Robert Coorey Reveals Why Finding And Feeding A Starving Crowd Is The Most Effective Marketing Strategy Of All
7 Dec 2025 · 48 min
Robert Coorey explains how to find a 'starving crowd' of highly motivated buyers by targeting specific pain points instead of generic wants. He shares how a nutritionist's webinar converted 8 of 500 attendees into $8,000 in course sales, and how his own book strategy achieved 43% opt-in from cold traffic by offering it free plus $9 shipping.
Questions this episode answers
December 30, 2014.
227 marketing strategies.
About 250 pages.
About 43% opt-in from cold traffic (over 12 months).
About 10% buy the paperback after opting in.
Chapters
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What is up? My fellow listeners, welcome back to my kitchen. I'm going to cook up some cool profits for you today. Got a pretty exciting show and I'm going to tell you in advance that we may geek out a little bit here. My guest, Robert Khoury and I are going to talk about all types of different marketing strategies and business and profit building strategies that we both focus on and how to make it even better, how to apply them to anybody's business. And one of the things that I know you're going to love about this is that Robert is a wealth of information in all different areas of marketing and business. We are somewhat soul brothers like that. I can tell you. I've always often felt like a jack of all trades when it comes to business and marketing and I've got so much intellectual curiosity about all of these various areas. When I read Robert's book, which I'll share with you in just a second, I was just going through it like crazy, highlighting a bunch of stuff and he opened my eyes up to a lot of strategies I didn't know and I invited him on the show to share these with you. Now if we talk over your head, if we talk, talk about things that you don't quite understand and you know, it's not quite basic. I just encourage you to go check out Robert's site, come get the show notes and more importantly, buy Robert's book, Feed a Starving Crowd, which we're going to talk about here in just a second when I introduce him. Let me give you a little bit of background on Robert Khoury. He is a number one best selling author and a wildly successful marketer. Currently he's the director of global business at an marketing agency in Australia and it's actually Australia's top online marketing agency. He is obsessed with helping others achieve unheard of results through innovative strategies to feed starving crowds of buyers. And if you know anything about marketing, those are the best types of buyers out there. He's the author of a brand new book called Feed a Starving Crowd which I've read, as I said, and I have to say it's amazing. You should go get it@feedastarvingcrowd.com Robert welcome to bacon wrap business. Excited to have you here.
Thanks for having me, Brad.
Yeah, as I said before we got on the call, I loved the book. It was recommended. Esther Kiss, who is a mutual friend, recommended that we meet and recommended that I check out the book. She knew that you'd make a great guest expert for the show. And as I was going through it, one of the. And we'll get to your background here in just a second. But one of the hardest parts for me was saying there is so much awesome stuff. How do I pick and choose a couple things that are the juiciest and the most fun to talk about? So I want you to keep that in the back of your mind because I don't, I mean we couldn't make a five hour podcast if we just talked about this forever. But tell me a little bit about your, about your background and what you know, why you're one of Australia's top entrepreneurs. What makes you a marketing expert? Where did you get this expertise? I'm guessing you weren't born with it.
Yeah, no, I wasn't born with it. The first ad I ever ran was a DJ ad in the yellow pages when I was 16. And I was amazed when I put an ad in the yellow pages, paid a thousand bucks and somebody actually called me and gave me their credit card information to book me in.
I was just fascinated by that. And ever since then I've been an avid student of marketing and just gone through all the courses, listened to all the books, listened to all the audios, gone to everything, and just been a real devourer of anything that's been fresh and new in the marketing space. I suppose I really came to prominence when I almost broke the world record for the most number of people in a webinar. That was kind of.
Yes, I read about that. Let's talk about that. Break that down. So what's the background on that?
So that was for a client of mine, she's a nutritionist here in Australia. And so she, before we came along she never had any online products. So she's had some books and then she did some one on one consulting pretty much. And so we kind of flipped around her business model and made it more of an information marketing business. And the first thing that we did was take one of the best selling books and turn it into an online course. And this world record webinar was for the online course that she was releasing around one of her best selling books.
Okay, so how did You. I mean, it's one thing to have a webinar, and it can be the best information ever, but the most important thing is, number one, letting people know about it, and number two, encouraging them to show up on that webinar.
How did you. What was your strategy there?
Yes. So to start with, if we go back to the start, the genesis of the webinar, what we did was I interviewed the nutritionist, and I said, listen, you've been working one on one with women for seven years. Tell me exactly what are the 10 biggest pain points that women come to you with? And so she told me, I said, great, that's all I need. So I took those 10 pain points, and then I also asked her for 10 stories of women that she's helped fix up these pain points. So that was the only ammunition that I had to work with. Then I put a landing page up, and we said, hey, it's a free online seminar. Because her audience is like women 40 to 60. So a lot of these people don't even know what a webinar is. And so we changed the language to be an online seminar that you can join from your computer, which got messaged across really well. And then we said, look, if you've got any of these 10 pain points, if you're having any of these health challenges, then you should definitely attend this webinar because we're going to show you how to fix all of them up. And so that messaging was extremely strong. And I feel that because the messaging was so strong and we nailed the pain points, we had a starving crowd. That was the key reason why it was so successful. All the other things that we did were nothing amazing. A lot of the marketing that we did was just emailing her list and doing some Facebook ads. It wasn't anything fancy at all. But because we nailed those pain points and she knew her audience so well, we were able to get a starving crowd of people to come.
That's great. So it was really all about the message to the market. That was spot on.
Absolutely. Because I'll give you an example, I'll give you some more detail around this. She told me that the number one problem her clients have is bloating. So they'll wake up in the morning and they'll fit into their jeans perfectly. And by the end of the day, they feel like they're going to explode out of them because we use colorful language like that. And even case studies of people who had those kind of challenges and described how by using this nutritionist method, they were able to overcome that. And so if you came to this online seminar, you learned the strategies as well.
You know.
That'S really important for folks to understand. I mean, message to market is one of the areas that I, when I'm working with clients or something to myself, I spend the most time on is what are you really, what are you really saying to that crowd in order to get them? It's one step removed from copywriting. It's the overall message. And what I love about that is it's probably very easy to assume that, oh, all these women just want to lose weight. Well, that can be a very, that's a bigger goal. But that bloating, that's a problem that they're having. That's something that they, when they have it, they feel it. It's like you said, it's a pain point. And if they're in that pain, they are. God, this is such a pun. But a starving crowd, right? You know, it's absolutely. And that's a great segue into defining what a starving crowd is and why it's so important.
Yes. So essentially the phrase feed a starving crowd came from Gary Halbert and he told a story where if you're both going to open up a hamburger stand, if he could have any advantage over you, he would want a starving crowd. And you could have any other advantage in the world, but he'd still beat you because he's got a starving crowd. And so when I learned that from Gary, I kind of reflected back on all the businesses that I've worked in. I've worked literally across hundreds of different industries in my career and probably in probably 25 to 30 businesses I've actually worked in the whole time I've been doing marketing. And I found that the businesses that were the most successful and the easiest to grow was when we were feeding a starving crowd. And every time I tried to start a business where it wasn't feeding a starving crowd, it was hard work. I mean, you know.
It'S not easy. Like, I started a video business five years ago. So I saw that video was becoming a trend online and I said, I went to businesses and I said, look, I've got some great video guys. I want to build videos for your business and we'll put them on the website. And you know, YouTube started to grow a bit now and you guys got to have video etc, etc. It was hard work, you know, because no one, it was too early. Like video wasn't that mainstream five years ago. And even if people liked it, they didn't want to pay for it, you know, so they thought they could do it for free with their little iPhone. And so I worked the whole year. I made 30,000 bucks, and I've never worked so many hours in my whole life. I would have been on less than minimum wage if I counted my hours. So I just realized that I wasn't feeding at the end of the year when I filed my tax return. I looked at the numbers of black and white. I'm just like, look, I'm not feeding a starving crowd. This is just too hard. I'm too early for this trend. And that's what it's like. And a lot of entrepreneurs can identify with that. When you're trying to push things uphill and it's just too hard, then you're doing something wrong. Because business is never easy, as you know, it's never ever easy. But it shouldn't be so hard that you work your guts off and you're going nowhere.
Yeah. And a starving crowd can be.
It also reminds me of when you just mentioned the pain points. It's way, way, way easier to solve. People will to sell something that solves somebody's pain, then gives them pleasure. And that starving crowd. Notice you didn't just say feed a hungry crowd, because hunger is not a pain necessarily. It's like, okay, I'm hungry for lunch, but if I'm starving, that's a pain. And if you're feeding me, you're putting that pain out. It's not like you're giving me the, you know, I'll pay way more to get that hamburger if I'm starving than I will to get a gourmet meal by a Michelin rated chef, you know, when I'm simply hungry. So tell me a little more about some of the starving crowds that you have fed and some of the success stories there.
Sure. So whether it's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the start of my career, I worked in the copier game. So I was one of the top salespeople for, you know, a very large copier company. And I found that in my first year there, I was selling to small business. Again, that was not feeding a starving crowd. That was very, very difficult. But then I changed tax, and then I started working for big corporates and also for government departments. Now government departments do a lot of printing, and they are very happy to spend a bit of extra money. Even though they say they need to buy the cheapest, they're very happy to spend a bit of extra money for a quality product. And so that was a very starving crowd for what I was offering. And I used a lot of very creative marketing techniques. This is in the early 2000s. I was one of the first people to introduce email marketing to this Fortune 500 company. And I was one of the first people to do special reports and live workshops and all those kind of things. That was not very common back then. Now it's as common as dirt. But 10, 15 years ago, no one was doing that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, that was definitely a starving crowd there. The copy of industry to big corporates and government.
Sorry to interrupt there, but have you also found that sometimes with creative marketing and phrasing and whatnot, that you can take a crowd that may not think they're starving, but part of the marketer's job is to make them realize that.
The problem of not having your solution is much bigger than they realize that it is. So I've always found that it's kind of referred to as twisting the knife. Once you find that little pain point, the market may not realize it's that bad. It's your job to say, yeah, but if you don't have that, look at all of the other ramifications. So you can actually cause a hungry crowd to feel as though they're starving if you do that. Correct.
Very true, very true. And I would say that it's best to have them hungry in the first place, because I agree. If they're just not. If they're already full and they've been slammed with everything already, and then you try and give them something else, then it's going to be too hard. But if they do have that initial bit of hunger. Yes. With some good marketing, which is what I teach in the book, you can take that hunger and really twist the knife, like you said, and turn it into right now.
What are some of the other starving crowds that you've either worked with personally or helped clients with that, like, you know, the.
Nutritionist or the health expert who had those 10 pain points? That's a very starving crowd. But are there any markets?
I've done it for my own business. Yeah, please do. Please do. Yeah, for my own business. Feed a starving crowd. What I did was I. I deliberately found out what the pain points for people who wanted to learn about marketing were. So what I did was I went to Amazon.com I looked at all the 3 star reviews of the top 100 marketing books on Amazon. Essentially what I did there was I didn't look at the 1 stars because they're normally people who are Biased against you or maybe your competitors who don't like you. I didn't look at the five stars because normally that's your friends or family. And, and look, a five star book is a book that's changed your life. That's a pretty phenomenal book. And there's not that many of them. So you look at the three star reviews because they're the most objective and the fairest because that means that someone's read the book and they've said, okay, there's some good things and there's some things that need to be improved. And so when you read the three star criticisms, you start to notice that there's some common themes that continue to come up. Right. And so I found this when I wrote before I wrote Feeder Starving Crowds, I looked at the top hundred marketing books and I'm sure you'd love to know what the five biggest pain points are, right?
They are in order. Number one, there's all general information out there. There's no specific advice. So people in their books, they'll write, go start a blog or go start a Facebook page or.
Engage with your customers or give good customer service, but all those things don't help us. If you start a blog, what's that going to do for anyone? You've got nothing on there. What are you going to write about? How are you going to promote it? How are you going to monetize it? If you start a new Facebook page, you're going to have two friends on there, you and your wife and maybe your mum.
How is that going to make any money for you? If you've got a Facebook page and you've got friends and you listen to the advice about engaging with your audience, well, what's that going to do? How is that going to turn into revenue? We're already business here. People were very, very frustrated that they weren't getting specific advice. So that was the first thing. The next thing was that they found a lot of the advice, assumed you already had a business that was going well or you had a business with traction and there was nothing really there for this. If you were just starting up something from scratch and you wanted to work out how to do things. So that was a huge pain point. They assumed you already had money to spend and you already had a customer list. And yeah, there was things like split testing and conversion rate optimization. But like I said, if you're a small business and you've got no traffic, well, what good split testing going to do for you? So people are quite frustrated about that as well. There are other problems as well, but it might take too long if I go through everything. But to cut a long story short, I found those five biggest pain points and then I wrote my book with all those pain points in mind.
Another one of the pain points was you can find the same information for free on Google. How annoying is it when you spend 30 bucks on a book and you could have gone to Google and got all that stuff for free? Yeah, quite frustrating. So what I did with my book, I made sure there was no fluff. You know, there was no general advice. There was no, it just got straight to the point. There's, you know, in the book there's 227 marketing strategies and the books only 250 pages. There's no room for fluff.
Right.
And then there was no general information. Like all this stuff is specific advice. It's all the exact steps, there's specific directions that you need to do to be successful and there's no stuff in there that you can find for free on Google. This is behind the scenes of my private client campaigns where I break it down step by step. You can't go to Google and search for that. And the other half of the book is when I interview guest experts and I really drill down into what made their campaign successful. So for example, like I looked at Evan Pagan's multimillion dollar live event launch and I went through every single thing that he did in that one month period when he launched that campaign. So.
That'S why I've been able to be very successful with this business that I've set up and this book that I've written because I took my time and I did the research and I found out what people were starving for in this market and then I just gave it to them.
That's great. Now let me, for the audience's benefit, I'm going to read through real briefly. I wrote down some of the chapter titles so that people can get an idea of the, the stuff we could talk about. So how to find a starving crowd. Basically identifying your market, unusual ways to launch your business fast and cheap, how to use scarcity, which is very effective in selling but without being slimy. Copywriting techniques high converting web design and landing pages, how to get affiliates and JV partners, social media secrets, YouTube and Facebook campaigns, how to use video sales letters, how to use crowdfunding to get the capital for your business, how to launch a best selling book, and how to do consulting as a business. So what I love about that is it's a little bit all over the place. But all of those things are very juicy, tactical strategies that every single person. Like you said, they're very specific strategies that people can use to get more traffic to their site and convert more people from browsers to buyers, but all predicated on the fact that you need to have that starving crowd in the first place. So I love that taking a look at those. I mean, each of these could be a mini book or an entire podcast episode by itself. But let's talk about what your favorite or one or two strategies that are really working well for you or any of your clients.
As it relates to some of those. Let's put do you have any favorite stories from the book?
Let's go through Launching fast and cheap.
Everybody always wants to launch a new product and they think that you need a huge list to make it all happen. In the book, I detail a real easy way that you can get a launch out without even having created a product yet. What you do is you consolidate all the lists that you have already. And a lot of people think they don't have a list, but everybody has a list. You've got business cards, you've got Facebook friends, you've got LinkedIn connections, you've got mobile phone contacts, you've got a list. Whether you think it's a list or you don't think it's a list, it's the list. And what you do is you just tell them that you're going to be holding an online seminar and you're going to be releasing a new product and you want to tell them all about it. And so you see how many people come along to this from your existing list and you just tell them about your product, you give them a bit of training at the same time and you make an offer and you see how many of them actually buy it. You say it's coming out in two weeks time. Now, I've done this, done this many times. The first time I did it, I was working in E Web marketing and we wanted to launch a new online course like how to Start an Online Business. We didn't know who was going to buy this, what we should charge for it, all those kind of things. So I ran a one hour webinar. I just invited all the people that were on our list and we consolidated all the lists together, all our personal contacts and all the people on the official mailing list. And we just emailed them, we said, hey, we're going to start this new course. We're going to teach you how to start an online business. Would you like to come to this webinar? So we had 500 people attend. I ran the one hour webinar, just told them a bit about my story, gave them a few tips and then said if you want to learn more, we're running a five week course. It starts in two weeks time if you'd like to join it. So out of the 500, we had eight people buy and it was a thousand dollar course made. 8,000 bucks.
Nice.
Yeah. Which is pretty good. I looked at the total hours that we spent on it and it was 40 hours. So, you know, at 500 bucks an hour or so, that's pretty good money. You know, most people would be $200. So $200 an hour. But most people still be happy with that anyway. For a week of work.
Well, and it's repeatable and you can do all that. And it's proof of concept that what you have somebody wants.
Absolutely. And yet $8,000 isn't a whole lot of money. But it was still proof that people wanted this and it was something that we could continue doing.
We continued that on for a few years and it worked really well. So that's an example of how you can launch nice, fast, cheap, doesn't cost any money. You don't have to build a product first. You can just get it out there once you've got the sales happening.
Right now, do you have a favorite source of traffic that works particularly well?
Yeah, I do. My default is going to Facebook these days, like a lot of people. The thing is, Facebook's getting harder and harder to sell on. And so because it's getting tighter and tighter with the controls they put on. So what we're finding we need to do is to move towards native advertising and storytelling. That's what we found is the most sustainable way to get a lot of traffic through Facebook. And what I mean by that for the people who haven't heard of that before, is most of our blog posts now, most of our Facebook posts, most of our ads are telling stories. That's what we're doing for our clients. And it's not.
So you're going from the Facebook. You're going from a Facebook ad to a blog post?
Yep.
Correct. And it's very story driven. It's not leading with the offer.
No, not at all. It's all blog posts, all training. And you're gonna love this, Brad. This is how we work out what blog posts to talk about. So I get our virtual assistants to go into a category. So I'll give real life example. One of my clients is one of the world's top public speakers. He gets paid $10,000 to do a one hour speech and you almost can't book him for months in advance. He just makes a killing. And so what we did for him was we looked at all the public speaking blogs out there. So anyone that's trying to teach people how to do public speaking, and then I got them to write down, list all the articles from those top 100 blogs. And then I said, go and look at how many times each one of those article has been Facebook shared, LinkedIn shared or tweeted. And so we had accounts, we had all the articles, we had a count of all the social engagement, and then I just ranked them from number one to number 100. Which articles had the most social engagement, which ones are getting the most, most traction. And then we just wrote six blog articles based on those top. Those top articles.
Exactly.
You write your own version, our own spin on it. Because we knew that people were starving for that information. That was how we fed that starving crowd. And so all of our. So one of them was like how to get booked for a TED Talk. And the funny thing was my client actually rejected being booked on a TED Talk because he was already making a speech for the Prime Minister here in Australia and he was booked out that day. They wanted him to speak on the TED Talk. So he was one of the very few people in the world who said no to ted.
Nah, that's amazing. That's a pet. Because he's talking for the private. Yeah, exactly. That's a great strategy too. I mean, you talked about how you used Amazon for the research for what are the big pain points. And then you use competition to see. Yeah, what are people sharing? What are they doing? I mean, the nice part is the resources are out there. There's no need to be hyper creative and reinvent the wheel. You just have to be resourceful and know exactly where to look. So you're doing. Let me dig down a little bit further. So you're sending them to a blog post now, is this just a blog post on the article with. Is there a direct call to action on the bottom of the blog post or are you just allowing people to come there and click around and maybe join the newsletter? Or how specific are you getting with the call to action and the article that you're sharing?
Yeah, we've tested a lot of different blog format and now we've got a really nice format together that has a call to Action download. So it's very, very clean layout, very little navigation, and there's a right hand side banner that follows them all the way down the website as they scroll down to that blog article. And down the bottom there's a call to action as well. And that call to action depends on the client. It might be join the webinar, come to a free event, download the book, but whatever, the call to action is down the bottom at the end of the article. And the article is written so that we see we're kind of painting the picture of the future in that article as well. It's not just straight content. There is, there is a little bit of sales messaging in there, of course, but very subtle.
No, of course, but it's, you know, that's really, that's why it's native advertising. That's. I mean, the word advertising is in there because it's not just putting out information for information's sake, but, you know, taking the world of direct response, which is usually very hard hitting. It's, listen, here's what I have. Here's why you should get it. Here's what you should do now, here's the next steps.
People are.
A little bit more wary because they've seen it everywhere, but they still love reading articles. They love getting content. Content, in a lot of cases is king. Now, are you also using remarketing when you send people to those articles?
Definitely, yeah.
That's such a remarketing. For those who don't know, it's when. If you've ever felt as though an ad for a product or another website is following you around the Internet, well, there's a good chance it is because you can install what's called a little piece of code on a website which puts a little cookie on there. Meaning if you've come to my website and you leave, I can follow you around Facebook or the Internet and continue to show you that ad almost on whatever website you're on if I'm willing to pay for it. And what I found, and I bet you have too, is that the return on investment because those clicks are really cheap for remarketing is just amazing both for branding and for cost of profit.
It's the best money you can ever spend. And we can never spend as much as we would like on remarketing. Just whatever the maximum is. I just put it on because it's the best form of marketing you can do. Someone's already been to your website and you can still continue to talk to them.
Yep. Now, have you heard of I just ran across this the other day. So I don't have experience with them and I don't. I don't think this is against any terms of service at all. I was talking with somebody and they said they'd have to check, but I came across a company called Prime Loop, P R I m e l O-O-P.com and what they allow you to do is share a. It's like a link shortener. So.
I could go to my Facebook page and share a link to Yahoo, but I'm sharing a link from this. It's a link shortener. Now what's going to happen is that person, if they click on that link, it's going to drop the cookie on their machine and then take them wherever I sent them. So if I'm sharing recipes on how to make a green juice in a forum on a Facebook page or whatever, anybody who clicks that, even though they're not landing on my page, I know they're interested. So now I can follow them around with my retargeting devices. Have you heard of doing this?
I haven't heard of it. I just quickly brought the website. It looks amazing.
It really does. I thought that was kind of a game changer and I had found the way I found them. I remembered I was on my phone and I was on Facebook and.
I saw a blog. I'm sorry, it was a sponsored post and it said, steal this campaign. And then it said something about GoPro and whatnot. And first of all, I love this. I did a screen cap like, steal this campaign. Such a great subject line, such a great thing for a marketer. It's like, okay, I'll steal it. I went there and then they were saying, listen, we've got campaign. We're going to tell you what we would do if we were trying to compete with, with a company or launch a product in a competitive environment. And we welcome you to steal this idea. This is native advertising at its finest, by the way. So they said, imagine that you are competing with GoPro cameras and the blog post is on there if you take a look at Prime Loop's blog, but it says, imagine you were competing with GoPro cameras and you had your own camera, the, you know, whatever, the Bacon Cam 2000. So they said you could go to forums and places that people like GoPro type videos and you could start to share other videos that are really interesting. You're not sharing any sales pitches, you're just sharing content. But you're sharing content with your Prime Loop link shortener. So as people click on that and then they go to see the content and they like it, you're cooking them as camera aficionados. And now you can start to remarket to these people.
Through Facebook adroll.
Right?
Yeah. Yeah. So I thought like that to me that is bacon wrapped. I'm actually, I've reached out, I'm hoping the. Just the other day I reached out to the owner of the company. I'm hoping to get him on the, on the show.
Anyway, I wanted to share that with you because it fits really well with native advertising and everything else because now you can share links to things you don't even own.
That's so cool.
I know, right? Okay, so now we're diverging off a little bit from there. So you said native advertising is working really well for you on Facebook. You do some YouTube advertising as well, is that correct?
A little bit. Not a huge amount. We've had mixed results with that.
We'll move to that as a secondary thing. We find Facebook's a lot easier to get a strong ROI from.
I agree. And with their ability to really go in and demographic and psychographically target, it's really off the charts. So let me talk a little bit about the book as a marketing tool that you've been using. So number one, I love the way like feedastarvingcrowd.com everybody should go there once they're done with this or while you're listening to this podcast. So I love your landing page and I love some of the stuff you're doing here. It's really great because you're actually giving it away. The landing page is beautifully laid out. I mean there's a ton of little conversion tips that you can just go through this. I'm not going to go through them right now, but it's just one of the best laid out book landing pages I've seen tons of social proof and everything else. So at the bottom of this you've got, you've got three offers here and one of them is to download the ebook for free, simply.
Just for opting in just for subscribing. I don't have to pay a penny. But then you've got two more options. One of them is I can get the paperback and the ebook for only $9 or I can get everything personally signed access to a recent live event for $99.
But you literally are giving this book away for free. For people who want it, definitely.
Yeah. So we started off selling it and what we found was that the page converted it like 2 or 3%, something like that. And I was getting quite frustrated because I felt this is such a good book and I just want to get into the hands of as many people as we can. Once people read the book, then there's so many great opportunities for them to start joining our coaching programs and our courses and even as a consulting client if they're big enough. And so what I decided to do was to flip the whole model on its head. I'm like, well, why am I trying to charge 30 bucks for this book? It's worth hundreds of dollars anyway. So $30 doesn't do it justice. Regardless, it's still too cheap. I may as well give it away for free and then really build a connection with people so they get to read the book and then I can continue to market to them after that. And then there's a good chance that they'll come into some of our other programs. So what I did was I flipped it all around. I gave for free. I gave the paperback as well away for free. They have paid $9 shipping worldwide. And I found now the page converts at 43% from cold traffic, which is just phenomenal. 43% from cold traffic? Yeah. That's been across 12 months. That's solid data.
Is that primarily for the opt in versus the sales? Okay, great.
Yeah, so that's for the opt in. We get about probably 10% of people buy the paperback book and then 90% just take the free book.
Cool. So I'm going to give you a piece of unsolicited advice that you can do really quickly on the other end. And I guarantee you it will give you a little bit of a fun little bump on the back end. Yeah, on the back. So I've done this and I've done this with. Well, I've done this for clients.
After I opt in and I come to the thank you page says, yeah, we'll send you an email to the book shortly. And then obviously I can sign up for a free consultation if I wish to. It's not mandatory on that page. Put a link to say if you would also like to download the. You know, if you would also like to get the Kindle version or paperback version on Amazon, click here. Simply give people the option after opting in to get it for free to buy it on Kindle or Amazon. And I mean on Kindle, I think you're only selling it for 99 cents, which is crazy because I've seen the book.
So it's counterintuitive that somebody who just Got the book for free in PDF version, would go and buy it on Kindle. However, many people, myself included, prefer reading on Kindle. Now you've just given it to me for free. So using the law of reciprocity, I'm thinking that's really cool, but you know, it's only 99 cents. I'll go ahead and get it on Kindle too, because I like to read it there. So I've done this with a couple clients. My friend Mike Koenigs gave me the idea.
Because he saw his book go to number one just by doing this. So he gave me this idea in a Mastermind.
Yeah.
And I did it with a couple other clients and I'm like, holy crap. People are actually getting the free book and they're going to buy the Amazon book as well.
That's amazing. I never would have thought that would happen.
I know. So it's just give people the opportunity to get it in that format because remember, it's the format. People may like the PDF, but they read their little Kindle, they want it there too.
Very great. That's huge. Thanks, Brad.
Yeah, absolutely. So I definitely. That's my only real recommendation on that. Except I may have something else. How else are you using this book as a tool to get. Because I know you have coaching clients, consulting clients. I mean, you're giving away the book.
For the majority part. So obviously the money maker for you is all the business that it can generate outside of it. What are you doing? What else are you doing to use this book as a revenue generator or something like that?
You'll love this one. So what I've done, well, there's two aspects to it. One is more like personal branding and getting my name out there and the concept out there. So for that, what I do, for any real heavy duty influences, I'll put the book in a beautiful nice red box with tissue paper and I'll put an Australian hat in there. And it's a nice, like it's got, it's got corkscrews on the front and they keep the flies out of your face and it looks really cool. And so I'll send that to a lot of influencers. I've done it to probably maybe 100 or 200 influencers already. And so most of the time when they receive it, they'll wear the hat, they'll hold the book in their hand and they'll take a photo and post it to their Facebook wall.
That's great.
And it's just brilliant. It's so cool. It's priceless advertising because you couldn't even pay those guys to be affiliates for you if you wanted to, just because they're so busy, but because you sent them a nice little gift, they're very, very happy to reciprocate and to wear the hat and take a photo of the book. So the one time it's had the most success was when I did it with a celebrity here in Australia. So there's a celebrity, there's two twins that are on TV in Australia all the time. And they came and approached me and wanted to find out more about my work and how I could help them. So I invited them into our office and they came in, we did a one hour session and at the end I said, look, can you take a photo with the book? So we took a photo with the book and then they posted it to their wall with the photo with me and them with the book. And that got over a thousand downloads in 24 hours just from that one post to their audience. They got 180,000 fans on Facebook.
Wow. Nice. That's been fantastic.
I get notified when we get book downloads and when they first posted it, I didn't know they posted it yet. And my email was going crazy. Like, what the hell's going on here? Maybe someone's hacking our system. There's just too many book orders coming through. I don't know what's going on. Then I found out when I checked Facebook that they posted it on there and it was really good.
Yeah, that's fantastic. I love that. And I love the addition of the hat because it's not just the book, it's a hat. People are like, this is great. I'm going to put this on, take a quick pic. Do you ask them to take a photo and share it or do they.
I do it directly. I write a personal message and I write in brackets. I hope you enjoy the Aussie hat brackets. It would make a great Facebook pic. So I don't directly ask them to do that because I think it's unfair, but I do. I hint at it. Yep.
No, it's perfect. And that's the kind of stuff that does end up going viral. People see what you're doing, they take a picture of it.
There's another strategy that you could do, although I really like yours with the hat because that's really amazing. But another strategy you could use, depending where you are, I guess, Australia or over here in North America. But if you're trying to get, let's say you're trying to Get a consulting client with.
A bigger company and maybe you don't have that person, maybe you don't have a contact there, but you just know who the person is. Let's just say it's a 10, 15 million, 15 million dollar company. Heck, screw that $50 million company. And you'd love to get something in front of the CEO. And you have an idea that some of the stuff that because you followed this company that some of the stuff that you offer could help that person. And you're pretty sure they're not doing it. Whether they have a website, they're not effectively capturing emails, or maybe they're not using webinars, maybe they're not using scarcity correctly or mom something in social media, anything that like a topic that's in your book. So your book is already on Amazon and are you already using Amazon's CreateSpace for the physical book? Is that how you use it?
No, I've got it now. I've got it published. So it's done by the publisher.
Oh, okay. So but is it, is the, is the physical book available on Amazon?
Yeah, you can buy it on Amazon.
Great.
So always have stock. They never order enough stock. They really.
That'S a gripe of mine. But yeah, anyway, and that doesn't even.
Matter because one of the things you can do is purchase your book for that person. So let's say any company that's doing decent money, I mean you can find the company's address online so you can find the corporate headquarters. You don't need to find somebody's home address. And let's just say you're sending this book to me, you could find my address online and you buy your own book as a gift for me. But you also Amazon will gift wrap the book assuming that it's fulfilled by Amazon. Right. So they'll gift wrap it and you can put a little card that says.
Brad.
I mean it could be very simple. Brad, I wanted you to have a copy of my best selling book because there's an idea on, there's an idea in chapter four that I think could make you some money or I think could help you out. So I'm being very specific here because your book is filled full of ideas like you don't need to buy feed a starving crowd and read it cover to cover. You could literally skip around. It's like almost like a reference book. So if you send me this book and it's gift wrapped number one, it's delivered by Amazon, so you know it's, you know it's going to be delivered to the person. Number two, if they open it up, even if the secretary opens it up, it's gift wrapped. So they're not going to open up the gift wrapping. So I'm going to get this, I'm going to unwrap it. Right. So the feeling, number one, everybody loves to get something from Amazon. Everybody loves to get something gift wrapped. Now there's your book. But I might say, so what? Who just sent me their book. But now you've got that reason why saying there's an idea in chapter four, like I followed your company. There's an idea in chapter four I think you might be able to use. Call me if you know, contact me if you want to discuss. You could even include a little link to a video that you created for them. You know, go to feed aarvingcrowd.com Brady and then you can just talk directly to me. So I love that strategy. I'm working with a client right now that we're just now about to start doing a campaign to about 10 C level executives at companies here in the US to use this. Precisely. I love the whole hat thing. I think that's awesome. But this is potentially a way that you could use this to get in front of really big consulting clients, especially if you know that they're not doing something that you recommend in your. Your book.
Yeah, very true. And I would bet if you send a 10, you would certainly get at least a few positive responses from that. Certainly. Without doubt.
Exactly. And you could even put on there in the note, if you can't use this idea, pass the book on to somebody you think might. Because remember, CEOs run with CEOs. So it's just another way since it's already on Amazon and because you've got a ton of ideas, just another kind of cool way to end up using it as a tool.
Love it.
Thanks. Now what is.
What'S okay besides just getting this book in the hands of more people? What's a nut that you're trying to crack right now or something that you could use help with in the form of resources, contacts, ideas or strategies that either myself or potentially one of my thousands of listeners who come across this, maybe it rings their bell to help you achieve another goal.
Is there any that'd be great? Well, right now our business model has always been the book and then consulting. So we haven't had a whole amount of other ways for people to work with us. So what I've decided to introduce is an online course and also A mastermind group. And so those are both launching in the next few weeks. And so, yeah, anyone that's had great experience in those different areas, I'm always happy to talk to and to learn from, definitely.
Oh, fantastic. Now are you, is the, are the online courses, is it. Who's it specifically for? Is it for people kind of just getting off the ground or is it like higher end, a little more advanced?
Yeah, it's more, it's more mid, intermediate to advanced.
Okay, so you've had some information, you've had some basic skills, but now you've got kind of a business and you're ready to ramp it up, etc.
Yeah, it's for people like, you need to know what a squeeze pays is already and you need to know about checkout processes and things like that. Like if they're new terms to you, then it's probably a bit too advanced. So it's for someone that got a business, it's got a little bit of traction and wants to take us to the next level.
That's great. And although you're in Australia, you do business worldwide, so it can be somebody anywhere that you do both consulting with and obviously the info product, am I correct?
Definitely, yeah. I've got clients all around the world.
That's fantastic. So I love, as I said, what you've done. I think every single person should go to feedastarvingcrowd.com check out the book, you can get it on paperback and the ebook for free if you just simply pay a little bit of shipping or obviously you can just get it for free by opting in and getting on Robert's newsletter list, which, as I said, I highly recommend you do it. I've went through this thing and honestly, there is more nuggets and strategies and tactics in here that I've seen in like $2,000 courses that just give you a ton of fluff. And this is all like action, action, action, action. So I think you've done a tremendous job. I've got a little bit of book envy I wish I would have written in this one.
Thanks, Brad. That's a great compliment coming from you too. Thank you.
You're absolutely welcome. For all you other folks out there listening to this.
If you like what you've heard, as I said, get his book. If you have any other questions, ideas or strategies, you can email me@askbradaconrapbusiness.com you can also share this episode on your Facebook page. You can share a picture of yourself listening to it. You can share a picture of yourself in an Australian hat with Robert's book listening to it. You can just simply share it and we would both very much appreciate that along with subscribing to the show on itunes. Robert, it has been a very big pleasure to have you on the show today. I wish you a ton of luck, although I don't think you'll have it because this is the kind of book that I think will go viral pretty well and just do an amazing job for your reputation for somebody who really knows what they're doing and is not full of, not full of fluff. So is there anything else that you'd like to.
Leave us with? Is there anything else we missed?
No. Stay strong and keep going.
Fantastic. Well, I appreciate you and your time and you listeners out there. I appreciate you as well. Forward to sharing the next episode of Bacon Wrapped business. Sizzling hot business advice just like this. Guaranteed to make some fat profits. So until next time, guys, over and out. Thanks a lot, Robert.
Thanks, Fred.
Sa.