Stefan Pylarinos: Passive Income From Self Publishing

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This is Ryan Daniel Moran and you're listening to Freedom Fasting. On today's episode, we're extremely fortunate to be joined by Stephanie. He is an expert at self publishing, the Kindle platform, on Amazon.com on today's show, we talk about how having a book is easier than ever. That sounds like a difficult task, and it used to be. But in today's era where we can self publish and put money on a platform like Amazon.com, it's actually extremely easy. Stefan also talks about how that platform can result in massive income, even if you're writing about something that you know nothing about. And furthermore, we go into talking about using Kindle Publishing as a way to spread your message. So if you've got a passion or you're interested in something and you've got an message that you want to spread, how Kindle Publishing can be the platform to do that. Finally, we talk about how to use it as a launching path for a real business and a passive income stream.

That can make a lot of money.

For a very long time. Stefan has published over 100 books, many of them on topics that he knows nothing about, and he makes a passive income from that system. And we talk in depth about exactly how to do that on today's show. What I really like about this episode is that we talk about two things that are at the very core of what Freedom Fast Lane is all about. It's about passive income and it's about following your passions. And if that's something that lights you up like it does myself and a lot of my listeners, then you'll definitely want to go to our blog, freedomfastlane.com and enter in your best email address. You want to pay special attention to the videos and the free newsletters that we put out about turning your passions into profits. Because using a platform like Kindle Publishing is a great addition to the strategies that we talk about. Taking something that you're really interested in or passionate about and turning it into a full time income. We have one training we call the Six Figure Blogging class, which is about having a simple business around something that you're really passionate about or something that you're just interested in and want to learn more about, and building that into a wildly successful income that allows you to spend your time doing exactly what it is that you love. And Stefan goes into exactly how to take the information highway of Amazon.com and spread a message and have a long term passive income that will last for years. And the opportunity is only getting bigger. So I'm very excited to present this to you. So let's go into today's show.

Hey, everybody, this is Ryan Moran and today we're joined by a friend of mine and also a publishing juggernaut who is a well sought after coach. He's also a blogger at Project Life Mastery, and he is changing lives all over the world with his knowledge in not only mastering many things about life in general, but getting really specific on getting your message out there, getting paid to spread it, and living a life that's extraordinary. We're joined by Stefan Polarnos. Stefan, thanks for hanging out with us.

Thank you for having me, Ryan.

Stefan, we've known each other for a while now, and I've always been impressed in the way that you go about life's challenges and taking life by the horns and making it your own. And I know recently you've been really focused on spreading your message and helping other people spread their messages through.

A channel that's really new to the world of self digital publishing through a publisher like Amazon.com and you've done it many times successfully, and you're teaching other people to do it. Why don't you give us some insight into why this channel is becoming so big and what the opportunity looks like?

Yeah, you know, well, first I'll mention I've done Internet marketing for a few years now, and I've experimented with a lot of different methods out there. You know, I have my own products, I have done affiliate marketing. You know, I have my blog, projectlifemastery.com I have my YouTube channel, my podcast, just like you. But I found that Amazon was just a huge marketing opportunity to really get my message out there and reach more people, especially with the way the world has been going. I think the world has been, you know, we consume information more in digital formats now. More and more people have their iPads and iPhones and Kindle devices, and in the States they have the Nook, and here in Canada they have the Kobo. And so more and more people are getting away from physical paperback books. And I just thought that Kindle was an incredible opportunity to reach more people with the content and the message that I have. And what I originally started doing with Kindle actually was I started taking content that I already had created on my blog. So, for example, my blog, I have blog posts and videos about my morning ritual and how I set goals for my life and juicing and meditation, all that kind of stuff. And I actually started taking that content, rewriting it and putting them into Kindle books and Just using some of the content and the information I've already created just to reach more and more people. And it's just been an incredible medium, and I think it's just a huge, growing trend. I think over the next five or ten years, physical paperback books are going to be more and more extinct.

And Kindle ebooks outsell paperback books by far now. So I think it's just a great way to reach a lot of people, share your message and make money at the same time.

I'm reminded of when I was in college and I wrote my first ebook, which I sold as a product, and my roommate and I were talking about it, and he said, do you think that ebooks would ever take over physical books? And I was like, no, that's impossible. That would never happen. Because at the time, there was just laptops, you know, there was no iPad, there was no Kindle, there was no Nook. And now that we have those, the market is exploding for digital books. But the question always comes up, okay, great. I have a message I want to share with people. I have something I want to get out there, but I don't want to write a book, Stefan. So how can this possibly benefit me?

Yeah, totally. Well, I think there's really two ways of going about it. You could write your own book, which I've done and have succeeded with, but I've also outsourced many of my books. I've actually over 100 Kindle books published now to date, and a lot of them I outsource. And I was able to find writers inexpensively that can put together my message and write a really quality book and publish that up on Kindle. And I could focus more of my efforts on the marketing the book and everything. In fact, I have a friend that I've been coaching, and he's a horrible writer. He hates writing English is his second language and everything. But he's actually a really good speaker and communicator. And what I told him to do was to make a video or just an audio recording of a lot of content that he had on a specific subject because he's an expert in health and weight loss and all that kind of stuff. So I told him just to record something, and then with that recording, send that to a writer. And there's a lot of writers that you can hire. We can go into more specifics of that. But he found different writers that could write the book for him. And in that way, it was still his message and information. He was able to leverage himself.

And create a quality book out of that. So I found a lot of people that they're not good writers. I have one client who is dyslexic and he can't even write the descriptions for his Kindle book. He outsources everything. There's a lot of different ways around it. And that's a great thing about the Internet is it's very easy to outsource things and find other people in different parts of the world that are better at you at specific things and get them to do that for you inexpensively.

Okay, and when you say inexpensively, how inexpensively does it cost to get a book written about us?

Right. Well, there's different price points based on the quality that you're looking for. A lot of my books are all nonfiction books. And so they're not, you know, people are more interested in the factual information, the how to. And so I found that I've been able to outsource those types of books more inexpensive than a fiction book, because with a fiction book, people want more of a story, want to be more engaged. And so with fiction books, the way that I first started was I found companies that could outsource and write a book for me for as low as $22 for an ebook. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but a lot of the books that I would publish would be fairly short books. So they would be around 15 or 20 pages. And I'd start selling them anywhere from about $2.99 and Amazon would pay me a 70% royalty. And so with a 20 page book.

People weren't really expecting to pay a lot of money for 299 or anything like that in terms of the price point of a book and everything. I started out with that and I was able to get a fairly good quality book and then proofread it, format it myself. Eventually what I started doing was investing a little bit more time and money into my books to make them more and more better quality. But you can start off just for a fairly inexpensive book for as low as $22. And there's great companies out there like epicwrite.com or fweeze.com, f w e e z.com you can even, for example, hire article writers for you. You can come up with a structure of a book, let's say it has five different chapters and you just come up with the titles for the chapters and you go and buy five or 10 articles and you can turn that into a Kindle book and publish it as well. So that's. So yeah, I Mean, if you're looking more for a low end book, and I always say to people too, start off. Generally, this is how I started off, was just with shorter type books. And then once the book starts selling and making money and I've validated it as a market, therefore, then invest more time and money into improving that book, making it longer and better quality. And when you have a longer book, let's say you eventually make that book a 50 page book or 100 page book. @ that point you could also sell it for more money as well. And so I started off just making my books inexpensively and then just going from there and just always had the mindset of just improving my books and making them more and more better.

Quality. You just blew my mind a little bit because my first book was 60 or 70 pages, its first draft was 60 or 70 pages. And I did, I've done exactly what you talked about. After I got feedback, I went back, improved it, made it better. I had no idea that you could take a 15 to 20 page book and publish it and sell it on a place like Amazon and get huge exposure for that. But it makes sense for a, you see $1.99, $3.99 books all the time on Amazon. So. And when I buy them, I don't expect them to be super long. I expect them to be short. In fact, when I buy a book, I would rather it be really short so that I get the major idea and I'm done and I don't have to sit there and read a bunch of stories that are gonna take hours for me to digest. So I actually appreciate it when they're shorter. But now I have the question, Stefan, is if I publish a book that's $2.99 and I'm getting 70% of that, it's about 2 bucks, where's the money gonna come from? Why would I spend all this time to make a book that I'm gonna sell for three bucks and make two off.

Of? Yeah, and before I answer that, let me just go back for a second here and just mention that people actually, like you said, prefer books to be shorter. And this blew my mind as well, that people more prefer buying like a series of books. Meaning, you know, I know one friend, he didn't experiment. He just had a general online marketing book and that did okay for him. But he found that actually taking that long book that was 100 pages, but instead of creating smaller, five smaller ebooks from that, for example, breaking down the process of Internet marketing and having one Small niche book on SEO, right? Search engine optimization, One on pay per click, one on outsourcing, one on copywriting, he found that was actually more successful. Instead of selling a $10 ebook that had all that stuff, but just have five ebooks that are $2.99 that covered specific areas. But to answer your question in terms of, you know, how you actually make money from it when you're selling those books for $2.99. Well, part of it is, you know, when I first started off the method of creating these shorter, smaller books, I have a lot of these books that I might invest $25 to create and I'll get a cover done from someone on Fiverr or something like that. There's different ways, different price points for that as well. But if you're able to create an ebook and be able to rank it in Amazon, because Amazon is just like a search engine, it's just like Google, except people go to Amazon, they have their credit card ready and they're a buying audience, and that's one huge benefit from it. But if you're able to rank an ebook highly in Amazon for a specific keyword that people are looking for, then you can get an insane amount of sales and an insane amount of money. You can get hundreds of sales or even thousands of sales every month. If you're selling your book for $2.99, you're making about $2.08 per sale. You can easily start to. I mean, that amount of money can add up in a lot of ways. But also, making money on the back end of your books as well is another way to monetize them. So you could, for example, in all my books, when somebody buys it, I always promote the next book that I have in the series. So I promote other books that I have. Then I also use my books as a way to promote my blog, my coaching, my other services I have there as well. But in my case, I found that if I can just publish these small little books on different topics and different niches, be able to rank them. Some books in some markets might. For example, I have a book on binge eating, binge eating disorder. And I think I'm ranked. If anybody searches that term in Amazon in the Kindle store, I think I'm ranked number two or something like that. That's a book that I sell for $299. It'll make me about $100 a month, passive income. And if I just put out 10 books like that in a month, then that could be $1,000 a month, passive.

Income.

You're not an expert in binge eating, are.

You? I actually am because I struggled with that for a lot of years of my life or whatever. But a lot of the other niches that I'm involved with, I'm not an expert at at all. And I've just been able to rank different books in different categories and different keywords and different niches. And I've actually found a way to automate a lot of the system as well. I've been able to publish 20 books in a month in a lot of cases because I can just. Once you have one book that's making you money, you really just scale it up. And the more books that you put out, and if each book is making you $50 or $100, I have some books that make me a couple hundred dollars and even one that makes me over $1,000 a month. Then when you have more books like that, then it can be a very significant amount of.

Money. I want to take a pause for a second because we're talking about something that I actually am surprised by. Honestly surprised. I didn't have this perception of Kindle Publishing before we started this chat 15 minutes ago, or whenever it was, and that's that the Kindle publishing you actually use as a money making model and the way that I've always perceived books in general is as a way to spread your message, to get yourself out there, and we'll go there next. But what I'm hearing you say is that anybody could go in, even if they don't have a message, if they don't have something to promote and use. The channel of Amazon Publishing is actually a money generating model. I had this perception that it was somebody like you or myself who has a message that wants to spread it. Kindle is a great way to do that, and that's what I've done. But you're saying that you've actually just gone in and put stuff out there and the checks come in and you get passive income from them, from something that you outsource the process to, you're not necessarily an expert in. And I'm kind of having my mind blown a bit. I didn't even realize that anybody could go in and just start publishing small books and have royalties coming in, like passive.

Income. Totally, yeah. And I've done it from both angles too. You know, I enjoy writing, right? That's one of my passions. I have a blog, I write all this content and I actually created my own book because, you know, I was passionate about that subject, I made a paperback version of it. I'm going to make an audio version of it as well. And it's great for people that enjoy writing, you know, because, you know, back in the day it used to be very difficult to get your message across to find a publisher and create a paperback book, all that stuff used to be very challenging and difficult. Whereas today it's very simple and easy to be able to publish your own book and get your message across. But I got more into it in the money making opportunity as well, because out of all the other things I was doing online to make money, affiliate marketing, creating my own products and selling them on websites like clickbank and everything, I found that the amount of time that I'd spend to be able to monetize something like that would take a little bit of time. And a lot of people have the expertise to get into some of those areas. So, for example, when I used to do my websites, my blogs, to do search engine optimization, it would generally take me a few months before I would be able to build a blog that could start getting traffic to it and everything. And I wanted to make it look natural with Google and put up content every few days so it's natural and not send like a million backlinks and everything to a website. And then after a few months, then I could start making money from that blog or that website or, or that product. I'd have to do the copywriting and the graphics and all the different elements of that. Whereas I found with Kindle, it's something that you don't really require to know all that stuff and have all that expertise. And anybody can easily publish a book literally today, in 12 to 24 hours, Amazon's going to review it and publish it on their website. And you could be making money from that book tomorrow. And once I started to get more into that and seeing exactly how easy it was and how fast it was, I just quickly transferred a lot of my energy and focus into learning more about Kindle and how I could actually monetize it better and be able to publish books at the same time, be able to help people too and provide a lot of.

Value. So let's move into now about Amazon as the, the initial taste test that people have in somebody after they, before they scale up and take them into coaching or products or conferences or whatever it is. Because I've always seen books as kind of that initial shaking of the hands. It's that initial, hey, you like, you're gonna like my stuff, read this book. It's the intro to someone's philosophy that gets them really addicted and hooked up to buy more from them. An example would be somebody like Tim Ferriss. You know, you, you people bought the four Hour Workweek, they started following him, he started releasing more books, now he's a speaker, he invests in startups. And, and it all came from the publishing that he had in the four Hour series, the Four Hour Body, Four Hour Chef. And you see this is, is really common. You have people like Brendan Bouchard who will publish a book and then launch a training course on the back end of that after somebody's gotten that initial taste. And then there's somebody like me who's done that with the Freedom Manifesto. And then, and then it's the initial taste that people have of me. And then they find this podcast or my blog or what have you. And what is really interested me about Kindle is that really for the first time ever, anybody can do that process and anybody can go in and make that first initial shaking of the hands and put it on a channel that gets in front of millions and millions of people. Whereas before you had to go to a publisher, you had to get a book deal. And that stuff still happens. But all of a sudden there's no more barrier to entry. Right. Anybody can put it on.

Kindle. Yeah. You know, I think first and foremost when you have a Kindle book book, you are an authority figure. I don't know if you can hear this background noise right now. Is that interfering at.

All? You're okay right.

Now. Okay, great. Yeah. So first you're an authority figure. When you have a Kindle book, people automatically associate.

Will listen to your advice and it has more value to them because they're getting it from a published author. So I think there's a lot of value in that and that's a really great way just to boost your authority with your audience or to get people to associate with your value. The second thing is your books have to add value in some way. If you're just publishing crappy books that people have buyer's remorse from or they're not really getting value from, then obviously they're not going to check out your blog, they're not going to buy any products that you recommend or anything like that. So I think the one thing that Tim Ferriss and Brendon Burchard have in common is they add value for first. And your books have to be revolved around solving their problems in some way. It has to deliver and over deliver whatever the title is. Or whatever promises that you have in that book. And when you start doing that, you start to build that trust factor and that relationship with anybody that's reading that book. Because if they apply anything that you say or recommend in the book and they get results from it, they automatically associate that with you. And you become the expert and the authority.

Once you're able to establish that with your books. And the great thing with Amazon, too, is that the review system is great, because if you got a crappy book, people will let you know. And if you have a great book, people will let you know as well. And if it's crappy, I've always just used that as a way to improve my books and make them better. And so that's unavoidable. You will get some negative reviews. Like, even Harry Potter has like 100 negative reviews, right? So some people just won't like certain things. But that's a good barometer to see. Are my books actually adding value and helping people? And then what I do is, you know, I'd say about 90% of my books is just pure value, great content. They're focused on solving the person's problem and helping them. And then about 10%. At the end of my books, I always offer them an opportunity to mention other books that I have on Kindle, right? So I have a list of them. I'll have maybe a preview of another book. Like, I'll have the first chapter of another book, and then I'll have like a link in my book that says, click here if you want to continue reading more about this book. And then I always like to give away some sort of bonus in my book as well. You know, it could be, you know, offering them a free video, you know, or free ebook or something like that that's on your website that they can go to and download. And that's a really great way to.

To reach out more to the people that are reading your book, because you're almost doing them a disservice by not offering something more to them. Because a lot of people read your book and they're like, what's next? Or they really love it and they want to know more about you or what you offer, and they want to follow you. So it's really just giving them an opportunity to have that next step in place. I've had great success by building a great list and getting them to. Getting a lot of my customers that buy my books to subscribe to a newsletter. And then on my blog, they can check out other content, articles That I have videos that I have sometimes different products or resources that I have there as.

Well. And I bet you find that the people who find that stuff after they've written something that they bought from Amazon are just a more long term buying customer than somebody who finds you on, on Google or somebody who finds you from an affiliate link or whatever it is. Somebody who's already digested something from you and then comes back to you and gives you their email address. That's somebody who's with you for a long.

Time. Yeah, totally. I totally agree. And a lot of people, they, you know, especially when they, a lot of people are hesitant, I find, to enter their name and email and certain things because of negative experiences they've had before where some people haven't delivered what they promised or they just spam them or whatever. And so I find that having a Kindle book and having them digest that first builds up the trust and the relationship with them to want to know more and to want to be on your newsletter or be more receptive to different products and everything you have. So you definitely have a really stronger, a lot stronger relationship with them because they just invested not only money in your book, but also the time to actually read it and go through it. And it's really a great way just to build a relationship with that.

Person. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to go through this step by step with you. And let's take somebody who has, they have an idea, they have a message. Let's say we could even say that this person is a relationship expert or is somebody who wants to be.

Consulting people to have a better marriage or to stop a divorce. And this person doesn't really know where to begin getting that audience. And all he or she knows is that he or she eventually wants to be speaking at conferences and eventually wants to be working directly with couples and helping them stay together because they know that they have something to share. So if they have that idea, if they have that concept, how can they break that down into something where they say, okay, I know that I can start building an audience that buys on Amazon and I know it can help a lot of people with that initial first thing that they purchase. But I have no idea what the first steps are for me. What do you say to that.

Person? Yeah, so I think there's two ways of doing it. One is either if you have a book and you have a website or a blog or some sort of channel or platform where you can promote it, then you can kind of skip a lot of the step with the market research. But a lot of people, they don't have a platform or blog to really get started with it, and they want Amazon to do the selling for you. And if that's the case with every book that I have published, I always make sure that they're targeted or they're created around specific keywords, meaning there's specific keywords that people are typing in in Amazon or on their Kindle devices of what they're looking for. And a great way to start to discover what people are searching for in Kindle is if you just go to Amazon.com and there's that big search bar right there. And if you just click the drop down and go down to the Kindle store and if you start to type in a keyword like how to, Amazon will automatically start giving you a list of, of suggestions, right? I'll start suggesting other keywords. And those are the keywords that people have typed in and what people are looking for on Amazon. And so if I had an idea, let's say on a relationship type book or a marriage book or something like that, I would start to type in what type of keywords people would be searching for to find a book like this. An example is if it's a book on how to attract women or how to attract men, I start to type in how to attract men or how to attract women to see if Amazon suggests that to me. And if it does, then I'd say, great. That's a market that people are actually searching for. They're looking for books in that area. It's really important that whatever keywords you decide to go with that, you make sure that that keyword is in the title of your book. And there's other ways to optimize with that keyword as well. But making sure that you have that keyword in the book because you want to get in front of that audience of what people are looking for. One challenge that I made when I first started was actually with a dating ebook because I used to be a dating coach for five or six years. I put out a book and I spent a lot of time and energy and money. I spent months creating this book when I went to launch it and release didn't really do very well because I didn't do the research beforehand and get in front of people what they were looking for. You really have to understand what people are looking for, what they're searching for, what they're typing in, and make sure that you just give them what they want. That's really all marketing is, giving people what they want and solving their problems. I would say that's the first step is start to do the research and discover what people are searching for and looking for. Another thing I do as well is specific keywords. There's going to be better opportunity with some keywords than others. So, for example, some keywords that you might try to get into might be more competitive than others. There might be more and more books.

With those keywords and people search it in.

That plays a role or a factor in the market or the niche that it can get into as well. If you typed in, let's say you're a personal trainer, you want to do a book on weight loss. If you just type in, type in weight loss on Amazon, you're going to see thousands of books that show up. And then probably the first 10 books on the first page are all going to have like 100, 200, 300, 500 reviews. And so the challenge is it'd be very difficult to compete with a lot of those books, especially if you don't have a platform like a blog or something like that to promote your book. And so I'd recommend to you, if you're a personal trainer, to find more of a narrow niche. Find maybe like creating a book on a specific type of workout routine that people are looking for or a specific type of diet. For example, instead of targeting weight loss, you can create a book on the Paleo diet or something that's a little bit more narrow, that's less competitive, that you could create a book in and start to be able to rank your book in there and get a lot of exposure and a lot of people to download and check out your book. Because.

Like I said, if you're doing weight loss, a general weight loss book, there's a thousand other books out there like that. And if you're not able to rank your book or make it stand out from a thousand other books, then your book isn't going to get found and your message isn't going to get found and it's not going to be the best use of your time.

That's probably the most complicated part, I would say, in the whole Kindle publishing process. But once you've found that you discover what kind of niche you want to get into, the key keywords, you've done a bit of research on it and you decided, this is the type of book that I want to create, the next step is really just coming up with a compelling title for the book. I think of A title of a book, almost like a headline, it has to have benefits, it has to get people's attention and it has to have the keyword in it as well. And I structured all my titles of my books of having a title and a subtitle. The title is usually a lot shorter, whereas the subtitle is more descriptive. And I see a lot of people make the mistake with this as well. They just maybe have a one word title or a title that sounds good. And there's a difference between having a title that sounds good and one that actually sells. And so making sure that you have a really good, compelling title and a great way to just kind of research this is just do some searches in Amazon based on the niche or category that you want to get involved in and look at the books that are selling, look at the books that have a lot of great reviews and look at their titles, look at how they market it, the descriptions of it and everything. And you can start to model some of what they're doing and create a really great title for yourself. Once you have the title it's really about, next step is just creating the content. You can either outsource it and you can use some of the resources that I recommended. You can give them the title of the book, you can tell them what you want, want the book to be about the chapters, the sections.

You can give them. The more resources, the more helpful you are to the writer, the better quality book you'll have. So that's one way of doing it. And the other way is just sitting down and writing the book yourself.

Writing can be a really enjoyable, fun process. One thing I'd say though too, if you decide to write your own book, is don't be. One thing that stopped me a lot, and I found stops a lot of people, is trying to be perfect, trying to be a perfectionist. And I'm a really big believer in taking imperfect action, meaning just execute, just do the best you can. When I first did my first dating ebook years ago, I spent months writing that book. I had my family, my friends proofread it. I want to make sure everything was perfect. And I realized that I had spent it actually prevented me because I was almost scared of putting out a book and people might criticize me or might get a negative review or something like that. I've kind of taken a different approach now. Whereas I'll just do the best I can in writing a book. I'll get someone to proofread it and everything. I'll put it up there and I'LL just improve it as I go more. The attitude of progress, not perfection, as long as they're making progress. I don't know about you, Ryan, but when I first started my YouTube channel, my podcast, it's nowhere near what it is today. When I first started, it sucked. The quality of my videos weren't that great. I saw my digital camera and my blog wasn't as great as it is today, but I just kept improving it. And I learned more and more about how to make better videos and how to be a better speaker and how to write better on my blog. And my blog and everything I put out now is much better. But when I first got started, I just started putting it out there, even if it wasn't.

Perfect. Yeah, you started making mistakes and you learn from your mistakes.

My first book was not finished and I decided that I was never going to finish it until I got some feedback. So I just polished it up so that it was a marketable product and put it out there. And then after I got some feedback from people being like, dude, I loved this part. This part, I was, okay, great, Now I have some feedback to go back and actually improve it. And you get negative reviews. My first negative review was a guy saying, this is the worst book I've ever read. You know, it had all five star reviews, you know, like a dozen five star reviews. And then one guy saying, this is the one worst book I ever read. And I sent him a message, you know, smoothing over the situation, but took some of his feedback into, okay, what did he think he was getting when he bought the book? What did he actually get? Where was the disconnect? And how can I solve that so that I don't have more angry people in the.

Future? Yeah, absolutely. And you can't be afraid of that. You can't be afraid of the rejection, the failure, because if you are, then you're not going to take any action. It's almost like somebody that wants to get started in dating. They want to meet someone and they're waiting for the perfect moment to approach that person or the perfect moment to go say hi or sometime in the future, then I'll do it. You just got to be not afraid of that rejection and just go up to people and start talking and you are going to get rejected. But part of the process is just learning from it and getting better and taking it as feedback. Then just, you know, just focus on getting better and just keep going with.

It. I want to talk briefly. We've mentioned some of this before, but I want to talk briefly about taking someone who has bought a Kindle book and leading them up through the process of giving you more money. Taking somebody from a $3 buyer to a $3,000 buyer. And I know that that sounds like a big jump, but when, when you get that all of a sudden this opportunity of having free traffic come from a place like Amazon starts to look extremely attractive when somebody starts as a $3 buyer and they like you so much that they are trying to give you 3,000, $30,000. So I have some insight here, but I. You're the expert here. So I want, I want you to dispel some myths and walk us through that process of what it looks like to take that free or low ticket buyer to somebody who is willing to give us a lot of.

Money. Yeah, you know, it's really about designing the sales funnel of what people go through and having the next step for the person every step of the way. And so in my case, I have a lot of books that are in the self help niche because that's the industry that I'm in and I have a backend set up for that already. So for example, I have books on meditation and juicing and my morning ritual and how to set your life plan and all these different areas, which is my demographic for my blog. And what I have to offer, what I essentially have done is I have those books that are the front end. Those just get people in the door. My books provide an incredible amount of value to them. At the end of the book, I give them an opportunity to buy some of the other books that I have as part of this series that I have. Because some people are just going to remain as Kindle readers. They're looking for other Kindle books. That's their medium of consuming information and they enjoy that. With all my books, first and foremost, I have a series around them. So that's part of the back end that you can have a lot of people, they just publish one book and they're doing themselves a disservice by not having a series. I'll generally build my books around either my own name or have a pen name. I'll create a pen name around my book, which is very common. And I'll have a series of maybe weight loss books or self help books. My girlfriend does this, by the way. She has astrology books and all the different zodiac signs and everything. Those go really well together. But then having the next step, which for me has been to get my, my customer or my reader to subscribe to my mailing list, which is more of a channel for me to add more value, give them more content, but also monetize that as well and offer other products and services that I have. And so for example, once I'll have someone that reads my book, they go to my website, projectlifemaster.com they subscribe to my newsletter. And then once I have them on the newsletter, then I'll offer possibly other products. They could be affiliate products that are still relevant and related to what they're looking for. And I'll sometimes do this around a pen name too is I'll create just an email list or an opt in, let's say they're looking for weight loss stuff. They'll opt into a newsletter they'll have specifically for weight loss and dieting and everything. And then in that autoresponder I'll send them emails that will promote affiliate products, Maybe products from ClickBank or different products that I've used so I can monetize it that way. And I found that you can. There's a lot of products on ClickBank that you can make $50 or $100 a sale just as a commission, which is significantly a big jump from the $2.99 that you're making sure that on the front end, right. And then you could do the affiliate approach because a lot of people don't have their own products. But if you do have your own product, that's a great opportunity to market or sell that to them as well. And then in my case I have the higher ticket price item which is my coaching.

Once I've part of the funnel is the book and then affiliate products or my own product, then after that, once they've been through and invested in other products that you've had and you've been giving value to them and everything thing a lot of people, if you make that next offer and maybe you have.

A blog or just a website or something around your coaching or consulting or whatever that is, a lot of people will now buy that and purchase that because they have such a great relationship with you.

In my case, as a customer and a reader, I look at someone that talks Tony Robbins and Tony Robbins, he took this exact same approach with me and I started listening to him. I got so much value from what he was saying and what he was giving away and all his products, I began to associate that with him. And because I've gotten so much value from Tony Robbins, I've been to his seminars, I've gotten coaching from Tony Robbins coaches, I've invested so much money in that company all because of the value that I've received from him through all his books and programs and everything.

That's really how I think about it, is just adding value and just making sure that you have that sales funnel set up and optimized so that you have more opportunities for the readers to go through that funnel and sign up for other services that you.

Have. Yeah, and the cool thing about Kindle is that it's a constant source of fresh blood. It's a constant source of new people finding you and your message. Where if you have that back end dialed in, where you have a $500 an hour coaching plan or if you have expensive products, or even if you're just following people up in an email sequence that promotes other people's products.

There'S a constant flow coming from Amazon that's free. Not only free free, but the traffic is actually paying you. And that's a cool way of get paid traffic is that it's paying you and, and they're consuming more and more and you get this constant fresh blood that's coming in to where you can continually sell those higher end coaching calls or sell those coaching products or, or higher end products or whatever it is. And you don't have to do anything except, except maybe once in a while you put out a new one and you can get even more exposure.

Yeah. You know, and some people, they don't even care about the front end sales they make from their Kindle book, but they just have it optimized for the back end. The cool thing about Kindle is they have something called the Kindle select program which means that your book becomes exclusive only to Amazon and Kindle for 90 days. But the benefit is that you can do a five day free promotion for your.

Book.

Book. And I've been able to within five days get thousands of people to download my book for free. And I'm not making any money because it's free, but on the back end I am because I'll have thousands of readers go through my book and that can get on my newsletter or buy other products and services that I have to offer. That's a really great thing about it too is that if you have the back end optimized then you, you can even sell your book for 99 cents.

I've got a Kindle product teaching people this stuff and I created a Kindle book on how to do the Kindle publishing and I just sell it for 99 cents. And I'm not really after the 35 cents that I'm going to make when somebody buys it, I'm after the back end. And when people go through it and they get the content from it, then they're going to go ahead and buy the higher priced item that I have to offer them. And so it's a fantastic way for lead generation if you already have a product or service. But even if you're getting started with your books and they're making you a bit of money and you're profiting that way, you're going to want to start to think of developing the back end and everything because you're just leaving money on the table.

Otherwise. You mentioned the product that you have around this topic. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the courses that you own offer and where people can connect with you when they want to learn more and dive deeper into this.

Stuff? Yeah, sure. So the product is called Kindle Money Mastery and it's basically a product that I created based on the method that I've been able to create for myself that's worked for me, publishing over 100 books this year alone. And it's also a method that I first tested out on a lot of my coaching clients for my blog. A of lot. A lot of people pay me up to $1,800 just to learn this information of just me walking them through every week, publishing a book, marketing it, getting reviews, that whole process of it. I've even gone through the process and started teaching it to my girlfriend who I mentioned has a bunch of astrology books and even my mom who's in her 60s and approaching retirement. I actually got her going with this too and she doesn't really know much about computers or anything as well. I first.

Was able to come up with a step by step system of doing this and I did it with a few books first before I scaled it up to over 100. And all my books are making me money. What I decided to do was create a video training course of me breaking down step by step and showing people exactly how I create the book, come up with a niche, do all the research for it, how I outsource it, how I publish the book, how I write a good description for it and everything, how I market it, how I promote it, how I get reviews and also how I make money from the back end. And it's just 100% open and transparent product. You just see everything from start to finish. I even have follow up reports showing exactly how much the book that I create in the program is making over two weeks, over A month and several months after that. I just wanted to be totally open and transparent about the whole thing. I found there's other Kindle products out there, but they're not very transparent or open. They just have some advice and tips and everything. And I just wanted to create a membership site that has the best content of everything that I do and is always updated and made better and better and better. We released it about two weeks ago. It's been getting amazing results and feedback. A lot of people have been making a lot of money with it, a lot of great success stories. And if you want to find out more about it, go to www.k moneymastery.com so k moneymastery.com Very.

Cool. And I want also for you to plug your Project Life Mastery blog because I think there's some really cool stuff on there that people just want to connect with you and learn more about your overall philosophy. So talk a little bit about.

That. Yeah, you know, Project Life Mastery is just my passion and part of my purpose, which is to grow and develop myself, to be the best I can be and, and just sharing everything that I'm learning with others. I have on Project Life Mastery, a great YouTube channel with a lot of videos, video blogs that I put out. I've got a really popular one on my morning ritual which a lot of people said have changed their life. I get a lot of great feedback from that, but it's a place where I just share everything I'm passionate about. Health, fitness, spirituality, how to make money online, passive income, relationships, all these different areas. And I have a podcast there, a great blog post and everything. And yeah, if you want to check it out, go to.

Www.Projectlifemastery.Com. all right, Stefan, thanks so much for sharing our knowledge on spreading our message through Amazon and this new wave of publishing. I think it helped a lot of.

People. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks.

Ryan. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode with Stefan Pilarnos. If you enjoyed this episode, then you definitely want to go to freedomfastlane.com and download the free report called Passions into Profits. It will show you exactly how to take something that you're interested in or passionate about and turn it into a passive income, much in the way that Stefan and I talked about in today's episode. You'll also want to pay attention to the video that goes along with the PDF, Passion into Profits. It will show you exactly how to turn what you're interested in into a full time income using a strategy that I call the six Figure blog and we have a class that we put on called the Six Figure Blogging Class that shows you how to tie all of your interests and passions together into an easy to follow model that can earn six and sometimes even seven figures simply by focusing on what you love. I believe that we were made to follow our passions and to share it with other people who are doing that, and this strategy allows you to live in those passions while also earning an income that far exceeds your imagination. So head to freedomfastlane.com and make sure you download that report. In the meantime, thanks for listening and I'll chat with you soon. Take care.