How to Use Affiliate Marketing in a Book

If you’re writing a book, I hate to break it to you, but they don’t make much money. One way to increase the worth of a book is to include affiliate offers in the book. This episode will show you exactly how to do that.

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Links Mentioned in this Episode

Affiliate Marketing for Authors Training

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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy

How to Run an Affiliate Book Launch

How to Find Affiliates for a Book Launch (or Any Launch)

The Affiliate Donut

What & How to Communicate to Your Affiliates

How to Use Leaderboards to Find Affiliates

How to Onboard Affiliates the Right Way

How to Use Affiliate Marketing in a Book

If you’re writing a book, I hate to break it to you, but they, don’t make much money. One way to increase the worth of a book to your business is to include affiliate offers in the book.

This episode will show you exactly how to do that. So trust me, I know the effort that goes into writing a book. If I knew what was going into writing a book, I don’t know that I would do it. I’ve been at Turn Your Passions Into Profits. I’ve said before January 2023, about the exact date soon coming out, published by my dream publisher, Benbella. I mean, the manuscript was 100 hours. There’s so much new stuff in this book. The publisher is a precaution for them so that they don’t get sued. They go out and they run what’s called a similarity scan. Is there anything in this book that’s, like, plagiarized?

Well, there wasn’t because it’s my stuff. But I was really pleased because they even said that almost none of it is identical to stuff that’s anywhere on my content. That’s a lot of new stuff, stuff that I just haven’t had the opportunity to share. And I’m really excited to put that into book format. So the main script alone took 100 hours, maybe over 100 hours.

I was writing an hour a day. An hour and a half a day, whatever the math is on that. 15-16 weeks. No, 18 weeks, sometimes 90 days. Take a few days off. An hour and a half. Yes. Over 100 hours of writing the book. I’m in the editing process now with the developmental editor. That’s going to be I’ll spend 25 to 30 hours reworking the book from that standpoint just to get it more.

Just to get it perfect. Little things like this sentence don’t need to be here and things like that. We’re going to spend 25, 30 hours in the developmental editing phase, take on the developmental editor and the multiple copy editors, and all of that. I mean, it’s an astronomical picture. Now, thankfully, my publishers pay for all of that on the front end, so I don’t have to.

But admittedly, that comes out of what the book makes. If the publisher spends $50- $100,000 on the book on the front end, that comes out of mine at the end. And so books just don’t make a lot of money. They don’t make merely enough money in and of themselves to be worth it and we all know that. Does it give you reputability? I think that’s the word authority. Yeah.

Does a position you as the expert. Yeah. Is it fun in the sense of, like, I can’t wait to hold the thing? I’ve never held one of my courses. I can’t hold my course. I can’t hold No Product No Problem. I can’t hold Find Affiliates Now like they’re not tangible. I get to hold my book and I can’t wait till I get that first copy sometime in October, and I unbox it.

I’m telling you, it’s going to be nothing short of a spiritual experience, but they don’t make a lot of money on their own, so they lead to things. But one of the ways that you can make some money initially, right away is through affiliate offers. And I want to share how to do that in this podcast. So I think I Jonathan Hyde. Reach out to me. So what’s the best way to promote affiliates with a book? This is such an overlooked area of monetization within books, I almost never see it done.

I mean, I can’t even think of a single book that I’ve seen it done in. There wasn’t a client of ours. Our clients do this. The things I’m sharing are these things we share with our clients, they do these things almost nobody else does. And I’ve read or listened to over 100 books in the past two years. Not a single one of them did this, actually, except for one. There’s one that kind of did it. Well, now that I think about it, and he’s not a client, so one out of 100, he’s like half out of 100. But it’s inevitable, if you think about it, that if you’re writing a book, you’re going to mention your favorite tools.

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I’m reading through the manuscript. I’m on page 117 of two, I guess 288 or 298. I don’t remember. I’m on page 117 and already I probably mentioned seven or ten things that are affiliate related that are affiliate officers. I said I’m an affiliate marketer. These are just the tools. I’m mentioning them in normal conversation. If I read you the paragraph that I mentioned in a conversation that I’m having with you, it wouldn’t feel unnatural. It wouldn’t feel unnatural. So you’re going to mention things.

Unless there are six ways to monetize a book with affiliate offers, the first way is your recommended tools in the book. So you’re answering the question, what do you use? What do you use and why? They’re saying, here’s what I use and why. So having a page or a couple of pages at the back of the book that covers the tools that you use. So the key here is that you reference this throughout the book. I’m doing this with mine. Hey, I talk about this thing and I say, I’ll give you an example. I talk about email marketing, and I say my recommended email providers are at the resources section at the back of the book.

The key with this is you don’t want to just make a list of products and then have the links you want to put some extra effort by not only listing what you use but why you use it? So just a very quick synopsis. In my book, I talk about I mentioned Asana, and I just write a very quick thing like this is the tool that we use. It’s my favorite project management and task management tool out there. Easy to use makes collaboration and delegation super easy. You can start with the free version, which has worked for us for more than a year.

Here’s the link I talked about. Slack. This is the tool, the only tool that we use as a team to communicate with each other. So we’ve eliminated email, change, random text for getting to copy someone. It’s our go-to communication tool and again, you can get started for free. So make sure you make a compelling case for why your readers should check out the tool that you recommend. So using that recommended tools page, you can put it in the back of the book is a great way to do that. Now make sure you follow the principles of a good resources page. Okay?

If you want to learn how to put together a resources page, the same principles apply to a resources page inside of a book. Just go to MattMcwilliams.com/resourcespage and you can download my guide to how to put together a resources page you will follow based on the same principles as you would in the book. The one exception that I talk about on a good resources page online, is you want images, you want a logo, or some sort of representative image.

You don’t want to include that in a book. It just takes up too much space. And especially if you have a publisher and you’ve got 20 things, it’s going to take up a lot of space. It can be like a six-page long thing. I don’t want to personally use my space. Not my space, but my space that I have in the book. When I have a limit, we have a workout limit, but I also have a page limit with my publisher, I don’t want to take up an extra three pages just for a couple of images.

So people are in reading mode there. So that’s the one exception. So when you go download that report, just ignore the part about images, but follow all the other principles. They totally work. Make sure you use pretty links. That’s another one. Nobody’s going to type in your 8000 characters long affiliate link into their browser.

Just MattMcwilliams.com/convertkit, for example. Right? If you’re looking at ConvertKit, the second way to use affiliate offers inside of a book is to offer an extended study. So this is what I do a couple of times in the book. I don’t do it a lot because it just didn’t fit. But I say, hey, I touched on this subject. If you want to go deeper, check out blank. Right? So you’re giving in a book. You might touch on the subject.

You’re giving a 30,000-foot flyover. You go two layers deep when the real subject is seven layers deep. But the reader wants to go deeper. They want to take their learning to a whole other level. And that’s where affiliate links come into play. So, for example, I talk a little bit in the book about product launches, but I don’t go into detail because that’s a whole book in and of itself.

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Jeff Walker’s book launch and his course, product launch formula. We’re getting ready to go through it as a team. I looked up that course is like 50 hours long. I can’t write a book about it and include it in my book. I’m also not the leading expert on it. So I point them to Jeff Walker. I say, hey, here’s a little bit about product launches. If you want to go deep, go learn from Jeff. Hey, as you’re building your online business, you may want to start a membership site. I’m going to give you a little bit of information about membership sites, but I’m not an expert on that.

I can’t write 300 pages right now. This book would be 3000 pages long. So I say, go learn from Steve McLaren. And so then if one out of 200 book buyers goes over to Jeff Walker and purchases PLF, I make a roughly $800 Commission. That’s $4 a book extra I made. Even if I only convert a quarter of a percent of the book buyers, then I made an extra $2 a sale. The third way that you can work affiliate offers into a book is to what I call the how I learned it. So you might go in-depth into something. Probably still not fully in-depth, but you write thousands of words about something, and then you say, hey, I became an expert at this.

Thanks to Blank, check out blank stuff. Here again, going back to Jeff Walker, I say that in the book like, hey, I feel like I’m an expert at product consciousness. I’m one of probably the one or 200 best experts in the entire world at product conscious. You know what? Because I’ve studied everything from Jeff. His product cons formula literally opened the door for me to do what I do today. Now, the thing is, my position, that is, yes, I am an expert. I can teach you a lot about it. But if you want to learn from my mentor, go learn from Jeff.

You want to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. I’m not going to plagiarize his stuff. I’ll teach you the basics, and I’ll teach you a few of the nuances that I’ve learned over the years. But go learn straight from him. Not only do I want to give credit where credit is due, thank you, Jeff. But I also want to show people where they can learn the same fundamentals I’ve learned. So I link to his stuff and say, Hey, do you want all the background? If you want all the background and you want to know the WHY, not just the little bit? That I share with you? Go learn from Jeff.

You want to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. I’m not going to plagiarize this stuff. I’ll teach you the basics, and I’ll teach you a few of the nuances that I’ve learned over the years. But go learn straight from him. Not only do I want to give credit where credit is due, thank you, Jeff. But I also want to show people where they can learn the same fundamentals I learned. So I link to his stuff and say, hey, do you want all the background? If you want all the background and you want to know the why not just the little bit that I showed you, go learn from Jeff.

So in the book, I say Jeff Walker literally invented the formula that is now so common in product launches. You may think that you can reverse engineer the process by watching other launches, but you can’t you can pick up some stuff, but you need the course. You need a course that gives you the solid framework you need to succeed. My team and I plan to regularly go through the course as a refresher. It’s a significant investment board. And on that note, we’re going through to the team as I’m recording this 14 days from now, we start now, we start next week.

So in seven days, we start going through it together as a team and they’re going to meet every week for an hour and discuss our biggest takeaways and ask questions and talk about how we might implement what we’re learning in the course. I was being serious when I say this is the third time I came and I’ve gone through the course in the last six years. Every other year is kind of what we’re training on that. So sharing how you learn something. It’s a really effective way of driving traffic to affiliate offers because you’re living proof that an offer actually works.

You’re living proof that what that person taught you actually works. That’s the third way. So just to recap so far, recommended tools. Having a page or two at the end of the book can offer an extended study as you touch on something. And then if you want to go deep, here’s how to learn. And then how I learned it right. The fourth is just a casual mention. This is probably the most low-key way to promote affiliate offers in a book. That’s the least profitable. But it’s worth it because it’s just so easy. And I do this probably ten or twelve times In the book.

I mentioned a person and I mentioned a product, and I just put a link in the ebooks. You can do the hyperlink, right? You can do footnotes, you can do a link in parentheses. So in the book, for example, I just mentioned this video, but I talk about ConvertKit and I just put this link MattMcwilliams.com/convertkit. That’s all I put I say a lot of people ask me, how do I set this up from a tech standpoint? And my recommendation is you sign up with ConvertKit – MattMcwilliams.com/convertkit, blah, blah, blah. I forget exactly how we word it.

Now, you’re not going to get a ton of activity on these links. I’m thinking I might get one out of every 300 to 400 people to click on that link. But it’s so easy, so why not? What would be the point in not doing that? For one, if I want to go, I’m still going to include it in the back, but it’s longer. If I want to drive people into longer for me to say I recommend ConvertKit parentheses. There’s a link to convert kit in the back of the book in the recommended tool section. Why not just put the link there? It’s shorter, right? So this is casual mention. Are you going to make tens of thousands of dollars even if you have to sell a captive book to make tens of thousands of dollars? NO.

But let’s not make an extra $0.25 a book. We’re going to sell hopefully between 20 and 35,000 preorders in the book if that brings you in an extra ten grand. Okay, that’s kind of cool. The fifth way is your bibliography or suggested reading. Basically, at the end of the book, I have a thing that says, Hey, I recommend numerous other helpful books on the topic of starting an online business. For a full list, visit MattMcwilliams.com/Books If you’re going to recommend other books, instead of having a bibliography in the back and making nothing, why not earn an affiliate Commission?

I mean, yeah, it’s like $0.28 on Amazon. Well, $0.28 times an average of 2.5 books, times one out of 100 people that buy your book. And Whoopi do you’re making an extra quarter of a book? Well, it could be an extra ten grand. Why not? I always look at things in terms of like if I can do something that simple and pay one fifth of something on my team’s, like an assistant salary. If I do five of those things in this book, I paid for my assistant’s salary. How cool is that in the ebooks, the bibliography or suggested reading section can affiliate links and a print book.

You got to get a little creative, though. So rather than providing a list of other books like I mentioned earlier, you provide a link to your suggested books page and then you create a suggested book page at link. I mentioned that MattMcwilliams.com/Books that follows the principles of the resources page that I mentioned earlier, but it’s for books. It says the name of the book, it has a picture of the book and why I recommend the book and then the link. You follow the same thing. If you go to the URL, you’ll see how I lay it out.

It’s MattMcwilliams.com/Books books and you can actually copy the way I do it. I don’t care, pretty basic format. And then number six is just recommended products from others. So this is not something that I do in my book. But we’ve done really well with some of our clients where they’re interviewing somebody for their book and they ask them for their recommendation of certain products and then link to them.

So they say Jeremy recommends focusing at will to improve your focus. Find out more at this link and then you provide the link to them. It’s a great way to avoid author bias and get kind of a neutral recommendation. And then you make money from products that you might not be the expert on, but somebody else did the recommending. That’s kind of cool. So if you interview people or if you can be just quoting somebody in the book, like you could find an article and so and so talked about such and such and recommends this product and you link to it as an affiliate. That’s pretty cool. That’s a pretty cool way. So again, number one is those recommended tools. Make sure you go check out the supplies for your what we talk about in the second.

Number five, is the bibliography as well. But make sure you go download that report. MattMcwilliams.com/ResourcesPage and learn how to put together a resources page. You can also use that to put together a recommended books page. Number two, that extended study. I touched on this little bit of a topic, but if you want to go deep, check it out here. How I learned it. Sharing how you learned something that you share in your book. That casual mention, just parentheses. Very easy. Talk about this when we go to the bibliography/ suggested reading, and then six recommended products from others, maybe that you interview like books can be a great way to promote affiliate offers if you do it right.

So six ways, hoping to maybe even double what a book is worth to you. Now I got a great question about this when I was doing a presentation recently and I’m going to have four authors and I want to share my answer here. Lady asked, how do you handle affiliate disclosure in book form? That’s the part that always keeps me off my website for a normal and more expected. But it feels like one of those moments in a book for some reason.

Now, number one, depending upon when you’re listening to this, this could change. So we’re talking about the disclosure of material connection is what the Federal Trade Commission in the United States said. So my first advice is go to the FTC. Just Google disclosure of material connection. FTC. Read what they say specifically about this because it might change in seven minutes. I might record this and release it and it’s already been changed.

Now, my personal answer, based on what I’ve studied full disclosure. I’m not an attorney. I did not stay at a Holiday Express last night is that you need to include a disclosure in the book. Now, I would recommend making it obvious. Put it in the beginning as like an author’s note or something. Don’t try to bury it. It’s not going to affect sales. I already bought the book. It’s not going to lower trust. It’s actually going to increase it.

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So you might just literally put at the very beginning of the book, you talk with your publisher if your self published and figure that out. But something like note, some of the links in this book might forget how we worded. It might be affiliate links. That means if you click on them and make a Commission, however, it does not impact my recommendation of said product, et cetera, et cetera. You might put it on that resources page in the back. But based on what I read, if you put it at the beginning, you put it where there’s more than one week. You don’t really have to put after every single link. It would be ridiculous. It just clogs up the bug and makes it kind of sound stupid.

So hope that helps. On that I can ask the FTC, though. Seriously, legally, I have to say that don’t take my word for it because it might have changed. So again, six Reasons How to Work Books or Work Affiliate Marketing in Your Books as I say, I’m Super excited about my next episode. The first interview I’ve done in quite some time. And there’s a reason why I even decided to do it because I’ve got my good friend Chandler Bolton and we’re going to talk about affiliates and books. How to Write, Publish and Sell your book is coming up in the next episode.

I’m really excited about that. So make sure you hit that subscribe button if you haven’t yet so you don’t miss that episode and some awesome episodes coming up. I’ve got one I’m going to tell you. I’m going to talk about the worst part of our business, and I would be willing to bet that it will surprise every single listener. It’s going to shock you. What is the worst part of our business? If you think you might know, hit me up on social media and let me know what you think the worst part of our business is.

I’m going to tell you guys. So make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss any episodes. Also, if you know somebody who benefits from this hit the share button or just tell them what are you going to go listen to this episode. I know you’re one of 81% population who says they want to write a book, but you’re trying to make prices like money on it. So haven’t, go listen to this episode. I tell them to hit the drive as well so they learn everything is coming up that will wrap up and I will see you in the next episode.