Alright so before I talked about how to actually make money from a book. Today I’m going to take what I laid out there and take it to the next level. If you haven’t read how to actually make money from a book make sure to do that first as it really adds to what I’m talking about here as well as lays the groundwork for it. Marketing is a very interesting phenomenon and above all else it’s about using human nature to your advantage (and ideally the advantage of your prospect/customers as well). One key aspect of making more money for whatever it is that you do is by becoming an expert.
The best way to become an expert is to publish a book on the subject. Authors have special places in our minds and are automatically seen as being “above” the average person. This is the prime reason that every entrepreneur (really everyone) needs to write a book to distinguish themselves in the marketplace and help fight commodization and beat competition. However there is a way to take the book that you wrote and make it work for you ever more with little added work.
You can take your book and make it from a general marketing piece to a laser focused marketing piece. Essentially imagine taking your book from a shotgun to a sniper rifle while still retaining the power of both. So use your book to dominate your overall niche as well as position yourself as an expert but then use this strategy to futher dominate subniches and become the go to expert with them as well (with little extra work).
How To Dominate A Sub-Niche & Why You Should
Alright so let me start this off by talking about my terminology so we’re all on the same page. By niche is mean a particular market. So while fitness would be a genre fitness for men would be a niche. Not the most exact of definitions but it’ll work for what I’m talking about here. A sub-niche would be fitness for high school football players or fitness for men over 40 or senior citizen fitness and so on and so forth. Again your definition may be different but that’s the terminology that’ll hold for this piece. So let’s talk about dominating a sub-niche.
The purpose of your book is to help dominate a niche, meaning a particular market. Now here is the problem many run into after dominating their niche. They figure after dominating their niche that they have therefore dominated the sub-niches attached to that niche as well, but that’s not the case. And even talentless competitors can come in and take market share by focusing on a tiny sub section of your niche. With enough of these competitors and they can really cause a problem.
One thing I hear a lot is “I don’t understand it what’s in my book works just as well for X as it does for Y” translated to our example above “I don’t understand it my book The Adonis Physique: The Man’s Guide To Building His Greatest Body Ever works just as well for men over 40 as it does for your average gym goer yet I keep losing those customers to Old Jim’s Circuit Training For Men Over 40. Jim isn’t even certified and gets his clients crap results”.
Or some version of the above. Essentially a more skilled entrepreneur is losing out to an inferior competitor simply because the inferior competitor is more highly targeted and the more skilled entrepreneur cannot afford to go after every single little niche because it wouldn’t be viable to do for every little sub-niche what he did for his niche yet the competitors keep piling up and he keeps losing money.
The Solution
So what is an entrepreneur to do? The solution I found after listening to a Dan Kennedy tape where he talks about how he started selling more of his Magnetic Marketing System (a recommended buy BTW). So essentially Dan was speaking to different groups of people selling his marketing system that worked equally well for all of them. He sold to real estate agents, lawyers, professional speakers, small business owners, and a couple of other niches as well. Dan was getting a good response but felt he could do better.
So essentially (I can’t remember exactly what the tape said but this is the gist of it) Dan switched out the front cover of Magnetic Marketing with Magnetic Marketing For X (X being whoever he was speaking to at that time) so it might say Magnetic Marketing for Real Estate Agents or Magnetic Marketing for Intellectual Property Lawyers and so on and so forth. He may have changed some of the interior information as well (can’t remember exactly what the tape said) but by and large it was in general the same product.
And yet his sales increased by something like 20%. Now here’s how to use this information to dominate a sub niche. Take what you have for your niche and then repurpose it for a sub-niche while keeping the main (good) information the same. So let’s say you wrote a book The Adonis Physique: The Man’s Guide To Building His Greatest Body Ever and noticed older men shy away from it yet the information contained within is better than anything else out there for them. So you write a “new” book titled Make Your Body Great Again: The 40 Year Old Man’s Guide To Building His Best Body Ever (or something the idea not the title is what’s important).
Now let’s say your first chapter of Adonis was 8 exercises every man should be doing you’d take that information and repurpose it with the first chapter of MYBGA would be 8 exercises every man over 40 needs to be doing and chances are 80% of the information is going to be the same. So you’re only coming up with around 20% new information yet dominating a sub-niche. Now just repeat this as needed.
Good Information Should Never Be Used Only Once
Doing this will prevent frustration when you see potentail prospects following bad advice because it was simply targeted to them more than yours was. When a big name steps into a sub-niche it sends shock waves and will help keep the clowns out. However big names don’t step into sub-niches because the ROI isn’t high enough yet with this strategy the ROI is there because like I said you’re only coming up about 20% new information. Making it worth it to go after that particular sub-niche.
Combine this strategy with what I laid out in how to actually make money from a book and you have a very potent one two punch for not only dominating a market but also penetrating new markets as well as helping to establish yourself as an expert in the process with very little work on your end. A very powerful combination when done properly. Takes some work to get going but is well worth it in the long haul.
If you have any questions you would like to see answered in a future post send them to me at charlessledge001 (at) gmail (dot) com. If you found value in this post then I would encourage you to share this site with someone who may need it as well as check out my books here. I appreciate it. You can follow me on Twitter here.
-Charles Sledge
