Here are the core reasons why Russell is finally getting involved in social media.

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Hey everyone! This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a very special Halloween Marketing In Your Car.

Everyone, so this Russell and today is… It just happens to be my favorite holiday, which is Halloween, and a lot of people think, “Halloween is your favorite holiday, Russell?”

But yes, I don’t know why. I just have so many fond memories of getting candy, and smashing pumpkins and everything else fun I did as a kid, and now it’s fun to take my kids out -- not smashing pumpkins, I try to teach them respect.

We’re definitely going out and getting candy, making some witches brew, a bunch of other fun stuff, so it’s going to be a fun day today. Anyway, I’m really excited.

So today I want to talk about just the kind of stuff that’s been happening in our business. What’s been interesting is, as we’ve been trying to kind of shift up our business model and change a whole bunch of things, you guys will start seeing a bunch of changes happening over the next two months in our business.

We’ve been, you know, about six months worth of back-work, and doing stuff that no one can really see yet, but you will all be able to see it very, very soon, a whole new re-brand of all of our sites, all of our brands, things like that.

And one of the big pieces that we’re doing is focusing a lot more now on social media, things like that, and it’s interesting because I’ve always fought social media. I’ve never wanted to do… I didn’t want to tweet. I didn’t want to do Facebook.

I didn’t want to do all that kind of stuff, but it’s getting to the point now where I just can't ignore it anymore, and we’re getting more and more involved. And it’s been interesting like, for any of you guys who are SEO type people or curious about SEO, it’s really interesting how much SEO has been changing.

We used to have full-time teams of people who did SEO, and now we’ve pretty much canceled and let go of all of them.

What we’re finding, and it’s interesting -- and I think that this will be the trend, moving forward with SEO -- is like it’s having a lot less to do with like backlinking and things like that. It’s having a lot more to do with like the actual social interactions that people are having.

I’ve heard stories and read things that talk about how the new future of SEO is, basically, social media. Where instead of someone going to Google and typing in, you know, “work at home,” instead of finding whoever has gotten the most backlinks, it will look at you and look at your social profile.

See the people who you care about, and then see if any of the people you care about, if they’ve liked something. Or they’ve commented on something, they asked who’s making work at home make money.

And if they have, then boom! That will show up on top, and it’s just interesting that that’s the direction that things are going, where search and social are now becoming one.

So I think that’s why we’re now focusing on that and trying to learn the game and trying to be engaging, and trying to build a Fan Page, and trying to tweet and all these nerdy things that I never wanted to do.

But we’re doing them now, and I think that right now they’re important but soon they’re going to be essential. I mean, look at like back in the day we’re used to go spend a ton of money for a backlink, right?

You get the perfect backlink and almost instantly you can get ranked very, very quickly. Where I think now it’s going to be a lot more like networking, and finding the social influencers in a space.

For example, lets say I’m in… like let’s say I’m in the diabetes market, right? Which we are… and so, you know, and now I want people searching for diabetes to show up.

So what I’ve got to do is I’ve got to go out there and network and find people who are big, prominent names in diabetes, whatever, and get them to comment about me on their social media, on their Facebook or Twitter or Google Plus or LinkedIn or whatever.

But if I get that person to do it, now all those people’s followers, in the future when they start searching for stuff, I’m going to pop up, and so I really think it’s interesting.

It’s moving away from like the technical SEO, you know, to get rankings where it’s X amount of links, and the link quality and the link density and latent SIMATIC index and all these things we used to focus on to try to beat the search engines, right? And now it’s not. Now it’s being social. It’s getting people to talk about you. It’s networking. It’s gone back to like organic business.

It’s really interesting, and so again despite the fact that I’ve been fighting it for years, we’re now jumping in and trying to focus on that because I think that’s going to be the future for all of us.

And I also look at like when I first got into this business, the way that I grew my business was networking. Like I was out there on the forums, meeting everybody in my industry. I was getting to know them.

I was going to events and meeting them, and I became very, very social, and then somewhere along the line I had kids and a wife and a company and we just stopped being as social, and so…

Oop, I’m pausing because I just drove past a cop in the Ferrari, and he’s looking at me now.

Anyway, we basically, as I said I stopped being as social, and luckily I built a lot of deep connections and relationships, and I had a lot of really good partners.

But if I look at my business now, and I think that nothing is stagnating at all. We’re still growing, but it hasn’t grown as it should because I haven’t been out there networking, and the new place to network is not the events, it’s not the forums -- it’s social media. It’s Facebook, and I hadn’t been putting in my time there.

And so, just for you guys, you know, think about the same types of things. This networking stuff that we’re talking about, it’s good from so many standpoints. It’s now good for the social traffic, obviously.

It’s good for future SEO rankings and things like that, and it’s also really good just for finding partners and friends and networking and things like that, and so I just want to stress to you guys that now is the time to get social, if you haven’t yet.

Jump on the bandwagon with me. You know, I fought it for years, but now we’re jumping in and I think that all you guys should, as well.

So, anyway that’s what’s happening for our Halloween today. I’m really excited. I just got to the office. I’ve got my fake biceps. My Halloween costume is these fake biceps, and then a blonde mullet wig. [Laughter] Which is kind of fun.

I had it the other day, and my daughter said that I looked like a muscle woman because my mullet was long and blonde. So anyway, I’m dressing up like a muscleman, with a long mullet, and going to have a fun day today.

So I’m excited. I hope you guys are as well, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

The question that Russell asked that helped him raise an extra $500,000 in extra cash by the end of the year.

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Hey everybody! This is Russell Brunson, and welcome to today’s Marketing In Your Car podcast.

Hey guys, so we just finished a two-day mastermind here in Boise. I just actually drove my brother, who’s our audio-video guy, back to the airport. He’s flying back home, and I’m driving back, to go hang out with my kids and my wife and stuff, and so I’ve got probably 15 minutes or so in the car.

I just wanted to talk to you guys about some cool stuff I’ve been thinking about. And what I want to talk about is probably one of the most important things that I think any of us could ever think about. It’s had a really profound impact on me the last like week, so I’m excited to talk about it.

So earlier this week -- my wife and I have been planning on building a house for a while. We’ve been looking at a lot of stuff, and we finally found some land we like and everything.

And then just like last minute, I think it was on Tuesday, we saw this house. It looked really cool. So we’re like, “Oh let’s just call the realtor and go check it out.”

So we go check out the house and it’s amazing! It’s 11,000 square feet, it’s on five acres, it has everything we could dream of in a house.

Plus like the yard is amazing. There’s a swimming pool, there’s a hot tub, there’s like a full orchard worth of trees. Like seriously, the coolest house like I think I’ve ever seen, and so I want it really bad, right?

And the only problem is, to buy a house that size, we had to have a down payment of $500,000 to be able to move forward on the house, and I don’t care who you are, a half a million bucks is a lot of money, right?

So I’m like, “Well, how can I?” Anyway, so I started to just… like my wife is like, “I want this house. I want this house.” I’m like, “We can't really afford it.” But I was like, “Don’t worry. I’ll start thinking about it, and I’ll figure out a way that we can get it.”

And so, all of a sudden I started asking some interesting questions. The question I asked was: “How can I make a half a million dollars in extra cash before the end of the year?

So the next two and a half months, and typically if someone says something like that, you’re like, “You’re crazy. There’s no way you can make a half million dollars in two and a half months extra on top of what you’re doing.”

I was like “there’s got to be a way,” so I kept thinking about it and thinking about it, and my wife’s like, “Don’t talk about something like that. It’s not good.”

You know, she thinks it’s like you. What I’m going to do is illegal or something, that she’s just kind of funny like that. She doesn’t like when I plot and scheme ideas, so I’m like, “No, there’s got to be a way that we can do that.”

So, I went back home and went back to the office, and we’re all working and I kind of told those guys, “You know, I love the house. I want to move in.”

And Brent and John share an office with me, and I kind of asked them, “You know, like how can I make an extra half a million dollars this year?” And they kind of just like are working and kind of commenting, and they’re not paying attention.

Finally, I was like, “Guys! Stop what you’re doing, like this is actually really an important thing. We need to be asking ourselves questions like this more often. Like how can we make an extra million dollars or half a million dollars cash in the next like two months?”

And so, they kind of put everything down and started focusing, and we started asking questions. We started kind of evolving this thing, and within about 45 minutes we created a very realistic, concrete plan that I honestly think we could execute to make a half million dollars in the next two months, and we got it done. And then I kind of stopped, and said, “You guys, we need to ask ourselves questions like this more often.”

I was like, “You know, an hour ago, we were working on these projects, and we never asked the question how can we make an extra half a million dollars. We just… we’re were just working on our thing.”

And I started thinking like, if we look at a squeeze page, and we say, “How can we improve the conversion on the squeeze page?” and we ask that question, we’ll figure out a way to make it better.

If we do a sales letter, how can we make this better? If we ask that question, we’ll figure out a way to make it better, and what I was thinking is like when you ask the right questions, the right things will come.

If you ask big questions, you’ll be able to figure out the solutions to big things. So kind of an example of what we were figuring out for our $100,000 offer, or to make a half million dollars, I was like:

“You know, we do a product launch and try to sell a $1,000 product, and sell 500 of them, I’m like, ‘Oh, that sounds like so much work!’ I was like, ‘We could do this… We could do this…’”

And all of a sudden I was like, “What if we… What if we created a $100,000 package and just sold five of them?” and like, “Oh, that’s a good idea. What can we sell for $100,000?”

I’m like, “Well, think about this… Like we launched this call center. We launched this little mini call center in our office. We’ve got two sales people. We hardly generate any leads.

It’s very few leads, very targeted. And right now, with two sales people, we’re averaging, not quite, but pretty close to $100,000 a week in sales.

And I was like, “Think about this. If we found five people who have a business, but they don’t have this little like mini call center thing that we just built, and it could literally make them $100,000 a week.

“What if we come in and say, ‘Hey, pay us $100,000, and I will come to your office, and my team will come and build out the whole thing. We’ll train sales people for you. We’ll get the whole thing done, and you will leave with a business that can make you $100.000 a week.

“Would you pay me $100,000 if I gave you business that made you $100,000 a week?” Everyone was like, “Yeah! I would. That’s a no-brainer. Of course I would.”

You know, obviously, it was just like, yeah, it’s a good deal. But I’m like, but still the same thing is I’m kind of scared. Like if you’re going to write a check for $100.000, there’s so much risk in that so much fear. And like, is that actually going to work or not work? I was like, “Well, what if we did this. What if we came back and said:

“Hey, give us $100.000, but don’t give it to us, put it in an escrow account. And we’ll look at it, and then we’ll come in, and we’ll build this entire thing for you for free.

“We’ll set it up. We’ll launch it. We’ll run it, and we’ll watch it, and we’ll help make sure it works, and we will wait until it’s made $100,000.

“And as soon as it’s made $100.000 in gross profits, then that $100,000 that you put escrow will be released to me, and then you’ll have a business that you can keep running to make $100,000 a week.”

I was like, who would say no to that? Like as long as you have the ability to put $100,000 in escrow, who would not do that? Like I’m going to make you $100,000 before you ever give me any of the money, and so it starts being like that.

I’m like this is actually really good. Like this is something I would have paid for in a heartbeat, and it’s got to be the right business, the right company, right?

But if it’s the right fit, we could literally come in and in less than a week we could build this whole thing out for somebody, and have a new asset hooked to their business and make them $100,000 a week.

And so, I started getting excited. So I was talking to some guy, and this guy, I kind of mentioned it to him. And he was like, “Dude, I know tons of people who would go for that.”

So he started calling some people, and we got two or three people lined up that may do it. Then by mastermind group, when I kind of pitch it, and soon as I do everyone’s going crazy, and one person is like… they’re like:

“We’re not on spot yet. We can’t do it, but I know somebody who would be very interested, who wants to do it,” so then we got one potential client.

Then Daegan told me, he’s like, “There’s a guy who was talking to me two weeks ago, who said, ‘All I want is the call center. I want somebody to come and set the whole thing up for me, and I’d pay anything -- any amount to do it.’”

Boom! We got a lead right there, and then the guy in the room also said he wanted us to do it for him.

So within two days of me just asking that question, of how I can make a half a million dollars in a month, I’ve already got six people, potentially, who are able and interested in giving me $100,000, for me to come set this thing up for them, and I was just like, how cool is that?

And it’s just interesting like, most of us -- the difference between successful people and not successful people is successful people ask the right questions -- and I’m really kind of ashamed of myself. I haven’t been asking better questions lately.

My questions lately have been stupid. They’ve been like… they haven’t been big enough questions, you know, and so I’m going to start every single morning, waking up, and like asking a big question or multiple big questions, and then using that throughout the day, try to answer those questions.

Because my question is like how can I get my work done today, or how can I whatever, nothing good is going to happen. If my question is like how can I make an extra million dollars, how can I change more people’s lives, how can I double the size of my list?

Like if I ask questions like that, then suddenly my focus goes there. And as Tony Robbins says, “Where focus goes, energy flows,” and we just started to start picking the right questions. And if you pick the right questions, you’ll start growing correctly.

I think we focus too much on trivial things that don’t really matter, as opposed to picking the right questions to help us grow our business the right way.

It’s kind of funny… and then later that night in the mastermind -- seriously I need to learn to take my own advice sometimes. But we were at dinner, and I was talking about how the Ferrari, we would probably do a contest and give away the Ferrari, and do a fun kind of thing like that.

I was talking about that, and one of my friends, who works for ClickBank said, “Hey, you should have ClickBank. Use part of ClickBank to give away your Ferrari.” And I’m like, “Well, there’s no way they’re going to do that.”

He’s like, “Why not?” and I’m like, and I told him all the reasons why it wouldn’t work. He’s like, “Dude, you’re just not asking the right question.” I’m like, “There’s no way that will ever work.”

And he kept like making fun of me. He’s like, “You just ask. Ask a better question! Like you’re asking the wrong question.” And I kept telling him, I was like -- his name is BJ.

I’m like, “BJ, this… ClickBank would never in a million years go for this. Like it’s a mute point. Doesn’t even, like it’s not worth even discussing.

And he kept saying, “Dude, you’re the one who talked about, say, ask a better question,” and I was just kind of upset and annoyed with him, so I kind of ignored him.

Anyway, the next day we’re sitting in the mastermind meeting, and all these discussions are happening, and then after talking to BJ, and all of a sudden boom!

It hit me. A way that we could partner with ClickBank on the Ferrari launch, and I said, “BJ, like I just answered the question.” I said, “Because you forced that question into my head, annoyingly, it was in there and my brain figured out an answer.”

And within a day we had the answer to this thing that, potentially, can make me insane amounts of money -- an actual quarter million dollars a month -- because I had that question forced into my head.

If I would have asked the question, I probably could of figured it out a lot quicker. So I just want you guys to all just start thinking about the quality of the questions you’re asking, and how often you’re asking them.

I teach a Sunday school class today, and I teach the 15 and 16-year-old kids, and so today in class I was just talking about this concept about questions, and I was like, “What are your goals and your dreams and your desires?”

And they kind of were telling me things they’re trying to accomplish, what they’re doing, and so what we did is we took a minute. I had everyone pause for just a minute, and I actually timed it.

I said, “I’m going to give you a minute right now. I want you to pick one big goal or one big question to be your focus for this week, and then I want you to come back next week and report back to me what happened, because you focused on that question for an entire week.”

And so, we paused, and then had everyone sit there and think for a little bit, like what would be their question, and I didn’t have them tell me what they were because I don’t want to…

You know, since with people that age, they’re embarrassed to show their real desires and their dreams, what their questions are, so I didn’t ask them to share it with us.

But I gave them a full minute to think about it, and I ask them, “Do you all have your question?” And I said, “Okay, I want you guys to go home tonight, think about a question, and when you wake up in the morning, I want that question to be the first thing on your mind.

“And throughout the day, I want you to be thinking about that question, and then tomorrow, the next day, I want you to wake up in the morning and for an entire week I want you to focus on that question.”

And I said, “For most of you guys, I promise you, by day one or day two, this big, huge question that you didn’t think was even possible to answer, you’ll be able to answer, and it won’t take you a whole week.”

I was like my “how am I going to make a half a million dollars extra in the next two months,” which -- it’s a big order that I was asking my brain to come up with -- but sure enough, within hours, we had the answer, okay?

The question of how can I get ClickBank to completely promote my launch to all their affiliate base is a big question! Not even logical! And within a day we had the answer.

Okay, so just start thinking big, thinking way bigger than you’ve ever thought before, and figure out that question that you never thought you’d ask and you probably shouldn’t ask.

If somebody knew you were going to ask it of yourself, they would make fun of you, and tell you it’s not possible. Or tell you that things like that don’t happen to people like you. And if you do that, I promise you cool stuff is going to happen.

And I think about the Ferrari… I’m like when the Ferrari contest came out, at first I looked at it and I was like, “I imagine a lot of people competing. “I’m not going to win,” and then the second I looked at it, I said:

“Huh! How can I win this?” and as soon as I did that, it opened up my brains to a pathway, and suddenly a month later we won a Ferrari, okay?

If you’ve ever read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, he talked about the difference between financially rich people and financially poor people. He said, “Poor people say, ‘I can’t afford that,’ and rich people say, ‘How can I afford that?’”

Just a change in the question, how do you position it differently, how do you do it so that your mind doesn’t say, “Oh good! I’ll think about this” and relax, but instead, you put your mind in a state where it’s got to think, and got to figure it out.

And our minds, our subconscious minds, are so much smarter than we give them credit for. We just don’t ask because we’re so lazy, and it doesn’t want us to ask. It wants us just to hang out and watch T.V.

But if you turn the T.V. off, ask the question, then ask the question and keep asking and keep asking it, you’ll be shocked at how fast the answers will come.

I’m convinced of that. I’ve seen it twice this week, with seemingly impossible goals and dreams, coming about in reality in a matter of hours, after we asked the question, so ask the question and see what happens.

Anyway, that’s it for today you guys. I am actually just back from the airport, and I’m grabbing my wife and my kids from church, and then we’ll be heading home.

I hope you guys had a great weekend. It depends when you’re listening to this, but I hope everything has been great for you guys.

If you’re enjoying these podcasts at all, please share them with your friends. Post it on your blog.

Come and comment, and we love it, it’s fun to do, and I hope you guys are getting some ideas that will help effect your lives and your businesses, positively.

Thanks so much, you guys! This is Russell Brunson with the Marketing In Your Car podcast.

Russell is driving home a 2 AM in the morning and sharing some of the insights they got building out their new SAAS products. Russell also shares with you what it’s like being a super hot girl!

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Hey everyone! This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to an exciting edition of the Marketing In Your Car podcast.

It is actually 2:00 in the morning. I just dropped off Todd at the hotel. Todd is our developer. You guys heard about him in the last episode, and I’m in the Ferrari driving home at 2:00 in the morning. It is freezing cold! And the top’s down, and I just passed a cop.

But the top will remain down because we’re driving a Ferrari. You don’t put a top up. I don’t care if it’s two in the morning, if it’s freezing cold, that’s how we roll and run the Ferrari.

So in the last episode, I was talking about developing software is a service type product, and what’s been fun is basically the last two weeks Todd has been here in town.

We’ve been developing a brand new product, and I’m super fired up about it because I think it’s going to change the way that people do marketing. I know it’s going to change the way I do things.

It’s going to make it where, basically, I can do all the marketing by myself without any webmasters, developers or anything, which is exciting. So anyway, I’m excited for it. But I’m more excited just to talk more about you guys, about software as a service.

And we talked about it last time, just some of the benefits of it. But the reality is like it’s been interesting is we’ve developed this product.

You know, in the past when we developed products, we tried to give it so many features and so many things that it’s just overwhelming to customers and to us to support it, and to create.

And we’ve really been following this model just like making a strip-down, bare bones, as simple and as easy as possible, and as we’ve done that it’s just making a tool that I think people will use and stick with long-term.

One of the cool concepts we talked a lot about tonight, that I think I want to kind of focus this on with you guys is, when you’re creating, if you decide to create your own software -- if and when you’re creating your own software.

One of the biggest keys in the long-term success of your program, whatever you’re creating, is if you can create something that has pain and disconnect.

And it makes me laugh… I’ve been doing membership sites now for, man, seven or eight years. We’ve made millions of dollars off membership sites. But one of the constant dilemmas we have is there’s always this constant churn and burn. We’re always just adding people into the funnel.

I just passed another cop, so I might go onto the side street here. Anyway, it’s a constant burn and churn when you have a typical membership site because content is good, but it’s not essential.

Like when somebody -- you know, their credit card comes up, and they’re looking at their bills -- like when they look at like “Oh, it’s a membership site. I enjoy it. But, hey, you know, it’s… I don’t have to have it.”

So it’s creating something that if somebody wanted to cancel, there’s huge pain and disconnect. And that’s really what -- you know, not that we’re trying to develop things that cause pain, that would hurt our client’s business.

But is something that is so valuable and so useful that if they ever canceled it, would be very painful. So, you know, if for some reason their credit card failed, they’re just going to think, “Oh my credit card failed, no big deal.”

If their credit card failed, within two minutes they would call you because they’re using your service so much that they have to have it to function. And that’s the kind of product that you’ve really got to create, and I think that’s really the big secret.

I really think that next year, with this product rolling out, I think we could do $10-million pretty easily next year. And it’s just because we’ve created something that’s so powerful and so useful that the pain and disconnect is just so much, and so I really want you guys thinking about that.

Like if you do decide to develop a software program, like what kind of product or service can we create that ties our customers in so deeply that they just love it so much that they can't cancel?

It’s kind of like our supplement. Our supplement has been interesting because I think it’s kind of the case with any supplement you have. There is a percentage of people who it doesn’t work for, and there’s a percentage of people who it works great for.

And that’s how it is right now. If we have people, we have clients who are literally calling us saying:

“My bottle is empty, and my new next shipment hasn’t come in! I will pay you whatever it costs to overnight this thing. And make sure that I have that bottle here tomorrow because I don’t want to go through a single day without this in my system.”

We get those kinds of calls all the time, which is awesome and exciting. And so, again, it’s pain and disconnect. If those clients stop having our supplement, they’re in so much pain that they can't function, and so they don’t want to go without it.

And I think that, you know, in the past in the Internet marketing world, what people have taught and talked about it is just, you know, “create something that’s good and people will stick on it.”

But I think you’ve really got to create something that has such a big pain and disconnect that they can't leave you. They won’t leave you because it’s so important.

And that’s the kind of businesses we’re really trying to focus on, and I think you actually should be focusing on as well, and so, I just want to kind of throw that out there because that’s what we’re talking about right now, and it’s been a lot of fun.

The other thing that we are kind of playing with that I think is interesting that I want to throw out just an idea for you guys is:

If you do have a membership site or something that doesn’t have that big, huge pain and disconnect, you know, one thing that we’ve been looking at a lot recently is like, what’s our average customer value?

You know, and we did this before on our membership sites. You know, the average customer stays for one month or three months or six months or whatever it is.

When you find that number out, it’s very important to kind of just start focusing on that. Say, “okay, our average customer is staying for just three months at a time, you know, or six months at a time, whatever that is, if you know what that dollar amount is.

We’re going to be instituting one of our membership sites coming up next month, and I’m really excited for is… We’re going to give people the ability to buy out their membership site.

So if we know the average person stays for three months, that means that month number two or two and a half, we’re going to start a campaign basically saying:

“Hey, you’ve been a member for two months. So far, I hope you’re really enjoying the site. What we want to do is, we want to offer you the ability to buy out your contract.

“So basically, for an extra $100 or $200 or whatever it is, you can get a lifetime access to the site. So longer do you have to pay us $97 a month, just pay $200 and boom! You get lifetime access.”

And suddenly for anyone who takes that, we just basically increased, you know, we took that person from the average two to three months, to six or eight or twelve months of revenue.

Anyway, it’s a cool concept I’m really excited for, and I can share stats and results, as we get deeper into it and kind of see what happens.

But just think that. Think about what’s your average stick rate, and right before that average stick rate, give people the ability to buy out a membership at a discount.

Or people who cancel give them the ability to buy out the membership at a discount. Same kind of thing that, you know, they’re probably just tired of seeing the monthly payments. They probably still like what you have, so you said:

“Hey, you know, you may not like paying $97 a month. But for how about $200, we’ll give you lifetime access. You never have to pay again.”

And just some fun things to start looking at, just different ways to look at your numbers when you’re doing reoccurring revenue, continuity, and things like that. So anyway, I hope these are just a couple fun ideas.

Again, you know, I am so tired right now. We’ve been going like, literally the last two weeks that Todd has been here, we been going late nights like this almost every single night.

I’m pretty sure my wife is ready to kill me, but sometimes that’s what you do as an entrepreneur. You burn the midnight oil to create something really cool that will pay you for the rest of your life.

And so that’s what we’ve been doing and just having that kind of fun, so my brain is kind of all over the place. I just wanted to share with you guys some interesting ideas while I’m driving home, so it’s been a lot of fun.

I’ve also had a lot of people email me, asking what it’s like driving the Ferrari, now that I’ve been in Boise driving it for the last week or so. It’s been interesting.

Like the first day we had it and parked at the office, we probably had four or five different sets of people who came to the office, parked, came to the door and asked like, “Who’s Ferrari is that? Who’s Ferrari is that?”

Like it wasn’t just someone driving by, like they actually came into our office, and asked to see and ask me questions about it. This one kid that drove by, and the guy got so excited he called all his friends.

We had this group of like all these teenaged boys outside our office just checking out the car, and they literally sat outside for over an hour, taking pictures and just looking at it. I thought it was the funniest thing!

And then, the other thing that’s been interesting is I kind of know what it feels like now to be a really super hot girl. Like, literally, when I’m driving down the street, I have guys driving -- be honking their horns, waving, yelling catcalls at me.

I had people like, pulling into parking lots and asking me questions, like I’ve never felt that. I’ve never had the opportunity to be a super, smoking hot girl, but I could imagine that’s probably what it’s like for them.

Like they get approached, they have people yelling at them; here people are just like staring. Literally, I can watch as I drive down the road and almost every guy has this like really weird like whiplash, you know, where they’re following the car.

And so, I can kind of empathize now with super hot girls, and I feel bad for them sometimes because that would be really, really hard and annoying. At first it’s kind of cool and flattering, but after a while it would be annoying.

So anyway, I’m still in the stage where I like being the super hot girl, and I’m enjoying everyone yelling at me in my car. But I’m sure it will go away, and we keep talking about, you know, what are we going to do with it?

Obviously, I don’t think I want to drive a Ferrari the rest of my life. I would like to, but… You know, winning a Ferrari is cool, but I think we told you guys in one of the other episodes, it’s just the tax liability is like…

Basically, Joel, he won. You know, he gave me the car so he wrote it off on his taxes as a $130,000 loss. We basically incurred a $130,000 gift, and so I had to pay taxes on $130-grand. Which in my tax bracket is like $60-grand or something crazy like that, so by winning the car I’ve got to pay $60-grand, plus I’ve got to pay sales tax. I’ve got pay like another eight or nine grand as soon as I register it, which I’m doing tomorrow.

It’s kind of just an expensive machine, so I think after like the thrill of driving, it wears off. We’re going to do a contest and give it away. We talked about selling it, but selling it…

Let’s say I sold it for $130- $150-grand, you know, after paying taxes I still would make $70- $80-grand. Whereas, if I did a contest, and if I execute it correctly, we could make a lot more than that.

So we’re actually going to, using the Ferrari in a contest, to give away our new software we’re launching. So who knows! We’ll see. Time will tell. It’ll be a lot of fun.

Anyway I just got home, you guys. I’m ready to crash and go to bed. I hope you guys are having a great day, having a fun time being an entrepreneur.

Think about some of these cool things I’m sharing with you. Hopefully, you guys implement it in whatever your business you’re in, and I will talk to y’all again soon.

Thanks so much, you guys!

What I learned when launching our first real SAAS program.

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This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

I hope you guys are having an awesome day today. I’m actually not driving to the office today. I’m driving to a hotel to pick up our programmer. He is a stud. Some of you guys may know him.

He is in town for the next couple of weeks working on some cool projects, so I am going to grab him from the hotel. I have kind of a little longer drive today, so I thought I would do a podcast and talk to you about what we are doing right now, because it’s exciting.

Just to get the wheels in your head turning if you are doing any software as a service products, SAAS (software as a service). This is kind of an interesting time in the internet world.

When I first got online, the thing to create were these little .exe files, desktop-based. I remember Armen Morne things like E-cover Generator, Header Generator, Sales Letter Generator, all these different products.

When I first got online, I saw all the things that Armen was doing, and I was like, “I want to do software too.” I did Zip Brander and Form Fortunes and all these other little software programs.

Back then, the cool thing to do was create these little downloadable software programs to download and run on a computer. That’s what we did. People would pay for it one time and we would end at that point.

I remember the very first software as a service we ever had was called Digital Repo Man. It was this really cool product where basically if you had an ebook or some product that you were selling, you would use Digital Repo Man to lock it down. Then you could give it to your customers and when your customers wanted a refund you could turn their license key off so they couldn’t give it to other people.

It was a cool thing. For whatever reason, it didn’t sell that well. I think it’s one of those things where it’s a prevention versus a cure. People don’t really want to buy a prevention. They want to buy a cure.

They wanted to buy something for after someone steals their book so they can go out there and beat up the customer that did it, but they’re not willing to pay money to lock it down ahead of time.

Anyway, it didn’t do that well, but it was the first time I had sold software as a service, where people log into a members area, they pay you monthly. It was kind of cool.

My favorite thing was that if I made an update to the software, it automatically made the update for everyone. Whereas with Zip Brander when I made an update I had to contact all my customers, give them something to download a new version.

90 percent of our support questions were because people hadn’t downloaded the newest version. It was kind of a nightmare. Software as a service became really big for a while, and we started doing some things in it, but I never really paid a lot of attention to it.

Then a little while later WordPress came out and we started building three or four different WordPress plugins and themes and stuff like that, because the WordPress is so big. I’ve got a friend who is probably listening to this podcast, Stu McClaren and he runs a site called WishlistMember where they sell membership plugins for WordPress.

They’re doing awesome. They’re making an insane amount of money with it. I was talking to him back when we were in Kenya and he told me one of the biggest issues with it is that their support is kind of a nightmare.

Everyone has different servers and different hosting and different version of WordPress, all these different things that can happen with WordPress. Then if you make an update, everyone with your software has to go download the update.

In January this year, we kind of mapped out this idea for a really cool plugin, and that’s what we were going to do. Then we found someone who had something kind of similar and they went and looked at it. The service we had created is a really cool thing that will go and backup your entire website.

It’s this really cool thing, but it’s kind of hard to explain. It’s awesome. The company saw they had something similar and they built a WordPress plugin. They had it for about six months and then they took it down.

We contacted them and said, “Why did you guys take down the WordPress plugin?”

They were like, “Our software doesn’t need the WordPress plugin. We just used it to get into the WordPress community. But it’s a nightmare. We have to support a billion different website. It got so support-intensive that we just couldn’t do it anymore. Now we’re back to our normal software as a service thing.”

I was like, “Isn’t that interesting?” A company like that had huge VC money and they couldn’t even support a WordPress plugin. Again, this year we were planning on building this WordPress thing out and we finally decided not to go that direction.

We’ve been focusing on three software project simultaneously, which probably isn’t the right way to do it, but they all go hand-in-hand so we did it that way.

One is a shopping cart that we are calling Backpack. One is an analytics and follow-up tool called Actionytics. Then one is this really cool front-end website creator, and we don’t have a name for it yet. Hopefully we’ll think of a name soon.

After these programs are finished, we’ll be excited to start rolling them out. My focus for next year is 100 percent this new software company and these three products we have. I think the potential is really big with it.

That’s kind of the direction that we’re focusing on. As we’re developing software programs, for any of you guys who are thinking about developing software, I wanted to give you some tips and tricks and ideas to think about that we have found helpful and might be useful for you guys if that’s the way you’re going.

By the way, if it’s not the way you’re going, you should look at it. If you get one really good software program, it will feed you for the rest of your life.

One of the big things is the first version of our landing page creator was actually an automated webinar site. It was called ClickFusion.com. I loved that domain name, I love the logo, I love everything. We built this automated webinar software which I think is the best out there by far.

I think the problem is we have way too many features. We can do anything for everyone. Because of that, no one ever adopted it. It was too much stuff.

A little while ago I read a book called Rework by 37 Signals. Of all my marketing books, it’s probably the one I’ve read the most times. Stu, who I was talking about earlier, actually recommended it at Pirate’s Cove.

Rework is a book written by the owner of 37 Signals, and they have Base Camp and a lot of other products like that. They’re all software as a service kind of things, and they were talking about their methodologies to create software.

One of the big takeaways I had is that they draw out their feature list, and they cut it in half. Then they cut it in half again and again, and they try to make the most bare-bones, simple thing as possible.

When customers come and ask for features, they say no. If people are looking for this or that, they tell them to go try their competitor. They basically say they try to keep things so simple and easy that you really can’t mess it up.

It’s a different mindset. Most software people I know look at software like Bill Gates and they want every feature in the world like Microsoft Word with a billion features that no one knows how to use except the bold, italics and underline.

I just kind of thought about that from our side. Let’s make things that are simple, easy, that everyone can use. As we’ve rebuilt this new automated webinar/landing page/funnel generator, this time around we’ve built it way differently, where it’s stripped-down, bare bones.

It does one or two core things really well, and that’s it. It’s turning out amazing. I’m excited to start marketing, because I think people are going to really jump on it, because of how easy it is to use.

That’s kind of what I’m doing right now. I’m at the hotel, going to grab Todd right now. I may do part two of this tomorrow or even tonight. I want you guys thinking about first off, creating some software, but second, creating it very simply, very easy.

If you’re thinking about that at all, I would go read Rework by Jason Fred. You should read that no matter what. Every mistake I’ve made in business, when I read that book I was like, “Crap, I made that mistake and that mistake.” I found tons of them.

That’s about it for today. I hope you enjoyed this podcast and I will talk to you all either later today on part two of this one, or tomorrow. Thanks everyone.

There’s no school like the old school. Start using the old marketing methods that still work.

---Transcript---

This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast.

I am doing something exciting today. I am promoting a teleseminar. The last time I did a teleseminar was years ago. It’s been so long since I’ve done a teleseminar. Let me tell you why I decided to do a teleseminar instead of a webinar.

I’m lazy. I don’t know about you guys, but webinars take a lot of work to create and design and get the slides and all this kind of stuff. While I could do that, I don’t have enough time. I’m too busy right now to go and create another webinar.

I was thinking, “How do I do this a lot easier?” and I thought of teleseminars.

It was funny to me, and maybe this is just me, but I think a lot of us do this. We find something that works really well, and for some reason we stop doing it. I made my very first million online by doing teleseminars. Every single week I was doing teleseminars.

When I started creating the registration page for this teleseminar, I was looking at my old hard drive that had all my old websites and stuff on it. I found one that had every single one of my old teleseminars. I started looking at all these pages.

I remember seeing a teleseminar page with Marlon Sanders, Matt Basac, Vince James, all these people I used to do teleseminars with. We made so much money doing teleseminars, and it wasn’t nearly as difficult as doing a webinar.

We would get on a teleseminar, we’d start talking and hanging out and at the end of it we would sell something and we always did awesome with it. It makes me laugh because I haven’t done a teleseminar in years and years and years.

It’s this tool, a profitable tool that we have that we never use. I don’t know if you’re like me, but if you are, I want to challenge you guys to do a teleseminar for your list. Again, the prep time is about a thousandth of a percent what it takes to do a webinar.

Just see what happens. I’m doing one this Friday. My plan is, now that I’m back from winning the Ferrari and everything, is I want to just do a breakdown with my list going over the seven or eight steps of what they need to do in the next 30 days.

I’m going to show them that blueprint. At the end of it, I’m going to have an application for them where they can apply for our coaching program. It will be fun, it will be no stress, we’ll hang out, we’ll have a good time and I’m excited for it.

I want to throw that out there as another marketing tool for you guys to bring back into your arsenal. If you haven’t been doing them for years like me, we should try them out.

We talk about pattern interrupts. Pattern interrupts are huge. If we are doing webinars every single time, webinar, webinar, webinar, after a while our audience starts realizing there is going to be another webinar and this is how the process works.

You’ve got to interrupt the pattern every once in a while. That’s why I’m excited for teleseminars. I’m not positive, but I’m guessing that you’ll see me doing a lot more teleseminars over the next few months, just because it’s going to be fun to mix it up a little bit.

When everyone else is zigging, we’re going to zag. Same thing as right now: everyone is doing email and social media and we’re going old-school with direct mail and telephone.

Just have some fun mixing up your marketing messages, hitting people with different media, different ways. I think you’ll be surprised at the results. I know I’m excited for this, excited to see the results. Maybe I’ll share with you guys on a future podcast.

My recommendation for today is to start thinking about the telephone, start thinking about teleseminars. The service we use is www.InstantTeleseminars.com. It’s a really simple, easy system to use to do a teleseminar.

They probably have a trial, so go test one out, make a bunch of money with it and then pay the first month’s bill. That’s about all I’ve got today. I’m actually not heading to the office. I’m heading to the gym right now. This is Russell Brunson and I will talk to you guys all again soon.

Hear Russell’s story about their drive in the Ferrari from Las Vegas back home to Boise.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone, this is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to a very special episode of the Marketing in Your Car Podcast. Today I am driving in my brand new Ferrari.

Well, it’s not brand new, but it’s brand new to me. I don’t know if you can hear that. Can you hear that? That is the engine. It is very loud.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you guys the story of the Ferrari, because we’re having a lot of fun. Give me one second and we’ll get started.

This will be less content and more entertainment; because I thought it was a fun weekend. We won this Ferrari in the Pure Leverage contest, which was pretty cool.

I’m driving and everyone is staring at me. It’s kind of fun. At the event, they called us onstage at the last day and said, “We’re taking a break. You can take a break if you want to, but we’re going to go down and give Russell a Ferrari.”

They took me and my wife outside and we had about 250 people following us down the hall, out into the lobby, out in front of the hotel. Then Joel who gave us the Ferrari pulled it up next to everybody, revved the engine.

Then we got in and literally our car got surrounded by 250 people, all with cameras and iPads and iPhones. It felt like paparazzi, like I was someone famous or something like that.

Then we got in the car and took off and sped around the corner just to kind of hide. When we got around the corner, it was just this dead-end parking lot, but they told us to wait until the crowd came back in. We sat there just waiting for the crowd to come back in.

When we got back, sure enough, there were some lingerers who came over and ambushed us and wanted pictures. It was kind of crazy. That was what we did that night. Then we took it to the valet and they parked it.

The next day we decided we were going to drive home, all the way from Las Vegas to Boise in it. We came back to the valet and they brought the car back to us.

It was funny because this sweet car pulls up and everybody is waiting to see who it’s for, and it’s my wife and I. I look like a little kid with my backpack, and we walk over, jump in and take off.

I’m not much of a car person, so I don’t really know how to drive a car like this. It’s kind of different. We’re driving away from Vegas and we need gas, so we pull into this gas station outside of Vegas.

As soon as we pull in, we get swarmed by people from in front, behind, all of them coming around taking pictures of the car and asking if they can look at the engine. I even had a guy ask me for money, which was really exciting.

It was kind of creepy though. We weren’t ready or used to that attention. After we filled up with gas, then all these people are swarming us. We were trying to start the car and leave.

The way you put it in reverse is weird. I was trying to put it in reverse to back up because there was a car in front of us filling up with gas and it wouldn’t go in reverse for anything I would try. I was like, “What in the world?”

Then another car pulls up behind us and we’re stuck here with all these people taking pictures, cars in front of us, cars in back of us and I can’t reverse the car. I start the car and then it dies. I’m like, “This is a nightmare.”

Finally, the car in front of us started pulling forward so we started the car again and took off. We were kind of at a truck stop, so we were stuck behind all these trucks. We got out the owner’s manual and spent 30 minutes reading and trying to figure out how to put the car in reverse, how to put the top back up and all these things.

We finally figured out how to learn it. We jumped on the freeway and started driving. Three times, people would speed up next to us and take pictures of us while we were driving. It was kind of crazy.

We brought a Go-Pro camera and mounted it to the front of the car, so we’ve filmed the entire drive home. On our way home, we were going through Utah. I grew up in Utah, so we stopped in St. George and saw my sister and her family and took them all on rides. Then we stopped and took all my cousins on a ride.

We ended up stopping eight times in two days and gave everyone rides in the car and everything. It was fun. It was a long drive, though. It took us pretty much two days to get home.

Then when we got home, it was raining in Boise, so we got home in the rain. Then we picked up my kids and took each of them, one at a time, for a ride. We found this little place behind our house where there are no cars, and I took it there and I just floored it.

We took off and my youngest kept saying, “Daddy, I want to go in the racecar.” That’s what we’ve been doing and it’s been a ton of fun.

Anyway, there’s not much content today. I just wanted to tell you guys a story about the Ferrari. It’s been a lot of fun. I’m at the office now and I’m having a guy come to detail it today. We’ll get it all detailed up and I’ll have a nice car to drive around town, so that will be fun.

Anyway, that’s about it. I hope you have a great day today. This contest was interesting. Even though everyone was competing for it, there were a lot of people who had no chance. Why should they even try to win a Ferrari? Why should they even try to win it?

I just say, for you guys, think about 10 years ago. 10 years ago I was in the exact same situation you guys are in. I was looking at these contests and I never had a shot to win them, but I tried. By trying, I learned different things. I learned that if I give bonuses, more people will buy.

If I do webinars, more people will buy. I tried to figure out different ways to sell stuff. To win the Ferrari I had to basically do a blend of most of those things. We gave away bonuses, we did webinars, we did teleseminars. We did all sorts of things to do this.

It’s taken me 10 years to get to a point where I can win a prize like this. For some of you guys, I would start now. Look for contests that are happening online in your market. I guarantee most markets have some kind of online contest happening. Go enter and try to win them and see what happens.

We had a chance in Vegas to hang out with my buddy Dave Gardner. Dave is an interesting guy. He came to Kenya with us last year. He won a prize that we were doing to take one of our students to Kenya. He won that.

I was reading this book he wrote, and he was talking about how he won that prize and he won three or four prizes. I’m like, “How do you win all these prizes?”

He said, “I just enter them and do my best.”

A lot of people don’t enter because they don’t think they can win, so they don’t, whereas someone like Dave tries a lot of them and he wins a lot of them.

I guess that’s my motivation for today: go out there and try. You never know what’s going to happen a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. Heck, one of you guys might win this Ferrari when I give it away in a year or so. Who knows?

Thanks, you guys. I will talk to you all tomorrow.