How Books Fueled a 7-Figure Marketing Empire | Nick Hutchison

#010: Marketing expert Nick Hutchison shares BookThinkers' journey on Business Confessions. Learn practical tips on book-driven business promotion, unconventional success paths, and balancing well-being with growth. Valuable insights for entrepreneurs!

Show Notes with Timestamps:
00:00:00 - The Genesis of Book Thinkers
00:03:43 - Evolution of Book Thinkers
00:06:13 - Business Growth and Iteration
00:09:36 - Marketing Strategies
 00:12:02 - Growing a Podcast
 00:12:37 - Overcoming the Fear of Rejection
 00:14:38 - The Third Door Metaphor
00:16:17 - Revenue Boost and Business Growth
 00:19:22 - The 10X Mindset
 00:23:33 - Building a Solid Foundation
00:24:59 - Email Automation Tools 
00:25:48 - Choosing Beehive Over ConvertKit
00:27:14 - Sales Funnels and Acquisitions
00:29:23 - The Power of Sales Calls
00:32:03 - Content Strategy and Value Perception
00:36:53 - Leveraging Trending Content for Growth
00:39:00 - Delegating Engagement Strategies
00:41:54 - Importance of Books in Business
00:43:27 - Social Media Promotion and Content Management
00:46:32 - Nick's Book Launch and Its Purpose
00:49:38 - The importance of focus in business
00:50:12 - Reevaluating success and balance
00:51:16 - Managing risk and ego
00:52:21 - Offering custom book recommendations


Nick Hutchison's Links:
Website: bookthinkers.com
Instagram: bookthinkers

Dylan's Links:

• 🎙️Podcast: BusinessConfessionsPod
• 📽️YouTube: @BizConfessions
• 📷Instagram: DylanWillx
• Linked-In: /dylan-williams

Other Episodes you might like:

• 7-Figure Blueprint for Any Business | Chandler Saine
• Building a Unique Online Fitness Empire | Lee Maasen
• Land Investing & Building Multiple Streams of Income Daniel Martinez
• Hiring Top Talent Overseas | Stratton Brown

Past Guests: Chandler Saine, Daniel Martinez, Stratton Brown, Lee Maasen, Nico Lagan, Daniel Roman,Tim Branyan, David Van Beekum, Nick Hutchison, Deirdre Tshein, Sanchez Zehcnas, Christina Lopez, Keigan Carthy, Hemant Varshney, Taniela Fiefia, Jennifer Blake, Nicki Sciberras, John Chan

Transcript

Dylan: 0:00

How much

Nick: 0:00

money does your business make? Dylan, I'm involved with a number of different businesses, but book thinkers, which is the main subject of discussion today, just wrapped up last year at about 500, 000. So

Dylan: 0:12

you reach over a million people a month on your podcast. You've also interviewed some pretty cool people. Let's see. Grant Cardone, Lewis Howes. And Alex Ramosi, just to name a few. what does your business do? I

Nick: 0:25

have a marketing agency, BookThinkers, that helps authors promote and market their books. So years and years ago, it was about 2016, I graduated college. I took a full time software sales position and I started reading books about sales and marketing and communication. And I was shocked that more people my age weren't reading books written by the best salespeople of all time and applying them to their sales roles. So I started a post about the books that I was reading on social media about a year later, 2017, as a way to connect with like minded people. Because again, my friends and family, they weren't into this type of stuff. And what happened next surprised me. My audience started to grow and authors started to reach out to me and ask me to help them promote and market their books. And the rest is history. I'm sure we could Do a deep dive onto that story if you want to, but at the end of the day, I help authors get more exposure for their books.

Dylan: 1:16

going back to the beginning, what was your initial strategy with this and then how's it evolved over time? Cause I know that you've got a very successful podcast. You probably didn't start the podcast and then start the agency. So take me through that initial thought and then how it's evolved over time

Nick: 1:30

when I was. Still in my senior year of college, reading these personal development books, getting ready to graduate, I stumbled across a book called Thinking Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It's one of those classics, and there's a concept in that book called a mastermind. And so the idea that Excited me at the time was the idea of a third mind, right? Two people in the same room focused on the same problem creates this third mind, there's this intangible energy that's focused and it helps you create momentum faster. And so I had another. entrepreneurial minded friend named Alec, and we would meet on weekends at school in one of those sort of like classrooms with the whiteboard that was empty. And we would just mastermind, we would journal things that we were interested in starting a business around. And we were reading business books. And one of the ideas was that businesses solve problems. So we would journal about all the problems we were facing. And one of the problems that I presented one weekend was that I was reading all of these books. But I had no place to centralize my takeaways, right? People were asking me the same questions over and over and over again. Hey, Nick, what's a good book for this? Or what were your favorite takeaways from that? So the original idea for book thinkers was a website where I could just. Categorize my favorite takeaways from the books I was reading and send people over there, maybe do some affiliate revenue to Amazon or something. We weren't really quite sure, but that was the problem that I wanted to solve. And then quickly from there, it evolved into, okay, let's build a mobile application. That can help other readers do the same thing, a centralized place for them to organize their biggest takeaways from the books they're reading and connect with friends, see what they're reading, maybe even a platform that can help them retain more. long story short, we spent hundreds of hours, tens of thousands of dollars outsourcing the build of this mobile app as recent college graduates, which is a ton of money at the time, right? We were some broke college students and it never came to fruition. But like I mentioned during the original intro. I was posting on Instagram as a way to connect with like minded people and maybe sell that mobile app into the audience one day. So even though the app fell apart and never really came to fruition, I was left with this big audience and authors who started to come to me to say, Hey, Nick, I need help promoting my book.

Dylan: 3:41

And that's how it

Nick: 3:42

evolved. I love that. It's funny. So it was by accident.

Dylan: 3:45

I always like to ask that question. Things usually evolve over time and then you learn new things and you're on a totally different trajectory at that point. So that's really cool to hear. so you've had this idea, it changed. How did the agency portion come to. Fruition and where you're at right now to leading up to that point,

Nick: 4:03

it's funny. I went back to the original book that I promoted that I was paid to promote and I looked at the conversation and I was paid 50 to promote that book multiple times. This was back in 2018. and I laugh about that now because now we charge thousands of dollars to promote a book, right? So it's just, it's a big difference, but I'm reading all of these books that say, Hey, if you have an inbound demand for something, follow the clues, right? There's other people out there who need your assistance. They just don't know it. So by day I'm working this full time software sales job and I'm experiencing a lot of success in it. And I'm pouring, that's my nine to five. And then I have my five to nine. I'm pouring time and energy into this. Book thinkers community that I'm starting to develop and so I start to use my cold calling tactics But on Instagram, I start to DM authors that I find on Amazon and I say hey I'll promote your book and I was trying to figure out the pricing 2018 2019 so I would increase it every time I'd reach out to somebody So 100, 150, 200, 250, what else can I add in here to up the dollar value, right? And, I would follow up with these authors and say, what else can I help with? What else can I try? Because I started to realize that these authors are writing books because books are a great business card. They're a low ticket value step in a value ladder. So somebody gets involved in the book, they want more information. Maybe there's a course at a hundred dollars. Maybe there's a live training coming up, a webinar at a thousand dollars. Maybe there's consulting or coaching or, an in person event coming up. So there were all sorts of upsells that an author would have on the back of their book. And so if I could move a lot of books. Those people would naturally get funneled into the upsells. I tried out all sorts of different services at this intersection between social media and books, podcasting, all sorts of stuff. Most of it didn't work, but a few things did work. And so I would continue to sell and grow and grow. And so that number seven figures, BookThinkers has done seven figures cumulatively, over that period of time. Last year was 500, 000. And This year will be the million dollar year as a standalone business that I'm involved in. but that's the story of like how it continued to grow and iterate. It was a lot of trial and error and it was reading and applying business books. modifying my sales outreach and things like that.

Dylan: 6:19

Nice. So what I'm taking from this so far too, with the agency and what it's evolved into, are you helping with the upsell down sale portion of it? Or is that typically something they already have going for them? Cause I know I'm thinking right now of the business owner who decided to. Create that book, or get out there a little bit more, like you said, with the online, the business card, they might not know about all these other upsells, downsells, everything else they could get through with a digital product or something alongside their business. Are you helping with that? what's your stance on that? And what are you doing with that?

Nick: 6:52

A little bit. so here are the three primary services that my agency offers today. Number one is short form video production for social media. So we'll help an author turn their book into 50 or 100 pieces of short form content. And that short form content is good for Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera. So every piece of content is really five or six pieces of content. Now we focus on organic reach. We're engineering these videos with viral potential, right? So every video has a strong hook. Way to grab attention, a powerful opinion. Then it's followed up with a piece of value that retains that viewer through the video and actually provides value, educational value to the person watching them. And then at the very end, we build in a call to action into a number of these videos. So the value comes from the author's book. We're turning the physical book into 50 or a hundred pieces of short form video content, and then built on the back end of those videos, we have a call to action. So that call to action. Oftentimes, a number of them are for the book itself because the book then has a call to action in the back of it for the courses, coaching, consulting, speaking, et cetera. But a number of those videos that we build have a call to action directly to what they're upselling. We don't really work with a lot of authors that don't already have that piece built out. We're starting to get into the consulting space of helping authors build out those other offers. But today, most of our clients already have those funnels built out. Number two is podcast booking, so we help authors get placed on four, eight, or twelve podcasts per month guaranteed to talk about their book and their business. And we prioritize the author's niche over anything else. one time I met an author who said she was on Good Morning America and didn't sell any books. And I think that's because if you're talking to everybody, you're talking to nobody. So we focus on the author's niche and put them in front of good people for those conversations. And then number three, book reviews. So on Instagram today, we have about 160, 000 organic followers, and on the other platforms, maybe another 50. And so we get, we still get paid today, from authors to post about their book and interview them on our podcast. So those are the three things that make up the 500 that I referenced.

Dylan: 9:07

I want to know how though you as a business, how do you market your service?

Nick: 9:12

there are a number of ways that we market our service. the podcast that you referenced during the beginning where we've interviewed people like Russell and Alex and Lewis and those kinds of people, Greg Cardone, at one point during, At one point, while I was growing the audience, I noticed that a lot of those people were resharing my book reviews, and they were following the account, they were viewing our stories, commenting on stuff, some of them were starting to pay us for content. I realized these people are more accessible than I previously thought they were. And I was introduced to the idea of borrowing credibility. if I'm pictured with Grant Cardone, and you trust Grant Cardone, trust is transitive. Meeting. you trust Grant, Grant trusts me, then you'll trust me as well. So I started to think about, how do I position myself with these people more often, not from behind a screen taking a photo of their book, but actually with them, and podcasting came to mind. And I think it's still a way that you can position yourself and start to do business and market your business too. So nowadays, I'll give everybody like an actual business example. We recently worked with somebody who, his name's Matt Higgins. He's been on shark tank as a guest shark. And he, co owns RSC ventures with the owner of the dolphins and big venture capital fund and a whole bunch of other stuff. And he put out a book called burn the boats. So we invite Matt to our podcast to talk about his book, burn the boats. While we're having that discussion as an agency owner, I say, Hey, Matt, what are some of the things that you've done to effectively promote and market your book or in the boats? Because we're a marketing agency and I'm always curious. And he tells me, and then he says, by the way, what do you guys do? Oh, here are all the things that we do. Let's have a conversation at the end of the call about it. And then we go and we film video content with them, for instance. So the podcast itself is a positioning tool. It's a way to build credibility. It's a way to make money, but it's also a way to sell and promote my business, my agency. So that's one thing that we do. Number two is, we're doing a million organic impressions a month. And so there are inherent marketing, that's a lot of marketing touches for the business. Everything is branded book thinkers. And then number three, we do have a couple of outbound salespeople who are reaching out to authors, proactively, about their books and setting up sales calls and in the whole nine yards.

Dylan: 11:26

Is that through usually social media?

Nick: 11:28

It is. Yes. Yeah. Because all of our services are related to social media. And so if somebody is not on socials, like if we're prospecting on LinkedIn or phone lists or something like that, those people are harder to sell and convert because they're not using the tools that we're proposing to use to promote and market their book. You know what I mean?

Dylan: 11:46

how did you grow your podcast so quickly?

Nick: 11:49

Borrowing credibility, getting in front of people who already have a big audience. if Grant Cardone shares your podcast on his story automatically, that's a lot of eyeballs. you don't have to push it yourself when somebody else like that is pushing it. And by the way, I think this is a fun concept to talk about because you're podcasting and I bet a bunch of people in your audience are podcasting or thinking about starting a podcast. There's a metaphor that I like to use. With these hard to reach people like Grant Cardone, and the metaphor is this, the hot girl at the bar, everybody anticipates rejection. So they know they never go up and talk to her. And as a result, at the end of the night, nobody took their shot. Nobody talked to her. So she walks out feeling insecure. And so does the guy who didn't go up and talk to her. On social media, the larger your audience gets, the more people anticipate rejection and they actually don't reach out. And this is so counterintuitive, we don't think about it this way. Greg Cardone, he must get 10, 000 DMs a day because he has millions of followers. False. He gets less DMs a day than you would anticipate because everybody anticipates rejection. So a lot of the people that I've worked with that have these massive audiences, I'm just prospecting through Instagram. I'm saying, in the example of Grant Cardone, Hey Grant, congratulations on the release of your upcoming book. I help authors like A, B, and C, all people that he follows. So he has, he can bypass. Any due diligence or fact checking or anything, he doesn't care about how many downloads because he sees the people that he respects have already worked with you. I'd love to help you, I'd love to have you on my show and promote you to my audience. Here's a link to book. So I'll provide one kind of backup thing here, which is that when I had maybe 20, 000 Instagram followers. I used to literally get 50 to 100 DMs per day. you could ask my wife, I'd spend two hours every evening answering DMs, book recommendations, questions, et cetera. I wanted to answer everybody. Today we have 160, 000 on Instagram and we probably get like 5 to 10 DMs a day. And I'll meet people at conferences who have said, Hey, I've followed you for three years. I'll be like, great. What's your Instagram? And I'll check. They've never DM'd you. Why didn't you DM me? I didn't think you'd respond. Why? Because of the follower count. So the same thing applies again, to hammer this point home, to the people that you want to reach out to. I say take your shot and use that formula that I just said, snowball momentum with names and stuff. But yeah, everybody's more accessible than you'd think that they would be. And that's a really good

Dylan: 14:11

idea. Faulty of it myself. I've thought this exact same thing. but not to say I won't shoot my shot though. I'll go try. that's really good though. And I was just thinking through that, somebody else mentioned something along those lines of even building something up to the, to that point of Also to everybody starts somewhere. I was going to go somewhere else with this, but everybody starts somewhere. Just shoot your shot. Essentially, I'll shorten it instead of getting into a long story like that because,

Nick: 14:36

can I say one more thing related to podcasting? Another metaphor that might hit, and this is directly from a book recommendation. There's an amazing book and audio book. It's actually better on audio called the third door. Have you read it, Dylan?

Dylan: 14:49

I have not, and I've read a lot of books, but no, I have not

Nick: 14:51

read that one. So The Third Door, it's a book written by Alex Benayan, and here's the metaphor. Every nightclub has three ways to get in. The first door is general admission. So you wait in a line that goes around the block in the freezing cold, maybe they let you in, they charge a cover, you gotta pay to get in the door in the first place. Not where we want to go. And, door number two is the VIP entrance. You have to pay your way in, you've got to have a lot of money, you've got to already be famous. Most of us, when we're first starting out, like you just mentioned, we don't get access to the VIP entrance and we can't afford it. But every nightclub has a third door. And In the case of an actual physical nightclub, that might mean like crawling through the, breaking in the kitchen window, crawling through the back and coming into the nightclub. You're still in the nightclub, right? Even if you broke through the back window and army crawled through the kitchen and popped in the back, right? And so all of these people There is a third door and this book talks about this college kid who drops out and ends up interviewing Bill Gates and stuff and about how he used the third door to get access to all of these people, compounded their credibility and ended up at Bill Gates. And so if anybody is looking at trying to get in touch with harder to reach people, borrow their credibility for their business or their podcast or any combination of anything, then that's a really good place to start the third door. And there's so many other amazing lessons in that book.

Dylan: 16:11

when did you experience your biggest revenue boost?

Nick: 16:14

About two, wow. Two years ago? Yeah. Wow. A year and a half to two years ago, I read a hundred million dollar offers by Alex Hormozy. And that book, if anybody doesn't follow Alex Hormozy, I highly recommend following him on all of your social media channels. He talks about very complex business subjects at a fifth grade rating level. And so he just simplifies everything and gives you the actionable takeaways. And it wasn't his first book. He's written a number of books, a gym launch book and some stuff like that. But a hundred million dollar offers came out about two years ago. It's a book on offer structure, offer creation, price guarantees, pricing structures, things like that. And my business at the time had hit a monthly bottleneck. And I was looking at a way, one of the, his major kind of promises with that book is that he'll help you 5x your revenue. So I'm like, I want a five X my revenue. So I jumped into that book and I started to study his value equation and it has a number of variables on top and on bottom. And he has a few exercises in the book that most people would gloss over, but I decided to go through all of them. And one of the exercises involved Imagining all of the ways you can solve your customer's problems. It doesn't matter how crazy, how insane, how big it's going to be. Just put everything on the paper with a dollar value next to it. And as I was going through that process and he has some really cool questions, like he'll say, how many different ways can you sell a brick? 30 seconds, write them all down. You'll write them all down. And then it'll be like, Oh, but what if the brick could be any size? And you're like, I didn't think about size. Now there's a bunch of different ways that I could sell it. What about different colors? What about different materials? And that just helps you think of a lot of different ways that you could sell bricks. So you apply the same thoughts and exercises to your business. And I thought about all these different services that I could start offering authors in the video production service that we offer today. That was not a piece of the business two years ago, came as a result. And so I went, I don't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head right now, but I went from at the time, two years ago, maybe like 20 K a month to 50, whatever the numbers were. it was a huge jump in revenue, maybe 10 K a month to 30, 40 K a month or something like that. And, it literally came as a result of finding that new service as a result of going through that book. 100 million dollar offers by Alex Ramosi. that was a really big step up for us at the time. Alex

Dylan: 18:37

Ramosi. he's definitely well known. he's done his research. you can tell when somebody's gone through something. He's definitely gone through a few different things. Everybody. I feel like he's the new online business, essentially of this era right now. Everybody knows

Nick: 18:51

him now. Yeah, he's like the next Gary V. Cause eight years ago or whatever, seven years ago, every video would be a Gary V video. Now it's a hormosy video.

Dylan: 19:01

So after implementing that stuff, how do you grow from here? What's the plan for 2024?

Nick: 19:06

Right now I'm going through a book called 10x is easier than 2x. The idea of the book is that if your actual goal is to 2x, which is hard to do, right? 500, 000 in this business unit to 1, 000, 000 in this business unit. The fastest way to get there is by pretending that your goal is 10x. 5, 000, 000 instead of 1, 000, 000, right? Which is only 2x. What that forces you to do is totally change the paradigm that you're operating within. It forces you to change the activities that you participate in on a daily basis because book thinkers as a marketing agency doing a million dollars a year is very different than a marketing agency doing five. So by shifting my actual like realistic activities to a business that's operating as a 5 million business, it forces me to do an 80 20 analysis. This white. 20 percent of my activities are generating 80 percent of the revenue. And then I have to automate, delegate, or eliminate all of the 80 percent that's only contributing to 20 and then like double, triple, quadruple down on the most important, highly leveraged activities. It's a complex explanation, but again, the point is I need to operate like a 5 million business. In order to effectively achieve the 1 million revenue goal for that business unit. And I'm going through a bunch of exercises right now within that book to put myself in that space and start to change our activity. So with my agency, we have a, we have a full time team and every day we meet on a daily huddle and those are the exercises that we're currently going through as a team, make sure that everybody has an opportunity to contribute new ideas and think outside of the box. Because again, like if you're selling bricks, what about a different color? What about a different material? What about different sizes? And so I think getting your entire team involved and thinking about how to grow a business is really important because everybody brings a different perspective. Every technician, every manager, every entrepreneur sees things through a different lens. And so those are some of the things that we're currently focused on for that business.

Dylan: 21:08

How big is your team right now?

Nick: 21:09

We have five full time people at BookThinkers. Six, sorry, six full time people and then five part time people.

Dylan: 21:16

So does that process that you just mentioned, does that involve the 80 20? Does that involve Pushing off more tasks or is that hiring new people for those tasks? I think

Nick: 21:26

it's a little bit of both. For me, when I was first starting the agency, you hit that 10, 000 a month sort of mark. And then the question becomes, do you hire and delegate all of your full time focus? You could start to focus on higher leveraged activities, and that's what I've always chosen to do. Now, what was a little unique about my journey was that I had that full time software sales position while I was building BookThinkers. And so for a long time, I didn't need to take any money out of the business. I could hire to delegate immediately without needing to draw my own salary. So I actually had full time employees in the business before I ever left my full time sales job, which is a little funny. not everybody's story, but definitely was mine. I received some advice early in my journey that I needed to build the parachute before I jumped instead of build the parachute on the way down. And the advice stemmed from the idea that as a business owner, if you're operating from a place of scarcity. That bleeds into your decision making, your customers feel it. You're discounting unnecessarily. You're compromising on your integrity, but if instead you can build an effective nest egg emergency fund, or keep a full time job while you build your side hustle, then you can, it's a slower build. Cause not all of your time is focused on it, but it's a healthier and more successful build. Statistically, Michael Gerber in his book, the E Myth Revisited, he says that 95 percent of small businesses fail in the first five years, 95%. And it's because they run out of money. So I do think that, delegation is an extremely important aspect of why my business is continuing to grow that business book thinkers. you don't want to, I guess delegate too fast. Got to have the foundation first. Yeah. I think a lot of people miss that in entrepreneurial conversations and business conversations.

Dylan: 23:12

Luckily, just to mention, a little bit. What you just said, I had a side hustle of my businesses before, one of them, while I was still working my corporate America job for way too long, essentially, I was making, I ended up, I think my last month there, I made my yearly salary in one month, and I said, this is probably time to go, I said, this is

Nick: 23:31

probably, I think you did wait a little too long, that's, hey, listen, that's great though. It really is. Yeah.

Dylan: 23:36

And, I knew it was time to leave at that point. I knew I had something going and also too, to that extent. Even with the podcast, three or four months before we even record a single episode, we had every SOP or CRM built out. I say CRM, we're using a management tool, but we had the CRM built out. We had the SOPs set in place when we're booking a guest, when they're getting their emails, all the structures. Booking every we had everything laid out, and that took months to build that stuff up before even started like booking a guest. And I got to that point. I'm like, I need to start booking guests now, like the whole premise of it all. But just the foundation though, you can go so much further. If you have a good solid foundation, you can build upon that. You're not putting things together and everything. And that's why a lot of people, like you said, After five years, they've run out of money because they're constantly trying to fix the problems that they didn't address at the beginning. That's so big. what kind of tools are you using, for marketing in the company right now? Do you know that?

Nick: 24:28

Yeah, I do. we don't use a ton of marketing automation tools. as far as tools that we're using in the business, we do have a CRM. It's called, I've, I was very trained in Salesforce as a CRM and HubSpot. In my prior tech sales career, but I think that was an overload for what we're doing at book thinker. So we use a tool called less annoying CRM LA CRM. Have you heard of that? I have actually. Yeah. So it's like a bare bones, CRM task tracking tool. so we do use that internally. That's the primary thing that we're currently using. we have, some email automation. I think we're currently transitioning away from MailChimp and towards a new email platform, but that decision's out of my hands, so I'm not really sure what we're moving

Dylan: 25:13

to. I gotcha. Yeah. Yeah, we actually moved away from that with another company we had. We were using MailChimp, and then they I had a bunch of issues and then we went to constant contact, I want to say. And then we looked from there to go to either convert kit or we actually just settled with a company. It's a smaller company, but they're growing a lot. It's called be half.

Nick: 25:34

That's what we are too. Yeah. That's funny. I was an advocate for convert kit because if on a few podcasts that I was listening to a big. A few big time marketers were using it, but yeah, the operations guy on our team fell in love with beehive. So that's what we're currently, I think if you even go to book thinkers, beehive is maybe our email collection right now. That's funny. Oh, wow.

Dylan: 25:54

Yeah. Yeah. It's knowing the backstory on that too. And like where they came from and what, where they're going. I'd rather be a part of them now than where they're going to be here in the next five years or so.

Nick: 26:03

Oh yeah. You'll have to send me their back. I'm not familiar with their backstory at all.

Dylan: 26:07

The, I won't go into it too much, but essentially the owner started was one of the co founders of the morning brew, the big email, million dollar, 75 million or whatever they sold for essentially, or something like that. yeah, but, do you. Do you use a, for your acquisitions, clients coming in, do you have a sales funnel that they go through?

Nick: 26:26

We really don't, a lot of it's manual today through Calendly and forms. So it's a little antiquated, there we could definitely do a better job at cleaning some of that up. I used ClickFunnels for a number of years. as a funnel tool, but fell out of love with it. A few years ago, we were talking about Russell Brunson, that interview, I don't know when I interviewed him, 2020, 2021, something like that. Second

Dylan: 26:49

interview. So

Nick: 26:50

it's been a while. It's been a while. Yeah. I fell out of love with the product after a while. And then I don't know that my agency has really ever picked up those pieces very well. A lot of what we're doing today on the website goes direct to book a call. And there's not a ton of automated, like email around it. What are you currently using? Nothing

Dylan: 27:10

right now. As far as that, do you, I saw you have a BSL on there, right? Like a video sales letter. That's explaining kind of what you do. And then from there you're then pushing them to a call to book a call, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. okay. so it's

Nick: 27:23

yeah, it's just. Calendly is the software. Yeah.

Dylan: 27:25

Yeah. Everybody nowadays is pushing. It's gotta be this and it's gotta be set up like this and it's gotta be all this stuff. And it's just essentially goes to show that anything works, just do it. have

Nick: 27:34

a good product. Yeah, exactly. And my, in the world of book marketing, a lot of these agencies operate internationally and who operates them is a, nobody really knows, like they're just a ghost. It's an online profile. And so our strongest competitive differentiator. Is video it's we get on and we talk to you and we ask good questions. and you would think that's a given probably in a lot of the industries that people are listening and working in, but in the book industry, it's not, most of the actors are international and they don't want to get on a call. They just want to operate from behind a sales page or. Email and, you might pay them for services and never meet anybody. So again, that's, we just push direct to a sales call and we have people on our team that'll take care of it, or I'll take care of it depending on the prospect. We just pitch live, which has been very useful. And again, the business, the business of book thinkers is growing as a result of that method.

Dylan: 28:31

Years ago, I would look at that and think, why can't I just buy something? I don't want to have to book a call. You try to sell me on something. And then now in this, now I'm looking at it live. You don't know what you even need yet, so talk about it, figure something out. You might be, you might need something you don't even know is exist, even, talk to them, figure out what you need to go and they're going to push you towards the perfect solution for you. You might not even know that it's

Nick: 28:51

even there. So yeah, Russell talked, I. In dot com secrets and that conversation I had with him, I think we talked about the idea of you walk into a sporting goods store and an associate meets you at the front and says, where, what are you here for? what do you need help with? Versus you walk in and nobody greets you and you just wander around aimlessly. Like the success rate of somebody greeting you at the front door is so much higher than wandering around yourself. we've tested it, I've, when somebody requests pricing and they're not willing to get on a call with us, our success rate of selling something to that person is very low, like infinitely lower than if we get on a sales call with the same person. we push really hard, like we really, I have no issue presenting pricing within the first minute of a sales call, but then I'm there to answer questions. Russell Brunson always says a confused customer always says no. And the best way to avoid confusion is be available to answer questions in real time.

Dylan: 29:43

And it's so good. who'd you learn all that stuff from? Who'd you learn what you just talked about a lot of things that I feel like there's a lot of key points that you just mentioned there to sales wise and everything is there. Who do you learn that stuff from? I know you probably got a book or something that you've picked up on.

Nick: 29:56

I have read so many great sales and marketing books. I think that my favorite sales teachers have been Russell Brunson, Grant Cardone, Alex Ormosi, Patrick Bette David, some of these big name people. I've read five or six books from Jeb Blunt. He's the sales, sales gravy guy. and there are so many other great books. when I was in software sales, my favorite book was, called Gap Selling by Keenan. The idea that there's a gap, between where a customer is and where they want to be and you just help them fill the gap. There are so many other great sales books out there. Way of the Wolf by Jordan Belfort. I've read so many books on psychology and persuasion and negotiation just to get a good understanding of what human beings go through. Books like Influence by Robert Cialdini, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. there are just so many good books available for us to consume and then implement. Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. the list goes on and on.

Dylan: 30:52

Great one. Yeah. Yeah, that's probably one of my favorites, actually, is Chris Voss. Probably because he's just good at storytelling as well, so that goes along with selling.

Nick: 30:59

He is, for your audience, this is my favorite metaphor from that book. He says, if a husband, and I'll get it slightly wrong, but here's the point. If a husband and wife are arguing about which shoes to wear, the husband wants to wear brown and the wife wants him to wear black. If they split the difference and he wears one brown shoe and one black shoe, that's the worst possible outcome, right? Because now he looks like a clown. Now, if he wins or she wins, those are better outcomes because he's wearing either black or brown. And so the point of that book is never split the difference. When you compromise, both sides lose. But when one side wins, both sides win. And I think that's a really interesting paradigm shift. Man, that's good.

Dylan: 31:35

Yeah. I've read that book multiple times, but you just, you explain that very well. Cause I just, another light bulb just went off in my head too. I'm thinking about other scenarios. So that's great. Now you guys have a content strategy. I'm sure you guys follow. Walk me through that content strategy you do for yourself or for clients.

Nick: 31:50

Well, years and years ago when I was in charge of distributing content every single day, I think consistency mattered more than just about anything else. Show up every single day, provide value, entertain, and that's it. And that original kind of consistency matters above everything else idea came from Gary V. Gary talks about jab, right hook. And the idea is that if you're a boxer, And you're throwing a jab, and you throw another jab, you're collecting data, you're getting to know your audience, your opponent, a little bit better every time you jab. And a jab is a piece of value without a call to action. It's just, you're just showing up to collect data. By the time you throw a right hook. You've collected enough data with your jabs to land that right hook where it needs to go. Same thing happens on social media. You provide value for a while every single day. And by the time you throw a right hook with a call to action, like you bring your audience to life and ask them to do something or to buy something, they're much more likely to participate. If you've been jabbing for a while, so I think that's the underlying premise behind everything that we do is we just want to show up and provide value on a daily basis. Now, value is not determined by the person creating the content. Value is determined by the audience. All of these social media algorithms operate in a similar way, at least from a high level. When you distribute a piece of content, it gets micro tested. So a small percentage of your audience will see the content. If that audience interacts with it, likes, comments, shares, etc., then the platform says, Hey, this is valuable, let me share it with more people in your existing audience and beyond. But if they don't interact with it, It's not valuable and the platform doesn't want to distribute content that's not valuable because they're layering ads in there and they want as many ads to be seen as possible. And if you get off of the platform, cause the content that it's showing you stinks, they lose money. So they smush that content. So what we optimize for is Engagement. We want people to like comment, share. We want them to feel something. We want them to learn something, be entertained, be educated. And that is what will get your content distributed to more people. So we build that into the content that we create for our clients. Every piece of content has a strong hook, a way to grab attention, a way to disrupt you from that endless scrolling, a powerful opinion that you either agree with or don't agree with, but no middle ground, right? Middle ground stinks. And then provides value, retains the viewer through the end of the video. And then sometimes there's a call to action. Most of the time there's not. So those have been a couple of things that we pay attention to as far as content strategies concerned. About a year ago, I hired one of the other big book people in the space who was creating way better content than I was, but wasn't building a business out of it, right? It wasn't monetizing it effectively, had a full time job, couldn't escape it. And I said, Hey, I'll show you how to run the business side. If you want to come in and do all of our content. And so he's been doing our content for about a year now in terms of editing and following trends and doing research. And I think that's translated into a lot of success for our clients as well, because he does a lot of video editing for clients. Those are a few things that I think about as far as content is concerned. I'll share one other thing that I think is important because I know, here's the bottom line, everybody is insecure about their comment section. Everybody. As your audience grows, your insecurity grows with it. I remember when I first started posting on Instagram, if I didn't get 10 likes, I was like, Oh, this stinks. Now I'm all insecure about that piece of content that I distributed. Now, if a video doesn't get 10, 000 views in the first day, I'm like, Oh, now I'm all bummed about it. And if you thought about speaking to an audience of 10, 000 people in person, like that is a massive amount of people. And now I'm all bummed out when a piece of content doesn't do that within the first couple of hours. So because everybody is insecure about their comments section, I think the fastest way to grow any type of online audience, not a podcast, but like a social media following on Tik et cetera, is another Gary V strategy. It's called the dollar 80 strategy. Are you familiar with this one, Dylan? You're going to have

Dylan: 35:57

to explain it. I actually saw that the other day because we were looking at content strategies and his 1. 80 came up and somebody combined it with something, but you please tell me what

Nick: 36:06

it is. It's so good. So we're all familiar with that saying your two cents. You're just your genuine thoughts on something. So what Gary says is you want to go out into the world of let's say Instagram and you want to leave your two cents on 90 posts per day. So that's how you get to 1. 80. Here's the actual strategy. You search a hashtag related to your niche. in your case, hashtag small business leaders or something like that. And you go into that hashtag and Instagram will filter it for you. Trending posts, recent posts, reels, etc. So go to trending and comment on the top 9. Leave your genuine two cents couple of sentences if they're posting about how they loved reading the seven habits of highly effective people Comment back and say hey, I loved habit number seven sharpen the saw and as a result of that I read a ton of books every year. What are some of your favorite books start a discussion with that person? Because it's a trending piece of content, there are going to be a lot of other comments in there related to your niche. Go like all of them. Now what's nice is, if you do this on ten hashtags a day, the top nine pieces, say you get to 90 pieces times two cents, a dollar eighty, you're consuming 90 pieces of trending content per day in your niche. what is working, what people are starting to respond to. And then you can steal like an artist and recreate what resonates with you and what you know already is resonating with your desired audience. There are a couple of other things here as well. One is that as you comment on these posts and like other comments, those people get a notification. Hey, this guy, Dylan, just commented on my stuff. Let me check them out. They're going to see you're already in their niche. They're going to feel the need to reciprocate. Because you've provided a comment or you've liked one of their comments, they want to reciprocate that feeling, the likelihood that they follow you back or sorry, not back because you haven't followed them, but the likelihood that they follow you because you're producing valuable video content in their niche and you just liked or commented on one of their posts is pretty high. And so you're collecting followers that have a predisposition for engaging. And they're in your niche already. So it's like the most perfect storm when you do this every single day in and out, day in and day out for a while. That's the main strategy that I used back in the day as a technician within the business to go from zero to a thousand to 10, 50, probably stopped around then, but that got us an organic base of very interactive, genuine, excited to comment people. And I think it's like the best strategy out there. Wow.

Dylan: 38:36

That's good. That, that's honestly what we're looking forward to. let me ask you this. Cause I know a little, I know how you're going to answer this probably, but we'll go a little further, but cause you need to provide your own value. Have you figured out a way to delegate

Nick: 38:48

that? No. Yeah,

Dylan: 38:49

because I know that's very hard because you're giving your own two cents to something and you, and it's hard to delegate your own thoughts to somebody and how you answer and respond to things and also bring value. So that's difficult.

Nick: 39:00

Yeah. We, the actual creation of content has been, part of that is outsourced to our team coming up with hooks and content strategies and stuff. And then I'm inserting my genuine thoughts into a video after reading a book. So that is slightly delegated the dollar 80 strategy. We do perform that. On behalf of a number of our clients, so somebody on our team will read somebody's book, listen to a bunch of podcasts, really get to know them and then go out there with some canned kind of comments that we can modify that the author provides to us and then go out there and distribute those. hey, what are your thoughts on rich dad, poor dad, they type something up, send it to us real quick. We can go comment on a hundred posts related to rich dad, poor dad, with their genuine thoughts, but continue to modify it slightly depending on the post. you're right, it does lose a little bit of integrity when done that way. It's a hard thing to delegate. But it can be done, you can get creative, y'all have done

Dylan: 39:55

it, y'all have actually done it. So that answers that. And I'm thinking that now that you've unblocked that thought in my head now and made that open, even their one response, you could even put that into AI too, and come up with multiple different responses and then use that to distribute throughout there. That's good. That's really good. I would. as a service, if I was using you guys, I would want that, so that's really good. I would not want to sit there and take my time to go through each and every post and do that. So that's awesome that you guys figure that out. That's awesome.

Nick: 40:23

It's a lot. It's a longer play, but it compounds over time. I forgot to mention that as long as you're commenting 2 or 3 sentences. The platforms love to rank content. So when somebody clicks into that trending video, unless they've pinned something, your content will probably sit up top because everything else is a fire emoji, or a clap emoji. And like by writing a couple of sentences, you're automatically differentiating from every other comment that's out there. Another one of my favorite books is the compound effect by Darren Hardy. And it essentially states that small steps in the right direction when repeated over a long period of time will lead to disproportionately positive outcomes. And so in the case of the 1. 80 strategy, same input, 90 comments per day, 90 genuine two cent comments per day, will lead to, let's say, 100 followers a week for a while. Birds of a feather flock together. The more followers you have and the more engaging your content is, the higher the likelihood that next prospective person actually presses follow. So now, BookThinkers doesn't do this anymore, but with 150, 000 followers and people like Grant Cardone and blah, blah, blah. If we go out there and comment on 90 posts per day, everybody follows. They reciprocate because they want you to continue to engage. You're a big, exciting community or a big, exciting brand or presence and you just commented on their posts. Of course they're going to follow you. so it's probably like a thousand followers a week that way. so yeah, I think it's a super powerful strategy and you can just Google dollar 80 strategy and see a bunch of stuff on it too.

Dylan: 41:54

That's good. That's good. I'm actually gonna take that. I'm gonna see how we can promote that and get going with that as well What tools do you guys use for? Promoting through social media. I guess I would say do you guys have anything that you're using?

Nick: 42:06

No everything I mean, we definitely leverage chat GPT for Taking an existing caption and making it more engaging and things like that, but as far as distribution of content, no, there are tons of, there are tons of references out there that state that if you post organically within a platform, instead of using a third party, posting tool, that you'll have higher engagement with the platform wants you to create within the platform, not integrate and automatically post. So currently everything that we're doing is automatically done that way, or sorry, manually done that way.

Dylan: 42:41

Yeah, I see you guys housing all that stuff, like in a Google doc or your CRM that you have built out.

Nick: 42:47

Yeah, we have a, we use Google drive and there's a whole system. So we have, we manage the content. I forgot to mention this as one of our core services. It's a. It's built on the back of our video content. So if somebody doesn't have a team to distribute content for them, but they're a time pressured entrepreneur or author, we can step in and act as their social media management partner, post content either three times a week or once per day for them generating the captions and everything. So yeah, there's an entire Google drive system built out where everybody's videos are housed, content schedule, the caption schedule, like all that kind of stuff is. Currently in Google drive folders with docs and videos and everything like that.

Dylan: 43:27

And I'm sure that it's evolved over time because more people started asking for that and didn't actually do the put out what you actually created for them and stuff.

Nick: 43:34

It happened way more than you would think. Somebody would spend 20 grand on videos and then wouldn't post any of them. They'd be like, all these came out amazing. I love every one of them. you haven't posted any yet. I just can't get myself to do it, yeah, it evolved out of that need. I get it. I

Dylan: 43:49

really do. going back to books, what have you seen books do, or what have you seen, let me rephrase this, what have you seen books do for people's businesses as far as creating a book or becoming an author?

Nick: 44:02

They do a lot. would you rather buy from a realtor who's just a realtor, or a realtor who wrote a book on first time home buying? it adds a layer of credibility to anybody in any profession doing anything. I think writing a book is one of the best things that you can do to increase your sales. and the likelihood that somebody does business with you, Amazon hands out a bestseller status to just about anybody that writes a book and there are ways to game that system. And so being introduced as, Hey, I'm Dylan Williams, or Hey, I'm Dylan Williams, bestselling author of XYZ it's still has this inherent credibility. Like it hasn't lost its sauce. You know what I mean? People still hear bestselling author and they're like, Oh. That's nice. People want to do business with authors. There's this like sense of intellectual, I don't know, prowess that comes with that term author. So I think it helps a lot. they're a great lead generation tool, they're like Russell Brunson is famous for his free book plus free plus shipping. Book models where, it only costs them 3 to print a book. So you pay seven for the shipping, which actually covers the book, the cost of the printing and the shipping. You get the book for seven bucks and now you're a fan of his for life. And that is a step in a value ladder that leads to all of his courses and coaching and events and everything like that. So they're a great step in a value ladder and they're really inexpensive. Nowadays, you can self publish a book. all you need is a word document that has a few thoughts on it and you could be published on Amazon tomorrow, which is pretty cool. so yeah, books are great for business. there really are. And the other side of the coin here, which is a little bit different is that. I just went through the experience myself for the first time writing a book is a great personal development experience. Even if you never publish it, forces you to condense your thoughts into actionable, simple frameworks. It's a form of repetition, which leads to better retention. So if you can simplify something and put it on paper and review it a bunch of times and really make it good, you're ready to teach that information to somebody else as well, which I think is another great benefit. And depending on the type of book you want to write, some people use it as a way to overcome trauma and all sorts of things. So books are the best accountability partners and the best business cards, in my opinion. That's good.

Dylan: 46:14

banking off that, that was my next thing I wanted to talk about

Nick: 46:16

is you have a book. I do. What's that book about? My first book just launched on November 1st, 2023. So a couple of months ago, and it's titled rise of the reader strategies for mastering your reading habits and applying what you learn. And I decided to write this book because over the years of building my community, BookThinkers, on social media and the podcast and everything, we've received hundreds, probably thousands, of very similar questions. Hey Nick, how do I choose the right book for this problem? Or how do I take great notes? How do I retain more from the books I'm reading? How do I take better action? Why do I always Get all excited, but then nothing changes. And so I went out there and responded to every single one of those questions, but there's no leverage to that, right? You're a business guy. it was a lot of manual work. I wish I could just say, here's a book to solve all of your problems. But unfortunately, nobody had written a book about how to implement books. So I spent a couple of years observing my own behavior, answering questions, compiling my notes. And this book is the result of that. It has. All of my favorite tips and tools and strategies for getting more from the books you read. That's perfect. You

Dylan: 47:25

have a lot of data points, I'm sure on that as well, with a lot of your, following reaching out and asking those kinds of questions. That's a lot of data points with a lot of different followers too, from that.

Nick: 47:34

Yeah. And everybody has the same goal, which is using these books to improve themselves, right? I only operate in this world of personal development, self help business. philosophy, psychology, whatever you want to call it. And so yes, I believe books are a wonderful way to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be because they condense decades of somebody else's lived experience and greatest life lessons into days of consumption. Russell Brunson spent decades of his life learning something, then years of it writing about the concept and simplifying it, making it digestible for somebody else's brain, and now it's available for 20 in a few hours of your time. You can't beat that. yeah, that's why I think, there's no problem in the world of business or health or fitness or mindset or spirituality that can't be fixed. By reading a good personal development book and implementing, and I genuinely believe that Nick, how many books you think you've read individual books, not including reading the same book multiple times, like probably 500 individual books over the last 10 years. I only started 10 years ago. Wow.

Dylan: 48:39

So you've got your, you're an author yourself. You've been immersed in the business world. You've read a few books. A couple, not many. if you had to sum up that experience, what would you say you learned?

Nick: 48:52

I've learned that people optimize for the wrong things. People optimize for money at the expense of their health and relationships. People optimize for their health at the expense of their money in relationships and relationships at the expense of everything else. So your first question, how much revenue has book thinkers as a business unit done in the last year? 500, 000. It only did 500, 000 because it wasn't my primary goal to, to max it out. I've learned over the last 10 years that what I really need to optimize for is enjoying the passage of time. And for me. Focusing my time on different business ventures, like I'm involved with, I have real estate properties, multifamilies, I have a few other businesses that I spend a lot of my time on. That brings me a lot of joy. And yeah, I could, the business could be growing faster. there's that, the first line of The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papazian is an old Russian proverb that says something like, if you chase two rabbits, you'll catch none. And people say that about business. You need to focus on one thing and keep the one thing, otherwise it'll fall apart. But to me, that sucks the joy out of business. Like again, what I've learned is that you need to enjoy the passage of time. When you enjoy your present moment, that creates a sustainable path forward where you actually love your life. You're healthy, you're wealthy, and you're happy. You're not sacrificing any one of those. You're doing them all at a manageable pace without risking any of those categories and overextending. I've met, when I was in my early twenties, I just turned 30. So when I was in my early twenties, If somebody was rich, I thought, Oh, they're successful. I'll read your book. I'll buy your course. I'll follow you online. I'll preach what you say that's success. And then I started to realize that most of those people who are rich, they weren't healthy and they definitely weren't happy. They didn't have good relationships. And so nowadays when I meet those people, I have empathy for them. I'm like, you're not successful just cause like you did a hundred million dollars this year. look at you, you're not healthy. You're not happy. So again, that's, it's a little bit of a tangent. Like I'm definitely focused on this right now. It's been my mantra for the last couple of months, but a good balance of in, doing what, what creates joy for you in the present moment. That's what I've learned after reading these 500 books.

Dylan: 51:08

That's good. That's honestly why you don't know my background much at all, but that's why I'm here a podcasting now It's money's not everything at all. It's really not and I'm glad you actually said That's really

Nick: 51:20

good. I think I don't remember where I got this But I think statistically, after you have an emergency fund of 100, 000, 99. 99999 percent of, like, all unforeseen expenses are covered. you've removed 99. 999 percent of risk. If you live a decent lifestyle, so it's yeah, if you overextend and you risk burnout and you hate what you do just to have more of an emergency fund so that you're covering and set up 99. 99, like you're adding some extra nines that don't even matter anyway. It's what is all that for?

Dylan: 51:54

Yeah, I think it's ego. I think it just becomes, you become that person at the beginning to then just feel that same ego that you've built because you've done something at that point. But. Man, that's good. True. as we end up here, is there anything else you want to leave the audience with? You've dropped some amazing value today, amazing.

Nick: 52:11

If anybody wants a custom book recommendation from me, because you've heard today's conversation and you're like, oh, this guy loves books, and you're right, books do condense decades into days, but I still don't know where to start and I don't want to read Rise of the Reader. one of my favorite things to do is play this sort of book matchmaker role again, I get fulfillment from helping people make progress and take action and solve problems. So anybody can direct message me at book thinkers on Instagram. I promise you there are less DMS coming in than you would anticipate. and tell me about a problem you're facing or a skill that you want to develop and I will provide a custom book recommendation to you. Sometimes it takes me a few days to respond. Sometimes I'll have to ask some followup questions, but again, one of my favorite things to do is provide custom book recommendations to people because I have a, a pretty wide understanding of what books work in certain circumstances and it just, Brings me so much fulfillment when somebody comes back 30 days later and they're like, dude, I can't believe I didn't read this 10 years ago, it would have saved me thousands of hours of headaches. And I'm like, yes, that's why I'm here. You did it. Yeah.

Dylan: 53:13

what if somebody wants to work with your agency? How would somebody get ahold of you with that?

Nick: 53:16

Bookthinkers. com and you can book a discovery call right from that homepage. Perfect.

Dylan: 53:22

Nick, I appreciate you coming on today and, sharing all the value that you did.

Nick: 53:25

I really enjoyed it. Yeah, I appreciate you. so

Dylan: 53:26

much.

53:28

Hey, if you're still listening, hopefully you got some value out of this or amusement. Either way, I really appreciate you for listening. My goal with this podcast is to build something of value while also showing others that it's possible to do the same. And what I mean by that is, I'm not perfect at this. I fumble, I stutter, and I just want to show that it's okay. If you've been putting something off. This is me telling you to go for it. So I need your help in growing this and there's two main ways a podcast grows. One is through ratings and reviews and two is through word of mouth. So I can only do it with your help. If you can leave me a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify as well as post this to your social and it doesn't grow without you. Thank you. Talk to you all next week.