What do you really want from life?

Happiness? Financial success? Making a difference? Making the world a better place? A great relationship? A happy family life? To be respected and admired? A meaningful spiritual life? The opportunity to serve? The opportunity to grow, in experience and knowledge? Outstanding health and fitness?

Most of us desire just about everything on the menu! We may rank them differently, but we all want to succeed, in whatever terms each of us defines success. If you and I were to sit down a year from today, what would have to happen in your professional and personal life for you to say that you got everything you wanted out of the next twelve months?

What holds us back?

If you’re like most successful people, you are extremely knowledgeable about your field. You have great experience and you understand how to solve the problems of the clients who come your way. The challenge that faces almost every entrepreneur, professional, consultant, and business owner, especially in these uniquely challenging economic times, isn’t a question of skills. It’s a question of marketing.

The hardest thing in the world is to get the word out to your prospects that you’ve got the answers, the skills, and the experience to solve their problems.

How has the Internet actually made life tougher for businesses?

Everybody thinks that the Internet is the greatest information tool since Gutenberg invented the printing press. And that’s true. At the same time, the Internet exposes your prospects to more of your competitors, across the country and across the world, than ever before.

When your prospects have so many choices, they tend to look at every business’s offerings as a commodity to be judged solely on price. It doesn’t matter how good you are, how smart you are, how fast you are, or how experienced you are when the world has turned you into a commodity. All people care about is how cheap you are. And for a business to thrive, to be judged strictly on price is a recipe for disaster.

How do you reverse that dangerous trend for your own business or enterprise?

How do you stand out as the expert, the authority, the only smart choice, in a world where technology seeks to turn everyone into a commodity to be judged strictly by price?

What if there were a means by which all of your prospects had access to all of the information in your head about what you do and how you do it? What if they could discover, in a simple, clear, and orderly way, that you are the most knowledgeable, the most trustworthy, the most experienced, and the most honored provider of goods and services in your field?

That doesn’t happen with a web page, no matter how expensively created or attractively designed. After a while, every web page starts to look like every other. And besides, you can only get a miniscule percentage of what you know about your field on to a web page. After all, how long will you spend on a web page, no matter how interesting, before you move on to see something else on the web?

A traditional brochure or marketing folder won’t do it, either. First, you’ve actually got to get a brochure physically into the hands of your prospects, and make sure they actually read the thing. In addition, a brochure is far too small to convey everything you know about your field, in order to generate that sense of respect and trust necessary for your prospects to feel that you are, once again, the only smart choice.

So if it’s not a website and it’s not a brochure, what’s the best way to get all of the information in your head across to your marketplace?

Are you talking about a book?

Exactly. In an era when information can be posted on a website one day and disappear the next, the most stable platform, if you will, for demonstrating to the world your depth of knowledge, the breadth of your experience, and your ability to solve problems…is a book.

Websites, brochures, and other marketing pieces convey information. Books convey knowledge. Not only that, they confer on the author a sense of respect and admiration that no other marketing tool can provide. Marketing expert Jay Abraham says that “Every CEO, business owner, and professional needs a book the way everyone else in his or her organization needs a business card.”

What do books do for their authors?

A lot. When you’re the author, to put it simply, you’re the authority. You, alone among your competitors, can get radio and TV interviews, speaking engagements (which are often very lucrative and prestigious), and a presence on the Internet beyond your own website as a guest speaker or interviewee on other leading websites in your field.

Books shorten your selling cycle—people read your book, or part of it, or simply know that you, among all your competitors, are the only one in your field who has actually taken the time and trouble to write a book that explains how to solve their problems. Instead of you trying to get appointments with them, they’re trying to get appointments with you. And you don’t have to sell them on what you offer. They already know what you offer, and they come pre-sold.

What if I don’t have the time or the inclination to write my own book?

Glad you asked. If you’ve got an hour a week, you can have your book complete within five months.

How is that possible?

At BusinessGhost, we’ve done dozens of books for business owners, entrepreneurs, consultants, health care professionals, and even a member of the Forbes 400. Our clients come from diverse backgrounds and work in diverse fields, but they all have one thing in common—they’ve got very little free time. That time is used much more effectively working in their business, not writing books. That’s where we come in.

If you can give us an hour a week, and most people can find an hour a week in their schedules, our unique process allows us to create for you your book without any meaningful disruption to your busy schedule. We like to say that “If you’ve got time to talk to us, you probably don’t even need a book. But if you don’t have time, and you do want more from your business and from life, then we might be right for each other.”

How does the process work?

We begin by asking three critically important questions, in order to determine the focus of your book…but also to help our clients determine the best course for all of their marketing efforts, online and off-line. Those questions are as follows:

Q: What’s the best marketplace for you to sell into right now?

Is it your current market, or is there a different market that you would love to enter? For example, we worked with a financial planner whose client base consisted of individuals and couples with a net worth of $1 million to $5 million. He successfully used his book to tap into the marketplace of individuals and couples with net worths of $5 million to $15 million.

Q: What knowledge do you possess, that if your prospects knew you knew it, they would hire you instantly?

In other words, what’s the body of information that you possess that is simply too big to compress into a sales interview, a marketing piece, or even your website?

Think for a moment about how much you know about your field. Think about all the difficult situations you’ve handled for your clients, the problems you’ve solved, the training you’ve undergone, the wisdom you’ve gleaned from books you’ve read and seminars you’ve attended. Have you ever been able to share more than a few percentage points of that knowledge in a sales interview with a prospect?

Again, even the best-designed and most attractive websites only present a few percentage points of the overall body of knowledge that the CEO, business owner, consultant, or professional possesses.

Now imagine that your prospect had access to all of the information that you possess. Through the means of your book, they can see for themselves that you are indeed not just the author but the authority in your field. Ask yourself how different your sales process would be if your clients knew how much you knew about your field and about solving their problems.

You could write a book about a lot of things. At BusinessGhost, we have discovered that the most powerful business books are those that demonstrate to the reader the knowledge and prowess of the author in terms of solving the specific problems faced by those in their marketplace. We’ll sit down with you and learn from you the nature of the body of knowledge that will be conveyed in your book.

Q: How do we break that body of knowledge down into a logical sequence, so that the reader is enticed by the way the book opens and stays with you throughout the entire book?

That’s how we determine the Table of Contents for the book. What we’re doing here is taking that body of knowledge that we discussed in Question 2 and breaking it down into chunks, creating a logical flow, creating the chapters that the book will contain. We might modify the Table of Contents as we move forward, but now we have a starting point for creating the book. We know the audience. We know the subject matter. And we know the flow of information from author to reader.

Now what?

After that initial discussion, which generally takes an hour or two, we then schedule weekly meetings with you. During those meetings, your BusinessGhost writer will interview you on the subject of each successive chapter. So you know that this Tuesday at 9:00 a.m., you’ll be interviewed about Chapter 1. It won’t be a broad-ranging interview about everything you’ve ever known, thought, or believed about your business, field, or industry. Instead, it will be a tightly focused discussion just on the material that will be presented in Chapter 1.

We have found, after having written dozens of books for highly successful (and time-pressed) business people, that if you give us an hour, and in that hour tell us everything you’ve ever known, experienced, thought, and believed about the subject matter of that chapter, we can take that interview and turn it into a beautifully written chapter within two weeks.

A week later, on the following Tuesday at 9:00 a.m., you’ll have your second interview, this time on Chapter 2. And the process repeats: You tell us everything you know about the topic of Chapter 2, and two weeks later, that chapter will be in your inbox. So if we’re talking about a ten chapter book, if you give us an hour a week, you’ll have the entire first draft of your book done within eleven to twelve weeks. A month of editing, and the book will be ready for distribution.

In other words, you can be an author…four months from today. And you can start publicizing the fact that your book is coming out…right now. Your marketing team or our marketing people can seek for you, immediately, speaking engagements, media appearances, articles in leading business journals (or whatever periodicals appeal to your marketplace)—the sort of exposure that only authors can receive. You can start benefiting from your book the moment that you decide to become an author.

Why do you create ebooks as well as traditional books?

We saw earlier how the Internet flattens the marketplace, seeking to turn every business or service provider into a commodity to be judged solely on price. Now, you can harness the power of the Internet to work in your favor instead of against you.

We make your book available on Amazon to be downloaded to the Kindle, to the Sony Reader, as an attractively designed e-book to be downloaded from your website, and to be read on an iPhone, Blackberry Storm, and other hand-held devices. You can send the link to your book to everyone on your e-mail list…for free. You can invite your satisfied customers to send the link to your book to everyone on their lists.

The “old school” approach to the dissemination of information is that a book should be a revenue stream. At BusinessGhost, we know a little something about the publishing business. We know that one of the hardest ways in the world to make a dollar is by selling books.

We take the radical position that your book, in and of itself, is not meant to be a revenue stream. We don’t want to see our clients trying to make a couple of bucks here and a couple of bucks there selling books.

In today’s world, people view information as something they shouldn’t have to pay for! Your book can be a revenue stream—you can sell copies back of the room at your speaking events, and when you do media, you can direct people to Amazon. But the real money that you will earn from your book comes from the quantum boost to your business’s bottom line.

In other words, even though you’re becoming an author, you’re not going into the book business. You’re using the book to double or triple the gross income of your business.

Can you illustrate for me how this works?

With pleasure. Gary Kadi, for whom BusinessGhost has written two books, consults to dental practices. He charges dentists $120,000 a year to revitalize their practices, get their team members all on the same page, create a selling system within the office that allows the dentist to practice dentistry instead of having to sell patients on services, and generally makes dental offices a happy place for the dentist, the team members, and above all, the patients.

As a result of Gary’s first book, he tripled the gross revenue of his business and was invited by two of the nation’s leading providers of dental equipment (in two different fields, of course) to speak on behalf of those companies around the country. Gary now regularly speaks to audiences of two to three hundred dentists and team members, for a fee of $6,000 per talk. In addition, everyone in the audience receives a copy of his book! The growth of Gary’s consulting practice has been astronomical.

Can I get hard copies of my book as well as all the electronic versions you mentioned?

Absolutely. One of the ways we save our clients enormous amounts of money, time, and frustration is that we manage the process of creating both digital and hard copy versions of their books. We have a relationship with an extraordinarily experienced and talented book designer and production team that makes the process of becoming the author of a book, whether digital or physical, amazingly easy.

What about marketing the book?

One of the easiest ways to burn money, as most business owners have learned the hard way, is to throw it at marketing people. We’ve been around long enough to know who the best book marketing people are.

We offer book marketing packages tailored to your specific needs that are aimed at attaining media attention for your book, including TV and radio appearances for you; speaking engagements at appropriate venues where your prospects and industry leaders can be found; the placement of articles drawn from your book in appropriate business journals or other periodicals; and a presence on the Internet beyond your own website.

Our marketing team will work with you, listen to your specific needs and desires, and create a personalized marketing plan the goal of which is to get you, your book, and your message before the broadest possible audience of people who have the specific need for your services.

How do I get started?

Call BusinessGhost’s CEO Michael Levin, toll-free at 800-637-6856. Making the call is the first step on a surprisingly short—and enjoyable—road…to becoming an author, and therefore the authority, and the only smart choice, in your field. Michael looks forward to hearing from you.