2.5 Become the Industry Expert – Write a Book

Writing and publishing a book is the pinnacle of positioning you and your business as the leader in your niche.

It seems like a huge task and when you are up to your eyeballs running a business it is.  Probably the best first book would be an educational book on your specialist area of expertise.  If you have followed the process outlined in this book then writing the book should be relatively straight forward because the bulk of it will already be available in the documents you have already created.

One of the keys to getting it done relatively quickly is in the statement ‘Go Wide – Not Deep’.  If you go too deep you are likely to lose the reader and the research and detail will take more time with relatively little benefit.  The majority of people are visual or kinaesthetic and they learn best by watching or doing and not by reading.  Writing an in depth training manual is unlikely to maintain interest, in fact, it will bore most people to tears.  A book with less depth and more high level information will maintain interest and encourage the reader to either recognise you as the expert in the area or engage and come and learn from you.

Ideally the content you provide should be enough for someone to actually go out and make use of it.

Some of the things that writing a book will do for you are :

• Position you as the expert

When you write a book on the subject you will be viewed as the expert on the topic (as long as the content is good and as long as you are an expert anyway).  When you are already an expert, a book written by you just assists in proving the fact.

• Marketing Tool

Providing valuable content to a prospect is a great way to market your business.  It is like a high powered business card and is significantly better than sales brochures and flyers.

• Promotional Opportunities

Writing a book will give you real opportunities for  promoting your business.  In chapter 5.5 we look at ways to getting yourself and your business into the media.  The book will certainly help with this and provide some excellent opportunities to promote your business.

Some other benefits of writing a book are :

• It’s an advertisement without looking like one
• You build trust before you start selling
• It has a high perceived value
• It brings prospects to you
• It gives you instant differentiation
• It makes you an instant authority
• It helps you close more sales

This chapter outlines a process that will help you get your book written and published very cost effectively and in a relatively short period of time.  There are some workshops on the topic that only cost between $100 and $400 and will take away a lot of the mystery surrounding the process of actually planning, writing, publishing and moving the book.