If you’re a coach or a content creator, there’s a fair chance you’ve thought about publishing your own book. Fortunately, that doesn’t have to mean penning a massive 300-page volume in your area of expertise (thank God!). Instead, you can create a low-content book!
If you haven’t heard of low-content books, they are exactly what the name implies—books with smaller amounts of content (or no content at all), such as:
- daily planners
- guided journals
- workbooks
- activity books
…just to name a few.
These types of books are surprisingly easy to create and are very well-suited to coaches and content creators alike.
Watch the video or read the main points below where I’ll show you how low-content books can work synergistically with your business to help you:
- grow your audience
- build your brand authority
- increase your revenue
(This post contains affiliate links, which means—at zero cost to you—I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. Thank you for your support!)
How Coaches and Content Creators Can Add Value By Publishing Low-Content Books
As a coach or content creator there are many ways you can incorporate branded low-content books into your mix of offerings. Doing this can help you provide value to your audience while simultaneously demonstrating your expertise and gaining their trust.
Here are a few examples of how you can use low-content books to offer value to your audience:
Are Low-Content Books Easy to Make?
Yes! Creating low-content books is easy.
You’ll just need two separate files for each book:
- one file for the interior content
- one file for the cover
Creating Your Low-Content Book Files
When it comes to creating the interior file and cover file for your book, you have a couple of options.
1. Create Them Yourself
You don’t need to be a professional designer to create your own interior and cover files. You can find stock imagery and pre-made interior templates on design resource sites like Creative Fabrica (one of my favorite go-to image sites).
Once you’ve found images and templates you like, simply customize them to suit the purpose of your book.
I have a TON of tutorials on my YouTube channel. Check out these low-content book-related playlists on my channel:
You can also download my free guide, “3 Steps to Publishing Your First Low-Content Book in Less Than a Day,” which will help you get started.
2. Outsource to a Freelance Designer
One of the best things about the time we live in is the colossal number of resources available to us through the internet. It’s now so easy to outsource even the smallest of tasks—at competitive rates—to people all over the world.
If you’re short on time or just don’t have the desire to create your own files, don’t let that stop you; consider outsourcing this work to someone else instead. You can hire a freelance designer from a site such as Upwork or Fiverr to create these files to your specifications.
For more information about how to outsource these tasks, check out How to Outsource the Design of Your Low-Content Books.
Publishing Your Low-Content Books
Once your book’s files are done, sign up for a free Kindle Direct Publishing account and upload your files.
Next, add your book’s title and pricing information. When everything looks good, hit “publish.” Once it’s approved, your book will be for sale on Amazon! Woohoo! When someone buys a copy, Amazon will print it off and ship it directly to the customer, with absolutely no extra effort from you. That’s right—no shipping, no customer service, just sitting back and reveling in your new-found self-publisher status.
How Low-Content Books Can Help You Grow Your Business
Next let’s discuss how you can use low-content books to help you:
- grow your audience
- build your brand
- increase your revenue
Grow Your Audience
Using a freebie (aka a lead magnet) is one of the BEST ways to build your email list, especially when you’re first starting out. By offering a link to your freebie from inside your books you can get people to sign up for your email list, thereby growing your audience.
Here are 4 steps to help you get started.
1. Create Your Lead Magnet
Before you publish, create a downloadable lead magnet and set up a landing page to host it. A lead magnet can be something as simple as:
- a 1-page PDF cheat sheet on a relevant topic
- a free guide
- a video
- an audio file
2. Create an Email Nurture Sequence
An email nurture sequence is a series of emails sent over the course of a few days, weeks, or months to provide value to new email subscribers. Beyond giving new subscribers helpful content, this email sequence will help you build trust and expertise.
3. Include Your Lead Magnet URL in Your Book
Include a prompt inside your book for people to visit the URL for your lead magnet’s landing page. When people visit this page, ask them to enter their email address to download the freebie. They’ll receive something valuable from you, and their contact information will be added to your email list.
4. Make an Offer
After you’ve continued to offer real value over the course of a few emails, then introduce your first offer.
Build Your Brand
It’s important to remember that branding isn’t just about logos and visual identity. Your brand is really more about you: your persona, how you make your audience feel, and how your audience perceives you in relation to everyone else in your space.
Publishing high-quality low-content books related to your business will have several positive results. It will:
- increase your online presence
- help you become more well-known in your space over the course of time
- demonstrate your professionalism, as well as your authority and credibility in your industry
- help build know-, like-, and trust factors with your audience so they’ll be more likely to take your main offers seriously
Increase Your Revenue
Because you’ll be selling the low-content books you create, they have the potential to increase the overall revenue of your business. To make the most of this opportunity, you’ll want to use your email list to promote your books. Whether you have one person on your email list or 1,000, you have an audience to promote your books to. Don’t overlook this opportunity!
Once you’ve used a series of emails sent over the course of a few days, weeks, or months (“email nurturing”) to provide value to new email subscribers, you can begin to promote your book (or books) via email. As your email list grows over time you’ll have more people to promote your books to, which will increase your earning potential.
To improve the chances that people on your email list will buy your books, consider what types of books might work best with your main offers. Here are a few ideas I mentioned earlier: daily health trackers and stress relief coloring books for those in the health and wellness industry; daily planners or dot grid journals for productivity coaches and content creators; guided journals for life and career coaches; and course workbooks for course creators.
Bonus Tip!
To further increase your revenue potential, set yourself up as an Amazon Affiliate. Creating and sharing affiliate links for your books will generate commissions on any of your books purchased through those links. Even better, you’ll also receive commissions on any other eligible purchases that customers make on Amazon within 24 hours of clicking on your affiliate link.
Think Long-Term
Probably the most important thing to remember about using low-content books to grow your audience, build your brand, and increase your revenue is that you’ll need to think in the long term.
Adding books to your business offerings won’t create an instant audience of thousands, make your brand a household name, or make your revenue skyrocket, but low-content publishing can be a valuable tool in your brand-building and marketing tool belt.
You’ll start small and build steam slowly over time. Most importantly, you’ll be building an audience of qualified leads who are legitimately interested in what you have to offer, which may potentially lead to further sales of your current core offerings.
I hope this post helped you understand how adding low-content books to your business offerings can help you move the needle forward to:
- grow your audience
- build your brand
- increase your revenue
If the idea of selling low-content books is new to you and you’d like to learn more, download my free guide, “3 Steps to Publishing Your First Low-Content Book in Less than a Day.” You can also join my free Facebook group, Low-Content Profits.
