Why You’re Not Making Money With Your Book

There is one primary reason you’re not making money from your book.

You’re not making enough offers on the back end of your book related to your marketplace.

I have 3 questions for you:

1. What is the offer that you’re going to make to your ideal client?
2. What is the high ticket thing you’re going to be selling?
3. What is the big problem that you’re solving?

You have to make more offers to your marketplace that will create income. With one great offer to your market, you can build a seven-figure revenue stream. One great offer is all you need.

What does a great offer entail?

A great offer is a high ticket offer.

Using myself as an example, our high ticket offer at Best Seller Publishing is about those that want to write a book, specifically, those that want to write a nonfiction book in the expert industry, coaches, consultants, entrepreneurs, and brick and mortar business owners.

Maybe they’ve struggled for years trying to get a book written, maybe they’ve gotten the book written, but it just hasn’t done very well because they don’t know how to promote it.

So we have our high ticket offer to cure that problem.

Your book needs to speak to your ideal audience so when you show them you can solve their big problem, you have an offer for them, whatever that looks like.

One of my favorite models is a six week, $3,000 program on the front end and a six month $10,000 program on the back end. I talked about this in a previous blog post.

Remember, the problem that you can fix for someone, won’t be a problem you can fix for everyone. The more specific you can get, the better.

[socialpug_tweet tweet=”Remember, the problem that you can fix for someone, won’t be a problem you can fix for everyone. The more specific you can get, the better. @BSPBooks” display_tweet=”Remember, the problem that you can fix for someone, won’t be a problem you can fix for everyone. The more specific you can get, the better. @BSPBooks” style=”2″]

The solution you offer your prospective clients needs to be a result that they want, and it’s even better if you can guarantee it.

I was recently talking to one of our clients about this very thing because he has a successful consulting business and he has a high ticket consulting program. He works with large corporations so he typically gets six-figure contracts, but whenever somebody pays you six figures, they often feel like they own you.

So there’s a little bit of a challenge there.

What he wanted to do was have a lower ticket offer in the $5,000 to $10,000 range that would appeal to a larger audience.

As we were walking through his high ticket offer, I told him I liked what he was doing and I knew there were elements within it that people would be interested in, but to create a successful front end offer (at $5,000 – $10,000), he would need to deliver great results.

His prospective clients need to come out at the end of a six-week program, not having just done some “therapy.”

He’s not a therapist, but what I meant was that he can’t just be answering questions. This new offer really needs to move them to completion on at least one goal. It needs to give them the tools and resources to accomplish something.

Something you’re going to want to figure out is what kind of delivery you want. I gave you an example of one six to eight-week delivery. That’s a lower ticket offer where you promise a certain result for your customer.

For a higher ticket offer, you want to tell potential customers that you see their problem and that it’s time for them to invest their resources so they can get a guaranteed result because they shouldn’t be wasting any more time on it.

Their time is more valuable when spent doing other things.

Essentially you’re saying, give me the problem and I will fix it for you.

Because they’re going to be giving you more money, you’re going to be giving them more time which means it’s a significant investment for you both.

You have to present this offer consistently. I know people, and I have been guilty of this myself, who have a great offer in place but are not consistent in taking that offer to the marketplace.

The more you make your offer to the marketplace, the more money you’re going to make. It’s about awareness: making the people who have a problem you can solve, aware that you have the solution.

There are a number of different ways to consistently make that offer:

1. Regular speaking engagements.

I’m not talking about one or two speaking engagements a year. That’s not really the kind of consistency of making an offer that’s really going to make you money.

For people that want to be speakers, I always warn against that. To make money, you have got to be on stage and if you’re not on stage that week, you’re not making money.

If you don’t want to be a regular speaker, doing events every week, then you may want to consider speaking at engagements that come along while focusing on something else.

2. Social media.

You can reach out to your ideal client on Linkedin and you can utilize Facebook groups by giving content, giving feedback, and sharing your ideas and thoughts. I went into more detail about how to utilize Linkedin and Facebook on this blog post.

3. Your own content.

You can also focus on creating your own content with calls to action.

Whether you have a podcast, a blog, consistent work on social media, etc. it has to be something that you do daily, but the best part is they’re all free. They do cost you your time, which is significant, but those are things you can do every single day to make your offer.

I actually do all of these things. I speak, but not that often. I only speak a couple of times a year, but on the right stages. I don’t give a lot in Facebook groups, other than my own private group, but I create content on a regular basis. I like to make videos like this one. These videos are then repurposed into blog posts, podcasts, emails, social media content, etc.

I will create one piece of content with a ton of information or multiple examples, and then that can be broken down into subsets and other elements so that it can be spread out.

Obviously, I have people that I’m paying who are helping me with all of this, but it’s absolutely possible to do without a team as well.

What’s my favorite method to sell books besides the three ways I mentioned above?

Paid advertising and marketing.

It’s the closest one can get to being totally hands-free while having your offer consistently presented to potential customers.

Is it passive?

Of course, it’s not truly passive. I have people look at the ads every single day. I also pay an outside ad agency to help me with them. Once I get an ad dialed in, I can send it to the marketplace and it can do the job of making of the offer.

As time goes on, you’re going to have fewer people responding to your ads. So what do you do?

Create new content for your ad.

You want to be consistent in creating new ad content because as you feed it to the marketplace, it will have diminishing returns. That’s okay. That’s normal.

The good news: there are tons of ways to repurpose your content and tweak your ad copy. Sometimes it’s a matter of trial and error.

When you’re ready to go to eight or nine figures, you might need a few different offers, but one great book with one great offer is going to bring you to seven figures and multiple seven figures.

I want to share some questions people ask me in regards to how to sell their book more:

FAQ’s

1. Billy asks, “What if there is no specific result and you are doing a Membership Program for coaching?”

There has to be a specific result for your coaching, otherwise, why would people pay for your coaching? There has to be a result that you’re promising people because no one just wants to be in a coaching program without ever seeing results. They’re hiring you as a coach because they see exactly how you can help them with their problem.

There is a result that you’re giving to your clients so you need to quantify that result. What problem are you helping them solve? Maybe it’s not something that you could quantify in a six or eight week period, but you need to be able to quantify it in some length of time.

No one is going to pay to be in a coaching program if they don’t see changes happening.

2. Grace asks, “I have a six week and a six-month program. What are some other evergreen marketing methods?”

There are tons of evergreen marketing methods. You could sell a course via an auto webinar, an ultimate guidepost, a podcast episode, etc. Whatever the method, you want to make sure you focus on the content because it’s the content itself that you want to be evergreen.

At Best Seller Publishing, we don’t do all of those things because you don’t need to do all those things to get to $500,000 – $700,000 a month in revenue.

You only need to get one great offer that you love delivering that gives people great results. So if you have a six-week program, that’s fantastic, especially if it’s in the $5,000 – $7,000 range.

The key is to make sure you’re solving a neck bleeding issue for your clients. Dial in on the big problems your clients face and then make consistent offers within your marketplace.

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3. Julie says, “any ideas to generate leads for those in a rural/low populated area? How can I sell my course without just using social media?”

Build a mailing list. I’m curious about why you don’t want to use social media. I understand some people have negative thoughts about it from a cultural standpoint, but from a business owner/marketer’s perspective, social media is one of the greatest innovations ever for you to deliver your message.

If you’re a rural, low populated area, then you’ve got to go outside your area. One of the best ways you can go outside your area is to target people based on their interests on Facebook, Instagram, social media, etc.

So I would start there, Julie and work your way back. How do we go from reader to prospect? Do you capture emails via free giveaway in the book? Is it all in the email follow-ups?

On the first couple of pages of my book, I have a giveaway. It says “a gift for you” with a link to a website where I give away free PR and media training. All people have to do is go to the website to get the information in exchange for their email.

You can use the book in conjunction with some type of bonus that you’re offering. You could offer a free pdf version, you could offer some materials out of the book, you could do a free plus shipping funnel, etc. to build your email list.

There are a lot of things you can do that cost little to nothing, but they are going to cost your time. Those are the two resources you have to work with, right. Time or money and usually it’s a combination of both those things.

4. Paul says, “Guilty of not making the offer consistently with amazing results.”

It really is that simple.

The more you make a great offer that clearly defines the problem you’re going to solve to your marketplace, the more money you will make.

Now here’s the interesting thing: even if you don’t have a clearly defined offer or if things aren’t quite where you think they should be, you can still be making an offer.

You can make an offer to your marketplace and get feedback from them. Give surveys, ask them, “do you like this or do you like this?” “If I could solve this problem for you, would it matter? Or would you rather have this problem solved?”

In other words, if you’re not making a great offer because you don’t have it dialed in yet, at least talk to the market and ask what a great offer would be. Communication within your marketplace is key.

5. Paul asked, “I think I understood the ideal client but not the bleeding neck. I hadn’t fleshed that out yet. Can you elaborate on that?”

You’ve got an ideal client, but part of having that ideal client is knowing what their pain point is.

What is their big problem? How do you solve that big problem for them?

6. Maria says, “at what point do you suggest to offer your book?”

The offer isn’t the offer of your book.

The book is your way to show yourself to the world as an expert in solving the problems of your ideal client. So the offer is the more expensive thing that the book is going to lead people to.

Use your book to show yourself as an expert in your space so your ideal client sees you and trusts you. Then, you lead them to a higher ticket offer: a six to eight-week program, etc.

The book itself is not the offer. The book is just the beginning.

On average 1,000 people a month are getting a copy of my book, “Published, Promote, Profit” and I only need 25 of those people to become my done-for-you clients. That’s my math.

25 people out of 1,000 are 2.5%. I only need 2.5% of the buyers of my book to respond and say, “you’re the real deal. I want a guaranteed result. Here’s a check. Help me handle all this stuff.”

Maybe your math is better than that. Maybe you can get 10% to respond instead of 2.5%.

But remember, I have a little bit of a bigger organization. I’m not doing the actual consultative sales calls. I have a team doing that. All of that matters.

When you have these things in place and you’re consistently making a great offer to your marketplace, you will get profits from your book. They’re going to want to give you money to solve their problem.