Forget Viral Videos: Write a Book to Grow Your Business

Marketing experts say that if you want to grow your business, you need to write a book. There is no better way to get your message out and create an impact than writing a book. However, not everyone has the time or resources to write one. If you’re looking for a new idea for marketing, try publishing a book instead of making a viral video.

The best business books 2020 is a category that has recently been trending. It’s important to write and publish a book in order to grow your business.

How writing a book can grow your businessAs the creator of a publishing business dedicated to helping entrepreneurs, I’m always confronted with the same issue:

When a company owner chooses to publish a book (or, for that matter, do anything else), their aim is to be the best. Because the conventional publishing business is based on a single metric—sales—it is unavoidably the focus of their attention.

The brightest entrepreneurs we deal with, on the other hand, have a distinct objective in mind, which can be summed up in this simple formula:

Attention + Book = Business Growth

I don’t mean narcissistic attention in the sense of “everyone look at me.” What I mean is that paying attention is essential for accomplishing all of your other objectives. Attention is the key to unlocking these possibilities, whether you want to sell more of your product, recruit more excellent people, raise more money, or obtain speaking engagements.

Writing and publishing a book is not just one of the greatest methods to attract attention, but it’s also one of the most under-utilized by entrepreneurs, in my experience producing over 500 non-fiction books for business leaders.

Not only is writing and releasing a book one of the most effective methods to get attention, but it’s also one of the most underutilized by businesses.

How writing a book can grow your business

How does a book entice you to read it?

When many writers consider their objectives, they tend to focus on conventional publishing measures such as sales, reviews, and even income.

These measurements may be useful to certain writers, but they are the incorrect emphasis for entrepreneurs.

Rather, business owners should see a book as a multi-purpose marketing instrument with a unique ability to attract attention. You may need to sell copies (and will almost definitely need to wow readers) to do this, but producing a book is mostly a technique for attracting attention to further your other objectives, not an aim in itself.

We discovered this when we released our first book, authored by Melissa Gonzalez, a pop-up retail specialist. We were thinking like a conventional publisher, with a sales-driven approach. Melissa had something else in mind.

She knew it wouldn’t sell many copies since she wrote it for a tiny, specialized audience. Instead, she wanted to concentrate on writing the greatest book she could for a very specific audience and growing her company as a result.

It was successful. She’d been booked for numerous keynotes and panels as the world’s authority on pop-ups within three months of the book’s publication, and she’d been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, Fox Business, and Bloomberg. Even more impressive, she’d quadrupled her inbound leads and even secured a seven-figure consulting contract since one of her readers was so pleased that he contacted her.

Melissa realized what we were just realizing: publishing can do so much more for your company than simply sell copies as an entrepreneur.

How can writing a book help you develop your business?

There are four major ways that books contribute to company development, based on Melissa’s experience and the stories of hundreds of other entrepreneurs we’ve worked with since:

How writing a book can grow your business

1. Authorship, trustworthiness, and competence are all conveyed by writing a book.

“A book is the new business card,” as many people like to remark. Everyone has a business card, therefore I disagree. You can buy business cards from Office Depot, but you won’t be able to write a book there.

“A book is the new college degree,” as I like to remark. Only around 10% of individuals had college degrees roughly forty years ago. It was a huge indication of credibility and authority if you possessed one. It was significant. However, now that everyone goes to college, it has lost its significance.

So, what is a trustworthy and uncommon indication of trustworthiness and authority these days?

Writing and publishing are two things I like doing.

You put yourself up to be evaluated when you publish. It’s quite simple to obtain a college diploma while skirting around the requirements. It’s impossible to write a decent book by feigning it. Either you understand what you’re saying or you don’t.

Yes, being judged is dangerous, but that’s why a good book earns you so much praise.

This is why, at my publishing house, we refuse to deal with anybody who offers us money. You can’t simply spit out gibberish and call it a book and expect to receive all the advantages if you don’t know what you’re talking about. To acquire credibility and authority, you must create a good narrative, and a good story is characterized by how engaging and useful it is to others.

How writing a book can grow your business

2. Writing a book increases your exposure and gets you media attention.

Who does a media outlet turn to when they need an opinion on something? Isn’t he the expert? And how do they determine whether or not someone is an expert?

Because they’re the ones who authored the book. The authors of the books are the experts. Blog entries are written by commentators.

It’s ten times simpler to attract media attention after you’ve started publishing.

Authors are sometimes fortunate enough to have the media approach them directly, but even if they don’t, proactive pitches are much more likely to land when you have the credibility of having written a book on the subject.

It isn’t only the media that is to blame. To get past the gatekeepers who govern entry to the places you most want to enter: lecture halls, television studios, boardrooms, media pages, special events, and ultimately people’s thoughts, having a new book is customary (and sometimes needed). “My next guest has just uploaded a cat video,” Charlie Rose does not mention.

How many individuals in your profession do you know who have gotten a lot of attention just because they published? Even though you knew more than they did, it was only because of the book that they received the attention that you did not.

How writing a book can grow your business

3. Writing a book makes it easier for others to discover you.

Google is the most popular search engine. YouTube is ranked second. Do you know what the third number is?

Amazon. Even more importantly for businesses, it is the most used search engine for finding goods and services (with 44 percent of searches for products and services starting there).

This is about more than simply paying attention. Advertisements may attract attention, but no one looks for ads to help them decide whether or not to purchase a product or service.

When it comes to purchasing information, individuals seek to professionals or authority. What is the first thing that comes to mind when they need knowledge from an expert? They turn to the individual who actually “authored the book” on the subject, just as the media does.

A excellent narrative attracts people to you, explains who you are, and demonstrates how you can assist them. It’s the most effective marketing tool you’ll ever have for not just building your brand, but also attracting customers.

How writing a book can grow your business

4. Writing a book encourages others to speak about you.

Word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective kind of advertising. You listen when someone you trust instructs you to utilize something, and you do so.

Anything that encourages others to speak about you and your company is an excellent marketing tool, and a book facilitates word-of-mouth marketing better than practically anything else.

This is because it puts your narrative in your own words into people’s lips, so when they speak about you, they’re actually saying what you want them to say. People will repeat your words, phrases, and ideas to others if you write a good book.

This concept is used to assist our writers in positioning and framing their work. “Imagine someone who read your book at a cocktail party chatting to someone else in your prospective audience,” we suggest. What do you think they’d say? Consider what you’d want them to say to the other party.”

You can build the positioning and narrative of your tale after you grasp it, once you can imagine that discussion organically occurring between two individuals.

If you can create a book that is useful to people and addresses a particular issue (preferably the same problem as your company), they will want to share it with someone else who is experiencing the same difficulty.

Why? Because it improves their appearance. That’s how word-of-mouth marketing works.

Is it really worth it?

Attention is the key to attracting better customers, workers, and investors as an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs are one of the few organizations with the capacity to convert the attention a book creates a significant return on investment, whether you use it as a lead magnet, to enhance your reputation or authority in your field, or simply to give it away to help complete sales.

James Altucher, a popular author for the Wall Street Journal, says:

“Writing a book isn’t the same as posting your views on a blog. It’s a big deal. It displays your best-curated ideas as well as the most essential things on your mind right now to consumers, clients, investors, friends, and lovers.”

The time investment, on the other hand, seems to be unattainable for many businesses. We have hundreds of competing responsibilities as company owners, and finding time to write a book feels like too much of a commitment.

When you consider that most entrepreneurs are better “doers” than writers, it’s easy to understand why so many company leaders seldom write.

Publishing, fortunately, does not have to be as time-consuming or complicated as many people think. You understand the value of utilizing your staff to build your company as a business owner. Why not enlist the help of a group to write your book?

This may be accomplished in a variety of ways. At our firm, we surround specialists with a team of publishing pros that are capable of extracting ideas and converting them into a book in 25 to 30 hours of phone time. Others rely on their current teams, employ a ghostwriter, or collaborate with a co-author who loves writing and wants to share their thoughts.

The point is that if you think a book—and the authority, publicity, attention, and word-of-mouth that comes with it—can help your business expand, you owe it to yourself and your company to figure out how to make it happen.

You will, as well. After all, you’re a business owner.

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