Hustle
First and foremost, we authors have to hustle. It’s tough out there. It’s a hyper-competitive realm. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and we Indie Authors are all wearing milk-bone underwear. Hustling is vital if we authors want to create the kind of life we deserve…. Like Roosevelt said during The Great Depression, “Above all, do something.” The math is simple here. Do something, and someday we will become something. Do nothing, and we will certainly be nothing beyond what we already are. And I think we all want more than that, right? Well, guess what? Hustling is doing something. And doing something is what sells books.
If we are hustling as authors, we’ll probably start our journey with social media. This usually gives us some recognition but doesn’t always sell a lot of books. Next, we could find our way into exploring the realm of paid traffic. Paid traffic can come in many shapes and forms. Some of you might have heard about Amazon Ads. Amazon does a great job of selling books. So why not use the number one book-seller in the world to help us sell more of our books to people who are already on the Amazon site looking to buy a book? It just makes sense, right? Later on, I will explore this strategy a little more with you.
Facebook Ads are another form of paid traffic. Nobody in the world does a better job than Facebook in targeting specific niches or markets based on demographics. Through Facebook, we can focus our exact audience through Facebook Ads. We can actually tell the people we want to speak with how we can help them well-targeted Facebook Ads. However, our excited prospects are going to have to do an extra step here. After we engage them with our Facebook Ads, then they’re going to have to go over to our Amazon page to purchase our books.
Affiliate marketing is another way to use paid traffic. One of the beautiful things about affiliate marketing is that it can still be used to make money even if we don’t have a product of our own to sell. We can just latch onto someone else’s product, and they’ll send us money after we send them customers. However, since we’re all authors with products/books, what I’m going to talk about here works the other way around.
Through affiliate marketing, we can get others to latch on to our product or book. All we have to do is entice them with a small piece of the pie. They send traffic or paying customers our way, and we send them a few bucks for helping our sales happen. It’s sort of almost like having virtual employees working for us who we really don’t have to manage or oversee in the traditional sense. It’s a win-win for all of us hustlers.
Hustling also includes us thinking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Now, we don’t have to put SEO, or any of the things I’m talking about in this chapter in place overnight. But someone who is hustling to sell more books will at least begin thinking about SEO and soon after take some initial steps to at least put in motion.
If we’re hustling hard and fast, then our side-hustles could actually provide us some money. With this additional money, we could pay for the next opportunity or even opportunities that pop up in our lives. This dynamic will help bring us to the next level. One side-hustle can pay for another side-hustle, which can pay for another, and another, and another, and then hopefully snowball into something really big and lucrative for us. But none of this happens if we don’t hustle.
However, don’t forget that this all takes time. It’s a slow process of gaining multiple income streams through our books that will someday equal our full-time day jobs income. Heck, with enough of our side-hustles someday, we may even be able to replace our day job income altogether. Or at least have a nice retirement plan in motion that will bring us an additional income of possibly passive income in our golden years. All of this is possible. And one of the things to makes this even more possible is relationships. Building up relationships speeds up this process and makes things more fun, too.
Relationships bring joint-ventures, as well. Relationships also bring new learning for us. Hey, bottom line, we should be learning something from every person we meet. We should also be building relationships in our specific industry and related industries with people who can surely teach us a lot.
If we hustle hard enough and long enough, we’re going to be successful. That’s how the world works. That’s how success happens. However, getting a mentor is another way to speed up our learning curve and the building of our network. Mentors save us lots of time, and they introduce us to their high-quality friends.
We should work with everyone we can. And while doing this, make sure to work with integrity, so our reputations precede us. This is a great way to take our game to the next level and make some money selling our books and related services. We also need to be cognizant of being likable. People do business with people they like and trust. We also want to make sure people who are working with us feel like they are winning.
To make people feel like they are winning, we always have to give them value. We all have some value we can offer somehow. We can give information value. Remember, not everyone knows everything. We can give friendship value, too. We, humans, are social creatures. We can also provide financial value. We can help other people make money if we’re in a win-win mindset. We all know everyone loves making money. And we also know they really like people who help them make money. Furthermore, they also are usually very willing to try to return the favor.
*Watch this FREE video lesson on this chapter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzMaHzb1MHQ&t=11s
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