Dr. Travis Zigler is a recovering optometrist turned ecommerce entrepreneur. He is the founder of Eye Love, eyelovethesun.com, whose mission is to heal 1,000,000 dry eye sufferers naturally. Dr. Travis and his wife, Dr. Jenna Zigler, use the profits from Eye Love to fund free clinics in Jamaica and the US through their charity, the Eye Love Cares Foundation, eyelovecares.org.
Due to the success of Eye Love (over $4 million per year as of 2020), others have asked if Dr. Travis would help them grow their business online, and more specifically with Amazon, which is one of his superpowers. Specializing in Amazon PPC, Dr. Travis blogs about Amazon PPC and selling on Amazon and also has a free Amazon PPC Masterclass, which you can check out here: profitablepineapple.com .
Listen to this informative Publish Promote Profit episode with Dr. Travis Zigler about starting a sales funnel with a free book.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- How a free book is a great start to a sale’s funnel.
- Why a Google ad to a blog post instead of a product will yield more sales.
- How having a free book can lead to more product sales.
- Why the persistence of Google Ads to a blog post can create ROAS.
- How pay one cent for a website visit might be better than worrying about SEO.
Connect with Travis:
Links Mentioned:
eyelovethesun.com
eyelovecares.org
profitablepineapple.com
freehydrate.com
Guest Contact Info:
Facebook
facebook.com/groups/dryeyesupport
Rob Kosberg:
Welcome, everybody. Rob Kosberg here with another episode of Publish. Promote. Profit., the podcast. I’m with someone that I think is going to be of great help to you, especially if you’re interested in the eCommerce world. Dr. Travis Zigler is a recovering optometrist. We’re going to talk a little bit about what recovery means, turned eCommerce entrepreneur. He’s the founder of Eye Love, which is eyelovethesun.com, eye, E-Y-E, whose mission is to heal a million dry eye sufferers naturally.
We’ve already had a conversation about my dry eye problem. We won’t get into that on the podcast. Dr. Travis and his wife, Dr. Jenna Zigler, used profits from their Eye Love to fund free clinics in Jamaica and the US through their charity, the Eye Love Cares Foundation, eyelovecares.org. Thank you for that. Thanks for your service to people. I love when entrepreneurs like yourself give back. Dr. Travis, thanks for being with us today.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Rob. This is great.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, I think we’ll have some fun. It’s a little bit different than maybe some of the podcasts you’ve done. For those that are watching on YouTube, as you mentioned, my cohosts are with me today, Bob and Finley, my Argentine Dogo and Bull Terrier. If you see them in the background, try to not be too distracted. Maybe we could start with the obvious. Why does someone become a recovering optometrist? What does that even mean? You, obviously, went through a lot of hard work and trouble to become an optometrist in the first place. What does all that mean?
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Let me first off say that your glasses are great, but they’re too similar to mine. I am going to switch glasses really quick just to make sure …
Rob Kosberg:
I love it.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Well, I want people to be able to tell us apart. I’m just going to go with a different color here.
Rob Kosberg:
Fantastic.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
I just thought of that. Recovering optometrist, I was an optometrist graduate in 2010, and worked for my uncle for about four or five years. I worked for my uncle while I was in undergrad as well in optometry school. Felt the niche to do more, just a little backstory, jumped shipped, quit my job, we moved across the country, my wife and I did. We started two practices of our own, ran those for about three-and-a-half years. At the same time, we started this online business called Eye Love.
Eye Love took off a lot faster, because we can reach a bigger demographic, teaching people how to heal their dry eye naturally online versus seeing people one on one. The recovering part of that is medical profession is traumatizing now, because it’s not the doctor and the patient anymore. It’s the doctor, the patient, and this big old insurance company right in the middle. It’s terrible. It decreases care. I actually pay cash for all my doctors now. I don’t even get an insurance company involved. Do I have insurance? Yes, I have a Samaritans ministry plan.
You pay cash for all that. It makes the relationship better, because you’re going to get more one on one time with that doctor because you’re paying them cash. The insurance company is not involved at all. That insurance façade, it really just burnt me out. I told everybody I wanted to retire by the time I was 40 years old from optometry and not see patients anymore one on one. My wife and I were lucky and fortunate enough to do it by the age of 33 and 32. We’re now all in on this online thing, three years strong.
We love every second of it, because we have time and location freedom. It’s everything we wanted. It’s just a lot of fun. We get to help and impact more people, because we take on more mission trips per year. We used to go on one every two to three years. Now we go on two to three a year. We didn’t get to go last year, unfortunately, for COVID reasons. What we did instead is we actually donated groceries. There are a lot of families in need, especially in third world countries like Jamaica, that they rely on tourism, that’s their number one economic driver, and it’s gone.
A lot of these families just have no money. We donated a lot of groceries down in that area, just because they had so much need for food. Even though we weren’t able to go down there and do it ourselves, we were able to still help positively with our charity. That’s why we do everything we do. We want to serve other people. That’s really what life is all about. If you’re miserable or you’re not happy, it’s probably because you’re not serving somebody else. Once you start serving somebody else, that’s when everything starts to change for your life, as far as your life just takes off and your happiness takes off as well. I guess that’s a recovering optometrist in a nutshell.
Rob Kosberg:
No, that’s good. Look, I appreciate your heart and your wife’s heart, the things that you’re doing, clearly, with both your charitable organization as well as the trips that you take, obviously make a difference. I think, clearly, you could not do that if it weren’t for the transition that you made. Maybe talk to me about that for a minute. How did that happen? You don’t just go from … What is it? 12 years of school to become an optometrist to we’re going into the eCommerce, eBook, courses, business. How did that journey happen? What did it look like?
Dr. Travis Zigler:
It’s a great story, actually. When we started our practices and when we started this online thing, the reason we started the online eCommerce journey is because I went from seeing five patients an hour at my uncle’s practice to seeing one an hour when we opened up our new practices. That slow down made me bored. Idle hands tend to get creative or cause trouble, depending on who you are. I found a course online taught me how to sell on amazon.com. I took the course. We actually started out as a sunglass company, hence the name, eyelovethesun.com.
We still sell a couple pairs of sunglasses, but we’ve shifted our focus to more of a dry eye focus. When we were on this journey, what we noticed is we were growing these practices. The online business was growing exponentially faster than our practices were. Practices, 20% year over year, 30% year over year, doing great. The first year in our online business, we grew 1000%.
Rob Kosberg:
Wow.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Then the second year, we doubled again. The third year, we doubled again. The 10X and then the doubling year over year, we got on the Inc. 5000 list as a result of that, the fastest growing companies and we should make it again this year. It was just a no brainer for us to go all in. The shift from being a sunglass company to dry eye happened because when we moved to South Carolina, we were going to start trying to have kids. As fate would have it, we couldn’t have kids. My wife was told that she couldn’t have any kids.
We tried everything in the Western medicine realm other than IVF. IVF, we woke up the day of the IVF appointment, after three years of trying different things, we just didn’t feel like it was right for us. We didn’t want to put my wife’s body through that. We then started exploring Eastern medicine. We went to an Eastern medicine practitioner, acupuncture, started taking herbals, changed her diet a little bit, we’re vegetarian for the most part. We just adjusted a couple things. Then we got pregnant in three months.
Rob Kosberg:
Wow!
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Going from three years of trying to being told we can’t have kids, to IVF, maybe getting us pregnant, 20% chance, to getting pregnant three months later doing Eastern medicine. It shook us to our core, because we were trained in Western medicine. That’s all we knew. Now I’m thinking about all my patients that I’ve been treating for dry eye with this drop and this drop and this prescription and this prescription. I’m thinking, what if we just take a step back and approach it from an Eastern medicine standpoint, and focus on their diet and just changing a couple things, focus on hydration, stress, sleep, all these things to just decrease the inflammation of our body to get our body back into homeostasis or that balance. Then in turn, that’s going to decrease the inflammation in our eyes, which is then going to lower the inflammation of our eyes. That’s the same thing. Then your dry eye is going to go away.
Rob Kosberg:
Wow.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
That whole shift led us to writing our book and starting to teach people this whole philosophy. We’ve sent thousands of people through a boot camp challenge that we made. It’s free. The results are better than any of the prescription eye drops that are out on the market. Our core was shaken. We just pivoted into more Eastern medicine and just learning that and functional medicine and just teaching it to more people. That was a lot of life events. We’re actually expecting our third child, it could be today.
Rob Kosberg:
No way. Congratulations!
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Yeah. It’s been a wild ride the last three years, that’s for sure. Infertility no more as you can tell from child number three, but he’s due on the 24th of March in 2021, so any day now.
Rob Kosberg:
Wow, that’s amazing. Well, congratulations! I’d like to learn a little bit about the challenge that you’re referring to. It sounds as though much of the prescription, if you will, has to do with diet and what you’re putting into your body that may cause inflammation. Can you talk a little bit about what is the challenge, and is it specific to dry eyes?
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Yeah. We target dry eye. My book is called Rethinking Dry Eye Treatment, I’m going to hold it up for the YouTubers, but Rethinking Dry Eye Treatment and you can get this for free at dryeyebook.com. That’s our start of our funnel. If you want the paperback version, you can buy it there, Audible Kindle. Then throughout this book, we talk about the challenge. We used to charge $4,000 to join the challenge because it was hands on functional medicine from us. We then changed it to a free model. How we do that is it’s another lead magnet for us. You can visit that at dryeyebootcampchallenge.com. In week one, we teach you how to take care of your eyelids.
Your eyelids are very important when it comes to your eye health, because your eyelids produce oils that put oil onto the eye. The oil in the eye moisturizes, lubricates, protect your eyes. 85% of people that have dry eye, it’s usually a result of their eyelids being inflamed. Week number one, we teach you how to take care of your eyelids. Now all the products that we mentioned are our products. We get them in with a free book or a free boot camp challenge in that week one. Then what we talked about in the book with the eyelid hygiene part, it’s all our products.
Specifically, that’s how we profit from this. Then week two, we go into green smoothies. We replace your breakfast with a green smoothie. We don’t take away anything from you. We replace something. Because taking away, people shut down right away. When we replace something, it’s a little easier. Because when you look at breakfast foods, bagels, donuts, cereal, any kind of dairy, sausage, bacon, all that is inflammatory. You’re increasing the inflammation. If you start your day out with a green smoothie, it’s very alkalizing.
A very simple green smoothie is a plant-based milk, some spinach, some berries, throw in a banana for flavor if you want. That’s it. That’s a very simple one. If you want to start adding other things like avocado. Avocado is great, not much flavor, thickens it up really nicely. Frozen cauliflower doesn’t have much flavor, thickens it up nicely. Don’t put fresh cauliflower because you will taste that. Then you can add protein powders and things like that to make it flavorful even more. You can make it as simple or complex as you want it. We give them smoothie recipes.
That’s week two. Week three, hydration. So many people forget how to drink water. I think it’s around 90% of people are dehydrated today, because all they’re doing is drinking soda and pop and juices, and they’re not drinking water. I drink water and tea. That’s pretty much it, then the occasional beer, but just occasional. That’s the week three. Week four, I might get my weeks mixed up. Week four, we start talking about getting away from non-organic food, starting to eat only organic. Because non-organic food has pesticides, fertilizers. What are pesticides and fertilizers?
They’re poison. It’s pure poison that you’re putting in your body. It’s made to kill something else. You’re just a bigger version of that something else. You’re slowly killing yourself by giving yourself cancer and heart disease and all this inflammation in your body from these pesticides and fertilizers. Then we go into what foods to remove. We’re very gentle with that. Those are your processed foods, your sugary foods, like white sugar, gluten, dairy, those are all the most inflammatory foods that are out there. Then finally, we talk about how to sleep better, how to stress less. Then I got to think, I got to run through all my weeks here. I think that’s it.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s good.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Yeah, I think that’s about it.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s excellent. How often do you run this challenge? Obviously, going from $4,000 to free, pretty significant. How do you fill the challenge now? What does all that look like? I know you’re in eCommerce and probably Facebook ads and Instagram or what, expert. Talk me through how to fill it and all that.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Yeah. The goal is we try to get people on our website with blogs. I sent you a blog before the podcast started. That was all about how much your eyes water and why they water. Somebody searches on Google, why are my eyes watering? We have a Google ad that shows up for that blog post, not for a product that we sell, just for that blog post. Most people with Google Ads are going after the product description words. They’re not going after those long question words, and that’s what we go after. We try to think of the problem that the product solves.
Then we write a blog post on it. Then we drive traffic to that blog post. We’ve been doing this for three-and-a-half years now. We have hundreds of blog posts getting all this Google Ad traffic. When we first started the strategy, we were getting about one new email a week. The new email, we get that email by putting a pop up on that blog post that says, get your free dry eye book. Get the free digital version of this book. Then when you put your email address in, it goes to an upsell page that offers you to buy this book or to buy any of our products. That was our goal. We got one per week. Then we started getting one per day. Now three-and-a-half years later, we’re getting 200 per day.
Rob Kosberg:
Wow.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
We’re getting 200 emails per day as a result of this strategy, long persistent action over the course of a long period of time. Then we try to get them to join the boot camp challenge. The book talks about the boot camp challenge and we talked about it as well. Again, one simple step per week, for eight weeks, to lead, to lower inflammation, and then to live a healthier lifestyle. Then they get in the boot camp challenge, and then they start purchasing our products as a result.
Rob Kosberg:
Or they may purchase your products right from the initial get go too, right?
Dr. Travis Zigler:
We made it week one on purpose, just so then we can really see the frontend numbers quickly. Then you know how much you can advertise for and everything.
Rob Kosberg:
This is gold, by the way. Thank you. Love this. One of the strategies that we have at Best Seller Publishing is, and I briefly mentioned it, we use my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Publish. Promote. Profit., on the frontend of a free plus shipping funnel. That free plus shipping funnel then, for 7.95, they get literally free copy of the book. Then there’s number of upsells and down sells, ultimately to potentially working with us, for ghost writing, or a book launch, or publishing, or PR and media, whatever.
We know we’re spending $50 to sell a book, but the funnel itself is earning us $35 or whatever. We’re still on the red a little bit, but not very much. I share all that to say and to ask, what are you spending with the Google AdWords that you’re doing on a daily basis driving traffic? If you don’t mind me asking, if you don’t want to say, that’s fine. What are you spending? What kind of results do you see from that on a regular basis? Because that’s pretty gold strategy right there.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Yeah, we’ve been scaling the strategy for quite some time. This is just off the top of my head. I’m going to try to think. With just the Google Ads strategy, we’re spending about, I’d say, I got to think here, 15,000 a month on this strategy. This is over time, three-and-a-half years we’ve been building up to this. That $15,000 a month is turning into about $50,000 in revenue for us, not just from the book sales. That’s a small portion of it, but product sales as well. We have the book sales and we have the product sales, both. Spending 15 to make 45 usually per month.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, not bad, not bad.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Yeah. It’s about three to four ROAS. We are in the black from the get-go, from this. If I’m not getting a two ROAS or above on a blog post, we’ll actually shut it down. We’ll try to optimize it first, and then we usually shut it down.
Rob Kosberg:
For those listening, ROAS is return on ad spend?
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Yes, sorry.
Rob Kosberg:
No worries. No worries.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
The Google Ads strategy is one part of our marketing, and then we have remarketing with Facebook. We do remarketing with Amazon ads. We also spend a lot of money on Amazon PPC. Just creating that one consistent action, that persistence of Google Ads with a blog post has just created this ROAS. We didn’t get that ROAS right away. We were at the one to two ROAS at the beginning, as your blog starts to get traction. That’s when everything takes off. Then we get an email address. We try to sell them.
If they don’t buy, we continually expose them to blog posts over and over and over again. What is dry eye? What causes dry eye? What are dry eye treatments? What else could I do for dry eye? What is IPL? What is the LipiFlow? What is Restasis? All these different things that we can come out with blog posts, and we just continue to get them back on the blog. That continues to decrease our ad spend and increases our return on ad spend.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful. I love that. I would assume then when I go to this blog post, I’m going to get retargeted. I’m going to start receiving a lot of different blog posts, which is good.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
You will get an email probably every two days from us.
Rob Kosberg:
Love it. That’s great. I love the strategy. My other assumption, and please tell me if this is correct or not, but my assumption is that because of the keywords you’re targeting, they’re not really buyer keywords. There’s probably a much cheaper cost per click in that situation. I would also assume that because you’re driving them directly to a blog post, which is information that Google really likes that, and so maybe even increases your SEO or the opportunity for some organic traffic. Can you speak to that for a moment?
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Yeah. Your assumptions are really good. First of all, when you’re going after a problem that your product solves versus just going after the product, then you can get lot lower cost per click. We’re getting some cost per clicks in the one cent range.
Rob Kosberg:
Unbelievable. Beautiful.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
For $5 a day, we’re getting 500 visitors on a blog post.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s incredible. That’s beautiful.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
I will pay that all day long. Some other blog posts are in the 20 cents, but still, 20 cents, to get people to put eyes on your website. This content, what we also have is a video. We always have a YouTube video that accompanies that. That came later. We didn’t do that right away, but now we do it. Then they’re watching a YouTube video on our blog. Again, like you were saying, Google loves that because they’re just sitting on our blog. The longer somebody sits on your blog and interacts with it, the more it’s going to shoot up an SEO. SEO is not a strategy for us.
It’s a side benefit of it. We do not worry about SEO. It’s there, but it’s not huge in our book. Because when you’re paying one cent, I’d rather pay one cent for a visitor all day long than worry about SEO.
Rob Kosberg:
I agree wholeheartedly, great strategy.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
We just flood with that cheap, cheap traffic. We’ve tried this in different areas, so dry eyes, where we focus on now. We’ve done it in paleo. We’ve done it in keto. We’ve done it in intermittent fasting. We’ve done in all these other categories. We do it with our agency. I have an agency on the side called Profitable Pineapple Ads. We write articles on how to do Amazon advertising. We teach you our strategy for free. When you get on that website, it goes through the exact same process. I told you this before we got on.
We just released a book at the day of this recording, and we haven’t even incorporated that into the funnel yet, because we have a free Amazon PPC course. We have a paid course. Then we have our agency. We do that same thing. It’s not quite as cheap for the clicks on that. We’re paying more like 50 cents to 75 cents. Our lifetime value isn’t $300 like it is at Eye Love. It’s more like 10 to 20, to sometimes $50,000 for a client.
Rob Kosberg:
Right, right. That’s a beautiful strategy. I wonder, this may be difficult to answer, but is there a strategy that you employ to find those questions that you can answer in a blog post that aren’t directly related to a buyer, but that clearly are sending someone with that problem? How would that be interpreted to a completely different industry, whatever that industry is? Does that question make sense?
Dr. Travis Zigler:
I think so. A good example would be Restasis. Restasis is a prescription. Let me know if I’m going off of what you asked, but …
Rob Kosberg:
No, you’re on track, I think. Yeah, I get where you’re going with it.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Restasis is a drug that people are always researching, because they get prescribed it. It’s $500 a month. They’re like, whoa. They’re typing in Restasis coupon, or how does Restasis work, is Restasis worth it? Then we have blog posts that talk about the Restasis coupon. We have blog posts that talk about Restasis reviews from real clients and customers. We have blog posts that just talk about the mechanism of action of Restasis. Nothing to do with our products.
Our products aren’t really even mentioned on the blog post, but they’re getting on our dry eye blog, which then we can retarget them. They get into a Facebook pixel audience. We pop them up with, hey, looks like you have dry eye, check out our free dry eye book. I think this is answering your question, but completely unrelated to our product, but related. Those people that are looking for Restasis have been prescribed, they’re under a doctor’s care plan. Now we have to try to convince them to go away from Western medicine, or not go away from it, but in conjunction with that, follow our protocol, an Eastern medicine and functional medicine. Did that answer your question?
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, yeah, totally. I think, obviously, it will take some thought for somebody. The idea is you’re, obviously, staying on topic and on subject matter, but you’re using ancillary pieces of it. In your case, anybody that gets a prescription for Restasis clearly has a dry eye problem. It’s not a buyer keyword, because you’re not selling that prescription drug. However, because they’re looking for that means that they have the same problem that you solve and perhaps a better solution for them is your solution rather than Restasis.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
That’s exactly right. Then to go into it just another quick example, you brought this up earlier, is your book just for dry eye? It’s not. We market it towards dry eye. You can literally replace dry eye with anything like high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol. Follow the steps in the book to reduce the inflammation in your body, to heal yourself from those diseases. You just wouldn’t do the eyelid hygiene part if you had a diabetes. We feel like we’ve maxed out the dry eye space as far as blog articles.
What we’re doing now is we’re trying to go after people that have something like glaucoma. Glaucoma is a disease of the eye, nothing to do with dry eye. Because you’re trying to decrease the pressure inside dry eye, because the pressure inside dry eye is causing damage to the nerve of your eye. The nerve is what communicate your eye to your brain. What we know being optometrists, is that most glaucoma patients have dry eye. We can get a flood of traffic around glaucoma. Then we have to see if they have dry eye by trying to pick them out.
Another example would be rosacea. Rosacea, nothing to do with dry eye, but a little bit to do with dry eye. The same concepts hold true with rosacea. Then macular degeneration, this is in the back of the eye. Macular degeneration is where you’re losing your central vision, nothing to do with dry eye. People that have macular degeneration tend to be in their 70s and 80s. They tend to be women, which is our target demographic. Then we’re trying to get them on a blog post to try to get them to convert over to our dry eye products.
Rob Kosberg:
Right. Love it. I love the thinking. I think anybody that is looking to use a book or their expertise and maybe sell eCommerce or even higher ticket stuff, this is a great, great strategy. In fact, it’s a strategy. I am totally going to rip off and employ. Because we do some blogging and we’re doing more and more blogging now that our content marketing is really ramped up. I love the idea of running traffic. We run a lot of AdWords traffic. We’re scooping the cream with AdWords, meaning that we’re going right for just the buyer keywords, et cetera, because we sell a high-ticket service. However, driving them to the blog post, then retargeting, et cetera, great, great strategy. I see you’re giving me something in the chat to look at. I will take a look at that.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
That is actually a free training on my agency’s blog posts or blog that teaches that whole strategy I just said. I actually do the live training about a year-and-a-half ago on exactly how we did it. It is based on selling a product on Amazon. If you sell your book on Amazon, you can use that exact strategy. I’m sure we’ll have it in the show notes down below too. It’s just to warn you, you will be retargeted.
Rob Kosberg:
No, no. I like retargeting. I’m an ad junkie. I like it. I like to see what smart people are doing to be successful in their business.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Yeah, that’s a free training. You’d only have to put your email in to get the free training, but it works. Then I think I have the pop up on there for our free master class. If you’re an Amazon author or if you’re an author of any kind, then that master class is going to teach you how to use Amazon PPC to sell more books.
Rob Kosberg:
Love it. We will put that in the show notes for everybody listening. Because, obviously, many of our clients are authors. Of course, many of the people that we work with directly, this could be beneficial too. Let’s change gears just a little bit, although you’ve already shared a lot of your marketing strategies. I like to talk about, obviously, the things that you’re doing within your expertise. I also like to transition, the whole idea of Publish. Promote. Profit. is publishing your book, publishing your content, promoting it, and then using it to make an income and an impact on the world, which you’re obviously doing.
Can you talk to me about what your book has done for you, for your business? You shared a little bit about using it on the frontend as a free giveaway and then selling it. How instrumental has your book been to your business and what you have today?
Dr. Travis Zigler:
I think it’s bigger than you think, but it’s hard to measure it. Because a book just gives you that instant authority, that you’re an author, that you took the time to write a book. A lot of people think that writing a book is difficult. If you have a great plan, which I’m sure you guys do, then it’s very easy to write a book. We were already creating blog posts and we were already creating all this content. Then we just put it into a book format. That’s what we did. The book itself, that instant authority piece, we have doctors that buy our book to give to their patients.
Rob Kosberg:
Wow.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
That’s really cooled to see. Doctors are reading it and shifting their mindset a little bit. Because like I said, in Western medicine, we don’t learn any of this. I feel like we’re creating a revolution around dry eye care. We’re spearheading that. There are doctors getting on board now, taking this Eastern-Western medicine approach based on what we’ve been able to come out with online, on YouTube, on Facebook, our book. All of that has shifted the mentality of some doctors. Now, at the same time, we have a lot of doctors on board with us. Then we have a lot of doctors that just absolutely hate us.
Rob Kosberg:
Of course.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
Whatever you throw out to the world, expect it to get some polarizing points of view. There have been times that my wife has been in tears because of what doctors have said to us, because people are cruel.
Rob Kosberg:
They are cruel.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
It all stems from jealousy. Because you did something that they didn’t have the guts to do. The book can do so much for you. It can give you confidence. It can give you authority. It can give you, of course, sales, and then it gives you trust. Because literally, this is sitting on over 4000 people’s bookshelves, coffee tables. It’s been read, it’s been listened to. We’ve been in their ear multiple times with our YouTube channel, with our audiobook. It gives you that trust.
When I meet people that either have followed me for a while, either on my agency side or on the dry eye show side, they feel like they’re meeting celebrities. It’s funny because I’m just a guy working at my home office, writing a book, and coming out with videos. It gives you that authority push. Then for the agency side, what’s a high-ticket item just like yours is, it makes it a lot easier to close somebody because they’ve seen me multiple times on YouTube videos. When I get on a phone call with them, they already know they can trust me.
Otherwise, they wouldn’t be on that call. It’s very easy close at that point, it’s not even closing. It’s just a matter of seeing if we’re comfortable together. Same thing with the dry eye side, it’s easier to close somebody before a sale, because they already know they can trust us. They’ve seen us multiple times. They’ve gotten to know us. That’s what a book can do for you, is it can create this holistic sense that I can trust when you haven’t even met the person.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, yeah. I love that. Obviously, you and your wife are two people. You can only do so much. You have what? 4000 little soldiers out there in the form of your book winning people over to your thinking, your mindset, and your cures, your actual help. Obviously, you could never replicate that just on your own. You’d be exhausted from all that. It seems like, one last thing, and then maybe we can tell them where best to find you, although we’ve given them a bunch of different links. We’ll maybe give them one or two to focus on.
It seems like your book is at the centerpiece of everything that you do. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but even your blog post strategy, your various ad strategy seems to eventually lead people back to your book. Is the book the centerpiece of your funnel or is it not? If it is, how is that working? Is there any moving away from that? Or what does that look like?
Dr. Travis Zigler:
We have a hero product that is the centerpiece of our funnel, that’s through our products. We wake up every day saying, how can we sell more of this product? When we know somebody can get on that product, because the problem with the pain industry is everybody is looking for that quick fix. If you can’t give them that quick fix, they don’t care about anything else that you offer. The book is more of a slow fix for us. It’s more of one of those long-term plays. We have a product that actually gets to the source of the problem. It gives you relief quickly.
That’s the main point of our funnel. Then what we use the book for is to give them a different point of view from anything they’ve ever heard. When they come across the book and they start reading it or the boot camp, because they’re the same thing, they always say, after the first chapter or two, “I have never been told this about my dry eye. I have never even been educated on any of this.” Then that’s why we call it Rethinking Dry Eye Treatment, because it’s a whole different thought process around treating your dry eye. Then they start to shift their mentality around it.
Then once you can shift somebody’s mentality on something like a severe dry eye or something in pain and it works, they’re going to promote you, love you forever. Like you said, 4000-foot soldiers, but more I’ve gone through the boot camp. We have YouTube subscribers; we have an email list that’s a lot bigger. Once you shift their beliefs on how they treat their dry eye, which is what our book and our boot camp does, then they’re pretty much going to be raving customers of ours for life, because we’ve changed their life. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what gives us the biggest satisfaction, is we get to change people’s lives with just simply with a book. That’s amazing.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, show them that you can help them by actually helping them.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
It’s a novel concept.
Rob Kosberg:
It’s a novel idea. You don’t have to convince them of anything when you’ve actually helped somebody. Travis, look, I love what you’re doing. I love your heart in all this and really happy for you and your wife on child number three. It sounds like you’ve been blessed a lot in your life and have really made a difference in a lot of people’s lives. Let us know where best the listeners can find you, where they should start. I think they need your book, for sure. Where best to find you and start down that path?
Dr. Travis Zigler:
If you do have dry eye, head to dryeyebook.com and check it out. You can see our whole funnel there and just go there, even if you’re marketing just to see our funnel. It’s super simple. We don’t complicate it. Because our target demographic is that postmenopausal female. We try to keep it as incredibly simple. I always have my mom in the back of my head to start whenever I’m creating anything new, so dryeyebook.com for that. Then we do have an Amazon ads course, it teaches people how to use Amazon advertising effectively. That’s at profitablepineapple.com.
We do also have an agency. We don’t work with authors yet. Because, unfortunately, Amazon does not let us use our technology for Amazon ads for authors. Maybe in the future. If you’re listening to this in 2022, then reach out, you never know. The free course that we offer, absolutely free, all you have to do is put in your email. That is 100% geared towards more of a manual Amazon ads process. If you’re an author, it will work perfectly for you, so definitely go through that.
Rob Kosberg:
Love it. Love it. Travis, thank you. Thanks for your time. Thanks for sharing some real gold, some stuff I plan on stealing. If you pay attention to my funnels, you’ll see we’ll be running some traffic to blog posts and that kind of thing. Sincerely, wish you the best with your wife and the birth of your third child. Good luck with that and look forward to maybe Amazon opening it up for authors and us being able to send you some clients down the road.
Dr. Travis Zigler:
That would be awesome. Rob, thanks for having me on.
