“Send me an email that’s really easy to follow for purchasing and signing up and I’ll send it to friends.”

People want to help you. Are you making it easy for them?

This is the note I got after I sent someone to a sign-up page to get on my Book Launch Team:

“Send me an email that’s really easy to follow for purchasing and signing up and I’ll send it to friends.”

She asked this because:

1. It wasn’t easy to follow.
2. She couldn’t figure out how to buy the book.*
3. Because of #1 and #2, she didn’t want to send it to friends.

I was glad to hear it from this one person because I hadn’t yet sent out the link to many people.

(* This is a tricky one. She (and her friend) couldn’t buy the book on their phone because it opened in the Amazon App and not on Amazon.com in Safari (iPhone). You often can’t buy non-Apple products through non-Apple apps. Solution? Buy through Amazon.com on a computer, not through the app.)

Do you know your audience?

I’m an author. I listen to podcasts about book marketing, I regularly join book launch teams, and I buy books, sign up for mailing lists, and leave book reviews.

But most people don’t do any of those things — or at least not on a regular basis.

Do you know what you’d like your audience to do?

You (hopefully!) have a long laundry list of what you’d just love your audience to do. Here’s a sampling:

1. Join your mailing list.
2. Buy your book.
3. Read your book.
4. Leave a review.
5. Share your book on social media.
6. Tell their friends about your book.
7. Look forward to reading your next book.

But if you only had to pick one of those, which would it be? Let me help you out:

#1: Join your mailing list.

Why? Because now you can have a conversation with them. You can email them (sparingly! not too sales-y!) and then slowly but surely help them out with the other items on the list.

That’s it. It’s that simple.

OK, great. So now what?

How do you get them to do Step 1? What do you have to offer? What are the benefits of signing up to be on your Book Launch Team? Here are a few examples:

1. They get a free copy of your book — before it hits the stores.
2. You offer early access to your future books (in return for honest reviews when the book comes out).
3. Maybe you have some funny (or terrible!) deleted chapters they might like.
4. They might want to know about the behind the scenes life of an author — or a book launch.
5. Give them access to an exclusive Facebook group where they get members only access to … whatever it is they want.

Offer them all that, but remember that the very first link, the only button they see to get things started is to join your Book Launch Team (or join your mailing list or whatever it is you want to call it). What you want is direct access to a dialogue.

That’s it. There’s more, but that’s it.

So that’s what I’ll be working on tomorrow on this page: Every Single Day Book Launch Team.

Please let me know how I’m doing. Was it easy to sign up? Clear why you should? Was the process streamlined?