Exploding Sales Funnel Fraud

How to Resolve and Expand Your Audience Out Of Trust

The core value any online commerce runs on is trust.

Yet business schools don’t teach this. They are instead given all sorts of models to use which take them away from why they are there to begin with.

A business is a ongoing exchange of valuable services and/or products – usually in return for that commodity called money. (But not always.)

The major problem that business courses and online training have is that they are so busy teaching the How’s that they forget the Why’s.

Look at that definition above. It’s all continuing exchange of value.

That all has to happen in an atmosphere of trust. The seller has to trust the buyer and vice-versa. These are age-old principles, which tend to help us understand how it’s done these days in digital-everything.

The reverse of this is a scam, where whatever is promised is only partially delivered. (See my “Get Your Self Scam Free” for more details of this.)

There is no decent physical model to explain what happens in marketing.

Perhaps the stupidest or laziest one is calling it a “funnel.” That implies once people enter at the top, they eventually move down to the bottom and out.

This model doesn’t deal with the fact that people are leaving all the time because they don’t want or can’t trust the person or group they are dealing with.

A better model is a set of concentric circles. People start on the outside edge and gravitate toward the center as you improve your relationships with them.

The ideal flow of customers – and customers implies they are following a custom, or cultural habit – goes from less trust toward greater. Your clients come very closely in to you, and what you do, to absorb everything possible. When they’ve achieved the highest pinnacle of what you can offer, then they do one of three things:

1. They move on to another mentor, or
2. They go back through the material from the start, or
3. They become evangelists for your material and bring new customers to you.

The Usual Suspects, the Usual Lies

Recently, I laid out how the Social Media has been pushed as the latest Shiny Object. I wasn’t so complimentary about it, as it was described as “Revenge of the Social Media Zombies.“

audience, self-publsihing, social media, trustaudience, self-publsihing, social media, trustaudience, self-publsihing, social media, trustSocial Media, and even book distributors (like Amazon) are on that outer ring. People come and go, they even buy your books and you have no clue who they are or what they did for you.

That outer ring isn’t worth much of your time to deal with, as there are no reliable ways to build trust. You cast a wide net of content out there, and invite them closer in to you.

Next in would be to get them as subscribers to one of your feeds, so they could get your particular brand of content on a regular basis. This is your blog and podcast. Blogs are less reliable as most people don’t know how to simply subscribe to a feed and get your data regularly, so podcasts are further in.

The next closer ring is an opt-in email subscription, where they can get a regular newsletter from you. Here is where you can build your relationships more closely. At any time, you can communicate directly to individuals, or vice-versa, and improve your mutual trust.

Even closer in would be a membership, where they have to log-in to get your special content. Here you are able to track their interests more closely, and find out what people are clicking on within your own site.

Memberships don’t have to be paid, and it is probably best to have a free one at the outset. They do have to sign in and take that extra step to get your material. They have to demonstrate a little more trust. And you reward that with exclusive value.

From here on in, and closer, you’ll be able to offer tailor-made products to them. With their feedback, you can carefully improve the value of the content they are looking for. And, if this content is good enough, they’ll pay you for it.

Courses start showing up here. Especially when delivered with a Learning Management System (LMS). You can then open a course up which is delivered on demand, not on a time schedule. People can progress at their own pace, and you can send them tailor-made emails to encourage and debug them.

And this is where it gets quite interesting. Because the trust becomes mutual.

As the trust increases, you can offer ever-greater value, and your clients will start to exchange with you more frequently and in greater volume (you can set and get higher payments.)

Errors, Mistakes, and Misdirections

Most of the misdirections which are being spread ignore this trust factor.

For authors, this can be very confusing. Amazon pays for sales, but doesn’t build trust. Your buyers are completely anonymous. And you probably know more about your reviewers (especially the trolls) than you do about your buyers.

Like Social Media, there is tons of “free” advice about how to get sales on Amazon. A lot of it is spread by Amazon itself, who wants you to only sell on their platform.

Let me repeat – Amazon is the outer ring of trust. Right out there with strangers giving you odd looks.

Here’s how you use Social Media – post your content with invitations to join your mailing list. “Interaction” (like resistance to the Star Trek’s Borg) is futile. Always syndicate to as many social networks as possible.

Here’s how you use Amazon and all ebook distributors – post your content with invitations to join your mailing list. Never respond to reviews. Always publish to as many distributor platforms, in as many formats as possible. Always. Because they each have different audiences.

Do you see the similarities?

You don’t spend a lot of your valuable time where you’ll have nothing to show for it.

You can’t build lasting relationships by “interacting” on either social networks or book distributors.

The one exception – perhaps – is to run something like a private Facebook group by invitation only. That is tricky, though, since that platform can shut you down at any time, just as the book distributors can cancel your account at any time (like Google Play has done to many Indie publishers.)

Ideally, you’d run a personal forum on your own site if you want to interact with people on that level. Like social media, it depends on how valuable your time is (as in “what should you be writing or editing right now?”) You can get a return of money for monetary investments, you’ll never be able to get time back for time spent. Always invest money. Always spend time wisely.

This model tells you to spend most of your time building relationships with those closest to you. By giving them private and exclusive special offers, they’ll help you with reviews on Amazon and sending out tweets, plusses, and likes on your behalf. Those can attract attention and get people closer in.

But some percentage of your time needs to be spent on the middle ground as well. Guest blogging, and being a podcast guest are the ways you can build your audience by interacting with other’s audiences.

In these, that existing audience is given the opportunity to join your inner circles. They trust the site you are appearing on, and can start building trust in you. Appearing as a guest takes more time than simply doing your own thing – but the investment pays off better.

Again, here’s the breakdown:

Outer circles:

social media, book distributors
– syndicate content with offers to join your inner circles.

Middle Circles:

blogs, podcasts
– deliver regular, valuable content with offers to join, as well as appearing as guest (also with offers to join.)

Inner Circles:

free memberships, email subscription, private forums, free courses– give them more valuable content and invest in relationship building with offers to purchase. These can start inviting others to join.

Closest circles:

paid memberships, paid courses, coaching– this is very intensive relationship building. These can become your evangelists.

– – – –

I hope you’ve now started examining and discarding what you’ve been told about sales funnels and all the conventional wisdom around them. I know that this was a tough slog for years for myself and others, as there is just so much untested silliness being foisted off as Gospel these days.

Do test everything I say for yourself. Don’t assume it’s useful until you’ve tested it for yourself.

All this article is about is to lay out a common sense approach to timeless natural commerce principles.

As you uncover more of these natural principles for yourself, you should speed up your own progress toward the goals you’ve set.

OK?

See you next time…

Please Download This Complimentary Transcript

Exploding Sales Funnel Fraud from Robert C. Worstell

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Originally Published at: http://livesensical.com/podcast/selling-books-online/exploding-sales-funnel-fraud/

How to Publish (and Sell) Your Next Book Back-Ass-Ward - 7 Steps to Breakthrough Success.

With all the false "conventional wisdom" out there, it's surprising that you'd be reading something like this. I mean, all that stuff is supposed to work, isn't it?

Well, not too surprising, since most self-publishing authors still can't quit their day job - because their books simply don't sell. And "most" is about 97% or so. So the smart ones like you are still looking.

So - Welcome.

There's a reason some authors sell and some don't - it's audience.

Not "platform" - Audience.

Your actual audience will buy your current books, your earlier books, and tell you want they want you to write next - setting that up for an "instant bestseller." Audiences buy things. Platforms just sit there.

The term "platform" has been used to include all the things you do to market you book which take you away from anything that actually gets the earlier ones sold and the next ones written. It comes from traditional publishers, who want to make you feel good about all those things you do which are supposedly marketing, but are mostly time-wasters.  Big numbers of Twitter Followers and Facebook Friends doesn't equate to sold books. Tweeting or liking someone's cat pictures doesn't get your books promoted.

Real promotion means building your audience. Anything that doesn't do that isn't worth your time. Might as well go off and perfect your horseshoe game.

After the decade of study I've done to narrow down and isolate the basics which actually do help you sell your books online - this is the bottom line. Everyone talked about it, or around it, but no one would say exactly how to get it. Meanwhile, there was a lot of justification for doing all sorts of things which never wound up as sales or building a verifiable audience.

I was talking to a couple of self-published authors recently, and they had the same exact problem - no audience and no clue how to get one. But it brought up that they missed the point: Build Your Audience First.

This post is how to build a foundation to your continuing online book sales, not just a "platform" where you maybe, might just possibly get someone to think about buying one.

How to Get an Audience (not a platform.)

The bogus term is to call it a platform - it isn't. Social media isn't something you build on - it's just a time suck. That is, unless you are actually using it to get people to join your audience.

Since you already have a book published, we are going to fill in the missing steps:

0. Get an autoresponder. 

Do nothing else until you get this done. Don't make my mistake. If you don't have an autoresponder, you aren't building any audience, and your book sales are poor (if not non-existent) without one. Every single multiple-hit author I've researched had one of these. Every one. When others put in the time to set one of these up, their continuing sales took off - not just a spike from a "one-shot wonder".

A recommended autoresponder to start with is Mail Chimp as it's free for the first few hundred emails you collect. (There are other autoresponders with free plans as well. Mail Chimp is just really easy to get started.)

Go directly to your autoresponder and sign up. Like I said, it's free. And will take you maybe 15 minutes.

Do not pass "Go". Do nothing else.

Get this done first.

(No, it's not particularly logical, but it is the single one thing which separates profitable winners from starve-in-the-garret wannabe's.  Get This Done First before anything else.  I'm not kidding.)

1. Get a domain. This can be anything. Your name is fine, your pen-name is fine, your dog's middle name is fine. Just get something that's fairly easy to spell and remember. Maybe you want to start a publishing company - it just doesn't matter. Pick something. Really.

Your blog will get no respect if you've got ".blogger.com" or ".wordpress.com" or ".anyotherbloghost.com" after it. They'll know you're an amateur - and so will the search engines. Get Your Domain Name. Maybe $11 a year. Invest in yourself.

2. Get a blog and put the domain on it. Maybe you want a Wordpress blog. I'd get a Blogger blog as they host you for free. The point is to get someone else to host your site for you that doesn't cost you money that your books aren't earning yet. You want to spend your time writing, not caring for a blog everyday and updating plugin's, fighting security problems, etc.

We'll go over what you're going to put on that blog in a little bit - just hold on. Not a big deal, actually. Just get it set up. Don't add any content or anything. Make sure http://yourdomain.com works. One step at a time.

3. Put the auto-responder script so people can opt-in to your list via that blog. Just follow the directions -it's pretty simple. Put that script right up top - so people see it as one of the very first things on the blog. That's called "above the fold." I like to put it over on the right sidebar, with the content on the left. But you can do whatever you want. Just set it so any visitor sees it right off.

4. Now create a landing page for your book using it's existing title, cover, description, and links to the distributors that sell it. Then I'd suggest getting something like Ganxy to help you sell it directly on your blog. (That 95% royalty should excite you a bit.) But we really want to list all the various places people can buy it. Because they have their preferences. This seems counter-intuitive, but it's not. Providing value is the key.

Ganxy can link to your hardcopy versions as well as audio books - even if you don't have them now, this sets it up so you can update your landing page in the future to sell those then.

5. Go back to that ebook and add the link in both front and back so people can "Visit [domain].com for more material and related books." That's where they go directly to that landing page on your blog. Update that ebook on all your current distributors.

Note: Ebooks are audience-builders, they are emissaries. They are not an end-all to everything - they are only a starting point. (Read that as many times as you need to in order to get it to sink in.)

- - - -

Technically, that is all the bare-bones you need to build an audience. You could stop here - but your audience actually won't let you. And you do want as big an audience as you can manage.

6. Post your first three chapters of your book - one chapter per post - on your blog. Make sure each of them have a link at the bottom where you send people to the book landing page to get their own copy - and tell them to opt-in to your list if they haven't already.

And you can continue doing this through the entire book if you want - but for now, just get those first three chapters up.

Oh - and go visit Pixabay or any other public domain image host. Find some appealing, interesting, appropriate images for each post. Put these at the top of your post. Keep that in as a habit. People love pictures.

- - - -

All of this costs you nothing, particularly, except your time.

Get all of the above done first before you do anything else. Get these done.

I'm emphatic here as this is exactly what struggling authors don't do. And it hardly mentioned by the "authorities" on how to sell your book online.

Do nothing else until you get all the above done. Period.

- - - -

OK, with that done, we can start getting some real traffic to your blog:

7. Podcast each chapter you've posted.

You'll need to find my posts on podcasting and follow those steps. You'll need to buy a decent USB podcasting microphone (under $100 - Blue Snowball or Blue Yeti are popular, but Plantronics headsets are acceptable as well.) And you'll need to download Audacity (free) and learn how to use it. It's short learning curve, actually. (Hint: click on the red "record" button and start talking.)

The reason for this is that podcasting immediately jumps your blog traffic. Weird, but true. People especially want to hear the author read their own book.

What this also does is to give you an audio book later which you can also self-publish. Or at least audio chapters you can post on for people to download as part of your book bundles.

A key point: at the end of each podcast - make sure you tell people to opt-in to your list. 
Every. single. time.

8. After this, keep adding to your blog. Yes, there's a lot of study you can do on SEO and all that. And you can study copywriting to really make your blog posts stand out.  But your book chapters should do fine. If you do nothing but the steps outlined here, you'll start seeing traffic and getting people opting-in to your list.

Blog and podcast that whole first book. Then drop the price to .99 so they can get it easily.

Ask for feedback from your audience from time to time - what do they want, what would they like to see more of, what problem (non-fiction writers) do they most need to solve? The ones which write you regularly - get their honest reviews of your writing style.

9. Once you have an audience and a direction to go, then you'll find what your next book should actually be. (For public domain indie publishers, this will tell you what your next book series should be about.)

10. These steps - regular blogging and regular podcasting - will continue to grow your audience.  Just keep giving them a call-to-action to join your list. Each release you make is announced to your audience first. It's only when you have an audience that you can really take advantage of your pre-release specials and pre-orders, etc. Not to mention Amazon reviews.

11. Notice that I didn't mention social media. If you're not doing this, you don't have to start.

Otherwise, the two best social networks to be on are LinkedIn and Google+ - because they are content-based, not cute-kitty and ailing-relatives-based. Join and participate in appropriate groups on those two platforms.

Set up IFTTT to take care of posting updates and links everywhere else. (LinkedIn will post to Twitter for you.)

Yes, that may sound a bit harsh. LinkedIn is much bigger than Twitter. And you can do full-length posts there (not just a hundred characters or so.) Google+ will help your blog standings. Communities on these are very educational. Just give great value and never spam or even once say "Buy My Book!" They'll find your blog and find your book - once you've helped enough other people openhandedly. Always, always - give value first.

- - - -

Those 11 steps are simply all there is to selling books online. The rest is built on this as a foundation. It's only taken me about two years to boil everything down to this one key factor:

Audience.

The only way you get an audience is to build a list for their emails and let them join. Then you can talk to them and find out what you should actually be doing to best help them.

In return, they'll buy your books and recommend them to the people they talk to regularly.

Engaged fans are the proven route to success.

Let them join you on your own journey - and their success will be yours.

- - - -

Make sure you're opted-in above to not miss a single white-fisted, hair-raising, cliff-hanging adventure in self-publishind.

This podcast brought to you by LiveSensical.com

Your Audience, Your Responsibility, Your Advice

Any Writer Starts By Listening

This comes up over and over again. People who listen can have conversations. People who "soapbox" often end up standing there alone.

The key to successful books is writing for the audience. Sure, you may be scratching your own itch - but when you write that how-to book, or that fiction masterpiece, you are exchanging value with your audience.

Authors who start making a living at their craft - and those who go beyond this to crafting their fortune with bestsellers - all know this to be an evergreen truth: your audience is always right.

Your audience may be small, but in this day and age, they don't have to be physically living in the same area in order to find one another. You can and will grow your audience by continuing to produce content that they need, want, and love.

I was updating "Just Publish! Ebook Creation for Indie Authors" right along this line recently - and again today discovered that I had hit on a nerve there.

Because when you use an ebook launch to develop your next book, you are surveying (listening) to what your audience wants - and then crafting your product to that, so they get what they are yearning for.

It doesn't matter what genre you write in, or whether it's fiction or non-fiction (or a "memoir" somewhere in between.) The point is that you actually listen to your own audience and deliver the goods they want.

The point of this is to help them improve their lives.

After that, the basic marketing techniques of coming out with tons of well-crafted books at affordable prices takes over. Each and everyone of these well-crafted masterpieces are determined by the public they are written for.

A bottom line is that more you improve their lives openhandedly, the better your book and your series will sell and keep selling.

Of course, you are encouraged to leave a comment below so we can have a conversation about this idea. Who knows - you may wind up in the dedication section of my next book as being the genius who inspired it...