MBA2052 Why You Should (and Shouldn’t) Write a Book + Free Ride Friday

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Hey. Oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show. Making building a business just a little bit easier every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Friday, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse co. Or you can win it for free. Just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday, like today to see if you won. It's that simple. In today's lesson, you will learn why you should and shouldn't write a book. Many entrepreneurs decide to write a book for many reasons. Some of these reasons are actually solid and can help you, your brand and your business. And some of them are not so solid and unfortunately cause you to feel disappointed. You work so hard to write a book, to put it out there, to market it, to publish it. And you just don't get the results you're looking for. And that has a lot to do with understanding what a book can and cannot do for your business. It also has a lot to do with your intent. Intentions when you're writing the book. Because if you're writing a book with one intention and you're expecting a different result that that intention is not aligned to, you're going to be in trouble. Many people use a book as a lead magnet, a calling card, a way to drive traffic. But unfortunately that's not why people read books. They don't read books to join email lists. So in today's lesson, I'm going to just lay out what works and what doesn't when it comes to writing a book. And that way you can ask yourself, am I ready to write a book? Maybe you're, maybe you're not. Maybe it's for a later stage in your career. And that way you're not implementing something that's going to waste your time and money and effort with very little results. We're going to get into all the details in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Gas, snacks, tolls.

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Data detour to Metro. Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile, just bring your number. $30 first month and $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro or T Mobile in the past 180 days. Here's the thing about writing a book. There's just no way around this point. And that is your book has to be valuable. The content actually has to be great. It has to impact people, it's got to help people. It can't be a marketing hack, it can' a way to optimize your funnel. It actually has to be valuable. In fact, I think if you're going to write a book, the book really should give $10,000 worth of value. And the great books out there do this. The books that I review where you would pay $10,000 for a course at a university and you'd actually get as much information, you'd get as much insight, you'd get a new perspective on things. These are the books that really change the game. The books that change your game, change your business and your brand. And that's really what you want to do with a book, is make people recognize, man, this person's valuable. I'm getting so much out of this book. A book is sort of like a faux free plan where you're basically offering incredible information for incredibly Low price to win them over, to make them feel like, wow, this is incredible. What else has this person got? And it happens organically. This is called brand affinity, where you love the brand and a business so much because of what they offer you that you want more. This is not a hack, this is not a strategy. This is not some sort of quick win where you just like switch them over to your website. This is actually taking the time to write a valuable book. You should never write a book if you have nothing to say. I learned that from Michael Port, the New York Times best selling author and Wall Street Journal best selling author of Steal the Show and the think Big Manifesto and Book yourself. Solid friend of mine and I always pick his brain when it comes to writing books because he writes great books. I've been fortunate enough to be friends with some really incredible authors. Roommate Sadie, who is a New York Times bestselling author of I'll teach you to be rich mentioned once on this podcast that the reason why he wrote his book is to change people's lives, is to help people be financially literate and live their rich lives, whatever that means to them. So again, if you're going to write a book, you have to have something valuable to say. You may not be in the head space to do that right now. You might have something valuable, but you just are consumed with other things. Don't fall into the trap of saying, oh, I'll just write any kind of book just so I'm out there. And it's sort of a marketing play. This will hurt you in the long run. Why? Because let's say you put out a mediocre book or a lousy book, and then in the future you do have the headspace, you do have something amazing to share with the world. Release that book, it goes out there. And unfortunately, when people start looking for your book, reading about your book, reviewing your book, maybe you're looking for publishers even before that. The material you put out there in the world beforehand is going to be weighed in into that decision. So you shouldn't be writing a book just so you can get some cheap traffic. A lot of people do this as a strategy. They're like, hey, Amazon's a very popular website. I'll just self publish a book on Amazon so people can know my name and my brand and get out there. Now there's nothing wrong with self publishing a book. In fact, a lot of great books are self published. Wall Street Journal best selling author Pat Flynn self published his book will it Fly? And it hit the wall Street Journal best selling list. So there's nothing wrong with self publishing, it's just understanding that when you self publish, it's not like you're doing less work. You still have to spend time marketing your book, promoting it, getting into the hands of the right people. Dori Clark, who's another prolific writer, great author, had her on the podcast a whole bunch of times. Best selling author of Stand out and the Long Game, some incredible books. She advised me, if you're going to write a book, see this as a major project. It's going to take a lot of your time. She spends two to three years after writing the book, promoting it, selling it, getting on stages, speaking about the big idea of the book. So again, don't think that if you're going to get a successful book out there that this is going to be a weekend project or something. You're going to just kind of sneak into the next quarter. Great work needs great effort and great dedication. So if you're running your business and you have a special insight or you have a special take on how you run your business or how you do business, or you have thoughts on how to approach a certain topic or a certain challenge that your audience is going through, this deserves your attention and time. And if your business can sustain itself and you have a great team managing it and you have some time to spare to write a great book, then this is good. This is great. You should do that. Understand this is something that you are going to need to spend some time working on. Even if you have a publisher and a publicist and all that kind of stuff, if they get you on podcasts and get you on TV shows, you need to show up and you need to deliver. You shouldn't be writing a book if you are trying to make lots of money. For the most part, books are not a money maker. They're a reputation maker. They're a name maker. They're a brand awareness and affinity maker. A great book will amplify you and take you to the next level when it comes to your credibility and your authority, but necessarily won't make you a millionaire. Only the very, very top selling books of all time really make enough royalties, really make people some significant cash. This is literally a couple dozen books that are on the bestselling list constantly. But here's the good news about writing books, and I learned this from Ryan Holiday, best selling author again, New York Times best selling author of Stillness is key. The obstacles of the Way. Ego's the enemy. There's so many good books from Ryan Holiday, one of my favorite authors, but he says the best way to promote a book is to write another book. He's saying that, hey, if you write a great book and for some reason it doesn't get as much traction as you like, but you know, the value is there and the people that do read it feel like it tell you it's impacting them and that they're really getting a lot out of it. Then one of the ways to promote that book is to write your next book. Because when you write another book, people are going to look up the other book as well that you wrote. They're going to read that book and say, what other books has this person written? I actually did this with Ryan Holiday. My first book that I picked up from Ryan Holiday was the Obstacles Away. I totally loved that book and just went down the rabbit hole of finding what are all the books that Ryan Holiday has written. And I actually was on the waiting list in his newsletter to find out when his next books will come out. And even some of his books are not always going to be a hit. One of those books is Perennial Cellar. I think it's one of the best books he's written. One of my favorite books that I've read on the concept of what makes something just be amazing and stand the test of time. But I'm sure that book help promote other books as well.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's Expired.

Expired in 2012. Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to geico.

Now you might be thinking, Omar, well, do I do any marketing strategies to my website or to my email list inside the book, or is that a waste of time? No, that's not what I'm saying. If your book is valuable and it's valuable on its own, but you want to give extra value, like give worksheets and checklists and you want to send them over to your website, go ahead and do that. Some people do that behind a email wall, meaning that they have to subscribe to get those cheat sheets. Some authors I've seen don't even have that. They just send them to a page and that's where you get them. And they figure, hey, if they want to be on my email list, they'll subscribe. They might check out my website, look at my blogs, and love what I have. That's a call up to you personally, I think you can actually do both, where you can give them the option to subscribe and also give them a chance to download without that. So it's on the page. Hey, if you like this content, like my book, I do a weekly newsletter that gives even more actionable tips. Sign up here. So there's nothing wrong with doing that within the book. I've also seen a lot of great marketing of the book by bundling it with courses or mastermind sessions or training sessions or live speaking opportunities where you get to invite this person, the author, to an event of yours or to your company or something like that if you buy a certain number of books. Gary Vaynerchuk is kind of the godfather of book bundling. He's done this very early on, about 10 years ago when he released his first book, Crush it. And I think he has some really innovative ideas about how to sell books and market them. So I'd definitely check out what he does over there. The bottom is that if you're going to write a book, write it because you have to write it, because there's something great you want to share with the world that you know can help people you know. It's going to be incredibly valuable. That will make it successful, that will move the needle, that will get people that read it to love what you're all about, check you out and become maybe a customer or a lifelong lover and promoter of your business and brand. That's the hack. That's what works the when it comes to writing a book. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 VA Show. Today's episode's not over though, because it's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is Pedzi. Pedzi says on Apple podcasts this week's episode was the best yet. Thank you, Omar. You're a legend. Thank Pedsy from Australia for that amazing review. Your mission is to email me over at omar100mba.net so I can hook you up with a lifetime membership to Ezcourse. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter weekly random draw. We call Freeride Friday right here on Fridays on the podcast, just listen in to see if you won. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the best ways to know how to write a great book is to read great books. This is why I love reading books. I read about 50 books a year and it's for good reason. I want to surround myself with great copy, with great writing, with interesting thought leaders, with people that know how to explain what they're trying to get to people's heads, right? So I'm really a big fan of being surrounded by greatness in a topic or an area like books, so that you can just understand that's the bar you want to hit. This is a type of book, this is the type of impact I want to make on other people so that when you write a book, you can easily compare your book to the ones that you've read before the greats. And you could say, hey, this one can stand on his feet. This one's not too bad compared to what I've read before. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of Foreign.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk?

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money, like by switching to Geico. You could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big it feels good to geico.