Yesterday, I got on a call with Rob Marsh and Kira Hug of The Copywriter Club to record a new episode for their podcast.
To kick off the interview, I repeated my Peter Parker origin story, of getting bitten by a radioactive spider and becoming imbued with incredible copywriting powers, and then squeezing into a tight red and black spandex outfit, and renaming myself Spider-Bejako.
What’s that? I hear you groaning?
Fine. What I actually told Rob and Kira was my origin story, but it looked more like the following:
1. Nine years ago, I quit my IT job to write content on the cheap as a no-contract freelancer for The Motley Fool.
2. Things were going smoothly for the first two months, at which point they suddenly got rough. From one day to the next, the work disappeared forever due to changes inside the MF business.
3. I sighed and said, “Well that sucks, now what.” After making a list of my options to make money now, I decided to start a new career, writing tiny alternative health books and publishing them on Kindle, one or two or three per month, which is what I did for a year.
Whenever I tell this story to other writers, their ears always perk up and they ask me for more on my experiences writing little books and self-publishing them on Amazon.
I always tell them the same, as I told Rob and Kira yesterday:
I managed to sell a lot of books on Amazon, but I couldn’t make it work as a business because I was an idiot.
Back then, I knew nothing about marketing, email, back-end offers, all the stuff I take for granted today. I was selling hundreds of copies of my books each month, but I didn’t build a business out of it.
That’s why I eventually dropped the self-publishing and got into copywriting for direct response clients, which is the path that’s led me to where I am now.
Which brings me to my offer to you today:
I still think self-publishing on Amazon is an incredible opportunity. There’s cachet to having a published book — even self-published — that cannot be replicated by anything you do on your website. Besides, book readers are the highest quality leads you could ever get. Plus Amazon is free traffic — or even traffic that makes you money.
That’s why I have my “10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters” on Amazon, and why I’m putting together a new 10 Commandments book, tentatively titled, “10 Commandments of Hypnotists, Pick Up Artists, Comedians, Copywriters, Con Men, Door-To-Door Salesmen, Professional Negotiators, Storytellers, Spirit Mediums, and Stage Magicians.”
But back to my offer:
Odds are, you knew some or all of this before. You knew it’s good idea to have a book out there… but you still might not have one.
Perhaps you have no time to do it, or you have some other hangup that’s keeping you from creating a book, even though you realize it would be valuable for the authority you’re trying to project, for the product or service you’re trying to sell, for the business you’re trying to grow.
My offer is simply to help you get this all done fast — book, optin, emails. Or even to do it for you — in case you already have good content that could be combined, molded, and repurposed into a book.
I don’t have a formal offer defined yet because I want to first hear if there is any interest in this, and if there is, I want to hear what your situation is.
So if you have a business, or better yet, if you have a business and a bunch of content you’ve created — videos, podcasts, blog posts, emails, courses — then hit reply, and we can start a conversation about where you’re at and and how I might be able to help you.