743: Apply the Book Formula Process to Write an Easy Book in Record Time and Get Clients

Robert Plank 0:00 Marketer of the day. Episode 743 apply the book formula process to write an easy book in record time and get clients

Drew Griffin 0:14 familiar with Robert plank, who is is just been extraordinarily supportive of all of us. Has been doing some amazing things in various types of spaces, obviously, in the local marketing scene. He runs a local media asset, as well as a LMA, dfy.com amongst other things, you know, he's a programmer. Has created multiple courses, lots of different plugins with WordPress, simply a dude that is well trusted by us and has been sharing some pretty amazing information about what he's going to be talking about today. I think you're in for a treat and well, let's just go ahead and turn it right over to Robert. Right now, we're going to probably spend about an hour or so with Robert and yeah, just sit back, pay attention, be safe. Right now, we're in the midst of some craziness that's happening pretty much all across the

Unknown Speaker 1:14 world. It's not

Drew Griffin 1:17 now's the best time to just kind of sit back and learn how you might be able to leverage this in your business. Yeah,

David Calafiore 1:22 you use this as a distraction, maybe too, just escape the world of craziness that's all around us right now, which is difficult, but yeah,

Robert Plank 1:31 Robert, how you doing? Not too Shab I mean, focus on what you can control, right? That the whole big, scary world out there, you can't do anything about some virus spreading. But what you can do, thing, what you can control is building your own business. And as Drew and David, you guys have said these last few days, especially, is that a lot of these businesses out there, they're in panic mode, right? There are employees not going to work. They're closing their doors. Who knows how many months until the public is feeling safe enough to go back in. And then even some of these local mom and pops are doing things like the curbside delivery, and they might need to find some drivers around the community to help out with that and do deliveries. I mean, it's a real big shake up time, and you know, it's really easy right now to go and hide and, you know, binge watch NetFlix, which maybe do that for, you know, half a day or a day or two, but then at some point you have to pay the bills, right? And all a lot of these local businesses, at some point, they're going to need to pay the bills too. So this, in this shake up time, it might be a good idea to pursue the things that you've always wanted to and to maybe think about building up your LMA or, you know, there's always that to do. List of, you know, I could run the contest. Well, guess what? Now's your time, right? I could be sending those reach outs to those local businesses. Well, now's your time. And the topic, as you guys said, and what we're talking about today is making a book, and a book kind of scares a lot of people, but they're, yep. I mean, you guys have a book, it's, it's book fever, right? The book virus is spreading around. And we all need, we all need to have books. And a lot of people are afraid of, you know, the work that might be involved, or their perfectionism, but you can have just a little, tiny, dinky book. Your book technically doesn't even have to have pages in it. This one does, but you can have a book that and a really easy jumping off point for anyone out there in LMA lands, if they don't know what to have a book about, is write a few pages about what your what services you can provide on your LMA, right? If you sell ad space, if you're one of those videographers in the group, if you can do the quick, those 32nd those one minute interviews, if there's something special outside the box, I mean, like you said at the beginning here, drew you have your your business card on on crack, on steroids, right? Everyone throws away a business card, but if you had a really dinky book, I think this cost me like $1 or two to create. So what if you had a big box of these made? And maybe gets too scary to walk into these businesses these days, but maybe send them to them in the mail, and this is a great way to get your foot in the door. But I think that just by like we're launching Lance and I are launching a course about this lately. And as you guys know, when you launch a course, sometimes you do the survey thing, right? You do? You ask people about where they're stuck or about their fears, and figure out where the pain point is, and everyone just making it too complicated. And I think that everyone, especially lmaers, the key. And I mean, you guys know this, you just finished the book, the key isn't to get a few steps knocked out of the way, right? If you were working on 20 things on your book at once, if you're figuring out what's. The cover, what's the title? What am I going to write? Let me edit. It'd be a big mess, and you wouldn't finish, like most people, just let it become a huge mess. But if you realize that in this day and age with self publishing, with places like Amazon, they will first of all make your book for you for free, basically, right? You just pay like that little percentage of what their costs are, but it doesn't. You don't have to spend, you know, five by 5000 copies of your book. You don't need to spend five grand on your book. You can use, like what's the brandys, course, cannibal like cake, right? Use Canva like cake. Make a book cover. And then all these online systems, they want you to just upload your book cover, upload a Word document with the words inside, and then there's a little bit of fine tuning. But everyone out there, especially Jeff Bezos, they want you to have a book. So now's the time to do it. Especially in these scary times, it's time to think outside the box. And yeah, get your book out there,

Drew Griffin 6:05 and now's the perfect time to do it, certainly within the next couple of weeks or the next couple of months. We don't know, you know what that time is going to consist of, and there's a lot of uncertainty. So something like this may be an amazing opportunity to sit down and follow your instructions. Uh, obviously you're, you're talking about this a little bit earlier. Robert was, you don't necessarily need to be, you know this, this perfect grammar executioner, right? Like you may not need to have the best command of the English, English language, to actually author a book or the patients, and the wherewithal to actually understand syntax and where, you know the best way to actually construct the sentence where a paragraph, let alone a book itself, in its in its entirety. You know, there's all kinds of ways to go about constructing a book. And, you know, obviously one would probably think that you need to sit down over a period of time to, you know, put one of these books together. And that's just simply not the case. What are some practical ways that or ideas people might be able to construct an idea around. Do they need to be an expert in something in order to get a book done?

Robert Plank 7:30 You don't need to be an expert. But I mean, technically, everyone who has an LMA already has a resource, right? And so you can have your book talk about what the LMA can do for you. And, I mean, with these books, there's kind of like you're saying here Drew is that there, it doesn't have to be like the good old fashioned start to finish, like, big, thick book. There's all kinds of outside the box, things that you can use. Like, for example, you're in this one, and honestly, you haven't read this cover to cover, right? You haven't read every single person's chapter, right? Right? So, so, yeah, so no one is going to notice if you had a little typo, or if, if all your pages aren't filled in, it's like, it's a lot of it. It's a credibility tool. And just like how your people have set up their local media assets, and maybe at first, you just created a Facebook page, and then later on, you added a website. You can approach your book in the same way of just get that minimum viable product out there and just have a blank book, and then maybe later on, you can add in some of your contact information, or add in a handful of ideas for some of these local businesses to maybe think about some things outside the box, like maybe, have they claimed their Facebook page? Do they have their listing on Yelp and Google? Do they have a simple website? Do they have a Facebook pixel? There's probably just a handful of easy things and some of these books, the pages are so small and you can put it in large print, you can maybe even just start with some bullet points and have just one quick page saying, hey, you know, there's this thing called a Facebook pixel. Have you done that? You know, you can claim your business on Google, my business. Have you done that? And so, you know, you're talking about this idea of being an expert, and that's really scary, right? Because when we think of experts, we think about like nuclear physicists or brain surgeons. But there are things that that all your people know about, because they they've run these lmas, they've set up websites, they set up Facebook pages, and it's all really basic third grade things about internet marketing that are so simple for us, but the local bakery or whoever, they don't know about this. And if you can put it in simple terms, then you can win. And like a big, I don't know, a big, a high had early on, which I can't remember, I don't think, I don't think we talked about this. But when I was, like, 1718, years old, I was having trouble making money, landing clients, right? I was, I was a programmer like you guys, and I was just always trying to, you know, win on price, or I thought, if I talk to more people, I would get some programming jobs. But then, as soon as I began writing a few things down, as soon as I had my own book, and at that time it was just an ebook, then I had more people than I can handle. Then I had to turn people away. So I thought that if I was teaching my secret sauce, if I taught how to do what I did, I thought that it would not lead to me getting any clients. But then the opposite happened. I ended up landing people that maybe they they got the the book or the ebook, wanting to know what was involved, so that way, maybe they can check on the final work. Or maybe they had the best of intentions and thought that they would become a programmer or create an app, and then once they saw the steps involved, then they, they were like, Okay, well, it's good to know what's what the the process is, but this is too much work for me. I'd rather pay the person that wrote the book in order to do it. So, so, yeah, so a good jumping off point for any LMA person out there is list a few things that you do and like, give away the whole formula, and don't make it overly complicated. Don't make it techie on a purpose, but just explain what you've done to set up these the Facebook page and to, you know, any kind of fun, like posts that got a lot of engagement. And even, like everyone here who has an LMA page, a Facebook page, you all kind of know what gets responses and what doesn't right. You guys know about posting memes or about posting the local news stories in the community, or how it's kind of important to post somewhat consistently, or do things to get people you know involved and ask questions, and do the fun things like say, you know, the the last person to comment on this post gets a fun gift. So there's all these things that that all your people know about. And then if you're, if you've been, have you had an LMA for maybe six months or longer? Then there are fun stories, right? Then there are those success stories of, did you get 200 people to come into Al's pizza? Or what Sal's Sal's pizzeria, right? Or if you did this fun NFL football game back when we had sports teams, maybe we'll have them, but, but, yeah, there's all. There's like, once you start digging case studies. Yeah, there's the case studies. And once you start digging, it's like hard to stop, right? Then you'll find more and more things that you can fit into a book. But I think that the key to all of this is to have it where it's always publishable, right? So if you just had cover and some blank pages, put it online. Cool now. Now you could ship that out to the local clients you want to land. Then maybe the next day at the inside and put in some of your contact details, so that way they can, they can reach you. And guess what? Just that on its own, it is a business card. And then maybe the next day, add in some bullet points or add in a list of things that you could do for these local businesses on menu. So I think that if you incrementally go about it, then you'll never get stuck. You'll never have a half finished book, just like how your LMA has never half finished. You set it up good enough once, and then you just keep on bolting on, adding on the fun things as you get better at it, that's incredible.

Drew Griffin 13:43 I know that the title of this webinar and this workshop is how to create a prospecting tool that every local agency owner should have. We love talking about prospecting because that's really what helps propel a business floored. In fact, not too long ago, we talked about a strategy about following up and using business cards to do that in such a way that we're not necessarily looking to get our business card out there, but more or less to get the other person's business card so we can follow up with them. This is a little bit of a different beast, because people just don't throw books away, right? A lot of people throw business cards away. They get them and they throw them away. And that's kind of why we taught about that process, right? As you were just talking about this whole concept of, you know, creating a book and getting some blank pages and and that sort of thing, I thought of several ways that this can be leveraged to help local businesses and for your agency to be able to connect with those local businesses. In fact, we were thinking about putting a little bonus together here to teach people just to do that, maybe perhaps something along the lines of the best of your local town. Type of deal where you just simply interview local businesses and put that into the book, right? Like, what business wouldn't want to be known as the best of Pottstown or the best of whatever their local town is, local media asset would be very, very easy to accomplish simply through doing what we're already doing anyway, like interviews and connecting with these local businesses, it actually gives you an excuse. And now, once you produce one of these things, of course, they're going to want to copy right, because they are actually listed inside the book itself. They can use this as social proof that, hey, we were actually listed in this book, an amazing opportunity for local media asset owners, or anyone who has a local agency or is interested in getting a book together, here's an amazing way to really connect with a bunch of people and bake in an audience at the same time. Yeah, 100%

Speaker 1 15:55 it is an amazing prospecting tool. It stands out. And I think that's a big key too, is seeming remarkable, standing out when you're when you're out networking or prospecting, like my I had this, I did this book, like four years ago. I don't really hand it out too much anymore, but the truth is, when it's true drew you say people don't throw these things away. About two months ago, I got an email from somebody who I gave this book to at a networking event, like probably three and a half or four years ago, and they said, hey, you know, they sent me an email saying, Hey, you gave me your book a while back. We're looking to do some marketing for a company, and I wanted to reach out to you about possibly meeting up and talking. Does that happen with business card? Does that happen with business card? So my move so my move, here's my move, at the networking and prospecting events or meetups woods, you'd be talking to somebody, and they'd say, Oh, do you have a card? And I kind of, I didn't have any cards with me, but I would reach around like, Oh, I'm looking for my card. I'm like, Oh, I don't. But, and I would keep, like, 10 of these in my in my in my bag, my computer bag, and it's like, I, you know, I don't have my cards occur in the car, but hey, you know what? Take, take one of my books. And that was my move, to hand out the book. Kind of like, not like, I don't want to be like a jerk say, oh, take a copy of my book, you know. But it kind of just, you know what? Just take one of these, my contacts and information is in the back, and give it a read. Here you go. And that was my move, and it worked extremely well for, you know, it still would if I was handing that particular book out. But it does work. It does stand out. And it's an amazing way to just make connections with people in and stand out.

Robert Plank 17:36 Nice. I'm totally going to steal that whenever the live networking comes roaring back and, and I've done the kind of a similar thing, except for, like, when I go to some of these NSA national speaker association meetings around here, I bring, like, a bag of, like, 10 of my books, and then same, same deal, like, either they have a business card or they don't have a business card, and I need, I need to steal the fumbling around my pocket thing, but I have a Sharpie with me, and I go and, like, sign their name on the book, and, you know, and then, and it's like, it's weird, because at least with those speakers, I have to tell them the book is free. They're like, Oh, don't have to pay you, like, 10 and 20 bucks. I'm like, no, no, it's free. Like, I want you to have it, but you're so right that the it like the years later it might pay off, right? It's a numbers game, and it's about the follow up and and, yeah, if your book's been on their shelf for the past five years, and then that, maybe they're they look at, oh, well, is there a book I haven't read recently, or if they're still on your list? Now, there's multiple ways that right there, they're keeping in touch with you, and you don't even know because their books has been sitting around for years.

Speaker 1 18:47 That's it, man, I would get 100 of these printed up at one time. I think if you did like 100 to like create space, they were like under $2.50 a piece. This is 100 this one in particular is like 142 pages. And I mean, what? What a great investment to make in terms of of making connections with people and being remarkable and rememberable for $2.50

Drew Griffin 19:12 Well, David, from there, that $2.50 cent investment for that one that just recently got in touch with you, you know, what's the likelihood, or, you know, what's the real return on the investment of that? I mean, you ended up signing these people for probably 1000s of dollars in in consultation and other types of services, right? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 19:33 I mean, another thing I would do, too is at networking events. I was member of, still am of some large networking groups where, you know, you would get the opportunity once a month or once a quarter to actually get up at the networking meeting and give like, a 10 or 15 minute presentation. So I would do that, and at the end I'd have a giant box of books, and I'd get everybody in the room a book of mine. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 20:00 Nice,

Unknown Speaker 20:03 huge, huge.

Robert Plank 20:04 There's so many cool, crazy things that you can do, like at this other speaking event, I I made a mock up for each person, so like this. This Beth Hodes lady. She was one that I thought was going to be at the event, but wasn't. I passed out the rest of the books, but blank pages on the inside. And so this is the this is kind of interesting, because, let's say, and like, you can't go crazy with this, right? You can't, like, make, like, 100 of these, but let's say you're going to that monthly Chamber of Commerce meeting, and there's someone that, like, you know will be there, or maybe you met them last month, and you know, they'll show up again and again. Like, why not have your virtual assistant or whoever make a front and back cover, and then you can get this printed on demand for and basically, we're talking about the cost the Amazon's printing for, like, a book this size is, like you said, like $2.50 maybe $3 at the most. And then I use Lulu for some of, like, the the just ad hoc print on demand. And it's more like, it's like, $4 so, I mean, we're talking just a few dollars. It's not like, it's not like, it's 10 bucks a pop, and then, um, and, yeah, it's like, have. And I think that everyone who's watching right now needs at least have like a pile of some kind of books on hand for whatever local networking presents itself. But then you also what I do is, I think in the last week, I sent out maybe like 3545 copies. I sent like a three pack with three my my latest books to people, and even shipping, if you know how to do it, is pretty dang cheap. Like, even if there are people that maybe aren't in town that you're looking to to network prospect with PayPal has a special page where it's called, like, create a shipping label. It's like paypal.com/ship, label slash create. And so what I do is I take a, like a manila folder, and I put a book in, and I kind of wrap it around and tape it, and then send a media mail, shipping via PayPal. It's like $2.85 so I mean, you to add up your costs. I mean five, $6 at the most to even get a book made, printed, mailed, sent it to whatever prospects. I mean, it's so cheap, right? You don't have to drop all this money. And then there's, like, there's all kinds of outside of the box stuff that we're talking about here, like, how there's, like, the thing with, like, the best, you know, the best pizza in town, the best wings in town and some of your LMA people are doing like the these local summits, right? They're having, like, the big event where each business owner has their speaking slot. And the thing that I hope that these people doing the summits keep in mind is to reuse the content, right? Because it's good to have your business owners come in and present stuff. And, you know, everyone has fun, but don't let that content die in six months or 12 months, are those business owners still going to get some mileage out of that speculated or that presenting? Well, they can, if you maybe get the recordings transcribed, edited, put it into a book, and then, and then, yeah, have a few copies for yourself. Set it up so that you are those people who participated in the summit. Maybe they can order some copies that cost. Maybe the next time you do the summit, you build that into the price. So maybe, like they pay to have a slot in your in your little event, and that comes with 25 copies of the the book, and then you can have a lot of fun too, with the with the rebranding, because what I've been doing lately is I get a book made and I sell it on Amazon, like, like this one. But then I also mentioned there's this, there's this platform called Lulu, which is a little more expensive, but you can have your book on both platforms. And when you do that, then you can do this fun thing called private labeling, where you have the exact same book, but then you put someone else on the cover. And so the the book that that I'm showing off of Drew's. And if you guys in the group know no Lance, I just have a book full of each person has a different chapter. And next time around for the 2020 book, we're going to have David in talking about everlinks. And that's already kind of the wheels are in motion there. But every person in this book has their own chapter, right? So there's like different author names for each chapter and then, and that's great. But then we also had separate covers made and then multiple copies sent to each person. So Drew posted a few days ago, this kind of cool little spread where he like. Had a bunch of his own books, and he's on the cover. So there's some minor, just subtle touches you can do to your book. Here, you can have the best of whoever in town, but then for make multiple variations of the book, where that the like the best pizza, like they're on the cover, like they're that business owner's photo, the establishment and the sign and the outside right in there and then. And even, I don't know if you noticed this Drew, but even in the books I sent to you, your chapter's right up front, isn't? Yeah, it is. And so is everyone else's.

Drew Griffin 25:39 It's, it's fantastic. I gotta tell you, you know, I want to jump in here for a second and and just share that. I shared that onto my social profiles, right? So not only in our main group, but privately on on my personal wall, as well as Instagram and inside of stories and that sort of thing. And what happened thereafter was people that I'm in contact with, I'm associated with and connected with on various social platforms. I got a ton of people reaching out to me, asking me for a copy. How did I get it done? What's inside the book? What it's about? It started to create conversation and interest, right? So this particular book, even though I didn't really write it, I technically contributed to it in a very special, unique way. There you go. I didn't do any of the work with regards to this book yet. I've got a bunch of them to give out. I've got a bunch of mini chapters to give out as well. And now it's spurning a lot of attention around this idea, like, how can I replicate this? How can I create even more books? Number one, it's entirely plausible. There's my ugly mug on the front of this, on the front of this book, and, yeah, it's, it's burned a lot of interest in there. So now my ideas, you know, compound with what you're talking about here, for the not only the LMA, but some other projects are now really starting to develop some life to those, to these future projects, I would highly recommend everybody consider writing a book, or at least authoring it in some capacity, and hopefully we'll be Getting into how people can actually get that done.

Robert Plank 27:23 Yeah, and yeah, we want to make sure people know how to get to it. So the link is delicious, marketing.io/go/book, and I mean, there it's just like with all this LMA stuff, there's always a million ideas, right? And I think the key is to is to, out of all the ideas that are there, get started on one idea that way, while that's rocking and rolling, while the books being sold, or you're sending copies out, then maybe you can jump on the other idea. But I mean, so many crazy things you can do, right? You can make the mock up book. You can make the QuickBook that is your actual business card, and kind of goes into more into detail about the things that you do, have a menu of your services, have links to your own products, or your own other books, or, you know, any, an easy thing that anyone can do is make a list of your favorite tools in whatever, in whatever capacity you run your Business, like if you know if you use everlinks, or if you like to use a certain thing for through on the contests, motivational quotes? There is an easy way, or you can, if you just think in terms of a book as well. What's on this one page? If this one page says, Use ever links, here's what's great about it. Here's my shortened affiliate link. Then that's an easy jumping off point. So we have the mock up books, the business card books. You can get these local businesses to be in a compilation book with you. You can network with other people or the services, not just local businesses, but say, I mean contact Drew and David and have them contribute a chapter to your book. Contact the makers of some social posting tool and see if one of their reps will get on an interview with you, transcribe it chapter in your book. And even if they won't do that, write a chapter about cloud campaign, or about, you know, Meet Edgar or whoever, and feature them in a book. I mean, as I think the kind of the common theme we keep circling back to is that people are automatically impressed with the with the fact that it's in a book, right? And a book on its own is not a magic button, but in combination with the follow up, with your networking, with having a local media asset page, it gives you one more step ahead of some of these other people that don't even have a book. I mean, when someone researches David califori and drew Griffin, if they see that there's an Amazon page for you guys, for you. See that there's a way for someone to buy the book that gives you a lot more legitimacy than someone who maybe they have a website, right? Maybe they have a LinkedIn page, but do they have a book? No? Well, they must not know very much. They must not be able to help my local business all that much, right?

Speaker 1 30:16 So one of the main ways, Robert, that you are doing this is utilizing things like a podcast, where you're you're have the opportunity to sit down and interview somebody in depth, and then you're extracting the information from those interviews, having them transcribe and then taken and put into these books in different chapters. That that is a fantastic way for anybody who, especially if you're running a local media asset and you want to maybe write stories about local business owners in the area. It's a great connection tool, first of all, to approach a local business owner, do a podcast and then not even tell them, but take the information and the content from that podcast, have it transcribed, put into a book. And then what an amazing excuse to be able to walk back into that business and hand that business owner a book with their image on it, and, you know, some of the content from your interview, which maybe lays out the story of their business, or how they, you know, got started doing what they what they're doing in in business right now. That is an amazing, amazing way to connect to a local business owner.

Robert Plank 31:26 And something that I keep getting reminded of probably every, almost every time I jump into your guys's Facebook group is is, have a funnel, right? And a lot of and I saw even there's one person in the group who's like, oh, I might be closing down my local business, and everyone jumps in saying, No, keep keep it going. Don't give up. And it's really it's easy to get burned out if you, if you think of things as, like, really flat, right? Because it's easy to think, Oh, I'm going to send 100 feelers to local businesses, and then you do all this work and nothing comes back. Or I'm going to make 100 mock up books, and nothing comes back. But I think that the key from a lot of the this prospecting, and a lot of us like doing, doing a little bit of work for free, is to, is to weed out the people that don't want you, right? And so, so maybe you, you go to the that Chamber of Commerce meeting, and there's a couple of people who you take their business card, you hand them your book. Those are your your warmer prospects, right? You you send some emails, or you send some social media messages to all these businesses, and then maybe a handful reply back. Now, those are the ones to continue moving forward with, right? So it's like, Don't invite everyone on your podcast. Don't take everyone on your podcast and put them in a book. But those businesses that are even slightly curious about what your LMA can do for them and your social marketing, it's like, it's like, reward these, these business owners, for giving you a little bit of attention. And I think it's, I don't know, I don't know if I'm putting it into the into the right words here, but I think that it's easy to get burnt out on saying, oh, make 100 books. I'll get 100 podcast episodes. It's like contact 100 businesses, and then the 10 that's are talking to you. Then focus on those, right? It's, it's like things got things in terms of a funnel, instead of just like blasting and then wondering why it didn't work was because you just did one blast. You don't have this step by step process to walk people through. Or maybe you meet someone at the event, you get their business card, you hand them your book. A week later, shoot them an email, see if they want to talk to you a week later, see if they want to be on your podcast. Maybe they weed themselves out that way after the podcast. See if they even, like you know, want to be in the book. Once they're in the book, then roll back into their business again. Most of these other internet marketing agencies, right? The bad guys, the ants, the people that aren't on lmas, they don't do this. They kind of try it one and done. They spam, they blast. They wonder why it doesn't work. They're not bringing people up the funnel.

Speaker 1 34:08 Yeah. Now listen, this is not difficult to do, but it's also not, you know, push button, easy. It takes work. It takes consistency to go out and continually contact people and put the work in, but it's extremely powerful, and the results that you'll get in return are really, really worth it. Now, Robert, you've got this kind of systematized don't you? Can you kind of explain to maybe about how you go about making this easy on yourself, because it can sound like a lot of work, but it's not as hard to put together as most would think, right?

Robert Plank 34:45 And and we have, like, we we plugged the link. We have that course coming up called Book formula. And this is the, the fifth iteration of our publishing a book course. And the thing is that if you, if you try to sit. Down, and you get sit at the laptop, and you pull up the Word document with the blank page, and you say, you know, page one introduction. You think you're going to type for the next 200 pages. It's not going to work. You need to make it easier on yourself. And the new, updated way that we're doing this is we have you make the book cover. First we have you make the book where there's, there's no pages inside, that way, you can at least have an easy win, right? That way, that way, even if you only had a book with blank pages, you could that could still work as your business card, right, even if there was nothing inside of it. So, can you

Speaker 1 35:35 explain that? How does, how does a blank book work as your business card?

Robert Plank 35:39 Because you, you have your your contact details in there, right? You have your bio, you have your your web address at the bottom. Maybe you put your your phone number on it. So, I mean, you can make books in all shapes and sizes. So one year for Christmas, I made a book like this, called Internet Marketing on crack. This is like, maybe five years now, and it's got my phone number on it, right? And it was just, and I just, I made it something that was a weird size, big and ugly, just because, as you know, with internet marketing, sometimes big and ugly stands out better. So I just made it, like a big honk, an eight and a half by 11. And then there's just, yeah, like, different, different things, like, there's, there's motivational quotes in there. Man, maybe I should, like, update this and and send this out. But there's, like, some of my best blog posts in there. And again, it's almost at cost. And, I mean, we have stuff like for our courses, we kind of and this, I mean, this looks like it's from a bookstore, right? And this is just, if you know how to make the cover, put the the text in there, and, like you guys said, navigate some of the menus and things like that. I mean, here's our, our book. This is like 558 pages. It's a big old, like, big old thud sort of book. But, I mean, you can make any sort of size book you want, right? Big, small, but, but, yeah, if you had just no pages in it, or even, I mean, how about this? You could have a book with no pages and say, place to take notes and line, line, line. You could have the thing to say, take notes, but the footer of every page had your your name, your website, your phone number, all kinds of fun stuff like that and so. So yeah, if you can have a cover, and you can have a book that you can use for for networking or make, make your live streams. Do your videos, because authors do this all the time, right? If they have a book coming out for and it won't be out for the next few months, they market it ahead of time, right? And so you could get the mock up made, and then, while you're still scrambling to finish the inside of the book, start putting out videos, or send those, reaching out videos to local businesses and just be like, I have, my name is Drew Griffin, and I have an upcoming book called local media assets. They don't have to know that. There's nothing written yet. It's, it's still in process. And then a lot of people, they get stressed out about the contents of their book, right? They think it has to be some big, crazy weaving Lord of the Rings type of tale. Like, early on, I knew this guy, and he said he wanted to make a book that was fiction and nonfiction at the same time, he wanted to make a book where, like, he's driving along the road and he gets run off the road and gets in a car accident, and he wakes up when it's 1950 and then he has to, like, learn more. He applies internet marketing to old 1950s principles. And I'm like, well, that's kind of a cool idea. Roland, was he? He died. He's he died of a colon cancer. He died before he could make the book. He made it too complicated. And then, in the meantime, I had a friend who was teaching copywriting, right, how to make sales letters. And it was a 20 chapter book. And I looked at the book and it was like, chapter one, how to do a headline. Chapter Two, how to do your sub headline. Chapter three, and then the very last chapter was how to do the PS on your web page. I was like, Oh, it can be that easy. It doesn't have to be this big old crazy tail. I met a guy who put out a weight loss book, and Chapter One was drink water, chapter two was walk around the block. So simpler can be better, and especially if you consider that you should not put your entire life knowledge into a book, because no one will care about it, except for you, it'll be too weird. But if you think in terms of, where are people stuck, how can you help them? What are some easy tools, or what are some easy tasks that you could do for them? But if they don't want you, they're free to go ahead and try it on their own. But then when they get. Up than they need you. I think that's a better way of thinking about it, and it helps you get outside your head, right? Because when we started this call, we were talking about how it's easy to get down to the dumps. It's easy to say, Well, I'm stuck at home because of the virus, and then a lot of the bad stuff creeps in, right? You start thinking about the all those inside feelings, and the way to get out of that is to to help someone else, right? And so if you think about these local businesses, they need help. They need to get their customers back, or they need their customers to keep going. Maybe they're worried about hanging on to employees. Maybe it's finally time for them to embrace some of this digital stuff. Get a website online, ordering, maybe an app. I mean, if someone in this LMA group has a process for taking any restaurant and getting an app, getting, like, a local app created, and there's all kinds, I mean, you guys know better than me, but there's all kinds of like services where they'll generate an app for you, right? And they'll put it on the Apple Store and put it on the Android store. I mean, walk some local business through that process and even set Make, make the most promising business on your radar right now, the case study and say, let's say you're this kind of business, and your problem is people aren't. People can't come in right now, and you're worried about employees. Maybe you had to lay a couple people off. But then now the employees can't run the business. Here's what you do, and you just even walk them through, maybe even maybe leave out what the exact tool is, but take screenshots and say, I want to use this app creator. And we put this business's name in there, and we do this, to set it up, and we put it on the Apple Store, put on the Android store, market it on Facebook. Here's how we get people coming in the door. Just think about like a case study like that, and then, boom, there's your book, right? You created a book without even thinking about it, and it's up to you to decide how deep you want to make it, because you don't even have to do screenshots, if you don't know how to do it, maybe just tell people about this idea of the app, and then just kind of talk about the real, like basic How would you explain it to a 10 or 12 year old about how would an app work For this local business? I mean, all kinds of crazy ideas, as long as you get out of your head, you think about the problems that these businesses have, and then what are a handful of steps that will get their customers back, or get their money back? I

Speaker 1 42:35 love it. I mean, just the whole blank book concept kind of just opened up my eyes as you were kind of explaining, you know, why you'd want to do that. I wasn't thinking in the sense of like it just could be like a notebook for somebody or, I mean, I'm seeing a lot of advertisements recently for, you know, people putting out social media content planners. Like, if you are running an agency that's offering, you know, social media posting, you could create a content planner book that kind of just, you know, has 365 pages in it with content ideas for each day, and then basically walk around to local businesses, introduce yourself and hand out a book. Hey, you know, we run a local agency. Thought you might find this handy, nice to meet you

Robert Plank 43:21 and and there are so many just, like, easy, easy things that I mean if you think in terms of, like, if, if you only had five minutes a day to like for your restaurant, to To get a more expanded online presence, what can you in just five minutes a day? Each of those is just a quick page of your book, right? Right? The Facebook page, put the pixel on there, just easy things, and it doesn't even have to be 365 days at first. Because with the thing I was worried about early on with this self publishing thing, was I was worried that the book would be set in stone. I was worried that I would be stuck with the title, with the price, with the contents. It would just be stuck and and you can put out the your the best stab at your book right now. Maybe you only have 15 ideas, or 20 ideas for the social media marketing you put you publish that for now, and then that's what gets printed. And then maybe in a week, you think of 10 more, and you go and you update the the Word document, upload it again to the print on demand, and then every copy that comes out after that is the new version. So this really can be a thing where you create the basic bare bones now and then, maybe it's blank pages now and then, in a week, it's 10 pages. In a week, it's 20 pages. You just kind of incrementally as you go, yeah, Robert,

Speaker 1 44:39 why don't you bring up your screen right now and take us through what you guys are going to be teaching in this course.

Robert Plank 44:47 All right, so let's see how to do that sharing screen. So at the at the moment where Brian. Casting. It's a live course. We'll be starting on March 25 and here's basically the the agenda is, we'll be helping you figure out your books hook, and then from that, figuring out your concept. And then from that comes the the cover and mock up. And just like, just like everything else, there's a little bit of thinking, but not much, and it's mostly just reducing the bad decisions and having a couple of good decisions left over. And then once you make the decision, then you apply the template. And so it's easy to say, Oh, well, I don't even know what to put on my book cover. We figured out a template. So the template in this case, is title, picture, author name on the back. Picture, bio website, right? And then if you start thinking in terms of, let me just plug in the pieces, then guess what? You can have that that book with the blank pages by the end of the first module, with a few other things figured out, like your bio. So if you if you want to eventually appear on a podcast to promote your business, which is a good idea, you have the bio that's on your book. Now you have that figured out. So the first module here is just figure out your idea, and to get to the point where you have at least the mock up business card book that you can hold in video or you can pass out. Then the next step is to do this thing, what we call the doodle and present method, which means, you know, people get really stuck about where, how do I even start? Where do I even say for like, the first sentence of my book? Well, an easy idea is to draw a doodle, draw a quickie little diagram that might be, like, three boxes with arrows, or maybe you have, like, I don't know, it's just some kind of graphic or pie chart, yeah, yeah, something like that. If you have some kind of a symbol or a graphic, then this could be the Quickie presentation you give at the Chamber of Commerce, like you were saying earlier. David, how, yeah, 15 minutes you can unpack 15 minutes worth of this one graphic. You can spend 10 pages unpacking what this graphic is. So this idea of having a graphic that you can unpack a little bit or a lot, means that it can be a whole chapter, or can be like one little presentation and and the thing also about a book is that if you if you don't have an outline, you're pretty much doomed to failure. But a lot of people don't want to have an outline because they're worried that that, uh, it'll make writing the book boring, right? Because they're like, oh, now I'm just filling in the pieces of the outline, and I've twice now created a book the same day I thought of the idea. And I don't have a copy on him, but there's a book called checklist mindset, where I wanted to make a book explaining Google Drive, Google Documents, Google Sheets, Gmail, Asana Zapier, all these productivity tools. And I was mad that I didn't have a book. So I used this process that we have, which the WWh, WW as part of it. But it's this process of dumping out all the ideas, narrowing down the good ones and rearranging and unpacking, and then you end up having an outline where you can literally just speak it out, if you want to, and then get it transcribed and get it cleaned up. Or you can look at this whole outline and just choose out of the maybe seven things that you that you thought of, like seven things you could do to help a local business. Just write a quick blog post or like, consider it a Facebook post, but write a few pages worth, and then that can just be your book for now, right? So let's say you thought of seven different chapters for all these cool things you could do with a local business. Maybe chapter three is the most interesting one. Just make that your book for now. No one has to know that later on, you went back to your original plan. So we basically have you, we show you ways to research what other people have done. And this is this. I've never seen anyone else do it as quickly as I do. You can literally go on Amazon and find a book similar to yours, because, unless we're talking about these really specific books, like the like the mock ups or the compilation books, if you're looking to make a book that maybe shows off what you do, you don't want to have something too weird, right? You want to have like, four work week for for this, for example. So we show you how to just look at the books that already exist on Amazon to see if there's an existing demand, and make something that's kind of in that category, but your own take on it. And then you can, when you see how we do it, you can look at a lot of books on Amazon and see what what your books. And shouldn't have. And then look at, like the covers, and there were specific things we look at where we can just say, Oh, well, I hadn't thought of this idea to put in my book, just by doing the research about it. And then the third module here is how to speak out your book, How to get it transcribed, how to either edit it yourself or have someone else edit it. And then finally, the thing we're talking about where it's easy if you know how to it's easy to publish a book, if you know what you're looking at and what to click right, and if you haven't done it, it's just it's so confusing, where you might get stuck. And so we show you how we can just go, click, click, click, and in a couple of minutes, if we have even just the cover cool books online, if we happen to have the inside the writing cool books online. And then we have a few bonuses for things like how to use your book to get on podcast and sell more copies of it, how to bang out an audiobook. And by the way, I hope you, both of you guys, put the local media assets book in audiobook form, because these last six months, my audiobook sales have been about on par with the book sales. So audiobooks, you have less buyers, but you get a heck of a lot more in the the money with every sale. And just like in the same way, where Amazon has ways where you can give away your book and get paid for it. The same is true with audiobooks. You can give away these things called promo codes, where someone can take a special code, go to audible.com get your audiobook for free. They don't pay any money, but you still get paid because it's in the big Jeff Bezos slush funds. So they're just all kinds of ways where you can make extra money from having an audiobook. Plus someone gets your audiobook for free, then that boosts your sales for the print book on Amazon. Plus you can follow up and get them to leave a review on the audiobook. Plus now you're in their ear. If they prefer to listen from audiobooks than regular books. We talk about the compilation books. We show how to make a website based on your book. You can get interviewed about your book on my podcast, so all kinds of fun stuff. So that way you're not that way, this idea of a book isn't just like a woulda, shoulda, coulda. It's not something that maybe I'll get to but I'm making it too complicated now you can use this self quarantine or social distancing time to finally get the book done. And like you guys have been saying, it doesn't take six months or six years. You don't have to write 200 pages, as long as you know what to click and what the simple shortcut is, that way you make it easy on yourself. It's amazing.

Drew Griffin 52:51 It is amazing. I mean, look at the look at this price to get all of that. I mean, just simply that module around the idea of creating an audio book and potentially generating as much revenue from the sale of an audiobook as well as your physical copy, not to mention all the other benefits that you just covered. It's an amazing skill set and knowledge to be able to leverage this, and not only for just local media assets, but for any business endeavor that you might have, or some ideas, or some concepts to generate lead magnets or amazing tools that you can get out there and be well known. You know, jumping onto the podcast circuit is an amazing way to do list building. And if you've got a book and you've got a funnel that you're certainly going to cover on all these different modules, it's an amazing way to start building out a list of people that might like to do business with you. I agree

Robert Plank 53:53 completely. And you mentioned the podcast circuit, and I think when I when I was on your is, this is the show, right? We'll call it a when I was on your, your show, here, your live stream a few months ago. I talked about, I interviewed this guy, William Hung from American Idol and and I bought his book. And I don't know if it's if it's if I should say this or not. I don't know if he'll be mad, but basically, so this book of his 99 pages, and I've read, I've read so much, really good, but he paid $17,000 for this to have a book made and and so, I mean, if you charge these local say, say, you network with the local lawyer or accountant and you can work out it, and you use what you learned in book formula to get a book made for them with their picture, if you charge anything less than $17,000 then you're the cheap option compared to what a lot of people are paying. So my mind has been blown lately on and again, it's like someone's, you know, paying big bucks for their for their book, that's a good thing, and they're investing in the future and all that. But we're, I think. Everyone in this LMA group, we're not charging enough, right? And that's that's an easy way for us to get and thing is, too that for a lot of these local businesses, having a book, either, you know, being in a group book, or the local lawyer having a book about, you know, how to how to survive your divorce, or that accountant on how to save on taxes for some of these people, that's cost prohibitive, right? Even the local accountant maybe they don't want to pay $17,000 for a book, but maybe they can pay you five or six grand for it. And maybe they don't trust the Big Shot in Los Angeles or New York City, but you live in town. Maybe you can show that you have book of your own. You can show that you have the best of restaurants in town. And that's I've been seeing a lot of that with your LMA people, is they kind of do the quick early win, and then they use those other successes to get bigger and bigger successes. But the key is to not leave things incomplete. So run the one contest, or build up the subscribers and the messenger bot, do the proof of concept, show what can be done at one time, and then use it to approach another business, to get a contest run of their own, get some kind of a book created for yourself, proof of concept. And then when you approach some of these local businesses for a book of their own, you can say, well, this isn't my first rodeo. It's my fourth book, or fifth book, or I did the book for that person down the street. Wouldn't you like to catch up with him? Lots of fun possibilities as usual with us, right? It's like just a underweight train of one idea leads to these are 20 leads to 2000 I

Speaker 1 56:45 would imagine that most you know, local business folks don't even know that this is a possibility, you know. And I think once they you can kind of open their eyes to that. Like, you just use the example of a lawyer, like, you know how to save your ass during a divorce. Or, you know, I think it's great thing for lawyers, but any, I mean, a chiropractor, a dentist, any, they can take some sort of niche thing, some part of their business that they always get questions about, or they're always have people wondering about, and write a book about it. And it's an amazing lead generation tool. It's a social proof tool. It's absolutely a service that you could offer to local business people, as well as creating books for yourself to you to spur on your own prospecting and sales.

Drew Griffin 57:32 It's evident, yeah, Robert, you just said that William paid $17,000 to get a 99 page book done and What? What? Basically, for 97 bucks for the book formula, you could have all the secrets that you need. You don't need to be a major publishing house to actually do it. This book formula actually uberfies the entire publishing industry, right? You have the ability to leverage, you know, two of the largest distribution channels on the planet. And it doesn't it's not really even that expensive to get the to get the book done. It takes a little bit of time, which, right now, that's all we have all nothing but time to actually sit down, think out of think out of book. Join Roberts and Lance on March 25 to get started with book formula, 97 bucks. I'm going to be there. Yeah, hey, I'm taking full advantage of this. In fact, I'm just about to hit the purchase button to go through this entire course with everybody as well. Crazy, crazy. Not to David, we just published the LMA book, and you know, by by proxy, I've got my name on the title of another book, you know, by way of, by way of Robert. And I'm going to take this formula and run with it, because right now, outside of LMA, this is an amazing service that you can provide, not only to build your local media asset out, but other opportunities, right? You're going to meet all kinds of businesses, whether it's attorneys or physicians, you know, local restaurants. I mean, there's probably amazing like, every single one of these businesses has a story, right? They all started the business point, and you could probably extract a business right out, or book right outside. So again, what's the URL for this? David,

Speaker 1 59:30 it's I put it in the chat. It's also pinned to the top of the chat. So it's delicious marketing. I always put.com by accident. Delicious marketing.io forward slash go. Forward slash book, so ignore my last post there. Just delete that it's pinned to the top. That is the correct link there. And so Robert, just to confirm you're doing this in live sessions starting March 25 um. Um, how many? How many live sessions are there? Is it all done in one one, in one session, or

Robert Plank 17:00:06 four modules, four live sessions, one week apart,

Unknown Speaker 17:00:09 for 97 Wow,

Robert Plank 17:00:12 that, that way there, there's time after the session to go and do your assignment, do your homework, get a book cover made, wait for it to get sent to you, and then the next get a little bit of a break. Next week, you jump in and get to the next step. Okay,

Speaker 1 17:00:26 love it amazing. I'm excited too to kind of go through this and and learn some I mean, we've put books together, but there's always things that I've not considered. There's ways to make it easier on yourself, like this book that I showed you earlier, this took me forever to put together. You know, four years ago, I agonized over this, and there was probably no reason to do so. The content inside could have been a lot easier, a lot simpler, and it would have gotten me the same effect that doing something just a lot, a lot simpler would have gotten me, and hopefully I can learn that even our book drew local media assets. Book took us a while to put together. It's very, I mean, it's simple, it's a it's a quick read, but yet it still took us forever to get together and actually, you know, make it available for everybody. We've

Drew Griffin 17:01:23 got no books. We've got other, yeah, it's gonna

Speaker 1 17:01:26 be right speed tomorrow. Speed to market is key, just getting shit done and

Robert Plank 17:01:31 and you'll be excited too, when you get these fast results. And the book wasn't a huge slog to get to, I mean, and I mean, it is tough to take action without a plan. I mean, imagine if you didn't know English, and all you have was the dictionary, and you just like flip to random words from the dictionary. It take your let's take 10 lifetimes just learn English versus if someone said, here are the basic beginner words, here's how here's what dog is, and here's what cat is, and here's how to do a simple sentence, then you would have more of a plan and as a little bit of a PS here like so this book that that drew was in some people paid as much as $975 per chapter. $975 where I met with them for 20 minutes interviewed, got the transcript made, and I think they got like, five copies of the regular book, and then five of the little one, and then they can order as many copies as they want. Lance and I are currently in the process of making a compilation book for some doctors, and with this, I think we've sold eight out of the 12 chapters, $7,500 a pop. And then a couple of them, because we raised the price, have paid $8,500 and that comes with, well, there's like, a really kind of high profile doctor, they're co authored with. So that's why the price is higher. And then 100 copies of this book, and then 100 copies of this, this size of the book, of like, you know, the one with them and that, and their face on the cover. So, I mean, there's all kinds of crazy stuff you can do, and especially if it's one thing to say, Okay, well, maybe, uh, maybe the pizza place, maybe they wouldn't want, like, a book that's all just there, just them, but some kind of profession that has a lot of clients coming in and out, doctor, dentist, chiropractor, if they had 100 copies of their books sitting in the office, if they gave a copy to every new patient, or if they had a stack of them sitting out on the coffee table, there's so many outside the box solutions, if only you You find the people who are paying you more money, right, and that, and that comes in twofold. That comes in with the compilation book, or even just if you or whatever you're using your business for, or whatever you're trying to move your business towards, if you have a book, you get those better customers, right. And again, whether it's local businesses or people who are hiring you for your agency stuff. I mean, book leads to better customers. I think,

Speaker 1 17:04:04 yeah, I just love, you know, I think a lot of us are doing local agency stuff. So first off, it's an amazing connection tool. If you want to do like a local podcast or interview series, and then create the book from the content from the interview or the podcast or whatever. That's an awesome way to just make the connection and friendship with the local business owner. On top of that, if you are offering specific services, so you're doing web design, or you're doing Google, my business stuff, or SEO, whatever it happens to be, write a process book about a specific part of that service that you sell, give everything up, you know, tell a local business owner exactly how to do a specific thing, step by step in that book and go out and give that out to people. Most nine times out of 10 the local business owners are still not going to understand even with a step by step process book. Or have the time to actually go and do this stuff themselves, and they'll contact you. Another great idea, which I think I'm going to use, is create a content guide for local business owners. They know they should be posting to social media, they know they should be making videos, but they don't know what to post and they don't know what to make videos about. So a book that has our business name on it, our phone number, pictures of Drew and I and inside might be, you know, 50 pages of different content, ideas for social media, and it just gives you an excuse to walk into a business and introduce yourself, shake the business owner's hand and give them something of value. That's what I mean. That's what I'm thinking of right now in terms of how we're probably going to use this. Drew 100%

Unknown Speaker 17:05:48 awesome stuff.

Speaker 1 17:05:49 Yeah, guys, I would jump on this for 97 bucks, four live sessions. You know, Robert's going to take you through the step by step process that they figured out over years on how to, you know, put these books together in a very easy way, without wasting time and figuring a lot of the bullshit out on your own. It's going to save you a lot of time, going to get you moving and actually doing it. That is the key. You can think about it all you want forever. It's a great concept, but if you don't actually go ahead and put the book together, it's useless. I would absolutely jump on this. It's an amazing offer from Robert and Lance and Robert. We thank you so much for coming out and sharing this with our group today.

Robert Plank 17:06:27 Happy to do it. People need to know this, especially LMA owners.

Speaker 1 17:06:32 I agree. I agree. It's just a fantastic opportunity. There's, there's literally a ton of ideas floating through my head, and I think there's just, there's, there's, there's so much opportunity out there to take advantage of this and use this strategy to increase our business, increase sales, help in prospecting and help with connections and relationships to local business owners. 1,000,000%

Drew Griffin 17:06:59 jump in on this. We're going to be jumping in it as well, so we're going to be attending and going along for the ride and with you. So let us know that you've picked this up. And we'd love to, you know, promote any books that you guys produce out of this book formula. Course, that's coming up, and can't wait to see everybody on the inside of this again. Head over to delicious marketing.io forward slash go forward slash book guys, the price of this is going to be increasing in just a few days, so get in on it while it's at its lowest price, and turn around and leverage this for your own businesses, especially in this downtime, nothing else to really do but write a book or two. So we'll see you on the inside of the book formula with Robert plank and Lance Tamashiro. And can't wait to see what you guys produce with this book. We're super grateful. Hopefully this is going to speed up our process of cranking out books left and right and yeah, we'll see you on the inside. Yeah.

Speaker 1 17:08:04 If you have any questions at all, need some clarification, Robert and Lance are in the group. They're happy to answer questions. Just make a post and tag those guys, and they're happy to answer questions. So are we. So guys, have a great rest of the day. Stay safe, get some work done, plan out the future, because all this BS is going to pass sooner or later, and let's be ready for when it does. Talk to you all soon.

Robert Plank 17:08:31 We really appreciate you listening to today's episode of marketer of the day. Subscribe to us on iTunes and rate and review us at marketer of the day.com/itunes, do.