Eric Siu explains how to use a book for audience growth, citing his own Leveling Up targeting gamers and their parents. A book takes 5-7 years and multiple edits, but works as a funnel: run profitable ads to a landing page offering the book, audiobook, and courses. Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Malcolm Gladwell prove books become timeless brand pillars.
Today we're going to talk about how to build an audience using a book. So my book over here, Leveling Up, 2 big things that you have to do if you're trying to write a book. One, you have to have a message. You have to have something that's— that you think is worth spreading. You have to be willing to put in the work. It's a labor of love, probably going to take about 5 to 7 years to finish it, especially if you're writing it yourself. You can definitely use a ghostwriter or a co-writer, but it takes time. probably have to go through 5 to 7 rounds of edits. And so it's not easy to do a book. The reason why I'm doing this book as well is 'cause this Leveling Up book is about really my childhood, right? I played a lot of games growing up, you know, from ages 8 to about 22 or so. And I view life as a game. There's over 3 billion people in the world that have played a game. That's a big total addressable market or TAM. If I can capture even a portion of that, that's gonna be great, right? Because I do have a marketing audience already. I have a business and a marketing audience, which is great. But what really aligns with me, what I want to be doing the rest of my life, is leveling up the world. And that's ultimately something that I will never accomplish, right? I just want to work towards it, get a little better every single day, and help people along the way. That's what leveling up is. And so my life mission, I have a lot more of a why that's tied to this book versus any type of marketing book that I would create. You got to think about if you're going to write a book, what's the total addressable market? And maybe you don't need a huge market. If you're writing a book for investors, maybe it's for wealthy real estate brokers in a certain area, maybe you have a couple hundred people that read the book, but all these people are super wealthy that read it. For me, it's the total addressable market is very big, but if we're talking income sizes, it's probably not huge, right? We're talking probably average to below average, but the ability to be able to level up this audience is great. So if the message is strong enough, it will spread. And naturally people will opt into my email list. People will opt in, people will buy books for their kids. As well, or the kids themselves, the gamers themselves will buy the book because they want to get better and they want to kind of figure out how to, you know, how to, how to make an impact on the world. And so that's one piece of it, right? It's figuring out the messaging, like who, who, who am I targeting? Because A, I'm targeting the gamers maybe, but also the parents. The parents are the ones that are fighting with their kids all the time about, you know, screen time, you know, how much games should they be playing, you know, that type of stuff. So understanding your audience first, that's going to be a big chunk of it because that's going to guide your marketing messaging. And if you have a strong message, you have something to say, that's also very important too. And also looking at what Russell Brunson has done with ClickFunnels, he does a lot of book funnels, meaning that he would drive ads from different channels and it'll hit one of his landing pages. And in the landing page, people have the ability to buy cross-sells, upsells, the audiobook version. They can buy different courses as well. And the ads will become profitable or at least break even, right? And then you can really scale up because then you can market to those people afterwards and get them to buy stuff. That way you can also spread the message while you're also making money. If you're looking to build an audience with your book, Also think about the channels that you have. You might have podcasts, go on other people's podcasts, hit your email list, whatever audiences you have, your owned audiences, or even your earned audiences, you want to hit those. You know, earned audiences might be like, again, you getting on an interview somewhere else, or you could also be, you know, running ads, but you want to be running the ads profitably, right? Usually for a book, if it's like $20, you'll probably lose money on it. But if you create a book funnel, if you just Google what a book funnel is or YouTube what a book funnel is, you have some more insight into how the numbers work. And I recommend reading the book Dotcom Secrets to learn a little more about that. I think if you're looking to do a book for the long term, it's definitely a huge brand builder because if you look at some of the best authors in the world, let's use Tim Ferriss as an example. He wrote The 4-Hour Workweek. He got access to all these angel investing deals and very successful. And you look at Gary Vee, you know, he's got his businesses, but he also started with his book Crush It. Okay, so a lot of people have books and, you know, they had a message to spread and, you know, You know, ended up working out for them. It's not gonna be an easy journey, but I do believe you can build a brand. Like, again, Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, Daniel Pink, Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Ryan Holiday, all these people, they built their brands off of books. And I think books are very timeless. Books have been around for ages, and they're not going away anytime soon. Sure, you can talk about, oh, I like audiobook. Great, audiobook's one format, but you know, it's still a book. By the way, The fact that people are kind of saying, hey, you shouldn't be doing it, means you probably should be doing it because in a lot of cases, what's old becomes new again. So let me know what you think in the comments. Hit the subscribe and the bell button if you want more content like this. And don't forget to check out the next clip over there. And we will catch you tomorrow. Bye.
