Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Back in early 2011 I hit a plateau in my business.
I seemed to have tapped out my blog traffic at 2000 visitors/day.
I kept publishing more content, but the traffic remained stagnant.
I was having people write articles for me.
I had assistants making phone calls.
My automated webinars were full and running daily.
Yet, for some reason, my income seemed to hit a plateau.
After careful analysis, I realized I’d hit the maximum income level with everything I was selling. At the time, I was promoting other people’s products and didn’t really have my own brand.
But over the next few months, that drastically changed. I built a “micro-giant” brand that’s currently known globally.
The point is, I know how difficult it can be to grow your brand when you hit a plateau, and I’m about to reveal one of the biggest brand-building strategies in existence.
Building your brand is about being everywhere. The traditional avenues for being everywhere are:
- Website
- Blogging
- YouTube Videos
- Facebook Marketing
- Starting A Podcast
- Media Buys
- Email Marketing
- Social Media
There really isn’t much else.
What I discovered was WRITING A BOOK!
I’ve already written several books, but they’ve been digital and privately sold. I’m talking about writing a physical book and launching it around the world to the OFFLINE market.
I’m also going to cover digital publishing for beginners, but publishing a PHYSICAL book is one of the most powerful brand-building strategies in existence.
Offline is the key. Most online businesses have little offline presence. When really offline is the biggest untapped source of traffic and buyers for over 90% of online businesses.
By publishing a physical book, you can grow your brand and gain new customers from bookstores across the globe. Tim Ferris from the Four Hour Work Week, for example…
Since the inception of his first book, his blog has grown astronomically. I found his book offline, bought it, he mentioned his blog within a chapter and now I’m an avid reader.
Publishing a book allows you to reach new audiences like nothing else. The kind of audiences that don’t hang around on Facebook or Google. Out of all the authors I’ve spoken to, they all agree that publishing a book is an EXCELLENT strategy for growing your brand and expanding your audience. (Just as long as the book is distributed through the right channels)
Out of the authors I spoke to, there was much debate about publishing traditionally or self-publishing. In my own opinion, you should do both.
Publish with a publisher physically and self-publish an ebook online.
Publishing A Book Traditionally is appealing for several reasons:
- You’d actually have a physical book in the bookstores.
- It Makes You Look Like A Bad Ass
Publishing a physical book gives your brand credibility, authority, and status like nothing else.
- Completely New Community
Publishing a book physically would open your brand up to a whole new community of people and opportunities. People you would probably not meet when self-publishing or going another route.
- Leverage
Publishers are powerful. They allow you to leverage pre-existing relationships the publisher has been forming for years.
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Publishing a book traditionally also has its downsides. You’d be giving up a share of the profits and a lot of control. It can also take a long time to get your book accepted and onto the shelves of bookstores.
Self Publishing Has Many Advantages
- You Keep All Of The Profits
- It’s Fast, Simple, And Easy
- More Freedom Over The Book And Publishing Process
At the same time, there are several drawbacks to self-publishing. Anyone can self-publish a book, it’s less prestigious than a traditionally published book. Also, it’s up to you and your connections to market the book.
Not An Easy Decision…
If you’re trying to build a colossal brand then without a doubt traditionally publishing is the way to go. If you want to reach out to the offline market via bookstores to grow your online audience then traditional is definitely the way to go.
Of course, you’ll have to write something interesting enough to convince a publisher to actually work with you. For a lot of brands and individuals, that’ll be the hard part.
Getting your own book traditionally published is without a doubt an ultra-effective marketing strategy for reaching out to new audiences. But it comes at a price, the sheer effort involved is more than enough to put most people off.
If you’re just starting out and are running a ‘simple blog’ then self-publishing a book is the most straightforward option.
Self-publishing is faster and substantially more automated. You can easily publish a digital book onto the Amazon Marketplace to begin with. Just to explore its potential for growing your brand and a larger audience.
Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform allows individuals to swiftly self-publish their own books onto the Amazon marketplace. There are a lot of authors out there currently generating vast amounts of PASSIVE income from their KDP sales alone.
Many bloggers are using the KDP platform to grow their blogs and are rapidly seeing an increase in subscribers. While KDP is the preferred option among individuals, there are many other platforms such as iBooks that are equally as powerful.
Publishing a book requires an extreme amount of dedication & effort, but once it’s written the hard part is truly over. Of course, you then have the other hard part, marketing.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below.
Comments
Benaiah Marshall, August 1, 2012, 18:45
Dude! You’re a genius! I never thought about going the traditional publishing route. I have written a couple of E-books and agree with you that it can help develop some awesome connections. But publishing the traditional way is a pretty damned interesting concept.
RJ Palmer, August 1, 2012, 20:10
David, I’ve been considering writing a book for a while now, but I was always leaning toward self-publishing. Your post really opened my eyes to the benefits of traditional publishing, especially the credibility and new audience aspects. Thanks for the insight!
Amelia Turner, August 2, 2012, 09:10
David, this post is exactly what I needed! I’ve been working on my brand for a while, but I’ve hit a plateau just like you mentioned. Writing a book, especially going the traditional route, never crossed my mind. This could be the breakthrough strategy I need. Thank you!
Oliver Hayes, August 2, 2012, 11:30
I appreciate the detailed comparison between traditional and self-publishing. I’ve been self-publishing for a while, but your points on the credibility and leverage that comes with traditional publishing are making me rethink my strategy. I might just start looking into publishers. Great advice, David!
Sophia Barrett, August 2, 2012, 13:05
Hi David, I’m curious about the initial steps to take if I want to pitch my book to a traditional publisher. Do you have any tips on how to make my proposal stand out? I’m new to this and would love some guidance!
Henry Lucas, August 2, 2012, 14:20
This is such a timely post for me, David! I’ve been debating whether to self-publish or try my luck with traditional publishing for my upcoming book. Your insights about brand credibility and reaching new audiences are convincing me to give traditional publishing a shot. Thanks for the valuable advice!
Grace Mitchell, August 2, 2012, 16:45
Thank you for breaking down the pros and cons of traditional versus self-publishing, David. I’ve always thought self-publishing was the only way to go, but now I see the potential benefits of traditional publishing. This post has really broadened my perspective!
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Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
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What this is describing, without naming it, is signalling theory: a costly, hard-to-fake action that credibly demonstrates competence in a way a cheap action can’t, precisely because a blog post costs almost nothing to produce and anyone can write one. The original model was about job markets and educational credentials, but the logic transfers cleanly to brand-building, and it explains something the post gets right almost by accident. The post’s own list of downsides to traditional publishing, giving up a share of profit, giving up control, waiting months or years for acceptance, is exactly the cost structure that makes the signal credible in the first place. A self-published ebook that anyone can produce in a weekend doesn’t carry the same signal, not because the writing is worse, but because the cost of faking it approaches zero. Strip the marketing language out of this post and what’s left is an unusually clean description of costly signalling applied to a personal brand.
Philip’s signalling point makes sense to me, but I wonder how it travels. In Turkey a self-published book carries much less of that credibility cost than in the US market this post assumes, traditional publishing here is a smaller industry with different gatekeepers entirely. Would the signal even land the same way for readers outside an English-language market?
Reading this while counting the actual hours: ‘the hard part is truly over once it’s written’ is doing enormous work in that sentence. A book is not a forty-five-minutes-a-day project.
Twenty-two years in corporate taught me ‘leverage pre-existing relationships’ is management-speak for you don’t own the relationship, they do. Familiar trade.
Graham’s right about who owns the relationship. Stripped down, the post’s own case for traditional publishing is three things: credibility, a new community, leverage. All three assume the publisher picks you. What’s missing is any version of this for the majority who pitch and don’t get picked, there’s no fallback between traditionally published and gave up.
The strongest case against the traditional route isn’t cost or time, it’s rights. Standard contracts route the profit and long-term control to the publisher, permanently, in exchange for a distribution advantage that self-publishing platforms have mostly closed. If the goal is brand rather than an advance, the trade here may not work the way it did when the Tim Ferriss example happened.
I think what’s being missed in how people usually read this kind of post is the offline point specifically. Everyone in this space fights over the same three social platforms and the same ad auctions. The idea that most of the audience worth reaching has never seen your content because they’re not looking at a screen at all, that’s the claim here that doesn’t get repeated enough.
Ade’s offline point is fair, but as a process it has a brutal bottleneck: the whole diagram runs through ‘get a publisher to say yes.’ Everything downstream depends on clearing a gate the post admits most people won’t clear. Self-publishing removes the bottleneck and most of the offline reach with it.
I self-published on KDP two years ago hoping for exactly the offline-adjacent reach Ade’s describing. Sold around forty copies total, almost all to people who already followed the blog. Zero bookstore discovery, obviously, since it never touched a shelf. The offline upside in this post belongs specifically to the traditional-publishing path, and that’s a much bigger project than ‘write a book.’