NICHE MARKETING for
WRITERS, SPEAKERS, and
ENTREPRENEURS
How to Make Yourself
Indispensable, Slightly Immortal, and Lifelong Rich in 18 Months!
Gordon Burgett
[See a Sample Chapter and Table
of Contents below]
On the surface it
looks simple: writers write something, speakers speak something, they fit it
into a niche market, everybody's happy, and the doer gets rich! Alas, niche
marketing is a process, not a panacea: it's a thought pattern carried to
completion. A path that can lead to financial, emotional,
intellectual, and spiritual fulfillment all at the same time.
Gordon Burgett's purpose in his book, NICHE MARKETING FOR WRITERS, SPEAKERS, AND
ENTREPRENEURS, is
to put you on that path in one easy step ready so you can become the creator of
your own wealth and ruler of your own reign, wanted and sought while you help
build a better world!
Some of the
concept comes form two of his earlier books, Empire-Building by Writing and Speaking and Publishing to Niche Markets, where "core development," "topic-spoking," and TCE are first seen.
Unique to these
pages is the definition and development of niche marketing itself and how it
can be used to realize your life goals, as well as the detailed explanation of
the 11 means that constitute the heart of this form of niche marketing.
Will the
application of these words make you lifelong rich in 18 months? It could. But
it will more likely get you centered, organized, and profitably in motion so
that what is created in 18 months will be the base of a foundation of years,
then decades, of healthy, happy earning and living.
TESTIMONIALS
"Too many
authors write for themselves....and their books fail in the marketplace. Gordon
reveals the secret to sales success: writing for an identifiable and locatable
reader. Every author needs his valuable formula."
Dan Poynter, author
of The Self-Publishing Manual
"Bravo! Where
were you 18 years ago? I had to learn the secrets of niche marketing the hard
way. You take the reader by the hand and teach them how to be a big fish in the
right pond for fun and profit."
Dr. Terry Paulson, author of They Shoot
Managers Don't They?
Robert Tucker, author of Managing the
Future
"Gordon Burgett's
theory (it's not even a theory anymore, it's a proven fact) is that people will
pay for valuable information. Those possessed of such information can sell it
to the many or the few. In most cases, the latter is both easier and more
profitable. He claims that following his advice will make readers
"indispensable, slightly immortal, and lifelong rich" in 18 months.
Sound crazy? It's not....the basic concept has worked for Burgett
and thousands of others."
BOOKPEOPLE'S BOOKPAPER, New Titles
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part One: The Premise
Part Two: Targeting Your Market and Yourself
Part Three: Becoming an Expert
Part Four: Customizing and Expanding Your Information
Part Five: Niche Marketing
Biography/Sources/Index
ISBN: 910167-22-2
192 pages/paper
* * $14.95 (plus shipping (and, if
applicable, CA tax.)
Chapter 1: The Premise
Can every reader of these pages make themselves indispensable, slightly
immortal, and lifelong rich in 18 months? Probably not.
Yet in that year and a half they could be properly planted on the path to
wealth and well on their way to achieving all three goals.
How long, then, might it take you to reach
six-figuredom? Quickly.
Seven figures might take a few more months, a year, two, five—maybe never. The timing is really up to you and how well
you apply the broad suggestions on these pages—how
much you do, how you do it, and when.
What specifically must you do to achieve
those goals? Sell information.
How vital or crucial the information is to
the buyer, how unique or singularly shared, and how clearly and well you can
impart it will determine your indispensability. How profoundly it is offered
will govern the depth and degree of your immortality. And how you sell it, how
much you sell, and what you charge will directly affect your income and
profits.
The eighteen months is a guesstimate on my
part. It's too long for some: they'll be in fatcat
city in half that time, or sooner. It's too short for others, who will nibble
at the process, dabble at it while trying a dozen other strategies, tiptoe
stealthily into new areas, timidly probe at the new means. Some will never
receive the benefits. They are terrified of success or flat-out refuse to see
the obvious, and simply won't work with sufficient vigor and finesse to make
their dreams come true. And some just bought this book to carry around. (It
doesn't work vicariously or osmotically.)
Later we will discuss the kind of
information that is salable and how you sell it, plus all of the steps needed
to reach the three goals.
Now, let me offer a rough, opening example
of how one might realize these goals by taking a crucial piece of knowledge
through the major steps of its developmental and marketing life.
Let's say you are an insurance agent who
primarily sells policies to dentists.
You could continue selling insurance and
earn a fairly reliable $45,000 a year. Or you could retire in about three years
with well over a million dollars in the bank. The difference is what you do
with a particular piece of information: you know that dentists pay thousands of
dollars a year for malpractice insurance—and
you know how dentists can cut those malpractice premiums in half.
There are 125,000 practicing dentists in the
A NEWSLETTER
Yet a book is a static exchange: its contents are frozen on the page. And
insurance premiums, the range and kind of coverage, and industry policies are
dynamic, as are the laws and practices concerning malpractice. So to keep your
clients currently appraised you decide to offer a quarterly newsletter. It will
update the contents of the book every three months plus provide significantly
more information about insurance and dentistry written in lay language. The
newsletter would be an excellent guide, really the final word, to that
particular facet of dental business: full of facts, objective, directed
specifically to dentists and their staff, even fun to read.
How would they know about it? Three ways. It would be advertised on a double page at the
end of your book. You will send a follow-up subscription solicitation that
describes the newsletter, with a free copy, three months after the book has
been bought—from you, which puts the mailing
list in your control. And, beginning three to six months after the book is
offered for sale, you will run ads about it in the professional publications
sent to dentists.
Let's say that if 12,500 dentists buy the
book, then 6,250 might subscribe to the newsletter: some would be book buyers,
others attracted by the display ads in the journals. If it costs $49 a year for
the newsletter and $12/year for you to produce and mail, plus $30,000 is set
aside for promotional expenses, that would result in
an additional income of $200,000 a year.
The book, in this instance, first explains
the new concept, then says that for future, continual
updating readers should become newsletter subscribers.
But once the book has been sold out, the
newsletter performs the function of explaining the concept to future dentists
as well as those who did not purchase the book when it was available, and it
keeps related information current for all subscribers. That is, after the book
is unavailable one would simply subscribe to the newsletter. This should result
in a steadily increasing subscription total. Let me estimate that at $50,000
additional profit (from about 1900 new subscriptions,
or 1.5% of the total dentists) for each of the second through the fifth year,
an annual newsletter will ultimately bring an income of some $400,000, and
conceivably much more.
OTHER, SIMILAR BOOKS
Even though you know insurance for dentists best,
there is no reason to stop with that vocation. Could you explain how
malpractice premiums in other fields could be reduced by a similar amount? And
would gynecologists, chiropractors, lawyers, therapists, or neurosurgeons, for
example, be any less eager to spend $20 to find out how to save thousands on a
payment they already dislike?
To do that you set up the "Lower
Malpractice Insurance Premium Publishing Company," with you as the
publisher. You list all of the vocations, subpractices,
and branches that require malpractice insurance; you hire a competent writer
for each field to produce a book that follows the format created in Dentists:
How to Lower Your Malpractice Insurance Premiums 50%; and you promote each of
these books in roughly the same way.
Your profits should be about the same, minus
10% for the writer—plus a huge bonus for producing a
good book: the editorship and 35% of the list price of the resulting newsletters
sold to those clients.
How much profit would you realize from these
books? Let's say you publish only six to a total market of 350,000. Figuring
three flyers for a dollar to contact the potential buyers, $2 to produce and
print each book, and for the $19.95 list price another $2 royalty to the writer
at a 10% sales ratio, your profit would be about $400,000, after deducting some
$40,000 for overhead for the now expanding firm.
And if the practitioners in each of these
markets, starting three to six months after their respective book flyers have
been distributed, began subscribing to a newsletter for $49 (but which again
costs you $12 a year to produce and mail), to an initial 5% selling ratio that
would increase 25% of that 5% for each of the next four years, how much might
that bring, after deducting 35% of the gross income for the writer and setting
aside $90,000 annually for promotion and additional overhead? $257,375 the
first year, $344,219 the second, and so on....
If you are thinking of quitting this
windfall after three years you should have realized profits of $180,000 for
your initial book concerning dentists and malpractice insurance; $200,000 from
the newsletter the first year; $250,000 the second; another $400,000 from the
six formatted books to other malpractice-prone professions; $257,375 from
newsletters to these latter six markets, and $344,219 the next year. Or $1,231,594. If you'd wait a year longer that would be
$1,962,657.
Not included is income from other
information dissemination means, such as articles, talks, speeches, seminars,
audio or videocassettes, consulting, even the sale of insurance itself.
And the above figures could result in far
more (or less) income with simple adjustments. Raise the book's cost to $24.95
and you earn $311,759 more. Lower the newsletter to $44.95 and you lose $96,187
(but recoup $24,806 from the writers' 35% bonus). If the book includes color on
its pages or a fancy cover and costs $4 a copy to produce and print, you lose
$95,000. Lower the writer's bonus on the newsletter to 25% and your profits
increase $85,750 the first year and $21,440 more each year thereafter. Or
should the postal rates and flyer design and printing costs reduce your flyer
cost/mailing ratio from 3 for $1 to 2.5 for $1 you will lose $31,634 in the
initial promotion of your seven books.
One can get lost in the figures, as
important as they are. What I've tried to show here is that indispensability,
immortality (of a terrestrial sort), and wealth are readily accessible to those
willing to work to create them.
The rest of this book shows how to do it.
|
Gordon Burgett |
(800) 563-1454 |