141: Using Click Funnels to Grow Your Audience and Sell More Books

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Larry Becht has been a digital marketing expert for the last decade and is a Click Funnels certified partner. His company, the Expert Media Group, helps you turn your products and ideas into profit.

Today, Larry is going to share with us how authors can use Click Funnels to build an e-mail list, establish a deeper connection with your audience, and create multiple ways to promote your books automatically.

Larry has been an entrepreneur for the last 25 years. He started studying internet marketing with Dan Kennedy 10 years ago. It was through Dan that Larry was exposed to Russell Brunson and Click Funnels. When Larry saw the amazing potential of the Click Funnels technology, he became one of the first people in the world to register and become certified as a Click Funnels partner.

Larry has also studied with and become certified by Ryan Deiss of Digital Marketer.

His company, Expert Media Group, has helped hundreds of clients promote their books and ideas.

How to Use Click Funnels to Start Making Money Online

In the past, if you wanted to set up a sales funnel online, you needed a whole team of people, including website designers, copywriters, graphic artists, and specialists on the different platforms you were using to set up your sales funnel.

Now with Click Funnels, you can set up everything in your sales funnel through one hub.

Click Funnels can handle:

• Your website
• Your autoresponder system
• Your CRM autoresponder system
• Your entire sales funnel process

You can use your own graphics, write your own copy, and design your own pages easily.

Finding Your Purpose

The first thing you have to know in order to get the most out of Click Funnels is what you’re going to use the system for.

Click Funnels has several different funnel templates you can use depending on what you want to do.

You can:

• Create an opt-in page funnel where you collect people’s email addresses. This is a simple process involving two pages and can be set up in as little as 24 hours.
• Create a sales funnel to sell your product.
• Create a webinar funnel.
• Create a membership website

Click Funnels offers a range of options to cover whatever kind of flow you want to create. What you need to know in the beginning is what you want your end result to be.

Click Funnels Is a Self-Contained Service

Click Funnels is a self-contained service. That means that when you subscribe to Click Funnels, you don’t need to have an autoresponder.

However, if you already have an autoresponder that works well for you, Click Funnels can integrate with them and be a backup in case your autoresponder loses data.

Click Funnels for Authors

Several of Click Funnels’ features are particularly useful for authors looking to grow their audience or make more sales.

Collecting Email Addresses

The most important thing you can do as an indie author is to build an email list. The standard way of collecting someone’s email address is by using a squeeze page.

A squeeze page is a simple page where visitors have two choices. They can either:

1. Give you their email address and get whatever list incentive you’ve set up to build your list.
2. Leave your page.

In general, there are two windows of opportunity to collect someone’s email address:

1. You can collect someone’s email after they buy your book by creating bonus content and putting a link in the book.

The link to your bonus content would drive people to a squeeze page where they have to give you their email address to receive their bonus content.

2. You can also get someone’s email before they buy your book if you’re using Facebook Ads or some other ad platform. The ad would link to a squeeze page with bonus content that promotes your book. The bonus you offer when somebody signs up for your list before they buy your book should be inexpensive to produce and offer high value, because there’s a chance someone might sign up for your list and not buy your book.

One tactic that has been particularly successful for nonfiction authors is to have a short video series around the content of your nonfiction book that primes your audience for the content of the book.

You want to set up two separate email lists depending on whether a person joins your list before they purchase the book or after. This allows you to communicate more specifically to different segments of your audience.

You’ll also want to have different bonus content in case people want to join both lists.

It’s important to separate or segment your list based on the traffic sources for sign-up. This way, you can tailor future email campaigns based on your audience and where they came from.

In the internet age, personal connection is a premium value. The more you can connect with specific segments of your audience, the more value they will get from you—and the more money you will eventually make.

Using Click Funnels to Segment Your Email Lists

Click Funnels has some very robust emerging technology that allows you to segment your email list in powerful ways.

There is a version of Click Funnels that allows you to track your audience’s social media activity so you can create a list of social media influencers.

You can also segment by:

• Geographical area
• Age
• Gender
• Interests/hobbies
• Purchase history (this is especially helpful if they make purchases similar to your product)
• Whether people have opened their emails
• Whether people have clicked on the links in your emails

Click Funnels stands out as a service because it allows you to know more about your audience than other list-building solutions.

What to Do with Your Audience after They’re on Your Email List

You can do any number of things with the people on your email list.

When you segment your lists appropriately, you can have individual email campaigns such as announcements about Facebook Live for people who came to your Facebook ad campaign.

You can deliver further bonuses in the future, as well as updated content related to your book.

You can tell people who buy your book that you’re offering a course on the subject.

The Product Launch Formula

Jeff Walker popularized the product launch formula many years ago and it has worked for many entrepreneurs.

It also works to launch a book. The basic structure goes something like this:

1. You set up a squeeze page that allows people to access a video training series of three to four videos over a two-week period. These videos cover the three or four most important points in your book. Or they could train people on one particular element in your book.

So if you’ve written a book on how to build a blog with WordPress, you could do a video series on The Three Essential Elements of Any Good Blog Post if you wanted to go this route.

2. After people have signed up to your list, they get access to a video in the series every few days.
3. The point of this is that by the end of the video series, your audience has a really good idea of what’s in the book and they’re excited about the content.

You generally want to plan this sort of thing one month before the launch of your book. That gives people time to sign up on your list before your book launches, and to go through the video series.

It’s possible to set it up so that people can pre-order your book directly from your video series so they don’t have to wait for the launch date.

Multiple Buying Options

One powerful reason to use Click Funnels to implement the product launch formula is that Click Funnels allows you to easily offer multiple buying options so you can bundle other products with your book to increase the amount you make from your customer base beyond just book royalties.

Click Funnels gives you the option of creating multiple buy buttons for different products and product suites related to your book.

So at the end of your video series, you tell people your book is live on Amazon and then offer your book plus additional training courses or one-on-one coaching for a much higher price point.

Following Up with Your Subscribers

You want to give your email subscribers as many opportunities to buy as you possibly can.

The best thing you can do is study other successful authors in your market and see what they’re offering in terms of services in their business. Then you offer a similar type of product that you deliver in your own unique way and make sure your audience knows about it.

A certain percentage of your customers are going to want to learn from you on a deeper level. By creating products and services and putting buy buttons on your website, you are maximizing the number of people you can help achieve their goals.

The thank you page that people go to after they sign up for your list is another good place to let people know about other products and services you offer.

If you want to make more money in your business, add more buy buttons to your website. If you want more email subscribers, add more opportunities for people to subscribe to your list on your website
— Tom Corson Knowles

Click Funnels and Split Testing

Click Funnels makes it easy to split-test various elements of your selling funnel.

Split testing allows you to tweak your webpage and sales funnel to maximize the money you make and the value to your audience.

The number one thing that sets super-successful internet entrepreneurs apart is that they just try more things.
— Tom Corson Knowles

Links and Resources Mentioned in the Interview

The Expert Media Group — Click the link to get two free guides on how to use Click Funnels as an author to engage with your audience and get more sales.

Click Funnels — Sign up for a 14-day trial of ClickFunnels

http://www.digitalmarketer.com/ — Ryan Deiss’s website with more courses and programs on marketing