Smart Author Media: A Unique Way to Help Authors Scale with Chris Benetti

I basically just started publishing podcasts. It was hard from a mental standpoint because like, I was basically saying, hey, I'm an expert at marketing books, even though I haven't really fully validated the model. But I did turn out to be an expert at marketing books. It was just like a pre frame of like, hey, I'm going to be this expert, you know, and so I'm going to just talk about it like I am.

What's happening? This episode is about marketing your business, growing your business with the use of a book and these clear frameworks, these very predictable models that I brought Chris Benetti onto the podcast to share. He's the owner of Smart Author Media. He's been selling a whole bunch of business, you know, growing businesses on the back of books. So if you don't have a book, don't run away. There's frameworks to create one quickly using the content you already have. And if you do have a book, this is perfect for you. You're going to get a whole bunch of swipe and deploy strategies and very specific frameworks with numbers and all the percentages, everything you need to know to kind of run the math on your own business. And then you can start to see, holy moly, a book is probably your best marketing asset you have. And he's going to give you a whole bunch of frameworks on how to deploy this. So Chris is the man. Take notes. Enjoy. See you there.

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Mr. Benetti. We're back together. It's been way too long, dude. And we both look different. I feel like. Thanks for hopping on so early, man, where you're.

Oh, dude, I mean, it's a pleasure to be reconnected. I feel like a long lost brother. Yeah, you are.

Well, dude, I feel like, and I always say the, the lame excuse of Facebook messages. I'm just like never on the platform. And I know like that's how we've always communicated other than like something used to be in Slack when we were working a little tighter together. I was like, well, you're like, do you have an iPhone? I'm like, yes, for the love of God.

So please text me.

Yeah, that's a direct line. So we made it happen. It's been probably a good, like at least few years or so since we genuinely connected this way, you know, on video. Things have changed, you know, since because we were, we were doing some software, you know, collabing a little bit on a previous business of yours that was interesting and we all learned a lot. That was when Matt Wolf was around, co hosting. And now you're doing a whole. Well, you've been, let's be honest, you've been always really good at the marketing side of things, branding, ads. You've taught us a lot over the years too. And now you've taken that to the author. What do you call it? The author market. But people with books who are authors who want to scale their business on the back end with smart author media. So cool stuff, man. And I'm like, that's where you're at now. It's almost like there's a gap to fill in here. Don't know where to start, but like, you got longer hair now you have a kid, you have a new business. It's like you're still in Australia, right?

Out in Australia. I'm still in Australia, but in a new house now as well. Right on.

Well, how's, I mean, I guess catch me up a little bit on like the transition, because it seems like a lot of transitions in a pretty short period of time. I mean, I'm familiar, but I'm curious of like, how that's been landing with you, because you've been, you've been very productive with a new kid in the house.

Let's just say that having a new kid was definitely. It was all planned and all accounted for. It has certainly been harder than, you know, you could have expected, but at the same time manageable as well. But I'm glad I had like a good six months of building smartwater Media before, you know, having Harlow. Having him whilst trying to, like, start something from scratch without that period ahead would have been quite challenging. But, you know, my business model is, is really based around, like, scalable inputs and it's simplified as much as I possibly can so that it doesn't have huge time pools from me. And yeah, it's, it's ultimately by design, so.

It'S, it's been, it's been such a long time. I've always kind of been an agency guy with my own business and that's kind of paid the bills and, and been the backbone of everything that I do. Software came and. And went kind of thing. But what ultimately led me down to the path of smart author media was.

A couple of things. And this was really clearly pointed out by a good mentor, mentor of mine and. And friend of ours, Charlie Valor. But he basically said, you need to have a niche or a niche for you guys and you need to have a recurring business model. And that was kind of two things missing from what I had previously. And so we basically just did a bunch of identification and realized that the author niche wasn't being serviced very well. From a marketing perspective. There were certainly marketers who, who were doing launch campaigns like Amazon bestsellers and other bestseller campaigns, and then, you know, that would. There's people building book funnels, but no one was really kind of standing up and going, hey, I'll run ads and consistently get you sales and consistently get you clients from your books. And that's kind of like the. The place that I carved out in the market.

And it didn't come easy. Like, obviously I had to validate the model and validate that we could get results and do all the things. But it has been such a tremendous journey and well worth it. And there's been many points of like, man, am I really selling the right service and doubting myself just based on, like, I guess, misaligned expectations with clients, which just comes as a part of running an agency. And I'm sure you, you know, have seen this in the day, but it's one of those things where.

Yeah, you just got to get used to managing expectations and aligning really well.

That's like life in general, relationships, you know, partner, whatever. But yeah, man, the agency model is tough, but it could be very scalable, lucrative if you do it right. But it sounds like the specific thing you said was scalable inputs, and you did it by design. And obviously it's a lifestyle type of play. You know, like, there's a reason why you did that, I'm sure. Yeah, your kid being the impetus of that whole thing. But like niche and recurring business model, because that's like a. It's a recurring theme on the show recently is like, hey, how do I restart what I'm doing? Or maybe there's a new change in the world. AI is taking my business, whatever it might be. Just looking ahead.

It seems like you've done this really smartly. How did you validate the model? I'm curious of the process that you and Charlie kind of walk through there?

Yeah, it was all around beta. So how do we get beta testers on and just putting it out to the network? And I've been lucky enough to build out a network of people in an Internet marketing space, so they all vaguely know.

What a funnel is and what ads is. And so it's like it wasn't really hard for me to put a message out and go, cool, these people know what I'm talking about and they can potentially put their hands up if they want to. And then second, people value books in the space. And so there was actually quite a few authors that came through. And so by putting it out to my networks, there was some hand raises there. By putting it out to my friends and saying, hey, do you know anyone? There were some hand raises there. And so we ended up getting about three or four different beta testers coming on. But then the second thing was, and this is really hard to do from like a mental and ethical standpoint, but like, I basically just started publishing podcasts as soon as I could as well.

And it, it was hard from a mental standpoint because like I was basically saying, hey, I'm an expert at marketing books, even though I haven't like really fully validated the model. But I did turn out to be an expert at marketing books. It was just like a pre frame of like, hey, I'm going to be this expert, you know, and so I'm going to just talk about it like I am. And so I had a bunch of just like really good service providers, like different publishers, different ghostwriters, other marketers, bestselling authors come onto my podcast and we essentially validated the model out through. Through them as well. And they gave me ideas on how I could market books and everything else as well.

That's pretty rad. I like that because you leverage. Yeah. The previous network, of course, and you've had that established for years now and have always given value really well. You've been a great connector too. So thanks for making the connections that you have for me back in the day too. And it carries over. You're useful to people. Joe Polish, one of his newest books, it's all about that. It's like being useful to others. Highly recommended, by the way. And what comes to mind there is like, cause you have some bangers already as clients and case studies, you know, you have Ryan Dice with his get scalable. Is it Get Scalable, right, the book. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's behind you. I know he's been on the podcast, you know, months ago. There you Go. And then James Schramko of course with his book and he's a good friend of both of ours and mentor. So the fact that you have those guys as people who trust you in this early model, like super smart and it's just a, that's a lesson in using your network but also being valuable and putting yourself out there in a way to give value up front. So yeah, and let's, let's explain the model too because it's interesting how you focus and I like it that you're focusing on the marketing side. You're not necessarily writing the books for folks you know, there's other resources out there maybe can you explain your model with what you're doing now? And best people you serve the model.

And the reason why I focus on marketing is because everything before marketing is somewhat commoditized. There's a lot of people doing a lot of different things there and everyone's trying to be a publisher and everyone's trying to write books and it's great. You know, I'm not knocking that as a business model and most people are very successful doing that. It's really great for me because there's a potential good amount of referral partners for my business.

That's immediately what I thought of.

It's really good for me. But yes. So the business model essentially is once someone has a book that's published, we try not to focus on like launch strategies and things like that. We just focus on post launch.

Let's smell sell books with advertising and assets that we own like sales funnels so that we can build our email list, create customers for ourselves and then let's continue to indoctrinate them and sell them into other things. So we typically do what's like it, what's called a next steps offer. So once they buy the book, we'll give them a next steps offer for booking in a strategy call with the team. And that's typically done like right away. But then all of our follow up we do retargeting ads as well is all based around like getting them back to do the next step thing. So they're always kind of been positioned the follow up next step offer throughout their kind of customer journey so that we can get them back in doing the thing that we really want them to do. Like obviously the book is a good entry point to that. And so yeah, how we achieve that is we run really good ads that are very simple, very effective to then either sell or give away a book in a book funnel. And if we're giving away a book. It's very straightforward, just name an email, opt in and then you know, next step offer on the thank you page. If it's selling a book, then we can start looking at order bump offers, we can start looking at upsell offers. And all of those things are really put into place not to make profit but to just offset the advertising spend that we have. Because when we give away a book it typically is like less than $10 per lead. But when we sell a book, it can go up to $60 to get someone to actually buy the book. And even if we're doing a free plus shipping offer and so you can start to see how that can be very expensive for us to get good volume. And so to offset that we just put in more offers in the book funnel so that you know, average cart value can try to creep up to match the acquisition costs that we have on the advertising.

And then yeah, essentially we then have the thank you page offer again as well for the paid book funnel to kind of do the next step thing. All of our email follow ups and everything that we build for clients is all based around kind of delivering obviously the value indoctrinating and then getting them back to do the next step stuff as well.

I like it. Yeah, I had the books actually right over there. It's called a two week vacation test. There you go. By Austin Netzle and he, I think his. I don't know if it's still active and I don't have the link on top of my head. I shouted it out on his episode but he was giving away, you know, a physical copy of his book and he was like this is like the best way to do funnels because you know your cost, you know, and you said under like $10 a lead. And these people are committed like and obviously they're receiving something too. So there's that whole, there's a lot of persuasive type of principles happening there, reciprocation and whatnot, that's just like a lot more valuable of a person. And then like you said there's a funnel that happens behind that as well and you know instantly but also I'm sure later once the book arrives, timed out and all that. So I'm kind of curious of, of some of these maybe your thoughts around that if that's the kind of, if you've seen that successful, not successful.

Well, I mean it's, it's a good model really when you think about it. So it's good because today we can Get a client from the book because of the marketing that we do right away. But then the book sits on the bookshelf and it's like a constant reminder of hey, either read me or hey, either work with me because I'm an expert on this topic. And I'm sure most entrepreneurs want a two week vacation and so like maybe they should put his book to the test and, and actually work with him if they don't really have the time to go through and implement the stuff themselves. And that's typically how most books are framed. It's like, hey, here's the how to. But if you want more help, then work with us. Right? You know, same with Ryan. It's like, here's the how to to build a scalable business, but if you want more help implementing the systems, then we've got an offer for that. And so it's just like a get it done quicker and faster and with less effort kind of offer.

And so I call it the knock on effect. Because today, like people will become clients, tomorrow people will become clients. Six months down the line, your book is still on their bookshelf. They might pick it up again and become clients or even a year from now. Like people don't always have the time to read the book right away and consume that knowledge, but it's always there reminding them. And they'll always remember that you're the person for that thing. And so when they think of needing that thing, then they're going to pick up your book, they're going to see the offers that you have in your book and they're going to potentially want to reach out to work with you. So that's why I love books the most because it's just, it stands the test of time.

Yeah, no, it really does. And for someone who has a book currently, let's just talk to them really fast because I'm sure a lot of people do, or maybe even a smaller book, I don't know what you would call a book or if like, if it's a smaller workbook thing. But let's talk to those people. Like they have something like that. What's like, what's a good model that you would recommend starting with and assuming they have at least like a core offer, you know, a business behind it. But maybe, maybe it's not optimized in between.

Yeah, so definitely they need to have a core offer. Otherwise I would advise against selling books or marketing books. It's just going to be something that you spend a lot of money on. You're going to feel bad about because you're not making money on your book. And then you're going to blame or get upset that, you know, you're spending money on marketers or whatever the case is. Like, you're just going to be upset. It's not expectations. Right. They start getting definitely expectations. So I'll just set that right up right now.

But certainly, you know, I love old books. Like even 100 page books, like, they're kind of my favorite. They're easy to read, you know, they're super tactical. The Evergreen Traffic Playbook or whatever it was. I think I still have it.

I remember. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. That's the name. Yeah, there was Evergreen Wisdom too, is another one.

There we go.

Oh, snap, look at you.

Mine's on the other side of the wall. I can't hold up.

I mean, I read this back in the day and I was like, this is sick. I want to implement it right away. And it was just basically like, run Google Ads retarget with Facebook ads in it. But such a model.

Yeah, yeah. And most things should be. But yeah, carry on. But that's a good example though. And I'll just say it was repurposed from other podcast and articles we wrote mashed up into a book.

So there's a lot of ways to.

Create a book and even more so now with AI and stuff too.

Yeah, and I mean, like there's the offer on the book as well, but it's like 96 pages. So it's like this is a book, you know, and someone can get tremendous value from that book. And I think first and foremost, like, if you don't have a book yet, just realize that it doesn't have to be the book. It can. It's just a book and it's part of your ecosystem now. So like Matt and Joe didn't write this as the book for them. You know, it's a book in the journey. But I'm getting sidetracked. So, yeah, certainly if you have a book, the best strategy I would recommend is just to determine whether you want to generate a lot of leads for a pretty cost effective dollar amount, but have them be less qualified. And so like really it's just weighing up the pros and cons of like selling the book or giving the book away for free. And selling the book encompasses like free plus shipping offers, which is, I know you guys did that back in the day because you're still charging, you know, an amount. But the pros and cons ultimately come out to be like, if you sell the book, you're going to get more qualified people. They're going to buy stuff from you, they're going to become customers of yours, which makes it easier for them to spend money with you again in the future. And I certainly did with you guys. And then if they get the book for free, they're going to be less qualified. But you're going to get probably 10 times the amount of volume for the same dollar input. So you spend a hundred bucks on ads, you're going to get 10 times more people getting a book for free. But the downside to that is, like, obviously people just get free stuff when they see ads or get free stuff on Facebook. It's like the collection of lead magnets and PDFs that we've all gotten over the years. It's like, I'm not sure I've ever opened one of those a second time.

You do a flash look, skim and call it good.

So, you know, yeah, even if it's a book, like, it's kind of the same thing. Kind of. I would say a book still, like, outweighs everything else, but it's, there's still a downside. But the cool thing is, like, you don't need someone to even open your book or read your book for you to get a client from your book. It's all just a positioning and authority asset. So as long as you're comfortable giving a book away for free, like, I would potentially start there if you're, if you're looking to DIY your book marketing, just because it's, it's such an easy campaign to run, it's easy to validate, it's easy to scale. Whereas if you look at charging for your book, man, like, you can go weeks without getting a sale. And you'd just be trying to test and optimize, test, optimize, and you would just come up to dead ends. Dead ends, Dead ends. And you, you know, unfortunately, I've seen it happen with even clients that we're trying to run campaigns for. And, you know, it's maybe like 2% of clients that work with us that, that happens. But it's, it's, it's something that definitely should be considered overall. So it really just comes down to, if you charge for your book, it's going to be harder, but you're going to get better quality leads. If you give your book away for free, it's much easier, but you're going to get less quality.

Got it. Can you give some case Studies, because I know you've had some awesome clients already. And I'm curious of like these kind of scenarios, and I mean what you can tell, of course, and what they've given you permission to. We don't want to ruffle any feathers, but I'm curious to like maybe both scenarios and kind of how that looks like some people can kind of visualize.

Yeah, well, I certainly can give some case studies. I think the biggest thing to point out is that even if you get less volume doesn't mean you can't make good money from that. Most of the time. We see typically a 1 to 5% conversion rate of people who get the book become clients with you. And that's without advertising. So it's pretty easy to do the math. Like if you sold 100 books and you got one client from that, and it cost you $3,000 to sell 100 books, plus you've got an average cart value there. So maybe it's.

Let'S just say, being very low on the average cart value. Let's just say it costs you $2,000 in that scenario. And one client is worth 5 to 10 to $15,000. It's like it's gravy all day. Right. And even if you're paying for an agency or anything like that, like you could easily self liquidate based on that, plus have more money to put back in to continue to grow. And 100 books a month is not a huge number to accomplish. It's, it's, you know, 100 bucks a day on advertising. Sometimes less for some people, sometimes slightly more for others. But it's quite easy to validate when it comes to a couple of examples for you. Most of the examples, the guys have, you know, sold or given away less than 5,000 books and they've made tremendous, tremendous money from the book. So probably my favorite to share is Nigel Moore, who is a client of mine and has been since April 2022. Like literally when I started the business, he was like my first beta tester. Yeah, yeah.

Doing something right.

Here's a really good one because he's one of those examples where we give books away for free in exchange for a name and email. And the cool thing with Nigel is his core offer is a membership. So he has a $47 a month membership and we've been able to make a profit based on that with my agency fees and our advertising spend. So we spend about six grand a month on ads. And that's just like casual. We keep it there because it's a Good amount of volume. His audience is super niche, so it's not a huge audience size anyway. And we have given away around 2,000 books.

And we have a 10% conversion rate of people who get his book for free. They start a$7.14 day trial for his membership and then they, they stay on for a long time. Because the way that we've positioned his particular book and membership offer is that he has built out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of resources for this particular niche. And if they trial the membership, they are more than welcome to log in, download everything and cancel. And that's literally, we just called it out. So like one of his, like best case studies, his name was Pete, made this testimonial video for him and he's like, I had every intention of doing the $7 trial, downloading, you know, thousands of dollars worth of templates, canceling. But once I was in there, I saw that it was too good and I wanted to stay. And then so we like put his video as like the sales video for the trial. And then we put like, here's a handful of resources that you can download for free and cancel your membership after you've done that. And we just like listed them there. And that's just. It converts it like 10%.

Dude, it takes some balls to do, but I love how open you are. Just like, whatever, here you go. So it's the reality.

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So yeah, I mean that's just like a tremendous case study. So you know, We've spent about $100,000 on ads in the past two years and we're up over 200,000 in revenue. And our monthly recurring revenue is $25,000 now based on the trial conversion.

So with that we pretty much put in about $9,000 a month on like my retainer plus advertising spend and then we get $25,000 back without doing anything. So if we didn't run ads tomorrow, he would still have the 25K. And so we just build that and we probably give away.

Man, we give away probably three.

To six hundred books per month at the moment. And then we have a 10% trial. So we get about 10 trials a week at the moment.

Okay.

It's compounding.

Dude, that's awesome case study and thanks for putting out, I mean, all the goods because I think everybody can kind of, you know, you work the math and see what's possible. Even with an agency fee on top of that. It's a no brainer, you know. Yeah. And yeah, and I think the biggest barrier here, it's like obviously if you have a book, well now you can start kind of looking at what's possible because you have that asset. Could be something you wrote like last year, two years ago, whatever has that knock on effect, like shelf life. But at the same time, like, boom, there was some marketing magic behind it. And like really, you're targeting to the ideal type of buyer.

Yeah.

Or even give away, you know, leads, potential leads. In this case.

Yeah. I mean, we did Sramko's book and that's not a new book really in the grand scheme of thing, it's like six years, seven years old. When we, when we launched his book in 30 days, we gave away like over 5,000 copies and to Australia and US marketing only it ended up being 90 cents per download. So not, not a new book. And yeah, like, so you can revitalize a book that you've had for years and be quite successful with it.

Dude, that's, that's incredible. And I'm just thinking of like, so how about giving away your book to people in other ways? Like, and maybe this isn't what you're focused on because you're more on the ad side of things, but I think of, you know, like, what else can you do to maybe gift books to strategic people in your network, you know, partners. Maybe they're not the ones that are going to go through your funnel and actually buy stuff like that, but they can.

I actually heard a really cool strategy from Roland Frazier because he did his new book with Jay. Jay. Yeah, Jay Abraham. So the, the strategy because like I listen to a lot of business lunch because I really like Ryan Dice and I also really rolling.

And they were basically just like exchanging an episode on like how are they going to market their new books? Because obviously Ryan came out with get scalable at around the same time as Roland and Jay came out with their book.

Yeah.

Ultimately he said, we're putting our budget behind going on Amazon and ordering author copies and sending it out to a bunch of potential referral partners that we have identified or high level people that we want to work with to help them, you know, arrange selling their business or acquisition, you know, acquisition of a business. And they basically just said we're going to send out like a thousand copies per month. We're just going to do it through our author, our author copies dashboard, which essentially, if you don't know what that is, if you have a book published on Amazon, then you can basically send out a copy and just pay the cost of what it, you know, what it costs Amazon to print your book plus shipping. So it typically is like what, six or seven dollars per book to send it out to someone.

So I mean like it's a no brainer. And you know, I've, yeah, I've thought exactly that model. But it's cool to hear that they were, they're doing that is like, yeah, you just budget a certain amount every month. You go to your best referral partners, people in your network that you know are going to have that, you know, that network effect. I mean, shoot. Maybe some of them will even just buy or be your best lead source at least. I mean like there's a, it's a. Yeah. To pay five or six bucks for each. Come on. It's a no brainer. And then Amazon does all the work.

You know, another friend of mine as well, he actually, he has a SEO business and we all know how hard SEO businesses are today, especially with the, the market. But he essentially every single time someone books in on his calendar, he will send them out a copy of his book, but he sends it out personally. He's got his in an envelope that's a gold envelope, so it stands out in the mail. And then he's got his inserts in there as well. So he basically sends that out to every single lead that comes through. And that just like helps to.

Make him the most tangible provider for the SEO services. Just like, you know, the amount of people who have SEO books is like, you know, this much or the amount of people who have good SEO books is even smaller. But yeah, he just instantly stands out by sending all of his leads a book as well.

It's a no brainer, especially when you know your cost. And that's what Austin was saying on the podcast I brought up earlier. He's like, you know your cost. And that's, he might have been doing that same thing he said about, you know, six to eight bucks. I forget the exact number, but it was under 10, which you already said here too. It's like, I mean that might be a fat book if you're sending, you know, something for like 10, 10 bucks or plus. But yeah, it's a math game. At the end of the day you just know your math and especially if you have the funnel that's already converting, you've tested it, run some traffic to it too, then it's just like game on, you know, just start sending them out there.

One more like last one I think would be really cool, is affiliate model as well. So like if you think about running ads, you most likely going to spend more than you make in a funnel to actually get someone to buy your book. Most of the time we do have like probably 10% of clients who make profit from running book ads, but it's not, that's not what the purpose is. It's an acquisition funnel. So it's really just meant to acquire customers for as little cost as possible.

But if you could somehow get an army of affiliates to promote your book funnel that you know you've validated, tested, know it's working, then my suggestion would be to give the affiliates 100% of all of the digital offers. So we have our book. Let's just say It's a free plus shipping offer, 999 or whatever. To America. And then we have three different offers above that. An order bump for 37, you know, an upsell for 297 and a downsell for like $97, something like that. If you put it out there to have affiliates get 100% commissions on those three digital offers, then you're still getting an acquisition for zero, essentially, which is really what the goal is. You just have to pay the cost of the book. Well, the person who buys the book pays the cost of the book because that's what it actually costs to ship it out. It's typically $9, $10 to print and fulfill a book. So, you know, it's essentially a net zero equation. And then all of your affiliates are being heavily rewarded because they're getting 100%. They feel like you're giving them everything when it comes to that. I feel like that's a really smart way for you to also think about different advertising avenues. And then that even might incentivize, just like you and Matt used to do with ThriveCart. You know, put together, like, all these additional assets around this thing, run ads to it, you know, do blogs or make videos or whatever. Like, it could really incentivize affiliates to go hard.

Yeah, I mean, they see because it's a numbers game on their side too, and it's immediate value, you know, it doesn't, at least for them, it doesn't look like they're pitching something hard. It's like you're literally giving away something or at least you're incentivized to do that and go harder. Like, you know, rather than some big ticket product that's a lot more barrier or tool.

And it's, it's all positioned as like, hey, just get, you know, my good friend's book for free. And it's like, you know, how hard is that to sell? You know, like, exactly.

Now it gives me some ideas of a. Of a launch I'm actually currently in right now. Well, might have to talk after this.

Okay.

So how about something else that comes to mind? And this came up because of Roland and Jay Abraham. I saw they did kind of like this book launch. I think it was like a contest. I forget exactly what it was now and I'm like, blanking on it. It's been a few months ago, but have you seen any contests? I mean, obviously you can pair up the affiliate thing with a contest and have, I guess, affiliates point to something like that gets a lot more of the sharing going.

Yeah, I'm not, I'm not one really? For the contest side, I haven't thought enough about it, to be honest with you. I'm like, so in my lane. It's not funny. That's good.

Yeah.

So I wish I had some strategies, but I'm not sure I actually have thought about it enough to give you anything.

No, that's fair, man. You've given more than enough already. I'm curious if there's any, like, obviously. Okay, so the two camps, at least my mind here, are like those without books. Write a book.

And then if you don't, or if you do have a book, then obviously we just gave you a whole bunch of models or Chris did here and things to think about, numbers to crunch to kind of go down that route. The ones without a book right now, I mean, obviously AI prevalent. We all know that it can write a whole bunch of stuff. Doesn't mean it's the best stuff. It might not be in your voice. Whatever. It's getting better.

Any tips on how to get someone to, like, write something quickly or do you ever consult on people early in that stage just to get over that hump, you know?

Yeah. And most of the time, it's just like making connections with friends who do help with those things. So.

It'S hard because it's a specific recommendation. You know, like, if someone has X book that they want to write or they're in a specific niche or industry, then I would connect them with different people, depending on who they are and of course, what their budgets are as well. You know, there's. There's people who charge a thousand dollars to help, and there's people who charge a hundred thousand dollars to help. So it's like, who, you know, who's the. The person that needs the help? Right. And so I'm very mindful of that and making the right connections.

There's certainly AI stuff that can help, like a guy named Sean Vossler, who's a really good copywriter and very smart marketer. He created a platform called Movable Type. And it's essentially, write a book with one big idea, and it's all AI generated. You literally put in your big idea and it will. AI will spit out a book with Google Docs and all of that kind of stuff so that you can edit it and customize it. The biggest thing around that kind of stuff is like, obviously don't just do that. Get a book from that and then market that. Because if someone does read your book, it could potentially look really bad on you. As someone who's trying to put out that value in the world. So definitely go through, edit it and all of those kind of things. But, you know, I think the biggest thing is when it comes to writing books, you need to make sure that you have frameworks in your business or methodologies in your business that you can write content around. And I would even say it's a benefit for you to have workshops, webinars, you know, other events that you've recorded where you're talking about these methodologies. Because if you do ever work with someone or if you are getting, you know, support with writing your book, then all of those assets come into place and they actually form a lot of the content inside your book. So it's actually less work for you to get to a finished product. And so I just say that's very important to have.

I like that, man. And that's. It goes into. So I've been working with, partnered up with Mike Koenigs on all sorts of stuff, and the guy's written 19 books now. I think it's just crazy. And essentially like, you know, he has.

A book for every new endeavor or angle.

I mean, there's all sorts of things. I think like 18 of those are actually business focused. Like one was about his cancer, Journey through it and Beat It. So it's like. But he's told me his process. I'm not going to go through all the details now, but it's exactly what you said. It's like basically a framework. I mean, it's like thinking through everything. There's a lot of previous material, but then there's also, like, with the use of some tools, Cast Magic is a really great tool to use and like mine the content like webinars and podcasts and other audio YouTube videos that you might have posted that can then fit into these frameworks that you have mapped out however you map it out or follow someone else's guidance. But know that like, yeah, we're, we're all sitting on like, wealth of content. It could be emails that we wrote, like, whatever it is.

To your point, it's like it doesn't have to be such like a big boulder to push up the hill. It's just really coming around. Like, what's the big idea? What are you trying to do? Write a framework. Probably something that's proven, of course. And then, yeah, use some of these tools and ways to kind of leverage what you already got and then fill in the gaps.

Yeah. And you can write 100 page book. And it doesn't have to be hard. Like, it does not one like, little methodology could fit inside this book.

I love it. I take that as a compliment. But, yeah, man. I mean, because I'm honestly in a spot now where I'm like, I have an idea for something new, but at the same time, like, I know I can get it out of my head faster than ever now to record. Like, I'm going to start by recording some podcast episodes about it. But then I know, like, there's tools like Cast Magic or there's the Oasis I shout out. Pretty often you can just, like, ramble into your phone and it gives you. It spits out your ideas in more of a format that you give it.

Okay.

Just ways to shortcut the game. But it's all leveraging you and your knowledge still, you know? So cool, man. Shoot. I mean, other than this, is there anything that we missed? Like, some big, glaring, obvious thing that you think would be helpful for those watching?

Well, I think we went really good into giving books away for free and having kind of membership services on the back of that. I would actually say, like, my. My favorite strategy is getting people to booking on strategy calls with you.

Because it's just. It's so much more tangible. And, you know, if you're someone who's even smaller, you know, you don't really have a big team and stuff. It's like, that strategy is so bulletproof, it's not funny. And so I would just, you know, if you're a service provider like me, I'm actually about to start my book, and my strategy is literally going to be give the book away for free, book a call on the second page, and have a sales conversation with someone. And ultimately it just gears it up for me to be able to get clients really easily. And it's the same process if you're a coach.

If you run different products like that mentorship stuff, it's really simple for you to just have a book on the front and have a strategy call to follow that up. And as long as we position it well, or even position a strategy call as a bonus when we're giving the book away for free or selling the book, then it's not, hey, I'm gonna try and sell you on booking the strategy call. It's like, hey, this is what's included with your purchase or your download today. It's like, go ahead and redeem it now kind of thing. And it just makes it, like, less salesy to actually get someone onto that call with you. So I actually do think that that's like, my preferred model when starting to work with someone if they do sales calls, if they take that on, because it's just such a tangible thing. We usually have around 20% of people who either buy or download the book actually booking call our clients. And if you're, if you're decent at making sales calls, you know, you'll probably close a good amount of people on, on the calls as well.

Oh, yeah, man. For sure. Especially when it's inbound, like you're not even, you're not going cold. They know you, they. You've already given them the book. You know, there's, there's a clear reason why you're going to chat. And now it's just more. It's enrolling them into the next step, whatever that looks like. Don't be fearful of picking up the phone or picking, you know, having that zoom call or whatever it is because, because you're right. Actually, that's like the most basic funnel. And it's probably 80, you know, 80, 20. That's going to be like the most results right there. You could validate a lot right off the cuff. You're not building something recurring. You could if you want to, but at least, you know, that's, that's probably a great way to start for everyone just to test out the model. Yeah, right on, brother. Well, how can people find you? Go maybe chat with you? What's the next best step to work with Mr. Benetti?

Yeah, I mean, smartaulthormedia.com chat we can essentially have a bit of a deep dive session into what you're doing with your book. So I've kind of positioned it as a half an hour consultation session. Usually I charge $2,000 for an hour consult. So, you know, I really would put the value at a thousand bucks on, on that call together. And, and ultimately, you know, I like to go and do a deep dive into, if you have a book, what are you doing to market your book? If you're not marketing it yet, what can we do and really put a game plan together for you so that you can actually have some tangible steps to go ahead and implement that. And if you want, you know, obviously our help to do it at the end of the call, we can obviously discuss that stuff as well. But it's really not about selling you on anything. I'm not a hard salesperson. I'm just, hey, I want to give value. I want to help give you the steps and the tools. And at the end of the day, I'll point you towards different resources that you can utilize to actually implement the stuff that we talk about as well.

Yeah. I mean, Chris, you, you obviously, you're like this off. Off these podcasts as well. So you're an open book. You're always been super helpful, man, and, and there's no reason why you're. I mean, it's obvious why you're getting the results you are and working with the people that you already have only like, you know, a couple years into it, but, like, you've been playing the game for a while, obviously. So, dude, I can't wait to work together with you because I know I will on probably multiple things, which I'll tell you about one of these after we hang up here. And.

What else? Like, is there any, like, kind of final, final point here? Anything that you want to leave people with to think about or maybe just something that you're. You find exciting? I mean, now you have all this new stuff in your life. It's kind of curious, like, what's on your mind here?

Oh, man. Well, so outside of business is obviously like family life.

And so being a dad, I'm actually going to be a second time dad just like you, sir.

Congrats, man.

14, 13, 13, 14 weeks, I think today actually.

So.

Heck, yeah, you know, we're, we're definitely in the journey.

And, and yeah, like, we literally just moved into our new place that we built.

Maybe a month ago. So, you know, it's been a bit of a process of doing the things that we want to do to this place. Landscaping, different, you know, walk in wardrobe, cabinetry, you know, all that kind of like fun stuff that you have as a homeowner.

Adulting hard.

I know, yeah. But I'm very, like, bullish on investing as well, like property investing. So Charlie has been a really good guide for me there. And it's really, it's really just grow business as much as possible so that you can make a lot of profit, reinvest that profit into tangible assets outside of business so that everything becomes sustainable and, and doesn't rely on one source kind of thing.

Sticks and bricks. Invest in sticks and bricks.

I'm. I'm three deep now at the moment. And my next acquisition is actually, we're planning to buy our dream.

Property and, but not to live in it yet. So, like, my, my sites are set on a $2 million property down south of where we are now, which I think we spoke about years ago. Margaret River.

Yeah, yeah, rings a bell. Nice.

Yeah, I'm just like, you know, how do I make business as profitable as possible so that I can save up this ginormous half a million dollar deposit for that property. Seriously.

I think that's great, man. And these are similar conversations I've been having on the podcast. But also off are is exactly that. A lot of real estate, lot of investing. I have a couple clients that are financial advisors, slash work with family offices and yeah, that's the thing. Alternative investments. There's. It's like you can, you can do a lot in your business. So it's like we can control that in our, you know, like, like you said, it's almost like what was the term you used at the very beginning of it? Essentially, it's like, you know, it's scalable because, you know, it's shoot scalable by the inputs, by design. You know, you kind of know the levers to pull to get more profit out. So I think it's a pretty common thing these days. People are thinking about, it's like grow the business and then take that into alternative stuff.

Yeah. Otherwise you're left with nothing. You just like, oh, where did that $500,000 in revenue go? Like, no.

Yeah. And it could go quick too, you know, or maybe taxes. At least here, you know, it's real estate, a big thing. Well, Roland, Roland Fraser, you mentioned him earlier. And I'll just end on this note because on my brain, because it's like you be the dancing bear, you know, but when the bear stops dancing, basically the money stops flowing. You know, a lot of people, they build like agency models or something around yourself or your brand and yeah, that's always stuck with me. So it's cool. You're safeguarding yourself. Very smart. So. All right, brother, thanks for that little insight there. And your time has been fun. So let's do it again soon though, huh?

Yeah, definitely. I'm all in.

Thank you.