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Marketing Secrets

Welcome To Russell Brunson’s Marketing Secrets Podcast. So, the big question is this, “How are entrepreneurs like us, who didn’t cheat and take on venture capital, who are spending money from our own wallets, how do we market in a way that lets us get our products and services and things that we believe in out to the world… and yet still remain profitable?” That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to MarketingSecrets.com.
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Now displaying: September, 2015
Sep 30, 2015

I think I discovered the fruit that keeps us moving forward.

On this special midnight episode Russell talks about being tired and a little burned out in his business and how he will get past it. He also talks about being able to serve and help others and how that keeps him going.

Here are some interesting things to look for in today’s episode:

  • What types of things have Russell feeling tired and ready for a break.
  • Why serving and helping others is so important for Russell.
  • And why he continues to do what he does.

So listen below to hear how Russell, just like everyone else, sometimes feels tired and burned out.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone. This is Russell Brunson and welcome to midnight Marketing In Your Car.

Hey everyone, so I am two days into my six day event. I've been doing a lot of events lately. I need to stop this. I need to get back to just working hard. Literally, I'm kind of getting, not burned out, but just ... I guess, stop doing events. We did a five day event for this certification in Boise and now six days. Our high end Mastermind group, our Inner Circle grew so big that we had to split it into two groups.

Then we have our $12,000 program, Ignite, and then we did an event in Boise for them as well. I kind of like bundle them all together. Monday, Tuesday, we had a Mastermind. Wednesday, Thursday, we had the Ignite event and then Friday and Saturday, we have the next Inner Circle. Kind of a crazy week, but the first two days, it's always interesting ... This is me getting vulnerable, and it's almost one in the morning and I'm tired, so maybe I'll listen to this later and be like, "Why in the world am I sharing all this"? You guys are getting it because you are here listening when I'm talking.

Anyway, it's funny because I'm sure all you guys get this, at a point where you get some burn out in your business. Right now, I'm kind of feeling that a little bit. I think partially it's just because the last twelve months since we launched Click Funnels, we've been running fast and trying to grow and scale, a company, which luckily has been working. That's exciting, right? That's a big thumbs up. Then cut off all the other businesses so we're shutting things down.

The only business we really have besides Click Funnels right now, that's live and active is the DotComSecrets business, which it has a bunch of employees and you know there's things happening there as well. Our high end coaching, things like that. It seems like recently, coaching has exploded, which takes a lot more time, and seminars, and trying to speak to sell Click Funnels and this-and-that. Thing after thing after thing, it just getting a lot.

Right now, from this week, and then I have two weeks off, and then I'm going to Australia for a week, then I got three speaking gigs in a week. Then after that, I've got a two or three month break, which is going to be really, really nice. It's just kind of chaotic, right? A lot traveling, a lot of time away from my family and I honestly, all I want to do is be at home in my wrestling room playing with my kids.

I'm trying to get through this backlog of commitments and then we're going to really be restructuring things. We are trying to protect my time a lot more after the first week of November. So part of me, coming to this coaching, which is like, do I want to keep doing that? Do we just shut down DotComSecrets and focus on Click Funnels, that's on us, where the big opportunity is.

Monday when I was driving to the Mastermind, I Voxed Liz, a lot of you guys know Liz. I said, "Hey, what would be your thoughts if I did stop doing the coaching stuff?" I was curious, and she messaged back this really great thing about the impact I had on her life and anyway, it just made me feel really good. Then we started the Mastermind and honestly, I was nervous at first because there was a lot of new faces in the group. I hope everyone gets along. I hope that everyone is providing value, and I just want to make it an amazing experience for the group. We did it day one and day two, and it's been kind of hard because I'm also planning for the events happening the next two days.

I pull an eight hour day with the Mastermind, then I go back to the office for six or seven hours working on presentations. And then all day mastermind and I just got done spending eight more hours working on presentations for tomorrow. I was just tired, worn out, and beat up. It was amazing at the end of the Mastermind today, I had everyone go through and say, "What was your biggest ah ha"? It was awesome. Just seeing people who came in on Monday and within 48 hours, I completely transformed, not just their businesses in a lot of situations, but their lives.

We had one guy, an older gentleman, started bawling his eyes out when he was sharing his take away. Then we had someone else who it completely changed the trajectory of his life, moving forward. For me to have a chance to be part of that, to have facilitated that and to be around that is so neat. I remember I got back to the office and I had all this stuff. I was stressed out and overwhelmed at all these things and I got a Vox from this dude named Noah, in our group, and he left me the coolest Vox, thanking me for the experience and all these kind of things. I'm sitting there tired and I just want to go home. I'm worn out and he was inspired that I was putting this much effort into the event the next day.

It just made me so grateful for that. I think that it's interesting; I get a lot of value personally, out of that. Out of the helping and the serving and seeing people's lives and businesses affected in that way. It's just interesting. It's funny, after all the stress and headache, the tiredness, almost trying to figure out, should we just stop doing this? What's the plan after a day like that? I was like, you know what? What we are doing is good. It's worth it. It isn't just me selling something to make money, but it's people having life changing effects because of it which is ... I think, one of the main reasons most of us get into business, especially a coaching type business.

With that said, I'm two days into a four day event. I'm sure I'll message you guys again throughout the week telling you the ups and the downs. I'm sure there will be some of those as we make it all through it. I'm just excited. I really enjoy this. I love the chance it gives me to share, grow, and to think. To try to think bigger than I normally do. To try to inspire and bring new things. I'm just going to say, for you guys, whatever business it is you're in, I would try to add some kind of coaching component to it just because when you do you start making connections and you start seeing ... I don't know how to explain it.

I've talked about it in different podcasts. When I was in high school, my senior year, they had me start coaching at wrestling camps. I remember trying to break down moves for people and learning and really starting to figure out why these things work. I could do the move but I started realizing why the move worked. When you understand that and you're conscious of it, you can change things and you can make things better and execute things better.

I think a big part of that was for me, when we were putting this event together and we're calling it Funnel Catcher. It was kind of walking through the content promotion strategy that we're starting in our business. I really had ... To be able to get the information, to be able to share it the next two days with everybody. We had to test a lot of things and we had to try a lot of thing. I had to learn a lot of things. I had to think through things. I had to try to figure out why does this work or why isn't this working? How could this work, potentially on this network and that? It just made me think at a different level than I would if I was just in my business the whole time.

I am grateful for that. It's pretty cool. What's cool is that we have the presentations over the next two days and it's going to be a good framework for the entrepreneurs who are at the event, to take it and to run with, but it also has forced me to build a foundation as well. Where we would go for something, we're kind of onsey, twosey doing to here is the framework in a defined way.

Anyway, it's pretty exciting. I don't know if my ramblings meant anything or mattered tonight, but hopefully it did. Hopefully you guys feel that in your business sometimes, where you're stressed, you're overwhelmed, you're tired and you just want to give up sometimes even, but after you do finish through and execute, you see the fruits of it and how it can affect people. That's the recharge. That's what gets you going again. It keeps you excited. That's it! I am home. I have got a whopping five hours of sleep I got to get tonight before I'm on stage tomorrow and I'm on stage the whole day, so I'm going to get some sleep. I will be ready in the morning to deliver and serve.

For all of you guys who are in Ignite or Inner Circle, I'm excited to see you guys in the morning and hopefully, what I bring tomorrow will help transform you and your businesses and get you to where you want to be. I appreciate everybody for listening and we will talk to you all again very, very soon. Thanks guys.

Sep 23, 2015

Early morning, sleep deprived ramblings, the morning of product launch day.

On today’s episode Russell talks about product launches and how much work it was before Clickfunnels. He also shares what he loves and hates about product launches.

Here are some fun things in this episode:

  • What Russell loves about product launches.
  • Why product launches can be so difficult.
  • And what one of Russell’s favorite reasons for having a deadline on a product launch is.

So listen below to hear about Russell’s love-hate relationship with product launches.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody. It is product launch day.

Hey everyone, welcome to Marketing in Your Car. Today is product launch day. Yes, you heard me right. Today, ClickFunnels 2.0 is going live, which means it's 6 in the morning and I'm driving to the office. I was up last night until after 1:30. I want to talk about a couple things.

First off, product launches, I forgot how hard they are. The last time I did a ... well, let me rewind. My business, for a long time, for probably 5 years or so, was based off of a product launch model, which was horrible. I don't think I realized how horrible it was until I moved to one that's not product launch. I was like, "Wow! That's way better." This was our old model, is every quarter we had to launch a product. We get as many people as possible to promote for us, and we get them all on board. They all promote, we make a bunch of money, we get a whole bunch of people to join our list, and for the next three months we would have to then repay favors to everyone who promoted for us. We promote all these other things, repay favors, by the end of three months, our list was kind of dead from promoting other people's stuff. Then lo and behold, we had to do another product launch. Everyone that we had promoted owed us favors, so they promoted.

That was the cycle. Four times a year, we’d do a product launch, and I forgot how much work it is. I forgot the stress and the headaches, and all the little things. Obviously, that was pre ClickFunnels, so now it's way easier. Back then, it was like, I don't know how we survived it, but we did somehow, luckily. We survived it, we thrived through it, and now we're here. Anyway, it's kind of interesting to me. I'm so grateful to not be in a difficult product launch business. We did a product launch earlier this year with my book, and then we're doing this one for ClickFunnels 2.0, which is two in a year, which is way too much. I think I'm retiring from the product launch business. I'm going to be focusing on growing a company the good old fashioned way instead. We're doing this because we can, and we think it'll be fun. It'll give us a big surge of energy, and customers, and excitement.

It's kind of interesting, at our live event we promoted the dream car contest, which is exciting. We promoted Actionetics and Backpack. In that little room of 600 people, everyone was going nuts, but then the rest of the world doesn't know what's happening, so it's kind of like, we needed to make some noise and get everyone else excited too. That's kind of what this is about. This obviously isn't like a typical product launch. It's not just us doing a new product, it's ClickFunnels, but now we're also releasing Backpack and Actionetics inside of it. It's exciting. That's kind of what's happening today. One secret I learned from product launches is never have your product launch go live at 9 a.m. I used to do that all the time. We'd pull all-nighters, 9 a.m.  we'd go live, and there would always be issues. We set it for 4 Eastern, that way I've got until 2 o'clock my time. I could go crazy, past lunch, and then we open it all up. I've learned that, and hopefully you guys, if you ever do product launches, that will be a good little tip for you as well.

Dang,  I had something really cool to share with you. I'm trying to remember what it is now. Well, I think it had to do with the transitioning of a company from a product launch, over to a sustainable business. I was listening to a podcast with Ryan Lee. Ryan is one of the coolest dudes. I don't think I've ever really told him that, but I really just like him. Anyway, he launched his podcast called the Freedom Show. It's really good. It's kind of like Marketing in Your Car, just little ten minute things. Ryan is just fun. I like him a lot.

One of his guests he had on there was one of my friends, Mike Lovich. Mike was talking about a concept that I thought was kind of cool. He said that when he launched his business, he was out there trying to hustle and nobody ever promoted him. Ryan, I guess, was the first person to ever promote him. Ryan promoted him, he made some money, and he's like, "That was house money now." He made 2 or 3 thousand dollars. He's like, "Now it's the house money I'm gambling with. Then I went out, and I learned how to buy ads, do media, and do all these other things that kind of go with that."

That was his big secret. I think about that, you know, the main reason I like product launches is because of this increased excitement and energy and surge of people caring about what you're doing. It's still probably one of the best ways to launch a business. It's hard initially, because a lot of times you don't have partners, you don't have things like that, and it's hard. If you really launch it, do the initial product launch with one person. If you find one person who believes in what you're doing, pay them 100% commission, or 200%. Whatever it takes to get them engaged and involved.

Do this initial push which causes momentum. Momentum is good because, even if it's just a little bit of momentum, one dude buys your thing, that's momentum. That's like, oh my gosh. Things are moving forward. Now we can start running instead of walking. There's all this momentum that starts going forward. I think a lot of times it's that initial surge. When you do start making money from that, the key. This is the hard part for a lot of us entrepreneurs who like to spend money on dumb things. You got to reinvest that money. There's a point that you can take money out, but it's not at first.

I look at our supplement business, it's funny. People are always like, "Oh, I wish I was in the supplement business. You're making like 20 grand a day." I'm like, yeah but we didn't pull money out of that business for like a year and a half. Every penny we made went back into either inventory or ads. It was kind of interesting. A business like that, you have to scale it. The time you start making a lot of money is almost when the business dies. It's not necessarily that way. We built this one better.

The first time I ever remember seeing that, these guys were selling a website on Flippa. It was back in the acai berry days. It was a free plus shipping, scammy acai offer. They were explaining their metrics. They were like, "Yeah, the way it works, we scaled it up. We got it to the point where it's doing 100 grand a month, or 500 grand a month," or whatever it was. He's like, "We're buying media. We're not making any money, and then we stop buying media and we just live off the recurrent as it dwindles down to nothing." That was the whole model. At that point, they sell it on Flippa.

They were kind of showing, they'd done the cycle over and over again where basically that's what they were doing is that you know, they got to a point where it was making half a million dollars a month but were not making any money and then they stop buying ads and then that recurring of half a million dollars a month comes in and then next month is 300 thousand and 200 thousand then 100 then 0 and they only make their money when the business is dying. Which kind of sucks, right? We won't make money until we decide to kill our business. That's how a lot of these guys work and Neuracel wasn't that way. We were profitable earlier but it still took a while. It was ... we weren't able to pull money out until we decided to stop growing, if that makes sense. We got to a point where we were doing about half a million dollars a month and then we stopped growing it because we wanted to take some money out. We sat there ... we could have kept growing it but then we would have had to kept reinvesting the profits in inventory and advertising.

So it's kind of ... I hate business like that where you can't ... you know where you grow and you ... or where you profit when you stop growing, which isn't much fun. I don't know why I went on that rant. Probably because I had like 3 hours of sleep last night. It's been thing after thing ... but anyway, the moral of that story was, when you do a business, when you do a product launch, you get that momentum, is reinvest that money. Reinvest it back in and get to the point now where you can pull profits out. Make a little money, you pull it out, you just killed the goose that could lay golden eggs. All right.

Now I remembered what my moral of the story was, kind of. I think ... some smart dude, I don't know which guy it was. It was either Parato or Occam or some dude who said something famous. I would probably know this like 3 hours from now but this early, I really have no idea. But he said something and I'm sure someone out there is just shaking their head, thinking, Russell, you should know this guy's name.

Anyway, he basically said that like when you have a task, right, all the ... or you have a deadline. Somehow magically, all of the like the amount of work will grow to expand to fill that task up, right? Fill that allotted time up. It’s funny, because we have been working on this product launch forever, we had all these things pre-done like months in advance. We were ... it's just crazy. No matter what you do, at least in my experience, maybe other people are better than me, no matter what you do though, you're always ... all the stuff you have to get done for this product launch, does not get done until the second it goes live. It's insane how that works. It's literally insane how that works.

We spent so much time and effort testing everything and then now still we were up until 1 o'clock last night. I'm up this morning at 5. You know, and we're testing and trying and everyone's going to be up and then ... what's interesting and this is what's kind of cool. As you get closer and closer to the deadline, you always have this list of all this stuff you want to get done and as you look at the clock, okay, there's 3 hours left, there's 2 hours left, there's 1 hour left, there's 30 minutes left, there's 5 minutes left. You start cutting things. You're like, "That can't happen. That's impossible. That's impossible. Eventually come out with what's left, which is the little pieces that basically the ... you usually start trimming off all the nice to haves and you end up left with the half to haves. After the launch starts, then you go back to adding in all the other things that you try to get it finalized.

But it's interesting is that ... that's one of my favorite reasons to have a launch is it forces you to get done all the must haves, right? And to trim out all the should haves or want to haves or whatever you want to call them. Most people ... most entrepreneurs, they never get their thing live because they spend years trying to get it perfect. Like I said, if you don't have a deadline, you don't have something happening, somehow magically all time will get filled up with stuff that you need to get done and it just never gets done so that's one nice thing about a deadline like this. It's do or die. You don't have any choice because you know, in 4 hours from now, people are promoting whether it's live or not and if it's not live, then they don't promote, we just lost on huge opportunities, you know, hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars.

Anyway, hopefully you guys got a little value out of today. If not, I apologize it's the lack of sleep and everything that we got from the circumstances but regardless I hope that from this you got the fact that having a product launch business model is no fun but having a product launch to force you to get stuff done and to give you initial momentum, which then can be turned into cash flow and everything else you need to be able to start scaling your company in an actual growth-type business as opposed to a product launch business is good. There's a time and a place so thank you Jeff Walker for giving us a product launch and everybody thinks that that's a business, you're not listening to Jeff. Anyway, I'm at the office guys. Appreciate you all. Have an awesome day. Hopefully when you watch this, ClickFunnels will be live and will be bug free or at least as close to that as humanly possible. Love you guys. Thanks everybody, have an awesome day and talk to you soon.

Sep 21, 2015

A glimpse behind the vision of what Clickfunnels is becoming.

On today’s episode Russell talks about the new updates to Clickfunnels and future updates that will come to make Clickfunnels better and better.

Here are a few things to listen for in this episode:

  • Find out some of the new features coming out on Clickfunnels.
  • Hear about some of the future features that will be coming eventually.
  • And find out what Russell’s prediction is for how many people in the industry will eventually be using Clickfunnels.

So listen below to find out some cool Clickfunnels features that you will soon be able to enjoy.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car!

All right, so that intro's a little weird, I'm not going to lie, but I got have some kind of pattern interrupt. I say the same thing every morning, so there you go. I hope you guys are doing amazing today. It is Monday as of when I'm recording this. I know maybe, who knows when you're listening to this. Monday I'm recording it and on Wednesday we start our pre-launch for Click Funnels 2.0, which I am insanely excited by, and nervous, and everything all wrapped up into one. It's crazy, like I'm sure any of you guys that have been listening for a while know a lot of the stories but we launched Click Funnels about a year ago and in that year it's grown like nothing I've ever dreamt of. People are adopting it and it's so exciting. We didn't want to sit on our, what do they say? Sit on your laurels or sit back and just sit there, we wanted to continue to improve, and make this thing better, and make it what I would have dreamt of.

It's funny, I think it was ... What's his name? Henry Ford or something; I think I might have mentioned this in another podcast, too, but he said something like, "If I would have asked my customers what I wanted, they would have told me they wanted a faster horse." I felt like when we first came out with Click Funnels that's what people thought it was. It's like, "Oh, it's like LeadPages, you can move things around." We're like, "No, that's a piece of it, that's not the vision; the vision is so much bigger." The vision that I know Todd and Dylan and I had when we first launched the company was so much bigger. The question was not like, "How do we make a better LeadPages, or better Unbounce, or whatever you want to say?" At the time when we launched Click Funnels was it was in the midst. Todd was coding Click Funnels while we were launching Neuracel. The Neuracel project, obviously, as you guys know did really well but, man, it took a lot of people, and time, and effort, and every little change was like a nightmare.

For me, when I was building this, like my dream is where I can just not have to have all these people here doing this stuff. Where I can just log in, and drag, and drop, and move things. At first, it was funny because we had the vision from day one that it wasn't just going to be one software program. It was 3 things, it was Click Funnels, Backpack, and Actionetics. In fact we owned Actionetics, Todd started developing that way before Click Funnels was even a dream. It's been a long, long, long time in the making and most people don't know that. They think it's, "Oh, we just added these new things."  It's like, "No, Todd spent 5 or 6 years building Actionetics the first time around and then having to re-code it to bring it into Click Funnels." It was very well thought through and thought out. The vision, in fact, we had explainer videos done for both of those before we ever launched Click Funnels.

It's not something where we're just trying to, "Oh what should we do?" It's been part of the vision from day one. In fact, for me, and I know for Todd and Dylan, I think, that it's been very frustrating to like, "Everyone's loving Click Funnels." It's like, "Yeah, but it's not done yet, it's not complete, it's not what we know it's going to be." We know what the vision is and that's what we're so excited share with you and with everybody and it wasn't quite there yet. What's exciting about this launch is that this will be, the complete product, will be released during this launch. You guys will have access to Click Funnels, Backpack, and Actionetics. We're calling it the Etison Suite. Etison's the name of our company by the way. Etison, E-T-I-S-O-N, it's like Thomas Edison and Tesla mixed together, so it's Etison. It's the full Etison Suite.

What makes me nervous is releasing 2 new huge ... An affiliate platform and basically an email auto-responder that does a million things more, at one time is scary. I know that at first we've had to do, on purpose, we can't launch all the features at once because it would just be a nightmare, so we're rolling out with minimum viable product. Not so much that other things aren't done but because we need to make sure that's perfect. People will get in there and we'll start seeing the little bugs, and tweaks, and changes we need to make. We'll scramble as quick as we can to make those things more and more solid. From there, over the next year or 2 years, 3 years we'll keep adding and building upon those things. The nice thing on our side that I'm excited for is that the product will be done. It won't be like, "Okay, what's the next thing we're going to build? It's like, "That is the product, that is the vision." Now, it's like how do we take that, make it more stable, make it faster, make better?

In fact Todd did updates this weekend where, and this is kind of geeky-nerdy, and probably doesn’t make sense to all of us, including me, but the pages load-time went from 500 milliseconds to 1/20 of that or something like that. Like .15 or something, so you guys probably didn't notice that but this weekend your page loads went up 5 times faster because of little things he's doing like that. That's the vision that, moving forward over the next 12 months is just making things faster, better, stronger, more reliable, and incrementally adding little things. As opposed to like right now we're tripling what the product is. So that’s exciting. The only other big thing that's coming out is the Market Place, which we have a different dev team building that out and it's almost done, as well. When that's done, on our side it's going to be now just making that better, and better, and better as opposed to building out new things.

I'm excited and I know you're probably excited and just wanted to share it with you guys. That was it, nothing else to really share other than that's where we're at. I hope for you and your company it's the same way. Getting feedback from people is one thing, but I hope you have a vision of what you're trying to accomplish and where you're trying to go. A vision that's bigger than most people can even contemplate because that's where greatness, I think, comes from is really knowing where you want to be. Typically, it's you want to get there for your own reasons, your own business. It's interesting I was talking to Jason O'Neil, one of our inner circle members who's crushing it right now and it's just fun. He built this software program and he said something that was really cool to me, he said, "All it is I built exactly what I wanted and now everybody's buying it." I think he said he's up to 30 grand a month in recurring from this software and it's just like it's awesome. I'm so proud of him, it's so fun to see.

That's what it is he built it for himself and by doing that it's become something everybody else is adopting. Same thing, Click Funnels, we built it for ourselves. We built it because we didn't want to have another Neuracel where it took us 2 months to launch and then a year of optimizations. It could have been done in a weekend and that's what we've done. Anyway, I hope you guys love it all, I hope that you're patient as you get it because there are going to be little hiccups, and issues, and little things. It won't be perfect at first, but it will be perfect soon and that's the game plan, the goal. I foresee that in the future, in a year from now, the majority of people in our market will be using it for everything. For email, for their affiliate programs, for their pages, their shopping cart.

I've seen the future of where they're going. I've seen the dashboards like some of the new Click Funnels dashboards that won't be immediately, but as we keep developing this into more and more of full blown CRM you'll be able to see ... Oh, it's just exciting, it's awesome. The visibility you'll be able to get from your customers which was never possible before now. I tried for 12 years to be able to see an accurate lifetime value of one of my customers and it was impossible. Where now, with Click Funnels it will be just one of the stats you see; which is the power of having everything in the same ecosystem. We're able to see everything, able to see what emails they open, what pages in the funnel they hit, how often they hit it, how long they were there when they hit. It's just, it's amazing. Appreciate you guys, appreciate you believing in the vision, appreciate you being part of it, and we'll keep making it better and better for you.

Like I said, just as it comes out, just know there's going to be little hiccups at first. We know it, you should hopefully now know it. Be forgiving, enjoy the process with us and in a year from now you look back thinking, "Wow, I cannot believe what's been accomplished in the last 12 months." That's what we're saying and other people are saying about Click Funnels in the first 12 months. We're just going to keep on trying to make it better. Appreciate all you guys. Have an amazing day and we will talk soon.

Sep 21, 2015

How to stay relevant in your market consistently year-in and year-out.

On this episode Russell talks about Shania Twain and what she taught him about remaining relevant. He shares some things that he has been doing to stay relevant in the business.

Here are a few cool things you will hear in today’s episode:

  • How having a crush on Shania Twain in his teens taught Russell about staying relevant 20 years later.
  • Why it is so important to stay relevant.
  • And what some of the things are that Russell has done to always be a part of the latest trends in business.

So listen below to hear how Russell keeps his name fresh on people’s minds and how that can help you within your own business.

---Transcript---

Hey, this is Russell Brunson I want to welcome you to today's marketing in your car.

Hey guys and gals and everybody out there driving either to or from work, or hanging out in your cubicle, or at home, or in bed, or wherever you are hanging out with me tonight, or today. I appreciate you guys, I'm heading home from the office right now and had a long day. We have a thing called “Decade In A Day” we do for all of our inner circle members where they come in and we get to do a full day consult. Well, an hour long consult with them but with eight people throughout the day, so it's eight hours.

I'm a little bit fried, and I'm heading home right now to go to the Boise state game. We've got a cute little handicap kid we're taking with us, so we've got to get there early to get him into the stadium and it's a lot of work, but it's going to be a lot of fun. Really excited for that, hopefully my energy level will stay up because I am beat right now.

I wanted to talk to you guys about something interesting I learned from Shania Twain. Now, I need to admit first off I'm a huge Shania Twain fan, had a crush on her since I was eighteen years old. I was actually at my senior year in high school, we went to a wrestling tournament and the wrestling tournament was out in Florida, and our parents didn't come with us, it was a whole bunch of wrestlers. I can’t believe our poor coaches took us on that. We went there, we're all in a hotel room, jammed with like twenty wrestlers in one hotel room. Anyway, MTV was cool back then, I don't think it is anymore, but it might be for young kids, but I don't think it's cool. Definitely back than it was still cool, and so every morning they'd turn it on and every morning this song came on from this beautiful girl, named Shania Twain. It was the song “Looks Like We Made It”.

I fell in love with Shania back then, and it's been awesome ever since. Anyway, fast forward and it was ... it was interesting, went to her concert and it was fun, we had a great time. What was weird to me is like this was the first time I had ever seen her live in person, and my distinct thought in my head was like “Hey, it looks like Shania Twains mom!”, that's what it felt like.

I'm like, oh, I'm not eighteen years old anymore, she's no longer thirty years old or whatever she was back then. We're all getting older, it's different, and I think that they were saying it's Shanias last tour ever and all of this stuff we were reading online. Even though the first time I had heard about her was 1998, I guess she had been touring and doing stuff since 1992.

So, from 1992 until today, which is, I don't even know how many years that is, twenty years? That's a long time right? A long, long time. It's interesting that people hear Shania Twain’s coming to town and they still pack the house with tons of people, it was really really cool. Maybe start thinking about the question that I think is important for me, specifically, and for you and for everyone who is trying to sell stuff, and the question is, “How do we remain relevant?”

It's interesting, I got started in this business twelve years ago, and in that time I could list off pages and pages of people who came in who were the hot stuff in the couple different markets that I have been in. They come in with a lot of energy, a lot of fanfare, and they come in and it's like “wow, these guys are amazing”. Within a year, year and a half, two years, these guys disappear and they're no longer relevant.

Okay, you see it with celebrities all the time as well. I remember I had a guy write a sales letter for me a couple years ago, and one of the case studies that he talks about, and we had it hand sketched and it was like, “this is hotter than the tickets to a Justin Bieber concert” or something. We never launched that sales video and in the future I was always going to.

Now look at like, Justin Biebers whole career is dead and I'm like crap, I can never use that sales video because that's no longer relevant, he's no longer relevant, the whole concept. If I do ever launch that sales video I've got to re-sketch it with someone else who is cool, which I thought was kind of funny. I should just post the hand sketch out of this Justin Bieber because it’s funny ... anyway, that's a good question… How do you stay relevant?

I've been grateful that in the twelve years I've been in this business, one that you guys would be familiar with, I've been in a lot of businesses. One that my face is on the front of it, how do you stay relevant? It's scary because I've gone through session or seasons, whatever you want to call them in my life, in my career, where I wasn't anymore.

I felt that, one minute you're the hottest thing on earth, the next minute nobody cares. You work really hard and all of a sudden you become relevant again, then it goes away and it's like man, how do you do that, how do you stay that way? It's funny, I had a talk, call, whatever you want to call it. Mike Filsaime, one of my closest marketing buddies, one of the first guys I met when I got online, he came to Boise a couple years ago and spent a couple days here just talking about business and stuff. I asked him, he was doing  the marketers cruise every year, and I was like, "Why do you still do that man? You don't make any money, it's a week away of your life."

He said, "The real reason I do it, is to stay relevant. That's what keeps me in the mind of my customers, my JV partners, my prospects all the time." He's like, "If I stop doing that there's a chance that I would slip and not be relevant anymore."

That's the first time I had ever thought about it, like “Wow that's interesting. How do you stay relevant?” That's the question I don't know if I can answer today on this podcast, but I might give you some hints or some ideas of things I've thought through, things that I think have helped me in the times that I've been able to stay relevant. I hope I can continue to stay relevant for a long time. Until I'm ready to disappear into the night, which is going to happen you guys, mark my words. One day Russell will disappear and, I'll keep doing the marketing in your car because I love you, but the rest of the world will not know I exist.

A couple things, first off I think a big part of it is you've got to be a ferocious learner. Not only does whatever market you're in change a lot, even if things don't change a lot in your market which is true with some things... People that are in that market, their cycle, the things that are happening, things that are hot, things that are exciting. If you ... I remember in the internet marketing space for a long time, membership sites was the thing, it was the hot topic. I luckily came in and rode that wave, I came out with a concept called micro-continuity about that time, and it blew up and made insane amounts of money. I was super relevant than, but then the buzz and excitement of membership sites went away.

I had to transition away from micro-continuity, that product if I launched it today would not do a fraction of what it did when we launched it. I hit it at a time it was hot. One of my very first products I had success with was a public domain thing. For whatever reason public domain, one or two years into my career became this hot topic and everyone was talking about it. Yanik Silver is launching products ... all of these other things were happening; I was like, "Huh."

All these people talking about public domain, I'm going to make a public domain membership site. It came out and it just the right timing and it worked. It was relevant, it kept me focused. I think that if I was in a veracious, I don't know how to say that word ... learning all the time and seeing what the trends are, and learning and trying to be the top of my game so that whatever was hot and relevant, that I was in that conversation. I understood it, I could keep up with it, and I could help expand those conversations and take the concept of like membership sites or recurring, and how could I make this better? What can I do, how can I expand that thought or that concept?

I think that's one really big thing. I think that ... that kind of leads to another thing is like, being prolific. Again, how do you teach being prolific right? It's hard, it's not something that you can just teach I don't think. It's understanding, I have this thing called the prolific index, some of you guys may have seen it. In the middle it's like the sane zone, this is like when you go to high school and they teach you about the four food groups, like that's in the middle.

Then on both ends, I call it the crazy zone. The crazy zone is like where people are crazy, like, "Hey liposuction, you should just chop off your fat and you'll lose weight that way," right? Somewhere between the crazy and the boring mid zone, is the prolific zone. This is where like, for me I think I talk about guys like Dave Asprey, I hung out with last week. Putting butter in your coffee to lose weight, that's the prolific zone. It's not mainstream where no one's going to give you money, it's not crazy where people are going to think you're insane, but in between there.

That's the sweet spot, that's where you've got to be living, that's where you've got to be thinking. I have friends that are amazing at helping people lose weight, but they are so mainstream that it's hard for them to get a message out because their message is the same as everybody else's message. If you want your message to grow and to expand and to be shared and to go viral, whatever you want to call that, it's gotta fall in between there, it cannot be in the boring zone or the crazy zone. It's got to be in the prolific.

Even if you don't believe in the crazier part of the things, you've got to find the things you do and you've got to tell stories, and create things so that becomes exciting. That's the key, that's a big key to it. The next thing I think is ... I don't know, there are so many things. I think it's being relevant not just to customers, but to partners. How do you serve people that potentially extend your message?

I've spent a lot of time, especially over the last twelve months trying to put a lot of time and energy into building relationships with other people who I feel are very relevant, so that I can ride on their coat tails or I can leverage some of those things as well. Learning how to speak, learning how to sell, learning how to be good on camera so that people are excited. This periscope thing for me has been evolving a lot lately, it's been interesting to me.

I love my podcasts, I love this, but it's hard for me to grow this audience. It grows organically, and luckily there's a lot of word of mouth from you guys, who I appreciate it. Sharing this with other people, in fact, if you like this episode, share it, please. It's hard for me to inherently promote, there's not good tools to build your podcast right? There are things you can do but it's not as easy, where as with periscope I've got a lot more things, a lot more tools to use to grow that following.

Its growing, not super fast but right now we're average about three or four hundred people are watching my webinar, or watching my periscopes when they're live, which has been awesome. Then another five or six hundred, so almost a thousand people are watching each one which is cool, but then evolving and I'm figuring ... these first ones are fifteen to twenty minutes long, they're good but I was losing people really fast.

I did it a couple days ago, I called it a marketing quickie and I shared it, and it was awesome. Engagement, sharing, everything was way better. Now, when getting my platform now, so I've done three in a row, it's called marketing quickies, like quick five minute long periscopes.

They're fast, they're awesome, and I'm taking that and I can push it. It's growing, and I think that finding something like that and then being very consistent is key as well.

Anyway, there's a lot of little things. I don't know if I know the answer, but what wanted to kind of start the conversation and get you guys thinking and running that through your heads. I think that's important, because just because you're making money today, you might not be making money tomorrow. Be grateful for what you have right now, be grateful for whatever platform you have, because it can go away.

I've seen mine go up and down throughout the years, and I'm very aware of that, and I'm very grateful for what I do have, and I want to stress for you guys that you understand that, and be grateful for it. Do things to stay relevant, that's a big key. Again, I have friends who thought they would be forever, and now I watch them and most of them ... they're not doing what they were doing five, ten years ago, and that's a big deal. Hope that helps, hope that helps at least get your thoughts in that direction, and yeah. I'm tried, I'm beat up, I'm going to go home, go to the football game and have some fun.

Thanks you guys, I appreciate you, and I'll talk to you soon.

Sep 14, 2015

How to change your sales process that’ll allow you to 10x your prices with half the effort.

On today’s episode Russell talks about getting quotes on construction projects and the frustration that comes with waiting. He shares how those contractors could do things better and how that relates to his business.

Here are some interesting things to listen for in this episode:

  • Why Russell doesn’t believe in doing quotes and why that turns into comparison shopping.
  • Why Russell is not trying to be the cheapest option in the business.
  • And why positioning yourself in the right place and setting your own rules gives you the control over your customers.

So listen below to hear how to take control in your business and make your own rules.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody. This is Russell Brunson, and welcome to Marketing in Your Car.

Hey everyone, I just finished a near flawless morning routine, it was exciting. I woke up on time, I studied my scriptures, which, for me, is a big thing. Then, I did my supplements. I'm trying to process how to stack them to make me feel the best. When I just down a million supplements at once, I don't feel like I'm taking over the world. I tried something where first thing in the morning, I get apple cider vinegar lemon shot, which is horrible, it's really painful. Then, do my keto OS right then, along with my On It supplements. Then, do my study, then doing my morning workout. It was super dark this morning, it's crazy. A week ago, when I was running, it was light. Now, it's dark, so I did this stuff inside my wrestling room, which was fun.

Did a killer workout for an hour, did cardio really hard for 20 minutes or so, then switched over to weights, body weight stuff and heavyweight stuff, which was really fun. Then, came back in and did bone broth, this green drink thing, and my bulletproof hot chocolate stuff, along with the rest of my vitamins. Anyway, feeling good like that, breaking them up like that and then doing the stack that way. Anyway, feeling really, really good. Liking that, so I'm going to keep tweaking and testing that and try to keep perfecting this thing, which will be fun. Now, I am heading into the office. I had a thought today, as I was looking at vendors and how people have been working with me on different project in the home and things like that. I wanted to hopefully save some of you guys from yourself, that's my goal for today's message.

This is what's been happening. I call a contractor or whatever, have them come out here. I'm like, "This is what I want to have happen." I'm all excited, I have all this energy, and I'm showing them everything. They're like, "Oh, cool, cool, cool. All right, we're going to go home and build out a quote for you, and we'll get back to you." My excitement level drops a little bit, like, "Okay." Then, they go home. Honestly, like a week, two weeks, three weeks later, they come back with a quote for me. They email me the quote in a state where I'm not longer pumped up, excited, and fired up. They email it to me, and it sits in my inbox. I look at it just really devoid of emotion, it's got a whole bunch of things that mean a lot to them, but means zero to me. I'm looking over these things, and it's so uninspiring.

So far, three or four people that have sent me these quotes back, I haven't even responded back to them. What's funny is that when I don't respond back to them, none of them ever follow up again. They just don't, that's the end of it, and they lose my business. It's crazy to me because some of these projects are really big projects that could make or break a company sometimes, I would think. A couple things I want to do is first off, I want to walk you guys through the process of if you are doing quotes, how do them right. Then, I'm going to walk through the process of how to actually do them better. Here's how to do them right. When I am in the peak excitement level and I am going crazy, that's the time you want to get me to commit. You don't want to get me to commit three weeks later when I'm out of state, right? The biggest thing about sales is 90 percent of it's creating the emotions so that when you ask them for money, they say yes. When someone has you over to their home, they're excited, and they're going crazy, that's the time you want them to commit. That's step number one.

Again, most times, you're not going to know what it is right now, but man I would lock them in right now. I'd say, "Look, this project's going to be pretty big, it's going to be 20, 30,000 or whatever, could be potentially. I'm going to go find those things out for you, but I want to lock this in today. I know you're excited, I'm excited. How soon would you like us to come out?" For me, I kept telling the guy, the most recent guy, I kept telling him, "My biggest concern in life is urgency, I want this done yesterday. I don't really care how much it costs, I just want it done." With that, it took him three weeks to get me a quote back, which is ridiculous.

I wanted it done in three weeks, so right then, he should've said, "Hey, how about this? Let's lock this in, and say it's going to be a lot. Let's just say the first $10,000, because you know it's going to be more than that, right?" I'm like, "Yeah." "Okay, let's lock this in while you're excited and I'm excited. First $10,000, that means my guys will come out next Wednesday, and we're going to start this process. It's going to take me a while to figure out exactly what it's going to cost, but it's at least 10 grand. Let's lock down 10 grand, you pay ten grand right now. We'll get started, and I'll have the rest of the quote for you later on. I guarantee it won't go over 50,000, or 40,000."

Or, ask me what's my max budget, and I can say, "I'm looking probably 40, 50 grand." "Okay, cool. We'll make sure we don't go over that. Let's lock in 10 grand right now and let's get started." Now, you've got me as a client. Now, you sold me and got my credit card at the peak of emotional impact. I'm pumped up, I'm excited, I'm fired up, right? Not three weeks later after I'm annoyed that I still haven't heard back from you. That's step number one, step number two is getting money now, it's way better than getting money later. Lock in, get some money now, and figure out the rest of it later. You don't have to have 100 percent perfect quote, you just find out what their max budget is and tell them you guarantee it'll come in underneath that.

Then, go back to work and spent your week, two weeks, or three weeks, whatever it takes, figuring that out, but get the process started. The biggest things that can cause people to cancel, refund, or whatever is that the process never gets started. They're sitting around waiting forever. We had someone come in and do blinds, it took them eight weeks to get the blinds installed, just ridiculous. We didn't hear back from the once. During that eight week period of time when I'm nervous, I'm waiting, I'm excited, I'm losing this, I'm getting frustrated, you should be calling telling me the status. That gap is when you go to be really treating them right. Those are some things if you're doing quotes that I would really think about.

Now, I want to shift it around and tell you guys a better way to do it. The better way to do it is don't do quotes. When doing quotes, suddenly, you are in a business now of comparison shopping. In fact, the guy that sent me the most recent quote, on the top of it, it had this big disclaimer, like, "If you send this quote to other people, we will bill you $250" or something stupid like that. You know what happens is you get a bill, I forward it to three other people, and they try to beat it. As soon as you give them a quote, they're going to go comparison shop. It's the dumbest thing in the world, you don't want people comparison shopping, you want to flip it around and you want to position and posture the right way.

The way we do it is we position ourselves as the best, the most expensive, the hands-down best alternative on earth. One of my mentors, Dan Kennedy, said, "If you can't be the cheapest option, there's no strategic advantage in being the second cheapest." Which is a huge, important thing. I'm dropping a piece of gold for you guys right now when you understand this. If you can't be the cheapest option, there's no strategic advantage in being the second cheapest. If you can't be the cheapest, you need to be the most expensive. Position yourself as the most expensive, like we are the most expensive shop in town, but we do it the best. Go after the premium market, because again, either go after the cheapest, or the premium, but don't be in the middle.

Pick the premium, then strategically position yourself in a spot where you are not easy to work with. It's hard to get to you, they have to apply, and you change the whole process. That's why my coaching program is application only. We don't go out there and beg people to buy from us, we make them apply, we put them through a process to position and posture ourselves at the top of it. The top of the market, not the low price leader, or the second-to-low-price leader. If you can't be the lowest, then you got to be the most expensive. We position ourselves that way, we make people apply. When they apply, now it changes the whole thing. No longer am I coming out and giving you a quote, you got the control in your hands, they're applying and asking to work with you.

Now, that control is magically in your hands. You can increase prices, you can demand things, you change how the playing field is. A funny example, we had someone apply to join my Inner Circle program. They were talking to one of my sales guys, and they asked the sales guy, "Hey, can you send me a proposal for what this is going to look like?" My sales guy started laughing out loud, and that guy's like, "What?" He said, "We don't do proposals here, Russell doesn't wear shoes at the office. If you're looking for a proposal, you're not the right fit for this program." The guy apologized, "Oh, I'm so sorry. No, no, no, here's my credit card number." Completely just changed the thing. You have to understand that if you position yourself right and you posture the sell right, it puts all the power back in your hands, not in their hands, which is the the key.

If you put it in their hands, where you're sending them a quote and then you're waiting to hear back from them, you lost everything. You lost all your strategic advantage; you lost your ability to price things the way that makes sense. You lost everything, and it just changes everything. I hope that gives you guys some ideas, and this is going for any kind of business. I see way too often people that are sending out quotes, they're putting out bid sheets and all sorts of stuff like that. I think it's the dumbest way on earth to do business, all you're doing is asking yourself ... You're doing all the work, putting in all the effort, then have someone go and price shop you.

Unless you do it correctly, which is really hard to do the right way, and most of you guys won't do it the right way, I kind of mentioned earlier, then don't do it. Flip it around, make it where you are the high end leader. You're the most expensive, you're so busy that you cannot and will not take on everyone. They have to apply and jump through hoops and they have to prove to you why they should work with you. When you do it that way, everything else changes. Now, you're in the driver's seat, and now you can run your business the way that you want to do it, as opposed to doing the way your customers want to, which is a big key that I want to instill upon you.

Obviously, we love our customers. We want to serve them at the highest way possible, but we also do it on our terms, not on their terms, which is key. As soon as you do it on their terms, your customers will eat you alive if you allow them to. It's funny because some of the support guys on our team, what they always wanted to do is, "Hey, let's go ask our customers what they want in a software program." There's a, I think it's a Henry Ford or someone, quote, he said, "I didn't ask my customers what they wanted because they would've told me they wanted a faster horse. We went out and built a car." Same thing with us, we always say, "No. If we asked our customers what they wanted, they would've told us they wanted a cheaper version of lead pages." That's not what we're doing, we're trying to change the world here. We are the innovators, we're the thinkers, we're the ones that are thinking outside the box.

We love feedback, and we appreciate it, but at the same time, we're building what we know is right. We've got the foresight, and we know where we want to go. It's the same thing for you. Love, respect, and treat your customers the best you can, but you've got the set the policies, you've got to set the ground rules for how someone works with you. If you don't set those rules, they will set them, and I promise it won't be favorable for you, in the long run. It won't make for a business relationship for you or for them, honestly. You're going to resent them, and you're not going to be able to serve them at the level that they need to be served at. Whereas, if you do it the right way, it'll change everything.

Hopefully, this helps some of you guys. I remember when I first got started in this business, one of the first guys I got turned on to is a guy named Dan Kennedy, who I've mentioned a couple times. I went through all his training, which has probably skewed my thoughts a lot. I went through his time management courses, everything. He's way worse than me, but he was very strict about those kind of things. If you want to message Dan Kennedy, you can't call him, you can't email him, you fax him. Actually, you don't even fax him, you fax his assistant.

Once a week, his assistant collects his faxes, puts them in a FedEx box, FedEx's them to him. He then gets those FedEx's, once a week opens them up and hand writes the responses to them. Then, puts them back in a FedEx box and then back to his assistant, who then gets them, then faxes them back to you. It's two to three week long process to get a response from Dan Kennedy. Some of you guys are like, "That's ridiculous! Why should I do that? It's so annoying!" Then, you're like, "Man, Dan Kennedy's the man. Look how are it is to get to him, I got to pay a lot more." It's just interesting. I don't go as far as Dan, but I definitely do set my own rules, as should you guys as well.

Anyway, hope that helps a little bit. Thanks for letting me vent, share, and hopefully inspire you guys and give you some ideas on how you can run your business and how you can protect your own time as well. I'm going to be doing Periscope later on today on time management, some of the things I do. If you are on my Periscope, then come check it out. If you're not, come follow me on Periscope. If you just go to blog.dotcomsecrets.com, you'll get all the info there on all the past Periscopes, plus all the old Marketing in Your Cars, we archive them as well. All the Marketing in Your Cars, all the Periscopes, all the cool stuff's being archived at blog.dotcomsecrets.com. Thanks everybody, have an amazing day and we'll talk to you soon!

Sep 8, 2015

What I remembered about business while wrestling with my 9 year old twins this weekend.

On today’s episode Russell talks about wrestling and how beating your opponent requires that you have an angle and why business works the same way.

Here are some cool things in this episode:

  • Why you need to have a different angle in your business to have success.
  • How you can find an angle in your business to beat others in the same market.
  • And how all that relates to funnel hacking.

So listen below to find out why you need to have the right angle to differentiate your business and have fast success.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone! This is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car or Marketing In My Car or something like that.

Hey, everyone. So, I was wondering today. How many of you guys actually listen while you’re in your car? Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m the dude in the car and you guys are all marketing at your house or in your office. I don’t know.

But anyway, I appreciate you guys been on today. Hope things are going amazing for you and your companies. And I’ve got a bunch of fun stuff to talk to you about. Last night or not – it was actually Sunday, I was sitting around after church thinking about stuff and I started mapping out ideas for cool things I want to share with you guys. So I’ve got a list of cool stuff to share with you guys. So, that’s my game plan for the next few days.

Today, what I want to share or talk to you guys about a little bit, and hopefully this will help you guys when you’re thinking about positioning your products and your services and even your brand as a whole. And kind of the back story behind this, most of you guys at this point know that I’m a wrestler. I wrestled through high school. I was a state champ. I took second place in the country. I was an all-American, ended up wrestling at BYU until they cut the wrestling program that went to Boise State and I became one of the top – I think the highest I was ranked was 14th so top 14 wrestlers in the country. And I trained for Olympics for a little while. In fact, we built a whole Olympic Training Center.

Anyway, recently I built my own wrestling room at my backyard. So I’m obsessed with it to say the least. But anyways, it has been fun. As I built my own wrestling room, I’ve been working with my kids. Teaching them wrestling…. I got some jiu-jitsu guys coming over, teaching them some wrestling and it has been really fun. So it was kind of fun because it has kind of given me a chance to kind of re-remember a lot of the fundamentals of wrestling, of things that we take for granted because we just do them instinctively. But you start trying to break it down for someone else like, “Oh, this is why you do that and this is how you do that,” and things like that.

So in wrestling, one of the really interesting things when you’re wrestling someone, if you guys watched a wrestling match before, people come out and they come like head to head typically and it looks like the heads are smashed together and they’re trying to punch each other in the face, trying to get in on each other’s legs, right?

So from the outside looking at it, you probably don’t know what’s happening. You’re like, “Oh, that’s kind of weird.” But if you look at what the goal of a wrestler is, like when we’re getting in there and we’re tying up, and we have our head to head and we’re pushing and pulling and moving people around, our entire goal of that is we’re trying to get an angle. OK? We’re trying to get somebody to step so that we’ve now got an angle we can attack them from.

I know that it’s very difficult if not impossible for me just to shoot directly like through somebody. It’s really hard. The way that if I want to take somebody down, I’ve got to move and move and move until I can get them take a little step and then I can take an angle. And as soon as I got an angle, instead of going head to head, I’m going to head to like me going through their ear type thing. I have an angle. Now, it opens up the whole world to me. Now, I can actually get it on their legs. I can take them down. But it’s a hundred percent – it all requires me getting an angle like if I want to takedown on somebody, it’s just how it works.

And so, I was thinking about that as I was showing my kids, like I was showing Bowen, one of my twins, like we’ve been doing like these things where he pushed and we’re doing inside control and trying to like get in good position, I told him how like I just want him to push and pull. I was like, “Watch. When you pull right here, what happens is I step and then check it out. Now, we’re not head to head. Now, you’ve got a little angle on me. Now, it opens up a shot where you can actually get on my leg and you can take me down.”

And so for wrestling, that’s the whole point is I’m in there beating the trash out of the other dude’s head trying to move him all with a hope that I can get a little bit of an angle. And as soon as I get that angle, as soon as it opens up, boom! Takedown’s there and I can score.

All right. So there is the metaphor. So, how does that relate to business? OK? So in business, I see so many people where when they say, “Hey, I’m going to be in this business or this market.” They pick what they want it to be. And then I think part of it is a disservice that I’ve done because I talk a lot about funnel hacking. So they say, “OK, this guy has got this.” And they go and they make the exact same thing.

Now, what just happened now that you got this new business? You’ve just stepped up and you’re head to head with someone. You got the exact same product, exact same offer, exact same everything as these guys. OK? And that’s going to make it difficult. I’m not saying you can’t be successful. OK?

There are some people – like for example, this week is actually the world tournament in Las Vegas for wrestling and there’s an Olympic champ named Jordan Burroughs who has got the best double leg I’ve ever seen in my life. And he can just plow through everybody like he’s so dominant. Like this dude does box jumps higher than his head. He’s got the strongest legs and hips and he just can plow through anybody. He doesn’t even need an angle. Just boom! He’s just taken you out, right?

But for average humans and the majority of people, we got to have an angle, right? And so, the same thing for you, if you go head to head with someone, you have the exact same thing and you funnel hack them exactly, what just happened? Now, you’re going up against someone else who if you funnel hack someone well, you’re going to get some perfect competition and you can’t – this could be hard for you to score to make money.

And so, what I want you guys thinking about a little bit is the angle. What’s your angle? What makes what you do different than what everybody else is doing? Okay? When I’m funnel hacking someone, I’m looking for a process. I’m looking for price points. I’m looking for things like that. I’m looking for layout. But as soon as I figure that out, my next goal is how do I make mine different or better or more unique or what’s my angle? What makes me – why is there a purpose for me to exist in this market that I’m stepping into?

I got a friend. His name is Mike Lovitch and Mike is one of the smartest dudes I’ve ever met. He owns a company called RealDose and a bunch of other things. He owned a company called Hypnosis Network. I think he may still own that. I don’t know. But he was the one when we trying to create weight loss offer back in the day and I was doing what I kind of do. I was like, “OK, here’s one that’s successful. Let’s model it.”

And he kind of made this really good point to me. He said, “Every market is kind of like its own little ecosystem.” And if you look at an ecosystem, there’s like – let’s say it’s weight loss. There is Mike Geary, he owns The Truth About Abs. Then over here is so and so and they own high fat. And over here, so and so, they own low fat. And over here is – you see these ecosystems, this little world. And if you come in and you got exact same thing with somebody else, suddenly, you’re competing with them and if they’ve got a bunch of partners, now you’re competition to everybody, and nobody is going to let you in the cool kids’ crowd.

If you can come in and look around, look at the ecosystem and see where everybody is at and then figure out what’s not being served? What’s the message or the thing or the product or the service that nobody else has done or at least nobody else has done well? And that’s how you find your angle. There you get it and you find that spot. And now, you look at all these other people in your ecosystem. Instead of you becoming head on head and direct competitors with them, because you’ve got an angle, now you’ve opened up partnerships with all of them.

So, all of your potential competitors all become your potential partners. And that’s a big key with this. So I want you guys thinking about that today, just really figuring out like what’s your reason for existence in your ecosphere? The market you picked, where are you different? Why should someone care that you exist? And if you can’t answer that, you need to start thinking about it more because right now, you’re going head to head like I would in a wrestling match.

And until I find that angle, I got to push and pull and move and just grind this guy until I can get a little bit of an angle, find my spot in the ecosystem and then boom. As soon as I do that, that’s when growth explodes. That’s when you start having tons of success very, very quickly is by finding that angle, finding the difference in your world, in your ecosystem, in your market and then blowing that up and exploiting it. That’s where you have success quickly.

So I want you guys thinking about that because I think it’s really kind of the next evolution of funnel hacking. It’s not just – funnel hacking is all about finding all those pieces, the proven success road model. Then the second step is now you coming back and saying, “Now, OK. What’s my angle? What makes me different than everybody else? Why should I exist?” That’s what you really got to start thinking about.

So, I want to put that in your head today. I was thinking about when we launched ClickFunnels, out there in the market, there was a bunch of other people doing stuff similar. We had LeadPages, we had OptimizePress, we had Unbound and a bunch of different things.

And so – in fact, our initial thing when we first started, Todd, my business partner in ClickFunnels, he was like, “Oh, we can clone ClickFunnels in a weekend. Like that’s the easiest. Like I can literally, in a weekend we can have our LeadPages. We can literally clone LeadPages in a weekend and we could be going head to head with them.” OK, that’s cool.

But now, we are like direct competitors like there’s no differentiation. There’s no – all these other things we missed. How do we – like what’s our angle? What makes us different? What do we want to be? What do we want to be different? How do we – how can we serve this market better than anyone else has in a different way? And now, it’s kind of – from those questions and from that conversation is where ClickFunnels was born.

So that is my question for you. I want you to look around your ecosphere, the market that you’re in or the market that you want to be in and let me know why you exist, why people should care about you. What’s your angle? What’s different? Because as soon as you figure that out, as soon as you figure out than angle, as long as it is a good angle, sometimes I get an angle on somebody that puts me in bad position then they take me down. That’s not good either. You don’t want a bad angle. As soon as you get the right angle, that’s when you can score, that’s when you can start growing your company quickly.

And I’m sure it’s the same in most sports. I always think wrestling is the best, and it is. But I think most sports, I played football for a while. I played basketball. Like all those sports are the same thing, it’s all about angles. Like if you don’t have the angle, you’re going straight on, it’s hard to compete. But as soon as you figure out the angle, it changes everything.

So, that’s the message. That’s the moral for today. Start thinking through that because that’s going to help you guys to grow and differentiate yourself from everybody else.

All right. With that said, I am almost to the office. I’ve got an amazing day today. We got some cool stuff happening. I’m working on the ClickFunnels 2.0 re-launch which is turning out so exciting, so amazing. I’ve spent all night last night building out new affiliate center for ClickFunnels inside of ClickFunnels, which is exciting. If you guys haven’t used the backpack plugin inside of ClickFunnels, it’s pretty awesome. So we built out a whole affiliate center.

And this weekend, I also went and I built out all my autoresponder sequences inside of Actionetics for all the DotComSecrets side of the business. Then today and tomorrow, I’ll be building them out inside of the ClickFunnels side. So, pretty exciting. I’m having a lot of fun with it. I’m excited to be able to share Actionetics with you guys because it is amazing.

If you ever look in the emails that have come out over the last three days from me, those are all ClickFunnels emails. And look how amazing they look, except for an iMac or was it Apple Mail? Apple Mail, out formatting is off. But everywhere else, we look amazing. So we’ll get there. But I think you guys are excited to be able to play with it and see it. And you’ll see how we’ve taken the concept of autoresponders and then got our angle on like why is ours different, why is it better, how does our tool help you dominate people more than anybody else’s?

So you will see, my friends, you will see. Anyway, that’s it for today you guys. Have an awesome day. Go out there figure out your angle and let’s make some more money, serve some more people and have an awesome day. Thanks everybody!

Sep 4, 2015

A response to a Facebook message about how we balance our family life.

On this episode Russell talks about how he balances his marriage with his business and how he makes it all work and makes everybody happy. He also talks about how if he had married anyone else he wouldn’t have been so successful.

Here are some cool things to listen for in today’s episode:

  • How Russell has managed to have a successful business without sacrificing his marriage.
  • Why it’s important to have balance between your business life and family life.
  • And why Russell’s wife Collette, is a big part of his success.

So listen below to see how Russell has the perfect balance of marriage and business.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone! This is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in Your Car.

Hey everyone, hope you are having an amazing day. I have a lot of cool stuff happening over here. It’s been keeping me busy all day and all night and haven’t had a ton of chance to share stuff with you guys so I want to jump on here.

I’m having a lot of fun with periscope though lately which has been really, really cool. And so, if you guys aren’t periscoping yet, go do it, and if you’re not following my periscope yet, now is the time. If you go to blog.dotcomsecrets.com, you can get all the old episodes of all my periscopes, all the Marketing In Your Car podcasts, everything good is there. So go check it out.

All right. So for today, I had a really cool question that I wanted to kind of try to answer. It’s not something that’s like super easy to answer and maybe I’ll do a follow-up podcast like this one time when my wife is in the car with me. Someone asked today on Facebook and said, “Russell, how in the world you do all the stuff you’re doing and you’re wife still loves you?” which is a good question.

And again, it would definitely be good for her to chime in on this because she doesn’t or maybe who knows. But I want to kind of share from my perspective some stuff because it’s hard. I want to preface it by saying a quote from a guy named David O. McKay and he said that no success can compensate for failure in the home. And I do believe that. And so first and foremost before anything else, always remember that.

That should be something we all print out and hang on our wall at the office so that we remember what the goal is, right? I’ve seen people who have lost their marriages because of business, because they’re trying to achieve this thing and because of that they miss out on their family and their spouse and all these other things. And so, that’d be kind of a big initial thing to really make sure you have your priorities because that’s the most important.

I had a friend recently who was having some marital issues because of his business and he said, “How in the world does Collette let you do all this stuff all the time?” And talked about how like they were having real, real struggles to the point where like this may not last forever. And I told him, I said, “Man, if I were you, I’d quit business then, because business is stupid. It doesn’t really matter. It’s just this thing that we do to keep us busy throughout the day. The only thing that really matters is our family, is our wife, our spouses, and things like that.” I’m a big believer in that.

So like if there ever a time that business comes between your family, you got to walk away from the business. I’d rather go bankrupt than go through a divorce. That’s like how I feel about it. And so, just know that that’s the driving force.

Now with that, like now that we’ve got some ground rules. We know what’s the most important thing is now and where our boundaries and how do we create boundaries that everyone is going to be OK with. So for me, this is a lot of learning and a lot of unhappy wife moments that have kind of brought me to this spot now, where I feel like we’re really in a good spot where things are happening.

And so, I want to kind of share some of the insights that I’ve got. So maybe I’ll have Collette come on some time and share some of her insights because they’re probably the opposite of what mine are.

But one of them is, depending on where you are in your life right now, is picking the right spouse. I’m a big believer in you can only be as successful as your spouse will allow you to be.

I’ve got friends who are great entrepreneurs who flat out, their spouses weren’t OK with the time away. And because of that, they had to quit and not do what they wanted to do. And so, a lot of it is in the selection of your spouse ahead of time.

Now, that’s not everything, which is good because I don’t think my wife by default right out of the gate was probably that way. In fact, we had early on had a lot of issues where I think I drove her nuts but she – I did pick an amazing woman. I told her and I believe this deeply that if I had married any of the other girls that I dated in my past, I don’t think that this company and what I do would have been possible. It wouldn’t have.

She was the only one that I could have married that would have made it so that I could – she was the only one that was like OK with me gambling and risking time and energy and money on crazy ideas and not tear me down because of it. And just be OK like, “Hey, if we’re broke, I don’t really care. I just want to hang out with you.” That was kind of her attitude. That was a big part.

Another big thing for me is she has to be aware of my schedule. I used to be at the point where I’d be working and all of a sudden it would like 8:00 o’clock and then I call her, “Oh, sorry I’m late. I’m going to be pulling an all-nighter tonight,” which wass really, really bad. But if I tell her in advance, far enough in advance like if I say, “Hey, later – next week, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Todd and Dylan are flying to town. We’re going to have a hack-a-thon, you’re not going to see me those nights.” And as long as she knows that in advance so she could prepare for it, she is usually OK with that. I’m sure she doesn’t love it but she is OK with that.

I also try to be very particular on those days when I’m gone a lot like all the guys are going out to eat, I’m not going to go out to eat with them. I’m going to race home and try to spend an hour or two with her and the kids just showing that I’m there and that I care and because that’s important. That’s key. If everything is just focused on the business is not a good thing for anyone. So that’s a big part of it.

Another big part for me and I know this doesn’t work in all relationships. A lot of people, their spouses are intimately involved in the business, some aren’t. With me, my wife is not intimately involved with it. And I think that honestly, that has kind of served me as a good thing where she – it’s separate. Like there’s a big separation from the two. And so, I’m able to kind of run the business the way that I see fit and she runs the home the way she sees fit.

And because of that, we kind of each – like we have our roles in it. And as long as I don’t do anything stupid that affects what she is doing, she is pretty much fine with most things. Even when our business had ups and downs, one thing that I tried to remain consistent is I needed to have her – for her to have certainty. And certainty is such an important thing for most people especially women.

And so, everything else – my entire world was collapsing around me. I was firing people left and right. I was doing whatever I could to save it, I was working all those times but I was very consistent to make sure that it didn’t affect her, which isn’t always possible but I make sure that she was making the same amount – has consistently like I didn’t want to lose that. And that was a big thing for her. And so, she didn’t feel the brunt of a lot of that which made it OK. That was a big thing.

I think another big part for spouses is like having belief and faith that the sacrifice you’re putting is going to be worth it. And I think you are really making sure that it’s something that they want as well. I think that some of the issues my wife and I had earlier on in our marriage were about that where I had these goals. I was trying to get stuff. And she – and one day I came home and I was like stressed and she was just like, “I don’t – like those things don’t matter to me. I just want you to come home and be with us and with the kids. That’s what I want.”

And when I understood that. I was like, “Wow! I’m doing these things…” I feel like in my head, “I’m doing this thing for you and for the family.” And the reality is you’re doing it for the most part for yourself if you’re completely honest. And so, just being very aware of that making sure that you’re doing things for the family and not just for yourself is a big piece of that.

So anyway, those are a couple of different ideas that hopefully will help a little bit. Obviously, it’s not everything. There are a lot more things. But hopefully, that kind of gets you thinking in the right direction. I’ll do a follow-up on this next time I’m driving with my wife and get her feedback from her corner and see what she says as well.

So, I’m at my daughter’s soccer practice now and I’m watching her. She is amazing this year. She has been really fun to see. So, I’m going to watch her for a while and then I will get back home for dinner.

So I appreciate you guys listening in. I hope you got something of value for today. And we will talk to you guys all again soon. Thanks everybody.

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