[image error]

Memorize this formula. Traffic + Offer = conversions

It’s the only thing you need to know to make money in any business.

Traffic, no matter where it comes from to look at your offer and determine if they want to buy.

Your digital marketing strategy can include multiple offers from multiple traffic sources, and it should.

Ideally, you’re building a list of people who:

Want to read what you write in your blog or book

Who want to buy what you sell

Who want to grow personally and professionally

Who like your product, your brand, your mission

So let’s start with that.

What is your mission?

It should be a simple 30 second elevator pitch that lets you capture someone’s imagination as they see your vision.

My mission is to help 1000 new authors earn $100,000 this year selling fiction on Amazon.

That’s a pretty cool mission, huh?

Why 1000?

I can hear “real” writers gnashing their teeth and complaining about a tsunami of crap washing over the literary landscape.

Well fuck you Jack.

Here’s my take on it.  I’ve been writing since 1978.  Not professionally, since I didn’t get paid for it.  But I drew cartoons and words onto blank blue pieces of paper to tell action stories.

I loved Star Wars and Smokey and the Bandit, Six Million Dollar Man and Fall Guy.  I was a kid, but I knew what I wanted to do.  I wanted to write stories that made other people feel like they were having fun.

So I did.

Starting then.  All through high school too.  I didn’t tell anyone at the time, but I wrote novel in high school and submitted it to a teen novelist contest.

That was my first official rejection letter.  It sucked.

I wasn’t much good at being critiqued or failing then.  I don’t blame my mom or my dad, but I was told all the time growing up that I wouldn’t be much.  Expect to fail, keep expectations low, don’t try, don’t strive.

Any attempt to make or work at a better life was met with swift reprisal.  I was asked a lot, “Who do you think you are?”

Trust me, getting that kind of feedback makes a mess of the inner voice in your head.

I stopped trying to get published until I was in college.  But I never stopped writing.  I wrote all the time, all sorts of stories.  I read.

Like Stephen King. Or Terry Brooks.  Or Mark Twain.  I read a book a week or more.  I wrote almost every day.

I sucked.  I know it, but I created habits and practiced.

Then I tried to be a professional writer.  I got a ton of rejections.  It didn’t hurt, didn’t bother me as much.  I was the first guy in my family to go to college.  Ever.

That took balls.  I skipped the Paper mill and went for a degree in English.  I started in broadcast journalism, and a professor told me I wasn’t handsome enough to be a reporter.  I shouldn’t have listened to him.

I think all professors are probably idiots.  I learned later that most of us live in bubbles.  Bubbles of community, bubbles of job and family.

Every now and then I peeked out of the bubble and got a glimpse of a bigger world.  I try not to live in a bubble now.  Warning: Society wants you in a bubble.  We admire everyone who is brave enough to be different, and then do everything we can to normalize them and bring them into the bubble.

I’ve seen this described in a ton of ways, in business, in music, and art and writing.

Be different to stand out. But get a cover that looks like a thousand other covers on Amazon.  It’s the only way readers will buy you. (that’s true.)

Write different.  But be close enough to someone else’s style that readers will recognize and respond to it, so you can sell books.  (true again)

Get in a community of other authors, each telling you how to make it.  There are a thousand ways to make it.

Pick one.

I think you should pick my way.

I’ve been writing and publishing on Amazon since 2015.  I missed the big eBook explosion that started in 2012.

I’m sad about it.  I had enough books, product and fiction that I could have been publishing that whole time even as I climbed a corporate ladder.

I kept writing through it.  I write 5k words a day most days.  I have a hundred stories I want to tell.

But I like training.  I like helping.  I miss helping people learn.

So I created a way to help new authors.

I don’t know if 1000 will take a chance.  Fiction is funny.  You either can write well, or you can learn to write well, but you have to find readers who respond to you.

It’s tough to do with just one book.

It’s tough to do with just two books.

Three is a good start.

Then it’s about marketing.  Getting traffic to come to your landing page on a website, writing copy to get the person to either buy your book or sign up on your list.

That’s the offer.

You use math to get your conversion rate.  8% is a good one.  Higher means you’re doing it right.  Lower than 5% means you need a new offer.

Or new words for the same offer.

It’s part art, part science, kind of like writing fiction.

Traffic + Offer = Conversions.

I’ve seen people play with the numbers to show you how to reach $100k.

That’s all made up projections.

The real test comes when you hit publish on your book.

And then the next one.  Followed by the next one.

I wish I would have started in 2012.  But 2015 was a good time to start too.  2016 was good to me.

2017 is even better.  When are you going to start?

Can I help you get more traffic?  Can I help you find ten or more ways to create income streams from your books?

From each of your books?

Sometimes you just need an outside eye to consult with, someone to identify where in your platform you could make a tweak to take you to the level you want to be.

Impact adjustments that can have a dramatic impact on your bottom line.

How much does it cost?  $197

How long does it last?  Until you start realizing sales from the tweaks, meaning I’m with you on the path to make six figures in 2017.

Click here if you’d like to know more.

If not, no worries.  Just memorize the formula:

Traffic + Offer = Conversions.

Then go buy this book for less than a cup of coffee to help an author out.

And write.  Daily.  In a series.

That’s worth the price of a cup of coffee too.