#036: How to Earn a Great Living by Writing 'Lead Magnet' Books for Clients

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. All right, all right. Well, welcome everyone and thank you for joining me for episode 36 of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. My name is Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to the six figure level or the part time equivalent. As a reminder, you can find detailed show notes of this episode by going to b2b launcher.com episode 36. If you're going after small businesses or entrepreneurs or even solo business owners, people such as consultants, for example, there's a very lucrative opportunity out there that a lot of writers don't even know exists. And it's writing lead magnet books or ebooks for these businesses or individual clients. Lead magnet ebooks are basically informational tools used for marketing purposes. They typically outline the methodology or the approach or the formula that the business uses to produce results for their clients or customers, either via the services they deliver or the products they sell. And many businesses and entrepreneurs use these tools because they found that sharing their insights, their systems, that sort of thing, through a book is a great way to build credibility and to turn many cold prospects into hot leads and customers. The problem is that even though this strategy is proven, it works extremely well. Most of these business owners aren't writers themselves. They also don't have people in their company who can write well or who have the time to take on such a project. They know what they want to say, but they're not skilled at putting these ideas down on paper. And that's where you can come in. In this episode, you'll hear from Susan Anderson, who's the president of Triumph Communications and the author of Working Writer, Happy Writer. And Susan has created a thriving writing business that's focused on writing and producing lead magnet books just like the ones I just described. And in this interview, she explains what these projects are all about, what types of clients you should go after, how to approach the work, how much you can charge, and much, much, much more. So this is one that I think you'll really, really enjoy because if anything, you'll know how you can approach this type of work and this opportunity to your existing clients, or even how you can write a lead magnet of your own for your freelance writing business. So enjoy the show and I'll talk to you at the end. All right, I'm sitting here with Susan Anderson, and Susan is going to be talk topic that I've recently just really found out about. And it's specific project type that's lots of fun, very lucrative, and Susan has had great success with. So as soon as I heard about it, I asked her to come on the show and she graciously agreed. Susan, so great to have you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Oh, it's such a pleasure. You've been such a help to me and my business that if I can give back a little bit, that'd be great.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, you know, that's, that's the spirit that we try to keep here, a spirit of generosity. So I appreciate that. It's a lot of people get some very valuable information from the show and thanks to, you know, guests like yourself. So for folks who don't know you, why don't you start by telling us a little bit about yourself, what type of work you do, what types of clients, and maybe a little bit about your history and how you got to where you are today.

Okay. Actually, it all started back in 2005. I hired a business coach going, okay, what should I be when I grow up? I'm looking at the business end of 40 and still hadn't figured it out. And through some questionnaires and various drilling down, we figured out that writing was my thing. I thought, great, that's wonderful, except if I don't write a best selling novel that ends up on Oprah, this is not going to be a business. I had never even heard of business writing. And she said, are you crazy? The Internet is booming. Every business out there is going to need to have a writer. I thought, okay, I like those odds. So I got Peter Bowerman's book, well fed Writer and just was blown away by the opportunity. Unfortunately, I kind of like being a hermit. I did not want to talk to somebody. I know you've done cold calling, and a lot of successful writers have started off by doing cold calling. I think I would have rather chewed my own foot off than do it.

And Peter's a big proponent of it too.

Yes, yes. So I was like, I don't know how I'm going to do this, but I'm going to figure out another way. So I actually got started on guru.com and believe it or not, within like six months, I was making about $5,000 a month.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. And I never had to talk to anybody, so it was ideal.

That's a huge number, especially considering that these sites have a reputation of very, very low paying work.

They, they really do. It didn't used to be as bad as it is now. Like now I don't even use that site or any of those. I always advise people, just go find your own clients directly because there's just no point. You could get asked to write a book for a dollar there, and that's just not happening. But back in the day, it used to be fairly lucrative and yeah, I worked my butt off, but it paid well. At some point, I think it was around 08. Guru completely changed how they ranked the writers there and I had risen to number one spot. And I held that for about a year just from sheer volume and nothing but great reviews and endorsements and all that. But when they shuffled it, I was nowhere to be seen in the search results. So that kind of was a downer. I decided to build a whole new way and went after direct clients. So I needed nudging. And Peter was right, of course. I learned how to talk with people about what I was doing and attended some networking meetings that kind of helped me to get a little bit more comfortable with that and started building some strategic partnerships with marketing agencies that they would find clients coming to them left and right going, can you build us a website? Oh, and I guess we need text. And these guys didn't know how to write, so they were really happy to hand that off. And then that kind of grew. They also needed press releases, blog posts, articles, all kinds of other stuff. So I recovered and rebuilt from scratch. But I ended up building up team of us based writers who write with me because I reached the point where I was beyond capacity and decided I would like to actually have a life as well as working. And so I've got this handful of writers who I've trained to do it the way that I want it to be done and the way my clients want it. And some of them I've met, some of them I've never met, but it's fantastic. So we're able to create quite a bit of really good content.

So essentially you're in a way kind of the project lead and so you have writers who do most of the writing for you. Do you do writing yourself still or you may.

I do. I kind of cherry pick or maybe whatever the opposite is and take the worst projects sometimes, you know, whatever projects I actually, you know, I need to be involved in or want to be involved in, I'll do that. The ongoing stuff. We do a lot of white label content for like we'll work directly for a marketing firm and we'll blog for their clients. So they may have 20 clients we're blogging for. And so, you know, the writers typically will write that. And I have a project manager who helps coordinate all those moving pieces. So that. That works really well. And then I have, you know, if I'm doing a white paper or something a little bit higher end or more interesting, then I'll take those.

Okay. And would you say that most of your clients are marketing firms in agencies or direct clients at this point?

Most of them are agencies and firms.

Okay.

Yeah.

And, you know, this is fascinating, which, by the way, I wasn't aware that most of your business was this. And we may want to do at some point, maybe another show about this, this model of having other writers work with you. Because I get asked about this all the time, and it's very, very challenging. I've tried doing this myself. Very difficult to find writers who can write in a similar voice as yours or similar voice to what the client is looking for at a high level of quality and don't charge so much, you can actually make a profit.

That's a huge learning curve, and it's taken a while, but I really got it at this point. In fact, some of the writers, if I read just a piece of. I'm like, did I write this? They write so similarly to the way that I write at this point that sometimes it's very hard to tell the difference.

Well, yeah, so this is. That's fascinating. And by the way, I applaud you for finding a model that works, because I know most people who try to do this fail. And I've failed many times trying to develop the same thing and trying to find a group of writers who can do that. But there's one particular project type that you've had some really good success with and you really enjoy. And I know you've been growing this side of your practice lately. Let's talk about that. Because it's. They're books. Right. So tell us more about that.

Oh, yeah, this one I love. I call it the mother of all business cards. Because this thing, it's. And when I refer to it that way, I instantly have any business owner's attention. What. You know, so this thing I love, essentially what it is, is that it's based on the idea that content helps to build connection and credibility because people buy from the people that they know like and trust. So there's this saying that we all have about the expert. Well, that's the person who wrote the book on whatever the topic is, and yet most of them haven't written a book. But they could if they just knew how or had the time and the bandwidth and the processes in place. So every business owner, if they've become a subject matter expert, especially service oriented businesses, but in some cases products and nonprofits as well, they've got the makings for a book. And this instantly. By publishing, they completely set themselves apart from all of their competitors. There are very few in any particular niche who have a book. And even if there are lots of people who have a book, their prospects probably have never run into anybody in that niche who has authored a book. So this is really cool. And just first, to be really clear, we're not talking about they don't have to go get an agent, they're not seeking to get signed by a publishing company. They don't have to end up with a garage full of books that their wife is kicking them out of the house because they can't park anymore. I mean, it's just really painless at this point. Tremendous.

You're talking about, just to be clear, this is a self published printed book that a business owner can use as a marketing tool. As you said, a business card on steroids, in a way.

Absolutely.

To get their foot in the door, to build that credibility early in the process and set themselves apart.

Yes. So I tell them this is not the goal of the game here, is not getting royalties, I don't care. And they understand it. By the end of this explanation, they get it. They don't care whether they ever sell a copy of their book. And in many cases they never will. The goal is to use that book to generate leads and kind of nudge them gently through the sales funnel.

Gotcha. What does the finished format look like? What are we talking about here?

Well, we do a couple different things with different packages. The most common thing is that they'll have a book that's about 50 to 100 pages in Word. And then we format it to whatever size, they call it trim size. But whatever trim size they want, most commonly they go by five by eight because it's a common size. It's kind of a standard publishing size. And it's one of the smaller trim sizes so their book looks thicker. Because you don't want to have a book lit, you want to have a book. So usually what we'll end up with is about a half inch to an inch thick spine, which is enough space to make it look like an actual book. You can have the title of the book on the spine and it doesn't look like you could have stapled it it looks like a real book, so it's kind of cool. We also do it as a Kindle if they want it as a PDF that they can give us a download on their site. I mean there's a lot of ways once it's completed and created then they can, you know, rehash and reuse it a bunch of different ways. But that's the most common thing is about a five by eight paperback. Typically there's no graphics, no images, just because the print process sometimes picks them up well and sometimes it does not. So just to be safe, if they don't need them, it's better not to include them. We'll include a forward and about the author. Sometimes they have a dedication, you know, all the normal book stuff. And you know, they can order, I'll tell you about the publisher in a little bit, but they can order one book or zero books or 5,000 books, whatever they want to do. And they are completely in control and there's no minimum.

Gotcha. Which is great because you know, you talked about the garage full of books. That used to be a. The only reality. It's either order a garage full or nothing. And I know things have changed. So definitely we'll talk more about that. But let's talk about the potential clients for this. I think you mentioned service firms.

Yes.

Can you give us some examples of maybe different types of service firms or other types of businesses that really lend themselves to the strategy?

Oh sure. So I've written for just a short list of stuff, but local online marketers, that's been probably the most frequent type of client that I've had. So they want to explain what they're doing and kind of use the book to generate some leads. I've written for dentists, I've done a couple other product, I mean service oriented businesses like a chiropractor. I did a couple different coaches, like life coaches and you know, different specialties of coaching. One guy who created a software system and sort of a process, business process system that goes with it. So a little bit like the E myth or built to sell, that type of system integrated with a software.