Jessica Andersen: 0:41
Hey Sonja, Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 0:44
Absolutely. So, Jessica, I’d love to first kind of just hear a little bit about your background. How does one get into book coaching, and then specifically with high impact leaders?

Jessica Andersen: 0:55
Okay, good question. One gets into book coaching by starting off as a proofreader. You know like when you go to work in a restaurant and you start as a dishwasher and then you, like, work your way up. It’s sort of how my journey has been. I started as a humble proofreader and then I quickly moved into copy editing and I found that my clients were asking me for higher and higher levels of editing, and these days I feel my audience has shifted once again. So I’m actually moving into the book coaching space, as you alluded to, and that really means helping my clients through the actual writing process instead of the next process, which is editing. Okay, and how I got into that sort of genre that you mentioned with brand books, as I call them, and helping high impact leaders craft these books is my very first client. This was exactly the kind of book that she was making. She has since written, I think, 15 books and they’re all to do with her business, which is making money online and helping others do the same, and I think I just found out with a dreamboat client for my very first one and I loved it so much that I decided that that’s going to be my niche and I’ve never strayed from that.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 2:03
Wow, 15 books is impressive. I imagine that’s happened over a period of years. I have so many questions around that, so one would be this sounds like this is something that makes sense if someone already has a business, or should they have a business. Like what does it look like for that person?

Jessica Andersen: 2:23
Okay, great question. I have actually worked with a couple of clients who do not yet have a brand or business when they went to go write their book, and those have actually been my favorite books to work on. And they’re very brave people because they have to do the work ahead of time of thinking of, like, how am I going to serve people, what kind of people are they, what are their problems? And then I’m going to put it all into a book before I even have an offer to promote. But they start with the book as a low ticket offer. It’s definitely not the norm and I I don’t recommend that for everyone. I do find it easier to make the book once you already have a very, very clear idea of the audience that you serve and you’re already pretty solid on your offers.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 3:05
Got it. It makes a lot of sense. And then what about? Okay, with someone who already has a book under their belt and now they’re kind of shifting into this world of wanting to use it as a brand? What would you say are other things they might need to have in place, ideally, if they do have that business, do they need to already be on social media? Do they already need an audience? How do they even get people to buy these books?

Jessica Andersen: 3:31
Oh, that’s another great question. I love all these questions. One way to do it is by self-publishing. This is always a decision that someone has to make up front. Are you going to try and get a book deal from a traditional publisher or are you going to try and self-publish it? I’m really attached to the self-publishing world because being self-taught is one of my values, but I find that you have so much more control over it. In terms of the book itself, you have creative control, and then on the marketing and launching side, that’s all on you as well. Ok, so you can actually utilize Amazon as its own SEO platform, almost, because people are typing their questions into Amazon actually every day and looking for answers in books, because books are still reputable sources of information?

Sonja Crystal Williams: 4:20
Definitely. So if we were thinking process-wise, ideally kind of from what I’m hearing so far. Someone has a brand. They decide they have a clear vision of what they want in this book. You in that process are helping them do the outlining and the writing. Do I have that right?

Jessica Andersen: 4:38
Exactly because none of us come out of school knowing exactly how to write a book like this. We’re used to writing term papers in a very academic sense, a very, sometimes a lot of corporate language as well, and our writing, which isn’t the point of a brand book. We want to be speaking to your readers in a conversational tone, using their language, but it’s hard, especially when online we are trained as consumers but also as content producers, to write these little short form pieces of micro content that you just blast on LinkedIn or whatever platform you’re on, and then the process of writing an entire book seems so overwhelming. So I come in helping people to really break that down and sort of their fears is like you don’t have to become a best-selling author, because that’s not really the point of the exercise. You can own the term author even if you haven’t gone to school for that specifically, or even if you’ve never done it before. You have to try it first.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 5:42
Oh, that makes so much sense. And even within your own niche, I’ve seen business owners who release books as part of their branding and in their niche they’re known. You don’t have to be the New York Times best-seller, the global best-seller or anything like that, so that makes a lot of sense, OK. So, Jessica, you shared the story about how perfect that first client was and went on to publish 15 books. So since then and since you decided to kind of move deeper into book coaching, how do you grow your business on a day-to-day basis?

Jessica Andersen: 6:17
So it’s funny you asked because when I started out, I had the belief that I had no network, because I spent 10 years in a totally different industry, in the luxury hospitality industry, which is why I alluded to the restaurant metaphor in the beginning. So I started off actually cold emailing, to great success. I will say that there’s a big stigma around that in the online space, but there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. But I decided to move away from that because I felt it was very, very time consuming and I wanted to start instead of like push marketing myself. I went to try the pull marketing aspect and trying to attract some ideal clients using social media and I wound up on LinkedIn. I landed there because I tried a few different platforms and wasn’t really getting traction anywhere, probably because I wasn’t focused on one. But when I really went all in on LinkedIn, I saw a huge difference and landed another absolute dream boat client just by posting on LinkedIn once a week, nothing crazy. And this person connected with me without adding a note, without saying anything, and she just lurked in my post like watching my content. Maybe would like something once in a while and then, out of the blue one day, dm’d me with her request. So LinkedIn is a great place for that, because there are only there’s maximum, I think, 5% of users who are actually posting content on there, so it’s not very saturated, but there are so many profiles who are on there just looking at their feed, so you’d be surprised if you started showing up more on LinkedIn. Who would see you on there?

Sonja Crystal Williams: 7:55
Yeah, there was a chart and I wish I came across this chart many years ago and have never been able to find it since and it was a chart that mapped out the personalities of people with profiles on social media and one of them used the term lurkers, and that chart called them observers people who are just there to watch and kind of participate from a distance, but they have no interest in really posting things. So that really says a lot. I wanna go back to something else really profound that you said, which is that idea of push versus pull in marketing and the idea that you had a successful type of campaign. You were running a push campaign which, for those of you listening, the idea of push campaign is you’re putting yourself out there versus it coming inbound to you, which is what Jessica’s doing now, pull like you’re kind of pulling them toward you. So that makes a lot of sense. So let’s kind of shift into kind of going into our lightning round. I wanna ask you some more questions, but in our lightning round we go a little bit faster just with kind of what some of those answers are in terms of how you are approaching your business. So I’m hearing LinkedIn is what’s working today and this may answer the question, but I’m gonna throw it out to you anyway. If you had a grant for $50,000 to use yes, free money in your business for the next 12 months, how would you spend that budget from a marketing standpoint? How would you use it?

Jessica Andersen: 9:26
Oh, I would probably use it to buy myself time to write my own brand book. Hmm, because it’s something I haven’t done for myself yet.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 9:36
Yeah, that’s huge good. Yeah, so gives you that time to write the brand book. And from the brand book, when you write that brand book, let’s just say, if you were using yourself but I’m imagining you do this for clients, but with yourself if you were putting kind of your marketing hat or this is what I want had on how do you distribute that book? Does it go straight to Amazon or do you think about other places where you get it in front of people?

Jessica Andersen: 9:59
Amazon is definitely my number one thing, I would say, because, since I have a website and a blog, I can get SEO traffic from Google, definitely Amazon, and perhaps a book funnel as well, if I wanted. Yeah, if I wanted to tie it into my other offers.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 10:17
Okay very cool. Okay, what’s most fulfilling about what you do? The services that you offer.

Jessica Andersen: 10:26
Probably seeing the transformation of my own clients from being amazing at what they do in their fields to then becoming authors on top of it and getting to see them add author on their little LinkedIn bio Right.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 10:42
That’s very satisfying. It adds credibility right, absolutely, absolutely, and then people can go back to Amazon and really cross-reference it. It’s a very real thing, so that’s very cool. And then deciding to kind of approach branding themselves with a book, what are some things? If someone were to do that, like what’s the one or two pieces of advice you would give them, if they were just kind of teasing out and trying to figure out and they were on the fence if they wanna do it or not?

Jessica Andersen: 11:11
Be super crystal clear on whom you’re speaking to in your book, and so in many cases, like I said before early on the call, if you’re already an established business owner and you know your audience and your own clients really, really well, that’s a great start. But I’m always checking to make sure you know about that before you start the book process, Cause it’s gonna be really hard to write a book in a vacuum. If it’s like this is the book that I wanna write, but it’s not quite the book that people wanna read, you’re gonna have trouble marketing and selling that.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 11:49
Great, okay, great tips. And then, as a business owner and I know this from being a business owner for many years sometimes you hit bumps along the road. Have you hit any bumps along the road in your business and, if so, like how? Have you overcome some of the challenges just being a business owner?

Jessica Andersen: 12:07
Oh gosh, maybe there’s a lot of isolation sometimes, but I feel one huge challenge that I have living in France is the time zones, and it’s tough to participate in some online events when it just doesn’t jive with my time zone. It’s been a huge hurdle since I don’t work much with local clients. I’m working on books being written in English, so a lot of my clients are based in North America and just in a broader sense, the isolation that I feel sometimes being here. But fortunately this year I’ve been meeting lots of people on LinkedIn, especially in other groups where I get to collab with them, and it’s been working out much better. You have to go out and seek it.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 12:53
I guess you have to go out and find it. Yeah and you bring up collabs. So I’ll kind of in our lightning round kind of end with that question, which is you and I met in a collab group. What are your thoughts about collabs? Is there a value to them? And then just for listeners who just don’t even know what a collab group is or how to become part of them, just what are your general thoughts on what it is and how you feel like it’s benefited you?

Jessica Andersen: 13:21
Yeah, I really love collabs. If you think about it in terms of artists, when someone releases an album and they feature another artist who’s really big at the time on a track, that’s an example of a collab right there. So we’re sort of borrowing from that. Or even like a late night show right Someone who’s asking someone to be a guest on their show. In a way, that’s also a collab. You’re getting to leverage each other’s audiences and each other’s platforms. So I actually love collabs. I love the power of it. Just to give you a short example of one collab in particular that I participated in this year I have a very, very small email list because I’ve been focusing on growing LinkedIn, so email list is like second and I did a collab with someone. It was just a simple email to swap and the day that went out my email list doubled from one collab. It was so easy to set up, I did nothing. The other lady just shared my stuff to her list and boom.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 14:20
Amazing, yes, so very valuable and just to kind of recap on the things that you all might be hearing. Again, a lot of value, push versus pull marketing, cold emailing, moving into that evolution of cold emailing, to using LinkedIn, to even participating in collabs and email swaps, and, although some of those things might be second tier for all of you listening, find out what your first tier is in terms of what channel you might want to put your energy into, and then you might have some secondary tiers that fall underneath that. So thank you so much, Jessica, for being willing to share what you do with us Incredibly valuable and, as well as us, peeking a little bit inside of your business and learning about your growth. Jessica, how can people find out more about your services as a book coach?

Jessica Andersen: 15:11
Yeah, you can visit my website, Jessica L Andersen. com. Andersen has S E N at the end. It’s a funny Danish name. Or, even better, you can come find me on LinkedIn it’s the same name and you can connect with me. I would really love that.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 15:25
Yes, absolutely. And then anything, any promos, briefies, anything you have for anyone that’s listening. That might be a helpful place for them to also get started, as they’re on the fence about becoming a book author.

Jessica Andersen: 15:40
Yeah, so, as I mentioned, I’m moving into the book coaching space and I’m going to be supporting people through the actual writing process and I’m putting together a new signature service that I’m really excited about. That I have crafted with the direct input of people in my audience, so it’s going to be really, really helpful and that’s going to be coming out in a couple of weeks. So by the time August rolls around, that will be on my website. If you just go to JessicaL Andersen. com, you will see it right there.

Sonja Crystal Williams: 16:06
All right, perfect. So we’ll be sure to drop that link in for everyone who’s listening. That way, you can take a look at Jessica’s website and find out more about that program. Thank you again. So much, Jessica, and thank you everyone for listening to 10 Minute Marketing. I hope you have a great day.