“I came to Peter to develop a strategy and gain the clarity I needed to start a movement to help transform engineering education around the globe.  As an academic, I was skeptical that a business guy would be able to figure this out very easily or at all, but he jumped into deep water without any hesitation, asking exactly  the right questions and providing just the right information.  He then swam laps around the pool by connecting me to some awesome and inobvious resources, and in very short order I have a solid strategy to start swimming in deep water myself.  Now Peter is working with me to improve my strokes and execute the strategy he developed.  It is safe to say that working with him was eye opening, a wonderful learnig experience, and time and money well spent!!”

Left brain or right brain? Innovation versus execution? Process or people? Strategic versus tactical? Many of these concepts are positioned as either/or behaviors or default types of people, teams and organizations. There are ample tools to help determine your dominant type or style. There are also dozens if not hundreds of books on each of these topics. Every one of them attempts to make the case for why their model or view of the world is the better mousetrap. Each one supported by research and case studies supporting their argument.

So, given all the information that is out there it should be pretty easy to determine how one needs to think and act in order to be successful,right? Not really. Is it that the difficulty in choosing correctly is relative to the situation? Partly. I think the issue is that we tend to swing like a pendulum when it comes to analyzing and solving business issues. We go into “strategic planning mode” for a while, than we dive into mastering new tools or technologies for a bit. Once we’ve done that we may launch an employee engagement program because it’s all about the people, right? But than we dive into six sigma or process improvement for a while and those programs yield some impressive results. The soup du jour method of running a business isn’t really one that is viable or sustainable, although it may be fun for some.

In my work I’ve observed that the authors and thought leaders that have the ability to zoom in and zoom out are the ones that are making a difference and growing their respective businesses at a faster pace than those that aren’t. Business is dynamic. Choices that you make are usually not permanent and need to be reevaluated, tweaked and modified over time as circumstances change. The market changes, clients demands and needs change, technology changes, cultures morph and evolve. You need to constantly revisit what you are doing and if it is still the best way to accomplish your objectives. What is challenging for many is that we all (as individuals, as teams and as organizations) have default tendencies. Some are visionary and future focused while others are more oriented towards execution and implementation. We prefer to stay in our comfort zones whatever they may be.

If you’re a zoom in (tactical/execution/operational) type trying zooming out for a bit. If you’re a zoom out (big picture, strategic thinker, future focused) type spend some time drilling down on the tactics and processes. There is never just one right way to achieve a goal or objective and alternative view points, ideas and concepts are needed today more than ever.

“As an Executive Coach I know what it takes to help people reach their goals. I can say, unequivocally, that Peter’s passion, personality and expertise brings the clarity of thought and intensity of focus necessary to determine the best course of action for reaching those goals. Not only has Peter helped me to already, but he will continue to be an important part of my plan for success for the foreseeable future.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Being a successful  author or thought leader is not easy.  It’s incredibly rewarding on many levels yet it’s getting more and more difficult for many to be able to effectively monetize their content.  The quaint old days of getting a nice advance from a publisher and then going out on the speaking circuit a few times a month to make a living are pretty much a distant memory for most.  Running for Vice President or having served as Vice President seems to work pretty well but that’s another story. It’s changed a bit since Mark Twain’s time and it seems that most of the changes have occurred in the last five years or so.

What I find intriguing in my conversations with authors and thought leaders is that many don’t think enough about the landmines that have and will impact their practice or business.  The publishing business (is that term an oxymoron?) is changing and in a state of flux. Boom!  The speaking business is off over 50% and it doesn’t look to be coming back any time soon. Boom!  Corporate training budgets are being cut. Boom!  Consumers have far less discretionary income. Boom!  Get the picture?

Now for every landmine there are an equal or greater number of opportunities.  Self publishing,  social media, digital content, coaching, licensing, assessment tools, consulting engagements, etc.  The reality is that it’s hard enough to stay on top of your game as a thought leader from a content perspective add to that the ability to master social media, community development, branding, marketing and so on and the probability of success is reduced drastically.

My suggestion?  Spend some time and come up with 5 “landmines” that are currently or will in the very near future affect you.  Determine what percentage of your annual revenue is at risk for the next year, two years and three years.  It’s a bit scary to make the assumptions and projections but it is also a motivator.  Now you need to be open to ways to replace (and hopefully wind up with a net increase) to your annual revenue.  Chances are you won’t be able to come up with all of the answers on your own so engage others in the process.  Once you do come up with a few options take the time to consider what it would take to execute any or all of them efficiently.  Again it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to execute many on your own so find trusted resources that can help you in the process.

The landmines are out there.  The opportunities are out there as well.  By coming to grips with the landmines you will actually force yourself to find opportunities.

One of the challenges you face when considering the ways to leverage your content is that there are now more modalities than ever before that people use to consume content.  The days of just reading a book or an article to gain knowledge are over.  You need to be able to understand who your market is and how they prefer to consume content and than you need to make sure you can give them what they want in the format they want it.  In today’s world the answer is rarely ever one format fits all. Beta may have been a better format than the VHS tape (ok I’m dating myself with this analogy) but if you wanted to reach the audience the smart move was to release your work in as many mediums as is logical and possible.  Think of your book as Beta and all of the other options as the VHS of today.

1      Develop Video-based Training 

 
 
Develop a video library containing 6 to 10 themes that are subsets of your work.  For each of these themes you should be able to come up with 5 to 10 (sometimes more) 2-5 minute video vignettes.  They should be able to stand alone (although bundling a few is ok) and they don’t need to be produced in an expensive studio, in most cases you can produce them yourself with the technology that is out in the market and inexpensive.  Some of these vignettes can be given away for marketing purposes but given that they are modular you can package and bundle them to meet the needs of a client. These are often licensed to large companies for special showing on a per trained person basis or on an enterprise basis. Many companies also fund training for their clients – not just their employees.

2     Develop New Tools, Utilities and Applications 

 
 
Developing tools to help drive the learning is another way to leverage your content.  Tools are getting easier and cheaper to develop every day. They do not have to be mechanical or mathematical. They can be literary, colorful or artistic. Games can also be developed for use as learning tools. Make them useful and make them fun and enjoyable.

3   Reformat and Repurpose Your Content 

 
 
You don’t need to create new content as often as you probably are doing it today.  Once you create content it is far easier and more profitable to simply make it available in all the different ways clients will want to buy it.  Create an inventory of your content, note the format it is in (articles, manuscripts, workbooks, Power Points, videos, etc).  Reformat them.  For example take your best 5 articles and create videos from them.  Take your workbooks and create a tool-kit. Write it once and make it available any way and every way your people want it available to them. Price it so that it sells.

4  Develop Your Consulting Business 

 
 
In most cases the book bestows the author with a very personal process or methodology or at a minimum a distinct point of view. This is inherently embedded in the book and the author and the work he is capable of.  Consulting is your ability to offer that perspective for use to help solve a specific problem for a specific client based on circumstances that exist at a specific point in time. Consultant fees should cost more than workshop training since it is not as readily scalable.  Identify the people in your target audience and offer your consulting services as a thought leader so that you may offer your input, perspective and deliver solutions on demand.  Identify people who do what you do and offer them insights into how to solve the problems facing them as they seek to achieve success wherever they may be. Make use of the mobile, Internet, social media technologies so that you can communicate and perform what is needed no matter where you or they are located.

Here are few more ideas to think about when contemplating how to best leverage your content and your book.  Obviously not every option is a viable one for everyone but the more you consider the more you will ultimately be able to use.

1    Create an Assessment Tool  

 
 
What will happen if people read your book?  The promise of many books is that as a result of people reading or consuming it they will be able to think, act, believe, behave, perform etc in a quicker, better, faster, or easier way than they have before. If you can’t answer that question, put the energy and effort into being able to clearly articulate the answer to in a concise manner. Once you know the answer to that question, now you can develop an assessment tool that measures how well they are progressing or moving towards performing at a higher level.  Ideally you would develop a series of assessment tools (i.e.,—a free version, say that evaluates one crucial element for improvement, and then a number of pay versions that that measure individual progress, team progress and organizational progress, professional prowess).  Corporate clients as well as consumers love assessment tools. They are a viable, scalable and incredibly profitable extensions of your content. They are useful products, services, and tools that allow for product diversification and intense socialization of the book content and purposes.

2    Offer Several Types of Coaching 

 
 
There are several ways in which you can monetize your content via coaching.

◦                                 delivering coaching one to one

◦                                 delivery coaching in groups

◦                                 licensing your coaching process to others to deliver

Clearly document the coaching process you develop and utilize.  Make sure it can be readily duplicated and systematized. Include procedures, content, models, metrics, reporting, tracking for accountability, desired outcomes, and other elements to ensure that people achieve real improvement as a result of the coaching they receive.

3    Offer a Variety of Workshops 

 
 
Your content can easily be converted into several workshops.  The key variables are length (2 hours, 2 days, etc), and purpose.  Workshops can be customized to meet the needs of the client and the audience (by function, role, industry, demographically, geographically, etc).  Delivery of the workshops can be done by the author, by others that have been carefully selected and trained in the methodology etc. Workshops can be done in person, by telephone, teleconference, or by video web conference. You can also vary the price a number of ways based on the time, location, and the number of people that attend.

4  Develop Strategic Processes For Leveraging Your Speaking 

 
 
Many authors focus on keynote speaking because it has traditionally paid rather well. However, the market has shifted dramatically and it is more difficult to manage and achieve success in speaking for many reasons.  You can aim at developing a paid speaking income and business. You might need to start off speaking for free.  Some authors and thought leaders continue to speak for free, (at least on occasion) particularly when the target audience is closely aligned to their target market and they can quantify the benefit as a result of all the other opportunties they receive from being there.  No matter where you are at in your career, do not view a speaking gig as a transaction.  This is a very expensive mistake.  A speaking event should be the beginning of a long term relationship with all the people at the event. It should not end when the applause dies down.  

 
 
Whether you are being paid or not, develop a plan that covers the pre-event, event and post-event phases.  You have a unique opportunity to learn a lot about your sponsor, the client, the audience members, and the people they work and communicate with.  Your plan needs to be specifically designed to allow you to develop a deep understanding of their issues, struggles, culture and concerns and therefore be in a great position to offer specific solutions that will have a vital and positive impact on them. Identify their pain! Deliver help for the needy! Give them ways to reach you later! Capture their contact information! Follow up with them later.

Everybody is doing it. With easy-to-use, off-the-shelf publishing software, even producing a good looking book isn’t that difficult. Books are being written and published at the highest rate in history.

It’s selling books that is the problem. Many authors write a book and simply expect the sales of the book to propel them towards riches and financial success.  But alas, Oprah is no longer on the air, and even getting a spot on The Today Show isn’t easy.  In fact, the one shot grand slam strategy is pretty much the highest probability way of striking out at your first and only chance at bat. Most books published today don’t make money at all. But many authors make a lot of money, using the book as a component of a solid platform.

So what is an author to do?  Very simply, you must go beyond the book.

To be successful with a book today means that you have to leverage certain specific business concepts and leadership content in a transformative fashion. I looked over the strategies that our best and most financially successful authors and thought leaders adopted to build their platforms this past year. The book is just one component to success.

The strategies identified clearly reveal that if you approach your publishing and marketing with a can-do attitude and adopt new methods with multiple income streams to reach the right target audience with refreshing value-added content and services, you will maximize what you get out of your time, efforts and investment.

1)      Target Your Media and Your Market Carefully

The best way to start is to develop a targeted and focused outreach strategy to reach your target market and the media that serve them.

Step 1 — Define your Target Market— Who is your book really designed to help, serve or entertain? Create at least two or three different personas describing the age, sex, education, location, income level, work focus, role, title, job function, social groups and orientation of the people who make up your target market(s).

Step 2 – Determine where they “hang out” both online and offline—what blogs are they reading? What other authors do they follow? What trade magazines are they reading? What associations or industry groups are they members of? What do they do to reach their people?

Step 3 – Value-added Outreach—Deliver content that is of value to these people. Feel their pain. Champion their cause. Fulfill their highest desires. It could be with excerpts from your book, tools, articles, videos, or it could be fresh new material that is simply from you.

It’s easier to find 100 blogs that your target market is following and get 70 of them to run your content than it is to try like crazy to get on The Today Show.  A single problem solving tips article or a feature story in the right magazine, or trade journal may be worth much more than a short talking head interview on the major networks. You will be more effective to offer value-added content to the right media every time.

2)      Develop and Leverage Testimonials

The value of a single testimonial (be it from a fellow author, business person, or an academic or professional colleague well known blogger, columnist, etc.) is significant.  It helps convert browsers into a buyers.  The trusted evaluation and endorsement bestowed sways someone that is on the fence to move from browsing to buying.  However, you need more than just a few testimonials.

Tremendous leverage comes having a dozen really great testimonials.  It’s important that the people you get to endorse your book have a following much greater than yours.  The action plan you develop and implement getting these testimonials can be designed and deployed so that the person who endorses you helps spread the word to their followers. For example 10 authors that have a following of 100,000 people each is a million targeted people with a much higher propensity of buying your book. This way, each testimonial becomes an endorsement that is directed to an audience that has the same circulation as many of the top targeted media you might seek coverage in.  To do this you must think ahead and plan to do much, even all, of the work for them—meaning you have to create a variety of collateral, properly formatted communications for them to use (tweets, announcements about the book, press releases, videos etc etc).  Be disciplined in asking them when to spread the word about your book and always, always offer to do the same for them.

3)      Give Plenty of Books Away – But Only to the Right People!

For most authors and thought leaders the book is just one format that their content exists in (and quite frankly one that usually isn’t that profitable for the author). Be crystal clear about who your target market is.  Identify the ways to get those books into those people’s hands. Now think of who can influence them if they were to send them a book.  You can send them out with a personal note or ask them if you can send books to them if they would them deliver them to the type of people you are trying to reach.  If you want to get a book to an executive for an endorsement, you don’t send one book to the executive directly. You send two or three or even four books to the executive’s secretary, or executive assistant, asking them to pass it on to the executive. You can  yet reach out to your network to see who personally knows the type of people you are trying to reach and offer to send a copy out on their behalf. If you want a speaking engagement with a large company, or organization, you don’t send one book to the president. You send a dozen books to the Presidents Executive Assistant with a request to give them to each of the reporting Directors and Vice-Presidents and meeting planners and their staff.  Then you follow up with a business proposal to try to close a major deal.

Every thought leader and author has a vision, in fact every successful business has a vision.  Often a lot of time, energy and effort is spent debating, crafting and fine tuning the vision to insure it is perfect.  It’s integrated into the marketing and communication programs of the organization, the training and development of the employees. And than…?  Well, typically it’s back to business.  Writing, speaking,  finance, operations, sales, marketing, vendor management, technology, product development, customer service, etc.

What isn’t done effectively is applying the vision, which by definition is big picture and high level to day to day situations which are more specific and tactical in nature.  Thought leaders and authors that can apply their well crafted vision to their day to day activities have a tremendous advantage.  Integrating and applying a vision and using it as a guide help them prioritize more effectively and keep their strategy, vision and objectives aligned.  A vision doesn’t serve you well, regardless of how brilliant or bold it may be if you can’t use it as a lens or a filter to help you decide if doing A is a better option than doing B.  It’s often as simple as asking yourself when faced with options and choices (which is what we are all faced with every moment of every day) which is a better choice relative to your vision.

A vision is a well articulated representation of where you want to go and what you will and won’t do to get there.  Every day you’re either getting closer or further from achieving that vision.  It happens as a result of making sure that what you are doing on an hourly or daily basis is helping you get to where you want to go.  Use your vision as a tool to help you insure that you are on that path. It may not be why you crafted your vision but it is actually a great way to bring it to life as a viable tool on a daily basis.

OK, so you’re an author or a thought leader (or aspire to be one); you’ve got a model, a message, a methodology that you’ve developed and you’re thinking about ways to  market your services, solutions or products, now what?  Where do you start?  What is the most effective way for a thought leader to market themselves?  Write another book?  Hire a PR firm? Develop a product road map?  Probably not.  The least expensive and most powerful way to do so is to develop a thought leadership marketing program.  It isn’t particularly difficult but it does take discipline and focus.

So where do you start?  The first thing to do is to make sure you have clearly defined your target market or markets.  With as much specificity as you can you need to understand whom your content will resonate with and why you’ve got a better mousetrap than the current options in the marketplace.   You need to be able to clearly articulate the promise that your work is inherently making to them.  What is it that they will be able to do, think, act or behave in a different way as a result of consuming your content?  How do those things impact business results in a measurable and sustainable way?

The next step is to do some research and figure out where your market gets information from.  This is a long tail exercise for most.  You need to figure out what blogs they read, where they are in the social media world, the associations they belong to, the events they attend, the trade and industry publications they read, the authors  that they follow and you need to understand how they consume content.  Articles? Videos? Webcasts? Podcasts?

Now you need to take an inventory of your content.  What I mean by this is to create a library of your work and note the format that it currently exists.  Converting your work from one format to another (i.e. a blog post to a video) is typically a better way to leverage your content than to constantly create original content from scratch.  Take note of the gaps that you may have and allocate the time to close the format gaps.

Next you’ll need to create some outreach material.  You’ll be offering your content to bloggers and editors and you need to make a solid case as to why your work is relevant to their followers and readers.  Your objective is to get your work out into the market place.  Their objective is to meet the needs and to provide benefit to their members and readers.  Finding alignment will require you to be creative and thoughtful in your outreach.

Now that you’ve got all the pieces in place it is time to execute your thought leadership marketing campaign.  Ultimately it is a combination of a PR activity, a marketing activity a branding activity and a lead generation program.  You may need  additional assistance to oversee the execution and the necessary follow up and the specifics for everyone will vary.  The point is to develop a strategy, align the resources you have against your target market and consistently use your work and your content as your primary marketing tool.  A robust thought leadership marketing program will get your message out to those who can become clients and customers, strengthen your brand and generate quantifiable results.