[Case Study] How Nicholas Kusmich sold 6.400 Books using a Powerful viral strategy

One in ten people lacks access to clean water. Chances are that you already knew that. Helping this one person is what “Charity: Water” has set up to do. Helping this one person is what Nic Kusmich has managed to achieve in a very very extraordinary and unconventional way — using viral marketing! Let me tell you more about Nic…

Nic Kusmich — entrepreneur, marketer, advisor

I’ll tell you a secret — Nic has superpowers. It’s not like he can become invisible or reverse time — he can scale your business revenue like nothing else you’ve seen. He calls his ability “Contextual Congruence” — proprietary process developed based on deep understanding of social behavior and what creates conversions. Here are some members of the “pretty” fine group of people that have trusted Nic and his ability:

• Tony Robbins — The world’s leading personal development coach — worked with top CEOS and presidents of countries
• Joe Polish — Founder of the Genius Network (a.k.a. 25k Group) and co-founder of 10XTalk.com, and ILoveMarketing.com
• Robin Sharma — One of the most famous authors of all times in the genre of self-help, improvement and motivation

The Story — How Nic sold 6400 books and provided clear water for Charity: Water

Step One: Write a valuable book

The story (read Case Study) I am about to tell you is about a book – “Give: The Ultimate Guide To Using Facebook Advertising to Generate More Leads, More Clients, and Massive ROI”. Nic set up to write this book in order to spread his knowledge on Facebook advertising. He set the price at 4$ for the Kindle Edition. His next step was to create a Landing page for the book.

Step Two: Creating the landing page

Drawing from his vast experience Nic decided to make his page have 3 key parts:

1. Above The Fold

Nic placed, a handily crafted video explaining the book purpose and the benefits you are getting buying the book. He explained that 100% of the proceeds are being donated to “Charity: Water”. He even went on to further calculate how much books he needs to sell in order to provide the water for a typical village — 4200.

Actionable Tip #1: Correlate your success with a “feel-good cause”. The people love sharing things that make them feel good and make them appear righteous.

Actionable Tip #2: What is the first thing you see on this page? It’s the yellow button, right? It’s tempting to press it. Use contrasting colors and sizes to make things appealing.

The call to action of this part is buying the book on Amazon. This caused its own problem — How do you track the purchases coming from the site? How do you track the effectiveness and ROI of the site itself?

Nic solved this problem using an irresistible offer.

2. The $197 bonus

Nic set up to give away his “4M Facebook Formula” Training, for everyone that purchased the book. He used a compelling message and highlighted the price that this bonus is worth. $197 for just $4 — an irresistible offer huh?

Actionable Tip #3: If you need something from your customers (a click, email or purchase) make sure you compensate them with an irresistible offer.

This way, Nic was able to get contact point with almost all of his readers and was able to calculate(roughly) the effectiveness of the landing page. Great move!

3. Get all the Eyeballs you can (using UpViral)

The next challenge for Nic was to get as many eyeballs as he can to the landing site. Nic decided to play it smart and create a viral contest.

Entering the contest gave you a chance to win bonuses equivalent to $10k. The prices were some of his own courses and time. The mechanics were as follows:

• Nic used UpViral to create unique personalized share link for every visitor.
• At the end of the Pre-sale, the person that had most book purchases coming as a referral from his/her share link, wins the prizes.

Actionable Tip #4: When you think of a price or an incentive, try to think about something you already have and you can produce with no additional cost. A course/book that you have already developed or an hour of your time could be very appealing while having no additional cost.

This way Nic was incentivizing his visitors to share as much as they can. Here are the UpViral settings he used to set up his campaign:

As you can see, Nic decided to give 1 point every for every referred lead coming from a link, not for the share itself. This is quite a neat trick to tie actual sales to the competition score.

In order for this campaign to work as optimally as it can, Nic had to craft an amazing, compelling and touching social media post. Here is what he did:

Delving into the post itself we can distinguish few key characteristics:

• The image shows both the product and the supporting goal — the customer knows what it gets right from the image
• The texts are to the point and talk about the “price to worth moment”(you get $197 for just $4)

Actionable Tip #5: Try to visually connect your product with the emotion you want your customer to feel. Note the smile of the child holding the water and the book on the same picture.

Step Three: Promote

Nick tapped his huge network in order to promote the landing page, which would eventually start the viral loop. Here are the things he did:

• Submitted a post to his personal FB Group — the group has more than 25K members and serves the purpose of a personal mailing list.
• Partnered with influencers in the marketing field in order to promote the book and the landing page.
• Sent a compelling email to his mailing lists, linking them to the landing page.
• Ran a Facebook Ads — it only makes sense to advertise book for Facebook Ads on Facebook, right?

Actionable Tip #6: Based on the same principles that make the viral marketing the most effective marketing strategy you can employ, try to leverage authority and recommendations first. Nic has used his own FB group where he is an authority. In addition, he has partnered with influencers to reach their audience. Try replicating it in your next campaign.

Step Four: Enjoy the Results

Here are the results of Nic’s campaign:

1. Books Sold and Revenue Generated

Nick managed to sell a whopping 6400 books for a total of $26k. It was well above his target of 4200 — a village was provided with a clean water thanks to Nic.

2. Viral Leads And Shares Generated

Before we delve into the stats let’s put things into perspective — Nics viral loop isn’t a closed one. In order for the viral loop to close successfully, Nics leads need to go ahead and buy the book from Amazon. This breaks the closed-circuit characteristic of the successful viral loops and causes the stats to be skewed — there is a high probability that the real conversion rate is much higher than the reported one.

Here is a brief overview of the results Nic got using his viral contest:

• 1422 people signed up for the $10k bonus competition
• These 1422 People managed to refer 6941 new visitors — 4.9 to 1 ratio
• Nic’s viral loop managed to drive additional 229 leads resulting in $900 revenue

Step Five: Learn your lessons

As this was Nic’s first viral campaign of this kind, here are the two main points he identified as points to be done differently:

Use UpViral in a tightly closed-loop state and don’t leak eyeballs

Nic’s recognized that his viral campaign was “leaking” a lot of eyeballs out of the viral loop. The call to “viral” action was in the middle of the page length and many of the people (even if they bought) never got there and never got the chance to assist the virality by their shares.

Actionable tip #7: Make it easy for your visitor to help you go viral. Don’t make her/him jump through too many hoops (a.k.a. scroll too much) in order to play his part in the viral loop.

Leverage other influencers audience much more

Another point for improvement, that Nic identified is the usage of influencers. Having a more strategic approach to influencers communication, partnerships and cross-promotion could yield even better leads to feed in the viral loop and gain even more traction.

Actionable tip #8: Think who already has your target customers in their audience and try to kickstart your viral loop by collaborating with them.

8 actionable tips to take home:

#1: Correlate your success with a “feel-good cause”. The people love sharing things that make them feel good and make them appear righteous.

#2: What is the first thing you see on this page? It’s the yellow button, right? It’s tempting to press it. Use contrasting colors and sizes to make things appealing.

#3: If you need something from your customers (a click, email or purchase) make sure you compensate them with an irresistible offer.

#4: When you think of a price or an incentive, try to think about something you already have and you can produce with no additional cost. A course/book that you have already developed or an hour of your time could be very appealing while having no additional cost.

#5: Try to visually connect your product with the emotion you want your customer to feel. Note the smile of the child holding the water and the book on the same picture.

#6: Based on the same principles that make the viral marketing the most effective marketing strategy you can employ, try to leverage authority and recommendations first. Nic has used his own FB group where he is an authority. In addition, he has partnered with influencers to reach their audience. Try replicating it in your next campaign.

#7: Make it easy for your visitor to help you go viral. Don’t make her/him jump through too many hoops (a.k.a. scroll too much) in order to play his part in the viral loop.

#8: Think who already has your target customers in their audience and try to kickstart your viral loop by collaborating with them.

Ready to get 16,435 free subscribers in 30 days?

Nic is just one of the examples of how you can run a successful viral marketing campaign and get thousands of eyeballs on your content. The best part is that it is not a black-magic art — you can do it too and you can learn to do so.

Check out our FREE webinar and learn how you can tame the power of virality and use it to grow your business beyond your wildest imagination.

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