Did you know writing a book can help you grow your business exponentially? If you’ve been thinking about publishing your own book, this episode will give you insights about how to use it to sign more clients, before you actually put pen to paper.
In this episode of Influence By Design, Samantha talks to Chris Benetti, founder of Smart Author Media about strategies for leveraging your book to grow your business. They explore how a book serves as an excellent “front end” offer by allowing you to provide tremendous value, build authority, and attract high-quality leads for your “back end” business services.
Chris outlines various platforms and funnels you can use to get your book into the hands of more of your potential clients. He contrasts marketing on Amazon to maximise volume and royalties versus implementing a full sales funnel on Facebook to capture contact data and continue engaging ideal prospects.
Chris also shares tips for crafting compelling book sales pages, emphasising articulating customer problems, and then positioning your book as the perfect solution.
Overall, Chris highlights the value of thoughtfully mapping out the journey you want to take your potential clients on, and then cementing it with a sales funnel that matches the vision. Do this, and your book will undoubtedly be highly instrumental in expanding your business.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- How Chris first started working with book funnels and high-calibre clients (01:01)
- How writing a book can help bring more leads into your business (06:23)
- The difference between ‘back end’ and ‘front end’ marketing (10:14)
- Different ways you can get your book into the hands of people who need it (13:23)
- Why running Amazon ads can make sense for some people (20:31)
- Ad spend differences among the different book-selling platforms (23:21)
- Is it essential to know about the book funnel process before you even start writing your book? (32:08)
- What successful book funnels look like (35:33)
QUOTES
“A book is probably the best asset for someone who wants to give a tremendous amount of value, build their brand and authority, and get the highest quality leads possible.” – Chris Benetti
“From a lead generation perspective, the book is a hand raiser. It’s only the beginning of the story.” – Samantha Riley
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WHERE TO FIND CHRIS BENETTI
Website: https://smartauthormedia.com/chat
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/itsbenetti/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsbenetti/
LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/smartauthor
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@smartauthor
CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY
Facebook: Samantha Riley
Instagram: @thesamriley
LinkedIn: Samantha Riley
Twitter: @thesamriley
ABOUT CHRIS BENETTI
Chris Benetti owns Smart Author Media and is an expert in book marketing.
To date, Chris has helped his clients collectively generate over $20,000,000 in sales from their books & digital offers, and in 2023 alone,Chrissold over 19,000 books for his clients.
TRANSCRIPTION
Chris Benetti: Maybe the book actually does solve their problems and they want helps to further complete the journey. Or maybe the book doesn’t solve their problems enough and they want some support to do so. The book is a really good gateway entry point for someone to want to progress, along the journey. And you being an author instantly differentiates. Anyone else is a competitor who isn’t an author because you’ve literally written the book on the topic.
Samantha Riley: Welcome to the Influence by Design podcast. I’m Samantha Riley, authority positioning strategist for coaches and experts. If you’re ready to build a business that gives you more than just a caffeine addiction, and you dream of making more money, having more time, and having the freedom to be living your best life, then you’re in the right place. It’s time to level up. Welcome to today’s episode of Influence by design. I’m your host, Samantha Riley. And today we’re going to be talking about how you can use your book to grow your business. We’re going to speak more into exactly what that entails and why you want to do that. But let me welcome Chris Bonetti to the show. How are you, Chris?
Chris Benetti: I’m fantastic. Thanks for having me, Sam.
Samantha Riley: Yeah, an australian accent, something we don’t often hear on this show. So super great to have you joining me from Perth, and we’re recording this at very early in the morning. So I really appreciate that you’re a marketer. You’ve helped people sell over 21,000 copies of their books. You’ve worked with people like Ryan Dice, Steve Sims, Scott Oldford, James Shramko, some really big names in our industry. How did you get into specifically working with book funnels and working with people of that calibre and that nature?
Chris Benetti: Well, I’ll say, firstly, if you ever have an idea of someone that you’d love to work with, there’s no harm in free. So I started my journey in my business by finding the people who I would love the most to work with for free. And I just went hard and it has probably been the biggest ROI activity I’ve ever done in my business because not only has it helped me with having the accolades of working with Steve Sims and Ryan Dice, which if you’re in the marketing world, those are very big names, but that has also helped me with actually proving my worth and the value of my services and then them making recommendations over time to me. And so that’s probably the biggest source of my referral income is just based on me doing free stuff initially for people and then getting really awesome wins and having them kind of circle back and refer me more work. So that’s the second part of the question. The first part of the question, helping authors, is, I’ve got a background. From end of 2016 up until 2022, I basically worked as a sales funnel person, a developer, conversion expert, if you will. And so we basically focused on building funnels for clients. And sales funnels are essentially websites in a series of pages to kind of direct people to the actions that you want them to take with you. So buying something or opting into something to become a lead or booking a call with you and just going through a specific process and conversion rate optimization. So if someone had, a sales funnel that wasn’t working for them, they weren’t getting the conversion rates that they wanted on the buying side or the lead generation side, then we would come in and kind of identify what was not working and fix that for people. And so I had that really good skill set across those six ish years. And the thing that was missing for me was I didn’t have a niche that I looked after, and I also didn’t have a recurring service, necessarily. And I actually hired a mentor, and we basically identified who was being underserved in the whole world across different industries, and then what services we could actually provide to them to help them actually get tangible outcomes and wins with our offering. And so that kind of naturally led to, nonfiction authors, people who are business authors specifically, they have a book for their business and basically helping them sell more books, which is very beneficial for them, because if they sell more books, they can potentially get more clients on the back end because of the whole identifying who we work with. And it’s beneficial for me because now we’ve got an ads management service that actually is recurring for us, and it’s super niche, and there’s really no one else that offers the same kind of service in the world.
Samantha Riley: Yeah, totally. I love that you touched on the relationship part first. I’ve recorded three episodes today, and every single episode has started the same way. Relationships are so important. And I feel that there are a segment of people that don’t understand how to not just start a relationship, but, why you want to nurture that and the importance of that. And I get asked all the time, oh, my goodness, how do you know those people? How do you have access to those people or even get them to answer your messages? Well, it’s years and years and years of really adding value, nurturing, and not coming right out the gate going, oh, well, because I’m so and so I’m charging my worth. Well, sometimes it is just about adding value to nurture, your relationships, and that there is value in that in itself, and it is really a win win. Right. Because for the people that you’re doing that service with for free, they will give you back something. And it’s not always clients. It could be an introduction, and that has a value of its own. So I love that you touched on that. Now, let’s talk about specifically books. I think that most coaches understand that writing a book is really great for their authority, for reaching new, audiences. But I feel that not every coach manages to tie in how important it is and how to bring people into their business, like how the ecosystem works. Can you speak a little bit to that? Because all of these pieces aren’t separate. Well, they are separate pieces, but they all kind of work together. Can you speak a little bit to that?
Chris Benetti: Yeah. So, I think a book is probably the best asset for someone who wants to give a tremendous amount of value, build their brand and authority, and get the highest quality leads possible coming through. typically, people who buy or download books for free or read books in general, there’s not a big percentage of the world that actually likes to read books. It, doesn’t seem like it’s small, just based on our experiences, but it’s actually a very small percentage. And so, when you have someone who is interested in your book, they’re basically opening themselves to saying, hey, I’m committed to learning, or I’m committed to becoming better or progressing myself, especially with the kind of books that we work with. Business development, spiritual stuff, therapy, that kind of stuff. All of that is them going, hey, I want help in a certain capacity, which is amazing, because that then opens the opportunity for you to reach out and go, hey, how can I give you more help than just a book? Because a book is a starting point, but it’s a very diy starting point. There’s no real help beyond the book that someone can get. They have the book’s content, and that’s where it kind of ends. So there’s really two camps to that. It’s like, okay, cool. They either reach out to you for more help if that’s what they’re interested in. Maybe the book actually does solve their problems and they want helps to further complete the journey. M. Or maybe the book doesn’t solve their problems enough and they want some support to do so. The book is a really good gateway entry point for someone to want to progress along the journey. And you being an author instantly differentiates anyone else who’s a competitor who isn’t an author because you’ve literally written the book on the topic. Right. So I think that’s like the initial kicking off point to think about and the angle that your book comes from. And then the second part of that is maybe they don’t reach out, but you now have the opportunity to do so yourself. So if we’re running book funnels, then we’ve got contact data. We know people who have expressed interest in learning or becoming better or wanting to progress themselves because they’ve seeked your book. And from there, that gives us opportunity to follow up with email, sms, phone calls, any of that kind of stuff, if you want to proactively do so. M and that basically allows for you to identify more problems and to potentially reel them back into working with you at a further capacity. And I’m more than happy to chat about specific funnel processes that we can take someone through that would make sense for this audience. But, yeah, generally that’s the overarching idea behind why a book is beneficial and then how we can actually lead someone towards the service. and I call it back end, but basically lead someone towards working with your business.
Samantha Riley: So can you just talk to us a little bit about back end and front end? Because I think this is going to help people kind of understand or get the context. So you talked about, like, back end marketing, front end marketing. What is the difference?
Chris Benetti: Yeah. So for this audience, you guys are coaches. Back end is essentially your coaching offers, working with you at a higher capacity. So that’s where you would make the most of your money, and that’s where it’s really somewhere where someone will get a lot of value from working with you. Front end is more so like an entry point to entering your world or entering your business ecosystem. And so books, are front end because it’s like surface level. It’s the starting point. Other things like webinars or other things like lead magnets or even low priced horses and things like that are all front end. It’s the starting point that someone’s going know they’ve got a problem. They don’t know any specific solutions or products that offer solutions out there, but they find yours. And so it’s like, kind of like, hey, I’ve just discovered Samantha. Right? And so then they enter your world. You’re able to give them value in whatever form that is, a book, a course, a download, whatever. And then that either solves their problem or it doesn’t. And they potentially want to work with you further on the back end side of things. So they basically just cross contaminate with each, other.
Samantha Riley: Totally. I think that the really important part to this is that people need to understand that it’s not the actual book that’s making you the money, it’s the piece that’s having people raise their hand and saying, I’m really interested in this topic, I want to learn more about it so that then you can bring them through and gently guide them and lead them to where they can work with you further. And I think that it’s really important to remember this because a lot of people think, oh, I’m going to be an author and I’m going to sell my books. But from a business sense, we’re not talking about a fiction author here. In a business sense, the book is just that hand raiser piece. It’s only the beginning of the story, it’s not the entirety of the story.
Chris Benetti: Yeah. And I don’t think I’ve ever made a profit selling books directly and I’ve sold tens of thousands of books for clients and successfully, profitably. But it’s just m not the book is the profit piece. The whole ecosystem is the profit piece.
Samantha Riley: Yeah. So let’s talk more about that then. The book is on the front end. There’s all different ways that you can do it. You can just sell your book regular on Amazon. You can use that book funnel, you can give it away. Use a self liquidating offer, just charge shipping and handling. What are some of the different ways that we can move our book or give our book to the hands of the people that need it? Give it away, sell it. Let’s start there.
Chris Benetti: Yeah. So you have different platforms and then you have different mediums. So you’ve got like organic, you’ve got paid, you can go and spend your time and try to get things in bookstores. There’s different channels, if you will. And so there’s a lot of things to consider there, but you’ve ultimately got leveraged ways and you’ve got unleveraged ways. And so manually going and posting on social media about your book to an audience that already exists to you is a very unleveraged way to try and get someone to get your book going. And doing speaking tours and on podcasts and even on stages, potentially if you’re at that level, is a very manual way for you to go and get someone to get your book going and doing book signings and things like that again, manual. Right. Telling friends and family and all that, it’s all manual.
Chris Benetti: And so that’s basically all of the organic approaches to marketing your book. All the unleveraged ways. When we transition into the paid advertising side, which is where I specialise, that’s when we can just leverage things. So with the clients that I work with, 95% of the work, if not, more is actually on my agency to sell your book. And so you can imagine how leveraged that is for someone. All they have to do is just have a little bit more money to spend on doing so. Right. But the money actually does buy them time freedom, and even strategy freedom. They don’t have to think about what they’re going to do to sell the book. That’s my job. Right. So when we look at the paid channels, there’s obviously all the different social platforms like YouTube, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and so on. Then you’ve also got the marketplace like Amazon as an example to also be able to sell your books. The two areas that I like to focus on is the meta suite, which is Facebook and Instagram and Amazon. And the benefits of each platform is different. So we’ve spoken a lot about sales funnels today and things like. Like that’s just not a part of the Amazon advertising platform. When you advertise on Amazon, you essentially sell your book directly on Amazon and you don’t get any contact data from that. It’s just a direct sale over there. So the benefits to that is like if you have good call to actions in your book to get people back into your world, that’s a possibility. You can easily sell more volume on that platform at a lower cost because it’s less. You know, anyone listening here today is absolutely capable of running Amazon ads for their book if they want to. And I’ve got some master classes and stuff on YouTube to cheque out if that’s something you’re interested in. But essentially it’s a very easy kind of way to sell a lot of copies of your book. But the downside is you don’t get any contact data. You can’t build your email list or anything like that. Which to be honest, is the biggest benefit of having a book as a front end.
Samantha Riley: Yeah, right.
Chris Benetti: So where I typically like to drive my clients, who are all business owners, is the Facebook and Instagram site so that we can implement a book funnel, so that we can actually get contact data, so that we can continue a customer journey and get them to become back and clients with, you know, that’s kind of like generally the whole slew of things that you can do and how to sell your book or give it away. And, when it comes down to different offers, you’ve got like the paid digital copy of your book, you can send out free audiobooks as well. If you have that, you’ve got the slO, which self liquidating offer you mentioned is free plus shipping kind of offers. You can charge full price digital, you can charge full price physical. So there’s 101 different ways that you can actually package your book and get it out there. And to be honest, that is like very. It’s something that I work out with all my clients when we start working together, but it depends on who we’re working with, on my recommendations for what we’re doing, and it comes down to what your goal is. So for anyone listening here, if you’re a coach, you probably want to get people booking in on strategy sessions or something like that with you so that you can sell more people into your coaching programmes. And so what I would suggest if I was to do a paid advertising campaign for your book, I would probably do just a free digital book giveaway, essentially, and just have someone fill out their name, their email and their phone number, download the book on step one of the funnel, and then step two would just be like, hey, congrats on getting my book. I see that you’re wanting to get help in these areas and if you ever wanted to, get some more support, like, now’s the time. I’ve opened up a free strategy session for anyone who is interested in getting a little bit more handheld support on XYZ problem. And essentially I’ve got a calendar below that you can book in on a time with me and we can go through it together and work out the perfect game plan or system or strategy for you to help you come XYZ problem. So like that now just opens up a simple, hey, they’ve just downloaded the book to, hey, they immediately potentially can come and book in on a strategy session with you, which is sales calls, which helps you obviously grow your business right away. And that simple process, when we look at the different book packaging offers, free and paid and all of that, a free book is probably ten times easier to market with ads. From a conversion perspective, you’ll actually get ten times more volume through there as well for the same dollar that you spend. And it’s just easy because it’s congruent book to congruent back end offer, which is your strategy and what you help with, most likely your book aligns with what you offer on coaching and therefore it’s easy. And it makes sense for the person who’s coming through the funnel to want to continue to progress with you.
Samantha Riley: Going back to what you were first talking about in regards to Amazon ads and you can’t build your list with it, what are the reasons that we would want to run Amazon ads in the first place? Is the cost per acquisition a lot smaller so that we’re talking volume or why would we even consider it?
Chris Benetti: Yeah, potentially it’s smaller. It just comes down to people buy in different modalities. Some people like to buy on Amazon, and if you’re selling on Amazon, although we’re not getting contact information, you’re still getting your book out there. And a lot of people’s goals when they are promoting their book is to get their book into the hands of as many people as possible. The other benefit of Amazon is that it actually does contribute to book tracking numbers as well. Whereas if you were to sell your book on your own website, that doesn’t necessarily do. So if you cared about the actual total books sold number in the grand scheme of things, then Amazon does contribute to that. Whereas if you sold 50,000 books on your own website, it’s not something that would contribute to book tracking, technically speaking. So there’s that to consider. But generally speaking, it’s just that it’s much easier to sell books on Amazon. People buy books on Amazon because it’s a trusted marketplace and it’s my first stop for books.
Samantha Riley: Always just open Amazon.
Chris Benetti: And how good is Kindle? Right? Like you can just get a book delivered to your Kindle or your iPad or your iPhone or whatever, and it’s as simple and same with the audiobook versions, like audible is great. So all of that considered, people will potentially buy how they buy. And if we just run some simple ads on Amazon, then we can get in front of how people buy anyway. Not only that is that it is a book marketplace. There’s a lot of competitors books. There’s a lot of other books that are in the same topic. It’s quite easy to market your book on those books. And so while someone’s in a book buying decision or process, we can position our book alongside their book. And it makes it kind of easy for them to either look at our book as an alternative or even just add in our book to their order as well. Whereas on Facebook it’s very demand based. It’s very, hey, stop the scroll. Let’s get someone right now who’s potentially got this problem to come in and download our, book as a solution. So they weren’t potentially thinking about it prior, whereas Amazon, they most likely are searching for something similar or seeking out something similar.
Samantha Riley: So completely, completely different. Talking about ad spend, then, is there a difference between the two? Like, is it dearer to sell a copy of your book on Facebook, for example, than Amazon or any other platform? You mentioned YouTube.
Chris Benetti: Yeah, I don’t really have experience with YouTube and things like that, but definitely between Facebook and Amazon, the cost difference, it’s an interesting conversation because with Amazon, the only money that you can make is from your book sale. So the dollar you spend is the dollar you make, from someone buying your book, where when we are getting someone to buy our book with Facebook ads, we can now set up a whole sales funnel, which might have several different offers inside of it. And I don’t want to get too technical around sales funnels, but there’s something called an average order value or an average cart value, which is basically the average of what everyone spends in your book sales funnel, as an example, will be this amount. And so if you can get that to 20 or 30 or $50, then you can now spend 20 or 30 or $50 to actually have someone buy your book, and it’s costing you $0 net. So the whole scenario of running book funnels with Facebook ads and actually getting someone to buy your book becomes, a lot more interesting. There’s a lot more potential. Now, I will say, and as a caveat, that the majority of people will probably not break even with a few offers in their book funnel. And there’s a small percentage that will, and there’s an even smaller percentage that will make a profit every single week running book funnel ads. But going back to front end, back end, front end here, isn’t actually, the goal isn’t actually to make a profit. It is to generate new leads and customers for your business so that you can make a profit on the back end. And, yeah, so that’s kind of like the difference between the two. But if we were talking specific numbers, I would say, like direct cost for someone, a cost per acquisition on Facebook, you might pay about the same as Amazon, up to three times more on Amazon. It can be quite cost effective. generally speaking, you might pay about the same amount of money that you would actually charge for the book, and sometimes half of that as well. So, like, if you had a $20 book, you might pay up to $20 to get someone to buy your book. It might be slightly more than that sometimes, but most likely it’ll be a little bit less than that with advertising. So with all the royalties and things thrown in there as well, it’s still going to cost you money to run those ads m on the book sales. But again, you’re getting your book out there to the world, which in my opinion is a fantastic brand building asset, a fantastic authority building asset. You’re giving value to the world and that person might reach out to you.
Samantha Riley: Yeah. And I guess from what it sounds like, we’re more likely to get people off the back end by running a full funnel rather than just running Amazon ads to me. And, just correct me if I’ve got it wrong, that the Amazon ads would normally be, and like Facebook and Amazon rather than just Amazon or Facebook. Would I be right?
Chris Benetti: Most of our clients will run both simultaneously, for sure.
Samantha Riley: Yeah. Cool. What are some practical insights that you can share with our audience on selling their books today? What’s something that they can implement that’s going to have them being able to get something running and getting some sort of action? I’ll say action rather than anything specific because it’s going to be different for every author, I’m guessing.
Chris Benetti: Yeah. Well, I don’t think that the unleveraged ways are a, bad thing to think about. So if you haven’t already hit your audiences as much as possible. I know some know there’s different camps of people, like people who will absolutely. When they’ve got a book launch or they’ve got a book, they’ll really go hard on promoting it to their audiences, their Facebook network or their network. Like, if you haven’t done those things yet, then I would just encourage you to do so. You’d be very surprised at the amount of people who would actually show interest in there. And then the other thing that you could do, again, that’s unleveraged is what are the groups that potentially have your audience in there as well? It might make sense to start doing like value posting in there and things like that. That would drive traffic back to your personal profile. And then you can just make sure that your pin post is about your book or you’ve got your Facebook cover photo about your book and things like, you know, if you wanted to get started right now, those are some very easy things that you can do to promote your book. That doesn’t cost you any money, it just costs a bit of time. And if you, to be honest, blocked out an hour of your day every day, in the morning or the evening or whenever, to post about your stuff, then you’d actually see a decent amount of traction come through. Generally speaking, from an advertising perspective, I’ve actually got two master classes on my YouTube channel that are very detailed into Amazon ads and Facebook ads and book funnels. And so with those master classes, I actually did those for, some high net worth masterminds for people who have books. So definitely you’ll be able to get a lot of value from watching those. The gist of it is I break down the whole process in writing your book sales funnel. Copy what it looks like from an actual physical perspective, like what the book sales pages look like and how you can build those out. Then I also go into running or setting up and running your first Facebook ad. So what targeting, you should think about how to write the sales copy, how to link it all up, and basically everything technical that goes into running ads. And then to further that, I’ve actually gone ahead and done a problem solving section in the Facebook masterclass as well, that’s based around, hey, what happens when your ads don’t work? And what do you do to fix that? Essentially, because that is a big problem of Facebook ads. I expect to launch an ad and it not to work.
Chris Benetti: But it’s what I do next to fix that makes the m, you know, both of those. I think just based on this conversation, I would identify, like, do I want to sell Amazon books or, books on Amazon? Do I want to sell books in my own funnel or give away books in my own funnel? Because that’s what I would definitely recommend for anyone here. And then I would suggest just like potentially going and watching those master classes just to get a bit more of an understanding of what you can actually do to implement those things. And you could launch an ad if you’re giving a book away for free on Facebook with a book funnel, you could launch an ad at like 20 or $30 a day. And you could expect to get three to five to ten new leads every single day come through potentially, or people downloading your book. And again, that is five to ten people actually seeing your call booking offer. If you’ve done that on the second step, that’s a good amount of people who potentially might book in a sales call with you. And that can really roi quite fast.
Samantha Riley: Yeah, totally love that. And of course, we’ll link those YouTube links in the show notes below so that you can just go straight to those because it sounds like they’re super valuable. My question now is just as you’ve been talking about all of that, how important is it to know that process prior to start writing? Or does it not matter? Can you fully write your book and then start this process? Is there a benefit in understanding this process before you even start writing? So my brain is like, how much needs to be reverse engineered to make the book funnel even better?
Chris Benetti: I would say that you probably don’t need to think about the book funnel itself too much, just more so the overarching journey that someone should go through. So for know, the main things I always look for in a book is making sure that you have some sort of way, if someone bought a book through a bookstore or through Amazon, where you don’t get contact data, a way for them to actually come back into your world. And so the simplest way to do this is with resource links. So if you had a QR code in your book, or a resource link for companion resources for the book, where they can click on that or search that URL or scan that QR code, and they can go to a simple page where they can enter their name and email to actually get their resources emailed to them or to access those to download. And then that’s just a way for you to bridge the gap between physical book to actually them becoming an email subscriber with you, which allows, again, for you to reach out. So I would just say that that’s something that has to be thought about. And then I would also just say that you’ve potentially written your book for your business. So the thing is, what’s next? What should they be doing next with you? Is there next steps to work with you in more capacity? Is that what comes next? Or maybe the book has solved a specific problem. It’s given a very clear solution. Well, maybe they have another problem that they need help with and maybe that’s the next steps. So all of those kind of things I would just make sure. I’ve, kind of thought about towards the end of the book as they’re going through, or even the end of each chapter, potentially alongside the resources. And then one other small thing is that I would always make sure that there’s an offer at the end of the book, like an actual visual offer on the second last page of the book. I’ll just show you this one. Not sure if it has it or not.
Samantha Riley: We’re about to find out.
Chris Benetti: Yeah, there is one there.
Samantha Riley: Look at that. Your next step. That’s about as clear as you can get.
Chris Benetti: Yeah. And there’s, testimonials and stuff in here as well. But yeah, like your next step in the twelve month mastermind. But yeah, basically these ending pages are like some of the most viewed pages in the book. Like the very back of the book.
Samantha Riley: Right. interesting.
Chris Benetti: So I would put an offer probably right here on the last few pages that is visual. And these guys have done that. They’ve written testimonials. They’ve got to get now get started, plus the resources. So I would definitely make sure that that kind of stuff is included and thought about. And that’s essentially like you taking them through a funnel as well to kind of get them back into working with you at a higher capacity.
Samantha Riley: Yeah, love that. What are some of the characteristics that you’ve seen of really successful book funnels compared to funnels that haven’t worked so well?
Chris Benetti: It’s got to be the explanation and detail. I would say whenever we’re doing advertising, it’s very important for us to talk about problem solution. Like what are the pain points, what are the problems that someone’s going through and really expressing that. So that’s probably one big thing. Another thing is the social proof behind books and authors. So if you look at like James Shramco’s funnel as an know, we’ve got like two overwhelming sections on the book sales page that is just based on Amazon reviews and the overwhelming proof, and they’re all screenshots of Amazon reviews. So it’s not like we’ve just written the review out. It’s like, no, it’s an actual, here’s a tangible Facebook screenshot or Amazon review screenshot or messenger conversation, with approval, of course, or email or anything like that. So definitely identify what the problems are. Make sure you speak to those quite a lot and how the book is a solution. Really show social proof on your sales page. And then I also like to break down the book as well. So it’s like, here’s five reasons why you should buy this book, or here’s five of the best things inside the book and what page they’re on. So it’s very specific to like, hey, really detailed. Yeah. This is how you’re going to be able to benefit from reading my book and get an outcome. And by the way, here’s some social proof to back that up.
Samantha Riley: Yeah, I love that. That’s so cool. That’s so cool. For everything that we’ve talked about today, what is one piece of information, I guess, or a thought that you want to leave people with that really ties this episode up in a bow.
Chris Benetti: I would just say that it’s always good to think about that journey. What is the journey that someone’s going to go through when they enter your world? They see an ad from you for the first time on social media, or they hear you on a podcast. What does that look like for you? And how can we cement that with sales funnels, with email follow up sequences, and just really think about someone coming through that process with us. If we do that, then there’s no chance that your book funnel will fail. It will absolutely be a success. There’s no chance that your email nurture sequences that you follow up with people are going to be unsuccessful. If we really think about the journey that our customers go through, our clients go through and cement that with the systems like the funnels and the emails and all of that, then I think you’re going to have a tremendous amount of success.
Samantha Riley: Love that so much. Chris, you’ve added so much value to our audience today. You’ve really not held back. You’ve let us know everything that needs to happen. How can people stay connected with, you know, take their learning with you to the next level?
Chris Benetti: Yeah, for sure. So social media is great for me. Facebook specifically, Chris Benetti, you can find me. My username is. Its Benetti. Like, hey, it’s know. And then my YouTube is just at smart author. So I think YouTube is like smart author. That’s the URL. And then if anyone wants to book in a conversation, we can chat about your book marketing, specifically smartauthormedia.com. And then the chats would be the direct link to booking a call with me.
Samantha Riley: Yeah. And of course we’ll put all of those links in the show notes to make it nice and easy. So you don’t need to go hunting. You can just click on a link, which is certainly the way I like to work. Let’s keep it as simple as possible. Chris, thanks so much for joining me today. It’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you.
Chris Benetti: Thanks for having me.
Samantha Riley: Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Influence by design podcast. If you want more, head over to influencebydesignpodcast.com for the show notes and links to today’s gifts and sponsors. And if you’re looking to connect with other experts who are growing and scaling their business too, join us in the coaches, thought leaders, and changemakers community on Facebook. The links are waiting for you. [email protected].
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