Email subscriptions are kind of crucial to online marketing, don’t you agree?

But how do you get them?

Many marketing experts say you need a lightning rod of sorts — like an ebook.

The problem is it takes forever to write and design an ebook worth its salt. Isn’t there a better way?

Yes, there is.

Ladies and Gentleman, I introduce you to Quora.

The Method

The strategy is actually quite simple:

• Curate a bunch of answers from Quora experts and wrap it all up into an ebook.

This means you don’t have to write a single word of it. Score!

By the way, Medium is a GREAT place to attract email subscribers. If you want to get my free 5-day email course on how to get 1,000 followers on Medium, sign up below!

1. Search For Good Quora Answers

The first thing you need to do is search Quora for answers worth their salt. This means you have to find a burning question your readers NEED to have answered.

For me and my audience at The Post-Grad Survival Guide, I wanted to focus on Resume Writing — more specifically Resume mistakes. So I took to Quora.

All I had to do was select numero uno from the search bar above.

Now I do some scouting.

There’s 41 answers for this question along with 64 followers. It looks pretty damn healthy to me, so I’ll scroll down to the answers..

This answer from Kyle seems pretty thoughtful, helpful, etc., so I’ll see how many views it garnered.

1,000 views? 11 Upvotes? This all sounds pretty good.

I’ll reach out to him.

2. Send The Expert A Private Message

Go ahead and click on their name to get to their profile.

Kyle’s profile gives me a ton of ways to get in contact with him. He’s on Twitter, LinkedIn, and I’m even able to send him a private message. He’s also founder of Uneven Odds, so I could always go to his website and search for a “Contact Us” page.

Private messages send an email notification to your target via email, so I’ll opt for that path.

Here’s a copy of the message I sent over to Kyle.

Hey Kyle!

My name is Tom Kuegler and I’m a freelance writer who also contributes to the Huffington Post. I came across your answer on here about common resume mistakes and I really enjoyed it!

The reason I’m emailing is because I wanted to see if you would allow me to include it in a free ebook I’m creating for my audience over at The Post-Grad Survival Guide. The ebook will center on common resume mistakes and will feature the opinions of other top writers on Quora.

I would obviously credit you and provide links to any site/profile you want above the answer.

Let me know if that sounds good to you!

Tom Kuegler

I won’t copy his response here because I haven’t gotten his permission, but it was a fantastic one and we even bonded about our travels! He was very happy to be considered for the ebook, and gave me the green light.

I could break down how I wrote the above message, but the truth is pretty much everybody responded.

The genius of this method is the fact that your targets get free exposure and you get free content for your ebook. It’s a win-win.

3. Rinse and Repeat

Now you need to repeat steps one and two with ten more targets.

Most will get back to you relatively quickly — I’m talking 1–2 hours — while the rest won’t because they either don’t use Quora anymore, their contact info is dated, or they’re insanely busy.

I got most of my responses within a couple hours, which allowed me to move on pretty rapidly to the next steps.

4. Hit Up A Free Trial Of LucidPress

When you’re confident in the quality of your content, it’s time to design your ebook.

LucidPress is the best tool for that.

There are zero affiliate links here. In fact there’s no links at all. Go get to the site yourself and start to design your ebook.

Pro Tips:

• Make sure to select the “Digital Magazine” template for your ebook. It’s a nice square shape that makes it easier to read on digital screens.
• On the next page choose a pre-made design theme on the left hand side to work with. You’ll find 7–8 different page designs to go off of for each theme, which is super nice.
• Take free stock pictures from sites like Pexels to help design your ebook.

This is what a couple pages of my ebook look like:

Look! It’s our friend Kyle Gundrum!

I can’t give you too many graphic design tips, but if you stay close to the theme ideas, you’ll be in good hands. To see what the rest of my ebook looks like for ideas, take a look here.

5. Download And Shrink Your PDF

Now when you download that .pdf file, it’s going to be massive — not the kind of thing that delivers well in emails.

Make sure to use a resource like Smallpdf to compress that file into a nice little package so it delivers well.

6. Show Your Contributors Their Work

Don’t forget to send your contributors an email with the .pdf so they can hand it over to their audience.

They’ll appreciate the thought and it’s just a little common courtesy!

That’s it! That’s a pretty simple way to design an ebook in just 24 hours, right? You’ll get responses in 1–2 hours and you have the rest of the day to design.

Now you’re ready to start collecting emails.

By the way, if you want to get my free 5-day email course on how to get 1,000 followers on Medium, sign up below!