Five Freebies to Offer Your Online Prospects

If you are trying to market your book, or yourself as an author online, you know how important it is to not just drive traffic to your website, but to get your online visitors to opt-in and enter in their email, name and/or phone number. Not only do your visitors have to trust you, but they want to know what is in it for them too. You want to offer your prospects something of value, in exchange for them opting in and entering in their information.

Here are five freebies that you can give away to those who opt-in to your website or landing page:

1. Offer Excerpts or Chapters of Your Book

Why not? You could charge $0.99 for it, but really, you want to get people to buy your entire book. Give away a juicy chapter that will have them excited to jump back on to your site to buy the full book!

2. eBook

Write a short story. Convert it to an .epub file and give it away on your site as a freebie. The idea is to give them a taste of how well you can create an amazing story. If it’s a good short story, they’ll be sure to want to buy your book. At the very least, they’ll stay on your mailing list. They may not buy your book now, but they might in the distant future.

As a service provider for authors, I give away a free eBook with 30 tips for eBook authors. If you are planning on creating an eBook whether it is to give away free or to sell, Subscribe to My Newsletter and I’ll send you 30 Writing Tips for eBook free to help you get started.

3. Email Newsletter

Here you could tell your prospects that you will email them your special newsletter on a specific topic, e.g. Write a Novel in 90 Days. You would create a newsletter campaign with your auto responder to email your opt-in, once a day for the next 90 days, a set of pre-created emails. Or you can just send them a monthly newsletter filled with book reviews of the latest hits in the self-published genre of your choice. Get creative!

4. Offer a Coupon

Offer to discount your book if your prospects join your mailing list, which you will send them after they subscribe of course. You could offer a coupon such as Buy One Book, Get One Free; or offer Free Shipping for subscribing.

5. Start a Contest

A great contest that might gain a lot of opt-ins is if you would offer your latest book free, personally signed with a message by you, chosen at random after a set time frame, such as 30 days or 48 hours. People love signed copies of books, and they might find it worth a shot to opt-in for that great incentive!

Some of these methods may take longer for you to generate a book sale, but its all about getting your readers to trust you and be loyal to you as an author.