How To Use ClickFunnels for Authors

As an author, it can be extremely disheartening to find that no matter how good your writing is and how much time you dedicate to your books, you just can’t seem to reach an audience. Previously, unless you had access to a full marketing team or big-ticket publisher, it was nearly impossible to get your work out there. Luckily, the current market has much more accessible and affordable methods, like ClickFunnels.

ClickFunnels is an excellent tool that authors can use to build their audience via an email list, sell their books directly, and build a lasting relationship with readers. It’s versatile, efficient, and easy to use no matter what your base niche is.

With ClickFunnels, becoming a successful author with a strong following is easier than ever before. Used in conjunction with a professional platform and easy-to-learn marketing techniques, the service can let even a brand-new author look like an industry veteran by offering enticing leads that bring in the sales with proven effectiveness.

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Why Authors Should Use ClickFunnels

Authors are generally driven by the desire to get their stories in front of other people. Whether they are writing intense genre fiction or insightful memoirs, an author wants to impart the lessons that they have learned to others. Making money is a somewhat secondary motivation, but it doesn’t have to be difficult.

Advertising as an Author

Advertisement is absolutely essential to an author. While some authors have the resources to shell out for entire marketing teams through big publishing houses, most are choosing the more economical self-publishing route for more creative control. Unfortunately, that means the major mantle for marketing falls squarely on the author’s shoulders.

Marketing can get complicated! Your campaigns need to be specifically tailored to your target audience, but how do you do that when you don’t know who that audience is? What if you don’t even know where they’re from?

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Once you’ve figured out the demographic situation, you still need to find ways to get your ads in front of these audiences. Will you take out big ads on popular websites, advertise on your social media, create a book trailer? It can be overwhelming for a first-time author.

How ClickFunnels Can Help

ClickFunnels, an online sales funnel builder, simplifies the process by giving you access to and control of several different resources in the same place. It’s a marketing tool that essentially does the legwork for you, offering you simple templates that can be customized to your book’s exact needs. For more information about what ClickFunnels is and how it works, see this full breakdown of the company.

With ClickFunnels, you can advertise not only on your own website (through the simple to assemble marketing funnels that give the site its name), but through email listings and social media. They also offer excellent advice on finalizing and selling your book via their blog.

ClickFunnels offers you a way to build:

• Custom landing and squeeze pages
• Webinars
• Membership sites
• Many other kinds of sales funnels that encourage upselling

Overall, they offer 22 different funnel templates that cover everything from product launches (which is perfect for book release marketing) to event funnels (which can make it easy to market a book tour or signing).

Click here for a FREE two-week ClickFunnels trial, a FREE ClickFunnels course, and over 10 done-for-you funnels!

Let’s take a look at how that can work in your favor by exploring how the average author can take advantage of the marketing capabilities of ClickFunnels.

How to Use ClickFunnels As an Author

The process for using ClickFunnels as an author is relatively simple and comes in four basic steps: creating an appealing product, building an email list, launching and selling the book, and following up with your buyers. After this, there are a few other tips and tricks you can use to increase your marketing’s effectiveness overall.

Build Your Email List

The email list is an author’s bread and butter; this is how you build a sustainable, engaged audience. Emails lists get consumers interested in your product or service long-term. Someone signing up for an email list means that they are invested in how you and your product will grow and develop over time. For authors, this means people willing to read present and future books.

ClickFunnels is especially good as an email list building service because it offers analytics on your subscribers that you can use to tailor your marketing strategies. They offer ways to track social media influencers, which can be helpful if you’re offering review copies and promotional advertising.

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They also offer excellent demographic and analytic data, including:

• Who opens their emails
• Who clicks what links included
• Age
• Gender
• Geographical region. 

This information is fantastic in terms of targeted marketing; people respond well to advertisements that apply specifically to their lives. With these analytics in mind, you can make sure your campaign applies to the people it will be in front of by tailoring the language, imagery, and frequency of the marketing campaigns to suit trends you see in your email list.

ClickFunnels offers several different templates for your funnels, but one of the most common and best ways to collect email addresses is a squeeze page. A squeeze page gives your potential customers two options: enter their email or exit the page. This page can show up either immediately before or immediately after they buy the book but is somewhat more effective if you can manage it before.

The wonderful thing about an email list is that you’ll have multiple opportunities to sell, but we’ll discuss that in more detail in just a moment. For now, let’s focus on the most important part of the process: your book.

Finalize Your Product

It may be the last thing you want to hear when you’ve just spent a year or longer working on a manuscript, but a very important first step in the advertisement of your book is to give it a marketable makeover. This involves a few different mini-steps.

1. Your Title. Your title should clearly explain exactly what your topic is and why it’s important. It should be short, snappy, and easy to say. For instance, if you’re writing a seasonal cookbook, you might name it Christmas Kitchen Staples.
2. Your Subtitle. Subtitles offer you a sorely-needed chance to explain in further detail without bogging down the main title. For our hypothetical cookbook, the subtitle might be “50 recipes to delight around the holiday table.”
3. Your Cover. Your cover should be clean, uncrowded, and focused. This doesn’t necessarily mean minimalistic, but it does mean that the images and text you use should draw attention without being overwhelming. Your images should be relevant to your material. In our cookbook example, you might feature an image of one of the key recipes behind a red or green title box.

If possible, you should have your cover professionally designed. There are ways to save here, too, though. Free publishing programs like the Kindle Direct Publishing service usually include stock cover designs that can function as a base for customization.

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It’s a good idea to run your cover by beta readers to get feedback on it before the book comes out. Done through ClickFunnels, not only can you get polling results, but you can encourage beta readers and subscribers to preorder your book before its release.

Sell Your Book

Once your book is released, your email list should be the first place to gain access to it. This is another opportunity to introduce the squeeze page, this time to either buy the book or exit the page or email.

This is the perfect time to offer bonus material, and you definitely should also be able to offer bonus material to your subscribers.

These bonus materials could include:

• Short video training series
• Ebook and physical book options
• Signed copies or bookplates
• Additional mini-ebooks or course material
• Bonus essays, articles, or op-eds from yourself or a promotional partner

Bonus material offers an incentive to continue paying attention and gives you a chance to upsell further services that are already relevant to your customers. On top of this, you’ll want to give several opportunities to buy the book in the process; make sure that there is a “buy now” option on most if not all pages of your funnel.

Split Testing Is Key for Creative Professionals like Authors

One unique feature of ClickFunnels is that it offers you the opportunity to carry out split testing. Split testing means using different marketing techniques on different groups simultaneously before a larger launch in order to test the techniques for effectiveness. Doing this allows you to know that your marketing energy is being spent in the easiest, most efficient way possible.

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To split test a strategy, follow these steps:

• Separate your emailing list into two groups 
• Design your email campaigns the same way you usually would, and send them to their respective recipients. 
• From there, watch the analytics of each campaign; keep an eye on the number of opened emails, clicks, and, most importantly, sales. You’ll be able to tell which campaign is more successful by the engagement levels.

Split testing is excellent for long-term strategizing. It gives you the advantage of narrowing down your marketing techniques to the exact formula that will drive the highest number of sales the quickest without having to waste the entire campaign runs on inefficient techniques.

Follow Up with Your Readers

Once your subscribers have purchased your book, you should be able to offer them a reason to stay subscribed. You could offer additional information, invite customers to events like tours and signings, or tease upcoming releases. The point of this stage is to continue engaging with your audience and incentivizing them to stay with you as you work on future projects.

This is another excellent opportunity to offer bonus material for your readers to explore and interact with. You can pull from the list above, possibly tweaking it to include adjacent topics that build on the original book’s purpose or lesson. Alternatively, you can offer supplementary material that increases the value of the initial book.

Following up also means you have the opportunity to ask for reviews. Reviews are important tools when it comes to book marketing, and they’re free to everyone involved, which makes them doubly appealing. Encourage your customers to leave reviews of your book in well-trafficked marketplaces like Amazon, Goodreads, and various social media.

Marketing Tips and Tricks for Authors

Aside from the basic steps of building a list, finishing the product, selling the book, and following up, there are a few tools that authors should have in their arsenal when it comes to marketing themselves. These include a personal website, active social media, and a network to work within on a local level.

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Maintaining an Author Website

While on the surface, keeping up with an author’s website seems intimidating, it’s really quite simple. All you need is a basic hosting site, an attractive bio, and a point of sale. This can all be accomplished for low or no cost to you.

WordPress is the most popular website builder for a reason. It has plenty of free templates for building a clean, crisp site, and offers easy integration of Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple products. It’s also very easy to incorporate ClickFunnels into your WordPress site, as they explain here in their help center.

While not necessary, running a personal blog from your website can definitely help. Post consistently about something that you are passionate about, and you’ll end up with a quickly-accessible backlog of writing that can act as your professional portfolio. This makes it easier for readers to get to know you and your style before they opt into your email list or buy your book.

More than that, really, your website will function as a base of operations for your marketing. Having a personal website means you have a central hub for your email list and sales funnels to live.

Building an Audience for Your Works

We’ve already talked about how email lists function as your database of dedicated readers, but how do you build that in the first place? You need to have a platform.

An author’s platform is their overall presence, on and offline.

One excellent way to establish this is by having active social media. Consider using a social media content scheduler like Loomly to post regularly on one or two different media sites. You’ll also want to log in regularly and interact with others in your community (usually under the hashtag that describes your genre, or #WritingCommunity for writers in general) in order to encourage engagement.

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Instagram is a great place to build up a following because it allows you to show off the visuals of your book. This helps it stay in customers’ memories by building a stronger association between title and product. Click here for more information about how to integrate ClickFunnels with Instagram.

For authors, Twitter is especially important. It’s a great place to meet and network with other industry professionals. Agents and publishers will frequently host “pitch parties” to pick up new clients, giving you an opportunity to put your work before a larger audience. The site also makes it easy to chat with your readers and bring them to your website.

Promoting Your Book

Promotions are fairly easy to achieve if the site you’re selling on lets you control pricing. With KDP especially, running promotions is easy; you can run a Kindle Countdown deal (with a steadily decreasing discount over a set time) or a free book promotion with a few simple clicks. These deals can be incorporated into your funnels to increase their effectiveness.

You can also promote your book in person. Reach out to local businesses like bookstores and cafes to see if they would be interested in working together on a signing event or display. You can also reach out to author groups in your area to network in person and build connections that can lead to blurbs you can add to your promotional material or additional promotional outlets.

Consider getting business cards with your book information on them to hand out when you network in person. They’re a fairly cheap investment (some printing services like Vistaprint will sell packs of 100 for as little as $15) and leave a professional, memorable mark with other industry professionals.

ClickFunnels Makes Book Marketing Easy

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, it’s never been easier to write and publish your work. With ClickFunnels, it’s never been easier to sell that published work. They make the daunting prospect of marketing yourself much less terrifying by simplifying the process down to its core components.

On top of that, ClickFunnels offers many free resources on their blog. They offer insight into the world of marketing in several different niches, from affiliate marketing strategies to author tips and tricks to improve sales over time. Even if you don’t decide to use their marketing services, you can benefit from their experience and expertise.

Try ClickFunnels for 14 days completely free through this link. The trial comes with ten free funnels, as well as exclusive course material to make sure your funnels are as effective and profitable as possible.

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