by: AskPat Episode 129 Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 129 of AskPat. Really quick, I just want to give a shout out to everybody's that left a review on iTunes for AskPat. Thank you so much. I appreciate and read every single one of them. If you want to leave a review, just look for AskPat in iTunes, and leave an honest review right there for me, and I'll read it. I'll check it out, I promise. Now let's get to today's question from Brian.
Brian: Hey Pat, I just read your Ebooks the Smart Way, and I want to thank you for that book, and for taking my question. So, here's my question. I'm a musician that's planning on writing a lesson ebook for beginners on my instrument. I also would like to start a blog about drumming. What should I do first, start the ebook and sales pitch? Or start the blog? Thanks for taking my question.
Pat Flynn: Brian, thank you so much for your question, and you are in luck today, because I actually just interviewed Nathan Barry from NathanBarry.com, in the Nathan Barry Show podcast, who talked about this very exact question. He has experience with creating ebooks and selling them for, actually, ridiculous amounts of money. He's almost generated over a half million dollars through self-publishing ebooks, taking the information in his brain about web design, and app design, and putting it and packaging it into an ebook, and selling it to his audience. And there was a question actually asked of him, this was on a live hangout we just did, about what do you do when you don't have an audience, or what would you do first? How would you go about marketing? What would you do in terms of building an audience?
His answer was great, and I want to share that with you today. And that is, and to answer your question, I would create the blog first. I want to create the blog first because that's your personality, that's your brand, that's how people are going to get to know you and who's behind this ebook. However, at the same time, I would mention that you have an ebook coming. So, you have the blog, but you also, in the beginning, just mention that you have this book coming. Now, what this does is, for new visitors who come to your site, it's going to show them that you are somebody worth paying attention to. You aren't just somebody throwing content up there, which may or may not be good. I mean, I'm sure it's great brand, but if you go to a website, you kind of have no idea about who the person is behind that content, until you start to read their about page, or get to know them a little bit, or start to dive deep into their content well. If you share that you're creating a book about their interests, something that can provide a solution for them, and you hint at it, you get people to subscribe to your email lists, and you drop even more hints, you create buzz about it, you create hype.
What that does is it shows the brand new visitors on your site, the people brand new to your web page, that you are somebody worth paying attention to. That you aren't just another blogger, but you're somebody who's actually publishing a book about this content that you have. This knowledge that you have that can help and provide value to others. So, what you want to do, you want to collect an interest list off of that, as well, which will help with the promotion and the launch of your ebook. So, that is the perfect way to do it. Start your blog, but at the same time, mention, at the end of blog posts, in the side bar, on your about page, on a specific landing page as well, that you are coming out with this book. And if people are interested, and you could bullet point quickly what this book is going to do for your target audience, you could collect email addresses, so that at the time at which you finally have your ebook written, you can then launch to that list that you've already generated.
The cool thing is, when you see those interests come in, and when you see those emails come into your AWeber, or your MailChimp, or whatever email service provider you're using to collect these email addresses . . . When you see those emails come in, that's validation, that this book is something that needs to be written. And so you're working on your blog, you're working on building relationships. You're perhaps even giving away one or two chapters of your book to provide even more value, but also build buzz for your book. You're going to be very motivated to actually get your book done.
And I would definitely follow Nathan Barry, and the number of different models he's used to promote his books. You could also check him out on the Smart Passive Income podcast, in episode number 75. So, the short link for that is smartpassiveincome.com/session75. He goes over a number of different book strategies there, and at that point in time, he was grossing, or he had grossed, about $200,000 in sales from his ebook. When I interviewed him just the other day, or actually today, he is at half a million dollars. He's doing extremely, extremely well. Now, this sort of strategy that I talked about, he sort of used that on his app design handbook when he first launched. This was the first book that he created and sold on his site to an audience that was fairly new to him. So, he actually built this blog, he created a lot of high value content on his blog. You know, posts that were 3,000 to 4,000 words in length that were very, very educational, very high value to his target audience. But then they also mentioned, “Hey, I'm writing this book. If you want more of this, you better check out this book that I'm coming out with.” And of course, people subscribed to his list, and like I said, it's just really easy for him to sell, at that point, because, not only did he provide value and collect these emails, but through doing that, he was able to prove himself, and to just build a relationship and build trust with people that were following him.
So, Brian, I hope that answers your question. I wish you all the best of luck. An AskPat t-shirt is headed your way and please, send me an email, or another audio file through Speakpipe on AskPat.com. Later, to keep us posted, I would love, love to hear about your success story, and for those of you listening, if you have a question, you'd like potentially featured on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there using the Speakpipe widget right there on that page. And Brian mentioned in his question Ebooks the Smart Way, which you can all get at ebooksthesmartway.com. That's a landing page where you can get Ebooks the Smart Way for free.
Thank you all so much for listening today, and as always, I'm going to end with a quote. Today's quote is from the amazing and late Bruce Lee. And his quote was, “The key to immortality, is first, living a life worth remembering.”
The key to immortality is first, living a life worth remembering. Awesome, thanks so much, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.