Educating customers by giving them famous books?

This sentence bears repeating.

Ebooks aren't a good idea for this application. It isn't the education that's important, it's the idea that it's a physical gift that can be handed over to them...and that it establishes you as an authority.

You need a print book.

The truth is, a 64 page "book" can be printed by any online book printer for about a dollar a copy in a run of 1,000 copies. People on Fiverr can design a cover and even format the book for you.

On Amazon I have several books on various sales and marketing subjects. They are available in both Kindle and print editions. i sell about 5 times more digital books than print. But all my clients have come from reading the print versions. None from reading an e-book.

I'm talking about tens of thousands of books over several years, so the example is valid.

It was clear.

You are proposing to sell them a free book by someone they do not know. Then you propose to sell them on yourself.

Selling the free books requires work.

So you are proposing to double your work.

And more.

Because you are appealing to those who want free.

They come in 2 forms:
Well-intentioned ones who will not get around to doing anything about it,
The broke asses you do not want as clients.

Yes, once in a blue moon you get a beginner who is both interested in the info and in applying it and able to do it.

Yes, your goal is to establish yourself as an authority on the subject and as a good person/ company to work with.

But you are doing neither.

Sign up for Dan Kennedy's gick thing.

You get a bunch of stuff, for free, that Dan wrote and sells for whatever amount he says the free stuff is worth. And you get signed up to get his follow up emails.

He is doing what you are proposing. And doing it right.

Sign up and study his method/ funnel.

The 5000 words e-book would be a good freebie to automatically give people to induce them to sign up for your email marketing series.

A book you write, that you give away in hard copy, makes you seem that you are an authority. Before they read one word.

People are amazed by people who have enough wherewithal and words to produce a book.

If you are not going to write your own, save yourself effort; just go to bookstores and stick a business card in every marketing book they have.

Same results as what you propose but less effort and money involved.

Yea it was clear what you want to do. A typical Internet Marketer who really doesn't know how to market his marketing services, although I could be wrong and you are thriving with your marketing consultancy. If so, I humbly apologize.

You have misinterpretted the law of reciprocity. You think giving a gift, may oblige them to
hire you once they have been educated on their need for marketing.

As several have pointed out, you're backwards with this idea.

You also assume, (wrongly) someone will bother to search Amazon for reviews of a given book. Your potential clients don't have the time, they are trying to run a business. You're asking them to do a lot for some free gift from a stranger.

And you want to spend money, running ads, to find people who want a free book? Man, how long have you been at this marketing thing?

You want a shortcut, some Millennial BS (no matter your age) magic. Do this, and customers will come.

It would be better if you gifted yourself a book on getting clients, customers or consumers, because you clearly don't have an idea on how to do it.

I am always AMAZED and BAFFLED by so-called marketers and also copywriters who come up with some gimmick, short cut, and no selling way to get clients.

I have one word for you. WORK.

That is what it takes to get clients to spend money with you, and that word has a lot of context wrapped up in it, including but not limited to the idea, you know how to market.

Why not use whatever it is you are trying to sell to others, on your own marketing?????

Puzzling.

GordonJ

PS. But go ahead, give it a try, it is your time, and your money. All the advice in the world isn't going to help you out because you are demonstrating a resistance to any thing other than what you want to do. Good luck.

Absolutely.

And I've bought college textbooks on marketing, and read..skimmed through them. Nothing at all about how marketing really works...how to really sell.

Dan Kennedy gave a talk and said "If you want to know how to sell something, talk to a 53 year old vacuum cleaner salesman...because he really knows how to sell something". After the talk, I met him and let him know that I was 52, and he was right.

My wife's nephew once asked us to invest in his printed t-shirt shop. He said he needed $25,000 to start it up.

I asked if he had ever sold t-shirts before...No
Did he ever work in a t-shirt store....No.
Has he ever owned a retail store before...of course not.

By now, he was getting irritated with my "cynicism". He did point out that he took a marketing class in college.

I let him know (in front of his parents and other relatives) that he was asking us to give him money for a venture that he wasn't interested enough in to prepare for.

You know the rest of the story. He borrowed the money from his parents (a second mortgage that makes my teeth grit even to this day). He spent it all and promptly closed his "business" after a few months.

A few months later, he invited my wife and me to a "dinner" at his house...he was planning on buying houses and flipping them..."and was looking for partners".

I said (again in front of relatives) "Sure. I'd love to...but I never loan money to relatives, because it always goes bad. And I never loan money to anyone else...because I'm intelligent"

Sure enough, my sister-in-law....a wealthy CPA ...loaned him $100,000 to start buying and selling homes. A year or so later...she declared bankruptcy, because he defaulted on loans she signed for. Over a million in mortgages that he stopped paying.

About the books giving away. I've got a few books from authors that are friends, but never from a salesperson. I no longer loan out books out of my library.

Like I said before, the books I gave to potential clients were to establish/enhance credibility/celebrity. Like an expensive business card. I never expect them to be read.

In fact, I stopped giving books away at paid speaking gigs, because the people thought "I got the book. I can do it all myself".

The books I gave away had nothing to do with the service I was selling. And I would point it our clearly, that the book was on a different subject...advertising in print, while I was selling internet marketing services.

Except the main reason businesses go under is nothing to do with profit margins, it's to do with cash flow or lack thereof...

A lot of businesses fail because the owner knew they needed marketing but did not know which method worked best for their store or did not know how to implement.

Plus, you grow a business better if you delegate tasks to people who can execute at a price that makes sense.