Beyond the Best Seller with Hal Elrod - Genius Network #86

How to write a book that creates a movement, earns you a fortune and changes the world with Hal Elrod. Hal is one of the highest rated keynote speakers in America, creator of one of the fastest growing and most engaged online communities in existence, and author of one of the highest rated best selling books in the world, the Miracle Morning. The book has been translated into 27 languages and is practiced daily by over 500,000 people in 70 plus countries. If you would like access to the complete presentation, the show notes, the links and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 86. You know how powerful a book can be to establish your expertise, position you in your market area, and sometimes even earn you some extra money. What about writing a book that could earn you a fortune? Or your book starting a movement? Or how about changing the world? Sounds too good to be true, right after you hear Hal Elrod's presentation, you might have a mind shift. Hal's book the Miracle Morning is now selling over 10,000 copies a month. Plus it's creating a movement worldwide with over 45,000 members in his Facebook group in 46 countries. Pretty impressive for a young man who not too long ago was clinically dead for six minutes after a drunk driver hit him. Then the doctors told him he'd never walk again. Hal is very much alive. He certainly can walk. And he's going to talk to us today about beyond the bestseller how to write a book that creates a movement, earns you a fortune and changes the world. Please welcome my friend, Hal Elrod. Thank you.

All right, you guys ready to have some fun? Yep. All right, good. I have nothing fun planned for us. So the title of my message, the subtitle really tells a lot. How to write a book that creates a movement earns you a fortune and changes the world. It's a big promise to make. And I know there's a lot of people in the room that you don't have a desire to write a book. Or maybe you didn't until today. Right. There's been some pretty compelling messages around this topic. And then some of you already have written books or you're in the middle of a book. We got dean who sold 3.4 trillion books. I think Tucker's how I hope they serve beer in hell. Sold more than the Bible. You can Google that. And then Robin Sharma, you're humble, but I mean, I believe Robin has sold 10 million plus books. Yeah. Which is 9,800,000 more than I've sold. So I believe that. I think we should lobby for Robin to give the next 10 minute talk. But until then, you have to settle for me. So this is a quick kind of social proof. Garrett Gunderson sits down next to me and I get insecure because I'm like, Garrett's a New York Times best selling author. I didn't know he was going to be at my roundtable, right? And then afterwards he goes, hal, I've never thought about books this way. Completely change the way about the book that I'm writing. And this is what he said. Hal's strategy's been game changing as my intention is to make my new book the number one financial book of the next decade. That wouldn't be possible without what I learned from Hal Elrod's beyond the best seller. In case you don't know my backstory, this is me when I was 20 years old. I was head on by a drunk driver. It's a long story, 10 minute talk. Don't have time for the full story, but I died for six minutes. My heart stopped. I broke 11 bones. The whole left side of my body was just destroyed and came out of a coma. Was told I would never walk again. In case you didn't figure it out, I did walk again. But this shifted my focus of I was in sales at that time and maybe I meant to do more. And my life's been dedicated ever since to helping other people fulfill their potential. What do authors really want? And you see the word authors is in, it's in parentheses because you can swap it with entrepreneurs. I think that the answer to that question is true for whether you're an author or an entrepreneur. And I think we can boil it down to impact and income, right? That's really what we want. We want to make it scalable. How can we scale our impact so that while we're sleeping we're impacting people? And while we're sleeping, of course we're bringing in money and we're impacting our family and we're bringing in money for our family. So how do you scale your impact and income? And that's the thing is most books don't do that for authors. Most people ask, how do you monetize your book? What's your back end? I go, no, no, no, you just sell a lot of books, right? Yeah, we do events and all the back end stuff.

But.

But how do you actually write a book that actually does creates this extraordinary impact in the world and an extraordinary income for you and for your family? So quick rundown on the miracle morning. It was self published in 2012. This year it's gonna traditionally publish in 21 countries, by 21 of the top foreign publishers and translated in 21 languages. So the impact is kind of going global. 200,000 copies have been sold so far. But that doesn't really tell the story because I'm going to show you a graph later and you'll see that it sold like this for years. And then it hit a tipping point and we'll talk about why that is. And then the income, it's brought in $1.2 million conservatively in royalties in the last couple of years. That's not the back end, that's not our events, it's not the coaching. That's just in a self published. Amazon has sent those kind of checks and now it, you know, it's about $6 per book as a self published author. So $60,000 a month with 10,000 books a month. If you're wondering should I self publish or should I traditionally publish? I discovered by accident this hybrid publishing model, if you will, self published the book. And my philosophy was I believe in the message. I'm going to promote the hell out of it. Why give all my rights and my royalties to a publishing house where I have to do all the work anyway? Because when this came out, I didn't have a platform, I didn't have anything, I didn't have any leverage. So I thought I'll traditionally publish it until the publishers come after me. And then when that happened, I turned down all the US deals, but was able to keep my self published rights in the US and then leverage that into go into all these foreign markets. So I've gotten over $200,000 in advances. But it's the distribution, it's in every bookstore in the uk, every train station, every airport. It's the number one best selling book in Korea out of every book in all of Korea right now. I couldn't have that reach without the traditional publishers in those countries. I'm not going to go to Korea and get a translator and shop the book around. Right. So that's the hybrid publishing model that I kind of stumbled upon that anybody can do, right? If you believe in your book, you self publish it here and then negotiate to keep those rights while it goes into foreign markets. It's one of the highest rated books on Amazon with 1,630 reviews. And what we'll talk about today is it lends to that, right? And obviously if you go to Amazon and you see that many reviews, you go, well, this must be a good book. And I don't know about you guys, but I buy stuff on Amazon based on how many reviews and what the average reviews are in terms of building your list. When I launched this, I had no platform. You'll see in the last you see this is May 25th. This is like two days ago. The last 30 days, right? I don't know, how do I do this? The 11,166 new contacts. When I say 80% opt in rate, what I mean is every book that I sell is 80% of the readers opt in to get the resources that are offered in the book. Now I didn't know if that was good or bad. I was at a publishing conference a few weeks ago and they announced that their Average author got 8 to 12% opt ins for the bonuses in their book. So I'm going to talk today about how do you make that 80%. Now you'll notice it's actually 80% but I only sold 10,000 books. How is it 11,000 opt ins? We'll talk about that too. How do you get more opt ins in books that you're selling? The Facebook group. I just put this up here because Joe Polish is the first member of the Facebook group. But this was last month. It grows by about 2 to 300 members a day from around the world. And then serializing your book, right? This is something that you know, the whole chicken Soup for the Soul model best selling book series of all time. Any of us can model that. And so we have the miracle morning for all these books. You'll see our newest book that we have not designed a cover, that's not the final cover, but that is fellow Genius Network member Cameron Herold. We're doing the entrepreneur book. But you can serialize your book. It's another way to take it. Now here's the deal. This tells a big part of the story. You'll see. I published it in 2012, leveraged every human being I knew on the planet to please buy my book and we sold 2,000 copies. I didn't have a platform, I didn't have a blog, I didn't have a podcast. I had nothing. So our sales dropped. I kept promoting, kept promoting, kept promoting. It took a year and a half of promoting. I've done over 250 podcast interviews. I've gone through Clint Arthur's TV training, Celebrity Launchpad. That's how long it took. And then if you look at the scale now, in the last since September, we were averaging 10,000 copies per month. So again, if you're going, well, I don't have the platform. I'm not Tim Ferriss. I don't have the following sustained effort. If you believe in your message, you keep promoting it, you keep sharing it. All right, can you switch that so it counts down from there? No. Okay, so here's the four core strategies to go beyond the best seller. And when I say beyond the best seller, the premise of that is the idea that so much is promoted. You hit the best seller list. Hit a best seller list. You look at a lot of best selling authors. I can go to Amazon and look at their author rank and go, well, they were New York Times a year ago. Now they're the 676,000 thousandth book in sales on Amazon. So hitting a best seller list versus having a book that sustains. You gotta wait. Not that you can't do both. Number one, elicit behavior change. Number two, compel readers to opt in and share. Number three, and by the way, I have a handout that has all of this so you guys don't have to write down anything. Create a self sustaining community. Continue promoting until we're going to each of these. So number one, elicit behavior change. If this is all I taught you, I believe this is the single biggest differentiator for from 98% of books out there and what you can do with your book. Most books change the way you think, right? And it's a very temporary value add because who's been there where you're reading a book, you go, oh my God, this book. You're telling everyone you know, it's amazing for the three weeks that you're reading that book, then you stop reading it. The thought changes that it created for you are replaced by the next book that you're reading and you're not talking about that book anymore. But if that book had shifted your behavior in a way that was meaningful, where you started doing something different every day that added value to your life. Now you're telling every years later, why are you and your wife still doing that? What is that thing you guys do that's changing your life? Oh, I read this book two years ago. It put this routine in our life and now our marriage has been better ever since. We do it every day or every week. How do you lessen behavior change? 3 Ways to do it. Rituals and routines. Give them something to do. Nick Kuzmick and I were talking about how he could take his niche of marketing and Facebook ads and ritualize it. And I told him, have them create a weekly ritual that they do where they assess their numbers, they track them, they do their marketing plan. Something that adds value in a way where they're going to start to tell all their colleagues and all their friends. Second is daily affirmations. Everybody in this room, if you have a book, you should have a PDF download, which is simply an affirmation that reinforces the most important content in your book and so that people are printing it off, which that's part of the opt in strategy, but they're reading it every day and through repetition they're reinforcing the value that the book added as opposed to forgetting the value, which is what happens more often than not. And then number three, a 30 day challenge to transform. Give them a 30 day challenge to take what you're teaching them, your content so that they can actually turn it into something that is going to stick with them and they're going to sustain the beyond the reading of the book. Number two, compel readers to opt in and share. How do you do that? Number one, offer five. I have five. You can. The number's arbitrary. It could be three, it could be 10 downloadable resources that are relevant and compelling to your content. So in the Miracle Morning book, so the Miracle Morning, I talk about the power of affirmations. And then I say, hey, if you want to see my own affirmations that I actually used this year to write this book, which was a goal of mine for three years prior, that I failed to do because I. If you have any goals that you're afraid of, go see the affirmations that I use so you can create your own, right? So that's number one. And if they go, eh, I don't like affirmations, they keep reading. Then there's another lesson I'm teaching around journaling. And they can download a sample of the Miracle Morning journal. So the point is there's five different touch points throughout the book that are all valuable and compelling. And if by the fifth one they haven't opted in to get the downloads and either your bonuses suck or your book sucks, right? One of the two. But the point is offering those compelling downloads so that they're gonna opt in. That's how we get the 80% opt in and then setting it up to opt in for readers to share your book. So in the book I talk about the value of paying it forward and sharing something that's helping you. If this book's helping you, you can share it. Let me make it easy for you, right? Send your friends here, send them this link. They can get the first few chapters of the book for free. They can download a 15 minute video of me explaining it and teaching them how to do it. They can get a 60 minute audio. So you don't have to do the work of convincing your friend why you're excited about the stuff that you're reading. Right? Make it easy for them to share. And this is an example. This is simply the opt in page that I have for the bonuses. You'll see you get the affirmations, the smoothie, the journal, the 30 Day Life Transformation Challenge kit, and then finally create a self sustaining community. The Miracle Morning community is one of the fastest growing and more importantly one of the most engaged. Like quality engagement. Which like not the kind of engagement that you don't like Paul. Like good engagement. People are supporting each other, helping each other, giving advice to each other. Not just liking, but here's how to do it. Special invitation in your book the beginning of my book starts out with a special invitation. If you're reading this and you want to tap into tens of thousands of people that are already doing this. Now keep in mind it started out with tens of people. When the book came out it was hey, if you want to tap into a community where this is blah blah blah. It was like my vision for the community, but it was just me and like 10 of my friends in there. But the point is there's a special invitation in the beginning. Now here's a little bonus ninja trick that I added later which is a benefit of being a self published author. I at the end of the book put a special invitation. Again same exact page but in the table of contents it says in the beginning a special invitation. At the end it says a special invitation. And in parentheses in case you missed it the first time that tells them when they're looking at that must be important. I'm going to really pay attention to that special invitation. Finally a pinned post. Give new members simple steps to get started so when they do come into the community, right away they're taking action. And finally engage daily. Right? So engaging. I don't engage. I engage daily because I passionate about the whole community. But I have two different assistants, right that go in there. They like posts, they comment on posts, they support the people in the community. And this is an example of how we duplicated this in a best month ever challenge community. You'll see that. So we have 3,500 members. But day one we had like 200 people opt in and we had 180 posts, 200 people, 180 posts they were given simple instructions to post what you're here for. What's your best month ever? Challenge. And number two, leave a comment, an encouraging, supportive or helpful comment on someone else's post. So they posted and then they engaged and supported each other and it created this self sustaining community. And then number four, continue promoting until. And this is what I'm closing with, which is just simply there's the reminder like if you believe in your content, you believe in your message, you're really here to help people. You can't go, well, I tried it for a few months. It's not really getting traction. I'm going to move on to the next shiny object. For me, this was like, I'm going to promote this. I really believe this can change the world because it's changed my life and it's changed the life of every person I've shared it with. So I'm committed to sharing this over and over and over every single day until it's created the impact that I know that it can. And that for you is my wish for you is to have that level of commitment and to sustain whatever you're doing. So there's the wrap up. Elicit behavior change. Compel readers to opt in and share. Create a self sustaining community and continue promoting until thank you guys.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Genius Network. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event, please visit geniusnetworkevents.com that's geniusnetworkevents dot com if you would like access to the full presentation, the show notes, the links and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 86 that's geniusnetwork.com 86.