$100M Leads

Alex Hormozi

📚 GENRE: Business & Finance

📃 PAGES: 279

✅ COMPLETED: April 6, 2024

🧐 RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

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Short Summary

Alex Hormozi became a millionaire at 23-years-old and crossed $100M in net worth by age 31. In $100M Leads, Hormozi shares the marketing and advertising strategies that have helped him grow the many businesses he operates. 

Key Takeaways

1️⃣ More Leads = More Growth — The growth of a business largely depends on the amount of leads being generated. Double your leads to double your growth. The key to getting more leads is advertising, which is simply the process of telling people about your stuff (product, service, lead magnet, etc.). Without leads, you can’t expect to grow. 

2️⃣ The Core Four — The core four represents the only four ways a business can advertise. The model covers warm and cold audiences, and allows you to reach people using personal and public channels. Included in the core four are warm outreach, content creation, cold outreach, and paid ads.

3️⃣ Volume Is Key — Advertising works; you just need to target the right people and do it enough. Volume is the key to advertising. Most people and businesses simply aren’t doing enough. Even the right strategy will fail to produce leads if it isn’t done at a high enough volume. You advertise by using all four strategies in the core four model. If you execute these strategies consistently and with enough volume, you will get leads. If not, people aren’t going to know who you are or what you’re offering. 

Favorite Quote

“You're not getting as many leads as you want because you're not advertising enough. Period. As a result, your potential customers are ignorant of your existence.”

Book Notes 📑

Ch. 1: Start Here

  • About the Book — This book builds on the author’s previous book titled $100M Offers, which helps readers develop offers that people can’t refuse. This book is more about capturing leads for your offer. It’s about marketing and advertising and how they can be used to drive leads. All of the advice in this book comes from the author’s experience building companies and brands.
  • About the Author — Alex Hormozi is an American entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. By age 32, Alex and his wife Leila’s net worth crossed $100M. The couple’s new mission is to make business accessible to everyone. They fulfill this mission by making content on social media and publishing books and free courses for entrepreneurs.
  • Leads, Leads, Leads — Once you have a product and an offer that you’re prepared to put out into the world, it’s time to figure out how to capture leads, because leads ultimately drive the growth of the business. Put simply, the more leads you have, the more you’re going to grow. But leads aren’t going to show up magically. How do you get leads? Advertising. 
  • Advertising — Advertising is an essential part of every success business. Done right, it can help bring awareness to your company and products, create demand, drive sales, and make money. Advertising is about making the unknown, known. Leads come directly from advertising efforts.
    • Quote (P. 1): “Advertising, the process of making known, lets strangers know about the stuff you sell. If more people know about the stuff you sell, then you sell more stuff. If you sell more stuff, then you make more money. Having lots of leads makes it hard to be poor.”
  • Advertising to the Rescue — In 2017, Hormozi was a successful gym owner who was using effective advertising strategies to help other gyms open and add new members quickly. He later ran into some bad luck and landed in a situation where he needed to make $150,000 in a month. He and his wife made $215,000 and were able to make the payment. How? Hormozi essentially bundled his advertising strategies and sold his offering to gym owners he knew for between $5,000-$10,000 apiece. He also used his own strategies to help sell the offering to random gym owners he didn’t know. He then used his strategies to start and grow other random businesses.
  • All About the Leads — This book is designed to help readers get more leads for their business. Hormozi is of the belief that leads help drive a business. Advertising is the key to leads. The more you advertise, the more you become known, and the more leads you get. The key is to progressively get more, better, and cheaper leads.
    • Quote (P. 17): “You’re not getting as many leads as you want because you’re not advertising enough. Period. As a result, your potential customers are ignorant of your existence.”
    • Quote (P. 17): “To make more money, you’ve gotta grow your business. You can only grow your business in two ways: (i) Get more customers; (ii) Make them worth more. That’s it. . . You get more customers by getting: (i) More Leads, (ii) Better Leads, (iii) Cheaper Leads, (iv) Reliably (think ‘from lots of places’).”
    • Quote (P. 18): “All else being equal. . . when you double your leads, you double your business.”
  • Chapter Takeaway — Advertising drives leads. Leads drives business growth. When you double your leads, you double your business. You should always be on the hunt for good quality leads. This book will reveal how to do that. 

Ch. 2: Get Understanding

  • What Is a Lead? — Leads are people you can contact. This could be somebody who fills out a form on your website. It could be somebody who follows you on social media. It could be a contact in your phone. Anybody you can contact is a lead. But there are levels to this. Engaged leads are what you want. These are people who volunteer their information to you. This shows interest. If someone gives you their contact information on your website (e.g. in exchange for some kind of resource you’re offering), that is an engaged lead. Engaged leads matter most. 
  • Give People What They Want — To get engaged leads, you need to offer something of value. And you have to offer something that people want. If you don’t, you’re not going to get leads. Your offering could be anything — an actual product for sale, a free whitepaper, a free guide, a free webinar, etc. The key is to offer something of value. That’s how you get interest. 
  • Offers: Core Offers & Lead Magnets — Offers are what you promise in exchange for something of value. Core offers are offers that straight up ask for payment in exchange for a product. Some companies — Apple, for example — can do this because they have a good reputation and high degree of trust with customers. Most other businesses cannot do this very effectively; they need to assemble a lead magnet first. Lead magnets are usually offers that contain something of value for free or low-cost (e.g. whitepapers, guides, videos, webinars, programs, courses, etc.). The lead magnet allows the prospect to learn more about the business. In exchange for the free resource, the business asks for a person’s contact information so they can follow-up with emails and other communications. The lead magnet usually provides a small taste and entices the prospect to buy the business’s core offer.
    • Quote (P. 31): “A lead magnet is a complete solution to a narrow problem. It’s typically a lower-cost or free offer to see who is interested in your stuff. And, once solved, it reveals another problem solved by your core offer.”
    • Quote (P. 31): “So your lead magnet should be valuable enough on its own that you could charge for it. And, after they get it, they should want more of what you offer. This gets them one step closer to buying your stuff.”
    • Quote (P. 31): “Think of it [lead magnet] like salty pretzels at a bar. If somebody eats the pretzels, they’ll get thirsty and order a drink. The salty pretzels solve the narrow problem of hunger. They also reveal a thirst problem solved by a drink, which they can get, in exchange for money. The pretzels have a cost, but when done right, the drink revenue covers the cost of the pretzels and nets a profit.”
  • Creating Strong Lead Magnets: Step 1 — The first step to building a strong lead magnet is determining the problem you want to solve and who you want to solve it for. The key to this is picking a problem that’s very specific and meaningful. From there, solve it. Once you have a solution (your product or service), you can begin forming lead magnets that lead to your core offer. 
  • Creating Strong Lead Magnets: Step 2 — Choosing the type of lead magnet you want to use is step No. 2. Generally speaking, there are three primary types of lead magnets to choose from. If you can develop a lead magnet that does all three at once, even better. The three main types of lead magnets include:
    • Reveal Problem — This type of lead magnet makes the prospect aware that they have, or may have, a problem that your product would be able to solve. If your business is one that offers faster internet servers, you could offer a free speed test as a lead magnet. You may be able to push your core offer to the people who use the speed test and find that their internet is working at a slower speed than they should be receiving. This could also be an educational resource, like a whitepaper, that discusses the prospect’s problem and offers solutions (usually in the form of the product your company offers). 
    • Free Trial or Sample — With this lead magnet, you give full but brief access to your product or service. You give them just enough of a taste to know what they could have if they purchase the real deal. Staying with the internet server example, you could hook prospects up to your server for a limited time to give them a preview of what they would experience if they buy your core offer. 
    • Free Step — This lead magnet involves giving away one step in a multi-step solution. If the solution to the prospect’s problem requires multiple steps, this lead magnet would be used to solve the first step. The prospect would then need to purchase your core offering to solve the other steps. 
  • Creating Strong Lead Magnets: Step 3 — The third step to developing strong lead magnets involves selecting a method of delivery. Theoretically, you can deliver your lead magnets to prospects in almost an infinite number of ways. For the most part though, delivering the lead magnet is done using one of the strategies below:
    • Software — You give the prospect some kind of tool that you’ve made. This could be a calculator specifically designed to help with a problem unique to their industry and business. It could be a spreadsheet or dashboard. It could be a small technology offering. 
    • Information — You give the prospect valuable information. You teach them something. Courses, lessons, whitepapers, videos, podcasts, interviews with experts, live events, hacks/tips, guides — these are all examples of lead magnets that deliver information and help educate the prospect on the problem they want to solve. 
    • Services — You give the prospect a free, limited time trial of your service. This gives them a preview of what they can expect when they purchase your core offer. You could also give the prospect access to a smaller service that is related to your core offer. 
    • Physical Products — You give the prospect a physical thing. This could be a small sample of your core offer to give them a preview. This could be some kind of chart related to your core offer. Any sort of physical thing qualifies here. 
  • Creating Strong Lead Magnets: Step 4 — Once you’ve decided on a lead magnet and the way you want to deliver it, it’s time to do some testing. The way you present your lead magnet is everything. You will get far more clicks if your presentation of the lead magnet is strong. How do you ensure presentation is strong? You test. You test the headline. You test the photo or graphic you’re using. And then you test subhead. In that order. The headline is the most important one to get right, so test that one if you can only choose one. You can also test things like your CTA as well. How do you test? You can use polls on social media, conduct a vote with your family and friends, or use A/B testing software. One note about this: having “how to” in the title or subhead seems to deliver a lot of clicks. People want to know how to do things. 
  • Creating Strong Lead Magnets: Step 5 — Step five involves making it as fast and easy as possible to consume the lead magnet. The fact is, people don’t want to put forth a huge effort for things. You have to make it extremely easy to acquire and consume the lead magnet. Make it easy for them to enter their information (e.g. fewer fields). Make it easy and fast to download the lead magnet. If you’re offering information and education, make it available on all mediums (e.g. book, course, video, audiobook, etc.). If you’re offering a free consultation, be available on more days and at more times so it’s easy to schedule a call. Make sure the directions for using the lead magnet at every simple. The point here is to spend some time brainstorming ways you can make the lead magnet very easy to access and use. 
  • Creating Strong Lead Magnets: Step 6 — Step six is to ensure your lead magnet is providing a ton of value. You can never provide too much value. People will make their purchase decision based on the value they experience with your lead magnet. If it’s a strong experience with a lot of value, there’s a good chance you’ll earn their trust and they’ll buy your core offer. If not, they’ll turn away. The key here is to provide a lot of value to the prospect before they buy.
    • Quote (P. 42): “But remember, people buy stuff based on how much value they think they’ll get after they buy it. And the easiest way to get them to think they’ll get tons of value after they buy is… drum roll please… to provide them with value before they buy.”
  • Creating Strong Lead Magnets: Step 7 — Step seven is all about the CTA. The CTA tells the audience what to do next. Good CTAs do two things. First, they make it very clear action to take to move forward. Second, they give a reason to take action. As a bonus rule, your CTA should ask the customer to do one thing, not several things. A little more on these:
    • What to Do — CTAs tell the audience to call the number, click the button, fill out the form, book the call, etc. There’s a million things you can ask the customer to do here. The key is to make sure it’s very clear what the customer needs to do to get the lead magnet or offer. It should be very simple and direct. 
    • Reasons to Do It Now — In general, people are far more willing to do something if they have a reason for doing it. This goes for any situation in life. When asking people to do anything, your chances of getting them to do it skyrocket when you give a reason, even if the reason isn’t great or doesn’t make sense. Any reason is better than no reason at all. Harvard performed a study proving this, as Robert Cialdini wrote about in Influence. In terms of getting people to take action on your offer, there are a few reasons that are very effective:
      • Scarcity — All of us are loss-averse. We don’t like missing out on opportunities that we could have. When your offer (e.g. lead magnet, product, or service) is scarce, meaning it is limited in quantity, it inspires people to act now. When something is scarce, it seems more valuable. People who are interested don’t want to miss out. Draw attention to anything in your business that is scarce — this could even be something simple like your time. 
      • Urgency — In line with the point about loss aversion, people are more likely to act when your offer is only available for a limited time. When time is running out, there is a greater sense of urgency and prospects get the itch to buy before they miss out. The shorter the time, the greater the sense of urgency. 
      • Any Reason — Again, any reason is better than no reason at all. When you give prospects a compelling reason, or reasons, to act, they are more likely to do it. Make sure you’re being honest, but it is definitely effective to give some kind of reason to act in the CTA. 
  • Chapter Takeaway — Most businesses can benefit from a lead magnet. Lead magnets give prospects a chance to build trust and try you out before they buy your core offer. There are seven steps that go into building a strong lead magnet and variety of ways to deliver it. Maybe the most important part of building a lead magnet is making sure it provides a lot of value and isn’t “fluffy.” When writing a CTA, always try to give the prospect a reason for acting. 

Ch. 3: Get Leads

  • Warm & Cold Audiences — In the marketing world, there are type types of audiences: a warm audience and a cold audience. A warm audience is one that already knows you and who has given you permission to make contact with them. Think “people you know” — like friends, family, followers, current customers, previous customers, contacts, etc. A cold audience is one who does not know you and has not given you permission to make contact. Think “strangers.” The difference matters because we will market to each audience differently. 
  • Communication Styles: One-to-One & One-to-Many — There are also two primary types of communication styles: one-to-one and one-to-many. One-to-one communication includes private and personalized content, like emails and phone calls with the customer. A targeted email sent out to 10,000 customers counts here. You’re speaking intimately to one person with these communications. One-to-many communication is broader and includes things like social media posts, billboards, and podcasts. You’re speaking to many people at the same time here. 
  • The Core Four — Combining one-to-one and one-to-many communications with warm and cold audiences brings us to Hormozi’s ‘core four’, which he believes are the only four ways you can let anyone know about anything. These four ways are the only ways you can get the word out about your stuff (e.g. products, services, lead magnets, etc.). The core four is outlined and featured in the picture below. 
    • 1-to-1 to a Warm Audience = Warm Outreach
    •   1-to-many to a Warm Audience = Posting Content
    •   1-to-1 to a Cold Audience = Cold Outreach
    •   1-to-many to a Cold Audience = Paid Ads
  • Chapter Takeaway — The core four represent the only four ways you can market and communicate to an audience. Using all four methods will allow you to reach warm and cold audiences at the individual (private) and wide-reaching (public) levels. 

Ch. 4: Warm Outreach

  • Core Four Strategy No. 1: Warm Outreach — The warm outreach is all about contacting people you know. Again, this could be friends, family, contacts on social media (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.), current customers, past customers, etc. Warm outreaches come in the form of calls, texts, emails, direct messages, etc. In your communications, you let them know about your lead magnet or core offer. Warm outreaches aren’t exclusively for people just starting a business; this strategy works and is used by companies everywhere, whether there are 100 contacts or 1,000,000. When a lot of contacts are in play, automation and employees help execute the warm outreach. The 10 steps below show how to execute a warm outreach:
    • Step 1: Get Your List — Compile all of the contacts on your phone, in your email, and on your social media profiles. Get them into a list. 
    • Step 2: Pick a Platform — Select a platform you want to start sending your communications on. This could be email, text, social media, phone call, or anything else. 
    • Step 3: Personalize Your Greeting — Do your homework on every person and come up with a custom greeting. This will take some time. You don’t inside anything about your offer here (unless you choose email). You’re just hoping for a response to your greeting. 
    • Step 4: Reach Out — Begin reaching out to people on your list using your custom greeting. Again, you’re just hoping for a response. Reach out once per day for three days, or until they respond — whichever comes first. 
    • Step 5: Warm Them Up — When they respond, shoot the shit for a bit and then steer the conversation toward your offer. Use the ACA framework (more on this in the bullet below). 
    • Step 6: Make the Offer — Explain your offer, then ask if anyone they know might be interested. Usually the person you’re talking to ends up being interested if the offer is good enough. It’s critical to communicate the benefits of your offer here. See the bullet below about the value equation. 
    • Step 7: Make It Easy to Say ‘Yes’ — When you’re first launching a business, Hormozi recommends making your offer free at first. So, if someone shows interest in your offer, tell them it’s free as long as they: (i) use it; (ii) give you feedback; and (iii) leave a review or give a testimonial if they think you deserve one. The idea here is that people will be more likely to say ‘yes’ to a free offer, allowing you to “stack yeses” and get some practice delivering your offer. Learning is the most important thing at this stage.  Giving your offer away for free will also help you build momentum in the form of positive reviews and testimonials that you can later use in ads to get paid customers. Finally, those first few people who get your offer for free will be more likely to refer their friends and family to you. 
    • Step 8: Run It Back — After reaching out to all of your contacts on one platform (e.g. call or text), do the same exact thing on another platform (e.g. email)
    • Step 9: Start Charging — As soon as your first few free customers start referring you to people they know, start charging. Instead of ‘free’, your offer can be 80% off for the next five customers, then 60% off for the next five, then 40% off for the next five, then 20% for the next five, etc. Keep raising your prices as you get more customers.
    • Step 10: Keep Your List Warm — Regularly deliver value to your prospects and customers via email, social media, etc. The point here is to keep your list warm by consistently delivering value to them. Value can mean a lot of things: education, entertainment, etc. After sending value to your list consistently for a while, send them an email every so often that has the subject line: Are you still interested in [insert four letter desire]? This subject line is great at getting engagement. More info on this step is coming in a later chapter. 
  • Talking to People: The ACA Framework — The ACA framework is great for talking to people. It stands for Acknowledge, Compliment, and Ask. You start by acknowledging whatever the other person said. Repeat it back in your own words to show you were listening. Then you compliment the person based on what they said. Finally, you ask another question to keep the conversation going. This is a nice framework for talking to anyone. It does take some practice. 
  • Communicating Your Offer: The Value Equation — The value equation is Hormozi’s formula for creating a valuable offer. The ingredients that go into the offer are below. All strong offerings will have these features, and it is up to you to communicate these features. Interestingly, all of them show how the offer can help the customer. This is in line with other books I’ve read that discuss the importance of communicating the benefits of a product or service to prospects. Nobody cares about you or your business — they want to know what’s in it for them. Communicate the benefits! It’s critical that you communicate the following: 
    • Dream Outcome — What is the dream outcome for the prospect? What do they ideally want? Most importantly, how will your offer help them get there?  People will be interested in things that will get them where they want to be, make their life easier, save them time, etc. It’s critical that you communicate the way your offer does these things. 
    • Perceived Likelihood of Achievement — How likely is it that your offer will get the prospect to where they want to be? The way you communicate this and create confidence in the prospect’s mind is by flaunting things like testimonials, customer reviews, awards, endorsements, certifications, and other forms of third party validation. When a customer sees these, they start to believe that your offer is the solution they need for their problem. Provided below is a photo with a full list of ways you can back up your claims and increase perceived likelihood of achievement in your copy.
    • Time Delay — How long will it take for the prospect to get to their ideal dream outcome using your offer? Describe how fast people can start getting results, how often they get results when they start, and how long it takes to get the best possible results. Ideally, you want to communicate that your offer will get them where they want to go very quickly. But you don’t want to lie when you say it. Be honest.
    • Effort & Sacrifice — People don’t like to put forth effort. If your offer will make their life easier, it’s important to communicate the ways in which it will do so. If your offer can save the prospect time and effort, they will be interested. Point these things out in your communications. 
  • Chapter Takeaway — The first method of the core four, the warm outreach is all about getting in touch with people you already know. These are leads you already have. This strategy involves reaching out to your contacts individually, extending a free offer, and slowly charging as your contacts begin making referrals. 

Ch. 5: Post Free Content Part I

  • Core Four Strategy No. 2: Post Free Content — The second core four strategy involves posting free content. Posting free content helps you build a personal brand, which can deliver mountains of engaged leads. When thinking about content, it’s important to understand that it’s not the content that really matters; it’s the audience you’re building. That’s the valuable asset here, not the content. As you post more content, you begin to build an audience that compounds and grows over time. This chapter and the next will be all about how to post free content and build an audience.
    • Quote (P. 75): “What I didn’t understand was — the content you create isn’t the compounding asset — the audience is. . . Building an audience is the most valuable thing I’ve ever done.”
  • Post, Post, and Post Some More — You really can’t post enough content. Post on every single platform (e.g. Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Tik Tok, etc.) as much as possible, multiple times per day if possible. Your posts don’t have to be spectacular every time; it can be something as simple as a short LinkedIn post. The more volume, the better. The bigger your audience, the more engaged leads you’ll have, and the more money you’ll make. For the most part, you should be making posts that deliver value in some way. Every once in a while, you’ll then sprinkle in a post that contains an offer. If your offer is valuable enough, they’ll take it. But you have to have the audience first. The smaller the audience, the fewer leads you’ll get. Post a ton of content.
    • Quote (P. 76): “Leila bought me four calls with a big influencer who had the type of audience I wanted to build. She paid $120,000. On my first call, he told me to post regularly on every platform. So, that’s what I did. Twelve months later, my audience grew by more than 200,000 people. On my second call, he noted the progress. But I wanted more, ‘Do you have a blueprint for your personal branding? How do you put out all that content?’ He said, ‘Bro, anyone telling you there’s some secret is trying to sell you something. We just put out as much as we possibly can. Pull up your Instagram and pull up my Instagram… Look. You’ve posted once today. I posted three times. Pull up your LinkedIn.. Look. You posted once this week. I posted five times today.’ He went platform by platform. I grew more embarrassed with each comparison. ‘You just gotta do more bro.’ Simple. Not easy. Over the next six months I put out ten times the content. And over the next six months, I added 1.2M people to my audience. Also, when I put out ten times the content, my audience grew ten times as fast. Volume works. Content works. A growing audience is the result.”
    • Quote (P. 77): “Constantly posting free content means you’ll have a constantly growing audience of people more likely to buy your stuff.”
    • Quote (P. 77): “A bigger audience means more engaged leads. More engaged leads means more money.” 
  • Creating Content: Hook, Retain, Reward — Good content hooks the audience, retains their attention so they consume all of it, and rewards them for consuming it. Again, simple pieces of content like a short Twitter post, a meme, or a graphic can do all three of these things. Your content doesn’t always have to be a full-blown, over-the-top piece. 
  • Creating Content: The Hook — Everyone who makes content is competing for attention. Everyday people have a million things vying for their attention. In order to gain their attention, our content has to hook them in somehow. We want to redirect their attention from whatever they are doing towards us. We want to make our content the best option. How do we do that? We do it by picking topics people find interesting, by creating headlines that give them a reason to consume our content, and by matching the format of our content with other things they like. More on each below:
    • Topics — Topics are the things we make our content about. You can use tending topics that people are talking about right now, topics that involve your past experiences, or almost anything else you can think of. Creating content around personal experiences is a great way to differentiate your content from everybody else’s. Hormozi breaks his topics down into the following categories:
      • Far Past — Create content around the past lessons in your life. Connect that wisdom to your product or service to provide a lot of value. Try to pick past experiences that people can relate to. 
      • Recent Past — Create content based on recent experiences and conversations you’ve had. There’s gold in these recent experiences. Testimonials can be used here as well. 
      • Present — When an interesting story happens to you today, post about it. If an interesting idea hits you today, make a post about it. Share your ideas. Document your life. Take people behind the scenes and show them what you’re up to. 
      • Trending — Go where the attention is. Look at what’s trending right now and create content around that. If you can connect your own experiences with the trending topic in some way, even better. 
      • Manufactured — Pick something people find in interesting and do it. Then share how it went with your audience. Mr. Beast recently did this — he bought a grocery store and paid a guy $10,000 per month for every night he was able to stay inside. He then created videos and other content pieces around the event. Manufacturing an experience like this takes more time and effort than most content posts where you’re just posting about experiences you’ve already had. 
    • Headlines — Headlines are critical. People make snap judgements about whether or not they want to read your content based on the headline. If they read the headline and feel they will be rewarded for their time and attention by consuming the content, they’ll do it. If not, they’ll pass. A recent meta-analysis of news headlines pinpointed the components that drive the most engagement. Try to include one or two of these:
      • Recency — Recent news gets attention 
      • Relevancy — Nurses will pay more attention to content that pertains to nursing 
      • Celebrity — People like to consume content about celebrities. Hormozi recently posted a TikTok video where he gave a tip that he said he learned from observing Eminem. His thumbnail had Eminem’s name and photo on it. It’s one of his most-watched TikToks. 
      • Proximity — The closer to home, the more likely a person will consume the content  
      • Conflict — People like conflict 
      • Unusual — A six-fingered man spotted?! 
      • Ongoing — OJ Simpson’s ride in the Bronco was a piece of ongoing news that captivated the country
    • Formatting — Formatting is all about customizing your content to match the personality of the platform you’re posting on. For example, a business post that’s appropriate for LinkedIn won’t mesh well with the audience on Facebook or Instagram. Often, you can make one large piece of content and repurpose it slightly to match the different platforms. Gary Vaynerchuk writes about this in his book, Crushing It!
  • Creating Content: Retaining the Audience — Curiosity is one of the best ways to hold attention and retain an audience. If you can engage a person’s curiosity in your content, you have a winner. Maybe the best way to create curiosity is to place questions in the prospect’s mind. These can be explicit questions that you pose directly, or they can be implicit questions that are implied based on your headline or copy. Three great ways to embed questions and drive curiosity include the following. All three of these can be used independently or intertwined together to drive curiosity.
    • Lists — Lists are things, facts, tips, opinions, ideas, etc. presented one after the other. Good lists in free content also follow a theme. Think “Top 10 Mistakes” or “5 Biggest Money Makers” and so on. Giving the number of listed items in your headline, or in the first few seconds of your content, tells people what to expect.
    • Steps — Steps are actions that occur in order and accomplish a goal when completed. People like reading steps. “3 Steps to Creating a Great Hook” and “How I Create a Headline in 7 Steps” and “The Morning Routine That Boosts My Productivity” are good examples. Steps differentiate from lists in that they must be completed in a specific order to accomplish a certain task. 
    • Stories — People love stories! As a newspaper writer, I always liked to open an article with a short story that had a takeaway that matched the theme of the article. Stories keep people engaged and curious. Use them whenever possible. An example: “My editor made me do 19 drafts of this book — here’s what I did to him.”
  • Creating Content: Rewarding the Attention — Hooks and curiosity are great at getting somebody to consume your content, but is the content rewarding? If so, it will get a lot of engagement and shares. If not, people will move on. To be rewarding, the content needs to satisfy the reason the person clicked on your content to begin with. It needs to answer the questions you’ve embedded in their mind. Think value per second here. The more value you can pack into your content, the more likely people will enjoy it, find it interesting and useful, and share it with people they know. In short, you need to either match or exceed the person’s expectations. Reward the person for giving you their attention.
    • Quote (P. 87): “Provide more value than anyone else. Make good on your promises. Clearly satisfy the hook you used to get their attention. In other words, completely answer the unresolved questions you embedded in their minds.”
  • Chapter Takeaway — To get more leads, you need to build an audience. To build an audience, you need to post content everywhere. And you need to post multiple times per day. Great content does three things: it hooks, it retains attention (via curiosity), and it rewards attention. 

Ch. 6: Post Free Content Part II

  • “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” — Gary Vaynerchuk has popularized this phrase in the content marketing arena. The idea behind the phrase (in marketing) is to constantly give free content, then sprinkle in a post about your offer. Ideally, you want to create and publish fresh content that is educational, interesting, and entertaining. By doing so, you start to build an audience and deliver value to them. They begin to like and trust you. You’re essentially depositing goodwill into a bank account. Then, when you ask people to buy your product or service, you withdraw from that goodwill bank account. The more goodwill you have built up, the less damage you do when you ask people to buy. People will be more likely to entertain your offer when you give much more than you ask.
    • Quote (P. 89): “Gary Vaynerchuk popularized ‘jab, jab, jab, right hook.’ It simplifies the idea of giving to your audience many times before making an ask. You deposit goodwill with rewarding content, then withdraw from it by making offers. When you deposit goodwill, your audience pays more attention. When you deposit goodwill, your audience is more likely to do what you ask.”
  • Making Your Offer — When it comes to presenting an offer to your audience, there’s a delicate balance that needs to be respected. If you over-promote your offers, you risk alienating your audience and losing some of them. But if you don’t ever present an offer, you’ll never make money. When you’ve built a solid following and are consistently delivering value to them, it’s time to think about promoting your offers. There’s two ways you can do this:
    • Integrate — The integration approach involves weaving quick offers into your free content. If you have an hour-long podcast episode, for example, you would run three 30-second promotions during the episode that promote your offer. If you have a long article, you would integrate a few sentences and a CTA pointing to your offer at various points throughout the article. 
    • Intermittent — The intermittent approach involves delivering a steady stream of valuable free content, then making one of those pieces a dedicated ad pointing to your offer. For example, if you’ve delivered 10 pieces of free content, your 11th piece would be your offer. 
  • Scaling Your Content — As you start creating content, you may need to decide how you want to go about scaling it. You may decide to focus all of your attention on dominating one social media platform, then moving on to the next platform and building your presence on that one. This is the “depth-then-width” approach. Or instead you could decide to post content on all of the available platforms at the same time and slowly enhance your presence on each of them over time. This is the “width-then-depth” approach. The latter approach works well with Gary V.’s suggestion of creating one big piece of content and repurposing it for the various platforms. Whatever you do, start posting content as much as possible! Again, the key is to build an audience. The bigger the audience, the more leads you’ll get. 
  • Chapter Takeaway — Probably 95% of your free content should be content that delivers value to the prospect. Only occasionally should you mix in a post about your product or service. If you ask people to buy too often, you risk losing trust and integrity with the audience you’ve worked so hard to build. As Gary V. says, “jab, jab, jab, right hook.” 

Ch. 7: Cold Outreach

  • Core Four Strategy No. 3: Cold Outreach — This chapter is all about the third strategy in the core four: cold outreach. This strategy involves reaching out privately to people who don’t know you — personally or through your free content — via email, phone calls, texting, direct messages on social media, voicemail, etc. These are cold audiences. There’s one key difference between warm outreach (discussed in an earlier chapter) and cold outreach: trust. Strangers simply don’t trust you. But cold outreach is also a numbers game; the more people you each out to, the more engaged leads you get. There are three big issues with cold outreach:
    • Building a List — Because you don’t know the people you want to reach out to, you don’t have their contact information. The first order of business is to decide the exact cold audience you want to target. Golf apparel retail owners making more than $3M in sales? Perfect. From there you can do one of three things to locate the contact information for people who meet this criteria: (i) scrape software services, (ii) buy a list from brokers, or (iii) look for them by manually searching the internet and databases.
    • Talking to Your List — Once you have your list, you’ll have to contact the people on it. How do you get the attention of these strangers? They don’t trust you and likely don’t want to be bothered. You have to overcome these issues in a matter of seconds. The trick is to do the following:
      • Personalize — Personalization is what gets your foot in the door. Try to find 2-3 pieces of information on each person before contacting them. Use the information to personalize your opener. At the very least, the person on the other end will be intrigued by the message you’re delivering. 
      • Maximum Value — Your cold audience gives you much less time to prove your worth than your warm audience. To overcome their impatience, you need to deliver a ton of value, very quickly. In the first 30 seconds. Blow them away with your offer or lead magnet. Make them feel silly for even considering a ‘no’.
    • Getting an Answer — Most people who are contacted by strangers don’t respond back. A solution to this is to increase your volume. Simply contact them more often and on multiple platforms. Use automation wherever possible. 
  • Chapter Takeaway — The cold outreach takes a ton of time, but it can be an effective way to communicate your offer to strangers. It needs to be executed in a certain way to be effective though. 

Ch. 8: Run Paid Ads Part I

  • Core Four Strategy No. 4: Paid Ads — The final strategy in the core four involves running paid ads. Paid ads allow you to reach cold audiences at scale. They allow you to get your offer in front of a huge audience. But they are also risky — you have to pay to advertise on platforms, and there’s no guarantee that your ads will produce more profit than what they costed you to run. The good news is that the reach is guaranteed. By spending money to run ads, you are guaranteeing that your offer will get in front of people. 
  • Paid Ads Step 1: Where to Run Ads — Pick any platform! You can run ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Spotify, YouTube, and many more. Pick a platform that is popular and that you enjoy using. Most platforms come allow you to run different types of ads. For example, with LinkedIn you can have ads appear in a person’s message inbox or newsfeed. With YouTube, you can run video ads in a variety of ways. With Google, you can have your ads appear when somebody searches a certain keyword. 
  • Paid Ads Step 2: How to Target — To get the most bang for your buck with your paid ads, you need to target certain people. Virtually every platform you can run ads on will have targeting options that allow you to place your ads in front of specific people who meet certain age, income, gender, interests, time, and location criteria. In other words, you can choose your audience by using targeting filters. This will help you narrow down your audience and put your ads in front of the people you believe might want your offer. 
  • Paid Ads Step 3: Gaining Attention — For the ad to be effective, it must get people’s attention. This is why the headline or first five seconds (video ads) are so important. If you can’t get their attention, they’re not going to consume the ad, and they won’t buy your product or service. Getting attention is critical — it’s the most important part of an ad. A call out is that headline or first five seconds of a video ad. It’s whatever you do to get the attention of your audience at the very start of the ad. There are a few techniques that help with call outs:
    • Labels — A word or set of words that out people into a group. These include traits, titles, places, and other specific descriptors. An example could be: ‘Gym Owners’, ‘Clark County Moms’, or anything else that clearly calls out your target audience. For people who fit into these labels, they will pay attention when they hear or see the labels.
    • Yes-Questions — You ask a question to the audience that, if they say ‘yes’, puts them into a certain group. An example: “Do you have a home worth more than $400,000?” If somebody hears this and answers ‘yes’, they will pay attention to the ad. 
    • If-Then Statements — If the consumer meets your conditions, then you help them. An example: “If you run over $100,000 per month in ads, we can save you 20% or more.”
    • Ridiculous Results — Crazy stats, testimonials, stories, and results can capture people’s attention. Anything out of the ordinary does a pretty good job of getting us to pay attention. 
    • Contrast — Anything that sticks out will get attention. A bright color, attractive person, etc. 
    • Likeness — Anything that matches up with what you’re selling. If you’re selling motorcycles, dressing up like a motorcycle rider in your ads will help you. If you’re a doctor advertising your services, dressing up in all of the stuff doctors wear will help. 
  • Paid Ads Step 4: Holding Interest — Holding interest in an ad is really all about using curiosity and value. If people think an offer or lead magnet has big benefits and tiny costs, they value it. And they’ll exchange money or contact information to get it. But if the cost outweighs the benefits, they don’t value it. So the best ads make the benefits look as big as possible and the costs look as small as possible. This makes an offer or lead magnet as valuable as it can be and gets the most engaged leads because of it. In short, good ads use clear and simple ways to answer the question: why I should I be interested in what you’re offering? They clearly show people why they should want your offering. It’s always about the customer and never about you. How will the product or service help the customer? That’s what good marketing is all about. Below is some information on the What-Who-When framework that can help show customers why they should buy:
    • What — There are several components that go into the “what” part of the framework. These relate closely to the value equation discussed in a previous chapter. A good ad touches on all of the following, showing prospects how your product delivers maximum value:
      • Dream Outcome — Talk about the maximum benefit the prospect can achieve by buying your product or service. How will your product enhance his life? How will it help him solve a problem or live his dream life? A good ad will also touch on some of the bad things that could happen if they don’t buy your product. 
      • Perceived Likelihood of Achievement — How likely is it that your offer will get the prospect to where they want to be? The way you communicate this and create confidence in the prospect’s mind is by flaunting things like testimonials, customer reviews, awards, endorsements, certifications, and other forms of third party validation. A good ad will also touch on the risk of not acting. How will the prospect’s problem get worse if they don’t buy your product? What are the dangers of not acting?
      • Time Delay — A good ad will show how the prospect isn’t getting any closer to solving his problem at the rate he’s currently going at. He needs to act, and your product is the solution to his problem. Show him how fast your product will solve his problem and contribute to him living a better life quickly. 
      • Effort & Sacrifice — Show how your product or service will get them results with minimal effort and sacrifice. One of the best ways to hit on this is by telling them how your solution will take the guess work out of their problem. If they simply buy your product and use it as intended, their problem will be solved. No more putting wasted effort into researching other solutions and trying things that don’t work. Our solution will make it easy for you to get the results you’re looking for. 
    • Who — Humans are primarily status driven. Good ads show how a person’s status can change in some way by investing in your product and using it to improve their life. 
    • When — Use the past-present-future formula to show how a prospect’s decisions and indecisions have led them to this point where they have a problem, then use the same formula to show how making the decision to buy your product will lead to much better results. The goal with this is to create powerful visuals in the prospect’s mind. These visuals can be powerful motivators.
      • Quote (P. 145): “Get the prospect to see the consequences of buying and not buying through their past, present, and future. Especially through their change in status with people they know. This way, we help them to see the value of their decision (or indecision) at this very moment.”
  • Paid Ads Step 5: The CTA — The CTA portion of your ad is where you ask the audience to do one thing. To avoid confusion, it’s very important that you only ask them to do one thing. Be as clear and direct as you can possibly be when crafting your CTA. And make it as easy as possible to execute the one thing you’re asking them to do. Make the CTA button big. Bold the phone number. Do whatever you need to do to make your directions simple and easy to follow. You can also use scarcity and urgency here to help motivate readers.
  • Paid Ads Step 6: Build a Landing Page — You need to have a landing page that your ad will take people to when they click your button. This landing page should be simple and look similar to the ad you designed. The landing page will expand on the benefits of your offer and prompt them to fill in a few fields so you can get their information. People who fill out your form and submit their information are now engaged leads and have given you permission to contact them. 
  • Interesting Fact — If you Google ‘[PLATFORM] ad library’, you can find a library of ads currently running on that platform. Most of these libraries allow you to search by company name, giving you access to a lot of inspiration for your own ads. If an ad has been running for more than a month, you know it’s an ad that is working well for that particular company. Use this method to study ads. 
  • Chapter Takeaway — Paid ads are how you reach cold audiences at scale. They can get your offer in front of a lot of strangers. Capturing attention is the most important part of an ad; if people don’t notice it, they’re not going to consume it. 

Ch. 9: Run Paid Ads Part II

  • Scaling Ads: Three Steps — There are three main steps to execute when trying to scale paid ads. All three of these are important, because paid ads can be a bit of a casino. The steps are:
    • Track Money — Before spending any money on paid ads, set up some kind of tracking sheet so you know exactly how much you’re spending and making from the ads 
    • Lose Money — You’re going to lose money at first with paid ads. It’s essentially an investment of money. You have to pay a certain amount of money for clicks, but those clicks aren’t guaranteed to lead to engaged leads or purchases. The key is to monitor your ads closely and, once you see an ad that is producing a profit for you, invest a ton more money into that ad. You want to support your winners and kill your losers.
      • Quote (P. 150): “And this is important, because you might lose, nine or ninety-nine times in a row before you win big. But, to win big, you have to see the winners and double, triple, quadruple, 10x down on them. This is why paid advertising is a lot like a casino. You’ll often lose in the beginning to learn the game. But — with enough skill — you eventually become the house.”
    • Print Money — Continue to pump money into the ads that are performing well and delivering a profit via product purchases. Spend as much as you can on these ads. They’ve proven to be winners. They’re working. Reduce the amount you spend on your other ads. 
  • Chapter Takeaway — Paid ads are a bit of a gamble because you’re paying up front, and just because somebody clicks on your and doesn’t mean they will follow through and purchase your offer. The key is to run many different ads and pump more money into the ones that are performing well. Reduce the amount you’re spending on ads that aren’t helping you make money. 

Ch. 10: Get Lead Getters

  • Lead Getters — Lead getters are people who will do the core four work for you. Using lead getters is how you eventually scale your business, because it takes way too much time to run through the core four at a high level every day. Ideally, you’ll rely on customers and hire people to do your core four work. There are four types of lead getters, according to Hormozi: 
    • Customers — They buy your stuff then tell other people about it to get you leads 
    • Employees — People in your business that get you leads
    • Agencies — Businesses with services that get you leads
    • Affiliates — Businesses who tell their audiences about your stuff to get you leads
  • Advertising Is a Numbers Game — Advertising is guaranteed to work, no matter how you decide to do it. You could be doing something as simple as putting out flyers — it will work if you do it enough. Volume is the key to advertising. Most people and businesses simply aren’t doing enough. Even the right strategy will fail to produce leads if it isn’t done at a high enough volume. It’s also important to give your ads time. It takes time for your ads to gather momentum and produce results. You can’t get discouraged and pull the plug too soon.
    • Quote (P. 255): “Most people do not get that advertising is an inputs and outputs game. To them, outputs appear out of their control. Their low effort inputs get them their low and unreliable output of engaged leads. We’re ending that now. You input advertising effort. Your output is engaged leads. Period. Now, we are crystal clear on the stuff you do (the core four). And like we learned when maximizing the core four — you just gotta put in more and do it better than before.”
  • Chapter Takeaway — Scaling a business comes down to bringing in “lead getters” who can go out and do the core four for you. Employees, customers, agencies, and affiliates are the primary lead getters.Â