribe or didn’t get around to it.
Send them a reminder email.
Dear Friend,
Last week, I wrote to you about the newsletter I have started to build a reader base for my blog/website. I am counting on your support and feedback. If you haven’t already subscribed to it, please do so by clicking this link.
Thank you.
Regards,
Your Name
Start your newsletter with one subscriber. Build your email list, one subscriber at a time. This is how all of us have started. None of us had any subscribers when we started. We gathered them one by one. When you are still populating your site with useful material during the early days of your writing, you shouldn’t worry about SEO, lead magnets, pop-up forms, and things like that. You don’t have enough traffic to convert occasional visitors to subscribers.
People you know are your best starting point. It is called manual prospecting. It is non-automated outreach to people in your network you either know or don’t know to pitch your services.
When it comes to sales and marketing, prospecting is really the skill that separates successful authorpreneurs from the “wantrepreneurs” who never succeed.
The ability to reach out cold, strike up a relationship, make an offer, and accepting money for your product or service one of the most empowering skills you will ever develop.
And really, manual prospecting is ultimately just another category of writing.
It can feel demoralizing at first because we’re not used to rejection or being ignored. But that is the skill you need to develop as an authorpreneur. There is no other way around it. When it comes to marketing, it’s ultimately a numbers game. With time you will learn to contact just the right people whose problems you are solving with your book or article, or newsletter. They will hang on to every word you write.
Some Tips
Keep your publishing day and frequency consistent. This is very hard to do when you are just starting. Whether you write once a week or once a month, it doesn’t matter, as long as you don’t miss it. (Unless there is a pressing reason and you communicate that reason so that the readers don’t feel let down.)
People come to your blog/website/newsletter looking for solutions to their external needs (such as how to become an authorpreneur) but will subscribe only if you address their internal needs such as:
I am frustrated that I am not getting results,
I am fearful that I will waste time and money,
I am afraid that I don’t have confidence in my ability,
I am intimidated by all that information,
I don’t know whom to trust…
When you address their internal needs, they feel the connection with you, your blog, and your content. And that connection lasts long past solving their problem.
How do you address the internal needs? Through your personal stories. Share your own feelings, experiences, failures, and lessons learned. Mix your content type, rather than just providing practical information, go off the tangent, and write about your internal fears. I get more engagement whenever I rant about ‘how difficult a project was and how I was on the verge of dumping it and then kept going’ than on practical tips on How To Keep Going When You Want To Give It All Up.
Give value for free. If you don’t provide value upfront - often for free - or if you fail to clearly articulate that value, you’ll never attract an audience. Chance The Rapper became one of the world's biggest artists by repeatedly turning down record label offers instead of distributing all of his music for free for years.
Show you care. If you don’t care about your readers, they won’t care about you. People can sense whether you’re genuinely interested in them or not. Go out of your way to show that you care. People will happily give you their attention.
Reveal yourself. Even powerful brands like Apple couldn’t compete with the aura of the individuals behind them like Steve Jobs. If you want attention to your work, allow people to get to know you. Austin Kleon suggests that one of the best ways to reveal yourself is to show your work. He writes, “Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.”
Do something unique. Attention is a competitive sport. To earn it, you must figure out how to stand out from the rest of the pack, and you don’t get noticed by trying to fit in. The more you amplify what’s unique about your work and present it unexpectedly, the easier it becomes to attract an audience to it.
Give people something worth talking about. People share things that allow them to say something about themselves. If your creation represents an idea, belief, or message people genuinely want to spread, they’ll be much more likely to do so, and you’ll earn more attention.
Enable connections. One of the best ways to attract attention to your creations is to use them to build a community. Make things that enable you to connect with your audience and your audience to connect. A major reason people become fans is to connect with other fans and have a sense of belonging, so figure out how you can help enable that.
You can connect with me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Your homework this week:
Make a list of 200 contacts and write and invite them to subscribe to your newsletter in the lots of ten each day. Two hundred because at least 50% of them won’t respond.
Next week we will discuss building a lead magnet (a reward for subscribing) to draw subscribers.
Writing Industry News
Podcasts are going to be a big business in 2021. Tech giants, some with voice assistant tech, see audio streaming as an untapped advertising surface that they can modernize and lead. But as the borders are drawn, how will the experience change for listeners and the advertisers fuelling the boom? [The DRUM]
One-in-five digital US radio ad dollars are predicted to go toward podcasts in 2021. It is the first time it will breach the $1bn mark, according to eMarketer.Big tech companies that are rallying around podcasting are 1) Spotify, 2) Apple, 3) YouTube 4) Amazon.
What does an authorpreneur get to do with podcasting?
Podcasting is where the books get sold.
Newsletters are also going to be a thing of 2021. Twitter has announced that it had acquired Revue, a newsletter platform for writers and publishers. That way, it has become a competitor of Substack. Facebook has also got into paid newsletters.
What Am I Up to?
I have finally figured out what stalled my novel. It was the writer’s block caused by the style. I have spent the whole week learning and implementing how to write fiction. I wrote an article based on my learning, Five Fiction Sentence Types, and submitted it to the Medium publication The Writing Cooperative.
Published two other articles on Medium Do The Talented People Have Different Wiring and Are You An Author Or An Authorpreneur.
I drew four sketches this week that I am really proud of.
What Intrigued Me This Week?
To say I am obsessed with writing at the moment would be an understatement. I am seriously considering cutting down the number of hours I spend in front of the computer. So many times this week (it was one of those weeks), I thought about giving it all up, become a monk and move to Bhutan.
Since it is ‘obsession’ is not such a big issue that justifies $400 for a psychoanalyst to tell me what I already know, I decided to use internet therapy instead. The first article I read on ‘how to overcome an obsession’ had the following quote at the top.
“The cure for an obsession: get another one.” - Mason Cooley
That intrigued me.
So that is the reason I have multiple obsessions. I have already been using this cure.
That’s it from me this week.
Take care.
Neera Mahajan (www.neeramahajan.com)
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