[YetAnotherMatt]

I would assume that his blog posts are what convinced quite a few people to actually buy the book. That said, I'm not too familiar with the book sales industry.

I am familiar with consulting. Initially I thought that giving all special knowledge away for free would be the worst thing I could possibly do.

Boy was I wrong.

Nowadays I give presentations detailing step by step exactly what people need to do in order to achieve some outcome, with as goal that they could do it 100% by themselves if they want to.

My theory is that this leads to more sales due to me becoming more visible + it builds large amounts of trust + the best possible clients are going to be very busy + the best possible clients are aware that they could implement all my advice by themselves, but if having me on board as well increases odds of success by as little as 10% (or increases the total impact by as little as 10%), it is still going to be a win to have me on board as well.

[jjk166]

If you are good at something and the customer doesn't really understand the process then you can make it look easy, and no one wants to spend a lot of money to pay someone to do something easy. But if the customer knows what it actually takes to solve the problem, the real value of having someone else do it is much more evident. Even if you feel like what you do is easy, there are people out there who consider it indistinguishable from magic. The uninformed are impressed by the magic, the informed are impressed by the magician.

[vladmihalcea]

That's true. My blog is thd front-end to every product or service that I'm selling. It's a very useful marketing tool.