Marc Guberti

How To Optimize The Back-End Of Your Book

August 1, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

books

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.

How To Turn Content Creation Into Content Marketing

July 29, 2017 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

No one questions the importance of content for a content brand. Without content, content brands wouldn’t exist. The critical question surrounding content revolves around how much time we should spend on content creation versus content marketing.

As the theory goes, every minute you spend creating content you’ll lose on content marketing. But what if I told you that theory was completely wrong?

You can engage in content creation and content marketing all within the same minute. No, that doesn’t mean allocating 30 seconds for each task. Certain tasks fulfill both the creation and marketing components of successful content brands.

This is what Andy Crestodina referred to as the ‘gray area’ during my Content Marketing Success Summit. Andy explained that certain tasks fit both the creation and marketing parameters, tasks that we tend to separate as if they were oil and vinegar.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the gray area so your can create and market your content at a much faster pace.

Content Creation Gives You Marketing Ammo

You can’t market content unless you create it. But you can take the same piece of content and republish it on multiple platforms. It’s commonplace to see top content creators republishing their blog posts on LinkedIn, Medium, and elsewhere.

Each time someone in your preexisting audience shares your content – regardless of where they share it – it will lead to more people viewing that content.

If your blog posts, LinkedIn posts, and Medium posts each get 500 daily visitors, then you have a total of 1,500 visitors. And it only takes 5-10 minutes to republish already written blog posts on those platforms to see a big traffic increase.

As an added bonus, republishing your content on LinkedIn and Medium creates viral potential as more people engage with your content. This will put you content in front of a larger audience that you wouldn’t have reached on your own.

And when you publish on LinkedIn and Medium, you should include calls-to-action to drive people back to your blog.

At the start of one of these posts, use the anchor text, “This post was first published on [name of your blog].”

And at the end of your post, lead people to a relevant landing page (based on the topic of the content the visitor just read) that asks for the visitor’s email address.

You can also link to older blog posts throughout these posts to lead people back to your existing blog content. Just make sure these older blog posts are relevant to the topic your visitors are currently reading.

This model supports the idea of creating as much content as possible, assuming you have at least a decent sized audience on LinkedIn and Medium.

Influencer Outreach

Andy went into great detail about influencer outreach during our interview.

Basically, you contact several influencers and ask them for their opinions, recommendations, or a quote. This is content creation and marketing at its finest because you get thousands of words of content and influencers who will be happy to promote the post since they’re featured in it.

I leveraged this tactic for my blogging tools post. I asked dozens of influencers for their recommendations and 22 influencers came through. The post itself surpassed 4,000 words (and I added around 400 words at most).

Talk about an unfair advantage!

Other people basically wrote my content for me, and then more people marketed my content for me.

Granted, I did have to reach out to many people and copy and paste their content into the blog post. But many connections, combined with the power of HARO, made the mission easy to accomplish.

You don’t have to turn your entire post into other people’s opinions, quotes, and recommendations. But you can incorporate information from at least three influencers into your content.

Contact each influencer and see if they can provide 100-500 words. I typically ask for 100-250 words (unless it’s just a quote) because I want to make it as easy as possible for an influencer to provide me with free content (and share it with his or her audience).

If you can’t get the influencers to participate, you can hunt for quotes by reading their blog posts, watching their videos, listening to their podcasts, or reading interviews. You can then tell the influencer you mentioned him/her in your latest blog post and you may get a share, or at the very least some appreciation.

This strategy also allows you to build relationships with influencers so that in the future they might agree to be guests on your podcast, speakers at a virtual summit, etc.

For these relationships to work, you must get off the WIIFM Station (what’s in it for me). Only connect with influencers if you want to create a win-win atmosphere. My two favorite ways to build healthy relationships with influencers involve blog content and podcasts.

Incorporate Internal And External Links

Both internal and external links are important for SEO. Internal links lead people to your older blog posts. These links help keep people on your site longer as well as decrease your bounce rates, two metrics that are critical to your blog’s search ranking.

Internal links also drive LinkedIn and Medium readers directly to your blog, which allows you to keep these readers’ attention longer.

You can also connect certain blog posts together into a series. This requires readers to read all the posts in the series to get a complete overview of what you’re trying to achieve with your content.

External links to authority sites within your niche will allow you to piggyback on these sites’ search engine rankings. Search engines will recognize that you link to authority content. And the algorithms will assign more authority to your own site.

External linking is a long-term game. But you can immediately see the impact of internal links. And, if continued, they result in even sweeter results over the long-term.

In Conclusion

Content creation and marketing are both critical to the success of a content brand. While both involve a significant time investment, you can tap into the gray area of creation and marketing and feed two birds with one scone.

This time-effective route, combined with delegation, will make it much easier for you to grow and sustain your content brand.

What are your thoughts about the gray area? Do took have any other content creation and marketing hacks for us? Want to ask a question? Sound off in the comments section below.

4 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Strategy

July 27, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

A social media presence is paramount to the success of any business in the digital age. These days, no marketing strategy can be complete without a social media strategy. With the social media landscape constantly changing, we need evergreen tactics that can form the core of our social media strategy regardless of which social networks are our top dogs. The following are four ways you can quickly improve your social media strategy and get better results.

#1: Leverage On Messaging

Customer service is at the heart of successful businesses. Get customer service wrong and before long, your business could run out of revenue. You can leverage the messaging power of social media and turn it into a potent customer service channel that goes beyond special offers and resolving disputes.

Social media has vastly changed customer service landscape. This was inevitable given that many people spend a considerable amount of time daily on social networks. Just take a look at some of these eye-opening stats:

According to Pew Research, 70% of Facebook users log on daily, including 43% who do so several times a day. 59% of Instagram users, 38% of Twitter users, 27% of Pinterest users and 22% of Linked users log on daily.
In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Americans spend an average of 40 minutes per day on Facebook.
Research by Nielsen has found that 33% of customers prefer to contact brands using social media as opposed to the telephone.
JD Power conducted a study that established that two-thirds of customers go to Twitter and Facebook for customer service.

Clearly, if you aren’t using social media messaging for customer service, you are losing out on a great opportunity.

But, there is a caveat. Engaging customers on social media is time-consuming and at times complicated. Sifting through hundreds of comments looking for complaints and/or suggestions is just part of the game.

The only way to effectively use social media for customer service and stay sane is to use Messenger Bots. Facebook’s recently popularized Messenger Bot makes it easy to quickly respond to common requests such as initial greetings. Other messaging apps like Telegram even have built-in functionality that allows customers to get quick answers from a menu selection.

#2: Mix Paid Content with SEO

Content marketing will only continue to grow stronger in future. So, it’s important to keep creating valuable content. But, to expand distribution, it is advisable to use paid content if you can afford to. Organic traffic is fantastic but if you can reach a bigger audience with paid content that converts visitors into sales, then it’s worth a try?

Unlike a few years ago, paid content today is customized for the platforms and targeting options allow one to target a niche audience. Think of paid content as a useful ally to build an audience faster. Paid content is great for startups and local businesses especially when launching new products or running a seasonal campaign.

#3: Don’t Be Afraid To Experiment

Mark Zuckerberg once stated, “the biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”

Where social media is concerned, you must boldly experiment. The dynamic nature of social media means that new ways of doing things, technologies and tools keep coming up on a daily basis. The innovators that try out the new stuff before the rest of us often get to benefit from upgrades.

Instagram Stories is the latest feature that early adopters happily jumped on. While this feature hasn’t been around for long, it already has over 150 million daily users. Experiment with new features whenever they launch and sign-up for early releases where possible. You might just stumble on something that completely revamps your social media strategy and turbocharges your business.

#4: Don’t Forget the Golden Rule

Active interaction. That’s right. This is the golden rule of a successful strategy. A quiet audience that doesn’t interact with your posts is a clear indication that something is wrong. It could be your content isn’t relevant, interesting and useful enough or your response rate is low. Invest in a good analytics tool to find out what works and what doesn’t.

Remember that social media includes the word social. Don’t solely use social media to shout out your message at your audience. Instead, take the time to ask questions and interact with the people who engage with your content.

In Conclusion

About 80% of small and medium-sized enterprises are using social media to drive sales and business growth. Rather than just having a presence on social media, you need to go deeper and understand how to make the maximum use of the features to provide better service to your customers and improve your bottom line.

What are your thoughts on creating a social media strategy? Have any suggestions for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

E48: Open The Door To Happiness And Szen With Gary Szenderski

July 26, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Gary Szenderski is an author, speaker, teacher, and branding specialist. He specializes in helping people and organizations to navigate change, and frequently speaks and writes on the topic of emerging brands, personal branding, and companies in transition. Gary is an award-winning writer, author of the Book of Szen, often quoted marketing expert, and recipient of the Distinguished Instructor Award from the University of California in Irvine where he teaches branding.

Quotes To Remember:

“We should always start our songs on a positive note.”

“If you can’t change it, embrace it.”

“We have to deal with [past issues] head on.”

What You’ll Learn:

—How to discover what you want

—How to live in the moment and become more aware of what’s going on

—How to stay positive

—How to avoid hinging your happiness on expectations

—How to avoid distractions

—How to open the intake valve to your happiness

Key Links From The Show:

Gary’s Site

Gary’s email address: gary@bookofszen.com

Recommended Books:

The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Anchor

Start With Why by Simon Sinek

Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O’Donohue

E48: Open The Door To Happiness And Szen With Gary Szenderski

July 26, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Quotes To Remember:

“We should always start our songs on a positive note.”

“If you can’t change it, embrace it.”

“We have to deal with [past issues] head on.”

What You’ll Learn:

—How to discover what you want

—How to live in the moment and become more aware of what’s going on

—How to stay positive

—How to avoid hinging your happiness on expectations

—How to avoid distractions

—How to open the intake valve to your happiness

Key Links From The Show:

Gary’s Site

Gary’s email address: gary@bookofszen.com

Recommended Books:

The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Anchor

Start With Why by Simon Sinek

Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O’Donohue

Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy Using the Buyer’s Journey

July 25, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

This is a guest contribution from Nicole Stelmar

A consumer goes through three different stages before making a purchase: awareness, consideration, and decision. These three stages make up the buyer’s journey.

Why does this matter to content marketers? Each stage of the buyer’s journey presents an opportunity to reach potential customers and lead them down the path to making a purchase.

Unfortunately, many marketers overlook the first two stages and focus only on content for buyers in the decision phase.

In order to reach prospects in each stage of the buyer journey, it is important to understand what content resonates most with consumers in that stage. Here are some tips and examples on how to create effective content for each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Awareness Stage

The awareness stage is the first stage of the buyer’s journey—also known as the top of the funnel. In the awareness stage, the buyer encounters a problem that they need solved. The prospect is seeking information about a product or service without the intent of buying. They desire to find free, high quality educational content that will lead them to a conclusion.

Prospects will browse a wealth of information before they find what they need. At this point, their value as a lead is low because they may not notice you. However, if they find that your content is helpful and interesting, they are one step closer to buying.

Unfortunately, many businesses tend to overlook this part of the process. They don’t see it as a worthwhile investment because it may not guarantee a lead. However, neglecting the awareness stage is a mistake.

This is an opportunity to gain a connection and trust with your audience through quality content. Think of this stage as a first impression. A prospect will quickly sift through information to solve their problem as quickly as possible. You want your content to be intriguing and helpful so that you stand out among the crowd.

The types of content that interests prospects at this stage are blog posts, social content, and ebooks. Diversify your content with research reports, editorial content, whitepapers, and statistical reports that educate the buyer.

Let’s look at some examples of content for your customers in the awareness stage. First up is a research report from TransUnion’s SmartMove division. By providing its potential customer base with its own research, SmartMove is establishing itself as a trustworthy and authoritative figure within their industry. This will attract customers in the awareness phase as they are looking for more information on their newly identified problem.

The second example comes from right here at MarcGuberti.com. By offering potential customers free access to 27 Ways to Get More Retweets on Twitter, Marc is giving users in depth knowledge of Twitter best practices. He is also establishing himself as an expert in digital marketing and entrepreneurship.

Consideration Stage

Once your prospect is informed, you must convince them that your product solves their problem. This is known as the consideration stage.

The goal in this stage is to help the buyer identify exactly what they need to solve the problem that first brought them to the awareness stage. The second goal is to convince the buyer that your product or service fits their particular needs. In addition, you need to show them why your product or service is superior to that of the competition.

As the funnel narrows in the consideration phase, so too must your focus. Buyers in the middle of your sales funnel begin to trust you as an authority in your subject. Your goal is to show them that you are an expert in your field or industry.

And you can optimize for this advantage through the use of expert guides, webinars, live interactions, and white papers that compare your features and benefits with those of your competitors.

Odoo, a provider of management software, published this white paper, which compares its services to three competitor services. This allows Odoo to clearly demonstrate why its software is superior to competitors’, making a potential customer’s consideration phase much easier.

Another example comes from Source Capital Funding, Inc., a finance company and money lender. Source Capital Funding, Inc. provides its customers with a how-to guide for securing a hard money loan.

After their customers have identified their need (the awareness stage), they want more information on how to solve their problem (the consideration stage), which is exactly what this guide addresses.

Decision Stage

The decision stage is the most critical point of the buying process. Thus far, you have presented yourself as an expert and intrigued consumers with relevant information. You have also persuaded them that your product fits their needs and solves their problems.

In the final phase, you have brought the prospect to the tipping point where they are making their purchase decision. If you have done your job in the previous two phases, all you need to do now is close the deal.

At this point, they know they want to buy the product, but you need to convince them to buy the product from you. This decision requires content that will connect with them and help them to make their final decision.

The content you provide to close the deal will greatly depend on your industry or field. Many companies flood the market with flashy calls to action, newsletter sign-ups, and other attention-grabbing features.

However, these are services that are meant to benefit you, instead of the buyer. The strongest content that reins buyers in is that which that gives them real incentive. Features like trials, webinars, free downloads, demos, and case studies will compel your audience.

For example, Community Tax, an accounting firm, offers its potential customers a free consultation. This is a great way to attract customers in the decision phase who are just about to make their purchase decision by giving them one more reason to try out Community Tax. Free trials and consultations help make the purchase decision that much easier for the buyer.

This example from DotMailer, an email marketing platform, not only gives potential customers a two week trial, but customers can also choose to sign up for a free demo as well. The hope with this type of trial is that customers will like the service so much that they will be quick to purchase after the two week trial period.

Post-Purchase

You have successfully led your buyer through each stage of the buyer’s journey, and he has purchased your product. Now what? It’s time to nurture the relationship you have developed with your buyer. Don’t make the mistake of only focusing your content on customers who haven’t purchased yet. In that case, you would be missing out on a large group of potential repeat customers.

As with the three stages in the buyer’s journey, there are certain types of content that work best for customers post-purchase. Content in this stage can have various purposes: to engage with the customer, to make them feel heard, to gather feedback, to turn them into a repeat buyer, and/or to encourage them to be advocates for your product/brand.

So post-purchase content should also serve as a way of:

Reducing returns
Reducing customer service questions
Minimizing service costs
Diminishing potential bad word of mouth (or bad online reviews)
Retaining future sales

In order to achieve each of these, it’s important that you vary your post-purchase content as no piece of content will cover all of those goals. Focus on post-purchase follow-up emails, feedback surveys, extensive user guides, and suggestions of similar products specific to that buyer. This allows you to engage with your buyer in ways that make them feel appreciated and more likely to purchase again.

For example, check out Nordstrom’s post-purchase email. In this example, Nordstrom nurtures the relationship with the customer by giving them three opportunities to share their thoughts on the product and speak with customer service (“Write a review”, “order satisfaction survey”, and “Live Chat”). By making the customer feel like their voice is heard, he or she is more likely to purchase again after receiving such excellent customer service.

This final example from theSkimm could fall under the post-purchase email category (as it is an email sent post-purchase), but instead of looking for feedback, theSkimm is hoping to convert users into brand ambassadors. This tactic goes beyond encouraging repeat buyers and instead focuses on creating advocates who acquire new customers for you.

In Conclusion

The process of creating content that resonates with consumers is an art. And each stage of the buyer’s journey requires unique content in order to effectively move your potential customer along to the point of purchase. By tailoring your content to customers within a particular stage, you will succeed in converting more leads into customers. Just let the buyer’s journey be your guide!

About The Author

Nicole Stelmar is a Managing Editor at 365 Business Tips, a website focused on providing business owners all the information they need to successfully start and run their business. Nicole specializes in helping clients improve their digital presence through SEO and content marketing.