by Michael Shreeve, founder of Peaceful Profits
In today’s world of perpetual information overload, the most valuable asset any business or brand can obtain is attention. By being able to produce high-quality content that not only grabs a particular user’s or customer’s attention, but engages with them on a deeper and more personal level, businesses and brands can capture a greater portion of attention from those customers within their target market or markets.
Creating that high-quality and engaging content, however, is a task far easier said than done. While some brands might rely on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube to produce and distribute this content, an additional avenue business leaders tend to overlook is publishing that content into one unified place where their customers can easily digest it—in a book.
Just as the best salespeople show prospective customers or clients how working with you can deliver valuable results, a well-written book can deliver those results in advance so that those prospects can experience results for themselves first. A book also serves to sell your premium offers around the clock, rather than on the schedule of your sales team, meaning that its content can continuously add value to your customers on their own schedule while simultaneously generating an additional revenue stream for your business.
I have made a career as a freelance writer over the past 15 years. For the better part of a decade, I worked as a behind-the-scenes writer and digital marketer for a multitude of reputable entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and Fortune 500 companies. My combination of writing abilities, business acumen, and knowledge of publishing has helped me generate over $75 million in revenue for those clients.
Now, as the founder of Peaceful Profits, I want to help show you how you, too, can turn one book into 7 or more figures in revenue for your business.
Books increase your market share of attention.
Although our world today is one of hyper-digitization, where virtually every aspect of a company’s operations or a customer’s experience can be conducted nearly entirely online, there still remains a particular reverence in Western culture regarding books. In this manner, the information and content contained within a book published by you and/or your company is inherently viewed as more valuable than other content you produce, even if it’s the same content with the same messaging and inherent value to your market.
Books allow you to reach your prospects when they are least distracted. As business owners and entrepreneurs, we struggle to hold the attention of potential clients in a digital world filled with constant distractions and opportunities to easily click away. A book allows prospects to become immersed in your message, free of distractions, and able to pay full attention to your message.
As stated by Sprinklr’s blog content manager, Chloe Mason Gray, “capturing your customer’s attention paves the way to being remembered — to standing out amongst all the other messages coming at consumers at any given time and winning a more permanent spot in the mind of the consumer.”
The more attention you or your brand is able to occupy in the mind of a consumer, the higher the chances you have of converting that consumer into a paying customer. When you multiply that factor by a hundred times — or a thousand — that translates directly into increased revenue for your company.
Increased attention directly leads to increased sales
According to Forbes contributor Jia Wertz, the marketing team at Google, “…uses the term micro-moments to describe when consumers want to learn something, do something, go somewhere, or buy something.” The tech giant’s marketing team isn’t using this term superfluously, either, as Google continues to rake in hundreds of billions of dollars each year by capturing and capitalizing on the attention of its users.
While your book will obviously not rake in anywhere near the amount of revenue that Google can through directly targeting customers via online advertising, the psychology behind this behavior is unilateral; when customers become aware of what they want (i.e., the information you provide through your book) and where they can obtain it — this location being within your book itself — they will become drawn to those brands that can fulfill that desire.
In this way, your book needs to provide quality content that engages with your readers and prospective customers in order to act as its own “micro-moment” for those customers. So long as your book is able to offer value to readers (whose demographics, psychology, and other behaviors you already have an understanding of) over the course of time that they remain a customer, you can then figure out how to calculate the average revenue each customer generates for your company over the lifetime of them doing business with you. From there, you can scale your marketing efforts to acquire, retain, and upsell as many customers as possible to create even more revenue for your company.
Use your book as a way to upsell customers
As well-written as your book might be, and regardless of how valuable its content is to your customers, it should never act as the end-all, be-all means of generating extra revenue for your or your company. This is where the aspect of lifetime value offerings comes into play.
After you identify which problems your book and its content solve for your customers, you need to be able to identify how you and your company can solve additional problems or pain points for your customers. For example, if each purchase of your book can come with a discount code to one of your online webinars, personal Q&A-style interviews, or master classes you offer, you can easily turn the $5-15 revenue generated from your direct book sales into $30-45 by upselling your readers and converting them into paying customers.
This method will create a sales cycle that eventually operates nearly autonomously. This is another reason why it is so vital to write and publish a book that your target audience finds valuable in perpetuity: the more units it is able to sell, the more exposure it will bring you and your company or brand. The more exposure it gains, the more readers you will have a chance to upsell and convert into paying customers. Thus, the sales cycle repeats, eventually translating one simple book into an additional and valuable revenue stream for your company.
Michael Shreeve is the founder of alternative marketing and coaching business, Peaceful Profits. He serves on the board of three non-profits, is the owner of two online companies, and has successfully generated more than $150,000,000 in revenue for his clients. You can follow him and his teachings on YouTube.
