If you’re like every coach, trainer, and expert today, you want to grow your business, right? Sure, we all do. If not, then we’re probably going out of business. What’s more, we all spend a ton of time looking for the sure-fire tool, or piece of advice that will help us grow.
Let me ask you, how many emails do you get daily describing the one thing that you’re missing that will spur growth in your business? Doesn’t it seem that there’s an endless number of possibilities available to you?
The reality is, most business growth options take a significant amount of time and money to develop and get up and running. Others just take a lot of time and effort to do yourself or you can pay someone else to do.
However, there’s one option that you should strongly consider using. The reason is that few business owners decide to act on this option. It can be very powerful in helping you get the word out about who you are and what you do, without having to reduce everything you know into tiny sound bites on social media.
I’m talking about creating a book about who you are, your experiences, your company, what you do better than anyone else, and how you share your knowledge and products. With powerful technology and tools like Amazon Book Publishing, you can be an accomplished author easier than ever.
Now I know what you’re thinking, I don’t know anything about creating a book.
I’m not sure that anyone would be interested in what I would write about, even if I did write one,
I have no idea of what to do next when it comes to Amazon book publishing,
and I believe that this would cost me a fortune.
I’m aware of all these reasons. I’ve talked with scores of entrepreneurs about having a book and they’ve shared all their horror stories. I used to believe most of them. Not anymore. Like many others, initially I believed all the negative things professionals told me about the nightmares they experienced when writing or publishing a book.
Just to name a few, there’s the pain of dealing with “writers block”, finding someone to publish your book, and how depressing it is when the 50th editor sends back a “Not Interested” boiler plate response. There is a myriad of negatives that stop talented business owners from creating their book.
What I didn’t initially understand was that the majority of negative responses were based on second-hand, sometimes third-hand, information. They weren’t the result of firsthand experiences in creating a book, but what someone told them they experienced.
Separating Fact from Fiction about Amazon Book Publishing
Here’s what turned me around, I was fortunate back in 2014 to attend a pilot class on creating a book and self-publishing on Amazon, put on by people who I knew and trusted. They were teaching everything I needed to know about creating and self-publishing a book.
This all made sense, because the largest company involved in self-publishing back then, and still, was Amazon, and the class covered everything I needed to know about Amazon and their publishing business.
I learned the fastest techniques to creating a book, including:
• Picking your title and sub-title
• Choosing the best tool to use when creating your content
• Learning the fastest way to enter content
• Making it easy to see the most successful covers authors use in a great resource document with the categorized Top 100 books on Amazon
• Finding the best and most reasonable contractors to help me,
• Creating an account on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) site
• Uploading your manuscript onto KDP
• Providing the correct information to KDP for your book
• Avoiding the biggest self-publishing mistakes
• Determining the best categories for your book
Since this was a Pilot class, I was also afforded the option to stay a couple of days longer and learn the material at a deeper level, pass a test, and become Certified in the creation of a book and the Amazon book publishing program for self-publishers, which I did.
My next step was to see how well the book self-publishing program works by creating and publishing a book. The class ended at the end of August and there was a live event scheduled for September 19th. A challenge was thrown out to the students to create and publish a book and attempt to get it to be a Best Seller on Amazon before the live event.
I began creating my first book, Content Market Your Way to Triple Business Growth, the next week. I did have somewhat of a step up since I chose my Title and Sub-Title during the class and got great feedback from two well-known literary agents. I also had a front cover of the book created within two days.
I diligently followed the process and completed my book over the next few weeks. I was able to upload it to Kindle Direct Publishing on September 16th, three days before the start of the live event.
On September 18th, I followed the process for running a best seller program, and 10 hours later, the book hit #1 in one category. I walked into the event as a #1 Amazon Best Selling Author. I also followed the experts’ recommendations and captured screen shots so I could share as proof of my Best Seller status.
Boost Your Business with a Book
Here’s the thing, I didn’t go through this explanation in order to brag to you about what I accomplished with my first book.
I really wanted to emphasize that the book creation and Amazon book publishing process I was taught worked. It didn’t take me two years; it didn’t even take me two months. So, whatever stories you might have heard about the difficulty of creating and self-publishing taking forever and costing a fortune is not true for everyone.
And now you’re thinking, maybe my first book getting to #1 on Amazon was just a fluke. True story, I created and published my second book, Spin Your Content Into Gold, in 2017. I took me a total of 12 days and when I ran the best seller campaign, it became an International #1 Best Seller in a number of categories.
The focus of the class I attended was on creating business book, a book about you and your business, not works of fiction. There was a lot of emphasis on the value of having your own book where you can take advantage of being able to share who you are, what you do, how you do it and what makes you the best at what you do. It can become a great marketing tool. I say “can become” because just having a book is not enough, you have to understand the many ways you can use it to help you grow.
Here’s one example. If you’re like most business owners, you’re continuously looking for ways to:
• Attract new prospects and customers
• Get their attention
• Demonstrate your capabilities and experience
• Add them to your email list to increase sales
• Create a conversation with them
You have many ways to choose from to accomplish your customer connection goals. There’s email, regular mail, attending networking events, speaking at events that your prospects attend, etc. The problem is that most of these methods just aren’t working the way they have in the past.
For example, does this sound familiar?
• You go to an event and meet some people
• Briefly explain your business and exchange business cards. Three to five-minutes max
• Over the next day or two, you take the cards, sit your computer or smart phone and manually enter the information into your database
• You then create individual emails and send them out hoping they will be opened, and you will get some a response
At best, you get a response from someone requesting to meet where you get the first opportunity to have a conversation about who you are, what you do, etc. You will probably spend an hour or two with someone “picking your brain” Having someone pick your brain doesn’t add any money to your business. The vast amount of time these activities are generally a waste for you.
So, what’s the solution? How about this:
• You create and publish a paperback version of your book a where you spend lots of time explaining who you are and all about your business
• Bring copies to networking events
• As you are networking with people, you encounter someone you think will benefit from what you do, and you might want to talk to further
• You hand them a copy of your book with one of your Business Cards inside
• Offer to autograph it. A mandatory tool for every author is a Sharpie and always have it with you
• You then suggest you follow up with them once they have time to look at your book.
Since your book is about your business, you’ve shared all your qualifications, experience, ideas, and expertise. Using this approach, you’ve started a conversation with a potential client, instead of trying to connect with your elevator pitch and cramming as much as possible into those few moments.
People looking to solve problems want to work with someone considered an expert. It just so happens that most people consider someone who’s written a book to be an expert in their subject area; otherwise how could they have possibly created or written a book?
There are several ways you can use your book and Amazon book publishing to grow your business. I’ll cover more in another post. In a separate post, I’ll also cover the steps you can use to create your book.
So now, I have a few questions for you, can you see the value of your creating and publishing a book? Have I piqued your curiosity to know more? I hope the answer to both are yes!
Also, make sure that you sign up for my email list to get notified as soon as future posts are published [in the purple box below]. You’ll also get a copy of my latest book, Spin Your Content into Gold.