(This is a repost of an article I wrote on my blog at TheRichMindset.com - I thought you would all find it inspirational and useful. Cheers!)

Tim Ferris, author of the successful Four Hour Workweek and now Four Hour Body isn’t an author in the true sense of the word. He’s a masterful marketer who knows how to push people’s psychological buttons in order to sell books – and there’s nothing at all wrong with that.

As entrepreneurs we live and die by our ability to sell people on our ideas, and in this post I want to break down some of the brilliant marketing tactics Tim is using to push copies of his current book.

Strategy #1 – Polarize Your Audience

The content in The Four Hour Body isn’t designed for the average person. It’s designed for those who are willing to think outside the box and try new things, whether that means taking his PAGG combination of policosanol, alpha-lipoic acid, green tea flavanols and garlic to stimulate fat loss or eating like a pig while still build muscle mass.

More important than the actual content is how it’s packaged. Tim’s content is designed to polarize people – you either love him or hate him. Polarizing people is an interesting marketing strategy because those that love you will sing your praises, while those that hate you will still write about you and tell people about you, thus further expanding your reach.

Polarizing people means that their emotions are involved and can cause them to say and do irrational things. As a marketer, the more emotion (good or bad) you can get out of people the better, because they will feel a lot more passionate either towards or against what you’re selling. Whichever way they feel is win-win for you, because people are hard wired to share their polarizing opinions with anyone who will listen. You and I call this “word of mouth”.

Polarizing people has allowed Tim’s new book to cut right through the middle of the saturated weight loss market and stand out. It looks different, is named differently (consider “The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman” versus “A Course In Weigh Loss”, for example) and is current at the top of Amazon’s best selling list.

Strategy #2 – Pique Curiosity With Carefully Selected “How To” Lists

People hate to read. They do like to skim though, so one of our most powerful weapons as psychological marketers is our ability to cater to “skimmers” as I call them. And the best way to do that is with bullet lists. Here’s the entire bullet list Tim uses on The Four Hour Body website:

How to prevent fat gain while bingeing (X-mas, holidays, weekends)
How to increase fat-loss 300% with a few bags of ice
How Tim gained 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, without steroids, and in four hours of total gym time
How to sleep 2 hours per day and feel fully rested
How to produce 15-minute female orgasms
How to triple testosterone and double sperm count
How to go from running 5 kilometers to 50 kilometers in 12 weeks
How to reverse “permanent” injuries
How to add 150+ pounds to your lifts in 6 months
Notice how each bullet point starts with “How to” and contains a very specific benefit? This is no accident. Tim knows that his potential reader (typically middle aged male, single, relatively fit but not ripped – yet) will be nodding his head to every single one of these bullet points. This list will also pique his interest and in most cases will cause enough curiosity to make him go and grab a copy of Tim’s book.

What Tim cleverly does here is leave out the context and supporting details around each of these seemingly-amazing activities. For example, you can sleep 2 hours a day using polyphasic sleep, but that involves having 20 minute naps every 4 hours. That’s a nap at 8am, 12pm, 4pm, 8pm, 12am and 4am. So technically, yes, you can sleep 2 hours a day but will you? That’s really not the point. The point is that Tim has piqued your interest enough to get you saying to yourself “Wow, even if only a few of these are really true, I can be fitter/faster/stronger/more handsome. The book is only $15 bucks, let me grab a copy”.

Strategy #3 – Kudos from Influencers

Long before Tim released The Four Hour Body he tapped into his network of A-list bloggers, authors and journalists, as well as his huge blog readership. He gave out pre-release copies of his book to people he knew would:

Give it a favorable review – either because they’re a “fan boy” (i.e. love everything he does) or because they’re an author – and that’s what authors do. It’s the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” idea. Seth Godin is well known for giving glowing reviews to dozens of books in exchange for the same when he releases a new book. Again, this is brilliant marketing and there’s nothing wrong with it.
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Post a review on their blog – Tim’s book has been reviewed by people with huge followings, and once they’ve reviews his book they post that review on their own blog. This further enhances Tim’s credibility (“wow, Seth Godin reviewed Tim’s book so it must be good!”) as well as the blogger’s (“Kevin got a pre-release copy of Tim’s book so he must be special”). This is brilliant associative marketing on Tim and the participant’s behalves.
Strategy #4 – Hit Everywhere, Seemingly All At Once

This is possibly the most powerful psychological marketing strategy you can do, and Tim has done a great job of this for the Four Hour Body. On the date his book was released, he was seemingly everywhere. He was interviewed on TechCrunch. He appeared on Huffingtion Post. He was signing books in NYC. He was on TV debating with doctors. And of course his book was being reviewed on all of the blogs that his potential readers, well, read.

The genius of this strategy is as follows:

See Tim and his new book everywhere you go both online and on TV – in the same day
Think to yourself “Sheesh, everyone is talking about Tim’s new book, let me check it out”
Go to Amazon.com and read reviews – all are 5 star reviews, created in strategy #3 above
Buy Tim’s book and become part of the lovers or the haters – either way, he sells more books
In Closing…

Tim’s marketing strategy for The Four Hour Body is genius. It obviously took months of planning and has paid off big time. It’s a true blueprint for marketing a book by making use of social media, influencers and huge readerships. I’ve read the Four Hour Body and it’s a fantastic, detailed book, so I’m definitely polarized by the book’s content – but in a hugely positive way.