Click here if you haven’t read part one.

In a nutshell, I paid $10 to enter a huge newsletter promotion. Before the promotion went out I advertised my newsletter for the first time and gained 50 subscribers. Woo-hoo!

Everyone up to speed?

Great! Let’s continue.

I’m not going to go into detail on the particular promotion that went out —

Just know there were a lot of us, and with that $10 entry fee the prizes were pretty attractive.

And the outcome?

I’m sad to say that I didn’t sell any books. The only books that sold in quantity for anyone involved were the ones in the “free” category.

Lesson learned. People will always go for free.

Why pay $3.00 for a book on sale when there were 25 books for nothing? Makes sense.

So, did I lose my $10.00? Nope. Not at all.

I ended up with two very valuable things out of this promotion.

#1: Now that I had a real, live newsletter out there, I could see analytics.

#2: Over the three day promotion, I gained 200 quality newsletter subscribers. (Quality meaning they were already interested in YA science fiction.)

I’ll get to those subscribers in a bit. First, let’s talk about analytics.

Great Googley Moogley!

I love to look at numbers, and now I had brand new numbers to play with.

A lot of you have blogs, so you know you can look at your numbers. How many people came to your blog, how many visited which posts, and so on. But my actual readership is a bit of an unknown to me.

I have over 10,000 followers. (Awesome by the way. Thanks.) But a very small percentage of that number actually comes and visits my blog.

There are different ways to follow that cannot be gauged.

Like email.

I read a lot of blogs in my email, but I never click through unless I want to make a comment. If you are on blogger I won’t even go that far. (It takes too long. Not a fan of blogger and capcha) Anyway … That means that I don’t really know how many people are reading what I put out there.

That’s why the newsletter is cool. It tells you how many people the newsletter went to, how many of those people opened it (and when). And also how many people clicked on the links in the email, and which links they clicked. How cool is that?

It is a really neat way to see what your actual engagement is.

Arghhh… I’m getting to wordy on this. So sorry! I’m going to cut this off here and tell you about the coolest part of all this… What happened when I sent out my first real newsletter two weeks later.

We’ll chat next week!