Congrats, you’ve written your first book! But the work isn’t over just yet. Now, you need to make sure that it achieves the goals you set, including getting ongoing sales. This module will cover building a profitable sales funnel for your book, so that you can continuously generate leads and new sales. Your sales funnel is something you need to set up BEFORE you launch and promote your book. That way, you can start to gather leads now and make immediate sales once you launch.

Your sales funnel is a key part of your marketing strategy. It is a series of steps you lead potential customers through to get to the ultimate goal of buying your book. You will create content for each stage of your sales funnel accordingly.

Plan Your Book Funnel to Turn Your Leads into Buyers

Your sales funnel for promoting and selling your book will look something like this:

1. Opt-In Page/Form with Lead Magnet:

• Traffic is sent to an opt-in page
• Visitors sign up to your email list
• They receive a download, (your lead magnet) which covers something they’re interested in
• They are then given a Call to Action (CTA) to encourage them to make a book purchase

1. Email Series: You use an email autoresponder platform to send a series of emails after someone has signed up for your lead magnet. In your emails, you send helpful content directly related to your book and include links to your author page or your book sales page.

Ideas for lead magnets you can create include:

• Free download of a section of your book. For example, your first chapter, so they can see a great example of the quality and type of content in your book.

• A case study taken from your book that shows how someone resolved a problem or produced tangible results.

• Data from your book converted into an attractive and engaging infographic – maybe something that demonstrates a problem and a solution, a solution that you address in more detail in your book.

• Other valuable content including:
  • Templates
  • Cheat sheets
  • Blueprints
  • How-to Reports
  • Videos
  • Quizzes
  • Webinars

For your follow-up emails, after people receive their lead magnet, your goal is to demonstrate the breadth and depth of your knowledge and expertise. The ultimate objective is for your leads to trust you to deliver even more value in your book.

A basic sequence for your auto-responder could be a series of five emails.
For example:

Email 1 – In this email you could tell your leads a little about you and your background, and how your experience (relevant to your book topic) can help you to help them. Perhaps you once faced the same problems they are facing now and you overcame them.

Email 2 – Here, you could engage with your readers personally. Ask them about their biggest problem related to your overall book topic. Maybe conduct a survey. And then reply with your solution. This means your email sequence is no longer fully automated, but it could be a great opportunity to establish your expertise and credibility as an expert in the topic, and to engage authentically with your readers.

Email 3 –Tell them the story of how you came to write your book. What drove you to write it, and motivated you to finish it? If you have a passion for your book topic and getting that knowledge out to as many people as possible, tell them about it.

Email 4 – Talk about some content relevant to your book topic. Address one or two specific issues that you know are important to your readers. Tell them that you cover these in detail on your book.

Email 5 – For your final email in your series of five, recap your previous 4 emails. Once you have some positive reviews of your book and how it has benefitted people, mention those. Have a great email headline that attracts people’s attention and gets them to open your email. Also make sure to include a link to where they can buy your book.

As part of your email follow-ups in your sales funnel, you could also invite your leads to a free webinar that focuses on one subtopic or issue from your book, and which encourages them to buy.

Tools for Creating Your Sales Funnel

Here are a few examples of popular tools you can use to create your opt-in pages and manage your email list, including automating your follow-up emails series:

Email marketing software: ActiveCampaign, Aweber, Constant Contact, GetResponse, and MailChimp.

Webinar software: GoToWebinar, Webinar Jam, Webinar Ignition, Easy Webinar

Sales page tools: ClickFunnels, LeadPages, OptimizePress, Thrive Themes

Getting Traffic to Your Funnel

Finally, you’ll need to attract visitors to your book sales funnel, which starts with your opt-in page, or wherever you’ve put your opt-in form.

We’ll cover essential marketing elements in the next module. For now, here’s a quick overview of some proven methods for getting traffic into your funnel, including:

• Advertising
• Content Marketing
• Social Media
• Search Engine Optimization (organic search)

Advertising, such as Facebook Ads, will require some investment. You can keep the cost down by sending people to interesting content you’ve created. Then include a place to sign up for your lead magnet in your content.

Your content for content marketing could be things like blog posts, infographics, reports, and videos. The more consistently you create these, the more visitors you’ll eventually get.

Be sure to share all your content on social media, and in places like forums and professional groups – wherever your target readers are likely to be. That includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest.

For organic traffic, if you use keywords on your landing pages that your target readers search for, traffic will also arrive via places like Google. But that will take more time, so consider using advertising to start with.

When your sales funnel is set up and running, make sure to monitor your analytics results so you can see what’s working and what isn’t. Using this data, you can take action to improve conversion rates and click-through rates to your opt-in and sales pages.