AP 0715: How Can I Leverage My Book to Support and Monetize My Brand?

AskPat 715 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 715 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

All right. Now here's today's question from Jeanette.

Jeanette: Hi, Pat. This is Jeanette from craftwhack.com. It's an art and activity blog that I have. I have a book that was just released called Tangle Art and Drawing Games For Kids, and while it's selling some copies and I'm proud of my achievement, I'm not sure what to do next with it. Do I just let it hang out and be a book I wrote or is there some way to leverage this and use it to move forward in my blogging career? What would be a good next step to help monetize my site based on the book? Do I do spin off e-books? I'm just curious to hear any ideas you might have. Thank you very much. I am a major fan of your podcasts. Thanks, Pat.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Jeanette. Thank you so much for your question. First of all congratulations on your book. I think that's a great first step for a lot of people who are trying to go out there and build a brand, build a name for themselves and eventually monetize their site. A book is a great way to build authority, but also it's a great tool for establishing relationships. It's a great tool for building an email list. It's a great tool for leading into potentially what could be other monetization strategies which I'll get into in a second.

I want to talk about those first things that I talked about. Promoting yourself using your book, growing your email list, getting exposure. Obviously is your in the Amazon atmosphere you're getting a little bit of that already, but what's cool is when you have a book you have a little bit more, I guess you could say, permission to ask to be a guest on other people's shows or to do guest posting. When you reach out to other bloggers because you have a book, it's going to be taken a little bit more seriously. There is great opportunities for you to not even necessarily taking content in your book and repurposing it, but just establishing those relationships that you can then use to gain more exposure and get more people to buy your book which is really cool.

Then in your book hopefully if you haven't done this already, you can create a new version of your book, if it's a electronic version it's going to be much easier obviously, but you can update it so that there is copy in the book and calls to actions that will drive people toward a landing page that essentially gives them something in exchange for their email address. I do this with my book Will It Fly. I've been able to collect over 10,000 email addresses from readers who have logged in and subscribed to a course that they get access to. So a free course that they get access to and I've build that course using Teachable. Doesn't have to be a course.

Some people have their audio be free, the audio version of their book be free in exchange for an email address because they know they can build that email list quite fast that way. They often will put the call to action in some of the first few pages of the website because actually people look through the book before they buy it on Amazon. If they see that call to action there in that preview a lot of them are going to go and check out that thing that you have to offer in exchange for their email address.

Why is the email address important? Well, you collect their email address so you can survey them, so you can have a conversation with them, so you can send them promotional emails or you can let them know of new blog posts or new books that come out. The email list is really going to be the driver of a lot of the monetization stuff that happens on your website. Using the book in combination with some of those promotional tactics like we talked about earlier, the podcasts and the blog, I mean, you can build your list that way, too. Again, all talking about list building right now.

Then in terms of monetization, the book is really not going to make anybody rich. Quite typically the book becomes the first step toward monetization strategies that can actually give you a lot of profit. For example, creating your own online course or creating a web summit. I don't know exactly what you do on your website, but it's kind of in the arts and craft arena like you said. There is an episode of the Smart Passive Income podcast that you might want to listen to that's episode 37 with our guest Lain Ehmann who is in the scrap booking industry. She was able to use her connections and her network to create an online summit which is essentially an event but it's online that people can register for and they pay X amount of dollars. I think the ticket price was over a hundred dollars for hers per ticket. It would just be like you were at a event where people had their presentations and people could watch and take notes and you can save those videos and share them with the customers of that event later. That's pretty cool.

Then the other thing that came to mind is something that you kind of briefly touched on and that is creating new books. I know that the more product the you have the easier it is to sell because you'll have existing customers and you can offer them bonuses. You can create bundles and all these other things. Plus in the Amazon atmosphere, you're going to have more opportunities for people to find you through different search terms, through different algorithmic opportunities such as people who bought this book also bought this one and those kinds of things. The more stuff you have out there definitely the more opportunity there is for you to be found and then of course build your email list like I said. Then get to a point where you can monetize your website.

I want to go back to one more thing before I finish up here and that's the importance of actually surveying your audience because you're going to have people who come through this book and on your email list and they're going to have certain pains and problems and things that they're going to be interested in and potentially want to pay for and you want to make sure that you pick the right one to start with. I would potentially use a tool like SurveyMonkey to reach out to your email subscribers. Even before doing that I would just have an email in your autoresponder sequence that says hey what can I help you with or if you went on the blog today and saw the perfect topic that would help you in what you're doing, what would that be today? Asking these questions in an automated fashion like this through your email subscribers allows you to collect all this information about the kinds of topics you can be creating products about, creating courses about, talking about on social media. It's exactly what your audience wants. That way you won't ever have to guess anymore. It's exactly what they told you.

Jeanette, I hope this answers your question or at least gives you some things to think about. Thank you so much again for your question. To reward you I want to give you an ask Pat t-shirt. As always we give an ask Pat t-shirt for free to anybody who's question gets featured in the show. Jeanette, you'll get an email from my assistant in the next month or so collecting that information so we can send that to you.

For anybody else out there if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show all you have to do is head on over to askpat.com and you can ask right there on that page. Lastly and as always we like to finish with a quote. Today's quote of the day comes from Robert Louis Stevenson. He says, “Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.” Go plant some seeds people. Cheers.