Brad Costanzo on Life On Fire TV

Hey, what's going on? Nick Unsworth here. You're watching Life on Fire TV fired up to have my good buddy Brad Costanza here.

There we go.

That was the second take and the snap was just as good on the second one. So welcome to the show, man.

I appreciate it, brother.

Got a frosty beverage because it's past 5:00 clock and 5:00am that was the joke we had in the last one. But yes, it's anything past 5pm we're good for a beer. Absolutely. So we got a really great show here for you guys today because we're going to dive into, and by we're, I mean Brad is going to dive into techniques that you can use to grow your leads, grow your influence, and grow your revenues on Amazon. And so it's super innovative, super cool strategies that I'm excited to learn and then also just some mindset techniques that can really help you in your business. And you definitely want to hang on for this episode because Brad is a serial entrepreneur and online marketing expert. And this guy can help you take your business from wherever it is now to the next level. Hey, what's going on? Nick Unsworth here, and I'm a kick business coach and I'm on an absolute mission to help you find your purpose in life, to help you love what you do for work every single day, to help you be the rock star that you are meant to be, to make more money than you ever thought was possible, and to have more time, freedom, so you can actually enjoy the life that you're living. I'm here to help you set your life on fire.

All right, we're back.

Welcome back, welcome back. So, dude, great to have you on the show.

Appreciate it. My pleasure.

Awesome to have you on. So Brad and I are in a mastermind together and super cool. Basically, we have about 12 guys.

Yeah, 12.

12, 12 guys. I mean, just super talented, very successful online marketers and really business owners from, you know, quite a few different walks of life. And we meet up once a month and I mean, it's so powerful.

You know what blows me away? The fact that you. I was having this conversation earlier with some. Somebody who's kind of not in the entrepreneurial world. Yeah. And I mentioned the word mastermind because I was at a mastermind this week and they go, what's that? Literally, what's. They've. They haven't heard of it. And this happened several times. It's really. We take for granted the word mastermind is something that we're involved in a lot. Yeah, and we think, isn't everybody?

Yeah, I know. I forget too. You know, it's like a. Back home, like, oh, yeah, I was in a Mastermind last weekend and it's like, you know, aunts and uncles are like, what is Nick doing? He's in Masterminds.

Is that a cult?

Yeah. Yeah.

What is that?

But I mean, they're so powerful.

I mean, best things I've ever done.

You know, getting together once a month. I mean, with 12 guys, we're talking, we end up at 7:00'. Clock. And the format is really cool. I mean, we go and share the things that are working in each of our businesses and then share resources with each other and how, you know, what we can do to help each other. And I mean, from that one, you know, group alone, I mean, there's been. I've made extra money from it. I've gotten resources. I mean, you're always dropping resources in there and it's amazing. Yeah, get yourself in a Mastermind.

Number one thing that, you know, the relationships you develop and the resources you get, I mean, there's always somebody else who has the answer to your question.

Because they've been there, you know, so learning from their experiences. So definitely plug into a Mastermind and if you can't find one, Life on Fire. We've got amazing masterminds, so stay tuned for that. Stay plugged in, but cool. So here's what we're going to be talking about today. So you've got Brad here going to definitely just dive in and just pick your brain. And so we always like to think about Life on Fire as four pillars. We got mindset, marketing, networking and purpose. Perfect. So I think what we're gonna do is take the purpose side and we're gonna save that towards the end for your podcast and why you're making that pivot and that shift. But let's hear a little bit about, you know, before we dive into the pillars, a little bit about your background.

Sure.

You know, and just think, you know, less than five minutes, just bring us up to speed and kind of how you got to this point and how you sold the businesses.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, it was a. It's been a crazy ride. In the. The first part of my career, I was in sales, like financial services sales. I was a financial advisor, I was a consultant. I did commercial real estate consulting. And I liked the sales and the interaction and the aspect, but I didn't like the prospecting, the hustle. I didn't know anything about lead generation. It was just nose of the grindstone. And at the back In, I guess, 2007, I read the Four Hour Workweek, which has inspired many entrepreneurs, and I just said, this is. I got to figure this out. This is too cool. So nose back to the grindstone. Started a business publishing information online with a partner of mine, and we grew it to a nice six figure business. It was really pushing by publishing information.

Like, just give us a little bit of a dive on that. So were you the expert and they were taking your knowledge and putting it.

Out as a product and packaging it.

Or how else were you?

A little bit of both. On this one, I was the expert.

Okay.

And then the. Then I guess further versions of it where I would publish other people using my. Because now I had a list which is distribution and I had knowledge. So I would reach out to other experts and say, let me show you how you can get out there and do that. So they would create information that I.

Own and I would almost like publish them. Okay, cool.

And then that's one of the businesses that I sold. I started another business, a software company which is called Pig tones, stands for politically Incorrect GPS Tones. So we, we hired celebrity voice actors to create different voices, giving you turn by turn direction in your Garmin and Thompson. Oh, really? Yeah.

So that was kind of fun. Like Cartman and who was like a. The cool celebrity. They had his voice.

Oh, well, the. Our B. It was actually the characters, like Stewie from the Family Guy, but yeah, Sean Connery and so.

Oh, yeah, Sean Connery. Yeah. We might need to cut in a Sean Connery clip, right?

Yes. I'll play your game, you rogue. The key to it was I treated it as a marketing laboratory and just trying to figure out a little bit of everything out. I never held myself out as an expert in anything. And the funniest thing is one of the very first products I ever did had to do with magic tricks, like bar tricks. And I just wanted to figure out if I could sell something online. And I fell in love with the process of selling online and creating systems and things like that. So I collected a lot of knowledge.

Know how to do the bar tricks or did you sell courses?

Yeah, well, I sold courses on it and I knew how to do a handful of them. But then I. I decided I wanted to look. I saw a little opportunity in the market, so I wanted to learn more. So I went out and learned them and I retaught them.

Oh, really?

Yeah, so. And I realized, yeah, exactly.

Take what. What's. What's out there and don't copy, but look at your competitors and you can create a business.

So there is a. One of my favorite books. I wish I would have come up with this name. I would wear it on a shirt. But it's borrowing brilliance. There's a name of a book, okay. It's really about how to stand on the shoulders of giants and. And get. Take the inspirations from other people in different areas to solve any problem. Like, I'm gonna borrow the brilliance of you from this to this. And sometimes you can create something brand new, even though it's not original. Totally copying. But there aren't. There aren't that many original ideas out there. And it's how you package them. So to kind of continue on, the long story short, I built that business, I sold that business. And then about a year and a half ago, okay, both of them. And then when I moved out here to sunny San Diego from Dallas, Texas, and in the meantime, I had been doing a lot of consulting with friends and other entrepreneurs and various areas. And one of them, I noticed, had a big health following. Health and fitness. And he had information products. And he had this little orphan book out on Amazon, Kindle. And that was it. And I realized that he wasn't really making any sales. At the same time, I had this epiphany that if I'm looking for free information, I go to Google. How do I do this? When I intend to buy information, I go to one place, Amazon. When I'm there, nobody's there.

Looking for buying. Search bar. You know, it's your Google for buying.

Amazon doesn't give you anything for free. You have to buy everything there, Right? So it was this epiphany that, like, this is where people are buying information. Why am I not publishing there? So I dove deep in trying to understand everything about Amazon publishing and I republished this book, relaunched it. He had 45 sales in six months doing it himself. So we relaunched it. It became the number one book in health and fitness for like two or three weeks running, still just a perennial bestseller. And it's led to everything from an enormous growth in his business just off of Amazon. It led to an infomercial. It led to. Yeah, it led to some physical products and it led to a lot of other things because you're able to capitalize on the credibility of being a number one bestseller over here because. But that's not the end goal. The end goal is how that fits into your overall marketing strategy.

Huge.

Yeah. So to kind of finalize this, what the other areas I've been doing is working with entrepreneurs in everywhere from real estate, software, financial information, you name it, some online, some offline, and helping them, number one, license both their own content to other people and allow other people the right to use it. Okay to, to rent it per se as well as.

Dude, sir, you're like Mr. Wonderful.

I am Mr. Wonderful, but that's kind of one of my passions is really understanding the borrowing brilliance and leveraging what other people are doing to find kind of the shortcuts. Because I am lazy when it comes to doing all the hard work. I always look for the shortcuts.

Well, anything after 5:00am is, I mean, duty hours, you know, so that's.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, that's awesome. And that's a very inspiring story. I mean, I think what's so cool is, you know, it's reading a book. The Four Hour Work Week set you off, right? You know, and for me, that book was Rich Dad, Poor dad, you know, in college. And that set me off. And I just want to just encourage and challenge you that, you know, what is the book for you if you haven't, you know, if you still have a job or you feel like you're doing something that you don't love, then stay plugged in on our podcast. You're going to hear about Brad's podcast, but surround yourself with a positive content, find that book, be a voracious reader, and then, you know, find that book or topic or podcast that makes you want to just pop off and go that direction. Because your story's crazy. I mean, it's. I think what's so cool is it's starting by looking at what's out in the industry and then modeling. And then you took what was something that wasn't working for that client and then you created a case study. So a lot of what I'm always talking and teaching is like you've got to first create a case study for you to then become the expert on Amazon. You know, he didn't just come out and say he was an expert, it was, wow, I see an opportunity. That's where people are buying. You identified it, you did the research, you then proved it by getting a case study. You saw that crazy, crazy amount of success that resulted from one book and that packaging, that success story is now something that you can use value based pricing on, you can charge. If all that happened to that one client and that made hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars for them, that's worth 50 grand, that's worth 30 grand.

And what's cool is I've never. Although I still publish occasionally, I don't. I'm very picky about it because Amazon is not the end goal, but it is still one of the best foots in the door for other consulting relationships, which is what I really love. And that's where I say, well, let's take a look at your overall funnel and what you're doing. And let's see, does this have a place? And if it has a place in there, not only can I get the book written for them and do all the other stuff, whether they want to write it or utilize my resources, but now we've got a working relationship with. I could specialize in one little area. It opens the door for a lot of other places. So if people are worried about, like, if you want to do consulting or work with others, I'm not big enough to get in there. You don't have to be an expert in everything. Be an expert in one little thing, jam yourself in the door, become invaluable, and now you're trusted and like, okay, well, what else can you do Right there.

That is huge. Because, you know, I come back to narrowing your niche. And it's like when I think, when I hear your name and I think of you, I think of Amazon. And I know that you do way more than that, but that's a very valuable thing to have that mind share in my mind and in the minds of lots and lots of people. And that's the same thing that I did when I went to a Mastermind event that we're talking about in the beginning. And Eben Pagan just came back and said, you've got to narrow your niche. If you're a social media marketing expert, you're nothing in everyone's mind. Versus I became a Facebook marketing expert. And he was like, nick, Facebook, boom. Brad, Amazon. And again, it's that foot in the door. And so for you guys, if you can take what it is that you're passionate about, and just when you think that you've got it, just challenge yourself to narrow it down one more step. And one more step, because the more narrow it is, the more you're going to be able to build up that expertise even faster.

Just to kind of punctuate that, I read a great book. If you're in the world of direct marketing and you haven't read Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson. It's amazing. And in there. So Michael Masterson is a. He's one of the heads of one of the largest direct response companies. 8 Figure 9 Figure, I believe a nine figure business called Agora Publishing. And in it, huge. Yeah, they do a lot of newsletters and publications and front end products and back end marketing. But he says something I'll never forget. Which is your cheapest product, your lowest end, foot in the door, whether it's an ebook or whatever, has to be the tip of your spear. Has to be the sharpest, most cutting edge, most amazing thing. But it's your cheapest, it's your lowest end. But it's the rest of the things that, where you make all the money. The back end can be generic. So they may sell an amazing report for, you know, $47 or whatever on something nobody else is talking about. Yeah. And the upsells and the continuity is something maybe everybody else is talking about. But it's that, it's that tip of the spear that people go, I need to have that. So in a lot of ways I used Amazon as the tip of my spear. And then they got to work with me like, whoa, you can do this, you can do this.

I was like, yeah, I got talents.

And you know. Yeah. So I highly recommend having one specialty, if nothing else.

Yeah. Narrowing it down, having one specialty. I'm definitely gonna check out that book. Cause I haven't read it yet. I've heard lots of good things, so it's gonna get added to the queue.

Don't get me on book recommendations.

We're gonna pick, we're gonna definitely have that come out at the end. Because I know that you're well read and I love that you study NLP and things like that. So. And I think while we're kind of on this section, I think we should just stay and dive into the marketing pillars. So as far as the book publishing. So if you're going to explain to me as a guy that I haven't done a best. I haven't done a book yet. It is something that I've talked with my Cannings about. I'm doing some stuff with him and I know that it's going to help me go to the next level. And I know that for you guys to get this content from Brad, no matter what I love is that you can just take something that you love to do. Take a passion. That's what Life on Fire is about, is taking something that you love to do, put it into a book that could be the front end, the tip of your spear and then boom, you could then evolve and sell other products.

And services after the fact.

For someone that is a noob, that's A newbie. As far as creating a book, what are the steps? How do you go through that?

So the number one thing, well, first of all, there's creating a book for yourself, which, what do they say, the cobbler has no shoes or something? I don't even have my own book yet. It's still in process, which is really. It's ironic, however, is decide do you want to book for yourself? Are you trying to build your credibility or do you want to do it more as a service for other people? And I went the route of working with other people, so there's two ways, but I'll quickly cover both. So depending on where you're starting, this really all matters. If you've already got a business, if you've already got other products or things that you offer people, one of the best things in the world you could do is take that, repurpose some of what you've got into a book. People who've got online courses, podcasts. Podcasts, absolutely. That's one of the best things, is to repurpose your podcast content as a book. You transcribe it. You use a developmental editor, which is different than a proofreading editor, because a developmental editor, they're the ones who, they're kind of a writer and art, but they just want to really dive into it.

They can take something like a webinar recording or something that's really janky and turn it into something nice, something that you'd be proud of.

So one of my second books called Reverse Wholesaling by Kent Clothier, who's currently one of my top clients, you know him as well. He came to me because he heard about my success with Drew, my very first client on in the Amazon world. Yeah, Cannoli. So he said, what can you do for me? He goes, I don't want to sit down and write a book. I go, well, do you have any other content out there that is really highly valuable? And he said, take a look at this webinar. It was maybe a two hour webinar on how to wholesale real estate. So I took a look at it. It was really good content and I had it transcribed. I sent it to my developmental editor and I said, I want you to keep this in conversational format, such as a, you know, it's a dialogue. And what we're going to do, we're going to clean it up and take out the ums and the ahs and the conversational nuances and send it to the editor on Elance or odesk. They cleaned it up and then on Amazon, we positioned it as. And if you go to reverse wholesaling on Amazon, you'll read this book is a formatted transcript of a highly, you know, highly exclusive video training on how to do this. So every, every person who purchases this book also gets free access to the accompanying video training.

Oh, that's brilliant. That's so smart.

Right? So we just, we took the webinar, we sold it. You know, we sell the book for $2.99. I believe it may change now, but in essence we repurposed what he's got and we, we didn't position it as this is a book book. It's, this is a highly valuable transcript of video training. And because we put it out there, people loved it. $2.99.

So are you finding that a lot of people are buying that just to get the actual footage?

I don't know what their intent, but a lot of people buy it. And what's great is we don't do any really internal or external marketing. It's just out there. And the cool thing about Amazon and itunes, podcasts, whatever is success is sticky. So if you do an initial push and you get the rankings up there, people see it on the top of the charts, they go, I'm going to buy that again. There have been some studies and I don't have the exact figure or who did it, but I'll say they, on.

The Internet they're always, you know, must be true.

Yeah, but that, but we've seen this in our business, which is the, the customers who find you through a book, especially probably a podcast as well. Even though the book may be the cheapest thing you ever offer, the lifetime value of that client is two or three times as high as somebody who comes in through your squeeze page or somewhere else. Because the credibility that, oh my God, I bought this guy's book and I bought Versus.

I came in on some lead page, you know. Yeah. I mean it's so cool that Mike Koenigs, who's in our mastermind, I mean he's always coming back and saying that. I mean his, some of his highest quality leads are all coming through his books and he's got his system.

There's something that does to you when you buy the book, especially if it's a physical book, whether Kindle physical and like, oh my God, I'm gonna find out what else this author has and you have this kind of halo effect over you.

Sure.

Because you've got that third party endorsement of somebody like Amazon and you Know, we didn't really talk about this. People may not know. You know, if you gave me a PDF right now and we wanted to publish a book on Amazon, you know what it would cost you? Nothing, Nada. Amazon is revolutionized, really, the world of publishing, because they make anybody. Anybody can publish for free, and not everybody can publish well for free and have results. But you could, if you write up a 15 page the Word document, convert it to PDF, absolutely. You could upload a Word document and publish it, and within 24 hours, it'll likely be live. Wow. It's crazy. Now, what my clients work with me for on that is to do it well and to really propel it up the ranks and to engineer a lead flow from the book to get into the rest of their funnel to buy more stuff.

Cool. So what I'm picking up on this is that basically for someone that drills down on what their passion is, what they love to do, and they're clear and they've got their target market, they've got their. They narrowed their niche and then sounds like you can take content you repurpose. So if you have podcast episodes, if you have webinars that you've done or training programs, I mean, shoot. Sounds like with your resources, you could easily just create a product out of stuff you've already done, make it simple. Or you could actually just go and create your own book. And then that serves as that head of that tipping point or the tip of the spear. And so once that's done, you know, there's some techniques, I'm assuming, to then get it to rank. So it sounds like in my head, is there getting it to rank on Amazon from the way that you structure the description and things like that. Yeah.

Optimizing like a launch.

Okay.

Absolutely. The nice part is you don't have to write a sale long sales page. You want to keep it short and punchy, maybe three or four paragraphs at the most, really, on Amazon, because people, if it's a good cover and a good title and a good description and people are interested in it, though, chances are they'll buy it and. And then the promotion of it is everything. If you already have a list, that's the best thing you can do. Promote it to your list. You control the prices and everything else. You made me think of something about just creating the books. So this is one of my fun little strategies that I think people like. So I mentioned earlier something about licensing content, Right. So one of my clients, I'm not gonna mention the name. I had an Idea. So most people have probably heard of ghostwriters, right? So that's like if you didn't want to write a book and you hired me as a writer or some other writer to write it. And typically it's a one time fee or sometimes you pay like a percent or two to the ghostwriter if they do a good job. But you own everything, right. You're just paying for a service. So I did kind of a reverse ghost writing thing. I don't know anybody else who's done this necessarily, but I'm sure it's been done. And this truly is a licensing which is just the rights to market somebody else's information. So I had an idea for a book and I but I have no following in this area. So I wrote, I came up with a great title and I wrote the book and then I hired another writer to come in and clean it up and make a really good book. But now it's this book in a certain area that I've got no expertise, no platform, no ability to really get it out there.

Sure.

So I went to an expert who had a very big following in this niche and genre and I said, by the way, I've done this a few times. And I said, how would you like to have a best selling book on Amazon and not do a thing?

Wow.

I go, what?

That would be nice. Well, I'm hoping this story has to do with me. I'm hoping you're like, here's your book.

Right. Well, so what happened is I had the expertise, I had the content. What I didn't have was I didn't have a recognizable name or distribution list. So I said, what I'll do is I'll pay you 20% and all I want to do is put your name on it.

So.

XYZ Book Social Media Marketing by Nick Unsworth. Let's just say I was gonna do it like that. It's a great book. I let you read it. You' that's good. I would put my name on that if you let me. Great. I'm gonna let you. Social Media Marketing 101, whatever by Nick Unsworth. And now I'm gonna give it to you. You only thing you have to do is promote it to your list and be proud of it. So now that you're the ability for your list to buy the book gets it way up there. I own 80% of that. I own the copyrights, I pay you a royalty, I pay you a license.

Flip it around.

Right. So as opposed, it's a reverse Ghostwriting, I wrote it leveraging your distribution and your brand in order to get more buyers. So I've done that several times. And that what's nice is like the person in your position, the gloves to do anything. It helps you. And at the same time, I get all the income for doing the work one time. Right. And that's something else people can do.

Yeah. So what I'm pulling out of that is, I mean, it's basically like you've got, you know, writing a book for yourself or your own business, you know, elevates your brand, your positioning, all that good stuff in having something that's in the book, a call to action. So I write a book on Facebook advertising. And I explained that throughout the book, that they can get the video series or that they can get a complimentary training or whatever that may be, takes them from the physical book out of the book into my marketing funnel, builds my email list. And those are strong leads. But what you're describing here too is that you can actually use this to build a business.

Right.

And by the way, you're the guy building a business around.

Correct. Now, in this area, what I did with him, and this can be done in any way, the leads that come in go to his funnel because he gets the market to him. But they come in hard coded with my affiliate link, which for people who don't know that just means if they come in and they buy anything, I get credit for it. So I make a lot of money throughout his funnel as well. And if I wanted to, I could change the name. Maybe I'd want to pay him a little extra royalty instead of 20. Maybe I pay him 25%, but I keep the leads and I can continue to market to them. I could also co brand it so that it's you and me. Social media marketing with Nick Unsworth and Brad Castanzo. If I was trying to build my.

Name, you could easily step into a niche like that. Yep.

So that's what that's ultimate leverage. When I talked about I like shortcuts, I'm lazy. Yeah, it's not really being lazy. It's just trying to find smarter, working.

A little bit smarter faster.

Right. And you know that you mentioned one of the pillars of the show is mindset as well. So one of the. This is one of the things I'm most proud of that really helps me is whenever I'm trying to solve a business problem, I ask myself three and a half questions. So there's a who question, a what question, a what if question. And a why not question. So it's who else has what I need or who else needs what I have? What if. And then this is the brainstorming. We combine and do all of these things. What if? There could be a hundred different options, but what if we do something together that I couldn't have done on my own? Then the last question is the why not of is there any reason that this wouldn't work? But the who else has what I need and who else needs what I have is so powerful because in this situation, you have an audience and a brand. I have content. You don't want to write the content. I've got it.

It's a pain in the neck.

Yep.

Yeah.

So what if we combine forces? Why not? Well, there's, there's no reason why not push forward.

Yeah. It's like if I don't have to invest my time into writing the book and doing all the legwork, it's like it to me. It's additional revenue anyway.

Absolutely.

You know, and for both profiting from it, it's a good deal. So I think, I mean, I love that this is not only, you know, for some of that, that is looking for a business. I mean, you could, you could take these strategies and actually use them for someone else, use them for yourself. And then you could, like you're doing, I mean, license, do license deals and create a business out of it. Tell us about the launch process. So let's just say, for example, you know, you've got a passion that you, you've got a passion that you've identified, you want to, you know, build out a business and a brand or you've already got that established, you wanted to take it to the next level. And then how would you help them or give them strategies to get the best seller? Okay, so how easy is it?

So a lot of how easy is it depends on who you are starting off. So if you are brand new and you're coming out of nowhere and you're trying to launch your own book with no list, no expertise or nothing, it's going to be a lot harder. I mean, you're going to have to do a lot more work, you're going to have to do some advertising, build some relationships and it's hard to do, you know, get somebody else to promote, hey, my brand new book, will you promote it? It's selling for $2.99.

What's in it for me?

You'll make a nickel, you know, so you better have some good relationships to do that. That is A harder route. So in cases like that, I would probably do one of the things I said before, which is maybe piggyback off of somebody else at first in order to build your name, build it up right and then. But if you're starting with your own, the launch process, really, it starts internally and it is, you want to start to build up the pressure with your own list. Let them know you're writing a book, give them, what do you call it? Like, give them sneak peek copies, ask for feedback, make them opt in, say, I'm gonna give you one chapter at a time, give me feedback. And if you can really engage and enlist your tribe in the creation of it with you, they'll feel like they're part of it. So when you open the doors, they're going to probably go buy it first and review it. So Amazon, especially just like itunes, really, reviews are very, very important. Amazon, it's not only good for people to see it, like, oh, okay, it's well reviewed, I'll buy it. But Amazon will put it up the ranks higher and higher. Same thing happens with itunes. Which is why you need to review this show, Life on Fire. Yes, but it is important and it's no fun to ask for reviews, but sometimes you have to do it and you have to ask your friends and your families, guys, go review this. Give me an honest review.

It's a favor at some point. Yeah, it's a little bit of a favor. And one of the things that we did on the podcast launch is we gamified it. So anyone that wrote a review for our show and then they sent an email to support LifeOnFire, boom, they got a raffle ticket and then we did some really cool prizes and stuff. But yeah, writing reviews is so key.

It's so important. And then beyond that, beyond promoting it to your list, doing a big launch strategy, coupla create prizes. We've done that. If you, if you leave a review, it can be a one star, a five star review, it doesn't really matter, but leave a review, send us an email, let us know you did. You'll be entered into a raffle to win xyz. It can be really, really helpful reaching out to other bloggers and other voices of influence, peeling apart. Take a chapter out of your book and maybe turn it into an article and submit it. Maybe you're covering social media and a lot of other different things at Life on Fire. And if one of my chapters really appeals to you, build a relationship with you, ask if you can guest post, guest blog on there Give you a book, a copy of the book to read, and it gives you content for your people. And it, you know, and it. There's a. There's some hustle involved, especially on getting it up there. Depending upon how big your list is, several of the people I've worked with have started from scratch. Several of the people I've worked with, about 100,000 plus list makes it a lot easier.

Right.

But there's always. If you ask yourself that, who else needs what I have? Who else has what I need? You can solve a lot of problems if you network and build the right relationships that, you know, can help, you know, leverage their influence.

Okay, and then how about for. So let's just say with the launch process, basically you've got. Whether you have an email list or whether you don't, you know, you get. You basically you've got a. Sounds like the leverage points are kind of like a podcast. We've got reviews is definitely a big thing, but what about what kind of volume do you need to do to break bestseller?

Okay.

Now I know that there's tons of different categories and stuff, but like. And then, you know, and is it legitimately a best seller, you know?

Yes. So that this is the interesting part and I don't want to give away the secrets, but I will.

So it's the tip of the spear.

True.

So that's why we have beers today, is because I know he's got loosening me up.

What did you put in there?

Shot of whiskey, please.

Exactly. So the interesting part about Amazon on bestseller. So there's. There's an overall Amazon number one Amazon bestseller is pretty darn good. I mean, you're making a lot of money, but that's your Harry Potters and things like this, right?

Gary Vaynerchuk, man, Amazon bestseller is really, really good.

You're making a lot of money. You got to sell a lot of those. It's not like New York Times bestseller, which is maybe 10 to 50 times that. However, the importance of a New York Times bestseller is now starting to decrease. Before it was a huge badge, now just bestseller. Amazon bestseller is way up there, right? Especially with the public's perception. So Joe Plummer out, you know, in middle America sees Amazon best sellers, just sees bestseller, and it still carries a lot of weight. And that's great. Now there's overall Amazon bestseller, then there's category bestseller. So maybe it's, you know, there's Amazon all books and then business books, maybe the number one best seller in business books. But maybe you're in sales. So it's business. Sales is under business. Right. So you may be the number one selling sales book. Number 73 in business overall and number 1073 in Amazon overall.

Sure.

But because you're number one seller in Amazon business sales, you can claim bestseller. The other thing is, there's no bestseller police, like in New York Times, there's bestseller. Like, they probably watch that if you're claiming bestseller. There's a lot of history behind that. Anybody truly could say you're an Amazon bestseller. You really could, because you could have been at one time. Not all the books that, you know, I've published and I've got, I think, at least about eight of them, and they've all been bestsellers. Some of them still are, but some of them aren't. But we still get. The author still gets to claim I'm an Amazon best seller.

Because you hit the chart.

We hit it and we took a screenshot of it. And that's really proof. Yeah, that's really all that matters. So it's not number one. It's not as hard as it looks because you don't have to have as many sales.

And so, like, so for just for, you know, perspective, like, let's just say you're in, you know, within business, there's subcategories, and then someone wants to be the number one best seller in sales.

Yeah.

You know, what would it like?

A total rough estimate. So, interestingly, Amazon and I think itunes is the same way, loves momentum. So let's just say you get a thousand sales over the course of a few hours, you'll be number one. Boom. And now you may only last for a few hours. It may only last for a day. You're the number one best seller. Take your screenshot. Right.

Yeah. So you got to kind of watch that pretty closely.

Right. Because it can spike and it can be up there for a while. So this all really depends, but if you can get everybody buying your book at once, then. And that's why the whole launch process, you open the doors, guys, it's ready. Go.

Today, today.

Get it today. Even if you don't read it till next month, get it today. And you control the price. So you can drop the price way down. You may want to sell your book for nine, $10, but on the day of launch, you sell it for 99 cents. If it's a Kindle and you just drop the price to encourage as many people to buy it as quick as possible, it pumps it up. Because Amazon doesn't look at price. It Just looks at how many are you selling. Quantity only. Wow. So you're all the way up there now. By the time you've hit that, you can increase the price and hopefully you're gonna stay.

And what's the benefit of increasing the price? I mean, obviously there's a revenue opportunity.

To make more money as well as.

But is it sounds like the back end is where all the money is. So, like it's the offers in the book. So what's your take on the balance between raising the price? Is it to make it look normal like the other books, or is it, you know, raise the price because of a revenue opportunity?

So it all depends. Yeah. I don't typically look at it as a revenue opportunity until you get to the point where you're making, you know, let's just say you're doing a minimum of $10,000 in royalties a month, which we got a handful of books that are doing that, but yeah, and those are. Those are a lot of fun to get through Amazon. Yeah. So the strategy there, though, is if you are trying to promote yourself as a. Like, this is my big book. Like, this is my thing. And you're selling it for $2.99. Well, on Kindle. Or if you're selling it for real cheap, it can potentially cheat the look of it.

Yeah.

But not always. So some of my favorite books out there right now are selling like the physical copy is like $5.99. You can sell those on Amazon, same thing as Kindle. It works the exact same way. The author has said, I don't really care about making money on this. I just want everybody to get it, to have it. There's.

So if you take that position, you can make it work. It's like, I just want to give and give right now.

There's another. There's another strategy. And this is kind of a fun tweak. And it'd be too hard to go into the exact strategy of how to do it, but it does exist. You can trick Amazon into permanently pricing your book for free, your Kindle book, giving it away. The short part of it is it's the Amazon price match. So if you're giving it away, if you're selling it somewhere else for free, it's like smashwords.com is one. I've done this. So I publish it on smashwords.com for $0, and then I published it on Amazon for, let's just say, 99 cents. And me, my family, my friends just kept on going back to Amazon and they have a little button Says, let us know of a lower price. We just kept on letting them know, hey, it's being sold cheaper over here. And cheaper is $0. It took a couple months, but Amazon took our book and priced it for free. They go, you're gonna give it away over there? You're gonna give it away over here. That's great. The whole goal was to give it away on Amazon, but because now we went from selling like 50 copies a month or whatever, it was a really niche market, this is why we did this, to getting like 1600 downloads a month. Because people are like, crap, it's free. I'm gonna grab it and then you're gonna get a lot more.

More leads and action, right?

And then there's another book that I love and everybody should read this. It's a free book. It's on Kindle. It's called the Flinch, I believe Flinch or Flinch. And I love. There's like one line, book description says, a book so, so important we refuse to charge for it. And it's awesome and I love it. So you get in there and then you get a great line, right? And by the way, it was, it was one of Seth Godin's. He published it as part of his projects. And I think it was Julian Smith. It was the author. It was an amazing book. A book so important we refuse to charge for it, gets everybody indoctrinated into his line of thinking. And then it sends people into the.

Sends them into the marketing funnel. And so how about. So with that strategy, with the free strategy or even the lowering the price, it sounds like you want to launch and have a multi pronged approach. So you want to have your own email list or your own network, friends, family, everyone buying the book on the same day to spike up the charts so that you can be a best seller. You want to corral and network with other people and do joint ventures, whatever you have to do to get as many books sold in a short period of time as possible.

Absolutely.

Now, outside of that, it sounds like that there's people that are just downloading those books or they're buying them on a regular basis. So tell us about what do you do for keywords or for the description on these books so that people will always find them.

So how do you get your book.

To rank up on Amazon?

Cool. So it's not that hard to do. It depends on what area you're in. So the title of your book is really important. So you don't want to keep keyword stuff, your title, but if you can get some keywords in there or put it in the subtitle. It helps because that's the most important thing. I mean, it's really just putting the keywords you want to be found for if somebody are typing those in.

So if it's a book on Facebook advertising, you kind of want to like, you know.

Yeah. And I might put something about Facebook advertising secrets, blah, blah, blah, like make something kind of catchy that people are gonna. It's gonna sound like a real book versus just how to advertise on Facebook. You know, that's gonna be. Gonna be boring. But Facebook advertising for the, you know, for a certain market or for whatever. Phenomenal.

For a certain niche.

Right, Exactly. So that. That really helps. And then in the. In the description, you don't want to keyword stuff too much, but you want to use your primary keywords. And. And then they have.

So primary keywords for anyone that's not familiar. I mean, that would just be what, you know, might be searching. Yeah.

What people might be searching for in order to find your book. So if I type in Facebook advertising on the. Come across yours. If I type in how to, you know, paid advertising, PPC advertising, stuff like that, they may want to come across.

Facebook and then something about like the overall flow of the book. So I've heard differing opinions. So let's just say, for example, you know, a how to book. So just think about Facebook advertising. On one hand. Let's call it option A. Yeah. Is a how to book where it's literally screen captures in its how to advertise on Facebook. And it walks through examples of. There would be a case study. Sure. But it's literally how to actually do it versus the other one, which would be more about the what. And it's more about what's possible.