When most people think about a book as an asset, they think of sales, authority, and connections. If you don’t think of your book as a gigantic sales letter, then you are leaving a lot of revenue on the table.
Let me explain.
A reader who completes your entire book is a very warm lead for other products and services that you offer. It would be a shame to not provide several calls-to-action at the back-end of your book.
It’s acceptable to provide CTAs at the back of your book because they are optional and don’t add to the main content within your book. People will only decide to learn more about your offers at the back-end if they are interested and really enjoyed the book.
What Could You Offer At The Back-End?
Before we proceed, it’s very important to decipher what a back-end is NOT. A back-end offer isn’t your landing page where you ask for an email address.
You can provide a link to your landing page at the beginning of your book to capitalize on Amazon’s book previewer option.
This option will result in more customers, but more importantly, non-customers (which you can convert later) to subscribe to your email list.
Here are a few products/services that would make a great addition to the back-end of your book.
- Coaching: You’ve shared a lot of great advice in your book, but some of your readers need a nudge in order to take action. That’s what you’ll offer with coaching.
- Training Course: A frequently updated, more detailed analysis of the ideas in your book and the ability for readers to ask you questions.
- Mastermind: You can gather a few readers together who help and keep each other accountable with your occasional input. Masterminds result in less revenue than coaching but you can mastermind several people at once, while coaching involves a 1-to-1 relationship.
- Done-For-You Service: Your reader loves the value you provided but would prefer that you do all of the work. This is where a done-for-you service comes in. When you start out, you’ll have to do the work on your own, but as you grow, you’ll hire more freelancers to do most of the work for you. Charging a premium will ensure that you continue to make profits and accept clients even with increasing freelancer costs.
- Your Other Books: As your readers just finished reading your book, chances are they’ll be interested in more of your books. This will generate the least revenue but also be the easiest source of revenue. Including the same back-end offers in these books will make your readers more aware of them and turn them into customers. This is more of a long-term strategy for acquiring high paying customers
Provide Memorable Links
If a reader is interested in one of your back-end offers but doesn’t remember how to access it, you’ll lose out on a potentially lucrative sale. It’s true that a reader can simply go back to the book, but since most readers never get past the first chapter, imagine how few readers decide to crack open the book a second time.
This is why you should make the links as memorable as possible. For instance, you can use yoursite.com/mastermind to lead people to the mastermind offer. This is an easy URL to remember compared to yoursite.com/2017-book-mastermind-for-success. There’s a big difference.
For the sake of argument, let’s say the reader is willing to crack open the book for a second time. The main problem is that some readers will put it off as it’s a seemingly easy activity that rarely gets put on the schedule. The bigger the time gap, the more likely readers are to forget about their desire for your product or service…or go with someone else instead.
Make it as easy as possible for someone to buy something from you.
Create A Facebook Group
Some of your readers will go through your back-end offers and decide that none of them apply…for now.
But if you continue to build a relationship, over time you can get the same people to become your customers. So how do you build the relationship?
Start off with the essentials like consistently providing content and engaging with your audience, and then move to something slightly more advanced like a Facebook Group.
Create the Facebook Group and (this is important) include it in the same place you make the back-end offers. This way, if people aren’t immediately convinced, they can opt to join your Facebook Group (it’s free so they might as well join) and become part of your community.
As these readers continue to see you more often, they’ll think about your back-end offers more and more. This is how you turn a no into a maybe and then a yes.
Sprinkle Offers Throughout Your Book
While you showcase your offers at the back of your book, you can also sprinkle them throughout your book. Now it’s time to re-visualize your book as a gigantic sales letter. When appropriate, you can talk about success stories and experiences directly related to your product.
In a book about productivity, for example, I might talk about the level of productivity I needed to create one of my productivity courses. Choosing this topic gives me the ability to describe some of the benefits of the course without being salesy.
I can also share stories of people who went through the course and transformed their productivity – I can share what they did and, specifically, how the course helped.
Finally, you can start every chapter with a quote. In my Content Marketing Book (coming out in late October or early November), I began each chapter with evergreen quotes from my virtual summit.
I’m also leading off with quotes from my Content Marketing Plaza course to drive more attention to that. Then I’ll feature CMSS, The Plaza, and a few other products at the back-end of my book.
In Conclusion
Writing a book is exciting. However, if you miss out on including back-end offers, you will miss out on thousands of dollars (or even more). Most of the people who read your book from start to finish will adore your knowledge and will want more.
That’s where your back-end offers come in, and at the very minimum, these readers will join your Facebook Group. Make sure the URLs are easy to remember so your readers have an easy time taking action on your back-end offers.
When sharing the URLs, consider that some can get outdated. For instance, contentmarketingsuccesssummit.com currently leads people to the summit that took place a few months ago.
In 2018, that same URL will lead people to the next CMSS.
I want to consistently lead readers to the 2017 version which is why I’ll incorporate contentmarketingsuccesssummit.com/2017 as the link. I want to lead readers to the 2017 version because that’s the one I currently have, and the book is based on the summit.
What are your thoughts about including back-end offers in your books? Have any tips for us? Do you have a question? Sound off in the comments section below.
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