Kindle List Building: How to Grow Your Email List Subscribers Using Old Articles without Spending a Dollar

Without an email list, you are potentially losing 1000’s of dollars every month.

It’s true.

One of the most stable and highly converting sources of income online comes from an email list. Because almost everyone has an email address.

But there’s one problem:

To build an email list, you need to convert your existing traffic into subscribers.

If you don’t have traffic, you can’t grow your list.

Sure, you can do guest posting or Facebook Ads to get traffic. But these strategies involve you creating new content or spending money.

This is where Kindle List Building comes in.

Using this strategy, even if you’re fairly new to the blogosphere, you can tap into the Amazon Kindle market with over 244 million active users and get a consistent flow of email subscribers without necessarily having to spend a dollar.

The best part?

You can turn pre-existing dead articles into an email building machine.

Let’s Look At Some Impressive Statistics Regarding Email Users:

1. The total number of worldwide email accounts is expected to increase to over 3 billion accounts by year-end 2016 (Radacati Group).
2. 92% of online adults use email, with 61% using it on an average day. Those who were most likely to use email on a daily basis were those with a college degree or an income of <$75,000 (Pew Research).
3. This statistic is by far the most important of them all. There are 3x more email accounts than Twitter and Facebook accounts combined. (Radicati Group)

So, why is it that so many internet marketers and bloggers fail to focus on their email subscribers?

Is it because deep down inside we hope that the publish and pray approach still works?

Unfortunately, that ship has sailed long ago. It’s over and it’s time to level up your content marketing plan today!

If you’ve been up to date with the publishing world, you would have noticed the tremendous growth in Amazon.

It is an 88 Billion dollar company with 244 million active users as of 2014 (geekwire).

Authors like Steve Scott have gone on to earn 20k dollars a month just from Kindle publishing.

The general idea behind standard publishing is to build a blog and promote your readers and subscribers to buy your book on Amazon Kindle.

This article, however, is focused on reverse engineering that system and I’ve put together a step by step plan detailing how you can use your old articles to build an email list without relying on organic traffic from Google.

Nick Loper from SideHustleNation was able to acquire 533 email subscribers in 5 days on Noisetrade using a similar method.

More impressively, Nick Stephenson was able to get 15000 subscribers in just 6 months using this exact same method discussed below.

In our case, you won’t have to spend a dime and it can be consistent results for as long as your book is live.

What’s more is that this elaborate system can be used for any niche in any industry as long as there are problems requiring solutions and a desire for more information.

Step 1: Gather Articles And Identify Category

I can guarantee that most of us have blog posts in our archives that are superbly written but are collecting virtual dust.

Maybe they haven’t ranked well on Google and because they’re buried deep down in your archives, readers don’t have the opportunity to benefit from it.

In fact, you could even use popular content as long as it belongs to you and you’re marketing it under your own brand.

What you’re looking for are articles that complement each other in terms of,

1. Relevance
2. Usefulness
3. Similarity
4. And Credibility

When trying to sell a book, the best thing you can ever do is choose one person and solve a 100 of their problems rather than a 100 different people and only solve 1 problem.

Let’s use the fitness industry as an example.

Someone who wants to lose weight and build abs has a bunch of problems. They don’t know what to eat, what exercises to do, how often to exercise, how much calories to eat daily, how much sleep they need and so on.

Essentially, if you find 5 to 10 articles that deal with diet, exercise techniques and motivational advice on building six pack abs on your health blog, you could solve all their problems.

You’re targeting one group of individuals who have a specific problem – they don’t know how to get six pack abs. They are readily waiting for someone to come along and give them the answer.

You are that someone they are waiting for!

Once you know whose problems you want to solve, you can identify a book category within a genre to target.

Amazon Kindle consists of every known genre you can imagine but within each genre are multiple subcategories with the potential of great niche specific rankings and readers.

If you look at the categories on the left, you’ll notice that under Health, Fitness & Dieting there are a number of different subcategories. In our example, we’d be targeting Ab Workouts.

Once you identify a subcategory to target, you can put together all relevant articles and create your compact book.

To build your email list and target as many people as possible, you want to publish your book for FREE.

And if you don’t want to spend any money, repurpose content from your blog and unpublished drafts.

The Kindle store is divided between paid books and free books.

Free books that are niche specific and are above 8000 words in length almost always get a substantial free ranking.

This book ranked #2 in Ab Workout and #3,367 Free in the Kindle store is guaranteed to get at minimum 100 downloads a day!

3000 specific people are downloading that book every single month. 10% conversion rate guarantees 300 subscribers to your email list monthly.

And this is just a modest minimum estimation.

Books that are below #1000 ranking on the free store see upwards of 500 to 2000 downloads a day.

Step 2: Compile Your Book And Optimize It For Email Opt-Ins

Business is built on the ideology of giving to get. The more you give, the more you can get. You provide a service to people, people provide money to you. That’s how it works.

Readers on Amazon kindle are willing to give you their email addresses and even their money if you provide them with valuable books.

They want great information.

For this reason alone, I encourage you to publish books consisting of well written and useful problem solving information.

Solve people’s problems and they will chase after you.

Add each article in such a manner that the book flows smoothly. Your headlines will serve as chapter sections and you may be required to insert an introduction and conclusion to your book.

A good introduction details what the reader has to gain from your book. Let them know of all the problems you are going to solve even if you think its common knowledge.

You can do all of this on Microsoft Word or any word editor that can save either in .doc or .docx format.

Now, here’s where things get fun.

At the beginning, at the end of each major section and at the end of your book, insert a Call to Action.

In this case, it will be an incentive for readers to sign up to your newsletter.

Example 1: Steve Scott includes a ‘free gift’ in every book as an incentive for them to sign up.

Readers interested in his free offer are then redirected to the page below which is incredibly optimized. Once again, Steve’s CTA focuses on solutions to problems in regards to writing and marketing a book.

Example 2: A book ranked #1 Free in the subcategory for FRUITS and #418 Free in kindle store, the following Call to Action is included in the beginning of the book.

In principle, your CTA should be accompanied by an incentive.

Here’s the formula for this system–

1. Sell your book for Free on Amazon Kindle and other eBook stores.
2. In your book, offer an incentive in the form of a product or service (preferably at a discount or free) to those who sign up to your email list.
3. Your link can either redirect them to a page hosted on your website like how Steve Scott has done OR you can link your email subscription form instead and direct readers to sign up instantly.

To take it one step further, include a highlighted paragraph offering readers to join your mailing list to unlock more content.

In keeping with our example above, perhaps you included a section dealing with how sleep helps the body recover from exercise.

At the end of that section, you could include a CTA of a checklist to get better sleep which readers can receive when they sign up.

Here’s an example of how Neil Patel uses this technique in his article.

In regards to designing a cover, you have 2 options:

1. Get a cover designed by someone.
2. Design it yourself.

I like to design my own covers but you could post a job offer on Fiverr and get a cover for just 5 bucks.

If you opt to design your own cover, these are some of the things to keep in mind.

• Choose a minimalistic image with space to add text (you can find free images on Pixabay.com)
• Make sure the format for your image is JPEG or TIFF
• The main title is the largest text
• A minimum of 625 pixels on the shortest side and 1000 pixels on the longest side

This is an example of a quick book I put together using some of my old articles and a cover I designed in under an hour.

It has brought me 71 subscribers since I’ve made it free in early February.

If it worked for me, it can work for you too.

Step 3: Publish On Amazon Kindle And Smashwords

Once your book is completed, create an account on Amazon KDP, login to your dashboard and create a new title.

Fill in the relevant information, choose 2 subcategories, add keywords that are relevant to your book and upload your file.

Amazon will convert and prepare your book for the Kindle store.

In the pricing tab, choose between the 30% or 70% commission bracket and fill in a price.

I suggest pricing your book $2.99 and higher because when it’s priced as free, readers will be enticed by the value of the book and how much they’re saving.

Submit your book and it will be published within 24 hours.

NOTE: Do not enrol your book into the KDP Select Program. If you do, your book can only be published on the Amazon Kindle Store for 90 days and you’re limited to a 5 day free promo option.

The next step is critical.

Sign up to Smashwords.

Submit all the relevant information to Smashwords as you did for Amazon Kindle, upload your book, price for Free and publish.

When submitting your book, if eligible, it will be given a premium catalog status and submitted to stores like Barnes & Noble and iTunes automatically.

If there are errors in your book, correct them as specified by Smashwords requirements and submit for review again. Do not skip this step.

Smashwords will ask you to assign an ISBN, proceed to do so if you don’t already have one.

Afterwards, your book will be submitted for premium status catalog. This can take up to a week but once you’re approved your books will soon appear on a number of different book stores.

Step 4: Submit Links To Amazon Kindle

When your book appears for free on iTunes and Barnes&Noble, all you need to do is copy those links and submit them to Amazon Kindle.

Browse to your book on the Amazon Kindle store and click on the following – tell us about a lower price?

When you do, a pop-up box will appear, select website and paste the links from Barnes & Noble into the URL text box, fill in 0.00 in price as well as Shipping cost and the date of the price.

Then hit submit.

You will have to repeat this for each link from the different book retail stores.

It should take Amazon about 2 weeks to price match your book but once it does, your book will be free on the Amazon US store and on its way to earning you many email subscribers.

That’s it.

You’re done!

In Conclusion

As competitive as internet marketing and blogging is in 2016, there’s always more than enough room for growth and success.

You just have to explore all the possibilities and expand your search for subscribers.

It may take some creative planning but at the end of the day, content well marketed can bring about fantastic results even if you don’t have a super popular site pulling in huge chunks of organic traffic.

To end this article on a good note, here’s a little tip that could send some link juice back to your website. Include a link of a relevant optimized blog post in your Amazon Kindle Bio as well as inside your book.