How To Get Customers For Free Using Book Funnels And Facebook Ads

I always say that if you have one funnel or one offer or something that's making you money, but you don't have anything else, you don't actually have a business. You have a funnel, you have an offer.

Welcome to the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast, a show where we interview high voltage entrepreneurs growing and scaling through e-commerce, real estate, and other wealth without Wall Street ventures, showing you the path to making your first or next million.

All right, folks, welcome back to another High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. Look, if you want to make your ads great again, you're going to want to pay attention. If you're running ads for traffic, e-commerce, lead funnels, consulting, or some other measure of acquisition, and then you're going to want to pay attention to this. I got someone here today who's very good at it and he's done it for quite a long time at the highest levels you can imagine in our industry. And so I've got him on here today to talk about some of the things that are most passionate to him, book funnels, and we're going to go into what it means and how he's helped me on my book funnel. So thanks for joining, Hernan. I appreciate you jumping in, brother.

Thank you, Neil. Uh, it's my, it's my honor, my pleasure, and super excited to be here.

Good, man. All right, let's get, let's cut to your teeth. Where is your favorite traffic source right now? What is your favorite traffic source? Probably the best way to have it.

I would say we spend 80% of our budget on Meta ads. Meta meaning Facebook, Instagram ads. So that's where we really, we're really knee deep in.

So, okay. So you're not into alternative traffic sources and guru sources. You're not out there trying to make TikTok your, your side hustle.

Yeah, we try, like we, at our agency, we do focus, like we, we can do run, we can run ads on every major, right? Like we run ads on TikTok, we run ads on Twitter. That we actually went back to x.com, right? After the acquisition and whatnot. And now it's a much more viable platform. We run ads on Google, YouTube, but I would say 70 to 80% of our budget for ourselves and our clients go to Meta ads, Facebook, Instagram.

I tried X for a little bit and I had some trouble with it. I had really great click-through rates, clicks, all that stuff, but it just couldn't get anything to convert. I couldn't even get free opt-ins for email. I'm like, what am I doing wrong? So there's a specific psychology to that audience I hadn't figured out yet. There is really a psychology for every one of these audiences, isn't there?

Totally, totally. 100%. Yeah. X, it's, uh, it's its own like universe. This is like when you're trying to grab one working campaign and then immediately like copy and paste it to another network and then it doesn't work. Right. So because people are in different mindsets and different, they're in different wavelengths depending on the network that they're in. So yeah.

Yeah, it really is a different psychology. And when I talked about different e-commerce world endeavors like TikTok or Shopify or Amazon, people are like, well, what's the difference? It's all e-commerce. I'm like, well, there's a big difference. Like if you're trying to sell products on Amazon, it's a very different Mindset and framework of mind when people are going to buy on that very different psychology of buyer. So it's good to understand that. So what are your, what are your favorite types of funnels right now in your traffic source with your Facebook, Instagram being your primary 80%? What is your favorite kind of funnel right now?

Yeah, totally. So most of the time we run many, many types of funnels, many types of campaigns, strategies and whatnot. But most of the time, since, since we work with coaches, consultants, information businesses, we, I've done a little bit of everything in my career. I work a lot with e-com stores. I work a lot with brick and mortar businesses with SaaS companies. But over the past, I would say 6 months, 8 months, we decided to go all in on this info slash coaching space. And we basically run 2 funnels. One of them is to help these coaches sell high ticket, like their high ticket coaching programs. And that's a, what we call a short VSL funnel. It's a short presentation that goes to an application to, for people to book a call. We have this amount of success with that, but the reality is that the cost to advertise on pretty much everywhere, but specifically on Meta has been going up, right? Mm-hmm.

So those funnels Yeah, exactly.

So those funnels, they used to work really well. We're talking about 10x ROI or 8x ROI 2 years ago and whatnot, or maybe a year and a half ago. But since, since the cost to advertise have been going up, we had to more deploy more and more what we call, what I like to call acquisition funnels. And the, the, I would say the purest form or the, the most well-known form of those funnels are book funnels. And I love them when I was working. I actually learned about book funnels when I was working back with with Frank Kern and we had a, we had a digital book that we gave away and whatnot. And then the goal of those funnels is to acquire customers from ads at a break-even or better point. So that means that basically you're getting buyers, leads, and backend sales for free. So those are really powerful once they're, they're dialed in and they have their things to tweak and whatnot, but they're really, really powerful once they're dialed in, because again, they allow you to To get free buyers basically in your list, not only free leads, but also free buyers, which is way, way better in my opinion.

It's a strategy I've taken to heart. So for those of you who are listening and don't know this, we just launched our book about 3 weeks ago, Almost Automated Income with FBA. It's on Amazon. It's on our book funnel on voltage dm.com. Go check it out. Cause this guy right here has actually helped me come up with some ideas and concepts and has been consulting in the back for free. Cause he's just a generous, super awesome dude and gave me some tips to kind of get ours off the ground. And by the way, at the time of shooting this, we made our first sale on that funnel this morning. So it actually started off, uh, rather well. So I'm actually excited. And the funny part is I couldn't track it back to an ad. So it just came in organically. So there you go. So we're off and running. I'm definitely gonna have you, um, help me some more. But what are the, like, I'm understanding the concept of, uh, transfer of authority and books still from a transfer of authority, how they have a lot of it, especially with people getting even a digital or a paperback version, depending upon who they are and how they read and how they consume. Um, what are some of the other things you see, uh, and why you have really loved the book funnel and, and Is there really a lower cost per CPM doing this kind of model?

That's a great, that's a great question. And as you mentioned, people like books, they love books, they understand books, they get books. And books are like a way better, way better presentation card or a way better—

It's her business card, right?

Yeah, it's a business card. It's a better business card. Yeah. So, so that's, that's the, that's the deal there. But the reality is that while we might see kind of similar CPMs, right, or kind of similar, maybe a little bit lower CPMs. When it comes to running ads to these books funnel, these book funnels, the difference between getting a lead, like a lot of people run traffic to lead magnets or lead generation campaigns and whatnot. The difference between getting a lead and getting a buyer, even if they're paying you, I don't know, $10, $15, $20, or the free plus shipping kind of model, the difference is enormous, like in terms of quality, in terms of responsiveness and whatnot. And there's some additional elements to that book funnel that make it like super cool, just the book, it's not enough, right? Like you have your book, you've written your book and now you publish it and whatnot, but you need some additional elements in that book funnel that some people need to, or, or it takes more work upfront to make that happen. But at the end of the day, in my opinion, once it's up and running, it's way better than just sending traffic to a lead magnet or webinar or something like that.

So. Yeah, it does do a certain amount of Quality of transfer. If someone's willing to either listen to a podcast, in my experience, watch a podcast VSL that's at least 50 minutes in length and/or acquire a book or an asset that gives them more knowledge and information, they typically are not only more educated as a buyer, they have gone through a certain process of defining what's quality over quantity. And they know what's make money over actual business and consulting. And they are by all intents and purposes, much more quality leads and quality candidates. It's not just the amount of leads and candidates in my experience. It's also the quality of that candidate to actually do the business. Execute the business, work with tenacity and perseverance and grit and actually get some success out of it because they take personal responsibility. And I found you gate those people upfront enough and then they're willing to take responsibility for their business and model. Is that what you found too?

Yeah, totally. 100%. I think, I think that you're spot on there. And we also see that these people are more responsive. They're, they're easier to sell something else, right? Because they're already in the market for something that would be valuable for them. So I think that the true value of a book slash acquisition funnel, you can achieve something like this with a mini course or a program or something like that. It doesn't have to be a book, but I prefer the book. But the goal of that is always to ascend people into something else, right? To offer them more value with your higher ticket type of products and programs and whatnot. So yeah, I totally found that to be, to be the case. They are more responsive on the phone. They just jump on calls. They're more educated. It's Easier to, to, to sell them something else. And they're more invested at the end of the day. So.

They are more invested at the end of the day. And that's, that's quality of leads. And the way we do business is not just quantity. And a lot of people do that. I'm really more interested in just working with a small group of people who are serious than trying to make some sort of mass marketing opportunity present itself. Those are great. They can help. And I'm not saying don't do that. I'm just saying there are different ways to elevate your business for longevity than just short-term gains. And I see there's so much in the internet world. Where you can make short-term gains, right? That people lose sight of building a real business. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, totally. 100%. I always say that if you have one funnel or one offer or something that's making you money, but you don't have anything else, you don't actually have a business. You have a funnel, you have an offer, right? And again, a lot of people like, they go that route, which is I'm going to try to make as much money as possible right now from my ads, right? That's, that's where we Yeah. Come in and I'm going to forfeit like brand or goodwill or more money over the long run just because I'm trying to get as much money as possible right now, which is possible. Like we have some really, really successful, really successful acquisitions and book funnels, but it changes the math of a business in terms of how many customers you can acquire, at what velocity you can acquire them, how much you can fill out the rest of the things that you have going on, like group coaching programs, events. One-on-one masterminds, like whatever you can think of, you can, you can go that route of acquiring customers over the internet for free. And then you send them into whatever you have in the backend.

Yeah. But even not for free, I mean, you, you were a student, I believe a client of Dan Kennedy's or vice versa. He's a client of yours. And he famously said, if you can't acquire a customer, you don't have a business. Right. So yeah, we got to take the acquisition concept and not only just free, but acquisition smartly, uh, more profitable to business, of course. And you've understood that on scale. With being a CMO with Frank Kern's, right? Business when you were working with him. So that on scale too, right?

No, I mean, and, and, and to your point, when it comes to free versus paid, we are just to be clear, we are acquiring customers. We are paying for each customer that's coming in, right? Right now, what we're seeing on the B2B space is anywhere between $50 to $60 per buyer. And if you think about it, if you are getting buyers for, you're charging $15, $20 for your book or free plus shipping minus the book costs and whatnot. Then you think about, okay, I'm paying $50 here. How can I liquidate the ad cost? That's where some upsells come to play, right? So after people buy the book, a proverbial book funnel, proverbial acquisition funnel, what we're seeing right now is you have the book or you have the mini course or your first offer. Then you have 1 or 2 order bumps, which are like little things that you can add, like cheat sheets, maybe a call that you did with your mastermind group, like little things that people can add to their, to their shopping cart as they're checking out, right? That's another bump. And then you have upsells. And then the upsells are basically, I like to have one, maybe 2 upsells. And the upsells are basically additional material that they can add to the book. So if you have a book and if you have a course attached to the book, then you can sell that as your first or second upsell. If you have a low ticket continuity program, which are really popular right now, you can have that as a second upsell and they work really well. So it enables you to have some additional offers. Because at the end of the day, there's 2 metrics that matter on these type of book funnels, especially from paid advertising. The first metric is your cost to acquire a customer, how much you're paying on ads to acquire new customers. The second metric is the average order value on that book funnel. In other words, how much money people are spending on that first point of transaction, right? So if your cost to acquire a customer is lower than your average order value, then that means that you can scale that book funnel. You can still spend more money on ads. Because at the end of the day, while you can make money on these book funnels, the goal is to break even, right? So if you're spending $20,000 a month on this, on this funnel, then the goal is in 30 days or less to get those $20,000 back so that basically you're liquidating the ACoS. So that's what, what was I referring to when I was talking about free products?

Yeah, just give me an idea that we've done a lot of, you know, free workshops to bring people into a know, like, and trust relationship, and then extend them an invite to one of our other offers to see if there's something they want to go faster at, gas to It's a relatively good way to, to transfer authority, create that know relationship, that like relationship and trust without actually selling anybody. And that's how I prefer to do things because so many people have that like buy my crap sign up constantly, which drives me nuts. Right. But you just gave me an idea on the fly for using the book as a lead magnet to get them into the free workshop to show up with the book and actually do the workshop. So I'm probably going to test that out too.

Yeah, totally, man. In fact, sometimes or many times what we recommend our clients, many clients, they, they do have a lot of material like you do, right? And you can actually grab all of those workshops that you did and maybe like package them. And even if they've been free in the past, you can actually package them and sell them as a bump on the order.

Yeah.

Or an order bump. Like we do that. We do that quite a lot, especially because we give, we give people like insider access of how, how we conduct a group coaching session with our higher ticket clients or group client, group coaching clients. So that could be a good order bump. That could be a good— most entrepreneurs, they have a lot of things going on. They have a lot of things like laying around, like you have cheat sheets. You have SOPs that you put together for your company, right? You have training material that you've done for your team, right? All of those things are super valuable, extremely valuable. And those can be added to your book funnel to actually push up that average order value so that you can actually scale.

So. That's a lot of ideas. My brain is over here just like taking notes and exploding ideas. I got to figure out where to find the time to get it executed. What are, what are the things that are you're most interested in in the coming year? Obviously book funnels, but what are you excited about? Is there something that, you know, It's got you really fired up right now. Some success story you've got, something that makes you, something you want to talk about?

Yeah, totally. So, so, so, so for example, we had 2 coaches over the past, I would say 3, 4 weeks that we implemented book funnels for them or acquisition funnels rather. And their math completely changed, right? So, so their funnel math completely changed. We had this client that he was getting a 1.5x ROI on a traditional VSL funnel for his high ticket coaching program. So. He wasn't really making any money because after commissions and Stripe processing fees and all of that, he wasn't making any money. So we implemented a book funnel. He went from that to 3.8, I think, or 4x ROI just by doing that, that one change. But one of the things that I'm really, really excited about is the usage and the use of AI into these. That's huge because what we are doing with every book buyer or every front-end buyer that we have is we try to reach out to them. So we call them, we text them, right? We have an actual person. Reaching out to those, to those people, like an appointment setter, an SDR, reaching out to those people, asking them more questions, giving them more value, but also trying to, to get them to talk to one of our specialists and whatnot. And that process, we are starting to use a lot more AI to semi-automate that process. So when, when a book buyer, a front-end buyer, even a lead comes in, we can reach out to them automatically via text, via Instagram, via Facebook, via WhatsApp, et cetera, et cetera. And they, we can prequalify those leads. We can ask them more questions, give them more resources. And then if they're ready and they want to know more about what else we can offer to them, then we book them on an appointment. So that is something that we have started implementing for all of our clients. And, and since we're running ads, we need to be really effective with those leads that our clients are paying for. So adding AI when they don't have a small army of salespeople or SDRs to reach out to these folks. That is actually increasing their revenue just by adding those, those AI elements.

Very, very cool. So on the e-commerce side, I know you do some of this work, but just thinking out loud and an ebook that's tied to the niche that you're in that leads people to your Amazon product, your Shopify product, your TikTok shop. I mean, really at the front end, if you're going to do some sort of lead acquisition, that really could work at the end of the day, couldn't it?

Yeah. Yeah, totally. Totally. And I think that for e-com, there's a lot of opportunities to create these acquisition funnels as well, because at the end of the day, when you have an e-com store, Of course you have the added challenge or the added number that you need to discount for cost of goods sold and all of that, that the info product, the info space doesn't have, the coaching space don't have.

Correct.

But you can totally do that. Like, in fact, I've known some big e-com brands that they scaled with information upfront, right? Like either a course or a workshop or an ebook or something like that, information upfront. And then that was quote unquote an excuse to offer them their main product line. It could be 3 for the price of, of 2 or more of, more of the same generally works really, really well on e-com when it comes to these multi-step funnels. And at the end of the day, the goal on that case will be to liquidate the ad costs, but also liquidate how much it's costing you to ship out these products.

Right.

And additionally, I've seen a lot of, a lot of people implement subscription models on the second upsell or the first upsell. It's like, hey, you can subscribe to our thing and that's, that's residual recurring income. But at the end of the day, the goal of this funnel, the goal of such a funnel would be to liquidate the ad costs, get free buyers, free leads so that you can sell them something else with email or SMS.

Really build a list, build an asset base of people that are buying your product.

Yeah.

Which is a great way to do it. Well, look, man, your wealth of knowledge, you guys, if you didn't gain anything from today's call, you probably weren't paying attention to anything he just said. So if you're on the e-com world, you got an idea, you got an ebook, you got a concept, even go out and use like ChatGPT. To go help you create an ebook. That doesn't take very long anymore. There's a couple of tutorials on YouTube that can help you with that. Add the value, give away the value, and then recommend people buy the product to solve whatever problem is being solved. Problem, reaction, solution. Let your product be the solution. Create the problem in their mind with the book. Get them to react. Give them the solution, right? It's not a hard concept. You just have to remember to stay in front of your avatar. So if you understand the book, you understand the concept, you understand the funnels. If you're a lead or consultant, or even if you're a real estate broker or an agent or anybody who's in And wanting to acquire people into those models, you can follow this along too, right? What are the top 3 things you need to do to get into the real estate market this year when interest rates are so high?

Write an ebook.

Fuck it.

Right?

Give it out. Give it out to people. These are the new business cards.

Great tips.

Great suggestions. Great advice. You are very good. Where could people go find How to Make Ads Great Again?

Well, if you go to makemyadsgreatagain.com, there's a message there. That's, that's for my, for my digital marketing agency. And then Hernan Vasquez in all socials, you can find me and we put a lot of good content out as well.

Guys, he's helped me out with some great tips and things that I've done on my book launch recently. And so I would highly advise you go check them out, listen to this podcast. And if you want a copy of my ebook, I'm going to do a shameless plug for a minute. You ready for this? Okay. It is 60% less than the Amazon price right now in my book funnel. Go to voltage dm.com/book, grab a copy of that. There are a couple of upsells that might help you out. And then of course you can reach out to me and connect with me if you think that's a good idea. Guys, thank you so much for joining me. Hernan, thank you so much for your information, brother.

Thank you, Neil. It's been awesome. Thank you.

Let me ask you this. If you're serious about building an e-commerce business starting on Amazon FBA, what if myself and my team worked with you one-on-one to execute the steps outlined in the podcast while helping you discover what the heck to sell, how to make sure it's profitable, and how to successfully launch a brand? Plus, How to do it under a consulting plus performance-driven model where I put a $10,000 skin-in-the-game guarantee for those that show up and are serious about building a real business done with us? If yes, text keyword profit to +1-417-413-4209. That's 1-417-413-4209, and I will personally respond with a few simple questions. If you're not in the US or Canada, please visit voltage dm dot com. That's voltage dm dot com. Click Get Started and book a no-pressure discovery call with me or a member of my team to learn more about the Business Builders one-on-one coaching and mentoring for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and those looking to build an empire or retire using the power of e-commerce. Once again, thank you for listening, and be sure to tune in next week for a brand new episode of the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast.