It was almost a year ago that I was approached to create a website for, at the time, a soon to be released book, Invisible Killers. The authors had opted to go with a self-publishing route and asked me to develop their internet promotion strategy.

Several months before the book was to be ready for sale, we created a simple signup to accept pre-orders. Although we didn’t require customers to pay upfront, we still collected their complete contact information to let them know once the book was available.

About 2-weeks prior to receiving the books from the printer, we launched a PayPal-based ordering system and once the books came in, we immediately setup a merchant account to accept VISA and MasterCard.

This may seems like a very standard strategy for a book launch or any e-commerce website, but we took it one step further. The book, which focuses on issues surrounding environmental toxins, is a hot button issue for many people. Given this, we decided to launch an e-newsletter focused on the same subject. Thus came, The Invisible Killers Environmental Toxins Newsletter.

At first, we gathered up about 25 subscribers, a task that was much easier completed than we originally anticipated. From there, the list began to grow significantly each month, primarily through word-of-mouth referrals.

From this project, I’ve discovered several interesting facts:

1.) Every time a newsletter goes out, we end up with more subscribers
2.) Subscribers forward emails when you include a “Forward this Email” link
3.) Only about 50% of subscribers open their newsletter
4.) Subscribers respond to product discounts that require immediate action (within 1-2 weeks)
5.) The more subscribers you have, the faster your subscriber list will grow

Since launching our newsletter, our monthly visitors have increased almost 6-fold and growing exponentially each month.

Where do we go from here? Well, there are several different routes we can take. The easiest is to continue in the status quo and focus solely on building our newsletter, but a more likely scenario is to incorporate several Web 2.0 applications into the site to allow visitors to communicate with each other.