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This feed was archived on October 02, 2018 01:43 (
Why? Inactive feed status. Our servers were unable to retrieve a valid podcast feed for a sustained period.
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Every now and then I needs a marketing boost. Interviewing Robert Coorey gave me that boost!
Robert talks about failure and how every entrepreneur needs to embrace failure to learn and move forward.
Robert and I have a riveting discussion about the content of his new book “Feed a Starving Crowd”.
What I love about this interview is that there are GOLD nuggets of you to implement in your business today. Robert goes into detail about the “launch webinar” strategy and crushes the myth of not having a list (EVERYONE has a list).
Robert Coorey, MBA is a #1 Best-selling author, TV Pilot Host and wildly successful marketer. Recently listed by Startup Australia as one of Australia’s Top 50 Entrepreneurs.
You can download Rob’s latest book from the link below:
http://www.feedastarvingcrowd.com
Robert enjoys regular media appearances and has been featured on TV and Radio for expert commentary on business and marketing.
Robert is the co-creator and lead presenter of the upcoming Reality TV Pilot called “Business Rescue.” The TV Pilot takes struggling companies through a maze of marketing challenges over 30 days.
Robert is well-known as the “go-to” guy when you need to fill out a live event with “bums on seats.” He has successfully secured tens of thousands of registrants to live events in the last 12 months alone.
Robert is the Director of Global Business at E-Web Marketing, Australia’s top online marketing agency. He’s obsessed with helping others achieve unheard of results through innovative strategies to feed starving crowds of consumers. On several occasions, Robert has sent so much traffic to websites that they have fallen over and crashed, despite the largest of servers being in place.
Transcript
[transcript height=”200px”]
Automated Voice: How the heck do you use Infusionsoft? How do you make it work for you? Welcome to Infusioncast the only podcast that shows you the tricks of the trade and teaches you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. Join your host, Joshua Millage as he sits down with Infusionsoft pros to hear their stories and experiences making Infusionsoft work for them. Ready? Here’s Joshua.
Joshua Millage: Hello everyone and welcome to the Infusioncast podcast, the only podcast that teaches you to be an Infusionsoft expert. Our guest today is Robert Coorey. Robert is the number one bestselling author of “Feed a Starving Crowd” and is a reality TV show pilot host. He’s also a wildly successful marketer and recently he was listed as Australia’s top fifty entrepreneurs. Robert, welcome to the show.
Robert Coorey: Hey, good to be here Josh.
Joshua Millage: Well, I’m excited because I don’t get a lot of opportunities to interview authors who are really-I mean you’ve told be in the pre-interview that you’ve worked with Infusionsoft, but I love the fact that you have a much more macro perspective of the marketing world. This is going to be a lot of fun because I think your book can help so many of the people that are listening right now.
I would love to start off with where your book starts off, with this mindset around dealing with failure, because I think that marketing is so much of an art, as well as a science and we have to be okay with things not working. Tell me a little bit about your story and how you’ve kind of adopted this mindset.
Robert Coorey: Yeah, well the reason I wrote the book in the first place it was to really clarify all things I’ve experienced throughout my marketing career. I’ve started businesses before that have failed, I’ve worked at businesses that have been fantastic and everything in the middle as well. Just to give you a few examples, the best way to answer that question is really to look at where I started from. The first business that I ran was a DJ business when I was sixteen. I put my ad in yellow pages, it cost me a thousand dollars, and I was able to get four inquiries straightaway for that DJ business, which paid back for the advertising cost.
Then I realized that, hey, you can actually put an ad into the yellow pages and someone that doesn’t know you can read that ad, call you up, and give you their credit card details on the phone. This is pretty cool. This is how advertising works. I love it. Ever since then I’ve really dug deep and tried to find out everything that I can about advertising and marketing and how to really influence people to buy things and it’s progressed over my entire career. I’ve worked in big businesses, worked in some Fortune 100 companies. I’ve worked in small businesses. I’ve started my own businesses.
What I realized was when I heard this story from Gary Halbert about feeding a starving crowd, like if you were going to have a hamburger stand and somebody else was going to have a hamburger stand, and you could have one advantage over them, you’d pick a starving crowd. It doesn’t matter what the other advantage is, if you had a starving crowd and they didn’t, then you would win.
Joshua Millage: Right. I love that story.
Robert Coorey: Sorry. Yeah. Then I applied that back to all the businesses that I’ve worked in and which ones worked and which ones didn’t work and I realized every single time that I wasn’t feeding a starving crowd then the business didn’t work very well, but when I was feeding a starving crowd, the business worked out fantastically.
Joshua Millage: The trick then is really finding that starving crowd, right?
Robert Coorey: Yeah, very true. Do you want me to give you an example of one time of where it hasn’t worked and when I had a failure?
Joshua Millage: Yeah, I would love to hear that. I think we learn so much more from failure than we do success, so let’s start there.
Robert Coorey: Okay, so about five years ago I thought that I would start up a video production business and I didn’t know anything about video production, but I knew that it was a rising trend for online to have videos on your website and to put them on YouTube and Vimeo and those kind of places. I knew that businesses needed it, so what I did was I setup the business and I got a couple of freelance video guys to do the work for me and then I went out to businesses and I said, “Hey, look, you need to make some videos for your business. I can get it all setup for you. Here’s the price. Let’s do it. You need to do this, everyone else is doing it.”
It was like pushing shit uphill, so what happened was was that I was too early in the market place, people were still getting used to the idea of video. It wasn’t as prominent as it was today and it was so hard to sell on. I spent the whole year working very, very hard trying to sell video production services and I found out at the end of the year, I looked at my tax return, that I only made thirty-thousand dollars and I’ve never worked so hard in my whole life. Then I realized, look, I’m just not delivering [inaudible 00:04:51] to the marketplace yet, for whatever the reason is they just don’t want what I’m selling. I’m not feeding a starving crowd.
Then I looked at all the times where business was effortless. It’s never easy, but there are times where you get momentum and it’s a lot easier to run businesses, as you know. They were the times when I was actually feeding a starving crowd and I reflect on a few of those examples a lot in the book.
Joshua Millage: Well, let me ask you this, because I think a lot of people that we’ve worked with at codeBOX have a unique ability to look at failure as data, really. They look at it like, “Oh, that’s something that didn’t work,” but they don’t take it like personally. They don’t internalize it like, “Oh, I’m a failure. I’m worthless” and that sort of thing. I have a quote here from Josh Waitzkin, he was in, I think the movie was “Finding Bobby Fischer,” he was the chess phenom, and he says, “You should always come off an injury or a loss better than you went down.” What do you think of that quote? Does that resonate with you?
Robert Coorey: Love it. Love it.
Joshua Millage: Yeah. As I read through your book I saw that you kind of did that, man. I love that you would look at something and you’re like, “Okay, what’s there to learn here” and then move on and stay in motion. I think you, I’m probably going to mess the quote up, but was it Gary Halbert who said, “Movement is better than meditation?”
Robert Coorey: That’s it.
Joshua Millage: Yeah.
Robert Coorey: Gary was a great mentor of mine when I was getting started. It’s so sad that he’s passed away, but he was just amazing.
Joshua Millage: Do you think that’s the cure there, to becoming better off a loss or an injury, is moving back into another test I guess you could say or another strategy?
Robert Coorey: Definitely. I’m more of a future oriented person, so I’m always looking forward to what’s next and what’s coming up, rather than reflecting back on the past. That mindset is extremely important and the other mindset that is also important is, like as you start to build your personal brand, so since I’ve released this book and I’ve started to put out courses and start my own Facebook group and things like that and do more media and TV shows, the thing is when you put your personal brand out there then you’re making yourself open to being personally criticized, rather than just hiding behind the company. That’s a whole different level of mindset as well that you need to get around to be successful in that industry.
Joshua Millage: How have you done that, because that’s fascinating to me? I mean, I’ve experienced that a little bit, even with this podcast, but what are some of the things you would say to someone who’s dealing with “haters” out there?
Robert Coorey: Yeah, it’s tough. It’s very tough when you’re getting started because most people that start their own personal brand and start doing coaching and consulting and advisory, they’ve got good intentions. Most of us are really nice people and we like to be liked. It just doesn’t feel very nice when someone say’s bad things about you. It does get easier as time goes on, so the first one that you cop is very hard, it’s pretty brutal, and then over time you might learn to just come take it with a grain of salt. I compare it to, like sometimes whenever I feel it’s getting a bit tough and people are giving you hard, I then might read the paper and see how bad the prime minister or the president’s getting nailed every single day.
Then you realize, well, you know what, the more influential that you become, that means that the more people are going to have opinions of what you’re doing, whether it’s a positive opinion or a negative opinion. It means you’re becoming relevant as well. For anyone to actually take the effort to make a comment regarding what you’re doing or write a review, that means that you’re relevant and people care about you and what you’re doing is making an impact.
Joshua Millage: That’s such a positive way of looking at any sort of response, positive or negative, is I’m rippling the water here and people are responding.
Robert Coorey: Yeah. Sometimes it is even funny, right? Sometimes you read some of the comments and they’re just very, very funny. Even Brendon Burchard says, sometimes he might start a talk by showing some negative reviews he’s had on his Amazon books and he’ll make it into a joke where everybody laughs about it. He’s actually using negative-
Joshua Millage: I apologize for the technical difficulties here. My next question is a lot of the people in the audience are small businesses, so let’s give them some ideas of places to start with a marketing strategy, because that’s what I really enjoyed about the progression of your book and how you built on things like advertising and then you talked about copy writing. Then you’ve gone into different launch sequences and that sort of thing. I really love the kind of the vision and all the things that you cover, because it’s so important to people to not get, I guess you could say, fall in love with or become addicted to one thing.
I’ve seen that so many times, it’s like someone gets in their brain that it is like SCO is the answer and that’s it and nothing else could ever work for them, it’s only SCO. It’s like, well, maybe you should invest dollars elsewhere. Where would you tell someone to start, if they really don’t have any strategy, they’re just kind of throwing things against the wall? What would be the 101?
Robert Coorey: Okay. I’ll assume that they’ve already chosen what product they’re going to sell and who they’re going to sell to. We’ll assume that. Then the question is how to get the word out there. Essentially, if you’re just getting started and you want to validate if this is a good idea or not, what we can do is what we call a launch webinar. You collect all your different lists together, and a lot of people will say to me, “Rob, I haven’t got a list.” Well, actually you do have a list; you’ve got [inaudible 00:10:33] contacts, you’ve got email contacts, you’ve got business cards, you’ve got Facebook friends, you’ve got LinkedIn contacts, Twitter followers.
Everyone’s got a list, no matter how big or small it is and what format that it is in, you do have a list. You collect that list together and then you let them know that you’re going to be holding an online seminar or webinar in the next week and this is the topic that it is covering and this is what you’ll learn. Then you go in to that webinar, you train people on what you want to train them on, give them a bit of information about your new product or your service that you’re offering, and then you make an offer. You can say, “Here’s what the offer is, this is the deal for today. If you’re interested let me know or you can buy now.”
That’s a real cheap and easy way to validate a new business idea. You don’t have to have the product ready. I’ve done this before a product was even ready. The first time I did this was three years ago, so we wanted to launch a new training course, “How to Start an Online Business.” I didn’t know what people would pay for it, if anyone would buy it, none of that stuff. I said “Okay, look why don’t we just send an email out to our database.” We had all lists everywhere, it was a mess, so we collected them altogether. We put a message out saying we’re holding an online seminar next week, this is the topic, come along.
With all that kind of manual labor and getting out hands dirty, we’ve got five-hundred people to attend the webinar. I gave training for about forty-five minutes, gave some good tips and at the end I said, “Look, we’re going to be holding a five week online course. It starts in two weeks time. Here’s all the details. This is what you’ll learn and this is the price, it’s a thousand bucks.” I had eight people buy it out of the five-hundred, so we made eight-thousand dollars from that launch start. Now some people might say, “Eight-thousand dollars that’s not very much money, Rob. You know, that’s a real good launch” or “You only converted eight out of five-hundred, what’s going on there?”
Well, you know what, sometime-and they’re right, it’s not a whole lot of money, but it did validate the idea. You know, eight people pulled out their credit cards and purchased it and four-hundred and ninety-two didn’t. That’s okay. I spent one week on the whole thing, start to finish, because the training courses were only an hour long each. I totaled up all my hours, it was forty-hours of work for eight-thousand dollars. Now if you made eight-thousand dollars every single week, going forward, that’s not a bad income. You know that’s four-hundred thousand for the year. That’s not too bad. Most people would take that if you pointed it out that way.
Joshua Millage: I love that and I love how you’re focusing on the positive there with the validation that people were willing to pull out their wallets and spend some money with you. That right there is great data for building something else that’s potentially reoccurring or a different sort of product launch in the same sort of area. There’s a lot of positive things to gain and it’s all in how you look at it. Some could be, oh that was a failure at that conversion rate and that price point or could look at it as, no it’s a success, look at the time in and what you just said, you know, it’s a four-hundred thousand dollar a year opportunity if I could do this every week and that sort of thing.
I think like the best marketers use that as a fuel to the fire and they use that as a motivation to keep going and keep trying and I love the idea. I think one of things you just mentioned is so important for all the audience listeners to get, which is consider pre-selling, because it can take so much risk out of the equation of building anything. That’s absolutely brilliant. Tell me a little bit about copy writing, because you spend a lot of time in the book about that. Why is copy so important? I mean we hear it all the time in the marketing world, but for a lot of us it’s like, oh, so you just mean I have to write some words on paper? I feel like it is so much more than that.
Robert Coorey: Yeah, copy’s key and the two biggest mistakes that I’m seeing businesses make with their copy is when they competing in a saturated market or a mature market, let’s say it’s the weight loss market or the real estate market or the business market, any of those kind of categories that have a lot of competition and have been around for a long time, what you need to do is to use curiosity in your copy. If you’re just saying the same things that everybody else is saying, then it’s pretty bland and pretty boring and no one’s going to buy what you’re offering.
I’ll give you an example, so let’s talk about the weight loss industry for a second. Say you’ve an ad and it says how to lose ten pounds, so everybody’s seen that kind of claim before, that’s nothing new in the marketplace. However, if we just keep that same ad, but add another sentence at the end of it, so if we say, how to lose ten pounds…by eating more cake. Now that completely changes that marketing message and you’re going to get a lot of people that click on it. The reason is because there’s curiosity built in, because what does every single nutritionist and health professional tell you? Don’t eat cake.
It’s the first thing that they teach you to do when you’re trying to take a weight loss course or do any kind of nutritional information for yourself. If we can have a marketing message that is counter intuitive and is the opposite of what everybody else is saying in the marketplace, as long as you can fulfill that, that’s the caveat here, you need to be able to fulfill that. If you have something that’s very different and you can fulfill, then that changes everything.
Joshua Millage: Right, yeah that’s a great headline. I’ve always been told that the purpose of a headline is to really just get them to read the next line and so forth through the entire advertisement or sales letter or what have you. I like that, curiosity. I don’t think we think about that angle to take in our headlines.
Robert Coorey: Yeah. Another thing that’s important, while we’re on this hot topic, is about testimonials and also how to deliver that. What I’m finding is the most effective form of copy, today, is storytelling. That can apply across any of the different marketing channels that you use, whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, whether it’s your email database, whether it’s blogging, whether it’s getting postings on different people’s websites, storytelling is the number one way to make these things work properly.
I’ll tell you a few reasons why that’s the case, and this is not coming from me just saying that, this is from so much data, I’ve had forty-thousand people registered for different live events and seminars in the last four months and predominately using storytelling. The first reason why it is so impactful is because it doesn’t feel like selling, it just feels like explaining the story of how someone got to where they got to. It kind of flies under the radar of not being an advertisement for your business, which is nice.
The second thing is it makes it more Facebook proof and Google proof and by that I mean Facebook is getting a lot tougher on the different ads you can put out there or they really don’t like you putting things to squeeze pages where there’s no value there, it’s just, you know, a photo of a book and email box, they don’t like that kind of stuff at all. If you’re telling stories and you’re sending people to content, that’s a very different proposition. They’re very, very happy to have that because that’s kind of the nature of social media, it’s about people sharing stuff that’s interesting.
Joshua Millage: Yeah, that’s a great tip. I recently read a story about stories and one of things I’m realizing is that it’s also very primal because that’s how we’ve transferred information since the paleolithic era, is through stories. We’d tell our children about the stories of, you know, say, the bear in the woods because we wanted them to understand that that could hurt you. It’s almost like we’re ingrained to let stories come into our brains so much easier than if we tag something as a marketing message and go, oh, I don’t want to be sold right now. Oh, but I’ll listen to a story and if that story has persuasive triggers in it, that is fantastic.
I never even thought of the Google proof or Facebook proof, but you’re so right about that and they’re getting extremely good at basically just blacklisting anyone who’s over overtly spamming or anything like that, so it’s a fantastic tip. I love that.
Robert Coorey: Yeah, well we have to do this because the clients that I work with, they give us huge marketing budgets, we have to make it work. We have to be accountable for the spend. We have to stay on the forefront of all the different things that Google and Facebook are doing. We need to make sure that we’re using strategies that are sustainable in the long term, because a lot of the work that I do is filling up events and seminars for thought leaders in Australia and so a lot of the top guys come to me and say, “Look, you’ve got thirty days, I want five-thousand people at this seminar. Go make it happen.”
Joshua Millage: Pressure’s on.
Robert Coorey: [crosstalk 00:19:37]. Yeah and we’ve got to make it work. They pay us a lot of money and me and my team have to make it works, there’s not ifs and buts about it, we need to get the people. We have to bring strategies that are tested and that work in the marketplace. That’s what I cover a lot in the book. I go behind the scenes of all these different campaigns that I’ve been running and show step by step how I’ve done it.
Joshua Millage: Yeah, it’s brilliant. It really is. I’ve really enjoyed reading your book and all the great stories and you can tell they’re battle-tested, which is fantastic. You know Robert we’re coming to the end of the interview and I always like to ask more of a success type, mindset question and so my question to you is what is something that you do, either on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, to get you in a success oriented mindset?
Robert Coorey: I’ve done a lot of things over the years, but just in the last week I’ve been starting to listen to Noah St. John, he does these little audio files, that are called AFFORMATIONS. It’s not affirmations, like they way that we’ve normally heard it called, it’s AFFORMATIONS, with an “O,” like A-F-F-O-R-M, and what they do is it just kind of coups around the old-you know with the affirmations has like, I’m successful, I earn million dollars, I do this, I do that. That’s what I’ve been taught. For some reason that hasn’t resonated with me, I just feel like I’m lying to myself, you know, I don’t really believe that. What Noah St. John’s done is he’s kind of flipped it around and he’s saying, “Well, why am I so successful?”
He turns all those affirmations into questions and something psychological-this is how he explained it to me, because I just interviewed him last week, he said, “Something psychological goes on in your brain where if you ask yourself a question then your brain naturally tries to find the solution for you.” He explains it a lot better and in a lot more scientific detail than I can, but I’ve been using it for the last week and they’re just amazing. I just listen to it and I feel just so pumped up and energized to get into it.
Joshua Millage: Oh, that’s a fantastic tip. This is an audio program that the audience can go out and find, like on Amazon or something like that?
Robert Coorey: Yeah. They’re very inexpensive as well, like he’s got a book on Amazon and I think he’s audios are like twenty or thirty bucks each on the website, so they’re very inexpensive and it’s just brilliant.
Joshua Millage: Love it.
Robert Coorey: Yeah.
Joshua Millage: I love that. I’ve never heard that sort of success tip, but that’s fantastic. I do believe in the power of affirmations, but it’s really interesting, I’ve never said this, but I’m like you, I’ve always felt slightly, I don’t know, it just hasn’t resonated with me when like, I am successful, I will be the best, or something, I don’t know, but that makes a lot more sense to me if I can ask myself a question. You’re right, there is something psychological that happens where we’ll automatically go into solve the question mode and I think that that can be much more productive. That’s really interesting.
Well Robert, our audience loves to interact with our guests and so what would be the best place for them to ask your a question or connect with if they’d like to reach out after the show?
Robert Coorey: Well, I think the best way is to come onto the website, feedastarvingcrowd.com, we’ve got all the contact details there. Your listeners can also get a free copy of the book, Josh, whether it’s the physical copy, they just have to pay nine dollars for shipping worldwide or they can download the eBook for free.
Joshua Millage: Fantastic.
Robert Coorey: Yeah, feedastarvingcrowd.com is the place to get it all.
Joshua Millage: Great. Great. Well, I’ll put all of this information and more at infusioncast.co/feedastravingcrowd. Robert, thank you so much for being on the show.
Robert Coorey: Thanks, Josh.
Automated Voice: Thanks for joining us on this episode of Infusioncast. Struggling to embed Infusionsoft web forms into your WordPress website? Head over to infusioncast.co and download our free WordPress plugin, FusionForms. FusionForms allows you to easily embed beautiful Infusionsoft Forms into any WordPress website with a simple short code. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll talk to you in the next episode.
The following podcast is a production of Infusioncast, a subsidiary of codeBOX, LLC. Infustioncast is no way associated or sponsored by Infusionsoft. The opinions and perspectives in this podcast are of the host and his guest and do not reflect or promote any view held by Infusionsoft.
[/transcript]
The post Robert Coorey: How to Feed a Starving Crowd appeared first on Infusioncast.
80 episodes
Infusioncast with Joshua R. Millage - The #1 Infusionsoft Podcast
When?
This feed was archived on October 02, 2018 01:43 (
Why? Inactive feed status. Our servers were unable to retrieve a valid podcast feed for a sustained period.
What now? You might be able to find a more up-to-date version using the search function. This series will no longer be checked for updates. If you believe this to be in error, please check if the publisher's feed link below is valid and contact support to request the feed be restored or if you have any other concerns about this.
Every now and then I needs a marketing boost. Interviewing Robert Coorey gave me that boost!
Robert talks about failure and how every entrepreneur needs to embrace failure to learn and move forward.
Robert and I have a riveting discussion about the content of his new book “Feed a Starving Crowd”.
What I love about this interview is that there are GOLD nuggets of you to implement in your business today. Robert goes into detail about the “launch webinar” strategy and crushes the myth of not having a list (EVERYONE has a list).
Robert Coorey, MBA is a #1 Best-selling author, TV Pilot Host and wildly successful marketer. Recently listed by Startup Australia as one of Australia’s Top 50 Entrepreneurs.
You can download Rob’s latest book from the link below:
http://www.feedastarvingcrowd.com
Robert enjoys regular media appearances and has been featured on TV and Radio for expert commentary on business and marketing.
Robert is the co-creator and lead presenter of the upcoming Reality TV Pilot called “Business Rescue.” The TV Pilot takes struggling companies through a maze of marketing challenges over 30 days.
Robert is well-known as the “go-to” guy when you need to fill out a live event with “bums on seats.” He has successfully secured tens of thousands of registrants to live events in the last 12 months alone.
Robert is the Director of Global Business at E-Web Marketing, Australia’s top online marketing agency. He’s obsessed with helping others achieve unheard of results through innovative strategies to feed starving crowds of consumers. On several occasions, Robert has sent so much traffic to websites that they have fallen over and crashed, despite the largest of servers being in place.
Transcript
[transcript height=”200px”]
Automated Voice: How the heck do you use Infusionsoft? How do you make it work for you? Welcome to Infusioncast the only podcast that shows you the tricks of the trade and teaches you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. Join your host, Joshua Millage as he sits down with Infusionsoft pros to hear their stories and experiences making Infusionsoft work for them. Ready? Here’s Joshua.
Joshua Millage: Hello everyone and welcome to the Infusioncast podcast, the only podcast that teaches you to be an Infusionsoft expert. Our guest today is Robert Coorey. Robert is the number one bestselling author of “Feed a Starving Crowd” and is a reality TV show pilot host. He’s also a wildly successful marketer and recently he was listed as Australia’s top fifty entrepreneurs. Robert, welcome to the show.
Robert Coorey: Hey, good to be here Josh.
Joshua Millage: Well, I’m excited because I don’t get a lot of opportunities to interview authors who are really-I mean you’ve told be in the pre-interview that you’ve worked with Infusionsoft, but I love the fact that you have a much more macro perspective of the marketing world. This is going to be a lot of fun because I think your book can help so many of the people that are listening right now.
I would love to start off with where your book starts off, with this mindset around dealing with failure, because I think that marketing is so much of an art, as well as a science and we have to be okay with things not working. Tell me a little bit about your story and how you’ve kind of adopted this mindset.
Robert Coorey: Yeah, well the reason I wrote the book in the first place it was to really clarify all things I’ve experienced throughout my marketing career. I’ve started businesses before that have failed, I’ve worked at businesses that have been fantastic and everything in the middle as well. Just to give you a few examples, the best way to answer that question is really to look at where I started from. The first business that I ran was a DJ business when I was sixteen. I put my ad in yellow pages, it cost me a thousand dollars, and I was able to get four inquiries straightaway for that DJ business, which paid back for the advertising cost.
Then I realized that, hey, you can actually put an ad into the yellow pages and someone that doesn’t know you can read that ad, call you up, and give you their credit card details on the phone. This is pretty cool. This is how advertising works. I love it. Ever since then I’ve really dug deep and tried to find out everything that I can about advertising and marketing and how to really influence people to buy things and it’s progressed over my entire career. I’ve worked in big businesses, worked in some Fortune 100 companies. I’ve worked in small businesses. I’ve started my own businesses.
What I realized was when I heard this story from Gary Halbert about feeding a starving crowd, like if you were going to have a hamburger stand and somebody else was going to have a hamburger stand, and you could have one advantage over them, you’d pick a starving crowd. It doesn’t matter what the other advantage is, if you had a starving crowd and they didn’t, then you would win.
Joshua Millage: Right. I love that story.
Robert Coorey: Sorry. Yeah. Then I applied that back to all the businesses that I’ve worked in and which ones worked and which ones didn’t work and I realized every single time that I wasn’t feeding a starving crowd then the business didn’t work very well, but when I was feeding a starving crowd, the business worked out fantastically.
Joshua Millage: The trick then is really finding that starving crowd, right?
Robert Coorey: Yeah, very true. Do you want me to give you an example of one time of where it hasn’t worked and when I had a failure?
Joshua Millage: Yeah, I would love to hear that. I think we learn so much more from failure than we do success, so let’s start there.
Robert Coorey: Okay, so about five years ago I thought that I would start up a video production business and I didn’t know anything about video production, but I knew that it was a rising trend for online to have videos on your website and to put them on YouTube and Vimeo and those kind of places. I knew that businesses needed it, so what I did was I setup the business and I got a couple of freelance video guys to do the work for me and then I went out to businesses and I said, “Hey, look, you need to make some videos for your business. I can get it all setup for you. Here’s the price. Let’s do it. You need to do this, everyone else is doing it.”
It was like pushing shit uphill, so what happened was was that I was too early in the market place, people were still getting used to the idea of video. It wasn’t as prominent as it was today and it was so hard to sell on. I spent the whole year working very, very hard trying to sell video production services and I found out at the end of the year, I looked at my tax return, that I only made thirty-thousand dollars and I’ve never worked so hard in my whole life. Then I realized, look, I’m just not delivering [inaudible 00:04:51] to the marketplace yet, for whatever the reason is they just don’t want what I’m selling. I’m not feeding a starving crowd.
Then I looked at all the times where business was effortless. It’s never easy, but there are times where you get momentum and it’s a lot easier to run businesses, as you know. They were the times when I was actually feeding a starving crowd and I reflect on a few of those examples a lot in the book.
Joshua Millage: Well, let me ask you this, because I think a lot of people that we’ve worked with at codeBOX have a unique ability to look at failure as data, really. They look at it like, “Oh, that’s something that didn’t work,” but they don’t take it like personally. They don’t internalize it like, “Oh, I’m a failure. I’m worthless” and that sort of thing. I have a quote here from Josh Waitzkin, he was in, I think the movie was “Finding Bobby Fischer,” he was the chess phenom, and he says, “You should always come off an injury or a loss better than you went down.” What do you think of that quote? Does that resonate with you?
Robert Coorey: Love it. Love it.
Joshua Millage: Yeah. As I read through your book I saw that you kind of did that, man. I love that you would look at something and you’re like, “Okay, what’s there to learn here” and then move on and stay in motion. I think you, I’m probably going to mess the quote up, but was it Gary Halbert who said, “Movement is better than meditation?”
Robert Coorey: That’s it.
Joshua Millage: Yeah.
Robert Coorey: Gary was a great mentor of mine when I was getting started. It’s so sad that he’s passed away, but he was just amazing.
Joshua Millage: Do you think that’s the cure there, to becoming better off a loss or an injury, is moving back into another test I guess you could say or another strategy?
Robert Coorey: Definitely. I’m more of a future oriented person, so I’m always looking forward to what’s next and what’s coming up, rather than reflecting back on the past. That mindset is extremely important and the other mindset that is also important is, like as you start to build your personal brand, so since I’ve released this book and I’ve started to put out courses and start my own Facebook group and things like that and do more media and TV shows, the thing is when you put your personal brand out there then you’re making yourself open to being personally criticized, rather than just hiding behind the company. That’s a whole different level of mindset as well that you need to get around to be successful in that industry.
Joshua Millage: How have you done that, because that’s fascinating to me? I mean, I’ve experienced that a little bit, even with this podcast, but what are some of the things you would say to someone who’s dealing with “haters” out there?
Robert Coorey: Yeah, it’s tough. It’s very tough when you’re getting started because most people that start their own personal brand and start doing coaching and consulting and advisory, they’ve got good intentions. Most of us are really nice people and we like to be liked. It just doesn’t feel very nice when someone say’s bad things about you. It does get easier as time goes on, so the first one that you cop is very hard, it’s pretty brutal, and then over time you might learn to just come take it with a grain of salt. I compare it to, like sometimes whenever I feel it’s getting a bit tough and people are giving you hard, I then might read the paper and see how bad the prime minister or the president’s getting nailed every single day.
Then you realize, well, you know what, the more influential that you become, that means that the more people are going to have opinions of what you’re doing, whether it’s a positive opinion or a negative opinion. It means you’re becoming relevant as well. For anyone to actually take the effort to make a comment regarding what you’re doing or write a review, that means that you’re relevant and people care about you and what you’re doing is making an impact.
Joshua Millage: That’s such a positive way of looking at any sort of response, positive or negative, is I’m rippling the water here and people are responding.
Robert Coorey: Yeah. Sometimes it is even funny, right? Sometimes you read some of the comments and they’re just very, very funny. Even Brendon Burchard says, sometimes he might start a talk by showing some negative reviews he’s had on his Amazon books and he’ll make it into a joke where everybody laughs about it. He’s actually using negative-
Joshua Millage: I apologize for the technical difficulties here. My next question is a lot of the people in the audience are small businesses, so let’s give them some ideas of places to start with a marketing strategy, because that’s what I really enjoyed about the progression of your book and how you built on things like advertising and then you talked about copy writing. Then you’ve gone into different launch sequences and that sort of thing. I really love the kind of the vision and all the things that you cover, because it’s so important to people to not get, I guess you could say, fall in love with or become addicted to one thing.
I’ve seen that so many times, it’s like someone gets in their brain that it is like SCO is the answer and that’s it and nothing else could ever work for them, it’s only SCO. It’s like, well, maybe you should invest dollars elsewhere. Where would you tell someone to start, if they really don’t have any strategy, they’re just kind of throwing things against the wall? What would be the 101?
Robert Coorey: Okay. I’ll assume that they’ve already chosen what product they’re going to sell and who they’re going to sell to. We’ll assume that. Then the question is how to get the word out there. Essentially, if you’re just getting started and you want to validate if this is a good idea or not, what we can do is what we call a launch webinar. You collect all your different lists together, and a lot of people will say to me, “Rob, I haven’t got a list.” Well, actually you do have a list; you’ve got [inaudible 00:10:33] contacts, you’ve got email contacts, you’ve got business cards, you’ve got Facebook friends, you’ve got LinkedIn contacts, Twitter followers.
Everyone’s got a list, no matter how big or small it is and what format that it is in, you do have a list. You collect that list together and then you let them know that you’re going to be holding an online seminar or webinar in the next week and this is the topic that it is covering and this is what you’ll learn. Then you go in to that webinar, you train people on what you want to train them on, give them a bit of information about your new product or your service that you’re offering, and then you make an offer. You can say, “Here’s what the offer is, this is the deal for today. If you’re interested let me know or you can buy now.”
That’s a real cheap and easy way to validate a new business idea. You don’t have to have the product ready. I’ve done this before a product was even ready. The first time I did this was three years ago, so we wanted to launch a new training course, “How to Start an Online Business.” I didn’t know what people would pay for it, if anyone would buy it, none of that stuff. I said “Okay, look why don’t we just send an email out to our database.” We had all lists everywhere, it was a mess, so we collected them altogether. We put a message out saying we’re holding an online seminar next week, this is the topic, come along.
With all that kind of manual labor and getting out hands dirty, we’ve got five-hundred people to attend the webinar. I gave training for about forty-five minutes, gave some good tips and at the end I said, “Look, we’re going to be holding a five week online course. It starts in two weeks time. Here’s all the details. This is what you’ll learn and this is the price, it’s a thousand bucks.” I had eight people buy it out of the five-hundred, so we made eight-thousand dollars from that launch start. Now some people might say, “Eight-thousand dollars that’s not very much money, Rob. You know, that’s a real good launch” or “You only converted eight out of five-hundred, what’s going on there?”
Well, you know what, sometime-and they’re right, it’s not a whole lot of money, but it did validate the idea. You know, eight people pulled out their credit cards and purchased it and four-hundred and ninety-two didn’t. That’s okay. I spent one week on the whole thing, start to finish, because the training courses were only an hour long each. I totaled up all my hours, it was forty-hours of work for eight-thousand dollars. Now if you made eight-thousand dollars every single week, going forward, that’s not a bad income. You know that’s four-hundred thousand for the year. That’s not too bad. Most people would take that if you pointed it out that way.
Joshua Millage: I love that and I love how you’re focusing on the positive there with the validation that people were willing to pull out their wallets and spend some money with you. That right there is great data for building something else that’s potentially reoccurring or a different sort of product launch in the same sort of area. There’s a lot of positive things to gain and it’s all in how you look at it. Some could be, oh that was a failure at that conversion rate and that price point or could look at it as, no it’s a success, look at the time in and what you just said, you know, it’s a four-hundred thousand dollar a year opportunity if I could do this every week and that sort of thing.
I think like the best marketers use that as a fuel to the fire and they use that as a motivation to keep going and keep trying and I love the idea. I think one of things you just mentioned is so important for all the audience listeners to get, which is consider pre-selling, because it can take so much risk out of the equation of building anything. That’s absolutely brilliant. Tell me a little bit about copy writing, because you spend a lot of time in the book about that. Why is copy so important? I mean we hear it all the time in the marketing world, but for a lot of us it’s like, oh, so you just mean I have to write some words on paper? I feel like it is so much more than that.
Robert Coorey: Yeah, copy’s key and the two biggest mistakes that I’m seeing businesses make with their copy is when they competing in a saturated market or a mature market, let’s say it’s the weight loss market or the real estate market or the business market, any of those kind of categories that have a lot of competition and have been around for a long time, what you need to do is to use curiosity in your copy. If you’re just saying the same things that everybody else is saying, then it’s pretty bland and pretty boring and no one’s going to buy what you’re offering.
I’ll give you an example, so let’s talk about the weight loss industry for a second. Say you’ve an ad and it says how to lose ten pounds, so everybody’s seen that kind of claim before, that’s nothing new in the marketplace. However, if we just keep that same ad, but add another sentence at the end of it, so if we say, how to lose ten pounds…by eating more cake. Now that completely changes that marketing message and you’re going to get a lot of people that click on it. The reason is because there’s curiosity built in, because what does every single nutritionist and health professional tell you? Don’t eat cake.
It’s the first thing that they teach you to do when you’re trying to take a weight loss course or do any kind of nutritional information for yourself. If we can have a marketing message that is counter intuitive and is the opposite of what everybody else is saying in the marketplace, as long as you can fulfill that, that’s the caveat here, you need to be able to fulfill that. If you have something that’s very different and you can fulfill, then that changes everything.
Joshua Millage: Right, yeah that’s a great headline. I’ve always been told that the purpose of a headline is to really just get them to read the next line and so forth through the entire advertisement or sales letter or what have you. I like that, curiosity. I don’t think we think about that angle to take in our headlines.
Robert Coorey: Yeah. Another thing that’s important, while we’re on this hot topic, is about testimonials and also how to deliver that. What I’m finding is the most effective form of copy, today, is storytelling. That can apply across any of the different marketing channels that you use, whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, whether it’s your email database, whether it’s blogging, whether it’s getting postings on different people’s websites, storytelling is the number one way to make these things work properly.
I’ll tell you a few reasons why that’s the case, and this is not coming from me just saying that, this is from so much data, I’ve had forty-thousand people registered for different live events and seminars in the last four months and predominately using storytelling. The first reason why it is so impactful is because it doesn’t feel like selling, it just feels like explaining the story of how someone got to where they got to. It kind of flies under the radar of not being an advertisement for your business, which is nice.
The second thing is it makes it more Facebook proof and Google proof and by that I mean Facebook is getting a lot tougher on the different ads you can put out there or they really don’t like you putting things to squeeze pages where there’s no value there, it’s just, you know, a photo of a book and email box, they don’t like that kind of stuff at all. If you’re telling stories and you’re sending people to content, that’s a very different proposition. They’re very, very happy to have that because that’s kind of the nature of social media, it’s about people sharing stuff that’s interesting.
Joshua Millage: Yeah, that’s a great tip. I recently read a story about stories and one of things I’m realizing is that it’s also very primal because that’s how we’ve transferred information since the paleolithic era, is through stories. We’d tell our children about the stories of, you know, say, the bear in the woods because we wanted them to understand that that could hurt you. It’s almost like we’re ingrained to let stories come into our brains so much easier than if we tag something as a marketing message and go, oh, I don’t want to be sold right now. Oh, but I’ll listen to a story and if that story has persuasive triggers in it, that is fantastic.
I never even thought of the Google proof or Facebook proof, but you’re so right about that and they’re getting extremely good at basically just blacklisting anyone who’s over overtly spamming or anything like that, so it’s a fantastic tip. I love that.
Robert Coorey: Yeah, well we have to do this because the clients that I work with, they give us huge marketing budgets, we have to make it work. We have to be accountable for the spend. We have to stay on the forefront of all the different things that Google and Facebook are doing. We need to make sure that we’re using strategies that are sustainable in the long term, because a lot of the work that I do is filling up events and seminars for thought leaders in Australia and so a lot of the top guys come to me and say, “Look, you’ve got thirty days, I want five-thousand people at this seminar. Go make it happen.”
Joshua Millage: Pressure’s on.
Robert Coorey: [crosstalk 00:19:37]. Yeah and we’ve got to make it work. They pay us a lot of money and me and my team have to make it works, there’s not ifs and buts about it, we need to get the people. We have to bring strategies that are tested and that work in the marketplace. That’s what I cover a lot in the book. I go behind the scenes of all these different campaigns that I’ve been running and show step by step how I’ve done it.
Joshua Millage: Yeah, it’s brilliant. It really is. I’ve really enjoyed reading your book and all the great stories and you can tell they’re battle-tested, which is fantastic. You know Robert we’re coming to the end of the interview and I always like to ask more of a success type, mindset question and so my question to you is what is something that you do, either on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, to get you in a success oriented mindset?
Robert Coorey: I’ve done a lot of things over the years, but just in the last week I’ve been starting to listen to Noah St. John, he does these little audio files, that are called AFFORMATIONS. It’s not affirmations, like they way that we’ve normally heard it called, it’s AFFORMATIONS, with an “O,” like A-F-F-O-R-M, and what they do is it just kind of coups around the old-you know with the affirmations has like, I’m successful, I earn million dollars, I do this, I do that. That’s what I’ve been taught. For some reason that hasn’t resonated with me, I just feel like I’m lying to myself, you know, I don’t really believe that. What Noah St. John’s done is he’s kind of flipped it around and he’s saying, “Well, why am I so successful?”
He turns all those affirmations into questions and something psychological-this is how he explained it to me, because I just interviewed him last week, he said, “Something psychological goes on in your brain where if you ask yourself a question then your brain naturally tries to find the solution for you.” He explains it a lot better and in a lot more scientific detail than I can, but I’ve been using it for the last week and they’re just amazing. I just listen to it and I feel just so pumped up and energized to get into it.
Joshua Millage: Oh, that’s a fantastic tip. This is an audio program that the audience can go out and find, like on Amazon or something like that?
Robert Coorey: Yeah. They’re very inexpensive as well, like he’s got a book on Amazon and I think he’s audios are like twenty or thirty bucks each on the website, so they’re very inexpensive and it’s just brilliant.
Joshua Millage: Love it.
Robert Coorey: Yeah.
Joshua Millage: I love that. I’ve never heard that sort of success tip, but that’s fantastic. I do believe in the power of affirmations, but it’s really interesting, I’ve never said this, but I’m like you, I’ve always felt slightly, I don’t know, it just hasn’t resonated with me when like, I am successful, I will be the best, or something, I don’t know, but that makes a lot more sense to me if I can ask myself a question. You’re right, there is something psychological that happens where we’ll automatically go into solve the question mode and I think that that can be much more productive. That’s really interesting.
Well Robert, our audience loves to interact with our guests and so what would be the best place for them to ask your a question or connect with if they’d like to reach out after the show?
Robert Coorey: Well, I think the best way is to come onto the website, feedastarvingcrowd.com, we’ve got all the contact details there. Your listeners can also get a free copy of the book, Josh, whether it’s the physical copy, they just have to pay nine dollars for shipping worldwide or they can download the eBook for free.
Joshua Millage: Fantastic.
Robert Coorey: Yeah, feedastarvingcrowd.com is the place to get it all.
Joshua Millage: Great. Great. Well, I’ll put all of this information and more at infusioncast.co/feedastravingcrowd. Robert, thank you so much for being on the show.
Robert Coorey: Thanks, Josh.
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