Best Seller Secrets

How to Sell More Books with a Book Funnel and Paid Advertising with Chris Benetti

• Rob Kosberg • Episode 17

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I've got something special for you today. While we don't often have guests on the podcast, I couldn't resist bringing in an expert who's been making waves in the world of book funnels and paid advertising.

I recently crossed paths with Chris Benetti, the man behind Smart Author Media, and let me tell you, this guy knows his stuff. Since my upcoming book, "Book Funnel Secrets," is just around the corner, I thought, why not dive into some ad-related content?

We discussed the key elements of a successful book funnel and how to optimize it for maximum results. This includes crafting irresistible ads for platforms like Facebook and Instagram, as well as designing compelling sales pages. We also talked about the power of intent and how to leverage it in your book funnel to attract high-paying clients for your additional services.

So, if the idea of amplifying your book sales with paid advertising piques your interest, especially if you have more to offer like coaching or other services, then this episode is packed with insights just for you.

IN TODAY'S EPISODE, I DISCUSS:

  • Best practices for running paid ads for book funnels
  • Crafting the perfect ad creatives
  • Utilizing upsells and order bumps to maximize profits

CONNECT WITH CHRIS BENETTI:
Know more about Chris: https://chrisbenetti.com
Learn more about the Smart Author Media: https://smartauthormedia.com
Tune in to Smart Author Podcast: https://smartauthormedia.com/podcast

OTHER LINKS
Connect with Rob - https://bestsellerpublishing.org
Twitter - https://twitter.com/bspbooks
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bspbooks/?hl=en
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/bestsellerpub
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/BestSellerPublishingOfficial

CONNECT WITH US:
🌐 https://s.mtrbio.com/rkosberg
📞 1 (626) 765-9750

Rob Kosberg [00:00:00]:

One of the best ways I know how to sell more books to grow your audience and attract more high paying clients to your done for you services, coaching, consulting, whatever is to use a book funnel and paid advertising and traffic. On this episode, I interview Chris Benetti of Smart Author, who runs Book Funnels and who work with directly on some of our book funnels and clients. And we discuss in depth on how to run paid advertising and use Facebook, Instagram and social media to get your book sold through book funnels and paid advertising. So enjoy the podcast. Hey, it's Rob Kosberg with Bestseller Secrets. Excited to bring a little bit of a different podcast to you today. We have a fantastic guest. And as you guys know, I don't do a lot of guests anymore these days, most of it's solo and content. But I met Chris Benetti not long ago online and saw some of the cool stuff that he was doing with Smart Author. Smartauthormedia.com Chris runs ads and paid traffic for bookfunnels. I told him, of course, I have my newest book coming out, book Funnel Secrets, soon. And I thought, wow, we need some content for Bookfunnel secrets that's kind of ads related and ads focused. So if you're listening to this podcast and you're interested in how you can sell books online using paid advertising and you have something more expensive that you're selling, like a coaching program or done for you services or something like that, then I think you're going to get a lot out of this. So, Chris, thanks, buddy, for taking the time. You are literally 12 hours away in a different time zone in Perth, Australia. So appreciate having you on the podcast, buddy.

Chris Benetti [00:02:06]:

Yeah, no, thanks for having me, man.

Rob Kosberg [00:02:07]:

So you have some really cool clients. You've run traffic and book funnels for James Shramco. You're doing that now. Scott Alford, Joel Erway, who's a very good buddy of mine and a number of others. What I'd love to do is I'd love to kind of dive into some best practices in general when it comes to running ads for bookfunnels and then maybe go down one or two rabbit holes, if you will, and see what kind of incredible secrets we can reveal on this podcast. It is bestseller secrets. Give me what you would say. Someone comes to you, they want to run paid advertising, paid traffic with a book funnel to sell their book and something else. What are some of the first things that you look at and that you consider when it comes to paid traffic for a book funnel?

Chris Benetti [00:03:05]:

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. I would first say that obviously you need to take the time to set up your book funnel the right way. And what do I mean by that? So ultimately, you should spend some time really fleshing out your sales page for your book because ultimately that's going to be the number one thing that's going to sell your book. And then the next things that you should be looking at is what are the other offers that I want to put into my book funnel. Because every cent that you generate in your cart helps to alleviate ad spend. And so the more money you make in your book funnel, the less money you're essentially spending to get someone to buy your book. And generally, I'm sure Rob's seen this as well, but getting book buyers is actually not as cost effective as most people will try and praise, especially if you don't have any additional offers in your book funnel in place. So for me, it's like we try to get that sorted for our clients first to make sure that there's an opportunity for us to recoup revenue so that the ad spend as the budget increases on a daily sense, as that increases, we are being recuperated from the funnel revenue. So it's less stressful for the business owner, the person running the book funnel. And it just helps us to scale at higher levels without really having to worry about ad spend so much. So I would say the first thing once you've kind of got that dialed in, for me, creating ads, we take a simple approach. I think that a lot of people, there's two camps. There's people who try to overcomplicate things far too much. They worry way too much about detailing, detail targeting, they worry way too much about the copywriting and all of that kind of stuff. And that's important. But I think there's a fine line of being way too detail orientated, worrying way too much about everything being as complex as possible. And then on the flip side, there's people who take a let's let Facebook figure it out approach. And so they won't put any targeting in. They won't do any creative testing. They'll just go, cool, here's a bunch of creatives, here's open targeting. And I'll let Facebook figure it out. And what I found is that both are not the right method. I found that people who let Facebook try to do everything for them and figure it out, you're going to waste a lot of money doing that and then you won't actually know what works because Facebook is typically controlling the budget for you. It's spending on what it thinks it should spend on, and it's not a legitimate way to test your ads properly. And then on the other side, there's too much complexity to things like you don't need to get so granular. So there's definitely a fine line of like, cool, let's let Facebook figure it out. And then also let's be proactive with the way that we are running our ads so that we know how to test things. So for me, I actually heavily look at the sales page copy for the ad copy because I love the fact that it creates congruency. So most of the time we'll basically look at like, what are the high level things on the sales page? How do we make that into a cohesive ad copy or it's called Primary Text in Ads Manager. Essentially, how do we make the primary text as cohesive to the landing page as possible. And then generally you have your headlines, you have your image, video or whatever it is as the actual creative piece. So for me, headline is kind of the next thing where you kind of want to create some level of intrigue. You want to prompt someone to be curious enough to go to the primary text, to kind of want to read more. And then obviously the creative, which is the image or the video, it needs to stand out enough so that people actually stop and want to look at the ad further. And so I would say that that's probably the number one thing that you need to test when you're running ads. And that's the number one thing that we test. So for us, we essentially launch like one to two new tests on creatives every single week for our clients just so that we make sure that we're always finding new things that convert for them. And then essentially we create this pool of ads, or creatives, I should say, that work. And we can always go back to those as winning ads whilst we're also testing new things all the time.

Rob Kosberg [00:07:55]:

Let me ask you a question around that. Let me dive in a little bit deeper for a second. So you mentioned testing and you're testing new creatives every single week. I really like that. I'm thinking about because we run a book funnel constantly ourselves for Publish. Promote. Profit, right? So what does a test look like? How much are you spending on a test? When are you deciding whether or not this test is a successful creative or not? Walk me through what a test looks like for you.

Chris Benetti [00:08:32]:

Fantastic question. So for me, we do usually a 70 30 budget split. So 70% of our budget, whatever that is, if it's $70 a day on $100 a day budget, that will go to winning ads, things that perform and that we know perform. Now, obviously when you're launching your ads for the first time and you haven't validated things, you need to find winners, right?

Rob Kosberg [00:08:58]:

It's all testing then.

Chris Benetti [00:09:00]:

So for that kind of stuff, you should obviously do a lot of testing in the beginning to find the winners and then you can kind of do the 70 30 split once you do have that. So $30 a day in this example would go to that's probably enough budget for one ad to test. And so if we're testing one ad, we let it run until it's spent $60, usually within $60, we can see if it's going to convert or not, or we can usually see what the clicks are or not. And so that helps us to gauge some metrics on whether it's actually getting attention, getting people to the landing page, and if it's kind of a good enough congruency between the ad and the landing page to actually convert the person to buy the book. And so for us, that's kind of the guideline that we roll. And then it's usually just like two days of testing to validate. If it doesn't work, after two days, we either put the budget into the winner, or we activate an old ad that we know is a winner.

Rob Kosberg [00:10:06]:

Very cool. And so 30% is a continual kind of revolving testing part of your budget. And so every week you're throwing out a couple of new creatives, I imagine. I bought your creatives, of course, and we've already begun testing them, and they're doing very well. Obviously, there are certain things that you can do kind of over and over and over again. Maybe you could talk in a general sense of what the most successful creatives are and then back to the testing part. What kind of changes do you make? Because you're probably taking a successful ad and a successful creative, and then you're making adjustments to that successful creative to see if you can make it even better. So I assume. So talk me through a little bit about some of the most successful creatives and what they contain and then how you might make adjustments to it to make it even better or test it.

Chris Benetti [00:11:10]:

Yeah, for sure. So for us, we like simple, over complicated. And so if you see our creative library, you'll notice that if you did buy it, you'll notice that the graphics that we use are all quite simple. There's nothing super complicated. There might be some text about the book, but it's nothing over the top. We're not really here to complicate things too much. So for us, we prefer simple when it comes to the graphical creatives. And then for me, I actually really prefer videos of book flips. And so, Rob, I can probably include a book flip example in the show notes if you want. So I've just got a loom video of me flipping through a book, and that's essentially an ad that we run for a client. And the setup essentially, is you either have someone hold a phone in front of you, like over your shoulder, or you have a tripod or something, and you show the COVID of the book, your phone's facing down, you show the COVID of the book. You drop it on the table, you pick it back up, you flip through the pages, and then you kind of find interesting pages throughout the book and just kind of show it off before showing the COVID again. And that's kind of the ad. You don't really even need any text on screen, anything like that, maybe just some background music. And that's a really effective ad. That ad is our best performer on several accounts at the moment, and it's something you can do in five minutes or less at home, in your office, or wherever you are. You can do it in your lounge room. You can do it anywhere. And so ads like that, for us, work really well. And if you have copies of your books, put them in a box. Or if you get books shipped to your house, put them in a box, open the box up, and take a photo of all your books in a box, maybe on a slight angle. That's, again, another one of our best performing ads across several accounts. Lately, I've been really liking the lifestyle photos is what I call them, which is essentially people with your book, you with your book, you with other people who are readers with your book, just showcasing your book in real life. Because the graphic stuff is good and it's scalable because it doesn't require our clients input necessarily. We can just create graphics all day, all day and test. But the lifestyle photos, I find are really effective because it shows that it's a real thing, real people, and it kind of just creates a little bit more connection than a standard kind of graphic template would, if that makes sense. Now, you asked in terms of when we do testing, what do we change? So for us, it's incremental changes. Typically we'll find, like, what is the winning primary text or copy for the ad that converts well, and we usually don't touch that too much. I don't think that that's that important to consistently test. Obviously, we would have a few different versions of that. So we'll have the sales version, then we'll have maybe a review version, essentially with what are the Amazon reviews? What are people saying? And maybe we'll lace that into the copy as well. So it just adds a bit of social proof. In the ad itself, the headline is probably the number one piece of copy that you should test and change. And so for us, if a client sold a few books, we'll just go like, best selling book Reveals XYZ or like over 60,000 copies sold. Get your copy for one dollars or over 10,569 five star reviews on Amazon. And so we'll kind of test those kind of things so that it kind of stops someone and goes, I want to read a little bit more about this. And then that obviously would prompt them to click over to the landing page after they've read the ad in further detail. Nice.

Rob Kosberg [00:15:11]:

Very good. Okay, that's a lot about the ad, or at least the creative and testing. Let's go back to the very first thing you said, which was really focusing on making sure that the funnel itself is using a marketing term, has as high as possible AOV or average order value by having various things in the funnels bumps, courses, et cetera, that you're also offering. Besides the book, talk to me about what are the best practices that you've seen as far as, like, order bumps go or Upsells go, whether it's one upsell, two upsells, et cetera?

Chris Benetti [00:15:58]:

Absolutely. For me, if you guys don't put an order bump on your book funnel, you're missing out on a lot of money. And I find that's absolutely the highest converting upsell offer that you can have in your funnel. Typically, we see 30% to 60% conversion rates on anything from $17 to $47. For us, it's usually like, what are the different formats of the book? If we're selling paperback, let's do like a digital bundle. And I usually like to do some sort of template or training alongside of it. So it kind of stacks value because it's very hard to say, oh, my audiobook is worth $47, right?

Rob Kosberg [00:16:45]:

When they're getting the physical book for $7.95.

Chris Benetti [00:16:49]:

Yeah.

Rob Kosberg [00:16:51]:

Free plush, right?

Chris Benetti [00:16:54]:

Yeah. So obviously formats are important. People like to listen or read on their iPad or their Kindle or whatever. So I actually really just like to, hey, what is the format that we're selling? How can we bump the other formats? So if it's a digital book that you're selling up front, how can we bump paperback potentially, or even just the audio, if you have that, and if you guys don't have those kind of other formats, that's totally fine as well, I would say. What is something that is relatable to the book that you can give that's maybe a tool, a template, a training that kind of expands upon it, or maybe it's even an insight to why you wrote the book. And it kind of goes into the depth of behind the scenes of the book. Something that is kind of related and expansive from a technical side or even from an informational side, I think is a very valid bump for us. And that's usually what we'll test for the Upsell offers. I typically like to do, essentially the book solves a problem. Most of the time, it then creates another problem. So Rob's book as an example, publish, promote profit, is that right? Yep. Publish, promote, know it's going to tell you how to publish your book, promote your book, and make money from your book. What's the next thing you would need potentially from that? Like, maybe you might need funnel templates. Maybe you might need ad templates. There's a winning ad creative library that I heard is awesome. Maybe that's something you need. And so the book has created a problem for you. So now we can explain what that problem is on the Upsell page and go, cool, you've got everything you need now from the book. And we're not cannibalizing the offer of the book. Here's what you're going to need next as you're setting this up, and it's going to help you save time, it's going to help you save money, all these kind of things. That's what I like to do as the next offer in my funnel. And usually that upsell the first one, I'll have more expensive than the second upsell because I usually want to have more opportunity for someone to buy that thing because it's fresh. They haven't been oversold at that point already. And what I'll do is typically, if it's a higher priced thing, let's just say it's $300, I might do a split pay as a downsell. So if they say no, I'll be like, hey, I really want you to get access. How about we do a pay as you profit, people like to call it, or a pay plan. And we'll just do two payments of 151 now, one in a month, then the next offer, there's usually more still that needs to be solved. And so for your example, you've just given funnel templates and things like that. But hey, what about Ads training? Ads is pretty complex. A book can explain Ads so much, but you might need in depth training that's constantly being updated with the latest technical changes for Ad, the Ads platforms and new strategies. And hey, by the way, this includes templates for the Ads as well. And so that's just a simple thought to how you can kind of think about what your book creates as a new problem, which is getting things up and live and tested and whatever your book actually does talk about, and then how you can solve that with additional kind of things that add on to the book. Not cannibalize the book. And what I mean by cannibalize is if someone buys your book and then you sell them something that is basically the same piece of information that's inside your book, they're going to go like, hey, didn't I just buy that for your book kind of thing. So that's kind of how I like to structure things.

Rob Kosberg [00:20:56]:

Yeah. Well, just to add to that for a moment, we have a number of tests that we've done and that we've helped clients with where all we did in the old days, you would have old days probably not that long ago, but in the earlier days of doing this, you'd have maybe a 47 or a 97 one time offer on the front. And then a one time offer number two would be 197 or 297 and just swapping those and putting the higher priced offer as the first one time offer, as you said, gets more eyeballs on it and will raise your average order value considerably. I have one client in particular that doubled his average order value by simply changing places within his funnel of where his offers were. His offers were good. So that's good, that's very helpful.

Chris Benetti [00:21:52]:

And a double of average order value can essentially go from you having to spend money to get a book buyer to potentially breaking even or making money. Then I know that point.

Rob Kosberg [00:22:02]:

I know. And if you can break even or make money with a book funnel, then it's like an ATM. I mean, it's a gold mine. I mean, it's unlimited free leads and free of the highest quality leads you will ever get for your business. Because, number one, people that read books tend to be higher quality buyers in the future. Dan Kennedy has been saying that for 30 years. His best clients have always been his book buyers. That's number one. And number two is anybody that's willing to spend money with you right out of the gate, like pull their wallet out of their pocket, type in their credit card information, even if it's just $4.95, that is infinitely better quality than someone that just gives you maybe a fake or burner email address, right? Like mine is. Rickjames, 1969 at@gmail.com. So if you ever see that on one of your funnels, you'll know, okay, that's Rob's Burner email address. Anyway, so good stuff. So let's talk just for one more moment about the funnel itself. We talked average order value and we talked in a vague sense about average order value and about cost of acquisition. Give me some generalities. What are you trying to get to when it comes to average order value in a book funnel? And I know every book funnel is different because if you're dealing with a hypnotherapist that's doing one thing versus a real estate investor selling a real estate book, it's going to be different. But give me some ranges based on what you've seen and then also ranges on cost of acquisition. What does it cost to actually get that book buyer?

Chris Benetti [00:23:59]:

Yeah, and this is totally industry specific, like you mentioned. I think if you're spending it's hard because I'm going to say these numbers.

Rob Kosberg [00:24:09]:

Give me some industries, give me industries and tell me what you're seeing based on industries. That's maybe the best way to do it.

Chris Benetti [00:24:18]:

Yeah, for sure. Okay? So if it's like B to C, where you're selling something that is a little bit more commercially viable, there's a higher chance you're going to spend less than if you're going to B to C. Now, the caveat to that is, if B two B is something that's highly desirable, if it's make money or financial based, and it's like a super viable model for someone, it's super attractive. Someone wants to really get it and take action on it, then you're going to see a lower cost generally. I would also say that in the realm of if someone is more established than someone else, they're going to typically spend less money to acquire a book buyer just because they've built a brand reputation up already. And so, like, James Framco is a fantastic example of that B two B book. But because of his overwhelming reputation in the space, we spend less than $2 a lead on someone buying or getting his book for free zone. And that's consistently at scale. So for someone who's in the B to C space, I would say like roughly expect $40 or less on a person buying your book. If you've got a really fantastic book. You could probably get leads all day at like $10. I would say ten to 15 for a B to B place. I would expect your rough buyer to be at $100 at the kind of higher end and then at scale, depending on what you launch and stuff that can come down. For me, we typically see roughly a 20 to 50 kind of range for my clients in the B to B space or the investing space as well. And so it really does depend on the type of client and then the level of scale you go to. So obviously as you increase your ad budget, you're probably going to have some scaling issues where your cost per book buyer is actually increasing but you've got more volume coming through. So it's like there's always a bit of a trade off. When you start to scale your ads up from $100 a day to $1,000 a day. You're going to see inconsistencies, you're going to start to see consistencies. Some days are better than others and that's just the nature of ads. If you go in with the expectation that, hey, my Ads are always going to be consistent. This is what my funnel AOV is, average order value. This is what my cost per acquisition is, then you're just going to have the wrong you're going to go in and you're going to be disappointed every single day. It's going to be different. Some days you're going to get ten sales, some days you're going to get 30 sales, some days you're going to get one sale. And your budget is a daily budget. So some days you're going to spend $120 on someone buying your book. Some days you'll spend $8. It's one of those kind of games and if you just expect that and realize that and kind of look at it from a little bit more of a macro lens so like, hey, let's look at this on a weekly basis, let's look at this on a monthly basis and really gauge our performance. Hey, what was our average order value over this week? What was our average order value over this month? And then what was our cost per acquisition or cost per book buyer over this week or this month? You'll be able to really then get a consistency of metrics and now every single week or every single month you're working off of KPIs that you set for yourself. Let's just say I want to spend $30 or less on someone buying my book and then I want to have an average order value of $30 or more when someone buys my book. When you have those kind of metrics in place and you look at it from a little bit more of a macro lens and not a daily lens, then you're going to have a level of consistency that is helpful for you to review your accounts on. I think the biggest issue for people is like, yes, you need to manage things somewhat on a daily basis. You need to turn budgets up and down, you need to put more budget to winners and things like that. I just don't think that you can get those metrics that you're looking for on a daily basis consistently because Saturday is going to be different than totally.

Rob Kosberg [00:28:33]:

Yeah, totally understand that. You mentioned B to C. You mentioned B to B. So give the listeners some examples of what is B to C when it comes to books and what is B to B when it comes to books. Just some examples. Just industry.

Chris Benetti [00:28:51]:

Yeah, for sure. So I had a client and this is one of your clients, I believe, andrea Olsen. She has a book called what's it called?

Rob Kosberg [00:29:01]:

Go diaper free.

Chris Benetti [00:29:03]:

Go diaper free. That's the one. Go diaper free. So yeah, that's basically a book by a woman who runs a business selling go diaper free products, essentially. How do we ditch diapers and get babies potty trained?

Rob Kosberg [00:29:18]:

That's B to C in that type of situation.

Chris Benetti [00:29:22]:

She's written that for mums or dads who have new babies that don't want to spend money on diapers. So that's a consumer product. And so the book is for consumers to help educate them. So that's kind of like an example of B to C. Anything that's consumer based for people who aren't buying it from a business perspective. It's not like a money, not an investing, it's more of a consumer educational, how to kind of book. And then the funnel kind of has other things around that topic in place.

Rob Kosberg [00:29:57]:

Would make money like real estate make money? Would that be considered B to C as well? Any make money?

Chris Benetti [00:30:03]:

I would consider that technically B to C, just because not all people who are buying that are business owners, but generally they have an intent to make money to be a business owner or be an investor. And so I think it crosses the lines into B to C a little bit more. And for me, I typically see a higher cost per book sale sometimes when we're talking about real estate and things like that. So usually I'm pretty cool with like a $40 to $50 cost per book sold on a real estate book because I know that it's a little bit of a harder sell. It's a little bit more of a lump kind of sum or strategy to get into as a starting point. And so it's typically less attractive than like, hey, here's how you can make ten grand on Amazon tomorrow kind of thing. Usually going to be a bit of a higher cost per acquisition. With that being said, that's what I found for the American market, what I found for my Australian property investing clients, we actually see much less because we've got much less per book cost per sale than over there because we have a bit more of. A booming property market than the United States does at the moment.

Rob Kosberg [00:31:22]:

Interesting.

Chris Benetti [00:31:23]:

So it's all timely as well.

Rob Kosberg [00:31:24]:

Yeah. So the economy also plays a role in all of it also.

Chris Benetti [00:31:29]:

Absolutely.

Rob Kosberg [00:31:30]:

So two more things. 1 may be very short, and that is our expertise. My expertise tends to be in nonfiction, business related, et cetera. Do you ever do any fiction and any thoughts on running something like this for fiction? Have you ever seen that work? What are your thoughts on that working?

Chris Benetti [00:31:59]:

I haven't touched it in honesty, just because for me, there's enough clients that need our help in the nonfiction space. And it's a little bit of an easier sell generally because the people who write nonfiction and for you as well, like business, they can easily justify running funnels.

Rob Kosberg [00:32:24]:

They're selling something much more expensive on the back end. So they have the flexibility because of margins, to spend money on ads and traffic. And that's really hard when it comes to fiction because you need other things to sell. So, yeah, that makes sense. I just thought I'd ask because I always run into people that are interested in that and I don't know much about it, and I really don't have a good sense that it's even possible. If you don't see guys like Stephen King or J. K. Rowling doing it, then who are the most famous fiction authors in the you know jane Doe and John Doe are going to have a pretty rough time when it comes.

Chris Benetti [00:33:09]:

To think, you know, when it comes to fiction, people typically it's either like it's a hobby or they want to make money from it. And without anything else to sell besides your book, it's going to be challenging for you to make money on it.

Rob Kosberg [00:33:23]:

Yeah, fair enough. Okay. I thought that'd be short with ads anyway. Yeah, 100%. I have a client that does a million bucks a year, over a million just in royalties alone on fiction. And she runs some traffic, but it's really more about traffic to build her platform and sell the volumes of content that she has. She has 50 books that are selling. She's one of the top selling authors in fiction in the United States. And so it can work, but it's a very different methodology than the one you and I are talking about today. We've been going for a while. What am I missing? What else would you want to share or reveal when it comes to the funnel or when it comes to the traffic and the ads itself?

Chris Benetti [00:34:13]:

Yeah, absolutely. I just think when it comes to what you're doing, you just have to think of intent as well. So you're going to have essentially two cycles of someone coming through as a book buyer. You're going to have, like, the initial funnel sales cycle, which is all direct. Someone's going to buy your book, see your upsell offers. If your intent is to have them become a client of yours, then it's totally viable for you to put an offer to book in a call with you or your team on the very last page of the funnel, the thank you page. And that essentially is a way for you to connect them being a new customer to you, being able to have a call with them to see if it's a good fit for you guys to work together on your higher end stuff. Maybe you don't do that. You have a webinar instead and you invite them to a webinar or a VSL or something like that. There's a fantastic opportunity. So I would say firstly, don't discount the thank you page in the funnel. It's very valuable and it's probably the best place of lead gen that you can have in place. Then you're also going to have your direct email follow up sequence. So I would highly recommend that you guys take some time and write some emails about your book and then also include offers to what that next step is. Again, if it's a webinar, hey, I've just done this free training, go check it out. Or if it's a call, booking, hey, my team and I really want to help you get set up with XYZ. Booking a call here and making sure that you remind them that you have that available for them and that's going to help to continue that direct sales cycle. The second sales cycle, and this is why books are so powerful, is they're going to get your book and they're going to read your book. And that might not happen for two to six months, but when they read your book, and especially if Rob's written your book, they're going to read it and go, damn, how do I work with Chris? And so there's going to be a second sales cycle that comes through and I think it's your job to make sure that you have the offers in place or there's a way for them to find you easily to book in those things or continue that sales journey with you inside the book. And so it's very difficult for you to just directly judge the performance of an ads campaign and how that relates to your back end clients from a daily and a weekly.

Rob Kosberg [00:36:46]:

Yeah, some time is required to actually really judge.

Chris Benetti [00:36:51]:

Yeah, absolutely. So the sales cycle is longer. And I would say that the second thing here is that you're building a brand by selling a book. You're getting your value out into the world and you're building authority and so books, selling book. The reason why I love selling books so much is you do have that direct conversion metrics to go off of, but then you have the knock on effect of people knowing more about you, liking you more, trusting you more, because writing books is challenging. It's not an easy feat to do, and only established and really well thought out people. Besides all that AI stuff. Write a book and write it well. And so if you can stand out in the marketplace with your book and build your brand that way, it's going to help you with running your business in the long term. It's going to be a much bigger credibility piece than just doing a YouTube channel or something like that.

Rob Kosberg [00:37:48]:

Yeah, I love that. One of the things that I've been talking about for a long time is that traditional publishers expect you want you to have a platform in place to launch your book. But the vast majority of authors do not have any kind of platform in place. They don't have an email list, they don't have a following. Even successful business people often don't have any of that. And what we talk about, kind of the Author 2.0 methodology, is, look, use your book to build your platform. This is exactly what you're talking about. My book has sold 75 to 100,000 copies in the last five years. I was actually asked by a new client today. No one's ever asked me this before, but he said, hey, of those sales, how many of those are like, from your funnel versus how many of those are, like, on Amazon and Barnes and Noble? And that. And I was like, wow. I don't know. Exactly. Now, I know we've run some really big Amazon Wall Street Journal campaigns, but I would think that it's about 20% is from Amazon and 80% is from the traffic that I have run. But that has led to tens of thousands of people on my list. Tens of thousands and more of people that follow me and that know about me because of my book. So I had a bit of a platform before, but forget it. Let's forget that I had any if I had no platform whatsoever before my book came out. The book itself has built my platform simply because I got it into people's hands. So I couldn't agree more with what you're saying. I love that. So great stuff. We've been going a know, Chris, thank you, man. I know it's early in the morning in Perth, Australia, so it's great to be with you. I'm really excited we're going to be doing some things down the road together, which I already have some people in mind, so you and I will continue that conversation. But if you want to learn more about Chris or connect with him, maybe to run advertising or traffic from you for you, then go to Smartauthormedia.com. Right? Smart. Authormedia.com and is that the best place to go, Chris? Or is there something else you got a funnel to send them to?

Chris Benetti [00:40:18]:

Smartauthormedia.com is great. There's a big old green button there to book a call with me.

Rob Kosberg [00:40:23]:

Great. Fantastic, brother. Great to have you. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Chris Benetti [00:40:28]:

Yeah, thanks, man.