I am the anti brochure person. To my thinking, brochures are a tremendous waste of money for consultants and professionals.
Rhonda Sher and I have joined forces on speaking and other projects. She will be appearing at the Marketing With A Book Summit on November 13-14 to talk about her book, "The Two Minute Networker."
Rather than creating a brochure, start by writing how-to blog articles. Then turn those blog articles turn into speeches and seminars. Eventually, you gather the articles and publish a book through a strategy called print on demand self publishing (we’ve done it under 90 days and for less than a $1,000 for clients). Does it work? Here are a list of business best-seller titles by professionals and consultants that started out self-published (Source: Southwest Airlines Spirit, March 2005):
- The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson: picked up by William Morrow & Co.
- In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters (of McKinsey & Co.): in its first year, sold more than 25,000 copies directly to consumers—then Warner sold 10 million more.
- Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, by Weiss Roberts: sold half a million copies before being picked up by Warner.
If the idea of writing is to daunting, hire a ghostwriter.
P.S. Ken Blanchard is one of my heroes. I was thrilled that he agreed to write the foreword to my new book, Closing America’s Job Gap, that will be published in January 2011. My co-authors are Mary Walshok and Tapan Munroe. I am a big believer in co-authors. But ah, that is another blog post.