Episode 11: 3 Book as Business Card Examples

Modern Publishing Podcast Episode 11

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Welcome back to the Modern Publishing Podcast. I am you host, Blaine Moore. Today I want to revisit a topic that I actually covered in Episode 1 where I showed a few examples of how as a business person you can actually use a book to help promote your business.

So I’m going to go through some hypothetical examples today of a few different businesses and different ways that you can actually use your book, and if you would like me to put together an episode using your business as an example, feel free to visit ModernPublishingPodcast.com, and click on the contact link and just send me an email and let me know what your business is, and what you think you could do with your expertise and what you have to offer people, and I will try and come up with a good angle for you to write a book and how you can use it to promote your business.

So starting out today, my first example is going to be for the real estate agents out there. This is a relatively straightforward one. They could put together a short book about selling a house or buying a house and specifically what they should do.

If you’re a real estate agent, what you should do is write that book for your specific market. So selling a house in Cumberland County, Maine, or buying a house in Portland, Maine, depending on what your specific area is, where you live. Try and niche it down to whatever area you’re actually working in, and then that way if somebody is looking at a book and they see that there’s one that’s just a generic how to sell a house and there’s another one how to sell a house in whatever their town is or whatever their state is or however large of an area you work in, they’re more likely to take a look at yours, and they’re more likely to want to hire you afterwards.

So what you would do with the book once you have it written is you could use that as lead generation for your prospects. If you go somewhere where you meet people, you could hand them that instead of a business card so that that’s something that they can take home with them, and then you can also give it to your current clients if you are going to help somebody sell their house, then you can give them the book on how to sell a house. In there you can talk about staging and what the process would be like and things along of that sort. Then they’ll have that to look at while you’re getting their house ready to sell and while you have it on the market.

If you are buyer’s agent and you’re helping them find a house, then what you can do is provide them a book that shows them what kind of things they should be looking for in terms of do they need a garage, or do they need to take a look at the size of the property, the sum of the amenities that might be available, what kind of shape the attic is in, the roof is in, things that how to budget for buying their first house or buying a new house in your market. Try and include some things that are specific to your area.

Obviously, you don’t need to worry about talking about basements if you are living in the southwest where most houses don’t have basements, but if you’re in the north, you want to talk more about the different heating options such as oil or propane or electricity or geothermal versus air conditioning which is something that it would be more important down south.

So tailor it to your area. If there’s anything that you can tie in specifically with your particular market, if there are some amenities available in your particular city, sports teams, things like that, and just things that you can talk about for what people should keep an eye out for, then it will be a much more useful book for them. It will actually be tied to your geographic area, and then when you hand that to somebody when they start using you as a buyer’s agent or right after they’ve purchased their house, depending on the content that you have in the book, that’s going to help them with their buying and selling process. It’s going to help you get referrals later from them if they happen to enjoy your book and they like the service that you’ve given them and what it will do is it will help build your notoriety in your particular sales zone.

The second example that I would like to talk about would be for a developer. So this is actually a project that my brother is working on. We had worked on a piece of software, the WordCrusher software, which I mentioned back, I think, in Episode 6, and what this software does is it’s a Microsoft Word add-in, and while he was working on it, he discovered a lot of things that you could do with word add-ins that really aren’t well documented, and he actually had worked with some of the people that worked at Microsoft on the Visual Studio for Office team and had gotten some things out of them about how to specifically solve little issues that we had come up with.

What we think that he’s going to be putting together is kind of a technical cookbook, so what you can do if you’re a developer is put together something that showcases your specific experience and expertise and that could be from a specific project or from just everything that you’ve been doing in your particular workflows and create a series of tips and code samples that you can separate into different groups, which would be each chapter, and then in there would be some code samples and when you would use these particular tips and tricks and shortcuts and what you would do in order to get those into place in live code.

You could include a digital workbook that could just be a file that contains all of your code samples and have some things that people can cut and paste instead of having to type everything out specifically, so that would be a nice value add that would be offered to people who happen to purchase the book. You can just make a page inside of it that has a link to where they can go sign up for that, and that’s a good way to collect email addresses too if you decided to create more books like that or wanted to develop that market anywhere.

Now, there are two ways you could use this book. If you are a freelancer, then you would just use this book as an authority builder. Because if you’re talking to a potential client and you have a book on the particular technology that they’re going to be having you use to implement a solution for them, they’re more likely to hire you if you’re an authority on the matter and your competitor doesn’t have their own book about it, and that’s something that you can use, that you can highlight on your website and you can point out to people because even though they may not be the actual person that that book is aimed at, it would still show that you have a level of expertise that somebody else may not.

Now, another situation is if you’re looking to upgrade your current level of employment and you want to go and get a new job or find a new company that you want to work for, then what you could do is you could mail a copy of your book ahead of time to the HR department or you could just bring a copy of it if you have an interview already lined up and give a copy of that to whoever is interviewing you, and that will also set you apart from everybody else that just got the standard resume that doesn’t really make them look any different than every other person that’s being interviewed.

Now, the third example is if you are an attorney, and similar to the other two examples, real estate agent and developer, what you would want to do is write a book about an area of law that you practice in and describe it in layman’s terms, something that it would actually benefit the ideal client that you are looking for.

Now, for example, you could write about business formation if that’s one of the services you offer, so in that case, you would list the different types of businesses that are available for people to form such as sole proprietorship, LLC, S-corp, C-corp, et cetera, et cetera, and you’d want to talk about the pros and cons for that form of business. You’d want to talk about the scenarios where you would or wouldn’t want to use that type of business depending on the type of company and the future plans that you have or that you’re ideal client might have, and try and tie it in also to specific laws in your state or whatever areas that you practice in.

Because, obviously, as an attorney, you’d only be licensed to work in certain parts of the country, so you could tailor that for your specific area that you’re working in, and if there’s anything that’s a little bit different tax-wise or that’s specific for your area of law for that area of type of company that you’re building, then you can mention it there and that way it would be something that people can come in already knowing when they come to speak with you.

Another example for a type of service is, let’s say, you are doing intellectual property like copyright or trademark, patents, et cetera. In a book like that, what you could do is define the common terms, describe the history of that area of law, how it applies to the current landscape in what’s in place now, and you can list all of the self-help resources that somebody could use if they needed to do something. For example, if they’re going to register a copyright, that’s something that’s relatively easy to do by going to the copyright’s government website, and just uploading the files and mailing in a copy of your book or whatever the case might be for what you are copyrighting.

But there are some cases where you could do that yourself, and there are some cases where you really be better off hiring an attorney and somebody that’s specializes in what it is you do, and you could use your book to describe when somebody wants to hire somebody and when they want to do it themselves and save a little bit of money.

So again, you can use that as something that you hand out as lead generation. You can give it to your current clients as a thank you for doing business with you, and what this will do is it will set you apart from the other attorneys that are in your particular area because you’ll be the attorney that has a book on that particular subject area and you can promote that on your website and say that you’re author of XYZ book and you would then have some way of setting yourself apart and make it more likely that not only is somebody going to choose you over somebody else, but you’ll also have a lead magnet that your current clients can use to come back for more services or that they can hand to friends of theirs who might be able to use your services and get more word of mouth and referrals that way.

So those are three relatively straightforward ways of using a book, and if you’ve written a book, I’d love to hear how you’ve used it, and if you’ve thought about using one or are thinking about it and would like a little help brainstorming, then I’ll be more than happy to look at some specific case studies. So feel free to shoot me an email, leave a comment on this particular episode. That will be mppcast.com/11, or just go to the ModernPublishingPodcast.com and click on the contact button and I would love to hear from you and hear about how you’re using a book or how you’d like to.

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