Do you struggle to get stuff done each day? Russell talks about how to shut off active communication, switch to passive communication and how it can make you 200 – 300% more productive every day!
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Hey everyone. This is Russell, and I am actually going in tonight to the office. It is almost nine o’clock at night, but I’m working a late night tonight, because sometimes that’s what you've got to do. I’m going out of town tomorrow with my family and so I’m heading out to a late night session at the office to get some stuff done so I can take a couple of days off and goof off with family
I've been thinking about something a lot today, and I've been ranting with some of the guys who work for me about it. I just wanted to get everyone’s perspective on this and put it out there. When I first got into this business, one of my early mentors was Dan Kennedy, and I went through his time management course [laughs], which is different than most time management courses. If you've ever gone through it, he talks about time vampires and how to distance yourself from customers or anyone who wants to suck your time.
For example [laughs], with Dan, if you want to get hold of him, you have to fax his assistant. Once a week his assistant collects all the faxes, puts them in a FedEx box and FedExes it to Dan. When Dan gets it, he then writes his responses on the faxes and then shoves them back in the FedEx box and FedExes them back to his assistant. His assistant actually will respond back to each person who contacted him, so [laughs], if you’re going to ask him a question, it’s a two-week process. It may be annoying on your side trying to get hold of him, but it also makes you, when you ask questions, very, very efficient.
That’s my biggest issue with phone calls. I hate phone calls. You can ask anybody [laughs]. I hate answering the phone. The only person I answer the phone for is my wife. On the phone, everyone wants to be like, “Hey, how’s it going?” They try to catch up, and twenty minutes into this conversation, they finally get around to what they’re going to ask you.
Then e-mail came around, and at first, the way e-mail worked is we just told people what we wanted, they responded back, and it was great. But now e-mail has become so informal that to write an e-mail, I've got to go through this chitchat – the same stuff I've got to do on a phone call. It takes so much time and energy.
Then text messaging came out. I love texting, because I can text people and the response is really quick. There’s a new app I've been using called Vox which is great, because I can Vox somebody and leave a message, and then when they get it, they can respond back to me. If I have time, I can respond back.
I really like that type of communication. I hate active communication, where we have to be actively engaged, because it takes me and you having to be stopping everything we’re doing at the same time to connect and have that conversation. It’s so inefficient for me. It drives me crazy. A lot of people ask me, “Russell, how in the world do you run twelve companies. How do you do all this kind of stuff?” The way I do it is because I don’t have inefficient communication.
My people on Skype – I try to train people I work with and it’s very difficult, because they don’t understand. If you’re on Skype and you message me it will be like, “Hi.” –“Hi.” –“Hi.” I will never respond back to a “Hi”. If they leave me a question, I will respond back with the answer next time I’m on, but I hate the active communication, because it opens up a door that wastes so much time. It makes you so inefficient. If I’m respond back to someone who skyped me, “Hi,” it would become at least a ten minute conversation, talking about the weather and everything else before we got to the point.
For me, for time management, for example – I want you guys thinking about this, too – how can you shift your communication? To set active communication, where you’re sitting there talking in dialog with somebody, to inactive, where they send you messages and you respond on your time, kind of how e-mail used to be.
The tool that I’m using when I do that is Skype, for the most part. I’m still struggling to train some of people whom I work with on that, but that way you message me on Skype. When I am ready to focus on that project, I will find that thing, and I will respond back to them on that topic. Text messaging is still great, because of that. Voxer, if you haven’t downloaded the Voxer app, it’s great. I can leave voice mail. It’s almost like a voice walkie-talkie text message. I text message somebody what I want to tell them, and they walkie-talkie me back when they want to.
I encourage you guys to figure out ways to break up active communication and train your partners, your staff, your employees, into the inactive kind. You will get so much more done. I set my day out, so I know, “Hey, today from this time to this time, I’m working on this business, or this project, or this, whatever it is,” and I only look at e-mails and correspondence and things related to that. I shut off everything else. I’m not perfect at it. I’m still getting better at it [laughs], but I get so much more done when I do that. It’s amazing.
I promise you guys that if you will cut out active communication, cut out phone calls – you don’t call people. Don’t do meetings. Meetings are the worst thing in the world. Do not do them, especially the “Got a minute?” meetings. If you've got a staff, then you know what “got a minute” meetings are. They always end up being eighteen hours long.
Figure out ways to break up the active communication and turn things into passive communication, where you communicate back if and when you want to. And notice I said, “If.” That’s a big thing. You do not have to respond back to everyone. I would say probably ninety-nine percent of my e-mails go un-responded. I’d say probably fifty percent of my Skypes go un-responded. Just because somebody messages me, doesn't mean I have to respond back to them. I want to give you guys that permission as well, to understand that you don’t have to respond back to everybody. Just respond back to the people that you need to communicate with for the project that you are trying to move forward at that time.
If you do that, you will get so much more efficient. If you will train your partners, and train your staff, and train your employees to do that, you will become so much more efficient. I've got three partners right now that I’m trying to train on that. They’re like the talkers who want to just get on the phone and hang out and network and talk, and I’m the opposite of that. We have this thing where they will call me, and then I will text them back. But that’s the way you've got to be. You've got to be so protective of your time, because people will dominate your time. They will devour it, and they don’t care. If you don’t care about it, people will run you over and so that’s my message today, for tonight.
Again, I’m going in at nine o’clock, probably planning about three hours of some awesome stuff, and then I’m going to go and take a couple of days off and party with my family, and it’s going to be awesome. I hope you enjoyed this. Again, if you like these podcasts, please leave your feedback. This is brand new. I've never done one of these before, and I would love to hear some feedback, hopefully positives. If they’re negatives, please don’t leave comments [laughs], but if they’re positive, I’d love to hear your comments. In the iTunes place would be really cool and also at our DotComSecrets.com, for more information about us and how we can help your business. Again, you guys, just take care of your time. It’s your only precious commodity that you have. Protect it. Don’t let people suck it. Don’t let people be time vampires and suck it up. Be very protective of it. I hope this helps. Thanks, everybody.
Russell Brunson talking about the hidden business inside of everyone’s businesses…
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Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you back to the “Marketing in Your Car” podcast. I hope you liked our intro song [laughs]. If you listened to the first podcast yesterday, I told you I’d been talking about doing this for 4 years, and I was having my brother do my audio/video stuff. He was going and he was putting up the first podcast, getting it all installed on iTunes, making it all work, and he was like, “Hey, do you want to use that intro we had done about four years ago for the ‘Marketing in Your Car’ podcast?” and I was like, “Oh, yeah, I forgot. We hired this dude to make an intro,” so I listened to it. It was super corny, super cheesy, but it sounded like a cool radio show, and so we’re going to use it for a while. Congratulations. You guys get to hear our awesome intro.
Right now I’m actually not driving to the office. I’m actually driving to go to wrestling practice right now. One of my buddy’s kids is in town and wanted me to beat up on him a little bit, so I’m driving there, but I just had some ideas I wanted to let you guys have some fun with. It was the thought process I’m going through.
Yesterday I talked about the power of things being rare in your business, and so when I was sitting there that day when I got to the office, I was thinking about how I could use that on anything I'm working on right now. We recently launched a new supplement, and if anyone's ever been in the settlement business, I'm learning all of the headaches that come with the inventory management and stuff [laughs] like that.
When we first launched, we had no idea if it was going to sell, so we ordered a thousand bottles, and it sold really well. When we went back, we ordered twenty-five hundred bottles, and it sold out, so then we went back and got another thing, but the thing that's annoying is that we have a six-week delay before the next order comes in. If I put in an order today, six weeks later is when we'll get the bottles back in, so it's a huge timing issue.
I'm a good entrepreneur. I'm not so good with timing and all of that kind of stuff, so all sorts of headaches has been happening. We decided to test something in the last day or so, and I don't have extensive results yet to show you guys, but so far the numbers look really good.
On our phone number, if you'll call in to order, we have a voice message thing that we're doing, and we are also tweaking the copy on the page, which basically just talks about the fact that the supplement is rare right now, which is true because we ordered our last batch of whatever it was, and they're almost gone, so we spoke to that. We talked about that and basically said, "Hey, this is a trial run. We're making sure that it sells well.”
I can't remember exactly how the script went as I'm sitting here in my car, but we did a couple of tweaks with the script, talking about how it was rare. Eventually it will be something that we have full production runs of, and at that point, the price will be X, but right now, because this is a newer thing, we want more case-based success stories. Until we sell out, this is the new price point. So far, in less than a day now of results, that’s going really, really well, so I'm intrigued and excited to watch what's going to happen over the next little while.
The other thing I want to talk about today, and hopefully this will give you guys some ideas, but one of my favorite books that I’ve read recently is a book called "Rework", by Jason Fried and the team over at 37 Signals. They are the guys that invented Basecamp. They also brought Ruby on Rails, that language about, and anyway, they’re really neat guys, and I had a chance to interview Jason a little while ago.
One of the concepts he talked about was selling your byproduct. He talked about a coffee shop which sold coffee, and they made a bunch of money, but they had all of these coffee bags they were just throwing away, and so they started selling the empty coffee bags and started this whole new business just selling that. He was talking about his business, the fact that these books they’re writing are the byproduct of all of this stuff they’re learning.
I thought it was kind of interesting. For almost the last five and a half years now, we've been running the publishing and print newsletter “HeadDotComSeekers.com”, and we've had tens of thousands of subscribers from all around the world. Tons of success stories have come from it, but it's just been that everyone in our office wrote an article about what they're doing, and we published it.
Recently I came back and said, "Look that stuffs been good, and people like it, but how do I create a product that's just phenomenal and exciting?” I kept wondering, “What are the things that people in our market really want? What are they interested in?” What was kind of cool is that in January, I was at an event. It was Ryan Deiss’s and Perry Belcher’s Traffic and Conversion event. Listening to this thing, and after, one of my friends came over to me. He's from Israel, and he said, "Hey, why aren't they sharing more of their split test results? That's the main reason why I flew all the way from Israel to here, because I want to see the results from the testing.”
I thought, "Isn't that interesting? That was his main driving point.” In our business, we test stuff all day long. We've got split tests on thousands of awesome, exciting, crazy, different things. I was trying to think of that could be the byproduct of our business, sharing in our split test results. I don't know anyone that's as much of an entrepreneurial ADD as me and has so much happening in all of these different markets. I think right now we're in twelve different markets, I believe, unless you count the Thai company I’m trying to roll out. That would be number thirteen [laughs]. But we're doing stuff in all of these different markets.
I think we have the unique perspective that most people don't have, so we share stuff that's happening in our supplement business and in our “keep running” business, and in our dating and our weight loss, in our Internet marketing, and all of these different businesses, and share the results. So that's what we're now rebranding our whole newsletter around, around testing results, and in about two months from now, we’re re-rolling out our newsletter under that new direction, new angle, and I think it's going to be really cool.
Just for you guys to think about in your business – what are the byproducts? What are the things that you're doing that just by the nature of your doing it, it’s creating something? That could be an information product. It could be creating waste. Whatever it's creating, what other side businesses are there that you can do, that you can spin off of that? I thought it was kind of an interesting topic and something you guys could think about in your businesses as well.
That's all I had for today. Again, I don't want to make these long. I want to keep them small. My goal is I’m going to be recording these while I’m driving either to work or like right now [laughs], driving to the wrestling room. Hopefully these things will be something that you guys can plug in to your car while you're driving. You can download them in the morning. I still don't know how podcasts work. I've never really been a part of one before, but download them in the morning, and when you jump into your car, driving to work or when you're driving around during the day, listen to them for ten or fifteen minutes.
My goal is that if I can give you one little idea or just get your mind thinking about something different each day, then I feel like I've succeeded and that's what my goal is. I appreciate you guys listening in, and I will try to keep giving you some good ideas. If you want more information about me or our company, please go to DotComSecrets.com. That's where we share most of our Internet marketing. Cool stuff that’s going down. I appreciate you guys, and we will talk to you again soon.
Russell Brunson talking about how the power of “rare” is more powerful then scarcity…
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Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to the DotComSecrets “Marketing in Your Car” podcast. This is episode number one. This kind of makes me laugh, because this is something I’ve been talking about doing for five or six years, ever since I first learned what a podcast was. I have never actually done it, so this is the first podcast.
My game plan in this is that basically I have a five minute drive to work every day. I'm just going to dump some marketing ideas and concepts on you on my drive. It's not going to be long or extensive, just about five to six minutes long, and that way, while you guys are driving to work every morning, hopefully you can listen to this as well and get some ideas for your business. That’s the game plan.
Today I want to talk about something that was kind of interesting to me. Saturday night, I was working on my computer late, and probably at about two in the morning or so is when my resistance to buying is at its lowest. Of course I decided, "I'm going to swing by eBay and see if there's anything cool that I can buy," which is usually a bad idea. Most days when I do that I end up a thousand dollars poorer, by the time it's all said and done. That night was no different.
So I'm in there. I'm searching for stuff. I'm trying to find something to buy. I’m looking for different marketing things and typing all of my favorite guru’s names. Finally I found this product. It's called something like "Guerrilla versus Gorilla", like Jay Conrad Livingston’s guerrilla versus a gorilla. There was a whole CD course from Chet Holmes, Jay Conrad Livingston, and Jay Abraham.
When I first saw it, I was like, "Oh, this is cool," and then I passed it, but I had it in my watch list. I went back later on that night, and I looked at it. I was looking closer. It was a cassette tape set, but Tape 2 to and Tape 4 were missing. I'm looking at it, and I'm going, "Oh man, it's missing some tapes, so I'm probably not going to buy it,” but I was like, “I kind of want to buy it now, because this is kind of interesting to me. Let me go and see if I can't find it anywhere else.”
I started searching everywhere else, and I kid you not, there is no copy of that product you can buy anywhere online at any site, even at their own site. It's impossible. I searched for another hour trying to find a copy of that product. I couldn't find it anywhere, so finally I came back to eBay. The only copy that’s there is missing 2 tapes, and it’s $200, but I go and I buy it really quickly, for $200, because I want this information. There's no one else in the world that has it apparently. You can't buy it anywhere, and so I bought that.
I told my brother. I’m like, “Scott, I just bought this thing, but Tapes 2 and 4 are gone. I need that information,” and so he searched for another hour or two trying to find a torrent site that would have them. We couldn't find any torrent sites that had them, but finally there was this Internet marketing torrent site that he was able to find it on, and we were able to download it.
I've been listening to it this week, and it's been great a great product. It really got me thinking a lot about the power, not so much of scarcity, but the power of rarity – of it being rare. I started thinking about how I could use that more in my business. I remember when I first got into this business, and I started learning how to do speaking, I started speaking at every single seminar. The very first seminar I ever spoke at was amazing, because they introduced me as this rare underground guy who never speaks, blah, blah, blah. Because of the fact that I was rare, the response was amazing.
After a year of me traveling the speaking circuits and speaking all of the time, I wasn't that rare. Some of that disappears because they can go see you anywhere. After about a year and a half, I quit speaking, and now I only speak maybe once a year. Again, when I speak now, it's kind of that rareness that comes out, and it's different. I started thinking more about my marketing. How can I cause that?
One of my mentors and someone I've worked with a lot over the last years is Dan Kennedy, and Dan always talks about positioning yourself as the guru on the top of the mountain. People can see where you are, but they can't get there directly. They have to buy things to get closer and closer to you. With Dan Kennedy obviously, you have their $40 or $50 a month newsletter, and then their $200 a month newsletter, and then their Mastermind Groups. The more money you pay, the closer to the guru you get. I just wanted to kind of throw that out there, not so much to tell you what to do, but just to get the wheels in your head spinning.
How can you become more rare, which will increase the demand for you for your time, for whatever it might be? If you're in a consulting business, the rarer you can make your time, the more you can charge. From a publishing standpoint, if you're blogging all of the time...
I've been watching recently – Ryan Deiss has been launching his Authority ROI product. I've been watching his prelaunch and stuff, and it's interesting. He's talking about bringing in a whole bunch of guest bloggers to post on your blog. I think what's interesting about that is that fact that now you can keep consistently updating your blog and having new stuff happening so that there's content, there's excitement, there's stuff still happening, but you can step back yourself and become more of a rare commodity where now you come maybe once a week or once a month and post. At that point everyone's waiting to hear what the guru has got to say. He’s finally coming down from the mountain, and now he's going to grace us with his presence, and talk.
I think it's a really interesting strategy, so I just want to throw that out there for today. It's something that's been on my mind a little bit. Again, I'm not sure of the perfect way to execute it yet, but I’m going to start working on it more and more in my business from all sorts of different levels, from a consulting standpoint, when we do consulting work, from a product standpoint, from a blogging standpoint, just, “How can I make myself more rare?”, because again, it increases the demand and the excitement for you.
But how do you do that without becoming irrelevant either? If you're not out there for too long, then you become irrelevant, and so it’s this mix of, “How do you do it? What’s the perfect formula?” Anyway, something for you guys to think about today.
I’m now at the office. I’m going to end this recording, and I hope you enjoyed it. We’re about six minutes and eight seconds long, because that’s about how far away my office is from my house. Now I know. I hope you guys enjoyed this. If this is your first time ever listening, we’re going to try to figure out how to get this thing on iTunes, so please subscribe there, and then also check out our site DotComSecrets.com to learn how to increase your business. I appreciate you guys, and we’ll talk to you again tomorrow.