How to become a better father, husband, and person.
On today’s episode Russell recaps his new morning routine and where it’s been successful and what the hard part is. He also talks about how direct response marketing not only makes your business more successful, but also can work for every aspect of your life.
Here are some cool stuff to listen for in this episode:
So listen below to find out how to use direct response marketing in other aspects of your life.
---Transcript---
Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in Your Car. Hey everyone, I hope you are doing amazing. I am excited and happy as always, it’s not always but as often as possible. A lot of people have been messaging me asking me about how the early mornings have been going. First off, thank you now I know you’re listening. I had a couple people message me at 5 Mountain Time because they knew I would be awake, like, “Hey are you awake, are you in funnel time?” I love it.
So I’ve got a confession to make, I’ve not been perfect this week. Monday and Tuesday I did it. It was easy, it was fun. Wednesday I did not wake up, and Thursday which is today, I woke up. This is what I’ve found, a couple things. First off, the hardest part is not waking up early, the hardest part is going to bed on time. Is that crazy? You would think that that would be way easier because, I’m gonna go to bed, I’m tired anyway. But that is the hardest part.
So what happened, another interesting thing is, waking up in the morning, typically when I wake up early I’m going out to lift, so because of that your body kind of has this reaction where it freaks out and your brain has 3 or 4 things fighting against it, so there’s a lot of resistance, whereas waking up to get on the computer to do funnel time, I didn’t have any resistance, it’s kind of interesting, that part was really easy, but going to bed was hard. Initially I was going to try to go to bed at 9, but I realized my kids go to be at 9 or 9:30, so that didn’t work. So I tried to get to bed by 10, that’s my goal. First night did it, second night did it, the third night the kids went insane, which happens way more often than I’d like to admit. So they were crazy and then it was, what time was it? It was probably 10, probably about 10 when they went to bed when I was coming down trying to get things ready and checking things and cleaning up, all that kind of stuff. Pretty soon it was 10:45, I was oh man, it’s almost 11 and I was walking to the room, and I walked by my wife who was in the other room, and she just turned on Dancing With The Stars, and I was like, I’m just going to come in and watch one dance, one dance. Next thing I knew it was midnight and I’m like you know what, I’m not waking up tomorrow, so that was hard.
And then last night, because I love, I can’t tell you how much I love it though. I get so much done, I feel like no matter what else happens the rest of the day, it’s just a bonus. So I really like it, so I tried last night to get to bed. And my kids finally fell asleep. I was able to leave their room at about 9:30. I finally got to bed about 10:30, so it wasn’t too bad, and then I passed out and was up at 5. So I did it today, feeling good. So hopefully I can keep things moving through.
Anyway, what I wanted to talk to you guys about today has been on my mind. Usually when we do something, we just lump it as a success or failure. Our brain has two camps, this worked or it didn’t work. And I’ve learned with direct marketing that’s not how it works. In direct response marketing the cool thing is we’re able to see and track what happens at every point along the funnel, along the process. How much did we spend per click? How many clicks did we get? How many people saw our ads? What was the cost per view, per click? Then on the landing page, how much did we spend per opt-in? What conversion rates were? Landing page, sales page, emails, open rate, click through rate, up-sell rate, average cart buy all the little pieces. I didn’t get this for the first 7 or 8 years of my business until I started working close with Todd Dickerson on our team, who’s the genius who does all the split testing and those kind of things. And he got really good at looking at those numbers and figuring them out and showing us the stats. I realized, wow when you actually know all that stuff, two things. First off you know how much money you can spend to acquire customers. Second off you know what’s broken. It’s really easy to look at and be like, whoa, that’s not converting well. That should be higher, let’s tweak that and change it and start fixing all the things along the way. And hopefully if you guys have been following me for any amount of time, you’ve learned that we’ve talked a lot about that. The book Dotcom secrets, was a lot about that. So you learn the process is true there.
I also want to stress how it’s not just in marketing, it’s in all things. I was looking at this whole morning thing, by day three I was like, this sucks, doesn’t work. But then I was like, well it’s not that it didn’t work. Let me look at the process, what are the pieces that did and what are the pieces that didn’t. I’m looking at it, I’m looking at the bedtime is the hardest piece. That’s where my conversion rate sucks, I gotta figure out how to make that better. At the waking up part, hasn’t been hard so far, where some people that might be the hard part for you. Looking at the different things and trying to figure out where the bottle necks are and the low conversion rates are. And then what to do to tweak that and make it better and more exciting and all those types of things.
So my next game that I’m going to play with my brain, is figuring out how I can get to bed and asleep by 10. What are the things I need to do? How do I motivate myself? What are the, you know I’m not sure what that is yet, but that’ll be my fun thing to figure out. How to increase my conversions on what time I go to bed for the next little while. So that’s kind of a one off example. But think about all aspects of your life. What are other things that are important to you? With your husband or your wife, or your spouse or your girlfriend or whatever? Look at the process. Was my day awesome? Yes or no? If it wasn’t, why, what happened? Here it was good, I did this part and it was really good. I did this part and it was good, but then boom, I screwed up here and then the whole thing went south. I said this stupid thing and the whole thing went south.
Start looking at that and being aware of it. Instead of being like, that day sucked, or that let’s say that you’re hanging out with your kids, you’ve got three hours playing with your kids, at first it’s really fun, but you get tired or bored or whatever the thing was. And you’re like, that wasn’t as good as I thought. Why? What was the reasoning? I look at me and it’s like, I’m always trying to figure out how do I optimize the experience with my kids each day? Because I work so hard, that I want to make sure that when I’m not working and I’m with them that my focus is there, my energy is there and I’m able to give them what I want. So I look at , some days are just awesome, sometimes I’m like, man I am a good dad. Other day’s I’m like, Man I am a horrible dad. Why?
For me, I look at it, when I am a good dad, it’s when I’m out jumping on the trampoline with them, I’m running with them, I’m doing stuff, I’m creating, when I’m engaged with them. The times when it’s horrible is the times when I’m looking at my phone, I’m checking things. I’m not engaged, whatever it is. OR I’m tired, my energy levels are low. They want to jump on the tramp and I’m like, I’m so tired and I’m find excuses and ways to not be an awesome dad. So looking at that, I’m like, why was this day awesome, why was this day different? This day what was the process I did? I had good energy. Did I take different supplements? Did I sleep more? Did I eat different? Was that before I ate or after I ate? What was all the little things along the way that made that experience amazing?
My kids, I found out, and I’ve really….this is one big reason when people ask why I’m trying to eat healthy and why I’m doing all these things, and it’s less for trying to look sexy, because you know, come on. Just kidding. I’m such a dork. The real reason honestly is I feel like during the day, I’m giving 100%. I focus I have energy and I’m doing awesome and by the end of the day I’m worn out, I’m tired and my brains tired and my body’s tired. And I feel like, am I giving the best of my time to my work as opposed to my kids and my wife. That’s not right. How do I keep my energy levels high for the last 3 hours, or keep them the same level they are for the first 8? Because I feel guilty if I’m giving 100% the first 8 and then I’m only giving 60&% the last 3. So for me, it’s a big piece of that. I’ve been figuring out, what do I do? How do I eat differently? How do I get in a different state so that when I get home I can actually be aware and awake and have the energy I need to be an awesome dad and not a lazy dad.
There’s a quote, and Stu Mclarin actually posted it on his Facebook wall today. It’s from a guy named David O. Mckay. For the Mormons out there, we all know who he is. For those who are not Mormons, he is someone who us Mormons consider a Mormon Prophet, that lived I don’t know how long ago, 50 or 60 years ago. He’s no longer alive, but he had a quote that was really important, and it kind of ties into today’s message. His quote was that “No success can compensate for failure in the home”. For me, I think about that a lot. If all my energy is going to my work, and I don’t have that because I’m spending so much energy and focus there, I can’t fulfill my home duties, then I’m a failure. That’s something I think about. So I’m trying to think about how to increase energy levels.
There’s a couple examples. There’s a sales funnel how we do it. In a new morning routine, how we do it. This is how we do it on a time with your family, but it works in any part of your life. So instead of just looking at aspects and being like, this was awesome or this was lame. Start looking at the process and see what things to optimize and tweak to make it better. And the more conscience and aware you are of those things the more you can affect them and make them better. That’s the message for today. What should we call this one? Let’s see, just so you guys know, when I finish this podcast I send my brother the title and he titles it. But I want your guys’ help on this. What should we title this one? We could title it, how direct response effects your…how direct response can improve your daily life. That’s kind of cool right?
Alright, Scott, that’s what we’re going to call it. How direct response can improve your daily life and the sub headline will be how to become a better father, husband, and person. That sounds good. Alright guys. That’s what I got for you today. Start looking at your process in life, start optimizing and if you do, you will be happier, you will be better, and you will enjoy your time here on this amazing earth a lot better. So that’s what I got. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you again tomorrow. Bye.
How I shifted my morning based on the book “The Perfect Day”.
On today’s episode Russell talks about how to get 2 hours more of work in everyday and his schedule that will make it happen. He also shares a cool story about Marcus Lemonis.
Here are 3 cool things you’ll hear in this episode:
So listen below to hear how Russell gets 8 hours of work done in just two hours every morning.
---Transcript---
Good morning everybody and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Alright, so it’s a beautiful day, things are amazing. I’m in a great mood and I want to talk to you guys about something that I’m doing that’s a little bit crazy, not gonna lie. Little borderline, well you guys have been with me for a lot crazier things, but this one is really cool. I’m going to be trying to convince everybody that I’m friends with that this is a new way to live. I’m going to begin with you guys, because if I can convince you, then I can convince anybody. So this is where we’re at right now.
I have always been trying to figure out how to get more done each day. That’s the hardest thing. How do you get more crap done every single day and be able to spend more…….? For me it’s like, I got a lot of crap I gotta get done for work, family, church, there’s so many things. So it’s like, if I get an extra 3 or 4 hours a day or 4 or 5 days a week or whatever, that’s amazing, but how do you do that? So I’ve tried all sorts of stuff. It’s been interesting, in the past I always try to wake up at 6 to go lift weights, with that, it’s interesting, it works sometimes, but it’s easy for my brain to say no. I usually do probably 2 or 3 days a week, when I get up early and actually lift at 6. It’s not consistent and kind of hard, and I lift and hang out with my kids, then go to the office, the office day happens and there’s people and stuff. Then I come home and play with my kids again. It’s always good and I get a lot of stuff done, but how do I get more?
Last week I was in Joe Polishes 25K group, and oh man I’m going to tell you guys a story. I wonder if I should tell you another story. I was going to do a podcast since then, I totally forgot. This is called an ADD moment, then we’ll head back. So remind me when I get stuck, where to head back.
We’re heading back to the book, but before then…this is amazing. So the last day at the 25K group we were stting in the meetings and all the sudden my phone rang 3 times from Marcus Lemonis The Profit, and I was like, “Oh man, I’m stuck in this meeting, I can’t answer right now.” And then he texts me, “Call me right now.” And I text him like, “I’m stuck in a meeting, I really can’t. I’ll call you as soon as I can.” So at the break I called him, no one answered. I called again, no one answered. I’m like, “Dangit. I missed the little window.” And part of me is kind of freaking out, what in the world is happening where he would call me three times in a minute, there’s got to be something happening. So then that night, he texts me and he’s like, “Can you talk now?” And I was about to jump in an Uber, but I was like, I just dialed right back immediately. So I called him and first thing he says is “Hello.” And I’m like, “Hey Marcus, this is Russell.” He goes. “You’re being….I’m” What did he say? “I’m on location and we’re recording right now, you’re on camera is that okay?” Isn’t that crazy?
So I’m like, ”Yes, that’s totally cool.” He’s like, “Okay Russell, this is the deal. I’m at a meeting with these guys, they own a watch company and I’m thinking about doing a deal with them. But I was talking to them about the business model and they mentioned funnels and I asked them what they knew about funnels and they were like, ‘There’s this guy named Russell Brunson.’” And he was like, “Wait, you know Russell?” and they’re like, “Yeah, we’ve been to his events, we use Clickfunnels.” And Marcus is like, “Hold on.” And right then he called me 3 times in a row trying to get hold of me and obviously I didn’t answer the phone, I blew it. He’s like, “I’m sitting with them right now and I’m trying to make a deal, but I’m curious if I do make a deal with them, would you be willing to come on the show and actually build their sales funnel for them?” And I’m just like, I wish you could see me. I’m trying to be all super cool guy on the phone, so my voice is trying, I’m trying not to start squealing like a little girl, have my voice crack or something, but I’m jumping up and down on the spot and going nuts. All the people about to jump in the Uber with me are probably wondering. Did Russell win the lottery or something? What’s happening? I’m jumping up and down and going crazy.
So I’m like, “I would be honored. I would love to come help you guys build your funnels.” And he’s like, “Okay cool. That’s what I needed to know. Thanks man.” And I’m like, “Alright, thanks.” And that was it. Isn’t that crazy. Oh so crazy. So I’m going crazy and then I text Marcus later, and I’m like, “What’s the company, give me more info about it.” He texts me back and tells me what the company name was and he’s like, “I’m going to cut you in on equity on this deal.” And that was it. I haven’t heard from his since, it’s been like 3 days. I’ m going crazy. But is that insane? Crazy. Anyway, I just wanted to share with you guys. I was going to that night, but I must have forgot. So there you guys go. There’s my ADD tangent. Now I need to come back to the story at hand.
Okay, so back to where we’re at. So at the event they gave me, Joe Polish handed out these boxes. These big orange boxes. I’d gotten one before, I had one in the mail. I didn’t know what it was. The outside says The Perfect Day. You open it up and there’s a book and a journal and a bunch of stuff. And it’s this product created by Craig Valentine. I’d gotten it before, but I never read it. I’m like, “Oh cool.” Anyway, I took the box and when I was heading home that night, I pulled the book out and I’m like, “I’ll read this on the plane, so I jump on the plane, start reading the book. And in this book, he’s talking about how to create the perfect day and he’s showing a bunch of things, and the book was awesome. But the thing that was the most powerful for me, was he showed what his schedule was. Craig’s schedule is, he gets up at 4 o’clock every morning. From 4 to 6:30 he writes. At 6:30 he has breakfast, he does meditation or something and then I don’t know, at whatever the next time is, an hour later, he gets back and writes for another 2 ½ hours. Then he has his stand up meeting with his company at 10:30. So by 10:30 in the morning, he has had 5 hours of focused energy time writing and doing what he needs to get done. And then the rest of his day is answering emails, meeting with people, all the crap that normally we do in an office. He goes to bed at 8 every single night.
At first I’m like, “Dude, he is insane. 4 in the morning, I will never in a billion, infinity, million years do that ever. It’s just not going to happen.” And I was like, because I don’t go to bed until 2 in the morning, so if I got up at 4 that’s 2 hours of sleep and I would die. But if I went to bed at midnight, how would it work? Midnight to 4, 4 hours is not enough. So I’m like what if I went to bed at 10, 10 to 4 that’s only 6 hours, that’s about how much sleep I get now. But what if I extended that. What if I woke up at 5 and go to bed at 10 o’clock and wake up at 5. I try to do his process. And my day is different. I’ve got a million kids. I don’t have the luxury of breakfast and meditation before I start writing again. I’ve got breakfast and diapers and screaming, you know getting kids ready and it’s insane. But I was like, what if I woke up at 5 and from 5 til 7, 2 hours every morning, I got up and that’s my funnel time. I always tell people that if I could do anything in the business all day, all I’d do is sit there and build funnels. But I rarely have that time, just to sit there and build funnels. So I’m like, what if I made it so the 5am to 7am every morning is my funnel time. I don’t check emails, I don’t check Facebook or anything. All I’m allowed to do is open up Clickfunnels build funnels and write copy and all the pieces I need to do to push funnels forward.
So I was kind of excited so Sunday night I got all ready and my goal was to get to bed by 9, but I forgot that my kids go to bed at 9, which usually bleeds into 9:30 or 9:45. So that didn’t work, so it was like 9:45b finally the kids are in bed and I told my wife, “I’m going to bed, my goal is to go to sleep at 10” You know she’s been married to me for a long time and knows I typically don’t go to bed until 1 or 2. I was like, I’m going to try this. So I went to bed at 10 and it took me a little while to go to sleep because I wasn’t used to that. But luckily I was tired, it’d been a long day. So I fell asleep at 10, woke up at 5, got up and went in there and I started working building funnels for 2 hours. It was amazing. It wasn’t like when I wake up to go work out, there’s a lot of resistance. I have to get up, get clothes on, go out. There’s a lot of things that have to happen. Whereas for me to get up and go sit on the computer and build funnels, there’s zero resistance and it was really easy and I did it. And then I ate really healthy throughout the day and did supplementation stuff to keep my energy levels high throughout the whoile day, but I felt amazing. Then last night I went to be at about 10:30, I was trying to get to bed by 10, but I just had things that came up. So about 10:30 I went to bed, set an alarm for 4:45 basically, that way I can snooze it once. 4:45 my alarm’s going off, I totally slept through it. My wife starts kicking me like, “Why is your alarm going off at 4:45?” I’m like, “I’m so sorry.” So I went and turned it off, and jumped out of bed and because it wasn’t like, I gotta go put on my workout clothes, all the things your body freaks out about, it was just walking to the other room and start building funnels. I’m excited about it. I just walked into the other room, jumped on and from 5 to 7 today I just built funnels.
And I tell you what, in my 2, 2-hour morning so far, I’ve gotten as much work done as I typically do in an 8 hour day. So I’m going to the office, we have a webinar today, so I’m going to be selling on a webinar, I’ve got meeting and all this other stuff. And I’m not going to be stressing out, because usually I’m stressing out on days that I have webinars and meetings because I’m like, I need to move my things forward and I can’t. Where now, I’ve already moved things forward by the time my kids are awake, now the rest of the day is just a bonus. Anyway, I’m excited.
So that was my first chunk was trying an earlier morning thing, now I’m going to start reorganizing the rest of my life and my schedule to kind of tweak some other things to kind of get it in. Especially since, I don’t know if I mentioned this, I probably have, I’m sure I have. We’re building a bio-hacking room, so I got a flow tank and a cryosauna coming and a couple other things so I’m trying to map out my ideal day, where it’s 5 til 7 I do this, and then 7 til 9 I’m with my kids and then 9 o’clock, I do cryosauna and freeze and then 9:15 I go and lift weights til 10. At 10 o’clock I do flow tank for a few hours. 11 o’clock I come in. I don’t know, something like that, I’m trying to figure out exactly what the daily routine will be. But I started it with waking up basically an hour to 2 hours earlier with focus on 2 hours of funnel time and I tell you what, it’s been amazing.
So what I’m recommending for you guys to do, is wake up an hour to 2 hours earlier and do some funnel time, or writing time or whatever it is that you need to be doing more of in your business and your life. Spend that time there. And it’s interesting.
Anyway, I’m two days in, loving it and having a great time. I hope that you guys try it as well. I’m going to try to convince everyone I know to do this as well. I would rather, knowing how I’m feeling right now, I would rather wake up two hours earlier, and leave the office two hours earlier, because you’ll get 10 times more stuff done. Which is crazy to think because it’s the same time, it’s just sifting it all a little bit. So there you go.
I guess one problem if I convince all my team to wake up earlier, then we’ll all be awake and it’s just like we’re all at the office again which will just ruin us. So maybe I shouldn’t let them know about this big secret we got. Anyway, that’s what I got. I’m at the office, I’ve got a call with a lawyer, never fun but my lawyer’s awesome, so that’s one good thing. First lawyer I ever met I liked. Then I got a meeting with my accountant, which accountants are as bad if not worse than lawyers. But we got a new accountant that I actually like, so it’s going to be a good day. Then we got a webinar, some selling. It’s going to be a good day and I’m excited and the sun’s beautiful. A lot of good stuff happening. So appreciate you all. Have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you guys all again, hopefully tomorrow. Alright guys. Talk to you soon.
A behind the scenes look at what I was really feeling inside.
On today’s episode Russell talks about being in Phoenix Arizona and meeting with some icons of the industry. He also talks about the possibility of doing an infomercial for his new book, Expert Secrets.
Here are some fun things to listen for in the episode:
So listen below to hear about Russell’s amazing day in Phoenix.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in My Hotel Room. Hey everyone, I am actually in my hotel room shaving right now and I’m about to go to Joe Polishes 25K group and I thought, you know what….I wanted to share with you guys what happened yesterday. So you have to hear me shave, I have a horrible echo in this room. It’s going to sound horrible and I’m super late. I have to be there in 12 minutes, and instead I’m shaving and yeah, that’s how I roll. I’m never on time for anything. I am the biggest procrastinator ever.
I’m giving a talk today and I finally finished my talk and I’m like, “Oh crap, I got 12 minutes to get there, time to start getting ready.” That’s why I’m shaving right now and then on top of that I thought let’s just do a quick podcast to share the crazy day I had yesterday. That’s what’s happening. Welcome inside my world.
So yesterday was insane. We came to Joe Polishes 25K group today, which is in Phoenix, Arizona. And recently we got Robert Kiyosaki to write the forward for my new book, which is for me, the coolest, craziest thing ever. We became friends with one of the guys inside of their office that works there and turns out that they’re in Phoenix. I’m like, “We're going to be in Phoenix tomorrow. Can we come see you guys?” and he was like, “Sure.” So we came and it so crazy cool. We walked in the office and meet the guys and they guys I guess have been going through a bunch of our stuff. They listened to this podcast and bought some of our books and products. We walked into one of the offices and they had, I could see Perfect Webinar Script on the desk and some other stuff. It was cool. They had been totally going through our stuff.
They started to use Clickfunnels 3 or 4 weeks ago. They’re like, “We built 5 funnels, we have a launch happening next week. We’re loving it. We’re cancelling Infusionsoft.” All sorts of amazingness is happening. It was awesome. So that was cool. And then we had a tour of the whole office. We went into his radio station. The little studio with the microphone and everything and we recorded….I did a Periscope from there, so if you want to see that go to marketingquickiesshow.com you should be able to see the Periscope from inside the Rich Dad office, which is so much fun.
We interviewed them and they told this story about how their whole business came about. I didn’t realize this, but I guess Kiyosaki built the game first. Sorry it’s hard to shave and talk. He built the game first and then he loved the game but nobody was really buying it so they wanted to sell the game, so he wrote the book as an instruction manual to sell the game. And then the book, I think he published it independently. It was selling well, but not awesome. But it was selling good enough that it got on Oprah’s radar. Oprah went and had him on and boom it exploded and he became what he is now, which is cool. And he used that to sell the game and then from there they did a bunch of other stuff, so that was awesome.
Kiyosaki, Robert was not there, so we didn’t get a chance to meet him, but we heard a lot of stories about him, which were very interesting. And we were trying to get him to speak at Funnel Hacking Live next year, which would be awesome. So that is one of my goals. And then a couple of other things. We talked to those guys, they have agreed to promote the Funnel Hacks webinar. So we’re going to do the webinar to the whole Rich Dad audience and get these guys building funnels, which would be exciting. Help serve them. And then we’re also kind of helping them with a webinar that they’re creating. So I’m excited about that. So we’re going to be helping them create a perfect webinar, and create an offer, and put out a $1000 version of their Rich Dad Poor Dad stuff and make them a bunch of money. So that is the game plan. See how much money we can make Rich Dad and make him even richer and hopefully he’ll think I’m cool. Because that’s why we do what we do. Anyway, I’m excited and that was awesome.
So then we jumped in an Uber and 4 minutes away we went Dean Graziosi’s office, which is Dean is like the other biggest real estate dude in the world, and infomercial Guru and everything. So we went there and got to see his whole studio where they film their shows. We saw that they have Cryosauna in their office, which is super cool because I ordered my Cryosauna yesterday for my house, so we saw that. We sat around for two hours and I wish, oh I wish we would have recorded it. It was crazy. We sat there for 2 hours, it was a direct response history lesson. The first guy I ever learned from was Don Lapre back when I was 12 years old. And Dean was business partners with Don Larpre and talked about infomercials they did together. The whole story and the ups and downs they had together, it was crazy.
It was like direct response history. Going back to the foundation of this whole…..it was the……all these things and these stories, I was totally geeking out. You have no idea how exciting it was for me. So I sat there and listened to stories and we talked about things and looked what they were doing and tried to help them a little bit. Looked at what we were doing with Clickfunnels and how we were trying to grow that. And the cool thing about Kiyosaki’s office, they’re using Clickfunnels, at Dean’s office they’re using Clickfunnels. It’s just so cool to see people you’ve looked up to your whole life, I used to watch Dean’s infomercials, this is how dorky I am. And then I would get them transcribed and I would read them and try to understand how he did his pitch. And now to see him and his team using Clickfunnels and being obsessed with it and excited is the coolest thing in the world for me.
So that was really fun. And then, towards the end we started talking about my new book coming out, Expert Secrets and I was like “Oh we were at Kiyosaki’s office. He wrote the forward for it.“ and he was like, “ Oh what’s the plan with the book?” I’m like, “Oh, to take over the world basically.” And I was like, “ You know what would be cool” and it was funny because he doesn’t know and I didn’t even tell him this, maybe he’ll find this out someday but, at the very first 25K meeting with Joe Polishes group I was at, I was sitting at the dinner table and Dean was across from me, and I was sitting there. And I had told everyone that day actually, that I was never going to write a book again, and I looked across and I saw Dean, it was nothing he said or anything, but I was looking at him and I was like, I need to write a book, and it needs to be called Expert Secrets and Dean needs to do an infomercial for me. And then I went from there back to my hotel room and I called Julie, who is the person who helps me write my books, “Julie, book #2 is on the queue. Let me send you some money, let’s get this thing started.” Sent her some money and the book began that day. That was a meeting ago. Now it’s been 6 months since that meeting, the books almost done. It’s crazy.
So I had this meeting with Dean and I was kind of like, trying to be all cool, even though I’m super nerding out on the whole thing. Anyway, I’m like, “Hey, what I really want to do with this book, the goal with it is to take it main stream. The Dotcom Secrets book was all about getting our community and people who were marketers to understand these core concepts. Expert Secrets is about taking this to the masses. How do we get everyone to understand that they have a talent and a hobby and unique abilities that can change the world? And then Clickfunnels is the tool that allows you to do that. How do we get that out to everyone? And obviously infomercials would be the coolest.” So I told him, “My real motive is I really want to do an infomercial for this book and I want you to help me.” And he’s like, “Done. Let’s do it.” And I was like, “What? Are you kidding me? You're going to help me with an infomercial? How cool is that?” So we’re going to try to do an infomercial with Dean selling the Expert Secrets book, which is insane.
And he knows if it’ll work or not, but just the fact that we’re gonna try is so exciting. Anyway, so if you guys see me and I’ve got a grin on my face that’s as big as…..it’s huge, and I’m so excited. That’s it. When we left, Dave Woodward is with me, when we left we’re pinching ourselves. I can’t believe what we experienced in the last four hours. We just hung out at Kiyosaki’s office, and Deans office. The most amazing day ever. It can’t get any better than this. We should just go to bed and just end this because it’s such a perfect day and it was awesome. Anyway, that was my day yesterday, and now I’m up in the morning. Just finished my talk and now I got 4 minutes to be there and I still need to shower, so I gotta bounce guys. But anyway, I wanted to share that with you guys because it was exciting for me and hopefully it’s exciting for your guys as well. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day. Get some stuff done and we’ll talk to you guys all again soon.
The birth of my twins...
On this episode, Russell talks about his experience with what it was like when his wife, Collette, gave birth to twins.. He also gives good advice about being careful who you complain to.
Here are 3 cool things you’ll hear on today’s episode:
So listen below to hear how Russell and his wife, Collette felt after delivering twins 10 years ago and why it taught him to be careful about who he’s complaining to.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in Your Car. Hey everyone, I hope you are doing awesome today. I am actually in the car right now heading to go pick up my daughter from soccer practice, which is pretty exciting. She is amazing at soccer and so much fun to watch. So I’m going to go grab her and head home for some dinner.
I had something going through my head the last 3 or 4 days, actually it’s been almost a week now. And I wanted to share with you, I’ve been super busy and didn’t have time to do a podcast specifically about this, I thought I’ve got 5 minutes on my drive over to soccer practice, I’m going to share it with you guys really quick. It’s not a long one, but I think it’s an important one.
The title of this presentation is, be careful who you are complaining to. The reason why is because a lot of times we’re complaining about stuff, it seems like a big deal, but you put it in perspective of other people and other people’s lives, or even other people’s situations after that second, and they’re not that big of deal. And they kind of make you feel like an idiot when you realize sometimes.
Probably the most dramatic example of this, if you rewind 10 years ago, my wife as you probably have heard, had twin boys. If you’ve ever had twins, it’s kind of a crazy, amazing, but crazy experience. So we basically, my wife’s put on bed rest, she’s been taking all these drugs making sure the babies don’t come. And six weeks early all the sudden the water breaks. Boom babies are coming. Race to the hospital, all the craziness that ensues with that. We get there and it’s not like a normal baby delivery. Those who have had one baby, which I’ve had 3 times since, so I know how it works. It’s a doctor and a nurse hanging out in a room and a baby comes out. It’s pretty easy. When you have twins it’s insane. They think that you’re probably going to die, especially since this is our first kids, we’re freaking out anyway. They’re in the operating room. This huge operating room. There’s two NICU teams, there’s about 50 other people, okay I’m exaggerating a little, but there’s probably 20 some odd people in this room. Instead of being a nice quiet dark room, you normally give birth in, it’s lit up, there’s lights everywhere. It’s insane.
So my wife goes through this experience. Baby one comes out. Boom, everything is great, baby two comes out breech, which is a horrible experience. But she gives birth to both of them and then we go and see the kids and they’re in the NICU, which is an emotional thing. You see the babies come out and they rip them off and race them down to the NICU and I had a chance after both babies came out, to run to NICU to see all this craziness happening. Collette’s doing whatever women do after they give, I’m not really sure, but it kind of freaks me out to think about it. So they’re doing all that kind of stuff and she gets to come in later and it’s this emotional experience. She’s crying and sees the babies with all these cords and wires and it’s emotional. And all these things are happening and she finally gets to eat and drink.
And then we realize we have nothing for the babies to wear. So Collette gets cleaned up and we jump in the car and drive across the street to Fred Meyer to grab something for her to eat and for the babies. You know, a couple little things. So in the last 24 hours, my wife has given birth to not one, but two babies, she hasn’t eaten, hasn’t slept, hasn’t drank. It’s just been craziness. And I can’t imagine what that’s like. But as me, as the husband who’s just kind participating and watching this whole process, I’m like, this is horrible. I’m so grateful that it’s not me. And I’m tired and I’m onery and I’m sore and all these emotions and I didn’t even do anything, I just sat there.
So we get to the store and buying our things, and we’re checking out and there’s this teenage girl and she’s so annoyed to be there, and does not want to be talking to us. And we’re trying to be happy, but we’re obviously worn out, and I was like, “How’s it going?” and she’s like, “Okay.” You know like teenagers do. We’re like, “oh yeah, what’s going on?” and she’s like, “I’m tired.” And we’re like, “Oh what’s going on?” and I think it’s like 11 A.M. at this time, it’s been like 30 hours since we had woken up because my wife was about to have a baby. She’s like, “Oh I had to get up early this morning. I had to be here by 11. So I had to get up at 9. I’m so tired, I didn’t go to bed last night until like 1” and we’re like, “Oh so you only had 8 hours of sleep last night. And you’re so tired.” And we’re sitting there smiling like, I can’t believe you’re complaining about how tired you are. You had 8 hours of sleep last night. You’re a teenager, you have zero stress in the world. And you’re complaining.
And it was kind of funny to us at the time. So I thought it was kind of funny. Last week I hung out with these guys. If you listened to the podcast last week, Monday night I was at the office til 3 or 4 in the morning. Tuesday it was the same thing. I think I got 3 hours of sleep that night and then Wednesday I had a full day and then I went out to go meet some people and I’m talking to one of the guys and he’s like, “I’m so tired.” I’m like, “Oh really, what’s going on?” “I got off work at 6 and then the kids and dinner and all this stress or whatever, I’m just really, really tired. “ I just kind of smiled like, “Oh man, that sounds horrible. You’ve got to be tired. I mean you woke up, went to the office and then you came home and then you were off the clock and then you saw your kids and you were done. And that was it right? I have been at the office til past 3 A.M. the last two mornings in a row, and after I’m done with you guys today, I’m going back to the office.” And it just made me smile because I’m like, ‘You’re complaining about being tired and it’s just funny, because you don’t know who you’re complaining to.”Someone who has had 1/10th the sleep that you had and it just makes me kind of smile.
So what I wanted to share with you guys today is just be careful who you’re complaining to, because chances are people around all of us, have it worse off than we do. I was telling my kids last night. I was like, “If you think about 200 years ago, people lived in log cabins, they didn’t have toilets that flushed. They didn’t have phones or computers. 200 years ago, and everything prior to 200 years ago. 300 years, 400, 1000, 5000. Back as far as you want to go to the beginning of time. People had a really crappy time. If you complain about anything in this day and age, that’s kind of sad at this point. Do you have a roof over your head? Does your toilet flush? Okay, you’re doing fine then. Quit complaining.
So not only should we all just quit complaining as a whole, but when you are complaining, just be careful who you are complaining to. Because chances are, the person around you had just as tough a day, if not worse and you’re just going to look dumb if you’re complaining to them about what happened. Anyway, that’s what I got for today. I hope that helps somebody and it helps to keep us all….to quit complaining. To be grateful for the roof over our head, and flushing toilets and all the amazing stuff we’re blessed with because we were born today’s date in time. So that’s what I got for you guys today. Appreciate you all. Have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you all again soon. Bye.
“I think this might actually work…”
On this special episode Russell and Dave Woodward brainstorm their ideas of how to launch Funnel University. They also explain the concept of sticky cookies and why they are better than first cookie wins.
Here are 3 fun things you’ll hear on today’s episode:
So listen below to find out how this new launch idea would work and decide if you think it will sell really well or completely flop.
---Transcript---
Russell: Hey everyone, this is Russell, welcome to a really strange, different version of Marketing In Your Car. Alright, so I’m in the car right now with Dave.
Dave: Hey guys!
Russell: We are heading into the office today is Funnel University Launch Day, no matter what. You guys have heard me complain, this has been….I’m a big believer in the whole lead or gold thing, this time we killed 3 people, there’s lead in some people because we missed the deadlines. But today it’s happening no matter what.
So we’re driving and had an idea and we’re brainstorming about it and we just wanted to share with you guys, because who knows, something good might come. So typically in a product launch, we promote the product to everyone. So we’re thinking, what if we do a complete sneak attack and instead of promoting the product, we promote the opportunity to sell the product to our entire lists. So we email all the Clickfunnels members and basically just say, “Hey step number one we’re rolling out, this new product is coming out, first step you need to go get it because you gotta become an ambassador of this so go get it because it’s amazing. Then the second step is, you need to be an affiliate, so click here to get your affiliate account and lets go spam Facebook, or let’s go market efficiently to Facebook and other places.”
It’s the complete backwards sneak attack that will either work or it will completely bomb. I don’t know.
Dave: It also ties into to what you were talking about yesterday in Marketing In Your Car, as far as the importance of having affiliates. So now everyone who’s a Clickfunnels user you’re automatically an affiliate, so now you can basically show every single person real quick how to make your very first few bucks online, if you’re not already doing it. If you’ve already got a list or if you don’t have a list, I can now go out and promote something for Clickfunnels…..by the way we also have sticky cookies, but that’s for a different topic. So you have the opportunity of making money right away by giving away a gift.
Russell: Here’s a gift worth $700 or $800, we’re giving away for free, anyone you give it away to, you get commission. So let’s talk about the sticky cookie thing. This is a cool thing we just built. We’re the first one to test it, but I think it’s Clickfunnels wide.
Dave: It is.
Russell: So the way sticky cookies work, if you’re using backpack, let’s say you promote Funnel University and somebody signs up but then 6 months later I convince them to get a Clickfunnels account, you get commissions on that. Or 6 months later you convince them to get my book, you get commissions on that. It’s sticky to the person. There’s a fine line between sticky cookies, and first cookie wins, because I’m not a big believer in first cookie wins. So here’s the lifelong affiliate debate. One is like….first cookie wins means, if you click on my link first that cookie lasts forever, so if that person ever buys, you get the commission, which is good for fast movers. But people come in later it sucks because then someone comes in 6 months later and convinces somebody to buy and gives them a big bonus and then they don’t get commissions because the first dude 6 months ago got the first cookie.
So sticky cookies is not that because we don’t want to make it so people don’t want to promote.
Dave: As a product owner it really messes things up because then the only people who ever promote are your very first affiliates.
Russell: Yeah, there’s no incentive for people to come in later. So sticky cookies works, where it’s sticky so let’s say you get somebody to opt-in for the Clickfunnels trial and they don’t buy, or they opt-in at their house and then they go to work the next day and that’s when they decided to buy. Or let’s say they opt-in for Funnel University they don’t buy it, but then they buy Clickfunnels 3 weeks later because the follow-up sequence sold them and they buy that from a different computer. Sticky cookies will follow that person around, so if they buy 3 months later, it will still give you the commission for that person, even if they’re on a different browser, or computer, different product. Any product in our product line, if they buy you get commissions. The only way you would lose that person is if a new affiliate re-cookied them, it would override the sticky cookie. But the sticky cookie’s there for as long as it follows them.
The way it works is it’s not just cookie based. Let’s say you get somebody to opt-in, it adds your affiliate ID in the database, it knows if they buy anything from us in the future, even if there’s no cookie present, when they fill in the order form it’ll look to see who was the last affiliate who referred them to anything and give that person the commission. So that’s the concept of sticky cookies, which is a cool thing, as far as backpack, it’s this really cool advanced thing that nobody else is doing. So you should be using backpack for your affiliate platforms.
The cool thing is you promote Funnel University, all of the other crap we sell in the future….I mean all the amazing products we sell in the future. Sorry I don’t know why……we should probably edit that out. No.
Dave: No it’s actually the reason crap is coming up so much is because we’re thinking about selling toilet paper through a funnel. That’s why crap keeps coming up.
Russell: Oh man, there’s so many back stories to this week. Well two things of crap, one is Marcus Lemonis’ funnel, we’re selling toilet paper. It’s a crap funnel. All the products in the funnel are related to crap. And then Dave and I are also on a juice fast this week, which has added to the amount of crap we’ve been experiencing.
Dave: TMI
Russell: So back to the strategy. So now that you guys got the backstory, we’ve got another 5 minutes before we’re at the office, Dave and I are kind of brainstorming this. So if we do it, the big thing with we mail the affiliates in, we’ve gotta basically tell them that, you give away this gift and you can get paid 40% commission.
Dave: And it’s recurring.
Russell: And it’s recurring, yeah. And the product’s amazing. They get a print newsletter, they get software, which is super sticky. I showed you the software this week, it’s amazing. So what’s the downside? Because this is either going to work really good or it’s a gonna completely bomb. The downside is people buying through their own affiliate link probably. They’ll be like, “Oh I’m going to buy it through my own affiliate link.” which is annoying. Do we care or do we not worry about it?
Dave: Today we don’t care. The other thing is there’s going to be a lot of urgency and scarcity to it, which helps everyone understand the importance of getting out and doing it right away. Because otherwise, there’s no reason for them to promote it. This is a product that’s not going to be available to be promoted long term.
Russell: It’d be basically two weeks and then we’re shutting down the cart. So you’ve got two weeks to buy this thing or else you lost your opportunity, and two weeks to promote it.
Dave: Which is again, a topic for another Marketing In Your Car as far as membership sites and scarcity. But right now, the whole idea is to send out to the affiliates and basically to do a Blab or Periscope or something where people get excited about it and they can go ahead and have the opportunity of offering a free product to everybody and if they buy that product, they then will also be cookied with our sticky cookies long term so if they then upgrade to Clickfunnels, which is the whole reason we’ve got Funnel University, then they’ll have the opportunity of getting commission on that as well.
Russell: It’s amazing. So what we’re inventing here is the backwards product launch, where we’re launching the affiliate program and we’re hoping it incentivizes them to buy the product and promote the product. So each sale doesn’t turn into one sale, it turns into 5 or 10 or 20 sales, depending. That’s be interesting stats to check afterwards. How many sales per average user. Because if you buy and post on Facebook, “Hey Russell Brunson is giving away this $1000 marketing gift, I just bought it. Here’s my receipt, you should buy it too.” Everyone should be able to get 5 or 6 people from it. What if that’s the way the email reads like, Everyone go buy the product, that way you can show, “Hey I just bought this product, this is how cool it is. It’s going to be coming this week.” And then post that on Facebook or you email it, and tell everyone they need to get it two. So that’s step two, and then step…..yeah.
Dave: And It will go to the….You can link that directly on Facebook to the landing page, which would have a video.
Russell: This is so cool. I think we need to make a landing page that’s just a fast sale landing page too. Because the sales page we have there’s an hour long really cool, amazing video we made teaching some cool stuff using the Perfect Webinar Script. And then we pitch it really hard. It’s a free plus shipping offer so I don’t think it needs to be sold that hard. So I might clone the page right now and just make a simplified version of it that the affiliates can have so they can promote to the longer form education video or the quick sale or the squeeze page. Because the squeeze page has an amazing follow-up sequence as well.
Anyway, that’s what we’re thinking. so we’re just brainstorming and we thought let’s just invite everyone else in on this behind the scenes to hear what we’re thinking because this is either going to be a huge success or a complete flop. I think we’re going to do it, but we still gotta just confirm we are. So now you guys know what’s happening behind the scenes. We will find out today if that’s the right strategy and we’ll let you know in the next week if it works or if it completely bombs. If it bombs we’ll definitely shift mid-launch to “Don’t promote this thing, just go buy it.” Alright guys, that’s what we got for you. Have an amazing day and we’ll talk to you all again soon. Bye.
Dave: See ya!
What I learned 10 years ago that still sends tens of thousands of visitors a day to my websites.
On this episode Russell explains how he learned that having affiliates is easier than being a ninja. He also explains why having affiliates can help your business grow faster.
Here are 4 cool things you will learn about in today’s episode:
So listen below to learn all about the importance of affiliates for Russell’s business and your own, and also hear about some exciting new launches happening today!
---Transcript---
Good morning everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I almost just got in a wreck, but because I survived I thought I’d jump on here real quick and hang out with you guys today on Marketing In Your Car. Hey everyone, good morning. I’m feeling horrible right now. We’ve got a lot of fun stuff happening. I don’t know if I mentioned on the podcast or somewhere, but we’re building out some sales funnels for Marcus Lemonis, so I had Wynter Jones, one of my favorite people and an amazing designer, I had him fly out to Boise this week to work on it. So we’ve been working funnel hacking out hours, so every night we get home at 1 or 2 in the morning. Today it’s Wednesday, so it’s been two nights in a row of super late nights.
This morning I have Frenectomy surgery. I think that’s what it’s called. This little thing in my mouth that I have to get snipped and I really am not looking forward to it, in fact I’ve been postponing it now for a year and a half. And today is the day of reckoning. I’ve got no choice, I’ve gotta do it. I think I had 4 hours of sleep last night, now I’m headed to the dentist, to go get my mouth chopped up. I was half asleep driving, and all the sudden traffic stopped and I was still going so I had to skid on my breaks, and then I thought hey if I survived that, I should definitely jump on with my friends and talk about something cool. So that’s what’s happening today. I hope you guys are having a good time.
We are working really hard on launching the new Clickfunnels affiliate center, which I’m really excited about. I remember when I first got started in this business, and I don’t know about you guys, but when I got started I was observing everybody doing stuff and talking about stuff and I was watching everybody making money and I didn’t know how to do it. I was so sold on the fact that it was happening and I was just amazed by what everyone was doing. I had been creating some little products; I was selling stuff here and there and doing all sorts of things. And I remember back in the day there was a forum, it used to be awesome, it’s super lame now, but it’s called the Warrior Forum. Back then all the best marketers in the world would hang out there all day and talk marketing strategy which is cool. You go there now and it’s this horrible place with a bunch of people that don’t know what they’re talking about complaining about things, so it’s no longer awesome. But there was a day and time when it was awesome.
So I’m hanging out in the warrior forum and there’s all these people talking and sharing and giving and it was so cool. I remember this one post this dude wrote, the question was, “What’s your favorite way, what’s the best way to get traffic?” and I was trying to learn how to do traffic at the time, this is pre-Facebook so that wasn’t even an option. It was just Google and SEO and all the different things, so I saw that question and I was like, oh man, this is going to be awesome. I’m going to hear all these legends and these giants and these marketers discuss the best way to get traffic and I’ll just figure out what the best one is and build on that. That was my thought when I saw the post.
I start reading it and one guy’s like, “Google PPC is the best because blah.” The next guy was like, “SEO the best because blah.” Then someone’s like, this was back in the day and there was this thing called cloaking, “Cloaking is the best.” “Safelist.” I’m trying to think of what back then was cool, there’s all sorts of stuff. Anyway, everyone’s posting their ideas and trying to justify why what they did was the best. So I’m going through all these things and then all the sudden there was this dude, his name was Allen Sais. He was the guy who owned the Warrior Forum, and he didn’t post a lot, but when he did, he would silently walk in, drop a bomb of gold and walk back out. That’s totally what happened with this. All these people giving their explanation of these things, and he came in and dropped on sentence. All he said was, “I rely on my own network of affiliates.” Boom. Mic drop. Bomb exploded.
And I read that and I was like, “What?” At first it didn’t make sense to me. I read it and I read it again and kept reading it. And I knew that Allen was probably one of the better marketers, one of the more rich guys in that forum, and I was thinking of that and I was like, “There’s something to this. I gotta figure this out.” My brain was thinking, “I could learn PPC like that guy said, but what if I had 5 or 6 affiliates who are really good at PPC and they just did that. And I give them a percentage of the money, but they just did it and I don’t have to learn that. Maybe I’m not as good as one guy, but if I had 5 people doing it, or 10 people, who knows? What about SEO, I could do SEO or what if I find people who are already amazing at SEO and they become affiliates of mine.” Now instead of me doing SEO I’ve got 10, 20, 30 people doing SEO for me. What if instead of building a list, I found other people who have lists? And I realized that there was this power and this leverage of having affiliates, because I can build lists of a million people, which is awesome. But if I had 30 people each with lists of a million people, it’s so much more powerful. I could even rank number one on Google for my number one keyword, but what if I had 20 people all ranked. And I started thinking that, and that’s gotta be my focus, is less on me becoming a ninja at any one traffic source, and more of me building a really good affiliate program and attracting people that already have those things. People who are already doing those things and are already amazing at those things. That was kind of the thought process.
So back then, man this back 10-12 years ago, I launched my first affiliate program. And that became my focus. We trained affiliates and had an affiliate center and we had all sorts of things and that was my focus and because of that, my companies grew dramatically. During that time I became good at these other things, I learned how to drive traffic, I learned how to do stuff so I was able to do that. But we made 90% of our income from affiliates, and I think it’s really powerful.
With Clickfunnels when we launched it, we drove a lot of our traffic, but we had a lot of affiliates and that’s how we grew so quickly, is leveraging my network with affiliates I’ve been building up over the last ten years. But even with that, we’ve never had a good affiliate center. We’ve never done a lot of the core things we used to do back in the day to build and promote our affiliate program. We just haven’t ever done that. So that’s one of the big focuses, while Wynter’s been designing Marcus’ funnels, me and Dave Woodward, who runs the Clickfunnels affiliate program, have been focusing on building out an affiliate center and having new offers and just creating a bunch of cool things that will get people the ability to win cars from us and to make money, and all the other cool things we’re doing inside our affiliate program. So that’s what we’re working on and I think today, unless we had a couple little hiccups along the way, so unless something crazy happens, we’ll be launching the Clickfunnels affiliate program. We’re also going to be launching Funnel University. Which I think I mentioned 3 or 4 times in the last month or two that we were going to launch Funnel University, but we just had some external things that I don’t even want to talk about, because it makes me so mad why we haven’t been able to launch it.
Today should be the day unless there’s something crazy that comes up, we had one last hiccup happen last night at 2 in the morning, so we were trying to get that cleaned up, and then we should be ready to rock and roll. So those of you guys who have been paying attention and watching, we should have Funnel University live today, which is exciting. You should all buy it because it’s going to be amazing. I’m really proud of it. The content is second to none. So that’s really cool. So the content’s amazing and then…..my brain’s blanking out. Oh the software. There’s 3 software tools and they’re just insane. We’ve got a survey generator, a video image uploader, and a Webinar Chat app which are awesome tools. Anyway, there’s so much cool stuff.
The sales funnel we’re using to sell, I’m really proud. We put a lot of time and energy and thought in that one, so it’ll be fun to finally let the world see that, which is cool. What else, what else? And then the Affiliate Center. The new Clickfunnels affiliate center is going live too. Anyway, I’m excited. If you’re spying on me you should be able to see some of those things. The biggest message I wanted to share with you guys today is just that that’s where my focus is at. Is building our network of affiliates and I hope that that resonates with you guys. It comes back to all the stuff we talked about, dream 100, creating cool affiliate programs, and then there’s so much stuff that goes into it, but it is the key. So I hope all you guys focus on that in your businesses. I hope that little piece gives you guys the same aha that I had all those years ago when I heard Allen Sais say it the very first time. That’s it for today you guys. I’m at the dentist, I’m about to walk in there and get my mouth chopped open. I’m freaking out, but hopefully it will be good. Talk to you guys soon. Bye.
Which marketing channel is the best to focus on today?
On this episode, Russell talks about how TV changed over the years and made advertising more difficult. He also explains how social media is changing in much the same way as TV.
Here are 4 interesting things you will learn about in today’s episode:
So listen below to see how you can use social media to advertise to your specific market.
---Transcript---
Good morning all my fellow Marketing In Your Car friends. Welcome to another amazing day. Hey everybody, it’s amazing today. It’s like 80 degrees, which it shouldn’t be. I think it said on the news that normally it’s like 60 today, but it’s not, it’s 80. It’s beautiful and it’s amazing and I love it. You know you can’t help but be happy when it’s nice out here.
Okay, last night I had wrestling practice. I have not wrestled for a couple of weeks. We beat the crap out of each other and today my face is feeling it, my neck is feeling it, my back is feeling it, my arms, my sides, my ribs, my fingers. I am jacked and I love it. I miss this feeling. This is so much better than running on a treadmill. It was awesome. So last nice after practice we were talking about some stuff and I mentioned something that I thought was kind of cool so I wanted to share with you guys.
So I wanted to talk about old media, kind of what happened and then new media and what is happening now, because it’s really interesting. Rewind back I don’t know, twenty years ago maybe. No, I guess, dang I’m getting old. I guess twenty wasn’t that long ago, maybe thirty years ago. Whenever TV was different, before cable. There used to be three channels, there was ABC, CBS, and NBC I believe and maybe Fox, I don’t know when Fox came around, but initially it was three channels.
So if you wanted to get to everybody in the world, there’s only one of three spots you could advertise on. And those who capitalized on it made a lot of money really fast. In fact, the first time I meant Tony Robbins, this is the kind of story he told me. He said, “When I got started thirty years ago there were only three channels, so we just targeted those three channels, it was easy and we made a ton of money. What happened is that a few years later, they started adding more channels”. Maybe that’s when Fox News came about, and PBS and I don’t know, some of the other ones. And then it turned into cable. Cable had a couple of channels and then it turned into a couple more, and then today there’s hundreds channels on cable. Still there’s never actually anything good on TV, which is kind of amazing.
But there’s hundreds and hundreds of channels. And Tony said that his business during the recession took a huge hit and it was mostly because it was harder to get distribution directly to people. It became more expensive, it became harder, it became more spread out because no longer are people watching three channels, they are watching 103, and to buy ads on 103 different networks became really expensive. So because of that they were struggling they started exploring different avenues and that’s how we kind of met him, a bunch of us internet marketing dudes. We initially met him during that part of the journey where he was like, “Man, our distribution channels are so segmented and so fragmented now we can effectively get to our end audience.” And it changed the whole dynamic of their business. They had to shift and evolve and get better.
That was this whole process of going from 1 or 2 centralized spots where everybody’s eyeballs are at, to hundreds of spots and how it changed the business world. Now I was talking about how similar that is today. And one cool thing that’s interesting, the one thing that got easier when channels split is that because all these channels start popping up, things became very niche specific. There’s the camping channel, there’s the home channel, you know HGTV where they’re building homes and fixing and rehabbing and stuff. There’s all these different channels and they’re very niche-y. So if you had a niche business related to one of those channels it became easier, because you’re like, “I don’t have to advertise on NBC in front of a billion people and hope that a few people that actually care about my camping product are going to see it.” Now you can go to just the camping channel and everyone who is interested in camping is on that one channel. So for niche markets it became a lot easier, because now you’ve got your captive audience all in one spot and you can focus and target on that one channel. So that was kind of the big benefit that came from this huge breakup of TV.
Man the sun is so bright, my body wants to sneeze like crazy. So if I start sneezing, having a sneezing attack, that’s why.
Alright, so that’s the offline world. What happened, things were harder for people and also things were easier. When I looked at online it was kind of similar. A few years ago Mark Zuckerberg had a really sweet idea for a thing called Facebook, built it out, first it was free for a long time, then he started adding ad platforms. At first it became the place. It was the only place you would go, you could jump on Facebook, buy some ads and become rich. It was that easy because everybody was in one centralized spot. Just like back in the day with ABC, NBC and CBS, one spot, so Facebook was easy. It just worked. Then what happened is that after Facebook, a few years later, all the sudden people started splitting attention, because now these other social networks started popping up. You get Twitter, you get Pinterest, you start getting all the video platforms, you get Periscope and other things like that and then you split again. You’ve got Snapchat, you’ve got I can’t think of them all, but it went from one spot where people were spending their time and energy now it’s this huge fragmented thing.
Now people are picking their favorite platform and they’re leaving Facebook. Not everybody’s eyeballs are on Facebook 80 hours a day like it used to be. Now it’s like, “I spend my time on Snapchat, that’s where you gotta find me.” And then other people, “I’m on Pinterest.” And other people are on different spots. So what’s happened is that us as marketers used to be like “Let’s get really good at Facebook ads.” Now you gotta get good at Facebook and Pinterest and Snapchat and Twitter and YouTube and….where everybody’s eyeballs are going.
So there’s kind of positives and negatives of that. Very similar to the positives and negatives of the TV world. But before I explain those things, I am at my little man’s parent-teacher conference. I’m pulling in the parking lot, so what I’m going to do, I’m going to pause this right now, I’m going to go find out how smart my little son is, get his report cards and then I will be back for the rest of my drive back to the office to discuss this in a little more details. I’ll be back in a little bit guys. Talk to you soon.
Alright everybody, I am back. In case you are wondering, Aiden passed his kindergarten, or I guess his preschool parent-teacher conferences. He’s a genius, he cuts straight lines, he draws great pictures, he can count to ten all by himself. He’s amazing. Its fun they have pictures from when the year started and then now and you can kind of see the difference of how far he’s progressed on the Alphabet, numbers, pictures, coloring, cutting, drawing pictures of himself. Anyway, it was awesome. So there you go, my son’s a genius, which is cool.
So where did we leave off? I think I left off talking about how online media is starting to be fragmented just like the offline world was, it was happened way faster by the way. We had three channels on TV for decades. You know Facebook had a year, two year run before Twitter and these others start popping up everywhere and splitting the attention. So the attention’s going to all other sorts of places. So with that comes a couple of things. First off it gets harder. How is someone like me or you, who’s like, we’re small entrepreneurs, we’ve got a little team and we are trying to effectively market on thirty different platforms. It’s hard. At least with the TV age it was like, it’s thirty platforms, but basically you call your ad guy and say, “Hey run my ad over here, over here, and over here.” But with what we got to do, every platform is different. Some are keyword focused some are interest focused, some are….the way you run the ad, the way you design the ad are all different. You can’t run the same commercial on thirty channels. You gotta write image ads for here, video ads for here, 15 second videos here, but longer videos over here.
And then each platform has multiple ways to advertise too. You’ve got pre-roll videos, post-roll, tech….it’s hard. It’s this huge segmentation splitting of attention and for us to effectively be in all of them, it’s almost impossible. What do you do? It’s a good question. What should you do? A couple of things that I would notice, first off is notice the fact about in the TV world that it got easier when you focused more on a niche. If you were selling camping gear, you could go to the camping channel. You’re target demographic was there, which is cool. So it’s easier. So same thing as here, you gotta realize that even though there’s thirty different platforms, your audience isn’t on all of them. Even if they are on all of them, doesn’t mean you have to be on all of them.
I always tell people, you gotta learn initially one platform that you know your audience is on and become a master of that. So if I know camping channel is where everyone is at, that’s where I’m going to focus, if I know for me all my people are on Pinterest, I’m going to focus there and master that one thing. If I know they’re all on Instagram, or if I know they’re all on Snapchat….Wherever your people are, that’s the platform to pick. Just like the camping channel, we’re going to pick that one and be the best at that and focus on that and start pulling out customers from there. And really become good at that and then after you’ve mastered it, not while you’re mastering, this is the key. After you’ve mastered it, then go and pick the next channel. And then you can add on another one and another, but you shouldn’t be in thirty different things. It’s just too hard. You’re watering down all of your efforts, whereas you can focus on one and perfect it, it becomes better.
So those are some of my observations and thoughts today that I thought were kind of interesting and I hope that helps you guys to kind of look at that and say , “Okay, this is being fragmented, I understand that now and I can’t be everywhere at once because I will run out of money and time and energy and my message will become so diluted. I gotta pick one.” Pick the one that your market’s at because everyone’s market is different. My market’s not on Pinterest, but I’ve got other friends that make tons of money on Pinterest. My market is maybe on Instagram, I don’t know, I haven’t figured Instagram out yet. But other markets I got friends making a million bucks a year a hundred percent off Instagram. So you gotta figure out where your people are actually at? How are they consuming content? And you got to be there. But you don’t have to be on every single platform. That’s the mistake that so many people are making. And they’re spending money on so many different things. You can mine a lot of gold out of one well.
So figure out where that’s at and dig deeper and deeper and just kind of focus there and eventually, especially depending on the platform, some platforms are smaller. Some TV channels don’t have as much viewership, so eventually you’re going to tap out where everyone’s seen your message and you’re going to get ad fatigue and it’s just not going to do as well. At that point do you change the message or that’s when you add a second channel or a second distribution channel to focus on? But that’s a more powerful strategy, go deep and try to mine all that gold out of that channel as opposed to trying to effectively be in thirty or forty or fifty different channels and hopefully dabble in all of them. I’d always rather go deep in one section than dabble in a lot.
So that’s it for today you guys. I’m heading into the office. I got some exciting things happening. So exciting. I’m sure I’ll be sharing those with you guys in the next little while. I just wanted to take the time to drop some of those thoughts with you guys. So that’s what I got. Have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you all again soon.
What area in life are you struggling with today?… Good marketing will solve EVERY problem.
On this episode, Russell talks about good marketing, and why it can solve every problem in your life. He also goes over why bad marketing is destroying the Boise State Wrestling Program and how good marketing could fix it.
Here are 3 cool things you’ll learn in today’s episode:
So listen in below to discover how to solve problems in all aspects of life with the power of good marketing.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, right now I’m actually in the middle of a carwash and this is a first for Marketing In Your Car. Alright everyone, if you guys can hear me or not, we are in the middle of a carwash. I hope you can hear this; it’s kind of loud outside. I got car washed a week ago and then I had it the other day and it rained, just drizzled a little bit, and then my cars been spotted for the last week and I’m like, you know what I’m going to go and get this washed so that it doesn’t look like I’m driving a car that’s been sitting out for the last 2 weeks or whatever.
That’s where we are at, that’s the water going over us if you can hear that. Now we’re moving to the extreme polish section. Sweet, it’s dumping tons and tons of suds all over me and there’s all these crazy lines of red, green, I feel like I’m in a disco right now. This looks awesome from the inside. This is one of those carwashes you drive in and put your car in neutral and it pulls you through the whole thing while it’s washing everything. I think my wife might be behind me. There’s a car that’s just like my wife’s behind me, which would be really weird. Who knows? Maybe she’s getting her car washed today too.
I’m driving the Corvette, so the guy was staring at me, looking at me he’s like, “Nice car.” I’m like, “Thanks.” Anyway, I have some serious stuff to talk about, but I want to wait til I can hear you and you can hear me. We’re about to pass through to the end. The final scrubbing and wax It says the element of protection is going through, now it’s rinsing off all the bubbles. And now we’re about to go through the part where they crank on the heat and the air, and it’s going to blow all this water away. And here it comes. This is my favorite part. Right now all the water is being blown up the windshield so it feels like, it’s awesome. And check that out you guys, I’ve got a car now that is clean. It’s not completely dry but it’s mostly dry. Oh here comes the last phase, oh, I see flames. Alright you guys, now we’ve experienced a carwash on Marketing In Your Car. It doesn’t get any better than that.
What I’m doing right now, it’s getting loud again. So I’m going to actually pause it for a second, because I gotta go vacuum out the inside real quick, then I got something very important to talk to you about. So that’s the game plan, I will see you guys in a few minutes here. We will pick up where we left off.
Alright, alright, we are back on the road, and ready for an amazing day. So what I want to talk about today is a very important subject, in fact it is the most important subject, arguably that you will have to learn about or think about in your life. And that is very broad, but it’s important and I’ll explain why here in a second. It’s marketing. Marketing matters. I was going to say that it’s the only thing that matters, but that’s not quite true, but it’s the only thing that matters if you want anything in life. So there you go.
Now kind of to explain this; most of you guys know, if not you need to go back and listen to all the other 5000 episodes to catch up with who I am. But, I’m a wrestler. I grew up, was a wrestler in high school, was a state champ, took 2nd place in the country, was an all American. I went to Brigham Young University for a year, wrestled there. They dropped the wrestling program, transferred to Boise State, wrestled here, finished up my wrestling career here and then later went and tried to try out for the Olympics. We kind of built an Olympic training center here in Boise Idaho. I employed half the Olympic team to wrestle when our company was at a big peak, and then the company kind of collapsed, I had to cut the program and that really sucked.
But, there’s my wrestling background in a nutshell. So I love it more than probably everyone on earth. I spent over $600,000 that year on the wrestling program and it didn’t go anywhere, which is a lot of money to throw away. But that’s how much I love wrestling. So yesterday morning I get an email from some of the wrestlers on the team and they’re talking about the Boise State coaches. I wrestled Boise State and we had two coaches. The head coach and assistant coach. The head coach, while he was a really nice guy, horrible marketer. Worst marketer on planet Earth. Can’t recruit, can’t train, can’t sell anybody in anything, somehow he got the head coach job. He’s kind of been there forever so when the old coach left they let him come in there. He’s kind of run the program into the ground, and instead of noticing that and being like, “Hey I should surround myself with great people.” He did the other thing, which is “Let me get rid of everyone around me who knows what they’re doing to make me look better.” And I had that same thing happen…….
It’s something that’s common among wrestlers and among leaders who aren’t necessarily great leaders. So instead of trying to up their skills they fire and they cut the people around them and make them look better. Which by the way, horrible management idea. To anyone that’s followed my podcast, or what I believe. I’m the other way, I surround myself with A player geniuses that are smarter than me, because they make me look good. That’s kind of the opposite. But for him the idea was, “Hey, I’m gonna cut people around me who are doing good stuff because it’ll make me look better.” So yesterday he actually fired the assistant coach, which is insane because the assistant coach ran the whole program, did all the recruiting, did everything. But because of that, it made him look bad, so instead of being grateful and appreciative to that person like he should have been, he instead fired him, so that it would make him feel more secure in his role.
Now there is a huge uproar in the wrestling community here. So I got on this email chain that went on back and forth and back and forth all day long with people who want to get our coach fired. Trying to talk to the administrator and all sorts of things. Reinstate the assistant coach in place of the head coach and all sorts of crazy things. I just mentioned really quickly, “Okay, I agree there needs to be a change. I don’t invest money in the Boise State wrestling program anymore, because of some issues. And I would love to invest money back in the program. I love wrestling, I love Boise State, but I haven’t because a lot of the issues that everyone is talking about right now.” So one of the guys messages me and he’s like, “Well as a potential investor, what things would you like to see that would make it so you would be willing to give money.” They said, “Please be brutally honest.”
So that should be an entrance way to give me the ability to say what I really believe, and then should listen, they should shut their mouths, listen because you asked me to be brutally honest. So I went through and I was brutally honest. “These are the reasons I would not give money to the Boise State Wrestling program today.” And I gave the reasons, boom, boom, boom, boom.
A marketer would have looked at that and said wow, if you guys came to the funnel hacking event, it talked a lot about how, “Here’s the 3 step process to build the business. Step 1 find a market, step 2 ask them what they want, step 3 give it to them.” So you’re trying to figure out how to get money from me, so I say here are the reasons I’m not giving you money. The smart thing a marketer would say, “Wow, he told me exactly how to sell him.” And you come back and say, “Russell, sweet. You want this, I will do this.” And you would give me what I asked you for, and I will give you money. It’s so simple. All you need to do is just listen to what I said, and then give it to me and you get free money for doing nothing. That was what should have happened.
Instead, this guy, bless him he’s a wrestling coach….I don’t know. I love wrestlers, but…….anyway, he came back on every one of the reasons why I said I don’t currently invest and instead of saying “wow, let me fix that so you will give me money for free. Came back and fought me on every single one, and insulted me on multiple of them. I was just like, “Are you freaking kidding me.” I am telling you what it will take for me to give you money and instead of saying, wow let’s do that so you will give me money. He came back and fought me on every single point, insulted me on multiple ones and basically told me I wasn’t a true wrestling fan. I was like, “Are you freaking kidding me. Four years ago I spent 600,00 on wrestling here in Boise to make Boise wrestling better. In the last 12 months I’ve spent I probably won’t say, but insane amounts of money. More than the entire budget of the Boise State wrestling team for the next five years on my own wrestling room. I love wrestling more than anyone. Period. The end.
For you to come in and attack me and insult me like that, now I sure as heck don’t want to give you money first off, second off, your problems are all business issues you’re struggling with. And you’ll have a bunch of wrestlers that don’t know anything about business trying to solve these business issues. There are a couple of people in our little community who are business owners who actually know how to build a business and help solve these problems, but instead of listening to people who actually know how to run big organizations and made tens of millions of dollars doing it, you insult them because we don’t agree how it’s been run up to this point, which obviously hasn’t been a good job and that’s why it’s gotten to the point it is today.
It was just kind of interesting to me. In all of my points, the things that I wanted so I would give them more money, were nothing like, “Russell needs a statue of himself in the wrestling room.” Although that would be pretty dang cool. All of them were like, “I didn’t know about any of the events last year. I only went to one match because I didn’t know about it. We don’t market to our own people. If me, Russell, who is obsessed with wrestling, who spent $150,000 to build his own wrestling room in his backyard, doesn’t know there’s a match coming up, there’s a problem there.
Instead of saying, “Wow, you’re right Russell. As someone who’s marketing and sold tens of millions of dollars a year in your own products and services, would you mind giving us some advice on how to market this?” I would say, “I would love to donate my time and my energy to a cause I believe in which is wrestling.” But instead they come back and say, “All the true fans know when the matches are, those who don’t we should probably try a little harder to let you guys know about it.” Are you kidding me. I’m saying I will give you more money if you will effectively market your business, that’s what I told them and instead of asking me the best way to do that, they fought back on every single one.
My dad started this All-star Match in Utah to be able to fundraise for Utah Valley Wrestling. When BYU dropped the wrestling program, I was there, they dropped the program and my dad came back and built the coalition and teamed it, “Save wrestling in Utah” and they actually started a new wrestling program called Utah Valley Wrestling at UVU. My dad’s All-star match is running for 18 years, makes about $25,000 a year through this All-star match for the thing. I said, “You guys should run an All-star match.” I told them this a couple of weeks ago, and they’re like, ”We have. We’ve run one for two years in a row.” I’m like, “Really, how much money did it make.” “Last year it did $3 grand and this year $4 grand.” And I asked how they ran it and they were running everything wrong. So I asked my dad, “This is what’s happening in the program. You’ve been running one for 19 years, what would you do differently?” and he told me, “Here’s all the issues. First off, you guys are doing it after the wrestling season, which means…..this issue, this issue….” And he went on all the issues and he talked about how he marketed it and how he got coverage in the newspapers and all this stuff. And my dad marketed it and successfully. It has become a huge fundraiser. Raised over a quarter of a million dollars for the wrestling program through this thing he did.
So one of my things was like…and Boise State, they fundraise every year by doing a golf tournament, I was like, “We’re wrestlers, we should do wresting stuff to raise money for wrestling. I’m not going to go to a golf tournament and give my money to wrestling. That’s stupid. We need to use wrestling. We need wrestling camps, with junior wrestlers coaching these camps. That’s just common sense. Things that revolve around wrestling to raise money for wrestling. We had an All-star match, apparently you guys from last year, has been a complete bomb. If you want my money we need someone to run a good allstar match. My dad has run one successfully for 19 years in Utah and raised $25,000 a year. Not one person has ever asked him how he did it. If you want me to donate my money, we’ve gotta become business owners and marketers and focus on those things.”
So Instead of him saying, “Wow, can I talk to your dad” He comes back and says, ”First off, we’ve run this thing two years in a row and it has not been a failure, it’s been a huge success.” Then he starts going and getting defensive and talking about all the reasons this thing was a big success. I didn’t even respond. I just pushed it off. I’m using this podcast as my way to vent because I was frustrated. But I was like, Okay, what constitutes success for you? Was it a good wrestling match? Probably was. Did the athletes have a good time? Yeah, probably did. Did the few people who actually knew about it have a good time? Yes, they did. So from your standpoint as a wrestling coach it was a huge success. As a business owner, making $3000 from an event like that is a huge failure, horrible failure.
If my employees ran that, I would have fired them. I’m not saying from a, we ran a good event standpoint, it wasn’t a good, I’m sure it was. But as a business venture, it was ran horribly. And just from my 5 minute conversation with my dad I know 8 things they did wrong. If they just would have asked they would have known. I didn’t even know that we had an All-star match in Idaho until I told them they should start one. Oh we have for two years. How have I never heard about it?
These guys are missing the whole point. So what I’ve found in my life, and I think its true is almost every single problem in life can be solved with good marketing. That’s it. And until people understand that and embrace that, they’re going to continue to suffer from mediocrity. Think about any aspect of your life. Let’s say you’re like, “I don’t have a girlfriend. My life sucks.” How do you fix that problem? You learn how to market yourself. That’s it. If you don’t have a girlfriend or a wife or a spouse or a husband, or whatever the issue is, it’s because you suck at marketing yourself. That’s it. Any other excuse you give yourself is just BS, you suck at marketing yourself. “No one’s coming to my business. No one’s buying my products.” There’s only one problem, you suck at marketing your products. That’s it. That’s why nobody’s coming to buy your thing. “No one’s coming to my wrestling tournaments.” Because you suck at marketing. “No athletes want to join our team. “ Because you suck at marketing.
Every problem in life can be fixed with good marketing. I’m convinced of it. I don’t care what it is. You give me any problem, anything, it’s because you suck at marketing. That’s the issue. That’s the overlying issue. I look at the problems I have in my life, even in the ones in my personal life. If I was to be completely honest and look back at myself and ask myself a question, my question was, “Russell, why are you horrible at this aspect of your life?” and if I was honest with myself it’s because I sucked at marketing myself in that aspect of my life. That’s it.
So for you guys, who may not be wrestling coaches or people who care about that, but care about other aspects of your life? If you are not successful at anything that you want to be successful today, it’s because you suck at marketing, and it’s time to up your game and start becoming a student of marketing. Someone told me one time, “Russell, you are so smart. That’s how come you’re a multimillionaire.” And I was like, “It has nothing to do with being smarter.” This guy was a doctor. I’m like, “You are a million times smarter than me, infinity times smarter than me, maybe ten infinity times smarter than me. The only difference between me and you is I focus my time and energy on something that produces cash. Marketing. You focus the same amount of effort on how to become a doctor. Unfortunately while doctors get paid a lot, you don’t get paid nearly as much as someone who focuses on marketing. It’s just how the world works.” So for those of you guys out there who want to solve any area of your life, business, relationships, everything, the most important thing you can do is up your game in marketing.
It’s time to become a student of it. It’s not time to quit dabbling like, “I read an e-book, I read the blogs…” It’s time to become a student of marketing. If you come into my office, you will see ten walls wrapped in books from top to bottom, every marketing and sales book known to man. I’ve upped my game. It’s important to me. I love marketing and if you don’t love marketing yet, it’s time to step up your game and become a student of it and to become someone who loves it. If you love marketing, you love this game; it’ll transform your life in all aspects. Business, financially, if you want to raise money for charity, whatever it is that you want to accomplish in life, all those problems, the issues, the headaches that you’re struggling with will all be solved with good marketing.
So that is my message and my rant for today. I’m hoping that the wrestling team will see the light of day. A bunch of guys are going to talk to the administrators. My goal, what I hope happens, is that they clear house, let go of everyone, bring in a new team and allow people like me and a couple of other people who run successful businesses to come in and run this thing like a business. If we do that Boise State Wrestling will be saved and become an amazing program. And guess what? Our athletes will win. And they’re not going to win by having better wrestling coaches. They’re going to win because they have better marketing. That’s how you get good recruits. You get good recruits with good marketing. You get people to show up to your matches because of good marketing. Everything comes around with marketing.
I look at guys like Dan Gable the greatest wrestler in our sport. Not only was he one of the best athletes of all time, he’s the best coach of all time. After he won the Olympics, he went and started at Iowa State became head coach of the Hawkeyes, won 23 national titles in a row. Something crazy like that, and if you go to an Iowa Hawkeye event, there’s the entire auditorium is completely filled and you’re like, “Man, How did Dan Gable do that? He must have been a really good wrestler.” Yes, he was but that’s not how you fill events. You fill events by being good marketers. You become national champs by being good marketers and recruiting the best talent in the world to where you are at. I would say Dan Gable was probably the best wrestling coach in the world, and he was definitely the best wrestler marketer in the world.
I was talking to a bunch of the guys and they talked about how a lot of schools will wrestle and they’ll ride people, they’ll turn them over and pin them. While that’s good from a wrestling standpoint, it’s not fun to watch. If they drilled them like…..if we want to get fans to show up we have to have a wrestling style that’s fun to watch. We need to dominate people; we need to push them over. If we’re going to get people to show up, this is a show. This is show business; we gotta give them a good show. You give them a good show and people show up.
So I did that, and they went from being this sport that nobody cares about, if you go to an Iowa Hawkeye event, you’re looking at 30 or 40,000 fans going nuts, because they built it as a show because Dan Gable is a good marketer. That’s it you guys. Good marketing solves all problems. Not some problems, solves all problems. That’s how I really feel. So there you go, you guys. Rant over. I’m heading into the office, get some stuff done. Go up my game with some more marketing. I gotta learn, I gotta educate and prepare. I gotta be good enough to accomplish my tasks. That’s my plan for today; I hope it is for you as well. That’s it you guys. Talk to you all again soon.
Here’s a quick recap of what happened during this year’s Funnel Hacking Live event!
On this episode, Russell recaps the speakers and presentations from Funnel Hacking Live. He also tells some fun stories of cool things that happened at the event.
Here are 4 fun things you will hear about on today’s episode.
So listen below to see what you missed if you didn’t attend Funnel Hacking Live, or relive some of the best moments with Russell, Marcus Lemonis and many others.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, good morning, this is Russell and welcome to Marketing in Your Car. Hey everyone, it is the Tuesday after the live event and I survived. Congratulations, I’m here to talk another day. No, I just wanted to kind of give you guys a quick recap of the event, because it turned out amazing. It was just so much fun.
So the whole thing began with, I guess before it began it was me trying to get, my wife and I trying to get all of our kids to San Diego, which is a story in and of itself, but we got there. Then I’ve got all this deep seeded fear. One time 7 or 8 years ago we did a big event in SLC and sold 500 tickets and when we got there, there was about 100 people that showed up, which is embarrassing to go from 500 seats to having hardly anyone sitting there and trying to pull seats out. It was horrible. Then fast forward a few years later, some of you guys may remember Rippln. The second Rippln event we’re expecting 1200 people to be there, or something crazy like that. And when we showed up there was about 100 people in the hallway, so we spent 15 minutes pulling chairs out and shrinking this room down to about 20% of what it was, and it was the worst, most embarrassing, horrible feeling I’ve ever felt. Showing up with 150 people in the room as opposed to the thousand you thought. So because of that I’ve got all these deep seeded fears that nobody’s going to show up to my events. Last year, same thing, I was freaking out, scared to death the whole time. When I walked in the room before I got introduced the first time and there was actually people in the room, I was like, “Thank heavens.”
But that fear peaked its horrible head once again this year and I was stressing out like crazy. We had pre-registrations from 2 til 9 the night before, so I assumed everybody would show up and pre-register, I don’t know that’s just me thinking that people are not like me. Because I probably wouldn’t have pre-registered either, not going to lie. But I just assumed, so the night before I’m going to bed and they’re like, “So far, only 300 people pre-registered.” I’m like are you kidding me? Either nobody showed up or they’re all planning to pre-register in the hour we have before the event. So I’m totally once again, going to bed freaking out that night. Wake up in the morning scared to death. I get down there and luckily over 1100 people had showed up and we filled the room and it was amazing. So thank you guys for everyone who showed up. It was just such a cool show.
It’s interesting, you put so much time and energy and money and everything into these events and I think at first people think, oh this is for you. You’re trying to make money or whatever, and obviously that’s part of the plan, but that’s never the number one goal. The number one goal is to put on a show that’ll be not just something that’s going to transform your business, but hopefully change your life.
When I look at it, we’ll get the final numbers back probably in a week or so, from our cost and profits and all those kind of things, but we spent over a half a million dollars to put on that show for the people that came. In between speaker fees, and hotel fees, and food and beverage, travel for our team, and everything. Looking at half a million dollars, 500,000 or more to entertain you guys for a couple of days.
I was thinking about this, yesterday I took a day off and I was just kind of trying to relax and I really wanted to be entertained. I’d been entertaining all weekend and I wanted to be entertained, so we went to see Batman VS Superman. Before, I’m looking at it all and there’s all the critics saying the movie sucked and all these things. And I went to the movie yesterday and it was amazing. On so many levels. The cinematography was awesome, the story lines were cool. You know, we all kind of hate Ben Affleck right now, because who on Earth does what he did to one of the most beautiful women on Earth, anyway, so we hate him so we’re glad when Superman was kicking the crap out of him. There was some deep seeded anger and resentment against him, but as a whole the show was amazing. And I was thinking about how many tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to create that movie where they were there to entertain us for two and half hours. We spent $10 to go to it. We paid a little extra cause we got the D-box seats, the seats that shake when you’re sitting there. It was amazing, it adds a whole other level of dimension to the experience. I’m watching this thing, I spent between my wife and I maybe $35, $40 to watch this movie. I was like, people spent and risked hundreds of millions of dollars to entertain me for two hours and it cost me $40. It was amazing, and anyone who says it’s not amazing is just a high maintenance piece of garbage, is kind of my thoughts.
I feel the same way, if you came to the Funnel Hacking event and you didn’t get value….I spent a half a million dollars to entertain you for 3 days to educate you and train you to hopefully change your life. You spent, between flights and hotels, maybe $1500 to come. For those of you who came and made that investment, I hope that what we provided back was amazing and I think it was. The feedback from this event was awesome. Tons of people talked about how last year was life transforming, this one was even more so. I had one person who came to me and said, there’s been 5 times in his life where his life has been completely changed, he said this is one of the 5 times. One person came to me ahead of time and told me that they were suicidal before this weekend, they were planning on ending their life and after experiencing what we went through, they have a new look on life and they have a future and hope and everything once again. As I hugged that person who was crying, it was just amazing. It was awesome, it was worth the investment on our side.
To put on the show, and you know this year we wanted to do a lot of things. One thing that I wanted to heavily skew and give everyone in their mind, even people who don’t have information businesses to understand the power of information funnels. So most of my talks were tied around that, and I spent a lot of time just trying to convince and show external business owners who don’t have info product businesses why info product funnels are so important and how you can use it to get customers for free, and you can change the paradigm. And you can make it so that the price resistance you might be feeling in your business is completely gone. I wanted people to understand that and we shared with them all of the core info product funnels. And I think that, hopefully for everyone, for me that was the gift I wanted to share with everybody and I hope that everybody loved that.
On top of that I brought in some amazing people. Alex Charfen, he came and I always pronounce his last name wrong, so I’m trying to get it, but I apologize Alex, if you’re listening. But he came and talked about the entrepreneur personality type. Afterwards I had so many people like, “I understand myself now, I don’t feel alone, I don’t feel like I’m a weird person.” Which was really cool. So many amazing speakers. Sean Stephenson came, spent the first 20 minutes just making fun of me, which was awesome. Then delivered something that, I don’t think there was a dry eye in the audience. It was amazing. One of my favorite things he talked about there, he talked about the helicopters that go out in the ocean and try to save boats that capsized. You go out there and the helicopter can only hold 5 or 6 people and there might be 20 people that are in the water. Who do you decide, who are you going to save. It’s a good question talking about us with our business. There’s all these people we want to serve, and give and help and save. Who do we save? He talked the helicopters, said that when they get out there, the only people that are able to save are the people that are swimming towards them and how profound that was to think about for us. We can try to change the world, but you can only really affect the people that are swimming towards you. The people that hear your voice, the people that hear your message, and they come towards you and if you focus on them first and you help them so other people will see that and be like, “They’re helping people that swim towards the boat, we should swim towards it too.” And more people will come towards you, but initially when you’re focusing your message is focus on the people that are swimming towards you first. I thought that was really profound. His talk was amazing.
Kyle Cease who’s a comedian but also just life transformation, he came to his comedy show it was all about transformation as well, it was so cool. Just so cool, I totally geeked out on all that stuff. We had my Clickfunnels partners and founders and everyone get on stage and we talked about the future of Clickfunnles from the tech side and all that’s happening. We kind of bragged about our tech team for the first time ever. A lot of people don’t know, the tech team who’s building Clickfunnels right now, they’re a bunch of what Ryan, our CTO said, he said that they’re like the Russell Brunson’s of the tech world, of the programmer world. In fact, one of them was gone this weekend and speaking at this machine learning conference, he literally wrote the book on Machine Learning and he’s one of the dude’s who’s doing all the backend, database structuring and data and stats for Clickfunnels. If you look at people after people, it’s like a who’s who of the coding world, who are develops are, which is pretty amazing if you think about it.
He talked about why would they come to us versus the other companies, most of these guys are sick of working for VC backed companies that don’t really care about the customers, they’re loving working for a company where they get to see a difference, and when they make something it changes people’s lives and it’s pretty awesome. So that was really cool.
Who else, I know I’m missing some other stuff that happened. Let’s see, the first day, man there’s so many cool things, I don’t want to miss any. The second day we did a big hug hack-a-thon which was awesome. We had I think 7 or 800 people that actually stayed and pulled all-nighters with our team building out pages and funnels and sites. Which was cool. Bill Jones ran the whole hack-a-thon. We had a charity thing, ended up raising, over the last 12 months we donated over $45,000 for World Teacher Aide. During this weekend we raised another $45,000 which was awesome. $90,000 in the last year has been given to World Teacher Aide because of Clickfunnels members, which is sweet. So that was cool.
Let’s see then we had day 3 we came on with Garrett White, came and shared his message. Oh, on day two, I forgot, I did a presentation about becoming a Funnel Consultant, we had a lot of people who applied for our Funnel Certified Clickfunnels Consultant Program, which was cool. So we’ve got a lot of new people coming in there. We had a guy named Alex, who is one of my inner circle members, he came and showed how he does local funnels. How they’re blowing up gyms. They’ll have a gym and they have two different funnels they run, they just run traffic for a week and after two weeks they’ll completely film an entire gym before it’s launched, take that money to go buy the actual gym equipment, they launch the gym with $50,000 in their pocket along with 150 clients from day one, which is nuts. So that was awesome.
Day 3 Garrett White came and spoke about finding your voice and showed progression that he went from, from being who he was to finding his voice and his message. He kind of talked about that whole process, which was really cool. After that I did my funnel stacking presentation, which I was excited for and I think it turned out pretty cool. And then Jacob Hiller came and told this story about the jumpman, which is a info product that teaches people how to jump, which was amazing. And then the last part, which was the coolest for me, was Marcus Lemonis from the Profit, came and spoke.
It was so cool. He was so cool. I can’t even tell you how cool that dude was. We were expecting him to be high maintenance, like a real celebrity. He showed up, he Ubered from the airport over and kind of hung out and everything. Before the event, we had a chance for 30 minutes to kind of talk about he event and everything, he asked what Clickfunnels was and we explained it. He was getting so excited. First it took him about 5 minutes to get it, then when he got it he was like, “Wait a minute, how do you use this for camping?” we told him, “How do you use this for sweet peas“ we told him, “How do you use this for…..” business after business. Finally he’s like, “Is there any business that Clickfunnels won’t work for?” and we’re like, “Not really. It’s pretty amazing.” So he’s like, “We need to get you guys on the show. You guys need to be on the Profit. I’ve got a whole bunch of people with shows coming up. I’m going to figure out a bunch of these ones and you guys can come and build these funnels on the show.” He’s awesome. So then we’re like, “we’re going to take you in the back, w have a secret elevator, bring you up that way nobody will bug you and you can come out the back of the stage.” He’s like, “Nah, it’s Saturday, we’re just hanging out. I’ll just come in and hang out and take pictures with everyone if that’s cool.” I’m like alright, so he just came in the back, hung out with everybody, got pictures, and he came up and did his presentation and it was cool. It was way different than I thought it was going to be. It was more like a Tony Robbins event. He sat there and did interventions with people only he was fixing people on the fly. Super cool.
And then I had another presentation I was going to give, but I felt like it would have detracted from the message that Marcus kind of left, so instead we just ended the event, Ignite Inner Circle people went and got pictures with Marcus, I went and got pictures with everybody else. And that was a wrap, that was the event. Man, it was cool. So for those of you guys, who were there, I hope you had an amazing opportunity. I hope you took advantage of it. Oh Liz Benney spoke on day one and Ryan Stewman spoke on day one. Sorry, how did I forget those guys? Which was amazing, Liz told her whole story. She had the whole audience in tears, inspired and motivated. She shared all her stats, her numbers, her webinar, which was awesome. Ryan showed his backend funnels, how they work. The coolest part, at the end he had people line up for free copies of his book, he said, “You can have any objection and I’ll solve it right here on the spot.” And he resolved objection after objection after objection. That was dang cool.
So anyway, as a whole was an amazing experience for me, hopefully for every one of you guys who were there, and I hope that the small amount of money you put was worth the investment. Like I said, we spent over a half million dollars to entertain, educate, train and inspire you guys and I hope you got all that and a whole bunch more out of it. We’re excited for next year. Next year Funnel Hacking Live will be in February, which will be cool because it’s going to be the last week of February in Dallas. My goal, and this isn’t happening yet, my goal, I’m putting it out there right now, I want to get Mark Cubin, and I want to get Tony Robbins this next one. Otherwise, we can’t make it better than this years, this years was pretty dang cool. If we wanted to step it up, that’s the only thing we got to do it with. So that’s my goal and game plan, but no promises yet, but that’s kind of what we’re shooting for. We will see.
Anyway, with that said, I’m at the office. I took yesterday off to just lay out, hang out. Today I’m going to be using as a planning day, I’ve got a lot of stuff and projects and cool things happening, so I’m going to try to plan it, organize and just figure out the next steps. I hope you guys are as well, especially those who came to the event. Because now you have this reflection moment, “Okay, what am I going to do? All these things have happened. What should I do?” I remember listening to Tim Ferriss at an event one time talk about himself, and somebody asked, “what are you…if we were to follow you around for a day, what would we see?” He’s like, “It’d be pretty boring, most the time I’m just sitting there thinking, and reading and meditating. It doesn’t look like I’m doing much because for me, it’s all about…I don’t want to spend a week, a month, a year, whatever it takes, trying to figure out of all the dominoes all the dues, all the things out there instead of trying to knock over every single domino like most people do, I try to sit and figure out what’s the one big domino that if I push that one over it knocks down all the rest of the dominoes or makes the rest of them irrelevant. That’s what I do.”
So today is going to be like my big domino day. I’m going to sit back and try to figure out what the big domino is I need to knock over that will make all the rest irrelevant or knock over the rest of the dominoes.
So that’s my game plan for today, I hope you do the same thing as well. With that said, Have an amazing day. If you haven’t watched Batman VS Superman yet, go and watch it and don’t complain. These guys spent hundreds of millions of dollars and it’s going to cost you $10. With that said, I’ll talk to you all again soon. Thanks everybody.