As podcasters, we generate episodes upon episodes of content. What is stopping us from putting them together into a book? In today’s show, Tracy Hazzard has over a special guest for a rare Coaching Crasher episode. She sits down with none other than an expert in publishing and the host of the Promote, Profit, Publish podcast, Juliet Clark. Together, they discuss why you should consider podcast-to-publishing as a profitable strategy. Juliet breaks the misconception about marketing after publishing, detailing how marketing begins the moment you think about writing the book. She also talks about the importance of building trust with your content and planning ahead before publishing. Make the most out of your show and spread your value out into the world. Follow along to this conversation to learn more about this strategy!

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

What Makes Podcast-To-Publishing A Profitable Strategy For Content Creators? With Juliet Clark

Everybody who’s out there because we’re everywhere right now, I am excited to come to you without a regular episode. We’re going to do something fun and unusual. We’ve got a Coaching Crasher. If you’ve ever been to one of our Coaching Crashers, we very rarely invite somebody in to talk to our community.

The only reason we do is because they’re seasoned podcasters. They have to be a seasoned podcaster. They have to have something that’s universally valuable to most of our community. In this case, we’re talking authors and I know many of you who have podcasts are also authors or aspiring authors. We have that going on here. We also have to agree philosophically, and that’s the hard part. We have to get to know each other.

I am lucky here that I get to bring out someone who I adore, who I consider a friend. You know how people say that in the affiliate-like world like, “I’ve got my friend, Juliet.” Juliet and I usually joke about this. I’ve got my friend, but we truly are friends. I stayed at her house. We’ve hung out together. We do things. We talk once a month minimum if we don’t talk more often than that.

We truly are friends here and I am excited to bring you. There is no one I would trust more with my book. When you’ve got someone who’s now about, she’s a six-time author, speaker, and podcaster, spent many years helping authors, coaches, speakers, and small businesses all over the world, build expert audiences. See the synergy between podcasting and the author network?

She started out as a mystery novelist, which I’ve read. It’s very good. Gypsy, Granny Heist, Dead By Dawn, that’s my favorite. Pitchslapped is a book about marketing and her latest book The Author Success Handbook, which is what we’re going to be talking about and Author Alchemy. She has a black belt in Taekwondo. She is an avid hiker and golfer, which I know because very often, she’ll reschedule our time together so that she can go play golf in the summer which I don’t mind because I totally get it.

 

 

Juliet Dillon Clark is one of my favorite people. She’s one of the most knowledgeable people you’re ever going to meet about marketing your book. The author’s side at the audience building side to sell more books is critically important, but it’s also important because many of you are not doing books for royalties. That’s not a winning proposition. You’re writing your books to create more authority, get more clients, and get more speaking engagements.

If you don’t mark it, that’s not going to happen. You can’t just write it and they will come. Juliet is all about that and The Author Success Handbook. She’s got a little special gift for you after she does her talk with you. Juliet is an absolute expert in what marketing needs to look like, and what that path to Promote, Profit, Publish, which is her podcast. You’re going to want to tune in to that as well. Juliet, thank you much for being our Coaching Crasher. We’re glad to have you here.

Thank you for that great introduction. I need to change it now that I have seven books out. I’m excited to be here because I’ve been a podcaster since 2018. When you’re building a podcast audience, you are providing the content to build that audience for a great book launch. People are already looking for your expertise. The best thing you can do is take some of those episodes, put that together into a book, and then read your book for Audible because people expect to hear your voice when they hear your podcast and they hear you read the book. It’s very powerful.

What I’m going to talk about with The Author Success Handbook is something that every podcaster can use as well. We have a site called Author Traffic School. The misconception that most people have is that they write their book, publish their book, and then the marketing begins. What truly happens is that you start with the day you think about writing that book and get into the in-depth, building it up. Having that podcast is amazing because that’s your content piece.

Content is about building trust and it’s also about building that trust and showing off your expertise without being salesy because nobody likes being thrown a sales pitch every time. I’m going to talk about the track to do that because there is a way to build this that is like building blocks. It’s a solid foundation, building your home on solid ground versus sand. If you leave out any of these pieces, chances are it’s not going to be successful. The first place that you start with this is an honest evaluation of where your platform is. For many people, this is hard because they look at it and they go, “I haven’t achieved anything.”

You can’t figure out where you want to go until you can see what you have. You need to take a deep dive and be brutally honest with yourself. How many followers do you have on each platform? You’re going to be using social media. What is the size of your email list? I’ll get more into the email list. A lot of people say, “Email is useless. Not many people are opening.”

 

 

The truth is, it’s the one and only platform that you own. If for some reason you get disconnected on other platforms, you have that email list to connect with. Looking at the engagement on your email list. It’s great if you have 10,000 people, but if only 5 of them are opening, we have a problem. Digging down into what those numbers are and where I want to get those numbers to be.

If you’re self-publishing a book, you can go with any number you want. Hopefully, you’ve got a substantial number. If you want to traditionally publish, you need 100,000 plus followers. For a lot of people that’s not realistic. When you get down to where you want to be with this, you need to decide at that moment, “What am I going for here?” If you want 100,000 and you’ve got 1,000, you’ve got a long way to go to build and it’s always a very slow build.

After that evaluation takes place, you’re going to move on to what I call evaluating your zone of genius because if you’re running a business and you’re the rainmaker, chances are you’re not going to be able to dive into all those technical details that need to be done. It’s important to look at what you can delegate and what roles you procrastinate in your company. For me, I procrastinate, cashflow’s good, but I can’t procrastinate on posting the accounting. I hate accounting. That’s something that I can delegate.

Take a good look at your talents, skills, strengths, and what you do in the company. For someone like me or Tom, he’s the rainmaker. They’re both rainmakers, but I’m the rainmaker, I need to spend my time closing deals and pretty much let go of the rest. Let other people do the rest. It is important that you take a look at that and decide, “What can I keep and what has to go to someone else?”

After that, getting into the avatar building. You’ve probably already done this. If you have a podcast, you’ve identified who your audience is. The problem is most of you stop at demographics. My audience is 50 to 60, female, and married. There’s nothing cool and exciting about that and you can lose an audience there.

What you need to do is build it out further. Getting into the psychographics. I call them the feeling variables. This is where the excitement happens. Does your podcast and would your book go to someone that has a particular lifestyle? What are their interests? What are their personalities? What are their values? Those are the things that people get excited about.

 

 

You have to have a clear vision of what those people like and dislike and make sure that you are falling into that. You have to build that initial avatar and then validate it as well because you may think your audience is one vision of what you think, but it may be another as you get into your followers and start communicating with them. You might find out that there’s a little bit of difference there that could help you build a little bit better. The third thing here is looking at competing brands and influence. We often don’t go over to our competitors and look at what are they selling on their sites. What looks like it’s successful? What is not? We don’t want to copy those people, but we want to see how we can make ourselves stand out. There are a lot of podcasts for authors.

I stand out probably because I’m very practical and I tell you the truth if you don’t want to hear the truth, if you want smoke blown up, you’re behind, go listen to somebody else’s podcast because you’re not going to get it online. Look and see. How does your competition present themselves? Are they people who set high expectations and then there are poor reviews because they’re not meeting those expectations? Take a good look at those comparisons and their websites as well. The other part of this is the media. If you’re out in the world, we have a very divided media ecosystem. People are either in one place or the other.

Take a look at all media. I get pushed back on this all the time. My NPR listeners who don’t want to go listen to Fox. My Fox people who don’t want to go to MSNBC. The reason you need to do that is because your job is to see, “Where does my podcast? Where does my book? How can I come up with an angle that’ll get me across all of those media pieces?” That’s what’s crucial. We had a client who had a very liberal book, but the liberal media wasn’t picking it up because they had big people.

She was in competition against the Marine Dow of the world from the New York Times. The reality was the conservative networks wanted to pick her up because they thought she had a good message, but she didn’t want to go there. There’s no reason why you should ever cut your audience in half because of your belief system. Watch it and figure out where your foot comes in the door there. That is important as well.

Upfront, customer semantics. As you’re building your platform, what are the hashtags you’re going to use to get yourself seen? Your content is important. That’s the trust builder that’s going to bring more people into your podcast and book and garner you more followers. What are the keywords and hashtags? Once you’ve done that, then you have to look at another piece, which I call the consumer. Why does your consumer buy? If you’re a podcaster, your content and if you’re an author, your book, they’re leading people to buy bigger products and services.

Tracy said at the beginning, “Hardly anybody makes a living from royalties.” I would say more fiction authors do than non-fiction. For the non-fiction people, your goal is to use those as content and nurture ls to get people into those bigger products and services. You need to know why they buy. Taking a deep dive into the four personalities. We recommend you buy the book Why They Buy by Cheri Tree and take a look at where that audience fits and how you are speaking to them because that’s important as well.

 

The last piece of the getting ready part of this is whether your book and podcast are aligned with the brand that you are projecting. People can feel when you’re out of alignment. Don’t be that person who you’re bubbly on your podcast. Your book and whole website exude bubbly, and then people meet you at an event and you’re like, “Nice to meet you.” Don’t be that person because it’s out of alignment.

Make sure that all the pieces of your content and what you’re putting out there on your site are in complete alignment, the messaging, how you appear, and how you speak. People know people who follow me. I tell it like it is. My second language is sarcasm. Quite frankly, if you don’t like it, go away. That’s how it is. I’m very down to Earth in that sense. If they want fluff, I’m probably not their girl.

Tracy will tell you when you meet me in person, I’m very much that way and no-nonsense in that sense. Make sure that all of that’s in alignment and that you are in alignment with it. Now you’ve got all your research done and you’ve realized you’ve got a lot to delegate, new platforms to learn and you might have to learn to livestream and build that email server. You’ve got those pieces that you need to put together. That’s where you start looking into the planning.

All of this, none of this happens without practice. If you’re a podcaster and you’re on here, I would say your first ten podcasts probably suck because you hadn’t practiced. You weren’t being yourself. It’s all new. Same thing as with your platform. You have to practice and get these things right. Make sure you put enough time together to do that. Your marketing for your book should probably start a year before your book is released because you want to build that platform and you want to leave room for all the mistakes. No one ever built a funnel and had it be successful the first time. You’re going to have to build some funnels here. Make sure that you have all those pieces in place and you plan.

We have a planning schedule where we have you lay out everything in a year plan and then you break it down into quarters. What are your quarterly or monthly goals? What are the tasks you have to do to complete weekly? If you try to do all of this at once, chances are you’ll be overwhelmed and you’ll quit. It is important that you give yourself time.

Every author we have will come to me after the book is released and say, “How do I market?” I have to go back to a lot of them and say, “We’ve been talking about this for six months. Where’s your platform?” It’s a horrible thing to have to say, but you have to keep up the marketing, the speaking, the livestreams that everything you’re doing to build an audience, you have to keep it up afterward because people are not going to magically hear about your book.

Your content is really important. That's the trust builder that's going to bring more people into your podcast and into your book and garner you more followers. Click To Tweet

The next plan is content production. If you already have a podcast, your production is there. You have something to feed your list on social media. Ours is on a weekly basis. Scott Carson has a daily regimen. I can’t even imagine. That is a ton of content. You’re already getting graphics. You’ve got clips that you can create. YouTube shorts. You have all the materials to have a robust content and content plan. What I love about Podetize is all I do is upload and I don’t do anything else with it except give it to my assistant to market.

That might be one of those things in your zone of genius where you say, “I spend one hour a week recording my podcast. My assistant uploads it. We get the marketing materials. They take care of the content calendar,” and I’ve got the other however many hours a week you work to be in my zone of genius and rainmaking, working with clients, or whatever it is you do.

A podcast is the best way to do content because there’s much gold there. On a 20 to 30-minute content, you’ve got a blog, YouTube video, and audio. Those hit all three of the learning modalities as well. You can repurpose a lot of that and hit different places in your audience with different ways of learning. That YouTube channel will hit the visual learners, the audio will hit the audio, and then the readers are going to go for that blog. Once you’ve got that content ready, that’s when you start sharing, building that social media platform into something more robust, and also building that email list.

Here’s something that a lot of people don’t realize with that email list, and this happened to me personally. I had a huge audience on Facebook, I got kicked off. All it takes is one algorithm change on a social media platform and you have lost your entire audience. It is important for you to be able to connect via the list and build that list. That way, that list is always yours if something happens on one of the platforms, you have the ability to recoup that audience and bring them back into the fold.

It could be as simple as, “We’re no longer on Facebook. We’re over on LinkedIn. Join us over here and follow us.” I had a friend many years ago who didn’t do all this. For those of you who are old enough, there was a thing called MySpace. She had endorsers and advertisers. She was making her money from ad revenue from a magazine over there. She didn’t have them opt in for it. She lost her entire audience when Facebook opened up. Always be aware of that. People are in different places. She lost a significant amount of income. She had 300,000 subscribers on views a month in that magazine. Always be aware.

The last one I saw was Mark Zuckerberg decided that your business page wasn’t the place to congregate. It was going to be communities and people lost visibility on their Facebook pages. Always be aware that you have to have a backup plan here. Utilize every tool you have. In order to build that email list, you are going to need to have some funnels. I know authors hate this. I don’t know how podcasters feel about it, but I imagine if you’re an entrepreneur or you have an entrepreneurial podcast, you already have some ways to grab email addresses.

 

We do it with our podcast. We always recommend it at the beginning. We send our people to either Breakthrough Author Magazine where they can opt-in and get a free copy of the magazine monthly or we have a special offer that they can opt-in to. Understand that as well. You must have some funnels in place. The thing about funnels that daunts authors is they don’t understand digital marketing. Books are sold on the internet. Not that many people go into bookstores these days. Even if they did, unless you have an end cap, chances are that people aren’t seeing your book unless it’s online.

The other thing I want to say about that is everybody strives for bookstores. Bookstores are not your best option. Here’s why. If you get yourself into a bookstore, they take those books on what I would call consignment. You may get paid for the royalties upfront, but the truth is when they chargeback and return those books, because they’re on consignment, you’re not only going to get charged back for your royalties. You’re going to get charged back for that book printing.

A lot of times, they will destroy the book because in order to ship it back, if they shipped it back to where it was printed, then you get charged for the printing and the shipping. Bookstores are not always the great option people think they are because if you don’t have an end cap, chances are your book isn’t going to sell. Because those books are sold online, you need a robust digital presence. Before you should have a page on your website that says, “Coming soon,” your book cover should be done ASAP, have the book there, the book description, and a waitlist.

That’s your first avenue of a funnel then a drip campaign. Put those people into getting into your podcast as a weekly content fee. If you’re someone who is getting ready to market your book, what a lot of people don’t realize is when we send the books out to distributors, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Walmart, all those places where we distribute, those distributors get 55% of the retail price.

Imagine, they’re doing it. They’re putting a line item on there, putting the cart, sending the order into the printer, and they’re getting 55%. You need to come up with a very robust marketing strategy, which may be speaking. It may be, “Grab this book. I’ll send you a signed copy.” While you’re at it, put together a funnel that has a, “Get my book,” and a one-time-only offer. It might be like we’re putting together something for Author Alchemy. It’s, “Get the book. Buy the book,” and a one-time-only offer where they will get our Build Your Author Avatar program for free or for $7. We haven’t decided how much it’s going to be, but this is a great way to get people not only invested in the book, but you get to keep your 55%.

You have to ship the book yourself, but you also gather the email address, address, phone number, and all the information. When your books go out through the distributors, we don’t know who bought them on Target. It’s great that they bought it, but you’re giving away 55% of the retail price and you have no idea who bought it. You don’t know if they’re going to come into your audience or not.

Authors who are disconnected from their marketing are disconnected from their readers. Click To Tweet

One of the things I would recommend is putting together some funnel when the book is released. I know we have an author. You can pre-buy her book and she’s giving away a program. It’s going to be a very low-cost program. She’s ordered a quantity of books. She’s going to ship it then all of those people will go into her list.

Now that they’re on the list, she can invite them to webinars. She can invite them to other things. She can have personal conversations. Maybe you offer a, “Get this copy of my book and a free appointment with me, a consultation of some sort.” Now you’ve built a relationship there and that’s your goal with the author or podcast platform. The book is able to build a relationship that will lead people from that low cost.

In the paid case of a podcast, it’s free. The book is 20$ or $30. You are leading them into purchasing something bigger there. It is important that you learn how to do that. A lot of my authors will say, “Why don’t you do it for me?” and I don’t like to do it for you. Here’s why. Authors who are disconnected from their marketing are disconnected from their readers. In order to build an audience, you need to be connected to your readers.

You need to be feeding them good things and talking to them because you never know. You might find a good podcast guest. You might find a topic for your next book that your readers are telling you over and over, “I want to see this next.” It is important that you build that reader relationship like it’s important that you build a relationship with your podcast audience as well. I get emails every once in a while from my podcast like, “I want to know more about this. Are you going to do a podcast in the future?” I love that because maybe it’s something I haven’t thought about. If one person’s asking for it, chances are more people are asking for it. That’s it.

I’m glad you said that last thing because this is the exact same thing. I never worded it quite as eloquently as you, but that’s why you’re the author and I’m not. If you’re disconnected from your social media or your marketing, then you’re disconnected from your listeners. It’s the same thing that you’re saying there.

That’s why philosophically, you and I are matched here because we don’t post for people on social media for that reason. I know it’s the number one requested thing in our business and we’re resisting it because we know that the return is high from being connected. I’m glad you said that. That was fantastic. I took all kinds of notes. It’s not like you and I don’t know this, but I still took notes.

Platform, talents, avatar, building, ops, competitive research, all kinds of media, your messaging, and your consumer match practicing. Please do more. Have a plan and practice and then content production and then getting them off into your email, funnel, social media, podcast, book sale, or whatever it is. You want to get them all off of it and into your platform. The next time you write your book, your platform’s big again. It is bigger and easier to do that. I love that you said that.

There was one other thing that occurred to me when you were talking about how important the digital whole model is. It hadn’t occurred to me about all the cost implications of not being in a store. There are also highlights in the book. Shane Snow, author of Dream Teams said to me when I interviewed him that his favorite thing was to look at the highlights in his book.

He couldn’t always tell which buyer, it doesn’t have that, but it says, “Twenty people highlighted this passage.” When you have that, that’s new content. That’s your next new book. That’s the podcast that you want to create. It’s a feedback loop in the digital world that you do not get if somebody highlights the paperback copy in their home and you never see it.”

There is a lot to it. To be honest, in this book, we took feedback that we’ve gotten over the past few years and we built Author Traffic School to work with people one-on-one on the parts that they were weak on. We had many authors coming to us and a lot of them were part of a big coaching program. The coaching program had a little section on social media. Part of the problem was when you’re getting into this new section, a lot of times, you need help. You need someone to guide you. I remember being brand new in this digital space and I did many silly things. They didn’t seem silly then, but they failed and then I had to figure out, “Why did that fail?”

I had to go in and get some coaching on why it was failing. When we put this book together, I took this right out of traffic school. This is a how-to book. It’s chapter by chapter taking through the exercises, “Are you doing this? Did you do it this way? There’s how to set up your YouTube channel in here and a lot of different things that you do need.” I can see that highlighting, but that connection with not only my readers but my podcast people, the people who show up for our livestreams and magazine subscription, we are always asking like, “What do you guys want to see? What would be helpful?”

I always ask you to write about new things because they want to know what’s new. There are a lot of marketing things that are old hat. I remember you and I being on a webinar and there was a girl doing the cascading sales thing. I remember you talked about it later and I talked about it with other people that were on as like, “Are people still doing that where, ‘I’m going to make my $2,000 offer and then there’s this bonus and that?’” It is such an old way of doing it.

People want to cut to the chase. That’s what we always talked about. You want to get right to it nowadays. Juliet has a little offer for us.

It is available on Kindle over on Amazon. If you go over and buy the Kindle and email me the receipt at SuperBrandPublishing.com, I will send you out a signed copy of the book.

That way, you can take your notes and make your plan at the same time. I find that happens with the handbooks. I love digital copy because it allows me to think things through, but then when I’m trying to make my plan, I need something in writing. Now you’ll be able to do both.

With the book, you can Xerox some of the questions I have. We have the whole planning and evaluation, you know what you need to evaluate. You can take it over to your copy machine and do your honest evaluation and maybe three months later, copy it again and see where your progress is at. Having the hard book is a much better deal.

Thank you so much for being here. I’ve always learned something amazing from you, but there are many insights into the nuances and the overlaps between podcasting and authorship that I don’t realize until we have this conversation and a presentation where you’re giving the information. I still got my book right back there on the shelf for you and it is going to get finished, I promise you because every time I see you, it feels like I’m getting kicked a little and need to move forward.

 

Important Links

• Juliet Dillon Clark
• Gypsy
• Granny Heist
• Dead By Dawn
• Pitchslapped
• The Author Success Handbook
• Promote, Profit, Publish
• Author Traffic School
• Why They Buy
• Breakthrough Author Magazine
• Build Your Author Avatar
• Shane Snow
• Dream Teams