Imagine if you could construct a compelling business book that resonates deeply with your audience, providing a unique framework that guides readers to their desired outcomes.
Well, with a Big Idea, you can.
Join Ivan as he dives into the world of big ideas, exploring how to harness them to create engaging and transformative business books.
Discover how to create new opportunities. Zero in on your audience's core desire without asking them to compromise. And create turn your ideas into a tangible, credible asset.
Reading for this episode:
16-Word Sales Letter - Evaldo Albuquerque
---------------------------------------------
If this episode sparks off any new ideas, we would love to hear them! Please email us at info@writebusinessresults.com OR fire us a DM on social media. Links to all our favourite haunts are below:
LinkedIn:
Instagram:
Imagine if you could construct a compelling business book that resonates deeply with your audience, providing a unique framework that guides readers to their desired outcomes.
Well, with a Big Idea, you can.
Join Ivan as he dives into the world of big ideas, exploring how to harness them to create engaging and transformative business books.
Discover how to create new opportunities. Zero in on your audience's core desire without asking them to compromise. And create turn your ideas into a tangible, credible asset.
Reading for this episode:
16-Word Sales Letter - Evaldo Albuquerque
---------------------------------------------
If this episode sparks off any new ideas, we would love to hear them! Please email us at info@writebusinessresults.com OR fire us a DM on social media. Links to all our favourite haunts are below:
LinkedIn:
Instagram:
Hey, what's up guys? This is Ivan Meakin and you are listening to Content Untap, sponsored by Right Business Results. This is the show where I go on a mission to unpack all those tiny little details that make up fantastic content. I report my findings back to you and I try and give you some practical tips that you guys can take home into your next project. If you do like what you hear, please do all those classic podcasty things you know, like share, subscribe, tell your friends about us all that kind of stuff. It helps us spread the word and reach more people, just like you, which is awesome. Also, if you wanted to have a more in-depth conversation about what you're hearing today, just set us up on LinkedIn. You can go to the Right Business Results LinkedIn page or you can go to my own personal LinkedIn page and FireSidium. We can spark a whole conversation there. Thanks guys, let's just crack on with the episode.
Speaker 1:So the other day I was working with a client on a new book project and things were going really well. We'd figured out his ideal reader group, we'd figured out his tone of voice. Everything was set and primed for us to start work on production. So we were both feeling super excited about this and then all of a sudden, he hits me out of the blue with this question what is it that makes a great business book today? And it was a really good question. To be honest, I really wanted to do the answers from Justice, so I told him I would sleep on it and then I went to work asking myself all sorts of questions. Right, is it the expertise of the author? You know the years of the experience that they have that they're pouring into their chapters. Is it in the storytelling or the way the author tugs at the heartstrings of an audience? Or maybe it's in the structure and the flow of the argument, painting really clear, simple, logical solutions to problems that they have? Right, and you know, if you think about this, sure, all of these are super important. They're great ingredients that make up a fantastic business book.
Speaker 1:But this guy wasn't looking for an essay on book writing. He was looking for a clear, concise answer, which is probably why it took me so long to find out. So I need to think about the bigger picture here. You know, find that one common thread that all the greatest hits have in common. So I spent a while pouring over some of the classics in my mind. You know, I rated my bookshelf. I looked at books like the 4-hour work week. I looked at certain habits of highly affected people, looked at atomic habits. My criteria was good reading, but also ones that are commercially very successful as well. Okay, so it was a pretty long day and seemed at first that my efforts were in vain, and then, as these things normally do, the answer hit me out of the blue. I was walking in the park completely not thinking about this at all when the answer came to me, and it came to me weirdly.
Speaker 1:In this obscure little book that I'd read when I was working as a copywriter, recommended to me years ago by my friend, matt Wilson, I talked about a big idea and had to find one. In this episode, what I want to do is talk about this big idea and how it relates to business books, not just branding or marketing or marketing campaigns in general, but specifically how you can take a big idea and use it to create concepts for your book that are going to be engaging, unique and stand the test of time. So let's talk about what a big idea actually is. I have two definitions here, one I've just got from Wikipedia, which isn't the best source of information, but here you go. They say that the big idea is an attempt to communicate your brand, product or concept to the general public by creating a strong message, pushes brand boundaries and resonates with the consumers, which is kind of a good definition, but it's a little bit wordy, so I thought we could find a more concise one. I found one from a website called Smore Insights A campaign big idea is the overarching message that underpins all the elements of a campaign in order to resonate with the target audience, which I think is better because it's a little bit more clear, a little bit more concise, and it talks about the overarching message that underpins all elements of a campaign.
Speaker 1:Okay, so if we take that and we say how can we find a big idea? How can we find that overarching message that underpins all the elements in a book in order to resonate with the target audience? And that's exactly what this is. The big idea is that one phrase or sort of short paragraph that encapsulates the essence of what you're trying to do in your book, so a way for your audience to quickly grasp what your project is all about and articulate benefit of your core message very simply and concisely, and that's kind of what we want to do in a business book, right? We you know very quickly in the first few chapters, we want a reader to very clearly go yes, I know exactly what this is and I want to find out more.
Speaker 1:Okay, essentially, a business book is just another way to get your message across to your ideal audience. Right, most business owners want to see their book as a reflection of their overall brand or their overall personal brand. So if a big idea works for your personal brand, if it works for branding and marketing it obviously does, people have been using it for decades Then it absolutely makes sense why it would work very well for your business book. So you see, books like Influence, the four hour work week, halloween, friends, influence people, seven habits of highly effective people. You know, obviously those are classics, timeless classics, but even more modern ones like Atomic Habits and Simon Sinek's Start With. Why? You know, what we're going to discover in this episode is that a lot of them have a big idea running through their message, which I believe very strongly makes them so compelling. Okay, and another good thing about a big idea is that it can polish up, you know, age old ideas that just need some reviving right With the big idea. The very same thing that a person sort of scoffed and rolled their eyes at because they've been lectured a thousand times before today can become a thing of wonder to them.
Speaker 1:Let's go back to the obscure little book I read on sales copy. So the book I picked up was a book called the 16 Word Sales Letter by Evaldo Albuquerque. He's kind of a legend in the copywriting industry but may not be so well known outside of that. In this book is an absolute gem, because Evaldo breaks down the big idea into the following template, which I'm going to share with you in this episode, that he used to write sales letters, used to work for the financial giant Ad Gora, who's famous for writing amazing sales copy and having a team of great copywriters, and I'm pretty sure that Evaldo sales letters raked in over a billion dollars worth of business for them. So we know that this works right and lots of people use this, as I said before, to create sales copy. And I'm flipping it and taking it with a little tweaking and we're going to use it to construct ideas for a business book which is going to work really well.
Speaker 1:Okay, so here's the phrase. You can write this down if you want, or just feel free to ponder it for later. So the phrase is this new opportunity is the key to their desire and it's only attainable through my new mechanism. It's just one phrase hold the absolute key to writing awesome business books, trust me. So let's break it down piece by piece and apply it to some best selling business books. So let's take Timothy Ferriss's four hour work week Okay. So let's start from the top. So there's three fundamental things that we need to bear in mind with this phrase Okay, there's the new opportunity, there's their desire and there's my new mechanism Okay. So let's take a look at one of those three things.
Speaker 1:Now, the first thing we're going to look at is the new opportunity. So this is something says on the 10, right, it's exciting, unique and eye catching. Right, people love novelty. It gives them that dopamine hit that we all crave. If you wanted to find out more about this, just check out the episode we did on secrets and it will tell you all about that, right? But that's why every marketer under the sun kind of bangs the strome over and over and over again about unique selling points. Right, it's the same in the book. You know what you need to be able to offer your readers something that they haven't heard before, something that's entirely unique or not, maybe not even entirely unique, but there's a unique spin to what we're saying, right. So you need to be able to find that fresh, new angle, and your niche is going to make your people pick your message out of the crowd, because a lot of people are writing similar stuff. So if you can find a new opportunity and if you can leverage that new opportunity with the other two pieces of this phrase, you're going to be onto something awesome.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's look at it in the four hour work. What's a new opportunity in the four hour work week? Well, if we break this down, what Tim's doing is these offering people a new way of living that isn't the standard nine to five Okay, the nine to five grind. The suggestion here is that there's a new, better, more adorable way to live your life, and it's outside of this concept of retirement. Okay, and he says there's no need to wait to retire in order to enjoy your life. Now, this may not sound super unique today, but back in 2007, remember when this book came out, it really was a new opportunity where people, a lot more people than today, were definitely working at a nine to five grind, right? It's probably the summed up in the subtitle of the book Escape the nine to five, live anywhere and join the new rich. Well, okay, who are these new rich? How do I get into this new opportunity? Bingo, bbing.
Speaker 1:So let's move on to the second piece. So, now that we have the new opportunity, let's think about the second phrase to this. If you remember, it's new opportunity, it's the key to their desire and it's only attainable through my new mechanism. Okay, so let's think about the next piece of this their desire. So who are your readers, right? What do they want? Like, really, really want, and more than anything in the world, that you can help them get right.
Speaker 1:So, from Tim Ferriss' perspective his readers they want freedom. You know, if you think about the top level human desires, you know what this book is touching on really is. It's touching on freedom. They want to break free of this rat race and they want to work on their own schedule and they want to stop exchanging time for money, right? So it's ultimate freedom. But and the and here's a really important thing right, they don't want to sacrifice their wealth or their time to get it. So what this book is doing is it's saying you can have that, but you can make lots of money doing it too, and you don't even have to invest your time in it, because it's a four hour work week and a lot of the time is in copywriting. When you're thinking about writing benefits out, wait, what's really important is giving them that main benefit without them having to do something else or sacrificing something else that they think they have to sacrifice, because a lot of people feel like they can't achieve their main goal because they're going to have to sacrifice something else to get it. Really great example Think of the health and fitness industry.
Speaker 1:Right? If you want washboard abs or an absolute ripped physique, that's going to come at a cost. So the reason why people you know they may want that, they may like the idea of that, but they don't want to do a sacrifice their time being at the gym all the time. They don't want to sacrifice, potentially money to pay thousands of pounds to a personal trainer every year to help them get them into shape, right? So this is why I think like supplements is such a huge industry. Or you know a little bit more darker right Steroids, because they give you that shortcut. They give you what you want to get bigger faster, without sacrificing some of the things that traditionally people thought that they had to give up in order to attain that result. And that's exactly what this book is doing. Okay, it's saying you can escape the nine to five, you can join the new rich, but you do not have to sacrifice your time to do it. Okay, because there's a four hour work week and the model if you follow it will get you that.
Speaker 1:So think about what your people want and maybe, as a little seasoning, think about how you can give it to them without them having to sacrifice something that they traditionally thought they could sacrifice. And if you can do that, you're onto a super compelling argument that will form the basis for an incredibly engaging business book. So that's their desire. But at this stage and I appreciate at this stage, you know making a promise like that could be a ball of hot air, and a lot of people do. They offer a lot of hot air because they don't do the third bit, which is so important. They make all these promises and come back it up with anything tangible.
Speaker 1:So what we need to do in this book, if we remember the three things that we looked at. We looked at this new opportunity, we looked at their desire, and now what we're doing is saying this new opportunity is the key to their desire and it's only attainable through my new metagnism, and this is the bit that's going to give your argument something tangible. Okay, this kind of is the last part of the big idea framework that's vital to establish credibility with a reader. So this comes in a couple of different ways, you know. Obviously, credibility can come from you explaining the results that you've gotten people and your own personal story and experience. But the second way is by offering a framework, a system, a thesis, a constructed logical argument that is essentially the key to helping them unlock these opportunities, or the process that they need to take to attain the opportunity that's going to unlock their desire.
Speaker 1:Okay, so for Timothy right, that is the four hour work week, and throughout the book he lays out the steps to unlock this opportunity. He lays on the steps for people to follow along. So there's another really important word in this phrase that people need to hang on to right it's the fact that it's only attainable through my new mechanism. Okay, so Timothy's four hour work week is a blueprint that's unique to him. He invented it himself. It's something that he built. He probably was influenced by other people Of course he is, because everyone stands on the shoulders of giants, right, but it was uniquely him. And when people think of the four hour work week, they associate that with Timothy Ferris.
Speaker 1:So what we need to do is we need to find a framework or a system that we can deliver this. Yeah, this teaching through that is uniquely ours, because if people see that they can get the same result by following someone else's mechanism, well, yours doesn't really stand out from the crowd that much and you're just giving people an excuse to go somewhere else. But if you can convince them that this opportunity is the key to their desire and it's only attainable through your your mechanism, you're onto absolute gold, and that's why we need to have a new opportunity, because it sounds unique. And then when you combine a new opportunity with your new mechanism, they're going to be buzzing to read your book. So if we patch all of this together, what we can do is we can begin to build out this phrase for something like Tim Ferriss's book, and I've come up with it right. So listen to this and see what you think of it. Excaping the nine to five grand, living anywhere you want and joining the new rich that's the new opportunity, is the key to living more and working less is the key desire, and it's only attainable through the four hour work week blueprint. That's the new mechanism, right? So everything that this book does is it points people towards this phrase or it tries to instill this belief in the readers. And that's the big idea and what's really wild about this and the more thought about it.
Speaker 1:I went down this big idea rabbit holes that you can do this for almost any book out there, any business book out there, with a couple of caveats. This big idea framework, the one I'm using from about Albuquerque in my research I found it works really, really well for nonfiction books that are business book specific to people who are writing a book and leveraging it as a business tool to win business and build their personal brand. This is more kind of sales mechanics and mechanisms If you want your book people to buy into your idea and therefore buy your book and buy it to your message. So that's just a quick caveat. That's where I found this process works best. When you get used to this, you start wrapping big ideas around anything and trying it out in this framework becomes so much easier to distill your message if you have this kind of template that you can insert the words into and play around with.
Speaker 1:So let's look at Atomic Habits James Clear, amazing book. Big idea for this one, after doing a little bit of work, is transforming your life with easy, tiny changes in behavior. So that's the new opportunity, is the key to staying productive, motivated and happy, because Atomic Habits is such a mainstream book. Who doesn't want to be productive, motivated and happy? That's a key desire that a lot of people have and it's only attainable through Atomic Habits, which is the title of the book. Having these 1% little habits daily can categorically change your life. And one more we'll try it with seven habits of highly effective people Having the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates. So that's how do we deal with turbulent times and change? Okay, having wisdom and power to take advantage of opportunities is the key to solving your personal and professional problems, and it's only attainable through the seven habits of highly effective people.
Speaker 1:So what's really cool here is, if you pick up like business books and just skim them, you can actually start to develop like what the big idea might be right. So I've got Daniel Priestley's Bill of Subscribes here. It's a pretty good book. It's a very business book so it's very sales orientated. He's obviously using it to generate business. So if we just take a skim at the blur we can come up with something pretty cool. So creating demand that outstrips supply new opportunity potentially is the key to turning away business because you have too many customers wanting to buy right and it's only attainable through oversubscribes.
Speaker 1:Seven principles so big ideas are really powerful and if you can generate one for your book before you get stuck into the details of writing it, something amazing is going to happen. In fact, it's you. Amazing things are going to happen. So, first thing, you're going to have a lot more clarity on what you need to write. Okay, because if you can use your big idea as a focal point, it's going to be much easier to stay on track and not get kind of lost in all of your great ideas, because you just need to stick to the things that work with that big idea. The second thing is that your message is going to resonate with your audience because if you can tap into an opportunity that unlocks a real, deep, key desire and that they believe is only attainable through your new mechanism. It's going to capture the attention of your audience far quicker. And the third thing is that you're going to come across as a credible expert because you have a mechanism, a tangible asset that you're teaching that's allowing your readers to unlock all the benefits that you're explaining to them.
Speaker 1:Okay, so, before we wrap up, as an exercise, just try having a go at finding out what your big idea is. The best way this works is if you write it down. This new opportunity is the key to their desire and it's only attainable through my new mechanism. Okay, so think about your new opportunity. What is your solution, process or product offer that no one else does? What is the desire of your audience? What do they want more than anything in the world that you can help them get? And then finally focus on your mechanism. Okay, what is the process of the journey or the step-by-step argument or framework that your reader needs to follow to attain that desire and to unlock that opportunity? Okay, so if you're going to be on LinkedIn your big idea I'll get back to you with some feedback, or you know we can work on it together. Okay, it's going to be fun. So I hope that was useful.
Speaker 1:Guys, I'm going to leave you a very quick quote from a legend of marketing, david Oglevy, who said you will never win fame and fortune unless you invent big ideas. It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising attains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. So if you just reframe that, that will read you'll never win fame and fortune unless you invent big ideas. It takes a big idea to attract the attention of your readers and get them to read your book. Unless your book contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I hope that was useful. Guys, keep creating content, keep telling awesome stories and I will see you soon.
Speaker 1:Hey guys, thanks again for listening to another episode of Content Untapped. If you are interested in finding out what we're up to at Right Business Results and create content to grow a loyal audience, please do get in touch at info at rightbusinessresultscom and we'll get back to you post haste. Secondly, if you wanted to continue the conversation about creating great content or anything that you're listening to on this show. Give us a DM to the Right Business Results LinkedIn page or you can DM my personal page and we can spark up a whole new conversation about any of this stuff. We love having conversations about content, so the more the merrier guys. Thanks again for listening and I will see you next time.