InstaFreebie is a platform for authors to giveaway free ebooks to their readers. Often used to collect a reader’s email address in exchange for the free ebook.
You may also be interested in using Booksprout’s giveaways instead to increase the number of conversions to your newsletter.
Step 1: Create an InstaFreebie account
If you don’t have one, the first thing to do will be to create an InstaFreebie account. Follow their steps to fill in your profile.
Step 2: Add a book and begin a giveaway
On the InstaFreebie dashboard, you’ll need to add a book. Click the big “Add a book” button and fill in as many details as you can about it.
Once the book is created, you’ll land on a page that gives an overview of the book (if you want to get back to this page later, head back to the dashboard and click the book’s cover). You’ll also see the option to make a “new giveaway” by clicking the “new giveaway” button on the right side of the screen near the top. Click that button and then select the option to create an advanced giveaway.
The form is broken down into a few different steps, so on your first go through it might seem like there’s some details missing. Don’t worry, you’ll be asked about everything by the end of the process so fill in the forms as best you can. A few tips:
- Making the giveaway public can have the potential to gain additional subscribers from InstaFreebie’s own reader base. However, since this will be a slow drip campaign (meaning you’ll be consistently sending smaller amounts of readers to it over an extended period) you likely won’t make their minimum giveaway threshold to get in on their promotions. It’s up to you if you want to make it public or not.
- Don’t set an expiration date or maximum number of copies. Otherwise, you’ll have to keep an eye on it to make sure it still works and eventually update the link that you shared everywhere.
- I’d set opt-ins to be required, especially if you’ve made your giveaway public. The readers you’ll send to your giveaway page will already be on your newsletter, so it’s not asking anything more from them and you might pick up a few additional emails in the process!
Step 3: Direct readers to your giveaway page
Now all you need to do is direct readers to your download page! You can get this link on the page they send you just after you’ve created the giveaway. Otherwise, it can be found by going to your dashboard, clicking on your book, then copying the link they display for the giveaway you just created.
As with most of the other methods, the best place to share this link is in an automated email that gets sent to readers AFTER they verify their email address with your mailing list provider. The steps to do this will vary between providers. That means you’ve already collected their email address and the user has double opted-in.
An important note: whatever you do, DO NOT link to your InstaFreebie download page in the back of your books! If you ever want to change what book you’re giving away or stop offering a free book, you’ll have to update all of your books on all platforms that it’s published on. This is another reason that we recommend sharing this link in an automated email after readers sign up, because it’s easy to change there.
If you do want to use a direct link to your InstaFreebie giveaway in the back of your book, make sure you do it in a more permanent way. For example, if you have a website you may want to setup a page that automatically redirects users to your current InstaFreebie giveaway (technical users only). Another method is to signup for bit.ly premium and use that to shorten your InstaFreebie giveaway link. Bit.ly premium allows you to change the destination URL of any link you have, so you could have the same link but use it to direct to a new giveaway instead. Basically, you just want to avoid putting any link in your book that could potentially become dead at some point in the future.
That’s it!
Now readers can download a free book from you after they subscribe to their mailing list.
A few notes on this method
- For readers, there’s quite a few steps they need to take before they can access the book. With InstaFreebie they will need to subscribe to your list, double opt-in, go to your InstaFreebie giveaway page, enter their email address again, then find their ebook in their inbox. Many readers are going to drop off long before they complete the above steps and it’s good practice to minimize the work needed for readers, because every additional step they need to take will result in fewer readers taking those steps – which is bad for your bottom line.
- Make sure you read the fine print at the bottom of your book’s giveaway page. Readers will have to accept InstaFreebie’s terms if they want their book, which you may or may not be okay with. It states the following: “You will also receive free ebook recommendations and updates from instaFreebie in your inbox.”
- There’s no single landing page for you as an author, only for books. Each download page you create for a book will have its own unique URL. Should you ever change what book you want to give away or choose to disable the download page, you’ll need to remember where you shared that link so that you can update it. This is obviously quite error prone and will inevitably result in readers being directed to a page that no longer exists, meaning lost conversions for you.
Because of the above, I personally wouldn’t recommend this method for delivering free books to users in exchange for signing up to your mailing list. There are better methods you can use that are free, which have been outlined earlier.