How Freelance Writers Can Use A Short Book To Get Clients

Ready to Stop The Client-Getting Hustle and Create Your Own Source of Steady, High-Quality Clients?

Here’s How to Use a Short Book to Get More (and Better) Freelancing Clients

Follow this 6-Step Plan for Using a Book to Get Clients…Without Job Boards, “Value Posting” Everywhere, or Relying On Networking. 

Think about the last time you had a day off.

Now think about the next time you’ll have a day off again.

Do those two things both seem super far away from you right now?

Here’s the reality with 90% of freelancing businesses:

Most Freelancers Simply Can’t Afford To Take A Day Off Without Losing a Couple of Clients.

So they rely on things like:

• Job Boards
• Facebook Groups
• Networking (both online and in-person)
• Sending out hundreds of cold emails or DMs
• Spending their life on LinkedIn “value posting”, adding connections, and trying to connect with potential clients without coming across as sleazy
  
  

…and work on one-off project after one-off project from month to month.

And if the stars align one month, and all their projects wrap up at the same time – and if they can find time between all the “self-promotion hustle”, – they might be lucky enough to take a vacation. Maybe a couple days here or there, or a long weekend.

…Only to get back to their laptop on Monday morning to jump right back on the hamster wheel again.

Sound familiar?

Here’s the issue at the moment:

Right now, your client-getting relies on YOU to work.

If you’re sick, or take a day off, or are just too busy with client work to do any client-getting on any given day, you don’t generate any potential clients.

Simple as that.

But if you want to create a business that allows you more peace, flexibility, and freedom – without sacrificing the client-getting side of things – you need an asset that brings clients TO you.

(Rather than you approaching clients asking for work…the client approaches you asking “Hey, do you have space for a project in your schedule this month?”)

…And If You’re Tired of The Constant Client-Getting Hustle Every Month, We’d Like To Show You a More Peaceful Way of Bringing Premium Clients to You.

Let’s make things simple:

If we had to create a one-page field guide about growing ANY business – service-based or otherwise – the list of essential “pillars” that business would need are:

That’s it.

We’ve Helped Over 1,000 Freelancers, Coaches, and Service-Based Businesses Grow by Following These 3 Principles. 

So how do you do it?

How do you introduce new customers to your business every day, nurture them enough to build trust, and lead them to your premium offer on a consistent basis?

Well, you could use:

• Value Posting Everywhere
• LinkedIn Prospecting
• Networking and Events 
• A Website with a Freebie Download
• Webinars
• Facebook Groups

But, There’s a Better Way…

Sure, they all work to get clients, but they also all come with the same types of problems:

Want to know the method we prefer to get clients?

A Short Book That Can Take as Little as 14 Days to Write.

Since we started using books to grow our business in 2012, here’s what we’ve experienced both in our own business AND the clients that we build book funnels for:

• Better clients – clients who respect our expertise, are determined to succeed, and are a TON of fun to work with;
• Higher rates – in fact, when we do this for clients, many are able to go from $2,000 projects to $10,000 projects for their services within the space of a few weeks;
• Simpler marketing systems – the entire focus of our marketing now revolves around one question: “How many books have we sold today?”;
• Higher profit margins – we regularly maintain above 40% profit margins in our business, even after things like ad spend, overheads, and taxes are taken into account;
• A better ability to serve clients – with higher profit margins we’re able to easily add more resources, team members, and tools to our business to help us get even better results for our clients;
• And a business that’s simply more peaceful and enjoyable – read: “a business built upon systems and leverage, rather than hustle and being everywhere all the time”

The first client-getting book that our founder, Mike, wrote back in 2012!

For over 100 years, books have been one of the most consistent and predictable client-getting assets you can use to grow a business. 

Books can help establish your authority as an expert. They can help you grow an audience. They can help you nurture readers and guide them toward your services, coaching, courses, and more. 

And since we started using books to grow our business in 2012, we still haven’t found a more effective way to rapidly become a sought-after, premium freelancer with more clients than you can handle.

But the best part about using a book to grow your business?

The book does almost all of the self-promotion for you – which means you can finally take that long-awaited vacation without the fear of your whole business tanking!

Want to See How You Can Use a Short Book To Get Higher-Quality, Premium Clients Without Relying On Job Boards, Endless Networking, or Value Posting Everywhere?

Here’s our simple 6-step “checklist” for doing it:

Step One: Write Your Book

The first two non-fiction books that our founder, Mike, wrote back in 2012 brought in 4335 sales in 8 months. 

According to Mike: “I put the books on Amazon. I begged for reviews. I wrote a ton of blog posts. I tried to get on guest blogs, podcasts, email list shares, and more.”

That’s why it took 8 months to sell just 4335 copies. 

As a result, Mike only “made” $9,060.15 from book sales in the first 8 months. 

We actually recommend you DON’T do this.

In Fact, Trying To Sell Your Book On Amazon Is Doing Things The “Hard Way”...

The method we’re about to show you in this post is even more effective at selling books and turning readers into clients and involves much less hustle, stress, and unpredictability.

However, despite the “low” amount of revenue those first books made, they still worked exactly as planned:

As a result of those sales, Mike’s business ended up with more clients than he could handle – better clients too; clients he had only dreamed about working with before.

By the end of 2015, the business ended up working with over 1,000 different clients. 

And, with the help of these two books, the clients they helped bring in, and the audience they helped to build, Mike was able to work with amazing “dream clients” like Russell Brunson, Mel Robbins, SUCCESS Magazine, Bill Glazer, Brendon Burchard and many others. 

All that to say:

Books Are Incredible Business-Building Tools – But The Book Is Not The Business.

A book by itself makes no economic sense…

(Profit margins are low on shorter books. It takes time and energy to create a book. You need designers, formatters, and editors to put one out worth reading.)

…but a book as part of a larger marketing and sales system is the quick ticket to scaling to building a consistent, 6-figure freelancing business.

Which brings us to step #2 of the process after you’ve written your book:

Step Two: Bundle Your Book With Some Mini-Courses

Right now, it costs anywhere from $7 to $20 to sell a $5 book on Facebook. 

Most people aren’t equipped to handle losing $15 for every $5 book sale without going bankrupt, especially if they sell 150 books per day. That’s 150 x -$15 in daily net losses.

This is why people give up on paid traffic. They look at the math and say, “It’s impossible! I’m just gonna go back to spamming Facebook groups for clients.”

The good paid traffic strategist says, “OK, I need to find out how to offset that -$15,”.

Put another way: “How can I go from losing $15 for every book sale…to breaking even (or even making a slight profit) for every book I sell?”

Simple: You bundle your book with other stuff for people to buy.

For example, in The One Book Millions Method funnel, we offset that -$15 by offering an “upsell” worth $195. Normally, 10 percent of the people who see that $195 buy it. 

That means we’ve added +$19.50 to the “average order value” and have now turned that -$15 per book sale into +$4.50 per book sale. 

Now, we’re getting paid to put our sales assets in the hands of qualified prospects. Incredible!

An “Upsell” we’ve paired with one of our books in the past

Once you’ve set up the economics to work in your favor, you can move on to getting the book into the hands of your ideal clients…

Step Three: Run Traffic To a Sales Page Selling Your Book + Mini-Course Bundle

Don’t want to spend hours every day spamming strangers to get them to buy your book? Great – don’t.

Simply whip up a sales page for your book, write a few ads for it, and start sending people to that page.

Remember here too:

This isn’t some $997 course or $10,000 coaching program – this is a $4.99 book.

You don’t need to write some crazy long sales page, you don’t need to be the next David Ogilvy or Eugene Schwartz, and you don’t need to set up a multi-platform funnel with 247 touch points just to sell your book.

The argument you make on your sales page can be as simple as:

After building more than 37 funnels in the past year alone for ourselves and our clients, we have found that simple, mid-length, VSL-free sales pages work best. 

There are a hundred reasons for this: shorter attention spans of today’s market, load speed times, messaging, consumption, simplicity, etc.

Just know: You do not have to write some crazy long piece of copywriting genius just to sell your $5 book.

Once your book starts generating sales, then you can move on to the next step.

Step Four: Spend More on Ads (Because Your Ad Costs are Covered by Book Sales)

The fastest way to become a sought-after expert in your niche is to get your book in the hands of as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.

To do this, you’re going to need to leverage paid traffic.

Typically, we’ll aim to spend at least $3,000/day on ads to get our books in the hands of buyers.

But please don't be alarmed by this figure. 

After all, you've already set up the economics to work in your favor by bundling your book with other products. 

As long as you’ve done that right, your ad costs will be offset by your Average Order Value, and you will be acquiring customers at net zero cost (a.k.a. “for free”).

Here’s the other cool thing too:

You’re literally in charge of the “faucet” that you’ve built here.

Whether you just want to build a more consistent, peaceful, and profitable freelancing business…or whether you already have an eye to growing to a figure like $100k/month…

You’re completely in charge of that growth.

Your book will still continue to turn strangers into premium clients – but you decide how fast you want that to happen based on how far you turn the faucet.

Then, as more and more people buy your book, you’ll begin to build up a healthy email list – bringing us to step 5…

Step Five: Nurture Book Buyers Into Premium Clients

So people are buying your book now. Awesome! But your job isn’t over…

Remember Pillar #2 of growing a successful service business?

In any business, you and your client must have a relationship of trust before they’re willing to spend big bucks with you.

Of course, relationships of trust don’t just fall from the sky, so there are two things you can do to help your client trust you:

There are a ton of different ways you can do that, but the method we prefer the most?

Email.

We like to send a minimum of 3 emails per week – although sometimes we send a little more.

Our emails aren’t flashy, or controversial, and neither do they adopt some kind of smarmy marketing persona.

Yet email has been our most effective tool for rapidly turning $5 book buyers into premium, pre-qualified clients for a long, long time now.

In fact, in January 2021, we did another book launch.

In 22 days, we spent $30,510.15 on running ads to the funnel, and made $99,087.30 in revenue (counting funnel sales + back end offer sales).

Just a couple days later (after a few quickie emails to book readers saying “I’m looking for clients”), and by the end of the month, we’d spent $36,154.67 on running ads to the funnel, and made $141,108.68 in revenue (counting funnel sales + back end offer sales).

…and a substantial portion of that revenue was almost entirely a result of simply keeping in constant contact with our book buyers sharing more value than they expected to receive.

Screenshot from our payment processor, Stripe, after the first month of book sales + premium offer sales. Gross charges = sales processed the first month. 

And now that your book is regularly selling and turning complete strangers into premium, pre-qualified clients?

That brings you to step 6:

Step Six: Write Another Book, Or a Course, Or Keep Selling Your Services – Because Now You Have Your Own Audience. 

Here’s what you have now (thanks to a book):

1. A way to bring customers into your business;
2. The ability to nurture those customers as often as you’re able to;

Now you just need to plug in the third part of the equation:

3. The ability to offer the best transformation and outcome you can at a premium price (so you don’t have to work with a ton of clients and you can deliver amazing outcomes). 

Here’s the other thing too: You probably have this already – you just need to dial it in.

Whether you’re currently offering your services to clients, or selling a course of yours, or offering some kind of way to deliver a transformation to your clients, you now have a strategy that brings complete strangers into your business…

Turns them into pre-qualified buyers…

And leads them to your premium offers on a consistent basis.

Now you can rinse and repeat as needed.

(In fact, our team is currently working on our 6th book soon to be released!)

The best part about all this?

You DON’T need to have a huge team to make this work – you can plan, write, and publish your own book in as little as 14 days with a “one-man band” setup.

You DON’T need to have a huge audience for this to work (in fact, the book is the very tool you can use to rapidly build an online presence in your niche even if you’re currently “unknown”).

You DON’T need to hustle your butt off trying to get clients every day (one of the reasons we love books is because of their ability to turn complete strangers into our newest customers simply by reading the book).

And hey, you may be a writer, but your book does NOT need to be Shakespeare.

(Nearly all of our books use simple, plain language with no frills, just like this article.)

And as long as you can write a book that genuinely helps people to achieve a certain result, you’ll have no problem building those 3 key pillars of a successful business into your strategy:

Over to you!