You've written your book – woo hoo! Well done. Getting your first book completed and published on Kindle is a huge achievement, but your book isn't quite finished yet! The next step, of course, is being able to generate leads from your Kindle Book. This is where my client Alice was just before Christmas last year.
Alice had spent 7 months writing her book before it was edited. She has a nice cover designed to stand out on the Amazon “shelf” and was ready to test it. The next step for her is the same as yours: generating leads from your Kindle book.
We went through the Kindle book and although it was perfect for her audience in almost every single way, it didn't contain an offer for the person who was reading her guide.
Alice had no idea that she had to add some sort of offer to her Kindle book. She knew that people love closure and being guided to the next step, she just didn't know how to include this in her book.
In other words, Alice didn't have a powerful call to action in her book in order to generate leads. In fact, Alice was hung up on the fact that adding a call to action would be selling, and having one would make her book “salesy”.
Let's put “salesy” to bed, once and for all!
You have a business. You have overheads and expenses. You have clients. The clients come from sales. Sales come from marketing your business. No marketing = no sales. No sales = no business. No business means overheads and expenses = debts. Debts mean going and finding a job, and giving up your entrepreneurial dreams.
It's not being “salesy” to make an offer and share products and services that will make a difference to your client's lives. Not everyone will take you up on your offer, no matter how compelling it is and that's okay because hope is not your marketing strategy.
Your free offer needs to resonate with the reader, be something that adds to what they’re reading, and be beneficial and useful to the reader. In other words, it needs to add value to the reader of your book.
Guiding Your Reader To Your Email List
After talking through Alice's goals, she decided the best offer she could make, the one she would feel most comfortable with would be to invite her reader to join her email list.
Alice toyed with the idea of using her current opt-in, the one on her blog but it didn't meet the needs of the readers of the book. Alice wants to ensure whatever she offers has value to her audience.
What Optin Gift Will Add Value?
You want the opt-in gift to add value to the book you’ve written so it should be made exclusively for the book and almost like an additional component of your book. Alice loved this idea but she had no idea what would work for her readers. We set about brainstorming the value that could be added to her Kindle book.
Examples of Valuable Kindle Book Optin Gifts:
- An action-packed checklist
- Exclusive templates they can use as their own
- Access to an exclusive Facebook group or community forum
- An app that helps them get results based on your book
- Worksheets that help your reader implement the knowledge
Alice decided that 2 extra worksheets to enhance what she shared in her book would add incredible value to her readers. This will make them more likely to download it as it helps them put the information in the book to use. Knowing your book's audience is a crucial part of determining the opt-in gift.
What Type of Opt-in Gift Would Your Audience Love?
You know your audience better than anyone else does. What would make them want to go download something, in addition, to buying the book? Building a stronger connection with you and making your book something worth talking about and something worthy of their email address?
Different types of audiences like different types of opt-in gifts, some like apps, and some like more information. It’s up to you to choose an opt-in gift that is right for your budget as well as something that your readers want. Alice knew after brainstorming that her worksheets would be beneficial to her new audience. I explained that one of the ways of knowing if the opt-in gift was wrong, would be related to its uptake. If Alice sold 300 copies of her book, and 10% opted in, that would indicate that it's a good fit.
If Alice sold 300 copies of her book and one person opted in, then it would be time to go back to the research stages and test a new opt-in gift. One of the most powerful things about Kindle books is the ability to update them in a heartbeat. Alice loved this concept and she loved that Kindle will help her validate her business ideas.
Does Your Audience Understand How To Get Their Gift?
Will they understand how to go to a landing page, enter their email address, and then opt-in when they get the double opt-in email? Will they understand how to click the link to find the download page? Is it better to direct the reader to a download page and then retarget the visitor through Facebook ads?
Whatever you decide, give very specific instructions to your audience. Providing the free offer or lead magnet is going to build your list, as well as prove to your audience that you’re the expert and authority that they want to follow, if they want to solve their problems.
The Free Opt-in Process
Just in case you're like Alice and don’t understand how the free opt-in process looks, let’s go over it quickly. It’s not very hard it just seems tough if you think of it as a whole. This assumes you have a book and a freebie already.
You’ll need:
Your Kindle Book — This book will live on the Amazon website. You’ll simply upload it to their service where they’ll handle everything about the bookselling. If you're stuck at this stage, then get in touch and we'll give you a quote on doing this for you – Just send a message.
The Optin Gift – This may be an app, an information product, a checklist, or something that goes with the book and will add value.
A Landing Page – When your readers see the link in your book, they’ll type the link into their browser, which will take them to a landing page on your website. The landing page can be as simple as a form for the reader to opt-in to get the freebie. You can make something like this with Thrive Architect or even just your regular website software. The point of this page is to get the information from the readers so they can download the gift.
An Auto Responder Service – You need a service like Active Campaign to collect and house the email addresses and other information you collect from your readers. This is also, where you’ll put a series of emails to inform and engage with your audience with the goal of promoting other products and services to them.
A Download Page – A download page is how your readers will, via the link sent to them by the autoresponder go to collect their gift. Some people send smaller freebies as attachments with the email from the autoresponder but the download page is actually better because you can easily change the download page up when you want to and it’s another chance to bring your readers to your business website.
A Thank You Page – This page will be used after they download the offer, which will enable you to provide a special offer or another offer to them that is a paid offer. You can send them right to that page after they download or you can send that page to them via email.
Since I first wrote this post there's been a few updates! You can now use an all in one system called System.io and it starts out at no-cost, and then rises to £27 a month.
Your audience will read your book, notice the opt-in gift mentioned at least three times in the book, and will go to the landing page, submit their email address and then they’ll get an email from the autoresponder inviting them to confirm their details. Once they do that, the autoresponder will send them the email with the link to the freebie offer, which will take them to the download page. The download page will take them to the thank you page where you can make another offer to them after thanking them for reading your book and downloading the freebie.
Once Alice could visualise the process it was easy for her to see her next steps to generating leads from her Kindle book.
Examples of Kindle Books and Optin Gift Ideas
Let’s look at a few ideas and examples in different niches to get a good idea about how this looks:
Book Idea: Easy Weight Loss for Big Appetites
Freebie: 20 Nutritionally Filling Recipes to Help You Lose Weight
Freebie Format: PDF Download
Book Idea: 7 Homeschool Ideas for Children with Sensory Disorders
Freebie: 20 Product Round-up of Educational Toys for Children with Sensory Disorders
Freebie Format: PDF Download
Book Idea: 20 Ways for New Mums to Exercise
Freebie: Exercise Tracking App
Freebie Format: Mobile App
You'll notice from my three examples that the book titles are really specific and identify the ideal reader in the headline. The opt-in gift is related to the theme of your Kindle book and it adds tremendous value to the reader.
Your optin gift will be mentioned several times throughout the book. You can mention it in a sentence for example. When talking about exercising, how much you need to exercise to lose weight or build muscle, mention that you have a free tracking app just for readers with an easy-to-read link (that they won’t forget) and can go to when they’re not reading your book. Pretty Link Lite is a freemium WordPress plugin that will help you create an easy-to-read (and track) URL.
You can mention the download in your resources section at the end of the book, and you can also mention it in the section about you, the author.
Once Alice had grasped how to generate leads from her Kindle book, she started to envision a whole series of books that will help elevate her dream clients and grow her business!
If this is something you'd like to work on, please get in touch here and we can have a chat
Sarah x
