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Wondering how to craft a sales funnel that connects your book to your course? Hear from Julie Broad, online course creation expert and best-selling author on how to build a profitable business around your book.

After the launch of your book, what comes next?

With unlimited options for people to learn and consume content these days, diversifying the way people can engage with your book content opens up huge opportunities.

Not only can you reach more people with your message, you can also increase your revenue and build a sustainable business around your thought leadership.

But how exactly can you build a profitable business around your book?

We sat down with Julie Broad, Founder and President of Book Launchers to help answer this question. Julie helps professionals write, publish and sell non-fiction books. She’s helped entrepreneurs turn books into courses, as well as authors turn their books into courses.

Watch the video below to learn from Julie Broad, the different ways to connect online courses to books, and how to build a profitable business around your book with online courses.

 

Ways to connect books to online courses

There are many ways to connect books to online courses. As a consultant to authors and entrepreneurs, Julie’s seen many iterations of this process, saying “the possibilities are endless.”

To give you an idea of what models are out there, and what might work for you, here are some examples of how others have connected books to courses:

1) Book to Free Course

If you’re starting out with a book, there are many ways to connect it to an online course. In Pat Flynn’s book Will it Fly, he includes a link with an invitation to sign up for a free course to action the concepts in the book. That free course then leads into paid courses, with more advanced training.

If you’re new to creating online courses, starting out by creating a free, companion course may be a good way to go to test how your audience engages through the course format with your particular subject matter expertise.

2) Book to Online Membership Site

In addition to connecting your book to a free course, you could consider leading people to an online community through the book.

Fitness trainer Gillian Goerzen wrote a book called The Elephant in The Gym, which invites people to join her online community of others looking to get in shape. Using Thinkific, she’s built a virtual studio where people can train with her anywhere. She uses the book as the entry point to her sales funnel.

3) Book to Mastermind or Mentorship

Others use books as a way to funnel readers to higher level training or mentorship programs. For people who want to take the next step in applying what they’ve learned in your book, you could offer coaching in conjunction with training in an online course format, to bring a cohort of students along in the process.

Book versus course content

What is the difference between the content within a book, and the course?

Julie suggests thinking about the ‘hook.’

With a book, your hook may be about giving the reader knowledge of an experience you’ve had, and walking through different examples to fully understand a concept. With an online course, the hook is always about outcomes. Remember, your course content needs to be action oriented.

For example…

If you are writing a book on how to raise money as a startup founder, you might want to find stories that explain the process through different scenarios. You can help your readers grasp a concept by letting them into other people’s experiences, through the power of storytelling.

If in creating a course, you might want to sit down with two startup founders and interview them on the process. Instead of just telling the story, you’d want to call out key principles and action steps that students could apply to achieve a similar result.

“Take the content and stories in your book and turn it into something that can be acted upon.””

– Julie Broad

While you can go the route of mapping your course to each chapter in your book, keep in mind that your course content should be based on getting your audience to a specific result, as fast as possible. As Julie has seen with her own clients, “you may be able to create an entire course out of one chapter!”

Building a sales funnel from book to course

Plan to use your book as the entry point to your sales funnel. You can do this in a number of different ways. Here are some tips from Julie on how to do this in your own book:

Embed community

Think about how you want to build relationships with people beyond the book launch. You could let them know about your newsletter, Facebook group, or membership program that runs alongside your book.

Whatever community-building channel you choose, you want to give people a way to connect and build relationships with you (and each other) post-book.

Call to action

Make sure to have a clear call to action in your book that leads them into your sales funnel.

This may be to invite people to sign up for a free companion course that goes along with the book. Or maybe it’s inviting them to download a cheat sheet or guide to help them action the concepts from your book.

Either way, your calls to action should drive people to opt-in to engage with you, so you can continue to provide them with value outside of your book.

“Few books have great calls to action included in them. Don’t make this mistake! Make sure you direct readers to connect with you beyond the book, whether that’s through an email list, or actionable guide. This is the first step to including them in your larger sales funnel.”

– Julie Broad

To hear more of Julie’s tips for creating a sales funnel from your book with online courses, watch the video above!