YOU! SHOULD! WRITE! A! BOOK!
Here’s how Alicia Dunams—founder of Bestseller in a Weekend, in her interview with Mike Wolpert of Social Jumpstart TV—convinced me that every business owner should write a book.
SEVEN REASONS WHY
Everyone is an expert about something. How can people be confident in you if you’re not confident in yourself? If you consider yourself an expert, you want to go out there and show your expertise. Creating a book is the first way to productize your expertise and create your content. It’s a way to make you visible to your prospects and your target audience.
Amazon is a huge search engine itself, and its books are also indexed by all the other search engines. When people search your keywords on Amazon or Google, are you going to come up, or is your competitor going to come up?
You want to be able to deliver your information on a global level. Writing a book uses a one-to-many model rather than the old one-to-one model of phone and email. Wouldn’t it be better if your prospects could find you on Amazon and get in-depth information about you on their own? People might not buy your book, but after looking at your book online they might go to your blog, sign up for your subscriber list on your newsletter, or someday hire you or attend one of your seminars.
Unless you have a mega-popular blog, you won’t get on TV by blogging. A book gets you on TV, and is also a good thing to send to event planners if you want to have a speaking career on stage.
A book is pass-along marketing material. Anyone you give it to or anyone who buys it can pass it along to another person. It’s the best business card you could ever have.
According to Dunams, her clients’ lives change in a matter of months after publishing a book. They are able to raise their fees, book up their speaking calendar with stages nationwide, and appear on TV. And they can now call themselves published authors.
There are many wonderful things about eBooks. You can create your content once, and it will be available for the rest of your life and your children’s lives, creating residual income. You’re not killing trees unless someone orders a paper book. You do the book once, and it can sell over and over again, without being at the mercy of the publisher. And your clients can have access to your content for less than 10 dollars.
SEVEN IDEAS HOW
You need content. Why not start by identifying the content you already have? Look at your email inbox. What are the top ten questions people are asking you on a weekly basis? Write them down, and write a blog entry about it. After you’ve written several blogs, maybe that is a book about this particular niche you’re an expert in. You’re probably spending 30 minutes a day talking to each prospect about what you do, and having that same conversation with multiple prospects, over and over. How about putting that conversation into a form that can be delivered to many people at one time? The goal is to leverage your time by creating content—whether it’s a blog entry, an article, or a book—so you can say “Hey, if you want to learn more about this subject, go here and read this thing.”
You want to write about a niche topic. It’s better to be one inch wide and one mile deep than it is to cover more ground in a shallower way. Everyone knows that content is king, but actually, absurdly good content is king. Write 100 pages in which you really tackle the subject you’re an expert in, and focus in on it until you own and master that particular subject.
Who’s your target audience? What is their headache and how do you solve it? Create a concept in which you will help your target audience solve their biggest headache. Make sure that whatever you are writing, it is focused on takeaways, outcomes, and results for the people who read it.
Once you have your content, distribute it however you can. You can start doing this before your book is finished. Create an environment of anticipation for your book on Facebook and Twitter by getting input from your target audience. Make sure your followers are in the book, using case studies or thoughts they have shared on social media. They are getting involved, and creating content for your book. You are getting people excited, and helping them come along on the journey of you writing your book. This creates a built-in audience for your book.
Make an editorial calendar, just like a magazine does. Block out time for the project of writing your book (don’t forget about the time you’ll save by not repeating yourself over and over to prospects!), and get outside help if you need it. But make sure you also incorporate time for social media into your editorial calendar. Plan it out: what to blog about, what to tweet about, and when. Know what to work on when you get up. And whether you’re blogging, tweeting, or using Facebook, it needs to be weekly. Make this a part of your calendar.
Maximize your content. Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose, so you don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. You’re creating the content once, and then either selling it over and over again or duplicating it over and over again in different mediums. Once you’ve written your book, you can use it to create blog entries, videos, audio, and teleseminars or webinars. (Tweet lines from your book; it’s a perfect way to disseminate and distribute your content.) Or you can do it the other way around. Social media can be used to create content, just as it can be used to distribute content. For example, a teleseminar is a great way to create content for your book. Have someone interview you—an expert, or a colleague—and then use that content to create a book.
Self-publish. You can literally do this with a click of a button. Have absurdly good content, make sure it’s edited appropriately, and make sure you have a legal disclaimer (run it by a lawyer before you go to print). Then go to Kindle, where they will walk you through the process step by step. Kindle wants you there! Shelf space is unlimited, and they need your content. Get a cover design for 5 dollars on Fiverr.com. Upload it, and 24 hours later you’ll see your book being sold worldwide on Kindle. If you also want to create your book in a print format, use Createspace.
THE ALICIA DUNAMS TAKEAWAY: Write a book. It’s not that hard. Just do it.
