Marc's Blog

Content Writing and Marketing Services

self publishing

How To Optimize The Back-End Of Your Book

by 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

by 4 Comments

 

content creationNo 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.