Feed A Starving Crowd

With no marketing budget, we organized for thousands of people across four continents to give one an- other high fives, and the Facebook following quickly grew to over 130,000 fans.

Right now, I'm at E-Web Marketing; we're a mid-sized online marketing agency, and officially, one of the best places to work in Australia. With table tennis, pool, trampolines, and an office dog, it's certainly a lot of fun! Channel Seven in Australia came to visit our Sydney office and filmed it

As a marketer, if you can uncover these reasons and use them in your marketing copy, you’re well on the way to feeding your starving crowd.

My friend Alexi Neocleous, a legendary copywriter, taught me a lot about getting to the bottom of pain points to find the starving crowd. There’s some fascinating stories about how to uncover these in Chapter 4—keep your eye out for them!

A "ninja" way to find a starving crowd is to look at relevant forums and find what people are complaining about. Look at Amazon book reviews. The reviews for the book give valuable clues for what people were looking for when buying the book.

Let me share the story of how I found a big pain point in Amazon. I was recently reading up on self-publishing and I came across a book called APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur—How to Publish a Book by Guy Kawasaki.

Before buying the book, I was reading the reviews. (Don’t we all?) One of the reviews was very detailed and gave the book only three stars. The reviewer was critical that the book didn’t provide much help for unknown first-time authors.

A side note: In my opinion, three-star ratings are the best to use for market research. Anyone who gives a one-star or a five-star rating is biased. Three-stars seems to be the sweet spot where the reviewer has considered the book, enjoyed some parts of it, but has constructive criticism.

Back to the reviewer's comments. An "aha moment" came to me that help for unknown authors is a huge concern and pain point for anyone who is wanting to write a book from scratch and self-publish it. Authors want to learn how to sell the first 100 copies or so of their books. They’ve got no marketing budget, but they’ve got plenty of time, and they’re not scared to do menial tasks to get their books out there.

And they’re passionate about their books—each one thinks his or her book is the best thing anyone has ever written. Fair enough; it probably is. Selling information products to bootstrapping authors is definitely feeding a starving crowd.

Guerilla methods to identify the shortcomings in your competitor's products

When online marketer Eben Pagan was single and looking for tips on how to meet "Miss Right", all of the books out there were teaching you what to do once you were already in a relationship. Eben’s problem at the time was that he couldn’t get a relationship happening in the first place! It’s no good reading about how to have a better relationship if you don’t have one, right? There was nothing out there that taught you how to get a date. That's why he wrote the book "Double your dating" and started his $100 million information marketing empire.

Dr. Libby (women's health expert) looked at all of the cookbooks on the bookshelves and found that there was a huge gap in the market for healthy recipes that were easy to prepare and tasted great! So she wrote Dr. Libby’s Real Food Chef, which is about healthy food that tastes delicious. This book became a #1 bestseller for over twelve months straight, and there is now a Real Food Chef book series in production.

Action Exercise: Go right now to Amazon and search for the books relevant to your business and its niche. Out of the highest selling books, look at the three-star reviews. Find out what disappointed people in the book and write down the five most common complaints below. Here is your chance to serve your starving crowd.

1. ________________________
2. ________________________
3. ________________________
4. ________________________
5. ________________________

1. ________________________
2. ________________________
3. ________________________
4. ________________________
5. ________________________
6. ________________________
7. ________________________
8. ________________________
9. ________________________
10. ________________________
11. ________________________
12. ________________________
13. ________________________
14. ________________________
15. ________________________
16. ________________________
17. ________________________
18. ________________________
19. ________________________
20. ________________________

In Chapter 6, I will show you how to contact these affiliates in the best way possible, but for now, just write down your list.

Why is scarcity good?

If there’s something you really want, and you think it’s in rapidly diminishing supply, you’ll do anything to get it RIGHT NOW! It’s what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “loss aversion.” His theories are quite complex, but the root of them is that people are far more strongly motivated to act to avoid a loss than to gain something. Someone who misses out on an exclusive ticket loses more satisfaction than someone who gains satisfaction from a $100 windfall.

A note of caution: This scarcity stuff is really powerful, and it’s extremely important that you use it for noble and worthwhile causes. Nothing stinks more than a fake scarcity campaign where people say something like “There’s only ten available” when there’s really an unlimited quantity available. People know when you’re faking it, so don’t do it!

A closely guarded scarcity marketing tactic from the 1600s that still works today

The earliest example of scarcity marketing is the sixteenth century “tulip bubble” that occurred in Holland. When tulips were first introduced to the Dutch from Turkey in 1593, they were a novelty that quickly became popular and, therefore, somewhat expensive. Then the tulips contracted a non-fatal virus, “mosaic,” that didn’t kill but altered them so that they had streaks of different colors appearing on their petals, creating a variety of patterns that made them more rare. With tulip bulbs already selling at a premium, those altered by the virus became even more desirable.

At the free book resources page, there's a link so you can download the sequence and flow chart of the campaign. There was a lot of complexity, and it's easier to understand when you can see it all zoomed up.

Here's some examples of how much copy we wrote for a recent national speaking tour campaign:

• Video script for registration page (500 words)
• Cover letter to send out tickets in the mail (283 words)
• Landing page for free opt-in (301 words)
• Registration page (2,104 words)
• Seventeen follow-up emails to get registrations (3,400 words)
• Five "stick" emails to ensure people actually attend the event (1,304 words)

Total: Over 7,900 words

You need a lot of copy to drive people to take an action.

Two lessons I learnt from the world's top copywriter

About ten years ago, I learnt two very valuable lessons. I've used these lessons very successfully ever since. These lessons are so obvious, but so brilliant at the same time.

Lesson #1: Your readers are bored.

Lesson #2: Everyone reads your copy by himself at his computer.

You can apply these two lessons in tandem. Most people are bored at work, bored at home, bored when they go out. It's all just too boring. When they are browsing around on the web and they come across your brilliant content, you are actually doing them a favour by providing something that is interesting.

And everyone is alone when he or she is reading your sales copy. You're not talking to an audience of 1,000 people. You're having a personal conversation with one person. What does this mean? It means you can get emotional, and it means you should write your copy with the frame of mind you would have in writing a personal letter to a friend.

Templates and "fill-in-the-blank" headlines plus strategies for writing good headlines

While I was writing this book, I interviewed Alexi Neocleous, one of Australia's top copywriters. Alexi is the man behind a lot of high-profile campaigns, and he's on the speed dial of many top online marketers.

The first thing I asked him was "If I strip away every single headline and little tip and trick you've got and only leave you with one headline to use, what would that be?"

Without taking a breath, he said it would be the "How to" headline. The reason why is that it's the most universally applicable and diverse headline there is—because it promises to offer a solution. It promises to solve a problem; it promises to give information.

Alexi recommends to use the headline "how to—insert benefit"

How to lose five pounds. How to grow ripe red tomatoes. How to get at the top of Google. Or it could be how to solve a pain. How never again to slice a golf ball. Or how to cure frustrating slicing. How to put an end to your kids' ADD.

So that's the absolute basic one. Then as markets evolve, and people have seen your claims before, you need to start adding specifics—for example, specific claims, specific proof, etc.

As an example, "How to lose five kilos" is really a claim that's been said many times. But you can do: How to lose five kilos by eating more butter. How to lose five kilos by eating twice as much bread as you are now. How to lose five kilos without ever exercising for more than a minute per day.

These little specifics add surprise to the main benefits and lead people to ask themselves, "Wow, what's that about? I haven't seen that before."

The key to a great headline is surprise.

If someone is surprised, he will want to read more. And then you've done your job.