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Transcription:

Andrea: Hi everyone! Welcome to the Self-Publish Strong podcast. I’m your host Andrea Pearson. I’m joined today by my husband.

Nolan: Hi, this is Nolan.

Andrea: We’re going to be discussing Star Wars: A New Hope today, but first we’ve got a quote for you and a continuation on our automation sequences tips. The quote is by Winston Churchill and it is, “Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.” Do you have any thoughts on that since you picked it?

Nolan: It sounds cool.

Andrea: It does sound cool. So opposition in all things?

Nolan: Opposition, yeah.

Andrea: Yeah, when something is easy… I don’t know.

Nolan: If it were easy everyone would do it.

Andrea: Yeah, if it were easy, everyone would do it and… what is the quote? Something about men and rivers are made crooked by following the path of least resistance or whatever that is. Oh, the path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men. Something like that. Basically, if it’s easy, everyone would be doing it, number one. And number two, it doesn’t make you grow which leads to success. When you’re forcing yourself to grow, then you’re more likely to be successful.

Our tip today is a continuation, like I said, of the automation sequences tip. We’ll be talking a little bit about the first email that you’ll send, and we’ll talk later about reader magnets, but the purpose of this first email is to get them their freebie. So if you offer a free book in exchange for sign up, and I definitely recommend doing that because it doubled or tripled our subscriptions pretty quickly once I started doing it. We’ll talk about those later and best ways to, you know, have good results with that, the best things to give away.

But you want your first email of your automation sequence to be set up to send out immediately and the very first thing you want to have is basically a “Hi, and here’s a link to your freebie.” It’s a welcome email and it introduces you to them, but it should be a very, very, very brief introduction, if any introduction at all. At this point, readers are most likely more interested in getting their freebie than hearing about you, so keep the email short and to the point. You can basically tell them a little bit about yourself in it. For example, how often they’ll hear from you, if you swear, if you use too many smiley faces, which is something I am definitely not ever… I’ve never been accused of. Anyway, I do use smiley faces quite a bit. Yeah, it’s just basically a way to get your foot in the door so to speak, to let them get a feel for who you are in just a very, very little bit of a way. Anyway, I talk quite a bit more of this about this in-depth in my automation sequences course, but basically, every single sequence I’ve ever set up has been based off of this one that I’m going to be sharing with you over the next few episodes. By the time all these go live, you’ll have all of them, all the tips in order, so you will be able to listen to them all quickly. We are recording this in February. What’s the date today?

Nolan: The 16th.

Andrea: Yeah, February 16th, 2018. So this week, I’ve been working on… I finished the book cover for the fourth book in my Koven Chronicles. It’s Crimson Hollow. I also finished the cover for the third book in that same series. I wanted to get into editing the third book, but my brain’s been… we’ve been all over the place this wee