Business cards are still alive and well, a few have become digital, but in the business networking circles I move in, most people have a piece of card with their essential content details on to hand over. But what do you do with all those pieces of cardboard when you get back to your desk?
You might add them to a spreadsheet, or just leave them lying around your desk for a while. You might have a drawer full of them, or even a business card holder or a filing tray with them in. But what makes you remember the individual who gave you the card? It’s not the card (unless it was unusually quirky).
My mentor says that a book showcasing your expertise is the best way to attract new clients – and I agree that a book is a powerful way to help people to remember you.
Firstly, it sits on their bookshelf reminding them of you. And it probably has a picture of you on the front or back to help jog their visual memory of you too.
Secondly, it positions you as an authority (it’s no coincidence that the word authority has ‘author’ in it). Experts write books, you’ve established yourself in that category.
Thirdly, it’s a great marketing tool – at networking events, on social media, on your website and in your newsletter. In fact, marketing your book and your company is a symbiotic relationship, they feed each other.
If you don’t have time to write your book …
There are other options:
- Take a couple of dozen of your blog entries, organise them under subject areas and edit them into shape.
- Shortcut: Give them to an editor to do the hard work!
- Write your core areas of expertise down and talk to a voice recorder about each of them. Transcribe them and you’ve got your chapters.
- Shortcut: Send the voice recordings to a transcription service and the transcriptions to an editor.
- Get a professional writer to interview you on your specialist subject and then develop the resulting information into a book. This will probably require more than one interview session, but will still take less time than actually writing the book yourself.
- If you’ve done presentations in the past and you have slideshows or notes, use these to develop the content. Better still if you have video of your presentations, you’ve already got material to feed the book.
- Shortcut: Give all this material to an editor and an outline of what you want the book to be about and let them do their thing.
Writing a book doesn’t necessarily require you to spend hours a day for months slaving over a hot keyboard. If you love writing then by all means go for it, but if it’s not how you want to spend your time, get expert help.
