If you don’t keep track of your score in business, you can’t win. Here’s how Russell is building his scorecard today. I highly recommend you build one as well.

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Hey everyone, this is Russell, and welcome to another episode of Marketing in Your Car.

I hope you're excited for New Year's. It's coming soon. Last night, I was up until about midnight and couldn't fall asleep so I got my clothes on, drove to the office, and worked until three in the morning, and then woke up again today at seven because I'm so fired up about getting ready for next year. I want to tell you guys my number one task for today because I think it's going to be probably one of the biggest things that I could possibly do to increase our business next year.

I've never done it before. It shocks me. I should have been doing this for the last ten years of my business. I highly, highly encourage all you guys to copy me and do this today. What I'm doing is basically I'm making a scorecard. You know, the biggest problem that I think I have in my business is that I don't keep score. I don't watch the numbers as close as I should, revenue goals and things like that, mostly because I think I hate accountants. They stress me out. They just are really weird people.

Because of that, I really shy away from looking at the numbers and all that kind of stuff. Over the last month, I worked with my accountants to have them completely change our profit and loss sheets because I hate the way that regular accountants do it and I had them make up one for me that actually gives me numbers that look like a way I can actually read and interpret them. That was one part of it.

The biggest part is we're making a huge scorecard. I'm going and buying a huge whiteboard. We're mounting it in my office today. Basically, I'm going to break the scorecard into three different sections. One is going to be a daily section, Monday through Sunday, the time each day, and it's going to have our five core businesses, Dot Com Secrets, Edison, Neurocell, Body Evolution, Living on a Coupon, and other.

Have those businesses and have each day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and what's going to happen is each morning, we'll wake up and I'm going to put in how much money we made in each of those companies, boom, right huge in front of our eyes so we can see, “Hey, yesterday we made $13,000 or $23,000,” whatever we made, and we can see it.

Then every single day of the week, we'll put that in there and we'll set weekly goals each week and see if we can try to beat the weekly goal. That would be the first section. Then what happens after the week is done, we'll clear it all out and on the right-hand side of the board, it will be a weekly number. We'll have week one, week two, week three, week four, week five, and have just the total now of the entire week for all companies.

“Hey, last week, we made $160,000,” or whatever, and put in the number for that week. Week number two, week number three, week number four, and at the end of that, we'll have our monthly goal. At the bottom of the whiteboard, or all across the bottom, we're going to have all 12 months and we'll have just the monthly. January we made $450,000, February we made $600,000, whatever it is, and we'll be able to start seeing it.

What that will do is that will start getting me and everyone on my team and everyone here focused on those goals. Obviously we've done well and we always do well. We're focusing on just doing a lot of stuff but we never just focused on that number. I think that's going to be a really big thing for us is having a scorecard out in front of us all day long, every single day because if you can see the scorecard, you're more likely to keep working towards that and trying to increase it.

One thing I've learned is that whatever you measure, you can increase. If you don't measure it, you can never increase it. I've looked at that over the last years. I looked through our numbers with our accountants. It was up and down, up and down. There was no ever steady progression, just ups and down. I think with this, it will give us a focus every single day of what can I do today to increase that.

The big model that I'm going to have for our internal company and also for our website, in fact, I think I may change the tag line of Dot Com Secrets to just being, “How to give yourself a raise everyday,” and how often do we look at it. Everyday, how do we give ourselves a raise? Yesterday, we did $13,000. How do we give ourselves $14,000 today? What do we have to do to give ourselves a raise today, always having that be the focus.

That's what we're doing. We're building a huge scorecard. It's going to be fun. It's going to be on the board. We're going to look at it every single day. I'm excited for it. For you guys, you need to make a scorecard for yourselves as well. I recommending going to Home Depot. For $10, you can buy a big old whiteboard, go mount it on your wall, and make your own scorecard. Like I said, we're breaking our board into three sections, having our daily, weekly, and yearly numbers.

For this, we're just focusing on revenue numbers. Then internally, what we're going to be doing is the same kind of thing where each key department is going to have their KPIs which are key performance indicators. Revenue will be one KPI, refunds will be another KPI. Obviously we don't want any of those. We'll also have how many opt-ins, how much traffic level, all these different KPIs as well.

Each day, we'll mail out a report in the morning from the day before of, “Hey, here's how many opt-ins, subscribers, buyers, blah, blah, blah we got as well.” We'll have a daily email scorecard that goes out as well as the big scorecard for our numbers on the wall. That's what I'm doing today. Isn't it exciting? I recommend for all of you guys as well to make your scorecard, put it up so you can see it and everybody in your team can see it.

If you work remotely, you can do something like ducks board and build your own that way. I just want something that's out in front of you every single day, and just look at those numbers every single day because again, what you track, you can increase. That's it, guys. I'm at the office, about to go make my whiteboard. I'm excited. I hope you guys do as well. We will talk to you guys all again soon.

A cool new strategy I learned from Perry Belcher, kept me up all night Christmas Eve. Discover how a “tripwire offer” can change your entire business overnight.

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Everyone, good morning. It’s the day after Christmas, and I want to welcome you to the Marketing In Your Car podcast. Okay, everyone, so, I don’t know about you, but the last two days have been crazy. Partially because of Christmas, partially because I bought a course. And the night before Christmas, I only had two hours of sleep because I couldn’t stop listening to it, and it was awesome.

So, the product is called, it was Perry Belcher’s Secret Selling System. And if any of you guys know me, you know that I’ve spent close to $300,000 or more on my marketing education in the last ten years. And this product, I would say, would be one of the top three courses I’ve ever gone through. Amazing. Anyway, the, not Christmas Eve, the night before Christmas Eve, I was listening to it.

My wife passed out, and I was not quite tired yet, so I put it in. I started listening. I was like, 10 or 11 hours into it, and Perry started talking about this concept called The Trip Wire Offer. And that’s what kept me up all night long the night before Christmas, and then the next night we had Christmas Eve. So, I’m really tired right now, but I’m so excited it does not even matter.

So what I want to talk to you is about the trip wire offer, because this will change my business forever, and it should change your business forever as well. If you don’t have Perry’s course yet, go and find it. I don’t know how to even buy it. It was an upsell for something but if you can get a hold of it, do anything you can to get it. It’s amazing.

Anyway, so, with that said, the trip wire offer, I want to talk about what this is. And this is not something that’s new to me, but this is something I completely forgot. If any of you guys have been around me for a long time, you probably remember a course that we taught a while ago called Micro Continuity. It was by far our best selling product ever, and we launched it. What we did is, little did I know at the time, we had a trip wire offer.

I actually went to Hong Kong, well, I didn’t go to Hong Kong. I went online, I met this dude in Hong Kong, who sold these little MP3 players. And I took a six-hour trading course and I put it on this little MP3 player. And when we launched it, people bought this MP3 player for free, plus shipping. And then I would ship it out to them, and afterwards we would bill them $97 a month to have access to the Micro Continuity membership site.

And like I said, we launched that, we did well over $1 million. We had, I think we had 8000 people pay $97 a month at the time. And it was awesome. And we, a little while later we did the same kind of concept with 12 Month Internet Millionaire. We got an MP3 player and sold it, and we had these little offers. We had this cool gadget, and it blew up.

Now, there were two problems with the way we ran that before. Problem number one is we were cooking continuity in all of the things. Which isn’t really a big problem, we made a ton of money. The big problem though was that a lot of people just didn’t know they were getting billed. FTC came down, Visa and MasterCard came down, and just started hating those offers. And so, they penalized us, we lost our merchant account for a little while because of it.

And they just didn’t like the free plus shipping we put someone on forced continuity afterwards. And so, that was kind of frustrating for me. And because of that we stopped doing those types of offers. Because I thought that there weren’t any good unless you had a continuity hook to it. But looking back on it now, what was amazing was we did the free plus shipping thing, and we would get so many more people in the front door.

And then, because they made that first commitment, our upsells converted amazingly. We made insane amounts of money. Our ups, I remember for every free MP3 player we were giving away, we were averaging between $60 and $70 in sales from upsales.

Then we have the continuity after that. Again, stupid Russell, because I lost my ability to do the continuity, I just quit doing those things altogether whereas if I had pulled continuity out of the equation and just gave away the free mp3 player and I had the upsells afterward, I still would have made a couple million dollars just from those offers yet I stopped stupidly. So Russell has decided to repent and start doing offers like that again, the tripwire offer.

An example of the tripwire offer is something that's so amazing, so good, and super cheap that people just buy it. You get somebody in the buying mood, they've already said yes to the first thing and they start buying the upsells right afterward. Some examples from Ryan and Perry's business, I bought three or four of them this weekend and promoted one this weekend just to see how it went. One of them is in their survival business. They have these cool little credit card knives. Basically, you pay $2.95 and they ship you out a free credit card knife. It looks like a credit card and it folds into your knife. You keep it in your wallet. It's awesome.

I bought one of those and boom, they hit me with three upsells afterward. Then I bought this other one that was this instant light match that lights 10,000 times in a row, boom, free plus shipping. I paid $2.95 shipping and handling, and boom, they had three upsells afterward. Then I bought another one that was this super magic gadget card. I don't even know, it opens cans and does a whole bunch of things like that. Same thing, $2.95, upsold me three things afterward.

It's just brilliant because it's this really cool offer. People love it. They're very easy to put on Facebook. People pass them along a lot of times. In fact, the first time I found out about Perry and Ryan's credit card offers, because I saw it on Facebook, everyone is sharing it and passing it around, it had been shared 3000 or 4000 times, this cool free card. I went to contact them to become an affiliate for it and they're like, “Oh, we don't have an affiliate program yet.”

All these people were passing it and sharing it, and they weren't even making anything off of it, just because it was such a cool front end offer. I started thinking about that for my different businesses. For our weight loss business, I'm meeting tomorrow with some guys who do sourcing from China to try to find a couple different things that we can use this on. I'm going to have them look for a pedometer, those things you hold when you walk and it shows how many steps you take, looking for a skin fold tester, looking for a tape measure, different things like that that we can give away for free plus shipping, and then get people into our funnel.

In the information business, I'm looking again for more mp3 players, for USB sticks, things like that. For our couponing business, we're looking for stuff. I'm trying to find as many things as I can because they're sexy to advertise. They go viral. You get someone as a customer, they're more likely to buy your upsells afterwards, and they're awesome.

They don't have to be free plus shipping. Ryan and Perry, a lot of their tripwire offers are just like seven dollar reports that are based off one little thing, one trick, one technique, one hack. We're going to start finding all these little hacks, tricks, and techniques, and start making little tripwire offers to bring people into our funnels.

In fact, for each one of our core offers, we're going to build five or six different tripwires around it. For example, Dot Com Secrets to Success, I have five or six different tripwires in mind that we're going to build for that. Dot Com Secrets Lab, in fact, I came in early today because I'm excited to build out this new tripwire offer I have for Dot Com Secrets Lab, all these little tripwire offers that get people into your funnel to start buying your upsells.

They join your list, people promote these things, and you can make a lot of money. They're really fun for affiliates as well. Ryan and Perry with their credit card knife, they had an affiliate contest going on.  Basically, you give away a free credit card knife and they give you $10 for every credit card knife you give away. You don't get anything on the upsells but I was like, “You know what? It's a fun thing.”

I emailed yesterday, on Christmas Day, saying, “Hey, check out what I bought myself for Christmas. It's this cool credit card knife. It was free. I just paid $2.95 shipping and handling. You guys should get one too because they're really cool.” That was 12 hours ago, probably 18 hours ago I emailed that out. So far, we've had 99 people take the thing so I made almost $1000 by giving away a free credit card knife. People are excited. They love it and they're passing it on.

It's kind of cool and kind of exciting. It got me refired up. You guys, tripwire offers. Start thinking about how you can make a tripwire offer or multiple for any of your core products. I promise you, there is power in that. Anyway, I'm at the office. I'm going to go work on my new tripwire. I'm fired up. I'm excited. I hope you are as well. Thanks you guys, and we will talk to you soon.

Last night, Russell cut the deals on a 3-5 million dollar a year opportunity, and woke up this morning feeling awesome. Find out why on today’s podcast.

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Good morning, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and welcome to the Marketing In Your Car podcast. Hey guys and gals, so we’re not far from Christmas. I hope you guys are excited. I’m recording this on a Friday, and Christmas is next Wednesday. And just, I’m so excited, like, here I am, trying to get all the stuff done because January I’m excited to hit the road running with kind of a whole new business model and new plans and new focuses.

And some of the stuff I’ve been talking about over in the last few weeks. And I’m just fired up. And what I want to talk about today, though, was a little bit different, because, you know, marketers and entrepreneurs are always looking at, like, opportunities, right? And there’s so many opportunities in this world. It always makes me laugh. I have some friends that are broke, and broke people always complain because there’s no opportunities.

There’s not many opportunities, I don’t have a job, I don’t have blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And I’m in the opposite side, where there’s so many opportunities I can’t even sleep at night thinking about them. And one of my big a-ha’s that I learned this year, I guess I kind of re-learned it this year, was learning how to say No to opportunities. And I think one of the best ways you can make money in this world is learning how to say no to a really, really good opportunity.

And it’s hard. You know, obviously there’s going to be opportunities that — sorry, I’m driving and the lady is crazy across the street. Anyway, there’s going to be opportunities that are so good that are harder to pass up. For example, this year one of the big opportunities that came across my plate was Rippln. And it was something that I thought was going to be huge. In fact, it was huge, as you know.

We got 1.5 million members, but after we did our heavy lifting on the front end, the back end didn’t really kind of fulfil on the promises. And it just kind of went away. But I look at — I spent probably two to three months of last year focusing on that, spending off time and energy and effort. And when all was said and done, the amount of money they made was close to nothing.

But you’ve seen like Napoleon Dynamite, when he’s out there, when Napoleon’s out there and he’s doing all the work with the chickens. And then he gets paid in like, change, and he adds it all up, and he’s like, “Man, I made like a dollar an hour.” That’s kind of how I felt afterwards. For the effort I put in, man, it was just tough. It took three months of the year. A third, or I guess that’s a fourth of the year.

But again it was, it could have been, and it should have been a huge opportunity. And so you never know which ones you are going to hit and miss, and that’s why it’s tough sometimes to realize, you know, what do I try, what do I not try. And I had a guy the other day promote with me, like, “Russell, you need to be a part of this, this is the biggest new business opportunity in the word.”

And then trying to sell me on it, and how much money people were making and on and on and on. I remember I messaged him back, and I said, “You know what? I would love to, but the answer is no.” I said, you know, “I’ve learned over the last year that I make more money by turning away opportunities than I do by chasing opportunities. Because I’ve got enough. I’ve got something I’m focusing on that new opportunities don’t always mean more money.”

And I look back over this last year, you know, two years ago I was back in the shiny object syndrome. We had set up I think 11 or 12 different new companies. Last December, a year ago right now, we had a big publishing meeting, we had all the people who were publishing came in. And we were so excited about the next year what are we going to do, how are we going to roll all these different offers, and all these new things.

And this year, because we had so many different offers it was hard to focus. And so, slowly throughout this year I’ve basically gone back to my partners. And although we had invested $20 or $30 or $40,000 for each of these offers, in some cases, I just gave them back to the partners who walked away and just said, “Hey, Marry Christmas, here’s a gift. I’m just going to give it back to you and let you run with it. Because I’ve got to focus on the stuff that’s making me money.”

And it was hard. Every time I made a call to those partners, and just said, “Hey, sorry, I have to step away from this, but here’s all the assets you made, you can just have them, it’s a gift to you.” Every time, like, I was sick to my stomach to do it, because I knew how much money I was losing and missing out on. And how much money I had already invested that I was not ever going to recoup.

Every time I gave one back and I stepped away, the next morning I woke up and it was kind of like, if you have ever broken up with a girlfriend or fired an employee, you wake up the next morning and you know it was the right decision and you feel just awesome. And so I basically, over the last year, have cut some huge opportunities that I focused on. That I had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on and never became fruitful.

We just cut them. And I looked and there’s probably three or four real good opportunities that we have that we’re focusing on, and that’s it. And so, that’s kind of what we’re doing. In fact, this kind of came to a head, which is why I’m doing this podcast about these topics, because yesterday I cut a project that I think could have made $2 or $3 million next year.

And I cut it, and I walked away from it, and I was scared and I was nervous and I was frustrated. And today I woke up with a huge smile on my face, just knowing that because I said no to that opportunity, I didn’t lose $2 or $3 million. I think that I will be able to make $5 or $6 or $7 million more in my core companies because I lost that distraction, that thing.

And it was a big deal, something that I had been working on for two or three months, and run a bunch of friends and partners into it. It was a deal with one of the guys from Shark Tank. And so, it could have, should have been big, and it just kept, every time I get back into it, it just kept changing and morphing and not being quite what I had initially agreed to.

And finally, yesterday, I just kind of said, you know, I just can’t do this anymore, and I told him, I told the other partners, I told everyone. And like I said, I was nervous, I was scared. But man, today I feel great. I’m going in today and it’s one less huge project off my plate. I can focus again on the things that I know are going to make me money. Things that I’m doing every single day.

And so, I guess my bit of wisdom I want to drop on you guys today, and before the new year starts, is really look at the opportunities you have in front of you. I’m guessing you’re probably chasing two or three or four or five different shiny objects, if you’re at all like most entrepreneurs. And the best advice I can give you is cut all except for the one that you think is the best potential of being your big home run.

And just focus 100% of your efforts and energies, and focus on that one thing. And if you do that, you say no to opportunities, and you just focus on the one that you’re already committed to. That’s where you’re going to see the success you want this year. That’s how you’ll go from, you know, floundering or doing well but not doing what you want to do, to being hyper-successful, is when all your focus is on that one thing.

And this going back to keep, every few years I have to re-remind myself of this, because I get caught up in just like all the rest of us. Tony Robbins says, over and over and over again, where focus goes, energy flows, and it’s true. So, pick your one opportunity, pick the one that’s going to be your winner, focus on that, and cut out all the rest. And I promise you guys, you’ll wake up tomorrow feeling so much better.

So that’s it. I’m at the office today. I’m about to go chase after my primary opportunity. I’m excited. I hope you guys are excited as well. It’s going to be a great year coming up. If you enjoy this podcast, please share on Facebook, Twitter, wherever you’ve got avenues. So share it with other entrepreneurs because I enjoy doing it. I think it can help all you guys all a lot as well. Thanks again, and I will talk to you guys soon.

How to make the shift from a “promoting” company to a “publishing” company!

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Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, on a cold, foggy morning, here in Boise, Idaho, and welcome to the Marketing In Your Car podcast. Hey everyone, so I have not done a podcast in a while because I’ve been listening to a new course on my drives that Perry Belcher put out called The Secret Selling System. And it’s amazing, so if you’re looking for a course to go through on how to sell better, I would say by far it’s probably the best.

One of them, like, the top two or three courses I’ve gone through in the history of my life. It’s really that good. So, I highly recommend it. Anyway, so I wanted to talk what’s been going on in my mind, a little bit, because we are in December now. My twins just celebrated their eighth birthday, last Wednesday. We had a huge party.

And the year is winding down. I have about one more week with my staff, also going on vacations for Christmas, and just planning and preparing for next year. And I wanted to kind of just share with you one of the big epiphanies I had for myself. And it may be an epiphany for you as well, so I thought I would share it.

So I talked a little bit of our couponing company that we bought about a year and a half ago, and it didn’t really do too much. We kind of fixed up the site and stuff, and it was sitting there. I didn’t really have the time or energy to spend on it, so I really didn’t do too much to it. And it was kind of stagnant. It was only making about $300 a month.

And that was kind of frustrating. And then, I was able to recruit Xan Spencer and Jenn Spencer. Who, if any of you guys have followed me at all you know that they are one of our huge success stories who went into the hair bone niche. Now we’re making $30,000 a month, and then they sold the site. Anyway, I recruited them to come and help us on this project.

And they came in and the very first month they came in, we went from $300 to $6000. They sent me an income report last night for December, and we are officially half way through December and they’re already at $3800 and it’s growing rapidly. And I think that in the near future, that site will be making $40, $50, $60,000 a month. And it’s exciting.

And what’s interesting is I look at the way we’re monetizing that site and it has very little to do with selling your own products. It’s all about publishing. And we’re publishing offers for people in the couponing niche. People who are looking for discounts and deals. And all we do is we find deals and we post them. And we’re posting 10, 20, 30 deals a day on Facebook.

And then each day we send one email that recaps all the 30 deals we found for the day. And that’s kind of the business model. And it’s really interesting, because that was the big change we took, was going from where we were posting once or twice a day to like 30 a day. And Xan went in, and Xan is really good researching.

He went to all the other couponing sites in our space, and looked at how many average posts per day they have. And most of them are posting 30, 40 times a day. That’s how they’re making so much money. And have huge followings, obviously. So our old strategy in business is, boom, first off, build a bigger fan base, second off, publish things more often. And that really got me to start thinking about my core dot com secrets business.

And we’re really a publishing company as well, except we have our own products, but what do I publish? What do I —I mean, outside of the page stuff we have, like, we are not publishing that much stuff, you know? I may make a post to Facebook once or twice a week. I may send out three or four emails a week, and that’s only when we’re out there publishing, like free stuff.

And I started thinking, like, if I started treating this less like an internet marketing business where I’m selling stuff, and more like a publishing company, where we’re publishing things. We’re publishing offers, we’re publishing information, content, and looking at it from that standpoint, I realized that, you know, because of things like Facebook, we don’t have to — you know, email.

If I were to send you guys 30 emails a day you would get upset. But on Facebook, if I post 30 times a day, it doesn’t really matter. Only the things that really relate to you will rise to the top, and the ones that you click on and the ones that you scroll through. And because there’s so much noise, so much stuff, like, the way to win in social media, I believe, is you’ve always got to be top of mind.

If you’re posting once a day, you are not top of mind, okay? You need to go from $300 a month to $6000 a month in one month, and all it was, was being top of mind. Having, every time they’re looking at Facebook page, we’re there. Over and over and over and over and over again, which is exactly what they want. And so, I think one of the big changes for me, this upcoming year, coming January, is I’m taking some outsourcers who were doing SEO stuff before, and I don’t really believe in SEO anymore.

And we’re just going to kind of let them go, but now shifting to like we’re a publishing company. Let’s talk about this, and so I’m going to have one of our guys who full time, all he does — because Filipinos are obviously different hours than me, is while I’m asleep, he can go and research my topic. Let’s say, like, this week I’m going to be talking about copywriting or about whatever.

And he’ll go out and find blog posts and articles and just constantly, every day, be finding me 10 or 20 or 30 new resources on that topic. And he’ll be pulling in all of this aggregate information for me. Giving it to me, so I’ll wake up in the morning and look at it all, and from that, I’m going to block about an hour to two hours a day where I’m just focused on publishing stuff.

I’m going to take these articles, I’m going to turn them into blog posts, I’m going to turn them into Facebook posts and, you know, cue them up so that throughout the day there’s 20, 30 posts going out. All there is, just giving me awesome information about that topic that we’re talking about. And I will be pushing people to the thing we’re selling. So, for example, we’re going to be having a visible webinar, there’s topic based ones, twice a month.

So one of them is going to be Inception secrets, which is my copywriting course. So for two weeks, I have these guys find everything they can find about copywriting and ads and all this stuff I can be posting for free. And all these things will be pushing people to our live copywriting course, will be happening. And then I’ll be publishing the stuff on Facebook.

So 20, 30 times a day, everyone who is following me, people we’re advertising to, that we’re targeting on Facebook, will be seeing this content we’re publishing, that again, all brings back to our core topic. And if you think about it, if 30, 20, maybe 10, I don’t know how many times a day we’ll do it, say 10 times a day.

There is a new cool exciting copywriting thing that we posted, all of them pushing back to our thing that we’re targeting copywriters. You know, within a week’s period of time we should be able to get 2 or 3 or 400 people to join us on our live class. And that’s kind of my game plan, and so, I think one of the big shifts for me is that I’m going to be shifting away from my promotional company, which is where I think us and most information people are.

And switching to a publishing company where we are actually publishing content and information, and putting it out there, consistently. And making us the lead magnets so we’re bringing people back to our offers. And that’s kind of where my mind has been at, and I’m trying to kind of organize and create that machine right now. I still have one Filipino who all he’ll be doing is just finding topic ideas and interesting things for me to write about.

And then after I make the post, then I have another Filipino who, his job then will be to promote. We’ve got John and Shirley who will put everything on Facebook, but then there are so many other avenues and ways and places to go and promote that. Each blog post, each content, everything at that, and he’ll be focusing on the mass distribution from that side.

And so, that’s what I’m kind of doing right now. I’m shifting myself away from a promotion company and turning it into a publishing company. And I think that by doing that, where we’re putting out so much value and information and ideas, that I think on the other side of it it’s going to have a lot of big, hug, positive impact on everything, including our SEO, which is kind of funny.

It will be the sneaky way we do SEO. So, that’s my game plan moving forward next year, you guys. I recommend, and I highly encourage all of you guys to become publishing companies as well, in whatever niche you’re in. We’re doing the same thing with neuropathy, we’re going to do the same thing in our weight loss. All the businesses we’re doing, we’re doing the exact same thing, and you guys should be too.

So that’s the game plan, everyone. Thanks so much and have a great Christmas. Hopefully I’ll do another podcast before then, but if not, we wish you Merry Christmas, and thanks, you guys, and talk soon.

Lessons learned from the dumb entrepreneurs on the new show “The Profit”.

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Good morning, everyone, this is Russell Brunson. It’s an early morning, and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Hey guys and gals, so I hope you guys are doing awesome today. I’m actually, it’s 6:30 in the morning and I’m driving to go work out. And this is a testament of the power of hiring a coach. It’s freezing cold right now, and I would be sound asleep right now, if it wasn’t for the fact that I have a coach waiting for me at the gym.

It’s little things like, you know, obviously, I sell coaching so I believe in it a lot. We talked about why you need a good coach. But this is kind of just, you know, for me it’s such a big thing. I know how to work out, I know how to lift weights, I know how to do all these kinds of stuff, but just the fact there’s someone there waiting for me is what gets me out of bed and gets me to go and do the thing that I need to do.

So, if you don’t have a coach yet, in whatever area of your life you’re struggling with, go get a coach. I’ve got life coaches to help me in my personal life. I’ve got business coaches. I’ve got weightlifting coaches. Go find a coach as quick as you can. And if you need a coach in the marketing business, go to 30DayShortcut.com, we can help you out there.

Anyway, so today what I want to talk about is the other reason why I’m really tired today, is I found out about a new show, and I’ve been up all night watching episodes of it. So I think I got like four or five hours of sleep last night. So the show is called The Prophet. It’s on CSNBC. And I first, I remember seeing commercials for it and I was like, I didn’t really think too much about it.

And then Daegan Smith told me, he said, “Hey, that show is awesome, you should watch it.” And so I went to my TV and we have, like, it’s not TiVo, but it’s like the generic brand of TiVo, right? So we TiVo’ed it on our TV, and I never watched it. And then two nights ago, I was bored and my wife had already passed out. I was sitting in bed and I didn’t want to fall asleep yet, so I went to our recorded shows list and I saw that.

I saw The Prophet in there, I’m like, I might as well watch an episode. So I pushed Play, I started watching it, and I have not been the same ever since. The show is amazing. It’s all about this dude who takes struggling businesses and turns them around. It shows him going to these businesses and what he does, he basically comes in and gives them money, just to get in their business, to get things fixed up.

He has his team come in and they turn it around. He takes complete control for a week, and then he re-launches it. And if the people, if the entrepreneurs aren’t morons, and do his job, he turns them around into some amazing things. The first one I watched was, he went into this, I think 100carcash.com, or something like that.

Anyway, and he took this business that had been struggling and turned it around. And then by the time the show had aired, maybe a little afterwards, he had already, he had turned them all to a franchise and franchised it. I mean, almost 100 locations around the world. Which is amazing. So, that’s kind of the power of what he does.

And then last night I watched two other episodes, and it was crazy. So, the first thing that’s interesting is I feel bad for him, and for anyone who’s coming in to entrepreneurs’ business. Because entrepreneurs are like the most stubborn, hard-headed people in the world. Like, this lady last night, on the popcorn episode, she’s like, “My business is $2.5 million a year. I don’t need anybody, blah, blah, blah.”

You know, like, this total attitude. But her business is broke, it’s on the brink of bankruptcy. She’s borrowed money from everyone she knows, and you know, she made $2.5 million, but she didn’t make anything. Like, the business is negative. There were like almost $400,000 in cash that was gone, they couldn’t find it. There’s no record of it.

Anyway, and every single episode she’s like, he’s butting heads with these entrepreneurs who are so stubborn, because they’re so in love with their baby. And so it’s one thing that kind of made me realize as an entrepreneur, I’m probably the same way. We’re oftentimes not as humble or teachable as we should be, because we think we know everything because it’s our business.

And it was interesting, recently I was selling something to a group of people who were kind of more of my peers. And we were selling something that’s not cheap, it was $25,000 or $100,000. And I had a lot of my friends who were on the webinar where I sold it. And they, afterwards, messaged me, like, “Hey man, can you hook me up for free, can I have some of the thing?”

I was just like, man, you guys are not willing to invest in your business. You’re so hard-headed, you think you know everything, you’re not willing to invest. And it just blew my mind, and entrepreneurs, I think, a lot of times are that way. So that was the first thing I wanted to kind of just put out there, is that all of us, as entrepreneurs, we need to not be so hard-headed.

I was listening to a course from Kevin Trudeau, who is not doing too well in the news right now. But in there he talked about a concept called the Teachability Index. He talked about how people are more teachable during — like when you’re a kid and you go to school, etc, you’re super teachable. You’re soaking up everything that’s coming in.

But somewhere along the line, usually about time you graduate college, you think you know everything and your teachability index drops to almost nothing because you know, you’re just kind of set in your ways. You know everything there is. And I think entrepreneurs are the same way. When we begin, we’re like sponges and we’re soaking up everything.

But somewhere along the line we think we know everything and our teachability index goes to almost nothing, and we are stuck in our ways. I think all of us, as entrepreneurs, could really benefit a lot from stepping back. And try to become more teachable and kind of forgetting, you know, forgetting you know everything. And trying to start over and find good coaches, good mentors, good books, good courses. Whatever you can to help increase your business and becoming teachable again.

So, anyway, I had a lot of other cool stuff I wanted to talk about today, but I am at the gym and my session starts in two minutes, so I am going to jump in there. Just kind of one last thing I want to mention about The Prophet before I go. First off, go watch it, guys. Go find it, I don’t know if it’s on Hulu or whatever, but go and find it and watch it.

It’s probably one of the best entrepreneur shows I’ve ever seen. And second off, two of the three episodes I’ve seen so far, the entrepreneurs screwed him in the end. Just totally unethical and just didn’t hold up their bargain, their word. And it’s just sad to me to see how quick they’re willing to just, how low people’s integrity is.

I mean, it’s especially interesting just the fact that they were live on TV. They were live on TV and still doing this, makes me always wonder. So, make sure you have integrity in your business. People will know if you have it or don’t have it, and people — I mean, just be a good person, that’s all I can say. Have integrity, do what you say you’re going to do.

And if you screw up, then tell people you’re sorry and kind of go from there. So, that’s it for today, you guys. Hope you have an awesome day. Go work out, if you haven’t yet. It’s good for your body, it’s good for your mind. And go get a coach to help keep you accountable and help you doing what you need to do. Thanks, everyone, and I will talk to you all soon.

After our latest startup, I realized that almost everything people are teaching online about startups online are DEAD wrong.

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Hey everyone. Welcome to Marketing in Your Car. My name is Russell Brunson, and I am excited to be here with you today. Hey everyone. I am actually taking my wife’s car on a 25 minute drive to go get some stuff fixed. I have nothing else to do so you guys get to be entertained. I hope that’s alright. I am excited for this podcast. I have been thinking a lot. I have known for a little while, Stu McClaren, one of my favorite people on Earth, called me out yesterday, and said, “Dude, when are you going to do another podcast?” I just wanted to do this one. This one may be a little longer since I have a little more of a drive.

I just wanted to talk to everybody at a different level than normal. Normally I am trying to share different tips and tricks and techniques to take whatever you are doing and make it a little better and make you start thinking different ways. I wanted to talk about what has been happening with some of my businesses over the last little bit. It is interesting. There are so many people that are teaching internet marketing. There’s very few people that I really trust anymore. The biggest reason is because, and I outgrew myself in this same category, a lot of times we assume that whatever worked for us, is what is going to work for everyone.

I’ve built my internet marketing business. We have launched product after product and I know a good formula that works. I know that market really well. Over the last year or so, we have been putting out all these different products and different niches. Every time it surprises me how much new stuff I have to learn to make each of those businesses actually work. It is frustrating for me because I know all this stuff. I should be able to make it work right away.

It always takes time. It takes more time than I ever think. I’ve definitely changed the way that I think about business, and the way I teach business because of that. I understand that it’s not all cookie cutter. It’s not 100%. There’s a lot  you have to do, to figure out different markets. We are in the couponing niche. We have been doing well with it. Recently I brought on some of our friends. Initially they were students. They become really good friends. You guys probably heard of them if you have been following me for any amount of me, Xan and Jen Spencer.

We have this couponing site, and I didn’t have time to focus on it. I love the concept and the idea behind it. They just sold their hair bow site and made a ton of money selling it. They are looking for their next project. We brought them in to come work with us on this one. It has been  interesting watching what they have been doing and how they are getting into the market and understanding what it is, and really trying to figure out that path and what we can do to make it successful.

Holy crap. Sorry guys. You are getting this live. I am at an intersection, and the light is red and I am stuck in the middle. Holy cow. That was embarrassing. Let me pause this for one second.

That disaster was averted. I was at a green light, and I was turning left and I was half way in the intersection turning left and all of a sudden all the cars stopped. I looked up and we were all stopped turning left. The street we were turning left onto was completely backed up probably about a mile and a half. Then, the light turned red and I was stuck in the middle of the intersection with two cars in front of me in the middle of the intersection and a car behind me in the middle of the intersection.

I am back, and I am alive. Things are good. I was talking about how different it is. Same with our supplement. We have been doing really well with our supplement. Almost a year now. It is doing well. It is exciting. It inspires me just how we put out a little business like that, and by traffic and it works. It just keeps working and working. Because of that we decided to put a lot more energy and effort into it. We actually spent time to write a really good sales video.

We are going back now and diving back into that business, which is a whole different market. It’s interesting to me to start looking at. Obviously I could talk a lot about the differences in the market. That’s not the point. The point is that there are differences. Used to be back in the day you could find a niche, put up a product, drive some traffic and make some money. I think those days are a lot different now. You have to understand there is a culture.

There’s stuff that is happening, and these markets. It’s important to find those things. What I want to talk about today is more like the path that I am seeing a lot of commonalities among all the niches that we’re in, and a lot of what I am going to be shifting dotcomsecrets over to in the new year. I wanted to throw some of this out to get you guys thinking and you can get some ideas for your business as well. We used to always think that we lead with a product, create a good product, drive some traffic and that’s how you lead.

I don’t think that’s the smartest way to lead anymore. I look at that with our weight loss offer. That is what we did. The problem was that we didn’t know the market well enough. We created what we thought was the best offer possible. We launched it and it didn’t do well. We are going back and doing the stuff we should have done first to really understand the market. I think we will do well this time around.

We could have saved almost a year worth of time had we gone this direction the first time. If I, and any business I am in, or getting in like dotcomsecrets, like the relaunch for the entire brand and company and really starting from the beginning where the goal is how much value can you provide. I think that the smartest way to begin in any niche, this is even ecommerce. I am not just talking infoproducts, but anything, is start with value can you give people.

The simplest way to do that is blogging. Set up a blog and start sharing really cool stuff. That’s the first step. After your blog is set up I think you should start up a fan page. I have been fighting social media forever, but one of the other episodes you saw, you see I am starting to see the value of it. You can set up ads for five or ten dollars a day. It will add people to your page. Just set that up and let it run and get people adding to your fan page and watch this community grow from two people to 10 to 50 to 100 to 500 to1,000.

Consistently be doing that. When you are blogging, after you blog, the biggest thing you have to do is how do I promote this blog post now? There’s a lot of things you can do to promote it, but the best I think is Facebook. As soon as you make a post, you go to your fan page and boost that post and push it out there. You spend maybe five or ten dollars doing that.

The next day you make another blog post. You go to Facebook and post it and boost it. Just following that pattern. At first it will be super slow and aggravating and you probably won’t get a lot of traction from it. You will have the ads on there, and people are being added and just consistent. Months from now, three months from now, six months from now you are going to have five, six, ten, fifteen thousand people and it will start growing very quickly from there.

It is all about putting this value out first. Then, you start seeing what people are responding to. A little while ago I was watching a video that Jeff Walker put out there. I don’t typically watch Jeff’s stuff. I like him as a person, but I not particularly interested in product launches. The last thing I want to do is a product launch. I don’t look at that anymore. I was watching one of his videos, and one thing he said that really struck out to me, he was talking about how he said that the biggest thing for him is when he first got the publishing thing. He said, “I recommend all you guys just go publish something.” Put stuff out there. It wasn’t until I put stuff out there that I saw what people responded to.

What things do people like? What things do they share? What things do they talk about? What things do they not care about? What things cause no emotional response what so ever? For example, we know that on our couponing site the last two weeks, we have been posting the model in that market is different. It is how many offers can you get in front of people. We are posting tons over and over, 20, 30 offers a day.

Supposed to put those out there. Some of those get nothing. Other ones get some shares, some get tons of shares. This week had something interesting where Jessica posted on her blog this picture of these homemade dryer sheets that she makes. Unfortunately we didn’t put it on our Facebook page. We put it on our blog. Somebody came to our blog and saw it. The took the picture, they posted on their Facebook page and luckily they linked back to her site saying, “Check out this picture I found on livingonacoupon.com.” They posted it out there. Within four days that image had been shared 350,000 times.

Not liked, shared. 350,000 times. We found out about it from one of her friends. She said, “Look at this sharing your picture.” She saw it, and we missed it. We went back and over that two day period of time, the 350,000 shares, we had 50,000 people that came to our blog per day. Our revenue was over $400 each day, which is awesome.

We found out that was what something responded to. They wanted homemade stuff, like how to make homemade dryer sheets. I never would have launched a course on how to make homemade dryer sheets. Now we know that people are interested in that market and that type of a thing. Instantly now we know.

That is the thing Jeff was talking about. You need to start publishing something. Until you do, you have no idea what people are going to respond to. If you want to start leading with your sales message first then you spend so much time and energy before you know what people actually want, what they are listening to. I would start with that. Making cool blog posts, put it on Facebook page, boost them. Rinse and repeat over and over again. Have something in place where your fan base is growing, growing through paid ads. You are talking five bucks a day, ten bucks a day maybe to implement that strategy. That’s the first step. You are putting this stuff out there. Again, there are a lot of other things you can do to promote your blog posts.

For simplicity sake that is where I would start at.

The second thing I would do, and it makes me laugh. This is my belief now. Six years ago podcasts were brought to my attention, maybe even seven or eight years ago, and I thought they were the dorkiest, nerdiest things in the world and they would never catch on, kind of like RSS feeds, and I was right.

Podcasts I was wrong. They are the thing right now. I keep hearing it. It’s funny because I used to be a faster adapter of things. Now I am more stubborn. I am an old man now. I am a little more stubborn in adapting things. I didn’t want to adapt this for a long time. Recently, one of my friends had a podcast that he wanted me to listen to. I downloaded the podcast app, and I downloaded the podcast and started listening to it, and I got hooked. I suddenly realized that podcasts are the radio of the future.

You can subscribe to the people’s stuff that you want, and you have a chance to listen to it. One of my friends, Stu, I mentioned him earlier. He was telling me one of his clients who works for him said that each podcast listener is worth more to them than an email subscriber, which is crazy to me, but instead of fighting that, let’s go with it, right? Who knows how long email is going to keep working efficiently.

Let’s have distribution channels…as many as we can. I started thinking more about that. This is a distribution channel, these podcasts. I remember about two years ago I had a guy that wanted to interview me for a radio show. We went down to the radio station, and it was the coolest thing in the world. I felt like Frasier Crane. I had a big microphone. He had a producer. I asked the producer if I could call her Roz. She said no.

I felt like Frasier Crane. After I did that, I wanted my own radio show. That was my entire goal for the next 6 months was my own radio show. If I do a radio show locally and it goes good then we could try to pitch it and get syndicated nationally. I had this whole strategy. You got a big, famous radio show. You can sell ads, you can make money, you can push your products, books and make a fortune. For years I kept thinking about that and wanting to do it. After I got the podcast thing, I was like, “This is the radio of the future.” Radio will be dead soon if it’s not already. I don’t listen to radio. I hook up my podcasts that I want, and I am driving and I listen to them. I think again, that’s the direction that we are all going. I have been studying a lot. I am going to keep doing the Marketing in Your Car Podcast because I love it, and it’s fun. It is low maintenance for me to fulfill on. I am going to keep doing that. I am also going to launch another podcast underneath the dotcomsecrets brand.

It is more of an actual radio show where I have people that I interview and I am sharing things. I have to do my first interview for my first one this coming Tuesday. Mark Joiner is my first mentor and Mark is going to come on and be my first guest so I am kind of excited for that. Because I have been setting podcasts to what people are doing and it’s really intriguing. I was listening to the guy who runs the entrepreneur on fire podcast.

He basically interviews an entrepreneur every single day, seven days a week. He was sharing some of his stats, and what I didn’t get it until he went to this. He said, “I ran the show for free for a long time and got a big following.” Now he gets 10 or 20 or 30 thousand downloads each episode. You basically get paid on CPM so every download, every 1,000 downloads, you make whatever. Ten bucks or thirty bucks. Showing the math, each of my episodes, I have three sponsors. This guy, this guy and this guy. He is paying this. He is paying this.

That means, every single day that I do my podcast, because I know I’ll get 20,000 downloads because people are subscribed to it and they are waiting for it, because of that, every single day just to do my podcast, I make $1,200 in advertising revenue, $1,200 just by the fact that he is podcasting. I was doing the math, and $1,200 a day times 30 days, I can’t do right now in my head, but $1,000 a day times 30 days is 30 grand a month, 30 grand a month, and all he is doing is interviewing awesome people.

He launched this less than a year ago. Okay? Start thinking the blog obviously is a great platform. The blog is a great platform to get people who are on Facebook and reading and those types of things, but there is also this huge, untapped market of podcasting. You get these people to download and you are sharing content and ideas. You are building a following and you have your own radio show. People actually pay to sponsor the radio show when you get a following.

You start just like we talked about before. You start out by giving content, putting stuff out there and seeing what things people attach to. What concepts, what ideas you share, what things get other people interested. Only way to know that is to publish stuff. Put it out there like Jeff Walker was saying, seeing what gets people to respond.

That’s the first step, and trying to build your audience like that. I think any market I get in the future, that will be my first two steps before we ever create an offer and see if we can get enough of an audience based on that, then we can go and start getting sponsors for our podcasts and promote products as an affiliate on our blog and get sponsors for our blog.

You know over the last three, six, nine months, what people have been responding to, what things they are interested in, what things get shared, what things get passed around. You find out what doesn’t. As soon as you know that, now you can go back and create the right offer. The offer than people actually want. The thing they want to give you money for. I think that’s the right way to make a business. That’s the right way to start a business. Again, because every market is different, you won’t know what that is until you are in there.

You see the responses. The flip is people will love you because you are giving your best stuff every single day and when you come back and decide to monetize it, there’s different relationship level there. They are going to trust you over someone else because they have been listening to, they have been reading you or seeing you on Facebook. You have established yourself as someone who is credible and cares and someone who is trying to provide value in the world.

That is what I have for you guys today. I hope that gives you some things to think about. Those are things that I have been thinking about a lot. We are relaunching dotcomsecrets. The podcast, we are also launching, a new blog. A new blog you guys will be shocked. My goal is every blog post is for every post to be more valuable than a $97 product. We are going to change some stuff. It will be good.

That is our game plan. I am at the car dealership. I am getting my wife’s car fixed. I have to jump off. I hope you enjoy this podcast. If you like it, please come and comment, but also please share it. If you like it, go on your Facebook account and check out Russell’s latest podcast. It was awesome. I would appreciate getting it in the hands of more people. That’s about all I ask for. Appreciate you guys. Thanks everyone who is listening and paying attention. Good luck with your business and we will talk to you guys all soon.

An idea that sparked when I heard Tim Ferris speak in New York has dramatically changed the structure of our business.

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Hello everybody who is listening to our podcast today. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to the marketing in your car podcast.

I am having the most fun week I think I have had in a long time with business. Awesome stuff is happening. We just signed a deal Kevin Harrington and Click Bank and Traffic and Conversion summit that was amazing. A bunch of cool stuff is happening. Our living on a coupon site, we relaunched it using a bunch of social media, and we have gone from…it has gone from…it was making about $10 a day to now, $200 a day in two weeks period of time.

It is scaling rapidly, which is fun. Tons of fun stuff is happening. I want to talk about one little thing that I have been doing that we are doing right now that I think is, it is probably one of the smallest, yet the biggest breakthroughs I have had in a long time. Some of you probably remember I signed up for Joe Polish’s, 25k group. I didn’t join the group. I just went to the $10,000 thing out in New York. My wife and I went out there.

I had a couple of podcasts when I was out there. When I was out there, one of the speakers was Tim Ferris. One thing that Time Ferris said that has been resonating in my brain for the last couple months since then was someone asked him, “Should I be on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube? Where should I be at?” He said, you need to pick one. Pick one that is going to be your home. That is going to be your desired way to share stuff with your audience. Forget about the rest. People try to do things on 30 platforms, but they are never successful. Pick one that is going to be your thing that you know you can go to and focus on and go to over and over again.

If you do that then you are going to be successful. Again, that’s just a little thing that makes a lot of sense, but I have been thinking about it. I have been looking at my own business, and my business is all over the place. Some of you guys probably know. I hate going into Facebook, yet I have eight Facebook groups. I have a Facebook group for our local group, for dotcomsecretsx, for Russell Brunson fans, things like that.

I think we have five or six different continuity programs that are all separate. We have multiple blogs. All of this stuff out there. It’s confusing for me because of that, I never, I get overwhelmed logging into Facebook because I had 12 groups I needed to look in and check and communicate with.

Because of that I don’t log in and talk to anybody. I have a blog except I never blog because I know that I should blog. Twitter and tweet, and I never do anything. Because of that, because there are so many thing to do, I just don’t do any of them. I started thinking, I need to centralize everything and make everything simpler and easier for me and for our customers. That way they have a very clear path. Because of that we have been shifting a lot of things.

We decided what social media platform we are going to focus on. We are taking all of our eight or 10 or how many groups we have, we are deleting them all and create one group. It is going to be like the dotcomsecrets group. We are going to push everybody to that. As far as all of our products, we are merging multiple continuity programs into one.

If you join one, you get access to all of them that way people aren’t like, “Should I join this one or this one?” I don’t want to make my customer confused and feel like they have to sign up for multiple things. I want everything into one, singular focus. We have been doing that. From that idea we decided instead of right now we have tons of products all over the place. What if we created one customer center?

Somebody bought something and logged into any of our sites, and it takes you to this one, centralized customer center that has all of our products that they purchased. They can see, click on it and boom, get the information. Again, we had this idea and it seems so simple now. I am like, why didn’t we think of this years ago. It is brilliant.

People come in and see all the products they have access to and also the ones they don’t have access to. Click on them and buy them right there inside of our customer center. We already have the credit card on file, yes I want this product, and boom we ding their card and it unlocks it for them.

These are some of things we are doing all from that one little idea of communicating it to one platform. How can we shift all these things and move them into one platform? It’s been a fun process. Anyway, you guys will start seeing this come out soon.

We are probably two or three away from having the customer center done. We also have merged the customer affiliate center together. Those two accounts are basically one account. You log in, and you have your customer stuff and you have your affiliate stuff all tied there together.

It’s pretty fun and pretty exciting. I am excited for it. For you guys, think about for your business. Same kind of thing. What platform are you going to publish on? Just pick one. Is it going to be your blog? Facebook? I think blog and Facebook you can tie those two together because I look at Facebook more as like a way to amplify a blog, but what ‘s your home base? Some people, Facebook is their home base. Some people it is YouTube. They post videos all day. They use Facebook to promote it.

Where is your home place that you are publishing stuff all the time so people can find it, see it. They know if they are on here for Russell it is all right here. Same thing for you. Where are you going to publish at? If you looked by our products where can they find them at? Are they consolidated in one spot where they can find them easily? Can they upgrade and buy other things very quickly? That’s what we are doing. I am excited. It is going to be fun to see this whole thing roll out.

Before the end of the year you guys will see a new blog, new customer center, new affiliate center, a whole new strategy, a consolidation of our continuity programs into one continuity program, which we are lowering the price on.

I think it is crazy, but I think it is going to be really good too. I am excited. Hope you guys are excited about your business as well. If you are not excited then listen to these podcasts again and get refired up and reenergized. One of the times I was not excited was when I was not learning and growing. Get back into learning mode, the education mode. Learn some stuff. Get excited. Go apply it, and have fun with your businesses you guys.

I am at the office now. I am going to get some work done, get this stuff all consolidated so soon I will have a cool blog that you can actually read all the stuff I have to share with you guys. Thanks you guys, and I will talk to you soon.

As we transition from a YouTube generation to a Pinterest generation, this new type of sales letter is going to win.

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Good morning. This is Russell Brunson, and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Hey guys and gals and anyone who is out there in podcast land and listening today. I am excited today because today I am going to be working on our supplement. A lot of you guys know if you have been listening to this or following me, we have a supplement. I have been wanting to do a supplement for 10 years now, and finally about a year ago we put one together and launched it and it’s been great. We are having a ton of fun with it.

We have been testing a lot of different things. Initially what we started doing with it, we started with a free plus shipping type thing where they would get the first bottle for free. We would charge them shipping, and after 14 days we would start billing their card and ship them out a new supplement, which has been working good.

We are at point now where our recurring is around $50,000 a month from it. Not too bad for a little side project. Right? We should do half a million bucks or so this year from that supplement. So that is kind of cool. I want to grow it big. I have been people who got supplements who are doing half a million dollars a month or more.

I am on this eternal mission to figure out how in the world do I scale it. I think it is how it goes. The weight is really hard to scale immediately. We are spending $80 or so to get a free customer. In some cases we are able to break even by day 14, which is awesome. Sometimes it takes to day 45 or beyond to break even. I don’t know about you, but I have a risk. I am pretty into taking risks and stuff, but I am risk intolerant with my money.

Day 45, if we haven’t broke even by that point it kind of scares me. How do we create something where we can break even at day one or make a profit at day one and go from there? That has been the mission that we have trying to look at. We are looking at all the other people that are doing really well with supplements right now.

Ed O’Keefe has a really good supplement that I take now. I bought it to go through the sales process, and I am actually addicted to it. There are bunch of really good supplements as well. I have been watching their funnels. What has been interesting is that most of the guys that killing it right now aren’t doing free plus shipping type things anymore. They are selling one, three or four bottles off their order page and upsales for other things.

We are working on that. What I really want to talk about today is an interesting thing that I have been looking at. The shift from the sales video back to the sales letter. For the last two year, sales videos have been the thing that has been crushing it. I don’t think it is going to go away at all, but it is interesting. For a while it felt like the market was in this YouTube generation where everyone is watching videos.

Over the last year or so it seemed like it shifted more to the Pinterest generation where we are looking at images and text, if that makes sense. For example, if you post a video on YouTube or you post an image on YouTube, traditionally you are going to get way more comments, shares, likes, things like that from an image than you ever would from a video.

Isn’t that interesting? Where forever it was video, video, video. With our supplement we created a sales video version and sales letter version. The sales letter, we also did it a lot different than we normally do. We are trying to test some things that go against what I have always believed as the norms. I am testing to see if maybe I am wrong. If I am wrong, that is cool.

I would rather be wrong and rich than right and broke. We are testing this out, and I have been looking at, if you guys know Miconi, he owns Mind Valley, and if you look at them, they are crushing it right now in the personal development space. If you look at the way they design their websites and sales letters, they are very different. They are not a traditional sales letter, or even the sales letter way that I have done them and I have taught them where you are starting with a star story and a solution and you are going through this process.

They are more like these blocks of stuff. That’s the best way to explain it. If you look at one of Mind Valley’s sales letters, go to MindValley.com, and look at their sales letters, he sells theirs 10 or 12 blocks. Each block is its own little message. People can scan it. It almost looks like infographics. You scan it and see the things. Each block has a topic. They have bullet points. They have pictures and the next block and the next block and the next block. There is not a logical story progression throughout. It is just like we are talking about the benefits. This block we are talking about the guarantee. This block we are talking about what other people have said about it. This is the ingredient block and stuff like that. We design this sales letter to go that way.

We are going to be doing tons of testing and video versus sales letter versus video with sales letter versus tons of different things we are going to try out. It is really interesting to me right now that I feel like, I look at different markets. If you look at the warriors for example, all of the offers that are in there, none of them are video, very few of them are video.

The majority are all text. I am wondering if we are going to start transitioning back to a spot where people prefer more text based sales letter so they can scan more. They can get their information. If so, I am curious and I am interested to see if it will change the way the sales letters are built because the old school, traditional sales letter is a long story.

You can’t just scan because you are going to miss the point of the story. Whereas the way that Mind Valley is doing theirs and the way  we are doing this one, is it very scannable. Each block is independent of itself. If you are looking at that chunk, that block whatever you want to call it. It has one message. Each block has its own core message.

Anyway, it is just very interesting. I am excited to test this and see what is happening. I definitely think that we are transitioning away from the YouTube generation and transitioning towards the Pinterest image, text generation. Beware of that in your marketing. Look at how else can you add more text elements. At least, if you don’t have, you don’t want to make text sales letters, at least have an option that has a text version of your sales video.

I think people are getting now where they don’t want to watch videos as much. It was intriguing for years, but now it’s like, “Oh crap. A video.” Whereas you have text, they can scan, they can find what they want. It is interesting. I don’t know if I am right or wrong, but I am predicting the rebirth of the sales letter. The rebirth will be much different from the old sales letter. I don’t think it is going to be story based. I think it is going to be block based.

That is what I have for today. I am at the office. I am going to go play with my new sales letter. The smackdown will begin. Video versus sales letter. Maybe it will be a combination of both that wins. I don’t know, but we are going to find out. We are going to put it to the test because I want to see where people minds are at right now. It will be interesting. I am here at the laboratory. I am going to step in, and I will report my results back to you guys in the next week or two or three when we get some testing done, drive some traffic and see what people are responding best to.

Thanks so much everybody, and we will talk to you all again soon.

How to finally get past your sticking points and finish your projects once and for all.

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Hey everyone. This is Russell, and I am actually driving to the office, and I wanted to do a really quick Marketing in Your Car Podcast so here we are.

Today’s podcast is because, this is something probably a lot of us deal with. I just dealt with it, and it was very painful and it is over now. I want to talk about it because it will make some of you guys get some crap done that you have been waiting on doing forever.

We’ve been working on a relaunch of our dotcomsecretsx site for probably three or four months now. It has gone way too long. The biggest reason why is because instead of things that everyone is waiting on me to get done. It is stuff I really, really, really hate doing. I realize I associate so much pain with this one piece of the process that I just avoid it at all costs.

No matter what is happening I block out time. I will come in super early in the morning, a million different things that I try to do to get it done, and I can’t figure out ways to not do it. I have so much pain associated with it that I don’t get it done. I think, and I bet that a lot of you guys are probably the same way. There’s things in your marketing journey or your entrepreneur journey that you know that you have to do, but there’s one or two things that you associate so much pain with that you never do it.

Probably the biggest one that I have seen people do, and it blows my mind. Honestly, it has been good for me and my business, but it’s not so good for you and your business. A lot of people are willing to spend money on training, information programs and seminars and things like that where they are learning, they feel like they are getting value. They are scared to death. They have so much pain associated with spending money in advertising. What if the ad doesn’t work?

What if whatever we click on, nobody buys? There is so much pain they never do it. We just finished a group of coaching students. One of the students came back and was like, “How come I haven’t made any money yet?” I asked if he finished anything, and he asked why he wasn’t making money. The last step was I showed you how to buy ads, and I asked if he bought any ads yet. He said no. That’s the reason you aren’t making money yet. It is up to you at this point.

I think about the things in my life that cause me pain that I avoid them at all costs even if they are things that I need to do to be happy or more successful, whatever it might be. I have been trying to isolate those things, write them out. Look at what they are and why my  brain subconsciously creates so much pain associated with them. Then, I start thinking about, I learned this originally from Tony Robbins and since then I study it through NLP and a bunch of other things, was just the concept of pleasure versus pain.

Our brains will always either move away from pain or towards pleasure, towards pleasure, away from pain. When we have a task like that, that is holding us up, the problem is that our brain sees that as pain. It moves away from pain and towards pleasure, tries to find what I can do? I can go to Facebook. I can find pleasure there. I can go eat. I can find pleasure. I can go talk to my friends. I can find pleasure there.

Our brain tries to shift us to pleasure as fast as they can because it doesn’t want to have to deal with pain. For me, I realize forever this has been looming. What I tried to do, and it worked effectively, because I just finished my big painful task that I have been dreading for six weeks now. Six weeks I have been delaying this task that took me 20 minutes to do because I associated so much pain with it.

What I had to do, is I had to go find out, I had to create something that had so much pleasure, so much more exciting that my brain was like, “I want that. I want that more than I am scared of the pain.” I created this thing that I wanted. I am not going to tell you what it is because it stupid and childish, but it’s a pleasure thing for me. It was something that I actually wanted. I created that thing, and I said, “You cannot have that until this task is done.”

It made that pleasure so big and so exciting and so big that the pain of that task just got smaller and smaller and smaller, and I finished it. I just did it you guys. I am excited. I just want to throw that out there for you guys because I am sure that you have, each of us, all of us. I have this in a lot of other areas of my life, and I am sure you guys do too. You have this thing that is causing you so much pain, and you are avoiding it like the plague, even though it is the thing you need to do to get to the real pleasure, the true pleasure, the real happiness.

What I want you guys to do is think about that and figure out how can I create something so pleasurable and so great as a reward for myself that I will go through anything to get it. Think about wrestling. I used to go three, four days in a row without eating any food, two days without drinking any water, going through this horrible, physical pain. I would do this while I wearing plastic suits in wrestling, trying to lose 20 pounds in a three day period of time. I would do that every single week for 10 years.

Why would I do that? I had so much pleasure in winning a wrestling match. That pleasure, that high whatever you want to call it, was so big, I was willing to sacrifice food and water and social life and everything. Everything I had just because I wanted my hand raised after a match. That’s how much pleasure that created for me.

If you can start doing that in your life and look at and find those pain points that are keeping you from what you want to and create pleasure to help burst you through it, I promise you guys will see a ton of success, just like I just did. I feel great right now. Now, I am at the gym and I am excited. That is it for today. I am at the gym, and I am going to go work out. All you guys find out what your sticking points are and smash through them this weekend and have some fun. Thanks everybody. I will talk to you soon.

How a tiny shift in your packaging can dramatically increase your sales.

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Hey everybody! It is rainy here in Boise today. This is the Marketing in Your Car, Podcast. Alright, so my wife had a really cool experience that has some definite marketing benefits, so I want to talk to you guys today. A couple years ago I was at the Tony Robbins event, and he talked about the evils of cow milk. Not really, but he did talk about how he isn’t a really big believer in cow milk, and gave some good compelling arguments why.

I am not saying he is right or wrong, but we decided at that point to try and wean off of milk. We shifted from milk. We initially tried soy milk which was nasty. Then, we tried the rice milk. Then, we fell in love with almond milk. We have been drinking almond milk probably two and a half, three years or so. Took us a little while to get our kids weaned off regular milk. Finally got it. Tried different brands, and finally my kids and my wife and everyone settled in on this one brand, which I think is Blue something.

Anyway, so yesterday my wife went shopping at the grocery store. When she’s there, she walks in and there’s these three dudes in big suits, like tall guys in suits. My wife is shorter anyway. These guys are walking around, and she is going around shopping. She gets back to the milk section, and she is going to buy some almond milk. These three guys are standing right in front of the milk and staring at the milk.

She’s like, how am I going to get in there? She said excuse me, excuse me and squeezes through the guys and goes in and opens it up, and grabs four or five of these big cartons of almond milk, and puts them in her cart. The guys turn around and says, “Excuse me m’am. Do you mind if we ask you a question?” She says, “What?” “How come you bought the Blue Diamond brand as opposed to Silk?” She picks up the Blue Diamond brand, and she shows the picture on the outside and says, “There’s raspberries on the picture on the front of this box.” They said, “What do you mean?” She said, “We tried to buy Silk, but my kids wouldn’t drink it because there’s no raspberries on the box. This one has raspberries, and they thought it looked good, so that’s the one that they will drink.”

The guy said, “Seriously? That’s the reason you bought that over the other one?” She said, “Yeah. The only reason why is because it has raspberries on the box.” The guy says, “It’s a dollar cheaper than Silk.” She said, “It doesn’t matter. I’ll pay a dollar more for it. It is the fact it has raspberries on the box.”

He said, “Whatever. I don’t believe you. How about this? I will pay you a dollar for each bottle of Silk you buy or each box of Silk milk you buy right now.” She said, “If I was to do that I would be out 10 bucks because my kids wouldn’t drink this milk, and it would sit in my fridge and go bad.”

He said, “That’s so interesting. We are actually representatives of Silk. We work for Silk, and we are here just trying to figure how to increase sales and placement, and stuff like that. That’s just very interesting. That’s the reason why. It wasn’t because it was cheaper. It was because the picture on the box had raspberries on it.”

I just wanted you guys to think about that, the power of perception. Isn’t it strange that my wife, we buy four or five boxes of almond milk a week, probably spend three or four grand a year on this almond milk. We buy one brand over the other is not because of the cost. It is because of the packaging, what it looks like on the outside. It is just really interesting.

I have seen people who have products who just change the cover of the product, and they see sales change. For example, Matt Furey. He created a product. It was actually the very first product I bought of his. It was called the Martial Art of Wrestling. I bought it, and it was this glossy book, and it looked really nice and exciting. I read it, and loved it and everything.

Five years later when I found out what he was doing, and I was learning about internet marketing and all this stuff I went  listened to an interview. He was talking about his first product failure. He said it was this book he created called The Martial Art of Wrestling. He was like, “I spent all this money. It was nice and glossy. It was great, and nobody bought it. I had a huge bedroom filled with thousands of these books that nobody bought.”

It turns out I was the only person that actually bought it. Anyway, he was like, “Later on, I knew the content was amazing. Anyone who did read it, loved it. My next run of it, before the other one ever ran out, I decided to change the packaging, and made it more secretive and underground, and less like a book.

I made the cover black and white, non-glossy. Just paper. Instead of the Martial Art of Wrestling book, The Martial Art of Wrestling. Just made it more secretive and underground, just tweak the packaging dramatically increased sales.

If you have a product you are selling, and it’s not doing well maybe you just have to put some raspberries on the outside of the box. Maybe it’s not so much the product or the marketing or the sales funnel. Maybe it’s just you have to wrap it a little different, and make it so it’s a little more appealing to people.

I spend a lot of time in our businesses, I try to figure out the right hook and the right angle and the right thing. That stuff is very important. I can start working with somebody, and they have a product or business and they are struggling. We come in and not touch anything, just tweak their angle and hook a little bit and blow it up overnight. It is important. Think about that. Think about the raspberries on the outside of your box, what you can tweak and change to make it more appealing to your customers. That is it for the day. I am at the office. I am a little nervous to get out of the car because it is raining. I have a two foot step into the office.

Going to have a good day today, hope you guys will as well. We will talk to you all soon.

You are listening to Marketing in Your Car with Russell Brunson, the best podcast to help you easily launch and grow your own online business. Grab the wheel. Get in gear, and market in your car.

Lessons in entrepreneurship Russell learned last night while shooting zombies in the head.

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Hey guys and gals! This is Russell Brunson, and welcome to the Marketing In Your Car podcast.

Hey guys, so last night I had a chance to do something really fun. My wife and I went to this thing called the “zombie apocalypse.” Actually, it’s called Zombie Acres, where basically [laughter] I’m sure some of you guys, hopefully, have had a chance to do paintballing, which is very fun.

Where you go out in a field, and you have teams, and you shoot each other and try to kill each other, right? So what Zombie Acres was, was kind of like that except for backwards.

Instead of us going and shooting our friends, there’s a whole bunch of zombies attacking us, and we get to shoot them with paintballs, and it was a really fun thing, so we showed up there.

They had this huge bus, the Zombie Acres bus. And we get inside, and the windows are all busted out of the bus, and there’s a paintball gun out of every single window.

And so you go and you sit in the bus, and they drive around this haunted cornfield, and you get to shoot zombies.

The zombies are attacking you and jumping on the bus and coming in the doors and the windows, and you’re just pounding them in the face with paintballs, as fast as you can go.

And anyway, it was like, seriously, one of the most fun things I’ve ever done in my life. You know, I’ve been to a lot of haunted houses and stuff, and this trumped that by ten times.

So that was kind of what we did last night, it was super fun, and the reason why we did it, one of the guys who lives by me, he actually just started that as a company this year.

And I’m not sure how he got the whole idea behind it or anything, but they put the concept together and they found -- first, they were trying to buy a lot, but it was too expensive to buy someplace to do it.

So they partnered with some people, and they found some land to do it at, and they started doing it, and they promoted on Facebook and did a bunch of cool things. And it was just fun watching this little startup growing, and them using Internet marketing and all these things to kind of grow their business.

What was interesting is, I’ve been watching these guys. This was their first season doing it, and last night was actually the last night. So I’m watching them, externally, kind of seeing what they’re doing from the marketing.

And before it launched, they did a big pre-launch through Facebook, just locally here, and they were getting people to guess where it was going to be at, and it’s caused all this hype in pre-launch, which was awesome, and then boom!

They announced where it was going to be at, and then they did their first day, and then from there they posted pictures and videos and got people excited and more people started coming.

And then about half way through the season, they hit an obstacle -- and as most entrepreneurs, we know we hit obstacles a lot, right?

Yesterday, I hit like four new obstacles in my business that all are seemingly insurmountable. But we’ll figure out a way to break through them, right?

That’s kind of what happened to them. The city they were doing it is called Meridian, which is right next to Boise, and the Meridian City Council or whatever it was, came down and basically said, hey, you can't shoot paintballs outdoors in Meridian or whatever.

So they had to basically shut down, and they were shut down for about a week or so, and I felt really bad for them. But I just kind of watched it just to see how… I don’t know. I like seeing how entrepreneurs react.

You know, it’s interesting. You go to a store, if the employee behind the counter has a little issue, they just give up, right? But the entrepreneur in a business is always a lot more stubborn and pigheaded, and they figure out ways to get crap done, right?

So I just kind of watched them, and I just assumed that they were going to be done for the season, and then boom! About a week later, they’re back up and running.

And sure enough, he didn’t let that obstacle stop him, and went and they found another place in another city, set up shop over there, partnered with this farm.

That’s a farm called Linder Farms, and they already a ton of people coming for their corn maize and things like that -- and they set up shop right out there in the corn maize and kept going and finished through the season.

I just was impressed with their perseverance to kind of break through those sticking points.

And then, last night, again the first time that I had a chance to actually go. I had meant to go throughout the whole season, and things came up and then boom! They got shut down, and then it got re-opened, and just things keep happening, and we never got to make it.

Finally last night, we had a chance to go on the closing night, and we were on the very last bus. And it was awesome because when I was going there, I remember sitting there at first, and I showed up and I saw these two huge buses they had, like school bus style buses.

They’re all painted. The windows had been busted out. They basically had a paintball in every single window, and I was just looking at it.

And then, I saw like the staff that was, you know, doing tickets, and I saw the staff inside the buses, keeping people’s guns loaded and enough ammo, and I saw like all the zombies, and I was like, “there are a lot of costs involved with this little business that they’ve got.”

I was kind of doing the math, and I was, you know, looking at it. It was $30 a seat to be on the bus. Look how many windows there are, you know, and I’m looking.

They were making $600 -- $500 to $600 per busload -- and I was like, you know, that’s not bad money. But they’ve got a lot of costs, and I’m like, “I wonder how this is doing?

And I was noticing some things, you know, like when we went there. Like it was cold and I think they could have had some profit opportunities, if they would have sold hot chocolate or hand warmers or a bunch of things like that.

At the end, you know, they could take a picture, a lot of little things like that they could come back and really monetize.

But the brilliance came when I got on the thing, so I think it was, like I said, $30 per person to get on the bus, and then they give you 150 paintballs, which I assume 150 paintballs would last a pretty good amount of time.

I found out later, 150 paintballs lasts about three seconds, and so I’m at the brrrp boom! Balls gone! And they’re like, “Hey, if you want more paintballs, you know, the next 100 paintballs is five bucks.”

I’m like, “Yeah! Give me some more paintballs.” Pull out five bucks. Boom! Give me more paintballs. And about 10 seconds later, those are gone. So I paid another five bucks, boom!

Anyway, we ended up spending every penny that was in my wallet in paintballs, and by the end we were completely like… we were still not finished, and I was completely out of money, and I couldn’t buy any more paintballs.

And next to me there was a kid that was, man, probably 14, 15 years old, and he went and bought four refills of paintballs, so he spent an extra $20 on paintballs.

Again, everyone on the bus was doing this, and I started doing the math and that’s when I saw the brilliance of their business model: You’re getting in $30 is basically kind of covering their costs, and then when you’re in the bus, just keep buying more and more paintballs, is where they’re making money.

I mean, off of me they probably made an extra $80. They got us in and made $20, so there’s $100 between two of us, then there are 20 other people on the bus.

I was really impressed to see like how they were monetizing internally with the selling of additional paintballs, and I probably would have spent $200 or more if I wouldn’t have of ran out of cash.

They only take cash when your on the bus. I thought, you know, if they would figure out a way to do more, like a bar tab, where I’m like “another one, another one!” At the end bill me, I mean, I probably would have spent and extra… Goll, who knows, hundreds of dollars? I was having so much fun.

Anyway, it was really, really cool, and I started looking at that business model, and I started thinking like it’s kind of like the razor blade business.

You know, like if you go to the store, you buy razor blades, like the actual thing, the actual shaver thing isn’t that expensive, right? You can get those for like a dollar or two.

A lot of times they just give them away, you know, kind of like the bus ride. Then after you’ve got it, you got to buy razors, and you run a razor for a week or two weeks, and then it starts getting dull, and starts hurting, so boom!

You get a new one, a new one, and these keep replacing these razor blades, and that’s how that business makes a ton of money, and razor blades happen to be expensive.

Just like the printer business, right? They give away printers for free, and they sell ink over and over and over again. And that’s kind of the concept, and I thought it was brilliant, and executed perfectly.

Like I said, a couple things they could do, I think, to extract more money from me and the other customers.

At the end, I wish they’d had a professional photographer for taking pictures of us and the zombies; like that would have been something I would have definitely paid for, and I think most people there would have paid for.

Plus you could have used those pictures on Facebook, to help spread the message even further.

But as a whole, it was a fun night. An awesome to see entrepreneurship thriving and just see some people, who, obviously, went through a lot of trails and headaches to accomplish what they did, but to see them succeed last night.

And like I said, we were the very last bus, the last thing of the season, and afterwards they were out there taking pictures of all the zombies by the bus, and it was just cool -- and I was proud of them, to see them succeed with their new little business.

So that’s kind of what I wanted to just talk about today. Just to share a really fun experience that we had here, and then to share some of the outward entrepreneur things that they were able to do to succeed.

I hope that gives you guys some motivation in whatever business you’re in because you’re going to come into all sorts of troubles and issues.

You know, you may not be kicked out of your city because of your business, but you’re probably going to lose your Internet or you’re going to get your autoresponder shut down.

I can't tell you how many issues I’ve run into in my business every single day, and the entrepreneurs are the ones who figure out ways around it and figure out how to succeed.

And, man, that was a lot of fun! So if any of you guys are in Boise next October time, let me know and I’ll take you guys to Zombie Acres, and we will shoot some zombies and have some fun. It’s a good time.

So with that, I appreciate you guys. I’m at the office now. I’m getting back to work, and I’ll talk to you guys again soon.

Is it possible to find a happy medium?

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Hey everyone! This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to the Marketing In You Car podcast.

Today, I’m not in my Ferrari because it’s freezing! But we’re here and we’re having some fun.

Hey guy and gals! So I appreciate you guys all being here today on the podcast and listening in. We have a very fun and exciting day today happening. It starts off, actually, yesterday. Well, maybe like even a month ago.

A month ago, for those of you who know me, I’m not like a very big video game guy. But I love like the old-school video games, and so I found this Nintendo controller, like one of the original ones, but it’s a USB based one.

So I bought it, and I really didn’t know what to do with it, and then last night with my kids I went and I found how to download an emulator, and I downloaded all of the original games that we used to play.

So I had “Mario 1, 2, 3.” We had “Double-Dribble,” “Contra,” “Milon’s Secret Castle,” “Legacy Of The Wizard,” anyway all the fun games, and we started playing it last night, and I was up till forever playing it.

And it’s Daylight Savings, and so I was actually up even… I was up to like 2:00 or 3:00, technically. I think it was like 1:00 or 2:00 I went to bed, but it was like 2:00 or 3:00 in my brain because of Daylight Savings.

So anyway, that was fun and I’m excited to get back tonight. I have to get home from the office and keep playing. I got to beat some of my old games again. Oh, “Mike Tyson’s Punch Out,” I have that one too.

Anyway, so it’s been a lot of fun. But I want to talk to you guys about what I’ve been thinking about this whole weekend. Because I’m kind of having a big shift, and it goes against everything that I thought I believed about marketing, and I think that I just sold myself on it.

For those who have been following me for any amount of time, you know that I’m kind of like a hard-core like Dad Kennedy style, outbound marketer, right? We’re very aggressive with our emails and our banners and our direct mail and our -- everything that we’re doing.

And it works! Okay, like we’ve been very successful with it, but I keep watching like all these newer type companies that are coming out, and watching their huge growth they’re having. And what’s interesting, as I watch what they’re doing, and it’s very… kind of the opposite of what I’m doing.

In fact, they all kind of call like, what I do and what we focus on, the “outbound marketing,” what they do “inbound marketing.” And I’ve seen infographic about like how outbound marketing, you’re like “spammers” and “the email marketers,” and, you know, all these guys.

And the inbound marketers, the ones who “create good content” and “people come and listen to them,” and bla, bla, bla, and while I don’t completely agree with them, there are some valid, really, really, really good things that I have been getting from them that I enjoy.

I think there’s a blend of the two that you can really find a happy medium, and I think that using, you know, they would call outbound marketing techniques --- promote your inbound marketing -- is really where the magic is if you can find that sweet spot.

And so, I’ve been looking for the last month or so, for those of you guys who know, we’ve been publishing the DotComSecrets Labs print newsletter for, man, for a long time!

I think it’s been seven years we’ve been publishing a print newsletter. In the last five or six months, it’s been the DotComSecrets Labs Newsletter, and people will have loved the Labs newsletter.

They’ve been going crazy for it. Anyone who gets their hands on it, it’s just like “this is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.” And the problem is, though, it’s really a hard product to sell. It’s kind of like insurance, right? Like everybody needs insurance, but nobody really wants insurance.

Now if they get it, they’re grateful for it. It’s kind of like this: like we just really have a hard time getting mass appeal, and then about a month ago the girl that’s been doing our newsletter, she’s had her second baby and she just said, “Hey, I don’t have time now to keep dedicating to this.”

And so, I’m kind of at this crossroad, and what do we do? Do we find a new publisher? Do we just cancel it altogether, or what do we do? I kind of have this weekend, what I’m leaning towards, and I may not do it, so don’t hold me accountable to this if I don’t.

But I was like what if -- like anyone who gets the newsletter in their hands and sees the split tests and the results and all this stuff, I get -- it instantly makes them raving fans.

Mark Call said, “By far, it was the best Internet marketing product he’s ever purchased in his history online.” You know, everybody else that sees it, loves it. Like our Facebook reviews are just raving, from David Frey, from just everybody, right?

And so, I was like, “What if we just stopped selling that and just started giving it away? Like what if I made like a real blog, like people do in the blogging world, and I just every day blogged split test results? It showed cool thing, after cool thing, after cool, after cool thing?”

I’m always just like have a kind of fear. I’m like, “Well, why should I actually give all this stuff away? Like people will pay for it.” But I’m like, what if I did, though? If I give that away, it would create these raving fans who then come back and purchase everything else we have.

That’s been kind of my thought process over the weekend. I’ve got to talk to my guys and see what they think about it. They may think I’m crazy.

But I really think that, you know, one of the big shifts in my business over the last month or so is, bringing in all the social media and bringing in all these things that we haven’t been doing.

And I think that the reason why it’s so powerful is because, first off, it makes you relevant. Second off, it’s really rebuilding our platform.

You know, like I said, we’ve been building our platform for the last 10 years, but the platform shifted. And I’ve got to be honest: I’ve been slower to change over than I probably should have been.

So these are all the things that we’re trying to do to really rebuild our platform from the social media standpoint, and just doing cool stuff to get everybody raving fans where they just spend more time with us, and, in return, hopefully, spend some more money with us.

So that’s the kind of the game plot. I don’t know. We’re excited, and anyway I appreciate you guys listening. I just got to the office. I’ve got a fun-filled day of stuff I’m going to be doing. I’m fired up, excited. I found this company that does infographics.

You know, I’ve got tons of processes that we teach in our company, and I was like whiteboarding out. But I was like wouldn’t that be cool if we have an infographic for each one of them? So like the DotComSecrets X process, we take someone through it. You make an infographic of that.

Our DotComSecrets Local, our Micro-Continuity, our Underachiever, like making infographics of each of these different topics. The people can print them out. You know, put them on the wall, whatever. Pass them around.

Anyway, I’m excited about that too. I’m going to be having them do a DotComSecrets X infographic today, so I’m fired up! I’m excited for today. It’s going to be good.

I hope you guys are excited as well. If you’re liking this podcast, please go to iTunes and let me know. I love reading the reviews. It gets me excited, and other than that, you guys, I will talk to you all again very, very soon.

Thanks, you guys, and this is Russell signing off.

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

---Transcript---

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.

---Transcript---

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!

---Transcript---

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.

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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.

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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.

Most entrepreneurs get into business to create the perfect lifestyle, but within a year or so have created nothing more than an over-worked, underpaid job. How to structure the lifestyle of your dreams while you are building your business.

---Transcript---

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

Hey, guys and gals, this is Russell. Today is an exciting day. I am actually heading to Vegas to go pick up my Ferrari that I won, which is pretty exciting. Then we’re going to jump in the car and drive it all the way home.

I’m not sure if I told you guys this or not, but I had a really cool idea. I went and bought a Go-Pro camera. I’m going to mount the camera on the dashboard of the Ferrari looking out and I’m going to record the whole trip driving home.

After I get home, I’ll take the footage of that and make a time lapse video of the footage and use it as a background of a sales video. I thought that was kind of fun.

It’s interesting. I’m about to go do this really cool, exciting business thing. I actually went and dropped my three-year-old at pre-school. All that’s going through my head right now is a quote from a religious leader named David O. McKay.

He said, “No success can compensate for failure of the home.”

Today I want to talk about that, how important our families are. I’m as guilty as anyone, but we get in this business initially because we’re like, “If we do this, we’re going to have time freedom and we’re going to have money and we’re going to do all these things.”

We get into that with that goal. But what happens at first? We quickly find out that being entrepreneurs is not quite as easy as we thought it was going to be when we get signed up, which is a good thing. If it was super easy, then everyone would do it, right?

We go from doing the typical thing where people are working 8 hours a day to working 20 hours a day. The goal is, “After I make it, I’ll cut my hours back to a 4-hour work week or whatever.”

That’s kind of what our goal is. The problem is, there are a lot reasons, but I think we get addicted to the business. You get significance out of it. You get love and connection. All these needs you have are being met by your business.

Because of that, it starts growing, you start having success, and after a while you realize, I like this and I’m having a good time. I’ve been spending 20 hours a day building this business up to this point and I really enjoy it, I’m going to keep on doing it.

The next thing you know, one year turns into two, two turns into three and eventually it’s been 10 years and you’re just killing yourself over this business. The reason why you got in, to be able to have the time freedom and to be able to spend more time with your kids, what you get is the exact opposite of that.

You get basically a glorified job where you’re working more hours. You’re probably making more money, but not having the freedom that you got in this business for. I’ve been really recently thinking about that.

I was listening to this really cool course that I found on eBay. It’s actually J. Abraham, Chet Holmes and Jake Carter Livingston. They put this product together called Gorilla vs Gorilla. I found the cassette tapes on eBay. I couldn’t find the actual product anywhere, but I found the cassette tapes.

I was super excited because I love new marketing courses. All three of those guys are awesome. I was listening to it and Jake Carter Livingston said something interesting.

He said all of us get into a business thinking, “After I do this, I’m going to start working four days a week. After I do this, then I’m going to do this.”

He said the problem is we’re creating habits. Whatever habit you create right now, that habit is going to stick with you even after you’re successful. If you make a habit of working 20 hours a day, you’re going to continue to work 20 hours a day.

When I listened to that tape set, after I went and found a tape player to listen to it, it made me think about myself. What are the habits that I’m in? I realized that for probably five years I’ve been saying that myself: “I’m going to do this after this happens,” but that thing never comes.

I kind of made a conscious decision a little while ago. I said, “I’m going to start crafting my day the way I want it to be when I feel like I’ve achieved whatever dream I’m chasing.” I want to do that now because I want to create that habit.

I readjusted some of my life, and it’s bene really cool. You can probably tell my voice sounds kind of funny. It’s because part of it is I realized I missed my wrestling. It’s hard. There’s no one who really wants to wrestle a 33-year-old dude. It’s hard to find any wrestling partners.

But it turns out everyone in the world wants to be a cage fighter, so everyone wants to do Jujitsu and grappling and stuff like that. I was like, “This will be fun. I’ll find someone who’s really good and I’m going to start adding Jujitsu into my weekly routine.”

I hired a black belt and twice a week I go in and I get beat on by a black belt. I’m learning Jujitsu from him. That’s why my voice is so scratchy today. He brought in some other dudes to roll with me. I’m not a slouch. I was a top 15 in the country wrestler in college. I took second in the country in high school.

I can hold my own, but this new sport may be similar to wrestling, but it’s not the same. He brought in some brown belts who have been doing it for 15 years and we rolled yesterday. I did all right, considering all things. I hung with them well, but as a whole I got beat bad.

I jammed my ring finger and it’s swelling up to the size of a watermelon. I can’t fit my wedding ring on right now. I got chocked out probably eight or nine times. Typically you do a carotid artery choke, a blood choke. Those aren’t that bad. It cuts the blood off from your brain and everything goes dark and you pass out, or you tap out.

But he caught me on three front chokes, which are more like windpipe chokes, which cuts the oxygen off, and it thrashed my voice. It’s kind of crazy since I’m going to be speaking tomorrow at a seminar with 1,000 people. Hopefully my voice will last.

I made it a part of my day. I said, “When I’ve arrived and I’m happy with where I’m at, that’s what I want to do. I want to be wrestling and doing Jujitsu and lifting weights.” So I crafted my day to kind of do those things.

I said, “I want to spend more time with my kids,” so I changed the time I come home every night. I changed what I do when I get home. I started changing up my life to be what I want to be when I get to wherever I’m going.

I would encourage that for you guys. That quote from David O. McKay is powerful: “No success can compensate for failure of the home.”

I truly believe that. For all of you guys, I want you to take that to heart. Start today to create the lifestyle you want, because it’s going to be a habit, whatever you do.

Don’t get caught in the whole 20-hour workdays that most entrepreneurs do. Obviously, there are times you need to do that, especially when you’re first growing and first building, but really make sure that you structure your time and structure your life so it will be the way you want it to be when you get there.

Otherwise, you’ll get so addicted to this journey, because it’s fun, this whole entrepreneurial journey. If you get addicted to it, you’ll miss out on what it was you were actually going for to begin with.

That’s it for today. I’m going home, I’m packing up my bags and I’m about to jump out and head for the airport. All I have for you guys is remember, “No success can compensate for failure in the home.”

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

Russell covers a fast way to learn anything you want in a condensed period of time, plus get paid while learning!

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

Hey, everyone, I am on my way to the office this morning. It’s really dark outside today. I don’t know what’s going on, but it looks like the seasons are changing. I hope you’re having a great day. I’ve got some cool things to talk to you about today.

I actually want to talk about the coolest strategy in the world to learn anything you want and make a whole bunch of money while you’re doing it. The reason why this was brought to my attention was I had done this two or three times when I got started in this business, and it’s how I learned a lot of my internet marketing stuff and it’s how I started making money.

For some reason that still makes no sense to me, we stopped doing them, which is always smart. One of my friends and mentor David Frye, he went on and took this concept and did two and a half years’ worth and made over a quarter million doing it.

The thing that I’m talking about is telesummits. You guys may have seen or heard of telesummits. I actually have two telesummits I’m planning on doing with the sole purpose of learning a whole bunch of stuff from really smart people, and I want to make money while I’m doing it.

This is an alternate route to going to college. I think it’s a lot better and will serve you way better. This is kind of like my college alternative. I think you should go to school, mostly because that’s where the girls are at if you’re a guy, and where the guys are at if you’re a girl. If you’re in sports, there are a lot of good reasons for college.

But I don’t think learning how to make money is one of the things on the list. This is the process. For example, two things I really want to learn more about right now: first is the Kindle. I want to learn how to publish better on the Kindle. Second, supplements. We’re doing well with our supplement business, but I really want to take it to the next level.

That’s the two businesses I want to grow. What I plan to do is basically do a telesummit. This is how it works: for example, in the supplement space I know maybe 10-15 people who are doing really well in supplements, anywhere from $100,000 a month up to $1 million a month and beyond.

My goal, my plan is to basically contact each of them and say, “I’m doing this really cool supplement telesummit where basically I’m going to pick the brains of people that are doing well in supplements and ask them a bunch of questions. I’m curious if you’d be willing to jump on and let me interview you for an hour.”

Usually, most people when you ask them something like that, will say yes. You’ll get some no’s, some people are very secretive, but for the most part they don’t really care. They don’t mind sharing their business because it’s fun for them and they like talking about it.

I say that the big famous gurus, when they go home at night, they go home to a wife who doesn’t really care what they do. They usually enjoy talking to people who actually care what they do. It’s fun for them.

We’re going to line up basically 10-15 interviews with the top supplement guys in the world. Again, I could just do it and have that be it, or I could do a telesummit where I can say, “This is a supplement telesummit. If you’re interested in supplements, come register. It’s free to register and you can listen in on these calls with me.”

Afterwards we can either sell the transcripts or the mp3 versions. There are a lot of different ways you can monetize it. There’s that, plus you get the chance to pick the brain of 10-15 people that are doing exactly what you want to be doing.

Same thing with Kindle. I really am intrigued by the Kindle stuff. I haven’t done any of it yet. But the way I look at it, it’s an easy way to publish products. It’s a really good way to do lead-generation and stuff like that. I really want to learn the ins and outs before I dive into it.

Instead of what most people do, which is try to just figure it out, I’m going to find the 10-15 best people in the world who each have their way they do Kindle stuff. I’m going to interview them all and pretty quick I’ll get a picture of how I want to go and attack that world.

If I was going to go into SEO, I would do the same thing: find 10-15 people who are the best in the SEO world, do a telesummit, make some money selling tickets to it, and I have a chance to learn from 10-15 of the smartest people in the world.

I learned this concept from Howard Berg. He’s the world’s fastest reader. We’ve done a lot of work with him. Some of you were in the course we did with him. What was interesting was he told me most people will go and buy a book and they get that author’s perspective on the topic.

Usually, after reading one book that becomes their truth. “I read a book and it said this.”

He said, “What I’ll do is I’ll go and read 10-15 books on the topic. I get 20 people’s opinions, and from there I can base and create my own opinion.”

I really thought that was a powerful thing. I really like that. That’s how I try to approach things: not to just read one dude’s thing and go out there and follow it, but to go out there and find 10-15 different people, different ideas on how something works.

Then, after learning from all of them, take that and figure out what my game plan is, what my strategy is, based on that kind of stuff.

If you haven’t done a telesummit yet, I recommend doing it. Again, I’m doing it for a couple reasons. One is to make a little extra money. Number two is just to have the ability to learn very, very quickly a topic that is very specific and learn directly from the horse’s mouth, directly from people who are actually making a ton of money doing it.

And it will be a lot of fun as well. If you haven’t had a telesummit yet, they’re very easy to execute and pull off, and they can be very profitable for you. Go and do a telesummit.

I could tell you stories and stories about how much money people made doing telesummits. David Frye just started doing over 100 telesummits, and now he’s selling off all his domains and telesummits.

I have a friend, Sonja Ricotti, she makes millions every year doing telesummits. It’s a very good business model. Worst case, you have the opportunity to pick the brains of some of the best people in the world. I really think that’s the power behind these telesummits.

Go out, try one, get some information, learn some stuff, and we’ll talk to you all again next time.

Russell maps out how he has structured his coaching programs to automatically ascend his customers to the next level of coaching!

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

Hey, everyone. I am driving to the office now this Monday morning. I am very excited for this week for a couple reasons. First off, I’ve got some fun projects I’m working on. Second off, I am actually this week flying to Vegas to go pick up a Ferrari I won.

I won it in a sales contest for Pure Leverage, a new auto-responder company that was launching. We sold 1,100-1,200 people to it within a month, which was enough to win a Ferrari. I’m going to go pick it up and we’re going to drive it all the way from Vegas back to Boise, which is going to be pretty fun.

In fact, I bought a Go-Pro camera and I’m going to mount it on the dashboard of the Ferrari looking out and record the entire drive home. Then I’m going to time lapse that drive and have it as the background of a sales video. I’m pretty excited. It’s going to be fun.

What I want to talk to you guys today is I want to give you guys an idea and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot as we’ve been rebuilding our coaching programs. One of the last podcasts talked about how we have been dabbling with starting back up some of our coaching programs, selling high-ticket stuff but doing it much differently.

Instead of having 60 sales guys like I did back in an earlier version of Russell, we’ll do it pretty small where we pre-qualify and basically only call a few people who make the cut to work with us. So far, it’s been really good.

We’ve been learning a lot along the way and it’s exciting. One concept I wanted to talk to you guys about, since it’s something I’m implementing and anyone can implement it, is really focusing on your value ladder.

You’re bringing someone through some sort of chain of offers. Someone comes in initially at a smaller price and then you upgrade them to a higher price and you’re trying to get them up to your high-ticket things.

If you’re looking at the Dan Kennedy world, where I used to spend a lot of time with Dan Glazier and stuff, he calls it the ascension model, how to get your customers to ascend naturally.

As we’ve been building this whole program out, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that ascension strategy, how we get them to move from one to the next to the next.

When we create our packages, our first coaching package that we have is about $5,500. It’s really like a fast-start 30-day coaching program where they get 30 days working with me directly and with one of our coaches to get their business launched. I don’t think it takes more than 30 days to launch most businesses if you have some sort of product already. It’s just marketing and that kind of stuff.

That’s our initial offer. After that happens, my goal is to put people through a program called Decade in a Day. I you look at Tony Robbins, at his events he talks about how you can compress decades into days.

For example, you have someone who spent the last decade learning about the stock market or whatever their passion is, and they spent a decade learning that stuff and they wrote a book. You take that book and you can compress what they learned in a decade down into a few days.

I thought it was a cool concept, so we launched our second tier, which is called Decade in a Day. It’s not as expensive. We’re only charging $3,500 for it. Basically it’s a one-day program with me virtually, where you and the five or six or ten other people who signed up for Decade in a Day get on a virtual webinar with me.

For an entire day, I sit down and I rebuild your business, and then the next person’s business, then the next person’s business. You have a chance to have your own business re-tweaked and rebuilt on top of going and watching me critique and rebuild nine or ten others’ during that day.

The whole goal is to compress a decade of learning into a day. Basically, to kind of take you on whatever path you’re going, lift you up and shift in the right direction or make the tweaks or whatever it is. That’s our second program: a Decade in a Day.

The goal at the end of Decade in a Day is to upgrade people to our $25,000 a year mastermind group. That’s the progression we’re taking people down. What’s cool about it, if you look at what we’re doing, each program is designed to sell the next program.

It goes from quick-start, and after that 30 days their business should be done. The next offer is, “Now you need our Decade in a Day so Russell can go and critique your business. Now that we’ve built this thing, let’s put it on autopilot.”

We give them a voucher toward that so they get a discount on the second if they bought the first. Then after Decade in a Day it’s like, “Now that we’ve done this, let’s go over to this yearly program so we can do this more frequently with me meeting you in person, etc. etc.”

That’s the direction we’re going in. The takeaway I want you guys to have is positioning and creating your program so that each thing sells the next thing.

The first time I really saw this was with Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes’ business, the Business Breakthroughs. Basically they sell you into a webinar, and on that webinar they sell you into their coaching. In their coaching, they sell you into their high-ticket coaching.

Each one is created and structured to ascend you to the next one. I don’t think many of us think of our business that way. I know even when we had our call center of 60 people and we were doing crazy numbers, we were never trying to ascend anybody. That was the end of the value ladder. It ended there.

I think it’s important to look at something and say, “How can I help someone? How can I take them to the next step?” and really focus on how to ascend up and providing enough value that they want to and are able to.

Especially if you’re in a how to make money business, they should be able to make enough money during the first program to afford the second one and so on. If not, there’s probably something wrong.

That’s what I’m working on in my business. I think it’s interesting and I hope you guys found it interesting as well. Just think about how you can create your product line so that each offer makes someone want to ascend up to the next offer.

That’s about it for today. I’m at the office, ready to go have some fun. I’m actually going to be working with the first set of people who signed up for our quick-start 30-day coaching. If you’re listening to this, I will talk to you later today.

If not, you guys should get into the program. It’s really fun and exciting. It’s actually closed down right now, but we’ll probably open it up in a month or so now that we’ve taken this first test group through.

I appreciate you guys listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, please go to iTunes and search for Marketing In Your Car and give us a thumbs up, because it’s fun when people rate us. It gets me excited. It makes me want to keep on doing this. I appreciate you guys and I’ll talk to you all again soon.

Lessons Russell learned from Tim Ferriss at Joe Polish’s 25K group.

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

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Marketing in Your Car Podcast. I am so excited to be with you today. Today I want to share with you guys a story of what happened to me a little while ago in New York. There was this group I wanted to check out and join. It’s Joe Polish’s $25,000 group.

There was an initiation meeting in New York where you pay $10,000 to go there for two days. If you like it, you pay the extra $15,000 to join the $25,000 group.

I wanted to go out there, but there were a couple issues. One, it was the same time as my anniversary. Two, it was in New York across the country. And three, I had to convince my wife that we should be in New York instead.

I pulled off an elaborate scheme to convince her that we needed to be in New York for our anniversary, me and her, then I could go to the meeting. Luckily for me, it all worked out and we were able to do that. We went like four or five days early to New York.

My wife and I got to hang out and have fun the first couple days. On Monday morning we went to the today show and we jumped around behind Natalie Mirales and the others. It was cool, we were on TV. Our kids thought we were rock stars.

That night, we went and saw Wicked the play, and that was really cool. I had never even heard that story before, so that was really fun. The next morning we went to the Kelly and Michael Show. Kelly was gone, but Michael was there, and the co-host was Rebecca Romaine, which was awesome.

The guest was Carrie Underwood, so we got to be two feet away from Carrie Underwood, which was cool. And once again, we were on TV and our kids saw us.

That night we went to a taping of America’s Got Talent, so that was really cool. That was the fun part of the trip for my wife and I. Then the next two days we had the mastermind meeting.

We were there and the mastermind was really good. At the end they had a guy who a lot of you guys have probably heard of. Tim Ferriss got up and spoke.

I really enjoy reading Tim’s stuff, but I don’t think he’s a very good presenter. When he speaks, he’s a little dry and boring for me. I remember he was talking about venture capitalists and stuff that doesn’t really interest me at all. I was zoning out a little bit.

At the end, he opened it up for Q&A, and one person got up and I’ve had people ask me this question before so I kind of almost rolled my eyes when they said it.

They said, “Tim, what question should we be asking you?”

Tim sat there and thought for a minute and said, “Ask me how come I will never let the media follow me around for a day, because they ask me all the time. They want to see a day in the life of Tim Ferriss.”

The guy was like, “All right, how come you never let the media follow you around for a day?”

He said, “Because if you look at my day, I wake up in the morning, I do some meditation, then I eat cereal, then I go on a walk. Then I read some books, then I surf on the internet. If you were to look at what I do every day, you’d think I didn’t do anything.”

He’s like, “I don’t work like most people. Most people have a to-do list of all their tasks for the day. They try to go knock out each to-do one at a time, and at the end of the day if they’ve knocked them all out, they feel accomplished.”

He said, “I work way differently. I like to sit back and look for the one big, huge domino that if I push that domino down, it will knock down and make every other domino obsolete. That’s how I can accomplish so much. I’m not racing and running into the next thing and the next thing. I sit back and I look for the big domino.”

That was his advice. It was interesting because I am very much the opposite. I am someone who sits there and just tries to get tasks done. It has served me well in life, just doing thing after thing after thing. But it also has gotten me in trouble multiple times.

One day I woke up and I had 100 employees working for me, and it was because of that: me running and running and running and not really sitting back and looking at the strategy behind things and waiting to find that one big domino.

I remember when I got back from New York I went on a trip to the Dominican Republic. After I got back from that, I came back and I told my team that. I spent the next three or four days sitting in front of a whiteboard.

We have a wall in our office that is just a big whiteboard, and there’s a couch in front of it. I sat in that couch for days, trying to figure out what is our big domino. What is the one thing we can do that makes everything else obsolete?

It was hard, because I wanted to go and check my email and check the next task. I’m always a hustler, trying to go on and speed to the next thing, and in this case I didn’t do that. I tried to sit back and look at it strategically. It was interesting.

It’s kind of cool if you think about it. I’ve been doing Jujitsu for the last little while, and Jujitsu is kind of a similar concept. In wrestling it’s very aggressive and you’re always going, going, going. But in Jujitsu it’s a lot different.

Jujitsu is a lot slower, a lot more methodical. You’re just looking for the next strategic thing. I enjoy it a lot, but its way different than wrestling in that way.

This kind of feels like the Jujitsu style, where you’re slowly looking for that move that will get them to tap out, as opposed to trying to score point after point after point.

It’s interesting, the different mindsets. I’m in the wrestler mindset, the to-do mindset, let’s knock things out as quick as we can and accomplish stuff fast. I’ve been trying over the last month or so now to focus on what is that one big domino that I’m going to knock down.

It’s been interesting. It’s been fun to look at my business from that standpoint. I just encourage you guys to slow down a little bit, sit back and think about what’s the one big domino you can knock down that makes all the other dominoes obsolete?

If you can find that, you can make a lot more money in a lot less time. That’s what I’ve got for you guys today. I hope you enjoyed it. If you do like these podcasts, please go to MarketingInYourCar.com or go to iTunes and give some feedback. I’d love to see it. It’s exciting for me. I appreciate you guys and I’ll talk to you all again soon.

We’re testing a new backend selling system, and so far we’re loving it!  Get the details on today’s podcast!

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

Hey, guys and gals. It has been a little while since we’ve done a podcast, mostly because I’ve just been gone. We did some crazy trips, spent some time in New York. I went to the Dominican Republic. I was gone for all of August. It’s just been crazy.

I apologize, I’ve not been as faithful. But I am back now and ready to rock and roll. It’s been an interesting last couple of weeks or so. We’ve been trying to figure out ways to separate our businesses. I didn’t really think about my business very well when it got started.

We launched DotComSecrets.com and this other thing and this other thing, and now we have like five or six other brands under DotComSecrets.com: DotComSecretsLocal, DotComSecretsX, DotComSecretsLabs.

Every one of those really caters to a different market. DotComSecretsX is more for beginners and internet marketers, whereas DotComSecrets is more for startups. We’re trying to think about how to separate everything and still keep it together.

We finally figured out a way. I’m excited. Over the next month or so you’ll see us roll out this new model I am really excited about. That’s cool.

Another thing I want to talk about today because I’ve been in the middle of it for the last little while: some of you know we had a call center that we built up to about 60 sales guys with about 12 coaches fulfilling what the sales guys were selling.

It was a big operation. It was kind of a nightmare, not going to lie. But it was fun and we had a good time with it. About three years ago we shut it down. There were a lot of reasons why we shut it down. Liability was one of them. It was interesting.

For the last two and a half or three years, we haven’t sold really high-ticket back-end stuff. I always missed that money. I’ve been trying to figure out what is the best way to do it. I tried selling high-ticket stuff off of webinars. It didn’t work so well.

One of the nice things about the phone is you can sell really high-ticket stuff, but I do not want to sentence myself into having 60 sales guys.

I’ve been watching a lot of different people and a lot of different markets. I’m one of those guys who buys from everybody and watches what they’re doing and listens in to see what is working right now.

I’ve seen people in a bunch of different industries who are doing call centers and doing similar revenue numbers to what we were doing when we had 60 people, but they’re doing it with one or two people.

It’s really interesting. Basically it comes down to just a couple little things. The first one, and this is the big key, is laser targeting who it is you want to sell to.

When we were doing the call center with 60 sales guys, we made our offer so low-barrier that it opened up the world to everybody. Everybody would want it.

We called every single person in the world trying to sell this coaching. The hard thing about that is we had 60 guys to call every single lead and filter and find out who these people were, whereas most people are doing it very small-scale.

They are laser targeting their audience, primarily through Facebook and direct mail and things like that. When we had our call center, I had to get between 5,000-8,000 buyer leads a month to keep the floor open, which is crazy.

With this new model, you only have to get about 60 applications a month to make similar numbers. In laser marketing you’re not trying to sell to everybody in the world. You’re trying to figure out who is your perfect ideal client who would really want this. That’s who you go and you target. That was the first thing that was interesting.

The next thing is that, instead of trying to sell them something, when we would call them blindly and try to upsell them to coaching, you switch around and you make them apply for it.

You make them fill out this huge application. The more questions, the better, because you want them to actually think about it. Again, it’s just another filtering technique that pulls out more and more people.

Then we do the call. The call is a lot easier, because at that point they know they’re going to be sold something. They are interested in the topic anyway and it becomes really easy.

We launched our first new call center yesterday and it’s been interesting. We sent out some messages and we got about 100 and something applications back so far. We are calling those and the conversation is really different.

It’s not us trying to convince them to buy something. It’s about just trying to see if it’s a good fit. It’s been interesting.

I’m really enjoying it so far. I’m sure over the next few weeks and months I’ll report back as we sort of master this thing. So far, that’s where it’s at. Anyway, if you’re looking at selling high-ticket stuff, it’s interesting for me to look at these models and play with them a little bit.

Look at that. Look at putting up an application for some high-ticket thing you have. Send an email to your list or go on Facebook and target the perfect, ideal buyer for yourself, and then have that application for them to call on the phone and have that happen.

It’s been working pretty good for us so far. I just got here to the office. I’m hoping we’re going to close a whole bunch of deals today and change people’s lives with the stuff we do for them. It’s going to be exciting. Anyway, I appreciate you guys. I hope you enjoy this podcast and I dare, you I double dare you, to go out and test some of these strategies. Thanks, everybody, and I will talk to you soon.

How you can use your online influence to make money from advertisers.

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

Today I’m heading to the office and actually my son Dallan is coming with me today. You guys heard about Dallan on yesterday’s podcast. Dallan has been saving up money for the WiiU. He asked this week if I would hire him, the day after the 4th of July, which is today. I just hired Dallan and he is coming to the office with me today. He’s got his chalkboard with him and his crayons and his whiteboard and he is going to make some money. He’s excited.

The other thing I wanted to talk to you today about is, yesterday we had our 4th of July parade and there were some lessons that were really fun with it. I remember as a little kid going to parades, and they were insanely awesome. There were big ole floats and all kinds of crazy stuff. Yesterday we went to the Boise parade. The Boise parade was a little disappointing, not going to lie. It was mostly cars with banner ads stuck to the side of them. I realized very quickly that all a parade really is, at least the kind of parade we went to yesterday, is a marketing tool. They talk about getting excited and hyped up.

A whole bunch of people show up in this one spot and these cars with banner ads come by that basically tell you to go do things. We saw banner ads for all sorts of things. Every float had some kind of advertisement on it, and there was no purpose for a float other than they were trying to advertise for whatever their thing was.

I thought it was interesting. Then what was kind of cool was at the end we saw the Costa Vita car drive by and we were hungry and said, “Hey, let’s go to Costa Vita.” We thought the only one was far away, but we saw on the car an address for one that was about a block from where we were at. We walked over and had lunch at Costa Vita. It actually worked. The advertising worked on us. It made me think about, there’s a lot of ways to make money online. There’s a thousand different ways to make money online.

One of them that works really efficiently and really effectively is to get a website that has tons and tons of visitors just like a parade, and have good content or good floats or things that are there that get people’s eyeballs there. Then on the sides and middle and all over the place you just sell banner ads. It’s kind of interesting. That is an amazing business model. That’s how parades work. That’s how a lot of businesses offline work. It’s the same thing online.

For a lot of you guys, if you think about it that way, for you to make money online is kind of a two-step process. The first thing, just like the parade, you’ve got to get a whole bunch of eyeballs there. If you get a whole bunch of eyeballs there, the advertisers will come.

There’s a really cool book that I read recently. It’s called Trust Me, I’m Lying. I highly recommend it, you guys should read it. It just talks about how media is passed through online, back to the traditional media outlets. It’s a pretty controversial book, very interesting to read. One of the things he talked about is how bloggers make their money. They write unique, interesting stories that get a lot of attention and get a lot of views, because bloggers make money for every view that comes to their site, or if they work for a company it’s the same thing.

They get their base salary, but they get a penny for every person who comes and looks at it. They are not incentivized by sharing true stories; they are incentivized by sharing controversial stories to get people talking. That’s why the media channels are so messed up these days. It’s kind of interesting. I’m saying that because for you, if you want to start getting eyeballs, you can start selling advertising on your site. You’ve just got to be exciting or controversial or whatever.

That’s the biggest key. If you put out that content and put out videos and start blogging and all those things, that’s when you start getting eyeballs. It’s like a parade, and at that point you can go and sell advertising, either your own products or other people’s products. That is the key.

We are now at the office. Dallan and I are here and we are ready to work hard. I hope you guys are as well. That’s about it for today. If you enjoyed this podcast, please go to iTunes.com and look for the Marketing in Your Car Podcast. We would love to hear from you. That’s about it. Thanks, everybody. We’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Lessons in entrepreneurship from my 7 year old son.

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Hey everyone! Welcome to the Marketing In Your Car podcast. This is Russell Brunson, and I’m going to welcome you to today.

Okay, so today’s a beautiful day. Yesterday it was 108° here in Boise, which in insane, and it’s supposed to be 108° again today. It’s going to be hot, but I woke up this morning to a really funny experience.

About 7:30 the phone rang, and I picked up and answered it and it was a lady asking for Dallin. Dallin is one of my twins, he’s seven-years-old, and I said, “Well, Dallin is one of my seven-year-old sons. Can I help you?”

She said, “Oh, sorry. Somebody had filled out an application for a job for him, and I was just calling to return the call. I’ll take him off our list.”

And I was like, “What in the world? Someone filled out a job application for my seven-year-old son?” and so then my wife stumbles out of bed to come find out, who it was that called, and I told her.

She starts laughing hysterically, and anyway… So here, let me tell you the backstory to this story because it’s actually pretty awesome. So Dallin, actually both my kids, Dallin and Bowen, both my twins.

A little while ago, whenever I’m like dad, my wife’s out of town where she gone wherever, I like to take the kids treasure hunting. Which basically means we go to pawn shops, and I try to find silver coins and then they try to find treasures too, so it’s really fun.

So anyway, one of the pawnshops we were at, probably six months ago, they found Super Mario Brothers U, which I thought that meant Super Mario Brothers University.

And anyway, it turns out all it means is it’s Super Mario Brothers for the Wii U, and the Wii U turns out to be a whole separate console, so I bought this game at a pawnshop, take it home. We can't play it, and we find out we have to spend another $350 to get the console.

Now, I already think my kids play way too many video games, and I’m not really into having them go and have another console. So I said, “Hey, well, if you want this money, you’ve got to earn it.”

So I went and got a jar and on the front of it we wrote “Wii U $350,” and they’ve been saving all their pennies and their coins and their money in this jar to try to earn enough money for the Wii U.

And it turns out one of my sons, Dallin, is a lot more entrepreneurial than the rest, and is just trying all sorts of things to figure out how to make money. For example, we went down to St. George, and we found this gypsum mine, and we found these gypsum rocks. We collected all these rocks, and he’s been trying to sell these really cool looking rocks to everybody he sees, to get money for the Wii U.

In fact, he sold one of our neighbors a rock for $10, which was amazing. So he’s out there closing sales, and hustling and doing deals. He keeps telling me like, “Let’s just go to the store, and we’ll just give them all these rocks. They’ll trade me for a Wii U.”

But he can't quite understand that, so we keep trying to do stuff. So on Sunday night, this was two days ago, he wanted to figure out how he could make the money, and so my wife put together a chore chart for him.

So he’s been waking up early every single morning and scrubbing the toilets, folding the blankets, making his bed, dusting the house, everything in the world he can do to figure out how to make money.

And so, he’s working, you know, all day yesterday and he earned a dollar from all his work, and he’s all excited. Then he realized like, “Man, it takes a long time to earn a dollar. I’ve got $350 I’ve got to make.”

So he’s talking about doing garage sales. He asked me if I had any work, he could come and work for me, and he says he’s really good doing drawings so he can draw for me.

But every morning he’s been begging me to come to the office so he can make money. And anyway, it’s just fun seeing this little entrepreneur.

So I guess yesterday, he was on the computer and he went to Google. He typed in “jobs for kids.” He clicked on some link, and a form came up, and he went and told my wife, and just said, “Hey, I need…”

You know “what’s our address,” “what’s our phone number,” and just asked all this stuff, and she didn’t really know why, but right now they’re at the age where they’re learning how to spell and how to do stuff.

So they always come and ask us like, “Dad, how do you spell roses?” “How do you spell this?” “What’s my phone number?” so didn’t really don’t think too much about it.

He wrote down all this, you know, then the address or the phone number and wrote down everything. Went back into the computer on this form, and actually filled out a “Help Wanted” for online, and that was the phone call, was them following up with his call.

My guess, it was probably some kind of call center trying to sell him a business opportunity, but it made me kind of laugh. So that was my young son’s entrepreneurial journey, so far today.

It’s two days into his thing, and he’s trying to make money for this Wii, and it just made me smile, because it reminded me of me when I was his age.

I was doing everything I could think of to hustle for money, because I just had these dreams of all the stuff I wanted to buy, and what I wanted to do and be in life, and I knew I needed the money to do that.

And it kind of makes me smile because I know that’s how I got to where I’m at today, is because of those types of things, and I just want to encourage all of us right now, depending on where you are in your life.

Look at my son, Dallin, look at his example, and I want you guys to emulate that. I want everyone to be out there hustling and striving, and trying to figure out ways to start businesses, and make money and work extra hours and things like that.

Because that’s how you get ahead in life, that’s how great things start happening. It’s always interesting to me how many people tell me that they don’t have time to start a business because they don’t have, you know, the resources or things like that.

Where I’ve got a seven-year-old out there scrubbing toilets to try to earn money so that he can get what he’s looking for, and I think too many people -- too many of us -- use copouts and use excuses like, “I don’t have time” or money or resources or whatever it is to start a business.

Whereas, if you just go out there and do it and hustle and try and stay up late, and work a second job and do extra work for, whatever it is, to be able to get to whatever it is your dream goal is at the end of the rainbow.

So I just want to kind of leave off with that, and the other thing is I was writing a sales letter yesterday. One of the things I wrote in there was about how good is the enemy to great, and I just want to kind of touch on that as well.

You know, like a lot of us, if you’re not where you want to be in life in whatever aspect, it could be business, it could be personal life, it could be religious life, whatever it is, the reason why most of us don’t live great lives, the reason why most people don’t have great marriages is because they have good marriages.

The reason why most people have great business because they have good business, and if you’ve ever read the book Good to Great, that’s what it talks about is just how good is the enemy to great, and it keeps us a lot of times from achieving what we want.

And I just wanted to let everyone know that you shouldn’t settle for “good.” There’s too much amazing stuff that this life has to offer, and good really is the enemy to great. So set your goals high and work like crazy. Do whatever it takes.

If you’re a kid who can't even type yet, figure out how to get online, get your address from your parents, whatever it takes. But do what Dallin is doing and go out there and hustle, and if you do, good things can happen.

So that’s where I leave it off today. I appreciate you guys listening to my podcasts. If you go to DotComSecrets.com, you’ll notice that I started getting these images designed.

I found this really cool guy in the Philippines. He’s making these little podcast images, and he’s doing a great job so far, so there’s going to be a whole bunch of little podcast images all over our site for each one.

Like there’s, for Mary Poppins, the last steps, I talked about Mary Poppins. He’s got a picture of me holding an umbrella and just kind of some fun stuff.

So come check out our blog! Come say “hey “over there, if you like the podcast. I appreciate you guys, and we’ll talk to you again soon!