Tag Archives: content channels

9 ways to add value to your next ebook (so you don’t have to fill it with royalty-free images)

By Aaron Hoos on April 27, 2011 in Business

You’ve finished writing your ebook. You sit back in your office chair and breathe a sigh of relief. It’s a long document, brimming with a mix of wit, personality, and (of course) your expertise on the topic. You’re certain that it will offer your readers the insight they’re looking for. But something’s not quite right.

After you look at it again, you start to wonder: Is it just a giant “wall” of text? Does the ebook really pop the way you’d like it to pop?

A common, initial temptation is to google “royalty free images” to shoehorn throughout the content to break the up the text (and add to your page count!!!). But is that really the right thing to do? It’s tempting. It’s easy. But it doesn’t add value.

Instead, here are 9 ways that you can add value to your next ebook. These ebook elements will help to break up that wall of text, they’ll add some visual interest, and they’ll help your ebook to really pop in the mind of your reader.

Ebook value-add #1: Callout boxes

These are boxes that you see in magazines all the time. They’re filled with additional information, facts, tips, and hints. They’re often pretty “listy” (bullet lists or numbered lists) although I’ve written plenty that were formatted as paragraphs. Use these to add extra context or background, or to add some additional tips that your readers might want to learn or be reminded of. Don’t add more than one per page and try not to add one on every single page. Check out some of your favorite magazines for ideas. In some of your callout boxes, you can reiterate ideas that were spread across several pages, or you can show how the current point fits into a larger list. This is also a good place for an anecdote, quick tip, or to highlight a special link that is related to the topic.

Ebook value-add #2: Examples

Although you’ve probably used examples in specific situations throughout the body of your text, (for example, in this sentence) it doesn’t hurt to pull together several concepts into a longer example that is formatted in a different way. I tend to use examples to illustrate several concepts with a fictional story. But on a related note, I also use…

Ebook value-add #3: Case studies

Case studies are (usually) true life examples (perhaps “anonymized” to protect the subject of the case study). These can be used in a similar way as an example. However, since case studies are usually true life, I tend to use them less as illustrations of a point and more as inspiration or proof of the content. So I tend to use both in my ebooks. Strike a balance so you don’t overwhelm your readers, but remember that everyone learns differently, and some people respond better to examples while others prefer case studies. (Personally, I’m a case study person).

Ebook value-add #4: Appendix

One appendix (or several appendices) at the end can be a great place to put all that background information that you want to write but that you doubt your readers will always want to read in the body of the text. It’s the stuff that is important to know but, once you write this, you think that most of your readers will probably already know quite a bit of it. Chances are, you’ll write it into the body of your text and pull it out. (In many cases, I’ll write the first 5 chapters of an ebook, then pull out the first 2-4 chapters and put them in an appendix because my good sense and experience tells me that those first chapters were just warm-up and the real reason people bought the ebook started in chapter 3, 4, or 5.) There are other things you can add into an appendix: Industry information, lists of tips and ideas, a long reference list, step-by-step instructions, interviews with people, etc.

Ebook value-add #5: Templates

I love adding templates to an ebook. I like templates because, if you are a business trying to build a brand, templates are a great way to get people printing and using stuff that has your brand imprinted right on it. On the other hand, templates that have been shoehorned into ebooks can look funny if the header, footer, and page number of the ebook appear in the template. Often, I’ll create a file that has the ebook plus individual PDF documents that are each a separate template. The sky’s the limit with templates.

Ebook value-add #6: Resource lists

I like to add these usually at the end of a chapter. These can link to other content in the ebook, other content online (including specific blog posts you’ve written, which is something I advise my clients to do), Squidoo lenses, Amazon books, and other digital products (via affiliate links). The goal here isn’t to replace your wall of text with a wall of links. I wouldn’t have more than half a page of links at the most, preferably less. Think of it like this: Many of your readers might skip over this resource list, but some of your readers will want more information, now or in the future. They’ll look to your chapter and they’ll dig into some of your links for more information or another perspective.

Ebook value-add #7: “You will learn” overview

We all learn in different ways. I learn best when someone gives me an overview of what I’m about to learn and then gets into the lesson. If I don’t get an overview first, I struggle with trying to fit each individual piece of information into the big picture. So devote the first part of each chapter to an overview (a bulleted list or a couple of “big picture” paragraphs) outlining what the chapter is about.

Ebook value-add #8: Glossary

You’re an expert but not all of your readers are. They need a little extra hand-holding, and that probably includes definitions and explanations of key concepts. A glossary can be arduous to write (trust me! I’ve written a ton of them) but your readers will find it helpful.

Ebook value-add #9: Now it’s your turn

I find that my ebooks tend to become a little academic after a while. They might start off with lots of practical advice but I’m just wired to talk about concepts over practice… and most people who are sharing their expertise will probably trend that way, too. So, by adding a “Now it’s your turn” element periodically throughout the ebook, you’ll force yourself to step back from the concepts and consider what your readers will want to do in this situation. Then give practical, step-by-step instructions.

A WARNING TO LAZY PEOPLE

Most ebook writers will read this post and hopefully find some ideas to inspire them to add value to their ebooks. But some writers — the lazy ones! — will see this as a way to add bulk to ebooks for a padded page count. That is not my goal here. You could use these ideas to add bulk to your ebooks, but that won’t generate customer loyalty or long-term profit. It won’t wow your buyers with extra value. It only wastes your time (time you could spend adding value) and pisses readers off.

But to the rest of us — those who actually want to build a loyal and happy readership — these are useful ways to make your ebooks more valuable to readers. So, on your next ebook, why not add a couple of these elements!

Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge: Wrap-up

By Aaron Hoos on April 1, 2011 in Business

This week, I challenged you to explore a new marketing channel for your sales funnel.

How did you do?

You might not immediately see the results in your bottom line, but you should already see the impact elsewhere – are you spending a lot of time on this? Are you finding a way to target a specific stage of your sales funnel? Are you strategically expressing the messages that your contacts at that stage of the sales funnel want to hear? You may not be seeing bottom line results yet, but if your efforts are effective, you should soon see results in the specific stage of your sales funnel.
For me, I tried this challenge a couple of months ago with Twitter – I have had a Twitter account for a couple of years but only used it sometimes. So I challenged myself to get serious with Twitter and I have noticed a dramatic result in my web traffic as a result.

Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge: Explore a new channel

By Aaron Hoos on March 28, 2011 in Business

The Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge is a week-long challenge for business owners to focus on a specific aspect of their sales funnel for one week. It’s a fun way to keep you focused on one of the most important parts of your business. A new Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge is published every Monday and a wrap-up post is published every Friday.
Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge

The sales funnel is valuable to business owners because it gives them a way to systematize their marketing and focus on only a few marketing channels instead of all of the possibilities out there. But just because you’re focusing on a few channels doesn’t mean you should ignore the others. Maybe your business is particularly suited to a specific channel that you are not currently using.

For this week’s challenge, I’d like you to experiment with a new marketing channel. See how it works for you and measure the effectiveness of the marketing channel on your sales funnel and on your business.

Good luck! 

Just read: ‘Building a Successful Food Blog’ at Inc Magazine

By Aaron Hoos on February 26, 2011 in Business

In this Inc. Magazine interview by writer Clarissa Cruz, food blogger Deb Perelmen answers questions about what it takes to blog and how she grew her food blog into a (nearly) full-time career.

The recipe for building a successful blog is passion + dedication + time + consistency. A valuable lesson for any brand that wants to blog.

Read the interview here: Building a Successful Food Blog.

Want to start a business someday but not ready to quit your job? Here’s what to do

By Aaron Hoos on February 15, 2011 in Business

A friend of mine wants to start a business. She’s successful at work but isn’t earning what she is worth. Like a lot of people I’ve met, she really wants to start a business but here’s the conundrum:

It’s hard start a business when you’re busy with a “regular” job. On the other hand, it’s hard to quit your job then start a business.

Here’s what I recommend:

START HERE

  1. Choose what you want your business to be about. Even if you don’t yet know WHAT you want to sell, you probably have some idea about the topic. Are you a mechanic and want to (eventually) run a business that is mechanical in nature? Do you love jewelery and (eventually) want to do something in that field? It doesn’t matter yet what you sell, but choose your topic. It can be fairly broad.
  2. Start a blog. Spend 20-30 minutes a day writing a blog post. Do it every single day. Build up a body of knowledge on the topic. (Okay, if “every day” is too much, then start off a little less — say 3 times a week — and slowly increase over time until you’ve developed a good habit of daily blogging). Aim for high quality, insightful posts that help to advance your reader’s knowledge of the topic.

That’s it. That’s all you have to do in the beginning. If you’re at this stage — a sort of “dreaming the entrepreneurial dream” stage — then this is all you need to do. Don’t worry about search engine optimization, blog design, social media, etc. (That’s good stuff, but it’s not the point right now).

Eventually, you can take it further and turn your blog into a business (as I’ll describe in a minute), but your top priority should be consistent, compelling blog posts every day.

What you want to do is build a body of knowledge, which will:

  • Position you as an expert.
  • Help you explore the depths of the subject
  • Teach you things you didn’t know
  • Build an audience (and they’ll be more likely to listen and respect you because you don’t have an agenda of selling them anything)
  • Create an asset of information that you can later draw from

FAST FORWARD TO QUITTING TIME
Let’s say you stay with your company for another couple of years. You don’t love it, but the income is nice and the health care pays for your knee operation, but now you find yourself transferred to a department with a boss you don’t like. You can see yourself quitting in a month or so.

The good news is, you have been consistently positioning yourself as an expert for the past couple of years. You have 600+ blog posts and an audience of faithful readers.

Here’s what to do next:

  1. Decide what you are going to sell. A product? A service? There are lots of options. Pick one or two that you can do now and shelve the rest for later.
  2. Create your sales funnel. Describe the contacts at each stage of your sales funnel and how you’ll engage them at that stage and then move them forward. (Download this Sales Funnel Quick Reference Guide to get you started).
  3. Implement the contact-engaging marketing that you’ve just outlined in the above step to engage and market to your Audience, your Leads, and your Prospects.
  4. Quit your job. Woohoo!
  5. Implement the contact-engaging content that you outlined a couple of steps above.

Thanks to your consistent effort, you have positioned yourself as an expert long before you made the leap out of your job into the world of business ownership.

ADDITIONAL TIPS TO MAKE THIS WORK

  • Pick a topic you love and know something about and can spend years doing. Otherwise, it’s not worth it.
  • This only works if you are consistent. I’ve seen people do this and succeed. I’ve seen people not do this and struggle. It really does work. Set an alarm, brainstorm some topics, and be relentless. Consider it an investment into your escape hatch. (Check out this blog post about blogging frequency and check out this blog post to discover what you should never, ever do).
  • I mentioned earlier that you shouldn’t worry about search engine optimization (SEO) at this point. There are probably some SEO aficionados that are rolling in their graves right now but my reason is this: I want it to be a fun and simple effort. And search engine benefits will still be present in your blog, it just won’t be an intentional thing that you’ll do right away. You can always integrate that in later.
  • Don’t fret about what you’ll sell while you’re working. That will work itself out, trust me. Here is a blog post about 5 different types of content monetization to get you started. There are other things to sell, too, but content monetization is an easy first step. If you can’t figure out what to sell, send me an email and we’ll talk about it.

Like anything that is effective, this method takes some effort. There will be days when you want to quit. But this is, in my opinion, the most effective way to start a business when you want to start a business someday but aren’t ready to quit your job just yet.

5 tips to optimize your sales funnel today

By Aaron Hoos on February 10, 2011 in Business

Business success is closely linked to sales funnel optimization: The better your sales funnel is, the more you’ll sell (and the more profitably you’ll sell). And, the more you sell (and the more profitably you sell it), the more successful your business will become.

So here are 5 easy tips to start optimizing your sales funnel today for faster (more profitable) results almost immediately:

Sales funnel optimization tip #1: Collect and use testimonials. Testimonials help Prospects make buying decisions. Go back to your previous Customers and ask them for testimonials, recommendations, and user tips. Collect them from different content channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are natural collection points for testimonials).

Make it a goal to write 1 email a day asking previous Customers for testimonials. If only 1 Customer a week responds, you’ll still end up with 52 testimonials at the end of the year!

Sales funnel optimization tip #2: Enable word-of-mouth marketing. Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most effective and profitable forms of marketing because it is so credible. Word-of-mouth marketing happens when your Customers become Evangelists and share their positive experiences of your business with their peers. If you want more profitable sales in your sales funnel, empower your Customers with tools, skills, and ideas to speak positively about your business.

Take a moment and contact a Customer right now and offer them some kind of bonus if they would email three of their peers about you. Or, plan a highly valuable event (online or offline) to which Customers must bring a friend.

Sales funnel optimization tip #3: Don’t ignore the people who don’t buy from you. Although it’s easy to put all of your focus into the contacts who become Customers, there is a HUGE number of contacts who decided not to buy from you. Think about what you can offer them to capture a sale. (It could be a lower price-point for a lower-end product; it could be completely different product to meet their completely different needs).

Take a moment right now to think about a few Prospects who didn’t become Customers. Describe them (how are they similar to your Customers and how are they different) and brainstorm ways to turn them into Customers.

Sales funnel optimization tip #4: List your objections and counter them proactively. Objections can stop a sales in its tracks. But since you already know what most of your Prospects’ objections are, you have an advantage! Collect the top objections you face and do something with them.

Write down the objections you hear most often and then proactively integrate the counter-argument into your sales funnel marketing. (Check out how I countered a couple of top objections in a recent Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge).

Sales funnel optimization tip #5: Be intentional about all of your marketing content! Every blog post, web article, tweet, and press release should have a purpose. Stop generating content just for the sake of generating content and getting backlinks. Remember: backlinks have value for you because of SEO, but the strategic use of backlinks that a Lead clicks to become a Prospect (and ultimately a Customer) offers you value in real dollars.

In the next blog post or tweet you write, think about who is going to read it, where they are in your sales funnel, and what the next step is that you want them to take. Then use that information to shape what you write. (Need help with that? Download this free Sales Funnel Quick Reference Guide PDF).

5 steps to create a sales funnel that generates massive sales

By Aaron Hoos on February 7, 2011 in Business

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a detective. Detectives are cool because they start with a hunch and then put together the facts. The more facts they can put together, the more “airtight” their case becomes. The airtight their case becomes, the more successful they are when bringing the villain to justice.

If you want a successful sales funnel for your business — one that churns out one Customer after another — you need to be a detective.

Here’s why:

People have problems and needs and they are willing to spend money to solve their problems and fulfill their needs. But they’re also skeptical about whether a proposed solution will do what it says, and, they are reluctant to part with their hard-earned money.

People want to solve their problems and fulfill their needs but that skepticism and reluctance keep them from trusting and eagerly buying from you. As you use marketing and sales techniques to move your contact through your sales funnel, you will start to break down the barriers that the contact has put up. But you need to do a thorough job — you need to build a case in your favor and you need the eyes of a detective to look thoroughly at the situation and plug any holes in the case.

So business owners need to be detectives to build an airtight case that…

  • ensures the product or service being sold is going to solve the problems or meet the needs of the contact
  • addresses a contact’s skepticism and helps them to overcome it
  • addresses a contact’s reluctance and helps them to over come it.

Build an airtight case about these three thing and your contacts will become Customers every single time. (Conversely, the fastest way to lose a sale is to not have an airtight case).

BUILD AN AIRTIGHT CASE FOR A CUSTOMER-GENERATING SALES FUNNEL
The first step is to create a 3-columned chart:

  • In the first column, list as many problems, needs, or reasons that a contact has for buying your product.
  • In the second column, list as many reasons that a contact has for not trusting you (i.e. they don’t know you; they haven’t heard good things about you; they don’t know of anyone else who has used your product, etc.)
  • In the third column, list as many reasons that a contact has for not handing over their money (i.e. they don’t see the value; they aren’t sure if your product will work; they wonder what recourse they have to get their money back, etc.)

Make the lists long. Spend a few days on this and don’t worry if your lists get ridiculously long. The longer the better!

Once you have these super-mega-long lists, the second step is to think about where your contact is thinking about these things the most. For example, someone who knows they have a problem to be solved, but doesn’t know you yet, aren’t thinking about your guarantee. So make sure your guarantee comes after building a relationship. (That one was easy but some of them are harder to discern what comes first).

The third step is to address each one. If your contact doesn’t know anyone else who uses your product or service, get some testimonials. If your contact is a little worried about whether you provide value, give them case studies and lots of ROI measurements. If your contact is wondering whether the purchase is safe, make sure you highlight your guarantee.

The fourth step is to weave every single point on your three lists into your sales funnel’s marketing and sales content. So all that stuff mentioned above about the guarantee, testimonials, case studies, ROI, etc. should be created and integrated into your sales funnel.

The fifth step to watch your contacts closely to see how they move through your sales funnel. Are people hitting an invisible wall and no longer moving forward? Maybe there’s a problem with one of the messages you are using. Maybe it should go earlier or later in the sales funnel. Or maybe there’s a critical point you missed when you were creating your lists back in step one. Go back and rework those lists to build them out further.

A detective builds an airtight case by exploring every possibility and addressing it, and by finding gaps and researching diligently to plug those gaps. As a business owner, you can put on your detective’s hat to create a sales funnel that compels contacts to become Customers.

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